Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’S the Namesake
【연구논문】
Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
Laura Ahn (Seoul National University)
I. Introduction
Of those who write ethnic minority literature, the vast majority have written about their own experiences living as a racial minority in America, or about the experiences of other people from different homelands who have made their own journey to America as transnational immigrants and adjust to living in their new surroundings.1) Jhumpa
1) The term transnationalism was first coined by Randolph Bourne in his 1916 article “Trans-National America” where he wrote about the failure of the melting pot theory and how assimilation did not “Americanize” immigrants but made them cling all the more tightly to the cultures of their homelands. See also Waldinger and Fitzgerald’s “Transnationalism in Question” for their argument that the term “transnational” does not mean “transnational― extending beyond loyalties that connect to any specific place of origin or ethnic or national group,” but instead “highly particularistic attachments antithetical to those by-products of globalization denoted by the concept of ‘transnational civil society’ and its related manifestations” (1178). Finding that transnationalism is not the appropriate term to describe the 100 Laura Ahn
Lahiri may be seen as another of these writers as her works are, not unlike many other Asian American works, fictional stories that capture the essence of very real experiences of immigrant families in America and the palpable generation gap between parents and children.2) In The Namesake (2003), Lahiri introduces the reader to a story about the happiness and hardships of the Ganguli family who originate from India.3) The main portion of the text is devoted to the character of Gogol Ganguli and his struggles as a second generation
phenomena of human immigration, Braziel and Mannur argue that the term “diaspora” should be used instead. What many people refer to as “transnationalism,” Braziel and Mannur define as “diaspora” in order to make a clear distinction between the human phenomena of migration and displacement with the movement of goods and information across national borders. 2) In his interview with The New York Times about his life as a reader, former President Barack Obama praised both Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri for their works because they “speak to a very particular contemporary immigration experience. But also this combination of―that I think is universal―longing for this better place, but also feeling displaced and looking backwards at the same time.” He continued by saying that, “in that sense, their novels are directly connected to a lot of American literature” (Kakutani). 3) See “Spicing it up,” Sarvate’s review of The Mango Season by Indian novelist Amulya Malladi for more on the increase of Indian American literature today of “not only fiction by writers like Salman Rushdie, who can be blamed for starting the fad, and V. S. Naipaul, who belonged to the generation before Rushdie and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001; but also writers like Arundhati Roy, whose first book, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize for portraying her Indian family with an unmistakable Western sensibility” as well as Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, and Vikram Singh (36). See also Bhalla’s “Being (and Feeling) Gogol: Reading and Recognition in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake” for more on the diversity of responses to The Namesake, and South Asian literature in general, depending on the type of reader. Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 101
Indian American; but a fair portion of the text is also allocated to the experiences of his parents Ashoke and Ashima as new immigrants from India. What sets The Namesake apart from other literary works written about the American immigrant experience is that Lahiri cleverly uses the names of her characters to shape their individual lives and futures not just as a mere first or second generation immigrant, but as people who are more than what that labelling connotes.4) The comparison and contrast between Gogol’s experiences and Ashima’s are interesting to note as both characters grow to fulfill the meanings of their names in different ways. For Gogol who was named after his father’s favourite Russian author Nikolai Gogol, his struggle to make sense of his own destiny on his own terms leads him on a journey of self-reflection and self-discovery that continuously challenges his own previous ideas of who he is. For Ashima whose name means “she who is limitless, without borders” (26), her journey enables her to “grow into” her name by the end of the story by maturing into a woman who is truly “without borders” through her life spent in America. Although the struggle faced by Ashima and her husband Ashoke to hold on and adapt as first generation immigrants is contrasted with the search for identity among second generation immigrants seen primarily through the experiences of their children Gogol and Sonia, Lahiri uses their struggles as an immigrant family to serve as a starting point for each member of the Ganguli family to find their own identities and
4) See Sen’s review of The Namesake for more on how Lahiri writes about “people who need to make sense of their own destinies, in their own terms” (10). She writes that Lahiri steers away from providing easy answers, and offers her readers a complex look into the immigrant experience. 102 Laura Ahn understandings of who they are as individuals apart from their race, history or cultural heritage so that they all may truly be “without borders.”
