America inside out
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Some of the most important stories of contemporary America are being written by immigrant writers says S. SHANKAR.
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SOME of the most important contemporary American literature is being written by immigrants to America and their children. Celebrated writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank McCourt, Sandra Cisneros, and Jamaica Kincaid are amongst those producing this literature. Others, like the Mexican-American poet from Texas, Teresa Acosta and the Korean-American novelist from Hawaii, Gary Pak, are less well known across the world, though no less deserving. A writer producing this literature may lack an American passport or, indeed, any kind of legal document permitting entry into the country. Yet it is still American literature because it is written in America and concerns America. It is a literature in which America can be found standing proud, with all its promise of freedom for those fleeing religious and social orthodoxy; but America is also stripped naked here, in all its reality of exploitation for those with nothing to offer but their cheap labour. It is a literature of protest and of celebration. Emerging in the last 30 years or so, it is a literature in which to read the story of contemporary America.
The origins of this literature — of what may be called "a new literature of immigration", for, there is an older immigrant literature that was produced during the first few decades of the 20th Century — lie in a legislative act of the 1960s. American immigration laws till the mid-1960s were marked by quotas governing who could be admitted to the U.S. based on country of origin. The laws — in keeping with American racial self-imagination — systematically encouraged white immigrants from Europe and placed obstacles before most others. The Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the national origins formula and thus opened America's door to a great variety of immigrants. In the 30 years that followed — for by the mid 1990s, the mood towards immigration amongst the political elite of the U.S. had begun to turn restrictive again — more than twenty million immigrants entered the U.S., more than during any previous period. The presence of Indians in the U.S. in large numbers today is a result of the 1965 act. Statistics show that more than half of the twenty million immigrants have come from seven countries: Mexico, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Korea, India, and the Dominican Republic. The new literature of immigration captures the experiences of these immigrants.
Defining an immigrant is not easy. We can say an immigrant chooses — though the actual degree of choice can vary according to the social privilege of the immigrant — to journey to a new life in a new country with new laws. And we can add that also distinctive about an immigrant is the depth of engagement, willing or involuntary, with the "host" country into which the immigrant, in whatever spirit, enters. An immigrant differs from a traveller, a tourist, a slave transported across an ocean, or even an exile. An exile may live in a "host" country for as long as an immigrant but without engaging it with the same intensity.
The importance of a literature of immigration springs from this thoroughgoing engagement with the host country on the part of the immigrant. Because of this engagement, an immigrant literature is able to bring scrutiny to the deepest acknowledged and unacknowledged beliefs and practices of the "host" country even as it captures the wrenching experience of relocation in an alien country for the immigrant.
The Filipina-American writer Jessica Hagedorn is one of the more distinctive voices of the new literature of immigration that has emerged from the 1965 legislative revisions. An immigrant herself, in plays, poems and novels since the 1970s she has explored the experience of Filipino immigrants to the U.S. Her most important work is her first novel, the startlingly original Dogeaters. Published in 1990, Dogeaters is a brilliant and inventive narrative set mostly in the Philippines. Nevertheless, it too touches on the immigrant experience through one of its chief characters, who narrates some of the novel from her current vantage point as an immigrant in the U.S. The relationship of Filipino immigrants to the U.S. is inseparable from Filipino experience of occupation by the U.S. from the late-19th to the mid-20th Century. Dogeaters explores the powerful presence of American political and ideological influence in the Philippines. For many immigrants, there can be no neat separation between life in the U.S. and life in the "homeland". This is one of the lessons of Hagedorn's work in general.
The line of separation between an over here and an over there is even more blurred in the case of immigration from Mexico. Proximity to the U.S. has ensured a continuity of contact between Mexicans in the U.S. and their relatives and friends still in Mexico. Yet, in a series of widely read but controversial essays and book-length non-fiction, Richard Rodriguez has presented a perspective on Mexican immigration to the U.S. that can be described as assimilationist — as recommending to the immigrant a whole-hearted absorption into America. The son of Mexican immigrants, he has assertively laid claim to an American-ness and shown little patience for Mexican-American attempts to claim special intimacy with Mexico. America is as overpowering a presence over there in Mexico as it is in the Philippines, but as an American over here Rodriguez feels no corresponding obligation to the country of his forebears. In Days of Obligation, written in 1992, he notes, "Mexico was memory — not mine".
