This year the Dept. of English and American Studies at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia organizes the fourth week-long project designed for the students of the Faculty of Arts. Each year, there is a different thematic focus which is explored through a series of lectures presented by academics, workshops, film screenings, discussions and competitions in order to activate the students and hear their opinio...n on the topic. This year’s thematic focus is FEAR.
Inspired by the title of Julian Barnes´ book which may be read as a contemporary meditation on one of the most fearful topics – death, we would like to explore how fear shapes our everyday experience, and how is this phenomena investigated in literature and visual art. We invite textual, interpretative and comparative studies on literature, film, visual art and cultural studies that explore the phenomena described below. Contributions are invited on both individual writers/artists/fictional texts/movies and broader or cross-section topics.
Representations of rational and irrational fear in Arts and Literature: - Fear, traumas and angst of the unknown, “the Other” - Facing phobias (death, birds, spiders, darkness, claustrophobia…) - Parapsychological and supernatural phenomena - Monsters, ghosts, goblins, creatures, the living dead, spirit possession - Religious fear and prophetic visions, mysticism - Cultural hatred and xenophobia - Fear and music, fear in/of music - Fear and theatre, fear in/of theatre - Modern forms of fear and traumas o Soulless world of virtual reality o Life in the terror-haunted world o Loss of humanity o Transhumanism and posthumanism
Exploring fearsome narratives: - Horror, Thriller, Gothic novel, Adventure story, War novels - Fear in modern children´s and young adult literature - Fear in cross-over literature - Popular culture narratives - Movie and theatre adaptations of literary works - Visual, auditory and literary expressive means evoking fear
The speakers will present their papers to the students of the Department of English and American Studies at CPU Nitra, Slovakia during a week-long project that combines academic lectures, film screenings, discussion and competitions. Papers should range in length from 45 up to 90 minutes (up to 12 pages in the written form including endnotes and works cited) and be presented in the English language. Please submit a 300-word abstract of your presentation to the email addresses listed below together with your institutional affiliation and current email address. Selected papers will also be included in the next issue of the academic journal Ars Aeterna (Ars Aeterna 5) published by the Department of English and American Studies at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra in Spring 2011.
Abstract: Aravind Adiga’s second published book Between the Assassinations is set in a small (fictional) Indian town of Kittur in the period between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her son Rajiv in 1991. The challenging format of the work, reminding the reader of a guidebook, provides a unique opportunity to present Indian social landscape both in a (seemingly) factual and in a fictional manner. By blending both the objective and subjective modes of narration, Adiga succeeds in penetrating under the surface of the perfunctory gaze of a tourist and provides the reader with a vivid portrayal of India across class, religion and occupation. The stories in the collection, gushing with diversity and vitality, reveal profound moral dilemmas of the Indian continent, yet at the same time, they all touch upon the question of humanity with a persistent undertone.
The search for one’s identity and the process of its (re)construction rank among the most frequent discourses in contemporary academic discussions. The concept of identity has been scrutinized within a variety of disciplinary areas and from many perspectives, such as psychoanalytical, social constructionist or ideological but also in terms of its representation in the literary form through the view of essentialists or structuralists. To large extent, the preoccupation with identity and the self in the literary milieu has been fuelled by the emergence of postcolonial and ethnic writing which gained prominence in the last decades and became almost fashionable to deal with (at least at Western universities). In fact, the explosion of theories and new concepts of identity aiming to investigate the mysterious depths of human mind triggered Madan Sarup to mark the “widespread, pervasive fascination with identity” as a “symptom of postmodernity” (1996: 28). However, there has been a noticeable development within the field that has marked a shifting terrain in the studies. As Zygmunt Bauman pointed out the “modern ‘problem of identity’ was how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open” (Bauman, 1996: 18).
In general, the self was exposed to a crucial and dramatic transformation since its (re)evolution contributed to the alteration of its essential characteristics. It went from being marked as homogeneous and unified to being viewed as transitory and polysemous. The idea of a coherent, centered and integrated identity disappeared and was replaced by its flexible, fragmented and ambiguous counterpart. With the traditional views being undermined a new concept regarding identity as “fabricated, constructed, in process” (Sarup, 1996: 14) has supplanted them. Clearly, the postmodern world is a world of dynamism that leads to the reconstitution of the self that no longer possesses stability and fixedness. Instead, contradiction, inconsistency and hybridization take their place. In consequence, identity becomes a multidimensional space in which both psychological and sociological aspects have to be taken into consideration and which give rise to a relational self. It can be viewed as a “mediating concept between the external and the internal, the individual and society” (Ibid., p. 28), adjusting the self-definition to the changing relationships with others.
Writers such as Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Diran Adebayo, Sunetra Gupta, Romesh Gunesekera, Caryl Phillips, Kiran Desai or Jhumpa Lahiri, to name just a few, all deal with questions of identity in their novels. As Mária Kiššová points out ”the formation of the notion of identity and belonging are the key concepts of postcolonial literature discussed by McLeod, Spivak, Bhabha and many others” (2006: 93). Most of the current narratives, from the postcolonial literary spectrum or those that are labeled as postcolonial, are set in the multicultural centers of contemporary metropolis where different cultures coexist side by side. The protagonists, often immigrants or their descendants, inhabit a strange space in-between two cultures, which forces them to renegotiate their identities and come into terms with the challenges this position poses to them. Contemporary postcolonial writing seems to be so suffused with diverse comments on identity that, from certain perspectives, it appears to be stuck at the same place. Despite their unique style, poetics and their ability to lure the reader into the inner world of the characters, the stories seem to recycle the same notions or problems again and again. The Indian writer Aravind Adiga brings in a little bit of fresh air into the stale atmosphere.
Born in Madras in 1974, Adiga has achieved international acclaim with his debut novel The White Tiger which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2008. Over the course of seven nights, Balram Halwai, the ambivalent protagonist of the story, recounts his journey from the dark world of servants to the shiny life of a successful entrepreneur. Revealing the rotten mechanisms that move the Indian society and the omnipresent corruption and amorality, Balram himself becomes part of the machinery by murdering his employer. The book, both funny and gruesome at the same time, portrays life in India as the author got to know it during his life and his travels. Yet as he points out India has changed tremendously and not all of its inhabitants were able to come into terms with these changes. As the writer states: “[t]he past fifty years have seen tumultuous changes in India's society, and these changes -- many of which are for the better -- have overturned the traditional hierarchies, and the old securities of life. A lot of poorer Indians are left confused and perplexed by the new India that is being formed around them”[1].
What the novel seems to suggest is that there are no securities or fixedness in social structures that have been in operation for generations and have determined the shape of Indian identity. Balram himself floats easily from one identity to another as he climbs up the social ladder and the only distinction that he is willing to accept in relation to India’s social diversity is the division into the India of Darkness, or as he calls it the world of small bellies, and the India of Light, i.e. the world of big bellies. In the end Balram has gone a very long way and is as far from his origins as he can be thus eluding any attempt at putting a label on him. The author himself attempts to avoid clear identification; in one of the interviews he claimed that he does not necessarily see himself as an Indian author: “As a writer, I don't feel tied to any one identity; I'm happy to draw influences from wherever they come”[2]
Adiga’s second published book Between the Assassinations, which he wrote before The White Tiger, discusses identity both on the personal and cultural (or national) level. Most of the stories do not open this discourse explicitly, yet the preoccupation with the topic is omnipresent and seems to be rooted in the very culture the book refers to. The text itselfis very elusive in terms of genre identification and structure and it repudiates any attempt at defining it with a single and ultimate tag. The thick volume looks like a novel but it consists of separate short stories; it also contains simple maps and other typographical elements that refer to the format of a guidebook and masquerade fiction as fact. In terms of style, the stories are written in a straightforward way and are devoid of dense usage of symbolism characteristic for short stories. On the other hand, it lacks profound characterization and formal unity typical for novels. Adiga is simply a master of disguise (like some of his characters).
Kittur, the fictional setting of Adiga’s book, represents a small town vibrant with life and energy. The temporal framing of the stories dates from the assassination of Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984 to the assassination of her son Rajiv on 21 May 1991 (hence the title). By employing an unusual format for his writing, reminding one of the structure of a guidebook, Adiga puts the reader in the role of a tourist who, in Bauman words, “is a conscious and systematic seeker of experience, of a new and different experience, of the experience of difference and novelty” (Bauman, 1996: 29). The gaze of the tourist might be perfunctory, as the brief factual descriptions of the town’s monuments and places of interest suggest; yet Adiga forces the recipient to look under the surface of the tourist glamour. The factual[3] descriptions of various places of interest and short digressions into the town’s history or its linguistic and religious diversity are accompanied by stories of its inhabitants. These stories, which are always related to a particular monument or a place in Kittur, reveal another face of the town, the one which a tourist cannot access normally, and they provide a glimpse into what lies beyond the appealing fabrications of tourist machinery.
At first sight, the town is presented as an ideal tourist destination – it is a place with rich historical background and is inhabited by diverse religious and ethnic communities. As the introductory passage of the travel guide informs the reader, “[g]iven the town’s richness of history and scenic beauty, and diversity of religion, race, and language, a minimum stay of a week is recommended” (Adiga, 2009: 1) The central street of the town, namely Umbrella Street, accommodates a pornographic cinema, a manufacture of beedis, an ice cream shop, an English-language film theatre and a Chinese restaurant together with a Ganapati Temple, a Roman Catholic suburb, a Hindu suburb and a Muslim area. Temples exist alongside mosques, cathedrals and churches, Hindus live side by side with Muslims and Christians; there are the poor and the rich, the masters and the servants, the high castes and the low castes.
