Abstract
Immigrants often struggle to settle in their adopted country due to differences in identity drawn along race, religion and nationality. The offspring of these immigrants, born in the new country, equally struggle to reconcile their conflicting identities, claiming ties to two vastly different countries. While the parents often maintain cultural and religious ties to their countries of origin, the children are often caught between their parents' countries and their own birth country. This paper examines how migration influences the concept of identity in relation to first-generation and second-generation immigrants in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift. Postcolonial concepts such as otherness, hybridity, belonging and marginality are employed to examine the experiences of the characters in the two novels. The study not only illuminates the predicament of the characters but also highlights how they negotiate their identities as first-generation and second-generation immigrants. This study equally reveals how an immigrant’s identity is contested as a result of traversing international borders. This paper concludes that citizens of a country do not necessarily have to share the same ethnicity, race and religion.
Keywords: Migration, Immigrants, Belonging, Identity, Hybridity.
DOI: 10.36349/alqajolls.2025.v01i01.003
author/Okache C. Odey
journal/AL-QALAM JLLS 1(1) | December 2025
