Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [78]
Q: You mention that your earliest manuscript is written in English. Did you—do you—ever write in a different language?
BM: My mother tongue is Bengali. The first eight years of my life I was uniquely Bengali-speaking. At age eight, I went with the rest of the family to Europe. We stayed abroad for three years, which meant that I had to go to school and live in cities like London, Liverpool, Basel, and Montreux. That’s how I first learned English and picked up some Swiss German and French. English was the language of instruction when I returned to school in Calcutta, and, because I have lived in North America for more than thirty-five years, English has become my stepmother tongue. When I am writing fiction, I think and imagine only in English. To relatives in Calcutta, I write letters or notes in Bengali.
Q: You once said that there was “no formal language that American fiction [made] available” to you. What did you mean by that statement?
BM: In the early eighties, when I first started making fiction out of the urgency and the confusion I felt as a brown immigrant in black/white/red America, I suddenly realized that I had no models in the contemporary American stories and novels that I read for pleasure. Raymond Carver and his imitators were very popular at that time. I loved Carver’s writings, but the ways his characters thought and talked were totally alien to, and inappropriate for, my non-European fresh-off-the-jet characters. I didn’t have a ready-made community of readers who understood the motivations and the reasonings my characters were going through, how they struggled second by second with language to express their feelings to English-speaking America. I had to invent my own models. That was both scary and exhilarating.
Q: Which writers influenced you as you invented your own models?
BM: The writers I cherish because I have learned about the perverse workings of the human heart and soul from their fiction are Anton Chekhov, Isaac Babel, Bernard Malamud, and Flannery O’Connor. Among the contemporary American writers I admire extravagantly are Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Russell Banks, and Joyce Carol Oates. They take huge risks; they dramatize important issues so movingly that the reader ends up caring about them; they understand the power and the pliability of language.
Q: In what ways has your writing changed most significantly over time?
BM: I’m convinced that it’s changed in two ways. First, in the level of energy of the writing and the pleasure I take in improvising vocabulary; second, in what intrigues me—more accurately, obsesses me—as material. When I thumb through pages of my novels in chronological order, I am stunned by the changes. Like Jasmine, like Debby, I have gone through several incarnations. For instance, my very first novel, The Tiger’s Daughter, could only have been written by an Indian expatriate writer still coming to terms with the hometown that she had left behind. The vocabulary, the wit, and the sentencetions play on, or parody, the British English literariness that I was taught to admire unquestioningly by the Irish nuns in my Calcutta school. As I started thinking of myself as an immigrant in the United States, my fiction became more and more urgently about being a non-European immigrant in North America. I wasn’t aware of the changes as they happened; I was only aware of the urgency I felt as I was living through, and writing of, that immigrant experience.