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American Literary History, Volume 23, Number 3, Fall 2011, pp. 680-696
(Article)
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For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/alh/summary/v023/23.3.mukherjee.html
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Immigrant Writing: Changing
the Contours of a National
Literature†
Bharati Mukherjee*
I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce
and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince,
potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the
Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all
enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United
States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when
required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that
I will take this obligation freely without any mental reservation
or purpose of evasion, so help me God.
Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the United States of
America
The naturalization oath administered in a court of law makes
the acts of immigration and naturalization seem simple enough:
swear absolute renunciation of your former national allegiance,
promise readiness to defend the US Constitution and to assume
military posture when required, and you, foreign-born petitioner,
†
A version of this essay was delivered as the Gayley Lecture at the University of
California, Berkeley, on 21 April 2011.
*Bharati Mukherjee is the author of eight novels (most recently, Miss New India,
Desirable Daughters, and The Tree Bride); two collections of short stories
(Darkness and The Middleman and Other Stories); and the co-author, with Clark
Blaise, of two books of non-fiction (Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Sorrow
and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy), and numerous
essays on immigration and American culture. She has been Professor of English
at the University of California, Berkeley since 1989.
American Literary History, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 680– 696
doi:10.1093/alh/ajr027
# The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
American Literary History
too can be a legal American. But how exactly does the immigrant
absolutely renounce her earlier self, her fidelity to family history
and language “without any mental reservation or purpose of
evasion?”
Once upon a time, when the majority of immigrants were
Europeans fleeing poverty or religious and political oppression,
deliberate erasure may have been possible, and even desirable.
Philip Roth spoke with Terry Gross in 2009 of not knowing where
exactly his grandparents had come from because they had wanted
to forget it and they could never return anyway. Roth explained
that his grandparents never felt they belonged in that pocket of
Galicia, that they were never welcomed or even tolerated in their
homeland, so they had lost nothing in leaving it. They embraced
America as they understood it, totally, without reservation or
evasion. European immigrants who arrived in the early decades of
the twentieth century—as economic, political, religious refugees—
were grateful to the US for asylum and opportunities for selfbetterment. There was no going back to the homeland that had
failed them. And though the majority of these immigrants lived in
ethnic ghettoes, assimilation into America was the goal they
desired for their US-born offspring. The oath of citizenship could
have been written explicitly for them.
But what of those immigrants who were profoundly rooted in
their countries of origin, whose bond to the land was sealed in
blood through generations? How do such immigrants, especially
those destined to be writers, erase memory of the land from which
they had emigrated without mental reservation or purpose of
evasion? After all, writers are creatures of mental reservation and
evasion.
And what of the body of contemporary immigrant American
literature written by recent arrivals like Edwidge Danticat, Junot
Dı́az, Aleksandar Hemon and Gary Shteyngart, for whom English is
not the mother tongue, and who have no intention of willfully
erasing their premigration linguistic and historical inheritance? Some
erosion of homeland legacy is inevitable. Edwidge Danticat, in
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Writer at Work (2010), a compilation of brilliant lectures on the inspirational sources for her writing
(delivered as the 2008 Toni Morrison Lecture Series at Princeton),
offers this insight: “One of the advantages of being an immigrant is
that two very different countries are forced to merge within you. The
language you were born speaking and the one you will probably die
speaking have no choice but to find a common place in your brain
and regularly merge there” (112; emphasis added).
Danticat views the immigrant mindscape as a site of automatic coalescence of memory and experience rather than one of
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determined compartmentalization. In addition, Danticat’s concept
of migrant-memory includes both the lingering residue of personal
experience and the orally transmitted communal and familial
remembrances of the homeland especially of historical incidences
of brutal repression.
The immigrant US artist who shares Danticat’s belief that the
brain compulsively and continually merges past and present, there
and here, mother tongue and learned tongue, and who sees points
of convergence between national history and personal life story,
must reinterpret T. S. Eliot’s reflections on the relationship
between the individual “talent” and the literary traditions of the
countries of which she is—and/or he has been—a citizen.
In his famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
which demanded of the artist a “historical sense,” Eliot was
addressing a homogenous community rooted in European traditions. “[T]he historical sense,” Eliot wrote, “compels a man to
write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a
feeling that the whole literature of Europe from Homer, and within
it the whole literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (1582). Danticat’s generation of immigrant US authors appear to have no quarrel with
Eliot’s demand for a “historical sense,” but for a significant
number, the homeland histories are non-European, and the multiracial, multicultural US in which they compose literature has a plurality of narrative traditions. Any attempt at Eliotic “wholeness”
and simultaneity requires the immigrant artist first to recognize the
deep disjuncture, even hostility, between her premigration “historical sense” and the mainstream American’s.
