The Construction of Hybrid Identities in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and
Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
Turan Kolukirik
S1914049
Supervisor: Dr. J.C. Kardux
Second Reader: Prof.dr. P.T.M.G. Liebregts
June 19, 2019
English Literature and Culture
Leiden University, Faculty of Humanities
Kolukirik 2
Table of contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………3
Chapter 1: Theoretical Framework……………………………………………………………6
Chapter 2: “So We Can Rebirth Ourselves in the Images of Dreams”: Identity
Transformations and the Limits of Assimilation in Jasmine…………...……….12
Chapter 3: Revisiting the Past to Reconcile with the Present: Bicultural Identity
(Re)construction in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents………...………..31
3.1: Carla, Sandra, and Sofía………………………………………….…………35
3.2: Yolanda…………………………………………………………….……….50
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..…….62
Works cited………………..………………………………………………………..….…….65
Kolukirik 3
Introduction
In an era of globalization, our contemporary world is characterized by “unparalleled mobility, migration, and border crossing” and concurrent “clashes, meetings, fusions and intermixings” of cultures (Moslund 1-2). Literature attests to and critically reflects on globalization and migration. As Fatemeh Pourjafari and Abdolali Vahidpour point out, in immigration literature, protagonists “endlessly recreate [themselves] through [their] encounters with cultural complexities and discriminating experience of being a minority” (686). Immigrant identities are constructed through a constant process of negotiation between the old and new cultures. In relation to the formation of identities in the context of intercultural encounters,
Homi K. Bhabha theorizes the concept of cultural hybridity in his influential book The
Location of Culture (1994). Immigrant and other minority groups often find themselves in an in-between, liminal space between cultures (Rutherford 211). Though this position often produces conflict and anxiety, Bhabha argues that this “interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Location 5): the “process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation,” which he calls “the Third Space” (Rutherford
211, emphasis added). In relation to cultural hybridity, he also elaborates on Fanon’s concept of “mimicry,” which he calls “the affect of hybridity.” Mimicry itself refers to the ways in which the colonized imitate the dominant culture’s traits in an attempt to attain the position of power associated with that dominant culture or, more drastically and subversively, attempt to subvert the power dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized by asserting their hybrid identity in the Third Space (Bhabha, “Signs” 162).
Taking Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and mimicry as a point of departure, this thesis will analyze and compare the construction of hybrid identities in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989) and Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents Kolukirik 4
(1991). Forced and voluntary migration is a prominent theme in both of these works and leads to identity conflicts that the main characters resolve in different ways. The female protagonists in these works, who are all first-generation immigrants, feel that they belong neither fully to (the culture of) their native country nor their host country and struggle with negotiating their identities in the liminal space in-between the two cultures. In Jasmine, the protagonist leaves India for the United States after her husband’s death and adopts multiple hybrid identities in her struggle for survival and the gradual process of Americanization. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents tells the story of the hardships faced by the four García sisters after their family is forced to leave the Dominican Republic to live in New York. The novel focuses on the difficulties they face trying to reconcile their family-oriented and male- dominated native culture and individualistic American culture and its changing gender norms.
Reading both novels in the context of Bhabha’s theoretical concepts of the Third
Space, mimicry, and hybridity, I will argue that while the protagonists in both of these works develop characteristics of hybrid identities to a certain extent, there are differences in the role mimicry and hybridity play in each of them. In Jasmine, mimicry, rather than contributing to the construction of an ultimately hybrid identity, seems to be part of a process which eventually leads to the protagonist’s assimilation into the host culture. Similarly, in How the
García Girls Lost Their Accents, mimicry also plays an important role in the four sisters’ cultural adjustments. However, while most of the characters in this novel seem to remain in a liminal space of unresolved conflict regarding their identities, particularly Yolanda seems to find a way to construct a form of hybridity for herself.
In my close analysis of these novels, I will examine the construction and representation of hybrid identities in relation to migration. In the first chapter, I will provide a theoretical framework by discussing Bhabha’s postcolonial theory on cultural hybridity. I will specifically focus on the Third Space and colonial mimicry regarding cultural hybridity Kolukirik 5 and its significance in relation to American immigrant literature. In the following two chapters, I will apply Bhabha’s theoretical concepts in my comparative close analysis of
Jasmine and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, focusing on the different ways in which cultural identities are constructed and represented in these novels.
Kolukirik 6
Chapter 1: Theoretical Framework
Hybridity is a term often used to refer to “the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization” (Ashcroft et al. 118). Bhabha’s particular discussion of cultural hybridity, grounded in post-colonialism, avoids what he calls “that very simplistic polarity between the ruler and the ruled” (Rutherford 220) and instead focuses on “the interdependence and mutual construction of subjectivities” in the context of
“colonizer/colonized relations” (Ashcroft et al. 118). While Bhabha’s theories regarding cultural hybridity are originally set in a post-colonial context, their use can also be extended to immigration literature because, similarly to colonized people, “migrants are predominantly positioned at the margins of society and are subject to the hegemonial claims of the majority”
(Pourjafari and Vahidpour 685). In the context of this thesis, it is important to note that although Mukherjee’s and Alvarez’s novels evidently deal with migration, they are, to some extent, also lent a postcolonial character because of India’s (British) colonial past and the
United States’ “neo-colonial relationship” with the Dominican Republic throughout much of the twentieth century (Morín 131). In his analysis of cultural hybridity, Bhabha repeatedly discusses cultural difference and ambivalence in relation to the concepts of the Third Space, mimicry, and hybridity. In order to provide a clear theoretical framework for my analysis of the three novels in the following chapters, these concepts will now be discussed in more detail.
Bhabha’s theory on cultural hybridity suggests that “all cultural statements and systems” (Ashcroft et al. 118) are created in the “Third Space of enunciation” (Bhabha,
“Commitment” 22). To describe this Third Space between two different cultures, Bhabha uses the metaphor of a stairwell:
The stairwell as a liminal space, in-between the designations of identity, becomes the
process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference Kolukirik 7
between upper and lower, black and white. The hither and thither of the stairwell, the
temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it
from settling into primordial polarities. The interstitial passage between fixed
identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference
without an assumed or imposed hierarchy. (Location 5)
This Third Space described above is where cultural hybridity takes place and is therefore home to “the liminal figure of the hybrid” (Moosavinia and Hosseini 336). Fetson Kalua points out that “[b]y grounding his version of postcolonialism in liminality or the Third
Space, Bhabha is able to contextualize the vexed nature of the post-colonial condition and provide a counterpoint to identity issues” (25). The liminal Third Space between cultures can thus become a space of empowerment for the colonized where “the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity” (Bhabha, “Commitment” 21). As a consequence of this characteristic, Bhabha argues that “[t]hese in-between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity” (Location 2).
Richard Bower draws attention to the “ambiguous” nature of this in-between space where “social agency [is] created when individuals connect, interact and react with one another” (488). The Third Space becomes “the precondition for the articulation of cultural difference,” which, in turn, creates the ambivalence which is a crucial characteristic of cultural hybridity (Bhabha, “Commitment” 22). Ultimately, the Third Space “displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives”
(Rutherford 211). Therefore, cultural hybridity does not entail a mere mixing of two cultures, but rather the creation of a new cultural form within the ambivalence of the Third Space.
More specifically, the Third Space refers to the liminality between the two cultures in which mimicry and hybridity occur and ultimately contributes to the creation of the cultural hybrid. Kolukirik 8
As mentioned before, as part of his theories on cultural hybridity, Bhabha examines the concept of mimicry. He suggests that mimicry is “the affect of hybridity” and calls it “at once a mode of appropriation and of resistance” (Bhabha, “Signs” 162). In his essay “Of
Mimicry and Man” (1984), he describes mimicry as follows:
Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform,
regulation, and discipline, which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power.
Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance
which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies
surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both “normalized” knowledges and
disciplinary powers. (Bhabha, “Mimicry” 126)
This definition of mimicry highlights its double significance. In addition to this distinction made by Bhabha, he also draws attention to another important characteristic of mimicry, its
“partial presence” (“Mimicry” 127). The colonized do not simply copy the culture of the colonizer and become completely assimilated. Rather, they always preserve a degree of difference in relation to the colonizer which results in a “partial presence”. Because of this, mimicry essentially produces “a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, “Mimicry” 126). As a consequence of this difference, mimicry is always marked by “ambivalence” (Bhabha, “Mimicry” 126).
Mimicry can be used by the colonized, or by extension the immigrant, as “an opportunistic method of copying the person in power” (Gupta 3) by emulating “[their] language, dress, politics, or cultural attitude” (Lilja et al. 212). Through mimicry, colonized individuals seek to achieve the position of power associated with the colonizer as they
“suppress [their] own cultural identity” (Naresh 16). However, despite their attempts to opportunistically mimic the colonizer in order to fit in or associate themselves with the Kolukirik 9 dominant culture, the “desire of the colonized for [a] total metamorphosis” is never completely achieved (Gupta 4).
In addition to it being used as a way to obtain the power associated with the colonizer,
Bhabha also argues that the ambivalence of mimicry can empower the colonized as it can be used as a tool of subversion: “as discrimination turns into the assertion of the hybrid, the insignia of authority becomes a mask, a mockery” (“Signs” 162). David Huddart, elaborating on Bhabha’s concept, points out that mimicry can essentially become “an exaggerated copying of language, culture, manners, and ideas” marked by its “difference” (57). He also emphasizes that this “repetition with difference” should not be confused with uncritically imitating the colonizer (Huddart 57). It is not an indication of “the colonized’s servitude” or
“assimilation,” but quite the contrary, this version of mimicry becomes “a form of mockery” that ultimately “undermines the ongoing pretentions of colonialism” (Huddart 57). As
Bhabha argues, this process results in a situation in which “the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed and ‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence”
(“Mimicry” 129). This subversion thus exposes the constructed nature of the identity of the colonizer and its purported superiority. Therefore, Bhabha argues that the ambivalence of mimicry in relation to hybridity in the Third Space empowers the colonized through its potential for the construction of an alternative hybrid identity.
Much like mimicry, hybridity as a whole is also marked by ambivalence. Bhabha argues that “[t]he colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference” (“Signs” 150). The ambivalence caused by this difference enables the manifestation of hybridity. In discussing cultural difference, Bhabha underscores its distinction from cultural diversity. He views cultural diversity as problematic: “although there is always an entertainment and encouragement of [it], there is always also a corresponding containment of it” (Rutherford Kolukirik 10
208). Cultural difference, on the other hand, places itself in a “position of liminality” where it is characterized by its “spirit of alterity or otherness” (Rutherford 209). Therefore, as opposed to cultural diversity, cultural difference is more ambivalent and addresses the anxiety of the dominant culture as this culture is not able to easily identify it. Consequently, the response by the dominant culture to cultural difference can manifest itself in “differentiations, individuations, identity effects” towards the non-dominant culture, which underscore its
(assumed) power over the latter (Bhabha, “Signs” 153). Bhabha proposes hybridity as a response in the form of “the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority)” (“Signs” 154). He points out that this entails “the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects and displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination” (Bhabha, “Signs” 154). Therefore, hybridity engenders a “space of negotiation” between cultures which, together with its rejection of complete assimilation into the dominant culture, also rejects “the binary representation of social antagonism” (Bhabha, “Cultures In-
Between” 58). Through his particular identification of difference and ambivalence in the context of intercultural encounters, Bhabha ultimately regards hybridity as a subversive device of empowerment for the hybrid individual to assert his own particular cultural identity.
Having provided an overview of Bhabha’s theoretical concepts regarding cultural hybridity and highlighted its relevance for immigration literature, in the following two chapters, I will apply these theoretical concepts in my analysis of Jasmine and How the
García Girls Lost Their Accents. My analysis will focus on how cultural hybridity is represented in these works and to what extent the main characters are able to actually mediate their position between their native and host cultures in the context of their immigration and develop a culturally hybrid identity as theorized by Bhabha. Furthermore, I will also examine Kolukirik 11 how these novels as a whole reflect on the characters’ attempt at constructing cultural identities.
Kolukirik 12
Chapter 2:
“So We Can Rebirth Ourselves in the Images of Dreams”: Identity Transformations and the Limits of Assimilation in Jasmine
Jasmine tells the story of a female India-born immigrant to the United States and the hardships she experiences in the process of constructing a new cultural identity for herself as a result of the intercultural encounters in her host country. Her decision to leave India and move overseas is fueled by her desire to complete her late husband’s wish for the two of them to emigrate to Florida, where he planned to continue his studies and build up a new life with her. Despite her inability to obtain official immigration documents after his death, Jasmine manages to enter the country as an illegal immigrant after a perilous journey. Upon her arrival in the United States, she faces many difficulties, in response to which she adopts several different identities as she attempts to adapt to her new surroundings (Leard 115). The novel itself is focalized through Jasmine as a first-person narrator who refers to herself by a number of different names (Jyoti, Jasmine, Jazzy, Jase, and Jane) as she looks back on her life as an immigrant. All of these names correspond with a specific stage in her identity transformation throughout the novel. Each successive state of her transformation signifies a new stage of mediation between the American host culture and her native Indian culture, affecting her cultural identity significantly. In order to avoid any confusion in my analysis of
Jasmine, and in line with most critics’ discussion of the novel, I will refer to the protagonist as Jasmine throughout the rest of this thesis.
