Geographies of Intimacy in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth
In: Multiculturalism: Critical and Inter-Disciplinary PerspectivesSearch for other papers by Tawnya Ravy in
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For diasporic people, establishing private spaces and familiar intimacies is uniquely challenging and significant in understanding the margins of postcolonial and neocolonial structures of power. Diasporic people are often portrayed as struggling to recreate a sense of home in a new and unfamiliar place while attempting to deal with postcolonial narratives of progress that seem to undermine their efforts to re-establish familiar intimacies. In Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri explores geographies of intimacy and the way in which different spaces determine intimacies, disrupt traditional narratives of intimacy, and re-form intergenerational intimacies. Lahiri specifically focuses on second-generation Bengali immigrants, highlighting the unique pressures they feel from a displaced sense of the ‘familiar’ intimacy of their parent’s homeland and the same narratives of progress with which their parents struggled. The women in these short stories are largely responsible for drawing the boundaries of the new and old geographies of intimacy. As such, these spaces and limits of intimacy are often mapped onto women’s bodies and by women’s hands. From their position as connections to the homeland for their husbands living in the West, to their positions as ‘backward’ icons of tradition for their children, these women struggle to create and move in spaces of intimacy and familiarity. The different expectations for them in these narratives of intimacy often reflect the cultural and political tensions of diasporic communities living abroad. The way in which Lahiri collapses space and modes of intimacy speaks to the complex ways diasporic women attempt to shape the familiar and unfamiliar, private and public spaces of their multiple homelands. In this chapter I argue that Lahiri’s short stories demarcate women’s agency in establishing intimacy, pointing towards a larger narrative of women’s position in postcolonial and neocolonial structures of power as well as in the postcolonial cultural imagination.