For contemporary immigrants arriving from repressive societies where provocative national literature is banned, the individual
author’s “historical sense” of homeland tradition may be deficient.
In Create Dangerously, Danticat, who as a schoolgirl in Haiti was
exposed exclusively to French literary classics and who did not
discover inspiring insurgent Haitian literature until she arrived in
Brooklyn as an immigrant in her mid-teens, describes herself as a
“literary orphan,” borrowing that phrase from Jan J. Dominique’s
Mémoire d’une amnésique (62). A “literary orphan” has to improvise modes of literary delivery that best serve the urgency and particular shape of her transnational material. “Inasmuch as our
stories are the bastard children of everything we have ever experienced and read,” Danticat writes, “my desire is to tell some of my
stories in a collaged manner, to merge my own narratives with the
oral and written narratives of others” (62), and she credits Jacques
Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée and Dominique’s Mémoire
d’une amnésique with having unleashed this desire.
American Literary History
Danticat’s generation of non-European immigrant American
authors are also creating an expanded, elastic American English
vocabulary capacious enough to embody the fusion of languages
in which they live. And many among them are articulating their
break with the narrative traditions of American immigrant fiction
as it was practiced in the 1950s and 1960s, and, in speeches and
collected essays, are announcing their transnational aesthetics. The
one prominent exception is Ha Jin, who, in The Writer as Migrant
(2008), a slim volume of lectures on migrant aesthetics, chooses to
place himself in collegial relationship with prominent, and mostly
European, displaced writers, such as Conrad, Kundera, Sebald, and
Naipaul, and not with contemporary, immigrant American authorrefugees from repressive nation-states; who works within traditional, Western narrative conventions; and, who jettisons the
options of writing in his mother tongue or in Chinglish in favor of
simple, serviceable English prose that is easily accessible to
American readers, whom he has targeted as his primary audience.
In The Writer as Migrant, he explains his choice of conventional
English as medium: “[S]ome migrant writers . . . have to make
their living outside their mother tongues . . . their survival depends
more or less on estrangement from the mother tongue, and their
ambition may lie in another language in which they have to figure
out how to survive” (79 –80).
I shall use “Literature of New Arrival” as the descriptive term
for the current direction in US immigrant literature. I am arguing
that, in the US, we now have a sufficient body of “Literature of New
Arrival” to distinguish it from traditional—canonical—US
immigrant literature. In the past, scholars have not recognized “literature of the immigrant experience” as distinct in its aims, scope,
and linguistic dexterity from postcolonial literature, literature of
globalization, or diasporic literature, and have misapplied literary
theories that are relevant to literatures of colonial damage, nationbuilding, dispersal, exile, voluntary expatriation, and cultural and
economic globalization but are inappropriate templates for a literature that centers on the nuanced process of rehousement after the
trauma of forced or voluntary unhousement. I urge scholars to come
up with a new literary theory that provides a more complete, more
insightful entry into the “literature of the immigrant experience,”
and enables a fuller understanding of this emerging sub-genre,
“Literature of New Arrival.”
It is imperative that readers and scholars accept the new demographic reality in the US, a reality reflected in the “Literature of
New Arrival,” that embraces broken narratives of disrupted lives,
proliferating plots, outsize characters and overcrowded casts, the
fierce urgency of obscure history, the language fusion (Spanglish,
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I urge scholars to come
up with a new literary
theory that provides a
more complete, more
insightful entry into the
“literature of the
immigrant experience,”
and enables a fuller
understanding of this
emerging sub-genre,
“Literature of New
Arrival.”
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Immigrant Writing
Chinglish, Hinglish, Banglish), the challenging shapelessness, and
complexities of alien social structures. We will adjust to this loud
emerging voice, because politically we will adjust to our new
demography.
In March 2011, we learned from the results of the 2010
census that, in the past decade, Asians and Hispanics accounted
for nearly all of the national population growth. The Hispanic
community grew by 43%; the Asian community also expanded by
double digits. By the end of the current decade, white school children, nation-wide, will be in the minority. In three decades or
perhaps much sooner, non-Hispanic whites will become America’s
largest minority. The 50 million Hispanics now in the US constitute about 16% of the total population. Asians now account for 5%
nationally, but in the past decade in California, Asian immigration
actually outnumbered Hispanic. White Americans are significantly
older, with fewer children, averaging 41 years of age, Asians 35,
Hispanics 27. The Asian-Hispanic demographic is youthful and
ascendant; their contributions to American society are already
evident, but their mature achievements—those famous second- and
third-generation philosophers and mathematicians that John Adams
spoke of—are yet to come.
