Displaced, Nomadic Identities in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
Displaced, Nomadic Identities in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Summary/Abstract: Being essentially the fictional, projective metaphor of several autobiographical traumas, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) focuses on the nomadic identity issues experienced by two generations of Bengali Indians moved to the United States in search for a better life and for academic recognition. While the parents are still split between the father’s cosmopolitan will to integrate and succeed and the mother’s inner turmoil generated by the nostalgia for their left behind Bengali traditional identity and culture, a more complex, traumatic self-acceptance will be reserved to the child, a boy, who has no fixed, social name at birth, because, according to the Bengali customs, the name is provided by an esteemed elder member of the family, and his grandmother’s letter communicating the name is lost for ever while travelling by post to the US. Several classic migration topics skilfully penetrate the exquisitely written tissue of the novel: the two types of ‘homeland,’ the first one is organically acquired by birth, while the second is forcibly constructed by the more or less artificial impulse to live and adapt to a alien socio-cultural milieu, the nomadic displacement complex theorised by Deleuze and Guattari, or Homi Bhabha’s migrant, borderline identity formation process, specific to the unrooted in search for a transnational, trans-civilizational and transcultural fluidity. A migration novel, The Namesake is also the multicultural Bildungsroman of several borderline heroes who live the realities and traumas of a hybrid spiritual territoriality, in which space itself seems to be redefined, by shifting from the existential axis provided by the feeling of ‘being home’ and living in a ‘homeland’ to the more dynamic but self-consuming sentiment of fatal estrangement.

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