Vassanji: Spring in my step and the story of our lives
Writer M.G. Vassanji when he visited Kenya on January 24, 2013. Below: The cover of his new book. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
- I ask Vassanji about his Canadian experience. “It has been very positive. I am allowed to be what I am. I can dare say ‘And home was Kariakoo’” — signalling his memoir of the same title, referring to the area in Dar es Salaam where he grew up.
- Standing between the Kenyan and the Canadian flags, Vassanji wryly acknowledged the symbolism of that space before proceeding to read sections in a novel that, in crucial ways, summarises his most dominant striving as a writer, the desire to understand his place in the world.
- Is this lack due to the old fear or discomfort of baring the inner workings of a community? “Possibly”, he says, adding that “people should tell the world about themselves, or the world will fill in the gaps on its own terms.
A week ago, I was honoured to join friends and colleagues in literature for a literary cocktail organised Storymoja and hosted by the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi. The cocktail was in honour, yet again, of MG Vassanji, the Kenyan-born nuclear physicist who emigrated to Canada and now the leading East African Asian novelist whose focus on experiences of South Asian migrants has made him world-famous.
At the event, Vassanji read from The In-Between World of Vikram Lall to an audience that included Canadian High Commissioner to Kenya, Sarah Hradecky, and literary scholars Ken Walibora, Garnet Oluoch-Olunya, Kamau wa Goro, and Wandia Njoya, as well as Zahid Rajan and Zarina Patel, editors of AwaaZ, a cultural magazine about which I wrote some time back.
Standing between the Kenyan and the Canadian flags, Vassanji wryly acknowledged the symbolism of that space before proceeding to read sections in a novel that, in crucial ways, summarises his most dominant striving as a writer, the desire to understand his place in the world. It is a concern that is shared by a wider group of East Africans, whose ancestry is traceable to the Indian sub-continent.
It was quite generous of Vassanji, on the sidelines of the cocktail, to accept my request of setting aside two hours the following day for a conversation that we could not hold at the cocktail. At the Muthaiga Mini Market, where we met, I found Vassanji on the phone, his demeanour and simple orientation saying little about his knowledge of literature and of the world generally.
Alone, perhaps left alone or ignored by those who knew nothing of him, he reminded me of Richard Ntiru’s poem, “Introduction”, which dramatises the lonely life of academics.
We soon got talking, and from the mouth and brain of a guru, I soaked in insights that are unknown to many. Almost thirty years since he wrote The Gunny Sack, the writer has just published his latest novel, Nostalgia, which deals with issues of aging and dying, and the possibility of prolonging life. Under these circumstances, one may want to shed the past through medical science, or a government could use the techniques to “disappear” those it considers undesirable. In both cases the person would be given false memories, or fictions.
I was honoured to join friends and colleagues in literature for a literary cocktail organised Storymoja and hosted by the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi. At the event, Vassanji read from The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. PHOTO | STORYMOJA
STRANGELY COMPELLING
A refugee from Syria would become someone who remembers growing up in a farm in Peoria, Illinois. But is it possible to completely erase a past? Suppose a bit of it returns like a worm through a crack — Vassanji calls this phenomenon Nostalgia.
Does it mean, therefore, that the idea of the gunny sack is still relevant now, and did that debut novel of the same title serve is purpose? The affirmative response from a reflective Vassanji is followed by his declaration of the text’s relevance to people beyond him. “It is a book that many people identified with; it acknowledged people’s lives. It was about memories” of pioneer South Asians in East Africa, or exiles in post-colonial grammar.
In Reflections on Exile, Said describes exile as “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Whatever one does, whether successful or not, it is difficult to overcome “the crippling sorrow of estrangement.”
It is a variant of this crippling sorrow of estrangement that one reads of in this latest of Vassanji’s novels, and one that prompts me to ask him what he thinks of other East African Asian writers and their works. East African Asian literature “does not exist”, he says. “Maybe (Abdulrazak) Gurnah and (Yusuf Kodwavwala) Dawood… in the sixties there were serious attempts to forge such literature — one thinks of (Bahadur) Tejani, the two Kassams (Amin and Yusuf), (Peter) Nazareth, (Kuldip) Sondhi. But not any more. Of course in non-fiction there are many, including Issa Shivji and Abdul Sharrif in Tanzania.”
Is this lack due to the old fear or discomfort of baring the inner workings of a community? “Possibly”, he says, adding that “people should tell the world about themselves, or the world will fill in the gaps on its own terms. For example, in the west, when Africa comes up, people conjure up pictures of malaria, Aids, poverty. As if this could characterise life on the continent.”
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
I remind him about other attempts to reclaim cultural and political spaces in the region through initiatives like Awaaz and the Asian Weekly. “They are doing an excellent job, but we should avoid exclusivity or the tendency to ghettoize… to think in terms of them and us.
The Asians should open up to cultural influences from the rest of the nation. There should be an evolution in music, film, fashion. These cannot be exclusively coming from India and Pakistan. There is need for a kind of cultural revolution. There is, for instance, an Asian rap group in Tanzania, rapping in Kiswahili. Is there the same in Kenya?”
I ask Vassanji about his Canadian experience. “It has been very positive. I am allowed to be what I am. I can dare say ‘And home was Kariakoo’” — signalling his memoir of the same title, referring to the area in Dar es Salaam where he grew up. “People now realise that you can be several things at once, you don’t have to be either this or that. I am respected in Canada as a writer, even though I focus on Kenya, Tanzania, and India. Of course, even in Canada there are those in the cultural community who view themselves as guardians of a certain nationalist spirit. But their time is past.”
On my pet subject of homes, I wonder whether Vassanji has made a home in Canada. “Canada is home. It has allowed me to write. But I also have homes in other places… When I land in Nairobi, there comes a spring to my step, I immediately start conversing in Kiswahili with anyone I can. To me a Tanzanian or Kenyan is a ndugu (brother), and this I tell my kids.”
What about what I read as a certain disquiet with your other home, India? “Yes. I realised that India is relevant to me, but there were certain things about it that I could not accept, and this was to label people — essentially and irrevocably — by their faiths. In this respect I found myself to be an alien, an African and a westernised — Canadian — person.”
All these naturally lead me to ask Vassanji about the place of journeys and their impact on his writings. “The journeys that I wrote about in A Place Within: Rediscovering India reawakened something in me that I thought was long dead — my Indian-ness. I realised that India was alive. I was accepted for as long as I concealed my faith.
I made friends, and I wrote a novel — The Assassin’s Song — set in the place of my ancestral home. And Home Was Kariakoo was a thrilling homage to my childhood home. It was a joyful expression of my African identity, taking me back to a time when my identity was not in question.”
