Fashioning the
Self & Home Abroad: Things and Material Practices in The Namesake
Payal Jain is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Cotton University, Guwahati, Assam, India.
Payal Jain is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Cotton University, Guwahati, Assam, India.
ABSTRACT
Studies on immigrant narratives have frequently focused on the themes of
roots and routes, nostalgia and memory and the problems and possibilities of
multiple levels of assimilation and/or resistance. Most of such studies have
been carried out in relation to the larger concepts of identity and home. These
have invariably focused on the experiences, emotions and feelings of
individuals as subjects who go through various displacements
in life and the interpersonal relationships which they either miss or forge in
an alien space (Bacon; Baluja; Bhatia; Joshi; Kelley; Maxey; Mishra). This
paper, conversely, seeks to explore a lesser discussed dimension of immigrant
narratives, that is, the role played by things and material practices in
fashioning the subject self and creating a sense of home, by closely analysing
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.
KEYWORDS
Jhumpa Lahiri, home, narrative, self, material practice
ON A STICKY AUGUST EVENING two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli
stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies
and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon
juice, thin slices of green chilli pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to
pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her
pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta
sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper
cones. Even now that there is barely space inside her, it is one thing she
craves. Tasting from a cupped palm, she frowns; as usual, there is something
missing. (Lahiri 1)
These opening lines of the novel The Namesake (2003) by
the second generation Indian immigrant American novelist Jhumpa Lahiri
encapsulate the complex matrices of migrant experience pertinently. Studies on
immigrant narratives have frequently focused on the themes of roots and routes,
nostalgia and memory and the problems and possibilities of multiple levels of
assimilation and/or resistance. Most of such studies have been carried out in
relation to the larger concepts of identity and home. These have invariably
focused on the experiences, emotions and feelings of individuals as subjects who
go through various displacements in life and the interpersonal relationships
which they either miss or forge in an alien space (Bacon; Baluja; Bhatia;
Joshi; Kelley; Maxey; Mishra). This paper, conversely, seeks to explore a
lesser discussed dimension of immigrant narratives, that is, the role played by
things and material practices in fashioning the subject self and creating a
sense of home. Underscoring how being in a foreign land inspires the compulsive
desire for the ‘mundane things’ that the home consisted of, the things which
have to be recreated in order to feel at home and the things which can never be
realised authentically or fully, the passage quoted above facilitates an apt
entry-point in the context of reading The Namesake, a poignant
tale of immigrant experience from a new materialist perspective. Drawing
heavily upon the recent developments in the sphere of thing theory and new
materialism, the paper explores how the unappreciated objects and material
practices of everyday life from home such as cuisine, dressing, hairstyle, the
script of mother tongue, etc. acquire an altogether different resonance while
living in a foreign land. They develop an aura and can be said to invest human
subjects with desired politics, associations and identities. In other words,
this paper illustrates how humans and nonhumans, ideas and matters, subjects
and objects interact with each other, get into unfamiliar equations and
influence the identity of each other in a context that is not a familiar and
habitual one.