Yet what appears as a multicultural and multireligious paradise is in fact a battlefield of races, castes, classes and religions fuelled by prejudices and stereotypes. Words like Brahmin, Hoyka or low-caste are thrown into people’s faces as the worst offence. The history of the town, as the book informs us, has been marked by constant religious unrests and riots, violated treaties and conflicts, be it among the Arabs, the Portuguese or Mohammedans to name just a few. The town was ruled and inhabited by so many different groups of people that it failed to achieve a unified common identity that would embrace its diversity. The unrests and the violations of the past are obviously recast into the present and become the unofficial trademark of the town where it got so far that real-estate transactions masquerade as religious riots (ibid.: 162).
As far as the town’s demographic diversity is concerned, there are clear rules in operation, boundaries that are not to be crossed and which prevent different groups from mingling. Identifying with one group may automatically lead to repudiation from certain social and professional spheres as the opening sentence of the introductory story suggests. Obviously, it outlines Kittur’s problems springing from its cultural and religious diversity and unmasks the real face of the town. Moreover, the vast majority of characters in the stories are introduced to the reader in terms of their caste, religious denomination or social status (some of them even remain nameless) as if these labels would imply the existence of fixed and solid identities. Unmistakably, they are supposed to facilitate mutual contacts and communication as they clearly outline the territories in which they operate. But the stories continue to demonstrate that these labels and the characteristics that are attached to them are completely meaningless and imaginary. Let me mention few examples.
The protagonist of the first story is Ziauddin, a small Muslim boy, who has miraculously found an employment in the local tea-and-samosa shop despite the fact that “[n]one of the shopkeepers near the railway station would hire a Muslim” (ibid.: 3). The first sentence uttered by the boy when addressing his future employer is an evident statement of self-identification. Ziauddin’s “I am a Muslim, sir” (ibid.) clearly implies that the boy associates his religious denomination with some personal qualities and characteristics (evidently positive ones) and expects others to recognize them as well. Two pages later, however, the boy announces vehemently that he is Pathan which is obviously better than being a Muslim and even better than being a Hindu. Even at his age, Ziauddin understands that belonging to certain group is far more beneficial than being a member of some other so he assumes those religious or ethnic labels that suit him best at a given situation. But the matter is complicated even further when one of the locals starts claiming that “Pathans are white-skinned, like Imran Khan” and the boy is “as black as an African” (ibid.: 7).
The rich and spoilt boy Shankara, the hero of another story, faces similar problems as Ziauddin[4]. Being born half-Brahmin and half-Hoyka, Shankara finds himself in a conflicting position in between two different castes which leads to a dramatic turn of events. Shankara, feeling that the hated chemistry professor humiliates him because of his origin, decides to explode a bomb in the classroom. This act of violence meant as a form of protest represents Shankara’s attempt to silence his own rage and helplessness, yet it also produces an atmosphere of fear and inflames further anger and suspicions. The world that the boy lives in is a world of contradictions. Among his Hoyka relatives, Shankara is viewed as their superior since he is half-Brahmin, i.e. he belongs to a higher caste. Among Brahmins, he is looked down upon because of his Hoyka’s heritage that degrades his social position despite the fact that he comes from a rich family. The very family is divided by an impenetrable boundary produced by the caste system and Shankara decides to fight against it.
“I have burst a bomb to end the 5,000-year-old caste system that still operates in our country. I have burst a bomb to show that no man should be judged, as I have been, merely by the accident of his birth” (ibid.: 57).
This pathetic message that the boy addresses to the police in an imaginary interview is contrasting sharply with his own behaviour. Shankara is not only a victim of prejudices and cultural bias he himself acts according to them (although unconsciously). He looks down upon his chauffeur and his relatives in the same way he is discriminated for his own background which only documents how deeply rooted the notions of caste are in Indian society. As the boy gets involved with caste business more intensely (by attending some rallies), a world of absurdity is uncovered before him. As one professor informs him, the Hoyka caste which already belongs to the lower castes is further subdivided into seven sub-castes that are all governed by their own special principles. It is practically impossible to follow all of them and behave appropriately in every situation.
Unlike the young generation that is able to adapt to new circumstances to certain extent at least, the 50-year old Jayamma is stuck in a world of the past where stable rules were in operation; everybody having a clearly assigned role and position within the society. Jayamma, working as a cook in the household of a Christian advocate, is a proud “high-born Brahmin woman” (ibid.: 233). She clings to this mantra that represent all the certainties she has but is unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge the transformations that are taking place all around her. Throughout the story she keeps asking: “What kind of era is this when Brahmins bring lower-caste girls into their households? Where have the rules of caste and religion fallen today […]?” (ibid.: p. 236) Feeling punished for being “stuck among Christians and meat-eaters in this strange town” (ibid.: 232), Jayamma holds on to the stereotyped worldview. She does not change her opinion even after she finds out that the Hoyka girl she despised is in fact a lonely little girl and the Brahmin boy that she cared for behaves like a spoilt prat.
