Immigrant women writers have struggled to address the most crucial aspect of their identity—that of belonging. These writers have grappled with many questions: How does one belong? Where does one belong? What is wrong in being considered an American instead of a hyphenated American? Their writing is about their identity as much as it is about their characters, and they refuse to be “otherized” and “objectified” (Mukherjee 33). The idea of identity is complex because it is not simply “a transgression or just a matter of identity formation,” as Sara Ahmed argues; often these writers need to negotiate their identities (96). The burden of negotiating identities, which can be hybrid and multiple, is also complex because the world that these women writers live in introduces to them the complicated notions of race and ethnicity, faith and interracial marriages, sexism and homophobia. South Asian immigrant women writers have their own way of reacting to these issues; some explore them through stories—often romantic stories—while some create collages of memory and others analyze these issues through critical essays.

Tahiri Naqvi is a Pakistani American writer who has written about Pakistani women in Pakistan as well as in the United States. In Naqvi’s short story “Brave We Are,” the narrator, a Pakistani American woman, tries to define the word hybrid to her son, Kasim. While defining the word, she continues cooking her own hybrid food arrangement of Pakistani spaghetti. She thinks nothing of her son associating different items together to arrive at the meaning of hybridity until he connects the concept to a human being:

After explaining this definition, she gives an example of a hybrid apple to her son, concluding that the new apple will probably have a name like Macintosh-Yellow. Kasim retorts, “Does that mean Mary is also hybrid?” Kasim’s voice crashes into the narrator’s thoughts because she has not anticipated that he would apply the meaning of hybridity to his friend, Mary. Kasim doesn’t repudiate the definition of hybridity but comes to a conclusion that Mary, the daughter of a Pakistani father and an English mother, is a hybrid. The narrator is definitely shocked at her son’s attempt at linking the concept of hybridity to his friend’s racial identity. While the narrator seems to resist the application of the word hybridity to Mary, her food preparation tells a greater “truth” about hybridity than her perception of Mary’s hybrid genealogy.

If a hybrid identity is explained through a biological, essentialized definition, then that hybridity becomes negative, such as the case of the mulatto. Yet if it is seen as positive, it still does not mean that two wholes combine into a simple third whole. Rather, hybridity creates a dynamic being who is a part of a more heterogeneous group. Naqvi points out through the above scene in her story, the challenge faced by a mother who tries to define a hybrid identity without creating a stereotype “that can neither be waved nor be dismissed with flippant ambiguity” (59). The narrator tries to evade her son’s question about Mary’s hybrid identity tactfully, yet through her utterances, Naqvi seems to emphasize that the issue of hybridity cannot be ignored. The narrator is aware of the fact that the biological definition of hybridity may cause a problem. As readers, we are able to connect the narrator’s reluctance to let Kasim apply the term hybrid to Mary to the history of mixed-race children being called “halfies” and “half-breeds” in the United States. Genealogy becomes problematic in this scene, and the narrator definitely sees such an identity as negative. We can see this through her recounting of a conversation she had with Mary’s English mother, Helen, about Mary’s father’s ideas concerning his children’s lives. Mary’s father, as Helen communicates to the narrator, is reluctant to let his children choose the mainstream lifestyle, such as having a girlfriend or a boyfriend, which is against Islamic culture. Yet the narrator remembers that Mary’s father named his daughter Marium because “it’s a name everyone knows” (Naqvi 58). The narrator thinks he chose it because it is familiar, convenient, and tri-religious (58), but perhaps it is also because people will not ask any questions about Mary’s looks. Mary’s father’s attitude indicates there are difficulties in raising mixed-race children.

What complicates the narrator’s position on the idea of hybridity is her own hybrid creation of food. While she makes the spaghetti during her conversation with Kasim, she is using South Asian ingredients as well as ingredients that are particular to the dish in the United States. In the end, she makes sure that “the spaghetti isn’t squelched. The strands must remain smooth, elusive, separate” (Naqvi 60). The main ingredient must be pure. This image reflects back to the idea that “hybridity continues to be haunted by an idea of fusion or mixture that implicitly assumes ‘the prior existence of pure, fixed, and separate antecedents’” (Kawash 5). So, through Naqvi’s story, readers are aware of the fact that there is newness in the identity but that newness can’t be named because it is something in-between, belonging to both the homeland and the host-land and neither.

