Nhiều nhà văn từ vùng lục địa Ấn độ đã đến Mỹ
định cư trong những năm gần đây.
Bharati Mukherjee (1940-) đã sáng
tác một tập truyện ngắn rất được hoan nghênh tựa đề Người Môi
Giới và Các Chuyện Ngắn Khác (1988); tiểu
thuyết Hoa Nhài (1989) của bà kể về một phụ nữ nhập cư bất hợp pháp. Mukherjee lớn lên tại Calcutta; tiểu thuyết Kẻ Nắm Giữ Thế Giới *(1993) hư cấu những
chuyến hành trình đầy xúc cảm của các nhân vật trong Vết Chữ Đỏ của
Nataniel Hawthorne. Hãy Để Đó Cho
Tôi (1997) nói về cuộc sống vật lộn rầy đây mai đó của một cô gái bị
bỏ rơi ở Ấn độ, cố đi tìm lại gốc gác của mình. Truyện ngắn đầy thu hút tựa đề “Làm Vơi
Sầu Khổ “ (1988)
của Mukherjee, một
câu chuyện kể về những gì xảy ra sau vụ quân khủng bố đánh bom một
chiếc máy bay, đã tạo ra một dư chấn mới sau vụ khủng bố ngày 11 tháng 9, 2001.
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*The Holder of the World, (1993) is a novel by Bharati Mukherjee. It is a retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, placing the story in two centuries (17th and 20th). The novel involves time travel via virtual reality, locating itself in 20th century Boston, 17th century Colonial America, and 17th century India during the spread of the British East India Company. It also references Thomas Pynchon's novel, V.. The book was among the contenders in a 2014 list by The Telegraph of the 10 all-time greatest Asian novels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holder_of_the_World
This is
the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American
colonies in 1670, "a person undreamed of in Puritan society."
Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to
Mughal, India, with he r
husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course,
"translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu
raja.
It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth
century, an "asset hunter" who stumbles on the scattered record of
her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces
together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most
intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief
that with "sufficient passion and intelligence, we can deconstruct the
barriers of time and geography...." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/764308.The_Holder_of_the_World
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Meena Alexander (1951-), sinh ra tại Ấn nhưng có huyết thống người Syria và lớn lên ở Bắc Phi châu. Bà đã phản ánh lại kinh nghiệm bản thân qua hồi ký Rạn Nứt (1993). Nhà thơ và nhà văn viết truyện ngắn Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956-), sinh tại Ấn độ, đã sáng tác nhiều tiểu thuyết thật gợi cảm, tập trung nói về phụ nữ như Người Tình Hương Vị* (1997), Chị Em Thân Thiết **(1999), cùng các tập truyện ngắn khác như Những Lỗi Lầm Thầm Kín Trong Đời Chúng Ta (2001).
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* Tilo, the titular character, is a shopkeeper born in India and trained in magic, who helps customers satisfy their needs and desires with the mystical properties of spices. Her life changes when she falls for an American man named Raven, whom the book strongly implies is Native American Unfortunately, she chooses to disregard the rules of her training in her pursuit of romance and her decision to seek out customers outside her shop, which results in the spices inflicting punishment on her and those she cares about. To save Raven from being another victim of the spices' powerful magic, she decides to leave him after one last night where they make love. Afterwards, she accepts the punishment for disregarding the rules of her training, which results in the store being destroyed in an earthquake. She survives, and she and Raven reconcile and decide to help rebuild the shop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistress_of_Spices
**The story centers on two Indian girls, Anju and Sudha. The girls narrate their life stories in alternating chapters. The book follows Sudha and Anju through childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Although some of the characters immigrate to the United States, most of the story is set in India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_of_My_Heart
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Jhumpa Lahiri (1967-) tập trung viết về những xung đột và sự đồng hóa của thế hệ trẻ hơn qua tác phẩm Người Phiên Dịch Các Chứng Bệnh: Truyện Kể Từ Bengal, Boston, và Xa Hơn Nữa (1999), và tiểu thuyết Người Cùng Tên (2003). Lahiri viết từ kinh nghiệm của bản thân. Cha mẹ gốc người Bengal của bà lớn lên tại Ấn độ, còn bà sinh tại London nhưng lớn lên ở Mỹ.