Adiga makes it clear that the caste politics only creates unnecessary subdivisions and artificial borders between people and supports the discords in the society. They only lead to further problems and splits which demark dangerous territories; and no one knows how to navigate in them. At one point Shankara is proud to be half-Brahmin and dismisses Hoykas only to change his opinion few hours later and ends up absolutely confused. “[He] felt ashamed to be a Hindu; what a repulsive thing, this caste system that his ancestors had devised. But at the same time he was annoyed with Daryl D’Souza. Who was this man to lecture him on caste? How dare the Christians do this? Hadn’t they been Hindus too, at some point?” (ibid.: 71) Obviously, once you get involved in the absurd caste politics there is no way out of this carousel.
“I have the anxiety and fear of the Brahmin, and I have the tendency to act without thinking like Hoyka. In me the worst of both has fused and produced this monstrosity which is my personality” (ibid.: 74) “He was in a secret caste – a caste of Brahmo-Hoykas, of which he had found only one representative so far, himself, and which put him apart from all the other castes of humankind” (ibid.: 75).
The concept of identity presenting it as a rigid, unchanging entity simply does not work for Shankara, Ziauddin and the other characters in the book. What Adiga’s book suggests about identity does definitely correspond with current trends and theories in the field since they both emphasize the elusiveness of identity and the impossibility to fix it. Of course, Adiga’s portrayal of this matter is situated in more or less absurd and even (tragi)comic circumstances but the essence of the problem remains the same, i.e. it is impossible to fix identity in a particular place and time and keep it solid forever whether on the personal or on the national level. India, presented through the microcosm of Kittur, seems to be as intangible as its inhabitants. The book is flooded with numerable references to various religious denominations, caste divisions or nationalities. For a non-insider it is fairly difficult to orientate within the intricate Indian system of castes and religious denominations which determine the social status of the members of these groups respectively. Moreover, the linguistic variety of the town working in accord with the caste and religious divisions are remindful of the chaotic organization of Babel.
In conclusion, Between the Assassinations abounds in foreboding images and portrayals. There seems to be no sense of a collective self that would unite the town and its diversified inhabitants; the majority of the characters are egoistic individuals who are interested in their lives solely not realizing that without some unity no positive change can be achieved. Adiga’s book, then, does not provide a very optimistic portrayal of the multi-layered society; the stories depicting people struggling with irreversible poverty, corruption and with unendurably stratified environment imply that there is a dark ominous cloud hanging over India like the sword of Damocles.
Bibliography
ADIGA, Aravind (2009): Between the Assassinations. London: Atlantic Books.
BAUMAN, Zygmunt (1996): From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity. In: Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall, Paul du Gay (2005), London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 18-36.
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KIŠŠOVÁ, Mária (2006): The Search for Identity in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. In: Emigration to the English Speaking World. Eds. Janka Kaščáková, dalibor Mikuláš (2006). Ružomberok: CatholicUniversity, pp. 93-103.
SARUP, Madan (1996): Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World. Georgia:University of Georgia Press.
Interview. Available at: http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm?author_number=1552
[3] Since Kittur is a fictional town Adiga created for his own purposes, one has to bear in mind that the factual parts of the book referring to the town’s history, social and demographic landscape are fictional as well. The author thus creates an illusion (that of a guidebook which is not a guidebook at all) and complicates the matter even further by blending the borders between the objective and the subjective.
[4] Like Ziauddin who adopts identities as it suits him, Shankara has also been willing to change his denomination and become a Christian since there are no castes among them.
The paper seeks to analyze selected short stories of the latest short story collection of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. In Unaccustomed Earth,Lahiri explores the theme of migration and displacement with her typical poetic style and immense emotional involvement. The title of the collection is taken from a passage of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Custom-House suggesting that transplanting people into new soil might, in fact, be beneficial; yet Lahiri’s stories are mostly dominated by an omnipresent sense of loss or insecurity. Portraying the lives and struggles of second-generation immigrants, Unaccustomed Earth challenges our notions of belonging, identity and the significance of one’sroots.
No one today is purely one thing.
- Edward W. Said
In 1993, in his ground-breaking book Culture and Imperialism Edward W. Said noted that it is “one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history” (1994: 332). Said grounds this fact in the afterthoughts of post-colonial and imperial conflicts which resulted in “unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies” whose “incarnation today is the migrant” (Ibid.). The mixture of cultures and identities on global scale has been consolidated by imperialism (Ibid.: 336); yet as Said’s thoughts progress it becomes clear that he perceives these confluences as a “paradoxical gift” (Ibid.) of the era. Said’s (rather) optimistic conclusion of his book suggests that mingling of diverse ethnicities all over the world has enabled people to shed whatever limiting labels had been assigned to them - be it their nationality, ethnicity, sex or religion - and step over the dividing lines.
