Fresh From The Island Angel

In “Fresh from the Island Angel,” poet David Mura uses the perspective of a young girl to depict the difficulty of moving from one’s homeland to America. Although she lives in a new country, the girl still holds on to her ethnic roots, saying, “I still hold corridors of sunlight. Villages where palms and pomegranates and linen blow” (Mura 13-14). As a foreigner, she faces the challenge of preserving her true cultural background and adjusting to American society. Similarly, in her novel Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri describes the adversity members of the South Asian diaspora endure as immigrants. In one of the book’s short stories, “The Third and Final Continent,” the narrator leaves India and arrives in Cambridge, Massachusetts to
begin a new life with his wife. He notices how people do things differently in comparison to Indians, stating, “Americans drove on the right side of the road, not the left, and they called a lift an elevator,” and has trouble adjusting to these differences (Lahiri 174). This instance acts as a symbol for the larger struggles South Asians encounter in America, such as being unable to communicate with other people in English or being victims of xenophobia. Both Mura and Lahiri use their writing to portray the immigrant experience and emphasize the hardships of assimilating into mainstream society. More importantly, readers can see how one’s cultural identity is impacted when being surrounded by people from diverse backgrounds and ethnicities.