Cultural clashes and undercurrents of violence in Bharati’s Mukherjee works.

Bharati Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940, Kolkata, India and died January 28, 2017, New York.),
It is an Indian-born American novelist and short-story writer who described in her writing the cultural changes and alienation in the immigrant experience. She explored the internal culture clashes of her immigrant characters. Mukherjee, a native of Calcutta, attended schools in England, Switzerland, and India, earned advanced degrees in creative writing in the United States and lived for more than a decade in Canada, affording her a wealth of experience in the modern realities of multiculturalism.

Mukherjee’s work features not only cultural clashes but undercurrents of violence. In “The Middleman and Other Stories” (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, Ms. Mukherjee served up the immigrant experience in all its rich variety, told through the voices of newcomers from the Caribbean, the Middle East, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, all of them both daunted and intoxicated by the strange possibilities of life in the United States.

“The narrative of immigration is the epic narrative of this millennium,” she wrote in an autobiographical statement for the reference work Contemporary Authors in 2005.

In many of her novels and stories, a young woman — shaped, as she was, by a patriarchal culture — strikes out for the unknown, sometimes by choice and sometimes not. In the existential crisis that ensues, a new self emerges — or a series of people, with multiple answers to the question “Who am I?”

In “Two Ways to Belong in America.” She utilizes several rhetorical strategies to show that immigrants can be assimilated into the American culture, but that they should not be deported if they choose not to conform to said culture. She believes in the assimilation of culture, but it should not be forced upon anyone. Throughout the essay, she goes through a logical thought process that leads the audience to realize this argument and even feel guilty of forced conformity. Also, Two Ways to Belong in America symbolizes optional paths to American citizenship where the boundary is based on race, nationality as well as the ease of denouncing descendant cultures. From the story, it is evident associations with individual races and nationals can ease acceptance while others can impede it. The author presents a divert view of the influence race has on the application of American immigration regulations.

Reflection:

While reading  “Two Ways to Belong to America” I was really interested in colonialism at all. I think it is a very natural and full of heart story about the author and her sister.  I think that Mukherjee wanted to say that whether or not you’re seen as an immigrant is dependent on how you view yourself because there is no one way of being an American and everyone coming to America is seeking different goals.