Insecurities and Hope
Insecurities and Hope:
Bharati Mukherjee’s Hybrids
and the Role of Divider/Bridge
The dilemma is not a new one. Shaila’s difficulty is that for an instant, she became not of one culture or the other, but rather inhabited the space between them, the interstices of a cultural discourse the shape of which has not yet become fully realized. The question that must be answered in order to ascertain the eventual forms this discourse may take is, what is the role of such a person, acting as barrier and gateway between competing cultural value systems? Shaila’s position is that of the divider: she marks the point beyond which one culture may not cross without changing, at least partially, into another. Different stances on the issue hold the barrier to be a solid wall or as thin as gauze, or perhaps even illusory. Shaila’s position may not be as untenable as it seems, or it may be far worse than she imagines. According to some perspectives, she as interpreter has lost her cultural identity–and since she can never truly come to be of the other culture, she is rootless. Others would argue that she has the ability to move freely between the two more limited perspectives of the “pure” cultures, thus embodying the role of gate rather than wall.
Shaila’s dilemma is to some extent that of postcolonialism. Her role, and that of the Sikhs, is of colonists in the New World, the Western world that for so many years exported its cultural values to her nation. However, the same problems apply to the members of a culture that has been colonized, or even, as Mukherjee points out in several stories, to the returning soldiers who fought in Vietnam and absorbed cultural values there. Hybridization is the issue, the flux that exists when disparate cultural discourses come into contact and influence one another. The individuals who reside at that point of flux must deal with the violence that is often inherent in such contact, and must also deal with the fact that they have become hybrids, alternately regarded as outcasts and valuable bridges.
In The Middleman and Other Stories, Mukherjee presents this same dilemma from a multiplicity of perspectives. The narrators and central intelligences of the stories are male and female, American, Italian-American, Hindu, and from a wide range of economic and educational backgrounds. However, they share a trait: they are all attempting, consciously or unconsciously, to deal with their position of barrier and gate. Whether they attempt to cross from one discourse to another, try to reinforce the extant barriers between them, or simply stand uncomfortably caught between them, they are all placed in the role of hybrid.
Implicit in Mukherjee’s method of depiction is the idea that these barriers can indeed be crossed, that the hybrid is indeed in the position to move freely between competing discourses, although not without numerous qualms and certainly opposition from purists within each culture. Simply by choosing such a diversity of protagonists and portraying their thoughts to us, Mukherjee is demonstrating a method of communication across that barrier these characters inhabit. By allowing the reader to inhabit the consciousness of a young Italian-American woman, of a bitter and sadistic white Vietnam vet, of Shaila Bhave, she is showing that the barriers between discourses are largely illusory, and only exist because of the mutual agreement between cultures to maintain a separate identity. It is clear from her handling of these numerous protagonists that such an identity is not only impossible to maintain, but also can never entirely fade away.
In several stories Mukherjee portrays the protagonist as colonist. In these stories we are presented with a narrator who is attempting to enter a culture alien to them. One of her favorite techniques for investigating this idea is the intercultural romance. As a rule, Mukherjee portrays these loves as irresistible in a certain way, precisely because they involve a dependency. Take how Renata in “Orbiting” speaks of molding Ro, her Afghan lover, to fit the American mold. Renata is venturing outside her Italian-American background, seeking the exotic in a form she can control. She is attempting to create a new hybrid:
…Vic was beautiful, but Vic was self-sufficient. Ro’s my chance to heal the world.
I shall teach him how to walk like an American, how to dress like Brent but better, how to fill up a room as Dad does instead of melting and blending but sticking out in the Afghan way. In spite of the way he holds himself and the funny way he moves his head from side to side when he wants to say yes, Ro is Clint Eastwood, scarred hero and survivor. Dad and Brent are children.