New
Materialisms and Thing Theory
We cannot know who we are, or become what we are, except by looking in a
material mirror. (Miller 8)
Materiality has had an intriguing relationship with humans since the
beginning. We are not only surrounded by materials in our everyday life, but
even made up of matter. However, across cultures, materiality has been
projected in contrast to the essence, the desirable, and to put in a nutshell,
the goal of human life. Hence, it comes as no surprise that the dominant
socio-cultural discourses have either demeaned or completely ignored
“materiality” in relation to the “idealities” such as subjectivity,
consciousness, agency, values and so on (Coole and Frost 2). The relatively new
critical interest in materialities, however, has opened fresh possibilities to
read and reread our lives, cultural texts and representation with things,
matter and objects as focal points. Whereas the new materialist approaches are
as diverse as anyone can imagine, this paper primarily borrows from a position
developed by Bill Brown, the proponent of thing theory. Despite acknowledging
that as social beings, we are perennially surrounded by objects, Brown observes
that in our ordinary everyday conditions we look through objects,
objects are taken for granted and hardly draw attention to themselves (4). In
his opinion, Jean Baudrillard was right when he observed “we have always lived
off the splendor of the subject and the poverty of the
object.” Whereas the subject “makes history” and “totalizes the
world,” the object “is shamed, obscene, passive.” The object has been
intelligible only as the “alienated, accursed part of the subject” (quoted in
Brown 8). Habituated to this kind of a system, we perpetually give
central position to the human subject and inter-human relationships, while
almost ignore the role objects play in shaping us and our identities. In his
theoretical framework, Bill Brown further distinguished between objects and
things. For Brown, there are two ways in which objects become things. First,
“when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls,
when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuit of production
and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however
momentarily” (4). Second, one could imagine things “as what is excessive in
objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere
utilization as objects— their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical
presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols and totems”
(5). Thus, the story of objects asserting themselves as things, is the story of
a changed relation to the human subject (4).1
In other words, we begin to confront the thingness of objects when they
emerge out of their, to use Miller’s terminology, “humility” (1987) and assert
their presence with some kind of “excess, force, vitality, relationality, or
difference” (Coole and Frost 9). The editors of New Materialisms: Ontology,
Agency and Politics Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, in addition,
underline the dimensions of agency when they emphasise that we must recognize
“that phenomena are caught in a multitude of interlocking systems and forces
and [one need] to consider anew the location and nature of capacities for
agency” (9). It may be added here that these theoretical propositions in
things theory or new materialisms, by no means imply an abandonment of the
human subject. For example, Brown is interested in how things (unlike objects,
which are passive and docile) help to form and transform human beings. Thing
theory for him is “a condition for thought,” enabling “new thoughts about how
inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they
threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other
subjects” (7). These theories basically initiate new ways of thinking about
subject-object relations. The present paper uses these two premises and
underlines how ordinary, everyday objects from homeland, no longer a part of
the natural environment, emerge as ‘things’ in a foreign land in the chosen
text and unsettle the binary subject/object power positions and thus, challenge
the concept of conventional agency.
The Immigrant
Experience: When Objects Become Things
Technically, an ‘Immigrant’ is someone who comes to live in a country
from another country. This displacement, whether forced or voluntary generally
leads to upheavals and anxieties in the life of the subject. While one part of
the subject wants to get assimilated, the other one feels the need to reassert
the link with the homeland, one’s own culture and traditions. Most of the
narratives of immigrant experience depict this in-between-ness and dilemma. The
first-generation immigrants suffer the pangs of nostalgia most as for them
‘home’ had always been in the previous country where they had spent most of
their early lives and gained their socio-cultural identity. To adjust and
survive in the new location is never easy and it involves the constant efforts
to recreate home through various means such as holding on to the values of the
homeland, keeping oneself constantly in touch with the friends and relatives
from back home, visiting the home country regularly, and creating ghettos of
one’s own cultural or linguistic community (Joshi, Mannur, Maxey). The
challenge is not to forget the roots and be lost in the new cultural
environment, which demands all kinds of adjustments and assimilations. In
addition to the nostalgia related to family, friends and relatives from home,
the sense of loss is also related to a familiar materiality. One must here note
that in this case, home is not a place, but a space, which “is never
ontologically given,” but is “discursively mapped and corporeally practiced”
(Clifford 54). Whilst most of the everyday objects and material practices
remain inconspicuous at home, silently playing their roles in shaping the
social lives of individual, a new setting suddenly makes one not only aware of
their physical absence and but also bestows these with metaphysical
significance. Things get defamiliarised and their banal performance or
consumption is no longer possible. A close reading of The Namesake reveals
that holding on to the material practices of homeland becomes a part of the
discourse of resistance to assimilation abroad, assertion of one’s cultural and
national identity as well as a provisional substitute for the warmth of home.
Thus, it may be claimed that rather than humans giving meaning to objects and
materialities, in this context, material artefacts and practices associated
with the home become significant means of self-fashioning and invest characters
with an identity and a sense of meaning in a foreign land.
