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By Russell Schoch Bharati Mukherjee's life story resembles that of a character in fiction--her own fiction. Born into a Bengali Brahmin family in Calcutta, she was trained to speak BBC English and Academie Française French by Irish nuns at a school for girls from fancy families. As a young girl, she was chauffeured and accompanied by bodyguards, and she dove into books to escape the crowds of 45 to 50 blood relatives living in her household. After brief stays in European cities and schools, at age 21 she took an enormous leap to attend the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where, she says, she saw healthy cows for the first time but didn't understand a word of heartland American English the entire first semester. Two years later, she wound up coupled not with a fellow Bengali Brahmin arranged for her back home in India but with a Canadian-born, Florida-raised fellow writer she had met only two weeks before they were married, during a lunch hour, in a law office. "The big things in my life happen fast," she says. In the mid-1960s, she and her husband, Clark Blaise, moved to Canada, where Mukherjee became one of the youngest tenured women faculty members ever at McGill University. It was during this period that she began writing novels (The Tiger’s Daughter, her first, came out in 1971) and gaining an international reputation. But she did not like the life of a dark-skinned, non-European immigrant there--she was thrown out of hotel lobbies when not accompanied by her white husband, told to move to the back of a Greyhound bus, and spat upon. They came to the United States in 1980, Mukherjee teaching in various colleges before accepting a position to teach creative writing and literature at Berkeley in 1989. This was one year after her book The Middleman and Other Stories won the National Book Critics' Circle Award and put her even more prominently on the map of American literature. And it is "American literature" that this American citizen writes. "'Asian American' is a marketing tool," she says, resisting any hyphens or categories that others would use to classify or describe her. She's a practitioner of magic realism (an indelible part of the Hindu mind, she says), a sharp-edged essayist whose farewell to Canada ("The Invisible Woman") helped change its repressive racial practices, and a looter of all cultures, including her current one (she lives in San Francisco and uses the '49ers' "West Coast offense" as a metaphor in her most recent novel, Desirable Daughters). "The epigraph to that novel," she says, "is a Sanskrit verse that I discovered in my Upper Haight area, adapted by Octavio Paz and then translated into English by Eliot Weinberger." This is the kind of globalization she prizes, one where "we each take from each other's heritage what we need and sew it together into our own heritage." Her literary agenda, she has written, "begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America." Had she not been a novelist, she says, history would have been her field. She's "agile memoried and charismatic tongued," in the words she uses to describe a character in The Holder of the World (1993), a novel that ransacks the history and culture of both 17th-century New England and the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal. She paused in the following interview to praise Berkeley’s extensive library holdings: "I could not write the novels I have written, such as The Holder of the World, or the novels I'm writing now, without the incredible resources available to me in this library." As we spoke in December across from Doe Library in her Wheeler Hall office, the widely traveled Mukherjee had just returned from the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), where she had witnessed some serious tail-gating and met with the football coach, in addition to touring Faulkner country and, her main purpose, lecturing on American literature, including her own. Back in Berkeley, she was putting the finishing touches on an essay disturbingly entitled "My Death Foretold." It has to do with the possibility of forging one's destiny, or changing the stars--the astrological charts that figure in her fiction and, we found out, in her life as well. Between July 27, 2003 and July 27, 2004, according to my horoscope. How seriously do you take this? Other pronouncements in my horoscope have come true. So, with the year of my foretold death approaching pretty fast, I realize I'm balancing both a Hindu way of computing important events in my life and the fact that I am in love with the American mythology that you make your future, you make your life. Horoscopes have been important in your fiction. In Desirable Daughters, Tara's horoscope says she'll die 20 years before her husband. And Jasmine, too, which is a novel about balancing a traditional Indian faith in destiny by an American immigrant who has broken with tradition in some ways by leaving the original culture--deliberately deracinating herself. This sounds like a description of your life and your literature. You've done both. Yes, yes, absolutely. Nevertheless, the first and last events--birth and death--for a Hindu, at least