It's a little give and take...

Throughout our lives we have to shed parts of our identity in order to change and evolve new ways of living and looking at life. For example, in high school I was extremely involved in sports. I played on weekends, after school, year round; they were the first thing I thought about in the morning and the driving force of my motivation. But after graduating high school that part of my life slowly began to dwindle. Although I participated in intercollegiate volleyball, the shift in my life was starting to take place. I began shedding my athletic identity and started priding myself on my school work; my new source of motivation. Although sports will always be a part of me since they were so influential during my childhood they are no longer something that I wholeheartedly identify with. Jyoti, the protagonist in “Jasmine,” written by Bharati Mukherjee, has made the move from India to America, and in doing so has began struggling with her identity. She wants to be part of American society, but without losing her native identity. I believe that Jyoti wants to fulfill her American dream; to not be confined to strict roles, but to make choices and have the power to change our own life; “I know what I don’t want to become” (5).

When Jyoti made the trek to America it was because of the passing of her husband the dreams that he had of going to the promise land. She was very intelligent growing up, and was one of the few females to have secondary education. She wanted an opportunity to create a new future instead of being confined to prophecies. When she managed to arrive in America she shed part of her identity, she was “Jyoti, Light, but in surviving I was already Jane, a fighter and adapter” (40). Her dreams to come to America were coming true, but at a cost. She had to give up a name that was given to her by her grandmother in order to appease those around her. “There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams” (29). Her dream is to be free of impositions and limitations, she wants to forget the parts of her past that haunt her and make living that much more difficult. She is plagued with a prophecy and coming to America is a way to escape; “Experience must be forgotten, or else it will kill” (33).

Jane didn’t come to the land of opportunity without bringing some of her cultural identity with her. Her first home in New York was unappealing for her. She grew up in a small village in the middle of nowhere; that was home. She made a connection with her old and new identity by moving to Iowa and living on a farm. She makes a reference to someone about how she wants to be in Iowa because the climate is like Punjab (6). She needs that small farming community to make her feel comfortable in her surroundings. Although she is trying to adapt to the American lifestyle she can’t help but feel like an outsider. People don’t understand who she is or what her history represents. The people surrounding her are afraid of her past and of the “unknown”. They are uninterested in hearing about India, unless it is about her parents. Even her own husband has no idea how to refer to her, when he should be the one that is most respectful of her culture. She makes this comment to herself in light of what her husband has just said to her, “You mean Hindi, not Indian, there’s no such thing as Indian” (10). But he doesn’t know that. These small comments tell me that she is uncomfortable with the fact that they know nothing about her and they don’t even try to get it right.

In America, Jane says, “the language you speak is what you are” (11). Our simplification of people’s identities by just a language is very close minded. Jane is a Hindi from India who speaks Punjabi. But is that all there is to her? No, obviously not. She is a widow, who lost father, grew up in a small community where girls were treated as subordinate to men, and decided to make a change in her life in order to break the prophecies put upon her. Jane is trying to reinvent herself in a positive light by coming to America and trying something new. Unfortunately she is struggling with her loss of identity and trying to adapt to a new way of life with people that have no cultural background, except their own. Jane wants to find a balance between being and American and being Hindu, and in the mean time she is “happy enough” (21).