–(p. 76)
The key to understanding Renata’s attempt is the word “self-sufficient.” Renata wants to “heal” the cultural gap, in effect to bring the alien Afghan into her world and make him comprehensible. She recognizes that it is his alienness itself that makes him a “hero and survivor,” but at the same time sees him as incapable of caring for himself. This view of hers is correct, of course, considering that they are going to have to live in a particular cultural milieu, one with whose mores and customs she is conversant but he is not. His difference however, is enough that she is forced to identify Ro’s heroism with a familiar American icon, for she cannot describe him in his own culture’s terms. This does not preclude the love, but perhaps we may be repelled by her unquestioning assumption that Ro is the one who will be changed. It is clear from the context of other stories in the collection that Renata is letting herself in for change, that while she is in effect colonizing Afghanistan, Afghanistan is colonizing her. The result is that her perceptions are inevitably changed. “When I’m with Ro I feel I am looking at America through the wrong end of a telescope. He makes it sound like a police state, with sudden raids, papers, detention centers, deportations, and torture and death waiting in the wings,” she thinks to herself at one point (66).
Once a hybridization process has begun, and we have attempted to colonize the Other, we are inevitably changed permanently. We will never recover our previous perceptions of our culture. In “Fighting for the Rebound” we see the case of an American man who has an affair with an Philippine woman. Although he hates her politics, calling them “vile,” and even tries to manage her by pushing her gently to act in American ways, he cannot quite abandon her. The Third World Latin pattern of caring for the helpless woman sets in, and when she begins to behave according to her cultural pattern, he has no choice but to fill the role of a Philippine man. “Oh, Blanquita, you’re breaking my heart; don’t you know, didn’t anyone ever tell you about us? Under it all, you still trust us…” he thinks to himself, as his chances of an American lover slip away (94). He has come to perceive the woman as helpless precisely becuase of her cultural differences, just as Renata sees Ro as a hero and a man, and not a child like her father and brother-in-law, but still not “self-sufficient.” He admits it even to her:
“You think I can’t handle the situation, right? You think I’m just a dumb, naive foreigner you have to protect, right?”
“Yeah.”
–p. 89
Blanquita herself is of course a colonizer as well, seeking out patterns she expects to find in a culture alien to her. She is a Philippine trying to be American, and “for all the rotten things she says about the Philippines, or the mistiness she reserves for the Stars and Stripes, she’s kept her old citizenship.” (79) Griff recognizes this fact, and recognizes the position in which they stand, each reaching across the cultural barrier, absorbing a little of each other’s understanding. The difference between Renata’s love for Ro, and her sister’s love for Brent, who is not of Italian descent, is summed up quite nicely by Griff when he says,
But, Christ, there’s a difference between exotic and foreign, isn’t there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me.
–p. 81
Perhaps the clearest examples of reciprocal colonization in the collection are found in the stories where the contact destroys certain customs, and removes the protagonist from the sphere of their original culture. In these stories, such as “A Wife’s Story” and “Fathering,” the position of hybrid implies a loss of contact with the original cultural source. In these stories the representatives of the original culture cannot understand the new role the hybrid plays, and perforce fail to communicate with him or her. In “Fathering,” the story of a man who takes in his Vietnamese daughter, Eng, and lets his marriage to an American woman disintegrate, we see the example of a man who has ventured far enough in his search for the alien that he abandons the familiar. The climax of the story, where Jason denies the validity of the American perceptions of his daughter’s illness and even of Western medicine, shows how far he goes in his quest to embrace the Other. He was thoroughly colonized during his Vietnam experiences, although he tries to deny it to himself, saying “Vietnam didn’t happen, and I’d put it behind me in marriage and fatherhood and teaching high school.” (115)
The choice Jason makes is immaterial, in a way, for the fact that it arose at all is evidence of the reciprocal colonization that goes on in any such cultural contact. As the American armies colonized Vietnam, to the point of leaving daughters behind in a war-torn landscape, so do the ghosts on Vietnam come back to haunt Americans. Jason might have chosen his American wife Sharon instead, and returned to the life of “teaching high school,” but his perceptions have been irrevocably changed. In this instance, unlike in other stories, Mukherjee seems to demonstrate that the position of hybrid that Jason now occupies is untenable, for he cannot quite achieve connection with either his daughter of his wife. The position of the daughter is quite clear: “Scram, Yankee bastard!” she says to Jason, rejecting a connection with him (122). Similarly, the wife can no longer understand him, mistakenly believing that “Everything was fine until she got here… If you love me, send her back.” (121) She says this despite the fact that it was she herself who urged Jason to go back and deal with the hybridization that had taken place, who urged him to find the very daughter that now upsets her with her alienness. “Then go raid the refrigerator like a normal kid,” she snaps at Eng at one point, incapable of understanding that Eng’s behavior is “normal” in a different discourse, one of magical healing and violence (115).
