Introduction
This paper reflects upon the condition in which immigrants line up with a state of confusion. This ‘confusion’ influences their internal lives where their generations seek their personal identity and try to fit their consciousness into one of their ‘dual’ nationalities. So, in order to ‘know themselves’ they confront cognitive hardships pertaining to cultural, religious and national assimilation. The discussion revolves around how this social phenomenon of ‘migration’ results in the moral consequence as disorientation of culture and personification of identity.
‘The Joy Luck Club’ and Immigration
In the course of this paper, as examples we address three novels, Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club”, “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, and “Nervous Condition” by Tsitsi Dangarembga. The three composition of literary thoughts ponder and contemplates upon the notion that immigrants by all means, though survive the difficulties deploying various measures, but in the end what they are left with are the lost ethnic culture, nationality, language and customs. It is this culture that they feel they could really pass on as heritage to their children.
Migration serves as a phenomenon that appears to be an icon for the ongoing redefinition of the boundaries between what used to be clearly local and global, home and away, and identity and difference (Tulud, 2008). On one hand immigration is responsible for transformation of identities, while on the other it redefines and reshapes the core cultural nature of the immigrants as sources of empowerment. Thus, immigration makes it a site for reconstructing the meanings of the human condition in which it seems useless to teach the younger generation about their nationalities, what they are lured to is a new culture and a new theology.
‘The Joy Luck Club’ is the realisation of how Chinese immigrant women are affected by the political barriers which obstructs their American-born daughters to converge to their cultural values. The plot illustrates how the mother-child relationship is affected and compromised in the Chinese club, which is developed by one of the four emigrated women so as to keep their cultural inheritance alive within them, and to bring their children closer to their national culture.
They wanted their daughters to be American while retaining their Chinese nationality. The club offers them every entertainment to keep the four women united to their culture, like playing ‘mah jong’ which the women believed as one of the significant icon of their culture. Despite all the efforts to keep them in touch with their heritage, the women remained unable to wake patriotism towards their Chinese traditions among their daughters and feel the dormant side of recognising the ‘Chineseness’ in their children’s life.
The women find their daughters wrestling within the boundaries of American and Chinese cultural exchanges which created a complex situation for them to handle. On the other hand, daughters are internally at war with their conscience as to how to limit themselves to a country to which despite they have never been to, they are unconsciously bounded by the heritage.
Mother-child relationship and immigration
Although the founder of the club, Suyan earned and lived a luxurious life, but the worth of the lavishness which she experienced in America was far less than her memories of China, where she lost her husband and daughters in war. Suyan loved the fairy tale ‘Kweilin’ she used to tell her daughter, but later she found her cultural identities are no longer significant to June. This, Amy Tan points out when June unveiled the myth behind Keilin, she uttered, “so you can see how quickly Kweilin lost its beauty for me” (Tan, 2006, p. 22).
‘Beloved’ and psychological traits
Morrison in ‘Beloved’ illustrates what it takes to found one’s identity, through slavery Morrison presents a true picture of how migrants are traumatised physically and psychologically. She portrays Sethe as a symbol of motherhood who kills her daughter whom she named ‘beloved’ and found out that her death has void herself, as a consequence she looses her identity. There are various dimensions of the novel that gives freedom to the reader to analyse in every aspect what Morrison has tried to paint the picture with. These are the murky effects of immigration, slavery, motherhood, and community.
Motherhood in ‘Beloved’
Morrison has presented Sethe as an emotional figure engorged with motherhood. This can be resembled to emigrant’s nationality, since the country of origin is the mother who cares about each and every child. Sethe, therefore is evoked with a complex range of emotions within which Morrison constitutes a slight balance between negation and affirmation of self-hood and place within the community. The following quote reveals one of the wounds on slavery, “A man ain’t nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that’s somebody” (Morrison, 1987, p. 23). This clearly states that the real value of the individual is equivalent to a son as long as he is a citizen, but as soon he migrates and transforms into an ‘alien’, his life is of no worth.
