Why are immigrant stories so powerful ?

This appeared in The Hindu's Literary Review May 2004


Between memory and desire

Immigrant literature may seem to occupy a curious midway world, weaving a tapestry that is at once familiar and far away. Yet, it is a validation of the American way of life, with assimilation being seen as coming of age, says SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY.


WHAT is it that makes the immigrant experience such fertile literary ground? Popular and prize-winning, these angst-ridden accounts of the aspiring outsider seem to sweep the bestseller stakes. Whether it's Irish immigrant author Frank McCourt in Tis or British born Bangladeshi , Monica Ali's Brick Lane, the stories weave a tapestry that's both familiar and faraway .

For, the immigrant is in a unique position to tell a tale. Like every great epic, from The Odyssey to The Ramayana, his story is also that of a traveller. The immigrant journeys to the promised land and battles adversity, both mental and material. Jasmine in Bharati Mukerjee's Jasmine, for instance, begins her journey travelling through the underbelly of the immigrant trade route on forged papers, through the tiered bunks on the trawlers out of Europe, and ends up making good as a respected "caregiver" as opposed to the more servile Indian version of the "ayah" and then a wife . She moves from Jyoti to Jasmine and eventually to Jane Ripplemeyer, shedding personas like so many skins, eventually metamorphosing into a creature ready to fight fate and "reposition the stars".

Eighteen-year-old Nazneen, in Monica Ali's Brick Lane may have a smooth maiden flight to London, but she is to be married to a man she has never met, pot-bellied, stomach-stroking Chanu, and this is a battle for her nonetheless. Cloistered in her cluttered Brick Lane apartment, Nazneen struggles to find meaning in her day-to-day existence, gradually coming of age by attending activist meetings and eventually achieving economic independence and identity. Gogol in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is born at Saint Auburn Hospital, overlooking Boston's Charles River and the Memorial Drive, but he must nevertheless struggle all through school and even later for a sense of self. He is not born Indian, definitely not yet American. Appropriately and wholly unintentionally, he is somehow given a name that is neither Indian nor American, taken from the surname of his father's favourite Russian author.






The immigrant, like the Greek hero, also takes on the force of Fate itself whether it's the Chinese mothers in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club or Nazneen in Brick Lane. The primeval power of Destiny and men and women's struggles despite it, has always been the stuff of compelling story-telling and these stories are no exception. Fate appears as a leitmotif in Brick Lane where Nazneen's is born stillborn and left to her fate but still survives, this being a precursor to the many events in her life. The opening pages of Jasmine, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, introduce an astrologer cupping his ears ("his satellite dish to the stars") and foretelling Jasmine's widowhood and exile. Such stories, then, deal with the self and spirit yet viewed through the safety of the prosperous western prism. This is also what perhaps gives these books their "feel good" factor and makes them prime contenders for Western awards — for all the trouble these immigrants endure, their dauntless participation in the Great American Dream is what ultimately "liberates" them. The figure of the immigrant is romanticised as a spiritual vagabond and his or his progeny's ultimate assimilation seen as "coming of age".

Besides, the many exotic trapping of these stories, sketched on a canvas that stretches backwards in time and space, give these the universal appeal of the traveller's tale. Spice-filled kitchens compete with arranged marriages and vermillion filled partings, all adding up to create an atmosphere of these foreigners and their quaint colourful little ways. Third world cultures are painted as better somehow, more spiritual, earthy and even sensual but in nice non-threatening ways as in Irish or Asian lamb stew or wrapped up neatly in fortune-cookie wisdom. There's a multicultural richness in these accounts, in their creation of an exotic backdrop, the literary equivalent of "Casablanca" or Arabia of "Lawrence of Arabia". The description of food, clothes and festivals is in a language that flows and enfolds, appealing in a quirky crossover way — Mrs. Sen's kitchen knife in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, for instance, is described vividly as a "blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas". Yet for all the exoticism and nostalgia, the "home" left behind is undoubtedly not the place to be. Chanu in Brick Lane is muddled and misguided in his quixotic intent to return — the Bangladeshi village may be sylvan in retrospect, but Nazneen's sister Hasina's letters paint a dismal picture of the sordid life a woman might have to lead if trapped there. Gogol and Sonia in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake dread their holidays to Kolkata, the crowds and the discomfort, and rejoice in their return, "once again free to quarrel. To sleep for as long as they like". Immigrants like Hanif Kureishi's Karim in Buddha of Suburbia or Frank McCourt in Tis bring with them a whole new perspective on the structure of society, this brilliance of perception probably being possible only by virtue of their exclusion. Ultimately and importantly however, there is a complete validation of the Promised Land. Frank McCourt cribs and carps about the aloof unemotional American approach to life where taking in a meringue to a movie is construed as a huge breach of conduct, yet he can think of nothing worse than those poor souls who reached Ellis Island, who were turned back.

Set firmly in the context of a validation of the present way of life, an immigrant's story is thus powerful both in terms of story and setting, as well as politically correct. Asian historical memoirs from Wild Swans to Daughters of Arabia are stories of oppression and unhappiness, now safely told from the haven of the New World. Novels like The Joy Luck Club and Brick Lane reiterate this. They also deal with complex and very universal issues of enquiry into identity and being, striving to make sense of life mysteries — who am I, what is my name and where is home? It's a potent combination of the particular with the profound and in a world where boundaries simultaneously blur and yet don't go away; this is a story for us all.