Jason is forced by his hybrid nature, externalized in Sharon and Eng, to choose between the discourses he sees presented to him. This choice is an illusory one in that he will never be able to leave behind the trappings of one discourse while embracing another. Another example of this phenomenon, although a less violent one, can be found in “A Wife’s Story,” where a Hindu woman who comes to America, a cultural colonist among other expatriates such as a Hungarian and a Chinese-American, finds herself so altered by her circumstances that she is a stranger to her husband, who remained behind in India.
Panna Bhatt, the protagonist of “A Wife’s Story,” is Indian enough to be disturbed by the easy stereotyping of India that is evident in “Patel” jokes and American popular culture. She is also American enough to stop wearing traditional jewelry for fear of muggers, to embrace a man in public, to buy tickets for her husband and navigate New York City streets. She stands on the barrier as well, reaching into America from India. To her husband, however, she appears as one who has crossed the barrier. His perception is that crossing the barrier will imply losing her. Again, Mukherjee points out the way in which those involved in dealing with the hybrid must put their feelings in terms of dependence. Panna, as the hybrid, is aware of her husband’s inadequacy in dealing with American customs; but her husband sees her as something to be protected, curiously vulnerable precisely because she is crossing the barriers between cultures:
…He’s disconcerted. He’s used to a different role. He’s the knowing, suspicious one in the family. He seems to be sulking… But I can’t help the other things, the necessities until he learns the ropes. I handle the money, buy the tickets. I don’t know if this makes me unhappy.
–p. 32″You’re too innocent,” my husband says. He reaches for my hand. “Panna,” he cries with pain in his voice, and I am brought back from perfect, floating memories of snow, “I’ve come to take you back. I have seen how men watch you.”
–p. 39
The husband is trying to assert the traditional Hindu system, while Panna is standing uncomfortably in the middle of two competing systems. She says she cannot go back, asserting that the academic program she is studying takes two years to complete; but in fact the program is an excuse. “I’ve broadened my horizons,” she says (30). She has done more than that, she has assumed a new identity that does not partake completely of her roots, nor entirely of American values. As a hybrid she is free to make her own rules, although she will never be free of the two cultures of which she partakes. The close of the story emphasizes the fact that she may be free, but is also no longer bound by the ties which once nurtured her. Instead she is reduced to depending upon herself:
In the mirror that hangs on the bathroom door, I watch my naked body turn, the breasts, the thighs glow. The body’s beauty amazes. I stand here shameless, in ways he has never seen me. I am free, afloat, watching somebody else.
–p. 41
It seems clear that something is lost upon becoming colonized: a sense of self as part of a tradition. Upon losing certain linkages with a cultural milieu, the hybrid may be rejected by former friends, rejected by the former culture. This may lead to a strong sense of uncertainty about the way to behave, as we see in Panna’s statement “I don’t know if this makes me unhappy.” But there are clear advantages as well. The ability to cross the barrier may enable us to “heal,” as Renata wanted to do with Ro in “Orbiting,” and as the social worker wishes to do with Shaila in “The Management of Grief.” The motto, “Physician, heal thyself,” may come to mind here. Are hybrids in need of healing themselves?
Mukherjee consistently places the need for healing on the members of one particular discourse or another, not on the hybrids themselves. It can be argued that the healing she presents in story after story is in fact the process of hybridization. Take two of the more disturbing stories in the collection, “Jasmine” and “Loose Ends.” In the latter story we are plunged headlong into the mind of a man that few would argue needs healing. Jeb is a Vietnam vet who is obsessed with power and control: the ultimate colonist, sure of his discourse’s power and perfectly willing to subordinate all else to his pleasure. Since he returned from Vietnam, however, he has discovered that the pure discourse he lives his life by has gone:
Where did America go? I want to know. Down the rabbit hole, Doc Healy used to say. Alice knows, but she took it with her. Hard to know which one’s the Wonderland. Back when me and my buddies were barricading the front door, who left the back door open?
And just look what Alice left behind.