Jasmine’s particular journey as an Indian immigrant to the United States lends itself to a reading in light of Bhabha’s theoretical concepts regarding cultural hybridity because of the intercultural encounters which take place in the novel and their effects on Jasmine’s identity constructions. As discussed in the previous chapter, cultural hybridity is a complex phenomenon which revolves around the relationship between the dominant culture of the colonizer (or host country) and the minority culture of the colonized (or postcolonial Kolukirik 13 immigrant). While Jasmine’s construction of cultural identities in the course of the novel seems to show several parallels with Bhabha’s theory on cultural hybridity, certain elements of her immigrant experience also complicate it. In this chapter, I will discuss to what extent
Jasmine’s experiences as an immigrant living between two cultures contribute to the creation of a hybrid identity as theorized by Bhabha. I will argue that Jasmine initially seems to partially exhibit certain characteristics of a hybrid identity caused by her in-between position concerning her native Indian culture and American host culture. However, as the novel progresses, she gradually discards her hybridity in favor of a more assimilationist attitude regarding her continuously transforming cultural identity. Furthermore, I will also examine how the novel as a whole critically reflects on Jasmine’s identity transformations, specifically focusing on her eventual assimilation into American culture.
Jasmine’s adoption of multiple identities in each successive state of her journey in the
United States is the most striking characteristic of her immigrant experience. As Deepika
Bahri points out, Jasmine constantly finds herself “along the liminal, ‘fugitive’s’ space where she exists and survives by mutating constantly” (150). In the same vain, John K. Hoppe draws attention to her “interstitial subjectivity which cannot be wholly one presence nor wholly another” (145). Jasmine herself is also aware of her in-between position as an immigrant, as she repeatedly remarks that she feels “suspended between worlds,” “between identities” (76-77).
According to Bhabha, the Third Space is where the colonized or immigrant individual, caught between two worlds, is enabled to construct a hybrid identity. Jasmine’s liminal position as an immigrant thus provides the potential for her construction of a hybrid consciousness. One of the most prominent ways in which Jasmine’s hybridity manifests itself is through her utilization of mimicry throughout the novel. As pointed out by Bhabha, mimicry is “the sign of a double articulation” (“Mimicry” 126). It can be used by the colonized or immigrant individual to imitate the dominant culture “as it visualizes power,” Kolukirik 14 but it can also be taken a step further and be used as a “threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” by exposing the constructed nature of colonizer/colonized relations (Bhabha, “Mimicry” 126). While mimicry plays a pivotal role in the novel, I argue that Jasmine only succeeds in employing it partially. She clearly uses it to imitate the manners of the dominant culture, but she does not decisively assert what
Bhabha calls her “cultural difference” (Rutherford 209) to create an ambivalence through which mimicry becomes a subversive tool that questions the dominant culture’s relation to the minority culture of the immigrant. Rather, as I will show, Jasmine’s partial use of mimicry contributes to her achieving an opportunistic form of hybridity rather than an intentionally and effectively subversive one.
One of the most obvious ways in which mimicry manifests itself in the novel is through Jasmine’s adoption of American-style clothing. Soon after her arrival in the United
States, Jasmine is taken in by Lillian Gordon, who renames her “Jazzy” and helps her adjust to her new surroundings, before Jasmine moves on to New York to stay with her late husband’s teacher, Professor Vadhera. During her stay with Lillian in Florida, Jasmine is made aware of the importance of clothing as a “cultural signifier” (Moslund 128). Lillian helps Jasmine to “dress up in informal American clothes” and imitate American ways in order to “disguise herself from the immigration police,” since she is an illegal immigrant
(Moslund 128). Jasmine is eager to adopt American ways of dressing and behavior in her attempt to better fit in with the dominant culture of her new country and does her best to obtain more “American” looks and manners:
She gave me her daughter’s high-school clothes: blouses with Peter Pan collars, maxi
skirts, T-shirts with washed-out pictures, sweaters, cords, and loafers. But beware the
shoes, she said, shoes are the biggest giveaway. Undocumented aliens wear boxy shoes
with ambitious heels. … “My daughter calls them Third World heels,” Lillian said,
laughed, after the tea had calmed me down. Walk American, she exhorted me, and she Kolukirik 15
showed me how. I worked hard on the walk and deportment. Within a week she said
I’d lost my shy sidle. (132-133, emphasis added)
This passage shows that Jasmine essentially uses mimicry in order to not only hide her illegal status but, as the reference to the “heels” suggests, also her ambition to obtain the position of power associated with the dominant culture. She does not simply take over American ways of dressing and acting because she wants to be “invisible,” but also because she thinks her invisibility will empower her. In this sense, her mimicry in this passage can be read as partly subversive, as she attempts to use the existing power structure to her advantage as an immigrant. At the same time, however, in doing so, Jasmine indirectly acknowledges this existing power structure without fundamentally interrogating it, lending her mimicry a more opportunistic character.
Furthermore, this passage is also important because of Mukherjee’s apparent use of
“Orientalizing discourse in order to criticize the hegemonic position of the [United States]”
(Filipczak 126). By describing Lilian’s rather condescending reaction to Jasmine’s clothing and highlighting Jasmine’s need to wear American-style clothing in order to be accepted by the dominant culture, Mukherjee underscores “the inferior position of the ethnic subject,” who is immediately made aware of “the great dividing line between ‘us’ and ‘them’”
(Filipczak 126). Besides othering her, Lilian’s attitude towards Jasmine’s difference also reveals what Mukherjee has called the “dark side of the American will to transform the other, to control the other” (Mukherjee, “Female Multiplicity” 302).
Despite her conscious adoption of a more American appearance and behavior,
Jasmine remains aware of her cultural difference and appears to be wary to lose it, indicating a sign of resistance: “I checked myself in the mirror, shocked at the transformation. Jazzy in a
T-shirt, tight cords, and running shoes. I couldn’t tell if with the Hasnapuri sidle I’d also abandoned my Hasnapuri modesty” (133, emphasis added). Judith Oster points out that the immigrant individual’s “look into the mirror -- indeed the need to look into the mirror, to Kolukirik 16 seek one’s image -- seems to assume greater urgency as well as clearer self-consciousness in bicultural texts” (60). She draws attention to how “the unexpected difference reflected in the mirror … express[es] identity disruption or formation” (Oster 60). This is certainly the case for Jasmine. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, she realizes her transformation into her new identity and questions if the changes she observes are positive or not. Although Jasmine mimics aspects of the dominant culture, in this early stage of her identity formation she is afraid of losing her “Indianness”. This fear results in her initial desire to retain her difference from the dominant culture. She takes over certain aspects of American culture but makes sure not to lose her Indian cultural identity completely in the process. This retention of difference gives rise to what Bhabha calls a “partial presence” (“Mimicry” 127). In this stage of her identity development, Jasmine does not blindly imitate American culture, but desires to preserve a degree of difference in relation to the dominant culture. This awareness of her cultural difference and her desire to retain it result in “a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, “Mimicry” 126, emphasis in original). Nevertheless, in spite of her initial caution not to lose her Indian identity completely, her attitude towards her cultural difference does not remain the same after she leaves Lillian to stay with Professor Vadhera and his family in New York.
Upon her arrival in New York, Jasmine finds herself in a completely different environment than the one she got used to with Lillian in Florida. She spends the next five months living in with Professor Vadhera and his traditional Indian family in a “patriotic, nostalgic and homesick immigrant community” of Indians in Flushing, New York (Moslund
118). Jasmine’s experiences during these months cause significant changes in her attitude towards her newly developing hybrid identity. Back in Florida, she started to adapt to the dominant culture, but was still aware of her cultural difference and wary not to completely abandon her Indian identity and assimilate into American culture. Her experiences during her stay in the secluded Indian community of Flushing, however, cause her to change her outlook Kolukirik 17 on her cultural transformation. This change in attitude seems to show the first signs of a more assimilationist point of view regarding her developing cultural identity.
During her stay with the Vadheras, Jasmine feels constricted by the family’s expectation of obedience to Indian traditions. The contrast between her life in Florida with
Lillian and her new life in New York causes her to reflect on the changes in identity she has already undergone. In Florida, she spoke and improved her English and wore American clothes. In New York, “[she] was a widow who should show a proper modesty of appearance and attitude” (145). The cultural expectations of the diasporic Indian community, represented by Professor Vadhera and his family, inevitably prevent Jasmine from expressing herself according to her own wishes. This tension between her personal desires and the expectations of the Vadheras becomes clear in her comments on learning English and watching American television:
I felt like my English was deserting me. During the parents’ afternoon naps, I
sometimes watched soap opera. The American channels were otherwise never watched
(Professorji’s mother said, “There’s so much English out there, why do we have to have
it in here?”), but for the Saturday-morning Indian shows on cable. (144)
While Jasmine wants to learn more English and indulge in American culture through TV- shows, she is criticized by Professor Vadhera’s mother. A similar kind of friction arises when
Jasmine is expected to adhere to traditional Indian dress codes:
Nirmala brought plain saris and salwar-kameez outfits for me from the shop so I
wouldn’t have to embarrass myself or offend the old people in cast-off American T-
shirts. The sari patterns were for much older women, widows. I could not admit that I
had accustomed myself to American clothes. American clothes disguised my
widowhood. In a T-shirt and cords, I was taken for a student. (144-145) Kolukirik 18
Her confrontation with the Indian community in New York reinforces her desire to become more American, further stimulating her to take over characteristics of the dominant culture.
Jasmine feels stifled by the traditional roles and expectations she is faced with and wants to break away from them: “In this apartment of artificially maintained Indianness, I wanted to distance myself from everything Indian, everything Jyoti-like” (145, emphasis added). Her use of the word “everything” in this passage is crucial, especially considering her earlier cautious attitude not to lose her “Hasnapuri modesty” (133). Her experiences in the diasporic
Indian community of Flushing trigger a change in her overall attitude concerning her cultural identity, causing her to rigidly deny her cultural difference and strengthening her willingness to completely adapt to American culture (Burkhart 18). Because of this change in her outlook and her increasing unhappiness while staying with the Vadheras, Jasmine eventually leaves them. She contacts Lillian’s daughter, Kate, who helps her find a job as an au pair in
Manhattan.
Kate puts Jasmine in touch with Taylor and Wylie Hayes, a cosmopolitan couple who work as professors at a university in Manhattan and hire Jasmine to take care of their daughter, Duff. Jasmine, who after her experiences in Flushing is eager to leave her Indian culture behind her and completely embrace American culture, is fascinated by the couple she is going to work for. She sees them and the lives they lead as the epitome of American culture, and is particularly amazed by the husband, Taylor, who, to her great surprise, treats her as an equal:
He smiled his crooked-toothed smile, and I began to fall in love. I mean, I fell in love
with what he represented to me, a professor who served biscuits to a servant, smiled at
her, and admitted her to the broad democracy of his joking, even when she didn’t
understand it. It seemed entirely American. I was curious about his life, not repulsed. I
wanted to know the way such a man lives in this country. I wanted to watch, be part of
it. (167, emphasis added) Kolukirik 19
Not only is this passage significant as it shows the importance of Taylor to her as the personification of American culture, but it also shows how much she wants to become part of that American culture. She wants to “watch” and see how “real” Americans live their lives in an attempt to subsequently imitate that kind of life. Seen through Jasmine’s eyes, Flushing and Manhattan symbolize two extremes. While the Vadheras and her life in Flushing represent the native culture she is deliberately trying to suppress, the Hayeses and their home in Manhattan become representative of the American life into which she wants to assimilate completely.
While Jasmine desires to assimilate into American culture, she is not able to do so easily because her cultural difference visibly persists. She still does not speak English fluently and looks physically different from the people in her new surroundings. During her stay with the Hayeses, Jasmine tries to suppress her otherness and compensate for it by immersing herself in the culture of this new world she appreciates so much. As Anu Aneja points out, this “process of fabrication” simultaneously entails “an unmaking of the past”
(73): “The love I felt for Taylor that first day had nothing to do with sex. I fell in love with his world, its ease, its careless confidence and graceful self-absorption. I wanted to become the person they thought they saw: humorous, intelligent, refined, affectionate” (171). In her attempts to become more Americanized, Jasmine does all the things she wanted to do but couldn’t when she lived in Flushing: “Profligate squandering was my way of breaking with the panicky, parsimonious ghettos of Flushing” (176). Together with her adoption of this new way of life, she also adopts a new name, Jase. For Jasmine, this new name given to her by
Taylor becomes the symbol of a new kind of outlook on her life in the United States: “I liked everything he said or did. I liked the name he gave me: Jase. Jase was a woman who bought herself spangled heels and silk chartreuse pants” (176). Reinventing herself as Jase, she wants to completely break away from her native culture. Even when talking about her new identity, she immediately connects it to her adoption of clothes, which she considers to be typically Kolukirik 20
American. Mimicry continues to be an important part of her immigrant experience, but again, and this time even more distinctly, it proves to be only an opportunistic form of mimicry.
