Cultural Pollution by Immigrants in Anne Tylers Digging to America - Assignment Example

America is a land of immigrants and Immigration had been a cultural issue in America for ages. The question of American culture getting polluted by the immigrants had been a point of discussion for years now. But American’s always tended to look at this aspect of Immigration from their point of view only, which was almost always unsympathetic with the realities of the immigrants. That’s what is making Anne Tyler’s Digging to America interesting, since this novel is trying to look at the issue from the point of view of the immigrant. This way of looking at this issue is very pertinent, even in America of today. The fears of immigrants culturally polluting United States were expressed as way back as two hundred years ago by Benjamin Franklin. He feared, as early as in 1751 that his home state of Pennsylvania will get over run by German immigrants. “Why should Palatine Boors be suffered to swam into our settlements, and by herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours.” (“Observations concerning the increase of mankind”, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 4 as quoted in Immigrant Voices, page 4) He lamented that few of the children of the Germans would learn English .They would never adopt the language or customs. And finally he feared that Pennsylvania would get Germanized. The nativists of 1850s feared that the stability of the American culture would get threatened by the immigrants. “Like the founding fathers, American nativists believed republics were fragile creations, endangered by diversity….. They sensibly observed that emigrants could claim American citizenship, long before they had learned the language or customs of the USA.” (Immigration and American Diversity, Donna R. Gabbacia, PP 95,) Because of this fear they demanded that Immigrants should be made to wait for 21 years for getting the citizenship as the American babies had to. Thus in all historical contexts the cultural issues of Immigration were looked at from an American perspective only. Here is a novelist who is trying to look at the issue from the immigrant’s point of view. During the narration perspectives shift among characters; but Maryam Yazdan, the grant mother from the Iranian American family and her perspectives form the narrative and emotional centre of the novel. Maryam Yazdan came to the United States as a young bride from Iran. She had her childhood in Tehran, and came to America as the bride of an Iranian American doctor already established in Baltimore. She became a widow in her forties and had spent thirty five years in the United States, when we meet her in the novel. She doesn’t live her inner life in the past like some of her Iranian American friends. But still she feels herself as an outsider. This feeling of being an outsider doesn’t make her ashamed or feel inferior. She is rather proud of her culture which is outside the mainstream culture of the country of her migration. She remains dignified, elegant, compact and spare. She is soft spoken, but the sense of pride in her being an outsider makes even some of her friends branding her arrogant. So here is a character that accepts her reality, but refuses to be a part of it. Here is a character who tells the world, through her struggle to be herself, that this business of “belonging" is not that simple as it is made out to be. Through this character of Maryam, Anne Tyler shows that culture is a complex shell in which one has grown up; a shell of customs, habits including food habits, believes, attitudes and tastes. As long as one belongs to one’s ethnic cultural ambience, it is impossible for one to belong to another cultural background. In an interesting report in CNN about a camp named Ayandeh – or ‘Future” in Farsi – held in Atlanta, Georgia, for Iranian Americans who are confused with their cultural identities, a young man named Sammie explains his confusions thus: "As a high school student, I had a horrible time; One day I would come into school very dressed up thinking, Im looking Iranian. One day I would be wearing the baggy pants and dressed completely American. And I had no clue which one was right." (Report by David Aristo, CNN July 21, 2008, www.cnn.com/ 2008/US/07/21/camp.ayandeh/) Thus belonging or not belonging is all part of a complex phenomenon. It all leads one to existential questions like who we are? Are we separate entities or islands of cultural identities? Or are we just human beings in one big pot of soup? Digging to America poses these questions, though not fully answering them. The character of Maryam Yazdan becomes Anne Tyler’s tool to explore these complexities of human existence in an alien culture. The cultural dilemma is there in every character, but is more concentrated in Maryam Yazdan. Even the Korean child, her son adopts makes this grandma feel like something that doesn’t belong to her universe. To quote from the novel : “ Sometimes when Maryam Yazdan looked at her new little granddaughter she had an eerie, lightheaded feeling, as if she had stepped into some sort of alternate universe. Everything about the child was impossibly perfect.” (Digging to America, Chapter two) looking at the child more closely, she broods: “Her skin was a flawless ivory, and her hair was almost too soft to register on Maryams fingertips. Her eyes were the shape of watermelon seeds, very black and cut very precisely into her small, solemn face.” (Ibid) The novel revolves around two families- An all American family of Bitsy and Brad Donaldson and the American Iranian family of Sámi and Ziba Yazdan. Maryam Yazdan is the mother of Sámi Yazdan. The families meet at a Baltimore airport lounge as both of them await the arrival of the baby girl from Korea, adopted by each of them. It was Friday, August 15, 1997, the night the girls arrived. The moods and the ambience around these two families in the airport it self express the differences in their respective cultural expressions. Around the all American family of Bitsy and Bradson, there is some sort of“adoption festivity”. There are buttons that declared their respective roles. MOM, the button on the womans shoulder read--one that is on the man’s shoulder read DAD. And not only were there MOM and DAD; there were GRANDMA and GRANDPA, twice over--two complete sets. There were flotillas of silvery balloons printed with “It’s a Girl”. There were half a dozen video cameras, an infant car seat, and a skirted bassinet and so on. “Flashbulbs, insistent video cameras, everyone pressing too close.” The mood around the Iranian American family is less festive. Sámi and Ziba Yazdan, the other expectant couple is described as “Foreign –looking, olive skinned and attractive….. With a tucked, apologetic way of looking about.” They