–p. 48
Jeb’s rabid hatred is of foreignness, not the exotic, as it was defined in “Fighting the Rebound.” Alice becomes identified with another of the countless Patels, the daughter of Indian immigrants with the equivalent of Smith as a last name. Jeb rapes her at knifepoint, and then runs off to steal yet another car and perhaps kill more people. He is incapable of seeing beyond his closed cultural circle, and the result is pain for him and for those around him. He loses his lover, Jonda (whose very name suggests a yearning for the exotic), and chooses as surrogate the Patel girl he calls Alice, describing her as “luscious.” Jeb is fighting the lessons he could have learned in Vietnam, resisting them, attracted to the Other but attempting not to love it. Jonda’s gesture of healing is to point him towards others of his kind: a “Goldilocks.”
But perhaps the true cure for his psychotic nature would be to reach across the cultural barrier and acknowledge the Patels and Chavezes as people too, to cease fighting the hybridization that he immerses himself in, be it in “Acapulco, Tijuana, Freeport, Miami.” (50)
“Jasmine” is equally disturbing but for different reasons. Whereas “Loose Ends” presents us with a literal loose end, a man who should have become a hybrid but did not, thus creating a cancer at the heart of the American ideal, the story of the young girl from Trinidad shows us what can happen when a person attempts to cross the cultural barrier but fails to grasp the true nature of the discourse. Jasmine is the woman that the husband in “A Wife’s Story” fears his wife will become; she is the woman that Griff imagines Blanquita to be in “Fighting the Rebound.” She lacks sufficient knowledge of the culture to understand what is happening to her in any objective sense; instead, she is limited to her own Trinidadian perspective, which offers false views of America.
Jasmine dreams of an idealized America, and imagines that improvement implies crossing the cultural barrier. She attempts to do this by putting down Trinidad at every opportunity. She never realizes that she is exploited by the standards of the culture she is seeking to enter. She ends up losing her roots, and also sacrificing her future, totally unaware of the potential she is giving up.
Dissatisfaction with Trinidad, brought about by idealized image sof America, is what sends Jasmine across the border from Canada. The images she has of America are of course part of the cultural imperialism of the United States; for instance, that money must be green because it is more “businesslike, serious.” (124) She says of Trinidadian money that “Pretty money is only good for putting on your walls maybe… Real money was worn and green, American dollars.” (124) Already the cultural bias and the idealization of America and concomitant denigration of things Trinidadian is evident. Later, when her employer Bill Moffitt seduces her, clearly with the intention of using her as a convenient source of sexual satisfaction while his wife is away, he calls her a “flower of Trinidad.” Jasmine has abandoned her roots to such an extent that she refuses the label, asking to be called “Flower of Ann Arbor” instead (135). But of course she is not, or she would realize that her life, that of an almost certainly underpaid menial and sexual plaything for a man who has manipulated her into love, is not even close to being a fulfillment of the American Dream she so desired. The last line of the story, with its word “dreariness,” brings home the point that perhaps she does know it subconsciously.
It is ironic but also inevitable, as we have seen from other Mukherjee tales, that the reason Jasmine is able to accomplish even this much is her exoticism. It is reggae music that excites her, and when she is excited, men notice. It is because of her foreign background that Bill is able to take advantage of her in this way. She is, like Ro in “Orbiting,” ready for molding, in her innocence; but she has fallen into the hands of someone without the desire to heal that Renata has.
The similarity between the ending of this story and “A Wife’s Story” cannot be ignored. Whereas “A Wife’s Story” ends with Panna looking at herself in the mirror, feeling “shameless… free, afloat…” Jasmine’s story ends like this:
…she was a bright, pretty girl with no visa, no papers, and no birth certificate. No nothing other than what she wanted to invent and tell. She was a girl rushing wildly into the future.
His hand moved up her throat and forced her lips apart and it felt so good, so right, that she forgot all the dreariness of her new life and gave herself up to it.
–p. 135
The same images of physical beauty, of freedom, appear in “A Wife’s Story.” But where Panna manages to free herself from the more tyrannical aspects of both discourse she is immersed in, Jasmine falls victim to preconceptions and incorrect assumptions regarding America. She is in need of healing just as Jeb was in “Loose Ends,” for she is too much under the sway of only one discourse, and it prevents her from seeing that her freedom is totally illusory.
