Tenacious Displacement of Home in Mohamed Dellal’s “When the Wind of the Atlas Blows”

Abstract

In its drive to valorize narrative heterogeneity and condensed contextualization, Diaspora literary criticism usually places a special accent on the need to listen to underground voices overshadowed by the leading diaspora figures located in the West. It sees that Diaspora is a state of mind that does not necessarily entail physical dislocation for writers to shake the essentialist grip of tradition and the ideological long-established dichotomies. Drawing on this theoretical premise, this article seeks to explore the subversive prospects of writing home in one example of such minority literary work. Mohamed Dellal’s “When the Wind of the Atlas Blows” is a collection of short stories, written in English, that approach the trope of home from the perspective of local diasporic subjects. The narrative positions the present collection creates implicitly question the marginalization of the postcolonial experience of diversity for those who have not indulged the privileges of international migration.