Những tác giả Mỹ gốc Đông Nam Á, nhất là những người gốc Đại hàn và Phi luật tân, đã mạnh dạn lên tiếng trong thập kỷ vừa qua. Trong các nhà văn Mỹ gốc Đại hàn, nổi bật có Chang-rae Lee (1965-). Sinh tại Seoul, Nam hàn, Lee đã đan dệt vào nhau các lý tưởng của công chúng, sự phản bội, và nỗi tuyệt vọng thầm kín trong tiểu thuyết tựa đề Người Nói Giọng Bản Xứ *(1995). Quyển tiểu thuyết thứ hai của ông, Một Cuộc Đời Thiện Xảo** (1999) đào sâu vào bóng tối trải dài phủ trùm lên tội ác trong thời chiến –việc lính Nhật dùng “gái hầu” Triều tiên.
Theresa Hak Keung Cha (1951-1982), sinh tại Đại hàn, đã pha trộn hình ảnh, video, và tài liệu lịch sử vào tác phẩm thử nghiệm Dictee (1982) để tưởng niệm nỗi đau khổ của người Triều tiên khi bị quân đội Nhật chiếm đóng. Nhà thơ người Mỹ gốc Malaysia Shirley Geok-lin Lim, là hậu duệ của người Hoa, đã viết một hồi ký gây tác động mạnh tựa đề Giữa Những Gương Mặt Trắng Như Mặt Trăng (1996). Cuốn tự truyện của bà tựa đề Giấy Vàng Mã (2001), và tập truyện ngắn Hai Giấc Mơ (1997).
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*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Speaker_(novel)
Henry Park, a young Korean-American "spook" for Dennis Hoagland, is assigned to infiltrate the camp of John Kwang, a Korean-American politician running for mayor of New York City. Henry struggles with the recent separation from his white wife, Lelia, due to the premature death of their son Mitt. Further, he develops a keen double consciousness, knowing that his actions will cause the ruin of a fellow Korean-American, and tarnish an exemplar of success for members of a "model monority" in America.
**'A Gesture Life': Fitting In Perfectly on the Outside, but Lost Within
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
At t first glance, Franklin Hata, the hero of Chang-rae Lee's moving new novel, "A Gesture Life," looks like the living embodiment of the American Dream: an immigrant from Japan whose years of hard work and impeccable manners have seemingly erased his foreignness and made him a respected pillar of the suburban bourgeoisie. Doc Hata, as he is known, owns one of the loveliest homes in the lovely New York town of Bedley Run, and he is respected by his neighbors as the "living, breathing expression of what people here wanted -- privacy and decorum and the quietude of hard-earned privilege." As a local shopkeeper, he was revered by his loyal customers; as a retiree, he now enjoys "an almost Oriental veneration as an elder."
As in Lee's first novel, "Native Speaker" (1995), however, belonging and assimilation come at a cost -- in Hata's case, the cost of self-knowledge and genuine emotional connection. As his adopted daughter, Sunny, observes: "All I've ever seen is how careful you are with everything. With our fancy big house and this store and all the customers. How you sweep the sidewalk and nice-talk to the other shopkeepers. You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness. You're always having to be the ideal partner and colleague."
Hata's "gesture life" has consigned him to a peaceful, but strangely lonely, existence in Bedley Run. His one romantic involvement -- with a widow named Mary Burns who lives down the street -- will fizzle out in a sad, Chekhovian drama of missed opportunities and unspoken emotions. And Hata will eventually resign himself to a "bachelor dotage of one-pot meals" and "one-log fires and the placid chill of a zone-heated house." Better not to risk being vulnerable, he thinks: with his practiced routines (his daily laps in the pool, his daily walks through town, his meticulous upkeep of the house), he can enjoy a perfectly serene life free of upset and potential pain.
Hata's concern with emotional decorum and his "good station" in the community has turned his relationship with Sunny -- a mixed-race girl whom he adopted, as a single parent, when she was 7 -- into a civil war of unmet expectations and festering resentments. He has pressured her to excel at school, at music, at sports, and as a teen-ager she has rebelled with willfulness and passion. She has turned sullen and sarcastic and has begun hanging out with a group of older boys who are constantly in trouble with the law. When she becomes pregnant at the age of 18, Hata insists that she have a dangerously late abortion -- less out of a desire to protect her options in life than out of a compulsion to preserve his own good name.
