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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Interview by Dharini Rasiah
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Chapter
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Chitra Divakaruni and I met five years ago when we were both involved in organizations that addressed the concerns of South Asian American and South Asian immigrant women. She contributed to an anthology I coedited, Our Feet Walk the Sky, and we were both involved in Maitri and Narika, domestic violence help lines for South Asian women in the Bay Area. As cofounder and current president of Maitri, Divakaruni often re-creates many of the powerful testimonials of the women she encounters. Her earlier work is primarily poetry, and her first three books, Dark like the River, The Reason for Nasturtiums, and Black Candle, vividly capture the emotions her South Asian women subjects experience with domestic violence, marriage, family, immigration, and death. Her short stories and poetry have been featured in a number of anthologies, and she is the recipient of several awards. Arranged Marriage is her first book of short stories; it received the 1996 American Book Award, the PEN Oakland, Josephine Miles Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Fiction. 8 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Interview by D H A R I N I R A S I A H I interviewed Divakaruni on 31 July 1995, shortly after Arranged Marriage was released and her first novel, The Mistress of Spices, was completed. I was able to interview her over the phone despite her busy schedule of teaching, raising her children, and touring with her two new books. After speaking with her, I went to a number of readings and discussions of Arranged Marriage and The Mistress of Spices in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Divakaruni reaches a very wide audience, from students who are familiar with her writings and are well versed in Asian American literature to people who are curious about a book with a title like Arranged Marriage, which almost necessarily invites questions that revolve around issues of marriage and questions of “choice” that divide cultural/ethnic experiences. But Divakaruni deftly reworks questions that assume a polarized East/West cultural conflict that all South Asian Americans/immigrants uniformly encounter to address a more complicated reality that recalls histories of colonialism, geographic dislocation, and racism, and she often draws parallels to the experiences of other ethnic and racial groups. D R I had read The Reason for Nasturtiums in 1991, and it was a major influence on the work I was doing at the time with our anthology and with the Asian Women’s Shelter. So maybe we can start by speaking chronologically about your books of poetry. C B D The Reason for Nasturtiums came out shortly before Black Candle, but the poems were written around the same time. I just divided them into two books with different focuses. Black Candle is very much a women’s book. It focused totally on women’s experiences, and a lot of it is the darker side of South Asian women’s experience. So those are poems of oppression and empowerment, moving from oppression to empowerment. Being a writer yourself, you 141 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni [44.200.141.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:20 GMT) know that, when writing, one doesn’t do this consciously; poems come out of the subconscious. But, when I was putting the book together, I wanted to show different stages of oppression and empowerment. Some of the women are victims because they are in a society that is too powerfully oppressive for them to overcome. They have no models; they have no inspiration. But that doesn’t mean that their inner life is any less vibrant or any less human or any less powerful or painful. D R How did you come to write about this? C B D At that time in my life I was doing a lot of remembering . A lot of the poems in Black Candle are based on women I had come across when I was living in India—though of course transformed through writing and the imagination— women who were important in my life, in my family. I thought their lives in many ways were tragic and in many ways heroic because they were fighting against very difficult things (for example, being childless in a society that values children). I felt that no one gave them credit. They just lived out their lives, and it was no big deal to anyone. Of course you do that; you continue taking care of the family even when your heart is breaking. I...