For César Conde, president of Univision, the Spanish language television network, responding to the census data,
“Hispanics are fueling US population growth, and the changing
face of America” (qtd. in Univision n.p.). Behind the cliché of a
“changing face” (reminiscent of Time magazine’s prescient
“Browning of America” cover 21 years ago) stands a literary truth:
as the face changes, so does the character, so do the adventures, so
does the language.
Immigrant lives are often chaotic, crowded, and loud. Rules
of decorum adhered to in the homeland are impossibly shuffled in
the adopted land. Much gets lost in migration, like wives and husbands, and even children. Think of the back-stories of those
women playing mah-jongg in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club (1989),
the husbands and children left behind in China in the chaos of war
and revolution, and the rebirthing in California. Immigrant literature and immigrant lives are inseparable; form follows function
and much of what these writers are telling us is: my life is the
disjunctive aggregate of the life I led, the life I’m leading, the life
I’m striving for; the story of my life has no ready-made models
in the works of iconic Anglo-American writers. Nathaniel
Hawthorne, T. S. Eliot, and Henry James are probably cringing at
their first literary encounter with first-generation immigrant experience, but I detect inspiring sympathy in the works of iconoclasts
like Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.
American Literary History
The “Literature of New Arrival,” birthed by the foreign-born
or in some cases, like Amy Tan and Oscar Hijuelos, by their
America-born, alert, and closely attached children, is the most
exciting literary event of my long writing life. (Since I have drawn
examples of this literary event from works by authors who grew
up with a language other than English, I have arbitrarily excluded
American writers of Indian origin, as English remains a lingua
franca in sovereign India, and has for them the familiarity of a
step-mother-tongue.)
Willa Cather in her Nebraska trilogy featuring Scandinavian
and Bohemian immigrants in O, Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the
Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918), and André Dubus III in
House of Sand and Fog (1999) wrote about immigrants nearly a
100 years apart, without being immigrants themselves. Cather’s
immigrants are impoverished non-English-speaking Europeans,
who have fled a life of greater poverty in their homelands, and
who accept assimilation as the path to survival. Dubus’s immigrants are Iranian and Muslim; they have suffered severe social
demotion in restarting their lives in the US, and are not at all
eager for smooth assimilation; their journey ends in bitterness and
death. Both Cather and Dubus serve as empathetic mainstream
filterers of tortured immigrant lives, unfurling alien immigrant
psyches within existing American narrative modes, and therefore
making the unfamiliar elements of their conflict between Retention
of Old World culture and Letting Go comprehensible to mainstream America. The waves of southern- and eastern-European
immigration in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries,
unlike Cather’s Scandinavians, have been in our cultural DNA for
well over a 100 years: Ellis Island; huddled masses; babushkas,
tear-stained, wrinkled cheeks, babes-in-arms; and topping it all,
the Statue of Liberty. Today’s immigrants, whether they have
scaled a fence, crossed a desert, been stowed in a truck or a boat,
or arrived—visa in hand—on a 747, will also be absorbed. An
America made up purely of New England Puritan stock is now
literally unimaginable.
Henry Roth’s evocation of Jewish immigration, Call It Sleep
(1934), is a foundation text of early immigrant writing:
stream-of-consciousness, modernist, lyrical, and bruising. An
immigrant novel from a poor Jew then living in Harlem, and an
ardent communist, published in the depth of the Depression—yet
it has none of the seething proletarian rage of Michael Gold’s
Jews Without Money (1930), or the pugnacity of James T. Farrell’s
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), nor the sunny optimism of another first-generation immigrant, William Saroyan’s
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The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, published in the
same year.
Though written in elegant English, Call It Sleep evokes a
Yiddish-speaking home-world in which a child’s encounters with
the outer—the “American” world of Irish cops and Catholic
schoolboys, for example—are painful and perplexing, and even
tongue-thickening. Those encounters with the outer world are also
thrilling, liberating, sexualizing and violent, offering access to a
world defensively sealed off at home. In short, it is a
coming-of-age novel, and an assimilationist text, from a (then) surprise provenance. It realizes that within immigration, there is no
shelter for innocence, no protection against dark knowledge.
From its power and confidence, its manipulation of English
without fracturing or stereotyping in order to imply a deeply
ethnic world, spring the works of Grace Paley and Bernard
Malamud, Leonard Michaels, and Saul Bellow and Cynthia Ozick,
among hundreds more. It is Gogol’s overcoat to succeeding
generations.
