The diasporic slide: representations of second-generation diasporas in Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991) and in Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Softly as I Leave You (2011)

Abstract

The novels by Yasmine Gooneratne, A Change of Skies (1991), and Chandani Lokugé, If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Softly as I Leave You (2011), show the challenge of diaspora as sliding from parents to children. These fictions portray second-generation immigrants as “caught between two cultures”: the Sri Lankan culture of their parents and the Australian culture with which they engage at school and university. In Gooneratne’s comedy this cultural negotiation creates comic ambivalence in the second-generation character Veena, who is set to repeat the actions of her forebears. Gooneratne’s playful outcome contrasts with Lokugé’s tragic vision in her novels If the Moon Smiled and Softly as I Leave You, which position the “model minority” stereotype and racism in Australia, respectively, as significant challenges for second-generation characters. This article aims to counterbalance the dominant critical focus on first-generation diaspora in fiction. It examines relationships between parent and child characters in the novels in the context of social studies on second-generation diaspora, the South Asian diaspora, and multiculturalism in Australia.

Keywords:

• Second-generation diaspora
• Sri Lankan diaspora fiction
• Australia
• model minority stereotype
• multiculturalism
• racism
• Yasmine Gooneratne
• Chandani Lokugé

Notes

1. See Ommundsen (2007, 73–86) on the development of multicultural literature in the 1980s, and the subsequent backlash in the 1990s.

2. The “White Australia Policy”, which discriminated against non-western immigrant identities, was only legally dismantled through the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. This Act prohibits discrimination “based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin” by law (National Communications Branch: Department of Communications and Citizenship 2009).

3. Veena’s attitudes also reflect what Robin Field (2004) describes, regarding Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, as “the second generation’s prerogative to alternatively pick and choose what elements of their cultural heritage to retain in their identities” (171).

4. Field, again speaking about Lahiri, says that “for second generational South Asian Americans, marriage is a fiercely contested aspect in this evolving culture. Indeed, the choice of a love marriage over an arranged match is one of the most important examples of the choice of one particular cultural practice over another” (2004, 172). Lokugé’s novel suggests that marriage is equally significant for Sri Lankans in Australia.

5. As Scott Poynting (2008) argues, there is a correlation between anti-terrorist laws, post-9/11, and racism in Australia. Poynting suggests that anti-terrorist laws were used to support the dismantling of multiculturalism policy in the first decade of the new millennium, and that this state sanctioning of racism has supported civil reactions to terrorism policy, including the Cronulla Riots of 2005.

6. As Salman Rushdie (1991) famously puts it, there are times “sometimes [when immigrants] “feel [as if they] straddle two cultures; at other times, [they] fall between two stools” (15).