Introduction to Bharati Mukherjee
By Charles Sugnet, Associate Professor of English
It’s a great pleasure to welcome Bharati Mukherjee back to the Twin Cities.
Bharati Mukherjee grew up in a comfortable Calcutta family, wanted to be a writer from an early age. After completing her B.A. and M.A. in English at Indian universities, she persuaded her father to let her attend one of these strange American things called “creative writing programs.” In 1961, she arrived in Iowa City, expecting to study writing and then return to India. However, she very quickly met and married Clark Blaise, a Canadian-American writer, changing the pattern her family expected her to follow, and beginning life as a North American writer.
After living and working in Canada for over a decade with Clark and their two sons, and publishing three fine books of fiction, plus two non-fiction books coauthored with her husband (Days and Nights in Calcutta, 1977; The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, 1987), she spoke out strongly against a Canadian racism that she believed would never allow people of color full admission to Canadian society. One of the breaking points was that after the Air India crash, the Canadian premier sent condolences to Rajiv Ghandi for “the loss of your people,” even though a large proportion of the victims were Canadian citizens. She convinced Clark and the children to move to the United States; and began a 1988 article in the New York Times Book Review with the striking sentence “I’m one of you now,” as she described the naturalization process. She insisted on being an American writer.
At around the same time in 1988, Bharati published a collection called The Middleman and Other Stories, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Bharati and Clark had been close to Bernard Malamud, and The Middleman and Other Stories did for the so-called “new immigrants” of the 1980s what books like Malamud’s The Magic Barrel had done for East European Jewish Americans—namely to make them visible by giving them artistic representation, and to show that their relations with each other are no longer mediated vis-à-vis a normative whiteness. This is a book where a Gujurati woman doing graduate work in New York can criticize a David Mamet play with her Hungarian refugee boyfriend from 1956, where a mid-level Atlanta money-manager breaking up with his Filipina girlfriend goes to the mall to find a new lover, and where an Italian girl in North Jersey might join Amnesty International because her new Afghan boyfriend has been tortured. Bharati offered an acute and witty perspective on American culture, and a masterful ear for the American language—which is not quite the same thing as English. And many of her protagonists were women, dizzy with the possibilities they saw in America’s more open social field
I was lucky enough to be taking a Loft Mentor course on nonfiction writing taught by Bharati and her husband Clark as some of this unfolded—I can remember being told by someone at the Loft in hushed tones that Bharati would not be in class that day as a black limousine had come to take her to the airport for an appearance on the Today Show or Letterman. We were watching her transformation from an excellent writer and teacher to a literary celebrity. I also remember that one student in the class was making a living by working for the urulogy department, and Bharati was very interested in urology jargon, asking to see a sample of the professional journals, etc. Storing up for a possible future character in urology, or more likely, a future character with prostate issues. Tapping their considerable noses, Bharati and Clark said, “A writer must always be nosy.”
Bharati and Clark were very generous teachers, giving the impression that they had nothing to do but read our manuscripts and discuss everything under the sun with us. We spent evenings in one of those 3.2 beer bars on Franklin Avenue where you always eat too much bad popcorn, arguing about race and immigration. As a good American lefty, I was shocked and disappointed that Bharati had found Canadian racism worse than that of the U.S., and I argued that most immigrants to the U.S. had a much harder time that the world-eating immigrants in her book. After two or three such popcorny evenings, Clark intervened to say, “Charlie, you’re reading Bharati’s stories as though they were realistic, but in fact they are all Hindu reincarnation stories.”
One of the most difficult stories in that collection to interpret was “Jasmine,” about a young Trinidadian woman arriving in Detroit with no papers, no money, no prospects. As the story ends with her having sex on the floor with her boss, a married University of Michigan professor who exoticizes her, it’s very hard to tell whether we’re supposed to see Jasmine as a victim of gross sexual abuse, or as a world-eater who will discard him when he has served his purpose.
Bharati also felt that there were unanswered questions in the story, and decided to turn it into a novel (Jasmine, 1989), one of her most widely appreciated. If I’m not mistaken, it was while she was living near here, working in an apartment over in the Seward neighborhood, that Jasmine demanded to be re-reincarnated.
Since then, Bharati has published several more fine novels, including The Holder of the World (1993), Leave It to Me (1997), Desirable Daughters (2002), and The Tree Bride (2004). They continue to be witty and smart, but have gotten more complex, and sometimes outdo the 19th century in their cultivation of coincidence. If there has been a major change, it is that the fast-moving immigrants of her earlier work have begun to look back at where they came from, and to find that the past they dismissed may be necessary to understand where they are now.
Please welcome Bharati Mukherjee.
November 3, 2006
McNamara Alumni Center