Simona Hevešiová
Abstract:
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’s roots.
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 Phillips comments 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.
To conclude, Lahiri’s stories outline the tensions of preserving one’s cultural background in a foreign environment (in the narratives of the parents) and the conflicts of assimilation (in the narratives of the children). At the same time, they articulate the difficult positions of second-generation migrants who do not face displacement directly, physically, but have to struggle with the legacies of their parents nevertheless. Unlike her debut novel The Namesake which finally drifts to a (suggestion of a) satisfactory happy ending, Unaccustomed Earth is not that unequivocal. Summing up her own immigrant experience, Lahiri voices the very theme of her second short story collection: “I think being an immigrant must teach you so much about the world and about human beings, things you can't understand if you are born and raised and live your whole life in one place. It must be an amazing experience in many ways, but it has a price.”
References:
HALL, S. (1990). ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’. In: P. Mongia (ed.) 2003. Contemporary Postcolonial Theory. A Reader, London: Arnold, 110-121.
LAHIRI, J. (2008). Unaccustomed Earth. New York/Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf.
LOWENTHAL, D. (2003). The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
PHILLIPS, C. (2001). A New World Order. London: Secker & Warburg.
SAID, E.W. (1994). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage.
A Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri. Available at:
A Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri. Available at:
