Delineating
Immigration through the Logic of Transformation: Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine
Dr. S. Malathi
Assistant Professor of English
V. V. Vanniaperumal College for Women,
(Autonomous)
Virudhunagar, Tamil Nadu,
India
Abstract:
Bharathi Mukherjee
published Jasmine (1989), fourteen years after the publication of Wife (1975).
In this long interval, she had published two collections of short stories
Darkness (1985) and The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), and had left Canada
with her husband Clark Blase and settled in the United States. Mukherjee’s
traumatic experiences of racist prejudices in Canada find expression in her
short stories. Mukherjee details in her preface to Darkness, her movement from
‘expatriation’ to ‘immigration’. She has come under the influence of an
‘immigrant’ writer. She presents immigration from the Third World to North
America as a process of uprooting and rerooting. Her obsessive theme in this
new phase is the making of new America and the changing face of America. So,
there is a decisive shift from the ‘dark’ phase of ‘expatriate’ writing to the
'bright’ phase of ‘immigrant’ writing. This is articulated well in Jasmine.
Jasmine, the protagonist of Jasmine, passes through a six-stage transformation
from Jyoti of Hasnapur to Jane Ripplemeyer of lowa.
Keywords: Immigration, transformation, expatriation,
liberation, assimilation, Americanisation
Jasmine,
the protagonist of Jasmine, though
widowed at a young age, casts aside the weeds of a widow and begins her stride
towards liberation and empowerment. Ostensibly on the grounds of committing
sati on the Florida University campus where her dead husband Prakash wanted to
study, Jasmine lands on the Florida Coast. Despite the odds against her, she
gets assimilated successfully into the
Jasmine is
a novel of emigration and assimilation, both on physical and psychological
levels. In this novel, Bharati Mukherjee fictionalized the process of
Americanisation by tracing a young Indian woman's experiences of trauma and
triumph in her attempt to forge a new identity for herself. Jasmine is characterized by a tendency
in which feeling of being displaced is overcome by a desire to settle down, and
find a new home.
The nostalgia for the past is balanced by a
desire to capture the present; the loss of identity caused through the process
of displacement is mended by gaining a new one. Jasmine, the protagonist of the
novel, metamorphoses herself constantly, ferrying between these multiple
identities in different spaces and at different times. She shows the most
predictable crusade towards Americanisation and its obvious mutability of an
Americanised cultural identity. Jasmine never feels exasperated by cultural
incongruities. She survives to make a new start in the host country, ignorant
of the deterrents from her native past.
Geographically, the story begins in India and takes off
from Europe to America, where it bounces back and forth from Florida through
New York to proceed to Iowa, then finally lands in California. The novelist
deliberately transports her in time and space again and again so as to bring in
a sense of instability into the novel. However, her displacement of culture
ended with a set of fluid identities to be celebrated. These identities are
changeable, unfinished and at the same time have scope of innumerable prospects
(Darkness 3). In the novel, the journey is a metaphor that advocates the
ever-moving, regenerating process of life itself. In India, as Jyoti, Jasmine
is seen against the backdrop of the rigid and patriarchal Indian society. In
America, her self-awareness is reflected in her relationships with Bud, Taylor
and Du. However, her first husband Prakash initiates her transformation from
Jyoti to Jane.
Born 18 years after partition, Jasmine's family moved
from Lahore, where they had aristocratic connections to Hasnapur. Here they had
to lead the life of simple peasants. Having inherited a tradition of exile and
migration from her family, Jyoti is considered the most beautiful and
intelligent in her family. Her life, as happens in patriarchal societies, is
controlled and dominated by her father and brothers, "Village girls are
like cattle, whichever way you lead them, that is the way they will go"
(46). Jyoti is "the fifth daughter, seventh of the nine children"
(39). Jyoti's worried mother wants to kill her in order to spare her the pain
of a bride without dowry and diminish her future distress for a happy life. Although
the killing is violent, for Jyoti belonging to a poor family, it symbolizes
relief from would-be restraints and afflictions. Thus in the beginning itself
the writer throws light on patriarchal violence directed towards women. Jasmine
is found on the receiving end. The political disputes in the country, such as
the Partition Riots and the rebel movements which affect Jasmine's family also
depict the violence. Jyoti finds a US-based modern- thinking man, Prakash, as
her husband. Prakash encourages Jyoti to study English and renames her Jasmine.
