Introduction
Hair. Across races, religions, continents, and cultures, hair is universally regarded as an important feature of a person's identity. Young American couples save clippings in a scrapbook of their baby's first haircut; middle-aged women of color fight the stereotypes and racism that are dominant in work culture if they choose to wear their natural hair; cancer patients struggle with debilitating chemotherapy that not only leaves them weak and sick, but also causes their hair to fall out. Everyday hair plays a significant role in our understanding of ourselves, the world, and others.
So it shouldn't come as a surprise that hair is an important theme in Jhumpa Lahiri's novels The Namesake and The Lowland, both of which deal with issues of identity, culture, and family. Lahiri's novels primarily use hair in two ways--to mark identity and to identify. This essay will strive to analyze the ways hair is utilized and how its use better helps us appreciate and understand Lahiri's work.
Conclusion
Something as common and natural as hair is easily overlooked, but as this essay has tried to prove, hair can teach us much about the characters and themes in Jhumpa Lahiri's novels. In both The Namesake and The Lowland, hair plays an important role in the understanding and creation of identity of characters, but it also plays a more subtle and significant role in representing and identifying time and relationships between the characters.
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Strands of time. Strands of identity. Strands of relationship. There is much more to hair than meets the eye.
Works Cited
Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.
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Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Lowland:Vintage Contemporaries, 2014.