Eight years later, in his collection of essays entitled New World Order (2001), Caryl Phillipscomments on the condition of the twenty-first-century world using these words: “These days we are all unmoored. Our identities are fluid. Belonging is a contested state. Home is a place riddled with vexing questions.” (2001: 5) It is a world in which the migrant, the asylum seeker or the refugee play crucial roles and in which “nobody will feel fully at home.” (Ibid.) “As the laborious certainties of the old order continue to fade, and the volume of the global conversation increases, ambiguity embraces us.” (Ibid.: 6)
What Phillips and Said seem to be suggesting is that the era of globalization and constant movement across countries and continents have redefined some of the notions considered as certainties or fixities. The concept of home appears to be one of them. It has assumed a rather symbolical dimension recently that is sharply contrasting with its understanding as a material, physical place only. As people move across state borders, they are forced to re-negotiate their identities. The question of belonging and rootedness eventually comes up as the significance of the territory one occupies becomes just one aspect of the migrant experience. Contemporary novels are full of stories of individuals who find themselves on the verge of two different cultures, feeling part of neither of them fully. Physical displacement thus often leads to emotional alienation forcing the migrants to reconceptualize their identities in a long-term and a rather painful struggle.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri is writing such stories. Her personal experience of growing up in an immigrant community has been widely utilized in her writing career. Living in-between two different cultures as a child of Indian migrants who had settled in the United States, Lahiri, too, has had to struggle with a split identity: “As a young child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment, and vice versa. I felt that I led two very separate lives.” Lahiri’s sense of alienation, both from her American friends and her own parents, evolved eventually into one of the most dominant themes in her fiction. Most of her characters oscillate between two different worlds, struggling hard to keep them in balance. The author’s words confirm that she was not spared either: “The older I get, the more I am aware that I have somehow inherited a sense of exile from my parents, even though in many ways I am so much more American than they are. In fact, it is still very hard to think of myself as an American.”
In Unaccustomed Earth,her second short story collecion, Lahiri explores the theme of migration and displacement with her typical poetic style and immense emotional involvement. The title of the collection is taken from a passage of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Custom-House suggesting that transplanting people into new soil might, in fact, be beneficial; yet Lahiri’s stories are often dominated by an omnipresent sense of loss and insecurity. The process of self-reconstruction portrayed from generational viewpoints occupies the central space in the collection.
Portraying the lives and struggles of first- and second-generation immigrants, Unaccustomed Earth challenges our notions of belonging, identity and the significance of one’s roots. Most of the narratives focus on the lives of second-generation migrants who are supposed to be settled and adapted in the environment their parents have chosen as their new home and should not face any problems with acculturation. However, despite their rootedness in American soil, they, too, experience moments of self-doubts and insecurity which they seem to have inherited from their parents. The children’s stories are thus never complete without the narratives of their parents, whose cultural legacies still shape and influence their lives. In other words, the lives of children and parents are inextricably interlinked without them being aware of it, and problems such as identity crisis, feelings of alienation, isolation, or exclusion are passed down from parents to children as parts of genetic predispositions.
Lahiri’s well thought-out narrative strategies, conjoining the stories of the children with those of their parents, are implicitly explained in one of the stories. In Only Goodness the heroine strolls through the National Gallery in London and stops to admire Jan Van Eyck's portrait called The Arnolfini Marriage. The painting, depicting Giovanni Arnolfini, standing in a room, hand in hand, with his bride, may be regarded as an equivalent of Lahiri’s elaborated writing technique. Beside the two figures who dominate the painting (because of their placement in the foreground and their size), there are other objects worth noticing which carry symbolic meanings, such as the dog (symbolizing faithfulness), the fruits perfunctorily placed on the window sill and the blossoming tree outside (fertility) or the solitary burning candle in the chandelier. The careful selection and deliberate placing of these symbolical objects in the painting, which might at first sight appear as insignificant and random, correspond to Lahiri’s sense for miniature and detail. The very form of the short story and its spatial limitations, in fact, call for a dense usage of symbolic details whose meaning emerges from the context in the process of reading and contributes to a more profound understanding of the message.
A second look at the painting reveals another interesting detail. The spatial distribution of the figures and objects on the canvas renders the convex mirror on the wall behind the couple the focal point of the painting. Placed right in the middle of the canvas and in between the figures, the mirror simply draws the viewers’ eyes to its reflection. A careful inspection of the mirror image then reveals another dimension, namely two other figures observing the couple. It points to an invisible part of the scene which plays, however, a crucial role in the whole context. According to several interpretations, the two figures, one of them supposedly Van Eyck himself, are legal witnesses of the marriage ceremony and the painting thus functions as a marriage certificate. Lahiri, in a similar way, focuses our attention on surface images or scenes appearing as irrelevant which, through thorough investigation, reveal the true essence of the story. Like the painting with “the small mirror at the back revealing more than the room at first appeared to contain” (Lahiri, 2008: 157), her stories point to other stories operating within the invisible space in-between the lines. Thus, the stories of the immigrants’ children always reflect the stories of their parents and manifest their mutual interconnection.
