GENDERED DIASPORIC
IDENTITIES IN MICHAEL ONDAATJE ANIL’S GHOST, MONICA ALI’S BRICK LANE AND JHUMPA
LAHIRI’S THE NAMESAKE
CHAWLE D. K.
S.R.T.M.U.
NANDED
Contact:
ramchawle12345@gmail.com
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Abstract:
Diaspora writing denote
highly contradictory and contested categories through which to make and unmake
cultural interventive and parochial, depending on their position within their
new national home, their communal affiliation with their ancestral homeland,
and their internal differences of class, gender, and race. I examine the ways in which globalization—a
highly-uneven process that involves, among other things, the spread of global
brand names, the transnational flow of goods, knowledge, images, labor,
capital, and immigration at an extraordinary pace— challenges I compare and
contrast the identity paradigm with a Diasporic theorization of cultural,
transnational and gendered identity from an interdisciplinary postcolonial
perspective. This research paper majorly concern/explore how the processes of
globalization and transnationalism impact the theorization of cultural,
transnational and gendered identity in Michael Ondaatje Anil’s Ghost, Monica
Ali’s Brick Lane and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Ondaatje in Anil’s Ghost addresses issues of ethnicity and
identity. The shifts in individual identity of the central character Anil
Tissera constitutes the core of the novel which presents the problematic of
one‘s ethnicity and identity in today‘s world. Jhumpa Lahiri, the 2000 Pulitzer
Prize winner portrays the sufferings of the
second-generation immigrants in The
Namesake as a consequence of
cross-cultural conflict with her debut novel The Namesake. . In
the case of Monica Ali’s
Brick Lane, the good stemming from Nazneen’s upward mobility
seems to be rather more selective and gendered than it is common. By gendering
upward mobility and presenting women’s informal labor as the focus of the
novel. These novels are diasporic in consciousness and deals with the
issues of adaptation, adjustment and accommodation in a world where the
boundaries are thinned or often blurred.
Key
Words: Diaspora,
Globalization, Immigration, culture, Identity,
Gender
Asian
women migrating to Europe and North America sometimes bring with them – or are
expected to bring with them – traditional gender ideologies where family and
procreativity are valued over the individual self. Indeed, diasporic situations
can sometimes intensify the idea of men as negotiators with the external world
and women as custodians of traditional culture within the home. Many diasporic
women do successfully renegotiate inherited cultural values; others cling to
them defensively even while gender ideologies are changing within India itself.
Most often, their responses to conflicting gender ideologies are
(understandably) inconsistent.
I would like to begin
by comparing the nature of the diasporic communities in the three texts, with a
particular focus on their gender ideologies, before going on to explore the
ways in which the protagonists respond to them, reshaping their own identities
and to some extent the nature of the diasporic communities themselves in the
process.
Agree For Marriage:
In contrast
to Nazneen, a poor girl from a Bangladeshi village, Ashima is from a
middle-class family in Calcutta, and although her marriage too is arranged, she
does at least have the opportunity to meet the prospective bridegroom and give
her consent. Ashima and Ashoke meet each other in India during his visit from
Boston where he has been working on a PhD for two years, researching fiber
optics. Ashima has never heard of Boston or of fiber optics, but Ashoke seems
pleasant enough, so she agrees to the marriage. On the other hand Anil
remembers her studies in London and a experience of bad marriage to Sri Lanka
medical student.
Love affair and Arrange
Marriage :
Ondaatje Anils ghost depicts Anil‘s (self)destructive passion, her
marriage in medical school with a many-armed seducer‖with whom she shares days of battle and fuck‖ends as she ―buries‖
his presence, while ―never replaying any of their days together. Anil is
dislodged‖ in her affair with married science writer and author-figure Cullis,
with their intimacy. In Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, the protagonist Nazneen
migrates from a Bangladeshi village to the Brick Lane area of London’s East End
in an arranged marriage at the age of 18.
