Utopia, Dystopia and Exilic Experience in Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways

This paper examines the social contexts and repercussions of the experiences of Indian migrants in England as portrayed in Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways. Although narratives of migration is attached to the very genesis of human existence on planet earth, but the experience of human mobility has in recent history taken an unimaginably traumatising dimension and this has continued to draw the attention of creative writers and literary scholars. From the analysis of the text named above, this unprecedented trend in migration experience is fuelled by the apparent inequality in the world in which a greater percentage of nations of the world, especially in the developing countries, continue, in the midst of plenty, to wallow in abject poverty, underdevelopment and poor governance that make the mass of the underprivileged humanity that populate these disadvantaged realms to continue to exist in their varied states of disillusionment and vulnerable to diverse dangers and indignities in their quests for bare survival. Failed leadership in most of the Third World nations and societies occasioned by greed and leadership ineptitude, corruption, nepotism, bigotry, chauvinism, superciliousness, and extremism constitute the bases for the abysmal socioeconomic and political performance of these nations with the concomitant human mobility that result in avoidable suffering of the weak and disadvantaged of the world. The paper explores the socio-political trajectories of migration narratives and migrant encounters where dreams of utopia confront the reality of dystopia as projected in Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways.

Keywords: Utopia Dystopia Migration Displacement Trauma

Author

• Micah Okon Asukwo
  Department of English, Akwa Ibom State University,
  Obio Akpa Campus, Nigeria.
  micahasuquo@yahoo.com
  08068346534