of my generation, are ruled by the horoscope. But the middle part of my life has been being an American, in the sense of pushing frontiers, making myself; it's been about desire, ambition, being my own guide. And now, suddenly, I have to wonder: Will it, my death foretold, really happen? Does a death foretold bother you? I'm not at all bothered by it. I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of many, many things--pain, for example--but not at all of death. I think of it as the next big adventure. Let's talk about your childhood. Were you an early reader? Yes. I started reading at the age of 3. Later, I read Bengali translations of Russian novels, cheaply available from street vendors: Turgenev, Gorky, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. I also read French and English novels, so the whole world was available to me. I have no idea how as a young girl I imagined these Turgenev characters, or Gorky's--I used to weep over Gorky's fiction. I had no idea what they were wearing, or what their skin color was. But still it spoke to me. Instead of feeling torn between opposites, as many upper-middle-class colonials in India felt, I sort of made it all my own. As one of my characters says: "I'm a border-crashing claimant of the world's culture." Your early education crashed against some borders. I was educated, from age ten on, by nuns in the Loreto School in Calcutta, run by the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with headquarters in Galway. The biggest holiday in the school year was St. Patrick's Day, when they flew the shamrock out from Galway. You wore green? Of course! It was complicated because Islamic green is slightly different, psychologically, from shamrock green. But what the nuns were doing, in Calcutta in the 1950s, was carrying on a colonial education and instilling a colonial set of manners. A man came from England once a year to check the BBC-ness of our elocution. It was very important to the nuns that we weren’t speaking Indian English--with a "sing-song" accent. It's only lately that I've come to realize that this colonial underpinning of my education wasn't simply to make us acceptable if we had to give speeches as the wives of Indian dignitaries in European capitals. In a way, it was instilling in us: "This is the right way to speak; yours is the wrong way." And therefore coming to the United States has been very empowering for me. Here I’m not locked into thinking in terms of correct/incorrect; here I can improvise grammar, accent, and language and still feel self-worth. Let's talk about immigration to the United States and how it's changed in recent decades. Before 1965, American immigrants were predominantly white, European Christians or Jews. People trying to emigrate from Asia, Africa, Latin America had a much harder time getting in. But in 1965 the quota system was replaced by a merit system, and this made it easier for larger numbers of educated, urban, non-white professionals and their families to settle in the U.S. In addition, in the last two decades there's been an increase of undocumented entrants. As a result, our society has become noticeably more multilingual, multi-hued, and multicultural. I am very alert to the ethnic and linguistic changes that are happening as a result of these changes. Is this nation still a "melting pot"? Less and less so. America has traditionally expected immigrants to do all the transforming and accommodating, and the old "melting pot" model encouraged newcomers to discard, or conceal, their foreign heritages and subscribe to an Anglo-American ideal. But the post-1965 immigrants, especially those who have come to America as economic refugees, rarely subscribe to such a "melting pot" model. Their conflicts have to do with nostalgia and discovery: how much original culture to let go, and how much American culture to embrace? As I see it, over time--and often in spite of the immigrant's best efforts--the inherited and the adopted values fuse together. My point is that all Americans--not just us newer immigrants--are being forced to recognize the reality of this de-Europeanization. The original heirs to the American Dream encounter us on a daily basis: We are their doctors, their housekeepers, their grocers, their accountants, their golf heroes, their filmmakers, their spouses, and their lovers. We and they have fused into us. There's a healthy mongrelization of heritages and values going on in today's America. That's the two-way transformation that I dramatize in my fiction, especially in novels like Jasmine and Desirable Daughters. What would you like for this nation of immigrants? I want a sense of belonging. I want a sense of nationhood that makes it possible for both the newcomers and the old-timers to feel part of one community. I want an America in which individual Americans, no matter what their ancestral origin, skin color, economic background, or religion, think and feel they are a part of one community--because they subscribe to the Bill of Rights and the subsequent amendments, which are the Constitutional sanctions under which we live. This means the "pursuit of happiness" is like jazz--each of us can improvise our own categories of personal