lingered on the sidelines. There were no video cameras or balloons. There was no crowd to welcome their child except for “a slim older woman with a chignon of sleek black hair knotted low on the nape of her neck.” She was the grand mother Maryam Yazdan.The contrast, in looks, in public expressions between the two families meeting on the same location for the same purpose is intentionally exposed by the novelist. They are shown as mismatched clans. But they strike some sort of a lasting friendship through joint “arrival party”, one year at the Donaldsons’, the following year at the Yazdans’ and so on. The idea conceived by the Donaldson’s, was to help the infants both of whom are from the same culture and country to fit in. As the girls grow up the cultural contrast becomes sharper. The Americans have their own ideas of ethnic identity and don’t want their adopted daughter to lose her ethnic identity. Their attempts to safeguard the ethnic identity of the adopted girl often verge on comical situations as no cultural identity can be shelled off from the general environment artificially. The American Iranian couple, on the other hand is eager to make their adopted Korean girl more an American than a Korean. Thus the Donaldson family insists on keeping their daughter’s birth name Jin-Ho. But the girl, because of the American environment around her, asks to be called Jo as she grows up. She wants only American girl dolls. The Yazdans, on the other hand, quickly changes the name of their daughter from the Korean Sooki to the American sounding Susan. They try to make her more an American in every way. The novel is punctuated by each year’s Arrival Party. Bitsy and her strangely aired opinions about child rearing provide comical relief to the narrative. But the dilemmas of cultural identities are reflected on the grand mother, Maryam as if in a mirror, as she as she takes up the centre stage as the novel progresses. The conflict of cultural contrast becomes more acute to Maryam when the grandfather in the Donaldson family becomes widowed. The widower Donaldson starts courting Maryam which only adds to her confusions. She gets torn between the religious beliefs and culture of her home land and the American ways of things. As Richard Jenkins points out “Self is the individual’s private experience of herself or himself. The person is what appears publicly in and to the outside world.” (Social Identity, Key ideas, Routledge 1996 PP30) Maryam goes through the conflict between this inner self and her public appearance as a person. Because of this conflict finding romantic love at old age instead of inspiring, suffocates Maryam .She gets more scared of losing her cultural space in that relationship. “He is so American. He takes up so much space. He seems to be unable to let a room stay as it is. He has cluttered my life with cell phones and answering machines and a fancy tea pot that makes my tea tastes like metal”- murmurs Maryam Yazdan. After spending 35 years in United States she still couldn’t understand Americans or digest their ways. She is critical of the Iranians, like her own son and daughter in-law, who are struggling to become as much American as possible. “You think that if you keep company with them (Americans) you will be larger too. But then you see that they are making you shrink; they are expanding and edging you out.” These uncompromising cultural attitudes leave her in solitude at old age. Ms Tyler poetically describes a day in the life of Maryam Yazdan thus “What small small life she lived! She had one grown son, one daughter-in-law, one grand child and three close friends .Her work was pleasantly predictable. Her house hadn’t changed in decades.” This solitude is going to be painfully perpetual. “Next January she would be sixty-five years old- not ancient, but even so, she couldn’t hope for her world to grow anything but narrower from now on. She found this thought comforting rather than distressing.” (Digging to America- PP255) Digging to America is Anne Tyler’s 17th novel. Most of Tyler’s novels have Baltimore as the background. Her favorite thematic ambience is life in the middle class families, their ambitions and dreams, secrets and pains. Among Tyler’s best known books are The accident Tourist (1985) and the Pulitzer award winning Breathing Lessons (1988). The Accident Tourist was made into a film, directed by Lawrence Kasdan. This is a story of the triangle of love between Macon Leary, a writer of travel guides, his wife Sarah who leaves him but later wants him back and Muriel Pritchett a dog trainer with whom Macon moves in when Sarah leaves him. The conflict in the story is in that the characters refuse to flee their present life, into the future.Breathing lessons takes place in the span of a single day in the life of Maggie and Ira Moran. The story goes back and forth between the husband and wife who are reflecting on their families and the family they created together. In Back when we are grown up (2001) Rebecca Davitch, mother of a large family, finds out that life has made her a wrong person. She starts searching for her true self in the past. In Digging to America Tyler departs from her usual pattern of characters dwelling comfortably in their past. She starts the novel with the present and stays there mostly. The characters are more often facing the future. Personal history is not holding them back. Interestingly the title of the novel is inspired by a children’s game. The children play digging holes to “China”. Jin-Ho, Donaldson’s adopted daughter tells her grand father that children in China might be digging to America as well and that it would be cool if they would pop up one day from the ground when she and her friends were playing. “ They would say’ where are we?’ I‘d say,’Baltimore, Mary land”. By digging to America from an alien land one may physically reach America. But culturally one will still be inside the tunnel in between. To quote the Nobel Prize winning Romanian novelist and poet, Herta Muller “Everything I have, I carry with me. Or every thing that’s mine I carry on me. I carried everything I had. It was not actually mine. (On Packing –Words without boarders –The Online Magazine for International Literature.) --------------------- Sources cited: 1) Dublin Thomas, Immigrant Voices: New Lives in America.1773-1986, University of Illinois Press August 1, 1993. 2) Gabbacia Donna R, Immigration and American Diversity, Wiley-Blackwell, March 19, 2002. 3) Aristo David, CNN July 21, 2008, www.cnn.com/ 2008/US/07/21/camp.ayandeh/) 4) Jenkins Richard Social Identity, Key ideas, Routledge 1996 5) Anne Tyler, Digging to America ,Published by Knopf , May 2nd, 2006 6) Muller Herta, On Packing, www.wordswithoutborders.org, Translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin Read More