Politics and Poetics of

Belonging
Politics and Poetics of
Belonging
Edited by

Mounir Guirat
Politics and Poetics of Belonging

Edited by Mounir Guirat

This book first published 2018

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2018 by Mounir Guirat and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-5275-0351-8

ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0351-9
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Mounir Guirat

Part One: Politics and Poetics of Belonging in the Literary Text

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 10

Literary Space in American (Meta)Fiction and the Fictionalizing of
(No)Belonging: Pierre, or the Ambiguities and The Book of Daniel
Salwa Karoui-Elounelli

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 32

Shuttling between New Homes and Origins: The Diasporic Journey in
Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days: A Memoir and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine
Henda Ammar Guirat

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 51

The Residual and the Emergent in Andrea Levy’s Representation
of the Diasporic Journey for Belonging in Fruit of the Lemon
Mounir Guirat

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 67

Re-Collection: Montage of Self, Nation, and Text in Jhumpa Lahiri’s
Interpreter of Maladies
Hager Ben Driss

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 85

White Creole Subjectivity, Migrant Status and the Aporia of Belonging
in the Writings of Caribbean Women
Salwa Mezguidi Jday

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 96

Once an Alien, Always an Alien?: Politics and Poetics of Belonging
in Le Morte d'Arthur and Othello
Wajih Ayed
vi Table of Contents

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 116

To Be Longing for Belonging: Robert Frost’s “The Self-Seeker”
and the Quest for Belonging
Lamia Jaoua Sahnoun

Part Two: Linguistic Practices and the Formation of Categories

of Belonging

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 130

Bi-longing: Identity and the Language Learner
Chokri Smaoui

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 150

Language Competence “Desirable”: Insights into Changing Attitudes
towards Language Competence as a Feature of Belonging in Georgia’s
Greek Community
Concha Maria Höfler

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 169

Developing National and Intercultural Identities in Tunisian EFL Classes:
A Study of English Textbooks, Teachers’ and Learners’ Attitudes
Nadia Abid

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 197

Developing Relational Identity in Humor in Intercultural Communication:
A Semantic-Pragmatic Approach
Asma Moalla

Part Three: Cultural Conformity as a Belonging Strategy

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 214

The Strategic Purpose of Belonging in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have
a Dream” Speech: An African American Conforming to Americanity
Sadok Damak

Contributors ............................................................................................. 238

 CHAPTER FOUR

RE-COLLECTION:
MONTAGE OF SELF, NATION,
AND TEXT IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S
INTERPRETER OF MALADIES

HAGER BEN DRISS

The relation of writers to their social memory is central to their quest and
mission. Memory is the link between the past and the present, between
space and time, and it is the base of our dreams.
—Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New

In an essay titled “Re-Membering Visions”, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o starts

with an Egyptian myth about “dismemberment and re-membering” to talk
about African reality. It is the story of Osiris who is killed by his brother
and whose corpse was dismembered and scattered all over Egypt. With
much love and devotion, Isis “re-members the fragments and restores
Osiris to life” (Wa Thiong'o 2009, 35). This chapter uses Wa Thiong’o’s
image of remembrance to study Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maldies
(1999). Wa Thiong'o's essay and Lahiri's collection of short stories
intersect at one crucial idea: memory is a safety valve, a preserver of life.
The hyphenated word ‘re-collection’ I use in the title of this chapter
imitates Wa Thiong’o’s play on the word re-membering. Both refer to an
act of reconnecting disconnected elements. Such a hyphenated use of
words captures one major issue raised in Lahiri’s work: inbetweenness.
Indeed, this liminal condition stamps Interpreter of Maladies at a generic
level. While the whole text is divided into separate short stories, Lahiri
refers to it as “a book” (“To Heaven” 2000). The 2000 Flamingo edition of
Interpreter of Maladies announces an ambiguous literary identity for
nothing indicates the genre of the book. It is through a paratextual caption
by Amy Tan, placed under the title, that the narrative is finally identified:
“she is one of the finest short story writers I’ve ever read.” Lahiri’s text,
68 Chapter Four

