Author Bharati Mukherjee was born in 1940 in Calcutta and came to the United States in 1961 to study in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since then she has published nine books, including the novels “Jasmine” and “Leave It to Me.” She is now a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. Tribune deputy Books editor Carolyn Alessio spoke with Mukherjee while she was in Chicago recently to participate in Columbia College’s “Story Week Festival of Writers”:
Q: What was it like going from Calcutta to Iowa City?
A: It was a real culture shock. In Calcutta we were always guarded, not only by chaperones but armed bodyguards. There was all this political turmoil, and my father owned a pharmaceutical factory.
I arrived in Iowa for the first time in my life on a Saturday night, and there were all these big, blond kids outside the door necking. I had never even been allowed in coeducational classrooms before. I looked and thought, maybe I ought to go home.
I never touched money before I came to the United States. There was always a servant who paid the bills.
I came to the Writers’ Workshop because my father asked a visiting Fulbright professor where I should go to study creative writing. So my father sent a letter to Paul Engle, the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and said, “My daughter is interested in writing, and I would like you to be like a father to her.”
Engle wrote back and asked to see my writing, and since I didn’t use a typewriter, I wrote six stories on lovely bond in a fountain pen.
Q: What was it like being a female writer then? A non-American female writer?
A: At that time, Indian and Asian feminists had not been recognized as feminists. I ran into interesting debates with the Ms. magazine group, the Gloria Steinems, who felt that you’re not a feminist if you’re not enrolling in consciousness-raising groups or talking about the prescribed set of what makes you feminist. It was also the era when certain leading white feminists were going into (countries like) Iran and saying: “This is the way to do it. We’ll tell you.” It was an imperialist attitude.
In many ways I was in that pioneer group of nonwhite independent women saying that there are many ways of acquiring power, exercising power, and relinquinshing power. And I would think of people like my mother, who got married at 17 and quit school, who wasn’t allowed to leave the house, but who believed so much in education. She had to put up with a lot of abuse to send my two sisters and me to school. And that’s a way of being a feminist without having the intellectual rhetoric or the accolades.
I wasn’t into an articulated political consciousness raising, but when I got married (to fellow student and author Clark Blaise), we saw each other as two writers who had an incredible amount of work to do and very little money. Whoever had time looked after the children or did the laundry.
Q: Do you think things have changed for female writers in contemporary fiction? Are they still expected to explore certain issues?
A: I think that those kinds of classifications, categories and expectations are more publishers’ marketing concerns. Fiction about women’s consciousness, which was so bristly and raw and wonderfully energetic in the (1960s), became commodified and formulaic.
In the same way, I feel that some multicultural authors will give in to market expectations of doing an exotic ghetto number because they think people only want to read about your little Korean town in L.A. or your Vietnamese town or your Indian town. With serious fiction, it should be about what the author feels obsessive about rather than writing a formula or to a profile of a potential reader.
This is where Bernard Malamud was a kind of mentor. He said years ago when my first book was coming out: “Make sure that you write what you want, and don’t let yourself be bullied into writing what your publisher wants. The only worthwhile thing is to have integrity.”
Q: How do you feel about being included in multicultural anthologies or issues of magazines?
A: My mission, if you will, is to get Americans to realize that we have to work together to second-by-second redefine what American culture is and what the total heritage is. I can be just as much an American writer writing the kind of material that I do as a DeLillo writing his last novel about baseball. There are many Americans, and it’s sensitizing people to accept us as part of the fabric and not just simply adumbrations.
The Maxine Hong Kingstons, the Mukherjees, the Toni Morrisons should be taught as part of American civilization and American studies and not just as Asian-American literature and African-American literature. That immediately marginalizes it. I think of class syllabi as being modular. This year, maybe my students are getting Shakespeare. Next year, they may get Ben Jonson. It doesn’t matter which unit is missing which semester as long as I have taught them how to learn and excited their curiosity. Literature is either a distorting lens or a correcting lens.
Immigrant fiction is what I’m interested in, not multicultural. That’s a big difference. I have learned as much from Willa Cather’s characters as those in literature closer to my own experience. It’s about that process of rooting and rerooting, and that I can cross cultural, racial, ethnic borders. My heritage (consists of) all the literature that I have read since I started to read compulsively at age 3. I read in Bengali translation Gorky, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, all of which were available in Calcutta. That’s how I benefitted as a child, as a writer, and I didn’t feel that they were foreign. So my point is that the writer’s heritage is not racial-biological, but ingesting in your unique way all that you have been exposed to from other parts of the world as well as your own.
Q: I’ve read that the best conflicts arise from character. How does this work in literature concerned with multiculturalism or politics?
A: The moment you write with a thesis in mind, or that all minority characters are virtuous or all Establishment characters are victimizers, then you’re writing propaganda texts to be taught in graduate seminars in universities. You’re not writing literature, which must come from a personal obsession.
I want drama–I have a strong sense of dramaturgy. I want a strong character and a good story. Which means that any idea that I have has to be dramatized. Then I can’t control it finally, because if the novel is going well then the character takes on so much personality he or she dictates where it’s going to go.
And as a writer I very often give my best lines to the bad guy because I don’t want a schematic good guy/bad guy. Ambivalence, ambiguity, complicatedness is what life and literature are about. My protagonist is not the sole spokesperson for my ideas, but the minor characters together with the protagonist. Like with “Jasmine”–Jasmine is one character, but there’s also the Vietnamese boy and Indian women who are treated differently because they don’t speak the language and they aren’t very attractive.
Q: One of your best-known stories, “The Management of Grief,” has as its source an actual event, the terrorist bombing of a plane from Canada bound for India.
A: Fiction comes out of life. A lot of the stories in “Darkness” were inspired by newspaper clippings. “Angela” was the story of two 16-year-old sisters from small-town Iowa who had died in an automobile accident on the way to school. The picture with (the newspaper article) showed two girls, one who looked like me, and the other was very blond and Norwegian. The article didn’t explain it. Suddenly the whole story wrote itself.
Q: You and your husband have traveled extensively and written about it. What do you tell young writers who want to write travel fiction?
A: I say go ahead if it’s coming out of something urgent. For young writers, try everything. But after that, you must understand that to write about people traveling means that they are in peril somehow. They have been removed from all the familiar rules and therefore protections and inhibitions. Why have they put themselves in jeopardy? What are the consquences and prices you pay? When you travel you’re looking for something you don’t dare acknowledge even to yourself.
