1989, Mukherjee's novel Jasmine and Kincaid's Lucy were critically acclaimed. Both authors' personal trajectories that locate them now in the United States encompass some uncanny connections thematically and formally; both female protagonists (after whom the novels are titled) have served as au pairs, as 'caregivers,' Asian and Caribbean nannies to white middle-class families in New York City — a twentieth-century version of governessing, of being situated in the heart of mainstream American families, in unique positions to observe, assimilate, and report. 'Lucy is not a roman à clef of New York literary society,' remarks the Boston Globe's Louise Kennedy, who cannot resist the temptation of noting the black-women-raceclass issue, 'just as it is not the sociopolitical examination of race and class in America that some reviewers seem to think a black woman should be writing.'
Kincaid, columnist for The New Yorker, author of Annie John (1985), her first novel, was puzzling to her American reviewers. The novel explores an intense love-hate relationship between mother and daughter, expressed in a metaphoric, surreal style. The daughter struggles to assert her individuality from the mother's domination; even a final 'escape' into England is prefaced by the mother's words, 'It doesn't matter what you do or where you go. I'll always be your mother and this will always be your home.' Kincaid's works can be described as encompassing different explorations of the history of self- discovery and self-location in various 'homes' near and far from the Caribbean.
The bold experimentation of form in her collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River (1983), was received as 'irritatingly difficult [and] pretentious.' As a 'Caribbean' writer, she was stepping out of her skin a bit too much, treading uncomfortably to rhythms that Western sensibilities were not used to hearing from a Caribbean writer. Why didn't Kincaid write like a typical Caribbean? A similar reception was given to South African-Botswanan Bessie Head's A Question of Power (1973) when it was first published — for example, Arthur Ravenscroft's assertion that 'the topography of madness' is familiar to the 'West,' but that it is unexpected, perhaps too unnerving, to deal with 'nervous breakdowns' from 'third world' -671- writers. They should stay within the boundaries of what is expected from them — stories about community, colonialism, local tradition.
In her next work, A Small Place (1988), Kincaid, with the full talent of her sarcasm, launches a 'telling like it is' story of 'the ugly tourist' who eagerly and irresponsibly consumes the sun, sea, and sand of the Caribbean, 'in harmony with nature and backward in that charming way.' Kincaid has a remarkable and disarmingly lucid ability to reveal the most blinding truths, and to force accountability where it belongs, because as the narrator states, one 'cannot forget the past, cannot forgive, and cannot forget.' By evoking slavery and the painful reality that slaves could not hold their slave traders accountable for their inhuman actions, Kincaid draws lessons from that past for this present, such as the Antiguan neocolonial regime where 'all the ministers in government go overseas for medical treatment. All the ministers have 'green cards' [United States Alien Residency]'; in Antigua there is no decent health care for the majority. New colonizations have taken the place of the old ones: 'Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way.'
'Lucy is about a girl who lives on an island and goes to a continent,' remarked Kincaid on one of her book- promotion tours. Lucy was serially published in The New Yorker, though only its publication in novel form has drawn critical attention. Even as Lucy needs the distance from her home to be able to write about it, her words are suffused in the Caribbean reality. As Kincaid remarks about herself, 'I don't know how to live there [in Antigua], but I don't know how to live without there.'
