Vera Alexander, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Heterotopian Travels in M G Vassanji’s Writings
Journeys, migrations and dislocations are key concerns in M. G. Vassanji’s writings. Both his fiction and his non-fictional works feature travel as a prominent trope of quests for identity. His narratives explore travel both in space and in time as characters return to their origins and unravel their personal itineraries in their historical and social contexts. Ranging from pilgrimages and flights to explorations, these journeys challenge simplistic ideas and ideals of home and belonging.
Travel may be seen as a heterotopian act as it combines real experiential and utopian dimensions. Travel writing occupies a boundary between fiction and non-fiction, invention, hope and memory. While its place within literary studies is no longer questioned, its generic identity in a transnational age is subject to fluctuations. Due to his hyphenated designation as an ‘Asian-African-Canadian’, Vassanji is in a vanguard position to explore connections between travel, identity formation and narration, and to cast light on the ambivalent privilege of the impermanence granted by the status of being a visitor.
Focussing on The Magic of Saida and A Place Within, this paper will examine the politics and poetics of his representations of travel in the light of current debates within travel writing studies.
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John Clement Ball, University of New Brunswick, Canada
The Place of Partition in Vassanji’s Writings on India
Partition narratives are an important subgenre of writings on India and other partitioned lands, addressing themes of cultural memory, national and communal identity, political affiliation, and citizenship. Joe Cleary notes that cultural narratives from partitioned societies can “help either to ratify the state divisions produced by partition or to contest the partitionist mentalities generated by partition” (2). M.G. Vassanji can be counted on the “contest” side of these either-or alternatives. The Book of Secrets (1994), mostly written before his first trip to India, anticipates his later fascination with partition in noting ruefully how the previously inconsequential border between German and British East Africa became, in 1914, effectively a new partition dividing families and generating distorted affiliations and unforeseen enmities across a line drawn by colonizers. In the later “Dear Khatija: A Partition Story” (2005), The Assassin’s Song (2007), and A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008), Vassanji returns obsessively to the violent events and subsequent effects and memories of India’s partition. The shadow of the riots taking place during his first visit to India early in 1993, and the communal killings of 1947 that they echo, looms large over all his representations of India, and partition becomes localized in many places – cities (Delhi in A Place Within), ecumenical shrines (Pirbaag in The Assassin’s Song), houses (Khatija’s in “Dear Khatija).” But if the resulting vision of India is, echoing Gandhi, Rushdie, and others, of an inclusive, heterogeneous society tragically diminished by the narrowly communal identities and divisive mentalities partition engenders, in Vassanji’s India writings a vision of the heterogeneous self, ideally undivided but sadly too often factionalized, emerges as well. This paper will explore the ways in which Vassanji’s texts of India locate partition – as event, as legacy, as mentality to be resisted – in places outside and within the self. It will also endeavour (albeit briefly) to frame these texts within the larger tradition of partition narratives from India and elsewhere.
Work Cited
Cleary, Joe. Literature, Partition, and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel, and Palestine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
John C. Ball is Professor of English and Acting Dean of Arts at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. He is the author of two scholarly monographs, including Imagining London: Postcolonial Literature of the Transnational Metropolis (University of Toronto Press 2004), and edited the World Fiction volume of The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction (Wiley-Blackwell 2011). He served as editor or co-editor of the scholarly journal Studies in Canadian Literature for 17 years. He has published regularly on Vassanji’s work, including an article, an interview, several reviews, and an entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Vol. 334,Twenty-First Century Canadian Writers, 2007).
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Annie Cottier, University of Bern, Switzerland
Songs, Poems, Legends: Cosmopolitan Moments in M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song
In The Assassin’s Song, history, travel, questions of belonging, home and homelessness are negotiated by the means of songs, poetry, stories and legends. In fact, these various literary forms, Indian and other, occur regularly in the novel. Vassanji’s interest in them can be read as a discussion of cultural influences and productivity and, at the same time, of the complexity and ambivalence of sites of cultural production in a transnational context. The ginans (devotional hymns), the poetry of Keats, and the legend of a Sufi saint interweave with the elderly narrator Karsan’s account of his life as he returns to India after having spent many years abroad. What happens when migration occurs, and the knowledge of Romantic English poetry and Sufi mystical poetry is combined in one person?
