Draft

In what ways are they picking their identity?

Anya: act of resistance of American
No solidity of national identity

They must reimagine their identity

Reaction to some pressure?
Something coherent they are reacting to

What is transnational literature?

The Importance of Diverse Portrayals of

Immigrant Stories in Literature
Conversely

Introduction
I will use statements made by Clara Claiborne Park, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Fyodor
Dostoevsky and Rita Felski to introduce the issue of immigrant literature and the importance
of diversity in literature. Then I will examine two literary works (Waclawiak and Kureishi)
with particular focus on neglecting or fostering certain identities. Both protagonists (and
bicharacters) are very aware of their identity and spends much energy and time carefully
mending their identity/expression.

In this text I will explore the different ways the protagonists are developing their identities.
What factors pushes them? What methods are used to acquire the right traits that allows them
to pass as chosen identity?

1.1 Literature theory

People are susceptible to what they are presented with.

Park opens her paper with a solid quote by Fyodor Dostevsky: “As a general rule, people,
even the wicked, are much more naive and simplehearted than we suppose. And we ourselves
are too.”

(Naivety)(This headline will not be here, it is just to organize my text while writing)
In her book on uses of literature, Park makes some interesting statements about what it is like
teaching literature in a community college compared to in prestige colleges. Characterized by
usual sociological criteria roughly two thirds of freshmen at community colleges are from
working class or lower class, and the remaining third is from lower-middle class. Further, she
concludes that participants from this social group can be categorized as culturally
disadvantaged, and thus culturally naïve. What she finds less obvious, but true, is that a
surprising number of the culturally naïve see their teacher as a wise person who can help them
understand important things.1 As an example she shares her interaction with a student who,
after learning about Homer, Plato, and Dante’s perspectives on the afterlife, wants to know
from his teacher: which of them are the true perspective? 2 What this tells us is that many
students will take in what ever the teacher conveys and consider it to be true.

(Literature matters)
On the other hand, she claims that this way of interacting with literature might be considered a
cultural advantage instead of a cultural disadvantage. Similarly to how the culturally naïve
expect knowledge from their teacher, they expect literature to bring them important things,
and believe that what they read can matter, that it can offer them something they can use. 3
When realizing writers have an audience with this attitude/setting, we understand that the
contents of literature and what kinds of literary works are presented to certain audiences can
really make a great impact.

(The culturally naïve really takes in the message)

So what kind of literature can really make a difference? Park recites Ellen Cantarow (XX
WHO?) who talk about her approach to the “criticalness” of literature when she herself
studied literature. At Wellesley (COLLEGE?) she was really moved by what she read but was
taught that literature was timeless and above the petty details of any one person’s daily living.
Park makes the suggestion that perhaps she would have been better off if she had studied
literature in a community college. There, the simplicity of the students fostered the message
that literature has uses, and that these are at the heart of its interest and excitement. The
students in community colleges will not take out revolutionary ideas/encouraging or abstract
ideas from literature, but simply ponder on whats in this for me? According to Park, literature
for them will offer understanding of personal processes and events before it offers in society
or rebellion against it. The use of literature for them is primarily personal. Park
claims/presents a perception that contemporary readers know the difference between life and
literature. Still, she experienced within two weeks of analysing The myth of Siphus that one
very capable student passed in a final blank, two dropped out of school and one attempted
suicide. The point being made is that we must acknowledge the power that literature may
have among students whom familiarity has not rendered immune to ideas found in books. 4

(Thus, immigrant stories must be told)

This brings me back to the opening quote by Fyodor Dostevsk where we established that,
although it may be disappointing, people are much more naive and simplehearted than we
suppose. The outtake is that literature has power, and for that reason important stories must be
told. Stories making immigrant experience accessible to non-immigrant readers have long
1
Park 1973, 227
2
Park 1973, 226
3
Park 1973, 227
4
Park 1973, 229
been neglected. What effect might the flourishing of multicultural stories in traditionally
white and non-immigrant societies have?

In the following I will build my argumentations based on the following line of thought. In
Park’s paper on uses of literature she compares literature students in community colleges in to
literature students in prestige colleges and find that students in community colleges more
often consider literature to be something they expect to directly speak to them or impact their
life. The same goes for literature teachers. Community college students tend to see them as
someone wise who may teach them something important about life itself. When we look at
the general world population, my argument/claim is that the vast majority of the general
public can be categorized together with the community college students rather than the
prestige college students. Only a very small coterie of people are deeply invested in literature,
thus the rest goes under the category of the culturally naïve. Since literature tends/is proven
to make great impacts on the culturally naïve, presentation in literature really matters. What
stories and narratives are made accessible and affordable have major ripple effects on the
issue of accepting and understanding one another på tross av/across nationalities and
ethnicities.

