Jhumpa Lahiri and Her Hyphenated Identity

By Ajaya Kumar Khati Chhetri

Hyphenated identity is a post-colonial issue, conceptualized as a problematic self in diaspora. It is a traumatic experience for immigrants who live in “in-betweenness.” Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories from her debut collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) try to see how the traumatic experience of diaspora, hyphenated identity, and search for roots are revealed through her writing. Thus, it tries to understand the influence of the hyphenated consciousness of the immigrants in their lives that result from cultural displacement, emotional exile, or a sense of loss. Her stories primarily and necessarily bring to light the expression of hyphenated identity in diaspora and the search for roots.

Identity usually refers to a person’s relation to a set of characteristics related to culture, religion, geography, language, occupation, gender, etc. within a community. In other words, it answers questions like, “Who is?” Therefore, it is generally a frame of reference in which a person’s belonging is said to be determined. However, the question of identity has always been conflicting, especially for the culturally, geographically, and linguistically displaced immigrants or those who live in two worlds. Similarly, their strong ties to their country of origin remain repatriation to their native land. It attempts to re-establish an imagined homeland on the psychological boundary between their past and present. The problem of identity for them is that they feel culturally uprooted. Moreover, they are afflicted with double consciousness as they live in hyphenated status.

The question of identity, as she feels, is always a difficult one for immigrants who are culturally displaced or those who grow up in two worlds. Lahiri hits on the idea after being confused by the hyphenated identity she is living within the diaspora. She writes: “Like many immigrant offspring I felt tense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new, approved of on either side of the hyphen” (“My Two Lives” 28). Such is the experience of almost every Indian-American who lives simultaneously in two worlds: the world of American reality and the world of Indian tradition. She says, “At home I followed the customs of my parents, speaking Bengali and eating rice and dal with my fingers. These ordinary facts seem part of a secret, utterly alien way of life, and I took pains to hide them from my American friends” (28). Thus, Lahiri accepts her double consciousness, diasporic trauma, as a part of her life that she hides from her American friends.

Lahiri collects the experience not only of those immigrants who migrated to America but also of their descendents who inherited their parents’ preoccupations. The malady she has is her conflicting selves as she says, “America is home to me but I feel an outsider too. I have observed a sense of exile in my parents that can never go” (qtd. in Mitra and Pais 74). Many Indian-Americans, like her, are trying to re/make and re/establish their own cultural values as they are confused by the culture imposed upon them by the West.

This is the trauma Lahiri expresses in her words, “In spite of the first lesson of arithmetic one plus one did not equal two but zero, my conflicting selves always canceling each other out” ( “My Two Lives” 28). Immigrants’ nostalgia and their loss of roots, which always haunts them, are expressed in various ways. Interestingly, writing is one of them to reflect the problem of being in the world of migration. It attempts to restore the childhood home, distant in both time and space, to their present motivate their writings.

Works Cited

Lahiri, Jhumpa. “My Two Lives” Newsweek, 6 Mar. 2006: 28-29.  

Mitra, Sumit and Arthur J. Pais. “Boston Brahmin” India Today, 17 Apr. 2000: 73-74.