Migrants’ Identity Crisis and the Precarity of Home Alienation in Contemporary Internal Conflicts: Analytical View of Othello and Goats

Since the middle Ages, Arabs, Africans and people of other faiths have been much maligned and severely misinterpreted in the West. They have always been regarded as races which stand for extremism, brutalism, polygamy, fatalism, non-acceptance of the other, in addition to stripping females of their dignity and fundamental rights. Such misconception has been propagated for centuries despite voluminous literary attempts by Western writers to improve the image of the other. While the Catholic Church had wielded the Western intellectual mind in Europe, writers deliberately distorted the image of the other and their faiths in the medieval Christendom. Shakespeare had been one of the promoters of the perception in his plays. The characters of the Moor and the Turks are implicitly depicted in some works in a satire of the Oriental character and principles. On the other hand, the Orient has always aspired to the Occident as the haven of tolerance, freedom, human rights, openness, and decent livelihoods. In contemporary ages, when faith is confused with politics and has resulted in internal conflicts, it has become incumbent upon indigenous population to be either internally-displaced or become refugees in other countries. In both cases, they are ensnared, estranged, humiliated, discriminated, and doomed, not to mention their dreams are dispersed and their idealist conceptions are wrecked. The paper examines Othello by Shakespeare and Goats by Liwaa Yazji, a Syrian playwright, as a case in point.