Trendy Postmodernists
Contemporary fiction can be broken into an array of genre and categories. “The emergence and proliferation of feminist, multiethnic, multicultural, and postcolonial literature since the 1970s is, however, the most dramatic and significant manifestation of the de-centering and de-marginalization defining both postmodernity and postmodernism,” (5). With the onset of civil rights and the feminist movement, feminist theory and multiculturalism has taken the literary world by storm. As these issues have taken forefront in our minds and social demographics they have also flooded our fiction.
Jhumpa Lahiri is particularly devoted to the experiences of the immigrant in America. She focuses on the effects of assimilation on families and people in her novels and short stories. The strain American culture puts on the newly arrived Immigrants such as Mrs. Sen in “Mrs. Sen’s” as she learns to drive, and the longing for home, “Everything is there,” (pg. 113 Lahiri). The differences between the cultures are sharply noted when Eliot’s family eats pizza for dinner where Mrs. Sen spends a good deal of time cooking for her family and Elliot. Emphasizing the differences in the cultures, demanding recognition for both is a staple of multicultural contemporary fiction. The rejection of traditional western ideals involving assimilation and the loss of personal culture are highlighted in Lahiri’s works as Mrs. Sen continues to cook here homeland’s food and wear her traditional garb.
Breat, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat also works with multiculturalism. In Danticat’s novel, however, holding too tightly to the mother culture is seen as destructive. It is this fear of impurity that scars both Sophie and her mother. But where Sophie, through an American attitude concerning therapy, is capable of learning to handle her mental scaring, her mother is lost to a sickness that she does cannot seek help for and eventually kills herself, driven mad by her rape. Martine was “[from a place] where you carry your past like the hair on your head,” (pg. 234 Danticat). Her inability to let go of her past killed her. But with her death Sophie is freed and can move on and away from the harsher traditions in her culture.
In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, we have cultures joining together and being celebrated. The melding of a white child into a black family is revolutionary for the time of the piece. Lily comes to the Beekeepers and discards her previous life, adopting theirs, eventually becoming the keeper of the prayer wall. It is a sharing and assimilation of a subculture. Traditionally it is white culture that is hoisted on other ethnicities and ‘traditional’ American culture. In this story a small collective of Mary worshippers assimilate the young white Lily. “Whereas Modernism places faith in the ideas, values, beliefs, culture, and norms of the West, Postmodernism rejects Western values and beliefs as only a small part of the human experience and often rejects such ideas, beliefs, culture, and norms,” (4). Keeping with the spirit of postmodernist rejection of the dominant culture, Kidd celebrates a smaller, personal worship in the Beekeepers.
As more and more cultures begin to come together and meld, sharing their ideals and beliefs there is a need for understanding and empathy for the loss and assimilation of traditions. Without contemporary fiction to aid in the transition these experiences would not be recognized or shared nearly as effectually. With authors such as Lahiri, Kidd and Danticat celebrating a multitude of cultures, rather then focusing on American assimilation or purely their own origin cultures they enable the world and society to appreciate the diversity of the world we live in.
Works Cited
1. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Division of Random House, Inc, 1994.
2. Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
3. Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
4. "An Introduction To Modernism & Postmodernism". April 22, 2010 http://vc.ws.edu/engl2265/unit4/Modernism/all.htm
5. "Postmodernism-Postmodernism In Literature And Art". April 22, 2010 http://science.jrank.org/pages/10807/Postmodernism-Postmodernism-in-Literature-Art.html
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