Belonging to the new world that these writers have made their home and carrying the stories and experiences of the home country are also the subjects of Meena Alexander’s writings. Alexander, who has lived in India, Sudan, England, and the United States, uses poems, explanations of poems, stories of her grandmother and her ancestral place, and history to construct her identity. In “House of a Thousand Doors” in the collection The Shock of Arrival, Alexander portrays the condition of a woman who can’t enter the house:

In a vignette before the poem she talks about a “grandmother figure” who is not allowed in her father’s house. Alexander says the reason for this exclusion is because she is “a female and a married woman” who “has to leave her mother’s house” but can’t come back again (28). If she tries, she is denied entry to the house she grew up in. Alexander feels that her situation is similar to that of this grandmother: when she married and came to America, she couldn’t go back and enter her father’s house. This poem has two meanings about belonging: one South Asian, that is, a woman’s ultimate place is in her in-laws’ house, while the other is that of an immigrant—an immigrant is an exile or, as she feels in her own heart, what W.E.B. Du Bois has said: “two souls, two thoughts . . . in one dark body” (Alexander 2). When she began living in America, she felt she was living in a place “where she has no history” (63). Her history is here constructed through the stereotypical, exotic image of the western gaze—she is often seen as a Latina, a Guyanese, a Trinidadian, or a Fijian. Thus, she writes, “What does it mean to find one’s place in America? What does finding a place mean for an Asian-American artist who bears within him- or herself the mark of radical migrancy?” (161).

Her questions lead her to focus on the famous woman freedom fighter in undivided India during the British colonial period, Sarojini Naidu. Alexander talks about Naidu’s struggle with having to speak English. Alexander writes of Naidu, “Born of Bengali parents in the city of Hyderabad, she spoke not Bengali but Urdu, the Islamic language of culture in her city. Living at the edge of Bengali and espousing Urdu, Naidu added English to her store, the language of British India” (172). Naidu used the English language in her political life as she gave speeches in English. So, she used the master’s language to fight against the master. Alexander seems to say that she harbors the spirit of Naidu in the sense that she, as well, has made English her own language instead of writing in her mother tongue, Malayalam.

Similar to Meena Alexander, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni also creates a dual self in her collection of short stories Arranged Marriage. She talks about women who come to America after their marriage and try to live in both worlds. Sometimes for the purpose of living a meaningful life, her characters assimilate completely to the new life in America. The characters often anticipate their American Dream. Alexander’s short story “Clothes” chronicles the life of a young woman, Sumita, who is married to Somesh Sen. Somesh runs a 7-Eleven store in the United States. While still in India, Sumita dreams of this store—“Soft American music floated in the background as I moved between shelves stocked high with brightly colored cans and elegant-necked bottles, turning their labels carefully to the front, polishing them until they shone” (Divakaruni, Arranged 23). Her American Dream is to work in the store; however, when she reaches America, her life is no different from those of her friends who were married and continue to live in India. She has to live with her parents-in-law and remain at home and prepare food for the people who come to visit the parents and try on American clothes at night. She wears “American” clothes like shirts, skirts, and jeans and “marvel[s] at the curves” of her hips and thighs while Somesh promises to take her to the park where they can ride the roller coaster. Sumita’s desire, though, is to go to the store and work there. She, sometimes together with Somesh, dreams of moving into her own home. But one night her dream is shattered as her husband is killed by a gunman who robs the 7-Eleven shop, thus robbing her dream with it.

The story continues when Sumita is thinking about the kindness of her in-laws, who give her a white sari to wear, as is the tradition for a widow, and break her bangles but don’t ask her to cut her hair, blame her for their son’s death, or send her away. While the parents-in-law decide to go back to India, Sumita decides to stay in “this new, dangerous land” (Divakaruni, Arranged 33). Divakaruni ends the story with Sumita’s confidence that she will be able to survive in this country: “In the mirror a woman holds my gaze, her eyes apprehensive yet steady. She wears a blouse and skirt the color of almonds” (33). Thus, “Clothes” raises the question of stereotypes about arranged marriages and breaks that stereotype as well. It equally raises questions about the Indian woman and her agency: Couldn’t Sumita wear saris and still be independent? Is the writer’s message that one has to wear western clothes to be able to have empowerment? “Is the metaphor of clothes troubling in what it celebrates: America as liberation, India as stifling tradition?” questions Pallavi Rastogi (37).

