The following article is a short essay and review realised as part of a take-home exam for Postromantic Materialism course held at the University of Leuven in 2014-2015. You can also read an essay about NW by Zadie Smith and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.
Discuss the novel’s epigraph, Jorge Luis Borges’s “Boast of Quietness”.
In Boast of quietness (Jactancia de quietud in Spanish) Borges speaks about the inevitability of time and ponders on the identity of people who migrated. Borges was from Argentina and lived in Europe for several years. Between 1923 and 1929 he wrote a lot about his Argentinian roots and about Buenos Aires too.
Boast of Quietness is a poem of the collection Luna de enfrente (1925). This poem is focused on the opposition between “the ambitious”, people who have not moved from the city and plan their entire life there, and the poet, who speaks not only for himself but for all migrants too. The poet has clarity about only two things of his future: his life and his death. The ambitious never rest and do not have a bright viewpoint on humanity and homeland. In Borges’s opinion, these two abstract concepts corresponds to clear representations (“My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty”, line 8; “My homeland is the rythym of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword”, line 10). Borges “proclaims the inevitability of temporal existence (“Time is living me”, line 12)” (Jenckes, 2007:24) and “the poet’s passage through time is not in the name of anything, not even himself (“My name is someone and anyone”, line 15)” (2007:24).
The epigraph of Boast of Quietness is used as a poetic example of people who go back and forth between cultures, but they manage not to lose their own identity.
The author of The Inheritance of Loss portrayed different characters for her novel: Jemubhai, a student of higher education in London, Biju, an illegal immigrant in the United States, and Sai, an anglicized girl living in India with her grandfather. The estrangement coming from a migration experience is a recurrent topic in the post-colonial and migration literature. Desai managed to build a novel in which not only the immigrant is perceived as different, but also the inhabitants who become different after being exposed to another culture, unfairly detected as superior.
In an interview of 2010[1], the author Kiran Desai is asked why she chose the Borges’s poem Boast of Quietness. She answered:
This poem reflects the souls of the characters in the novel well. When you go to another country as a migrant, there are difficulties that you experience. The real important thing isn’t just your own story. There are many people’s stories like yours, and there are people who share the same fate, just as there are many books in a genre on library shelves. But you tell your own story. I selected this poem because it conveys similar feelings to readers. In the same way, when you look at the migration stories of Latin Americans and Mexicans, you can feel the parallels between all migrants’ stories. For this reason, Borges is a writer in whom I have a lot of trust in when it comes to conveying those feelings. (see note 1)
In the same interview, she states:
Being a migrant forces you to be creative because in one way or another you have a motivation […]. Your world and the environment you are in are changing, and this always makes you a more creative person. […] There is a light feeling of loss created by the migration feeling.
The author remembers another time Borges’s words in Boast of Quietness: “I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive” (line16).
Bibliography
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, Grove Press, 2006
Jorge Luís Borges, Boast of Quietness. Also consulted: “Jactancia de quietud”, Luna de
enfrente, Editorial Proa, Buenos Aires, 1925.
Kiran Desai: you are what you read, Sunday’s Zaman, published online September 12,
2010. Consulted on December 7, 2014. URL: http://www.todayszaman.com/arts-
culture_kiran-desai-you-are-what-you-read_221398.html
Kate Jenckes, Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife and the Writing of
History, Suny Press, 2007
Nazneen Khan, Ravi Jauhari, Aspects of immigration and diasporic sensibility in Kiran
Desais’s
The Inheritance of
Loss, Lapis Lazuli –An International Literary Journal, Vol.I, Issue.I, July
2011. URL: http://pintersociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/paper25.pdf
[1] Kiran Desai: you are what you read, Sunday’s Zaman, published online September 12, 2010. Consulted on December 7, 2014. URL: http://www.todayszaman.com/arts-culture_kiran-desai-you-are-what-you-read_221398.html