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CHITRA DIVAKARUNI
Like the character, Tilo, in her new novel, Chitra Divakaruni knows what
it is like first-hand to dissolve cultural boundaries and break through
ethnic barriers. When she moved from the Indian city of Calcutta to Dayton,
Ohio in 1977, she was a cultural anomaly. People would stop on the streets
and stare as she passed by dressed in her traditional Indian saris. It wasn't
until Divakaruni attended U.C. Berkeley in 1978 to earn her doctorate in
English literature that she truly felt at home in the more multicultural
environment. As she says now, "I think that, in some ways, being an expatriate
made me want to write, because it is such a powerful and poignant experience
when you live away from your original culture and this becomes home, but
never quite, and then you can't go back and be quite at home there either,
so you become a kind of outsider to both cultures. Which is hard, but very
good for writers, I think, to be in the position of looking in from the
outside observing."
Divakaruni, who teaches creative writing at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, did not take herself seriously as a writer until nine years ago when she joined a writing group in Berkeley. She published two books of poetry with small presses and then moved away from poetry to literary fiction, feeling that fiction was a more accessible medium for the stories she wanted to relay. Her first short-story collection, Arranged Marriage, published in 1995, was an immediate critical success and eamed Divakaruni the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize for Fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Fiction, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her third poetry collection, Leaving Yuba City, was published by Anchor Books in August 1997. Her first novel, Mistress of Spices has been on the best seller list for thirty-nine weeks and has confirmed her status as one of America's most exciting new writers. This modern fable of a young women born centuries ago with the ability to change luck with a touch of her hand, is a poignant fable that chronicles and reveals the sorrow and longing that defines the immigrant experience - along with the relief and joy the Mistress's cures bring to each individual's life. Chitra believes that, "If a writer writes well enough, a novel can be a window into a culture so much more vivid than the dry and simple facts of history. The joy of reading is that intuitive experience of another world, another way of looking at things, another life. If it's good literature the reader and the writer will connect. It's inevitable." In addition to her teaching and writing, Chitra is also a wife and mother to two young children and serves as the president of MAITRI, a crisis helpline for South Asian women, which is the first South Asian service of its kind on the West Coast. Divakaruni founded MAITRI, which means "friendship" in several Indian languages, with a group of friends in Sunnyvale, where she currently resides with her husband and two children. The purpose of MAITRI is to act as a bridge for South Asian women who have grown up with very different cultural backgrounds and need someone to talk to who can speak their native language and relate to their traditional value systems before they turn for help to a mainstream women's organization. Archive of Virtual Take
Our Daughters to Work Day chat on April 23, 1998. [HOME] [PROFILES] [WOMEN OF THE WORLD] [SPANISH] [CHATS] [TEACH] [RESOURCES] Credits and Contacts |
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