A Handful of Dirt by Jan Dost: the story of an anthropomorphic refugee

Abstract

The contemporary Arabic short story ‘A Handful of Dirt’ by Jan Dost laconically denotes the current refugee crisis of an isolated individual who falls short in social communication due to the language barrier. The struggle that makes us remember the old exodus stories crucially pinches him with pain, suffering, pangs of separation, frustration, rootlessness, and all sorts of problems human-beings encounter when they become forced diaspora or literally lose their homeland.

Here, the writer—probably autobiographic—picked an unknown (maybe Syrian) refugee struggling and coping with his own-self in an unmentioned refuge country (maybe Germany). He begins to talk with the inanimate objects lest he should forget his mother tongue: that is the culmination. Now, this paper will try to locate the psychological state of the refugee and further settle whether the man is anthropomorphic or not.