Henry Roth was a Galician-born, Brooklyn-raised CCNY
graduate; his book came out in the sophomore year of another
Brooklyn-born CCNY English major, Bernard Malamud. The parallels between Call It Sleep and The Assistant (1957) are striking;
Malamud, too, inflected English rather than fracturing it, to suggest
a world, or an underlying moral universe, beyond the natural. Henry
Roth and Bernard Malamud taught us that immigrant material is
adaptable to the modernist aesthetic. Roth’s narrator, David Schearl,
is a Jewish boy moved by Christian symbols; Malamud’s Frankie
Alpine is an Italian Catholic thief, struggling to find his moral
center, and so in love with the daughter of the poor grocer whom
he has robbed, beaten, and still steals from—that he then gets circumcised to become suitable to the grocer’s daughter.
The Jewish contribution to every aspect of American life,
and America’s eventual embrace of it, speaks to a two-way
assimilation in line with the aesthetic of Jewish immigration, as
Philip Roth had explained to Terry Gross. I’m here, and I’m safe
for the first time in my life, thank you very much. And because I’m
here, even if you don’t realize it yet, even if you won’t let me in
your neighborhood or your college or into your country club,
you’ve also been changed. Throughout his writing life (and here
I am borrowing from our friendship of over 20 years), when critics
or audiences whispered the great names of Yiddish literature in
Malamud’s ear, implying that he must be influenced by Bashevis
Singer or Sholem Aleichem, or other Jewish masters in various
languages, he responded, “Hawthorne, Melville and James.”
Malamud was as “American” as his friend John Cheever.
American Literary History
In the second half of the last century, all America became
just a little Jewish, because of the movies, the comedians, and the
literary outpouring. My China-born, Upper West Side-raised,
adopted granddaughters in New York light their friends’ menorahs,
love latkes and bagels with lox schmeer, bought, I might add,
from the Korean bagel shop. In coming decades, we will all
become just a little Asian and just a little Hispanic, because that’s
the way America works. Grinding poverty in the face of plenty;
faces pressed against the windows of the great American marketplace; pinched lives in the midst of abundance; rejection, death,
and madness in the face of tolerance: that is one near-universal
aspect of early immigration fiction. The flip side is that hard work
and education will erase the deficit within a generation.
Another aspect of early immigrant fiction in the US is the
ardent upholding of assimilation. Think of Saul Bellow’s gusty
exuberance in the first words of The Adventures of Augie March—
“I’m an American, Chicago-born—that somber city”—(though
Bellow was in fact Montreal-born, the son of Russian immigrants
to Canada, and an immigrant to the US himself ) an in-your-face
claimant to the American tradition of the make-your-fate, openroad picaresque. Think also of Henderson the Rain King—Eugene
Henderson, an Ernest Hemingway clone in his grandiosity, his
paternalism, a parody of American wealth and optimism, but
inwardly a hunger-artist in Africa bringing death and destruction
to credulous natives. Or think of Nathanael West’s (born Nathan
Weinstein) 1933 black comedy, Miss Lonelyhearts. What could be
more American than that, at first sight: an advice-to-the-lovelorn
columnist who falls in love with the loveless and is murdered by
the husband of one of them. In these books, a Jewish author has
turned the tables on America; it is America’s swagger and interference with the powerless and the pathetic in the name of higher
purpose that brings destruction.
With Philip Roth, a third-generation American, which is to
say an immigrant no longer but a mainstream American with some
lingering ethnic issues, sexuality with some guilt on the side, the
struggle is about finding his way in a soured, corrupted society.
And then there is, inevitably, the language and comic timing in
Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). For Roth, finding acceptance in
America is not the issue as it had been for the first and second
generations. Learning to tolerate America is. The “immigrant”
bites back. That too is very American.
“Influence” is an ultimately inadequate word in explaining
the succession of novels that may follow in the wake of a hugely
successful maiden effort, but I will say this: foundation works
instill confidence. Call It Sleep and Miss Lonelyhearts were
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remembered and kept alive, and not just at CCNY. That same
bleak Depression year (but a year that sparkled for ethnicities),
Lonigan and The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze
appeared, and they, too, roused their communities and generated a
broader readership. Such works make you realize your inner
ambition.
