Between Two Shores: Intergenerational Negotiations of Home
and Identity in Adib Khan’s Seasonal
Adjustments
M. Ashiqur Rahaman Sourav,
Lecturer,
Department of English,
Green University of Bangladesh,
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Abstract: This study
examines Adib Khan’s novel Seasonal Adjustments (1994) through the lens of
postcolonial theory to project how its protagonist, Iqbal Choudhury,
continually negotiates multiple, yet conflicting, identities across Bangladeshi
and Australian contexts. Focusing on hybridity (Homi Bhabha), subalternity
(Gayatri Spivak), and the reflections on exile (Edward Said), the paper ignites
such questions as how do cultural memory, religion, and geographical
displacement influence the sense of self-identification of Iqbal and, consequently,
his daughter Nadine in terms of her forming the identity? Close readings
portray that the sense of living in two worlds that Iqbal describes as dual
consciousness is expressed through ambivalent bonds with home and host,
fantasies of the orient and lived experience. These difficulties experienced by
Nadine, the protagonist’s daughter, also mark the issue of intergenerational
transmission of diasporic tensions as she struggles in both of the
environments. With this analysis of father-daughter relationships rooted in the
more general discussion of diaspora and the development of third space, this
paper reveals fundamental conflicts of identity formation between the two and
the permanent construction of a sense of home. The fact that plural identities
in the story by Khan are not bottled but dynamically created on the basis of
memory, power, and a cross-cultural encounter has been established in the
findings.
Keywords: Identity, Intergenerational, Diaspora, Alienation,
Hybridity
Over the last few years, Seasonal Adjustments has been richly
thematized in terms of Iqbal Choudhury’s identity crisis, exile, and
alienation, but not much in terms of extending such readings to the larger
diasporic theory. Vera Alexander captures his “worlds of disenchantment,”
demonstrating how prolonged absence renders him an outsider both in Bangladesh
and Australia (Alexander 84). Stefano Mercanti similarly argues that Iqbal
embodies “an identity capable of locating and perceiving himself ‘beyond the obvious
coordinates of a street, a suburb, a town, or a passport’” (Mercanti 5).
Jaywant Ambadas Mhetre, in turn, figures out how Bengali migrants balance
cultural retention and assimilation, though his eye on communal patterns leaves
the protagonist’s personal struggles only lightly sketched (Mhetre). Building
on Mhetre’s focus on communal assimilation, Sharmistha Saha argues that Seasonal Adjustments “shows how
belonging to two states simultaneously results in no belonging at all,”
highlighting Iqbal’s perpetual uprootness after eighteen years living in alien
soil (Saha 102).
Postcolonial critics and scholars
provide insight to develop these readings. Edward Said draws on Simone Weil’s
insight that “to be rooted … is perhaps the most important and least recognized
need of the human soul,” a tension mirrored in Iqbal’s oscillation between
memory and belonging (Said 364). Stuart Hall asserts that “cultural identities
come from somewhere, have histories, but, like everything which is historical,
they undergo constant transformation” (Hall 392). Uma Parameswaran’s metaphor
of “rootless but green” trees further frames diaspora as “perennial
negotiation,” where home becomes a continually reimagined space (Parameswaran).
This field is augmented by such
concepts as hybridity and subalternity. Homi Bhabha’s “third space” provokes
the in-between worlds of Iqbal and his daughter Nadine, where Australian and
Bengali values both clash and coalesce. Gayatri Spivak’s provocation “Can the
Subaltern Speak?” calls attentions to voices — like Nadine’s—that are mediated
by patriarchal and colonial structures (Spivak 305). Based on these, William
Safran considers diasporas to be “ethnic minority groups that, having
originally given up or been forced to leave their traditional ethnic homelands,
retain emotional and material links with them” (Safran 83), a condition that
underpins Iqbal’s nostalgia and dislocation.
Although researchers have explored
many areas, no study has yet managed to connect the intergenerational dynamics
of Iqbal and Nadine with the broader context of diasporic theory. It is through
the unification of Stuart Hall, fluid identity, Safran, homeland tether,
Bhabha, hybridity, and Spivak, subaltern, in the discussion with the works of
Alexander, Mercanti, and Mhetre that this research can possibly gain insight
into how the plurality of identity can be actively constructed using memory,
power, and cross-cultural encounter.