The Namesake: A Classic Tale of Immigrant Experience
Lahiri’s novel is one of the most well-known immigrant narratives from
the Indian subcontinent. This densely detailed work explores the lives of two
generations of an immigrant Bengali family, the Gangulis in US. The major
focalizers are Ashima Ganguli and her son Gogol and the novel unceasingly
underscores the differences of experiences and expectations between the first
and the second-generation immigrants. Whereas for the first generation, Ashoke
and Ashima, home always remains in Calcutta despite all they have given to and
taken from the new country, for the second generation, Gogol and Sonia the US
is the only home they have known. Yet, these positions of association and
identity are not unproblematic, and Lahiri in a beautiful fashion explores the
challenges and changes which mark the lives of her protagonists as they
gradually head for a far more complex and accommodating kind of existence and
worldview. As a typical immigrant fiction, the novel records at length the
tensions and the traumas that the first displaced generation goes through in
the process of maintaining a fine balance between settling down in a new place
and not forgetting the roots at home. The present paper focuses on the life of
Ashima and how for her, perhaps because of being a woman, this task is more
daunting and urgent. As referred to in the earlier section, the shift from
homeland entails various kinds of experiences, efforts and practices. The lives
of Ashoke and Ashima testify these. Even as they settle in US, their lifelines
are closely connected to India. Regular phone calls and letters from desh and
visits to India keep them rooted and close to the family and relatives. Once
they have their first child Gogol, the desire of having their own people around
is so urgent that they create a circle of Bengalis, the Nandis, the Mitras, the
Banerjees and others in and around Cambridge who function as substitutes for
those “who really ought to be surrounding them” (24) at crucial moments of
life. They all come from Kolkata and this is the reason they become friends.
These family friends regularly drop by one another’s home on Sunday afternoons.
The narrator adds:
They drink tea with sugar and evaporated milk and eat shrimp cutlets
fried in saucepans. They sit in circles on the floor, singing songs of Nazrul
and Tagore, passing a thick yellow clothbound book of lyrics among them as
Dilip Nandi plays the harmonium. They argue riotously over the films of Ritwik
Ghatak vs those of Satyajit Ray. The CPIM vs Congress party. North Calcutta vs
South. (38)
This is what constitutes a major part of the lives of the Gangulis in
America. They hold on the various cultural practices of the homeland as well
throughout their lives. For example, Ashima never calls her husband Ashoke by
his name as “it is not the type of thing Bengali wives do” (2). The marital
relationship between Ashoke and Ashima never takes an informal colour which is
the hallmark of American culture. It is in continuity with the practices of
home that their newborn son is given the pet name Gogol and they are not at all
disturbed about their son not having a ‘good name.’ This is so because a
practice of Bengali nomenclature grants to every single person, two names. In
Bengali, the world for pet name is daknam, meaning the name by
which one is called by family, friends and other intimates, at home and in
other private and unguarded moments.... every pet name is paired with a good
name, a bhalonam for identification in the outside world.
(25-26). Many such instances shape the lives of Ashoke and Ashima who never
feel fully at home in America, and slip into “bolder and less complicated
versions of themselves” only when they are back in India (81). In short, it is
the Indian and basically Bengali cultural practices they continue to follow to
remain rooted and real in an alien world. While connecting with Bengali
families and continuing with cultural practices are major sources of
camaraderie and strength in a foreign land, things and material practices from
home not only provide the Gangulis with a sense of a distinct identity but also
work as solace in the absence of a home that cannot be retrieved.