Back in Florida, Jasmine still partly resisted losing her cultural difference and thus seemed to be using mimicry to some extent subversively. However, at this stage of her identity transformation, she is unwilling (and unable) to use mimicry in a similarly subversive way by claiming a hybrid identity and exposing the constructed nature of the cultural polarities she thinks in.
While Jasmine herself is not able to expose the constructed nature of cultural identities, the novel does call attention to it. Mukherjee repeatedly alludes to the racial disadvantage of non-white immigrants in constructing a new cultural identity for themselves in America by emphasizing how Jasmine’s cultural, or more specifically, racial difference prevents her from fully assimilating into the dominant culture. Moreover, through Jasmine’s relationship with Taylor, Mukherjee seems to draw attention to the latter’s “well-intentioned but clearly paternalistic” behavior which is “reminiscent of an orientalist mentality” (Chu
135). Therefore, this time by means of her relationship with an American who does not deliberately want to erase or ignore her cultural difference, Mukherjee still suggests that
American assimilation emphasizes rather than questions the purported superiority of white
American society (Chu 135), which makes identity construction in the form of assimilation more complex for non-white immigrants.
Although Jasmine tries to suppress any form of perceptible cultural difference, particular aspects of her native culture still continue to manifest themselves. While she felt stifled by the cultural norms and traditions imposed on her in Flushing, her own thoughts still seem to give away the remnants of these cultural values. When looking out of her window to the university dorm buildings across the street, she is fascinated and shocked by what she sees: Kolukirik 21
I looked out into the dorm windows across Claremont Avenue. The windows were long,
bright, shadeless rectangles of light. No window shades, no secrets. Barnard women
were studying cross-legged on narrow beds, changing T-shirts, clowning with
Walkmans clamped to their heads. They wore nothing under their shirts and sweaters.
Men were in their room. Even on the first morning I saw naked bodies combing their
hair in front of dresser mirrors. Truly there was no concept of shame in this society.
(171)
The fact that Jasmine thinks that there is “no concept of shame” in American society seems to be part of her surfacing Indian norms based on the shame culture of her native country (Jacob
4). The shamelessness of the American students seems to suggest self-absorption and indifference to others as opposed to the social control in communal cultures like the one in which Jasmine was raised. No matter how hard she tries to suppress her Indian culture, it keeps resurfacing in certain ways. As Bhabha suggests, mimicry of the colonized or immigrant individual produces “a reformed, recognizable Other” (“Mimicry” 126). This seems to be exactly what is happening to Jasmine. As an immigrant longing for assimilation into the dominant culture, she “suppress[es] [her] own cultural identity” (Naresh 16).
However, her efforts to do so are repeatedly in vain as she can never achieve “[a] total metamorphosis” (Gupta 4, emphasis added).
Despite her own desire to completely erase her cultural difference, her difference itself is not seen as a threat by Taylor:
Taylor didn’t want to change me. He didn’t want to scour and sanitize the foreignness.
My being different from Wylie or Kate didn’t scare him. I changed because I wanted
to. To bunker oneself inside nostalgia, to sheathe the heart in a bulletproof vest, was to
be a coward. On Claremont Avenue, in the Hayeses’ big, clean, brightly lit apartment, Kolukirik 22
I bloomed from a diffident alien with forged documents into adventurous Jase. (185-
186)
In spite of Taylor’s acknowledgement of her “foreignness” and his genuine interest in her
Indian culture and past, she is very vocal in her dismissal of her cultural origins and “roundly critiques nostalgic clinging to repressive, Old-World practices” (Burkhart 17). Jasmine considers looking back and holding on to the culture she left behind a lack of courage. Her own awareness of her remaining cultural difference and the fact that she knows that Taylor appreciates it are not enough to embrace the formation of a hybrid identity. She deliberately chooses to reinvent herself with the name given to her by Taylor. The Hayes household is the place where, regardless of the lingering cultural difference she is trying to suppress, Jasmine truly feels that she has become a “real” American: “I became an American in an apartment building on Claremont Avenue across the street from Barnard college dormitory” (165).
Drawing attention to her suppression of cultural difference, Sten Pultz Moslund points out that, at first, Jasmine is characterized by “heteroglossia,” but gradually “gives way to forces of monoglossia,” reducing the representation of “intentional hybridity” in the novel (116).
Unfortunately for Jasmine, her newfound bliss does not last long. Just when she thinks that she has created a steady new life for herself in her new country, with her new identity, an uncanny coincidence forces her to leave her job with the Hayeses. While spending an afternoon in the park one day, her past catches up with her as she spots the man who killed her husband. As she fears for her own and her host family’s lives, she decides to leave New
York and move to Iowa, signaling the next stage of her identity transformation.
In Iowa, Jasmine settles in the white rural community of Baden. She meets Bud and the two soon start living together. Her relationship with Bud shows a significant similarity with the relationship she had with Taylor. Both men enter Jasmine’s life and give her a new name and identity. Where Taylor names Jasmine “Jase,” signifying a crucial stage in her familiarization with American culture and society, Bud similarly creates a new identity for Kolukirik 23
Jasmine when he calls her “Jane”: “Bud calls me Jane. Me Bud, you Jane. I didn’t get it at first. He kids. Calamity Jane. Jane as in Jane Russel, not Jane as in Plain Jane. But Plain Jane is all I want to be. Plain Jane is a role, like any other. My genuine foreignness frightens him”
(26). While the two men show similarities with respect to their creation of a new identity for
Jasmine, there is also an important difference between them. Whereas Taylor was aware of and genuinely interested in Jasmine’s Indian cultural background, Bud chooses to ignore that part of her history completely. He simply treats her as a native-born American, ignoring any evidence of her cultural difference because it makes him feel uneasy. Bud feels threatened by her otherness and Jasmine can only relieve his anxiety “by settling into the role of domesticated exotic” (Carter-Sanborn 577). It is noteworthy that despite her conscious refusal to negotiate the two parts of her cultural identity, her perceived otherness already seems to cause the anxiety that Bhabha mentions when suggesting that cultural difference, because of its ambivalence, addresses the anxiety of the dominant culture, as this culture is not able to easily identify and categorize the “otherness” it perceives. Even without her actively embracing a hybrid identity, Jasmine’s presence in the white rural community of
Baden seems to challenge some of the assumptions held by its inhabitants.
Many critics have criticized Jasmine because of its supposedly unambiguous praise of assimilation. Shushma Tandon argues that Jasmine is an “ebullient novel offering a spiced-up version of the classical recipe of assimilation into [the] dominant culture. ... [T]he central problem of the novel is that it is silent about the conditions that make such assimilation possible” (144). In the same vein, Susan Koshy argues that “Mukherjee’s celebration of assimilation is an insufficient confrontation of the historical circumstances of ethnicity and race in the United States and of the complexities of diasporic subject-formation” (69). I would argue the opposite is true, however. Jasmine’s persistent difference and resulting
“Otherness” underscore the complexities of assimilation for non-white immigrants in the
United States. Her statement that “Plain Jane is all [she] want[s] to be” (26) indicates Kolukirik 24
Jasmine’s clear desire to assimilate without having to be reminded of her (cultural) difference. However, through the reactions of the people around her in Baden, Mukherjee highlights the question of “[w]ho is allowed the luxury of plainness” in a society where
“plainness is a staunchly racialized form of citizenship” (Reddy 365). It is precisely by emphasizing Jasmine’s desire for assimilation into the dominant American culture, and simultaneously revealing the dominant culture’s (implicit) reaction of othering her, that
Mukherjee actually underscores the difficulties of identity construction for a non-white woman in a predominantly white American society.
In Jasmine’s new community in Baden, Bud is certainly not the only one who feels uneasy about her cultural difference. Bud’s mother shows a similar kind of attitude towards her. Although she says she likes Jasmine a lot, “even better than [Bud’s ex-wife]” who is from the same Iowan community (16), she does not feel comfortable with her Indianness and refuses to acknowledge it:
Mother Ripplemeyer tells me her Depression stories. In the beginning, I thought we
could trade some world-class poverty stories, but mine make her uncomfortable. Not
that she is hostile. It’s like looking at my name in my passport and seeing “Jyo—” at
the beginning and deciding her mouth was not destined to make those sounds. … She
doesn’t mind my stories about New York or Florida because she’s been to Florida many
times and seen enough pictures of New York. (16)
As is the case with her relationship with Bud, Jasmine’s mere difference makes Bud’s mother feel uneasy, even when Jasmine is not actively asserting it. Aneja points out that immigrants are often expected to “erase [their] difference completely” (74). Indeed, the exchange of cultures in Baden seems to be “a oneway process” only (Banerjee 238). Consequently, just as she accepts “the role of domesticated exotic” (Carter-Sanborn 577) with Bud and does not assert her difference to challenge the assumptions of the dominant culture in relation to her Kolukirik 25 own minority identity, she also rejects the opportunity to share her own stories with Mother
Ripplemeyer because she does not want to confront her, and by extension the dominant culture, with her otherness and create anxiety. Bud and his mother’s reactions to Jasmine’s difference further underscore “the historical and political situations that have written out for her a predetermined place within the hierarchy of race, culture, gender and class” (Aneja 74).
Ironically, Jasmine’s earlier “flirtation with ‘multiplicity’” in the form of all the different identities she takes on as part of her journey as an immigrant results in “a domestic and domesticated fantasy, a classic American dream of assimilation” (Carter-Sanborn 583), pushing her further away from constructing a viable hybrid identity.
Bhabha argues that “[h]ybridity represents that ambivalent ‘turn’ of the discriminated subject into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification -- a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority” (“Signs” 155). The ambivalence that would be created because of this “turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention” (Bhabha, “Signs” 154). In other words, “the discriminated subject, incompletely contained by the power and paranoid knowledge invested in its constitution, participates in, confronts, and unsettles that very power” (Carter-Sanborn 581). However,
Jasmine does not manage to successfully unsettle the preconceptions and prejudices of the community, let alone its power structures. Where it was first only she herself who denied and suppressed her Indianness, she is now also faced with an environment that does not want to acknowledge it. If Jasmine earlier was unwilling to create a hybrid identity by acknowledging her cultural difference and deriving empowerment from it, she now is unable to do so because she accepts, and even internalizes, the xenophobia of her new environment and its persistent dismissal of her difference.
While being denied her cultural difference, Jasmine is simultaneously faced with stereotypes concerning Indian culture. This becomes particularly apparent when she is invited to the University Club in Dalton, Iowa. She meets Mary Webb, a white American woman Kolukirik 26 who firmly believes in reincarnation and wants to talk to Jasmine about it. Because of
Jasmine’s Indian heritage, she assumes that she must believe in reincarnation as well. When she shares intricate details of her alleged reincarnations, Jasmine’s face makes “a funny look,” which prompts Mary to say, “This can’t be new or bizarre to you. Don’t you Hindus keep revisiting the world?” (126), projecting her view of the stereotypical Indian onto
Jasmine. A few moments later, something similar happens when a waiter arrives to take
Jasmine’s order. After she tells him that she would like pork chops, Mary says: “I thought you’d be vegetarian” (126). Mary’s attitude and comments are in line with what Bhabha calls
“differentiations, individuations, [and] identity effects” towards the non-dominant culture, which underscore her (assumed) power over Jasmine (“Signs” 153). Bhabha proposes hybridity as a response to this attitude of the dominant culture in the form of a “strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal” (“Signs” 154). This does not happen, though. Jasmine does not actively confront Mary by disavowing the stereotypes she is faced with. Instead, “[t]hose who would insist that there is such a thing as knowable
‘Indianness’ compel her to distance herself from what they believe to be Indian” (Bahri 151), pushing her towards further assimilation into the dominant culture without challenging it.
While Jasmine could embrace a hybrid identity and “distance herself from what [the dominant culture] believe[s] to be Indian” (Bahri 151) by confronting them with a form of
Indianness that would dismantle their preconceptions, she deliberately chooses not to do so.
Furthermore, it is important to note the irony employed by Mukherjee in this passage.
While Jasmine attempts to completely assimilate into the dominant American culture, she is constantly made aware of being “the Other” because she is not a white American. Again, this time through her use of irony in describing the interaction between Mary and Jasmine,
Mukherjee seems to draw attention to the complexities of identity construction by suggesting that “hyphenization is only imposed on non-white Americans” (Mukherjee, “Beyond
Multiculturism” 33). Mary’s comments about reincarnation and vegetarianism essentially Kolukirik 27 expose that America’s ideology of assimilation is not as readily an option for all immigrants to the country and that non-white immigrants remain being seen as not “completely”
American, despite their efforts at constructing an American cultural identity for themselves.
