Meena's Mockingbird: from Harper Lee to Meera Syal

Abstract

Syal's novel Anita and Me describes the childhood of Meena, a young member of the Asian diaspora in Britain in the late 1960s. The article demonstrates how this book draws on Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for inspiration, and shows how a post-colonial reading of Lee's description of the American South provides a way into a similar reading of Syal. The relationship of the two may then be understood as a post-colonial ‘writing back’.