SOURCE: Davis, Rocío G. “Revisioning a Homeland in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Rohinton Mistry's Tales from Firozsha Baag.” Literary Half-Yearly 37, no. 1 (January 1996): 67-85.

In the following essay, Davis discusses Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Mistry's Tales from Firozsha Baag, examining immigrant authors' attempts to reconcile their pasts and their national identities through their writing.

Salman Rushdie's 1982 essay, “Imaginary Homelands”, may be read as a paradigm of the discourse of writers in the between-world condition. In this piece, he describes and defines the situation of those writers who are, in the words of Michael Ondaatje's English patient: “born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives” (1992, 176). More specifically, Rushdie analyzes the theme of the homeland in the works of this breed of writer, pointing out that the attempt to...