II. The Struggle to Hold on and Adapt among First Generation Immigrants
The Namesake follows the story of the Ganguli family as Ashoke and Ashima immigrate to the United States and build a family there with the birth of their children Gogol and Sonia. For Ashoke and Ashima, the challenge is to reconcile their Bengali customs with their new American way of life, while Gogol and Sonia must learn how to be American without losing their rich West Bengali heritage. The struggle that Ashoke and Ashima face is to live as members of American society while still trying to hold on to as much of their Bengali culture as they can in a new world where nothing is familiar to them. In his review of Lahiri’s second collection of short stories Unaccustomed Earth, Ed Minus makes an observation that “cultural unease is Lahiri’s pervasive subject, and her accounts and, to a lesser degree, her analyses of such distress are sharply observant” but goes on to criticize her by writing that, “it is not, I think, unjust to remark that she gives more attention to clothes and food than to, for example, politics, religion, and language” (lxxxiv). What Minus fails to understand is that Lahiri giving “more attention to clothes and food than to, for example, politics, religion, and language” is not a reason to criticize her. He does not seem to understand the Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 103 importance of food and clothing as a sign of cultural identity for any new immigrant to a new country.5) Out of all the people groups found in the modern world, it is easily observed that Arabs and Indians prominently persist in wearing their traditional clothes on a daily basis. Ashima herself never fails to appear in the text in her traditional sari and sandals except for the day she was required to put on a hospital gown in preparation for giving birth to Gogol. The first scene described in The Namesake is also notable as it is of Ashima attempting to recreate a familiar snack that is particularly special to the people living in West Bengal and using American ingredients in her Cambridge home in the United States to concoct it.6) Ashima’s craving for true Indian fare, also felt by the other members of her family at various points in the novel, is significant as it symbolizes her deep-rooted connection to her motherland.7) This craving for true homeland fare is also true of other first generation
5) Eileen Chang (張愛玲, Zhāng Ailíng) is another Asian American diaspora writer who is known for writing about things that may seem superficial at first glance, but prove to be deeply significant. In her introduction to Eileen Chang’s writing, Sheets writes, “Written in simple and direct language, her deeply moral and realistic stories focus on the tragic ironies of human experience. They are replete with metaphors, symbolism, and imagery” (Eileen). 6) This snack that is sold only on trains in West Bengal is called Bhelpuri in Hindi or Jhal Muri in Bengali (meaning “hot puffed rice”). I am grateful to Professor Earl Jackson for his extensive knowledge on West Bengali culture based on his own experiences in India and for the other cultural references about India that he shared with me during our discussions about The Namesake that I made substantial use of throughout this article. 7) See Williams’ “Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies” for more on how “food as metaphor frequently constructs and reflects relationships to racialized subjectivity and also addresses issues of authenticity, assimilation, and desire” in Asian American literature (70). 104 Laura Ahn immigrants who often must use the ingredients available to them in their new country to replicate familiar foods from their home country as well. The significance of ethnic foods is a common topic in ethnic writing because one way for immigrants to keep from assimilating into a new culture is to reject its food.8) Evidence of Ashima doing so can be found multiple times in the text when she is seen cooking Indian fare for her family and her friends on many different occasions.9) As a culture’s food is an essential part of the culture, the descriptions of the meals partaken by the characters in the text are especially important. Gogol’s first formal Bengali ceremony is his annaprasan, or his rice ceremony. This is a ceremony that marks the first time a Hindu child partakes of solid food in the form of rice which is “the Bengali staff of life” (39).10) Although there are substitutions made
8) Another example of the significance of ethnic foods as a common topic in ethnic writing can be seen in David Wong Louie’s The Barbarians Are Coming which is a story about a Chinese American man named Stanley Lung who strives to assimilate himself totally into American culture and who prefers cooking French cuisine over Chinese to the dismay of his employers and family. 9) It must be remembered that foods that originate from India are very regional fare. Indian cuisine can be characterized by a wide variety of dishes, specific ingredients and individual cooking techniques. As a result, it differs from one region of India to another. 10) The annaprasan, or rice ceremony, is especially important to the Bengali people because of the Bengal famine of 1943 when an estimated three million people died from starvation and malnutrition from a shortage of rice in the region. There have been several artists, writers and film-makers who have tried to capture the vast devastation of the famine in their works including Bengali painter Zainul Abedin who made many sketches of the dead and dying, novelist Bibhuti Bhusan Bandyopadhhay who wrote Ashani Sanket with the famine serving as both backdrop and protagonist, and film-maker Mrinal Sen who made a National Award winning film in 1980 Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 105 because their extended family members and traditional dishware are back in India, Ashima and Ashoke cannot overlook celebrating such an important event in the lives of both their children. Though Ashima mourns the fact that her own family is not present at the celebrations, they make do with what is available to them and invite the friends they have made in Cambridge to attend instead. Even after Gogol is born, Ashima still makes her American version of the Indian snack by mixing Rice Krispies, peanuts, red onions, salt, lemon juice and green chilli peppers together in a bowl. She feels that:
Being a foreigner . . . is a sort of lifelong pregnancy―a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect. (49-50)
For Ashima, being a new immigrant to America is an ordeal. For the first time in her life she is away from her family and friends in India and forced to make a new start in life with her newlywed husband in Massachusetts. She is always unconsciously looking forward to her next visit to India, always feeling that she does not fit in with other Americans who surround her. Physically different from white Anglo-Saxon Americans such as her first neighbours Alan and Judy, she constantly sees America as a place where she is
