North-South Connections: The Representations of Travel and Travellers in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Fictional Memoir My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past (2005)

Abstract

This article seeks to critically examine three stories out of nine from Jhabvala's book My Nine Lives (2005) in which the author boldly merges fictional memoir with the short story genre. I argue that the three stories selected for analysis indicate the most dominant component in her works, namely her uprooted characters as constant wanderers whose cultural identities and belongings are as shifting and fuzzy as their home in a certain place in the age of worldwide globalisation and modernity. While examining her characters as tourists and travellers with multiple dwellings, this article highlights that journey is not merely a metaphor of cultural dialogue between the Global South and the Global North within the realms of Jhabvala's fiction but also a means to (re)discover or simply (re)imagine the established truths of the self, family and community, the notion of home and belonging, and the formation of new cultural identities in "our run-away world" (Giddens  2003, xxxi). By seeking a connection between travel and literature, my article aims to shed ample light on the transcultural connections of Jhabvala's fictional characters, their fluid cultural allegiances and above all their perception and representation of "travelling cultures" (Clifford 1992, 96-116) during their journeys around the globe.