Diaspora, Literature, and Culture In Canada: Analysis Of Diasporic Writings Of M.G. Vassanji
Many writers have distinguished Vassanji's characters as in the middle of or cross-breed. But, at that point, hybridity is given for a migrant. He discovers asylum in composing, his characters – a considerable lot of whom, regardless of whether in No New Land, The In-between World of Vikram Lall, or The Magic of Saida involve a luminary condition of being in diaspora. The characters manage personality emergencies that are worsened in an obscure place, or a place where they don't have a place as they are to start with, second, or third era short-lived. As indicated by Salman Rushdie: “The 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”.
Vassanji has numerous novels, including: The Gunny Sack (1989), No New Land (1991), The Book of Secrets (1994), Amriika (2000), The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), The Assassin’s Song (2007), The Magic of Saida (2012), and Nostalgia (2016). The Toronto South Asian Review has survived under a new name: The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, and has branched out into publishing. Vassanji won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1990 (best debut novel in the African region) for The Gunny Sack. He has also won the Giller Prize in 1994 and 2003, the Bressani Literary Prize, and the Harbourfront Festival Prize. He also has two short story collections: Uhuru Street (1992) and When She Was Queen (2005).
Vassanji’s work deals with Indians living in East Africa. Some members of this immigrant community later undergo a second migration to Europe, Canada, or the United Sates. Vassanji is concerned with how these migrations affect the lives and identities of his characters, an issue that is personal to him as well: “the Indian diaspora is very important…once I went to the US, suddenly the Indian connection became very important: the sense of origins, trying to understand the roots of India that we had inside us”. And also his novel conceived of a tradition that his commitments to worldwide artistic scene prove more inside and out insightful notice. Almost certainly, he has pulled in much consideration in the scholarly groups in the most recent decade, and countless that have been composed covering a few of its works. However, there is bolt of full length accumulations concentrating on his works and it starts to discuss this void and attracts basic consideration regarding Vassanji's commitment as a writer who composes transnational, and is pursued crosswise over land limits. His works have been pursued from numerous basic and hypothetical methodologies postcolonial, post present day, authentic, sociological, and mental among others. Much has been composed about his before works including No New Land, The Book of Secrets, and The Gunny Sack. Accordingly, a focal point of this volume is basically on his later works, in spite of the prior works are talked about too. The supporters of this book have especially taken a glance at The Assassin’s Song and A Place Within. A large part of which similar in center, give different elucidations of Vassanji's works fiction and true to life through an assorted variety of hypothetical systems. The support of a lot of this exploration returns to issues of globalization, transnational, personality, post-imperialism, cosmopolitanism and diaspora which is likewise be noticed that, by numerous commentators have attempted to fit Vassanji and his written work into national borders distinguishing him as Canadian, others as African or Indian, or these, none of the writers contended that Vassanji, or his works, have a place with a specific national worldview or maybe, the parts perceive Vassanji's engagement with transnational issues and his distraction with history and governmental issues, and worries of home, relocation, banish, misfortune, having a place, disengagement, brutality, injury, and identity as key to his composition. This accumulation has academic commitment which by and large touch on all the principle issues specified about. The expositions in this fundamentally address Vassanji's works through an assortment of systems and from a decent variety of points of view: close readings, examination of writings utilizing hypothetical ideal models, and in addition arranging his scholarly commitment inside the bigger settings of diasporic written works, South Asian Literature, Canadian Literatures and transnational literary works.
The disporic entity continuously negotiates between two lands, separated by both time and space - history and geography - and attempts to redefine the present through a nuanced understanding of the past. Almost all Vassanji's works take the diasporic discourse which largely involves the predominance of such feelings as alienation, dispersal, longing for the ancestral homeland, the experience of migrancy, a double identification with the originary homeland and the adopted country, strategy of mystery and revelation in his narratives. In all his novels taken up for study there is variety of different subject positions within diaspora communities.
One of the abiding concerns is to focus on complex hybrid and hyphenated identities emerging among members of diaspora communities particularly of the first and second generations. There is an element of surprise and curiosity in his works. He is a master storyteller who uses history as a tool in his narratives to embark upon a journey of discovery of roots and reasons; the more of the one he unearths leaves him with less of the other. His novels generally deal with personal as well as public history. M. G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secret, it narrates the struggle of the Shamsis- a Muslim Community, immigrants from India, trapped in British-German border struggle, besieged for Independence along with the incidents that occur in the diary of Pius Femandes. All the characters in the novel are held in secondary importance to the Book of Secrets, they are all seen in relation to it. Even people who have no apparent connection with "the book" are slowly drawn into its votex and absorbed by it. On one level it is about Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, for it is these three nations which were born of the former East Africa and the time span of the novel is stretched far into their postcolonial, independent existence.