about the famine called Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine). 106 Laura Ahn different from everybody else. Most of all, Ashima seems to feel that being a foreigner is an ongoing responsibility as she helps new Bengali friends, many of whom are newer to America than herself, to adjust to their new lives in their new country. She gives the Bengali wives who are in the same situation as herself recipes and advice gained from her own experiences like how to make halwa, a kind of sweet confection, from Cream of Wheat, and also tells them that it is possible to buy carp in Chinatown (38).11) A greater responsibility she feels as an Indian immigrant is the responsibility to teach her own American-born children Gogol and Sonali the customs and traditions of their own Bengali culture.12) Like her name, Ashima is “without borders” and so serves as a bridge for her children between Bengali and American cultures along with her husband. When Gogol is still young she shows him a photo album filled with pictures of his extended family in Calcutta and tells him who each person is. She also teaches him to memorise Bengali
11) This shows that Ashima is behaving like a Kolkata housewife because this is exactly what she would have done in Kolkata. The Indian Chinatown is located in the eastern part of the city of Kolkata and housewives would commonly visit this part of the city in order to buy carp. 12) Ashoke too understands the value of sacrifice and feels the burden of relaying the whole of India’s rich culture to his children. He too has sacrificed much to come to this unfamiliar land and, ultimately, he dies there too, away from his homeland and his extended family. Unlike his son who abhors any connection between himself and Nikolai Gogol, Ashoke feels a special kinship with the man, more than any other writer. He tells his son that apart from enjoying his stories, he likes Nikolai Gogol because the author “spent most of his adult life outside his homeland. Like me” (77). To Ashoke, Gogol is a name he identifies with the stories that he enjoys, a book that saved his life, an author he can identify with, and a son that he loves. Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 107 children’s poems and the names of the Hindu deities, but also allows him to watch Sesame Street and The Electric Company (54). As a mother to her American-born children, she does her best to teach them about their heritage at home while at school they learn about the American culture they were born into.13) Although Gogol and Sonia learn to eat typical American food like processed cheese, tuna fish and hotdogs and learn to celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, Ashoke and Ashima also make their children eat Indian dinners most nights of the week and take them to pujas,14) or the annual Durga Puja (literally translated as “Worship of Durga”), the Bengali festival that celebrates the Hindu goddess Durga (64-65). By taking them to traditional Bengali festivals, performances and concerts, and sending them to Bengali language and culture classes on the weekends, Ashoke and Ashima do their best to instil their culture into their children and pass on to them the traditions that they themselves were taught by their own parents. Another way Ashima serves as a link between India and America is through her innate skill for drawing that she inherits from her father and passes on to Gogol. Ashima’s father was an illustrator for Desh magazine and doodled sketches of animals on letters sent to his
13) See Alfonso-Forero’s “Immigrant Motherhood and Transnationality in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction” for more on how Lahiri “offers motherhood as a site of agency for negotiating a transnational identity for the postcolonial female subject in diaspora” and how she “shows how traditional gender roles . . . can be read as a source of empowerment when translated into the context of middle class immigrant life in America” (851). 14) In Bengali the “o” and the “a” are similar which may be why Lahiri decided to use the spelling of “pujo” instead of the more correct spelling of “puja” when writing her novel. 108 Laura Ahn daughter, son-in-law and grandson in America which Ashima would then tape to the wall above Gogol’s crib (36). Though he passes away while Gogol is still an infant, Gogol inherits his grandfather’s skill at drawing which is evidenced in his early kindergarten artwork and later in his eventual university major in architecture and subsequent job in that field. This innate skill is passed onto him through his mother as she herself shows her own artistic skills when she creates her own Christmas cards to send out one year using a drawing of an elephant that is a replica of a drawing her father had done for Gogol many years ago (160). Both inadvertently and purposely, Ashima and Ashoke thus teach their children many things that they themselves learned from their own parents and pass on skills and knowledge that they hope will continue to be passed on with each new generation.15) As people born in a different country than the country that they are currently living in, Ashoke and Ashima both have tried in their own way to become what they believe is Indian American. For Ashoke, who comes to America after a fateful encounter with a man named Ghosh and a horrific experience in a train wreck in his youth, he learns the value of the sacrifices he makes and like his name becomes “he who
15) See Katrak’s article “The Aesthetics of Dislocation” for more on how “Lahiri’s stories capture the humanity of ordinary people . . . who take diasporic leaps to create new lives even as they keep hold on the small details of their culture” (6). She expands on this argument by writing that, “while Lahiri’s characters remain self-consciously aware of their ethnicity, they participate in this US culture through their intimate relationships, married, single, raising children, driving that extra mile to get an absolutely necessary ingredient for a favorite recipe. Even as their ethnicity as South Asian Americans is performed in daily life, they work towards a hybrid realization of their subjectivity as Asians and as Americans” (6). Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 109 transcends grief.” He “transcended grief” that fateful night in India in 1961 when he was saved from the debris of the smashed up trains and was granted another chance at life. He did it again when he took hold of his new chance at life with both hands by making the choice to leave his quiet but comfortable life in India and applying to study abroad after recalling Ghosh’s advice to “pack a pillow and a blanket” and see as much of the world as he could while he still was able (16). Ashima too accepts her new life in America, but does what she can to preserve the traditions and customs that she and Ashoke were brought up to respect and pass them on to her own children. By making compromises between Bengali culture and American, Ashima and Ashoke become a bridge for their children and help them to eventually appreciate both cultures equally.
