Religious Belief and Diaspora in Coetzee’s Youth and Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus Ala’ Aldojan English Literature, University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan Yousef Awad English Literature, University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan Abstract—This study focuses on the role that faith plays in immigrants’ lives in the South African novelist John Maxwell Coetzee’s Youth (2002) and the Arab British author Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus (2008). Specifically, the study analyzes and scrutinizes the faith (lessness)-informed attitudes of the two protagonists toward the various challenges they encounter as diasporic subjects in a society that instills alienation and displacement. Each protagonist goes through an identity crisis triggered by his inability to reach his objectives and goals as Coetzee’s John fails to be the poet he has aspired to be and Sami finds it hard to finish a PhD on Arabic poetry that his late father has encouraged him to pursue. While faith helps Yassin- Kassab’s protagonist to eventually overcome the challenges he faces, faithlessness in Coetzee’s novel deepens the protagonist’s sense of alienation and dislocation as the novel ends on a gloomy note. The study adopts an approach of textual analysis and comparison between the two novels. It also touches upon other fields including religion, history, identity, culture, diaspora, politics, and mental health. It examines the protagonists’ cultural, national, and religious identities based on settling in diasporic communities in relation to the historical backgrounds and the socio-cultural conditions in the homeland and the host country. Index Terms—diaspora, spirituality, religion, mental health, immigration I. INTRODUCTION This paper examines the influence of religious belief, or the lack of it, on the lives of immigrants in diaspora. It focuses on the role that religion crucially plays in the development and improvement of the protagonists’ lives in diaspora in John Maxwell Coetzee’s Youth (2002) and Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus (2008). We argue that developing spiritual stability based on religion represents immigrants’ lifeline to survive in new and challenging environment, while its absence complicates their situations. The study adopts an approach of textual analysis and comparison between the two novels. Specifically, it focuses on the function of religious belief in overcoming the challenges that immigrants usually encounter as a result of displacement and alienation. Thus, religious faithfulness and faithlessness represent the ground on which the comparison between the two texts is held. The experiences that the protagonists in Youth and The Road from Damascus undergo are quite comparable. Both John and Sami live in England as outsiders and they attempt to fit into London’s social and cultural fabric. Academically, they aspire to fulfill their dreams in fields of arts and humanities; John aspires to be a poet, and Sami wishes to become an academic and a literary critic. In addition, they go through almost the same challenging stages on their ways to achieving their goals, including their impressions about their homelands, their interactions with women, their unstable religious and cultural identities, and, most importantly, encounters that challenge their self-perception and self-recognition. Despite all these commonalities, their stories end differently, mainly because of the role that faith plays in their lives. In Coetzee’s Youth, which is set in the sixties, readers meet young John, who aspires to leave South Africa and settle in Europe “for he will be an artist, that has long been settled” (Coetzee, 2002, p. 3). In London, John engages in many relationships with women; yet, he never meets the “exceptional girl” who “will appreciate what he is reading and recognize in him an exceptional spirit too” (Coetzee, 2002, p. 72). John believes that the exceptional girl will help him to become a poet. The novel presents the stages that John goes through while living in London until he meets Ganapathy with whom he shares the destiny of being foreigners, outsiders, and deserted in the West. Ganapathy’s life ends miserably, and it foreshadows how John’s life will end if he does not change his attitudes and behaviors. Sami, Yassin-Kassab’s protagonist, encounters challenges that hi s predecessor John has encountered in Britain. Yassin-Kassab’s novel is set in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The novel traces the life of Sami, who arduously but unsuccessfully tries to finish his Ph.D. thesis on Arabic poetry. He believes that going to his homeland will enable him to start writing his thesis, but, ironically, this journey makes it more complex and confusing. Sami uncovers one of the family’s direful secrets that would change his life’s perspectives and beliefs later on. Once Sami returns to London, his self-exploration journey reaches its peak as he plummets in the world of drugs and sex. Just like ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 11, No. 11, pp. 1457-1466, November 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1111.14 © 2021 ACADEMY PUBLICATION