Bharati Mukherjee is a twice-transplanted immigrant—from her native India originally and then from her husband's home country, Canada, where she experienced excruciating and humiliating racism; her works (the novel Jasmine and the short story collection The Middleman and Other Stories) reflect not only the dislocation and alienation inherent in the immigrant experience but also depict the “process” of moving into, adapting to, and influencing a new and alien culture. Mukherjee's themes are personal and, in her particular instance, universal because her “process” as writer and as immigrant have merged into one: duplicating—often in incongruous and absurdly funny ways—the process of millions of people in the twentieth century who are moving from one country to another and from one frame of reference to another.

These particular works (Middleman garnered the National Book Critics Circle Award) clearly and dynamically explore the disturbing personal and social effects of a global population of immigrants and also clearly posit an example for resolution or, at least, a glimpse into a future world where a newly amalgamated population of Americans can exist: a global fusing of sorts—of many selves and many cultures. The process of such fusing is the focus of her stories:

The new changing America is the theme of the stories in The Middleman. For me, immigration from the Third World to this country is a metaphor for the process of uprooting and rerooting, or what my husband Clark Blaise in his book Resident Alien calls “unhousement” and “rehousement.” The immigrants in my stories go through extreme transformations in America and at the same time alter the country's appearance and psychological make-up.¹

Indeed, Mukherjee is talking about a new, dynamically infused American culture (her term is fusion chamber) instead of the previous perception of a more static, diluted “melting pot.” In any culture-building endeavor, this fusion chamber becomes the locus where the receiving culture is simultaneously affected and effected in new and transmutational ways.

As Mukherjee stated in a televised interview, she sees the influx of immigrants as an invigorating and shaping influence on American life: “We have come not to passively accommodate ourselves to someone else's dream of what we should be, we have come, in a way, to take over, to help build a culture.”² Part and parcel of this culture-building task for the new “stranger in a strange land” is the enormous task of transforming or “reinventing” oneself. These transformations that the immigrant must undergo are both exhilarating because they are a type of rebirth and disturbing because they require not only painful revelation but define people and values in heretofore unknown and challenging ways.

The “reinvention of self” that is a requirement for successful amalgamation with a new culture is the central impetus for Jasmine, the heroine of Mukherjee's 1989 novel of the same name. Jasmine is herself the result of a line of Indian females in Mukherjee's writing that have been reflecting and refracting the metamorphosis required when exiting one culture and entering another. Jasmine is the quintessential “immigrant” that has surfaced from the first tentative explorations of the transforming (and ambiguously located) females depicted in Mukherjee's earlier works such as The Tiger's Daughter (1971) and Wife (1975). In fact, Jasmine is the amalgamation of Indian/Hindu consciousness in an American milieu: she is simultaneously ancient and modern, past (her life in India) and present (she “floats” achronologically through the novel), East and West; she is eminently “in process,” a dynamic bridge between what she is and what she is becoming. The initial sentence of this novel encapsulates Mukherjee's overwhelming narrative ability to intimate not only the amorphous fluidity of time, but also the sense of coexisting incongruities:

Lifetimes ago, under a Banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ear—his satellite dish to the stars—and foretold my widowhood and exile. (1989, 3)

In this opening to the novel, the reader finds juxtaposed the Old World image of an astrologer (who later in the final scenes of the book appears, uniting first and last in a circular fluidity) and the New World image of the satellite dish that has become both the astrologer and the communicator of prophecies.

