The Archaeology of the Colonial—Un-earthing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth

Abstract

The Archaeology of the Colonial—Un-earthing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth Michael Wutz (bio) We need to stop assuming a one-to-one correspondence between the geographic origins of a text and its evolving radius of literary action. We need to stop thinking of national literatures as the linguistic equivalents of territorial maps. Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet”1 Since the publication of her Pulitzer prize-winning debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Jhumpa Lahiri has come to be seen as a preeminent interpreter of the postcolonial condition of the Indian diaspora. By chronicling the lives of, mostly, privileged Bengalis transitioning into the West, she has mapped the anxieties of a population caught in the dual allegiance of transcontinental citizenship. At the same time, critics have ascribed the appeal of her work, in the United States and abroad, to her skillful portrayal of dislocation and generational crises, which has been judged to carry the universalizing qualities of serious, ambitious fiction. As the editors of Naming Jhumpa Lahiri observe, Lahiri’s work “sheds light on both universal dimensions of human experience and more specific Bengali, postcolonial, Indian diasporic, South Asian American, and Asian American politics.”2 Exceeding this concentric reach, Lahiri has also been grouped with a cadre of contemporary writers that has slid out of—or rather, beyond—the loose mesh of the postmodern vocabulary. Rachel Adams has recently identified Lahiri as an avatar of a newly emergent “American literary globalism,” which she understands as a generalized [End Page 243] feeling of social simultaneity across national borders, boundaries, and oceans, and which succeeds the more narrowly-Western aesthetic imperatives of the postmodern: “Relatively unburdened by the legacies of Euro-American modernism or the politics of the Cold War, their fiction reacts against the aesthetic sensibilities of high postmodernism while providing American literature with a new set of genealogical, geographic, and temporal referents.”3 This configuration of referents—from genealogy and geography to time, especially the vast temporalities of geologic time—is indeed fully evident in Lahiri’s work and provides the framework for a sustained eco-critical reading of Lahiri’s collection of stories and novellas, Unaccustomed Earth (2008). While Adams is primarily interested in mapping a global sensibility in American fiction that is operative in the present, I want to extend those terms, both historically and geologically, into the past and future by combining them with the thematic foci Lahiri’s work has, so far almost exclusively, been identified with: postcoloniality and immigration. Those twin themes provide the narrative spark for the stories in Maladies, but don’t extend into historical or temporal reflection. The intergenerational vector of The Namesake (2003), Lahiri’s first novel, is driven by time and change, but historical or geological ruptures are largely absent from its texture. The Lowland (2013), Lahiri’s most recent novel, is rich with a colonial and ecological sensibility that suggests centuries of human intervention and biological niche-building, but doesn’t explore them against planetary and geological time. Only with Unaccustomed Earth does Lahiri locate the story of migration and resettlement within the immensities of a transhistorical scale;4 and only Unaccustomed Earth—as its earth-bound title already suggests—carries the imprint of a deeply felt environmental and ecological sensibility in its texture. The presence of natural history within a typically more narrow human history; an awareness of the agency of natural or nonhuman forces; a sense of human accountability for its impact on the earth; and an understanding of the dynamic processes of the natural world—Lawrence Buell’s criteria for the identification of literary texts as being properly imbued with environmental and ecological concerns are all fully realized in Lahiri’s collection.5 It is against this geological, geographical, and ecological background that I want to offer a reading of Unaccustomed Earth that revolves around the figurative axis of its title: the earth. I submit that Lahiri articulates a multi-leveled theory of postcoloniality through the trope of the earth itself, the terrific and terrifying terrain having offered humans habitation for millenia. As a layering of tensional plate tectonics, the imbricated strata of the earth’s crust become a figure for...