Narrating the displaced child: Postcolonial hybridity and resistance in The Other Side of Truth

Abstract

This study explores the effect of Beverley Naidoo’s protagonist in The Other Side of Truth in light of displacement through a postcolonial perspective. It emphasizes how she navigates her identity amidst the traumatic exile and displacement, especially with the rise of forced migration. It further analyzes how political and psychological displacement shape the lived practices of refugees and encounters, leading to narratives whose protagonists have suffered a lot in their quest to speak up during their asylum and self-discovery journeys. Employing a close-reading analytical methodology, the analysis integrates works of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak with modern scholarship of refugee literature to properly understand issues of surveillance, hybridity, and narrative resistance. The findings indicate that the phenomenon of displacement is not confined to the geographical factors; it is viewed as a multifaceted state that intersects between the colonial power and violent practices against the colonized. The voice of the female narrator functions as a defensive mechanism against the colonizer while attempting to forge her identity by means of storytelling and narration. Naidoo’s narrative challenges all aspects of Western narratives and positions refugee children as moral mediators within a postcolonial circle. Eventually, this study claims that The Other Side of Truth retrieves the refugees’ lives from emotional or persecuted representations, proposing a resilient and resistant literary involvement with matters of exile.