From Sumita in the short story to Tilottama in the novel The Mistress of Spices, the story of making this new place home continues in the work of Divakaruni. Tilottama’s story is told through magic and spices. The novel opens with a single line: “I am a mistress of spices” (Divakaruni, Mistress 3). Tilo runs a spice store in Oakland, California, which is magical as she can use the power of the spices to help people. She can sense the illness, the loneliness and alienation, the homesickness and the heartbreaks of the people around her and accordingly gives them remedies, but no one knows this:

Tilo loves to help people, but she yearns for love in her life, so when she meets Raven, a Native American, she is divided within herself. If she falls in love, then she will lose the power of the spices; the spices will be angry, and she will be unable to help people. Tilo observes the lives of immigrants, who pass by her with all their troubles. She also feels their pain. Divakaruni talks about the violence that immigrants sustain to exist in this country through the story of Mohan and Veena. Mohan sells kababs and samosas in a cart, and he and his wife are planning to buy another cart and expand their business. He is attacked late at night by two white males and severely beaten up; “broken in body broken in mind by America,” Mohan is traumatized and has psychological problems (Divakaruni, Mistress 182). In the end, his friends gather some funds and send Mohan and Veena back to India, thus bringing the couple’s American Dream to an end. Tilo also feels very close to the women in her society; she feels the pain of Lalita, Ahuja’s wife, and Geetha. These women talk about the abuse in their houses, their longing for a better life in a new world—America. Tilo hears, “Silence and tears, silence and tears, all the way to America. Bloated sack of pain swelling inside her throat until at last today turmeric untied the knot and let it out” (107).

Susana Vega-González argues that Divakaruni draws on the magical power of women that exist in her culture (3). From literature to the real world, Divakaruni believes in materializing that power. Thus, in an interview she says, “At Berkeley, I volunteered at the women’s center. [. . .] As I got more involved, I became interested in helping battered women—violence against women crosses cultural borders and educational levels. Then, slowly, I focused on women in my community.” In 1991, with a group of friends, she founded a help-line to provide services to Indian American women. The most important things the help-line volunteers do is listen and be an empathetic presence. Inspired by the life stories of these women, Divakaruni published a short story collection, Arranged Marriages, which told of their abuse—and their courage (Softky).

The pursuit of the American Dream continues in the stories of Bharati Mukherjee, who emphasizes that the journey is not always easy. In a Massachusetts Review interview, she affirms

Mukherjee, born a Brahmin in Kolkata and living in an extended family, was surrounded by her girl cousins in India. However, she always felt that she was different from her cousins as she didn’t adhere to her father’s wish, which was to “marry the perfect Bengali bridegroom selected by him” (Mukherjee, “Beyond” 29). Like her, her fictional character Jasmine in her novel Jasmine didn’t want to get married to a groom chosen by her grandmother, at all—she wanted to be a doctor and have her own clinic. Jasmine, whose given name was Jyoti, grew up in a village in India before she came to America. Mukherjee shows the struggle of an undocumented immigrant who definitely achieves agency; yet, as Kristin Carter-Sanborn argues, Jasmine is someone who first transforms according to the fantasies of the men whom she meets (579). For instance, her husband Prakash changes her name to Jasmine: “He wanted to break down the Jyoti I’d been in Hasnapur and make me a new kind of city woman, to break off the past, he gave me a new name: Jasmine” (Mukherjee, Jasmine 77). Prakash dies in a terrorist attack, and then Jasmine leaves for America. The man who helps her to enter the US, Half-Face, fantasizes about her as a poor Third World woman who has nobody to protect her—“I have been to Asia and it’s the armpit of the Universe” (112)—and he believes that this idea gives him the right to rape her. Then Jasmine meets Lillian Gordon, who calls her “Jazzy.” Then she becomes Jase, the caregiver. The next man she meets, Bud, calls her Jane. Each naming is an attempt by others to give her a new identity, and sometimes these identities are racialized. For example, Jasmine tells the readers that Bud himself “courts me because I am alien. I am darkness, mystery, inscrutability” (200). She becomes racially a strange and exotic body.