By means of her ironic tone in this passage, Mukherjee sheds light on the exclusionary nature of American assimilation. While she has been outspoken about her pro-assimilationist views regarding immigrants, she does not refrain from criticizing how America’s Eurocentric attitude towards assimilation “categoriz[es] the cultural landscape into a ‘center’ and its
‘peripheries’” and consequently fails to “deliver the promises of the American Dream” to its citizens of non-European descent (Mukherjee, “Beyond Multiculturism” 33).
When talking about the new identity she takes on in Iowa, Jasmine says about herself:
“In Baden, I am Jane. Almost” (26, emphasis added). Again, we are reminded of Bhabha’s assertion about mimicry as creating “a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (“Mimicry” 126). The reader is constantly reminded of Jasmine’s difference from the dominant host culture. Her environment’s reaction to her visible Indianness manifests itself in what Bhabha calls “the desire for a reformed” but at the same time “recognizable Other”
(“Mimicry” 126). The reactions of the dominant American culture she faces in Baden are centered on reminding her of her cultural difference, while at the same time also “taming and pacifying [her] otherness through a normative Eurocentric homology” (Moslund 128). This tension between Jasmine and her new environment therefore complicates her apparent desire for complete assimilation, or at least her ability to fully assimilate, as there seems to be an unintentional manifestation of certain characteristics of hybridity. Her mere difference and her recognition of it unintentionally challenge “static notions of Otherness” (Bahri 137).
Because of this partial display of (inadvertent) hybridity, it would be too simplistic to dismiss any trace of cultural hybridity in Jasmine’s self-conception, but the fact that she does not actively position herself in the Third Space and fails to assertively subvert the hegemonic Kolukirik 28 relationship between the dominant host culture and her native culture does ultimately preclude the construction of a hybrid identity.
The complexity of Jasmine’s identity is even further emphasized in the novel by her comments on the differences between herself and Bud’s adoptive son from Vietnam, Du.
While she acknowledges that both of them are immigrants, she explicitly refers to Du, but not to herself, as culturally hybrid: “My transformation has been genetic; Du’s was hyphenated.
We were so full of wonder at how fast he became American, but he’s a hybrid. … His high- school paper did a story on him titled: ‘Du (Yogi) Ripplemeyer, a Vietnamese-American’”
(222). Kristin Carter-Sanborn points out that Du is able to find an equilibrium and
“[establish] a ‘delicate thread of ... hyphenization’” which “prevents his identity as a
Vietnamese from being effaced by the dominant culture” (581). Similarly, Jill Roberts draws attention to how “Du’s Vietnamese past catches up with him in Iowa and he welcomes this intrusion” (91). In contrast to Jasmine, he does not suppress his native culture and allows it to be part of his cultural identity. As a result of this particular attitude, Du is able to construct a hybrid identity for himself and eventually leaves the community in Baden to reunite with his long-lost biological sister. Jasmine, on the other hand, does not really seem to be able to work out a successfully hybrid identity as envisioned by Bhabha. As Carter-Sanborn suggests,
“ideally, [Jasmine] would be able to tap into what Gloria Anzaldúa has called the ‘mestiza consciousness,’ a ‘tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity’ like that demonstrated by [Du]” (581), but she ultimately fails to do so, which makes her “difference” gradually morph “into sameness” (Moslund 131).
At the end of the novel, Taylor and Duff find Jasmine in Baden. Taylor has split up with Wylie and asks Jasmine to join them and start a new life together in California. Jasmine decides to accept their invitation and leave her life in Baden behind, moving further “West,” both “physically and metaphorically” (Faymonville 53): “I realize I have already stopped thinking of myself as Jane,” she says (240). This final move seems to suggest a symbolic Kolukirik 29 return to her identity as “Jase,” the most ardently assimilationist of her previously assumed identities, emphasizing her definitive break with any kind of hybridity she might have manifested earlier in the novel. Furthermore, her revived desire to completely adopt
American culture also seems to show itself through her decision to leave Bud behind and pursue her own happiness, influenced by “the Western belief in individualism” (Moslund
109), as opposed to the more communal nature of the Indian culture she now completely rejects. The ending of the novel evidently underscores Jasmine’s eventual Americanization.
Despite the complexity of her cultural identity as seen by her manifestation of certain hybrid traits throughout her transformative journey as an immigrant throughout the novel, Jasmine ultimately does not succeed in successfully positioning herself in Bhabha’s Third Space and constructing a sustainable hybrid identity for herself.
While Jasmine eventually completely embraces assimilation in favor of assuming a hybrid identity, it is important to emphasize that the narrative strategy employed by
Mukherjee suggests an ironic distance between the protagonist (and her transformations) and
Mukherjee’s views of identity construction as an author. While Jasmine’s decisions throughout the novel display an unequivocally pro-assimilationist attitude towards migration,
Mukherjee herself seems to reflect critically on the choices Jasmine makes. As she explains in an interview with Beverley Byers-Pevitts, “Jasmine is only Jasmine. Jasmine should not be the spokesperson for all Indians or all non-white immigrants into this country” (Mukherjee,
“Interview Byers Pevitts” 197). Accordingly, Jasmine, as a cultural work, does not embrace assimilation in the same way as the titular protagonist does. While Mukherjee has asserted in her interviews and non-fictional writings that immigrants need to assimilate into the culture of their new country (e.g., Mukherjee, “Beyond Multiculturism” 34), there is a difference between the kind of assimilation Jasmine exhibits in the novel and the kind of assimilation
Mukherjee speaks of. Whereas Jasmine represents a form of assimilation in which the cultural difference of the (non-white) immigrant needs to be completely erased in order to fit Kolukirik 30 into a white, European mold, Mukherjee herself is critical of this form of assimilation and
“has sought to redefine [Americanness] in her fictional and non-fiction writings” as not singular but rather made up of “diverse experiences and people of various origins” (Nyman
159). This view is further supported by her comments on the reciprocity of assimilation:
As a writer, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed
me. It does not end until I show that I (and the hundreds of thousands of recent
immigrants like me) are, minute-by-minute, transforming America. The transformation
is a two-way process; it affects both the individual and the national-cultural identity.
The end result of immigration, then, is this two-way transformation. (Mukherjee,
“Beyond Multiculturism” 34)
Ultimately, by suggesting an ironic distance between Jasmine the character and Jasmine as a cultural work, Mukherjee draws attention to how non-white immigrants coming to the United
States “have to face the Orientalist gaze,” (Filipczak 125) even if they are willing to assimilate into American culture. Therefore, through her novel, Mukherjee essentially exposes how American assimilation is centered around a white, Eurocentric narrative which implicitly forces non-white immigrants to use opportunistic mimicry as part of their identity construction in their attempts to become “true” Americans.
Kolukirik 31
Chapter 3:
Revisiting the Past to Reconcile with the Present: Bicultural Identity (Re)construction in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents deals with the García family’s political exile from the Dominican Republic to the United States and the effects of their forced migration, together with the ensuing intercultural encounters, on the production of their cultural and gender identities. In the Dominican Republic, the Garcías are among the island’s wealthiest and most privileged families, who claim that their origins can be traced back to the
Conquistadores. Due to the father’s opposition to the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo1, the family is uprooted from their homeland and forced to start a new life in New York. The novel deals with the family’s difficulties in adapting to their new country and draws attention to the intergenerational tensions arising from the daughters’ desire to adjust to their new surroundings and the parents’ concurrent fear of losing their daughters to America and its cultural values, which differ significantly from their native Hispanic ones (Mujcinovic 180).
“[W]riting about Latina women who move back and forth between cultures,” Alvarez draws attention to the fact that the “notion of ‘Americanization’ is ambiguous at best and certainly not some seamless process” (Himsel Burcon 124). Structurally, the novel is divided into three sections, each dealing with the García girls’ adult lives in the United States, their teenage years, and their childhood in the Dominican Republic, respectively. The novel is narrated in reverse chronological order and makes use of shifting focalization, allowing the protagonist of the novel, Yolanda García, to reflect on the family’s lives and to reconstruct the traumatic events which ultimately contributed to their current fragmented sense of (cultural) identity and come to terms with them.
1 The novel contains several references to Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961), whose dictatorial regime ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, marking “one of the bloodiest periods in Caribbean history” (Galván 49). Just like the Garcías, Alvarez and her family were exiled from the country due to “her father’s role in a plot to overthrow Trujillo” (Carter 325).
Kolukirik 32
In this chapter, I will focus on the four García sisters and the different ways in which their cultural identities develop as a result of their immigration to the United States. As in my analysis of Jasmine in the previous chapter, I will make use of Bhabha’s theoretical concept of cultural hybridity in order to investigate to what extent the García girls are able to mediate both parts of their cultural identities. While all four of the García sisters, Carla, Sandra,
Yolanda, and Sofía, find themselves in an in-between position between their native
Dominican culture and the American host culture, struggling with a sense of not belonging fully to either (Luis 840), their reactions to this position of liminality differ significantly for each sister. I will argue that while all four of the García sisters (initially) try to reconcile their
American and Dominican identities, only Yolanda, the novel’s main protagonist, is able to construct a (partially) hybrid identity as theorized by Bhabha. In contrast, the other three sisters, despite their initial efforts to mediate their multiple cultural identities, seem to find themselves in a liminal space of unresolved cultural conflict. In investigating the sisters’ ability to negotiate their cultural identities, the novel’s narrative strategies play a pivotal role.
David Cowart argues that throughout the novel, “the four siblings come to represent the redshifting fragments of a single, once integral identity after the diasporic big bang” (51). As a result, Yolanda’s perspective, with which the novel formally begins and ends, and which is also the most prominent one throughout the novel, seems to function as an overarching consciousness looking back on not only her own, but also her sisters’ lives to trace back the source of their identity fragmentation. Consequently, even though the focalization and first- person narration frequently shift to the three siblings, their perspectives are, I argue, filtered through Yolanda’s consciousness. Therefore, they, unlike Yolanda, are ultimately precluded from obtaining a cathartic moment of insight regarding their troubled sense of identity in the narrative present. In the following sections, I will examine how Carla, Sandra and Sofía, both individually and together, negotiate the various challenges posed by their forced migration to the United States and its attendant intercultural encounters. Subsequently, I will focus on Kolukirik 33
Yolanda in more detail and examine how she, despite recurrent identity conflicts and accompanying (psychological) problems, is relatively more successful in constructing a form of cultural hybridity for herself. Before my analysis of the sisters, however, I will first discuss the specific narrative strategies employed by Alvarez more extensively in order to shed more light on how the novel as a whole reflects on identity construction.
One of the most striking features of Alvarez’s novel is her adoption of “the narrative strategy of multiperspectivity” (Mitchell 39), using shifting focalization and alternating first- person and third-person perspectives throughout the text. This narrative strategy is crucial as it effectively shapes the novel and the ways in which it represents the García family’s experience of identity fragmentation and their differing reactions to it. As Catherine
Romagnolo points out, “perspective and questions of identity” in the novel are interconnected with each other as “[e]ach shift in point of view signifies the beginning of a new truth, a new version of the story, as well as the birth of a new subjectivity” (104). Alvarez’s use of shifting narrative perspectives allows her to present the reader with “competing versions of events for the readers to make sense of,” enabling them to empathize with the García sisters who are attempting to make sense of their culturally liminal position and its attendant ambiguities
(Nas 130). Furthermore, Alvarez herself also calls attention to the influence of her Dominican background on the narrative structure of the novel. In an interview with Marta Caminero-
Santangelo, she explains how her cultural heritage does not only shape the themes of her novel, but also its form:
I think this multiplicity of perspectives comes from my culture. We are often members
of big, bungling, tribal families in our Latino culture. You’re never just one person. …
I’m interested in that multiplicity, that multiculturalness, of each person. Not just the
singular self, which is so much of the Western tradition; the hero on his journey, on his
Odyssean voyage. I’m much more interested in the many-mirrored reality which is very
much a part of where I came from. (Alvarez, “Territory” 20) Kolukirik 34
The “multiplicity of perspectives” mentioned by Alvarez ultimately results in the creation of an ambiguous and polysemic text, which “invoke[es] a site of borderlands and creat[es] a postcolonial, i.e. hybrid, stance” (Nas 130). In this sense, the form of the novel as a whole is
“mirroring the shifting and multiple nature of postcolonial identity itself” (Nas 133).
Therefore, just as the García sisters, and particularly Yolanda, in their liminal position between Dominican and American cultures, are trying to (re)construct their identities by attempting to “deconstruct the very borders of American society as a hegemonic institution”
(Schultermandl 13), so too does Alvarez deconstruct “linear narratives of immigration, assimilation and nationhood” (Saldívar 1) in order to create a hybrid text which reflects the multifaceted nature, ambiguity and contradictions of cultural identity negotiation.
Besides the use of textual fragmentation and multiple narrative perspectives, the novel’s reverse chronological order is also crucial to our understanding of Yolanda’s search for identity. As Mieke Bal points out, “[p]laying with sequential ordering is not just a literary convention,” but also “a means of drawing attention to certain things, to emphasize, to bring about aesthetic or psychological effects, to show various interpretations of an event” (81).