It is my interest here to undertake a reading of how these various literary genres occur in the narrative, which themes they address, and claim that they emphasize the novel’s cosmopolitan stance. I will refer to early (Stoics, Kant) and to more recent theorists and critics (Bhabha and others) of cosmopolitanism in order to define the concept of cosmopolitan moments. Cosmopolitan moments express the ethics and practice of the conditions of diaspora, home and belonging. In The Assassin’s Song, the songs, poems and legends are relevant not only as forms of literary expression, but they also comment on the vagaries of migration.
Annie Cottier is an assistant and lecturer at the English Department and the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation Rewriting Histories and Geographies: Cosmopolitan Moments in Contemporary Indian Writing in English. She holds a grant from the Swiss National Foundation and is part of the research group “The Politics and Poetics of Cosmopolitanism in Anglophone Literatures of South Asian Background”. She has written and published several articles on Indian writing in English.
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Gaurav Desai, Tulane University
`Ye Zindagi Usiki Hai’: Illicit Desire and (Post)colonial Romance in M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets.
If one were obliged to pick among Vassanji’s texts a work that best exemplifies a post-Manichean aesthetics, it would have to be The Book of Secrets. In this novel that spans the period just before the First World War and the late eighties, Vassanji challenges some of the ways in which colonialism in East Africa has been imagined. Rather than seeing British colonialism as an unmediated conflict between the white colonizers and the black colonized, Vassanji insists on turning his focus on the presence of Indian communities in East Africa. Instead of reading the white colonizers as a monolithic body of oppressors, Vassanji seeks to differentiate between them and to articulate for his readers what Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler were soon to label the “tensions of empire.” Further, by telling stories of illicit and sometimes unfulfilled sexual desires – between colonizers and colonized, between a Shamsi woman and a Hindu man, between a married man and an unmarried woman, between a teacher and a student, between men – Vassanji seeks to unearth the complex negotiations between sexual consent and coercion on the one hand and freedom and regulation on the other. In the process, I argue, Vassanji creates a vision of postcoloniality that is more in keeping with the inevitable resilience of the “maps of Englishness” that Simon Gikandi has so eloquently written about, than the rejectionist models of an earlier, more determined anti-colonialism.
Gaurav Desai is Professor of English and has a joint appointment in the Program of African and African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University. Author of Subject to Colonialism: African Self-fashioning and the Colonial Library (Duke University Press, 2001) and editor of Teaching the African Novel (MLA, 2009) he has guest edited a volume of essays on “Culture and the Law” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 100.4, 2001), on “Actually Existing Colonialisms” (Journal of Contemporary Thought, 24, 2006), on “Asian African Literatures” (Research in African Literatures, 42.3, 2011), and co-edited a volume of essays on “Multi-Ethnic Literatures and the Idea of Social Justice” (MELUS, 28.1, Spring 2003). Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (Rutgers University Press, 2005) which he co-edited with Supriya Nair has become a standard reference and classroom text since its publication. Among Desai’s other publications are articles in edited collections and journals such as PMLA, Genders, Representations, Boundary2, Interventions, Research in African Literatures, African Studies Review and Cultural Critique. Recipient of a residential fellowship at the National Humanities Center in 2001, Desai has also been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation award for a residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy, a visiting fellowship at the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities at Cambridge University, and an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship for his research. In 2004, Desai was made a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. His latest book on narratives of Indian Ocean connections between Africa and India, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian Imagination has been published by Columbia University Press in 2013.
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Jonathan Hart, University of Alberta, Canada
M G Vassanji and the Typology Between Tanzania and Canada
Vassanji has a double vision of Africa and North America. I shall weave in chronological order a discussion of his non-fiction that first considers his discussion of Tanzania then his view of Canada and then his revisiting of Tanzania. Vassanji’s sense of place defines his role as a writer who considers the places he has called home. He goes back to see how he can move forward. When Vassanji writers about one place, he also has an audience in another place. One aspect of M. G. Vassanji’s work that deserves more attention is his work in essays about life or in non-fiction, so here I am going to examine the text of one of these essays closely. In “When I was a boy, a soft Asian” (2006), Vassanji writes about corruption in Tanzania when he was growing up there during the 1960s. In 2006, Vassanji gave an address in Winnipeg that he revised and published as an editorial in 2006 as “Am I a Canadian Writer?” Vassanji sets out the traditional model of immigration in which the immigrant in Canada from Europe, China and Japan adopted the new and forgot the old (except some from Britain and western Europe where there were constant contact and continuity), and a traditional Canadian literature would express the core view of Canada and its essence, variations of which Vassanji lists and refers to as “venerable Canadian themes.” Moreover, Vassanji wrote an article for Maclean’s magazine on September 13, 2012, “Tanzania: land of constant complaints,” in which returns to some of his recurrent themes as the subtitle –“The country seems well, but corruption is rampant” – seems to indicate. Over the years Vassanji has moved back and forth between Tanzania and Canada and this presents the reader with a double vision in a movement over time.
