M.G. Vassanji: Essays On His Works

By Guernica

This collection was born of a conviction that Vassanji's contributions to the global literary scene merit more in-depth scholarly notice. The articles herein, most of which are comparative in focus, provide various interpretations of Vassanji's writings through a diversity of theoretical frameworks. The fulcrum of much of this research comes back to issues of globalization, transnationalism, identity, post-colonialism, cosmopolitanism and diaspora. It should also be noted that, while many critics have tried to fit Vassanji and his writing into national perimeters identifying him as Canadian, others as African or Indian, or all of these, none of the writers in this book argue that Vassanji, or his works, belong to any particular national paradigm. Rather, the articles recognize Vassanji's engagement with transnational issues and his preoccupation with history and politics, and concerns of home, migration, exile, loss, belonging, dislocation, violence, trauma, and identity as central to his writing. Included are a new and detailed interview with Vassanji and a previously unpublished article, authored by Vassanji himself. Among the contributors: Annie Cottier, Jonathan Hart, Jonathan Rollins, Warris Vianni, Amin Malak, and Nancy E. Batty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Mar 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781550719970

Book preview

M. G. VASSANJI:

ESSAYS ON HIS WORKS

Edited by

Asma Sayed

Guernica - Writers Series 41

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.) 2014

Contents

Introduction: Writing History, Writing Diaspora: The In-Between World of M. G. Vassanji

Asma Sayed

Loss, Belonging and the Vagaries of Migration: Cosmopolitanism in M. G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song

Annie Cottier

M. G. Vassanji and the Essay of Life

Jonathan Hart

Picturing Canada: Narratives of Home and the (Trans-)National Imaginary in the work of M. G. Vassanji

Jonathan Rollins

In Search of a Place

Warris Vianni

Ambivalent Affiliations and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji

Amin Malak

Mahabharata is yet to happen: Communal Violence and Diasporic Time in M. G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song and A Place Within

Nancy E. Batty

Deliberations on The Magic of Saida

Asma Sayed

History, Magic, and Film: In Conversation with M. G. Vassanji

Asma Sayed

The Book of Life: A Brief Biography of M. G. Vassanji

Asma Sayed

So as Not to Die

M. G. Vassanji

Bibliography: Works By and About M. G. Vassanji

Asma Sayed

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Copyright

Introduction: Writing History, Writing Diaspora: The In-Between World of M. G. Vassanji

Asma Sayed

It was 1993 and we, the faculty at a ­university in Gujarat, India, received word that a Canadian writer was going to be visiting the city. It was an opportunity to be seized. The writer was M. G. Vassanji, and it was his first visit to India, his ancestral home, at the age of forty-three. Vassanji gave a talk to the university’s graduate students and faculty. I had the pleasure of briefly meeting him and of formally introducing him to the audience. While I do remember that he was soft-spoken and humble, I do not recollect much from that encounter, all those years ago. And little did I know then that Vassanji would become the subject of my academic research, that we would come to know each other almost twenty years later in Canada, and that by that time his adopted home would have become mine as well.

Neither could it have been known, back in the early ‘90s, how prolific Vassanji was going to be and what a significant contribution he would make to the Canadian literary canon, specifically the South Asian Canadian literary scene, a contribution that I strongly believe needs greater popular and scholarly attention both for what Vassanji himself has produced, as well as for his role as a literary critic. At that time, in the early 1990s, Vassanji had written three novels—The Gunny Sack (1989), No New Land (1990), and The Book of Secrets (1993)—and a short story collection, Uhuru Street (1990); he had also published an edited volume of literary criticism titled A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature (1985). Vassanji, since his early writing days, has been a strong supporter of the Canadian South Asian literary community, and has done much to promote the works of South Asian writers globally. Thus, his contributions as a scholar and critic to the field of South Asian Canadian literature merit special mention. He was one of the earliest scholars to write about the contributions of South Asians to the Canadian literary scene. His 1985 edited volume on South Asian Canadian literature remains a seminal contribution. Additionally, he, with his wife Nurjehan Aziz, co-founded and published a literary magazine, The Toronto South Asian Review (later The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad), which they ran for over twenty years. The magazine provided a platform for publication and discussions of works, especially by writers of South Asian origin, in Canada and elsewhere. Over the following two decades since 1993, Vassanji has produced four more novels—Amriika (2000), The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), The Assassin’s Song (2007), and The Magic of Saida (2012), plus a second short story collection, When She Was Queen (2005), a biography of Mordecai Richler (2009), and a travelogue, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008). Vassanji has also written numerous critical articles on a range of subjects including, but not limited to, politics, migration, and Canadian literature.