As the negotiations of plural
identity in Seasonal Adjustments play
out in processes of displacement, cultural synthesis, and power-filled
silences, these particular processes become moments that are elucidated by
postcolonial and diaspora theorization in specific detail. Iqbal Choudhury’s
perpetually deferred return to Bangladesh exemplifies William Safran’s
assertion that diasporic subjects “retain emotional and material links” to a
homeland they have left behind (83), yet his ritualized remembrances and
remittances only accentuate the chasm between memory and lived reality. In
Australia, Iqbal inhabits what Homi Bhabha describes as the “Third Space,”
where cultural symbols lose any “primordial unity or fixity” and instead
generate hybrid identities in the friction between Bengali traditions and
Western norms (Bhabha 37). This in-between-ness is not a peaceful middle
ground, either, but a place of conflict: Iqbal is so uncomfortable at a Sunday
baptism of his daughter Nadine and so respectful at the same time of Islamic
zakat and so dismissive of localities that the zone of in-between permanently destabilizes
self and society alike.
Stuart Hall’s view that cultural
identity “undergoes constant transformation” (Hall 392) finds concrete
expression in Iqbal’s episodic self-revisions—oscillating from Orientalist
nostalgia for Dhaka’s “streets of shondesh and nimki” to an uneasy awareness of
his status as a “visible other” in suburban Australia. For Nadine, this
fluidity becomes more fraught: her voice is mediated by patriarchal and
ecclesiastical authorities, invoking Gayatri Spivak’s warning that, for the
subaltern, “there is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak”
(Spivak 305). The silence before religious rituals and the incident of her
resorting to the translation of her father show how there is an
intergenerational aspect to the diasporic silencing that exists in such
families.
Underpinning these fractured
subjectivities is the dialectic of exile and rootedness that Edward Said
characterizes [exile] as “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to
experience” (Said 359). Iqbal’s lament—“Home? Of course, I have a home! … It is
built on the foundation of remembrance and given shape by my imagination” (Khan
35)—echoes Uma Parameswaran’s injunction that “Home is where your feet are, and
may your heart be there too.” (Parameswaran 31) highlighting how imagination
compensates for, but cannot fully substitute, tangible belonging. In Seasonal Adjustments, plural identities
emerge neither as static hyphens between two cultures nor as resolved
syntheses, but as ongoing projects in which memory, power, and
intergenerational relations continually reshape what it means to belong.
.
The conflict between belonging and
dislocation in Seasonal Adjustments
occurs in several registers: the geographical, cultural, religious, and
generational registers, invalidating each one and supporting Iqbal Choudhury in
his constant endeavor of self-reconstructing. When Iqbal first steps back into
his Bangladeshi village... he immediately encounters the dissonance William
Safran locates at the heart of diaspora: the simultaneous “departure from a
homeland” and the maintenance of “emotional and material links” with it (Safran
83). As Avtar Brah observes, diasporic belonging is shaped by “simultaneous
exclusion and inclusion,” a tension that Iqbal enacts in every ritualized
return (Brah 182). Iqbal’s memories of shop-worn lanes and colonial-era mango
trees arrive as vivid impressions, yet they collide with the grime and bustle
of present-day Dhaka, leaving him “uncomfortable here in the village” and
caught in “a self-destructive vortex euphemized as living in the developed
world” (Khan 7). His continual allusions to the rituals of childhood, even its
food tastes, like the tang of nimki at mid-morning parties, serve not only a
nostalgic purpose to locate his nostalgia about a lost childhood but also to
depict how the memory itself becomes a place of conflict, as idealization faces
altered realities and puts greater fire under his exile condition.
The adjustment of Iqbal back in
Australia is also hostile. Though he has acquired the surface rituals of
suburban life—barbecues on Sunday afternoons, cricket matches under pale dawn
skies—he finds himself a “visible other,” exposed both by his accent and by
subtle codes of social belonging that he cannot fully master (Khan 9). James
Clifford’s definition of diaspora as “an argument with the term ‘home’ itself”
captures this conflict: Iqbal’s home is no longer simply a place but a
contested concept (Clifford 308). Here Stuart Hall’s observation that “cultural
identities…undergo constant transformation” (392) resonates powerfully. Iqbal’s
identity is not a stable hyphen between Bengali and Australian; rather, it is a
dynamic trajectory that loops back on itself. When he organizes an impromptu
game of soccer for local schoolchildren, he simultaneously asserts his
belonging through mastery of a colonial sport and underscores his outsider
status, for his teammates greet his enthusiasm with polite distance. In these
liminal moments, Iqbal inhabits what Homi Bhabha terms the “Third Space,” where
neither heritage nor host culture provides secure moorings nor where “the
meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity” (Bhabha 37).
