ABSTRACT
The sixth chapter, “Not at Home,” explores the notion of unheimlichkeit, or the uncanny, in relation to Partition survivors’ experience of displacement and resettlement in regions familiar yet alien at the same time, which produces in them a sense of feeling uncomfortably strange and disoriented. The chapter argues that the unfamiliarity of the language, culture and region they were forced to resettle in produced a sense of “not being at home” in a new land that was supposed to be home. The uncanny effect is produced as much through its first meaning of unfamiliarity and cognitive dissonance as in its second meaning through the exposure of those aspects of existence that were meant to be hidden.
