Colonfay Book

I would have called 'My Ántonia' an immigrant novel. But then I realized that dubious distinction is reserved only for the creations of writers of colour - Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Xiaolu Guo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sunjeev Sahota, Yiyun Li, Lee Chang Rae and so on and so forth. Especially now when the word 'immigrant', hurled at us ad nauseam from the airwaves and the domains of heated social media discussions, invokes images of gaunt, exhausted but solemnly hopeful faces of Syrians knocking on the doors of Europe and America, having voyaged across perilous waters that have already claimed many of their loved ones as price of admission.

Who are immigrants anyway? Those who had the foresight and temerity to circumnavigate the globe and assert their self-declared God-given right to rule over lands inhabited by 'savages' they could easily extirpate/subjugate by dint of military might? Or those who foolishly came afterwards, much much later, balancing their starry-eyed dreams of fulfillment or often mere survival, on the crutch of that primeval instinct that humanity will vanquish the fact of man-made demarcations, only to languish in exile for a lifetime pining away for a lost home they could never regain?
Let's separate the chaff from the grain. 'Immigrants' are always sallow-skinned, tan-complexioned, sun-browned, needy Asians, Africans, Arabs, Latinos glibly umbrella-termed into convenient one-word identities.

And yet narrator Jim's Ántonia epitomizes the immigrant's dream. The dream of making a home out of an alien place, of finding comfort, success, a modicum of acceptance among complete strangers and perhaps, coming to own a sweep of land to settle in and spread one's roots. Yes I know this is a eulogy offered to the prairies edged in gold in the dying light of dusk, an attempt to memorialize a way of life that the ill-informed city-dweller cannot begin to imagine, the author's wistful contemplation of a time and place frozen only in the amber of her memories. Her earnest effort to capture the nuances of the hardscrabble life with the land, teeming with its secret life in visible and hidden corners, as permanent fixture in the farmer's existence. But my reasons for 5-starring this are slightly different.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow on the mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes of those fields at nightfall.
As far as central themes go, the American Dream is a bête noire within the repertoire of notable American fiction. An ostensibly noxious concept deserving of indictment by authors who have found it commensurate with an obsession with the unattainable, a doctrine of mindless avarice that leads one down the path of self destruction. But Ántonia's version of the American Dream envisages a life of simple self-sufficiency, despite the hardships it may entail. It is worth protecting, worth immortalizing through the written word. The sky-rocketing desire for riches and social affluence is foreign to her Bohemian (Czech) sensibilities. In a way she is an extension of the Nebraskan wilderness itself - raw, rough and tender at the same time, inexplicably beautiful, cheerily resilient against the vicissitudes of fate and time, indomitable advocate of vitality and growth.
The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death-heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.
For Jim Burden, Ántonia is home, indelibly associated as she is with his boyhood days spent chasing rabbits and prairie dogs. She is a personification of those bygone days sucked into the spiral of time that can never be recovered, but the incontrovertible reality of which will remain etched on to the palate of Jim's consciousness in the brightest of letters till his dying day.
Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross.
Coming to the negatives, the casually racist comments directed at an African-American character ("He was always a negro prodigy who played barbarously and wonderfully.") and the exaltation of Antonia's womanhood could have curtailed my enjoyment somewhat but Cather did everything else so splendidly well that I'm choosing not to nitpick. Besides nowhere else within the wide realm of literature have I encountered such a believable depiction of friendship between a man and woman, each tied to the other through the bonds of shared childhood and a form of affection so wholesome that even a separation of two decades could not mellow it, each reduced to the status of a genderless individual, a blubbering emotional mess in the other's presence. (If I have, I cannot recall any such name at the moment.)
About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, the realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory.
Brava, Ms Cather.