The sense of an amorphous “self,” ever-changing and adapting to the violence done by a new culture, is centralized in a bizarre and perplexing image early in Jasmine. The heroine, in flashback, must make a decision between staticity (remaining in India and maintaining her traditional and societal place) and fluidity (the ability to forge cultural collisions into meaningful experiences); she confronts this dilemma when she views a floating, decayed, canine carcass:

The body was rotten, the eyes had been eaten. The moment I touched it, the body broke in two, as though the water had been its glue. A stench leaked out of the broken body. … I'm twenty-four now but every time I lift a glass of water to my lips, fleetingly I smell it. I know what I don't want to become. (5)

By the final pages, the reader realizes that Jasmine's entire history, her symbolic significance, is inscribed in her rejection of this image. It is an echoing image, a mixture of inconsistencies and grotesqueries that Mukherjee utilizes often in order to construct a meaning that encompasses dissimilarities. This effigy of death is simultaneously both the agent for and depiction of change—and flux. Stagnancy and stasis (carcass) stand in the midst of the flow of water (fluidity and the progression of life). The water is, incongruently, both “glue” and “disintegrator.” The “stench” is the unmoving lack of the progression of self.

Although Jasmine rejects stasis and opts for change, her move to America brings forth a violence of change that must be transcended and transmuted. Upon arrival, she is befriended by a ship captain, who under the ruse of assistance, rapes her. It is after this event that she decides to survive, to meet her fate, to challenge her future, and become another self, amorphous and nebulous as it may be.

At this point Mukherjee linguistically creates an expanding image of “self-reinvention.” As a writer of enormous creative power, she often takes a phrase, a cliché, or an image based in one culture beyond not only its literal sense, but beyond its cultural boundaries, freely playing with its form and association. A phrase that Half-Face, the malevolent sea captain, uses is “traveling light,” meaning, of course, that he carries little baggage, including scruples. But Jasmine reinterprets the term, incorporating his meaning and enlarging it to mean “without memories, without illusions.” And finally, as she comes to terms with the event of the rape, Jasmine further expands its meaning to “luminescence”—that is, clarified and glowing, transformed by a dynamic acceptance—which allows her once more to be a “traveling light” in the world.

Jasmine herself, as character and protagonist, is multiplex: she is a multitude of people; she “shuttles between identities” (77), becoming subsequent, ever-expanding selves (Jyoti, Kali, Jasmine, and Jane); and yet she is also Everywoman for anyone who has undergone a dramatic shifting of cultural values and for, in very subtle ways, the reader who participates in her many selves and in her “ascendings and descendings.”

The fluidity of self that is inherent in Mukherjee's themes and images of process demands a price, and always there exists in her writing a profound sense of loss in the stories of men and women who must give up their past in order to move into their future. Jasmine, who is rather a visionary, possesses the capacity to hold the idea of possibilities in her mind, a capacity that separates her from Vimla (who, unable to cope with the discrepancies of culture, destroys herself) and from her brothers who are content to remain statically where they are. At age fourteen Jasmine has the self-insight to admit: “I couldn't marry a man who didn't want to speak English. To want English was to want more than you had been given at birth, it was to want the world” (68).

Change, however, by definition is loss. Jasmine must turn her back (at least momentarily) on her old world of astrologers, Banyan trees, immolation, and uniformity of self. Du, a Vietnamese youth that Jasmine adopts while living with an Iowan banker, also loses part of his selfhood—his innocence (he has killed in order to survive), his home, his family—and in the process of becoming a “typical” American, he loses his freedom from compulsion. He becomes instead a reversed, inside-out “materialist,” wrought from the texture of his own personal history: “He needs to own. Owning is rebellion, it means not sharing, it means survival. He ate bugs and worms and rodents. He lived” (30). And Alfie Judah, the gun-running “middleman” in an unnamed South American revolution (Mukherjee 1988) loses his sense of self, his perception of himself as potent, effective, and causal when he is victimized by the very forces he came to control.

Although Jasmine and Alfie Judah are two of Mukherjee's most salient and dramatic examples of the ironies consistent with and the self-perceptual adjustments necessitated by the global immigrant experience, many of her other stories in Middleman subtly explore the ambiguity and alienation entailed in the particular acculturation of the immigrant to America. These tightly woven tales of “process” may be viewed as concise parables about the nature of cultural change and the overwhelming violence to self it can entail for the individual member or “soul” of a particular culture. These insightful and often jarring stories, differing in their individual settings and mentalities, are linked by multiple themes that express and emphasize two of Mukherjee's stated purposes: “to make my intricate and unknown world comprehensible to mainstream American writers,”³ and not only “give voice to continents, but also to redefine the nature of American and what makes an American” (Takahama 1991, F1).