however, trespasses generic boundaries as it straddles two sub-genres: the

short-story cycle and autobiography.
The short story-cycle, also referred to as short story sequence, a
composite novel or ‘rovelle’ (a combination of roman and nouvelle) upsets
generic lines. It “resists definition and occupies an odd, ambiguous place
between the short story and the novel” (Kennedy 1995a, vii). Even though
ostracized in academic circles as a mongrel-like type of fiction, the hybrid
nature of the short-story cycle provides Lahiri’s book with a wider range
of experiences and representations than those offered by a novel or a
single story. Gerald Kennedy opts for the term “short story sequence”
because the term ‘sequence’ shows the work’s “progressive unfolding and
cumulative effect” (1995a, vii). The reader in this type of texts acquires
the important role of a collector or what Robert M. Luscher calls an
“assembler.” “Across gaps created by the closure of each story,” he
argues, “a more intricate set of connections can emerge from the little
‘ecstasies’ the reader successfully experiences weaving the volume
together with a complex network of cross-references arising from the
interplay between the recurrent images, characters, settings and themes”
(Luscher 1995, 152). Within the same vein, Kennedy argues that the
reader acquires “a strategic position to draw parallels, to discern whatever
totalizing meanings may inhere in the composite scheme” (1995b, 196).
The reader negotiates meaning while piecing together the different parts of
the book. From this perspective, both reader and writer coalesce in an act
of gathering and assembling.
Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies is energized by a strong autobiographical
strain. Once more, generic boundaries are obfuscated for her stories resist
autobiography as a sub-genre while they engage memory as a major
background. Azade Seyhan proposes “autobiographical voices,” a term she
borrows from Françoise Lionnet as a more accurate term than either
autobiography or memoir for “it suggests an explicit or implicit dialogue
between the writer and the community, ancestors or family” (2001, 60).
Lahiri’s work definitely engages a conversation with both her community
and her family. Her stories narrate the tribulations of the South Asian
community in the USA and consequently acquire an ethnic scope. James
Nagel probes the idea of ethnicity in his work The Contemporary
American Short Story: The Ethnic Resonance of a Genre wherein he
argues that the multicultural side of the American short story-cycle
acquires vitality from a blending of new literary influences and old artistic
legacies (2001, 4-5). Rocio G. Davis equally maintains that this
inbetween-sub-genre is “a particularly apt medium to enact the enigma of
 Re-Collection 69

ethnicity” (2000, 75). Indeed, its ruptured unity is a suitable form to

explore questions of location, dislocation, memory and identity.
This chapter builds on the generic ambiguity of Lahiri’s work to
propose a reading that engages a dialogue between text, writer and reader.
It is primarily concerned with re-collection as a two-fold act: assembling
and remembrance. The first part presents the writer as a collector of real
memories. The second part focuses on the idea of remembrance as
articulated by fictional characters. And the third part interpolates the
reader as the agent of reminiscence.
Even though Interpreter of Maladies cannot be categorized as a
memoir or a full-fledged autobiography, memory -personal or collective-
surfaces in all the stories. Lahiri’s visits to India with her parents, her early
feelings of alienation, her attempts at integration, as well as fragments of
Indian history, all find their way in the interstices of her text. While subtly
inserted in her collection of short stories, these memories are openly
exhibited in her interviews and essays. What is significant here is that
these elements, placed outside the text, offer a rewarding access to it. In
Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Gérard Genette proposes the term
“epitext” to describe “any paratextual element not materially appended to
the text within the same volume but circulating, as it were, freely, in a
virtually limitless physical and social space” (1997, 344). He recommends
these epitexts, private and public, as “occasions capable of furnishing us
with paratextual scraps (sometime of prime interest)” (346). When
juxtaposed, text and paratext provide an aesthetic dialogue between the
personal and the fictional. As she blurs the lines between fictionalizing the
self and personalizing fiction, Lahiri emerges as a collector of memories,
both her own and her characters’.
In several essays and interviews, Lahiri records an anxious childhood
and adolescence over her identity. She describes her “perplexing bicultural
universe” (“To Heaven” 2000) as a “classic case of divided identity” (“J.
Lahiri on Her Debut Novel” 2007). In her essay “My Two Lives” (2006),
she describes a split self oscillating between two allegiances. “I felt
intense pressure to be two things,” she confesses, “loyal to the old world
and fluent in the new, approved on either side of the hyphen.” At that early
age, she was too confused to secure a comfortable navigation between the
borders of her identity. She perceived the hyphen separating her
Indianness from her Americanness as a gaping void, a “zero”: “in spite of
the first lesson of arithmetic, one plus one did not equal two but zero, my
conflicting selves always canceling each other out” (“My Two Lives”
2006). This state of anxious rupture marked Lahiri’s childhood. In her
interviews, she recollects the disorientation of a fissured self. “As a young
70 Chapter Four

