Literary Analysis Essay on "The Unaccustomed Earth"

Introduction

"The unaccustomed earth" by Jumpha Lahiri is a collection of short stories that explain the experience of Bengali immigrants in the US. The protagonists of the stories are second generation immigrants majorly from well-off families. Their parents expect them to succeed in life while holding to the traditional Bengali culture. Maintaining the Bengali culture in a foreign country is not easy. In trying to understand the relationship between the native culture and the second generation, one question remains unanswered: does the second immigrant generation manifest a cultural identity conflict in the host country? I argue that the second immigrants' generation illustrates a cultural conflict in the host country.

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Second Generation Immigrants

Second generation immigrants develop strong social bonds with the host society that makes them have a different experience of ethnic identity from their parents. The children of the immigrants adopt the languages, behaviors, and values of the host society (Wutz 256). Although not all second-generation immigrants adopt the culture of the host country, it is apparent that a significant number discards the native traditions and assimilate the practices of American society. There is no concrete negotiation between immigrants and the host country on ethnic and cultural practices that they would want to preserve. As such, it becomes difficult for the second immigrant's generations to have a borderline of their cultural practices. Thus, most of them are assimilated in the host country's culture.

Ruma

Living in a foreign land is always a struggle that leads to a divided self. Firstly, the immigrants need to uphold the memories, conventions, and links to their homeland (Oltedal 14). Secondly, there is an urge to embrace the host culture to ensure acceptance in foreign society. In the "Unaccustomed earth" Ruma is a professional lawyer married to Adam a white American. Ruma gives birth to a mixed-race child called Akash. Ruma decides to live in Seattle with her husband where she is not known. She gets a second pregnancy and decides to quit her job to take care of her children. While at home she feels alienated. Each morning she likes to go outdoors to bask in the American sun but remembers her responsibilities as an Indian woman of being a mother and a wife. She does not understand how her mother maintained the balance, and now she finds herself in a similar situation. While growing up, she had seen her mother migrate to a foreign land and exclusively taking care of the children and household. As an Indian woman, Ruma decides to quit her career and take up home responsibilities.

Ruma Disconnects With the Bengali Language

Ruma's mother emphasizes that she is supposed to communicate in Bengali whenever speaking at home. Similarly, Ruma being a Bengali woman teaches her son, Akash some Bengali language. However, since Akash is born in America, he finds no need to speak in a distant language while the environment around him is majorly dominated by English speakers. There is a conflict when Ruma tries to link Akash with the Bengali language. When growing up, Akash has failed to identify himself with Bengali culture, and the little Bengali he has been taught is forgotten.

By now Akash had forgotten the little Bengali Ruma had taught him when he was little. When he started speaking in full sentences, English had taken over, and she lacked the discipline to stick to Bengali. Besides it was one thing to coo at him in Bengali, to point to this or that and tell him similar words. But it was another to be authoritative; Bengali had never been a language in which she felt like an adult. Her own Bengali was slipping from her (Lahiri 12).

Akash is not comfortable to identify with the Bengali culture by using their language. Moreover, his mother Ruma is slowly losing interest in her native Bengali language. This indicates that there is a conflict in both the second and third immigrant generation in cultural identity.

Akash Rejects the Cultural Norms Installed on Him

Akash overcomes all the cultural identities that have been imparted on him by his mother. As he grows up, Akash hates Indian food, and language. He prefers eating American dishes and uses English to communicate. Also, Ruma's dressings show that she has abandoned the Indian culture to a great extent. For example, she is more inclined to wearing trousers when at home. Moreover, she wears skirts but puts on the saree occasionally. This shows that she no longer conforms to the traditional Bengali style of dressing like a customary woman. As such, she has gone against the traditional demands of Bengali culture.

Ruma Practices American Lifestyle and Ideologies. For Instance, She Keeps a Weak

communication with the family members and decides to move to another city to live her own independent life. Although in Brooklyn, she had long-time friends who knew her well, Ruma does not feel attached any longer to them. She wants to live in her compound where nobody knows him. In Seattle, she has few friends whom she has known when taking Akash to swim. However, she doesn't have a close friendship with them. She prefers living a private life with her nuclear family. She had spent her childhood years with the women in Brooklyn. However, she does not feel attached to their company. "For all the time she had spent with these women the roots did not go deep, and these days after reading their emails, Ruma was seldom inspired to write back"(Lahiri 35). This shows that Ruma was not interested in staying with people of her culture. She denounces her parents' culture and instead lives with her white husband in Seattle.