There is, some would say, a special irony in Rodriguez's assimilationist stance — an irony born of race. Race is to America what caste is to India, the thing that is always there even when you think it isn't. Not surprisingly, race and racism are special concerns of the new literature of immigration. After all, so many of these new post-1965 immigrants are non-white people living in a predominantly white society. Is assimilation a genuine option in America for an immigrant who is not white? Even today, the answer is more complicated than it would seem. Again and again, the new literature of immigration returns to examine this issue from every side imaginable to sometimes say yes, sometimes no, and sometimes something else altogether. Other important obsessions for the new literature of immigration include nostalgia as well as guilt for the "home country" and intergenerational conflicts between immigrant parents and American born children.
All these themes are to be found in the works of Indian immigrant writers in the U.S. The Indian community in the U.S is an especially influential and prosperous segment of a far-flung Indian diaspora that dates back to the 19th Century. Compared to Indian immigrant communities elsewhere, Indian Americans are a relatively recent emergence and it is only in the last few years that they have begun to acquire some visibility in the crowded cultural and political landscape of America. This visibility has included the emergence of writers who produce work meant clearly to be read as American, that is, work that is explicitly immigrant American writing as opposed to "postcolonial writing" or "Indian writing in English" that happens to be produced in the U.S.
The most successful of these writers is no doubt Bharati Mukherjee. In the novels, short stories and essays she has written over the last two decades and more, she has chosen to present herself as an enthusiastic American and tended to answer "yes" with regard to the option of assimilation to America. In her 1991 novel Jasmine, for example, the protagonist leaves the constricting orthodoxy of India for the freedom and opportunity of America. Jasmine's experiences in America are not all pleasant; nevertheless, at the end of the novel Mukherjee has Jasmine driving from Iowa towards California, going west in pursuit of her future in a recognisably American way, eager to reinvent herself yet again as an American.
The stark counterposing of a progressive America to a backward India that we find in Jasmine — and that dismayed many Indian readers — reappears in less stark ways in the work of Pulitzer Prize winning Jhumpa Lahiri, whose short story "Mrs. Sen's" from the 1999 collection The Interpreter of Maladies presents with great sympathy and insight the nostalgia an immigrant woman feels for India. And then there are writers like poet and novelist Meena Alexander and poet Agha Shahid Ali who have been exploring the many dimensions of the Indian immigrant community since before its newfound visibility. Their work avoids the easy opposition of India to America found in a novel like Jasmine, to offer a more nuanced exploration of the characteristic themes of immigrant literature in the U.S.
The literary work of Indian immigrants to the U.S. shares much with the work of writers from other communities while at the same time remaining distinctively Indian-American. Part of the attraction of such a notion as a new literature of immigration is its ability to make the reader break out of narrowly ethnic ways of viewing the world. How does Jessica Hagedorn's immigrant view of the Philippines in Dogeaters compare to Bharati Mukherjee's of India in Jasmine? How does Meena Alexander's view of immigrant life in New York in her novel Manhattan Music relate to Korean American novelist Chang-rae Lee's in Native Speaker? The new literature of immigration being produced in the U.S. now, post 1965, asks such questions of its readers.
The aftermath of the catastrophic terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001 has brought renewed pressure on immigrant communities in the U.S. In the ensuing climate of suspicion, the new literature of immigration can do the work of humanising immigrants to other Americans. It can also reveal, as only an immigrant perspective can, many previously overlooked aspects of contemporary American life to both Americans and interested readers in other parts of the world.
S. Shankar is author, editor and translator of five books. His latest is the co-edited volume Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration (2003). He is currently working on a second novel.
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