child,” she remembers, “I felt that I had two separate lives.” She had to
meet the expectations of two different worlds: her parents’ and her peers’:
“it was always a question of allegiance, of choice” (“J. Lahiri on Her
Debut Novel” 2007). In another interview, she explains her angst as a type
of legacy: “I feel that I have inherited a sense of that loss from my
parents” (“Pulitzer Prize winner-Fiction” 2000). Reiterating the anxieties
of her childhood in several testimonies reveals an attempt at conjuring a
trauma deeply incrusted inside her. Growing up, Lahiri resorts to writing
to face the ghosts of her childhood and to re/collect a divided self.
Lahiri records her rapport with writing as an act of existence, survival
and reconciliation. As she stitches sentences, she weaves herself in the
tapestry of her texts. She describes her fascination with sentences in her
essay “My Life’s Sentences” (2012), a title that clearly disrupts the
boundaries between her life and her fiction. “The urge to convert
experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one
another,” she states, “is the basic, ongoing impulse of my life.” This
gesture of aestheticizing the self is only one side of the story; the other
side is an ongoing attempt at bridging the gap between two separate
selves. In “My Two Lives”, Lahiri explains her urgent feeling to write
with “the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page
as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life.”
Talking about her experience of writing acquires the same recursive
move she adopts in recording her childhood agonies. The act of writing
becomes a confessional occasion reiterating the same anxieties and
chronicling the same ruptures. In her essay “To Heaven”, she revisits the
same idea expressed in “My Two Lives”: “what first drove me to write
fiction,” she states, “was to escape the pitfalls of being viewed as one
thing or the other.” Writing emerges as a refuge, a healing, a way to “seek
solace through observation and recording my impressions in a space that
was very much my own, on the page” (“Interview” 1999). That earlier
void, the “zero” braving any addition of her two selves, is now transformed
into a reconciliatory zone, a terrain of entente.
Interpreter of Maladies promotes the writer as both a therapist, a healer
of maladies, and a translator, an interpreter of ailments. The boundaries
between the personal and the fictional are blurred as the stories of her
characters diagnose her own malaise. Lahiri perceives her craft of writing
as an exercise of translation. “I view my position as a writer,” she declares,
“as a sort of interpreter” (“A Coversation” 2008). Within the same vein,
she declares all her characters as “translators, in so far as they must make
sense of the foreign in order to survive” (“To Heaven” 2000). Accordingly,
 Re-Collection 71

the act of writing/interpreting has a reflective quality: her characters mirror

her own anxieties and vice-versa.
The porous boundary between the real and the fictional is a topic that
Lahiri also expands upon in her essays and interviews. Similar to her
recollections of her childhood disarrays and her description of the healing
power of her writing, the story behind her stories acquires a testimonial
scope. Once more, reiteration accounts for a need to disgorge her
apprehensions. A pertinent example is offered in talking about two stories
from Interpreter of Maladies in two different paratextual asides. First in an
interview and then in an essay, she enunciates the dialectical relationship
between herself and her characters. Bibi Haldar in “The Treatment of Bibi
Haldar” and Boori Ma in “A Real Durwan” clearly channel the writer’s
own feelings of dislocation and estrangement during her visits to India.
“My own experience of India was largely that of a tunnel,” she confesses
in her essay “To Heaven”, “the tunnel imposed by the single city we ever
visited, by the handful of homes we stayed in, by the fact that I was not
allowed to explore this city on my own.” She ingeminates the same idea in
an interview: “what drew me to write about them was partly a projection
of my own feelings of being marginal when there. Of not being a part of
the culture. Of feeling foreign” (“Interview” 1999). Lahiri’s strategy of
attributing her own sentiments to her characters takes her stories to the
outskirts of autobiography without crossing generic borders.
Interpreter of Maladies is based on collected biographical elements
carefully couched in a fictional form. Lahiri offers a good example in the
last story of her collection “The Third and Final Continent.” She
acknowledges that the story was “based” on her “father’s past.” The
challenge, she adds, was “working with real facts and preserving truth, yet
having to disguise them to make it fiction” (“To Heaven”). Even if she
does not relate all the characters to her real life, it is easy to trace
autobiographical scraps. Based on Lahiri’s declarations and recollections
in her essays, the young Lilia in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”, for
instance, is a semi-fictional self-portrait as both writer and character grow
up with conflicting expectations “to be Indian with Indians and American
with Americans” (“To Heaven”). Similarly, she does not need to declare
that the story of Mrs. Sen in “Mrs. Sen’s” recreates her parents’ attempts
at “maintaining ties to India and preserving Indian traditions in America”
(“J. Lahiri on Her Debut Novel” 2007). Lahiri’s stories offer a space of
negotiating the personal and the fictional. It is an artistic rendition of the
self in which memory, in all its manifestations, plays the role of the
mediator between two split worlds.
72 Chapter Four

Memory is also a gesture of negotiating boundaries and borders, both

temporal and physical. It is a navigation between now and then as well as
between here and there that stamps the friction between longing and
belonging. An illustrative manifestation of memory in Lahiri’s work is her
excessive, almost compulsive, utilization of food. Interpreter of Maladies
is transformed into a culinary archive, a gastronomical documentation of
the self. The critical assessment of Lahiri’s use of food hovers around the
rapport between food and ethnic identity. Anita Manhur reads food in this
collection of short stories as “the backdrop, but a vital one, to address the
very processes of abjection immigrants experience while attempting to
cleave a cultural space with Americanness” (2010, 161). Within the same
vein, Laura Anh Williams contends that the metaphoric interpolation of
food “frequently constructs and reflects relationships to racialized
subjectivity and also addresses issues of authenticity, assimilation and
desire” (2007, 70). While the nexus food/identity is pivotal in Lahiri’s
stories, I slightly depart at this level of my analysis from these critical
assessments. As I relate the text to its paratextual echoes, I propose to read
food as a testimony, an element of recollection purporting to occupy the
hyphen between the past and the present, and between India and America.
In her essays and interviews, Lahiri interpolates food in the same
iterative way she does with her childhood memories and the act of writing.
Indeed, it is in these epitexts that she offers an interpretation of food as a
middleman, a negotiator of identity. In “Family Values”, an interview with
Alden Mudge (2003), the writer explains the culinary urge in her family:

I come from a very food-oriented family like most children of immigrants,

I’m aware of how important food becomes for foreigners who are trying to
deal with life in a new world. Food is a very deep part of people’s lives and
it has incredible meaning beyond the obvious nutritional aspects. My
parents have given up so many basic things coming here from the life they
once knew – family, love, connections – and food is one thing that they’ve
really held on to.