When I read V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961)
as an MFA student at the Writers Workshop, University of Iowa, I
had not known of the existence of a Trinidadian Indian community,
founded by indentured laborers who had been shipped in by the
colonial British to work as coolies in plantations after the official
abolition of slavery in 1837. Though the novel was set in Trinidad,
a country I still have not seen, and though its characters were
unlike any Hindu Indians I had ever known, A House for
Mr. Biswas gave me a consciousness boost seven years before
I wrote my first novel. I knew that Naipaul’s material was a part, a
strange part, of me. It exposed me, who had grown up in urban
India at a time of urgent nation-building, to an unfamiliar, New
World concept of “Indianness” as well as to the history of an
Indian dispersal, that had not been incorporated into the national
narrative in the India of the 1950s and early 1960s. At the time,
I did not read that novel as an evocation of an immigrant community of (in Naipaul’s phrase from The Overcrowded Barracoon,
1971) a shipwrecked people, permanently stranded on an alien,
unwelcoming shore. But it gave me the confidence to write about
a place and society—my place, my times—I had not encountered
in the literature I studied for my MFA, and later my PhD degrees.
I can only imagine that the successes of Oscar Hijuelos and Amy
Tan had the same effect on their communities.
A recent immigrant American puts into play the author’s
awareness of foreign (often US) interference with national development in the homeland. Danticat’s fury at America’s original
sin—because of its own slave-holding past—of shunning
Toussaint L’Ouverture’s successful slave revolt against the French,
its later invasion and occupation, and its reflexive habit of backing
ruthless dictators, is palpable. But her critique of Haiti’s own
color-coded racism, its submission to thuggery, its passivity in the
face of naked thievery, its sexual violence against women, is
directed inwardly as well.
But the question Danticat raises is: what would you do in
their place? If a redeemer miraculously emerged, would the US
permit it? The answer, universally in Latin America and the
Caribbean, based on the historical record, is sadly, No!
In other words, the aliens have landed, and they are writing
their own stories. Immigration holds too many secrets, too many
American Literary History
back stories, too many fears, too many memories, and too many
enemies for standard judgment. To name a few of its prominent
authors: Cristina Garcı́a, Junot Dı́az, Edwidge Danticat, Ha Jin,
Yi-Yun Li, Chang-rae Lee, Geling Yan, Dao Strom, Monique
Truong, Garry Shteyngart, Olga Grushin, David Bezmozgis,
Aleksandar Hemon, Téa Obreht, Walter Abish, Ariel Dorfman,
Nuruddin Farah, Lan Cao, and Jessica Hagedorn.
For immigrants who have fled to the US to escape or to
protest oppressive regimes in their homelands, immigration is loss
of community, of language, and of extended family. It is to give
up on the dream of a better future in one’s home country. It is to
cut oneself off from history and to condemn oneself to a world of
ghosts and memories. It is to admit that having survived terror and
poverty means nothing. It is to submit to a present in which past
nightmares are continually relived. It is to trust few but family and
to feed on family stories of horror and heroics in the abandoned
country. At the same time, immigrants are determined to remake
their identities, or at least their children’s, even if the larger
society fails to recognize that goal. If they wanted to resist selftransformation, if they wanted to remain immured from their adoptive society and unmolested by its unfamiliar culture, if they
wanted to confine their interest exclusively to events in the homeland, and to communicate only in the mother tongue, they would
be exiles or expatriates, not immigrants.
A second foundation text in what I am calling the American
“Literature of New Arrival” is The Mambo Kings Play Songs of
Love (1989), a sex-and-music-flooded, Cuban history and
pop-culture-packed, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by the
New York-born Cuban American, Oscar Hijuelos. Hijuelos was
the first Latin American novelist to win the Pulitzer Prize. Junot
Dı́az won the Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
in 2008. Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer for her first collection of
stories. I was the first naturalized US citizen to win the National
Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction. Cristina Garcı́a and
Edwidge Danticat have won just about every other honor. This
literature has come into its own in a very short time.
James Joyce set the table when Stephen Daedalus exclaimed,
“History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” a
sentiment echoed in Faulkner and Rushdie and throughout Latin
America, but it is a central credo with Caribbean and Latin
American authors (28). The nightmare is literal, and has a name,
like Trujillo, Papa Doc, Castro, Pinochet, the Colonels and
Admirals of Argentina, and various Central American despots.
And, of course, the CIA. Writers from nearly any Latin American
country can recount the family tales, the torture and brutalities, the
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genocides, and at the very least, the kleptocracy. Junot Dı́az
writes, “In Santo Domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a
supernatural shadow” (245– 46). That’s a good beginning; stories
that cast supernatural shadows are destined for immortality.
