Health Narratives: Exploring Changing South Asian Diasporic Identities

Abstract

This paper attends to memoir as an expansive and generative genre of writing that creates new ways of understanding the British South Asian diaspora. The memoirs by Sathnam Sanghera and Arifa Akbar intervene in discussions of identity and assimilation through their focus on mental distress and migrant bodies. The Boy with a Topknot by Sathnam Sanghera follows his journey as he grapples with his father’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. Arifa Akbar’s Consumed (2021) focuses on her attempts at navigating her sister’s death and her mental health distress. Sanghera and Akbar’s memoirs allow us to reconceptualise and explore diasporic identities through a polyphony of voice as their memoirs include fragmented memories, nonlinear narratives, interviews, art, and objects. Arthur Frank’s seminal work The Wounded Storyteller argues that illness is a ‘disruptive event’ that transforms us, and this is reflected in these memoirs as they engage with racialised experiences of health (Sunil Amrith) and encounter structural racism embedded in the public healthcare system. These memoirs focus on the ‘othering’ of bodies through race, gender, religion (Sikhism and Islam) and nonnormative experiences of health. This paper argues that the form of a memoir explores the diasporic identities as we are forced to confront the various understandings of ‘health’ for a migrant. Methodologically this paper is grounded in close reading through health humanities, migration studies, and diaspora studies.