Most often her stories center around characters who are immersed in the struggle of either escaping to America or adapting to the new world it presents once they have arrived. Culturally induced incongruities and disorienting “dislocations” produce wrenching explorations of selfhood that signal the monumental misunderstanding and pain that can occur when cultures clash. For example, in “A Wife's Story” (Mukherjee 1988) a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia narrates her adaptation to New York City's special brand of Americanism which becomes, alternately, an alienating force in her interactions with her visiting Indian husband. Immersed in “foreignness,” she attends plays with a Hungarian neighbor, roommates with Charity Chin, a Chinese “hands” model (who underscores the concept that as people, immigrants are often perceived only in pieces or portions of their identities), and contemplates writing David Mamet and Steven Spielberg to complain of their stereotypic interpretations of her culture (“Indians don't eat monkey brains”). Ironically, while defending her own culture, she is at the same time irrevocably estranged from it and finds herself viewing her husband in a distorted, disquieting light—the result of her passage into and through one culture and his state of embeddedness in another. But the problem is not merely a personal one; instead it is metaphor for the larger process of assimilation for all immigrants—a process that frequently entails undergoing one or another type of outrage:

It's the tyranny of the American dream that scares me. First, you don't even exist. Then you're invisible. Then you're funny. Then you're disgusting. Insult, my American friends will tell me, is a kind of acceptance. No instant dignity here. (26)

In “Orbiting,” Mukherjee presents a magnificently incongruous clash between a tortured, scarred refugee who, once forced to orbit airports until a country accepted him, attends a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at the home of his new Italian-American girlfriend.

“He was born in Afghanistan,” I explain. But Dad gets continents wrong. He says, “We saw your famine camps on TV. Well, you won't starve this afternoon.” (68)

This scene increases in poignancy and discrepancy when a “culture of pain” hits head-on with one of comfort, where on one day of the year blessings are both similar and yet galaxies apart:

Ro's talking of being arrested for handing out pro-American pamphlets on his campus. Dad stiffens at “arrest” and blanks out the rest. … Ro was tortured in jail. Electrodes, canes, freezing tanks. … Dad looks sick. The meaning of Thanksgiving should not be so explicit. (72-73)

Not only is the Afghanistani refugee “foreign” to the narrator's parents, his entire lifestyle—based on attempting to obtain what they already possess (and take for granted)—is alien. Through the lens of the narrator, the reader feels what the family is feeling when it observes the physicality of foreignness, the tangibility of difference. Simultaneously the reader is inside and outside both cultures, watching their attempts at co-mingling: “I see what she is seeing. Asian men carry their bodies differently. … Each culture establishes its own manly posture, different ways of claiming space” (70).

In “Orbiting,” the narrator is able to effectively carry out the reciprocal transforming process that Mukherjee envisions as resolution for the disorienting, alienating paths of cultural collisions. Watching her own culture and its premises confront and collide with another culture, she is, through the process of love, able to view both cultures as fluid, acting one upon the other, pulling each into their mutual spheres. Watching her lover, she allows his culture to comment on her own American way of being: “Our scars are so innocent; they are invisible and come to us from rough-housing gone too far” (74). But she (as all of us must in the end do) will act as mediator, easing the process of acceptance and assimilation.