happiness. Your land of birth doesn’t allow such "improvisation"? I come from a culture where you are who you are because of the language you speak, the religion you belong to, and the caste you belong to within the religion. You are who you are because of who your father or your grandfather was. In my case, the Bengali word for home--desh--means not Calcutta, where I was born, but the little ancestral village in what is now Bangladesh, where my father and his people came from, and which I didn't see until I was researching Desirable Daughters, about three years ago. What does your particular immigrant status have to do with your fiction? In their fiction, each of the Asian-American groups have very different kinds of inspirations, or fiction-generating traumas. Railroads for Chinese Americans. The internment for Japanese Americans. For the Filipino group, it's the colonial history of the United States. My group, who are more recent arrivals--especially the urban, middle-class, Hindu Indians--have no such traumas, either with American colonialism or with a long history of oppression in this country. And that's why it's easier for me, in some ways, to find my models as an American writer in a Henry Roth or a Bernard Malamud. But, skewering that model, or layering and complicating it, is the fact that I'm coming out of a non-Judeo-Christian axis, and I am not natively English speaking. And race, ethnicity, skin color also complicates that initial model; but I can plug into an American narrative tradition in ways that someone who already has a long-standing racial or ethnic communal identity in the United States cannot. You can parachute in without certain baggage? Yes. Right. It’s the new immigrants who are really expanding the grid and rewriting the parameters of the discourse. We're still forming our stories. You've said you don't want to be "hyphenated," to be considered "Asian American." I don't want to be forced, for political or economic reasons, to be a member of a group, without the individual differences of members of that group being acknowledged. Why am I to be called an Asian-American writer if another is not automatically called European-American? How relevant is it to say I'm Asian American and to be lumped together even with wonderful writers I admire--like Amy Tan or my colleague Maxine Hong Kingston--when they are second-generation Americans, Christian by upbringing or family culture? You were recently asked to contribute to an anthology of writers addressing the question, "What does it mean to be an American writer ?" What does it mean to you? It means that I am free to write about any aspect of culture and the psyche without having a political or economic problem being necessarily dominant. If you're living inside a dictatorship, you are almost bound to redress such a wrong, so that all writing becomes politically directed. You may write a romance, as Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the Indonesian writer who came here for a lecture a couple of years ago, did while under house arrest. But every reader in Indonesia read it as an allegory for freedom versus dictatorship. So if you live inside an oppressive culture, society, or nation, you are sort of forced to think exclusively or predominantly in those political terms. Whereas an American fiction writer, because those political pressures are lifted from us, is free to write about largeness of soul, of heart, of emotions--or petty things, ordinary things. For me, being an American writer is also about being in the best place for watching the formation of new patterns of assimilation--the culture changing, second by second, with the addition of body after body. Other cultures resist that kind of improvisation, expansion, redefinition. Something many of us can identify with is that you're a news junkie. Oh, yes! The television's on as soon as I wake up, and I turn it off only when I go to bed. And it's on in every room. I need that "hit" of news constantly, and that pace of news, from all over the world, and the weird transitions: starving people in Central Africa one minute, and then beauty contests somewhere else. That kind of transition, I find, by osmosis has become part of my aesthetics of transition in writing. And that constant flow of the world into your living room is, again, very much part of my own literary aesthetics. How so? It used to be that you never went outside your neighborhood. Everything you needed was right there. I think of the small towns I visited when I was studying at the University of Iowa: They were very homogeneous groups. And certainly the Ballygunge neighborhood of Calcutta, where I grew up, was predominantly my kind of people, speaking my language--my class and caste, with the same social codes. But now, with people moving around so much, and the news format I'm addicted to--this breaks those barriers of "neighborhood." The sense of community is so expanded that it brings the world into your isolated study or living room. There isn't the same sense of border and difference. But I believe we also re-interpret other people's culture and make it our own. For example, I think that the way I take in Elvis Presley is going to be very, very