Jonathan Hart, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Alberta, is the author of twenty books of poetry, criticism and theory, and history, including Comparing Empires (2003, rpt. 2008), Interpreting Cultures (2006), Empires and Colonies (2008), Shakespeare (2009), Dreamwork (2010), Musing (2011), Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2011), Literature, Theory, History (2011), Fictional and Historical Worlds (2012) and Textual Imitation (2013). He has held visiting appointments at Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, The Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) and elsewhere. His poetry has been translated into French, Greek, Estonian, Slovenian, Polish and other languages. Besides working on volumes of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he has a book From Shakespeare to Obama, that is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.
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Neelima Kanwar, H. P. University, Shimla, India
History and Philosophy: Metaphysical concerns in The Assassin’s Song and The Magic of Saida
The diasporic writers articulate their complex experience through the prism of nation, nationalism, history, identity, gender, class, etc. Their writings focus on the travails of movements, the sense of loss, uncertainty and anguish. Due to his multi-regional and multi-cultural space, M.G.Vassanji concerns himself with history and memory which define as well as limit his works. In his earlier six novels ranging from The Gunny Sack(1989) to The In-Between World of Vikram Lal l(2003) through the histories of individuals a recollectable past is created to be juxtaposed with the present. He has deftly portrayed complex relations existing between the centre and the periphery, the present and the past, and the personal and the public histories so as to establish how these histories define and shape the diasporic experience.
Following the pattern The Assassin’s Song (2007) and The Magic of Saida(2012) also engage with his ongoing exploration of history – social, political and cultural. However, these two novels also move beyond his concern with immediate surroundings and move towards the quest for spirituality and the metaphysical dimension. These can also be seen as extension of diasporic sense of displacement and homelessness which have metaphysical and existential connotations too. In his non-linear storytelling, Vassanji seeps these two works in faith, spirituality and magic as well. The paper attempts to read these two novels from two perspectives: firstly, how past/ history govern, almost as progressions of his earlier works, the milieu of the texts and secondly, how philosophy, spirituality, myths and faith lead the protagonists to come back to their own cultural being –Karsan to India and Kamal to Dar–es -Salaam, and how they respond to many queries so close to our human existence.
Neelima Kanwar teaches at Department of English, International Centre for Distance Education and Open Learning (ICDEOL), Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla. She has published a book on Native Canadian authors named Resistant Voices (2009). Also to her credit are several papers on postcolonial literature, especially on the ‘First Nation’ writers of Canada and Aboriginal writers of Australia. She has visited Consortium of Universities in Australia (2005) under Australia- India Council Fellowship. Dr Neelima has also been recipient of Shastri Indo-Canadian Fellowship in 2007 wherein she visited Universities in Toronto. At present she is involved in the study of interface/interaction between gender, race, culture and politics of difference in contemporary literature.
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Delphine Munos, University of Liège, Belgium
M.G. Vassanji’s A Place Within: Thinking through India, Transnationally
In their groundbreaking collection, Minor Transnationalism, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih advocate a new approach to transnationalism, which, by shifting the ground of analysis to “transversal” movements of culture, departs from existing theoretical frameworks and allows for the emergence of “minor-to-minor networks” (8) that have the potential to circumvent the major altogether. Lionnet’s and Shih’s understanding of transnationalism not in terms of vertical relations between center and margin, but in terms of cultural transversalism, is particularly apt in the context of MG Vassanji’s writings, notably because his books often complicate those hackneyed notions of hybridity constructing Western locales as the privileged sites of plurality. In this paper, my contention is that Lionnet’s and Shih’s concept of ‘minor transnationalism’ also proves useful to deconstruct the discourse of ‘dominant’ Western-based diasporas that style themselves as “the legitimate archive with which to explore diasporic subjectivities” (Vijay Mishra, 3) — such as the hyper-visible ‘new’ Indian diaspora of global capital.
Taking its cue from Lionnet’s and Shih’s concept of minor transnationalism, this paper looks at A Place Within (2008), the memoir of Vassanji’s travels across the land of his ancestors over two decades, with a view to showing how the author’s positionality as a ‘minor’ transnational (i.e. as a Canadian writer of Indian descent born on East-African soil) gives a new twist to the now-classic ‘return to the Indian homeland’ narrative — a staple, indeed, of the enormously popular Indian diasporic literature. At stake is the contention that Vassanji’s own brand of ‘minor transnationalism’ allows for a unique descent into the messiness of India, the ‘slippery’ nature of its past — well beyond diaspora’s dubious politics of retrieval and its investment in purist readings of the Indian homeland.
Delphine Munos is a F.R.S- FNRS postdoctoral research fellow in the English Department at the University of Liège (Belgium). Her book After Melancholia: A Reappraisal of Second-Generation Diasporic Subjectivity in the Work of Jhumpa Lahiri is forthcoming with Rodopi Press, along with “Mapping Diasporic Subjectivities,” a special issue of South Asian Diaspora guest edited with Mala Pandurang.
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Harish Narang, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
From Haripir to Haripur: Problems of Plurality in Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song
The Assassin’s Song by M.G. Vassanji is a very different novel from his earlier fiction. It is his first work of fiction that focusses fully on India. Not that there is no presence of India or Indians in his earlier novels. In fact, most of his books are centred around Indians but most of these are Indian immigrants located elsewhere—Africa and North America, particularly. India surfaces in those books as the point of their origin. It is a gaze at India from without. The Assassin’s Song provides a gaze from within. It focusses on an issue that has been the corner stone of not only the modern Indian state but of its various political structures that obtained in the pre-colonial period, namely, its plurality. Plurality has been its vajood –the raison d’etre of its very existence. Although Indian plurality comprises, among others, its linguistic, caste, and regional variations, the one defining factor of its plurality has been its religious minorities, particularly the Muslim since the arrival of Islam in India. This religious plurality of India has been challenged from time to time– both from within and without. One of the most recent challenges came from the western state of Gujarat during what came to be known as Gujarat riots in 2002 but which were actually nothing short of a pogrom against the Muslim community. Through the life of Nur Fazal, a mediaeval Peer from Persia who came to Gujarat in 13th century—and his successors– Vassanji in his The Assassin’s Song looks at the issue of plurality in Gujarat –no doubt a microcosm for the entire Indian plurality—from a historico-philosophical perspective spanning more than half a millennium. This paper explores Vassanji’s world view on Indian Plurality—particularly the question of Hindu-Muslim relations—as delineated in The Assassin’s Song.
Professor Harish Narang is currently a Senior Consultant with the University Grants Commision, New Delhi. Before that he was a consultant with South Asian university which has been set up jointly by all SAARC countries. He has also been a UGC Emeritus Fellow at the Centre of English Studies, JNU after retiring from there as Professor and chairperson in 2008. During his teaching career of over 40 years, most of which was spent at the JNU, Professor Narang taught courses in African Literatures in English, Canadian Literature and Theory and Practice of Literary Translation. His major publications include Politics as Fiction, Mightier than Machete, and Writing Black, Writing Dalit. A practicing translator for over 30 years, Professor Narang has translated and published over 20 books, of literary works of major African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Nadine Gordimer, North American writers like Hemingway and M.G.Vassanji, Indian writers like Manoj Das, Khushwant Singh and Jayant Mahapatra, into Hindi. Professor Narang writes stories in Hindi and English and has already published a collection of stories in Hindi—Pakistani Bachha. His forthcoming collection is titled Sunte the Sahar Hogi. Professor Narang is an amateur photographer and grows organic food on his farm.
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Dan Ojwang, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Vassanji’s Experiments in Ecumenical Secularity
Writing against the backdrop of histories in which faith and identity have been deployed to serve political ends, the full gamut of M.G. Vassanji’s writing is marked by its questing for an ecumenical sensibility, one that would draw the attention of his readers to what he has come to regard as the essential unity of the human world. This paper attempts a genealogy of Vassanji’s ecumenical experiments by linking them to broad currents of literary and political thought in the contexts that have most markedly shaped his imagination: East Africa, India and North America. At the same time, it draws attention to the contradictions that haunt Vassanji’s vision of undivided polities. The texts to be examined are When She Was Queen, The Assassin’s Song and A Place Within.