He prohibits her from having children at an early age and encourages her to
read his manuals to improve herself and to cherish a better future for them
both, in America. "Pygmalion wasn't a play I'd seen or read then, but I
realize now, how much of Professor Higgins there was in my husband. He wanted
to break down the Jyoti I'd been in Hasnapur and make me a new kind of city
woman" (77).
However, tragedy befalls her. Her husband dies and she
returns to her family. She has to decide between living the rigid traditions of
her family and performing Sati, or to continue to live the life of Jasmine in
America. She sets off for America as an illegal immigrant to Florida, Her
illegal transmigration begins with the thoughts:
We
are the outcasts and deportees, strange pilgrims visiting outlandish shrines,
landing at the end of tarmacs, ferried in old army trucks where we are roughly
handled and taken to roped-off corners of waiting rooms where surly barely
awakened customs guards await their bribe. We are dressed in shreds of national
costumes, out of season, the wilted plumage of intercontinental vagabondage. We
ask only one thing, to be allowed to land: to pass through: to continue. (101).
Thus
begins her journey of transformations, displacement and a search for identity.
She undergoes her first transformation from a dutiful traditional Indian wife
when she meets the intellectual Taylor who calls her Jase, and then moves on to
become Bud's Jane. But before that she burns Prakash's suit in the hotel to put
her past away by her informal sati. "Around her there were rusty metal
trash bins punched with holes for better ventilation. I laid the suitcase
inside and lit it from the bottom. It sputtered and flared. The outside melted,
and then the cotton and wool ignited" (120).
Sati for Jasmine is more like to discard the past and
begin a new present. She represents her resistance to Indian restrictions, and
her desire for a new life. With her New York identity as Jase, a sweet, happy
"day mummy," Jasmine discovers the joys of consumerism. Finally, she
becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, an Iowan banker's beloved. It seems likely that as
Jasmine leaves for California with Taylor and Duff, her identity will continue
to transform. In New York, Jasmine explicitly recognises her ability to adapt:
"I wanted to become the person they thought they saw: humorous,
intelligent, refined, affectionate. Not illegal, not murderer, not widowed,
raped, destitute, fearful" (171). The abilities to adjust to the requirements
of a changing environment and to cut the past loose are Jasmine's survival
skills. They allow her to deal with the transience and culture shock of
time-space compression. Bharati Mukherjee ends the book on a novel note, and
re-emphasizes the complex and alternating nature of identity of a woman in
exile, "Then there is nothing I can do. Time will tell if I am a tornado,
rubble-maker, arising from nowhere and disappearing into a cloud. I am out the
door and in the potholed and rutted driveway, scrambling ahead of Taylor,
greedy with wants and reckless from hope" (241).
There are number of sad incidents of
"between-ness" in the novel. In India, between the identities of
Jyoti and Jasmine, Jasmine feels hovering between the traditional and the
modern world offered by her Indian husband, Prakash: between controlled and
independent love (69). In the United States, she often confronts situations
that are "in between," highlighting the concept of "two."
When she leaves Taylor, he is between marriage and separation with his wife who
is also between her lover and husband (175). In Iowa, she happens to hear
"two" farmers talk about the difference between
"horsepower" and "whorepower" (179). Bud, her lover, knocks
one of them, because those remarks were intended to her. This kind of
between-ness with "two" issues leads her into distress.
The phenomenon of displacement in the novel can be traced
by focusing on a demonstration of the rhetoric of loss and gain at work in the
novel. Jasmine's intense desire to build a home away from her native land and
to rebuild her identity helps her to survive. The novelist seems to be
absolutely reluctant in the preservation of cultures, the glorification of
traditions and being indebted to the past. Mukherjee seems to advocate the
violence that accompanies cross-cultural revision and personal change. Jasmine
says: "There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake ourselves. We
murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the image of dreams'' (25).