“This woman was poor and fat. To Nazneen it was
unfathomable. In Bangladesh it was no more
possible to be both poor and fat than to be rich and starving.”
Before the marriage, Nazneen has never before
met her 40-year-old husband Chanu, who turns out to be kind enough, but
unsuccessful, socially awkward, insufferably pretentious, and in many ways
deeply unattractive. Ashima in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake also has an
arranged marriage to a man who lives abroad, but her situation is very
different.
Feelings:
In Anils Ghost, Anil meets and is sedately struck by a
Sri Lanken medical student, who seemly arrives in the way a circus arrives. The
only time when as Anil describes
“he turned up from Sri Lanka
in bangles and stilts” (Ondaatje 142).
Throughout Anil’s struggles, this was a
breaking point. It was the the part of her life that affected her the most
surrounding the various discoveries she has made. In the story her strong
feelings of who and who not to trust are shown later on in the novel.
Nazneen
in Brick Lane has mixed feelings about her husband but ends up assimilating
within her community in London so successfully that at the end she refuses to
return to Bangladesh with her husband Chanu. How Nazneen saying goodby to Karim
spells out
“She touched his hand for the last time. "Oh, Karim,
that we have already done. But always there was a problem between us. How can I
explain? I wasn't me, and you weren't you. From the very beginning to the very
end, we didn't see things. What we did--we made each other up.
By contrast, Ashima in
The Namesake falls in love with her husband fairly quickly, and they go on to
have a long and happy marriage. However, she always misses India and decides to
move back there after her husband’s death, leaving her grownup children behind
in the United States.
Bicultural:
Difference (In Terms Of
The Diasporic Communities):
Anil can be appropriate in
this case are those of a ‚traveller‘ diasporic and ‚migrant.
The biggest difference is that a traveller intends to leave again from
the place he/she goes to, either in order to return to his origin or to
continue the journey to another place. A migrant, however, plans to leave his
origin for good and wants to establish a new home at his destination. That
might, of course, not always work out for the migrant and he quite often does
return, but this return is then usually the result of resignation and failure.
Anil has features of both a traveller and a migrant.
The
Namesake and Bricklane differ in terms of the diasporic communities in which
their characters are placed. To put it simply, the characters in Brick Lane are
in a working-class, predominantly Bangladeshi neighborhood in the East End of
London, with little interaction with people from outside their ethnic
community. The Bengali community in The Namesake, by contrast, consists of
professional men with their dependent wives and children. They too are a
closely knit community, though they are geographically dispersed, each family
living in a predominantly 3 white suburban neighborhood. While the parents in
The Namesake tend to socialize mostly with other Bengalis, the children grow up
American, enjoying close friendships and eventually romantic relationships with
people from outside their ethnic community. Although they sometimes encounter a
lack of understanding or lack of interest in their cultural background, they
experience no overt racism, in contrast with the characters in Brick Lane who
sometimes bear the brunt of anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of the terrorist
attack on the World Trade Center. These considerations could at least partly
explain the differences between the two diasporic communities in terms of the
degree of patriarchal control to which the women are subjected. All over the
world it has been observed that patriarchal oppression tends to intensify not
only in situations of poverty but also in situations of communal conflict. The
impoverished Bangladeshi men in Brick Lane, particularly during a time of
heightened tension between ethnic groups, will feel more threatened and
therefore want to exercise more control over their wives and daughters than the
successful Bengali professionals in the comfortable liberal environment of
Massachusetts in The Namesake. Anil in Anils ghost is traveller, migrant, and
diasporic.
Gender Ideologies(
similarities and differences):
In Michael Ondaatje
Anil’s Ghost, Anil had been given two entirely inappropriate names and very
early began to desire "Anil which was her brother's unused second name.
She had tried to buy it from him when she was twelve years old, offering to
support him in all family arguments.
