Essay On Exile According To Julia And The Belly Of The Atlantic

In Exile According to Julia and in The Belly of the Atlantic, the narrators of both novels are from French colonized countries and they find that once they emigrate to France they are forced into a borderland. Gisele, of Exile According to Julia, grew up in France but her family and heritage lies in the Caribbean island Guadeloupe. Whereas Salie from The Belly of the Atlantic was from the island Niordior of the African country Senegal. The colonization of these countries by France disrupts the national identity of the women who emigrate to France in Exile According to Julia and The Belly of the Atlantic. This can be seen in the way that Salie and Gisele are othered by those in their community, also in the way that Salie and Gisele develop morals that are seen as “too French,” and through the lives of their friends and family.

They live between their two cultures of France and their native or ancestral lands. Salie speaks about living in the border lands from France when she says“Back home, I missed being elsewhere, where being ‘the other’ is my fate in a different way...Always in exile, with roots everywhere, I’m at home where Africa and Europe put aside their pride and are content to join together: in my writing, which is rich with the fusion they’ve bequeathed me” (Diome 127). As border dweller the two characters are capable of looking at the cultures in a way that other characters are not. They exhibit something called situational knowledge; what that entails is that they can speak on the behalf of the French and of the people from Senegal or the Guadeloupian