REMEMBRANCE AND TRANSCULTURAL RECONSTRUCTIONS IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
REMEMBRANCE AND TRANSCULTURAL RECONSTRUCTIONS IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S UNACCUSTOMED EARTH

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story Unaccustomed Earth in order to foreground manners of cultural remembering displayed by a South Asian American father, his daughter (Ruma) and her young son, Akash. The memories of the adult characters are triggered by a trauma, represented by the death of the mother/wife. As the dead character surfaces in the memories of her husband and daughter, she is remembered as a traditional South Asian woman who carries an interdependent model of identity. The father’s, daughter’s and grandson’s manners of relating to the dead character illustrate different ways in which memories of culture shape the identities of three generations of South Asian American characters. On the one hand, the father manifests a strong tendency to distance himself from the Bengali cultural core symbolized by his wife and he adopts American models of autonomy. However, while interacting with his grandson, Ruma’s father seeks out to prevent the third generation’s loss of Bengali cultural memories, by teaching Akash certain Bengali practices. On the other hand, Ruma attempts to restore the Bengali source of cultural meanings and she suddenly reenacts a cultural model of identity that she used to reject when her mother was alive. Thus, both father and daughter rely on remembrance in order to readjust their (already) complicate positions between American and Bengali cultural norms. Considering the characters’ different ways of filtering similar cultural memories, the present analysis seeks out to establish the coordinates of their new identities resulted from a re-evaluation of their pasts.

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