778 The American Century: Literature since 1945United States alone to escape her fate as a widow in a small village. There, she
constantly reinvents and renames herself, as Jasmine, Jane, or Jase, confessing,
“I changed because I wanted to.” “We murder who we were so we can rebirth
ourselves in the images of dreams,” Jasmine declares toward the beginning of her
story. And pursuing what she calls a “zigzag route” across America, she leads a life
of “adventure, risk, transformation”; “the frontier is pushing indoors through
uncaulked windows,” she declares triumphantly at the end of the novel, as she
prepares to leave an old home for a new one.
Jasmine is not, however, a simple celebration of American innovation and the
national imperative to “shuttle between identities,” any more than are what
Mukherjee has called her later “odysseys of dislocation,” Leave It To Me (1997),
Desirable Daughters (2002), and True Bride (2004). It is more barbed and rebarbative
than that. “I didn’t know what to think of America,” Jasmine confesses to herself
prior to her arrival in the United States. “I’d read only Shane and seen only one
movie.” “What she encounters, when she first arrives with a group of “outcasts” or
illegal immigrants, is hardly the promised land. “The first thing I saw were the two
cones of a nuclear plant,” she remembered. “I waded through Eden’s waste,” she
explains, as she describes stumbling from ship to shore: “plastic bottles, floating
oranges, boards, sodden boxes, white and green plastic sacks tied shut but picked
open by birds and pulled apart by crabs.” This nautical waste land is her entrance
into what often appears to be an “underworld of evil.” Washed up in America like so
much flotsam and jetsam, Jasmine is confined and raped by a man called Half-Face,
a paradigm of the disfigured landscape and perverted national myth. She has to kill
Half-Face to escape: first to New York City, “an archipelago of ghettoes seething with
aliens,” then to Iowa – which may seem rooted, reassuring, but has its own forms of
poverty and violence, and is, besides, a place where people tend to regard her as
“ different,” an “inscrutable” “alien.” Throughout her trials, however, what sustains
Jasmine is her spiritual buoyancy, her eager response to what she terms “the fluidity
of American character and American landscape.” “In America, nothing lasts,” she
reflects. That may be a cause for regret sometimes but, more often than not, it is a
source of consolation, even cheer. It enables Jasmine to be “many selves” and it
challenges her to become “a fighter and adapter.” And even though Jasmine herself
may claim at one moment “I became an American,” the situation, as she elsewhere
acknowledges, is richer, more layered than that. “I am caught between the promise
of America,” she ends up confessing, “and old-world dutifulness.” Not only that, she
learns to find salvation eventually in a synthesis between old and new. Her newly
acquired, American belief in the reinvention of the self finds confirmation, it turns
out, from her inherited, Indian belief in reincarnation. She is able to connect up with
the idea that she can be many women precisely because she is committed to the
notion of spiritual metamorphosis. “We do keep revisiting the world,” she tells a
friend. “I have also traveled in time and space. It is possible.” Shuttling between each
of her identities as if it were “a possible assignment from God,” feeling wondrously,
divinely inspired, she combines the cosmic rhythms of ancient belief with the New
World rhythms of mobility and adventure. So Jasmine is not so much a divided orGGray_c05.indd 778ray_c 05 .indd 778 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM