Tara's husband belongs 'elsewhere,' and so her home 'should' be with him, even though that space is not yet 'home.'
In Wife, Dimple Dasgupta fantasizes that 'marriage would bring her love…her father was looking for engineers in the matrimonial ads…. She thought of premarital life as a dress rehearsal for actual living.' As she fetishizes marriage, Dimple exemplifies the dangerous hold of subconscious socialization patterns of female submissiveness and suffering, enshrined in Hindu legend and myth, and validated by a patriarchal culture: 'Sita, the ideal wife of Hindu legends, who had walked through fire at her husband's request. Such pain, such loyalty seemed reserved for married women.' Dimple cannot easily shed these notions after she moves geographically into the United States. With the actual marriage, the predictable disillusion sets in. Her husband decides to change her name from Dimple to Nandini. Names are one type of personal markers of identity; when named by others, Mukherjee's female protagonists in Jasmine (as noted above) have certain identities thrust upon them. Dimple's socialization has not prepared her for the isolation of a wifely homebound existence in the United States. Her predicament is like that of newly brought over wives, sometimes by husbands who travel home for a couple of weeks, 'interview' several prospective brides, and select one. The realities of life here — isolation, winter, loss of community — hit much later. An independent lifestyle here, the fact that one's family does not have a say in one's every decision, also entails a bitterly lonely self-reliance. 'Losing' one's family's control also entails losing their warmth and love. Dimple becomes suicidal, thinking about where to die, in Calcutta, or in New York. Mukherjee's narrative does not allow her protagonist much interaction with the 'natives' within her immigrant locale. America hardly exists except as a backdrop, a physical location where Dimple finds herself geographically. Her mental space is in turmoil; she is not really at home anywhere, desperately needing help but unable even to articulate her needs.
Mukherjee grows in confidence in presenting Americans and American life. In Jasmine, her depictions of Iowa, and of the tragedies of small farmers unable to make their bank payments, ring with truth and poignancy. Ironically, Mukherjee's depictions of India are trapped in exoticism and a self-exoticism of her 'foreign' female -675- protagonists. Mukherjee's vision seems at times to be frozen in time. Her depictions of certain regressive customs like sati (widowburning), of child-marriage, and of widowhood are not mediated by changes and challenges to these traditions in contemporary India. The boundaries of what Mukherjee often presents as sacrosanct and fixed traditions are shifting, however slowly.
Mukherjee's success as a short-story writer is noteworthy. Her first collection, Darkness, documents the struggles of newly arrived South Asians, their experiences of alienation and racism as they try to find their 'place' in American society. Their personal and professional lives within mainstream America often carry severe psychological costs. Mukherjee explores different ways of coping between first- and second-generation immigrants, and the often tragic colliding of values, particularly between father and daughter. For instance, in 'The Father,' a daughter's decision to do something as 'artificial' as to reject marriage and get herself artificially inseminated results in her father's violent physical attack. Not only is the father alienated from a mainstream American culture where he works as a lonely, petty salesman (echoes of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman), but he is equally distant from his daughter, who has adopted some of the values of her locale. Similar experiences are echoed in personal stories and testimonies of Black Britishers in Amrit Wilson's Finding a Voice (1978). Horrendous conflicts between fathers and daughters constitute a sad refrain. Controls over female sexuality and clashes of traditional versus a freer, Western behavior nearly always make the fathers more authoritarian, dogmatic, and destructive. (Recall the discussion of Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions mentioned earlier in this chapter.) In the interest of saving the family izzat (honor), fathers will destroy their daughters' lives.
In her latest collection of stories, The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Mukherjee 'has vastly enlarged her geographical and social range,' remarks Jonathan Raban in the New York Times Book Review; 'the immigrants in her new book come fresh to America from Vietnam, the Caribbean, the Levant, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Italy and Sri Lanka as well as from India.' According to Raban, Mukherjee in this collection -676- hijacks the whole tradition of Jewish-American writing [the immigrant experience being classically recorded in Jewish-American fiction] and flies it off to a destination undreamed of by its original practitioners.
Her characters…see the surfaces of America with the bug-eyed hangover clarity of the greenhorn afloat in a gaudy new world. Yet they're not tired, huddled or even poor: they own motels, work scams, teach in colleges, breeze through on private funds. Their diaspora is a haphazard, pepperpot dispersal. They have been shaken out, singly, over a huge territory, from Toronto in the North down to a steamy Central American republic. They're in Ann Arbor, Cedar Rocks, Flushing, Manhattan, suburban New Jersey, Atlanta, Florida.
What Raban does not note (typical of New York Times reviewers) is Mukherjee's own upper-class background, and the classist and somewhat elitist tone in the stories. She overtly endorses the melting-pot concept and regards American society as the most welcoming of any in the world toward the 'other.' Even when racism is part of her exploration and critique, there is no attempt to place that racism within larger political systems of exploitation and inequality in the United States. Mukherjee gets a lot of mileage out of contrasting her own experiences in Canada, which were more overtly racist than in the United States, and endorses American society as 'safer' for peoples of color than almost any other in the world. In an interview she remarks:
In the U.S. I feel I am allowed to see myself as an American. It's a selftransformation. Canadians resisted my vigorous attempts to see myself as a Canadian. They exclude, America includes. And everywhere else, in Europe, France, Germany, Switzerland, the newcomer is a guest worker. To a Swede, whatever their egalitarian traditions are, a Burundian becoming a Swede is impossible. To be a Swede, a German, a Frenchman is a quality of soul and mind that takes hundreds of generations.
Mukherjee ignores the fact that, for peoples of color of lower class and educational background than hers, America is not always welcoming. In Mukherjee's work, the power mechanisms behind systematic oppressions of particular racial groups remain ultimately marginal. In Jasmine, she attempts to engage with the larger systems of domination that sustain racism through her portrayal of Bud and Jane's adopted Vietnamese son, Du. 'This country has so many ways of humiliating, of disappointing,' notes the narrator as she, in her various selves as Jasmine, Jane, Jase, relates to the outsider/insider -677- status that she shares with Du. Du adopts a hyphenated identity, Vietnamese-American; the narrator wants to shed her past, even use violence if necessary to create a new self: 'There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the image of dreams.' This denial of a past is as problematic as an exoticizing of the same past that lingers in her memory. In general, Mukherjee stays within a safe 'political' space with regard to the politics of race in the United States. This partly accounts for the type of applause that a Western readership and critical establishment gives her.
In conclusion, the realities of expatriation and immigration, of literal and metaphoric exile, of external colonization and imperialism, along with the internal colonization of mental and psychological states, are played out in our contemporary world as never before in history. In a conversation with Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie speaks aptly about the predicament of 'the migrant': 'This is, after all, the century of the migrant…there have never been so many people who ended up elsewhere than where they began, whether by choice or by necessity.' This chapter has explored some of the complexities facing postcolonial writers — multiplicities of identities that are necessarily negotiated in terms of 'choices' of language or of location, the search for belonging and for an audience. For contemporary writers who have lived through, who almost embody, colonial histories, external and internal colonizations, literal and metaphoric exiles, the politics of representations are mediated partly within market forces, that is, within radically different conditions of cultural production for those who continue to live and work inside their postcolonial societies and for those living outside.
Ketu H. Katrak
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