cultural dislocation

Marji grows up through a revolution and is sent abroad alone in Persepolis, where she is Iranian to everyone and at home to no one. Yi Yi follows a Taipei family through a year in which nobody quite explains themselves. Io Capitano walks two teenagers from Dakar toward a Europe neither has seen. The gap is between peoples, and it does not close by trying harder.

It requires two worlds. The character must cross into a world with fundamentally different codes — national, ethnic, civilisational, or literally non-human. Being out of step with your own society's class, generation, family or norms is fish out of water, not this — no matter how estranged the character feels.