III. The Search for Identity among Second Generation Immigrants
While the struggle faced by Ashoke and Ashima is to hold on and adapt as first generation immigrants, Gogol and Sonia face a different struggle altogether, the struggle to find their own identity.16) In the
16) See Friedman’s “From Hybrids to Tourists: Children of Immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake” for more on how “the protagonist of the contemporary immigrant novel―whether an immigrant or a child born to immigrants―is more concerned with his or her dual identity as it manifests itself in America and in the shrinking global community” and how “Lahiri’s depictions of the elite class of Western-educated Indians and their children’s relationship to both India and America dismantle the stereotype of brown-skinned immigrant families that are always outsiders to American culture and recasts them as cosmopolites, members of a shifting network of 110 Laura Ahn beginning, as American-born Indians, Gogol and Sonia accept and abide by the Bengali customs and traditions that they learn to associate with their parents. However, even as an elementary school student, Gogol is aware of the fact that his parents are different from the parents of other children and that they are the target for indirect insults simply because they do not speak English with perfect American accents. Gradually becoming more and more aware of the fact that their other friends at school do not live as their family does, both siblings begin to reject and rebel against the Bengali culture that their parents try to instil in them. Nathan Oates makes the observation that “what Gogol wants is to be his own person, and the novel exposes the fallacy of the American myth of self-creation” (178). Like most young teenagers, Gogol resists the influence of his parents and tries to break as many ties as he can with them. Rebuffing their efforts to introduce as much Bengali culture as they can to their children, Gogol slowly begins to divide his life at school from his life as home―which Sonia is also quick to follow. As a teenager in high school, Gogol tries as much as he can to blend in with his American friends and be as “normal” as possible. He learns to sneak around behind their backs in order to smoke pot or go to out of town concerts with his friends (93). In this way, Gogol slowly extricates himself from being under his parents’ influence and attempts to become his own self apart from them. Five years later, Sonia begins to act the same way her older
global travelers whose national loyalties are flexible” (112). Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 111 brother does when she too becomes a teenager. In fact, she becomes even more rebellious than Gogol ever was and her behaviour seems to stand in sharp contrast to that of her mother. For example, she alters her jeans and dyes most of her clothing black, while Ashima never fails to wear anything other than her colourful saris. Also, while Sonia goes out to dances and parties to meet and mingle with boys as a high school student, Ashima would never have attempted to meet any of the young men who knew her except the ones who approached her parents with the intent of interviewing her as a possible wife when she was young. Finally, as Ashima maintains her long braided hair as a traditional symbol of her Indian beauty, Sonia allows a friend to cut hers and threatens to dye a streak of it blond. Although it may seem that Sonia is acting out in rebellion to her mother, she is only really behaving in that manner because she is responding to the culture that surrounds her as Ashima did when she was around the same age. Each woman is behaving typically for her respective culture which serves to parallel the two women instead of drawing a distinction between them. As children born in a country different from the country that bore their parents, Gogol and Sonia adopt a “melting pot mentality” and try to assimilate themselves to the American culture that surrounds them.17) In the same way, Gogol and Sonia think of themselves as
17) This term was first used by the eighteenth-century French-born writer and agriculturist J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, when he asked in his 1782 epistolary book Letters from an American Farmer, “What, then, is the American, this new man?” Crèvecoeur’s argument was that Americans were a whole new group of people born from a “melting pot” of peoples who emigrated from Europe but immediately shed anything “European” about them after arriving on America’s shores and immediately adopted the 112 Laura Ahn
“American” because they too were born in America and longed to shed anything “Indian” or “Bengali” about them in order to whole-heartedly adopt the “American” way of life that they found their classmates following. However, just as the “melting pot” premise was soon broken, so too were Gogol’s and Sonia’s dreams of having a simple American identity.18) Other than adopting the dress and attitudes of their American friends, one of the greatest ways Gogol and Sonia attempt to adopt a different identity than the ones given to them by their parents is through the alteration of their names.19) As the title The Namesake indicates, the concept of names and their significance in determining one’s identity are central topics. Gogol is given his first name by his father as a tribute to his favourite author Nikolai Gogol, after the name that his great-grandmother would have given him mysteriously vanishes during its transit from India. Originally it was to have been his pet name, but through various circumstances, it becomes his
“American” way of life. 18) See Gordon’s Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins for more on how the idea of the “melting pot of America” was a fantasy from the beginning because it did not take into account the greater advantage Anglo-Saxons had over every other ethnicity from the start (129). As it was the Anglo-Saxons who had the advantage in early America, it was only natural that other immigrants from other countries were then expected to “melt” and assimilate into the image of the Anglo-Saxon. 19) A person’s basic identity can be found in their name as names have always been used as a marker of a person’s identity. A name is also commonly used as a way of showing possession over the person, animal or object being named. In the Biblical story of creation, it is through the process of naming that all animals were given to Adam by God–and all mankind after him–to take care of thereafter (see Gen 2:19, 1:28). Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 113
“good” name. Lahiri explains the difference between the two by writing that, “in Bengali the word for pet name is daknam, meaning, literally, the name by which one is called, by friends, family, and other intimates, at home and in other private, unguarded moments” and that “every pet name is paired with a good name, a bhalonam, for identification in the outside world” (25-26). Lahiri continues by writing that good names tend to represent dignified and enlightened qualities while pet names have no such aspirations but are frequently meaningless, deliberately silly, ironic, even onomatopoetic. Gogol was chosen as a pet name not just because it was the name of Ashoke’s favourite author, but because it was a page torn from Gogol’s book that saved his life when it fluttered from his hand and caught the attention of the rescue workers when Ashoke was caught in the middle of a horrific train wreck in his youth. The name “Gogol” was perfect because it represented not only the life of the son, but of the father as well. As a young boy, Gogol does not mind his name. As a young boy, he even prefers it to his good name of Nikhil which means “he who is entire, encompassing all” (56). It is because of his childhood attachment to his pet name, and his fear of being Nikhil, “someone he doesn’t know” (57) that prompts his elementary school principal to disregard the wishes of Gogol’s parents and allow the child to be known as Gogol at school.20) As a child, it was