As Lee cuts back and forth between Hata's current life in Bedley Run and his long-ago youth in Japan, the reader is gradually made to understand the roots of his emotional reticence and obsessive need for acceptance. Even in Japan, it seems, Hata felt himself to be an outsider: Korean by birth, he was adopted by a wealthy Japanese family who recognized his scholastic potential, and he struggled as a boy to be worthy of their sponsorship. When World War II began and he enlisted in the army, a similar desire to please his superiors -- and become the model soldier -- informed his every move.
It was during the war that the formative event in Hata's life occurred: he met and fell in love with one of the Korean "comfort women," who were coerced by army officials to service the men sexually. His doomed passion for K, as he calls her, and his failure to act persuasively on her behalf, will shape the rest of his life: forever after he will be on guard against the undertow of his own emotions; forever after he will regard his own passivity with a mixture of revulsion and regret.
Lee lays out these events in precise, elliptical prose that echoes Hata's own fastidious detachment. He conjures up, with equal authority, the brutal, acrid world of Hata's wartime service and the bucolic, Cheeveresque world of Bedley Run, using small, telling details to suggest each realm's complicated rules of social engagement. At the same time he allows the reader to see why Hata remains an outsider in both places: always trying too hard to fit in, always trying too hard to say the right thing.
Some of the people in the wartime sequences feel like one-dimensional pawns acting out overly melodramatic roles (an inebriated commander, a mercenary doctor, a psychotic soldier), but the people in Bedley Run, from Hata's gregarious friend, Renny Banerjee, to his realtor, Liv Crawford, are delineated with warmth and humor and insight. As for Sunny, she evolves for the reader from an inexplicably cold, ungrateful child into a conflicted young woman who shares Hata's sense of alienation and practiced instinct for survival. When she unexpectedly resurfaces in Hata's life after a long absence, she forces him to come to terms with their fractured relationship and his own secret past.
By creating two parallel narratives -- one concerned with Hata's current dealings with Sunny, the second with his encounters with K during the war -- Lee elegantly creates suspense out of the seemingly static story of a man trying hard not to feel. He has written a wise and humane novel that both amplifies the themes of identity and exile he addressed in "Native Speaker," and creates a wonderfully resonant portrait of a man caught between two cultures and two lives.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/29/daily/083199lee-book-review.html
Winner of the Asian-American Literary Award, Korean-American Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life was published in 1999. Lee found inspiration for his historical fiction in the deeply disturbing news about Korean sex slaves used by Japanese soldiers during World War II.
Narrated by a young Korean-turned-Japanese medic charged with overseeing comfort women in a camp in Burma, the novel provides a nuanced look at the psychological implications of assimilation and the pressure to conform. As the story progresses, he comes to realize that his carefully curated life of gestures is a front to avoid facing his traumatic experiences with the woman he loved and lost.
https://www.supersummary.com/a-gesture-life/summary/
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Những nhà văn sinh ra ở Phi luật tân gồm có Bienvenido Santos (1911-1996), tác giả tập truyện ngắn giàu chất thơ tựa đề Hương Táo*(1979), và Jessica Hagedorn (1949-) với những tiểu thuyết mang nét văn hóa quần chúng siêu thực như truyện Những Người Ăn Thịt Chó** (1990), Tội Phạm Của Tình Yêu *** (1996). Qua những cách rất khác nhau, cả hai tác phẩm đều hồi đáp lại cho tiểu thuyết tự truyện nhức nhối của người lao động nhập cư Mỹ gốc Phi luật tân Carlos Bulosan (1913-1956) tựa đề Nước Mỹ Trong Tim Tôi ****(1946).
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*https://www.supersummary.com/scent-of-apples/summary/
“Scent of Apples” by Bienvenido Santos is part of a short
story collection of the same name published in 1978 by University of Washington
Press. “Scent of Apples” tells the story of one man and his family’s unique
experience as Filipino immigrants to the United States. It’s a unique story, as
Santos himself is a character in it. Santos wrote “Scent of Apples” during the
Rebirth of Freedom—a period of activism following WWII and the restoration of
independence to the Philippines.
By appreciating the context, it’s possible to better understand the nostalgia
woven through the story and the difficulties Filipinos face trying to retain a
connection to their past while starting a new life elsewhere.
