Both Charles Dickens, in his novel Hard Times, and Abdullah Hussein, in his novel +migrT Journeys, remind us of something that most of us already know but would like to forget, which is the fact that during hard times the family is as likely to be a place of anguish as it is to be a place of refuge. When people find themselves struggling to make their way in the world - and this may be especially true of men who feel the obligation to support their families - they often take out their anger at the world at large on those whom they love and should wish to protect the most. The two authors explore this dynamic in different contexts.
Hussein, who previously wrote only in his native Urdu, writes in this book about his own arrival from India to live and work illegally in England along with a number of other poor Indians. The protagonist, Amir, along with the other men, is attempting to find himself in this new land at the same time as they are all attempting to understand what it means to be men, and this simultaneous quests for two identities at once puts significant pressure on them. They camp out in their crowded apartment each night, coming "home to the dark of that cave-like house, to sit and talk and do as real men do everywhere, dream of lump sums of money and ways of escaping." This dreaming is partly the dreaming of all young people of the future that they hope to have, but in this case it is colored by the particular pressures and restrictions of immigrant men. Amir's struggles to find a way to live with dignity drive away his daughter, Parvin, who with her brother and mother has turned against his anger and his traditionalism.
Dickens too focuses on the costs of low-wage work on families, in this case an English family living amidst the rise of industrialization in the 19th century as people are being torn from centuries of agricultural tradition. The major characters are Thomas Gradgrind, who has tried to instill in his c...