With
regard to gender ideologies, there are similarities and differences between the
two diasporic communities and the female characters have various ways of
negotiating them. In this respect, perhaps the most obvious element in both
novels is the complete dependence of the wives ‘at home’ on their husbands ‘out
at work’. This is not to say that the women do not work; on the contrary, it is
emphasized in both novels that female domestic labour in the diaspora is
constantly demanding, absolutely necessary, and largely unnoticed. This is
vividly expressed in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane which gives us concrete details of
Nazneen’s daily life, including the results of her brief hiatus from domestic
chores during her illness. She woke to find that:
The sitting room crawled
with toys, clothes, books and abandoned kitchen utensils… Nazneen picked her
way across the room without comment. It gave her some satisfaction. For years
she felt she must not relax. If she relaxed, things would fall apart. Only the
constant vigilance and planning, the low-level, unremarked and unrewarded
activity of a woman, kept the household from crumbling.
Ashima
in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake has a similar reaction when she returns from
the hospital to find that
‘there are dirty dishes
stacked in the kitchen, that the bed has not been made’ .
From a more privileged background than Nazneen
in Brick Lane, she is accustomed to domestic help in India, and the narrative
tells us that:
Until now Ashima has accepted that there is no one to sweep the
floor, or do the dishes, or wash clothes, or shop for groceries, or prepare a
meal on the days she is too tired or homesick or cross… But now, with a baby
crying in her arms… it is all suddenly unbearable.
More assertive than
Nazneen in Brick Lane, Ashima urges her husband to hurry up and finish his PhD
so that they can return to India. However, she is shown to have no more control
over her life than the more submissive Nazneen.
Dependent on Their
Husbands:
On the contrary, both women are completely
dependent on their husbands whose decisions about their lives are based
exclusively on their own career choices. Against Ashima’s wishes, she and
Ashoke end up living in the United States for the rest of his life, where his
academic position after he finishes his PhD is
‘everything
[he] has ever dreamed of’
while for thirty-three
years her life, and particularly their family life, is nothing like what she
wants it to be.
Lacking agency:-
Lacking agency, the female protagonist in each
novel participates in a diasporic community which provides support for wives
who share their displacement and dependency. After her initial loneliness,
Nazneen in Brick Lane enjoys the company of other Bangladeshi women on the
council estate, despite her husband’s disapproval of her best friend Razia.
Similarly, in The Namesake:
“The [Bengali]
bachelors fly back to Calcutta one by one, returning with wives… The wives,
homesick and bewildered, turn to Ashima for recipes and advice, and she tells
them about the carp that’s sold in Chinatown, that it’s possible to make halwa
with Cream of Wheat. The families drop by one another’s homes on Sunday
afternoons.”
However, it is
suggested in Brick Lane that if the diasporic community can be a source of
support, it can also act as a means of limitation and restriction, particularly
for women, who are policed much more closely than men. Indeed, despite
Nazneen’s propriety and submissiveness, 5 especially in the early years, her
husband restricts her mobility and activities, ostensibly because of what
people in the Bangladeshi community will say about her:
She did not often go
out.‘Why should you go out?’ said Chanu. ‘If you go out, ten people will say,
“I saw her walking on the street.” And I will look like a fool.’
Reinforced Clothing:
This
visibility and heightened scrutiny of women in both diasporic communities is
reinforced by their clothing. In both novels the wives wear traditional South
Asian clothing while the men’s clothing is more ‘westernized’. The
contradictory and often coercive nature of female clothing as cultural display
is emphasized in Brick Lane, where Chanu directs his daughters to wear
different types of clothing on different days. What the girls wore each day
‘depended where Chanu directed his outrage’:
If he had a Lion
Hearts leaflet in his hand, he wanted his daughters covered. He would not be
cowed by these Muslim-hating peasants. If he saw some girls go by in hijab he
became agitated at this display of peasant ignorance. Then the girls went out
in their skirts.
This situation reinforces Neluka Silva’s point
about the female body being ‘the terrain on which [group] distinctions are made
visible’ (23).
Generational Differences
And Conflicts Over Diasporic Identities And Gender Ideologies:
Both novels also call attention to
generational differences and conflicts over diasporic identities and gender
ideologies. In Brick Lane Nazneen and Chanu have two daughters, one of whom
complies with Chanu’s efforts to educate them about Bengali culture, while the
other actively rebels against all efforts to indoctrinate her as a conventional
Bangladeshi girl. In The Namesake the situation of second-generation female
immigrants is more fully explored through the character Moushumi, who marries
Ashima’s son:
“From earliest
girlhood, she says, she had been determined not to allow her parents to have a
hand in her marriage. She had always been admonished not to marry an American,
as had he, but he gathers that in her case these warnings had been relentless,
and had therefore plagued her far more than they had him.”
This is in keeping with the observation by
many scholars and casual observers that in the homeland as well as in the
diaspora, females tend to be under more pressure than males to maintain what is
taken to be ‘cultural purity’. It is worth emphasizing, however, that in
reality no culture is ever pure or monolithic, but always diverse,
multifaceted, and full of internal contradictions. Nira Yuval-Davis has argued
that gender relations are at the heart of cultural debates and that social
reproduction is central to cultural continuity.
Irene
Gedalof has further pointed out that it is the female body’s capacity for birth
that makes women crucial to the preservation of a particular community’s
integrity and purity. In addition, women’s responsibility for the organization
of the home and the socialization of children makes them crucial in cultural –
as well as biological – reproduction. For this reason, cultural control over
women is fundamental to the continuity of tradition and community identity.
These considerations, I would suggest, are particularly prominent in diasporic
situations, and individual females respond to the heightened cultural pressures
in various ways. At university, Moushumi majored in French because:
“Immersing herself in
a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge – she approached French,
unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation
of any kind. It was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could
claim her in favor of one that had no claim whatsoever.”
Thus Moushumi finds a
way of partially escaping the conflicting cultural claims inherent in a
diasporic identity. Her mother-in-law, the reluctant diasporic subject who
moves back to India after 33 years, has to admit to herself that ‘She will miss
the country in which she had grown to know and love her husband.’ (279) Brick
Lane, by contrast, ends with Nazneen’s insistence on keeping herself and her
daughters in Britain when her husband moves back to Bangladesh. So, despite the
strong cultural pressures on all of the major female diasporic characters in
these novels, despite their constructed dependency, despite their internal
conflicts and ambivalences, it is ultimately their individual choices which
shape their identities and destinies. The implication is that the pressures
arising from conflicts over gender ideologies in diasporic situations can be
transformative as well as challenging, and that the outcome depends perhaps
more on the individual responses than on the conditions themselves.
In the character of
Anil Tissera, Ondaatje inscribes a cultural formation that could, in many ways,
be described as postmodern, in that she transgresses the conventional notions
of identity and boundaries of gender and position. Anil Tissera occupies a
"dis-located" position, in terms of her name, her nationality and her
family; in problematizing notions of individual identity, Ondaatje explores the
concept of "Self" as something constructed, and yet whole and
realizable. She had been given two entirely inappropriate names and very early
began to desire "Anil which was her brother's unused second name. She had
tried to buy it from him when she was twelve years old, offering to support him
in all family arguments.
Reference:
·
Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, New york
·
Lahiri,
Jhumpa. The Namesake. London: Flamingo, 2003
·
Monica
Ali, Brick lane, Black Swan Edition 2004
·
Silva,
Neluka. The Gendered Nation: Contemporary Writings from South Asia. New Delhi:
Sage Publications, 2004
·
Kral,
Francoise. “Shaky Ground and New Territorialities in Brick Lane by Monica Ali
and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 43.1
(2007): 65-76. Web. 26 October 2010.
·
https://journals.lib.
.
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