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Mala Pandurang, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, India
Reading Vassanji’s Women: Across time, location and interstitial identities.
This paper is derived from a larger, ongoing project entitled ‘Wives, Mothers and Others’, investigating the socio- historical experiences of women participants in the East African Asian diasporicity over a span of hundred years. Initial interest in this area of research was stimulated by the presence of a number of women protagonists across the canvas of M.G Vassanji’s fiction.
This paper will examine multiple representation of women in M.G Vassanji’s fiction in all three categories, namely as wives, mothers and the ‘other’, across location, age, caste, class, ethnicity and religion. Vassanji’s women will be examined as participants of a transnational cartography, as their cross continental passage forms an important backdrop to their personal dilemmas and conflicts, as well as the formation of interstitial identities. Their gendered subjectivities will be evaluated in the context of a much larger and complicated socio-political -cultural relationship, at the interstices of the colonial and post- colonial histories of Britain, East Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Also, the projection of similar/disparate gendered experiences in the narratives by women writers of East African origin such as Parita Mukta, Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Neeta Dromson Kapur etc., will be taken into account. The paper will suggest that Vassanji’s excavation of unheard narratives of women migrants, hitherto embedded in the larger collective history of their husbands or fathers, is governed by a larger humanist ideology.
Mala Pandurang is Professor and Head of Department of English at Dr. BMN College, Mumbai, India. She has published in the areas of Postcolonial theory and literature, gender and diaspora studies. She is an alumnus of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Bonn) and the Fulbright Foundation (USA). She is presently working on a project titled ‘Wives, Mothers and Others. A socio-literary reconstruction of migration experiences of women from the Indian subcontinent to East Africa, funded by the University Grants Commission, New Delhi.
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Maya Parmar, University of Leeds, UK
The Book of Secrets: The Dancing Diaspora and Encoding Culture
As the title implies, M.G. Vassanji’s 1994 award winning novel is preoccupied with secrets: the secrets of illicit love and desire across class, race and gender precincts; the secrets of paternity; the secrets of warfare and colonisation. In explicating this layering of the hidden in The Book of Secrets, this paper suggests that there is something of the secret in the narrative of, as Parminder Bhachu describes, the ‘twice migrant’. Having established homes and businesses in East Africa, coming from India, this figure of the twice migrant has now settled in various parts of the world, including Britain, Canada and America. For this community I contend that dance is a significant form of cultural representation, for it enables the encoding of culture. In delineating the value of Gujarati folk dances to the ‘double diaspora’, this paper will closely read the instances of the clapping dance garba in The Book of Secrets. How these moments of dance complicate understandings of Navratri Hindu tradition, via the conversion of folk play into a Hindu-Islamic tradition, will be explored. This reading will be contextualised by two further texts preoccupied with the double diaspora in Britain. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, perhaps better known for her cookbook memoir The Settler’s Cookbook, is the protagonist in the one-woman theatrical performance Nowhere to Belong. The representations of garba and dandiya in her play can be read in collaboration with Vassanji’s depiction of folk dance in East Africa. Analysis of the play Strictly Dandia, however, complicates these representations. In returning to the value of the secret in the double diaspora, the paper also concludes on a consideration of the socio-religious evolutions of diasporic relations, citing each of the aforementioned texts – staged in various moments of displacement – as evidence of a trajectory.
Having completed her funded doctorate at the University of Leeds, on the embodied cultural representations of the Indian East African diaspora in Britain, Maya is now a Research Associate in English at the Open University. Working to develop the OU’s collaborative project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad’, as well as its follow-on projects, Maya has a strong interest in knowledge engagement. She was the Project Manager for Expulsion: 40 Years On in 2012, which, with the support from Arts Council England and the University of Leeds, sought to commemorate forty years since the 1972 expulsion of the Indian community from Uganda. Maya was also co-organiser of the Postcolonial City Conference at the University of Leeds (February 2012), which hosted eminent author Caryl Phillips. As a result of the conference, she is now on the Editorial Team for a Special Issue with the journal Interventions.