Bill Brown’s speculations on “why and how we use objects to make meaning,
to make or remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate
our fears and shape our fantasies” (4) in fact give an apt entry point into
looking at the role of things and material practices in the novel The
Namesake. The rest of the paper deals with these concerns and takes its
structural design from an episode related in the narrative itself. When Ashima
is married off to Ashoke, and is about to leave India, relatives give her all
kinds of advices about retaining the cultural roots in a foreign country, but,
to quote from the text, “her grandmother had not admonished Ashima not to eat
beef or wear skirts or cut off her hair or forget her family the moment she
landed in Boston. Her grandmother had not been fearful of any such signs of
betrayal; she was the only person to predict rightly, that Ashima would never
change (37). This statement is pertinent as it not only underlines the general
expectations from the woman of the family, but also highlights how material
practices such as food, clothes and hair style matter in defining a social
subject. In fact, these objects and material practices become metaphors and
metonymies of belonging to home. The following sections of the paper essay how
Bengali food, Indian hairstyle and sari, far from being a matter of pure
consumption or simple ways of life come to be related to the larger issues of
identity and rootedness. The last section of the paper, in addition, records
the significance that gets attached to Bengali script and narratives as a
metonymic extension of home. In a sense, these materialities can be seen to grow
an agency that was otherwise perceptually not available with them.
Recreating Home
through Culinary Practices
It is difficult, if not impossible, to think of immigrant Indian
existence in the United States without at the same time thinking of Indian
food. (Ganguly 123)
By now, for a diasporic community, it is a well-recognized fact that food
plays a very important role in immigrant life and becomes a significant medium
of reproducing home and homeliness. From being just a commodity, it starts
serving as an important part of their identity, a key to bonding and binding in
a foreign land (Ganguly; Mannur; Maxey; Ray; Williams). Lahiri’s The
Namesake, can be read as an illustration of all these connotations
associated with the thing named food. In fact, food and kitchen occupy such a
central place in the novel that it can even be classed as a culinary fiction.
Of the multiple levels at which food occupies space in this novel, only some of
those instances which relate to the food from home abroad have been discussed
below. At one point in the narrative, the narrator, for the benefit of the
culturally different readers, states that “There is no baptism for Bengali
babies, no ritualistic naming in the eyes of God.... Instead, the first formal
ceremony of their lives centres around the consumption of solid food” (38).
This statement underlines the importance of cuisine in the lives of the
Bengalis. For the Gangulis, Indian, and specially, Bengali food is a means of
recreating home, fighting nostalgia and thus sustaining the self in difficult
times. Rather than being a mere object that passively lives in the peripheries,
as ‘a thing’ it invites attention to itself, becomes a matter of conscious
choice, a way of being, a means of asserting their roots and a mode
of resisting total assimilation into the white culture.
To cite a few instances, when under pressure, Ashoke desires tea only,
not the coffee dispensed by American machines (11) and one can perhaps never
fully elaborate what ‘cha’ means to a stressed-out Bengali. Despite decades of
stay in the States, when it comes to cuisine his favourite “things” still
remain very ethnic in taste: “lamb curry with lots of potatoes, luchis, thick
chana dal with swollen brown raisin, pineapple chutney, sandeshes moulded out
of saffron tinted ricotta cheese” (72). While such a preference would have been
quite normal in Calcutta, the location of Gangulis in Boston gives a different
meaning to the phenomenon. As a couple, the senior Gangulis continue to throw
Indian feasts regularly for all their Bengali friends, enjoy eating at the
Indian restaurants and buy Indian grocery (65). The narrator particularly
points out that, though they allow the kids some (American) choice in terms of
food (127), the kitchen basically run by Ashima remains dominantly Indian in
its flavour. Ashima is an efficient cook and can comfortably manage an
elaborate meal for even forty Bengali guests. However, she does not
particularly like cooking anything that in not Indian (113) and hence inviting
just a handful of American kids for meal is quite taxing for her. These little
pieces of information pertinently point out the way food matters in the
everyday lives of Ashoke and Ashima. Being in a foreign land their preference
for the preparation and consumption of Bengali food is a signifier of their
different ethnic identity. In the case of Ashima, one must remember that, being
dependent on her husband, she does not migrate to the US out of choice. It is
her marriage with Ashoke that seals her fate in America. As a woman deeply
attached to family and native culture, for Ashima, America can never be a home
(108). She not only feels really distressed initially, later also, after
getting acclimatized to her life in the States to some extent, she tries hard to
remain as Bengali as possible. Throughout this narrative of her coping up with
life abroad, food acquires multilayered resonance.
