BETWEEN HOME AND EXILE: IDENTITY, HYBRIDITY, AND BELONGING IN ALYAN’S THE ARSONISTS’ CITY

Abstract

This study investigates the representation of diasporic identity, hybridity, and belonging in Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City (2021), with particular attention to the Nasr family’s transnational experiences between Beirut and the United States. It examines how migration, displacement, memory, intergenerational conflict, inherited trauma, and return to the homeland shape unstable and continuously negotiated identities. The study employs a qualitative and interpretive research methodology based on close textual analysis and draws primarily on Bhabha’s (1994) concepts of the Third Space, hybridity, ambivalence, and the unhomely. The findings reveal that Alyan does not represent hybrid identity as a harmonious synthesis of Lebanese and American cultures; rather, it emerges as an unfinished and often painful condition shaped by cultural contradiction, emotional fragmentation, and incomplete belonging. The analysis further demonstrates that memory and inherited trauma function as important sites of identity negotiation, while domestic spaces become unhomely through secrecy, displacement, and unresolved family histories. Gendered and racialized experiences also complicate access to belonging, showing that cultural negotiation occurs within unequal relations of power. Moreover, return to Beirut fails to restore an authentic or stable identity because both the homeland and the diasporic subjects have been transformed by migration, history, and time. The study concludes that the Third Space in The Arsonists’ City is not merely a temporary stage between cultures but a persistent condition of diasporic existence. By highlighting identity as relational, fragmented, and continuously reconstructed, this study contributes to contemporary postcolonial and diasporic literary scholarship and offers a critical understanding of belonging in transnational fiction.