Making Sense of Place Through Senses in Diasporic Writing

Sensory experience is fundamental to place-making. Sensory discovery and readjustment, adding previously unfamiliar sounds, smells, tastes and sights into their repertoire, is one of the most vividly described features of narratives of new migrant experiences. Migration studies often focus on this aspect of newness and discovery of the host country through the senses and the comfort provided by sensory experiences associated with home, such as the consumption of familiar food, music or other cultural artefacts. Focusing on a sample of fictional works and interviews with a Sydney-based Turkish-Australian author, Saba Öymen, this paper will discuss how fictional narratives describe the use of the senses to construct place, not as an externality that the migrant subject simply inhabits, but as something continuously embodied, carried and reconstructed through the body. Interviews with the author are used to elucidate the fictional material and to trace the interplay between lived experience, observation and imaginative elaboration in her writing. The analysis suggests that diasporic place-making is an embodied process and that it challenges the chronological and physical delineation of place. This reading extends Ghassan Hage’s concept of diasporic lenticularity by locating the body as the site and the agent that enables multiple inhabitance.