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Joseph Pivato, Athabasca University, Canada
Reconstructing History in The Magic of Saida
M.G. Vassanji’s novel, The Magic of Saida (2012) deals with the return journey of Kamal Punja, a Canadian medical doctor searching for his past in Africa. The novel has two narrators: The first is Kamal who recalls the story of his early life in Tanzania and his search for the mysterious woman, Saida. The second narrator is Martin Kogoma, a publisher, who listens to Kamal’s story and comments on past and present events in Africa. In trying to remember his life Kamal also reconstructs the lost history of the Indian communities in Tanzania.
The paper tries to critically examine the relationship between Kamal’s life story and the reconstructed history of communities in Tanzania. Using post-colonial theories we will consider the following topics: the phenomenon of the return journey among immigrants; identity and ethnic duality; memory and the loss of memory; and different perspectives in writing history.
The narrative framing of dual narrators may remind the reader of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, however the relationship between Canada and African is different from that of European countries. There are many references in The Magic of Saida to the German colonization of the Tanganyika territory and the later occupation by the British. The literary links between Canada and African include Margaret Laurence’s This Side Jordan (1960) and The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963) and Dave Godfrey’s The New Ancestors (1970). Vassanji also reminds us of the South Asian migrations to East Africa.
Joseph Pivato (PhD) is Professor of Literary Studies at Athabasca University in Canada. His research focus is on ethnic minority writing and migration. He has published eight books including Echo: Essay on Other Literatures (1994), The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing (1998), and Africadian Atlantic: Essays on George Elliott Clarke (2012). He has been a visiting professor at universities in Australia, Italy and Toronto.
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Jonathan Rollins, Ryerson University, Canada
“Roots, Routes, and Rhizomes: Diasporans, Nomads, and Tourists in M. G. Vassanji’s The Magic of Saida”
In his most recent novel, The Magic of Saida (2012), M. G. Vassanji continues his literary meditation on the themes of home, diaspora, belonging, alienation, and return. As in much of his previous work, this latest novel focuses on the life of an “Asian” East African character and his relationship to various sites of belonging. It presents the complex entanglement of push and pull forces that connect (bind) characters to homes that simultaneously attract and repulse, embrace and reject them. It also addresses the difficulties inherent in the defining of such fundamental terms as “home” and “identity.” Yet, there is also something else at work this time around. Pushing beyond what he accomplished in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall or The Assassin’s Song, for instance, here Vassanji further problematizes some of the now familiar binaries at work in his own writing and in diaspora literature generally: home/host, home(land)/exile, belonging/estrangement or alienation, centre/periphery, departure/return, etc.. In The Magic of Saida, it becomes increasingly difficult to articulate clearly where, if anywhere, “centre” is, where and what “home” is. It is on this constantly shifting ground that Vassanji’s diasporic “half-caste” protagonist, Kamal Punja, constructs his narrative map of identity.
This paper frames the novel in a critical rhetoric of mobility and fluidity that contests these problematic binary structures while simultaneously critiquing the limits of that language (how, for example, is the language of transnationalism “blind” to issues of privilege?) . It considers the ways in which Vassanji situates his text relative to a body of critical work that is resistant to bipolar models in order to suggest “the multi-situatedness of diaspora” (Král 15). Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the rhizome, employed here as a metaphor for home and identity formation, is significantly useful in this regard. Given the importance of displacement and return in the novel and the multiple roles that its protagonist plays (i.e., diasporan, exile, economic émigré, returning native-tourist insider/outsider), the paper will also employ the critical work on nomads, vagabonds, and tourists (Bauman, Hall, D&G, et al.) in order to theorize Vassanji’s articulation of the problems and consequences of “going home.”
Dr. Jonathan Rollins is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University’s Department of English and is cross-appointed to Ryerson’s Arts and Contemporary Studies programme. Dr. Rollins also chairs an Oxford-based interdisciplinary project on diaspora studies. His current research examines the use of cultural texts and textual communities as supplements to and/or substitutes for “home” in diaspora literatures.
