MILES TO GO
I've just started reading Pulitzer-prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's newest book, "Unaccustomed Earth", prompted by this description in a New York Times review:
"...the fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world comes to reinvent itself — accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs — is the underlying theme of Jhumpa Lahiri’s sensitive new collection of stories, “Unaccustomed Earth.”
Here, as in her first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” and her novel, “The Namesake,” Lahiri, who is of Bengali descent but was born in London, raised in Rhode Island and today makes her home in Brooklyn, shows that the place to which you feel the strongest attachment isn’t necessarily the country you’re tied to by blood or birth: it’s the place that allows you to become yourself. This place, she quietly indicates, may not lie on any map."
Also an emotional draw for me was the wonderful inspiration for the title of the book:
"The eight stories in this splendid volume expand upon Lahiri’s epigraph, a metaphysical passage from “The Custom-House,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which suggests that transplanting people into new soil makes them hardier and more flourishing. Human fortunes may be improved, Hawthorne argues, if men and women “strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”
As the son of a man who transplanted himself from India to Aden in the 1950s at the tender age of 17, and as someone who coincidentally did the same coming to a university in Alabama at the same age in the 1970s, this business of "Unaccustomed Earth" hits really home.
And as a first generation American, I can truly say that America happens to be the place that allowed me to become myself. For that I'm eternally grateful.
And glad to see extraordinary writers capturing what all that's about regardless of whether one is originally from Bengal, India, Ireland, Poland, Africa, Mexico, or any other physical point on the earth and what religions we're born into.
There is another author of Indian descent who is the subject of a new biography, which is next on my reading list. Here's an excerpt of the review from the Economist:
"PATRICK FRENCH takes the title of his life of V.S. Naipaul from the first sentence of “A Bend in the River”, one of the 2001 Nobel laureate's best-known books: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
It is the kind of statement that makes liberal-minded readers recoil, almost instinctively. Each part of it is a provocation. But it encapsulates the man, his fear of the void, his contempt for the loser. And it is a reason for reading this penetrating, wide-ranging and unflinching biography."
And again, here's an important insight by the reviewer:
"Born in Trinidad in 1932, of Indian descent, V.S. Naipaul, now Sir Vidia (for Vidiadhar) Naipaul, can be fully understood only in the context of his background. A void, as Mr French explains, is at the centre of Trinidad itself.
During the 16th century, the Spanish, Dutch, French and English dispossessed and exterminated the island's indigenous people.
The hole was filled by immigrants from everywhere—descendants of the exterminators, as well as Greeks, Portuguese, West Africans, Chinese, Indians, Venezuelans and Madeirans—all of them divided by race and language, subdivided by religion and caste, the whole thing finely graded by colour: “white, fusty, dusty, musty, tea, coffee, cocoa, black, dark black,” as a Caribbean jingle has it."
Most of us 300 million American souls are living proof of how our for-bearers and us have thrived in this "Unaccustomed Earth", a motley collection of "white, fusty, dusty, musty, tea, coffee, cocoa, black and dark black". Each of these individual stories have countless bitter-sweet moments in their own individual journeys.
But we're still uniquely united as Americans despite these tough individual journeys, amidst the constantly divisive forces of origin and color. We just need to be acutely mindful of this in these bitter, all too accustomed political times.
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