THE NAMESAKE

So this book is about a native Indian family who move from Calcutta to New York and struggle to keep a healthy balance between their Indian culture and the new American culture. The book is mostly focused on the son Gogol as the story develops, who struggles to forge his own identity while keeping up with his heritage.

Welcome to my first blog post, guys! So today I'll be talking about The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri and the few interesting insights I have about the first few chapters I read.

Brief Summary: Ashima and Ashoke, set up by arranged marriage, move to New York from Calcutta, India. They moved because Ashoke wanted to study abroad in MIT and become a teacher, and brought Ashima along with him. Ashima gives birth to Gogol and is afraid to raise him alone in America. Her loneliness is then faded as she and Gogol bond and meet other fellow Bengals nearby their residence. The family bonds with the others who share the same nationality, which eases their discomfort in the foreign country, but struggle with the deaths of Gogol's grandparents. They later then raise another child, Sonali (also know as Sonia), in a much bigger home and take a long trip to Calcutta, in which Gogol and Sonia silently protest against.

So, to start I'd like to say that I feel for Ashima. she continuously struggles with her loneliness, being so far away from home is especially hard since she was born and raised there, and spent more of her life in Calcutta. Throughout the chapters, even after she gave birth to Gogol, she still seemed so solemn. She did feel relieved to meet other Bengali families to be there to accompany her.

I may not know how she really feels, but knowing my parents went through the same thing and them passing on their stories of their first time in Canada to me allows me to feel some sympathy towards Ashima. My mother had already gave birth to my older brother in the Philippines, but as soon as she moved to Canada with my father, she felt isolated and hated the quietness. She eventually met other couples of the same nationality and bonded with them and met new people, and so she became more accustomed to the Canadian culture through them. Having help from her mother, her mother-in-law, sisters and sisters-in-law made everything so much easier to raise my older brother, and not having any of those people near her anymore while raising me (because I was born in Gatineau, Quebec) was tough for her.

My mother obviously, and persistently, holds on for dear life to her heritage. Same goes for my dad. They raised us with a healthy balance of both our culture and the Canadian culture, despite them having a slightly harder time coping and relating with the Canadian culture than my siblings and I do.

In the beginning of the first chapter, just before Ashima gave birth, she tried to remake a dessert she always had back in Calcutta. Ashima and my mother both used food as a way to stay anchored to their heritage, but also represents how much they miss home.

What I can relate to in this book is how Ashima feels out of place in America. In a cold, snow covered country, she knows she doesn't fit in and doesn't look like the norm. Her dark, sun-kissed skin contrasts with everyone else's pink and pale skin. Her accent and the way she pronounces words are funny to people. For example, in chapter 1, Ashima says "As long as there are ten finger and ten toe," (Lahirir, 7). Ashima doesn't add an 's' at the end of 'finger' and 'toe' because in Bengali, finger can mean fingers and toes can mean toes. After making this error, "Patty smiles, a little too widely," (Lahiri, 7), Patty finds this error slightly amusing, but not in a rude way. I have an accent sometimes when I talk. It honestly depends who I talk to. If I'm talking to my parents or my aunts and uncles, I talk to them with an accent so they can understand me better. With my cousins and friends, I change my accent back to the one I use at school. Accents do make people laugh, they're intriguing. They can either sound annoying or like candy for the ears.

What I also want to mention, at one point in the book Ashima asks Judy for some rice. Though, the rice was different. It was brown rice, totally different from the Basmati rice Ashima and Ashoke eat. Even my whole family, including me, hate brown rice. We'd much rather skip dinner than eat brown rice, and buy some more groceries. I remember living with my family friends for about two months and all they had was brown rice because the father (who was white, the mother was filipino) refused to eat white rice. I never knew why, to be honest I was scared of the dad. Once we moved out, my siblings and I never felt so happy to be eating white rice again. It felt like we were home again, home as in Philippines. My family and I recently came back from the Philippines, we took a four-week trip to Coron, Palawan.

Coming back from the Philippines was both sad but also relieving. It was extremely sad to leave such a beautiful country. Island hopping was one of the best parts of my trip, just like "Gogol and Sonia's first journey outside of Calcutta," (Lahiri, 84). Kind of like these fictional siblings, my siblings and I explored the many islands far from our hometown. Everything was different. The traffic was horrendous, there are no stoplights and no one follows rules. I was sure I was gonna die there, but it was pretty cool seeing people and cars so close to each other but never colliding. The street food was amazing, but what I missed the most was the familiarity of the faces, skin tone and language spoken, it really felt like I belonged.

What made it relieving to be back was my bed. Oh, how I missed my thick mattress and air conditioning. My soft blankets and carpets. What I also missed was my spaghetti. Spaghetti sauce in the Philippines is oddly very sweet, which I hate. So coming back to the familiar food I usually eat here in Canada was great. Just like how Gogol and Sonia felt. What I like about Canada is that I can finally speak English fluently, and not use broken English for my cousins in Philippines to understand.

Coming back to Canada was more sad than relieving despite me being born in Canada and being more accustomed the culture here than in Philippines. I did struggle to communicate with my family back there, which did make me feel outcasted, my clothes were more high-end than theirs, my few filipino sentences had a Canadian accent to them, I wore shoes instead of slippers, I was yellow and pale while they were golden and sun-kissed. But I felt more at home just by being there.

These first few chapters makes you think about where do you really belong, people usually tend to think that it's either here or there. But I really think I'm right in the dead centre. Yes, I do look different than the norm for Canadians despite our multicultural population because I'm Asian, but I was born here and I speak fluent English and French and I learned many subjects in this country and wear the same style of clothing as many. And yes, I do look like the norm in Philippines and I know all the traditions and all the foods there, but I wasn't born there, I don't know the language and I don't dress like them and my behaviour is different.

I belong to both cultures and love them equally, but this isn't the case for Gogol. Gogol preferred the American culture, under-appreciating and avoiding his heritage without even knowing the full depth of it. Which is what I disagree with. His heritage is what makes him, him. It's basically what makes the other half of him.

- Kiara