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Meena Alexander is a prominent South Asian American writer who has explored the condition of migration and dislocation, fusing poetry, prose and critical thinking. As part of the migrant experience, Alexander is preoccupied with ideas of home, violence, displacement, memory, and loss. This paper seeks to investigate the dilemma that migrants face in the United States as presented in Alexander's hybrid text The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996). The paper intends to answer the following questions: What does "home" signify to an immigrant writer in a new land? Is home a geographical place or an emotional space? Does home refer solely to the reservoir of homeland memories? Does it mean the newly adopted place from which she writes; or does it mean that "imaginary homeland" where she retreats from alienation in her new home?; and finally, how does she portray the xenophobic attitudes towards migrants in the United States? What is the effect of the English language on migrants? Selected poems from Alexander's book will be read within the framework of diaspora and migration studies with special emphasis on the writings of Susan Stanford Friedman, which offer useful perspectives for studying Meena Alexander's poetry.

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This paper attempts to explore the Bosnian war diaries, Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo (2006) by Zlata Filipovic (1980 and My Childhood under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary (2006) written by Nadja Halilbegovich (1979-). Both diaries provide an insight into the Bosnian genocide and the everyday life of children amid war. Both Zlata and Nadja bear witness to the horrific events in their country and create a concrete collective memory of the Bosnian war. Drawing on trauma theory and diary writing, the paper examines their traumatic childhood and suffering at a unique moment of Bosnian history and highlights the role of diary writing and testimonial narration. War diaries create a counterdiscourse to war and horror and allow them to document their traumatic lives amid war. The two diaries reveal how children in that war zone were denied their basic rights to live peacefully and enjoy their childhood. Through narrating their painful experience, they try to make sense of their traumatic experience as well

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