"Permanently Pregnant" (this made me cry lots)

Post started on 4/22. I finished the book several days ago.

Finally, many years after first listening about the book in a Fresh Air interview with Jhumpa Lahiri (I remember clearly as if it were today, I was at a store parking lot in Massachusetts, probably with a sleeping baby, waiting for someone*), I am reading The Namesake (read an excerpt of the book here).**

Being an expatriate is not an easy thing. It's a "state of being" that is very hard to describe. I love it when my friend Aliki writes about her time or travels abroad and beautifully captures some of the feelings that consume my life daily, at times. I've been longing to read more about expatriate life and I knew this book would be just that. I have barely started, and I've already been reduced to tears by this passage:

For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

I loved that the book begins with pregnancy and childbirth, but I wasn't expecting this great metaphor, expatriate life as a "lifelong pregnancy" without a due date and the relief and joy that come with birth.

ending the post today:

I enjoyed the book and the film arrived on Thursday from Netflix. I think my "closing thoughts" on The Nameseke are that it paints a slightly bitter picture of immigration and living as an expatriate and, particularly, the son of expatriates, torn between two countries and cultures. Although I live that "in-betweeness" every day in my life, I don't think of it so negatively. I don't think I long for my "home country" as much as Ashima did. Most importantly, I hope that the fact that I want my sons to be as "Brazilian" as they can possibly be going to Brazil only once a year at most and speaking Portuguese at home, make them feel torn later in life as Gogol/Nikhil did. (And I hope their names are different, but familiar enough not to cause them trouble!).

Of course this is only fiction, not real life, but the struggles of the book's characters did resonate with me in a profound way. When I was in graduate school, one of my closest friends was this Puerto Rican guy and when I got pregnant and had Kelvin he kept teasing me on an on about how I would have a "messed up" kid who would be asking me why he had to speak

Portuguese and be Brazilian. I hope he's wrong. I hope Kelvin and Linton can navigate well the sometimes choppy waters of being the children of expatriates.

* Thanks to Lahiri's website, I now know the exact date I listened to the interview, September 4, 2003. Kelvin was 18 months and he was probably napping in the car that day, or, alternately, I was so taken by the interview that I just sat in the car. In front of Whole Foods, I think.

**I wanted to have gotten the book through Paperback Swap, but couldn't find it the day I first checked, so I bought it for 99 cents from Alibris in the end and then immediately found it on the PB swap site. :-( I haven't joined the PB swap yet since they I couldn't find several of the (few) books I want to read.