This is certainly the case for How the García Girls Lost Their Accents where the reverse chronological order highlights “the backward-looking nature of immigration and coming of age” through a simultaneous unearthing of the psychological effects their immigration has had on Yolanda and her sisters (Lovelady 29). The structure of the novel thus “creates a systemic temporal regression that provides an exploration of causation rather than a drama of consequences” (Nagel 154). Besides signifying a desire on the part of the immigrant individual to (re)construct her identity, the non-linear narrative of the novel also has the effect of fueling “the reader’s uncertainty and instability,” which, again, enables them to identify with the García girls and the ambiguous position they find themselves in (Barak
163). As the overarching consciousness of the novel, representing not only herself but also her sisters, Yolanda’s desire to construct an identity by (re)constructing the past is Kolukirik 35 characterized by the prominence of storytelling, memories and recurring visits to the native country by various characters. Jacqueline Stefanko argues that, by tracing Yolanda’s search for (cultural) identity, Alvarez “decenter[s] and question[s] her own return to the island via a narrative that moves backward in time” (65). Ultimately, by means of employing multiple perspectives in a fragmentary, non-linear narrative, Alvarez emphasizes the multidimensionality and concurrent complexity of identity construction for immigrant individuals who find themselves in a position of liminality in their attempts at reconciling both native and host cultures.
3.1 Carla, Sandra, and Sofía
At the beginning of the novel, in the narrative present, we are introduced to the García sisters as adult women. It soon becomes clear that all of them, albeit in different ways, are troubled because of the effects of their forced displacement to the United States, as children, years earlier. We learn, for instance, that the oldest sister, Carla, has been through a divorce and is now married to the American psychiatrist she was counseled by in order to cope with her nervous breakdown. Significantly, struggling herself with identity, she becomes a child psychologist who often feels the need to analyze her family members’ behavior and actions,
“cloaking her confusing dualities with protective, clinical names” (Cox 145). Furthermore, it is important to note that, in terms of her cultural identity, Carla seems to be, at least outwardly, largely assimilated into the dominant American culture as she does not show any visible interest in her Dominican side. As the novel progresses, and the narrative regresses into the past, we obtain more insight into the source of her current psychological state.
While all four of the García sisters arrive in the United States as children, they each initially experience their immigration differently because of the different ages at which they emigrate to the United States. Carla is the oldest of the four sisters, which causes her to have Kolukirik 36 a relatively more difficult time adapting to her new life in the United States. This becomes particularly clear during the family’s celebration of their first year in their new country. She feels homesick as a result of her difficulties adjusting to the United States, which reveals itself in a wish as she blows out the candle on the flan: “Dear God, … Let us please go back home, please” (151). Despite her intense desire to return to her native country because she feels out of place in her new surroundings, Carla soon realizes that it is “a less and less likely prospect” (152). Her feelings of displacement are partly caused by her inability to fit in with the white American children at her school, who bully her due to her perceived “otherness”:
Every day on the playground and in the halls of her new school, a gang of boys chased
after her, calling her names, some of which she had heard before from the old lady
neighbor in the apartment they had rented in the city. … “Go back to where you came
from, you dirty spic!” … Another yanked down her socks, displaying her legs, which
had begun growing soft, dark hairs. “Monkey legs!” he yelled to his pals. “Stop!” Carla
cried. “Please stop.” “Eh-stop!” they mimicked her. “Plees eh-stop.” (153)
Carla is relentlessly made fun of because she looks and sounds different from her American
“blond” and “freckle-faced” schoolmates (154). Manuela Matas Llorente calls attention to the interrelatedness of “ethnic and linguistic differences” in Carla’s “sense of displacement,” as represented in this passage (71). Similarly, Catherine E. Wall points out that “standard gender- and ethnicity-based schoolyard harassment assumes linguistic overtones” in Carla’s encounter with xenophobia (127). Carla is self-conscious about the way she speaks English and remarks that “[s]he hated having to admit this since such an admission proved, no doubt, the boy gang’s point that she didn’t belong here,” underscoring the interconnectedness between correctly speaking the language of her new country and her sense of belonging
(156). Being bullied as a child because of her being perceived as different makes a lasting impression on her. She is made to feel “other” and, ashamed of her cultural difference, she Kolukirik 37 wishes to hide those parts of herself that make her stand out and look different from her peers. Her childhood experiences of xenophobia and her realization that her family will not move back to the Dominican Republic seem to awaken a desire in her to erase her cultural difference. This desire to erase her Dominican side in order to better fit into her new
American surroundings shows parallels with Jasmine’s desire to get rid of “everything
Indian, everything Jyoti-like” in Mukherjee’s novel (145). Like Jasmine, Carla becomes aware of her “otherness” in relation to the dominant American culture and wants to get rid of it so that she can belong.
Despite the similarities between the two characters’ realization of their cultural difference and the unhappiness engendered because of it, there is an important difference between the circumstances in which each of them is confronted with it. For Jasmine, her experience within the diasporic community of Indian immigrants in Flushing feels suffocating and eventually results in her desire to get rid of “everything Indian” and completely assimilate into American culture. For Carla, the confrontation with her cultural difference takes place in a predominantly white American community on Long Island as a result of recurrent bullying. While they are confronted with their cultural difference in different contexts, their response to it remains similar. This similarity in reactions emphasizes immigrants’ sensitivity to being othered. Rather than embracing their difference in an attempt to reconcile the multiple parts of their identities, their immediate reaction is characterized by attempts to erase any trace of it.
However, whereas Jasmine remains focused on erasing her cultural difference and assimilating into the dominant American culture, Carla’s attitude towards her otherness changes as she becomes older, enabling her to reconnect with Latino culture. While Jasmine actively tries to distance herself from her Indian cultural identity, Carla seems to be more willing to embrace her native culture. As Karen Christian points out, “[f]or the García daughters, their Dominican identity at times assumes the form of a diffuse, nonexclusive Kolukirik 38 hispanidad” (112). One of the clearest examples of this in Alvarez’s novel is Carla’s
“hankering for Mexican peasant blouses” (Christian 112) “when [she] discovered her
Hispanic roots” as a teenager (41, emphasis added). Significantly, however, Carla’s interest in Mexican peasant blouses seems to be less about an intrinsic desire to identify with Latino culture than about her unintentional mimicry of her American peers in order to fit in with the dominant culture. This is particularly reinforced by Alvarez’s ironic use of the word
“discovered” in this passage, as if Carla was not aware of her Latino cultural background before it became popular among American youth to wear this kind of clothing.
Furthermore, the difference between Carla and Jasmine’s assimilation into the dominant culture can also be explained by the differences between their native countries.
Roberto González Echevarría points out that
Hispanic Americans today have “old countries” that are neither old nor remote. Even
those born here often travel to their parents’ homeland, and constantly face a flow of
friends and relatives from “home” who keep the culture current. This constant cross-
fertilization makes assimilation a more complicated process for them than for other
minority groups. (28)
This is certainly true for the García sisters who spend their summers in the Dominican
Republic and are still in touch with their relatives on the island. Despite their gradual
Americanization, this kind of “cross-fertilization” partially obstructs their complete assimilation and stimulates the retention of their cultural difference. In contrast, apart from her temporary stay with the immigrant community in Flushing, Jasmine is completely cut off from her native India and other Indian individuals. These circumstances make it easier for her to suppress her difference as opposed to Carla or her sisters, who are continuously exposed to it, both in the United States and the Dominican Republic. Kolukirik 39
Ultimately, Carla’s experiences with xenophobia as a child after her initial arrival in the United States render her “too emotionally scarred to see beyond American ignorance”
(Cabrera-Polk 10) and significantly affect her attitude towards her native Dominican culture later in life: “[her bullies’] faces did not fade as fast from Carla’s life. They trespassed in her dreams and in her waking moments. … ‘Go back! Go back!’” (164). This specific response to her harassment signals Carla’s traumatization; as Cathy Caruth points out, “[trauma] is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event”
(4). As a result, on the one hand, her trauma remains a crucial obstacle to a successful negotiation of her conflicting cultural identities. On the other hand, although she loses her accent, marries an American and has a successful career as a child psychologist, she is not able to completely assimilate. The “constant cross-fertilization” (González Echevarría 28) between Dominican and American cultures and her persistent ethnic otherness in the form of her physical appearance make it impossible for her to become completely Americanized. At the same time, her almost complete assimilation into the dominant American culture complicates a successful reconnection with the family’s native culture (Christian 112). She belongs neither fully to the dominant American culture of her new country, nor does she fully belong to the Hispanic culture of her native country. Instead, she finds herself in a position of liminality between the two cultures. However, this in-between position should not be confused with the in-between Third Space envisioned by Bhabha. Bhabha’s Third Space of cultural hybridity is characterized by its subversive character and empowerment of the individual through the assertion of her cultural difference. Instead of asserting her cultural difference, however, Carla eventually decides to suppress it as much as possible. As Victoria
Cabrera-Polk suggests, in deciding which aspects of the dominant American culture “to accept or reject,” “Carla accepts the Western elements” while consciously subduing any kind of manifestation of her Dominican cultural heritage (5). Therefore, rather than successfully Kolukirik 40 balancing both parts of her cultural identity, she ultimately finds herself in an in-between space of unresolved cultural conflict where she can’t completely escape the influences of her
Dominican culture but is also unwilling to consciously embrace them.
Like her sister Carla, Sandra (Sandi), the second-oldest García sister is also faced with psychological problems in the narrative present. In addition to having developed an eating disorder, she suffers a mental breakdown for which she is hospitalized. Even after her eventual release from the mental institution, she remains emotionally unbalanced: “she cries so easily she has to carry Kleenex with her anti-depressants in her purse” (60). As the novel recedes into the past, it becomes clear that Sandra’s current sense of fragmentation and attendant psychological problems are significantly influenced by her experiences during her youth after her arrival in the United States.
Growing up, Sandra finds it challenging to negotiate her Dominican and American cultural identities. However, unlike Carla, Sandra does not have to deal with ethnic prejudice.
While Carla is bullied for the “dark hairs” on her legs and called “[m]onkey legs!” and “dirty spic!” (153), Sandra has, as her mother proudly shares, “the fine looks, blue eyes, peaches and ice cream skin, everything going for her” (52). Apart from her gradually fading accent,
Sandra can easily pass as a white American and does not have to endure the same kind of harassment as her older sister. Nevertheless, in spite of her realization that she “could pass as
American” (Barak 170), Sandra still struggles with her fragmented cultural identity because she simultaneously “wants to be proud of her Spanish heritage, which is disparaged almost everywhere in the U.S. in the 1960s and early 1970s” (Barak 170).
Her desire to connect with her native Hispanic culture is reminiscent of Carla’s interest in wearing “a Mexican peasant blouse” as a result of her temporary interest in her
Hispanic cultural background as a teenager and her wish to identify with it (41). Once again, the cross-fertilization between native and host cultures complicates the process of complete assimilation. Sandra’s desire to be proud of Hispanic culture clearly shows itself when the Kolukirik 41
Garcías have dinner with a couple of American family friends at a Spanish restaurant. This scene at the Spanish restaurant is particularly interesting because it shows Sandra engaging in a kind of ironic mimicry, displaying her peculiar relationship with hybridity. More importantly, however, this scene also sheds light on why Sandra is ultimately unable to successfully negotiate both parts of her cultural identity, resulting in continuing conflicts and psychological problems during adulthood.
The family’s visit to the Spanish restaurant is marked by Sandra’s initial amazement at the people she sees around her: “All the other guests were white and spoke in low, unexcited voices. Americans, for sure. They could have eaten anywhere, Sandi thought, and yet they had come to a Spanish place for dinner. La Bruja [their downstairs neighbor] was wrong. Spanish was something other people paid to be around” (179). This realization makes her “self-worth [swell] accordingly” (Frever 131). Unfortunately, her fascination and pride are short-lived when she witnesses a drunken Mrs. Fanning, the family friend, kiss her father against his will in an alcove near the restroom. She is shocked by what she sees and thinks to herself: “A married American woman kissing her father!” (181). She does not realize that her father is unable to stop the American woman “because of his social and professional dependence on Dr. Fanning, a prominent, wealthy, white physician” (Frever 131), who had helped Sandra’s father find a job after their arrival in the United States. He explains this to
Sandra and asks her to keep this a secret from her mother. For that instant, Sandra feels embarrassed about what she has just witnessed and wishes she had never seen it. She returns back to the table and soon her sadness makes room again for feelings of pride concerning her
Hispanic culture when the guests at the restaurant are treated to a performance by a group of flamenco dancers:
The dancers clapped and strutted, tossing their heads boldly like horses. Sandi’s heart
soared. This wild and beautiful dance came from people like her, Spanish people, who
danced the strange, disquieting joy that sometimes made Sandi squeeze Fifi’s hand hard Kolukirik 42
until she cried or bullfight Yoyo with a towel until both girls fell in a giggling,
exhausted heap on the floor that made La Bruja beat her ceiling with a broom handle.
