The Gendered Identity: Politics Behind the “I” in 'Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee' and 'The Hope Chest' Anonymous College

The tumultuous journey towards the search for identity is a trajectory that many characters deal with in novels. Likewise, this struggle forms a big part of Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee and Rukhsana Ahmad’s The Hope Chest, as both depict the growing up stories of a group of women. In Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, Tania, Chila and Sunita are three friends who have to navigate between their natal Punjabi culture and the opposing values of the British world that they live in. Eventually, they are able to find their own unique identities through a return to their natal culture. Things do not go so well in The Hope Chest – while Rani manages to break away from an arranged marriage and assert her own agency, Ruth ends up a mentally unstable single mother, and Reshma is forced to leave her children and family after having an unauthorised abortion. When compared to the things that these characters go through, the struggles that Tania, Chila and Sunita have to contend with almost seem to be solved too easily. Ahmad’s portrayal of the female identity struggle in The Hope Chest suggests that Syal’s depiction may be an overly simplistic generalisation, one that largely glosses over the debilitating effects that a patriarchal...