Although Mukherjee's stories illustrate the requisite reinvention of self—that is, the reinvention of the individual immigrant and the reinvention or metamorphosing of his/her receiving culture, her tales also delineate the sense of loss of self and the ambiguity of the transformation that accompanies such reinvention. In the short story “Jasmine” in The Middleman and Other Stories (not to be confused with her larger novel Jasmine), Mukherjee's Trinidadian heroine accomplishes her “accommodation” to American life by half-submitting to and half-willing an adulterous affair with the husband of her employer. In the last line of this disquieting story, Mukherjee undercuts the excitement of Jasmine's new found independence with her unique use of language, subtly mixing positive and negative sensations: “… it felt so good, so right, that she forgot all the dreariness of her new life and gave herself up to it” (129). The “dreariness” of her “new,” “good,” and “right” life emphasizes the compromised—exhilarating but painful—experience of the immigrant or refugee. Mukherjee repeatedly mixes alternating impulses or employs terms in ways that make them seem commonplace and yet foreign at the same time. Her diction, her symbolic landscape, her choice of metaphors all underscore her thematic concerns and her message that not only are the survivors of a massive global immigration those that are capable of being “in process,” but that they are the process by which a new America is reinvented and revivified.

This concept is clearly emphasized and thematically underscored in Mukherjee's masterful Jasmine (1989). The novel's larger narrative structure, in which images and characters piece themselves, is one of shifting, intermingling time frames where past, present, and projected future are mixed in spatially and thematically determined ways rather than chronologically. Like other novels that end where they begin, Jasmine's story ends with a vision of the astrologer over her kitchen sink—goading her on to claim autonomy in her destiny, urging her to “reposition” her stars. As her widowhood and exile (her “ending”) were foretold on the first page of the book, her “beginning” is envisioned on the last page of the novel.

Because Jasmine cannot be found specifically (in totality, a finished product) and sequentially in this novel, she remains undefined, but the reader sees her—whole, unbounded, in process. This flux of Jasmine is not mere function of her personality nor of her singular personal experience: it is the form of her story, the source of her meaning, and more importantly, an example for other immigrants as a way of being that incorporates continual metamorphosis and reinvention of self that becomes not mere mode of accommodation but fusion of culture and a transcendence of separateness.

The universe of Mukherjee's stories is multicultural and transitional—a universe of infinite variety and flux. Her characters are people in process and her narrative techniques, where mixtures are created, juxtaposed, counterpointed, and compounded so deftly, create a sort of in-between gap or, as it were, “fusion chamber” where the reader is caught between cultures and in the dislocating grip of manifest alienation and is propelled into the world of the immigrant. Many of the titles of stories in Middleman reflect this same sense of the transitional, the ungrounded, the limbo-like position of the “in process” and reinventing self: titles such as “The Tenant,” “Buried Lives,” “Orbiting,” and “The Middleman.” And it is the characters that grip the reader so fully—the wife reinventing herself before a mirror, the small time hustler importing Third World women to American bridegrooms, the Afghanistani “claiming space” in his new homeland—these are the voices and images of Mukherjee's text. Her short stories become little capsules of process, tracing the vagaries of cultural oppositions, illustrating the losses and gains of her men and women. Such are her characters that they enthrall, amaze, amuse, and repel us, taking us on their unique and yet similar “voyages of discovery.” Her immigrants are little universes, fluctuating, persisting. As Jasmine states near the end of the novel:

We've seen the worst and survived. Like creatures in fairy tales, we've shrunk and we've swollen and we've swallowed the cosmos whole. (1988, 240)

Evolution, process, becoming are the ways of life for Mukherjee's characters, and her process (as writer and immigrant) becomes process for the readers of her text and the citizens of a changing world.

Notes

1. Bharati Mukherjee, “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” interview by Alison B. Carb, Massachusetts Review 29 (1988-89): 645-654.

2. Bharati Mukherjee, “Bharati Mukherjee Talks about the New Conquest of America,” interview by Bill Moyers, A World of Ideas, Public Affairs Television, WNET, New York: 3 June 1990.

3. Mukherjee, op. cit., 645-654.

Works Cited

Mukherjee, Bharati, “The Middleman” and Other Stories. New York: Grove, 1988.

———. Jasmine. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989.

Takahama, Valerie. “Following Their Muses.” Orange County Register (13 April 1991): F1.