The novel begins with a scene in the kitchen where we are told that
Ashima Ganguli is combining Rice Krispies, Planters peanuts, red onion, salt,
lemon juice, and green chili pepper as a “humble approximation of the snack
sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks” (1). This concoction called Jhalmuri is
basically a commonplace popular snack item to which one hardly pays any
attention in India. However, for Ashima the same mundane jhalmuri means
something grander, both for being pregnant and for being far away from home.
After preparing as soon she tastes it, Ashima realizes that something is
missing in this concoction and that the ‘commonplace’ jhalmuri of
Calcutta can never be recreated authentically in the cold and alien weather of
America. This, but, does not mean that the practice is not meaningful. For
Ashima, it is an objective correlative, a substitute for Indian warmth, family,
in short home. Besides, this American jhalmuri can also be read as
not only a metaphoric extension of her life in USA (where she wants to remain
an authentic Bengali, but cannot at the same time avoid some inevitable
changes) but also a way of resisting assimilation and asserting her cultural
affiliations. In brief, it is a good illustration of how inspired by nostalgia
objects from homeland become things in a foreign space and can invest one a
sense of home. The first few pages of the novel clearly establish Ashima’s
alienated self in America and why she takes recourse to Bengali food as a
matter of solace. In fact, on one occasion, she even cries inconsolably when
she runs out of rice (34). This incident though may sound trivial, underlines
how the comfortable and taken for granted relationships and equations between
food, home and the self get defamiliarised in a foreign location.
In effect, Indian food becomes an extension of Ashima’s self-perception
and identity in America. For instance, she is the one to whom the “homesick and
bewildered wives” of fresh Bengali immigrants turn for recipes and advice. She
from her experience can tell them about the carp that is sold in Chinatown and
how it’s possible to make halwa from cream of wheat (38). After a few years of
her stay in the States, our narrator tells us, “Once a week she makes thirty
samosas to sell at the international coffeehouse, for twenty-five cents, next
to the linzer squares baked by Mrs Etzold and baklava by Mrs Cassolis” (50).
Sitting next to these (most probably immigrant) women selling German and Middle
East food items, Ashima’s Samosas give her a distinct Indian identity and a
sense of satisfaction. In the parties she throws regularly for her Bengali
friends and their families, though, the cuisine becomes hybrid in time, she is
still known for her mincemeat balls croquettes which are a version of aluchops eaten
as a snack popularly sold by roadside vendors in Calcutta (274). These are her
specialities and any party is incomplete without this item in the Ganguli
household. The other Bengali ritual which Ashima’s children have grown up with
is the payesh, a warm rice pudding she prepares for their
birthdays, even alongside a slice of bakery cake (39). This is one of the ways
in which Ashima retains her home connection. Ashima’s estranged self and the
succour provided by native food is beautifully captured in the passage which
reads “Though no longer pregnant, she continues at times to mix Rice crispies
and peanuts and onions in a bowl. For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to
realise, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy__ a perpetual wait, a constant burden,
a continued feeling of out of sorts. (49-50). All these instances together
underline how culinary practices of homeland in multiple ways shape and mark
the lives and identities of human subjects trying to fashion the self and home
abroad.
The relationship of the second-generation immigrants with ethnic food is
quite different from that of the first generation. Whereas Ganguli children
always preferred American food to the Indian one as kids, as adults, they also
once in a while crave for the Indian food. For them, Indian food is not simply
a variation in taste, but a thing associated with their childhood memories,
their parents and the innumerable trips to India. Thus, Gogol and his Bengali
wife Moushumi we are told, mostly don’t eat Indian:
But, sometimes on a Sunday, both craving the food they’d grown up eating,
they ride the train out to Queens and have brunch at Jackson Diner, piling
their plates with tandoori chicken and pakoras and kabobs, and shop afterwards
for basmati rice and the spices that need replenishment. Or they go to one of
the hole-in-the-wall tea shops and drink tea in paper cups with heavy cream,
asking the waitress in Bengali to bring them bowls of sweet yogurt and haleem.
