Identity

I am an American citizen.  I have blonde hair blue eyes, speak “American,” grew up in a very small town where ‘everybody knows your name,’ went to college right out of high school, have parents who are a nurse and a teacher, and enjoy my Americaness.  I can’t pretend to understand those Americans who emigrated from other countries.  My only facet of knowledge of feeling somewhat like an outsider is due to the fact that I studied in Australia for five months.  I have to say, even with all the hub-bub about what was going on ‘back home’ I was still ‘proud to be an American.’  I was regarded as someone different or foreign, but that’s because I was.  I did, however, try, to the best of my abilities to sort of be Australian. I dressed like them, spoke in their slang (well tried), ate some of the different foods, but I never became Australian.  In a sense I really didn’t want to, mainly because I wasn’t becoming an Australian citizen.  If I decided to move there and actually gain residency, it would be a different story.  I think it’s important to have a community, to feel a part of a place, to actually be in the place where you live.  Those who move to America and become American citizens and want to be should not be regarded as someone who is abandoning their origin, but who is embracing a new life experience.

Bharati Mukherjee, an author, who is originally from Calcutta India, has written numerous stories about what it is to become an American.  An actual emigrant herself, she is the perfect person to examine what it means to assimilate into the American culture, or in some cases, not.  In one of her articles titled “Two Ways to Belong in America,” she discusses the differences between her move to America and the choices she made to her sisters.  She blatantly states that, “I am an American citizen and she is not.”  To sum it all up, her sister has moved here, married an Indian and is a preschool teacher in Michigan, but has not abandoned her Indian citizenship and actually plans on returning to India as soon as she retires.  Bharati, on the other hand, has married a Canadian was “was prepared for (and even welcomed) the emotional strain that came with marrying outside my ethnic community” (p.2 NYT).  She even comments on how she was “opting for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans and t-shirts..(p. 2, NYT).  Bharati made the choice to surrender her heritage for a new life.  “I need to feel like a part of the community I have adopted. I need to put roots down, to vote and make the difference that I can” (p.3 NYT).  This is the attitude of someone who isn’t afraid of change and desires to absorb a new culture and find a new image of themselves.

Bharati also wrote a novel about a woman who leaves India to come to America called Jasmine.  The title is interesting due to the fact that the main character is not only called Jasmine, but Jyoti, and Jane, depending on which stage in her life she is at.  Jyoti, (the name she was given at birth) was the fifth girl of nine children, when in India, “daughters were curses” (p 39).  Even as a young girl she seemed to have a different opinion of life than those around her.  When most believed that their lives were pre determined, Jyoti, disagreed.  She comments on when an astrologer “foretold my widowhood and exile” (p. 3), she shouted, “No! You’re a crazy old man. You don’t know my future” (p. 3)!  Even at a young age, she had her own way of thinking about life and new she had a say in what her future would hold.  She was also always ready to learn, a very smart girl, even though her mother said “Gods cruel to waste brains on a girl” (p. 40).  Jyoti new that she was wrong and embraced her desire to learn and was even able to go to school three years longer than any of her other sisters (p. 45).  The status in which women had in India or didn’t have was not adequate for Jyoti. 

Jyoti left India to find a new life, not because she was running from something.  She was offered a job as a bank teller, but had bigger plans for her life, “I don’t want to be a seno…I don’t want to be a bank teller either….I want to be a doctor and set up my own clinic in a big town” (p. 51).  Because of her new life she adopted a new name. When she moved to New York, Jasmine, worked as an au pair for a family until a move to Iowa.  In Iowa she meets a man named Bud who loves her and calls her Jane.  They are engaged and expecting a baby.  Jane gets along with all of the people in Iowa and becomes an American.  There is no doubt in my mind that she is out to find a new identity not because she is ashamed of her heritage, but just to reinvent herself.  “I know what I don’t want to become” (p. 5).  There’s nothing wrong with moving to a new place and starting over.  Obviously she wasn’t as happy as she could have been in India, so instead of dealing with the life that was “set out” for her she makes a change.  Even if this means loosing some of her cultural traditions.  She even says “We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves into our dreams” (p 29).  I think this is so relevant to her change because it’s a positive identity shift she is making: “into our dream.” Why wouldn’t someone want to change to what you dream about?  For her, becoming an American citizen is just that.  “Once we start letting go-let go just one thing, like not wearing our normal clothes, or a turban or not wearing a tika on the forehead-the rest goes on its own down a sinkhole” (p. 29).  These adjustments she makes aren’t hard for her to do, she wants to.

I also agree that when a person moves to a drastically different place and desires to make a new life, there are some modifications that should be made if change is what they are looking for.  I like that Jane doesn’t totally abandon everything that she has learned, her cooking practices are still common.  “I took gobi aloo to the Lutheran Relief Fund craft fair last week.  I am subverting the taste buds of Elsa County” (p. 19).  Even though she is trying to completely change her life and make it new, there are still a few aspects of her heritage that she is able to hold on to.  It’s not as if she is trying to completely discard where she comes from; she is just ready for a change, a new life, a new self.  Jasmine is embracing her desire to become an American citizen and have a new identity.  I think that being able to pick up and leave your family and start a new life is courageous and inspiring.  Jasmine didn’t just stay in India like the rest of her family, she decided to do what she wanted and ‘not do what she didn’t want to do.’