From Silence to Voice: Reclaiming Identity in Nadia Hashimi’s The Pearl that Broke its Shell

Abstract

This paper looks at the issues of marginality, cultural displacement, and identity reclamation in Nadia Hashimi’s novel The Pearl That Broke Its Shell. In the interwoven stories of Rahima and her great-great-grandmother Shekiba, the novel showshow Afghan women negotiate with a very large-scale patriarchy that has made them invisible and voiceless. Both main characters present with cultural and social exclusion, which is a result of gender roles and traditional practices like bacha posh, which puts girls out as boys at times in which they may not otherwise have those freedoms. The novel does a great job at presenting the internal and external displacements, which in turn form the broken sense of self for the characters. Their journey is that of a struggle to restore identity in a culture that is dominated by sociocultural systems and systemic forces that undermine women. Using a postcolonial feminist lens, the study analyzes the role of storytelling and memory in empowerment and acts of defiance. It also illustrates the process of defiance and survival of the act of reclaiming identity in the context of collective and personal identity. Hashimi narrates a dissenting story portraying the socially dead women’s lives and the routes they can take toward womanhood, which profoundly highlights resistance, self-determination, and identity reclamation.