Jasmine herself is an agent of violence as she kills the mad dog, and more
significantly, the man who raped her. "I extended my tongue, and sliced
it. Hot blood dripped immediately... My mouth had filled with blood... I wanted
that moment when he saw me above him as he had last seen me, naked, but now
with my mouth open, pouring blood, my red tongue out... blood, ribbons of
bright blood, rushed between his fingers... [I] began stabbing wildly through
the cloth, as the human form beneath it got smaller and smaller" (106).
It is the eagerness of Jasmine to kill her past self that
permits her to dynamically proceed into alien but reassuring futures. The
futures into which she propels herself toward are not guaranteed to be
successful, but do have the potential for personal, material and spiritual
success. Though she uproots herself from her native culture and transforms
herself in accordance to a new culture she contradicts her own desires: on the
one hand she appears to be in a state of constant change, "How many more
shapes are in me, how many more selves, how many more husbands" (215). On
the other hand, she feels her roots penetrating foreign soil. "Taylor,
Wylie, and Duff were family. America may be fluid and built on flimsy,
invisible lines of weak gravity, but I was a dense object, I had landed and was
getting rooted. I had controlled my spending and now sat on an account that was
rapidly growing" (179).
For Jasmine, history is the commotion and fissure as a
result, the self becomes multiple and opposing. Her survival depends upon a
flexible strategy of appropriation and transformation. It is her idea of
disconnected history that admits her to subdue the restraining structure of
memory in her endeavour at re-inventing herself. In her self-structuring, she
does not destroy or dispose of the past, but puts it to a process of excision:
a simultaneous negation and preservation of the past. The past is
counterbalanced in terms of its power of constraint and paralysis but well-kept
as a means of re-creating identity within the framework of an in- subordinated
reasoning. The obvious non-existence of any sign of bereavement, wistfulness,
or pensiveness in Jasmine is quite noteworthy.
At one place Jasmine weeps over photographs of migrant
workers, though she is not related to it personally but she somehow associates
herself to it. She then controls herself and decides never to mourn over
Hasnapur ever again. "I remembered Kate's book of photographs of migrant
workers that Lilian, the proud mother, had shown off to me back in Fowlers Key.
That book had brought back such sharp memories of Hasnapur that I'd cried. It
was now only a few months later, but I didn't think I could cry over Hasnapur,
ever again" (160).
There is a temporal ambiguity in this passage: it is not
clear whether she promises herself not to bemoan again as if bemoaning is an
intentional act, or she is surprised by the event of lamenting in which the
subject is taken over by the intensity of memory. Memory usually forces a
person to cry over the loss of the object of desire such as familial bonds,
friends and homeland, Jermone Beaty and Paul Hunter in their book, New Worlds
of Literature, say: Thinking of home is often accompanied by nostalgia the
absence or loss of loved ones, the remoteness of the home place we are cut off
from our childhood home are Exiles. And the rest of us can perhaps understand,
that we are all "exiles" from our past, our childhood, that universal
"home" (Beaty 1)
But in Jasmine, the novelist replaces the task of the
memory to cry over the lost and gone by well calculated and manipulative memory
that helps the subject in its crusade for identity formation as well as
transformation. Jasmine therefore confesses: "I have memory." She
never says: "I am in the grip of memory." Jasmine represents herself as
being in control of her own destiny, or her own memory, "I rip myself free
of the past" (208), or even when to change and when not to: "I
changed because I wanted to. To bunker inside nostalgia, to sheathe the heart
in a bulletproof vest, was to be a coward. On Claremont Avenue, in the Hayeses'
big, clean, brightly lit apartment, I blooded from a diffident alien with
forged documents into adventurous Jase" (185).