Danticat, from the French side of the same blood-soaked
island, has similar tales. So many people die, or have been killed;
there must be a repository for the memories that remain. The dead
will walk the earth, looking for their bodies. And from those
waking nightmares spring works like Danticat’s The Dew Breaker,
Dı́az’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Cristina
Garcı́a’s Dreaming in Cuban.
The Dew Breaker is a collection of linked stories (which
seems to be a favorite form of the immigrant writer). A Macoute
(or “Dew Breaker”) waits in his car, smoking incessantly, on
assignment to assassinate a preacher who had become too popular,
hence a threat to Papa Doc. Thirty years later, he is a humble
Brooklyn barber dying of pulmonary fibrosis, the beloved father of
one of the main narrators, a Brooklyn-born sculptor. When the
daughter sculpts her homage to her father, he throws it into a lake,
saying, “I am not deserving,” and all the stories and secrets unfurl
(20). Her mother is the sister of the pastor he had effectively
killed. They have not spoken of the murder in 30 years. In the
Brooklyn-Haitian churches, the daughter thinks she “sees” the
other killers, old men now, sedate immigrants, like herself.
Here is her father as a younger man:
In his work there were many approaches. Some of his colleagues tried to go as far from the neighborhoods where they
grew up as possible when doing a task like this. Others relished returning to the people in their home areas, people
who’d refused cough syrup from a mother or a sister as she
sat up the whole night coughing up blood. Some would
rather “disappear” the schoolteachers who’d told them that
they had heads like mules and would never learn to read or
write. Others wanted to take revenge on the girls who were
too self-important, who never smiled when their names were
called out or when they were hissed at or whistled at in the
street. Others still wanted to beat the girls’ parents for asking
their last names and judging their lineage not illustrious
enough. But he liked to work on people he didn’t know,
people around whom he could create all sorts of evil tales.
(187–88)
Consider for a moment the encapsulated history in that brief
paragraph. The need to create false tales around his victims
American Literary History
(in this case, the pastor is Protestant, therefore deserving of death
for having deprived Catholics of salvation); the class resentments
that can be assuaged with a single bullet or a few nights of ingenious torture; the killing of pastors, fathers and teachers; the raping
of haughty girls. In a brief paragraph, we are given the pathology
of fascism: this is the Haitian version of a low-grade SS officer;
evil is truly banal.
Danticat presents a world in which resentment is valorized.
Her Haiti is a color-stratified world that recruits the poorest and
the most dispossessed, and empowers their murderous resentment
to do their worst, under the guidance and blanket authority of the
state’s apparatus. They get their guns, their dark glasses, and a
license to kill, torture, rape, and steal. The question posed in her
fiction: how does a citizenry, even that portion of it now relocated
far from the homeland, adapt to the reality of their past, and the
nightmare of familial memory? The mass erasure in the oath of
citizenship is insufficient. Danticat’s Haiti is also a country
blessed with heroes, nearly all of whom were assassinated. Her
writing acknowledges the national heroes, and celebrates the matrilineal strength of the Haitian family. It is the story-telling passion
of grandmothers, mothers, and aunts that transforms individual
acts of failed political resistance into inspiring epics of political
martyrdom.
To read recent US “Literature of Arrival” is to immerse
oneself in the history of the homeland the immigrant author has
left. The mode of delivery of preimmigration history differs from
author to author. While Danticat confines her dramatization of
Haitian history to remembering and story-telling within the family,
Junot Dı́az, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, externalizes Dominican history in extended Dave Eggers-/David Foster
Wallace-style footnotes.
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Dı́az’s dramatization starts up at the top with a dictator—Trujillo—a society rotting
from its head, a diabolical god-and-father figure wielding a
machete or AK-47, a breakdown of society reflected in torture, the
casual breaking of a family by killing the father in order to rape
and dispose of the wives and daughters; the mother’s escape
through madness and the washing-up on foreign shores, often
American, a “survivor’s” life of living nightmare.
Here is Dı́az, describing the after-effects of a beating by
Trujillo’s police of a girl made pregnant by a member of a prominent, Trujillo-supporting family. In Dı́az’s world of tropical surrealism, she survives by an intervention of a magic mongoose, and
by Dı́az’s injection of American pop culture: “like Superman in
Dark Knight Returns, who drained from an entire jungle the
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phototonic energy he needed to survive Coldbringer, so did our
Beli resolve out of her anger her own survival. In other words, her
coraje saved her life” (148). She is taken to a cane field, beaten
and broken, and rid of the baby she was carrying. As she stumbles
out of the cane field, guided by the magic mongoose that knows
that though she has lost this baby but that her future contains a son
(Oscar Wao) and a daughter (Lola), she is picked up by a group of
musicians in a truck:
Now check it: the truck held a perico ripiao conjunto,
fresh from playing a wedding in Ocoa. Took all the
courage they had not to pop the truck in reverse and peel
out of there. Cries of, It’s a baka, a ciguapa, no, a haitiano!
