Cross-Cultural Conflicts in Stephen Gill’s Immigrant

O.P. Dwivedi

The history of immigration is the history of alienation and its

consequences. For every freedom won, a tradition lost. For

every second generation assimilated, a first generation in one

way or another spurned. For the gains of goods and services,

an identity lost, and uncertainty found. ¹

Immigrant, a thought-provoking , novel by Stephen Gill, who is an Indian by birth and who is now settled in Canada, touches on a very real problem, a facet of Kipling’s “East is East, West is West/ And ne’er the twain shall meet”. It is a psychological study of the love-hate relationship the immigrant experience in a totally new country and opens a new vista for prospective immigrants leaving behind their native land and settling in Canada. It is the painful experience of the immigrants that I propose to deal with in this paper.

Stephen Gill’s duality of vision – a vision being the product of his upbringing in India and his settlement in Canada later on- enables him to discern both the Canadians and Indians on an equal scale of measurement, albeit the stern attitudes displayed by the White characters tilt it totally in their favour. Like a true unbiased social activist, Gill takes up the issues of cultural identity and acculturation, oppression and exploitation of the Asian immigrants at the hands of the Whites-- a by-product of the cultural difference pointing to the pathetic condition of the immigrants. In this connection, Vijay Misra, a renowned literary critic states thus : “All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way.”²

Gill’s Immigrant, states R.K. Singh, “is an exploration in immigrant’s aspirations for economic livelihood, social well-being and intercultural understanding vis-a vis the dimensions of the centrality of communication and politics in the affairs of the people.”³ How race and culture restrict and haunt one’s life in a foreign country can be seen in the unhappy experiences of Reghu Nath, the protagonist of the novel. Racial prejudice and threat to the native’s job are the two reasons for germinating the seeds of distrust and hatred. Almost the entire postcolonial literature is the outcome of these distressing attitudes.

Of late, the concept of the immigrant has undergone a severe change. Earlier, one used to undertake a journey to a foreign country mostly for education, and once the education was finished one returned home. But nowadays the one goes to a foreign country for education and economic upliftment. When one gets better prospects, one settles in that country, to the embarrassment of the Whites. After ruling over the Orientals for such a long time, such an attitude of the Whites is bound to arise. In his novel, Immigrant, Gill creates “a text and a context to cope with the politics of sharing and survival the communication problems and socio-economic and political contradictions, ambiguities and racist and ethnic prejudices that cause disillusionment and distrust in an immigrant in everyday life.”⁴ The issue of survival continuously receives a dent in the novel. Prabha, a graduate in Library Science, commits suicide in the stifling atmosphere around.

Immigrant revolves round the central figure of Reghu Nath, whose sufferings and harrowing experiences in Canada constitute the crux of the novel. The novel opens with Reghu Nath flying from India over the Atlantic and landing in Montreal (Canada). Fear begins to grip Reghu as soon as he lands in Canada, as the plane is late by seven hours and this makes Reghu anxious about his registration at the University of Ottawa. But this is just the beginning of his long and anguished stay in Canada. All his longing to obtain a Ph.D from the Ottawa University is further complicated by the communication barrier caused by Reghu’s unfamiliarity with the Canadian accent. Unlike the other White colleagues, Reghu is made to work hard without getting any appreciation. At the university, he “found himself in a mess because he didn’t know the number or type of courses he was to take.”⁵ Contemptuous of the professors’ attitude, Reghu decides to quit the university without obtaining the long-cherished degree.

Reghu’s lack of knowledge about the Canadian culture and society comes to the fore when while shopping he holds the hands of a compatriot unaware of the fact that such an act would present them as ‘homos’. He is left wondering how holding one’s hand can change his identity. Henceforth, he observes the Canadian people closely practicing hybridity, a quality found so commonly among the Orients, being unaware of the fact that the cultural vacuum can be hardly filled up in a country suffering from the loss of identity and individuality.

Reghu definitely suffers from a sense of isolation and nostalgia for the homeland. Being new to a foreign land, he fails to find a nice friend with whom he can share his secrets and experiences. His friendship with Akram, an ex-professor from the Karachi University, is only a momentary one, and his sudden encounter with one of his neighbours, who is pursuing a Music course in the University of New York, enhances his inferiority complex-- a sate of mind so formed due to the civil sing mission of the Whites. The obvious result is :

Reghu went up to the apartment when the musician invited

him. Unexpectedly, Reghu met an unusual welcome. The man

pulled out an empty beer bottle from under the bed and asked

Reghu to retrurn it and buy a beer for him. (p.40).

These painful experiences sometimes provoke him to go back to India, but he quickly reverts realizing that such an act would make him a subject of mockery among his friends and relatives and moreover he does not have enough money to undertake a return journey. He realizes the fact that his past life was now an illusion and the present situation was the hardcore reality, hence he opts to live in the present and in such a situation, he proclaims : “The whole world is my country. I am a world citizen” (p.42) thus dismissing, in one stroke the very Western concept of nations, and spreading the unheard message of universal peace and brotherhood. To talk of world citizenship is easier said than done especially at such a time when the concept of nation is proliferating across the globe; nevertheless Gill must be congratulated for his noble concept of world citizenship.

Reghu seems to be a youngman deeply influenced by movies; that is why in his very first meeting with an unknown girl he “mustered all his courage to say politely I love you. The girl glanced to one-side, then the other, before finishing her whisky in a gulp”(p.10). But the girl does not respond, leaving him completely dozed and baffled. Once more, his native culture gets a shock :

Women in Canada do not expect to hear the words ‘ I love you’ at the first meeting. It sounds phony to them – after all, they

have to know the man first (p.21).

