Scenery of belonging: floral motifs as representations of otherness in Sholeh Rezazadeh’s novel “The Sky Is Always Purple”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2311-259x.2026.1.11Keywords:
Dutch literature, migrant literature, migrant prose, novel, the category of Other, identity studies, floral symbolismAbstract
This article offers a literary analysis of floral symbolism as one of the key aesthetic mechanisms through which the category of Other is represented in contemporary Dutch-language migrant prose. The study focuses on The Sky Is Always Purple by Sholeh Rezazadeh, a Dutch writer of Iranian origin. Despite the novel’s strong reception among readers and its recognition within the Dutch literary field, it has not yet been the subject of systematic scholarly analysis. The object of the study is floral motifs as components of the symbolic structure of the literary text that participate in modelling experiences of migration, cultural memory, loss of home, and the search for identity. The research aims to identify the specific ways in which floral imagery functions as a strategy of othering, through which the text constructs a system of oppositions between memory and current experience, rootedness and existential instability, as well as spatial stasis and the dynamics of migratory movement. The methodological framework of the study is based on an integrated literary approach that combines textual, semiotic, and hermeneutic analysis, drawing on interdisciplinary insights from identity studies and cultural memory studies.
As a result of the analysis, the main floral motifs of the novel (the tree, the forest, the garden, and potted plants) are identified and systematised, revealing how they contribute to a coherent symbolic system that articulates the experience of the Other as a migrant subject. The relevance of the study is determined by the growing scholarly interest in issues of migration, identity, and intercultural interaction, as well as by the insufficient scholarly engagement with Dutch-language migrant literature within Ukrainian literary studies. The academic novelty of the article lies in it being the first comprehensive literary analysis of Sholeh Rezazadeh’s novel in the Ukrainian academic context, as well as in its conceptualisation of floral poetics as one of the key aesthetic strategies of othering in Dutch-language migrant prose. Further research perspectives include a comparative analysis of natural imagery in migrant prose across different linguistic and cultural traditions.
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