A new collection of South Asian diasporic short stories has been put together by editor Shyam Selvadurai under the title Story-Wallah as reported by The Globe and Mail. This might be a great way to get your diasporic writing fix if you are like me and find a full novel much too depressing to read through.
Indo-American writer Bharati Mukherjee, one of the contributors in this collection, believes that the diasporic posture is fraudulent and self-serving. “In literary terms,” she writes, “being an immigrant is very déclassé. There is a low grade ashcan realism implied in its very material.” In Karima, one of the stories in the collection, Pakistan’s Aameer Hussein writes of a character who is alienated both from Bangladesh and Pakistan: “With pride we assume the mantle of the dispossessed.”
The contrary view, held by writers such as Salman Rushdie, asserts that the immigrant is a cultural nomad, an Everyman in a world of shifting values and cultures — an interpreter of maladies (to quote the London-born, U.S.-raised Jhumpa Lahiri). Selvadurai, closer to this latter group, mentions the importance of this cultural clash to his own plots. And this is the theme running throughout the stories in this anthology.
Cool find, abhi. I’ve always preferred Bharati to Jhumpa, but there’s no accounting for taste (in particular Bharati’s short story about the Air India flight that was bombed and went down off the coast of Ireland. Anyone remember the name?)
Anyway, I think the best thing is to just tell a story. Whatever that might be. The best writers do just that – no more and no less.
MD, you’re referring to “The Management of Grief” from “The Middleman and Other Stories” (1988). Such amazing writing. I’ve always preferred her short stories to her novels.