La conquista dell’ibridità nella fiction di Meera Syal

The aim of this essay is to explore Meera Syal’s novels – Anita and Me and Life isn’t all ha ha hee hee – and to suggest that they show and sponsor a level of hybridity that I call ‘ibridità conclamata’ (full-blown hybridity), a condition in which the diasporic subject makes the most of the cultures that constitute him/her. At the end of both novels the female protagonists, who overcome their various crises and reach a more mature and balanced identity by valuing elements of the culture they had rejected – in this case traditional Indian culture – represent fictional embodiments of that kind of hybridity. What is implied here, and what the article tries to make clear, is that hybridity, to bring to fruition its positive potential, should not be thought of as a fixed condition but as involving continuous negotiation aimed at using to the full all the cultural resources available.