Adorno describes this distinction in his short note on
Jean Paul in Minima Moralia:
The
pronouncements, probably by Jean Paul, that memories are the only possessions
which no-one can take from us, belongs in the storehouse of impotently
sentimental consolations that the subject, resignedly withdrawing into
inwardness, would like to believe the very fulfillment that he has given up. In
setting up his own archives, the subject seizes his own stock of experience as
property, making it something wholly external to himself. Past inner life is
turned into furniture just as, conversely, every Biedermeier piece was made of
wood. The interior where the soul accommodates its collection of memoirs and
curios is derelict. Memories cannot be conserved in drawers and pigeon-holes;
in them the past is indissolubly woven into the present. No-one has them at his
disposal in the free and voluntary way that is praised in Jean Paul's fulsome
sentences. Precisely where they become controllable and objectified, where the
subject believes himself entirely sure of them, memories fade like delicate
wallpapers in bright sunlight. (Adorno 166)
Jasmine
sees memory from the utilitarian point of view. She makes rational use of her
memory. She uses it to expand herself. It appears that she goes on assimilating
memories of lost bonds, places and events. Though this psychological process
where the subject goes on replicating in itself behaviors, attributes or other
fragments of the surrounding world, especially of other subjects seems to be
improbable but it does seem convincing that Jasmine has amalgamated her earlier
beaten and raped self within her in a interior, but, by the same keepsake,
outside it, external to the interior. Violence affects Jasmine; it results in a
transformation. In Jasmine, violence results in a change in circumstances and
mindset.
The continual apparition of death is a hint that Jasmine
feels the need to kill her former identities simply because they cannot be
articulated or used to augment the expansion of the subject. If she would have
really assimilated memories of lost ones within her there would have been no
need to kill the former selves. Her earlier memories or identities form an
enigmatic territory. Because of this the figure of death dominates her
narrative. These dark terrains contain images of an earlier brutalized Self,
which remains preserved as an alien body excluded from the Self: "What the
crypt commemorates, as the incorporated object's 'monument or 'tomb,' is not
the object itself, but its exclusion, the exclusion of a specific desire from
the introjection itself" (Fors: xvii). Jasmine tries to convince the
readers that she has overcome the past by assimilating it but actually her past
constantly lurks into her present. As Jane at the present time of the novel
Jasmine juxtaposes in her memory each of her identities-as Jyoti, Jasmine,
Jazzy, Jase and Kali implying that she evokes and revises her past in
articulating her identities. The author depicts this transformation and
transition as a positive and an optimistic journey. Jasmine creates a new world
consisting of new ideas and values, constantly unmasking her past. She tries to
establish a new cultural identity by integrating new desires, skills, and
habits. This transition is defined not only in the changes in her attitude, but
more significantly in her relationship with men.
In the case of an average person the supposed coherency
would have been dislocated after having endured a shocking experience of the
deprivation of her objects of love and aspirations. But Jasmine rises above
ordinary lives by transforming all her sufferings to something more positive:
Jasmine, being in control of what puts her outside herself, is the epitome of
an ideal capitalist, a pragmatically-oriented individual and an American
heroine who faces the frontier (240) and who can change and rebuild herself
quite deliberately.
Cultural fusion in the novel is thus a placing of the
protagonist as a subject in control and as an agent of the rebuilding of the
Self. The protagonist is not affixed to any fixed or single identity since she
discovers no fixed roots to cling to. Instead of anchoring to a final selfhood
she cannot help but shuttle among temporary identities in different spaces in
different times, one after another.
Jasmine sways between the past and the present attempting
to come to terms with the two worlds, one of "nativity" and the other
as an "immigrant."
Edward Said, in his essay Reflections on Exile, says,
"Exile is the unhealable rift between a human being and a native place,
between the self and the true home: its essential sadness can never be
surmounted the achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of
something left behind forever" (101).
Works
Cited
Adorno,
Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from
Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott.New York: Verso, 2002.
Bhabha, Homi. The location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Derrida,
Jacques. "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria
Torok." The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A
Cryptonomy. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok. Trans. Richard Rand.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Jermone
Beaty and Paul Hunter. New Worlds of
Literature: Writings from America's Many Cultures. W. W. Norton &
Company; 1994.
Martin
Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Alfred Hofstadter, New York:
Harper and Row, 1971.
Mukherjee,
Bharati. Darkness. Markham, Ontario:
Penguin, 1985.
---.
Jasmine. New York: Grove Press, 1989.
Said,
Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other
Essays. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002.