20) An important point to be made here is that to go to school with one’s daknam instead of one’s proper bhalonam is like having the household being pulled inside out and turned upside down. This is because something that is as intimate and private as a pet name is being displayed for the public to see and perhaps can be equated to the consternation of displaying one’s undergarments in public. 114 Laura Ahn frightening to Gogol to be known by a different name at school and he could not grasp the concept of having two separate names and so expressed his wish to stay being “Gogol,” even at school. It is during a class field trip that Gogol begins to realize how unique his own name is when he cannot even find it among the names carved on headstones arranged in a graveyard. Sonia does not face the same problem that her older brother does in respect to her own name as Ashoke and Ashima decide to do away with a pet name in favour of a good name only. They decide, “For their daughter, good name and pet name are one and the same: Sonali, meaning ‘she who is golden’” (62). In the end, Sonali too gains a pet name of sorts when she is called Sonu, then Sona, and finally Sonia. This name “makes her a citizen of the world” because “it’s a Russian link to her brother, it’s European, South American” and “eventually it will be the name of the Indian prime minister’s Italian wife” (62). Gogol gradually becomes more and more dissatisfied with his name until he comes to hate it.21) On his fourteenth birthday he receives a copy of Nikolai Gogol’s collection of short stories from his father that he accepts with perfunctory gratitude and the knowledge that he will probably never read it. It is in his high school English class where Gogol finally learns about his Russian namesake in depth, and with each new revelation about his namesake, Gogol inwardly feels that what his English teacher is doing is indirectly comparing himself with this eccentric writer who
21) It is worthwhile to note that Russian names have mandatory patronyms, which adds to the burden Gogol carries of his name that was given to him by his father. Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 115 inspired his name. His hatred for the name Gogol grows to the point that he later decides to legally rename himself with his “good” name Nikhil and claim a different identity as a freshman in college. When asked why he wants to change his name, he replies: “I hate the name Gogol . . . I’ve always hated it” (102). By renaming himself, Gogol feels as if he has freed himself from not just the historical life and death of his namesake, but that he has claimed a real name for himself that he was cheated by circumstance out of in the first place because of the loss of his original name in the mail. By renaming himself, he feels reborn and free from the influence his parents have on his life. It is not until Gogol learns the real reason behind his pet name in his senior year of university that he realizes how significant the name “Gogol” was to his father. Gogol finally understands that his pet name was not just given to him because his father admired the author and felt an affinity with him, but that that name, that book and that incident symbolized the start of a new life for his father, and that it was that legacy of a new life that was passed on to him the moment he was born and Ashoke became a father. 116 Laura Ahn
IV. The Importance of the Journey
Ashoke takes his young family to Cape Cod one winter day. He and Gogol walk to the very tip only to discover that they had left the camera behind. Since they cannot take any photos to remember the day, Ashoke says to Gogol: “Remember that you and I made this journey” (187).22) Stephan Metcalf picks up on the same passage in his review of The Namesake and writes that “it’s as if Lahiri were saying: in America, where so little is suitably customary or ceremonious, there might at least be this. Memory, unaided by even a photograph, lays a claim on us that is so much more exacting for being so perishable” (Metcalf). Metcalf focuses on the word “remember” and writes that memories are precious because they are intangible and easily forgotten. Although that may be a true enough statement, Metcalf doesn’t seem to be giving Ashoke’s words the justice that they deserve. Ashoke doesn’t tell Gogol to remember the scenery, the lighthouse or the sea for the sake of remembering the
22) This episode is similar to the film Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star) (1960) by Bengali Indian film-maker Ritwik Ghatak as pointed out by Professor Earl Jackson. In the film, the two children of a certain family (an older daughter and a younger son) are now adults looking back over their lives. The older sister reminisces fondly about a trip that their father took them on once. They had one photograph but it wasn’t taken on the trip but before they left, but the father told them to hold the trip in their memories. “This is a really important scene in the general memories of Bengali culture in general as it also alludes to entire families having to hold onto memories of the homeland they were expelled from because of the Partition. While the latter would have no relevance to Gogol and his sister—the memories of homeland for the parents would have that poignance and particularly for Ashima—her perspective on America and Kolkata (in the first part of the novel) resonates with a sense of exile” (Jackson). Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 117 things that they saw that day. Instead, he asks Gogol to remember the day, to remember it always and to remember that they made a journey. For a young boy, the walk to the very end of Cape Cod is rather hard and so requires the occasional help of a father’s hand. In the end, father and son both reach the very tip of the landmass and are able to take in the view that awaited them there. Years later, it would not be the sea that Gogol remembers from that day, but the walk itself. It is the journey that he took with his father, the obstacles and curiosities along the way, that would stay in his memories. It would not be the sand or the sun that would make the deepest impression on him, but the memory of his father’s distinctive footprints in the sand, and the image of their slender shadows leaning towards each other cast by the sun. Years later, Gogol still remembers his father’s words spoken to him on that day and remembers that on that day, they made a journey together. In the same way, it is important and necessary for all people to “make a journey” to find their identity, regardless of where one is born, which culture one identifies with, and how long that journey may take. Rajini Srikanth writes that the best way to teach subject matter that is vastly unfamiliar, volatile, and highly complex is to “teach the journey and to teach the gaps in the journey” meaning “that you instil in them an appreciation for the many detours you have taken, the unexpected halts and encampments for further study of particular areas of interest not initially part of the travel plan, and the reflections and interpretations of places visited and peoples encountered” (197-98). It