Silenced by the lead singer who shouted, It’s a girl! The
band members lay Beli among their instruments, swaddled
her with their chacabanas, and washed her face with the
water they carried for the radiator and for cutting down the
klerin. Down the band peered, rubbing their nervous hands
through thinning hair.
What do you think happened?
I think she was attacked.
By a lion, offered the driver.
Maybe she fell out of a car.
It looks like she fell under a car.
Trujillo, she whispered.
Aghast, the band looked at one another.
We should leave her.
The guitarrista agreed. She must be a subversive. If they
find her with us the police will kill us too.
Put her back on the road, begged the driver. Let the lion
finish her.
Silence, and then the lead singer lit a match and held it in
the air and in the splinter of light was revealed a bluntfeatured woman with the golden eyes of a chabine. We’re
not leaving her, the lead singer said in a curious cibaen
accent, and only then did Beli understand that she was saved.
(150–51)
An important contribution of immigrant literature, going
back to Call It Sleep, is feeling the intimacy of brutality. We knew
the Ton-Ton Macoutes were brutal, but we had no access to their
interiority, nor to the fears of civilians they ravaged. We knew
Trujillo was a monster, a murderer and torturer of at least 50,000
Dominicans in a population of less than 10 million, and an exterminator of thousands of Haitian undocumented residents—but we
American Literary History
did not experience the brutality of his regime with the intensity,
the texture, that only fiction can deliver.
The dialectic in Dı́az’s novel makes us ask: what is the
purpose, in such a man-made hell, of getting an education, a job,
saving money, marrying, striving for self-betterment, building a
fine home, when all that such aspirations and achievements do is
engender envy or jealousy, and invite a home invasion by the
State? Pride and ambition must be stifled, beauty concealed,
knowledge and education denied.
In Oscar Wao’s Dominican Republic, the political climate
and culture turn men into feckless philanderers, and women into
sexual fetishes. Lola, who is Oscar’s sister and the wife of the
novel’s narrator, observes as she leaves her husband for his goatish
behavior, “Ten million Trujillos is all we are” (324).
In a spermatozoid sense, Trujillo aspired to be the father of
his country, and through his own efforts, to “whiten” the
Dominican population. Even his lone charitable act—the opening
of his borders to Jewish refugees from the Holocaust—had a
whitening motive. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
(a Spanglish rendering of the name Oscar Wilde), a nerdish,
300-pound virgin Dominican male well into his 20s, a reader of
science fiction, and an aspiring writer living in New Jersey—his
virginity being the “wondrous” part—makes a trip back to his
abuela in the Dominican Republic, and on that trip, falls in love
with an older, semi-retired prostitute, who is his abuela’s
neighbor, and also the mistress of a policeman. Love and its
consequences make for the “brief” part of Oscar’s life.
The “Literature of New Arrival” demonstrates another
schism, and that’s its sexual segregation. This too, perhaps, reflects
the reality of immigration and the cultures from which it springs.
The bond between mothers and daughters, grandmothers and aunts
and sisters dominate the work, to date, of Edwidge Danticat. The
exquisitely balanced, highly formal Joy Luck Club is also entirely
populated by women. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, which
unlike The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is exquisitely balanced and highly formal in construction, is entirely populated by
women. The men have been discarded, lost in transit. And while
there are many women entering and exiting their books, usually
essentialized, Dı́az and Hijuelos are connoisseurs of, and eventually critics of, unbridled machismo.
And what about the non-native-English-speaking immigrant
authors’ manipulation of standard American English? You learn a lot
of Creole (kryol) reading Danticat, and probably more Spanish than
you can absorb reading Dı́az. It is not the same as Anthony
Burgess’s synthetic Russo-English in A Clockwork Orange. Dı́az’s
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uncompromising use of Spanglish and his unexplained references to
DR history are more reminiscent of Rushdie’s delivery of Indian
history and use of Hinglish in Midnight’s Children (1981). The
message underlying Dı́az’s relentless packing of DR history and
lexicon into his American novel is this: the world has had to adjust to
American small differences; now Americans must go with the DR
flow.
