The Cartography of Belonging: Hybridity and Memory in Sorayya Khan’s We Take Our Cities with Us

Abstract

This research article explores the intricate dimensions of transnational identity, geographical dislocation, and mnemonic preservation in Sorayya Khan’s seminal memoir, We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir (2022). Operating at the vital intersection of postcolonial life writing, memory studies, and spatial theory, this paper argues that Khan constructs a sophisticated “cartography of belonging” that resists static, essentialist definitions of nationhood, race, and home. By analyzing how Khan weaves together her complex Pakistani-Dutch-American heritage across seven cities and three continents, this study deploys Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity and the Third Space alongside Pierre Nora’s formulation of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), Marianne Hirsch’s paradigm of postmemory, and Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space. The analysis demonstrates how Khan reconfigures domestic and urban spaces including Lahore, Islamabad, Vienna, and Amsterdam as active, psychological archives. These environments transcend passive backdrops for personal grief, functioning instead as palimpsestuous landscapes where macro-historical ruptures such as the 1947 Partition of British India, World War II traumas in Nazi-occupied Europe, and post-9/11 Islamophobia intersect with micro-histories of maternal loss and familial survival. Ultimately, this article illustrates how Khan’s narrative models a form of rhizomatic belonging. Through this self-reflexive process, narrative documentation operates as an architectural act of counter-mapping, establishing the sovereign page as the ultimate space of habitation and existential endurance for the hyphenated, global subject.

Keywords: Sorayya Khan, Hybridity, Third Space, Lieux de mémoire, Postmemory, Spatial Theory, Pakistani Anglophone Literature, Transnational Life Writing.