The novel is about cities of Mombasa, Voi, Kikono and Nairobi in Kenya, Moshi, Taveta, Tanga, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar in Tanzania for it is here that action takes place, and the characters are either born or brought up here. The novel is set in Africa and the politics are both imperial and postcolonial. Vassanji's novel is located at the intersection between story and history, between the fictional and the factual as well as between realism and the representational character of all art.
The Gunny Sack (1989), the first novel by Vassanji, celebrates the spirit of early Asian migrants from India who moved to East Africa in the early 1900s. The Gunny Sack is the sprawling multi-generation saga has spawned by Dhanji Govindji, who has left Junapur in Gujarat in the last century when the slave trade flourished and Europe ruled Africa, and has sailed in search of fortune for two months in a dhow to reach Zanzibar, the isle of enchantment. From there he has migrated to Tanganyika, and set up a duka, a shop, in a village Matamu, along the coast. Dhanji Govindji, a Shamshi - a unique Hindu-Muslim sect - like all his countrymen brought his quota of India with him, but soon commingled inextricably with the land of his adoption. He took a local woman, Bibi Taratibu, to warm him on 'cold nights'; and it was from this branch of his family that the narrator of The Gunny Sack, Salim Juma, was descended. The memory of Salim Juma, the protagonist, of The Gunny Sack acts as a symbolic space where he remembers dislocated Asian African experience in East Africa. This remembering includes finding family history which was unknown to him. The novel begins by introducing the reader to a symbol of accumulated but has unorganized and incomplete memories that is to a sack in The Gunny Sack.
In the beginning of the novel one can distinctly feel empty spaces that evoke a sense of loss as there are both missing ancestors and missing descendants . The readers are placed in between an absent past and uncertain future. In the novel Vassanji weaves together different strands and different levels of narrative – traditional and modern, oral and written – and draws together the voices has remembered and filtered through the consciousness of various characters and the novel is polyphonic in nature where Vassanji makes a lot of characters mouthpieces of stories. The author indicates in several ways why historical memory might be available to human subjects, to expand our notion of personal experience, to refer to both ways of feeling and ways of knowing, and to include not just individual selves but also collectives – as through the Asian African experience Vassanji also acquaints us with the experiences of their community in the context of how they felt when they were wedged in between Germans and natives and when different parts of Africa were declared independent. Thus, in The Gunny Sack, Vassanji shows the identity crisis of first generation and second generation migrants in Africa, who in spite of their ill-treatment by Africans stay in Africa.
The second novel of Vassanji’s No New Land is an infotainment dissecting the Canadian multicultural mosaic redacted by dynamics of emigration. Canada has been a refugee to many Asians and Africans who were dislocated during the colonial era of English. All South Asians now living in Canada are from Pakistan or Sri Lanka; many came from India, via Africa or the Caribbean, where their ancestors had setteled in British colonies either in the nineteenth century or the early twentieth. After most of these colonies gained independence from Britain in the 1960s, many of their Indian citizens immigrated to western countries such as Britain, Canada and the United States. The Lalani family in Vassanji’s No New Land represents the transplanted and dislocated Asians. The Britishers knew that Indians could be trustworthy administrators, clerks, menial servants. Hence, the Indians were taken to Malaya, Burma, Ceylon, the British colonies in Africa. The first wave of migration is in vogue during the Asian and African imperial rule. Vassanji has delineated this first wave of emigration in all most all his fictional works and No New Land is no exception to this. Nurdin Lalani, the protagonist of the novel epitomizes the attributes of a person who has forsaken his individual respect and individual identity with the homeland. The novel explicates Canada as a dream land for people from developing countries all over the world and especially Africa and Asia. Nurdin Lalani’s family undertakes the flight of enormous hopes for promising prospect of high living and has secured identity. Lalanis are denied economic sustenance in Tanganyika like other Asians and so embark on their navigation. Nurdin take leave of his past and perform his expedience of emerging a new trend, a new living in Canada land with opulence and technically advancement.
