Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from Bharati Mukherjee’s essay “A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman”, which appears in the anthology The Writer on Her Work(©1991 by Janet Sternburg)

I was born into a class that did not live in its native language. I was born into a city that feared its future, and trained me for emigration. I attended a school run by Irish nuns, who regarded our walled-off school compound in Calcutta as a corner of England. My “county”—called in Bengali desh—I have never seen. It is the ancestral home of my father and is now in Bangladesh. Nevertheless, I speak his dialect of Bengali, and think of myself as “belonging” to Faridpur, the tiny village that was his birthplace. The larger political entity to which I have my first allegiance—India—was not even a sovereign nation when I was born.

My horoscope, cast by a neighborhood astrologer when I was a week-old infant, predicted that I would be a writer, that I would cross oceans and make my home among aliens. Brought up in a culture that places its faith in horoscopes, it never occurred to me to doubt it. The astrologer meant to offer me a melancholy future; to be destined to leave India was to be banished from the sources of true culture. The nuns at school, on the other hand, insinuated that India had long outlived its glories, and that if we wanted to be educated, modern women, we’d better hit the trail westward. All my girlhood, I straddled the seesaw of contradictions.

I have found my to the United States after many transit stops. The unglimpsed phantom Faridpur and the all too real Manhattan have merged as “desh.” I am an American. I am an American writer, in the American mainstream, trying to extend it. This is a vitally important statement for me—I am not an Indian writer, not an expatriate. I am an immigrant; my investment is in the American reality, not the Indian.It took me ten painful years, from the early seventies to the early eighties, to overthrow the smothering tyranny of nostalgia. The remaining struggle for me is to make the American readership, meaning the editorial and publishing industries as well, acknowledge the same fact. The foreign-born, the Third World immigrant with non-Western religions and non-European languages and appearance, can be as American as any steerage passenger from Ireland, Italy, or the Russian Pale.

My literary agenda begins by acknowledging that American has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I(and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.I’ve had to sensitize editors as well as readers to the richness of the lives I’m the writing about. The most moving form of praise I receive from readers can be summed up in three words: I never knew. Meaning, I see these people (call them Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese) around me all the time and I never knew they had an inner life. I never knew they schemed and cheated, suffered, cared so rudimentary, the writer knows she has an inexhaustible fictional population to enumerate. Perhaps even a mission.

I have been blessed with an enormity of material: the rapid and dramatic transformation of the United States since the early 1970s. With that perceived perimeter, however, I hope to wring surprise.

Yet my imaginative home is also in the tales told by my mother and grandmother, the world of the Hindu epics. For all the hope and energy I have placed in the process of immigration and accommodation—I’m a person who couldn’t ride a public bus when she first arrived, and now I’m someone who watches tractor pulls on obscure cable channels—there are parts of me that remain Indian. The form that my stories and novels take inevitably reflects the resources of Indian mythology—shape-changing, miracles, godly perspectives. My character can, I hope, transcend the straitjacket of simple psychologizing. The people I write about are culturally and politically several hundred years old: consider the history they have witnessed (colonialism, technology, education, liberation, civil war). They have shed old identities, taken on new ones, and learned to hide the scars. They may sell you newspapers, or clean your offices at night.Writers (especially American writers weaned on affluence and freedom) often disavow the notion of a “literary duty” or “political consciousness,” citing the all-too-frequent examples of writers ruined by their shrill commitments. Glibness abounds on both sides of the argument, but finally I have to side with my “Third World” compatriots: I do have a duty, beyond telling a good story. My duty is to give voice to continents, but also to redefine the nature of American.