Book Review by Sunil Sharma
Lopa Banerjee. Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant’s Wayward Journey. New Delhi: Authors Press India. 2016.
Lopa Banerjee. Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant’s Wayward Journey. New Delhi: Authors Press India. 2016.
- Paperback: 236 pages
- Publisher: Authorspress (2016)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 9352074254
- ISBN-13: 978-9352074259
Rs. 450/- (Flipkart.com)
$23.95 (Amazon.com)
Is going abroad immigration or a planned escape?
If a careful escape, then how do you define such a finely-executed escape?
If a careful escape, then how do you define such a finely-executed escape?
Is it running away from your sordid present and self
into a promising future and a new self? An entry into a positive present and
self in a new territory?
Are not humans ready to flee and seek fresh pastures?
Every journey signals the search for a better
destination, a better ideal, some distant goal. It also signifies progress.
Economic migration; migration by marriage; migration within/without a
country---they all involve strategies of disappearance and then resurfacing
with new identities.
Some call it exile. Exile into the obscure, the
unknown.
Escape.
Exile.
Immigration.
Arrival.
Assimilation.
These are terms of debate of any transnational
journey.
Let us talk of the title of this memoir. Thwarted Escape.
Why do we want to escape?
The intriguing heading somehow reminds me of a
well-known and oft-discussed literary escape---the staged death of a female
writer/protagonist in the year 1976 and her flight into Italy under another
assumed name.
The following lines have become famous:
I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along
from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it. My life
had a tendency to spread, to get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame
of a baroque mirror.
Well, Joan Foster has got the ingenuity of arranging
her own death, because she has got the fertile imagination of a gothic-romance
writer. It comes easy if you are in control as an author and can plan fictional
beginnings and endings for your characters. Joan Foster, by faking death and a
past she wants to evade by that closure, becomes a character in an unraveling
plot that keeps the readers of LadyOracle
enthralled.
Escape-artist Joan has impressed critics interested in
feminist reading of the cult novel by Margret Atwood.
Death closes a book and a life history.
Staged death liberates and inaugurates an escapade, an
odyssey.
A female conducting her own death with clinical
precision from a stifling environment sounds a modern fairy tale of evasion and
escape---into a planned sequel, posthumous.
Few women---or men---can afford that kind of elaborate
fiction in real time.
But it underlies the existential drama across
centuries---migration as some sort of escape from some depressing fact.
Thwarted
Escape is a frank and honest chronicle, a bold documentation
of young Bengali girl’s transition through wedding into womanhood, motherhood
and a successful author recalling a frenzied escape from Kolkata into beckoning
USA.
And it a story that grips.
Although the author insists it to be a memoir, it can
be read both as a memoir and a fiction.
Fiction? A memoir?
Well, every act of writing---memory released from the
tyranny of time---comes sprinkled with star dust; the act of remembering an
act, episode or incident---real or heard or imagined---involves selection and
elimination---and finally artistic presentation like some grand meal well-seasoned
and visually appealing.
This book has the same kind of intensity and lyricism
that attend any creative act---fictional or real.
Lopa Banerjee, as subject/object of this powerful
female narrative of desire, longing and reality, deftly reveals the contours of
such epic journeys undertaken by ordinary folks everywhere in the world;
remarkable accounts of survival, hope and disappointment--- the problems of migration,
nostalgia and adaption to an alien setting that demands assimilation and
conformism to the dominant culture.
Migrants are split into two roles, twin identities and
expectations of a host community to act like them. Social role playing at its
best.
Migrants---the transplants that ably survive harsh
climate of adopted home country.
Lopa pays tribute to that pioneering spirit. The grit.
The will to adapt and embrace.
New beginnings are not easy either. Inhabiting two identities,
pulled by two different worlds, the in-built dualism of a migrant’s existence
can be taxing even for the most upwardly mobile. If the immigrant happens to be
a coy bride from Bengali bhadralok
transplanted within hours into another soil and setting, adjustment and
accommodation can be very challenging---but not impossible. The struggles, the
memories, the oscillation between present and past becomes productive for a
creative being---but a burden for a sensitive soul unable to express the
pressures of a hyphenated existence in a global melting pot.
Exile tries to overcome that feeling of estrangement,
of being an alien and attempts rapprochement.
The refugee---her word---stakes her claim for
ownership of a foreign earth, in the name of common humanity!
For Lopa, the location/relocation matrix proves
fertile ground for her debut book, lyrical and fast-paced like a Bob Dylan song.Those
core experiences of re-inventing another self and slow severance from the
lingering old realities of a post-colonial country and a clich├йd middle-class
life there form the basis of the book Thwarted
Escape.
Here, Lopa employs a female language rich with images,
metaphors and pictures. It is exuberant, the language and syntax, making the
reader immerse in Kolkata or Nebraska, as resurrected by a detail-oriented
writer recording the falling atoms through her shiny words, as her fav Virginia
Woolf observed, on a memorable day in 1919.
One sample will suffice for the cynics; a language only a gifted female can write,
poetic, crisp, sparkling:
Years back, I had
left the silly old streets of Calcutta in the
haste and allure
of discovery. I am the burnt out candle, who
knows not why she
keeps returning to the old flames. I keep
coming back, to
walk past the smothering traffic of Downtown
Calcutta, to melt
with the daily sweat and toil of subways and
local trains, like
the days when I used to commute to my old
office buildings.
In my cab journeys in the city’s peripheries, I
gaze greedily from
the window of my cab at the curled clouds,
the dust and the
soot of a city, thinking how it had once blown
me to death with
her betrayals.
It is a book that will talk to you
on lonely nights, when you remember somebody close that left for a foreign
shore. It is a story of every migrant, more so, of women going abroad for
running homes of rank strangers, lovingly reclaimed later as their soul-mates,
in the odd tradition, the strange logic of arranged marriages of India. The
book is an ode to Kolkata and America by a woman writer making waves through
her solid writing.
Thwarted
Escape
celebrates polyphony and open form of narration as practiced by Lopa Banerjee,
ten thousand miles away from her beloved Kolkata, and by now, a successful
writer and Indian-American woman, part of a multi-ethnic space, doing her
multiple roles.
And a daughter in a remembrance
mode.
It is a joy, listing to her solemn
voice!
Links:
