Ashima's pregnancy experience - Essay Example

and Ashima’s pregnancy experience Many people experience difficulties and hardtimes in trying to adapt to a new culture within a short period. As a result, they experience enormous situations such as a language barrier that hampers their communication and participation in their new society. In The Namesake novel, by Jhumpa Lahiri, Ashima Ganguli who is an Indian immigrant spends hard times when she tries to fit in the American way of life. Ashima Ganguli is a typical Indian girl living in Cambridge Street with her husband Ashoke Ganguli. Recently, she became pregnant, and it made her undergo some difficulties. Therefore, Ashimas’s first pregnancy brings her significant outcomes in order to give a birth. She feels abnormal to raise a child in a foreign country. She is concerned by her first experience in the hospital, and she feels discomfort because of her family members’ absence during her pregnancy.
Ashima is worried by the fact that she is going to raise a child far away from her parents. It is extremely difficult for her to give birth, and raise a child in a strange country where she knows almost nothing. Therefore, she feels lonely and more worried than anything else. Even though becoming a mother brings her satisfaction in her life just like her ancestry, “she is 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” (Lahiri p.6).
Ashima is also concerned with giving birth in the hospital because she has a different belief from where she hails. The fact that she is going to deliver a child where people experience extreme difficulties makes her unhappy. She thinks that giving birth in a hospital is an unnecessary experience a woman should never undergo. She reasons that women in India feel more comfortable giving birth in their parents’ house than in the hospital. For instance, she mentions, “there is nothing to comfort her in the off-white tiles of the floor, the off-white panels of the ceiling, the white sheets tucked tightly into the bed” (Lahiri p.4). For these reasons, Ashima feels strange giving birth in the hospital.
Ashima feels discomfort since she lacks relatives who can support her during her pregnancy. Being pregnant in a strange country without her mother’s and grandmother’s support is the most difficult part for Ashima. She feels that she misses the most important people in her life. She has a different feeling due to the absence of her relatives during her baby’s birth. Furthermore, the birth of her baby brings her conceptual elements together. She keeps wondering about the baby’s misfortunes and the pretty solitary birth. She fears a lot by the fact that “as she strokes and suckles and studies her son, she can’t help but pity him” (Lahiri p.25).
In brief, Ashima suffers a lot from lack of knowledge of American culture and loneliness. She was nervous and unhappy from her first pregnancy experience. Giving birth without her parents’ presence and living in a strange country makes her experience some difficulties.
Works Cited
Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Print. Read More