Arts & Letters September 7 Thursday,2017

Book review
The Newlyweds:
A pseudo ‘Bangladeshi’ novel
with a real heart
6
• Neeman Sobhan
I
have to confess that I picked up Nell Freudenberger’s The Newlyweds
because the protagonist was from my country of birth. With all the
concerns about cultural appropriation raging in recent times, I was
curious about a white American writer dealing with a Bangladeshi
protagonist who meets an American engineer through an online dating
service and marries him to migrate to the USA.
Before I unpack my opinions, I should make it clear that I count Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day as one of the finest books I have ever read. A first
generation British-Japanese writing -- an authentic ventriloquist novel in the
voice of Stevens, an English butler who represents a quintessentially British
institution. So, my position on the debate about who “owns” a culture, and
who might or might not be “allowed” to write about it, should be apparent.
Yet, it’s not easy when it’s your Sacred Cow that’s being milked. My
approach is to use the “Appreciator versus Appropriator” binary. If an
empathetic outsider chooses to represent my culture, I have no objections, as
long as it’s done artistically and accurately. Herein lies my basic problem with
Freudenberger’s book.
Every page of The Newlyweds, however heartfelt in its writing, has
some major or minor discrepancies regarding Bangladeshi culture that is
unlikely to occur at the hands of a native writer. Naturalistic fiction such
as Freudenberger’s novel relies on verisimilitude, which is undermined
by factual errors.*(A partial list is appended at the end of this essay) When
parts of the depicted world and its inhabitants do not feel real or convincing,
how can you take a fiction seriously and focus on its redeeming artistic or
philosophical sides?
None of the past reviewers of the book, I notice, were from Bangladesh.
Not surprisingly, most of them concentrate on the artistic issues, accepting
at face value Bangladesh’s culture as the exotic spice that adds piquancy. “A
marvelous book,” extols Kiran Desai on the cover. Desai is an Indian author
and she does not notice the factual flaws; she only deals with the aesthetics
of the narrative. She found the bouquet pretty. For me, however ardently the
florist wants me to accept the bunch as real, I know that many of the flowers
are fake.
I have not read Freudenberger’s previous novel, The Dissident, which
shot her to acclaim as one of the New Yorker Under 40 writers and Granta’s
Best Young American Novelists. I did, however, read her impressive fictional
debut, a collection of short stories, Lucky Girls, which deserved the literary
accolades it won. But after reading her present novel, I would safely hazard
that Freudenberger’s literary strength lies in the field of short fiction and not
in novel writing; certainly, not a novel about a world she only knows sketchily.
Freudenberger has lived in India but not in Bangladesh. She probably
thought that the fictional leap from Delhi to Dhaka could not be such an
insurmountable distance, aided by some historical research and socio-cultural
observations. Unfortunately, it was a bridge too far.
Freudenberger presumed to tell the story of her Bangladeshi protagonist,
Amina, based on a real life encounter with a Muslim Bengali woman
whose unconventional story inspired the novel. But Amina is a half-baked,
unconvincing creature, not reflecting any real, modern-day woman living in
the Dhaka of 2005. In just the first few chapters of the book, where we get
to know Amina as she tries to create her American life in the suburbia of
Rochester, we trip over many inconsistencies about her past life.
But even as my quarrel with the writer was that she was not getting the
details right, I could sense the sincerity in her portrayal of Amina, and her
sympathetic and respectful treatment of cultural and religious diversity,
and the vulnerabilities of the migrants’ life. What softened my heart was the
realisation that she was fully aware of being on shaky grounds on matters
related to Bangladesh, and in subtle ways, she created grounds for us to look
at her approach differently.
For example, the character of Kim, Amina’s husband George’s bohemian
Yoga instructor-cousin, seems expressly created to represent Freudenberger.
Early in their friendship, Amina is made to think this on behalf of all
potentially critical native readers like me: “There were a lot of things about
village life she thought might surprise her new friend, but she didn’t want to
undermine Kim’s admiration for her culture, which she thought was genuine
if not especially well informed.”
My copy of the book is underlined on every page with a question mark or
comment in the margins. Often I was frowning, but in the end, I burst out
laughing. This novel is an unintentional comedy of errors, and only insiders
like us Bangladeshi readers would know the truth. And that is the unfunny
part involving cultural appropriation. An established writer, with the power
of the publishing world behind her, gets away with telling a flawed story of my
culture, and wins plaudits for her performance.
The redeeming feature, however, is that the errors were mostly innocent,
and even when she does not get the facts right, there are truths aplenty.
“You thought you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net
that held it all together, until you discovered that there were many selves,
dissolving into one another...”
Still, I itch to edit and correct the silly mistakes. But the important question
I ask myself is that even with the errors, is the story something that makes the
world a better place? I think it does. If an outsider reaches out to understand a
nation unrelated to her own world, it brings us all closer. Freudenberger wrote
with genuine compassion and a desire to embrace an unknown world through
her imagination.
In the novel we encounter the notion of adoption. Kim is an adopted child,
and she, in turn, adopts an Eastern ethos that is incongruous with her western
upbringing. Much of her yogic life style is a mixed-up, pseudo-philosophy.
But it is her version of Indian spirituality. She claims ownership by dint of her
genuine ardency and humanity.
The book ends with a winning essay written for a Starbucks writing
competition. The essay, I feel, is the metaphor for the novel. Unbeknownst to
Amina, Kim writes Amina’s story, using her words, images and dreams. She
knows she does not own this borrowed story, but she shapes it lovingly, then
gives it away as a gift.
I think it is unfair of me to call Freudenberger’s creation a “pseudo” novel.
It may not be my Bangladeshi novel. But this is her version of a borrowed
Bangladeshi story, written from her heart.
The last sentence of the Starbucks essay is also the last line of the novel,
the bobbing message-in-a-bottle:“It is only by sharing our stories that we truly
become one community.”
*Some anomalies in The Newlyweds
Historical:
1. Amina’s father was a freedom fighter and he recalls how a fellow guerilla,
towards the end of the war, “got through the awful street battles here in
Dhaka.” We know that there were guerilla operations, but no pitched
ARTS & LETTERS DHAKA TRIBUNE | THURSDAY, September 7, 2017