Gill seems to be contemptuous of the parents’ role in India in fixing the marriages of their sons and daughters. He makes us see that marriage in India is not a bonding between a boy and a girl, but it is a mutual settlement between two families.

Failing to find any girlfriend, Reghu tries his tricks on Mrs. Wallace, a freelance writer of sixty, to satisfy his physical needs. He is successful in taking her to bed, but the skeleton-like figure of Mrs. Wallace cools down the fire of his lust. Henceforth he has a series of short-lived affairs with the white girls, but they turn out to be bitter ones. He now realizes that “the white girls expect to be treated as special, almost as China dolls, and disliked being touched in any way on the first date” (p.22), and further “A woman has to be emotionally involved with a man before she gives herself to him.”(p.24)

Reghu, thus learns a hard lesson about the Western culture, and his frustration seems to grow much and more. All his frustration reminds of what Salman Rushdie stated in his popular novel, Shame (1983) :

What is the best thing about migrant people…? I think it is their hopefulness… . And what’s the worst thing? It’s the

emptiness of one’s luggage… We’ve come unstuck from more than land. We’ve floated upwards from history, from

memory, from time.⁶

Rushdie thus tries to clear the presuppositions of the immigrants, highlighting their problems related to nations and identity.

Gill sometimes seems to be highly critical of the degrading moral values in the West. Mrs. Clifford, a woman in her late fifties is a paradigm of this assertion. She says :

I love people from the East. They’re polite, wise and nonaggressive. I wish I were an Eastern mother. (p.100).

And further she says :

We’ve lost our feelings and sentiments, and have

become as cold as our snow. Socially we’re

we no longer have blood in our veins. (p.101).

Mrs. Clifford is a widow and her son has left her alone in pursuit of his business. Gill takes up her issue and highlights the painful condition that the old people face in Canada. He frowns on the dying human values just for the sake of money. The loneliness of the Westerns in their old age once again presents the stern reality that every aged person needs someone to support him/her in old age. This reality is rapidly spreading everywhere in the human world. Apparently, the self-assertion of the youths is the real cause for this malady.

Racial incidents pervade the novel throughout. The novelist remarks: “A youth was slapped and pushed by white boys from the Toronto Station platform on the subway track…”(p.116-117). As a result, the youngman suffers severe injuries and is admitted in a hospital for almost eight months. Many schools in Toronto do not allow the Asian students to study some particular subjects. An Asian in Toronto is harassed by a child and ironically he is fined two-hundred dollars for hitting back the child slightly. In another biased action of the police, when a white man hits a car of an Asian and accepts his fault, the police does not take any appropriate action. Reghu himself becomes a victim of the police’s partial actions for hitting a pick-up van while trying to flee away from the intimidating truck-driver who is quite content to turn him blue-black. He is fined eighty-dollars by the cruel and callous police, paying no attention to the rude behaviour of the truck-driver. These incidents fracture the hopes of the immigrants overcrowding Canada. They are treated as a cancer. This bitter truth of racism also haunts Bharti Mukherjee, a famous Indian novelist, now an immigrant to America, who in an interview with Alison B. Carb confesses :

The seventies were horrendous for Indians in Canada. There was lot of bigotry against Canadian citizens of Indian origin, especially in Toronto… . Toronto made me a civil rights activist. I wrote about devastating personal effects of racism.. .⁶

Taking note of Uma Paramwaran’s famous quote, “Home is where the feet are, and we had better place our heart where the feet are”,⁷ Reghu adopts the Canadian citizenship, which doesn’t fetch any relief to his woes. He still remains jobless and runs from hand to mouth situation throughout. Reghu should have realized that the question is not about citizenship but about the colour of his skin. Subsequently, Gill talks about the need to understand one’s culture. Speaking of the importance of ‘culture(-s)’, a renowned analyst of Freudian studies states thus :

Cultures have the same properties as the individual

personality in that they possess nuclear and peripheral

areas of organization, and we might picture each culture

(culture is to society what personality is to individual) as

a huge jig-saw puzzle with its center composed of closely

fitted interlocked pieces while nearer the periphery lie more

loosely-organized pieces and even pieces which are not

interlocked at all.⁸

Clearly, the cultural constraints determine the behaviour – actions and reactions- of the individual in a given society. To conclude, Stephen Gill as an expatriate writer tries to clear the false preconceived notions of the Asian immigrants. He sends a crystal-clear message to the third-world people who are quite keen on entering into the first-world with strong aspirations for a better future without realizing that this displacement to the first-world demands greater adaptability in terms of both climate and culture.

WORKS CITED

1. http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/1F95/Immigrant.html

2. Misra, Vijay, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora : Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (London : Routledge,2007), p.1.

3. Singh, R.K. “Cross-Cultural Communication”, Language Forum Vol. XXIV, Nos. 1-2, p.2.

4. Ibid. ,p.2.

5. Gill, Stephen, Immigrant (Ontario: Vesta Publications Limited, 1982), p.16. – All subsequent references to this novel are absorbed in the paper itself.

6. Cited from Jasbir Jain’s Writers of the Indian Diaspora (Jaipur : Rawat Publications, 2003), p.58.

7. Parameswaran, Uma, “Home is where your feet are, and may your heart be there too!”, ed. Writers of the Indian Diaspora p.39.

8. Brown, J.A.C. Freud and Post-Freudians (Harmondsworth : Penguin Books, 1964), p.121.

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O.P. Dwivedi is a Research Scholar in the Department of English Studies and Modern European Languages,

University of Allahabad, Allahabad, India.

This paper is to be included in Dr.Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal’s forthcoming book Discovering Stephen Gill: A Collection of Articles and Papers.