In A Choice of Accomodations, for example, a middle-aged couple attends the wedding of an old college friend. The wedding reception and the whole stay, described in impressive details and representing the core of the narrative, uncompromisingly point to the couple’s insecurities and alienation that spring from deeply buried reasons. Suddenly, the ordinary situations during the visit uncover the inner struggles of the characters, of which they themselves are unaware. In Hell-Heaven the narrator discusses her relationship with her mother while growing up, yet at the same time it unveils the tragic story of her immigrant mother living in a foreign country and in an unsatisfying marriage.
The title story (the longest in the collection) is based on the same principle. It introduces the 38-year-old Ruma, now expecting second child with her American husband, who is visited by her recently widowed father in her home in Seattle. The visit occupies the central space in the narrative, yet again it points to discourses beyond its borders. The father’s stay uncovers Ruma’s personal problems leading to an identity crisis and the reader gradually discovers that her cultural background plays a very crucial role in her life that she is willing to acknowledge.
Cultural identification thus proves to be a problematic concept for second-generation migrants as well. Ruma finds herself in a conflicted position since she has inherited a sense of exile and loss from her parents. Lahiri’s story proves that children of immigrants are not born, metaphorically speaking, as tabula rasa but are rather contaminated by their parents’ migrant experience. Nor do they possess the desired stability and fixedness but instead struggle with uncertainties, ambiguities and confusion just like their parents before them. As Stuart Hall claims in his essay Cultural Identity and Diaspora: “[c]ultural identity is not a fixed essence” but a “positioning” constructed through memory and narrative (1990: 113). Therefore, the self is bound to be in the process of constant transformation with past and present, sameness and difference overlapping and informing one another.
Thus, the parent-child kinship may be regarded as a continuation of the dialogue between past and present. Yet the conversation is not always smooth. The father-daughter relationship in Unaccustomed Earth is rather complicated; Ruma has always been closer to her mother, a traditional Bengali woman, strictly adhering to all habits and customs even after moving to the United States. After her sudden death, however, the distance between Ruma and her father seems to grow even bigger. While her mother’s death shocked Ruma and left her totally unprepared for life without her, her father appears to be lightened by it. After selling the family house, a cruel act of “wiping out her mother’s presence” (Lahiri, 2008: 6) in Ruma’s eyes, he started traveling all around Europe, enjoying the freedom of a widower. The impersonal postcards Ruma receives from him from time to time remind her of her father’s openness to the possibilities of the wide world that starkly contrast his reserved behaviour towards his own daughter. The fragmented and incomplete sentences referring to his schedule and travel updates aptly exemplify the shattered father-daughter bond.
During the week-long visit, feared by both sides, Ruma and her father scrutinize each other; yet neither of them is willing to talk openly about their relationship and future plans. Ruma’s father, who remains nameless till the end of the story, gradually realizes how much his daughter resembles his deceased wife as the difference between mother and daughter gradually blur and disappear.
“Like his wife, Ruma was now alone in this new place, overwhelmed, without friends, caring for a young child, all of it reminding him, too much, of the early years of his marriage, the years for which his wife had never forgiven him. He had always assumed Ruma’s life would be different.” (Ibid.: 40)
Exhausted by motherly duties and her second pregnancy, Ruma shuts herself in the monotonous world of domestic chores, following her mother’s example. The part-time job in a law firm in New York is a matter of the past; in Seattle, Ruma has transformed into a housewife, eschewing all ambitions and possibilities concerning her self-realization.
“Growing up, her mother’s example – moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and household – had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Ruma’s life now.” (Ibid.: 11)
Ruma’s social isolation and her preference for solitude, which inevitably leads to her discontentment and frustration, contrast immensely with her father’s socializing and traveling adventures. At the age of seventy, Ruma’s “well rested” (Ibid.: 12) father has discovered the world of pleasurable pastimes and noncommittal acquaintances. Enjoying his newly acquired freedom and nonchalant lifestyle, he is able to disengage himself from everyday obligations and rediscover la joie de vivre. At the same time, however, he is painfully aware of his daughter’s worries and unhappiness. His week-long visit in Seattle finally succeeds in invigorating the long lost closeness, although without its verbal acknowledgment. Some matters still remain unspoken, but the initial barrier seems to be overcome in the final act of reconciliation.