Religious ritual in the novel
crystallizes these tensions in intensely personal terms. Iqbal’s daughter,
Nadine, becomes the focal point for competing spiritual claims: a Sunday
afternoon baptism in Melbourne, followed months later by an aqeeqa ceremony in
Khulna (Khan 80–81). Robin Cohen’s work on “multiple belongings” shows that
second-generation migrants often navigate overlapping allegiances, and Nadine’s
silences mirror this negotiated space (Cohen 56). To the Australian relatives,
baptism is a rite of welcome; to Iqbal’s mother, the aqeeqa is an assertion of
inherited faith. However, both rituals do not accord Nadine with any agency.
Gayatri Spivak’s provocation—that subaltern voices are often “mediated” or
“silenced” within dominant discourses (Spivak 305)—finds concrete expression in
Nadine’s hesitations before the baptismal font, her silence during Quranic
verses, and her reliance on Iqbal to translate prayers she barely understands.
Despite the symbolic affirmation of belonging to the two religions,
Christianity and Islam, respectively, the rituals actually reveal Nadine as an
ordinary example of a subaltern held by both patriarchal and colonial
traditions in the middle of the clash of powers with no voice.
The mediation of voice goes even
further to language. As the novel progresses, Iqbal effortlessly adapts himself
between Bengali, English, and the rare Malayalam words that he learned during
his student life. Anne-Marie Fortier argues that in such polyglot contexts,
“languages themselves become sites of identity production,” a point underscored
by Iqbal’s code-switching (Fortier 47). These linguistic shifts underscore
Hall’s insistence that identity “has histories” but remains “subject to the
continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power” (Hall 392). When Nadine gasps
over a Bengali proverb, Iqbal helps her with the correction of the tone, and on
this occasion the narrator puts forward that language is a heritage as well as
a tool of power. Speaking three languages, Iqbal is capable of exercising power
in all of those languages; Nadine has an unstable bilingualism, indicating that
her relative power to have any kind of a cultural identity is much more
questionable. Language itself is therefore staged in the text as a Third Space,
a place that cannot be encompassed in any one set of words or vocabulary that
experiences the diasporic subject.
Power and othering are also present
in everyday interactions. At a Melbourne grocery, Iqbal confronts a
shopkeeper’s condescending insistence that his mango purchase be “ethnic”—ripe,
fibrous fruits presumably destined for curry rather than for dessert (Khan 52).
The shopkeeper even sounds like Iqbal will always be a foreign taste. Here
Edward Said’s reflection that “exile is strangely compelling to contemplate but
terrible to experience” (Said 359) gains texture: Iqbal is drawn to the
familiar tang of ripe mangoes, yet his pleasure is shadowed by the reminder of
his difference. Thomas Faist’s concept of “transnational social spaces”
highlights how such local encounters reflect global hierarchies—a grocery aisle
becomes a microcosm of postcolonial power (Faist 112). During that scene, the
novel presents the ways in which everyday interactions reiterate colonial
structures and make Iqbal an other with even minor consumption practices.
Nevertheless, the alienation of Iqbal cannot be brought in line with
victimization. He instructs the local villagers in Bangladesh, to play the
imperial import of cricket, thus turning around the intercultural flow. In
Australia, he takes Bengali New Year behaviors in his backyard, where he covers
plastic tables with the colorful sari cloths. These moments of cultural
assertion demonstrate what Bhabha calls the “ambivalence” of hybridity: Iqbal
is neither a passive resistor nor a seamless integrator but an active
negotiator, adopting and adapting elements from both worlds to carve out
provisional spaces of meaning (Bhabha 37).
