A Relational Bildungsroman: A Refugee Girl’s Narrative of Subject Development in A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea

Abstract

Dina Nayeri, a well-recognized author and lecturer of literature who escaped Iran when she was 10 years old, experiments with a unique form of storytelling in her first novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea. This paper examines the peculiarities of Nayeri’s narrative and its implications for the tradition of Bildungsroman as the novel exemplifies important emerging changes in literary representation of refugees. The conventional Bildungsroman played an important role in the development of the modern concepts of the individual and the nation state. In other words, the Bildungsroman, as a popular cultural product of the 19th century, promoted and consolidated the idea of human subject as a citizen of a modern nation state. Refugees, stranded outside national borders and deprived of citizenship, thus pose a particularly difficult representational problem. Disrupting the ideological function of the genre of Bildungsroman, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea constructs a relational subject with multi-directional agency that retains a potential to give voice to the otherwise obscure figure of refugees. In other words, utilizing and creatively mixing American and Iranian narrative forms and weaving multiple storytellers’ voices together, the novel constructs an agency that is developed and expressed through diverse connections between people in and across generations, cultures, and national borders. As a result, a consistent, though multi-layered and shifting, sense of self emerges, redefining the genre and challenging the way the world and people are imagined today.