Currently, Vassanji is one of very few authors, if not the only one, treading the complex and intertwined territory of India, Africa, and Canada. His writing deals with those subjects that have not often been broached in the literary realm:

the migration of the South Asian communities, particularly the Gujarati Khojas, from Gujarat to East Africa to the West, their contributions to the development of the African nations, and their establishment in the Western countries such as England, the United States, and Canada;

the issues of race and ethnicity in the context of intertwining Indian and ­African histories, especially the history of the Sidis in India, which is a fast growing area of academic inquiry;

the history of the African nations, and the involvement of the African-Indian in political movements such as the Maji Maji uprising and the Mau Mau ­Revolution; the complexities of interracial and intercultural relationships—political and personal;

Gujarati culture and identity.

As Vassanji situates his characters in transnational spaces, history inevitably becomes his main terrain. Vassanji, as he himself admits, is obsessed with history.¹  In many ways, Vassanji’s writing is an attempt to read history alternatively and recognize that historical accounts are a matter of perspective. He challenges the understanding of history as linear. In fact, his works are a testimony to the complicated nature of history. For Vassanji, a writer plays a special role as a historian; according to him, a writer is:

[A] preserver of the collective tradition, a folk historian and myth maker. He gives himself a history; he recreates the past, which exists only in memory and is otherwise obliterated, so fast has his world transformed. He emerges from the oral, preliterate, and unrecorded to literate. In many instances this reclamation of the past is the first serious act of writing. Having reclaimed it, having given himself a history, he literates himself to write about the present. To borrow an image from physics, he creates a field space—of words, images and landscapes—in which to work with, and instal the present. (Vassanji, The Postcolonial Writer 63)

Vassanji’s desire to understand the past comes through in all his works, but especially in his travel memoir, A Place Within. In this travelogue, the reader sees an eager and meticulous historian. Attention to details, and an eye for the kind of historical minutiae that one does not always read in the mainstream history books, gives Vassanji’s writing an edge. But, as a writer digs into the past, he also finds information which may not be pleasing. In A Place Within, Vassanji comes across as a man thoroughly disturbed by violence that seized his ancestral land of Gujarat, much like Gandhi was in witnessing carnage that gripped India after its independence in 1947. Vassanji seems to inherit Gandhi’s agony. Like Gandhi, Vassanji tries to fathom the fear of violence that he observed during his first visit to India, but finds himself failing to comprehend it in any concrete terms. Vassanji’s attempts to understand this kind of situation also come forth in his Foreword to the Canadian edition of Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. He writes: The moral principle [Gandhi] had introduced as a tool to fight British imperialism went up in flames during the violence of the Partition. The depth of his anguish can only be imagined (xix). Gandhi, Vassanji elaborates, was controversial, both because of his personal practices and his policies, but ultimately, Vassanji argues, there can be no doubt that Gandhi is the great moral and spiritual exemplar of our time. Vassanji laments that [i]n our age of runaway materialism, however, Gandhi’s personal Truth may inspire, but has few committed followers (xix). Vassanji seems to imply that, if Gandhi’s principles of non-violence had been adhered to in post-independence India, the country may have benefitted from a reduction in the instances of communal violence that have pervaded its history, especially in the last couple of decades. Vassanji has a particularly difficult time coming to terms with violence in Gujarat, Gandhi’s birthplace:

And yet, in recent times, the bloodiest communal violence, with the most hideous attacks on human person, especially on women and children, has taken place with some regularity in this ancestral homeland, among these people I thought I knew, whom I have called—culturally, ancestrally—my people. For me to come to this realization has been profoundly shocking. If anything makes me feel alien here, it is my utter incomprehension of such violence, my inability to shrug it off. My generalization of Gujarat, too, was naïve, I realize; but, there it is, in tatters. (A Place Within 236)

Part of this naiveté that Vassanji carried with himself during his first visit may have come from the fact that Vassanji is a diaspora subject, having been raised outside of India, not having visited it until a later stage in life. He writes: To be resigned to the violence as many of my new Indian friends and acquaintances were, I realized, I would have to be born here. I was not (A Place Within 4). Vassanji thus experiences the anxiety that a diasporan usually does as he crosses national boundaries.

