Who are you?

Years before I was born, or was even a thought, my mom decided what my name was going to be. She had a roommate named Mary who was a flight attendant and one day she returned home from a trip with a bracelet that said “Melia” on it. My mom, known by Karen at the time, asked her what it meant. Mary told her that “Melia” was the Hawaiian name for Mary. So the story goes that upon hearing that “beautiful name” my mom decided that if she ever had a daughter her name would be Melia… and here I am.

From the moment we are born, perhaps before, we are assigned a name. As we grow, we learn the assigned names for various people, animals and objects. These names are supposed to convey the nature and essence of the thing that is named, but do our names truly represent who we are? For me, my name does truly represent who I am. Being that it is a unique name I have made it my own. I have never had someone say that I should be called something different. In Bharati Mukherjee’s novel, Jasmine, the main character Jasmine has numerous names. Jasmine herself even claims that “I have a husband for each women I have been. Prakash for Jasmine, Taylor for Jase, Bud for Jane. Half-Face for Kali”(197). All of these different names represent different parts of her life and all but one has been assigned to her. When Jasmine turns on the rapist in chapter seventeen she embodies Kali.

When Jasmine refers to Kali it is at a very violent and horrible part in her life. This name represents pain, suffrage and evil. Not only is it Kali who is raped, but it is also Kali who kills her attacker; “began stabling wildly through the cloth” (119). The name Kali suggests that Jasmine is transferring her pain and memory of this event to something/ someone else. By detaching herself and renaming herself when she refers to this event she is able to move on from it. It is a way to erase the past and escape from the trauma.

 Jasmine’s other names are given to her by men in her life. These men represent different parts of her journey. Her first husband even told her to stop regressing into Jyoti: “He laughed again and told me to stop regressing into the feudal Jyoti. “You are Jasmine now. You can’t jump into wells!”” (92). The men in her life create a new identity for her and tell her that it is time to move on and become renewed over and over again. After her first husband’s death she credits him for creating her “new self”; “Prakash had taken Jyoti and created Jasmine” (97).

On page 127 we see Jasmine questioning her multiple identities and struggling to come to terms with who she truly is; “I should never have been Jane Ripplemeyer of Baden, Iowa… Jyoti of Hasnapur was not Jasmine, Duff’s day mummy and Taylor and Wylie’s au pair in Manhattan; that Jasmine isn’t this Jane Ripplemeyer”. Mukherjee’s choice to give Jasmine multiple names suggests that it is a representative of her quest to find out who she truly is. She is able to reinvent her self to accommodate the situation at hand. No matter her name, she is merely on a quest to satisfy the “Lord’s assignment” (59).