musings on identity: Gogol, tradition & Alice

image from Indari

We watched a great movie for the second time last night - Mira Nair's adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 novel The Namesake.  I love Nair's work - I first saw Salaam Bombay! at an arthouse theater in Dallas  twenty years ago.  I can remember seeing Mississippi Masala with Lisa, talking about the relationship between Meena and Demetrius in the context of their respective traditions. Monsoon Wedding is among the most evocative films I have ever seen. 

The Namesake is about so many things - journeys, family, love - but for me, it is a way to engage on identity. The story is a very personal one - Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli, the parents of protagonist Gogol Ganguli, are based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s real parents, Amar and Tia Lahiri.

I have really been struck by what has happened to my own identity in the last year, as we have settled in Austin.  I spent 10 years in California, a place I love and a place that is so core to who I am.  That said, I laways felt that in California, I was working to create an identity, that everything was negotiable, that identity took so much effort to bound. 

I have always struggled with how much of my identity is invested in what I can do or give other people.  For the longest time, the primary venue for this was work.  Midway thru our 10 years in California, I went thru a bunch of stuff where I was able to diffuse that bomb a bit, able to separate myself from so much of my identity coming from my work life.  What struck me as odd was how much of that "transaction" mindset I carried over to my identity in faith communities.  Friends & mentors framed it as a prophetic role, but over time I felt like I was an "other", placed in a situation primarily to educate & animate.

Coming "back" to Texas, I sense that my identity is much more weaved into the narratives I live among.  The story of this land I grew up in, the story of people who I live with, the story of story itself.  For the most part, this is a huge exhale for me, a relief not to be constantly working to maintain identity.  At an unconscious, almost primal level,  I know which stories I am a part, and what my roles in those stories require.

It is a gift, one that I am so very grateful for.

I do miss something though.  I miss being part of faith tradition.  At the faith community we live in, I experience being part of a dynamic narrative, a tapestry of stories that are vibrant and vital & so real that sometimes I get dizzy.  That has been so healing, so generative, so powerful for me.

But I miss tradition, what the Scottish philosopher & Notre Dame Professor Alasdair MacIntyre describes as
"a historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition."  I grew up in a particularly..um..argumentative tradition (the Episcopal Church in the United States of America), what some might consider a veritable debating society for the Lord (or what ever deity description that is OK in your part of the tradition).  The arguing both enthralled & repelled me - ultimately, it seemed to engulf my identity.  In so many ways, I felt like Lewis Carroll's Alice , having passed through the looking glass:

MacIntyre goes on to suggest that "within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through many generations."  While the new-ness & made-up-ness of fresh expression is compelling, I do find myself aching for a tradition grounded in generations.  I sense this when I am with people who have worked for decades in the struggle against racism, a sense of what Romero called being "prophets of a future not our own".

I have no sense of how this will resolve, how integration may take place.  What I have gained from this movie is a sense of how Gogol Ganguli’s story echoes a predominant theme of writers who engage in pilgrimage & identity: individuals evolve through time and space, and cannot abandon their past. Gogol’s past is tangled up in the collective aspects of his identity: Indian, Bengali and North American culture – the macro-context of his life. 

But what is more essential to Gogol is a personally relevant and specific past – the micro-context of his life. This is defined by his family, a train crash in Bengal, suburban Boston, Nikolai Gogol, and an infinite number of events, people, places and ideas. For Gogol to understand his identity and be happy, he must learn to accept his unique micro-context.

That is where I find myself right, spinning between my own macro context & micro context.

Comments

[Kevin]

Just a quick note to say how much I appreciate your blog. Really good stuff. Regularly!

Cheers, Kevin

[carl]

Maybe it's time to become a pioneer? You could be a part of the creation of new stories of faith that people look back on centuries from now, and maybe those people of faith could embrace these new forms of traditions engaged in justice and truth that you helped begin?

Last night at Journey a group of people from many faith traditions focused on bringing justice to one small neighborhood in north austin. Maybe our legacy could be the dogged pursuit of justice in our "parish" as Wallis put it?

[Heidi Renee]

The book was one of my all time favorites and I have been hesitant to watch the movie because I hadn't heard anyone who had read the book review it. I am so relieved to hear it does the book justice. I watched the previews on my ONCE dvd and cry my eyes out remembering the story.

The links you make to the macro/micro and our identities are powerful. I am so disconnected to my home of origin, I can't imagine going back. This place on the edge of the world where we live now feels so much like home to me, more than I have ever experienced before. My macro and micro are beginning to realign in a way I had never dreamed possible. So few of my macro really don't know me anymore. I am such a stranger to them. Finding real community that accepts me for who I am now is giving me a new macro somehow and helping my micro to settle down.

I have no idea if this makes any sense at all, but it resonated deeply with me. Thanks again for highlighting the movie, I will be watching it soon.