In this post we suggest some titles about cultural identity and how it can be challenged when we move to another country and experiencing a diverse cultural and/or linguistic landscape.

For more suggestion you can have a look at Cultural Identity – Post 2

Rituals of Separation

Written by Elizabeth Rice, the book is a South Korean memoir of identity and belonging. The author tells the story of her arrival in Seul in 1966, as a nine month old. a nine months old. Her and her family lived in South Korea for the next sixteen years. When she moved back to America, Elizabeth started to feel a deep sense of dislocation and a cultural shock, missing her life in Korea. The book explores the complexity of cross-cultural identities, loss and grief when moving from one place to another, and the challenges of being a Third-Culture Kid (TCK).

Disoriental

In this book by Nègar Djavadi, Kimiâ retells the memory of her childhood in Iran while she is attending a fertility clinic in Paris. The Iranian regime, politics, and culture are depicted through Kimiâ’s modern and “disorientalised” lenses. Cultural identity, disorientation and confusion are at the heart of this bestselling novel. For Kimiâ, the sad reality is that “something needs to be left behind to move on and create space for a new life”.  

Girl, Woman, Other

Bernadette Evaristo recounts the stories of twelve women from the African diaspora. The main themes are cultural identity, feminism, sexuality, prejudice, and ignorance. Although the characters are very different in age, background, and experiences, their lives are intertwined. Evaristo accurately portrays modern Britain with humour, love, and emotions; her writing style is called fusion fiction, something between poetry and prose, and you will find the narrative contemporary and engaging. A true masterpiece.

The Arrival

Is a wordless graphic novel with black, white and sepia pictures: the amazing work of Shaun Tan. It is a story of departure and loss, of memories and new beginnings. The story of a father that leaves wife and son to seek better opportunities in a new country. Everything is unknown; the language is indecipherable, and the man meets other immigrants with unspoken stories of survival and struggles. The images offer the sense of confusion and displacement that many immigrants experience. The main character is searching for a sense of identity and belonging in a world so far away from home. But where there is unfamiliarity, there is also kindness and a sense of hope.

If you want to explore more about the theme of cultural identity, here are some interesting articles:

• That’s what we do: the identity of Global Citizens is an interview collected by Claudiaexpat in 2023 that tells the incredible stories of Kirsten and her adventurous life through countries, cultures, languages and connections.

• In This is what I call belonging, Claudiaexpat talks about Hanna, who migrated to Geneva for love and found herself isolated and lonely. But then she started a new chapter of her life, helping migrants fleeing the war in Ukraine to settle down in Switzerland. She supported them in their complex initial steps of finding their way in a new, unknown reality.

Alessandra Giacchi

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels.