August 09, 2004

Amardeep breaks down 'The Namesake' for youLiterature

Amardeep Singh, prof at Lehigh University, finds an invisible man in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. I normally wouldn't point at a piece referencing Gayatri Spivak and other jargon-filled lit academics, but this was so worthy.

For Sikh men of course, the misnaming is much more aggressive: “Osama” and “Bin Laden” are the most common mis-names one hears. One South Philly man (a caucasian), in a moment of inspired racist efficiency, recently referred to me simply as “Bin,” thus saving himself the expenditure of five syllables he no doubt did not have to spare...

“Jhumpa” is her pet name rather than her good name... Growing up in America, however, she has chosen it as her official, public name... Asserting the name “Jhumpa” is at once a misnaming and a refusal to be misnamed...

And he dissects the lack of a handle for the desi community in the U.S., while those in the UK have long since usurped the term Asian.

...desi may work, but it remains a name like a Punjabi or Bengali pet-name, a name used around the house rather than recognized by a broader public. In this case, there is a chance that the term will reach a critical mass, but it is not yet broadly available. I find it hard to imagine the word rolling off the tongue of someone like Charlie Rose...

“India” (like Calcutta and Delhi) is itself is an Anglicization of “al-Hind,” the Persian name for the area around the Indus River... What was India before it was misnamed? The confusion of the community-without-a-name is merely the latest extension of a permanent historical crisis in naming.

manish on August 9, 2004 07:01 PM in Literature · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post