As the title of the interview suggests, food becomes a “value,” an

ontological necessity, an ethical responsibility.
It is Lahiri’s sense of responsibility, her endeavor to please her parents
in preserving her Indianness, that transforms her stories into an ethnic
cuisine. Except for one short essay “Note to Myself: Take the Kitchen”
(2009), in which she describes her cooking activities during a vacation in
Cape God, Lahiri brings the image of her father as the guardian of the
Indian culinary heritage in all her other essays. In “Indian Take Out”
(2000), for instance, she describes her father’s food mania. “My father
 Re-Collection 73

spent days in the bazaars,” Lahiri states as she recollects in her essay the
shopping phase at the end of their visits to India, “haggling and buying by
the kilo. He always insists on packing the goods himself with the aura of a
man possessed, bare-chested, seated cross legged on the floor, determined,
above all, to make everything fit.” After describing her father, Lahiri
provides an exhaustive list of foods they used to take back with them:
lentils, spices, poppy seeds, resin made from date syrup, Ganesh mustard
oil, tea, rice, crunchy snacks, melon, bay leaves etc. Naming food is also
an act of preserving a part of one’s memory and endorses her father’s
endeavor to keep his umbilical cord with his motherland.
The father as a culinary custodian emerges in another essay by Lahiri,
“Rice” (2009). In this short memoire piece, she describes a rice recipe
jealously guarded by her father. “Pualo” becomes her father’s culinary
secret based more on a cooking ritual than a recognized recipe. Lahiri
reports that the first time her father made ‘pualo’ was on a ritual occasion,
her “annaprason, a rite of passage in which Bengali children are given
solid food for the first time.” The importance of the father in securing food
traditions is recreated in two stories in which the two major male
characters are highly involved in culinary activities. Both Shukumar in “A
Temporary Matter” and Sanjiv in “This Blessed House” are fictional
renditions of Lahiri’s father. Juxtaposing text to paratext, then, shows the
autobiographical strain in Lahiri’s collection of short stories. Her gesture
of piecing together her split identity is recuperated by her characters who
are equally involved in this act of re-membering.
The overlapping boundary between self and nation is best illustrated in
four stories, namely “A Temporary Matter”, “Mrs Sen’s”, “When Mr.
Pirzada Came to Dine” and “A Real Durwan”. Marked by reminiscence
and fragments of memories, these stories show characters striving to locate
themselves in time and space. The first story in the collection, “A
Temporary Matter”, sets forth this gesture of collecting pieces of the past
and juxtaposing them to the present. Set in the USA, the opening story
narrates a conjugal failure. Shoba and Shukumar’s three-year marriage
starts collapsing after the incident of their still-born baby. A power outage
ironically brings them together as they start spending this time of darkness
revisiting moments in the past they have never been able to reveal. This
game of confession, based on recollection, together with flashbacks,
punctuating the narrative, show Shukumar’s attempts at reconstructing his
life.
Self and nation are very subtly intertwined in “A Temporary Matter.”
The story, veering more towards the universal, does not expose anxieties
over Indianness in a blatant way. Narrated from Shukumar’s perspective,
74 Chapter Four

the story swerves more towards insinuation than indication. Both

Shukumar and Shoba are second-generation immigrants. Contrary to his
wife, however, Shukumar visited India only once when he was an infant.
Because “he’d nearly died of amoebic dysentery” (12), his parents never
took him again there. It is only after his father’s death and his mother’s
return to India that he starts getting interested in the history of his country.
His parents were the embodiment of a remote homeland, a reassuring
presence compensating absence. This may explain his complete disinterest
in India while they were all living together and his sudden urge to study its
history once left alone. Historical information from books, however, is
unable to provide him with an intimate relationship with India.
Accordingly, he “wished now that he had his own childhood stories of
India” (12). He has this silent wish the first night of the blackout. Darkness
conjures an absent space: “it’s like India,” Shoba remarks, “sometimes the
current disappears for hours” (11). Metaphorically, then, darkness does not
only stand for an exploration of the dark recesses of the self, but also a
journey back to a lost homeland. His crisis of belonging floats in the
narrative in small debris of reminiscences.
These snapshots of memory enable both the readers and Shukumar to
fill in gaps, to reconstruct a type of linearity in a fragmented story full of
silences. The story is mainly silent on Shukumar’s cultural anxieties. Food
is a key element to enter this area of shadow in the story. His scraps of
memories punctuating the whole text are mainly centered on a past where
food was abundant and Shoba was the feeder. In a metonymic gesture,
food becomes a substitute for an absent homeland. It is significant that
their first encounter occurs in an episode of cultural retrieval:

