Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [77]
Q: You once said of yourself: “I didn’t want anyone to know where I fit in, so I could be whoever I wanted to be, anywhere, and I could keep moving.” Did making your own traditions mean maintaining a certain flexibility?
BM: I came out of a society in which identity was fixed from the moment of birth. I was who I was because of the family, class, caste, and language I’d been born into. Communal identity was the only identity that mattered. There was no tolerance of individual quirkiness or rebellion. Those who dared marry outside their caste lost their original caste, and losing caste was a very big deal. In fact, any Bengali who moved out of the state was patronized as being a “not-quite” Bengali. When I was growing up in Calcutta, upper-middle-class Bengali Brahmin women were not supposed to have ideas and opinions of their own. My mother, who was married off to my father when she was in her mid-teens, had to put up with verbal and physical abuse from her in-laws because she believed in education for girls and insisted on sending us to the best girls’ school in the city. For me, empowerment meant escaping the identity I had been assigned by my tradition-bound community. I think of myself as being composed of a series of fluid identities.
Q: Do you think of Vietnam as a moment in which that American idealism was corrupted?
BM: I am convinced that the United States’ perception of itself was permanently changed when it lost the Vietnam War. I arrived as a student in Iowa when John F. Kennedy was president. All my American friends, even as they were making the shift from the plaid-skirts-and-white-blouses staid correctness of the fifties to the long-lank-hair-and-sandals-and-heavy-eye-makeup permissiveness of the sixties, acted on the assumption that the United States was the greatest country in the world. My friends had grown up confident that America was the most powerful nation in the world. The last days of the Vietnam War, when network television played and replayed the frantic evacuation of American troops, threatened that assumption.
Q: Does Leave It to Me challenge the reader to think about Vietnam in a new way?
BM: We are aware of how the Loco Larrys were victimized by the war. But I see Devi and her generation as the unacknowledged victims of that war. Ham and Jess acted without much regard for consequences. Devi involuntarily suffers the consequences of their actions. Devi asks, “What about us, Vietnam’s war-bastards and democracy’s love-children? We’re still coping with what they did, what they saw, what they salvaged, what they mangled and dumped on that Saigon rooftop that maniacal afternoon.” What Devi tries to do is make Ham and Jess’s generation aware of the moral consequences of their actions.
Q: Is this why you offer such a vivid depiction of Haight-Ashbury?
BM: I felt that I had to use the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco and Berkeley as the main setting for Leave It to Me because this area was where the “hey!—no consequences” kind of culture started when Ham and Jess were young, and it resulted in the birth of Debby and the dumping of her like “a garbage sack on the hippie trail.” The choice of setting was deliberate. My intention was to have Debby, as Devi, bring moral accountability to these places. I live in The Haight and I teach at Berkeley. I know the geography and the mentality of these places at a gut level.
Q: How did you begin to write?
BM: I used to create stories in my head when I was three