Lata Mishra

Across Cultures: A Study of Three Immigrant Women writers

Diaspora does not merely refer to a wandering journey, since it enacts a process of mutual translation and interaction, in which place has been translated into plural interrelationships that bridge and abridge different cultures. The (a)bridging effects of diaspora require us to examine the spatio-temporal imaginaries of place within a new context, for diaspora informs of the multifaceted complexity of the dialectical negotiation between here and there--a tension that not only reflects the very nature of diasporic identity but also indicates a salient feature of nonlimited locality. In the age of modem diaspora, it is almost impossible to segregate any local place that does not involve non-local or extra-local linkages in a wide network. Moreover, what we find in diaspora is a dramatic change in the politics of place, which starts to redefine place beyond the historical opposition of here versus there, since to a certain extent, there has been both merged and emerged in the very characterization of here.

To be in diaspora is not only to traverse various cultural and national spaces, but also to erect a bridge between here and there. In other words, the increasing global flows of diaspora that overcome distance and separation have created the effects of spatial compression. As mutual penetration between the local and the extra-local has dramatically increased, we need to explore the influence as well as the consequence of place-in-displacement on identity formation across cultural and national boundaries. As the custodian of tradition and memory, the family fulfils an important function, transmitting and mediating the memories, mores, and myths of the preceding generations and the community. In contemporary postcolonial literature the theme of the family is particularly rich and diversified. As the locus of tradition, the family, in these literatures may be explored as the place where the core values of the preceding generations and the ancestors are transmitted and lived, so that continuity and growth are ensured. At the same time, the family, as reflector and indicator of social change, offers a wide area of research for themes of conflict and reconciliation.

Globalization is tentatively defined as the "interconnectedness" of nations at a purely surface level, namely economics. Viewed from the vantage point of the power of socio-cultural parameters, such as race, religion, language and the economy, globalization is perceived as a narrative of contradictions and incoherence. Through technological advances globalisation has come to mean the economic and cultural interconnectedness of people in a world bereft of borders. It is a complex metaphor the world is experiencing, possibly, with the motive to expand links across humanity, to evolve a global consciousness. It is synonymous with modernization.

While clinging on to grass root cultural ideologies of caste, religion, and community, the social movement, sweeping the country through the new middle class professionals, youth and women, cuts across caste, region and religion, creates a culture where homogenization and heterogenization may actually operate in tandem or even reinforce each other, heightening incoherent societal contradictions. If globalization is towards consolidation of a world society, it could mean 'social change,' or modernity. The globalization of cultural identities have led to conflicting identities and rootless-ness in contemporary postmodern condition. Cultural change is not only a story of loss and destruction, but also of gain and creativity. As a result of increasing interconnection, old forms of diversity do vanish, but at the same time a new cultural diversity comes into existence.

The image of women in fiction has undergone a change during the last four decades. Women writers including the immigrant women writers, have moved away from traditional portrayals of enduring, self-sacrificing women toward conflicted female characters searching for identity. In contrast to earlier novels, female characters from the 1980s onwards assert themselves and defy marriage and motherhood. Recent writers depict both the diversity of women and the diversity within each woman, rather than limiting the lives of women to one ideal. The novels emerging in the twenty-first century furnish examples of a whole range of attitudes towards the imposition of tradition, some offering an analysis of the family structure and the caste system as the key elements of patriarchal social organization. They also re-interpret mythology by using new symbols and subverting the canonic versions. Women writers represent a segment of contemporary Indian fiction, which is focused on the education and enlightenment of women. Feminine sensibilities of these writers have prompted them to explore that tender area of characters which has been neglected for years in India. These writers have tried to encourage the assertion of feminine identity and self-esteem, while promoting social acceptance of a more complete and diverse set of social roles for women.