He thought back to their first meeting, four years earlier at a lecture hall in
Cambridge, where a group of Bengali poets were giving a recital. They’d
ended up side by side, on folding wooden chairs. Shukumar was soon
bored, he was unable to decipher the literary diction, and couldn’t join the
rest of the audience as they sighed and nodded solemnly after certain
phrases. Peering at the newspaper folded in his lap, he studied the
temperatures of cities around the world … When he turned his head to the
left he saw a woman next to him making a grocery list on the back of a
folder. (13)

Attending a recital in a language he completely ignores despite the fact

that it is his mother tongue betrays nostalgia to a lost culture he yearns to
recover. Shoba, who must also have the same cultural longing, is
associated with food. This is how food becomes a metonymy of a nation
and Shoba a substitute for the mother/land. After his father’s death,
 Re-Collection 75

Shukumar’s mother abandons the house and moves back to Calcutta (6).
Meeting Shoba metaphorically functions as a regaining of both mother and
land. Shoba provides him with an umbilical cord linking him to India, a
culinary route to motherland.
Food in “A Temporary Matter”, as it is the case in several other stories
of the collection, acquires a Derridean sense of the “supplement” as “it is
not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its
place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness” (1974,
145). Accordingly such an excess of food signals a perpetual fear of being
unable to overpower absence. Mrs. Sen offers a pertinent illustration of the
anxiety accompanying a supplement. The title of the story “Mrs. Sen’s”
announces food as a cultural artifact “to replace. It intervenes or insinuates
itself in-the-place-of, it is as one fills a void” (Derrida 1974, 145). The
possessive form in the title ironically refers to an eating place. Indeed,
Mrs. Sen transforms her house into a restaurant, a space where culinary
activities try to replace a lost home. Married to a university professor, Mrs.
Sen lives the trauma of being transplanted from her land. “Everything is
there,” she tells the mother of the young Eliot whom she takes care of.
Presenting herself as “Professor’s wife”, Mrs. Sen’s name announces a
double void: she is nameless and homeless.
Under the sympathetic, albeit puzzled, eyes of Eliot, Mrs. Sen enters
into a culinary frenzy:

He especially enjoyed watching Mrs. Sen as she chopped things, seated on

newspapers on the living room floor. Instead of a knife she used a blade
that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle to distant seas.
The blade was hinged at one end to a narrow wooden base. The steel, more
black than silver, lacked a uniform polish, and had a serrated crest, she told
Eliot, for grating. Each afternoon Mrs. Sen lifted the blade and locked it
into place, so that it met the base at an angle. Facing the sharp edge
without ever touching it, she took whole vegetables between her hands and
hacked them apart: cauliflower, cabbage, butternut squash. She split things
in half, then quarters, speedily producing florets, cubes, slices, and shreds.
(114)

Quoted at length, this passage is important to understand the character’s

strategy of assuaging her anxieties and overcoming absence. The image of
the woman warrior conquering a new land (the USA) with her culinary
prowess functions as a counter narrative of dislocation. “If there is one
thing sure about food,” postulates Terry Eagleton, “it is that it is never just
food – it is endlessly interpretable – materialized emotion” (1997). Food is
her revenge on absence.
76 Chapter Four

It is through this brutal image of dismembering that Mrs. Sen seeks to

re-member – to piece together a divided self split between here and there.
Her feeling of homelessness is conveyed through her interpolation of
memories. This is how “Eliot understood that when Mrs. Sen said home,
she meant India, not the apartment where she sat chopping vegetables”
(116). Cooking conveys an urgent need to keep ties with a lost home; it is
an act of preserving memory. Indeed, Mrs. Sen has a “curious scent of
mothballs and cumin” (117), remarks the young Eliot. The two scents
symbolically sum up her strife to protect her cultural identity from
disintegration. While spice functions as a metonymy of India, mothballs
represent a metaphor of resistance.
The image of resisting disintegration and the complete loss of identity
is reproduced in “A Real Durwan.” Similar to Mrs. Sen who is defined
according to her husband’s profession, Boori Ma is first presented as
“sweeper of the stairwell” (72). The two women share the plight of being
dislodged from their original homelands. Boori Ma was deported to
Calcutta after Partition and now occupies a liminal space as she can
neither forget “there” where she “tasted life,” nor can she accept “here”,
where she eats her “dinner from a rice pot” (71). The same image of the
woman warrior is recuperated in this story, now with Boori Ma fighting
mites: “she shook the mites out of her bedding. She shook the quilts once
underneath the letter boxes where she lived, then once again at the mouth
of the alley, causing the crows who were feeding on vegetable peels to
scatter on several directions” (70). The mites, reverberating with Mrs.
Sen’s mothballs, symbolically function as the danger of being swallowed
up by a new space: “I tell you, these mites are eating me up,” she
complains to Mrs. Dalel. The crows intensify the image of death and
disintegration.
Remembrance, once again, comes to the fore as a strategy to keep ties
with a lost nation. “Remembering”, argues Azade Seyhan “is an act of
lending coherence and integrity to a history interrupted, divided, or
compromised by instances of loss” (2001, 4). Boori Ma carries the trauma
of her violent deportation as a scar impossible to heal: “the turmoil had
separated her from a husband, four daughters, a two-story brick house, a
rosewood almari, and a number of coffer boxes” (71). Boori Ma engages
remembrance as an act of survival, an act that resonates with her
metaphorical combat against being engulfed by oblivion. It is through
storytelling that she resists death. Indeed, Boori Ma keeps recounting the
stories of her affluent past when she used to walk on “nothing but marble”
and “not a delicacy was spared” (71). She ends her reminiscences with a
recurrent sentence: “believe me, don’t believe me, such comforts you
 Re-Collection 77

