Migratory Labor Identity in Exile:

Migratory Labor

Identity in Exile: The Grapes of Wrath, Jasmine and China Men

Over the course of history, migration and colonization have brought different cultures and ethnicities in close contact with each other. This contact has influenced the shaping and definition of individual and collective identity at the same time. Many modern and postmodern narratives thus discuss the relationship between individual identity and collective identity and between the personal or autobiographical facts and the historical facts. These narratives often challenge the claims made by official and objective histories, pointing to the great number of stories that can actually be derived from what is usually called 'the objective reality'. John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath, Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine and Maxine Kingston's China Men are three major, representative novels that focus on the molding of individual identity in the flux of history. Each of these novels centers on individual stories that are incorporated in the larger ethnical and racial sagas. The literary techniques employed by the authors are very important, since their primary focus is on the various representations of identity. Thus, all of the three books use a narrative of migration and exploration of new territories to represent the way in which individual identity is shaped by history. Although they use different contexts or settings, all of the three novels observe the same theme: the way in which migration and exile modify the initial coordinates of identity. The individual is thus set up against a complex background of historical changes and developments that reshape the backbone of his identity. What these stories actually achieve is a retelling of history in a way that focuses on the individuals and communities whose identity was affected by major changes.

John Steinbeck's monumental novel, the Grapes of Wrath, documents the migration of the land workers from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression, focusing on the impact of the economical crisis on the lives of the common individuals. The novel does not tackle therefore problems related to ethnicity, but rather attempts to capture the moment in which capitalism, with its monster-corporations, has taken over individual labor. While the central character in the book is the Joad family that is also forced to leave their home and travel to California to seek labor, through the many, powerful descriptions in the text, Steinbeck manages to give a panoramic view of the major changes that were taking place in America at that time. The Grapes of Wrath is the collective story of a people who is swept over by tremendous and unstoppable historical movements. The author uses a poetic prose, selecting harsh, rugged words, using numerous repetitions and sometimes incorporating long dialogues in the rhythm of the prose so that the flow of words may continue unbroken. This rhythmic prose is a very important element in the novel, as it conveys the story of the migration in the form of a chant, thus intensifying the impression of flow or drift. The roll of the narrative mirrors the sweeping forces of history and change that ensnare the helpless individual in their flow. At the same time, these technical devices help create the effect of a story which is delivered orally, in a chant-like speech. Everything is reported rather than being brought close to the present or to the moment of speech. This technique is not accidental, as Steinbeck focuses on the story of a community, its migration and subsequent transformation. The first half of the narrative thus witnesses the image of gradual collapse and disappearance of an entire community.

However, the changes that are portrayed in the novel go even deeper than that. It is not only this isolated community in Oklahoma that is permanently transformed, but also the very face of time and man's way of life on earth. The emergence of capitalism resembles that of a multi-headed monster that takes control of the land, of possessions and of the individuals themselves. The 'Bank' in the novel symbolizes the grand corporations that become the owners of the land, cutting off permanently the individual or the community from the land. In his poetic prose, Steinbeck details this rupture dramatically. The community can no longer relate directly to the ancient land they felt so related to; everything is now mediated by the 'Bank', the careless monster that only targets profit, disregarding all other concerns. It is the very change from the natural to the abstract, from the living and breathing land as a possession to the abstract numbers and statistics held by the bank. Steinbeck's story thus acquires an almost mythological value as it details the fall of man and his way of life from wholeness and harmony into division and abstractedness. The novel thus purposely opens up with images of the dust land in Oklahoma, a dry area in which the land is poor and the draught often affects the crop. Nevertheless, the picture is not by far as desolate as the images of emptiness that will follow afterwards. Despite the poor quality of the land, the men that live on it can still find ways to go on with their lives, as long as their possessions and their families hold together in one big community. All this is broken however once the real owners of the land, the 'Bank', come and tell people they have to leave the land where their very identity is rooted.

The story is thus one of rupture and extreme transformation. Significantly, Steinbeck alludes to another time of great change, when the land had passed from the hands of the natives into those of the new colonizers. At that time also civilization had had a violent encounter with more primitive ways of life and had taken control, profiting by its power. However, now the situation is still more difficult as the change is even more radical. The people are no longer fighting other people, but capitalism itself which acts as an abstract and impersonal force. The fight is unequal and the people cannot win against the 'Bank': "It's not us, it's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the monster. Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours -- being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it."(Steinbeck, 36) Thus, the very relationship of man with land and with the concept of possession changes, as the economical forces change into inhuman, abstract corporations that are only interested in numbers and profit. People are this time indeed powerless, as they are fighting against something which is inhuman, although it was initially created by people and although it is conducted by people. The people in Oklahoma thus try to resist and oppose the transforming forces, but they are inevitably defeated: "The tenants cried, Grampa killed Indians, Pa killed snakes for the land. Maybe we can kill banks -- they're worse than Indians and snakes. Maybe we got to fight to keep our land, like Pa and Grampa did."(Steinbeck, 37) One example for this is Muley Graves, one of the villagers, who now lingers in the empty and desolated land, wandering by himself and living primitively in his inability to leave everything behind and face the change.

