Relocation as Positive Act: The Immigrant Experience in Bharati Mukherjee's Novels

Diaspora 2:2 1992 Relocation as Positive Act: The Immigrant Experience in Bharati Mukherjee's Novels Carmen Wickramagamage University of Hawaii at Manoa To define immigration as the activity of "coming to settle in a country that is not one's own" (Oxford English Dictionary) is to invoke its opposite: the existence of, and departure from, a country that is one's own. Such a definition oftransnational migration suggests that in crossing borders at national checkpoints an immigrant exchanges more than passports and citizenships; underlying the bureaucratic process that equates legitimate immigration with the possession of valid visas and authentic documents there is another vision of cross-border movement, in undertaking which the immigrant signifies a willingness to exchange the security that comes from living within the boundaries of a territory whose cultural geography is known for the uncertainty of life in a territory whose sociopolitical and cultural contours must be learned. This notion of immigration as exile from one's "true" home has come to be invested with contrary values through time. For some leading literary figures of the twentieth century—such as Conrad, Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Nabokov, V. S. Naipaul, Carlos Fuentes, Salman Rushdie, and Bharati Mukherjee1—this separation ofselffrom one's native place has appeared beneficial, even necessary; but for the many "ordinary" immigrants who live in the increasingly transnationalized world bereft of what Edward Said calls that "modest refuge provided by subjectivity, by art" ("The Mind ofWinter" 50), it does not seem to have either appeared or been represented as a positive experience. Sociological surveys2 and literary representations3 ofthe New World immigrant experience, for instance, suggest that many immigrants both perceive and experience immigration as deracination and dislocation, leading them to congregate in ethnic enclaves, where they attempt to maintain the illusion of a home away from home. Ifunderlying the human impulse to migrate is the belief in a second chance, this optimistic view of immigration and diasporization has not always been able to make itselfheard against that more dominant view that offers an image ofthe immigrant as 171 Diaspora 2:2 1992 an alienated inhabitant in the land that has become his or her new home—an image that has through time come to acquire the status of a stereotype. However, in recent years there has been a concerted effort by writers and cultural critics from both sides of the Atlantic—among them Rushdie, Homi Bhabha, Said, Elaine Kim, and Mukherjee—to contest and reconceptualize this image of the immigrant as "put upon and pathetic" (Mukherjee, Introduction xiii), unable to come to terms with the new culture, alienated and lost. Such a contestatory rearticulation of the immigrant experience has been necessary because even authentic images, once they float free oftheir particular historical contexts and attain the status of widely acknowledged stereotypes, have a way of becoming instruments of ideological manipulation , and after a while acquire the power to "in-form" the subjectivity of the immigrants as much as represent it. Rushdie, for instance, has spoken about the way immigrant in Britain has come to mean black immigrant and is used to relegate those immigrants to a status that is less than (British) citizen. Bhabha, on the other hand, sees the margins of the nation-space, where the imperfectly assimilated or unassimilated immigrants gather, as subversive, because he sees the margins as effectively contesting a nation-state's claims to legitimacy (4). For Said, life in exile is a means to acquiring a more comprehensive, "less orthodox," vision of the world than is available to those who stay at "home" ("The Mind of Winter" 55). Kim, like Abdul JanMohammed and David Lloyd, re-presents minority status as a subject-position, chosen, not imposed from above, when she speaks of the need for Asian Americans to reclaim the right to define their "own 'otherness,' not as foreigners but as American Others'" (170)—a "new identity" that she claims would allow them to challenge the "racial fantasies" constructed by the dominant culture (147). The interviews and published articles ofMukherjee,4 on the other hand, suggest that her concern is not so much with foregrounding the subversive potential oflife on the margins as with contesting the dominant culture's...