Bharati Mukherjee : The American Dreamer

When I met Bharati Mukherjee recently at the Asian-American Writer’s workshop, she seemed quite content just being ‘a writer’. But Mukherjee’s real life persona could have easily been a fictitious character out of one of her own novels. The defiant rebel in ‘The Tree Bride’, the non-conformist daughter from ‘Desirable Daughters’ or the resourceful immigrant in ‘Jasmine’ all seem to be autographical projections of her.

An acclaimed novelist and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Mukherjee describes herself as being raised in Calcutta within a ‘hierarchical, classification-obsessed society’ where ‘one’s identity was fixed, derived from religion, caste, patrimony and mother tongue’. She grew up ‘immersed in history and culture’, did her B.A from the University of Calcutta and an MA in English and Ancient Indian Culture in keeping with her family tradition. At the age of twenty-one however she took a break from tradition to attend the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa where, she says, she saw healthy cows for the first time but didn’t understand a word of heartland American-English for the entire first semester. Even though she almost decided to go back home the day she arrived because she felt ‘totally overwhelmed by the contrast of cultures’ Mukherjee earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing and later went on to do her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from the Iowa University.

While she did not give in to her impulsive urge to go back home upon arrival, two years later she did on impulse marry a fellow student and writer Clark Blaise during a lunch break in a lawyer’s office above a coffee shop, only a few weeks after she had met him. She fell in love with him, she says, possibly because he was ‘someone so totally outside the Brahmanic pale of civilization’ but mostly because he had blue eyes. ‘I hadn’t really seen blue eyes before that and he was also a nice guy’, she explains. Her questionable but resolute fancy for blue eyes consequently cut her off forever from the rules and ways of upper-middle-class life in Bengal, hurling her into ‘a new life of scary improvisations and heady explorations’. ‘Until my lunch-break wedding, I had seen myself as an Indian foreign student who intended to return to India to live. The five-minute ceremony in the lawyer’s office suddenly changed me into a transient with conflicting loyalties to two very different cultures,’ she says.

‘Before that moment in time I had no identity of my own; my identity was viscerally connected with ancestral soil and genealogy. I was who I was because I was Dr. Sudhir Lal Mukherjee’s daughter, because I was a Hindu Brahmin, because I was Bengali-speaking and because my desh was an East Bengal village called Faridpur’, she says. Being forced to negotiate the no man’s land between the country of her past and the continent of her present, she struggled for cultural assimilation and acceptance after her whirlwind marriage. ‘While changing citizenship is easy, swapping cultures is not,’ she admits. Shortly after her marriage, she and her husband moved to Canada, where Mukherjee became one of the youngest tenured women faculty members ever at McGill University. But Mukherjee’s speaks bitterly about her experience of racism in Canada, where she says she felt humiliated -she was thrown out of hotel lobbies when not accompanied by her white husband, told to move to the back of a bus and spat upon - and was driven to become ‘housebound, fearful and obsessive’. She later moved to the US, where she claims to have found a much greater acceptance as a South Asian.

Her struggle with identity first as an exile from India, then an Indian expatriate in Canada and finally as an immigrant in the United States has finally led to the contentment of being ‘an immigrant in a country of immigrants’. She has since then shifted into a ‘celebratory mode’ as a US citizen and writer, blending her several lives and backgrounds together with the intention of creating a ‘new immigrant’ literature. ‘Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new place as a loss, the loss of communal memory and the erosion of an original culture. I want to talk of arrival as gain. I want to write about others, who for economic, social, political or psychological reasons have had to uproot themselves from a life that was predictable to one where you make up your own rules.’ Reconciling her contemporary Western social values with her traditional Indian beliefs Mukherjee’s writing has become an expression of her expatriate experience. ‘Language is the only certainty I have and writing is the only home I have. But subsequently I also need to feel at home when I’m writing, to be familiar enough with my environment and to be able to exert my presence on the world around me’.

For that reason perhaps she has embraced her ‘Americaness’ so passionately. ‘I maintain that I am an American writer of Indian origin, not because I’m ashamed of my past, not because I’m betraying or distorting my past, but because my whole adult life has been lived here and this is my home now’, she says. She strongly opposes the use of hyphenation when discussing her origin, in order to ‘avoid otherization’ and the ‘self-imposed marginalization’ that comes with hyphenation. Rejecting hyphenation she chooses to describe herself as an American, rather than as an Asian American. ‘The term Asian-American is a marketing tool,’ she says and claims that such rejection of hyphenation is her refusal to ‘categorize the cultural landscape into a center and its peripheries’. But her repudiation of such labels, Mukherjee feels, has unfortunately also been misrepresented as ‘race treachery’ by many in the Indian community who she feels have ‘appointed themselves guardians of the purity of ethnic cultures’.

Although her writing is often racially classified as South Asian due to its thematic focus and cultural origin, she considers it simply to be ‘American literature’. However inspite of her insistence that her work be categorized as such, Mukherjee adamantly takes on the predominant mainstream American literature by rejecting the concept of minimalism, which is revered by influential American writers. ‘It is designed to keep anyone out with too much story to tell.’ she argues. Mukherjee herself prefers to use detail because it ‘works for the South Asian story’. ‘While images of suburban women driving around in a gas-suzzling SUVs, spending their day at the shopping malls would be considered decadent in the minimalist white fiction from a South Asian perspective these are the images of independent, liberated woman who has the freedom to go out and roam around’, she explains.

But acceptance for her South Asian writing, even in the U.S has not been easy to come by. ‘I once sent a short story to the New Yorker magazine from the ‘Management of Grief’ and they promptly sent in a reply saying that ‘Our readers will not be interested in the lives of Indians’, which came to me as a rude shock’, she recalls. ‘But America’s complexion is changing and Americans are beginning to see it for themselves. And what is really wonderful is that this is a two-way transformation,’ she says, echoing thoughts from her famous essay ‘The American Dreamer’. ‘As a writer, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me but it does not end until I show that I (along with the hundreds of thousands of immigrants like me) am minute by minute transforming America. That is how this two-way process: It affects both the individual and the national-cultural identity.’

‘Some stories are larger than their individual histories and good writing should always be able to connect with a global audience in a human archetypal way. Infact my motto has always been to make the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic. I’ve always been attempting to create and address issues which some one living in faraway places can identify with too even if I write about South Asia. My affiliation with readers should be on the basis of what they want to read, not in terms of my ethnicity or my race’, she insists.

For all her struggles and experiences as a writer, she describes her writing as a ‘celebration of freedom’ and says, ‘The experience of cutting myself off from a biological homeland and settling in an adopted homeland that is not always welcoming to its dark-complexioned citizens has tested me as a person but it has made me the writer I am today.’