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I recognize the
same brash authorial self-confidence, the swagger, I had first
encountered in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Thirty
years ago, Clark Blaise (my husband), reviewed it on the front
page of the New York Times Book Review. He chose to treat that
novel as a foundation text for post-Raj, English-language Indian
novelists. I quote at length from that review to underscore Dı́az’s
Rushdie-like refusal to pander to audience demands for easy
accessibility to alien immigrant experiences:
As a Bombay book, which is to say, a big-city book,
Midnight’s Children is coarse, knowing, comfortable with
Indian pop culture and, above all, aggressive. Salman Rushdie
assumes that the difference between Colaba and Chembur are
as important, and can be made as interesting as the difference
between Brooklyn and the Bronx. “We headed north,” the
narrator Saleem notes, “past Breach Candy Hospital and
Mahalaxmi Temple, north along Hornby Vellard past
Vallabhhai Patel Stadium and Haji Ali’s island tomb. . . We
were heading towards the anonymous mass of tenements and
fishing-villages and textile-plants and film-studios that the city
became in these northern zones.” Its characters speak in many
voices: “Once upon a time we had Radha and Krishna, and
Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we were
not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer
Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.” Much of the dialogue (the best
parts) reads like the hip vulgarity—yaar!—of the Hindi-film
magazine. The desiccated syllables of T.S. Eliot, so strong an
influence upon other Anglo-Indian writers, are gone.
Midnight’s Children sounds like a continent finding its voice.
How Indian is it? It is slangy, and a taste for India (or a
knowledge of Bombay) obviously heightens the response.
Here is a description of a café where Saleem’s mother goes
secretly to meet her dishonored first husband: “The Pioneer
Café was not much when compared to the Gaylords and
Kwalitys of the city’s more glamorous parts; a real rutputty
joint, with painted boards proclaiming LOVELY LASSI and
FANTABULOUS FALOODA and BHEL-PURI BOMBAY
American Literary History
FASHION, with filmi playback music blaring out from a
cheap radio by the cash-till, a long narrow greeny room lit by
flickering neon, a forbidding world in which broken-toothed
men sat at reccine-covered tables with crumpled cards and
expressionless eyes.” Very Indian. (19)
If you do not know what Falooda, Lassi, and Reccine are, if you
do not respond to the evocation of Gaylords and Kwality, too bad.
The uncomfortable fact is: many of these gifted writers love
their homelands, and their love for the homelands they have fled
is likely to be more complex and ineffaceable than their love of
America, which has sheltered them, but which, as Danticat suggests, has colluded in sustaining a dictatorship in the immigrant’s
homeland. The newly arrived immigrant-artist is likely to be less
a petitioner for inclusion in America as had been the European
immigrants of Philip Roth’s grandparents’ generation, and more
an edgy critic. The “Literature of New Arrival” simultaneously
expresses the necessity for escape from the repressive institutions
and the poverty that life in the homeland entails and the anguish
of separation from family and homeland. To survive in life is to
endure the pain and inevitability of “unhousement.” Death brings
the immigrant the only hope of permanent return to the homeland, even if that return is in a casket or as ashes in an urn.
The works that emerge from this struggle to find a “common
place” between the languages and countries of the brain and the
heart will cast that supernatural shadow Junot Dı́az identified as
Dominican. I feel that the academy has not yet developed the grid
and the grammar to explore American works that are not quite
“American” in a canonical sense. Such a literature possesses the
one essential quality of all great writing: energy. And energy is
released in the mangling and macerating of fused languages in the
reckless violation of outmoded forms, and in characters pinched
and pulled into supernatural shapes.
Works Cited
Blaise, Clark. “A Novel of India’s
Coming of Age.” Review of
Midnight’s Children by Salman
Rushdie. New York Times Book Review
19 Apr. 1981: 1þ.
Danticat, Edwidge. Create
Dangerously: The Immigrant Writer at
Work. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010.
———. The Dew Breaker. 2004.
New York: Vintage, 2005.
Dı́az, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead,
2007.
Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the
Individual Talent.” The Norton
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Anthology of American Literature. Ed.
Nina Baym. 7th ed. Vol. D.
New York: Norton, 2007. 1581–84.
Jin, Ha. The Writer as Migrant.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Ed. Hans
Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe
and Claus Melchoir. Afterword by
Michael Groden. New York: Vintage,
1986.
Univision Communications, Inc.
“Univision Insights: 2010 Census
Shows Hispanic Population at 50
Million Strong and Accounting for 56
Percent of U.S. Population Growth.”
Reuters.com. 25 Mar. 2011. 4 Aug.
2011 ,http://www.reuters.com/article/
2011/03/25/idUS220789+25-Mar-2011+
BW20110325..