The interposition of the personal
and political culminates in the thoughts about home by Iqbal. When he says,
musingly, “Home? Of course, I have a home! … It is built on the foundation of
remembrance and given shape by my imagination” (Khan 35), the reader witnesses
the fully dialectical nature of exile and rootedness. Iqbal can walk both on
land and water, yet his heart is lost, and his connection is still stuck to
memory, which he cannot return to, eventually, no matter how physically present
he might be. Another aspect of the plurality of identity is exhibited through
intergenerational arenas as depicted in this projection. The adolescence of
Nadine is developed under the flowing ambivalences of her father. At school she
is mocked because of her unconventional name; at home because of her different
ways. These ambiguities echo Spivak’s concern that subaltern voices struggle to
emerge amid structures that define them (Spivak 305). Steven Vertovec’s research
on second-generation identity shows that children of migrants often inhabit
“super-diverse” environments where hybridity becomes the norm (Vertovec 290).
However, the petty insurrections of Nadine, her refusal to say the prayer
because she does not understand it, and her insistence on consuming fish in a
school potluck meal are signs of early assertion of a third-generation hybrid
identity that can possibly surpass the torn allegiances of her father. In doing
so, Seasonal Adjustments does not
merely reach out to the personal turmoil of Iqbal, as it may indicate the
development of plural identities over the generations through inheritance.
Finally, the novel’s narrative
structure—shifting temporalities, interleaved memories, abrupt changes of
scene—mirrors its thematic insistence on instability. Pnina Werbner notes that
diasporic narratives often employ non-linear form to reflect the “ruptures and
continuities” of migration experience (Werbner 602). No single narrative thread
runs uninterrupted; instead, the past interferes with the current time,
Australian sunsets seep into Bangladeshi dawns, and Nadine’s upcoming steps
toward self-definition intersect with Iqbal’s receding dreams. This formal
hybridity enacts Bhabha’s contention that cultural “meaning and symbols” are
always in “a process of their negotiation,” never fixed or final (Bhabha 37).
Seasonal Adjustments
stages the negotiation of plural identities not as a resolved synthesis but as
an ongoing, contested practice. Through Iqbal’s conflicts—between memory and
reality, home and host, and tradition and modernity—and through Nadine’s
maturing voice in a male-dominated and colonial world, the novel illustrates
the ideas that postcolonial theory aims to describe: diaspora, hybridity,
cultural change, subalternity, and exile. These interlocking dimensions ensure
that the question ‘Where is home?’ remains open, serving as an invitation
rather than a conclusion, and affirm that plural identities are continually
evolving.
The tensions of diaspora
strangeness, hybridity, and exile are relieved in Seasonal Adjustments by Iqbal Choudhury and his daughter Nadine;
they prove that plural identities cannot be smooth synthesis nor hyphens. The
nostalgia ritualized by Iqbal as well as his incessant estrangements both in
Bangladesh and Australia suggests the validity of the observation of William
Safran that diasporic belonging is indentured by exodus. His residence in Third
Space, occupied by Homi Bhabha, does not generate any definite house or a
definite person; rather, it creates a chain of temporary cultural negotiations.
The mediated voice of Nadine, which is informed by battling religious rituals
and male power structures, places into perspective the caution issued by
Gayatri Spivak about silent subalterns, despite the gestures of minor
rebellions that serve as some clues to the forging of three-generation
hybridity. Edward Said and Uma Parameswaran reiterate that the siren song of
exile on the human heart is accompanied by the necessity of a rootedness and
the memory, however clear and bloody, cannot be solely a sustainable home.
Shifting the focus to both the daughter and the father, the study extends
postcolonial interpretations of Seasonal
Adjustments to the intergenerational level and shows how identity
construction is multiple and co-constructive. It implies that the researchers
should focus on not only the adult diasporic identities but also how younger
generations manage to resolve inherited tensions and pursue the novel cultural
directions. The future work may involve a comparison of Nadine with other
second- or third-generation characters of South Asian diasporic fiction, as the
area has been explored less and the kind of pattern of mediated voice and
selective resistance has been shown. The fictional forethought in fiction
stories could be tested by studying families with Bengalis and Australians in
the real world. The last thing is that further examination of gendered aspects
of the diaspora, especially how daughters and sons negotiate with ritual and
language use, would further enhance readers appreciation of plural identity in
postcolonial society.
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