cannot even dream them” (71). Repeating this statement not only
empowers her as someone who controls her story/history, but also
functions as “an iterative act of fixing memory” (Hutcheon 2002, 162).
Her oral record of her past competes with the written version of history.
For “we engage in history not only as agents and actors,” contends
Seyhan, “but also as narrators or storytellers” (4). Boori Ma’s stories
function as a corrective move against the amnesia of official history.
“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” provides another pertinent example
of the overlapping boundaries between the personal and the historical. The
episodic structure of the story engages both reader and character in an act
of reconstruction. Lilia recollects her memories when she was ten. Mr.
Pirzada’s visits to her family coincide with the partition of Pakistan in
1971. The narrative shows her rising awareness of her split identity as an
Indian who has no knowledge of the history and culture of her motherland
and an American immersed in the culture of her host land. Ruptured
spaces emerge in Lilia’s mother’s hierarchal classification of “here” as the
locus of “a safe life, an easy life, a fine education” and “there” as a space
of poverty and war (26). The partition of Pakistan is ironically juxtaposed
to the history of the unification of the United States she learns at school.
While she is able in her classes of history and geography to fill in blanks
on maps with “names, dates, capitals … with [her] eyes closed” (27), she
feels completely estranged in front of the map of India which looks like
“an orange diamond that my mother once told me resembled a woman
wearing a sari with her left arm extended” (26). Lilia’s first lesson of
Indian history takes place in the kitchen as her father explains to her the
Partition of India in 1947: “‘one moment we were free and then we were
sliced up,’ he explained, drawing an X with his finger on the countertop,
‘like a pie. Hindus here, Muslims there’” (25). The private space of the
kitchen, as opposed to the public space of the school, transforms Indian
history into a personal query. Like Shukumar, Lilia visited India “only
once and had no memory of the trip” (26). She, too, needs a childhood
story of India.
The story unfolds as a bildungsroman tracing the growth of Lilia into
national awareness. She finds her missing story of an absent homeland in
the person of Mr. Pirzada. He becomes a “refugee” while her parents’
house is transformed into an Indian territory as expressed jokingly by Mr.
Pirzada himself: “another refugee, I’m afraid, on Indian territory” (28). As
she follows with puzzled eyes the unfolding of an important episode in the
history of India, Lilia constructs her own story. His daily gifts of candies
become a “ritual” (29) announcing a passage into constructing memory.
Indeed, Lilia stores her “evening’s treasure,” she reports, “in a small
78 Chapter Four

keepsake box made of carved sandalwood beside my bed, in which, long

ago in India, my father’s mother uses to store the ground areca nuts she ate
… and until Mr. Pirzada came to our lives I could find nothing to put
inside it” (29-30). The box symbolically functions as a reliquary of
memories: her stories of India. Mr. Pirzada’s family becomes Lilia’s
metanarrative of India – a subtext of discovering self and other. She starts
imagining his “daughters rising from sleep, tying ribbons in their hair,
anticipating breakfast, preparing for school” (31). Then, she starts
worrying about his family which announces a growth in Lilia’s emotional
relationship with unknown land and people. Her story culminates into a
religious ritual in which every night she eats a piece of candy while
praying for the safety of Mr. Pirzada’s family.
Lilia’s story intersects with the stories of Shukumar, Mrs. Sen and
Boori Ma in accumulating memories to negotiate blurred boundaries
between self and nation. Each character engages remembrance as a
historiographic act through which the self is relocated both in time and
space. While characters are immersed in a process of gluing fractured
identities, the reader is equally concerned with this activity of piecing
together scattered fragments of the collection of stories. Interpreter of
Maladies transforms the act of reading into an act of bricolage. The
reader-bricoleur also bases reading on a montage of the whole work.
Recollection, in its double meaning of reminiscence and gathering, is a
rewarding strategy to read Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri’s deliberate
maneuver of infusing her stories with echoes and reverberations stresses
the importance of recollection in the whole book. Individual stories are not
meant to be read and forgotten; they are rather energized, this time, by the
reader’s memory. The focus here is not on obvious recurrent themes, but
rather on furtive details scattered all over the narrative and stored in the
alert reader’s memory.
The ‘book’ is one of the objects that trespasses the narrative
boundaries between stories. It appears in three stories as an epistemic
mediator between Indian characters and their absent homeland. Shukumar
in “A Temporary Matter”, the Dases in “Interpreter of Maladies”, and
Lilia in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” turn to books to fill in this gap.
Shukumar’s interest in “the country” started in “his last years of college …
he studied its history from course books as if it were any other subject”
(12). His attempt at transforming his rather passive consumption of
knowledge into a productive one finds a venue in the choice of his PhD
dissertation: “agrarian revolts in India” (2). His failure to complete his
dissertation, however, shows his estrangement from a space mainly linked
in his mind to culinary fantasies. Shukumar, the reader is informed, only
 Re-Collection 79

has “a facility for absorbing details without curiosity” (4) (emphasis

added). Accordingly, his project of writing/producing a book (a
dissertation) on India instead of reading/consuming books collapses.
Ironically enough, “cooking” becomes “the one thing that made him feel
productive” (8). The irony lies in feeling productive through the ultimate
symbol of consumption: food. The book in the case of Shukumar is tightly
linked to a consumed homeland impossible to produce.
The same idea reverberates in “Interpreter of Maladies.” The Dases,
born and based in the USA, pay a visit to India. Their Indian origin,
however, does not preclude them from adopting a tourist’s attitude.
Observed through the lenses of Mr. Kapasi, their guide, they display an
image of the cultural transvestite as they “looked Indian but dressed as
foreigners did” (44). Once again, the book appears as an artifact of
knowledge; this time an invitation for consumption: “a paperback tour
book, which said ‘INDIA’ in yellow letters and looked as if it had been
published abroad” (44). The ironic insinuation is clear here: the book not
only provides a second-hand knowledge about India, but it is also an arm-
chair production of the country. The book joins the symbolic function of
Mr. Das’ sunglasses and camera: they all provide a simulacrum of India –
a mere reproduction of the original image. Similarly, the wife, Mrs. Das,
negotiates her knowledge of India through a “Bombay film magazine
written in English” (47). The tour book and the film magazine transform
India into a site of touristic consumption, both geographical and cultural.
Like Shukumar, the Dases fail to produce an authentic version of the
homeland.
Even though the image of the book in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to
Dine” is also linked to Lilia’s need to gather knowledge about a distant
homeland, she departs from the other characters in her ability to produce
her own account of India. Lilia’s first lesson of the history of India which,
as stated above, takes place in the kitchen, a space of consumption par
excellence, has not influenced her vision of the country. Indeed, she soon
replaces the kitchen with another space of knowledge, the library. Reading
books about India becomes Lilia’s maneuver of resistance. The episode of
the library is a poignant moment of historical retrieval. Her assignment
about the American Revolution is transformed into a rebellion against an
educational system estranging the cultures of minorities. “But I could not
concentrate,” Lilia reports, “I returned to the blond-wood shelves, to a
section I had noticed labeled ‘Asia’ … Eventually I found a book titled
Pakistan: A Land and Its People” (33). As she gets immersed in the book,
she is violently interrupted by her teacher, Mrs. Kenyon, who “lifted the
book by the tip of its spine as if it were a hair clinging to my sweater”
80 Chapter Four

(33). The scene ends with Mrs. Kenyon replacing the book on the shelf.
This, however, has not put an end to Lilia’s pursuit of knowledge about
homeland. The narrator of the story, a grown up Lilia, will read later as
many books and she needs. She explains her knowledge of the details
about the 1971 war she provides in her narrative by subsequent readings:
“all of these facts I know now, for they are available to me in any history
book, in any library” (40). The word “any” echoes Shukumar’s use of the
same word: “as if it were any other subject” quoted above. However, they
utilize the word differently. While Shukumar’s “any” refers to a lack of
involvement, Lilia’s corroborates her sense of commitment. Her repetition
of “any” is an ironic reference to that specific book in that specific library
where she was once denied the right to read about anything but the history
of the host land. The whole story emerges as a counter-narrative of this
“epistemic violence”, to make a catachrestic use of Spivak’s phrase. The
elusive ending of the story becomes clear when read in the light of this
extended metaphor of books and consumption. The story ends with Lilia
throwing Mr. Pirzada’s candies announcing a growth in her perception of
consumption. Contrary to the Dases and especially Shukumar, she
emerges as a producer of knowledge, not a mere consumer of books.
Lahiri’s creation of porous zones between her stories manifests in other
travelling images and metaphors masquerading as objects. The most
prominent of these objects are items of furniture. “Mrs. Sen’s” offers an
interesting example of textual trespassing. It intersects briefly with “This
Blessed House” in conjuring home abroad. In “Mrs. Sen’s,” the sofa is
“draped at all times with a green and black bedcover printed with rows of
elephants bearing palanquins on their backs” (115). In “This Blessed
House,” an almost similar pattern is recreated on another item of furniture:
“silk paintings of elephant processions brought on their honeymoon in
Jaipur” (139). While the first narrative charts the story of an Indian woman
who feels uprooted from her land, the second one shows a young Indian
couple seemingly comfortable in a host land. The two stories merge
through this casually inserted detail which subtly raises anxieties over
space. Mrs. Sen fiercely protects her new space by refurbishing it with
everything Indian. The bedcover is a palimpsestic gesture to erase
Americanness and inscribe Indianness. Silk paintings, in “This Blessed
House”, however, fail to impose a new space as the old space refuses
erasure and keeps spouting Christian paraphernalia.
“Mrs. Sen’s” also leaks into “A Real Durwan” through the two female
characters’ use of newspapers first as elements of furniture and second as a
metaphorical subversion of the written word. While Boori Ma sleeps on “a
bed made from newspapers” (76), Mrs. Sen carries her culinary ritual
 Re-Collection 81

“seated on newspapers on the living room floor” (114). The newspapers in

the case of Boori Ma endorse further her oral rendition of her story,
explained above. This ironic subversion of the power of newspapers is
corroborated through the figure of Mr. Chatterjee who has not “opened a
newspaper since Independence, but in spite of this fact, or maybe because
of it, his opinions were always highly esteemed” (72). This implies that
Mr. Chatterjee’s historical awareness has frozen at one moment,
Independence, and consequently he is not aware of subsequent wars and
conflicts in India. Accordingly, the story of Boori Ma is lost in unread
newspapers, hence her strife to provide her own account. While “Boori
Ma’s mouth is full of ashes” (72), as Mr. Chatterjee keeps repeating, Mrs.
Sen is bent on feeding mouths. The two women share the oral venue to
preserve their stories. Mrs. Sen’s metaphorical use of newspapers as a
challenge to the printed word finds more evidence in the episode in which
she plays a cassette “of people talking in her language” (128). The last part
of the cassette in which her mother talks functions as a local newspaper
report: “The price of goat rose two rupees. The mangoes at the market are
not very sweet. College Street is flooded” (128). Like Boori Ma, Mrs.
Sen’s treatment of newspapers shows her inability to cope with a new
reality she utterly refuses. The recurrent item of the newspapers creates an
interesting echo between two characters who seem to be completely
different from each other.
Mrs. Sen steals her way into a third story, “Sexy”, to create, this time,
familiarity in a defamiliarized situation. Miranda in “Sexy” recollects a
childhood memory which shaped at that time her perception of the Other.
From the birthday party of an Indian girl who was her neighbor, she can
only remember “a painting of a naked woman with a red face shaped like a
kight’s shield … In one hand she banished a dagger. With one foot she
crushed a struggling man on the ground. Around her body was a necklace
composed of bleeding heads, strung together like a popcorn chain” (96).
The ten-year old Miranda “was too frightened to eat her cake” (96). Mrs.
Dixit’s explanations that it was a painting of the goddess Kali could not
assuage her fears. The ‘dagger’ and ‘popcorn’, as elements of food, are
recreated in “Mrs. Sen’s” through the blade and the chopped vegetables.
The eponymous character incarnates the image of Kali. Her violent acts as
she hacks vegetables apart or splits things in half metaphorically transform
her into the Goddess of Revenge. Jhumpa Lahiri creates an intricate
network of objects and images that circulate in the collection, and whose
meaning depends on the reader’s recollection. Those re-membered details
endow the seemingly dismembered stories with unity.
82 Chapter Four

Recollection in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies goes beyond

its thematic scope to embrace a whole strategy of narration. Author, text
and reader engage a synchronized act of remembrance to negotiate
respectively identity, unity, and meaning. Jhumpa Lahiri imparts her
stories with her own memories without infringing generic lines. While her
life permeates the stories, the whole collection stagnates at the thresholds
of an autobiographical account. The personal is collected, recollected and
then dispersed in the interstices of the collection. Her characters pursue
this venture of remembrance as a tactic maneuver to keep ties with an
absent homeland. Through ruptured memories, old spaces are conjured up
and new spaces are exorcized. While Lahiri’s characters endeavor to
relocate themselves in space, the reader attempts to reconstruct the textual
space. The act of reading yields a complex process of negotiating
meaning. Readers grope their way towards interpretation by re/collecting
images and trailing echoing characters and objects scattered all over the
textual space. Establishing a dialogue between her different stories
testifies to Lahiri’s aim at creating a living collection. A genuine daughter
of Scheherazade, Lahiri uses recollection as an act of preserving life, the
life of her stories.

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