Bharati Mukherjee has gained much respected reputation as an immigrant writer. In her novel Jasmine, Jasmine’s decision to leave her homeland coincides with her desire to escape the confines of her cultural identity. Religion and economics were huge issues in India. The novel begins with the phrase "Lifetimes ago," referring to the many "lives" that Jasmine has been through. She was born as the fifth daughter of a reluctant tiller of thirty acres in a poor village in India with the Indian name, Jyoti, meaning "Light" (Jasmine, 34). The seven-year-old Jyoti, who has not gained the name of Jasmine yet, is foretold of two "Fate[s]" by an astrologer: widowhood and exile (1). Shouting "No!" she rejects the "Fate[s]" that he assigns her. She grows up to be a bright girl, being especially good at English and arithmetic, specifically addition. After her father's death, she marries a modern, progressive man named Prakash. He gives her the name Jasmine in the hope of releasing her from her traditional way of thinking.

After his assassination by a terrorist's bomb, she tries to go to America as her husband so greatly dreamed of doing. Once she lands in Florida, the ship's captain, Half-Face, rapes her, and in taking revenge by killing him, she finds herself stronger and wanting to live, instead of burning herself alive. She is saved by an American woman, who trains her to walk and talk like an American, and bestows the new name Jazzy on her. From Florida she goes to a stiflingly conventional Indian community in Flushing, New York, then escapes to New York City, where she works as an au pair of Taylor, a scholar who studies "weak gravity," and is given the additional names of Jase and Jassy. Knowing that the killer of her Indian husband is on his way to get her, she decides to move to Iowa, where she meets Bud, a conservative banker, whose baby she carries. He gives her another new name, Jane. His ex-wife calls Jasmine a "tornado" (182). In the final scene, Jasmine is about to go to California with Taylor, where Du, her adopted Vietnamese son, lives with his sister.

The structure of the novel is rather entangled with regard to its use of time and place. The story begins with Jasmine's past in Hasnapur, India, and jumps into the future. Between these periods, she moves to the present, returns to the past in Hasnapur, then goes to the past in Europe and Florida, back to the past in New York, and then, returns to the present again. Geographically, it starts in India and moves through Europe to America, where it also jumps back and forth from Florida through New York to Iowa, then finally moves toward California. Mukherjee intentionally makes her heroine repeatedly leap around in time and space so as to introduce a sense of instability into the novel. The instability embedded in the core of the novel is deeply concerned with Mukherjee's idea of "immigrant." Mukherjee, born into a propertied family in Calcutta, India in 1940, the daughter of a scientist, insists upon being an American, not a hyphenated Indian-American. This insistence of hers is seen in the novel as well. Jasmine's transmigration has been "genetic," while that of Du was "hyphenated" (198).

Genetically metamorphosed Jasmine finds an effective way of adaptation to the new circumstances in the U.S., which allows her to move to and fro without looking back over India, while Du keeps his life somewhere between Vietnam and America in order to maintain contact with both countries.

In Jasmine's case, renaming occurs during her metamorphosis into a person newly "born." A close study of the sundry names given to Jasmine verifies this. Before reaching her final destination of the name of Jasmine, she goes through many stages reflected in the fluid names of her metamorphoses. Jasmine's renaming occurs five times. In chronological order, she starts with Jyoti (first introduced on page 5), then becomes Jazzy (119), Jase or Jassy which can be considered as one (156), Jane (4), and finally, Jasmine. The first naming, Jyoti, occurs in India. She is born with no hope of a dowry. In our country daughters are mostly considered a "curse," brought on by their own evil deeds in a previous life. Surviving infanticide, she is given by her grandmother the name Jyoti, meaning "light, brilliance, and radiance."

Jyoti is first renamed Jazzy in the U.S. by an American woman while she was under her care after killing Half-Face and being injured. The name carries a sense of glitz, and still, as with Jyoti, brings to mind bright lights. Jazzy is trained by the American woman to walk and talk like an American in a T-shirt and running shoes. She needs the flashy name in order to abandon her Hasnapur modesty and transform herself into a dynamic American. Through the woman, she meets Taylor, who gives her the names Jase and Jassy and later accepts her as Jasmine. These names, therefore, can be presumed to be Jasmine's designations, because at the end of the story, Taylor writes a letter "addressed to Jasmine Vijh." The name of the addressee suggests that Taylor might accept her as Jasmine. It is with him that she leaves for California as a person "genetically" reborn and embracing an American and Indian persona, as the name Jasmine signifies.

