Landscapes, identities, deslocations: Usama Al Shahmani’s novel "In der Fremde sprechen die Bäume arabisch"

Abstract

The beginning of the 21st century has shown an intensification of migratory flows around the world. In face of displacement processes, social actors are also confronted with new landscapes and, above all, with new symbolic practices that codify what we understand as landscape. The novel In der Fremde sprechen die Bäume arabisch (In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic, translated by Rachel Farmer) by Usama Al Shahmani, a writer of Iraqi origin, living in Switzerland and writing in German, problematizes this intersection, showing in its plot the contact of a refugee with the Swiss landscapes. This article intends to discuss how the protagonist of this novel interacts with landscapes, verifying the conceptions of his primary socialization and how these conceptions are transformed throughout the plot. With this in mind, the first part of the article presents a theoretical discussion of the concept of landscape, while the second part is dedicated to the analysis of landscape representations in the novel. It concludes that the protagonist undergoes a process of transformation of his identity construction, as he is open to the potential of meanings that emerge from the experience with the landscape.