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Bharati Mukherjee
20 quotes
“It meant that anyone with a brown face in cities like Toronto, Vancouver was fair game for physical harassment as well as verbal harassment on the street. And so, you know, there were incidents every day. And I was a victim of many such incidents of not being served in stores or being roughed up by teenagers in blue jeans overalls in subway - on subway platforms or being, you know, thrown out of lobbies of fancy hotels if my white husband wasn't near me or being given secondary examination in airports or - racial profiling…”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On her experiences with racism while living in Canada during the 1970s in “Remembering Bharati Mukherjee, An Indian-Born American Writer” in NPR (2017 Feb 6)
“I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, "Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals." My protagonists are very feisty characters. And, you know, that there is no one unified story about the immigrant experience or the immigrant passage and what I hope I've done in DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS is show how fractured the responses to that whole odyssey of moving, pulling up your roots from your original country and re-rooting yourself in an adopted country is.”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On what she hoped to convey in her novel Desirable Daughters in “Transcript: Bill Moyers Interviews Bharati Mukherjee” (RetroReport on PBS; 2003 Jun 20)
“I have been murdered and reborn at least three times; the very correct young woman I was trained to be, and was very happy being, is very different from the politicized, shrill, civil rights activist I was in Canada, and from the urgent writer that I have become in the last few years in the United States. I can't stop. It's a compulsive act for me. It's a kind of salvation, and the only thing that prevents me from being a Joyce Carol Oates, and I'm not talking about quality, but just that need to create, is schedule.”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how she has changed over the years in “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee” in the Iowa Review (1990)
“That's the marvelous thing about the writing process: you don't know when and how a memory, a scrap of conversation overheard, an allusion or image, is suddenly going to surface and work itself into your story. (1996)”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that if you are literate, all literature that you expose yourself to is your heritage to claim”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where am I going? I don't want to know too far ahead. (1996)”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Novelists aim for fullness of catharsis, not a political pamphlet. (1996)”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An author focuses on a few individual characters, and hopes that a larger frisson of emotion and revelation comes across to the reader. (1996)”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am always amazed when reviewers or some literary critics lump all Asian American writers together as being a homogenous group. Whereas within the subcontinental group of immigrants and naturalized American citizens here, we retain our old world ethnic differences. It's the narcissism of the slightest differences, as Freud might say. (2002)”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm amazed at how fast the interest has grown in writing in English by writers of South Asian origin, whether they're living in India, living in South Asia, or they are expatriate writers living here or immigrant American writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and me. The size of the community of such writers and the body of work produced has happened so fast. (2007)”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Literature can help bring about change of hearts and minds and then put pressure for political, legislative change. (2007)”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was born into a class that did not live in its native language. I was born into a city that feared its future, and trained me for emigration.”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America. The agenda is simply stated, but in the long run revolutionary. Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most moving form of praise I receive from readers can be summed up in three words: I never knew. Meaning, I see these people (call them Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese) around me all the time and I never knew they had an inner life.”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have been blessed with an enormity of material. I can be Chekhovian and Tolstoyan-with melancholy and philosophical perspectives on the breaking of hearts as well as the fall of civilizations-and I can be a brash and raucous homesteader, Huck Finn and Woman Warrior, on the unclaimed plains of American literature.”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“my true material is immigration. In other words, transformation not preservation.”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My theme is the making of new Americans”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I totally consider myself an American writer, and that has been my big battle: to get to realize that my roots as a writer are no longer, if they ever were, among Indian writers, but that I am writing about the territory about the feelings, of a new kind of pioneer here in America. I’m the first among Asian immigrants to be making this distinction between immigrant writing and expatriate writing. Most Indian writers prior to this, have still thought of themselves as Indians, and their literary inspiration, has come from India. India has been the source, and home. Whereas I’m saying, those are wonderful roots, but now my roots are here and my emotions are here in North America…”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how she considered herself an American writer in “Bharati Mukherjee by Ameena Meer” in Bomb Magazine (1989 Oct 1)
“I am an American. I am an American writer, in the American mainstream, trying to extend it. This is a vitally important statement for me-I am not an Indian writer, not an exile, not an expatriate. I am an immigrant; my investment is in the American reality, not the Indian. I look on ghettoization-whether as a Bengali in India or as a hyphenated Indo-American in North America as a temptation to be surmounted. It took me ten painful years, from the early seventies to the early eighties, to overthrow the smothering tyranny of nostalgia. The remaining struggle for me is to make the American readership, meaning the editorial and publishing industries as well, acknowledge the same fact. (As the reception of such films as Gandhi and A Passage to India as well as The Far Pavillions and The Jewel in the Crown shows, nostalgia is a two-way street. Americans can feel nostalgic for a world they never knew.)”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writers (especially American writers, weaned on the luxury of affluence and freedom) often disavow the notion of a "literary duty" or "political consciousness," citing the all-too-frequent examples of writers ruined by their shrill commitments. Glibness abounds on both sides of the argument, but finally I have to side with my "Third World" compatriots: I do have a duty, beyond telling a good story or drawing a convincing character. My duty is to give voice to continents, but also to redefine the nature of American and what makes an American. In the process, work like mine and dozens like it will open up the canon of American literature.”
Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source