different--having grown up in Calcutta when Elvis was big in the States--than it would be for someone who was living here at the time. That's the kind of border-crossing and border-deleting that my characters are interested in and that I, as a citizen and as a writer, am interested in. Do you know where the urge to be a novelist comes from? I think it's the ability to see life in narrative sequences, and to make unnatural connections between disparate events or objects and then invest those unnatural connections with literary significance. I've heard that you write completely different drafts of your novels. Yes. The first and second drafts are quite different from one another. And you don't even consult the first draft when writing the second? No. I just open up a new file on the computer. To go back and look at the first draft would mean I'm not thinking freshly. For Desirable Daughters I actually wrote about four drafts, not looking back at the first or the second. How do you distinguish your fiction from your essays? In fiction you take one individual, eccentric, or larger-than-life kind of character and see the possibilities of that one individual's reactions. Sometimes I find myself giving my best lines to the villain, because you need to humanize all sides, so that it's not simply a dialectic, a debate. Whereas when I'm writing essays about specific topics--political, cultural, or historical--I want to present my argument as my argument. I want to debate. Which is more important to you? Fiction. If I had more time, if I had three lifetimes instead of one, I'd like to do a lot more novels. I'd like to write all the books that are in my head. I feel I can transform the way people think--about other people or about nationhood--through my fiction. Explain the transformation you'd like to achieve. To make people realize that we have to get away from thinking of ourselves--of our identities--as fixed, as dependent only on inherited things: language, race, class, culture. And instead to improvise identity, to see ourselves as part of a changing community in which our loyalty depends on what community we have adopted and decided to give our loyalty to. I've always felt that individuals are a series of identities, simultaneous identities. Identity is not fixed. The moment you think there's only one way, you're going to crack. What would you say to someone who was born here and had inherited certain advantages in the community? Why wouldn't that person choose to identify with such an inheritance? Well, that's all right as long as the person didn't think his or her way of being American is the only way to be an American. There are many ways of being an American, and I’ll tell you why. Here you can claim to be part of the society, in your own way, and not be laughed at, can be accepted. Whereas in other countries, including India, if you're not born into a certain language and culture and ethnicity, you're not even allowed to think of yourself as an Indian. To be an American means that I'm agreeing to abide by the Constitutional demands and am accepting the privileges. You speak around the world, and lecture for the State Department. Why? I believe in cultural diplomacy as very much the way to counteract the stereotype a lot of non-Americans have about American culture. As being all Hollywood and Coca-Cola? And the total resistance to the fact of the diversity of political and intellectual positions within the writing community. There seems to be a need to fix all Americans, including intellectuals and artists, into a military-industrial complex that is America. So cultural diplomacy for me means that the more people realize how varied this culture is, how many different positions are accommodated, the better. You're not told what to say or not say? You're not expected to toe the line in any way. No guidelines, no consultation, nothing. Hasn't there been some censorship here since September 11? Haven't some books and movies been withheld as being "unpatriotic"? But that's censorship for marketing reasons. What I worry about within the publishing world is that, as multinationals buy up the publishing houses and publishing becomes a very tiny, unprofitable portion of a company that owns oil wells all over the world, that the market is going to decide what is American literature; that the American literature defined by writers who test literary boundaries, and who do not sell like more popular writers, will disappear. And then all the stereotypes about American culture will become true. Your work seems to test both literary and cultural boundaries. How would you summarize what you do? No serious artist confines herself to a set of pre-established boundaries. The neatly packaged world presented to me as a child was already being torn apart when I arrived at the Writers' Workshop in Iowa. Since then, my aesthetic credo has been to make the familiar exotic and the exotic familiar. I want to take my Calcutta and make it understandable, even empathic, perhaps to someone from Des Moines, Iowa. And to take Des Moines and suddenly make it far more exotic by looking at it from a different angle. |
 Photos by Robert Holmgren
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