| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Their novels present the world as a fiction, the truth of which can only be inscribed in fiction, and present the characters that make up the players in that fiction as playing out the roles inscribed by the authorial hand of colonial discourse. As Naipaul points out in a passage that explains the title of his novel The Mimic Men , “…we pretend to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the new world…” ( 175).
In the same way, the central character in Mukherjee’s Jasmine cannot be called simply “Jasmine.” She has a number of names, each one indicating a different role that she plays in the colonial game, whether it be her young Indian self, or the hardworking Midwestern American housewife. In Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses , the two central characters are actors who, at the start of the novel, are literally and metaphorically up in the air between two continents. One of them, Saladin Chamcha, sees that his life is in danger and begins to understand that his personality is nothing but roles that he played/plays; he thus “wanted nothing to do with his pathetic personality, that half-reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices…” (9). Likewise, Gibreel Farishta’s move to England sends him into a spiral of revelatory dreams and messianic fantasies that place him between worlds—the worlds of myth, modern life, different religions, and different cultures. What these two characters show is that being between two worlds (as the exile inevitably is), being a hyphenated, hybrid being, leads to mimicry, a need to take on the outward form of the exile’s new world.
These novels suggest that the exile cannot be analyzed with the same tools of simple binary oppositions that the humanist approach supplies: reality and appearance, original and simulacrum, and/or authentic and inauthentic. There is no essential being of the exile that is tied to the exile’s homeland or original landscape. Also, the new self the exile has created is not simply an artificial invention that is bolted on. Rather, there are many selves contained within exile. Mukherjee demonstrates the various forms the relationship of the different selves of the exile can take in the opposition she presents between the narrator of Jasmine (who is an immigrant from India) and her adopted son (who is a refugee from Vietnam): “My transformation,” the narrator points out, “was genetic, Du’s was hyphenated” (222).