1.2 The Danger of a Single Story

The Nigerian author and speaker Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes the statement that “The
problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete” 5. We all
have imaginary impressions about the world based on the stories we have heard. Somehow,
we feel like we can relate to middle eastern immigrants in England because we read … We
have a clear vision/impression of what it must be like growing up in a South African
township, and we believe we know the world because we know all Indian girls must walk
hours every day to fetch water. Our minds are unfathomably simple when it comes to putting
people in boxes, so with no intent of being mean, we make the easiest possible connections in
our brains, and identify people and people groups based on the scrant information we have
been exposed to/been provided with.

(One story becomes the defining one) -

Adichie experienced a widening/development of her horizon of understanding when visiting
the home of her family’s domestic help boy, Fide, for the first time. All Adichie had ever
heard about the Fide and his family, was that they were very poor and thus helpless. When she
saw a beautiful and useful basket crafted by Fide’s brother, she was startled and realized she
had never seen him as anything other than poor. She confesses: “I never imagined people like
him could create something.” 6 Poverty was her single story about them. When she came to
America to study, she was met with what she calls ‘patronizing well-meaning pity’. All
stories She experienced that her American roommate had a single story of her, and that in this
single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to Americans, no possibility of

5
Adichie, Youtube
6
YouTube source...
feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals. Adichie
concludes that if a people group is shown as only one thing over and over again, that is what
they become in the eyes of others.

How stories are communicated are defined by the principle of power; how a story is told, who
tells it, when it is told and how many times. The person/people in power have the authority to
not just tell the story, but to make it the definitive story of that person. XX
XXAn example Adichie makes: “It’s so sad to hear that Nigerian men are so violent. “I just
read a novel, American Psycho. It’s sad to hear that young American men are serial killers.”

(Introducing types of immigrant literature)

Grażyna Kozaczka from the literature journal The Polish Review, presents a trending literary
style/technique established in the USA in the early millennia. According to her, ethnic
impersonation have been explored by Americans for some time, and such impersonations
have also found their way into autobiographical writing. By inhabiting different nationalities,
we in a larger scale explore different immigrant narratives through testimonies, books, articles
and imagination. In the following we will explore this literary technique through the writings
of Karolina Waclawiak, in her novel How to Get Into the Twin Palms. Kozaczka mentions
how the protagonist carefully considers her ethnic identity. According to Kozaczka, American
writers have been exploring ethnic identities in literature for while by impersonating different
ethnicities and cultures through imaginary characters. Some of these attempts at exploring
ethnic cultures have been condemned as cultural or ethnical appropriation. What Karolina
Waclawiak does is explore the Russian XXX through the eyes of a Polish American second
generation immigrant girl.

Making narratives of the immigrant experience accessible to a broad audience unravels

perspectives that we might not have had before. A prominent theme in both Waclaviak’s How
to Get Into the Twin Palms and Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic is neglect of certain
identity traits is a prominent theme in both. The interesting park is that both the stories are
very much multidimensional. Another prominent theme is immigrant characters are doing
anything in their power living in such a way that they don’t stand out from what every society
they are trying to fit into. A third interesting repeating theme is generational gap in relation to
expectation. XX

FROM HERE ON AND OUT I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO WRITE FULL
PARAGRAPHS, BUT THEY ARE SUGGESTIONS, THOUGHTS AND QUOTES I WILL
USE….

1.3 The ethnic identity theme

I WOULD LIKE ANOTHER SOURCE THAT SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT IMMIGRANT
LITERATURE AND THE NEED FOR IT.
Award winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie loved reading when she was a child, but
the characters she got to know and the stories she engaged with was never anything she could
relate to. Novels including characters with dark skin and tropical diets was neither affordable
nor accessible for the young Nigerian girl. RELEVANT? HOW DID IT HURT HER? When
she attended college and studied literature, she was told by her supervisor that the story she
wrote about an African person, was not African enough. I will argue that we behold a popular
belief in large parts of our western civilization that relatable stories must include white
protagonists and relatable behavior, and simultaneously that all stories that take place in non-
western environments or have non-western protagonists, cannot be relatable.

“It was a strange choice to decide to pass for Russian” I want them to know me. I want to pass
fully. What will my name be? I will have to change the I to Y. I will have to get my story
straight. 7

“She had long attempted to inhabit her Polish skin and was happy to finally crawl out of it.”
She was ashamed at what she sees as kitschy displays of ethnicity practiced by some Polish
Americans. 8

1.4 Neglecting one’s self in order to blend in

Living in a way that the protagonists can blend in. Ali becoming an accountant, Anya
working, doing the American dream. I hadn't had a vacation in 16 months at FastTrak. But
now I was going to take one and for as long as I could. The first thing I was going to do was
take up smoking. It was going to hurt the running, but help my attempts of getting into the
Twin Palms. Getting in with Lev. 9

“It was a strange choice to decide to pass for Russian”

“She had long attempted to inhabit her Polish skin and was happy to finally crawl out of it.”