Jasmine’s life in America is filled with violence and hardship, but the novel ends with optimism and the re-emphasis of the complex nature of the identity of a woman in exile; as Jasmine notes, “Time will tell if I am a tornado, rubble-maker, arising from nowhere and disappearing into a cloud” (Mukherjee, Jasmine 241). From the very beginning Jasmine refused to accept her future: “. . . an astrologer . . . foretold of my widowhood and exile” (3). Now she is ready to face other obstacles and journey toward the next transformation, thus presenting to us a remarkable and heroic life.

What is striking about Mukherjee’s writing and what separates her from her compatriots is her dialogue about multiculturalism and hyphenated identity in North America and her controversial positon on these issues. In her article “Beyond Multiculturalism,” she talks about nationalism—Indian as well as Canadian and American. She feels that the traditional concept of the nation state is “violently destabilizing” (Mukherjee, “Beyond” 32). She tells us that to her father, identity was linked to the soil and family origins: “I was first a Mukherjee, then a Bengali Brahmin, and only then an Indian” (30). She critiques “the artificial retentions of ‘pure race’ and ‘pure culture’” while talking about the other Indian expatriates’ reaction to her self-declared identity as an American (33): “My rejection of hyphenization has been deliberately misrepresented as ‘race treachery’” (33). She is skeptical of some first-generation Indian immigrants who, “embittered by overt anti-Asian racism and by unofficial ‘glass-ceilings,’ construct a phantom more-Indian-than-Indians-in-India” as a mechanism to fight against marginalization. However, she is equally critical of the American nationalism that is driven by the fear of what she calls, in the words of Daniel Stein, Executive Director of the Federation for American Reform, “cultural transmogrification” (32). She fiercely condemns the Eurocentrist and ethnocentrist view of only “like-looking, like-speaking, like-worshipping” people as members of a nation state. She is unable to see how the Canadian model, “the multicultural mosaic,” could be successful when the country still holds onto its “fixed, exclusivist national identity” (31).

Unhappy with the racial profiling in Canada, she moved to the United States—a country she saw as a “stage for the drama of self-transformation” (Mukherjee, “Beyond” 29). What moves the readers most is her optimistic thought about Americans who “believe that one’s station in life—poverty, education, family background—do not determine one’s fate” (29). She was not oblivious to race-related hatred in America, as she noted the rise of physical and fatal attacks on Asian Americans in the 1990s. She reminds the mainstream Americans that “America’s complexion is browning daily” (31). Critics were skeptical of Mukherjee when she “drape[d] herself in the stars and stripes in an Iowa corn field for the lead photo for her essay ‘American Dreamer’ in Mother Jones in 1997.” Yet her response to criticism is curt and straightforward: “I choose to describe myself on my own terms, that is, as an American without hyphens” (33). Her reason is that by using hyphenization we give others the opportunity to marginalize us again; she asks, “Why is it that hyphenization is imposed only on non-white Americans?” She contends that hyphenization accentuates the categorization of the American landscape into a “center” and “periphery,” and she championed the obliteration of this categorization (33). Why is it important to seriously ponder what Mukherjee is saying here even though she might appear as paradoxical as she also talks about her nostalgia for her Bengali culture? She discourages the retention of cultural memory if the aim of that retention is “cultural balkanization” (33). She wants to sensitize her readers “to think of culture and nationhood not as an uneasy aggregate of antagonistic them’s and us’s, but as a constantly re-forming, transmogrifying we” and invent “a new vocabulary that demands, and obtains, an equitable power-sharing for all the members of the American community” (33). This piece that she wrote in 1996 holds true to our time. As immigrant writers fight to retain their identity as Asian Americans and as Americans on their terms, as they are repeatedly criticized for owning the American Dream, and perpetually considered as outsiders through the closed border rhetoric, Mukherjee’s very idealistic and optimistic conclusion seems to convey a positive note for the future: “I prefer that we forge a national identity that is born of our acknowledgement of the steady de-Europeanization of the American population, that constantly synthesizes—fuses—the disparate cultures of our country’s residents, and that provides a new, sustaining, and unifying national creed” (34).

Naqvi, Alexander, Divakaruni, and Mukherjee speak multiple languages and carry with them multiple cultures. As they weave the powers of women in their writing, not only do they create new stories but also talk about the influence of the past, which can be seen as complex, with tradition and modernity at war every step of the way. Echoing what Theresa Hak Kyung Cha says in the epigraph that these writers lived by writing about these experiences, I conclude that at the same time they were successful in showing the triumphs in living through the struggles.