Before she feels a sense of true fulfillment, one more and rather essential name, Jane, is presented to her by an Iowan banker, Bud. Jane is the most American name that Jasmine has had. However, as the novel carefully underlines, Jane is not "Plain Jane," a mediocre person without a particular role, but "Calamity Jane," an actual fighter who lived in the past. Bud assigns to her the role of destroyer, or "tornado," as she is called by Bud's ex-wife whose place Jane has taken. At times, she even plays the caregiver role of another Jane, Jane Eyre, with Bud as her own Mr. Rochester. However, all she wants to be is "Plain Jane." That is why she abandons the name accompanied by several roles. To relinquish those roles of Jane and become "Plain Jane," she needs to become a "tornado," and disappear into a "cloud" which takes the form of California.

Jasmine is the most significant of her five names, as it becomes the title of the novel. The name discloses her inner self. Jasmine is a flower with climbing nature. "Climbing" connotes succeeding by taking full advantage of the power of others. Her climbing nature is introduced in the scene where she, as Jane, is called by Bud's ex-wife "a gold digger" (174; 179). In addition, jasmine, the plant, is defined in the Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery as "fragrance," symbolizing female "grace," and "love," "memory" and "separation." The heroine reveals the climbing and enchanting figure that "jasmine" has. Thus, Jasmine, throughout her life under diverse and often changing names, clings to her climbing nature.

Jasmine creates the energy by her constant movement through various events and adverse circumstances. She attains power from her renaming by others and gives energy back to her surroundings while moving through protean changes of name. In India, Jasmine feels suspended between the traditional and the new world offered by her Indian husband, Prakash: between controlled and independent love (69), and between the identities of Jyoti and Jasmine (70). Obviously she feels uncomfortable in her dangling situation. After moving to the United States, she often encounters things that are "in between," reflecting the concept of "two." When she leaves Taylor, he is between marriage and separation with his wife who is also between her lover and husband (175). In Iowa, she happens to hear "two" farmers talk about the difference between "horsepower" and "whorepower" (179). Bud, her lover, punches one of them, because it is in reference to her that they made such remarks. The word "whorepower" reminds her of the murder scene of her Indian husband, where the "two" words "Prostitutes! Whores!" (85) are targeted at her. Through these two incidents, it could be said that she is the cause of his death as well as Bud's fight in the bar. This kind of between-ness with "two" issues leads her into distress. 

Chitra Banerjee was born in Calcutta and spent the first nineteen years of her life in India. Married to Murthy Divakaruni in 1979, she now lives in Sunnyvale, California. As she began living in the United States, Chitra became more and more aware of the differences in culture and it was then that she wanted to write for exploring these differences. The Mistress of Spices, Divakaruni’s first novel is a story of an Indian immigrant, Tilo, who runs a spice shop in Oakland, California. She not only supplies ingredients for a host of uses, but also helps customers in every way possible. When local Indian expatriates visit her shop, Tilo is at her best. She dispenses wisdom. She is too courteous and warm, with her Western customers, giving them the appropriate spice they need. She sells coriander for better eyesight, turmeric to erase wrinkles, chilies for cleansing of evil spirits. Some of them like the palm of her hand. Reason is simple: Tilo is a Mistress of Spices; and, a priestess of their secrets. The history of the protagonist is unique yet sad. Her birth is described with bitter remembrance:

They named me Nayan Tara, Star of the Eye, but my parents’ faces were heavy with fallen hope at another girlchild  . . .  Wrap her in old cloth, lay her face down on the floor. . . .  Perhaps that is why the words came to me so soon.  . . .  Or was it the loneliness, the need rising angry in a dark girl left to wander the village unattended. (The Mistress of Spices, 14)

 Shortly after birth it becomes apparent that the girl is special--she can see into the distant future with uncanny clarity--a skill that brings her fame, fortune, and vulnerability. She is unloved by her parents but duly appreciated as they revel in their daughter’s superfluous income. This attention only breeds contempt in the girl who longs to free herself from the family who only takes, never gives. Her internal wish is swiftly granted as pirates storm the village, taking the special girl with them to aid them in their plundering and killing her parents. Thus, Nayan Tara finds herself swept up in a life of roguish wandering--she had no real home in India, nor does she have one at sea. This searching despondency is ultimately satisfied in the sea; Nayan Tara throws herself in after hearing of a magical island of spices from two amicable electric eels, an act of desperation fueled by the will to find her place in the world. But, even though it may seem so, her decision is not exceptional.

Each year a thousand girls are sent back from the island because they do not have the right hands. . . .  Each year a thousand girls whose hands have failed them throw themselves into the sea as they sail home. Because death is easier to bear than the ordinary life, cooking and washing clothes and bathing in the women’s lake and bearing children who will one day leave you. (35)

Nayan Tara is one of the lucky few who are accepted by the Old One, a grand, ancient figure who rules over the island, commands its victuals, instructs her maidens, and regulates the influx of new apprentices. She also has mandate over the departure of these apprentices, who, after fielding a vision, select a destination. They then pass through a cleansing, transmogrifying flame, Shampati’s fire, to the location where they will set up a haven, a store, from which they will bestow their learned yet magical gift of physical and spiritual healing both through the sale and complimentary distribution of spices. However, before they depart, each apprentice must choose a new name, one rich in meaning and apt in its appropriateness. This is not only symbolic of their new identity as mistresses, but, in the case of the protagonist, a new identity in a new World. In choosing her name, Tilotamma, Nayan Tara incites both upbraiding and gentle laughter in the Old One.

‘It is certainly not confidence you lack, girl. To take on the name of the most beautiful apsara of Rain god Indra’s court (Tilo herself is quite homely) I (Tilo) hang my head. . . .  For this I could hate the Old One if I did not love her so, she who was truly first mother to me, who had given up all hope of being mothered. (44-45).

But, the Old One is not without misgivings, even though she permits the name for her most prized pupil. In a moment of foreshadowing, the ancient woman recites the myth of Tilotamma, saying,

Tilotamma, disobedient at the last, fell. And was banished to earth to live as a mortal for seven lives. Seven mortal lives of illness and age, of people turning in disgust from her twisted, leprous limbs.  (45).

 Wary yet ever-supercilious, Tilo haughtily responds, But I will not fall, Mother(45), a retort resonant with youthful ignorance. Tilo’s day of departure is especially poignant for the inexperienced mistress who never had a true family. But, her roving background makes Tilo a perfect, resilient candidate to face life as an outsider in twentieth-century California. In establishing a setting such as this, Divakaruni constructs a narrative based around the influx of a variety of voices, both male and female, who translate their plight as immigrants to the United States to the protagonist, the mistress, whose task is to mollify her customer’s individual pain and suffering through specifically selected spices, each noted for their particular power. It will be through Tilo’s eyes, and the psychic visions she has of her customers, that readers come to know the life of this subaltern population. Divakaruni’s characters are battered women: women, whose dreams have crashed but whose spirit remains undiminished in the wake of adversity. Not that Divakaruni’s women are always as solid as a rock in pathos. They are sometimes fragile, depressingly vulnerable and sensitive.

Woven throughout the narrative of The Mistress of Spices is a tale of oppression, one associated with the theme of familial expectations of Indian women in America. Divakaruni, in proffering the stories of a multitude of both female and male characters, is able to more fully explore the themes of cultural oppression, racial discrimination, cultural assimilation, and the discovery of voice. She  interweaves her text with fibers of Magical Realism, Post-colonial criticism, and feminist discourse to produce a tapestry of messages that, at times, overlap--but never contradict. Instead, these techniques complement each other in a way that produces a new voice, one that echoes with the calls for equality, feminine self-expression, and cultural competency.  As an Indian immigrant to the United States, Divakaruni, aching to break free from stereotypes, used her past experiences--and the desire to communicate the plight of Indian women in America-- as the driving force behind her writing.