The mythical quality of Steinbeck's work becomes apparent precisely in the way in which he portrays this major rupture between man and nature and man and humanity itself. Civilization brings with it new ways of life that upturn the original order. The use of the word 'monster' to describe the great machinery of capitalism is very relevant for the myth-like quality of the work: "[...] the monster that sent the tractor out had somehow got into the driver's hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him -- goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals."(Steinbeck, 39) it is not only the identity of a community that is at stake here in this migration narrative, but the very backbone of humanity that is altered significantly by civilization.

Another important element in the story that contributes to the mythical quality of the narrative is the destination of the migratory people: California is an allusion to the land of gold and to an earlier, similar migration. The people who are forced to leave their homes forever try to cling to the hope that the state they are heading for is a fairytale country, rich and beautiful, the very symbol of abundance: "I like to think how nice it's gonna be, maybe, in California. Never cold. an'fruit ever'place, an' people just bein' in the nicest places, little white houses in among the orange trees [...] an' the little fellas go out an' pick oranges right off the tree. They ain't gonna be able to stand it, they'll get to yellin' so."(Steinbeck, 95) Their conviction is enhanced by the stories they hear and by false advertisements they are sent. These false advertisements may very well stand for the archetype of contemporary commerce which is dependent on advertisement. California may moreover be a symbol for America itself, which was once seen as a heavenly continent, an unspotted, holy land. Steinbeck thus drafts at once a story of migration and tries to settle and capture the archetypes of the modern world. The story thus focuses on the fall of human life from wholeness into fragmentation: "Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch."(Steinbeck, 128) the Grapes of Wrath portrays thus the dissolving of an entire community but also of a long stage in the history of humanity, and its replacement with new coordinates for life, such as the ones brought by capitalism.

Another story that tackles identity in exile is that of Jyoti/Jasmine / Jane, the main character of Bharati Mukherjee's novel. While Steinbeck's story focused largely on the panorama of a huge change and the migration of an entire community, Mukherjee's story is restricted to life of a few characters, Jasmine being naturally the most important of them. However, the purport of the book is similar to that of Steinbeck: by setting two very different ways of life up against each other, the novel captures history at its crossroads, with identity wavering between the old and the new. The story of Jasmine is very important for this, as it is a miniature image of this great transformation as well as of the contrast between the East and the West. The name of the novel is very significant as 'Jasmine' is the name that best symbolizes the moment in which the character is at the very crossroads of her identity. Jyoti, her actual name, is the symbol of her old, conventional and superstitious personality that is ingrained with the Indian old customs, while Jane is the name she acquires when she is already in exile in the United States. Jasmine on the other hand is the name that her first husband had given her as an endearment and as a way of breaking her old conceptions: "He wanted to break down the Jyoti I's been in Hasnapur and make me a new kind of city woman. To break off the past he gave me a new name: Jasmine. He said, 'you're small and sweet and heady my Jasmine. You'll quicken the whole world with your perfume.' Jyoti, Jasmine: I shuttled between identities."(Mukherjee, 77) it is in her short first marriage to Prakash that Jasmine thus first gets a glimpse of the contrast between the old, Indian way of life and the 'modern', Western one. It is also at this point that her sense of identity first wavers, since she is caught between her ingrained sense of duty and a new and freer way of thinking. An eloquent example for Jasmine's shaken sense of identity is her confession that, although not yet fifteen years old, she felt envious of other friends of hers who had remained pregnant at even earlier ages: "I didn't dare confess that I felt eclipsed by the Mazbi maid's daughter, who had been married off at eleven, just after me, and already had had a miscarriage."(Mukerjee, 80) Here, gender identity is obviously questioned as Jasmine wavers between the way she was trained to think of herself, as a passive object, someone who has to obey the male figure, and the new ideas she receives from her husband.

Her impulse after his death, of going to America to sacrifice herself in a college campus in Tampa where he had once dreamed of going is a symbol of the voice of ethnicity and cultural background in her. In the Indian tradition, a woman that was widowed has no right to enjoy life anymore. This obviously denotes the fact that identity is obliterated by gender definitions. Like in the Grapes of Wrath however, people are forced to begin a process of adaptation once the change has taken place, so Jasmine eventually is mechanically included in a process of 'Americanization.' This cannot take place without a painful and dramatic identity rupture: "There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake ourselves. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the image of dreams." (Mukherjee, 25) Jasmine does not manage to kill herself as her mission had purposed. This act would have symbolized her conformity and compliance with tradition and the prescribed gender roles. Instead, she manages to 'kill' her old self and adapt to a new way of life. Once again, the story has a certain mythical quality. This is obviously especially at the moment in which Jasmine spots the new land from the ship that is carrying her forward. The description obviously recalls the impression the first explorers might have had of the virgin continent: "Then suddenly in the pinkening black of pre-dawn, America caromed off the horizon. The first thing I saw were the two cones of a nuclear plant, and smoke spreading from them in complicated but seemingly purposeful patterns, edges lit by the rising sun, like a gray, intricate map of an unexplored island continent, against the pale unscratched blue of the sky. I waded through Eden's waste: plastic bottles, floating oranges, boards, sodden boxes, white and green plastic sacks tied shut but picked open by birds and pulled apart by crabs." (Mukherjee, 95-96) What is interesting here is that the process is inverted: while Jasmine is the one that is more 'primitive', America is a false Eden, the cradle of civilization with its filth and waste, the tokens of the consumerist society.