is important to teach students about the journey so that they may learn how to find their own way not only 118 Laura Ahn in relation to what is being taught, but also in relation to life itself. In an interview with Barbara Kantrowitz, Lahiri speaks about being an Indian American writer. “I’ve often felt,” she says, “that I am somehow illegitimate in both cultures. A true Indian doesn’t accept me as an Indian and a true American doesn’t accept me as an American” (77). What is most interesting about her statement is when she says, “a true American doesn’t accept me as an American.” What exactly is a “true American” to Lahiri? It almost seems that she is contradicting everything she has written by that one statement. It would be best to address this question by looking at an article penned by Lahiri herself for Newsweek magazine where she admits that “with the exception of my first two years in London, ‘Indian-American’ has been a constant way to describe me” even though she felt like neither (Lahiri, “My”). Lahiri considers herself as an Indian-American, and like Gogol and Sonia in her story, she too felt the pressure to be both Indian and American at the same time.23) As a young child she too was “Indian” at home and her perception of “American” at school. Even then she saw that she could never be “entirely American” because of the things she possessed that others did not, and the things she did not possess but others did like names, looks, and knowledge about certain cultural things. Like Gogol’s initial rebellion to his parents’ desire that he should retain his Bengali roots, Lahiri too could not come to terms with her two selves co-existing peacefully with the other. It was only after she
23) See Sharmila Sen’s article “Foreign Accents: Notes upon my return to the Diaspora” for more on the importance “to remain attentive to the differences within diasporas, or between overlapping diasporas” (8). Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 119 grew herself and attempted to write about her two worlds on paper that Lahiri first began to accept both as her own. Lahiri too has “made a journey” of her own to reach a point in her own life where she is comfortable with both her identities as Indian and American.24) When she talks about “true Indians” or “true Americans” then, she is talking about individuals from either country who identify themselves with only one culture, be that Indian or American. As a child, she had wanted to claim that “trueness” by rejecting everything that wasn’t “American” but now that she has matured, Lahiri has let go of that idea and embraced that being Indian-American is not perfect, but it is who she is thanks to the guidance of her own parents who offered her their own helping hands along the journey. In the beginning of The Namesake, Ashima is seen alone first in the kitchen and then in her room in the maternity ward of the hospital, “cut off by curtains from the other three women in the room” (3). When Ashima first arrives in America, she spends countless days alone in her apartment while Ashoke is at the university. Judith Caesar argues that walls that surround the inner spaces of houses are often “a metaphor for confinement within one’s own ego, or confinement within a set of conventions that deny intimacy and individuality.” According to Caesar, “For the characters who live in these spaces, life is outside, not within . . . Doors shut out the world, and the protagonist in American fiction must step outside that door to understand himself and make meaningful contact
24) See articles such as Kantrowitz’s “Who Says There’s No Second Act?,” Minzesheimer’s “For Pulitzer winner Lahiri, a novel approach” and Wiltz’s “The Writer Who Began With a Hyphen: Jhumpa Lahiri, Between Two Cultures” for more on Lahiri’s own experiences as an Indian American. 120 Laura Ahn with others. To be shut in does not mean to be safe but to be trapped” (51). Placing Ashima in such closed spaces emphasises her feeling of isolation as a new immigrant to America. In the hospital, as she prepares to give birth to her first child, she compares her current situation to the one she would have been in India if she was still there. In India she would have been in her parents’ home in the company of her own mother, but in a closed off space from the other three women in the room and in an American hospital, Ashima cannot help but feel alone. She even wonders if she is the only Indian person in the hospital (3). Ashima has yet to step out into the world at this point. Caesar continues by writing that, “Walls form a prison, and those caught within those walls are in a kind of solitary confinement; the only answer is escape. The solution to one’s loneliness is outside” (51). In the beginning Ashima was afraid and could not bear to raise Gogol in this unfamiliar and lonely country. However, Ashima finally takes her first step towards escaping her loneliness the day she runs out of rice. She had been continuously crying for the past several days but when she cannot reach Ashoke to ask him to pick some rice up on his way home, she decides to make a change. Ashima decides to take confidence in herself and steps out of her confined space into the world both physically and symbolically. By taking her first step “outside,” Ashima takes her first step towards actually adjusting to living in America not just by leaning entirely upon her husband, but by going out herself and encountering both Caucasians and Indian Americans to make friends and acquaintances of. Just as the first chapter of the book begins with Ashima, so the Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 121 final chapter shows Ashima in the kitchen preparing food thirty-two years later. This time she is frying croquettes for a party she is having in the evening. It is held as a farewell party of sorts as she will be leaving to spend the next six months in India only to return to spend the subsequent six months in America. For thirty-three years Ashima has lived in America and learned to accept parts of it and adjust her own lifestyle to certain aspects of it. After the death of her husband, she has learned to live without him. Even after over thirty years of living in America, first as an immigrant and then as a citizen, Ashima has not conformed to American culture but rather found a compromise of her own that she can live with. Just as she plans to spend half her remaining life in India and half in America, Ashima has found a balance in her life that suits her. Just as Lahiri writes, “true to the meaning of her name, she will be without borders, without a home of her own, a resident everywhere and nowhere” (275-76).25) Ashima is able to truly become a woman without borders because she has learned to negotiate instead of conform. If she had followed only Bengali traditions in America and not opened herself up to the