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Asma Sayed, Canada
Between Languages: A Bakhtinian Reading of M G Vassanji’s Novels
Bakhtin’s theory is helpful in understanding the intercultural and interlinguistic structures which are at work in M G Vassanji’s novels. Vassanji writes transnationally, his works shifting between India, Canada, and African nations, and constructs a polyphonic work through the use of what Braj Kachru calls ‘World Englishes’ or ‘New Englishes.’ By creating an atmosphere of various accents, and grammatical situations, Vassanji adds to the heteroglossic world inhabited by his characters. According to Bakhtin, a novel is an active and interactive system of discourse. The novel consists of a multitude of discourses in a diversity of languages, and thus is the most appropriate form for denoting heteroglossia, the co-existence of many varieties within a single language. Another issue that Bakhtin examines is polyglossia, or the plurality of languages, discourses, and voices interacting within the framework of the text. Bakhtin contends that all language is dialogic; language is made of several social occurrences which give language its distinct meaning. In this paper, I look at different ways by which Vassanji uses various languages in his novels, thus creating heteroglossic texts. Vassanji’s writing is primarily the result of linguistic and sociocultural contact of various languages and cultures and thus it is a product of a multicultural and multilingual creativity. He uses Gujarati, Kutchhi, Hindi, Punjabi, and Swahili in his writing. By using various techniques such as code-switching, glossing, overt cushioning, repetition, double words etc. Vassanji generates texts with linguistic hybridity. For example, his characters’ code-switching mirrors social practices as well as cultural alterations (especially in multilingual countries such as Canada and India). The nature and extent of code-switching again depends on the type of social structure. For example, the second and third generation diasporans have recourse to both the language of the ‘home’ as well as the ‘host’ country, and straddle many boundaries including national, cultural, religious, and linguistic, among others. Vassanji manages to subvert the language of the dominant culture and deterritorialize language. This paper will explore the writings of M G Vassanji in the context of Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism, while exploring his use of multiple languages, most of them from India, and analyzing how he breaks hegemonic structures of national, cultural and linguistic power. Negotiating national and cultural boundaries of India, Canada and Kenya, and challenging the linguistic hegemony of English, Vassanji’s works contribute to the global post-colonial discourse.
Asma Sayed holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta, Canada. She teaches in the areas of comparative world literature, women’s studies, cultural studies, and communication studies. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the incorporation of South Asian ‘heritage’ languages in English-language writing, and the impact of linguistic hybridity on South Asian Canadian diaspora literatures in the context of global multiculturalism. She has published in the fields of multiculturalism, diaspora studies, and Indian cinema. She is the co-editor of World on a Maple Leaf: A Treasury of Canadian Multicultural Folktales (2011). Her forthcoming publications include Writing Diaspora: Transnational Memories, Identities and Cultures (Oxford: Interdisciplinary.net Press, Fall 2013), M.G. Vassanji: Essays on His Works (Toronto: Guernica, 2014), and Cinema and the Mother: Representations of Motherhood in World Cinemas (Toronto: Demeter Press, 2015).
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Alia Somani, Centennial College, Toronto
Diasporic Nostalgia and the Complexity of the Everyday: M.G. Vassanji’s African Fiction
Although M.G. Vassanji has been described as a diasporic writer because he traces his roots to India, East Africa and then Canada, he seems to carefully avoid the nostalgic, backward looking gaze that is typically associated with diasporic fictions. Instead of simplifying history and looking at the past through the safe, comforting lens of nostalgia, Vassanji’s fictional works – works such as Uhuru Street and The Book of Secrets — offer us a rich and textured account of everyday life in East Africa. In a short story like “Ali” for example, Vassanji draws attention to an Indian household where African servants like Ali are ruthlessly dismissed from service, often as quickly as they become embedded in the family. Vassanji, with his use of descriptive detail, takes us away from romancitized representations of “home” and instead offers us a way to engage with the past that is perhaps more productive and more honest. In this paper, I want to suggest that Vassanji’s engagement with the past resonates with my own experience. Having recently made a trip to East Africa, I realized that the nostalgic perspective with which I began the journey was inconsistent with what I saw and the narratives I heard. This is not to suggest that I didn’t find the heroism that I was hoping for, but rather that my expectations of “home” were shaken by the very lived realities and historical complexities that I encountered. Thus, in this paper, I want to move between Vassanji’s fiction and my own story of diasporic return in order to theorize the dangers of nostalgia and to consider the possibility that the alternative offered by Vassanji might open up a space for new, perhaps even utopian, futures.
Alia Rehana Somani completed her PhD in the Department of English from the University of Western Ontario, and is now an instructor at Centennial College in Toronto where she teaches Global Citizenship. Her dissertation, Broken Passages and Broken Promises: Reconstructing the Komagata Maru and Air India Cases, explores literary and cinematic responses to two traumatic events in Canada involving diasporic communities: the 1914 Komagata Maru incident and the 1985 Air India bombing. Her publications have appeared in Postcolonial Text, The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
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