Her Mother's Ashes is a collection of 20 stories by South Asian women resident in Canada and the United States. In her crisply intelligent preface, Arun Prabha Mukherjee cautions against the tendency to lump all Southeast Asian women's writing together, or worse, to create a catch-all category of "immigrant" or "ethnic" writing. She points to the diversity of cultures among Southeast Asians, a point well reflected in the formal and thematic diversity of the anthology's stories.
Among these diverse tales, several common threads emerge. One of the classic story lines can be found in Meena Alexander's poetic "No Nation Woman," in which a child accompanies her parents from India to North America, where her father has obtained a desirable job. There, she is haunted through adulthood by a vivid mental picture of her childhood home in India, but never does feel at home in North America. Towards the end of the story, the narrator writes plaintively, "I seem to have travelled always."
Another thread running through many of the stories is the traditional -- and oppressive -- situation of Southeast Asian women in their own cultures. Too often, they escape this oppression only to run into the racism, cultural chauvinism, and different variety of women's oppression found in Western cultures.
Naming is an important theme in a few stories, notably Himani Bannerji's beautifully written "On a Cold Day," in which Devika Bardhan changes her name to Debbie Barton, under pressure from an employment counsellor, and then bestows her original Indian name upon a suicide she happens upon, a woman "of South Asian origin, as the newspapers said," broken and bloody on the pavement, having jumped from her seventh- story balcony. Bannerji is a highly accomplished poet, short-story writer, essayist, and scholar who has been teaching and writing in Canada for many years. That her work is not better known here is a serious loss to Canadian letters; is it also an echo of the themes of discrimination and prejudice found in the book'?
There are many other fine stories here, such as "Love in an Election Year," by Tahira Naqvi, which interweaves political and personal themes, but the story that moved me the most was the title piece, "My Mother's Ashes," by Geeta Kothari. One of its motifs -- the distraught emigre daughter trying to scatter her mother's ashes on the Ganges but ignorant of "the proper ritual, the right prayers" -- continues to haunt me. It reminded me of my first excursion to a synagogue in Canada -- a small, egalitarian place that nevertheless observed Orthodox ritual and the use of Hebrew. Raised in a highly secularized Jewish family in New York, I was largely ignorant of what to do. At the same time, I felt a deep connection to the sounds, the atmosphere, and the people, and cried throughout the service's three hours -- saddened at what I'd lost, moved by what I'd found. In Kothari's story, the main character, Lally, stands on the banks of the Ganges, among "pilgrims and hippies," "waiting for someone to tell her what to do." Finally, she opens the urn and wades into the waters. "When all the ashes were gone, and she was left with an empty urn, she realized she was crying." Her crying is for her mother, but it also expresses a grief that goes beyond the loss of a loved one.
This article first appeared HERE.
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