Culinary Narratology in Everyday Life: Foodways and Identity ...

Culinary Narratology 12
immigrant in the US. She is overwhelmed, and feels “so far from home, unmonitored and
unobserved by those she loved . . . [and] terrified to raise a child in a country where she is
related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare” (5-6).
Ashima, the pregnant subject, is alienated and fragmented by a ruptured life that is
“haphazard, only half true” (24-25).
Ashima’s perceptions of her physical boundaries have shifted, and she has the sensation
that her body is simultaneously herself and non-self, a feeling somewhat like that of being an
alienated immigrant. Consequently, Ashima’s body is caught in a state of double
estrangement, and she begins to realize that being an immigrant is a sort of lifelong
pregnancy:
a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an
ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to
discover that that previous life has banished, replaced by something more
complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is
something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of
pity and respect. (49-50)
With another life, which symbolizes an Other, existing and growing inside the body, the
process of pregnancy biologically “alienates” women’s bodily perceptions, and thus entails
the most extreme suspension of bodily externality of the inside (Young 50). This sense of
bodily alienation is analogous to the circumstance of being an immigrant in diaspora, for the
sense of bodily integrity in both situations is dismantled and in a state of flux. In pregnancy,
Ashima’s “automatic body habits become dislodged” (Young 50), and the continuity between
her customary body and her pregnant body is disjointed and broken. Analogously, as an
immigrant woman, she is also deprived of the firm sense of synthesis of her body in a
diasporic context, unable to perceive the border of where her body ends and where the
exterior world begins. Ashima compares her experience of pregnancy to the ambivalent