Burden of Exile and Identity Crisis in Rizwan Akhtar’s Pakistani Story (from real to comic): A Postcolonial Critique

The study endeavors to analyze the reverberations of cultural hybridity in terms of sexuality and identity crisis caused by clash of civilization in Rizwan Akhtar’s Poem: Pakistani story (from real to comic). The writer on one hand is writing back to an imperial centre in order to defy its hegemony and on the other hand is found encountered with cultural fusion rising through clash of civilization. The entire postcolonial literature exhibits a kind of cultural hybridity that gives birth to a confused identity of orients. Love-hate relationships, contradictions between ‘self’ and ‘other’ native-alien clash of cultures, hybridity, realization, nostalgia, mimicking tendency, sense of alienation and ultimate disillusionment prevail throughout the poem in one way or the other. Here, the paper discusses the relevance of Bhabha’s theory of ‘Cultural Hybridity’ to understand the quintessential postcolonial ‘halfness’ which gets a fair handling by the selected writer. The natives try to adopt the invader’s culture in order to get acceptance but are always treated as others and inferiors. In exasperation, they espouse extremist ideas and assume bitter shades of indigenous identity. This article will explore the issues of identity in the light of Postcolonial critical approaches and concludes the burden of undecided citizenship in exile.