Ruma Rejects Her Culture's Dress Code

Ruma's dress code indicates that she has left the Bengali cultural way of dressing. Bengali culture requires women to wear sarees. However, after his stay in America, Ruma adopts the culture of the land and occasionally wears sarees. In most occasions, she is seen wearing pants and skirts. Instead of buying sarees and other traditional dresses she orders pants and American skirts. "She'd already ordered pants and skirts with elastic waistbands from catalogs, and there was solidarity to her face that upset her each time she looked in a mirror"(Lahiri 13). This shows that Ruma had already adopted the American culture and lifestyle of wearing pants.

Ruma Adopts American Ideologies

American thoughts had already become part of Ruma's life. When her mother died, the father lived alone. As time went on, her father was becoming old and in need have care. If it was in India, there would have been no room to negotiate whether to take care of his aged father. At first, she thought that her father would become an added responsibility to her family. In a short future time, she was expecting a child. Thus, if her father was coming to stay in their house, he would be a burden. She wanted to live a private life with her two children and husband Adam. The presence of her father seemed to disturb her mind so much. "Ruma feared that her father would become a responsibility an added demand, continuously present in a way she was no longer used to"(Lahiri 7). This indicates that Ruma had become used to individualism lifestyle of the host country, thus not identifying from her Bengali culture that emphasized on family re-unions.

Ruma's Contact With Her Father

Communication problem has set in between Ruma and her father. Ruma had not communicate with his father for seven months since her mother's death. She feared that her father would criticize her for abandoning some cultural practices. Ruma used to argue with her mother on several occasions. There was a conflict between the way her mother wanted her to embrace the Bengali culture and the influence of foreign norms. When her father came there is no confrontation and both remember the death of Ruma's mother. Ruma feels relieved in a way when the father makes known that he is too old to live with her. "But please understand, I prefer to stay on my own, I am too old now to make such a shift" (Lahiri 56). This shows that both the father and Ruma have abandoned the traditional Bengali culture but nobody is bold enough to start the conversation.

Ruma's father has been depicted as an independent widower with a newly found freedom to travel through Europe. When he comes to visit his daughter he is dressed in an American attire. "He was wearing a baseball cap that said Pompeii, black cotton pants and sky blue polo shirt, and a pair of white leather sneakers. She was struck by the degree to which her father resembled an American in his old age" (Lahiri 11).Although Ruma is surprised by the way her father has embraced the American lifestyle, she doesn't ask him to uphold the native Bengali cultural way of dressing. This shows that Ruma has also assimilated the American way of life. Moreover, Ruma gets to know that her father is in another relationship following her mother's death. She isn't not bothered by her father's lifestyle since has upheld the permissive US culture.

Conclusion

Unaccustomed earth reflect the cultural identity crisis among the second generation of Bengali immigrants in US. The second generation immigrants had lost sense of their Bengali roots. Thus, most of the people had different cultural practices from their parents. The second generation immigrants had embraced the US culture in the way of dressing, food, and lifestyle. On the one hand, characters who embraced the host country's culture had a conflict with their parents. On the other hand, individuals who did not adopt the foreign culture could not be accepted easily. Therefore, the second generation was in a dilemma in most cases to make a decision to follow one culture. However, most of the second generation immigrants adopt the new land's culture which was more convenient for them. Thus, as the second generation individuals accept the American culture they face rejection from their family members leading to a cultural identity conflict.

Works Cited

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed earth: stories. Vintage Canada, 2010.

Oltedal, Hanna. Indian American identity: career, family and home in Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed earth. MS thesis. 2011. http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-29030

Wutz, Michael. "The Archaeology of the Colonial-Un-earthing Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth." Studies in American Fiction 42.2 (2015): 243-268.Doi 10.1353/saf.2015.0008