EXPLORING THE VOICES FROM THE MARGIN IN SABYN JAVERI’S AND ELIF SHAFAK’S FICTION

Abstract

This study is an endeavor to explore the voices of the Subaltern in Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World (2019) and Sabyn Javeri’s Nobody Killed Her (2017). It further investigates the systematic suppression of the ones who find neither any share in the center nor any right on the discourse of power to express themselves.  This research gains insight from Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? and encompasses Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World (2019) and Sabyn Javeri’s Nobody Killed Her (2017) as a primary source of data. This study, after a thoroughly conducted textual analysis reaches the findings that Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World (2019) and Sabyn Javeri’s Nobody Killed Her (2017) are imbued with the instances of Subaltern’s speech which is neither heard nor acknowledged. This study analyzes the dilemma of the transgender community, objectification of women and pangs of the poverty-stricken people... The researcher concludes that those lying on the margin despite their utmost effort to represent themselves are silenced or suppressed in a noise of ideologies, and discourse of power which do not let them be heard. The research contends that identity is a process constantly being redesigned and refashioned by the dominant discourse and ideologies and the sincere representation of the Subaltern’s identity can redefine their identity which does not make them Other or Inferior.