Novelist Tanuja Desai Hidier spoke of the difficulty of claming the dual identity of a multicultural experience at a reading of her novel "Born Confused" last night.
The event, entitled "Finding Yourself Through Bringing Two Cultures Together," brought together the young author and an audience of roughly 75 students and faculty at Collis Commonground. Hidier followed the reading with a question-and-answer session and small group discussions over Indian food.
Hidier began her reading by defining the term "ABCD" -- American Born Confused Desai -- a term excerpted from an acronym that spans the entire alphabet and chronicles the stereotyped life of an Indian-American with a home in New Jersey and children in medical school.
"I would like to change the 'c' from 'confused' to a 'c' of 'clarity,'" Hidier said.
"Born Confused," a coming-of-age novel that features an Indian-American protagonist with immigrant parents, relates one young woman's search for clarity.
Like Hidier herself, Dimple, the novel's protagonist, feels "not quite American and not quite Indian."
Torn between the Americanizing force of high school and the desire to be a dutiful daughter, Dimple deals with the duality of her world by developing her "third eye," the camera lens. With her camera, Dimple creates her own world in order to enter reality.
Hidier related the character to her own life in the subsequent question and answer session.
"You feel like you're just starting to embrace your culture, and then MTV gets there first," Hidier said.s
Hidier said she was frustrated by the fact that she could write neither an American nor an Indian novel until she realized that this very conflict was her story.
Students in the audience connected with Hidier's tale of multiple identities.
"When I go back to my home city, I find it more Westernized than I am," Niranjan Bose, a fifth-year Dartmouth Medical School student said.
"You're a person without a home," Soumendra Nanda, a computer science graduate student and Bombay native added.
As Hidier demonstrated, however, creativity can be found within this conflict.
"Your story may actually be right before your eyes... everybody's story is worth telling, Hidier said. "And you absolutely should go for it."