25) Although one might argue that Ashima’s decision to live the remainder of her life half in America and half in India can be seen as a failure of her efforts to live as an Indian American in America like her children do, the point that I am emphasising here is that Ashima finds a balance that is right for her. Her affluent economic status allows her to plan to live with her younger brother’s family in Kolkata for six months and six months in America divided between her son, daughter and her close Bengali friends (275-76) and truly be a woman who lives without borders by choosing to reside in both of the countries she calls home. See Leyda’s “An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri” for more on how education can become economic leverage for immigrants (77). 122 Laura Ahn people there, she would not have been able to call it home as well. If she had forgotten all the Bengali traditions she had learned before arriving in America and conformed completely to typical American culture, she could not return to India and feel like it is still home as well. By striking a balance between her own Bengali culture and the American culture she currently lives in, Ashima has broadened her horizons. She has clung fast to traditions like wearing saris and sandals and celebrating pujas, but has learned also to find the middle ground for the sake of her children. She has learned to roast turkeys rubbed with garlic, cumin and cayenne for Thanksgiving, build snowmen in the winter and dye eggs to hide around the house for Easter (64). Although Christmas is a predominantly Christian holiday and clashes with her Hindu faith, she has learned to meet halfway on this holiday as well by decorating a tree with “ornaments made by Sonia and Gogol in elementary school: construction paper candle-sticks, Popsicle-stick god’s eyes, glitter covered pinecones,” “a torn Banarasi sari of Ashima’s that is wrapped around the base” and “a small plastic bird covered with turquoise velvet, with brown wire claws” at the top (285). Christmas is celebrated with the Christian elements taken out, Hindu elements added in, and the traditions that inspire joy and love intact. However, it is not only Ashima who has become a person without borders. Gogol too may be seen as a person without borders, but in a different way than how his mother is. For Gogol, being without borders doesn’t mean having the freedom to move freely between countries like his mother, but being able to cohabit two different cultural spheres at the same time.26) His liberty in The Namesake is Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 123 a reflection of Lahiri’s own experiences as a second generation immigrant.27) Like Lahiri, Gogol has his challenges trying to deal with his dual identity of being Indian at home and American at school. He had to find out for himself that he couldn’t simply reject one identity in favour of the other but that both were vital elements of who he was. As a university student, he unwillingly attends a panel discussion about Indian novels written in English and hears that:
“Teleologically speaking, ABCDs are unable to answer the question, ‘Where are you from?’” . . . Gogol has never heard the term ABCD. He eventually gathers that it stands for “American-born confused deshi.” In other words, him. He learns that the C could also stand for “conflicted.” He knows that deshi, a generic word for “countryman,” means “Indian,” knows that his parents and all their friends always refer to India simply as desh. But Gogol never thinks of India as desh. He thinks of it as Americans do, as India. (118)
For Gogol, identifying himself as an “ABCD” is as foreign to him as calling India “desh.” He has no trouble answering the question of where he is from either because for him, the answer is America. As
26) See Field’s “Writing the Second Generation: Negotiating Cultural Borderlands in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake” for more on how second generation immigrants exist “in a luminal space of cultural borderlands between the United States and their family’s country of origin” because they must constantly negotiate between their cultural roots and their American lifestyles (166). 27) See articles such as Kantrowitz’s “Who Says There’s No Second Act?,” Minzesheimer’s “For Pulitzer winner Lahiri, a novel approach” and Wiltz’s “The Writer Who Began With a Hyphen: Jhumpa Lahiri, Between Two Cultures” for more on Lahiri’s own experiences as an Indian American. 124 Laura Ahn time goes on however, he begins to realize that he cannot embrace his American identity and ignore his Indian one forever and that both are parts of himself that he must acknowledge as his own. Gogol goes through the struggles of being labelled “American” in India and “Indian” in America as a young man but it is only after the death of his father that he realizes that he must learn to navigate being both “American” and “Indian” to both cultures and in both countries.28) It is a learning process, and like anyone else, Gogol makes mistakes along the way. By marrying Moushumi, another Indian American like himself, Gogol thinks that he could not have found a better person to help him figure out what an “Indian American” identity really was. However, both learn that sharing a cultural background is not enough to base a marriage on when Moushumi begins having an affair with a previous lover and Gogol realizes that he does not want to make her stay with him. Like his father’s life had been radically changed by one train ride, so had Gogol’s when Moushumi let her secret slip on the train ride home to his mother’s house to spend Christmas with her and Sonia. It was only after the shock had worn off that he realized that the two of them were not right for the other and that he couldn’t blame her for their broken marriage. He understands, “They had both acted on the same impulse, that was their mistake. They had both sought comfort in each other, and in their shared world, perhaps for the sake of novelty, or out of the fear that that world was slowly dying” (284). Gogol understands that marrying
28) See Dalton-Brown’s “The Freedom of the Inbetween: Gogol’s Ghost and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Immigrants” for more on the notion of “inbetweenness” and how the “courageous acceptance of a dislocated life” can lead to a discovery of a powerful sense of self (342). Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 125 another Indian American will not answer the questions he has about his own identity and at a loss for what to do next, he turns back to his own past, to the book his father had given him so many years ago. Then, he did not care for the book, the significance of it to his father or the significance it had to himself. It is only years later, as a thirty-three year old man, that Gogol picks up the book that connects him to both his father and his namesake and begins to read it. Unlike his mother, Ashima, who will be able to live comfortably in both India and America, alternating between countries, Gogol must discover a way to cohabit the two different cultural spheres simultaneously. Gogol does not have the freedom or the desire to live alternating between countries like his mother, so he must come to terms with living as both an “Indian” and an “American” at the same time in America. There are no easy, clear-cut answers to the question of how he is to do so, but there is hope that he can find a personal answer to the question. This hope is seen when the story ends with Gogol opening up his father’s gift to him of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories and beginning to read it. V. Conclusion