Slavery and Immigration
The characters of ‘beloved’ weaves within the contradictions and ambiguities of desire and repression followed by control and chaos (Bjork, 1996, p. 163). Within the atmosphere of slavery and irresolution, there lingers the painful marks on Sethe’s soul that negates all hope for her renewal. Moreover, what I have understood is that Morrison has related slavery to contemporary migration that affects individuals in the same manner, the way slavery affect Sethe.
The only difference between Morrison’s Sethe and modern day slavery is that modern slaves have no physical marks, but they have emotional wounds on their souls influenced by communal circumstances. Each circumstance brings a measure of affirmation that points to the potential for cultural regeneration.
The way Dangarembga has mentioned the cultivation of voice and mind through education is inextricably linked with the vast cultural differences between Africa and Europe Tambu realises after getting back to her homeland, Africa. Tambu contradicts with Nyasha’s new means of ‘cultural identity’ which opposes their traditional values while colonising with the Western traditions. However, the novel revolves around the lives of five African women, struggling hard to survive in the Western culture while at the same time attempting to retain their origins. The novel portrays the real values behind culture which is defined as the forms and patterns of life in which socially identifiable groups interact with their environments and express their symbolic and material existences.
‘Nervous Conditions’ and cultural patterns
What actually leads Tambu to acquire higher education from England is the death of her brother at the Mission school, of which her uncle Babamukura as the headmaster allows her to go for her own education (Kennedy, 2008). Despite the resistance from Tambu’s mother, she leaves the village and befriends her cousin Nyasha, who possess a Western school of thought since spending much of her childhood in England while her parents studied.
She witnesses how Nyasha retaliates against her controlling father in a condition known as ‘bulimia’ and ‘anorexia’ and ends up in a psychiatric ward. Meanwhile Tambu wins scholarship for African students to the country’s most prestigious young women’s institution for which Tambu’s mother later blames ‘Englishness’ to be the cause for Nyasha’s condition. This is what happens to most of the contemporary immigrants who leave their homeland to acquire higher foreign education, but never gets back.
Ending thoughts on Spoiled identity
Dangarembga in Kennedy (2008) mentions that she created Tambu as the narrator of her novel because her own mental condition was not much different as that of Nyasha. However, Tambu’s deformed perception which stems from colonial racism poses impossible dilemmas that served as the cause for internal conflict for the black subject. The author puts the following quote to illustrate this, “The privilege of being admitted on an honorary basis into their culture” (Dangarembga, 1988, p. 178).
Dangarembga has tried to illustrate how young people experience the conditions of their lives and respond to them, and in the process, they attempt to produce unique cultural forms and practices to produce the expressions and products of their own experiences. But despite all the efforts they fail to broadly embed their traditional form into the ‘newly’ referred, since cultural combination with particular patterns of beliefs, values, symbols, and activities is not possible because culture is rooted firmly in the blood of the individual.
This can be visualised by the prominent study of tradition by Erving Goffman (1963) who described how an individual whose physical traits and behavioral characteristics did not fit the ‘norm’ could be labeled as a deviant and stigmatised by an imposed identity, which we can easily point towards the ‘spoiled’ identity (Lee & Zhou, 2004, p. 4). Furthermore, what Goffman elucidated was the interaction that the spoiled individual manage to confess about his or her spoiled identity, either by choosing to withdraw from social interactions or by passing for ‘normal’. Thus, what migration brings to us is perhaps some wealth acquired through lowering dignity but at the cost of spoiling younger generation, spoiling one’s identity.
Works Cited
Bjork Bryce Patrick. The Novels of Toni Morrison: The Search for Self and Place within the Community. (1996). Peter Lang : London.
Dangarembga Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. (1988). London.
Kennedy Rosanne. “Mortgaged Futures: Trauma, Subjectivity, and the Legacies of Colonialism in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s the Book of Not.” Studies in the Novel. 40:1-2. (2008): 86.
Lee Jennifer & Zhou Min. Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity: (2004). Routledge: London.
Morrison Toni. Beloved. (1987). Penguin Books.
Tan Amy. The Joy Luck Club. (2006). Penguin Publishers.
Tulud, Cruz Gemma. “Between Identity and Security: Theological Implications of Migration in the Context of Globalization.” Theological Studies. 69(2): (2008): 357.