“Trying to Wring an Ocean from the Precious Few Drops”: Language, Identity and Intergenerational Migrant Trauma in Second-Generation Fiction

Abstract: This article analyses three recent works by second-generation Australian writers—Peter Polites’ Down the Hume (2017), Tracey Lien’s All That’s Left Unsaid (2022) and Omar Sakr’s Son of Sin (2022)—examining the ways in which these authors represent and engage with the reality of multicultural and multilingual Australia. Each of the novels speaks from the perspective of a young Australian for whom English is the native language, while the parents’ home language can be a marker of identity or provoke feelings of clumsiness, inadequacy or alienation. Polites and Sakr intersperse their writing with words and phrases in Greek, Arabic and Turkish in a realistic depiction of code-switching and complex cultural identities. Meanwhile, Lien unpacks some of the complexities of child language brokering and the struggle for language maintenance in her exploration of the intense familial and linguistic pressures that stem from intergenerational trauma in the Vietnamese community.