(185, emphasis added)
However, as Frever points out, her feelings of recognition and intense pride are once again cut short when Mrs. Fanning “intrudes on Sandi’s self-spun Spanish fairy tale as surely as La
Bruja and her broom” (132). While Sandi is enjoying the flamenco dancers’ mesmerizing performance, Mrs. Fanning “scramble[s] up unto the platform, clapping her hands over her head … The restaurant came alive with the American lady’s clowning. She was a good ham, bumping her hips against the male dancers and rolling her eyes” (186). For Sandra, this vulgar intrusion by the white American woman “had broken the spell of the wild and beautiful dancers,” and she turns her chair around so that she does not have to see it anymore
(186). Julie Barak calls attention to how the white woman’s intrusion in this passage “creates a parody of [Sandi’s native culture], a second-rate combination of cultures that Sandi cannot find fulfilling” (171). In this sense, this passage can be read as a metaphor for the liminality of Sandra’s own position between American and Dominican cultures. Sandra is desperately looking for “a unified self, something noble, true, beautiful,” but, instead, she is only able to obtain “a gauche pastiche too similar to her own divided life” in the United States (Barak
171).
Sandra’s reaction to what happens at the restaurant seems be a manifestation of her inability to construct a hybrid identity for herself because she is unable to think outside of the set borders of “identity absolutism” (Cabrera-Polk 10). Like Bhabha, Gloria Anzaldúa also expounds on the concept of cultural hybridity, which she calls “a new mestiza consciousness”
(99). She argues that “[t]he new mestiza copes [with her position of liminality] by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (Anzaldúa 101). Anzaldúa’s approach to hybridity is similar to Bhabha’s in that they are both centered on a “rejection of the imposed imperialist mindset upon the marginalized” (Cabrera-Polk 1). Furthermore, her Kolukirik 43 particular discussion of a “new mestiza consciousness” describes “a state of consciousness that rejects binaries, acknowledges multiple, often conflicting identities owned by a single individual” (Cabrera-Polk 1). It is exactly her inability to think outside of identity binaries and accept ambiguity that prevents Sandra from successfully negotiating the multiple parts of her cultural identity in the Third Space.
Despite her general intolerance for ambiguity, Sandra does seem to engage in a noteworthy act of ironic mimicry at the end of the night. Ignoring her mother’s strict rules on not having their American friends buy them any presents, Sandra has Mrs. Fanning buy her a doll. She is instantly mesmerized by the doll who was “a perfect replica of the beautiful dancers, dressed in a long, glittery gown with a pretty tortoise shell comb in her hair, from which cascaded a tiny, lacy mantilla. On her feet were strapped tiny black heels as the dancers had worn” (188). When her mother asks Sandra to thank Mrs. Fanning for the present, Sandra holds the doll right next to the American woman’s cheek, makes “a smacking sound” and says “Gracias … as if the Barbie doll had to be true to her Spanish costume”
(191). By doing this, she is, quite literally, mimicking what Mrs. Fanning had done to her father earlier that evening. As Bhabha points out, mimicry is “repetition with a difference”
(Huddart 57). This difference is represented by Sandra using a typically Spanish doll while she is re-enacting the same kind of dominating act on the white American woman as the latter had engaged in with her father. Her act of mimicry thus becomes “a form of mockery” which ultimately “undermines the ongoing pretentions of colonialism” (Huddart 57) represented by
Mrs. Fanning using her position of power over Sandra’s father to kiss him against his will.
Furthermore, Trinna S. Frever calls attention to “the semantic duality” of the word “smack” in this passage, which can refer to “a kiss or a slap in the face” (133). Through her ironic mimicry, Sandra is not only kissing Mrs. Fanning, but effectively also engaging symbolically in an act of subversion of the traditional relationship between colonizer and colonized. Kolukirik 44
However, despite this singular act of mimicry, of which, as a child, she is probably not conscious, Sandra does not seem to have the kind of “tolerance for ambiguity” which would allow her to successfully develop a viable hybrid identity. Her general intolerance for ambiguity and a predisposition to think in identity binaries quickly resurfaces when she thanks Mrs. Fanning in Spanish “as if the Barbie doll had to be true to her Spanish costume”
(191, emphasis added). Ultimately, despite her noteworthy act of ironic mimicry, Sandra is not able to successfully mediate her American and Dominican cultures because she is not able to deal with contradictions arising from her in-between position. Her inability to do so eventually develops into an eating disorder and related mental ailments later in life.
Strikingly, even her physical reactions to her inability to negotiate a unified sense of identity are characterized by extremes which are hostile to ambiguity. As Cabrera-Polk points out,
“[h]er breakdown begins with two disparate physical expressions - an attempt to become
‘American thin’ and a desire to be ‘Dominican dark’” (8). While she could relatively easily assimilate into the dominant American culture because of her northern-European looks and her gradually fading accent, she chooses not to. She attempts to mediate between both cultures but is ultimately unable to do so because of her inability to think outside of binary identity representations. In this sense, Alvarez seems to use Sandra’s specific immigrant experience and attempts at identity construction to call attention to “the difficulties of reaching an acceptance of one’s multiple identities” in a society in which “having a specific identity” is considered the norm (Cabrera-Polk 8).
Unlike Carla and Sandra, who, as adults, are, at least superficially, more severely impacted by their childhood and teenage experiences concerning their cultural otherness,
Sofía (Fifi), their youngest sister, seems to be less affected by the family’s forced migration to the United States. In the narrative present, she is the most Americanized of all of her sisters and set apart by her rebellious behavior opposing her father’s old-world patriarchal mindset concerning sexuality and gender norms. Against his wishes, she falls in love with a German Kolukirik 45 with whom she elopes and has two children, causing her to “incur her father’s disapproval for her unchaste relationship,” even after she eventually marries Otto (Ciocia 135). Sofía’s dissimilarity from her sisters is heavily influenced by the fact that she has almost no memories of their lives before their exile: “I’m the one who doesn’t remember anything from that last day on the island because I’m the youngest and so the other three are always telling me what happened that last day” (217). Throughout the novel, but particularly as an adult reflecting back on the past, this lack of direct memory plays a crucial role in her identity construction.
Cowart calls attention to the importance of Sofía’s memory and the way in which it sets her apart from her older sisters. He argues that before their exile to the United States,
“each García daughter commits some relatively small transgression that, in the hothouse of the unconscious, provides its own little false justification or rationale for the subsequent suffering” later in their lives, such as “divorces, breakdowns, sexual neurasthenia, an eating disorder, estrangement from the father” (Cowart 52). While her sisters have their own memories to look back on, Sofía’s memories of the island are almost entirely reconstructed through stories told by other members of her family. In a recollection of the family’s last day on the island from Sofía’s point of view, she narrates: “They say I almost got Papi killed on account of I was so mean to one of the secret police who came looking for him” (217, emphasis added). This passage makes it clear that she does not actually remember this event herself, but reconstructs it based on the stories she has heard about it. According to Cowart, this results in “vicarious recollection,” which “does little to foster guilt” and thus causes Sofía to be “the least damaged” sister in adulthood (52). This indeed seems to be the case as Sofía is the only sister who does not need psychotherapy later in life.
While her lack of any substantial memory from the family’s lives back in the
Dominican Republic prevents her from experiencing the kind of severe psychological problems suffered by her sisters, she nonetheless also struggles to mediate aspects of her Kolukirik 46
Dominican and American identities. Paradoxically, her lack of memory makes it difficult for her to “(re)construct her bicultural, bilingual self” as opposed to her sisters and causes her to be “the most rebellious against her circumstances” (Barak 165), which is displayed most prominently in her reactions to Dominican culture’s traditional views on gender roles and sexuality, both while she is growing up and as an adult.
Although Sofía is initially the least connected to the family’s past on the island and consequently seems to be the most Americanized of the four sisters, her awareness of her cultural identity is challenged as a teenager. One summer, when the girls are already on the island, their mother finds a bag of weed in their room in the United States. Sofía takes the blame for it and is given two options. She has to either stay on the island for another year, or go back to the United States; if she chooses to return, she will not be allowed to attend boarding school and instead has to live with her parents. Sofía, rebellious and independent as she is, does not want to stay “home alone with Mami and Papi breathing down her neck …
Besides, I wanna try it out here. Maybe I’ll like it.” (116). This decision initiates her most extensive and immersive experience with her native culture. She spends the following months on the island and, surprisingly, quickly adapts to Dominican culture. Barak argues that her effortless adaptation to the island suggests a desire “to make up for her lack of memories”
(165). When her sisters visit Sofía during Christmas, they are shocked to see what she has turned into:
Fifi, there to meet us at the airport, is a jangle of bangles and a cascade of beauty parlor
curls held back on one side very smartly by a big gold barrette. … Fifi - who used to
wear her hair in her trademark, two Indian braids that she pinned up in the heat like an
Austrian milkmaid. Fifi – who always made a point of not wearing make-up or fixing
herself up. Now she looks like the after person in one of those before-after make-overs
in magazines. (117) Kolukirik 47
Moreover, she is dating a distant cousin, Manuel Gustavo, who is the embodiment of
Dominican machismo and Sofía’s sisters are amazed at how easily she lets him control her life on the island. Only once do they see her stand up for herself when her boyfriend yanks a book out of her hands because she didn’t answer the door quickly enough: “Fifi pales, though her two blushed-on cheeks blush on. She stands quickly, hands on her hips, eyes narrowing, the Fifi we know and love. ‘You have no right to tell me what I can and can’t do!’” (120).
Her assertiveness does not last long, though; “within the hour, Fifi is on the phone with
Manuelito, pleading for forgiveness” (121). It is important to note the narrative perspective employed by Alvarez in this passage. The changes Sofía has gone through regarding her appearance and behavior are focalized through Carla, Sandra, and Yolanda. Seen from their
“liberal feminist” point of view (Parikh 18), which is greatly influenced by their American experience, their youngest sister’s submissive behavior seems strange and incomprehensible.
They do not understand why she keeps going back to Manuel Gustavo despite her occasional vocal resistance.
Drawing attention to Sofía’s contradictory behavior, Lucía Suárez argues that her actions can be read as a sign of “anxiety of representation” fueled by “the dissonance experienced by children who migrate and are bicultural” (138). According to Suárez, Sofía is split between “the desire to escape the haunting, mysterious past” while simultaneously wanting to “claim that past” (138). Sofía’s ambivalent reaction to being back in the
Dominican Republic evokes what Alvarez has said about herself visiting her native country.
In her essay “La Gringuita,” she writes: “The truth is I wanted it both ways: I wanted to be good at the best things in each culture” (Alvarez, Something to Declare 68). Similarly, Sofía is the most Americanized of the sisters when in the United States and the most Dominican of them when in the Dominican Republic. While her complete immersion in either culture might not be caused by the same kind of intrinsic desire “to be good at the best things in each Kolukirik 48 culture” as described by Alvarez, her behavior does result in an equally dichotomous display of cultural adaptation, which is representative of her fragmented cultural and gender identity.
A revealing example of her tendency to subject her family to psychological analysis is
Carla’s diagnosis of Sofía’s adaptation to the island and its culture as “a borderline schizoid response to traumatic cultural displacement” (117), reducing the complex situation her sister finds herself in to a pathological condition. Her diagnosis tells us less about Sofía than about
Carla’s own response to their exile from the Dominican Republic and her ensuing identity conflicts. After all, she is the one who, because of the impact of her childhood exposure to xenophobia, eventually chooses to repress her Latino side completely. Seen this way, her comment seems to signal her inability to do what Sofía is trying to achieve: to (re)connect with their native culture. Furthermore, this passage is also significant as it reflects ironically on Carla’s patronizing attitude towards the changes her youngest sister has undergone. Just as
Mukherjee uses irony to draw attention to the reactions of white Americans to Jasmine’s difference despite her attempts at assimilation, so does Alvarez use irony to highlight the complex reactions exhibited by immigrants who find themselves in-between two different cultures. Through Carla’s particular response to Sofía’s unexpected adaptation to the island, the novel reflects on the sisters’ process of identity construction by using humor in order to shed light on an otherwise painful experience.
During her time in her native country, Sofía does not seem to be concerned with negotiating the two parts of her cultural identity. As a teenager in the United States, she appears to be the most assimilated of all four sisters. Similarly, when she goes to the
Dominican Republic, she completely immerses herself into the local culture, despite its sexist, patriarchal rules and conventions. Sarah Himsel Burcon points out that Sofía’s behavior shows “how easy it is (at least outwardly) for a person to adapt to a culture and become part of it” (129, emphasis added). Sofía’s behavior is characterized by an uncritical imitation of the culture of whichever environment she finds herself in. She does not seem to Kolukirik 49 choose which elements of the culture she wants to accept or reject, a key characteristic of hybridity. Eventually, her sisters manage to revive the old Sofía and they all go back to the
United States before she entirely loses herself in her (re)invented identity. As an adult back in the United States, Sofía completely returns to her old rebellious ways. She re-embraces
American culture’s more open attitude towards sexuality and gender roles, consciously
“[d]efying her traditional upbringing and Catholic background,” which she experienced more intensely than any of her sisters during her year on the island, by “elop[ing] with the blondest
German she can find” (Cox 145). It is almost as if the Sofía her sisters encountered on the island had never existed.
