Chitra Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices: Deploying Mystical Realism

Chitra Divakaruni's The Mistress qfSpices Deploying Mystical Realism GITA RAJAN Diuokoruni's prose is so pungent that itstains the page. —The New Yorker We live in a world oj"many kinds ofrealisms, some magical, some socialist, some capitalist, and some that are yet to be named. These generic realisms have theirprovinces oforigin: magical realism in Latin Americanjîction,...socialist realism in the Souiet Union,...and capitalist realism...in the visual and uerbal rhetoric ofcontemporary American aduertisincj. —Arjun Appadurai (1997, 53) Credo ofModernity I. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress 0/Spices is a seemingly simple tale that is shot through with special effects. The protagonist, Tilo, is a young Indian woman who emigrates to the U.S., runs an Indian grocery store in the distressed part of Oakland, California, falls in love with Raven, a handsome youngNative American, and builds a life oflove with him. This romantic shell, worn and curiously static, comes startlingly alive as Tilo begins to intercede in the lives of the cast of characters around her. Divakaruni keeps the story simple because she will complicate the telling of it. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Laura Esquivel (Like Water/or Chocolate), Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits), Susan Power (The Grass Dancer), and Salman Rushdie [Meridians:jeminism, race, transnationalism 2002, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 215-36]©2002 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 215 (Midnight's Children) who all use magic realism in their work, Divakaruni interrupts canonical, traditional accounts with insurgent possibilities. But, unlike Garcia Marquez's sorcery, Esquivel's and Allende's magic spells, or Rushdie's and Power's ghosts from the past, Divakaruni uses mysticism to achieve hergoal ofmakingthe commonplacewondrous and the real extra-ordinary. These other magic realists work with large canvases and bold brush strokes; they theatricalize the mundane by calling upon external powers, even supranatural forces, to seal gaps in the lived reality oftheir characters. Divakaruni, on the other hand, alters the genre such that her novel resembles an Indian miniature painting with fine, vivid, compact, and detailed brush strokes. She operates by drawingupon internal powers to gesture towards a deliberate mysticism, albeit a personalized , orientalized mysticism. Magic itselfsuggests an exteriority, and according to Webster's Dictionary is the "practice ofattempting to produce supernatural effects or control events through the use ofcharms, spells, or rituals." Magic is based upon a causal relationship between a fantastic, ritualistic act and the desired outcome, and since it is not bound as rigidly by superstition as religious belief, it creates a fluid space for the protagonist to function in and modify reality. Magic realism aestheticizes and braids together matter-of-fact daily events with fantastic elements, the real with the unreal, and myth with human experiences to call attention to historical injustices and political inequalities. Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier is credited with ushering in magic realism as a narrative technique in the 1940s (his term, marvelous real) in an attempt to reconcile the opposing worldviews of the conqueror and the conquered, and to mark a shift in power between two cultures. Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Amado, Carlos Fuentes, and Jorge Luis Borges made magic realism uniquely Latin American and specifically postcolonial, and have used it as a technique par excellence to re-present history. Though critics suggest that Garcia Marquez further refines magic realism by situating his narratives on a double plane of postcolonialism (critiquing empire) and postmodernism (decontextualizing experiential reality), he rebels against such confining categories. Within the South Asian context, Rushdie and Arundhati Roy come to mind. Roy's God ofSmall Things, a largely feminist novel, contains brief butwonderful moments ofmagic realism, especially in those parts where she calls sociocultural orthodoxy into question. IsabelAllende,1 Elizabeth Nunez, and Loida Perez (the latter two from the Caribbean) also give magic realism a feminist slant by fashioning strong, female protagonists 216 gita raían who employ elements of fantasy and myth with passion to critique patriarchal traditions and dramatize the potential of women in a new world order. This briefcatalogue ofthe elements ofmagic realism and a list ofsome major authors in the genre serves as a pretext for pointing out the similarities and differences...