Whereas Jamaica Kincaid] recognizes this contradiction of being 'here' and 'there' simultaneously in imaginative space, both for herself as writer and for her characters, South Asian Bharati Mukherjee, in personal statements, embraces the 'here' and celebrates her sense of belonging as an American citizen. This sense of unanguished belonging is not always true for Mukherjee's fictional characters, though she asserts this belonging for herself personally. In an essay that prefaces her collection of short stories, Darkness (1985), Mukherjee discusses the advantages of moving from a racist Canada (where she lived from 1966 to 1980) into a United States where she feels more culturally integrated. In Canada, as an outsider, she adopted an 'expatriate' identity: 'In my Canadian experience, 'im-672- migrants' were lost souls, put upon and pathetic. Expatriates, on the other hand, knew all too well who and what they were, and what foul fate had befallen them. Like V. S. Naipaul, in whom I imagined a model, I tried to explore state-of-the-art expatriation.' Expatriation was made painfully real in a racist Canada. A change of locale to the United States was transformative in positive aspects for Mukherjee's creativity, 'a movement away from the aloofness of expatriation, to the exuberance of immigration.' Mukherjee records with some bitterness her personal history in Canada:
I was frequently taken for a prostitute or shoplifter, frequently assumed to be a domestic, praised by astonished auditors that I didn't have a 'sing-song' accent. The society itself, or important elements in that society, routinely made crippling assumptions about me, and about my 'kind.' In the United States, however, I see myself in those same outcasts; I see myself in an article on a Trinidad-Indian hooker; I see myself in the successful executive who slides Hindi film music in his tape deck as he drives into Manhattan; I see myself in the shady accountant who's trying to marry off his loose-living daughter; in professors, domestics, high school students, illegal busboys in ethnic restaurants.
Mukherjee's adoption of an immigrant as opposed to an expatriate identity has been profoundly enabling for her writing. In her own words, she has 'joined imaginative forces with an anonymous, driven, underclass of semi- assimilated Indians with sentimental attachments to a distant homeland but no real desire for permanent return.'
Indianness is now a metaphor, a particular way of partially comprehending the world. Though the characters in these stories [in Darkness] are, or were, 'Indian,' I see most of these as stories of broken identities and discarded languages, and the will to bond oneself to a new community, against the ever- present fear of failure and betrayal.
Further, Mukherjee does not see her 'Indianness' as an isolated configuration that can only be at 'home' with other Indian people: 'instead of seeing my Indianness as a fragile identity to be preserved against obliteration (or worse, a 'visible' disfigurement to be hidden), I see it now as a set of fluid identities to be celebrated.' Mukherjee takes this further, and relates her personal identity to that of her identity as a writer; she 'sees [herself] as an American writer in the tradition of other American writers whose parents or grandparents -673- had passed through Ellis Island.' Darkness is dedicated to Bernard Malamud.
Mukherjee's novels The Tiger's Daughter (1971) and Wife (1975) trace a trajectory of an upper-class female protagonist, traditional and modern, socialized within Brahmin (the highest caste) religious and social codes, and equipped with an English- language education. In Jasmine (1989), her most recent novel, the protagonist is variously named Jyoti at birth, Jasmine by a nontraditional Indian husband, Jase by an American New York suitor, Jane by an American Iowa banker. Her multiple identities embody the physical and mental spaces that she traverses between the village of Hasnapur in India and the United States, fleeing immigration authorities and murderous ghosts from her past, seeking a belonging amidst the anguished thorns of various identities that struggle for integration. The confident tone of this novel reflects the protagonist's boldness, her search to escape the fate of widowhood and exile foretold by an astrologer at the beginning of the text. Mukherjee's previous novels do not present women like Jasmine, who is ready by the end of the novel to 're-position the stars…greedy with wants and reckless from hope.'
In The Tiger's Daughter, Tara, an upper-class Bengali woman, enters the United States for an undergraduate degree at Vassar. A familiar trajectory of the immigrant experience is explored — higher education and research facilities beckon one into the United States. Often, the qualifications acquired may disqualify one from finding a job in India, hence, the straddling of continents. Tara marries an American, and the novel traces her conflicts of belonging as she returns 'home,' familiar and strange, and gets to know the 'David [her husband] of aerogrammes…a figure standing in shadows, or a foreigner with an accent on television. 'I miss you very much. But I understand you have to work this out. I just hope you get it over with quickly…. Remember the unseen dangers of India. Tell your parents to cable me if you get sick.'' 'A foreignness of spirit' takes over Tara's consciousness as she struggles through a sense of exile both in her childhood 'home' and in the newly acquired 'home' of the United States. Mukherjee's explorations of the personal dimensions of female identity and belonging within marriage, an integral part of traditional Indian socialization for females, now resonates in a new -674- key as