In considering these aspects of hybridization and healing, the role of gender cannot be ignored. Mukherjee is careful to present us with hybrids of both genders, but as a rule the males tend to resist the process whereas the females immerse themselves in it. The males also tend to regard the females as sexual objects, and their hybrid nature is most clearly evidenced by the way in which they arouse sexual desire. In “The Middleman,” title story of the collection, the crucial understanding that the narrator comes to is one of the nature of the colonialist discourse, seen through the eyes of sexuality:
Her long thighs press and squeeze. She tries to hold me, to contain me, and it is a moment I would die to prolong… It is a moment I fear too much, a woman I fear too much, and I yield…
Later she says, “You don’t understand hate, Alfie. You don’t understand what hate can do.” She tells stories… the stories pour out. Not just the beatings; the humiliations. Loaning her out, dangling her on a leash like a cheetah, then the beatings for what he suspects. It’s the power game, I try to tell her. That’s how power is played.
–p. 19
Alfie in this story desperately desires to possess and control the exotic, and the stories that Maria tells are precisely those of the colonized, the person who has been possessed and controlled too often to ever forget it. It is a power game, if it is made so by either of the two sides in the competition of values. Maria does no more than tell the stories that Jasmine will live out. She tells the stories that the husband fears may happen to his wife in “A Wife’s Story.”
The sexual allure of the female in this collection cannot be ignored. Men are rarely described in physically attractive terms. Instead, even the first person female narrators describe their own bodies in sensual terms, as if to make themselves the meeting ground for cultural intercourse. Although this implies a reduction to subservience from some of the men’s point of view, the women do not seem to see it that way. Rather, the image is that of being freed by the body’s power. It is inevitable to think of the generational change that can come about with the hybrid’s children–a new tradition being established. The metaphor of sexuality (and generativity) is certainly apropos.
It is when the body itself becomes the focus, rather than the potential for children with the cultural characteristics of both, that problems ensue. To put it in broader cultural terms, when one society sees the other as something to dominate or possess, to rape or seduce away from their home. The men in Mukherjee often fall into that trap, representing the colonialist mindset and embodying the worst of its tendencies. Their position is not irredeemable, however, as the father of “Fathering” demonstrates. Although the men in the stories tend to be representatives of a particular discourse and the women tend to be those who cross or attempt to cross a barrier, Mukherjee has amply demonstrated that gender itself is not the root of the situation. Her ability to enter the minds of even the psychotic Jeb in “Loose Ends” demonstrates that even the barrier to that mindset can be crossed.
In the story “Danny’s Girls” we get a portrait of a young boy who is being initiated into adulthood by a sexual act–an ancient ritual in many cultures. However, his true act of adulthood is not to sleep with Rosie, who is portrayed as less than ideal, but to refuse to participate in the act of devaluation of women. He rebels against the portrayal of female exoticism as a commodity to be controlled by males. “I’d never really thought what a strange, pimpish thing I was doing, putting up pictures of Danny’s girls,” he realizes, and throws the flyers away (144). The realization he has come to is that what is being sold is precisely “docile Indian girls to hard-up Americans for real bucks. An Old World wife who knew her place and would breed like crazy…” (138) It is no surprise that he chooses for his initiation a girl who is not like the others, Rosie, who embodies exoticism (“skin… white as whole milk… lips… a peachy orange… high Nepalese cheekbones…”) but who was “a proud woman.” (139)
The other girls Danny brought over were already broken in spirit; they’d marry just about any freak Danny brought around. Not Rosie–she’d throw some of them out, and threaten others with a cobra she said she kept in her suitcase if they even thought of touching her. After most of my errands, she’d ask me to sit on the bed and light me a cigarette and pour me a weak drink. I’d fan her for a while with the newspaper.
–p. 140
Rosie is by no means the submissive exotic that is the fantasy source of power for the colonialist. She is not passive and pliant, but rather is empowered by her attractiveness. By choosing her rather than one of the equivalents of Jasmine that parade through the house, the narrator is choosing reality rather than the unattainable cultural image that is epitomized by his description of “Pammy Patel,” a classmate. Notice how Mukherjee constantly shifts the ground of the attraction: Hindu attracted to white, Asian to American, African to Hindu, and so on, forcing us to see the situation as universal.
…there was a girl from Syosset who called herself “Pammy Patel,” a genuine Hindu-American Princess of the sort I had never seen before, whose skin and voice and eyes were as soft as clouds. She wore expensive dresses and you could tell she’d spent hours making herself up just for the Gujarati classes in the Hindu Temple. Her father was a major surgeon, and Pammy’s brothers would stand outside the class to protect her from any contact with boys like me. They would watch us filing out of the classroom, looking us up and down and smirking the way Danny’s catalogue brides were looked at by their American buyers.
–p. 142
Not only is the image of the rich Hindu who has been culturally absorbed–not hybridized, but absorbed–idealized into a fantasy image, but there is the awareness that just as the Jasmines of the world are regarded as tokens of power by Americans, so are the fifteen-year-old Ugandan refugees seen by Hindu-Americans. The circle is neverending, and the narrator finds himself in the same position that he puts Danny’s Girls in. He does not like it, and rebels; but this story, coming as it does after “Jasmine” in the collection, must be regarded as being half of a pair, for many never can make the leap outside their discourse to become true hybrids. The distinction between being of two cultures and being of one and yearning for another is painfully clear, embodied thus in the metaphor of male sexuality.
Fortunately, Mukherjee does not succumb to the easy stereotyping of females as submissive and males as always seeking dominance. The sexual roles she uses are merely examples, not hard and fast rules. As an author, she has made the effort to present similar situations from multiple perspectives. The multiplicity of narrative points of view attests to the fact that as hybrid, Mukherjee has been able to cross cultural barriers herself. The story “The Tenant” gives us a Hindu woman who is a hybrid who has a choice between a metaphorically powerless white American male and a Hindu hybrid like herself. She chooses the hybrid, despite the fact that she found a white male who chose not to exercise power over her, a man without the arms to “dangle her on a leash like a cheetah,” as happened to Maria. To choose Fred, the armless man, would be to choose the ideal dream, not a realistic one. The situation is essentially the same as that of “Danny’s Girls.”
Of the eleven stories in the book, six are from a male’s point of view, and five from a female’s. The nationalities of the protagonist vary from American white to Tamil, Ugandan and Trinidadian, with a number of Hindus. A number of the stories present the failure of the hybrid to come to terms with the cultural flux in which they find themselves. Overall, however, the fact that the book exists in the form it does is a testament to the possibilities Mukherjee sees. The problems of postcolonialism are universal, common to both colonizer and colonized. It would be a reductionist view of the situation to limit the book to only female Hindu protagonists. In seeing the commonality of the hybrid experience, Mukherjee has given us the tool for making the walls of discourse into curtains which may be drawn aside.
This is not an idealized solution. Understanding, perhaps even translation across barriers will not resolve the problems that exist. But it does provide the possibility of a solution. In the final story of the collection, “The Management of Grief,” the cultural conflicts are strong enough to destroy many lives in a terrorist bombing. But the narrator, Shaila Bhave, does not return to India to live on an ashram, as her friend Kusum does. She does not hide from the past as her friend Dr. Ranganathan does, in moving to Texas, “where no one knows his story and he has vowed not to tell it.” (193) She does not attempt to be absorbed into Western culture as Pam, Kusum’s daughter does, traveling to a mythical California of riches and leisure, ending up with a job in a department store, “giving make-up hints to Indian and Oriental girls,” presumably on how to pass as Western, as she tries to do. Rather, Shaila comes to terms with it, accepting her position as hybrid. Her ghosts fade, but she will not forget them. Nor will she try to deny them. The road Mukherjee gives to her, and to the countles sother people who stand as dividers between cultural discourses, is not an easy one, one whose final destination we cannot yet know. But at least she is walking it, with one hand in each world for balance:
Your time has come, they said. Be brave.
I do not know where this voyage I have begun will end. I do not know which direction I will take. I dropped the package on a park bench and started walking.
–p. 194
So must we all walk, or suffer the fate of Jasmines and Jebs, unable to deal with the shifting world becuase we are too ethnocentric, too obsessed with power, the victims of idealized portrayals of the Other. So must we all walk, not knowing what direction we travel in, but at least knowing that others travel with us, a melting pot of insecurities and hope.
All citations taken from Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1988).
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