“My new slim black pants accentuate my hips and elongate my legs. They seem to like that.
My dark hair makes my eyes more cat-like and brighter in hue. More Eastern European. Less
American. I am starting to make sense to them. I am taking off all my American skin.» 10

Parvez and the neglection of his Indian persona

7
Waclawiak, 9
8
Grażyna 2014, 59

9
Wacklawiak, 36
10
Waklwiak, 16
Ali says “Western education cultivates an anti-religious attitude.” 11 Ali wants to give up on
being an accountant.
“And, according to Ali, in the world of accountants it was usual to meet women, drink alcohol
and practice usury”. 12

The boy explains that Parvez had not, in fact, lived a good life. He had broken countless rules
of the Koran.13 “Ali then reminded Parvez that he had ordered his own wife to cook pork
sausages, saying to her, 'You're not in the village now, this is England. We have to fit in.'”

The taxi drivers had little respect. “They made jokes about the local mullahs walking around
with their caps and beards, thinking they could tell people how to live” 14

“He hoped Ali would complement him on the beard he was growing but Ali didn't appear to
notice.”

The “Western dream”

Anya is unemployed, but tells her mother she is working at an unemployment service. She is
lying and bragging about the great feeling and sense of pride she feels doing helping work. “I
was living the American dream”.

This comment can somehow emphasize the common perception of western people helping out
the more unfortunate ones. Living the dream is to be an American and be able to help others.
But Anya is negletcting ‘the dream’. She

Parvez: “I love England, they let you do almost anything here.” That is the problem says the
pro-native. Ali is certain the native way of life is better.

Felski: When stories come to life, they impact us

“If the act of reading fuses cognitive and affective impulses, if it looks outward to the worlds
as s´well as inward o the self, then isolating and scrutinizing these intermeshed components
looks suspiciously like an exercise in academic hairsplitting.
Any social knowledge we gain from reading (…) requires that a text solicit and capture our
attention.
We need to read something engaging in order to actually take in the new perspectives we get.
“Mimesis is mediated by multiple devices designed to lure in readers and keep them hooked:
Suspencefilled plots, fine-tuned verbal mimicry, elaborate descriptions of imaginary drawing-

11
Kureishi, 105
12
Kureishi 105
13
Kurieshi 103
14
Kureishi 102
rooms, renditions of who-said-what-to-whom that replicate the intimacy and intrigue of
gossip. The enlargement of the reader’s understanding
Is steered not only by formal devises and literary techniques, but also by the magical illusions,
imaginative associations and emotional susceptibles that such techniques call into being.” In
order to develop the reader’s understanding by only (listing facts), one might risk overlooking
the co-dependence of enlightenment and enchantment. (Page IDK)

The shock of recognition – what the mirror shows is not always what we hoped or expected to
see. It is an interplay between on sameness and difference, feámiliarity and strangeness. “A
cognitive and interpretive component clings even to ou r most visceral reactions, our minds
and bodies register the unnerving impact of the disgusting, violent, or obscene.”

Even if it is uncomfortable, we actively seek the visceral responses. Discust, repulsion, grief,
hopelessness. We reap a variety of pleasures from such visceral responces. “The bracing
knowledge of facing fears, the masochistic bliss of being pummeled and punched by a work
of art, or the satisfaction of belonging to a subcultural coterie.”

“One advantage of splicing up the spectrum of literary response is that it underscores not only the different ways
that different people read but also the different ways in which the same individuals read, the dramatic
fluctuations in modes and motives of aesthetic engagement.»

recognize that works of art can be appreciated for a host of good reasons.

Aboulela – elsewehere home

“When the twins were very young they rejected anything that had a whiff of African or
Muslim culture about it – including your books” 15
“I wanted my kids to be proud of the Arabian literature, but they did not care”.
“You understood that the West’s image of the ‘muslim woman’ was a reduced simplified
cliché”. 16

Immediately I wanted to be your friend. We had so much in common, both of us here and
both of us from there (…) I felt that I already knew you.17
This was the first time I recognised myself in fiction. Not my inner self, I was able to do that
between the most unlikely covers, novels written by men from other centuries or set in places
I didn't even know existed. But in your work I saw my country, my values and the social
circles I grew up in. 18

15
Aboulela 2018, 205
16
Aboulela 2018, 200
17
Aboulela 2018, 194
18
Aboulela 2018, 194
Your story was a bridge to a world I had left behind after marriage and migration. A world I
was losing, but through your words it became vivid again and I could inhabit it.19

Literature

I DON’T NEED FEEDBACK ON SOURCES. MAKING THIS PROFESSIONAL IS A

PRIORITY FOR MUCH LATER )

Kozaczka, Grażyna. The Polish Review 59, no. 1 (2014): 110–12.

https://doi.org/10.5406/polishreview.59.1.0110.

Composition

1. Use of literature (Park), some people take in whatever they hear

2. That’s why we need to be exposed to multiple types of literature
Polish review – popular literature trend: inhabiting different nationalities
3. The danger of a single story: Stereotypes are not untrue, they are incomplete

4. Anya’s story – I don’t want to be assimilated, I want to become Russian

5. Parvez’s story – I don’t want to be associated with Pakistan. I love the English life
6. What effect does the literature have in the native reader? On the Western reader?
Pages of fruit: “I feel like I know you”
Rita Felski on alive stories.

19
Aboulela 2018, 195