Hybridity In The Night Counter, By Anjali Alii Yunis

Celebrating their diversity and non-belonging, transcultural-hybrid novels are believed to create hybrid discourses that may destabilize meaning and identity as well. For Moslund, hybridity itself is a highly problematic term in this connection. It is used haphazardly in the field of migration literature to denote or connote states of both cultural fusion and multiplication, or amalgamation and doubleness (15). What I propose here is that hybridity could be seen as a significant point from which a dialogue can begin with the creation of what has been termed as the ‘third space’. I believe that such a dialogue necessarily brings about a restructuring of this notion, apart from postcolonial discourse. Hybridity, according to Anjali
When in an interview she asked about her home, she said “I don’t know”, I belong to nowhere”, but I feel comfortable in the United States, as it is the country of all”. This is a clear indication of a third generation immigrant identity. They don’t feel so much concerned about their belonging or non-belonging. Ali Yunis’ also reflected much of her thought in her character. We find most of her characters in The Night Counter pay less head to “home syndrome”. On the one hand, home is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination (Raj 89).On the other hand, home cannot be conceived by dwelling in the past; home rather has to be the lived experience of one’s locality. Dwelling in the past may construct no home but myths. Along with feeling of belonging or non-belonging, it only brings
Hybridity is anticipatorily resourceful allowing the―creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zones produced by colonization (Ashcroft et. al.20). Hybridity entail mobility, and mobility endows freedom. It is in this sense that hybrid characters in Once in a Promised Land, The Hakawati, and The Night Counter, can be regarded as cosmopolitan.

The “Third Space” is the kernel hybrid position, mostly ―unrepresentable of itself yet assuming and assessing the fluidity of culture and binarial oppositions within this forceful process that visualizes and cautions conditions discursive and hierarchical(qtd.in Raj 37). One might also argue that hybridity, consequential of the procedures of specific and indeterminate yet yielding relations, is not two separate imaginative moments from which the third emerges but hybridity itself is the ‘Third Space’ which facilitate other positions to come into sight. The ―third space, at once contentious and prospective is the-in-between space– the platform for resistance and acculturation is groomed