Diaspora²  has also been the predominant characteristic of the formation of nation-states. With the increase in global diasporic populations, the conceptions of selfhood based on singular culture are no longer adequate to describe the transnational dimensions of national identity. In fact, any nationalistic understanding of diaspora is somewhat problematic; as Robin Cohen affirms: Nation-states are about welding the locals to a single place, gathering peoples and integrating ethnic minorities. Diasporas, by contrast, imply multiple attachments. They accommodate to, but also resist, the norms and claims of nationalism (135). Diasporans bring with them varied experiences, cultures, traditions, languages, and memories, and translate and transform a static historical nation into a dynamic multinational and transnational society (Zhang 140). Such transnational existence leads to many interesting cultural exchanges, which a writer may bring to bear in his texts. As Basch, Schiller and Blanc elaborate:

In contrast to the past, when nation-states were defined in terms of a people sharing a common culture within a bounded territory, this new conception of nation-state includes as citizens those who live physically dispersed within the boundaries of many other states, but who remain socially, politically, culturally, and often economically part of the nation-state and their ancestors. (8)

The diasporic location is the space of the hyphen that tries to coordinate, within an evolving relationship, the identity politics of one’s place of origin with that of one’s present home (Radhakrishnan, xiii). The hyphenated space furthers a sense of displacement. Ian Chambers writes that [t]he migrant’s sense of being rootless, of living between worlds, between a lost past and a non-integrated present, is perhaps the most fitting metaphor of this (post)modern condition (27). But a migrant also deals with other challenges. Moving from one geopolitical space to another also involves moving from a certain emotional, psychological, and mental state to the other. Such crossing further affects identity-formation. Diaspora constantly pushes one to oscillate between the feeling of homeness and homelessness leading to a sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back (Rushdie 10). But what has been left behind cannot be reclaimed; what remains is not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imagined homelands (Rushdie 10). Vassanji has articulated these complexities of diaspora subject in different genres, through various characters and from a multiplicity of perspectives in his writing.

Moreover, Vassanji himself has lived in double diaspora and in many places—born of Indian heritage in East Africa, and now living in Canada. He says that he finds himself smeared not among two but three places—Africa, Canada, and India (A Letter). As Vassanji asserts, a diasporan belongs nowhere: Home is never a single place, entirely, unequivocally. But there is a reverse side to this in-between-ness: it is to belong precisely nowhere. One is pulled between places, stretched out thinly across the globe, in a surface existence. ‘Nowhere’ is truly home (A Letter). Vassanji further argues that this state of in-betweenness is not easy, although it has its satisfaction as one does not judge differences too readily and it’s easy to empathize (A Letter). So, for a diaspora subject, and in this context, a writer, where is home, if any? Vassanji asserts that his writing is partly a search for home:

What is home to me? If I think about it, it seems to me that my writing is in fact a search for home. The home that I lost and the home that I am seeking. I don’t believe in the simple process of leaving and arrival. I have not arrived. I may have unpacked, but I don’t think I have arrived … Home for me is a constant process. It is the search, the homelessness. It’s like being in a train, where there’s the thrill of the motion, the rhythm. Arrival would be disappointing, it would be an anticlimax. And in fact, a betrayal. You see, home is a tremendous guilt. So at best, writing is a home. (Vassanji, Home 8)

While Vassanji finds refuge in writing, his characters—many of whom, whether in No New Land, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, or The Magic of Saida—occupy a liminal state, and the angst synonymous with the state of being in diaspora. These characters deal with identity crises that are exacerbated in an unknown place, or a place where they do not belong as they are first, second, or third generation migrants. Many scholars have identified Vassanji’s characters as in-between or hybrid. But then, hybridity is a given for an immigrant. According to Salman Rushdie: [T]he great possibility that mass migration gives the world is the newness [that] enters the world because of mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and bit of that (394). Rushdie, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha and many others have used the term hybridity to indicate the evolution of new, dynamic, mixed cultures and identities. Many of Vassanji’s characters are hybrid and inhabit a transnational liminality. They belong everywhere and yet, nowhere; they live in a no man’s land, to evoke the title of Vassanji’s novel.

