Diaspora and Syal’s Anita and Me Essay

In her essay “My Two Lives,” Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian American, explains the balance between the identities of the two countries inside her heart, as well as her psychological struggle between her bicultural identities. She describes herself as an Indian-American because she moved with her family from India to the United States when she was very young. However, confused with her identity through her growth, she feels that she doesn’t belong to either of the two countries because of its completely different cultures. When she is at home, she deals with her parents in an Indian way, which is strange compared to the American way that she come across outside. She says that she has a distinctive identity in spite of her Indian appearance

A person has always been able to choose to what extent their cultural experiences affect their perspective. Amy Tan’s, “Two Kinds,” Bharati Mukherjee’s, “Two Ways to Belong in America,” and Robert Lake’s, “An Indian Father’s Plea,” all show how the main characters have chosen to let their experiences have an effect on their cultural identity. A person’s cultural experiences shape perception based on their own identifications and they may chose to assimilate to different cultures.

Immigrants’ refusal to appreciate a fused culture promotes division. Mukherjee questions the idea of immigrants losing their culture for American ideals: “Parents express rage or despair at their U.S.-born children's forgetting of, or indifference to, some aspects of Indian culture,” to that Mukherjee asks, “Is it so terrible that our children are discovering or are inventing homelands for themselves?” (Mukherjee, 1997, para. 28). Many immigrants experience anger when their children no longer hold the ideals of their home country. This tension produced within the household hinders the unity within a resident country’s culture and encourages division within families. Using herself as an example, Mukherjee provides another instance of anger directed at her from her own subculture: “They direct their rage at me because, by becoming a U.S.

She explains her thesis by stating “Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new place as a loss of communal memory and the erosion of an original culture. I want to talk of arrival as a gain,” (360). The key points of the text include Mukherjee describing her transition between Calcutta and the United States, and what it means to be and American and how culture influences that aspect. The information in the text is significant; the people of America are a part of a melting pot, sometimes it is hard for them to find the distinction between American culture and their own. The information in Mukherjee’s story is clear and specific, unbiased, and is relevant to the purpose of the story. I believe Mukherjee has achieved her purpose of informing her audience about cultural differences; she presents certain strengths and weaknesses within the text.

While Mukherjee decided to embrace the new American culture, her sister decided to stick to her Indian roots. Mukherjee struggles to try and find where she belongs because she is always changing for others rather than for herself. Encountering differences is something she dealt with on her journey of creating her identity, she states, “Nearly 20 years ago, when I was living in my husband’s ancestral homeland of Canada, I was always well-employed but never allowed to feel part of the local Quebec or larger Canadian society” (Mukherjee 293). While changing herself to conform for others, we can all take a lesson from Mukherjee. In life, we go through many changes because we are growing up, becoming more mature, and finding things we like or dislike. We tend to change because of the people we surround ourselves with, like friends or coworkers in order to be accepted. However, she did not seem happy to be forced into a position where she had to conform to the way people would talk to her all for the sake of her husband. This takes away from building and developing one’s own identity because it does not represent who you really are. In society, we are sort of growing away from that in a sense people are taking pride in their identities. For instance, immigrants, women, and races are all

Alexie portrays how stereotyping, perpetuated at the hand of the dominant white culture, often strips the Indians of hope and engenders fatalistic attitudes. The closed-mindedness of the average

At its most fundamental, diaspora focuses on the physical movement of people. However, comprehensive scholarship elevates “diaspora” beyond

No diasporic community manifests all of these characteristics or shares with the same intensity an identity with its scattered ancestral kin. In many respects, diasporas are not actual but imaginary and symbolic communities and political constructs; it is we who often call them into being.” (Palmer)

The heat wave of the summer of 1952, Djinda wiped her hands against her dress. Her mother would kill her, it was dirty and the pink had faded. Her feet were bare and she hurried across the burning sand toward the small house her father had built. They’d both compromised each of their cultures; her father could do whatever he wanted that involved his culture but as long as he built her mother a house. This had been before she was born; her mother had also wanted to go to the hospital for her birth but had compromised to let the women of her husband’s tribe in there with her – much to the doctor’s protests.

A person’s heritage and cultural identity may be lost when moving to a new country where the culture is different and other cultures are not easily accepted. In the short story “Hindus”, Bharati Mukherjee uses setting, characters and the plot to discuss what it is like to lose your cultural identity while being a visible minority in America. Mukherjee uses the plot to describe the events that take place in the main characters life that lead her to realize how different the culture and life is in the America’s. She also uses the characters as a way of demonstrating how moving away from one’s culture and heritage can change a person’s perspective and ways of thinking. Mukerjee also uses setting in her story to identity the physical differences in culture between living in India and America. Alike the setting and characters, the plot helps describe the loss of culture with a sequence of events.

Each piece of diaspora literature is laced with several underlying themes that make themselves visible in unique ways. Memory and family are two of these themes that seem to take root in several pieces. These themes enable the author to add dynamics and depth to anything that they write. A prime example of these dynamics can be found in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Third and Final Continent. Lahiri flawlessly uses both of these themes to bring her writing to the next level. In fact, the relationships, both familial and otherwise, formed in The Third and Final Continent are based heavily on shared memory and routine. Lahiri proves that shared memories play a huge part in

Through her tasteful selection of contemporary Indian influenced prose pieces, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the unique journey of Indian families established in America. Focusing on the intergenerational aspect of traditional households, Lahiri conveys the emotional rollercoaster that accompanies a person who is branded as a foreigner. In America, there exists a common misconception that immigrants who arrive in this country fully assimilate or seek to assimilate as time progresses. The category I chose was "The Dot of true Happiness." The dot which signifies the bindi, a traditional red mark worn by Indian people, is the source of true happiness among these immigrants.

Bharati Mukherjee is one of the accomplished diasporic writers. Her writing focuses mainly on women’s suppression, struggle to overcome the problems and attempt to attain identification. Bharati Mukherjee also depicts the cultural conflicts between the East and the West. When a person enters into a new culture from the old one, the conflict arises between the two cultures in the alien land. This paper explores how the female character, Jasmine is portrayed as protagonist in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee portrays Indian woman as protagonist in all her novels and the character takes brave decision to emigrate which is the first major step of heroism. The character is portrayed with the capable of facing adventures and creates own happiness and identity, unyielding by conventionality. In Jasmine (1989),

The present study is based on the idea of displacement as the major theme of the selected short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of maladies”. The book contains nine short stories and each one of them deals with the question of identity, alienation, and plight of those who are physically and psychologically displaced. But I would like to limit my studies to the three short stories from the collection viz. “When Mr. Pirzada came to dine”, Interpreter of Maladies”, and “Mrs. Sen’s”. The migration has become one of the most important issues of the contemporary world. Jhumpa Lahiri is also a diasporic writer like Salman Rushdie, V.S Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee. The characters in the prescribed stories are citizens of more than one country

An article written by Kara Somerville in 2008 provides an interesting insight on the issue of transnational identity, and how different factors tend to affect it. Especially the paragraph about the Indo-Canadian immigrants' emotional connections to their both home's offers a good viewpoint on Anil's own process of forming her identity. (p.27) The people interviewed all bring up how