We have to recognize that though people may be dis-placed or dis-located they are never no-where. The trope of nomadology (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), whilst it hammers the privileged Western emphasis on roots and belonging, also threatens to flatten the huge diversity of experiences. Whilst there has been much work on the politics and economics of diasporic movement, there has been less attempt to “place” these movements. As Barbara Bender writes in A Handbook of Material Culture: While being strongly referenced in non-fictional space and time, the three parts of “Hema and Kaushik” foreground a tension between a yearning for some form of emplacing and embodiment of place, and a resistance to traditional forms of belonging. The deep meaning of “Hema and Kaushik” emerges from those echoes, as well as from the missing links – mishaps, mistakes and misrepresentations. But the three stories echo one another in a complex way, and should therefore be read as a whole. Unaccustomed Earth is divided into two parts and this paper focuses on the second part, a novella entitled “Hema and Kaushik.”Ģ“Hema and Kaushik” is in fact a trilogy in which each story might be read as a meaningful unit. Like her previous work, Unaccustomed Earth deals with second-generation immigrants born on non-Indian soil in the 1960s or 1970s and their difficulties in navigating issues of belonging, nostalgia and marginality in a context of speed, modernity and globalization. She therefore not only writes across places, but also across languages. As Pankaj Sharma explains in a paper entitled “Neither Here Nor There: An Assessment of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth as Migration Literature,” Jhumpa Lahiri is now known as “an American Writer of Bengali descent who writes about the diaspora and their modes of existence and identity” (2013, 33). Currently living in Italy, she recently started writing in Italian (Lahiri 2016). Born in London and educated in Boston, Massachusetts, Lahiri spent many months with her grandmothers in Calcutta during her childhood. 1Published in 2008, almost a decade after The Interpreter of Maladies, her first internationally acclaimed collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth is Jhumpa Lahiri’s third book and her second collection of short stories.
0 kommentar(er)