As almost all of Lahiri’s texts, Unaccustomed Earth discusses the problem of complicated intergenerational relationships viewed from the migrant’s perspective. Belonging to the second generation of immigrants, Ruma (like her brother Romi) displays typical signs of assimilation and gradual alienation from Bengali customs, a change noticed by her father as his children grew up. “The more the children grew, the less they seemed to resemble either parent – they spoke differently, dressed differently, seemed foreign in every way, from the texture of their hair to the shapes of their feet and hands.” (Ibid.: 54) Shedding many “habits of her upbringing […] in her adult life” (Ibid.: 14), Ruma’s perspective on her parents’ culture and its significance for her own life undergoes some crucial changes.
Unlike her father, who was always more prone to assimilation in certain matters, Ruma’s mother represented the cultural anchor in the family – she had kept wearing her saris and jewels all the time, had spoken only Bengali with her children, had created a circle of Bengali friends, and had regularly returned to Calcutta to visit their relatives. Ruma is aware of the fact that “[i]t was her mother who would have stuck out in this wet Northern landscape” while her father “resembled an American in his old age. With his gray hair and fair skin he could have been practically from anywhere.” (Ibid.: 11)
Despite Ruma’s drifting away from her Bengali roots, she is painfully aware of a certain loss. Her three-year old son Akash, “a perfect synthesis of Ruma and Adam” (Ibid.: 10) speaks only English, hates Indian food and has no memory of her mother. The fragile connection to her parents’ past, and to Akash’s roots as well, is slowly disintegrating. Not even Adam, her successful American husband, is able to provide the necessary consolation. Even though he supports Ruma in all her decisions and appears to be almost an ideal husband, Ruma has the feeling that “she and Adam were separate people leading separate lives” (Ibid.: 26). The death of her mother equals the death of all the things she embodied to Ruma (her Bengali-ness predominantly) and she seems to be losing the firm ground under her feet. “Remembering the past is [however] crucial for our sense of identity” (Lowenthal, 2003: 197) and the lack of connection to personal history may lead to the disruption of self-continuity and personal disintegration.
The image of Ruma’s neglected backyard garden becomes one of the central symbols of the story. Gardening has always been her father’s passion, which was never understood by Ruma or her mother. “[H]e had toiled in unfriendly soil” (Lahiri, 2008: 16) in order to produce beautiful flowers and vegetables for his wife’s use in the kitchen. The cultivation of Ruma’s garden turns into a mission during his visit. The “unfriendly soil”, when approached purposely and knowingly, is suddenly turned into a fertile place by the hand of the cultivator. This subtle image of transformation is paralleled by Ruma’s and her father’s different approaches to their lives. Ruma, who is stuck at the same place, in the same worn-out soil, withers while her father, who refuses to settle down and establishes a new relationship (with Mrs. Bagchi), thrives. At the end, however, through an unexpected discovery in her garden, Ruma accepts the fact that her father has moved on; yet the question of whether she will be able to do the same remains unanswered.
Similarly, Hell-Heaven, story in the collection which might remind the reader of Mrs. Sens’s from Interpreter of Maladies, explores a complicated parent-child relationship. The narrative perspective shifts to the more personal, first-person voice of the, already adult, daughter Usha, who recounts the piteous story of her mother as she recollects it from her childhood memories. An arranged Bengali marriage and subsequent emigration to a foreign country have placed the protagonist of the story, Usha’s mother Aparna, into a no-win situation. With a stranger by her side, with whom she has almost nothing in common, and thousands of strangers all around her, Aparna’ sense of isolation and loneliness threaten to escalate. But the accidental meeting with another Bengali, Pranab Chakraborty (called Pranab Kaku by the seven-year old Usha), triggers her vitality and restores the balance in her life.
Pranab appears to be the very opposite of Aparna’s husband – the shared love for music, film, poetry, common memories of their neighborhood in Calcutta, the willingness to listen to her and spend time with her, make him an ideal partner. Aparna clings to Pranab’s attention and companionship desperately (unaware of the catastrophe that awaits her). Usha, who begins to understand the intensity and the reasons for her mother’s transformation only years later, becomes part of an illusionary harmonious family which exists, however, only in Aparna’s mind. Pranab’s influence on Usha’s mother, of which he is unaware, is symbolically reflected in one of the pictures made during their small trips:
“In that picture, Pranab Kaku’s shadow, his two arms raised at angles to hold the camera to his face, hovers in the corner of the frame, his darkened, featureless shape superimposed on one side of my mother’s body.” (Ibid.: 64)
Aparna’s place in Pranab’s life is, however, soon supplanted by his fellow student Deborah, an American girl who is the complete antithesis of Usha’s mother and who eventually becomes his wife. Deborah’s presence violates the already established harmony in Aparna’s life and she perceives Pranab’s decision to marry an American as an act of betrayal. Usha, who falls in love with Deborah as well, unconsciously triggers her mother’s disintegration. This double betrayal is symbolically preserved in the pictures from their trips – Aparna being substituted by Deborah – thus creating a new illusion of a harmonious family. Aparna’s world is as shattered to pieces as Pranab’s ashtray which she smashes up. Only years later does Usha find out that her mother’s desperation lead to an unsuccessful suicidal attempt. Hell-Heaven, in this respect, unveils the arduous migrants’ condition. The uprootedness and displacement result in a personal crisis which threatens the very life of the migrant in this case.