**Dogeaters, set in the late 1950s in Manila (the capital of the Philippines),
addresses several social, political and cultural issues present in the Philippines
during the 1950s. The title is a common derogatory term referring to Filipino
natives who supposedly eat dogs instead of pork or chicken.
Dogeaters, set in the late 1950s in Manila (the capital of the Philippines), addresses several social, political and cultural issues present in the Philippines during the 1950s. The title is a common derogatory term referring to Filipino natives who supposedly eat dogs instead of pork or chicken. The term reflects attitudes within Filipino culture and attempts to become more westernized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogeaters
***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gangster_of_Love
"The Gangster of Love" refers to the name of the band formed by several characters in the novel, including Rocky.
****
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_Is_in_the_Heart
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Nhà làm phim và lý thuyết gia xã hội nổi tiếng người Mỹ gốc Việt Trịnh Minh-Hà (1952-) kết hợp việc kể truyện với lý thuyết trong tác phẩm đề cao nữ quyền Phụ Nữ, Người Bản Xứ, và Người Khác* (1989). Từ Trung quốc đến, Ha Jin (1956-) đã viết tiểu thuyết Chờ Đợi (1999), một câu chuyện buồn kể về một cuộc chia lìa kéo dài 18 năm bằng văn phong hiện thực tiêu biểu của truyện Tàu, đối với độc giả người Mỹ rất mới mẻ và độc đáo.
Những tiếng nói mới nhất đến từ cộng đồng người MỸ gốc Ả rập. Joseph Geha (1944-), sinh trưởng tại Lebanon, lấy thành phố Toledo, Ohio, làm bối cảnh cho các chuyện ngắn trong tập Xuyên Thủng (1990). Diana Abu-Jaber (1959-), nhà văn Mỹ gốc Jordan, sinh ra tại New York, là tác giả quyển Nhạc Jazz Ả rập **(1993).
Nhà thơ và nhà biên kịch Elmaz Abinader (1954-) là tác giả quyển hồi ký Bọn Trẻ Nơi Hàng Ba: Cuộc Hành Trình Của Một Gia Đình Đến Từ Lebanon*** (1991). Trong tác phẩm Chỉ Cách Đường Main Một Chút Thôi (2002) Abinader viết về tuổi thơ sống trong hai nền văn hóa của mình tại một thành phố nhỏ ở Pensylvania vào thập niên 1960 “cảnh trong gia đình tôi khiến lòng tôi tràn ngập niềm vui và đầy thân quen, nhưng tôi biết mình không thể chia xẻ những cảnh ấy đằng sau cánh cửa đó.”
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*Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
In Woman, Native, Other Trinh focuses her work on oral tradition – family, herself, and her culture. In this approach, Trinh asserts a people's theory that is more inclusive. This method opened up an avenue for women of color to critique theory while creating new ways of "knowing" that are different than standard academic theory. Trinh proposes to the reader to unlearn received knowledge and ways of structuring reality. In Chapter 1 she explores questions of language, writing, and oral tradition. She suggests being critical against "well-written," and knowing the difference between a "written-woman" and a "writing-woman.42" In the second chapter Trinh repudiates Western and male constructions of knowledge through anthropology. She argues that anthropology is the root of western male hegemonic ideology that attempts to create a discourse of human truth. Mixed in with her stories and critiques are photographic images of women of color from Trinh's work in film. She includes stories of many other women of color such as Audre Lorde, Nellie Wong, and Gloria Anzaldua to increase the ethnic and semiotic geography of her work, and to also show a non-binary approach that problematizes the difficulty of representing a diverse "other." Woman, Native, Other, in its inclusive narrative and varied style attempt to show how binary oppositions work to support patriarchal/hegemonic ideology and how to approach it differently to avoid it.