 Her first volume of short stories, Arranged Marriage (1997), alsoexplores the cross-cultural experiences of womanhood through a feminist perspective, a theme that continued to inform her work. How the changing times are affecting the cherished Indian institution of arranged marriage is the theme of all the eleven stories in this anthology. Most of the stories are about Indian immigrants to the United States who were from the author’s native region of Bengal. The stories are told by female narrators in the first person, singular point of view, often in the present tense, imparting a voice of intimacy and cinematic credibility. There are several immigrant brides who “are both liberated and trapped by cultural changes” and who are struggling to carve out an identity of their own.

Though references to local attractions, postgraduate education and her Bengali culture are sprinkled liberally throughout the tales, Chitra says the stories themselves – which deal with issues including domestic violence, crime, racism,interracial relationships, economic disparity, abortion and divorce – are inspired by her imagination and the experiences of others. At once pessimistic and filled with hope, Divakaruni creates contradictory as well as connected fictional worlds through the stories.

 The story “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs” for example, juxtaposes the protagonist’s vision of America as an illusion and reality when as a student, she, arriving in the city of Chicago from the conservative middle-class upbringing in Calcutta, is brought face-to-face with the horrifying reality of its mean streets. One common theme that runs through all the stories is that for those Indianborn women living new lives in America, independence is a mixed blessing. It means walking the tightrope between old treasured beliefs and surprising newfound desires, and understanding the emotions which that conflict brings. The strong moral values imposed by her own middle-class Bengali upbringing often become the fixed loci against which she juxtaposes the situations of the New World.

The female protagonists of eight of the nine stories in Divakaruni’s sensuously evocative collection The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001) are caught between the beliefs and traditions of their Indian heritage and those of their, or their children’s, new homeland, America. The diverse range of stories in this volume attracts the readers’ attention and most of them depict life in East and West with touching perception and color. While the problem of acculturation is deftly dealt with in “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter”, where a Bengali widow discovers that her old fashioned ways are an embarrassment to her daughter-in-law and decides to go back to Calcutta; miscommunication and distancing in a brother-sister relationship in “The Intelligence of Wild Things”, the protagonist Ruchira’s dilemma in “The Unknown Errors of Our Lives” who while packing up her flat in preparation for her forthcoming marriage, discovers her childhood ‘book of errors’, a teenage notebook in which she wrote down ways to improve her life—Divakaruni writes about the problems of life which she knows best. Her Bengali upbringing has contributed a lot to this knowledge.

 “The Names of Stars in Bengali” is the beautiful story of a San Francisco wife and mother who returns to her native village in Bengal to visit her mother, in which each understands afresh the emotional dislocation caused by stepping into “a time machine called immigration” that subjects them to “the alien habit of a world they had imagined imperfectly.” Along with the elaborate scents, sights and sounds of Bengali life, all of the stories are touching tales of lapsed communication, inarticulate love and redemptive memories. They illuminate the difficult adjustments of women in whom memory and duty must co-exist with a new, often painful and disorienting set of standards.

Jhumpa Lahiri also tries to relocate her cultural space and identity mediated by significant cross-cultural influences Though she lives in the United States, her work is imbued with Indian, and particularly Bengali culture and sensibilities. Wherever they are set, she explores “Bengaliness” in some of her stories, while others deal with immigrants at different stages on the road to assimilation. Most of her characters play out a simultaneous existence in two cultures; she changes cultural perspective as easily as a bilingual writer shifts from language to language; how she has minutely observed Calcutta and the middle-class Bengali milieu; how she has deftly depicted cultural disorientation. Jhumpa Lahiri is a class apart in the sense that her second generation diasporic status does not connect her to Calcutta by birth. Born in London, raised in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Jhumpa  presently lives in New York. Like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Bharati Mukherjee, Lahiri makes repeated references to the cultural tradition of Calcutta and their cherished moments of nostalgia or moments of bewilderment in encounters with the real Calcutta. In her novel The Namesake, Jhumpa takes recourse to a lot of Bengaliness. Ashima Ganguli, the mother of the protagonist is not only a Bengali by birth, her Calcutta lineage constantly haunts her and makes her a sojourner in America. Her home is a meta-American home from the outside but typically Bengali from the inside where we are told right at the beginning of the novel how she mixes Rice Krispies and Planters Peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl to make “a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks …spilling from newspaper cones” (The Namesake 1).

Dressed up in the “cavalcade of matrimonial bracelets on both arms: iron, gold, coral, conch,” (4) she remains the typical Bengali lady in spite of her physical location in Cambridge, Massachusetts for so many years. At the beginning of the novel, when she is in labour and her water breaks, Ashima calls out to Asoke, her husband. However, she does not use his name because this would not be proper. According to her, “It’s not the type of thing Bengali wives do…a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken…cleverly patched over” (2). From this statement we are shown how important privacy is to Bengali families. Bengali children are given two names: one that is a pet name, used by the family and close friends, and one that is used by the rest of society. Throughout his life Gogol suffers from the uniqueness of his name. In Bengali families “…individual names are inviolable. They are not meant to be inherited or shared”(28). We are even told how even Gogol Ganguli, by the time he is ten, has been to Calcutta several times, sometimes in summer and once during the Durga Puja and

“from the most recent trip he still remembers the sight of it [his last name Ganguli] etched respectably into the white-washed exterior of his paternal grandparents’ house”. (The Namesake: 67).

Calcutta thus becomes a marker in many ways in the lives of this expatriate Bengali family. Lahiri shows how traditional gender roles – often considered subordinate in the postcolonial context in their appropriation by nationalist agendas – can be read as a source of empowerment when translated into the context of middle class immigrant life in America The Namesake depicts the cultural and national fluidity offered by this status: the immigrant mother, a central character in this novel, is able to preserve the Indian traditions that link her to her homeland while simultaneously benefiting from the privileges afforded by American citizenship in order to ensure a successful future for her America-born children. An Indian matriarch living in the suburbs of Boston, she does so through the careful negotiations she makes for her family on a daily basis in response to the often conflicting demands of traditional Bengali culture and the pressure to become an assimilated American. Although in the context of Western feminism it may seem contradictory that it is through the role of wife and mother that a subjectivity which transcends any fixed national identity is achieved, this reading of Lahiri's novel is informed by the arguments of transnational feminists who resist any essentializing understanding of female emancipation.

These renowned women novelists discussed in the paper, are able to offer an authentic perspective on the social constraints placed on immigrant women. The novels conclude with a synthesis of cultures--on the protagonist’s terms. What was once unspoken is left expressed. Post-colonial women writers use their texts to deal with and often challenge the dual oppression--patriarchy that preceded and continues after colonialism and that inscribes the concepts of womanhood.  These novelists do not advocate rebellion and defiance of one culture and acceptance of another. They write to unite people and do it by destroying myths and stereotypes. As they break down these barriers, they dissolve backgrounds, communities, ages, and even different worlds. It seems that they have recognized the strength of mind and potential of the twenty-first century women who are on the way to gain independence and autonomy leading to assertion of the self. The work of Indian women writers is significant in making society aware of women’s demands, and in providing a medium for self-expression and, thus, re-writing the History of India.

 

 

Selected Novels

Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. The Mistress of Spices. New York: Anchor, 1997

…: Arranged Marriage. Black Swan, London (1997).

…: The Unknown Errors of Our Lives. Abacus, London (2001).

Lahiri, Jhumpa: The Namesake. Houghton Mifflin, Boston (2003).

Mukherjee, Bharati Jasmine. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1989.

 

References

Aneja, Anu. "Jasmine, the Sweet Scent of Exile." Pacific Coast Philology 28.1, 1993.

Chakravorty, Spivak Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak”? The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. (Ed.) Bill Ashcroft et al. London: Routledge, 1995.

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.

Katrak, Ketu H. “Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Post-colonial Women’s Texts.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (Ed.), Bill Ashcroft et al. London: Routledge, 1995.

Lopez, Alfred J. Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism. Albany: Sunny Press 2001

Loomba, Ania. Colonialism / Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998

Murfin, Ross and Ray M. Supriya, (eds.), The Bedford Glossary of Literary  Terms. Boston: Bedford, 1997.