NYT: What immigrant fiction has been the most important to you, both personally and as an inspiration for your own writing?
Jhumpa Lahiri: I don't know what to make of the term "immigrant fiction." Writers have always tended to write about the worlds they come from. And it just so happens that many writers originate from different parts of the world than the ones they end up living in, either by choice or by necessity or by circumstance, and therefore, write about those experiences. If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction. Hawthorne writes about immigrants. So does Willa Cather. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
My thoughts: Very interesting. If Jhumpa Lahiri's interview is to be believed, she has not read ONE piece of non-European fiction in the past decade. She reads European fiction to her children (she has, over the past TEN years). And get this, she does not believe in "immigrant fiction." This from the same thinker that has read me her immigrant fiction for the past several years. Her wondrous stories have been the single story - of the travails of the immigrant in Babylon. You do not like snake meat, but you lick the knife that was used to kill said snake meat. I tire for our writers sha. I tire.
Jhumpa Lahiri: I don't know what to make of the term "immigrant fiction." Writers have always tended to write about the worlds they come from. And it just so happens that many writers originate from different parts of the world than the ones they end up living in, either by choice or by necessity or by circumstance, and therefore, write about those experiences. If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction. Hawthorne writes about immigrants. So does Willa Cather. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
My thoughts: Very interesting. If Jhumpa Lahiri's interview is to be believed, she has not read ONE piece of non-European fiction in the past decade. She reads European fiction to her children (she has, over the past TEN years). And get this, she does not believe in "immigrant fiction." This from the same thinker that has read me her immigrant fiction for the past several years. Her wondrous stories have been the single story - of the travails of the immigrant in Babylon. You do not like snake meat, but you lick the knife that was used to kill said snake meat. I tire for our writers sha. I tire.
- Ikhide
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