Tuesday, 20 June 2006:

Poetry reader: Kristen Bird

Poem: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “Restroom,” UA 21-23

Much of the information is taken from http://www.chitradivakaruni.com/

I.  Biography of Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni

    A.  Born in India in 1957

    B.  Came to the U.S. in 1976 and earned a Master's degree from Wright State   

    University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

    C. To earn money for her education, she held many odd jobs, including

     babysitting, selling merchandise in an Indian boutique, slicing bread in a

     bakery, and washing instruments in a science lab.

    D.  Today, she teaches in UH’s MFA Creative Writing Program

II.  Writing

A.     Much of her work is autobiographical told through fiction and nonfiction stories and poetry

B.     Much of her writing centers around immigrant women

"Women in particular respond to my work because I'm writing about them, women in love, in difficulties, women in relationships. I want people to relate to my characters, to feel their joy and pain, because it will be harder to [be] prejudiced when they meet them in real life." – Divakaruni

III.  Themes in the Poem, “Restroom”

A.     Connection to Home:  “…I couldn’t have said it for the shame of it, the voices in my head, mother, grandmother, widow-aunt, telling me women did not speak of body-things.” (22)

B.     Sacrifice: “Had to leave her with my mother-in-law because he said we couldn’t afford a child with us now.  I’ll have to work in the store all day, and who would watch her.  I know how important the store is.” (22)

C.     Glamorization: “Long lights everywhere, lines of mirrors.  Taps, four, six, eight of them, faucets gleaming, the white sinks shining like in a fairytale…” (22)

D.     New Perception of Women:  “…women with their bright red lips, hair short and curling around their faces in golds and browns, bare, daring honey-colored legs, their short skirts, black, maroon, the thin, thin points of their high heels.” (23)

E.      Shift from Nature to Industrialization: “The air fills with a perfume I don’t know.  I step out, beathe deeply, fill my lungs with it…” (23)

Questions:

*It seems that in this poem, the fact that her husband has been shot and is at a hospital takes backseat to her new surroundings.  Why do you think this is?

*From http://www.time.com/time/daily/special/india/chitra.html

She describes her five-year-old son, Abhay, returning home from school one day and taking a bath, frantically trying, as he put it, to wash "the dirt color" out of his skin. "I began to realize," Divakaruni writes, "what a challenge it would be to bring up my children in a country where all their lives their appearance would proclaim them 'foreigners.' Where, though they were born in America no less than Bruce Springsteen, they would have to continually answer the question 'Where are you from?' "

The final sentence, “Water flows and flows over my hands, warm and full of light, like a blessing,” (23) sounds like a sort of baptism, an element often associated with the conversion experience evident in much of immigrant literature. 

Is the main character having a type of conversion experience or is the experience similar to other “soap and water” symbolism we have seen in other stories?  Please explain.