(229)
This occasional connect with Bengali food, while mostly emulating the
white culture underlines the fissures that mark the lives of second generation
immigrants. For them, US is the place where they see their present and future,
but the Indian past is imprinted so fast in their lives that it can never be
fully erased and would continue to surface from time to time. After the death
of Ashoke when Ashima decides to divide her time between Indian and America,
one of the things that she had to do was teaching Sonia “to cook the food Sonia
had complained of eating as a child” (279). In the absence of Ashima and home,
these recipes would serve as emotional anchor in Sonia’s life as once these did
in Ashima’s displaced existence in America.
Feeling at Home
with Sari and a Bun
Just as holding on to the culinary practices of home give a sense of
rootedness to the immigrant subject, the choice of clothes and hair style also
become conscious acts and in a sense a political statement underlining one’s
assimilation or otherwise in a foreign country. Unlike culinary practices which
are mostly associated with the private sphere, clothing and hair styling being
both a personal choice and a publicly visible aspect of one’s person can be
easily seen as capable of investing human subjects with desired ideological
associations. In The Namesake, these everyday material aspects of life
gain an excess and manage to rupture the conventional subject/object equation. Ashima,
despite her stay in the United States for more than three decades never changes
her sartorial self. She continues to wear sari both inside and outside the
house. Though the weather and culture of America make it a difficult choice,
for Ashima sari alone is comfortable attire. Thus, even in the labour room when
she has to change from her Murshidabad silk sari to a cotton gown which reaches
only her knees, she feels uncomfortable (2). Whereas one naturally would feel
that at an advanced stage of pregnancy loose fitting cotton clothes should feel
more comfortable, this instance proves that the concept of comfort is a
relative one. One feels comfortable at home, and for Ashima, wearing sari is a
part of feeling at home. Sari has been a part of Ashima’s upbringing as a
Bengali girl and just as she could never come to all her husband by his name,
wearing western clothes is also equally unimaginable for her. Though the
narrator does not clearly state it, Ashima’s saris are visible symbols of her
resistance to assimilate and become American. Robyn Gibson in the introduction
to The Memory of Clothes (2015) writes that apart from their
utility and aesthetic values, clothes have the ability to evoke issues of
identity, of relation of the self to the world. In the context of this
immigrant narrative, Ashima’s saris become an icon of her Bengali ethnicity, a
vehicle for marking boundaries.
Ashoke and Ashima’s settling down in America involves equally significant
acts of assimilation in and resistance to the western culture. Within a few
years of their stay in the States, to a casual observer, in fact, the Gangulis
appear no different from their American neighbours.
Their garage, like every other, contains shovels and pruning shears and a
sled. They purchase a barbeque for tandoori on the porch in summer.... they
learn to roast turkeys ... at Thanksgiving... to wrap a woollen scarves around
snowmen, to color boiled eggs violet and pink at Easter and hide them around
the house. (64)
They even gradually shift from observing elaborate pujos to
celebrating Christmas with progressively increasing fanfare. At the demand of
the children, Ashima has to cook American food frequently. We are told that
“there are many other ways Ashoke and Ashima give in.” Ashoke gives up his
wristwatch, his fountain pen and even Bic razors. “Though he is now a tenured
full professor, he stops wearing jackets and ties to the university.” Not only
this, “Ashoke accustomed to wearing tailor-made pants and shirts all his life,
learns to buy ready-made” (65). Amidst all these, however, Ashima sustains her
distinct appearance. Unlike Ashoke, she “continues to wear nothing but saris
and sandals from Bata” (65). Be it grand parties (39), casual outing to the
beaches (53) or her job in the library (162), Ashima is always clad in a sari,
her Indian attire. For her family, friends and acquaintances Ashima and her
Indian appearance are inseparable. It becomes an extension of her individual
self rather than remaining just a piece of clothing. Her relationship with sari
reminds one of a very popular example of sandeh alankar, a figure
of speech related to incertitude in Hindi that reads as: “Sari bich nari
hai, ki nari bich sari hai? Sari hi ki nari hai ki, nari hi ki sari hai?”
