Immigrant Experience and Irish Literature: Melatu Uche Okorie's This Hostel Life

This article studies two short stories from Melatu Uche Okorie’s acclaimed collection This Hostel Life from 2018. Both the recent year of publication and Okorie’s choice of subject matter – the system of Direct Provision and the immigrant experience in Ireland – merit the author the epithet of being a ‘new voice’ in the field of Irish literature. However, by the same logic, Okorie’s writing is commonly discussed under the heading of migrant literature and its implied marginality. The article argues that the stories from This Hostel Life negotiate the social, political, and spatial marginality of its African-Irish characters, as well as a discourse of ‘Irish literature’ that performs its own exclusions. As the article demonstrates, in addressing this condition, Okorie’s writing is not only invested in socially critical representation; it also employs distinctly literary and self-reflexive means of counter-discursivity. Adding to the existing research on Melatu Uche Okorie, the article suggests that her writing itself is occupied precisely with the space of writing and its reception, and that it develops a commentary on practices of reading and writing within and beyond ingrained notions of Irish literature.