Through its representation of the intercultural conflicts faced by Carla, Sandra, and
Sofía, the novel emphasizes immigrants’ need for a sense of belonging and the severe psychological impact it can have on other aspects of their identity development. Above all, it shows how different the reactions can be to their liminal position between cultures. Carla appears to be too traumatized by the xenophobic bigotry she faces upon her arrival in the
United States and, as a result, tries to erase her cultural difference completely and never achieves cultural hybridity. Sandra, the most northern-European looking sister, is not subject to the same kind of bigotry as Carla and is undeniably interested in her native Dominican culture. However, her inability to deal with the contradictions of bringing together multiple identities not only prevents her from constructing a hybrid identity, but also results in detrimental psychological disorders. In contrast, Sofía seems to be less psychologically troubled than her sisters at first sight. However, she is equally incapable of successfully negotiating both parts of her cultural identity because of her inability to selectively reject or accept (gender) norms and values of both cultures at the same time, regardless of the physical environment she finds herself in. Therefore, all of them ultimately remain in a space of unresolved (cultural) conflict regarding their identities.
Kolukirik 50
3.2 Yolanda
Like her sisters, Yolanda also finds herself in a space of liminality between American and
Dominican cultures. But unlike her sisters, she eventually does seem to manage to construct a form of hybridity for herself in her attempts at reconciling the two cultures. In the opening section of the novel, we meet Yolanda as an adult woman who has returned to the Dominican
Republic in search of a “home” (11) because she struggles with a (midlife) identity crisis.
Back in her native country visiting her family, she quickly realizes that she does not really fit there either as she has lost her fluency in Spanish and, being used to the more individualistic
American culture, cannot adapt to the more communal “social rules of the island” (Kevane
23). In this first part of the novel, Alvarez employs a third-person narrator which serves to highlight Yolanda’s alienation from not only her native country, but also herself as she has recently divorced her American husband, and subsequently suffered a mental breakdown which eventually led to her admission to a mental hospital (Rubenstein 66). As the novel progresses and traces back how she got to her current state, we get more insight into the complexities of her identity formation and the difficulties she faces throughout her life as she is trying to make sense of her in-between position between different cultures. Because of the identity conflicts she experiences throughout her life, her display of hybridity is rather complex. I argue that, despite these recurring identity conflicts, Yolanda does manifest obvious characteristics of a hybrid identity, particularly through subversive mimicry, in various stages of her life. Furthermore, it is important to note the significance of language in the formation of Yolanda’s identity (Schultermandl 7). Its recurring prominence in her attempts to negotiate her cultural identity seems to foreground her eventual ability to “accept herself as a whole of fragmented parts” (Matas Llorente 74) and find a Third Space for herself in (writing) language.
Prior to her nervous breakdown which leads to her seeking refuge in her native country, Yolanda is in a relationship with an American named John. John is “proudly Kolukirik 51 monolingual” (72) and unwilling to recognize Yolanda’s multiple cultural identities. In this sense, John is similar to Jasmine’s husband Bud. However, while John and Bud have a similar kind of attitude towards their partners’ cultural difference, Jasmine and Yolanda differ from each other in their reaction to their American partners’ attitudes. While Jasmine is rather passive and willing to suppress her Indian cultural identity in her attempts to assimilate,
Yolanda becomes gradually less inclined to assimilate into American culture (Luis 845). She wants her multiple identities, specifically her Hispanidad, to be seen and acknowledged by
John.
At this stage of her life, as an adult woman, she intentionally tries to assert her dual identity by embracing her otherness from the dominant culture. This becomes particularly evident when she is playing word games with John:
“Sky,” she tried. Then, the saying of it made it right: “Sky, I want to be the sky.” “That’s
not allowed.” He turned her around to face him. His eyes, she noticed for the first time,
were the same shade of blue as the sky. “Your own rules: you’ve got to rhyme with
your name.” “I” – she pointed to herself – “rhymes with the sky!” “But not with Joe!”
John wagged his finger at her. … “Yo rhymes with cielo in Spanish.” Yo’s words fell
into the dark, mute cavern of John’s mouth. Cielo, cielo, the word echoed. And Yo was
running, like the mad, into the safety of her first tongue, where the proudly monolingual
John could not catch her, even if he tried. (72)
Significantly, her assertion of her cultural difference is connected to language as she realizes that “words are crucial to her very identity” (Hoffman 24). In her essay “Of Maids and Other
Muses,” Alvarez points out that language, and words specifically, “can contain and hold and pinpoint experiences … can help us know what we are thinking and feeling … can make us feel intimate with ourselves and with strangers” (Something to Declare 156). In the passage mentioned above, Alvarez seems to similarly draw attention to the significance of language Kolukirik 52 in the novel as Yolanda uses it confront John with her bicultural self. After John’s dismissive comments, Yolanda reflects: “just because they were different, that was no reason to make her feel crazy for being her own person. He was just as crazy as she was if push came to shove. My god! She thought. I’m starting to talk like him! Push comes to shove! … taking on his language only to convince him” (73, emphasis added). In this passage, Yolanda clearly asserts her hybrid identity through her use of self-conscious mimicry. Her imitating John’s way of talking in order to convince him, thereby using the language of the “colonizer” to expose that “he was just as crazy as she was,” causes what Bhabha calls “the look of surveillance [to return] as the displacing gaze of the disciplined” (“Mimicry” 129). By responding the way she does, Yolanda essentially exposes the constructed nature of John’s identity, the personification of the dominant (white) American culture, and its purported superiority.
Whereas Jasmine has a more deliberately assimilationist outlook, Yolanda seems to be in a constant state of flux, attempting to negotiate the multiple parts of her cultural identities. While both characters differ from each other in this respect, there is a striking similarity in their being assigned or adopting different names. Jasmine is successively called
Jyoti, Jasmine, Jazzy, Jase, and Jane. Significantly, except for “Jazzy,” all of these names are imposed on her by men and she accepts them readily as she embraces her Americanization, underscoring the intersection of her marginalization in terms of cultural and gender identity.
Similarly, Yolanda is referred to by a number of different names in the novel as well, symbolizing her “fragmented identity”: Yolanda, Yoyo, Yosita, Yo, Joe (Yitah 239). In contrast to Jasmine, however, Yolanda, in her desire to unify the fragmented parts of her identity, only wants to be called “Yolanda”. This becomes specifically apparent during a conversation between the four sisters when Carla remarks that “[s]he wants to be called
Yolanda now” and Yolanda responds by saying: “What do you mean, wants to be called
Yolanda now? That’s my name you know?” (61). This firm declaration of her name as Kolukirik 53
Yolanda seems to further underscore her desire for a unified identity, instead of being referred to by a plethora of other names which would indirectly signal her identity fragmentation.
Yolanda’s sensitivity and unwillingness to accept the different names imposed on her also manifest themselves in other ways. Realizing that John does not understand her because of her “peculiar mix” of “Hispanic and American styles” (99), she eventually decides to break up with him. When she leaves him, she writes him a note: “I’m going to my folks till my head-slash-heart clear. She revised the note: I’m needing some space, some time, until my head-slash-heart-soul – No, no, no, she didn’t want to divide herself anymore” (78). Just like her refusal to acknowledge any other name than her actual one, her unwillingness to “divide herself” in this passage indicates her growing refusal to be split into separate identities.
Instead of being fragmented into multiple identities, she longs to have one consolidated identity in which her American and Dominican cultures are reconciled.
Furthermore, the tensions between Yolanda’s different names and corresponding identities are also reflected in Alvarez’s narrative strategies. As mentioned before, the novel consists of a number of sections which are, despite their interrelatedness, different from each other in terms of their narrative perspectives and the period of time in which they are set.
Loes Nas draws attention to this “composite form” of the text by pointing out that Yolanda
“thinks, speaks and acts differently in the different parts of the text” (132). A clear example of this can be seen in her attitude towards the different names by which she is referred to throughout the novel. While Yolanda does not like to be called anything but “Yolanda” as an adult, she does not mind the other names being used to refer to her as a child or teenager, and at certain moments in the text even does so herself. By means of Yolanda’s shifting attitudes and the structural fragmentation of the novel, Alvarez seems to call attention to the complexity of Yolanda’s identity. Moreover, as Margot Anne Kelley points out, the novel’s
“composite form with its focus on ‘disparate, individual moments’ suggests that ‘identity is Kolukirik 54 not inherent, but is rather constituted’” and “continually negotiated and renegotiated” (qtd. in
Nas 132).
After breaking up with John and moving back in with her parents, the significance of language in the construction and reclamation of Yolanda’s bicultural identity becomes even more apparent. As a response to John’s literal and figurative silencing, and his suppression of her otherness, she starts to talk excessively, quoting famous works of poetry and opening sentences of literary classics: “[s]he talked too much, yakked all the time. She talked in her sleep, she talked when she ate” (79). Her compulsive behavior leads to her mother to diagnose her with being “carried away with the sound of her voice” (79) and her parents decide to commit her to a psychiatric hospital. After her eventual recovery in the hospital,
Yolanda is restored to her senses, and instead of deliriously quoting others, she “improvises her first original words in months” (81). As Cowart points out, “language functions as a kind of pharmakon” for Yolanda as it is “the site or medium of both psychological collapse and emotional restoration” (48).
As the narrative regresses into the past, the importance of language for Yolanda’s identity construction and its interrelatedness with her romantic relationships is further reinforced. As teenagers, she and her sisters lose their accents and begin “to develop a taste for the American teenage good life” (108). But despite her almost complete assimilation into
American culture, she still retains her cultural difference. When she goes to college, this cultural difference is reflected in her reluctance towards having sex with a fellow student,
Rudy Elmenhurst. While she considers herself a “lapsed Catholic” (87) and is faced with the changing sexual norms of 1960s American society, she still feels something holding her back.
Although she is Americanized to a large extent, her otherness still shows itself though her more traditional views on sexuality (Castells 38). This attitude towards sexuality and differing cultural norms echoes Jasmine’s attitude towards the naked students she sees across her apartment: “[t]ruly there was no concept of shame in this society” (Mukherjee, Jasmine Kolukirik 55
171). Both Yolanda and Jasmine, despite rapidly becoming Americanized, have to deal with a resurfacing of cultural (gender) norms related to their Indian and Dominican upbringings.
Furthermore, Yolanda’s unwillingness to sleep with Rudy is also influenced by her revulsion to the way he talks about sex. She believes he “has no sense of connotation” (96) and wishes he were less vulgar in the way he speaks about it. The combination of her lingering
Dominican cultural norms regarding sexuality and her sensitivity to language causes her refusal to have sex with him to have “both literary and nationalistic dimensions” as her virginity becomes “a metaphor for ethnic identity, an identity at the point of becoming fully
American” (Cowart 49).
In his attempts to convince Yolanda to have sex with him, Rudy gets her to co-write a poem with sexual connotations. Yolanda, oblivious to the hidden sexual messages in the poem because of her (as yet) incomplete mastery of the English language (Castells 39), only later realizes the sexual theme of the poem and says: “[f]or the hundredth time, I cursed my immigrant origins” (94). Similar to her unsuccessful relationship with John later in life,
Yolanda’s miscommunications with Rudy suggest that her inability to be in a relationship with American men is rooted in their failure to speak the same language, both literally and metaphorically (Gómez-Vega 91). At this stage of her life, this causes Yolanda to become more aware of her position as an outsider in her new country. Similar to Jasmine and her sister Carla, her initial reaction is to want to erase her difference completely:
If only I too had been born in Connecticut or Virginia, I too would understand the jokes
everyone was making on the last two digits of the year, 1969; I too would be having
sex and smoking dope; I too would have suntanned parents who took me skiing in
Colorado over Christmas break, and I would say things like “no shit,” without feeling
like I was imitating someone else. (94-95, emphasis added) Kolukirik 56
This passage sheds more light on Yolanda’s complex relationship with hybridity. Not only does it show Yolanda’s desire for cultural assimilation, but it also draws attention to how she feels as if she is constantly “imitating” others. She is aware of her difference, but at the same time she realizes that she is simply imitating her American peers when trying to be like them.
However, this realization does not happen at the time of the events, but only retrospectively as Yolanda looks back at her college years many years later. Once again, the novel’s reverse chronological order serves to unearth the impact of earlier events on Yolanda’s identity development later in life. Therefore, her acts of taking over aspects of the dominant
American culture, despite her cultural difference, seem to be a mere manifestation of Yolanda performing identity rather than employing subversive mimicry, which has the ability to undercut “the ongoing pretentions” of the dominant culture (Huddart 57). Yolanda’s feeling of being seen as “the Other” simply engenders a desire to assimilate into American culture, but she is unable to do so completely. She is well aware of this as she notes, “I saw what a cold, lonely life awaited me in this country. I would never find someone who would understand my peculiar mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles”
(99, emphasis added). Yolanda’s comments as a teenager prove to be true later in life as we already know that her relationship with John falls apart and instigates a mental breakdown which prompts her to go back to the Dominican Republic, in search of the sense of belonging she cannot find in the United States.
