Melancholia and Orientalism

[eva_rajzman]

Rajiv’s melancholia manifests itself through learning Hindi, the language of his Aji, and wanting to go to India.
“I want to connect with my Indianness” (Mohabir, 34). He is very close to his grandmother and goes against the will of his parents to let go of this culture and assimilate. It seems like it is stronger than him; he wants to recover a lost identity taken away from him. “I want to plant our language back in my mouth” (Mohabir, 26).
Melancholia is also illustrated in the fact that he misses and is trying to return to something he does not know. On the contrary, his father wants to move on with this new life and culture and forget about this identity. His father also wants his children to stay away from the Indo-Guyanese culture and does not want his mom to teach them. He even burns his wife’s Ramayan as a sort of “cremation ceremony for his previous life” (ibid, 20). It reminds me of Yasmin Hai’s memoir, recalled in Sara Ahmed’s chapter, as her Pakistani parents really want her to assimilate and be a “good English girl.”

Both Antiman and Australianama show the influence of white orientalists in shaping the discourse and views on other cultures. In Antiman, the parents want to assimilate, probably because they have faced racism from whites. When Rajiv goes to Madison, white people are there to learn Hindi and even the songs and culture. “The grandchildren of the same white people who told her generation that they were backward and broken” (Mohabir, 37). This sentence shows the interrelation between racism and expertise that makes up Orientalism through generations. In Australianama, Samia Khatun explains how white feminist thinkers have played a role in depicting non-white women as stuck in a non-civilized world. Their discourse on gendered violence being related to the early stages of civilizational progress has even played a role in mobilizing public support and justifying the intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 (Khatun, 144).