Author: Gülden Kazaz Çelik

Abstract: Migrant literature has generated interest around the world since 1980s and consistently produced different accounts of the migrants either fictive or factual or fictive formed out of facts. These have been intensively read and hotly discussed under the arguments of diasporic studies. However, most of the time the difference between being diasporic and migrant has been neglected. This seems to be what happens in Elif Shafak’s The Saint of Incipient Insanities; the characters there, especially Omer, is the migrant who chooses to leave his hometown as well as all the collective identities defining him to become someone else. Not being a diasporic at all, he is not forced to go to USA neither does he ask to abandon what makes him who he is. On his journey to become someone different, he has encountered all the collective identities he thinks he leaves behind and experienced how badly he fails to create a new identity to himself because of his self-denial. In the end, he has to accept his own failure, which appears to be inevitable once a man is in conflict with who he already is.

Keywords: being a migrant, collective identities, identity formation, the sense of (un)belonging.

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.56.1