As the novel looks further back into the past, we arrive at Yolanda’s early teenage years in the United States. Once again, language plays an important part in her attempts to negotiate both sides of her cultural identity. One day, in Catholic grade school, she is asked to deliver a speech by her English teacher. Initially, Yolanda is terrified of having to deliver a speech in English. She still has a Spanish accent and is self-conscious about it. She tries to get out of having to do the speech, asking her mother “to call in tomorrow and say Yoyo was in the hospital, in a coma” (141). In her attempts to calm her daughter down and encourage Kolukirik 57 her to prepare the speech regardless, her mother mentions Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address, drawing attention to how a “real American” could come up with a memorable speech, and, therefore, so could she. While her mother gives her a rather American example, the tips her father gives her are inspired by his own valedictorian speech on the island and focus on “[h]umbleness and praise and falling silent with great emotion” (142). It is interesting to note that while her mother seems to be more focused on providing her with
American examples, her father shows a more conservative approach, anchored in their native culture. Yolanda, however, is not interested in her father’s tips. She and her sisters are not really listening to what he is saying during dinner as “[they] were forgetting a lot of their
Spanish, and their father’s formal, florid diction was hard to understand” (142). Later that evening, Yolanda decides to read some poetry to get inspired to write her own speech. She starts to read Walt Whitman’s poems and is immediately captivated by the poet’s words: “I celebrate myself and sing myself … He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher” (142). She eagerly starts writing her speech and when she is done, she, ironically, feels that “[s]he finally sounded like herself in English!” (143). This passage is important because, for the first time, Yolanda, whose native language is Spanish, feels comfortable in English, despite her persistent accent. Furthermore, the allusion to Walt
Whitman evokes another line in his well-known poem: “I am large …. I contain multitudes”
(Whitman 80). This allusion to Yolanda “containing multitudes” already seems to foreshadow her ability to construct a form of coherent identity for herself in which aspects of both her American and Dominican cultures can coexist.
Despite her and her mother’s excitement about the speech she has written, her father is less pleased about it and bursts out in anger: “‘What is wrrrong with her eh-speech?’
Carlos wagged his head at her. … ‘It show no gratitude. It is boastful. I celebrate myself? The best student learns to destroy the teacher?’ He mocked Yoyo’s plagiarized words. ‘That is insubordinate. It is improper. It is disrespecting of her teachers’” (145). Yolanda’s father Kolukirik 58 clearly sees the speech as disrespectful because he, unlike his daughter, is only able to place it in his own Dominican cultural frame of reference. It is only later, as the novel progresses towards the plot’s chronological beginning, that adult Yolanda comes to realize that her father’s (in her view) exaggerated reaction is caused by his trauma resulting from his experiences with members of Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic. As Cristina
Chevereşan points out, “Carlos, the head of the family, is still haunted by visions of oppression” and his reaction to Yolanda’s poem seems to be a manifestation of “[his] instinctive fears” of authorities, the “painful, disquieting reminders of trauma” (85).
Paradoxically, Carlos’s traumatic experience with members of Trujillo’s dictatorial regime causes him to be similarly authoritarian towards Yolanda, ultimately forbidding her to deliver the speech she has written. Although Yolanda is not able to completely put her plan in practice, this passage is pivotal as it shows how Yolanda is already starting to develop a hybrid consciousness for herself as a teenager. She is able to adopt American cultural values and ideas and incorporate them into her speech. Because she still preserves her cultural difference in the form of her Spanish accent, she unintentionally exhibits characteristics of
Bhabha’s mimicry through her “repetition with difference” (Huddart 57). Eventually, her mother helps her write a new speech which is more in accordance with her father’s more traditional values. Significantly, this second speech turns out to be a great success at her school assembly. Joan M. Hoffman argues that her delivery of this speech therefore similarly emphasizes her “find[ing] a voice that does justice to her dual identity,” as Yolanda, through her particular “manipulation of language,” is able to deliver “an Old-World-style speech to please a New-World audience” (26). Her ability to mediate both parts of her cultural identity and the importance of language in her attempts to do so, both during childhood and later in life, are epitomized by her mother’s comments in this part of the novel: “[b]ack in the
Dominican Republic growing up, Yoyo had been a terrible student. No one could ever get her to sit down to a book. But in New York, she needed to settle somewhere, and since the Kolukirik 59 natives were unfriendly, and the country inhospitable, she took root in the language” (141, emphasis added).
Moving further back into the past, the novel’s third, and final, section narrates the family’s life in the Dominican Republic before their emigration. In the last chapter of the novel, Yolanda finds a litter of kittens in a coal shed. She takes one of them, names her
“Schwartz” and separates her from the rest of the kittens by smuggling her away in her toy drum:
She meowed out goodbyes to her brothers and sisters as we crossed the yard. … I picked
Schwartz up, and in one deft movement, plunked her down into the hollow of my drum
… and then as the mother cat jerked around and caught sight of me and my drum, which
was meowing furiously, I brought down a loud, distracting drum roll … I drummed
madly. My heart was drumming. (286-287)
Although Yolanda manages to successfully sneak the kitten into the house, it does not stop meowing, which eventually prompts Yolanda to throw it out of the window, watching on as the animal “make[s] a broken progress across the lawn” (288). This passage is pivotal in relation to the rest of the novel as it contains foreshadowing parallels with the lives marked by separation and hardship awaiting Yolanda, and her sisters, in the United States. Just as she takes the kitten away from its mother and “plunk[s] her down into the hollow of [her] drum,” so too is Yolanda “ripped from her Dominican home” and “transplanted to the bewildering and ‘unhomely hollow’ of the New World” (Yitah 239). Soon after her encounter with the kitten, Yolanda has recurrent dreams about the mother cat “sitting at the foot of [her] bed…glaring at [her] with fluorescent eyes. … the cat came back, on and off, for years”
(289). The recurring visions of the mother cat remind Yolanda of what she did to the kitten, but, even more importantly, come to signify the trauma and the accompanying
“psychological fear of being taken away from her surroundings at an impressionable age” Kolukirik 60
(Luis 848). The mother cat thus becomes a traumatic reminder of the life she could have had if she had not been abruptly uprooted from her motherland.
At this point in the novel, just before the ending, a dramatic shift in focalization takes place when the perspective suddenly shifts from young Yolanda to the Yolanda in the narrative present (Smith 99): “Then we moved to the United States. The cat disappeared altogether. I saw snow… My grandmother grew so old she could not remember who she was.
I went away to school. I read books. You understand I am collapsing all time now so that it fits in what’s left in the hollow of my story? (289, emphasis added). The adult Yolanda’s reference to the “hollow of [her] story” refers to her “displacement” from her native country at such a young age and the sense of identity fragmentation it caused in her (Yitah 239). By
(re)constructing the past, Yolanda is trying to get more insight into, and come to terms with, who she is in the narrative present. Similar to how the kitten she takes away from its mother
“cannot long endure the hollow of her drum,” Yolanda’s identity crisis in the present shows that she “cannot live with the hollow of her story but must seek a wholeness of being by collapsing time into her narrative” (Yitah 237). Telling her story through language (writing) eventually becomes a way for her to negotiate the disparate parts of her identity. This significance of language, and writing specifically, as a way to deal with her position of liminality as a result of her displacement is affirmed one last time at the end of the novel when the adult Yolanda reminds us of the haunting presence of the past in her life in the present: “There are still times I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life, her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art” (289-290).
Ultimately, Yolanda longs for a reconciliation of her multiple identities, “a new identity, indebted to both but identical to neither,” which fuels her decision to go back to her native country at the beginning of the novel (Yitah 239). While Yolanda is focused on Kolukirik 61
“piecing together her fragmented identity,” she realizes that she is unable to do this in the
United States as she is “marked as the ‘Other’ in American society” (Yitah 238). However, a solely physical relocation from the United States to the Dominican Republic will not help her solve the identity crisis she finds herself in. As discussed in this chapter, rather than finding a solution to her identity crisis in a specific geographical location, Yolanda is, though intermittently, able to construct a form of hybridity for herself through language. This power of language to serve as a home for the bicultural individual has also been suggested by
Alvarez herself: “[I] would never have become a writer if [I] hadn’t had to cope with being between cultures. … [I] made [my] home in words, not in the United States or in the
Dominican Republic” (qtd. in Mayock 229). Evidently, this also applies to Yolanda.
Repeatedly, language enables her to employ (subversive) mimicry and empowers her to construct a form of hybrid consciousness in the Third Space. It is important to note, however, that despite her ability to do so at various points in the novel, her construction of an unequivocally viable hybrid identity remains complex. After all, her desire to go back to the
Dominican Republic at the opening section of the novel proves her continuing quest for self- discovery, and a search for belonging, as she has not (yet) fully achieved what Anzaldúa calls
“the new mestiza consciousness” (101). Nevertheless, Yolanda does seem to be the only
García sister who, by reconstructing the past, is able to work through her traumas and eventually find a way to reconcile her multiple selves in the process of writing her narrative.
Kolukirik 62
Conclusion
This thesis has explored the construction of immigrant identities in relation to cultural hybridity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost
Their Accents. Through a comparative close analysis of the novels, I have shown how both
Jasmine and the García sisters respond differently to their position of liminality between cultures in their attempts to negotiate their cultural identities as a result of their voluntary and forced migration to the United States respectively.
Having arrived in the United States as an illegal immigrant, the titular protagonist of
Jasmine goes through several identity transformations, which reflect her changing attitude towards her cultural identity as the novel progresses. While Jasmine is initially cautious not to lose her Indian cultural identity, she gradually becomes more inclined to adopt aspects of the dominant American culture. In her attempts to become more Americanized, she repeatedly mimics American-style dress and behavior. By doing so, she displays partial hybridity as she subversively uses existing power dynamics within American society to her own advantage. However, her manifestation of hybridity through subversive mimicry is complicated and limited because of her eventual inability to question these existing power structures, which renders her mimicry opportunistic rather than subversive. Moreover, despite her efforts to become entirely Americanized, her perceived racial otherness in the eyes of the dominant (white) American culture is a constant reminder of her inability to completely assimilate.
While Jasmine herself is not able to challenge the dominant culture’s assumptions and eventually tries to suppress her cultural difference completely in favor of complete
Americanization, the novel as a whole does reflect critically on her identity construction.
Through her representation of Jasmine’s multiple identity transformations, Mukherjee sheds light on how successful assimilation into American society, regardless of the individual’s desire or efforts, is unattainable for non-white immigrants because of widespread racial Kolukirik 63 prejudice. This idea is especially reinforced towards the end of the novel when Jasmine is already highly assimilated but nevertheless is surrounded by Americans who either completely dismiss her “roots,” which makes it impossible for her to share aspects of her
Indian culture with them, or have stereotypical preconceptions about her Indian cultural heritage.
In contrast to Jasmine, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents offers a more heterogeneous account of immigration and cultural identity negotiation. Through Yolanda’s overarching consciousness and the novel’s reverse chronological order, Alvarez shows how diverse immigrant experiences can be. Although Yolanda, Carla, Sandra, and Sofía are subject to the same conditions of exile from their native Dominican Republic to the United
States, their reactions to their displacement remarkably differ from each other. Significantly, however, each of the other three sisters’ experiences reflect certain aspects of Yolanda’s own struggles in reconciling her dual identity. Carla represents the traumatic aftermath of xenophobic encounters and its role in wanting to repress one’s cultural difference entirely. In the same vein, Sandra’s inability to unify both parts of her cultural identity display the immigrant’s necessity to accept ambiguities in order to successfully mediate between native and host cultures. Furthermore, through Sofía’s more divergent immigrant experience,
Alvarez seems to call attention to how bicultural identity construction is not a solitary process, but significantly impacted by aspects of sexuality and gender. Ultimately, Yolanda is the only García sister who is able to construct and embrace a form of hybridity for herself through (writing) language. However, it is important to note that Yolanda’s manifestation of hybrid characteristics is not static and changes throughout her life, culminating in her identity crisis towards the chronological ending of the novel. Her sense of identity fragmentation as an adult serves as an impetus for tracing back the family’s past, which ultimately provides her more insight into the source of her current psychological turmoil and enables her to construct a more stable form of hybridity in the present. Kolukirik 64
Paradoxically, the characters in both novels are (implicitly) expected to adapt to
American norms and values in order to feel a sense of belonging in their new country, while at the same time being othered because of their ethnic origins and affiliations, even if they manage to adapt culturally. The characters’ reactions in both novels show that Bhabha’s theoretical concept of cultural hybridity is not only complex in nature, but also seemingly utopian. Both Jasmine and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents ultimately show how difficult it is for American immigrant individuals to achieve a viable form of cultural hybridity both because of the psychological impact of immigration on the individual’s sense of belonging, but also because of American society’s general unwillingness to accept cultural and racial differences which do not fit into the predominantly white, Eurocentric narrative of assimilation it propagates. Kolukirik 65
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