Ghosts in Two Novels
Immigration can be a painful and to a certain extent puzzling experience for those who leave behind a culture, which was starkly different from the one, they encountered upon immigration. We have heard and read numerous tales of immigration and related problems and thus there have been numerous books on the subject and some of them have left an indelible impression on reader's mind. Two such books, which we shall discuss in this paper are "The woman warrior" and "How Garcia Girls lost their accents" written by Maxine Kingston and Julia Alvarez respectively. In the first novel, which is part fiction and part autobiography, author has described her experience as an immigrant in the United States with reference to her native culture and its restrictions. In the second novel, we come across immigration problems of a Latin American family. While ethnicity, racism and cultural differences are the main themes in both books, they have been highlighted with the help of ghosts.
In How Garcia Girls lost their accents, we encounter ghosts in the form of cultural values and traditions and also in the shape of white race. When Garcia family came to the United States after being exiled from their own country, they encountered serious problems as white people would make fund of their accents and everything Latin. Julia Alvarez has thus has skillfully highlighted the feelings of confusion that most immigrant children go through when their peers reject them. These white children were viewed as ghosts that would want to stop Latin Americans from becoming a part of American society. "Here they were trying to fit in America among Americans; they needed help figuring out who they were, why the Irish kids whose grandparents had been micks were calling the spics." (p.138). Ghosts also appear in the shape of old cultural values which hamstringed the assimilation process. Some people would stick with their old cultures and social values like Alvarez's own parents. For example talking about her work and her own immigrant background, Julia Alvarez says that her parents could never get rid of their roots and the mind-set that it had created. Jerry Berrios, in his article for The Arizona Republic (1998) writes about Julia Alvarez and her immigrant background, which provided impetus for the book under discussion. He writes, "Her [Alvarez's] parents kept immigrant habits. Alvarez's father, a successful doctor, would pinch pennies by turning off lights at home and buying ties at thrift shops."
The other book, Woman Warrior has given a more detailed account of psychological and racial ghosts that immigrants encounter when they enter an alien land with starkly different cultural values and social beliefs. "Woman Warrior" is divided into five long chapters and the dominant theme in the novel has been explained with the use of the term 'ghosts'. It is very important to understand what ghosts represent in the novel because this helps in understanding the psyche and problems of immigrants in a much better manner. Chinese families that moved to United States were not only affected by the culture which was absolutely different form theirs, but they also suffered from lack of friends in a land where people usually viewed them as strangers and never really paid any attention to them. Ghosts in this novel change forms at various stages. There were racial ghosts, historical and cultural ghosts and some psychological ones too. Racial 'Ghosts' for example, were white Americans who refused to take immigrants seriously and were completely indifferent to them. In the beginning of the novel it is the ghosts of a culture she had left behind that haunted the author the most.
The novel is interspersed with instances of anger and confusion that author felt welling up inside her when she encountered these ghosts. The author was not only disturbed by the immigration problems that her family faced with they moved to the United States, but she has also expressed anger against her own traditional culture. In the final chapter for example, Kingston compares Chinese traditions to America culture and reader learns that ghosts represent more than one thing in the novel.
Kingston writes in the final chapter "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe": "From the configurations of food my mother set out, we kids had to infer the holidays. She did not whip us up with holiday anticipation or explain. You only remembered that...
Chapter 3 elucidated clearly on this point, highlighting Weili's tendency to think of a setback once a solution emerges from a problem; these series of setbacks resulted to her inability to decide for herself, for in all of these setbacks, another person's welfare was put into consideration, rather than Weili's own welfare (70-1). Adams (2003) considered Weili's psyche as a response to her previous past, specifically, when she was raped
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