This roughly would translate as “Is it the woman around the sari, or the sari
around the woman? Does the woman belong to the sari or it is the sari that
belongs to the woman?” Just as this example refers to the uncertainly between
the positions of subject and object, Ashima and her sartorial extension defy
easy categorization in terms of identity of the wearer and the wear.
Just like clothing, hairstyles can serve as important cultural artefacts
because they are simultaneously public (visible to everyone), personal
(biologically linked to the body), and highly malleable to suit cultural and
personal preferences (Weitz 667-686). Along with her sari, Ashima’s her hairs
make an emphatic statement about her identity in a foreign land. She does not
adopt a hair style of the new country she settles down in. She never cuts her
hairs short as her grandmother had predicted. She continues to wear her long
hairs in a bun and this practice once again becomes a comfort practice for her.
She is not only bothered about her own hairs, but also of her daughters as she
relates it to identity and home connection. She does not appreciate that
Sonia’s formerly shoulder length hair has been chopped asymmetrically by one of
her friends and lives under the constant fear that Sonia will color a streak of
it blond, as she had has threatened on more than one occasion to do (107). This
material phenomenon is so very significant for Ashima that she and Sonia “argue
violently about such things, Ashima crying and Sonia slamming doors” (107). In
Ashima’s perception, coloring hair blond is not simply a matter of personal
choice, but implies a complete submission to American culture, and thus an act
of betrayal towards the homeland and its culture.
Deshi Bhasha in Bidesh: Lettering Home Abroad
Ashoke’s grandfather had once told Ashoke that books can let one “to
travel without moving an inch” (16). If not for Ashoke, this proves to be true
for Ashima during her early years in the States. While initially also she does
not much enjoy being away from Calcutta, after the birth of their first child,
Gogol, the feeling of nostalgia becomes more acute. Many things do not strike
her right, and she does not want to raise her child alone in America (33-4).
Ashima’s ideas of right and wrong are deeply rooted in home culture. However,
there is hardly much the Gangulis can do about it. And under such depressing
conditions, books and letters in Bengali script from home provide her the
comfort and respite she needs most. Whereas, the grandfather had meant that even
while sitting at home, one could roam around the world, in Ashima’s case, books
and letters in Bengali let her imaginatively return home. In addition to going
through her parents’ letters repeatedly she continues to reread the same five
Bengali novels which she had brought from Calcutta (35, 50). The Bengali
magazine Desh becomes a route to travel back to the desh that
is India. In this transformation of an object into thing, a simple magazine to
be read and discarded becomes a priceless possession for Ashima in America. The
Bengali script belongs to a shared past of the Gangulis and their other
immigrant friends from Calcutta and its importance and intimacy is undeniable
to them. Thus, even if ragged conditioned, Bengali books are preserved with
utmost care (66). This is the reason the next generation is religiously taught
to read and write their ancestral alphabet (65). If only it were home, these
efforts of retention and preservation of the native script would not have been
so vitally required. Though they need not, Gangulis continue to subscribe Sangbad
Bichitra (a fortnightly Bengali newspaper, published by Cultural
Association of Bengal that brings local community news from Indian subcontinent
to Bengalis all over the world) along with India Abroad, a magazine
of similar kind. This is another testimony to the surplus value the physical
presence of Bengali script comes to accumulate for them. Material entities
and practices, thus, become exceptionally viable means of connecting with home
while being abroad. This is not to say that things and materialities play any
lesser role in shaping human identities and affiliation at home. It
is just that in the immigrant experience their role gets
foregrounded. Besides, read deeply many of the episodes discussed earlier
also testify to the fact that materiality and immateriality, individuals and
things are intrinsically entangled. One can never clearly settle the divide
between the subject and the object, the doer and the done to, the dancer and
the dance.
Endnote
1 Unlike Bill Brown
who distinguishes between objects and things somewhat in the line of Heidegger,
Bruno Latour has some serious doubts on this dualistic categorization of material entities. In his essay, “Why
has critique run out of steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”
(Critical inquiry 30 (2004): 225-248). Latour suggests that as all
entities are a part of a complex network of socio-material existence, there are simply no
objects in the world.
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