This collection was born of a conviction that Vassanji’s contributions to the global literary scene merit more in-depth scholarly notice. No doubt, Vassanji has attracted much attention in the learned communities in the last decade, and there are a significant number of articles that have been written covering several of his works. Yet, there is lack of full length collections focussing on his works. This book begins to address this void and draws critical attention to Vassanji’s contributions as an author who writes transnationally, and is read across geographical boundaries. In the articles published so far, his works have been read from many critical and theoretical approaches—postcolonial, postmodern, historical, sociological, and psychological among others³ . Much has been written about his earlier works including No New Land, The Book of Secrets, and The Gunny Sack. Thus, the focus of this volume is primarily on his later works, although the earlier works are discussed as well. The contributors of this book have particularly looked at The Assassin’s Song and A Place Within. The articles herein, most of which are comparative in focus, provide various interpretations of Vassanji’s writings—fiction and non-fiction—through a diversity of theoretical frameworks. The fulcrum of much of this research comes back to issues of globalization, transnationalism, identity, post-colonialism, cosmopolitanism and diaspora. It should also be noted that, while many critics have tried to fit Vassanji and his writing into national perimeters identifying him as Canadian, others as African or Indian, or all of these, none of the writers in this book argue that Vassanji, or his works, belong to any particular national paradigm. Rather, the chapters recognize Vassanji’s engagement with transnational issues and his preoccupation with history and politics, and concerns of home, migration, exile, loss, belonging, dislocation, violence, trauma, and identity as central to his writing.

This collection contains scholarly contributions which collectively touch on all the main issues mentioned above. The essays herein critically address Vassanji’s work through a variety of techniques and from a diversity of perspectives: close readings, analysis of texts using theoretical paradigms, as well as situating his literary contributions within the larger contexts of diasporic literatures, South Asian literatures, Canadian literatures and transnational literatures. The contributions scholars make to Vassanji-criticism is undeniable. However, two highlights of the collection are the new and detailed interview with Vassanji and a previously unpublished article, authored by Vassanji himself. These two pieces, found near the end of the collection, bring us full circle: the inception of this collection was, of course, Vassanji’s writing, which inspired the scholarship herein, and readers are left at the end with more information about Vassanji, his literary inspirations and his own critical perspectives on life and culture, which will undoubtedly inform future research.

The interview, which is divided into five parts, will provide the readers of this collection yet another way through which to understand Vassanji, his writing and his work. In the section on The Magic of Saida, he speaks of the novel’s background, the African poetry tradition, the involvement of Indians in the slave trade, his frustration with the situation in Africa, and the influence of Joseph Conrad on his writing. The second part of the interview reveals Vassanji’s interest in and knowledge of Indian cinema. Vassanji’s characters, whether situated in India, Africa, or Canada, share an intricate bond with films from India. Characters such as Karsan’s mother in The Assassin’s Song or Kamal’s wife in The Magic of Saida consume Indian films with much interest. Moreover, in A Place Within, Vassanji provides details about Hindi films and songs pertaining to the sites he visits. Indian films are an incredible point of connection for people in India itself, but also serve as a link to India for diaspora populations around the world. Vassanji, as he reveals in the interview, didn’t watch films actively while in Africa, but started exploring and studying them after moving to the United States and Canada. Even in 1950s and ‘60s when the films were not as easily accessible as they are today, many films were released in African countries, as well as in Europe. Stars such as Raj Kapoor and Nargis were especially popular in the Soviet Union and the Middle East. From what Vassanji says, it is clear that the Hindi films were readily available in African countries as well, and songs were part of Indian diasporic culture there. As he says, it is impossible not to have known some of the Hindi film songs; the songs, for better or for worse, have become a large part of Indian cultural memory around the world—including in Kenya and Tanzania where Vassanji was born and spent his youth. As Vassanji recalls some of Raj Kapoor’s and Rajesh Khanna’s films and the associated songs, readers become privy to—dare I say?—a romantic side to this writer. What further emerges from these talks is Indian diaspora’s connection to the home mediated via cinema. The other three sections of the interview reveal much about the inspiration and creative thinking behind The Assassin’s Song and A Place Within and certain facts about Vassanji’s life. He discusses several characters from his novels, as well as the syncretic Hindu-Muslim traditions, the Gujarati Khoja practices, and the Canadian literary culture. Vassanji is a private person; yet, in the interview he does open himself up to readers and allows us some insight into the more personal aspects of his history. He speaks with emotion about the struggles and sacrifices of his mother, who was widowed in her thirties and raised her children singlehandedly in a patriarchal African society. We discussed how this awareness of his mother’s struggles—and the difficulties that all women face in patriarchal societies—impacts the type of female characters he has created, despite never having yet felt inspired to create a leading female protagonist. However, returning to what Vassanji has already published, the volume opens with an article on The Assassin’s Song.

Annie Cottier, in her article, "Loss, Belonging and the Vagaries of Migration: Cosmopolitanism in M. G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song," explores how The