The Book of Secrets is one of the finest novels of M. G. Vassanji. The story begins in east Africa at the time of World War I, as German Tanganyika andBritish Kenya are about to go to war, and stretches to the present day. It has acomplex narrative including omniscient storytelling about the past, quotationsfrom letters and journals, and the first person narration of a Goan school teachernamed Pius Fernandes. The novel is the diary of Alfred Corbin, a junior colonial administrator in an Indian community in British East Africa in 1913. Half a century later, in 1988, Pius receives an old diary found in the back room of an east African shop. Pius Femandes, a retired school teacher, who has served decades at a community school in the former German colony and British protectorate of Tanzania, becomes interested and begins to research the coded history he encounters in its terse, laconic entries. "You taught history sir, can you write it?" is the question when Feroze handed the diary to Pius Femandes. He, has perplexed by the puzzle of the incomplete diary, tries to fill the gaps to make a meaningful story out of it. The diary uncovers a story of forbidden liaisons and simmering vengeances, family secrets and cultural exiles - a story that leads him on an investigative journey through his own past and Africa's. The story is like a journey exploring the past as well as present. It explores the border between the self and the other, between giving voice and remaining silent, between the centre and the periphery as well as between the pure and the hybrid. It is as much about the past as it is about the present. It is observed by Simatei in the following lines, Vassanji [. . . ] is not interested in constructing a discourse overtlyoppositional to the colonial one. This certainly has something to dowith the position occupied by the East African Asians in the raciallylayered colonial system where they were more part of the colonising structure than a colonised people.
M. G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets is a polyphonic novel offering a variety of stories. The past and the present gets so intermingled that at one point the narrator becomes the character and as Pius admits "And so I know, am forewarned. Ultimately the story is the teller's, it's mine". Pius fernandes, is a Goan, he comes to the former German now British colony of Tanzania form a small Portuguese colony in India. He does not belong to one of the Indian communities who have settled in east Africa, and there can be no doubt that he is to some extent an outsider. Every major and minor character in novel migrates at least once. While Corbin, Maynard and Mariamuare displaced, the three most interesting instances of migration in Vassanji's novel are Pipa, Pius and Gregory. Pipa was borm in Moshi, moves between Moshi, Tanga, Dar es Salaam and Kikono.
The next novel of M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, (2003), Vassanji has set his story in the land of his birth Kenya for the most part, his main fictional characters come not from the Muslim Shamsi community as before but from the Punjabi-Hindu community settled in Kenya and various characters find themselves located/dislocated at different times. The novel uses Kenyan history to formulate much of its background and major historical events. Two real public figures, President Jomo Kenyatta and J. M. Kariuki, who has played significant roles in the making of the history of their country appear in the novel as fictional characters. The material from history has, of course, not been used in a mechanical way. Vassanji, in the manner of a creative writer, goes beyond the real to create a new artistic reality in which the specific rises to a universal level. As in his other novels, the mode of narration in this novel, too, is limited to the protagonist's point of view. It is Vikram Lall who tells his story from his hiding place in a way that it becomes a chronicle of the troubled times in the pre-and post-independent Kenya. The author exploits all devices so that the narrator can report other characters' thoughts and the events he does not see, overheard conversations, other characters' accounts and intercepted letters. This way he makes his story sound true. The point of view from which the story is told has much to do with verisimilitude. The best way to achieve verisimilitude is to tell the story from the inside. Vikram's story achieves credibility as it is told at a point when he has no stakes in camouflaging or sentimentalizing what he has experienced or witnessed. At the outset, he makes his intentions clear:I have the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa's most comipt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilion cunning. To me has been attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled country's treasury in recent years. I head my country's list of Shame. These and other descriptions actually flatter my intelligence, if not my moral sensibility. But I do not intend here to defend myself or even seek redemption through confession; I simply crave to tell my story.
In In-Benveen World of Vikram Lall, M. G. Vassanji uses history to bring home the disturbing truth about the diaspora's hopeless uncertainty, its perpetual state of in-betweenness, an ineluctable destiny from which it has no escape. It underlines the fact that instablities and dislocations constitute the diasporic experience. It shows how historical events determine the choices made by individuals, and shape the destiny of the whole community. In this novel, Vassanji places his protagonist in the thick of events. He manipulates his narrative skilfully to capture the minutest ripples of the human heart. The sweet bond of love between the British Janice and African Mungai and the tragic love affair between Deepa and Njoroge contribute greatly to the over-all emotional appeal of the novel. The sweep of events that storm Vikram's life has a haunting quality about it.
Vassanji has really captured a wide and authentic perspective of vividly has portrayed events which crisscross the boundaries of dry history and spellbinding fiction. Vassanji’s own works might be seen as taking a step forward, since the acceptance of diasporic literature as Canadian literature may contribute to the myth that multiculturalism is somewhat effective. If immigrant literature participates in the construction of the nation, then it may help people accept an emerging Canadian society made up of peoples of different colours and backgrounds