The story Jhumpa Lahiri spins for her reader in The Namesake around the Ganguli family is relatable by many readers who have experienced similar situations as first or second generation immigrants to North America. Lahiri uses all four members of the Ganguli family to illustrate the different hardships and happiness faced when uprooted from one world to be transplanted in another, when born into one world and discovering that deep connections with another 126 Laura Ahn world exist, and when trying to reconcile two worlds into one that is a balance of both. After initially rejecting Bengali traditions and everything “un-American,” Sonia and Gogol come to appreciate them after the death of their father brings the family together. While living with her mother in the suburbs of Boston, Sonia learns to cook the food she hated eating as a child and learns that her mother could be a friend instead of a foe. She begins to understand that she is not as different from her mother as she had previously assumed and that they share many commonalities after all. Sonia dates and eventually becomes engaged to Ben, a man who is “half-Jewish, half-Chinese, [and was] raised in Newton” (270). It is through her engagement to Ben that Lahiri shows that Sonia has found her own way of being “multicultural.” By having Sonia engaged to a non-Bengali man, and a man from a mixed genetic and cultural background, Lahiri is not advocating the idea of the American “melting pot,” but rather the idea it is perfectly fine to live as a family that celebrates traditions from more than one culture. Like her name, Sonia becomes “a citizen of the world” by entering into a marriage with a man who comes from a multicultural family, yet she also acknowledges and embraces her own cultural heritage by planning to have the wedding “on an auspicious January day” in Kolkata just as her parents did many years ago (276). For Ashima, she finds her balance between both her worlds by genuinely becoming a woman who is “limitless” and can freely pass between national borders. She becomes transformed after the death of her husband into a woman who can fit comfortably into both American and Bengali societies through her ability to adjust herself Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 127 as required. She can be seen as the member of the Ganguli family who has the greatest freedom because she can live as an Indian American both in India and America without major difficulty. In both countries she has rooms set aside for her, family to make her feel at home and friends to visit extensively with. She will both feel at home and have no home in both the countries she will live in. Although Ashoke’s death granted Ashima the freedom to be comfortable in both worlds, it would not be accurate to say that Ashoke did not find his own kind of freedom in America before passing away. Ashoke too “transcended grief” and found happiness in raising a family together with his wife, in his work as a student and later as a professor, and in living the quiet life that he did. He was granted a second chance at life after the train wreck in his youth and he did not take that chance for granted. With his wife Ashima, they held on to their Bengali culture and heritage in America and were successful in passing on an appreciation for that culture to their children. Together they found an equilibrium in bringing together the Bengali and American aspects of their lives into a balanced whole for their family. Gogol’s struggle was the most difficult one, but by the end of the novel there is hope as he takes sure steps forward on his own journey to find his own answers. He struggles with the names given to him by his father and everything they signify, but comes to terms with them to some extent by the end of the novel. He learns the significance of the writer Nikolai Gogol in his father’s life and why he was named after him, and true to the meaning of his “good” name of Nikhil, he has begun to be “he who is entire, encompassing 128 Laura Ahn all” (56). He learns it wasn’t the name of Gogol that he hated and wanted to change, but his identity as a displaced individual. Only after realizing that he could never be what he thought was an “ideal” American does he begin to appreciate his actual identity as an Indian American. With this realization, Gogol begins to cohabit the two different spheres of his life instead of dividing himself between them. He has yet to find the answer to the question of how to achieve this feat, but by recalling his father’s words to “remember . . . this journey,” he finds that he has the means to try. By the end of the text, all four members of the Ganguli family have grown to be people who are more than what they were at the beginning. Through the lives of her characters who have their own definitions of identity tested and changed, Lahiri has shown how connections across nations and cultures are possible in The Namesake. Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity 129
Works Cited
Alfonso-Forero, Ann Marie. “Immigrant Motherhood and Transnationality in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction.” Literature Compass 4.3 (2007): 851-61. Bhalla, Tamara. “Being (and Feeling) Gogol: Reading and Recognition in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.” MELUS 37.1 (2012): 105-29. Bourne, Randolph. “Trans-National America.” Atlantic Monthly 118 (1916): 86-97. Braziel, Jana Evans, and Anita Mannur. “Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies.” Theorizing Diaspora. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Malden: Blackwell, 2003. 1-22. Caesar, Judith. “American Spaces in the Fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri.” English Studies in Canada 31.1 (2005): 50-68. Crèveceour, J. Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925. Dalton-Brown, Sally. “The Freedom of the Inbetween: Gogol’s Ghost and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Immigrants.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 47.3 (2011): 332-44. “Eileen Chang – Introduction: Short Story Criticism.” eNotes. Ed. Anna J. Sheets. 1998. Web. 11 June 2019.
Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. The Holy Bible. New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1989. Jackson, Jr., Earl. “Re: The Cloud Capped Star.” Message to Laura Ahn. 19 June 2009. E-mail. Kakutani, Michiko. “President Obama’s Reading List.” The New York Times 18 Jan. 2017: n. pag. Web. 11 June 2019.
(2004): 9-10. Sen, Sharmila. “Foreign Accents: Notes upon My Return to the Diaspora.” The Women’s Review of Books 19.5 (2002): 8-9. Srikanth, Rajini. “Overwhelmed by the World: Teaching Literature and the Difference of Nations.” Pedagogy 7.2 (2007): 192-206. Waldinger, Roger, and David Fitzgerald. “Transnationalism in Question.” American Journal of Sociology 109.5 (2004): 1177-95. Williams, L. A. “Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.” MELUS 32.4 (2007): 69-79. Wiltz, Theresa. “The Writer Who Began with a Hyphen: Jhumpa Lahiri, Between Two Cultures.” The Washington Post 8 Oct. 2003: n. pag. Web. 11 June 2019.
■ 논문 투고일자: 2019. 06. 12 ■ 심사 완료일자: 2019. 06. 23 ■ 게재 확정일자: 2019. 06. 25 132 Laura Ahn
Abstract
Names and the Journey to Define a Multicultural Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
Laura Ahn (Seoul National University)
Like many other Asian American writers, Jhumpa Lahiri writes stories that capture the experiences of immigrant families in America. What sets The Namesake apart is that Lahiri cleverly uses the names of her characters to shape their individual lives and futures not just as a first or second generation immigrant, but as people who are more than what that labelling connotes. Although the struggle faced by Ashoke and Ashima to hold on and adapt as first generation immigrants is contrasted with the search for identity among second generation immigrants seen primarily through the experiences of their children Gogol and Sonia, Lahiri uses their struggles as an immigrant family to serve as a starting point for each member of the Ganguli family to find their own identities and understandings of who they are as individuals apart from their race, history or cultural heritage so that they may truly be “without borders.”
Key Words Indian American, diaspora, first generation immigrants, second generation immigrants, identity