A word from the editor - Alena Smiešková Interview with Manana Antadze - Mária Kiššová Folk Tales and Memorial Narratives as Viable Artifacts of Collective Memory - Katarína Školníková Bringing back the memory: Representations of Wrocław, Lwów, and Szczecin in contemporary Polish culture as examples of reconstructing cultural memory - Agata Strządała Remembering the Other: creating national mythology in A Passage to India by Edward Forster - Anna Bysiecka-Maciaszek Twisted Images of Cultural Memory: Paula Rego’s Visual Narrative - Agnieszka Gołda-Derejczyk The Barak Architekti Studio – Genius Loci - Viktor Šabík Fictional Memory and the Narrating Mind in J. Coe’s Novel The House of Sleep -Marina Ragachewskaya The Attempt Was All – the theme of memory in Ian McEwan’s Atonement - Petr Chalupský Struggling to Remember, Remembering to Struggle: Three Novels by Contemporary Scottish Women Authors - Monika Szuba ‘You Tell Your Secrets and I’ll tell Mine’: the Gold Dust of Memories - Ludmilla Miteva “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms”: Mnemotechnic and John Donne’s La Corona - Noémi M. Najbauer Memory and Art: The Paradox of Utopianism - David Schauffler Reviews
Try to incorporate the analysis of (some of) these allusions into your interpretation of the selected part in order to enrich / deepen your interpretation:
1. Rembrandt: Hendrickje Bathing (Howard + Kiki, p. 442-3) Relate this painting to the novel's ending. What does it suggest about Howard's and Kiki's relationship? 2. Hendrickje Stoffels (p. 442-3)
Try to incorporate the analysis of (some of) these allusions into your interpretation of the selected part in order to enrich / deepen your interpretation:
Try to incorporate the analysis of (some of) these allusions into your interpretation of the selected part in order to enrich / deepen your interpretation:
1. Edward Hopper: Road in Maine (Kiki, p. 266, 268) 2.E.M. Forster: A Room with a View (Harold, p. 298) - Zadie Smith's favourite writer; On Beauty is based on his novel Howards End 3. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (Howard + Victoria, p. 315)
Try to incorporate the analysis of (some of) these allusions into your interpretation of the selected part in order to enrich / deepen your interpretation:
1. "To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet" (Zora, p. 209) - taken from T.S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 2. Rembrandt: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (p. 250) 3.Rembrandt: Seated Nude (p. 251)
Try to incorporate the analysis of (some of) these allusions into your interpretation of the selected part in order to enrich / deepen your interpretation:
1. "For the longest time I wanted to be Malcolm X's private assistant." (Kiki to Carlene, p. 172) 2. Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen (p. 173-4)
3.Maitresse Erzulie (p. 174-5)Discuss the symbolical meaning of the painting. Relate Carlene' s words to Kiki's identity problem.
Try to incorporate the analysis of (some of) these allusions into your interpretation of the selected part in order to enrich / deepen your interpretation:
1. "... she' s so amazing, looks like Nefertiti." (Claire about Carlene, p. 123)
2.the anatomy lesson: Elaine Scarry (p.127) - the title of Smith's novel is derived from Scarry's essay 'On Beauty and being just'
3. Rembrandt: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (p. 127, 144) Discuss the relation between the painting and the title of this part of the book. 4. poem On Beauty (p. 153), originally wirtten by Nick Laird, the husband of Zadie Smith
Try to incorporate the analysis of (some of) these allusions into your interpretation of the selected part in order to enrich / deepen your interpretation:
1. Mozart's Requiem (p. 60) - Comment on Kiki's response to the music and its symbolical meaning. - English translation of the lyrics
2. Rubens: Fours Studies of a Male Head (Howard to Carl, p. 77)
Try to incorporate the analysis of (some of) these allusions into your interpretation of the selected part in order to enrich / deepen your interpretation:
2. "I'm just another black man caught up in the mix, tryna make a dollah outta fifteen cents" (Levi, p. 24) - allusion to 2Pac I Get Around
3. Rembrandt: Self -Portrait, 1629 Munich (p. 28)
4. Rembrandt - Self -Portrait with Lace Collar, 1629 The Hague
5. "I'm the Aunt Jemima on the cookie boxes of their childhoods, the pair of thick ankles Tom and Jerry played around." (Kiki, p. 51) - What does this statement suggest about Kiki's sense of self / her identity?
6. Rembrandt: The Shipbuilder and His Wife (p. 54)