**In Diana Abu-Jaber's "impressive, entertaining" (Chicago Tribune) first novel, a small, poor-white community in upstate New York becomes home to the transplanted Jordanian family of Matussem Ramoud: his grown daughters, Jemorah and Melvina; his sister Fatima; and her husband, Zaeed. The widower Matuseem loves American jazz, kitschy lawn ornaments, and, of course, his daughters. Fatima is obsessed with seeing her nieces married―Jemorah is nearly thirty! Supernurse Melvina is firmly committed to her work, but Jemorah is ambivalent about her identity and role. Is she Arab? Is she American? Should she marry and, if so, whom? Winner of the Oregon Book Award and finalist for the National PEN/Hemingway Award, Arabian Jazz is "a joy to read.... You will be tempted to read passages out loud. And you should" (Boston Globe). USA Today praises Abu-Jaber's "gift for dialogue...her Arab-American rings musically, and hilariously, true."
https://www.amazon.com/Arabian-Jazz-Novel-Diana-Abu-Jaber/dp/0393324222
***Early in "Children of the Roojme," an account of a family's struggles in the Middle East and in America, Elmaz Abinader cites a passage from her grandfather Rachid's diary: "I am writing what I have heard from the people and what my father and grandfather told me -- what has happened in our time." By recording these stories from her heritage, Ms. Abinader seems to be heeding Rachid's repeated admonishment, "Remember who you are."
In the remembering, Ms. Abinader illustrates for her readers the classic pattern of Lebanese-Christian immigration at the turn of the century. Prompted by the crash of the silk industry and political oppression, but mostly by the promise of enterprise, men left their mountain villages for America; here they peddled their kashshi -- bundles of notions and other small merchandise -- from farm to farm until they could set up their own stores (usually dry goods or groceries) and send passage money to their families in the old country.
More than a chronicle of immigration, "Children of the Roojme" also dramatizes the plight of those left behind in Lebanon as they endured famine, war, plagues of locusts, epidemics and family rivalries. These last were over prestige, mostly, or money, or seats in the church -- all fairly petty were they not occurring at the same time that the oppressive Turkish rulers played families off against one another and dealt out violent punishments. All of the lives were fraught with hardship, but the saga portrays survival, too. For those who reached the United States and those who remained, after all the work and sacrifice there was fulfillment in simple pleasures: a visit home, sitting with family on the roojme or stone terrace, watching the night sky, listening to the stories of loved ones.
Ms. Abinader allows the voices of her extended family to come through, capturing an authentic sense of their mannerisms and idiosyncratic concerns. The inflections are recognizable to anyone who has grown up with Arabic; I can hear the endearments and the curses, the hyperbole, the sincerity of their passionate intonations: "Some say all the stars are in love with the moon," a mother whispers to her children. "Look at the one near the moon. It tells the future."
Like her sources, Ms. Abinader, too, is a storyteller. It's no surprise to learn that she's a poet as well as a teacher of creative writing. She describes a battle against the locusts: "The men held torches to the crackling mountain, and inside those fences the locusts sizzled. More came -- to the fields of Antoun Fares, and to the hills of Baraket. The flames jumped and the locusts' bodies burned like butter."
Using the same powerful simple imagery, Ms. Abinader invests her characters with a poignant interior language. Rachid, facing the threat of execution of his family because of the testimony of a fellow villager, silently addresses his accuser even as the man is denouncing him to the Turks. "But Deeb Maklouf, you have seen my daughter's hair. How it falls and shines. My son Jean's legs, long; he will be the tallest, surely. Have you met Maron, born three years ago at the beginning of the war, slow to speak?"
"Children of the Roojme" is a generous, forgiving memoir. Rather than condemn, for example, the author describes a marriage custom meant to humiliate women and simply lets the behavior condemn itself. But with such contradictory characters -- like the religious man piously saying a rosary in one scene and in another terrorizing his daughter with a pistol over an imagined theft of $40 -- I'd have preferred some interpretation. What are we to make of such disparity?
The dates given at the beginning of each chapter are helpful, since the present tense can have a disorienting effect in a narrative that often suspends chronology and shifts forward and back in time. Even so, Elmaz Abinader's family shines through, remembered well, made human and understandable at a time when people from that corner of the world are too easily dismissed as neither.
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/14/books/remember-who-you-are.html
******
Nền văn học Mỹ đã trải qua một quãng đường dài, quanh co từ những ngày tiền thuộc địa cho đến ngày nay. Xã hội, lịch sử và công nghệ, tất cả đều để lại ảnh hưởng sâu đậm đối với nền văn học này. Dẫu thế, rốt ráo lại, vẫn có một cái bất di bất dịch trong văn học Mỹ – tính nhân văn, với tất cả hào quang sáng chói cũng như tối ám xấu xa của nó, nét truyền thống quá khứ cùng bao hứa hẹn tương lai.
Hết
