THE GUNNY SACK : A STUDY
Diasporic writings are invariably concerned with exile, memory, diasporic
consciousness, longing for return, alienation and search for identity. All
these characteristics find unique articulation in the novels of M.G. Vassanji.
Vassanji has produced five novels tracing the migration of people from South
Asia in the late 19th century to East Africa, and then from Africa to North
America in the 1960s and 1970s. The Gunny
Sack is one of them. It deals with the story of four generations of Asians
in Tanzania. Here the author has examined the theme of identity, displacement
and race-relations. He also has endeavoured to retain and re-create oral
histories and mythologies that have long been silenced.
The Gunny Sack celebrates the spirit of Asian pioneers who moved to
East Africa in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The novelist provides an
insightful look also into the culture of one particular group of Indians who
were born and grew up in East Africa during the mid 20th century. Living under
German colonial rule, the family of Dhanji Govindji become permanent residents
of Africa while witnessing historical events that result in the birth of
African nationalism. In this fantastic piece of work the writer focuses on the problematic
union of East Africa and South Asia. The tension arising from the contact
between the two lands is captured mostly in the characters that migrated from
India to East Africa. Here most of the Asian African characters such as Dhanji
Govindji and his descendent Salim Juma take part in the quest for new homes and
identity. It is interesting that the same quest for new homelands that were
more promising in terms of prosperity was to be Govindji’s downfall.
The main story of this
novel is narrated by Salim Juma. It is he who is bequeathed a gunny sack by his
mystical grandaunt named Ji Bai. This sack is an ancient sack that is full of
mementos. It appears as a metaphor for the collective memory. It becomes a
device to recall the author’s family history in India, Africa, England and
finally North America. Nicknamed ‘Shehru’, the gunny unravels a gallery of
characters whose unwritten stories reflect the Asian experience in East Africa
over four generations. It seems that the novel is both the story of one extended
family’s arrival and existence in East Africa as well as a repository for the
collective memory and oral history of many other Asian Africans.
The first section of The Gunny Sack is very interesting. In
this section we see that Dhanji Govindji arrives to Zanzibar as a trader from
Junapur in Gujarat in the late 19th century and then settles at Matamu in
Tanzania. He has a son, Husein, with a discarded African slave, Bibi Taratibu.
Later growing in prosperity, Dhanji Govindji marries Fatima. She is of Indian
extraction. She is the Squint-eyed daughter of a Zanzibari widow with unknown
antecedents. But when Dhanji Govindji’s half African son Hussein disappears
into the east hinterland, he pays out his fortune in attempt to find him again.
In search of Husein he devotes more and more time. In this search mission he
spends not just his own money but embezzles that of others to support his
search mission of his lost son. One morning Dhanji Govindji is mysteriously
murdered. The cause of Dhanji’s death is narrated as a shabby affair that might
be tied to his serving of ties with his relatives in India so as to establish
himself and his descendents in the new world:
A few years before, the Shamsi
community in India had been torn apart by strife. Various parties had sprung
up, with diverging fundamentalist positions, each taking up some thread of the
complex and sometimes contradictory set of traditional beliefs, hitherto
untainted by theologian hands, to some extreme conclusion and claiming to
represent the entire community. The bone of contention among Shia, Sunni, Sufi
and Vedanti factions became the funds collected in the small centres and
mosques. Faced with this situation, Dhanji simply stopped sending the money on
to any of the big centres and kept it in trust for the Matamu community. The
strife had resulted in the murders in Bombay and Zanzibar. And now it seemed,
in Matamu…. Mukhi Dhanji Govindji, Sharrifu to the Swahilis, was buried with
full honours by the village of Matamu, carried in a procession of males headed
by Shamsi, Bhatia and Swahili elders to the grave, grieved for by women
ululating along the way.1
We can read the
implications of the strife outside Matamu in far away India as being intimately
connected with Matamu itself. Moreover, we can also read the implications of
Govindji’s mental turmoil on his community. As he has stopped sending funds to
the mother community of the Shamsis back in India, Govindji declared the
autonomy of the Shamis of East Africa and sought independence. There are
insinuations in the novel that Dhanji Govindji had used money drawn from public
coffers for personal needs without consulting other faithful. This independence
of the mind was the one that had enabled him to make a journey in a dhow across
the Indian Ocean to Zanzibar. In the novel, this act of dislocation from the
originary homeland in Junapur and locating oneself in the East African coast is
very significant. This act was to be the initial step in the troublesome quest
to belong that future generation of Govindji’s family such as Salim Juma were
to face.
The second section of the
novel is named after Kulsum. Kulsum is Govindji’s granddaughter. She becomes
the wife of Husein’s son named Juma. In the novel she appears as the mother of
Salim Juma who is the main narrator of The Gunny Sack. Herein this
section we learn of the older Juma’s childhood as a second-class member of his
stepmother’s family after his mother Moti dies. At this time the family of
Govindji has mushroomed into various related families of cousins and siblings.
The late Juma Husein’s family has emigrated again from Tanzania to Kenya in
colonial Nairobi. After his wedding to Kulsum there is a long wait in the
unloving bosom of his stepfamily for their first child, Begum.
It is the 1950, and
whispers are beginning of the Mau-Mau rebellion. A segment of the novel
addresses itself to a description of these troubled times of rising African
nationalism. When Juma Husein dies in Nairobi, his family of Kulsum with her
children including young Salim Juma, the narrator, moves back to Dar es Salaam.
And gradually Kulsum’s son Salim Juma takes over the narration of The Gunny
Sack from his mother, recalling his own childhood. His life guides the
narrative from here on. Memory becomes the guiding force at this stage.
Salim
Juma now remembers his mother’s store and neighbour’s intrigues the beauty of
his pristine English teacher, Miss Penny (later Mrs. Gaunt) at primary school
in colonial Dar, cricket matches and attempts commune with the ghost of his father.
It is a vibrantly described, deeply felt childhood. Tanzania where the family
lives meanwhile is racked by racialist political tensions on its road to
independence, which comes about as Salim Juma reaches adolescence. With the
surge in racial tension and nationalist rioting, several members of his
close-knit community leave the country under feelings of rising unhomliness.
They go to England, the United States and Canada in search of other new homes.
‘Amina’ is the title of
the third section of The Gunny Sack. She is an African girl. Salim juma
loves her too much. He meets her while doing his National Service at Camp
Uhuru, a place he feels he has been sent to in error. This is so because the
National Service was a prerequisite for joining University. Due to their
exclusivity and unpredictable future as a migrant community, most Asian African
families would go long way to make their children go to National Service Camps
near Dar es Salaam where the core of the community lived. But Salim’s name -- Juma,
an African name, and his dark complexion due to his ancestry from Bibi Taratibu
could not convince the recruitment officers that he was not an indigenous
African. In spite of pleas from his family he was sent to the farthest National
Service Camp in northern Tanzania where he was the only Asian African amidst
many indigenous African colleagues. This exposure was a blessing as disguise as
it forged his African sense of self, only for it to be betrayed later in the
novel, when he was persecuted on racial grounds by the Tanzanian government,
because he was of Asian extraction.
Salim develops an intimate
relationship with Amina at the camp Uhuru. Amina is an indigenous African, and
their relationship inevitably causes Juma’s family anxiety, until the increasingly
militant Amina leaves for New York. Salim becomes a teacher at his old school
in independent Dar. After that he marries an Asian African but keeps a place
for Amina in his heart and in fact names his daughter Amina. When the older
Amina returns from the United States, the increasingly repressive independent
Tanzanian government arrests her. In fact she had turned into a racial human
rights activist. Due to his close acquaintance with Amina, Salim hurriedly
exiles abroad on safety grounds. He leaves an Asian African wife and daughter.
The novel ends with
dejected Salim alone in a basement of a flat somewhere in Canada, the last
memories coming out of a gunny sack he inherits, hoping that he will be the
last migrant of his family-line. The last paragraph of the last chapter of The
Gunny Sack captures Juma’s wish:
The running must stop now, Amina. The cycle of escape and rebirth,
uprooting and regeneration, must cease in me. Let this be last runway, returned
with one last, quixotic dream. Yes, perhaps here lies redemption, a faith in
the future, even if it means for now to embrace the banal present, to pick up
the pieces of our wounded selves, our wounded dreams, Little, One, we dreamt
the world, which was large and beautiful and exciting and it came to us this
world, even though it was more than we bargained for, it came in large soaking
waves and wrecked us but we are thankful, for to have dream was enough. And so,
dream, Little Flowered.2
Salim Juma, the narrator
who now lives as an exile in Canada, utters this above-mentioned passage. He is
just one of the droves of Asian Africans who left East Africa after
independence for Britain, Canada and the United States. After the migration of
his forebear, Dhanji Govindji, from Junapur in India to Zanjibar; after the
migration of his family from Tanzania to Kenya, then back to Tanzania and
finally after his migration to Canada, Salim is tired and exhausted by the
perpetual feelings of unhomliness and impossibility of belonging.
The question that we
should ask ourselves is: Is Vassanji’s choice of the imaginative scene as a
concluding part of The Gunny Sack a matter of chance or is it a
conscious discursive strategy that make the reader reflect on the dislocated
experience of the Asian Africans of East Africa over historical times? Is
exiled Salim the product of the locations he occupied or rather his community
occupied as migrant people in East Africa?
The answer to the
reflection above may arise out of a further sampling of Govindji’s originary
story in the first part of the novel, in the very beginning with the story of
Salim’s progenitor, Dhanji Govindji. In one particular instance reminiscing
about how he came to East Africa, Govindji tells his African born
daughter-in-law, Ji Bai:
As you approach it [Africa] from the sea, as you enter the harbour, you
see to the right all these beautiful, white buildings of the Europeans… behind
his beautiful white European face of the town is our modest Indian district,
every community in its own separate area, and behind that the African quarter
going right into the forest.3
The community of South
Asians who came to East Africa before or at the time of British imperialism has
now given rise to several other generations that in popular East African
discourse are known simply as ‘Asians’. In East Africa this community inhabits
a middle area, both in colour and status, between European whites and African
blacks. The attempt to make sense out of inhabiting worlds in-between the black
and the white has in fact become a congenital theme and leitmotif in almost all
genres of writings of Asian from East Africa. The imaginative writings of Asian
African writers such as Peter Nazareth, Bahadur Tejani, Pheroze Nowrojee,
Jagjit Singh and Kuldip Sondhi who wrote about the Asian experience in East
Africa in the 1960s and early 1970s serve as prominent examples. This literary
agenda persists in the oeuvre of the more contemporary Vassanji. It is argued
that Vassanji’s community, historically and socio-politically, was strictly never
a part of the Black/ White (post) coloniality but a community in-between the
two. By demarcating the land into three and situating the Asians in-between the
Africans and the Whites, M.G. Vassanji is playing out his commitment as a
historical translator but is also doing other things as well.
At
the very outset of The Gunny Sack, an examination of the settings
reveals that they convey a certain sense of in-between ness, especially when
seen from the perspective of the Asian Africans of East Africa. Take the
example of the place Matamu, a fictional location somewhere in present-day
Tanzania, especially as described in the following passage:
Matamu, the name always had a tart
sound to it, an after taste to the sweetness, a far-off echo that spoke of a
distant, primeval time, the year zero. An epoch that cast a dim but sombre
shadow present. It is the town where my forebear unloaded his donkey one day
and made his home. Where Africa opened its womb to India and produced a being
who forever stalks the forest in search of himself.4
A sense of identity, a feeling of discrimination and
demarcation, has always been in the writings of the literary members of Indian
diaspora. Writing from a ‘hyphenated’5 space probably instigates
authors like M.G. Vassanji to manifest their expressions of identity. In The
Gunny Sack, M.G. Vassanji talks about volatile union of Africa and
expatriate Indians. The being formed from this union is charged with the
relentless quest of trying to find its own true meaning. The identity that the
Indians are searching for is produced through this union. Salim Juma recounts
the consequences of the family movement from Porbandar, India to Zanzibar,
Africa. The narration carries an air of vividness and a sense of reality, as
Salim recounts the fortune of his family under German, then British
colonialism, and finally under Julius Nyrere’s socialism in independent
Tanzania. It is a spirited saga of alliances, rivalries, success and failures.
It illustrates the ability of the Shamsi community to survive oppression,
fragmentation and displacement. For these children of Africa and India, the
question of identity becomes an important issue. The maintenance of traditions
and culture turns out to be significant.
M.G. Vassanji seems to suggest that when several cultures
exist together, it is essential for each culture to have its own distinguishing
identity. But when this identity is imposed on a particular culture on the
basis of race, colour and religion, the cruel brutalities become rife with
reality. Vassanji focuses on this part of reality in his works. In The Gunny
Sack the colour of human creed becomes important. The characters of this
novel seem to draw their identities on this basis. The following cosmogonic
myth offered to salim by his mother Kulsum attests to this fact:
When God was well and ready after all
his exertions finally to create mankind, he sat himself beside a red-hot oven
with a plate of dough. From this he fashioned three identical dolls. He put the
first doll into the oven to finish it, but alas, brought it out too soon. It
came out white and undone. In this way was born the white race. With this
lesson learnt, the Almighty put the second doll into the oven, but this time he
kept it in for too long. It came out burnt and black. Thus the black race.
Finally the One and Only put the last doll inside the oven, and brought it out
just the right time, it came out golden brown, the Asian, simply perfect.6
This ‘theory of creation’7 seems to be the basic
theory around which the whole novel revolves. Even the main characters such as
the narrator Salim get their names according to this theory:
Thus our nicknames: Sona for the
golden boy, the youngest and favourite, my brother, Jamal; Kala for the one who
came between Salim, Salum in Swahili, the overdone.8
The narrator’s mother invokes the above-cited myth to
explain the politics of colour and belonging to her sons Salim and Sona. They
are reminded of that they occupy the same place as their forefathers whom they
relate to in two ways. This is by way of skin colour and cultural identity and
by the way of the interstitial location they occupy in-between the black and
white races of their world.
The sense of being that Vassanji portrays for all the
characters comes from the theory of discrimination. Perhaps through this
observation, Vassanji draws our attention not only to the circumstances under
which Asian Africans developed their interstitiality but also to the fact that
they have lost their sense of a secure identity, theirs is now an identity of
the in-between space, an identity that does not make sense in a world
interpreted in terms of Black or White.
At one place in the novel, Kala Juma narrates his sexual
encounter with the Swahili girl Amina:
I heaved and embraced her waist, pressing
deeper…. and I got her… and her legs moved apart ever so slightly to receive
me.9
The contentment to the conquest of aggressive, intrusive
male sexuality over the supine, passive, sex hungry female body is proved to be
brief and illusory. Mother Kulsum’s objections to this affair thwart it.
Edward, Salim Juma’s foster father, too frowns upon the alliance. He says to
Kala Juma, ‘Africans and Asians are different… it’s like the story of….’10
The unsaid pert of this rebuke speaks a whole volume of an
unhappy family history of cross-alliance or misalliance that Dhanji had
started. Desire of the narrator for autonomous selfhood becomes inconsequential
in the face of the historical forces of race and class difference in the
diasporan space. A constant sense of shame, discomfiture and uncertainty about
self- identity owing to being a half-cast prevents him from forging a
relationship in terms of marriage with Zainab and affiliating himself with
remnants of an already fractured Shamsi community. For his dubious background
he suffers violence and humiliation at the hands of Zanib’s brother. Thus he
turns to Amina.
During Kala Juma’s brief affair with Amina, the barriers of
race and class created by the colonial history of Africa between them prove to
be insurmountable in the post-independent nation. The exclusionary discourse of
‘Africa and Africans’ after independence calls into play the racial categories
of discrimination and difference, in which Kala Juma stands on the fringes of
the nation as ‘the other’. In this
context the following conversation between Kala Juma and Amina is significant:
“Why do you call me an Indian? I was
born here. My father was born here even my grandfather.”
She accusingly answers, “And then?
Beyond that? What did they come to do, these ancestors of yours? …perhaps you
conveniently forgot…they financed slave trade!”
“And what of your Swahili ancestors,
Amina? If mine financed slave trade, your ran it.”11
The accusation and counter-accusation in which Kala Juma
and Amina engage demonstrate how in a diasporan space of conflicting
subjectivities ‘past’ is deployed and counter deployed for inscribing oneself
in ‘home’ while excluding the other. Here Juma’s attempts – as part of Indian
Diaspora – at staking claims to a land as home and forging intimate personal
relationship are challenged by Amina. Arrogating to herself the originary
notions of indigenous self-hood, she constructs a discourse of
post-independence nationhood and home from which some people labelled as
‘outsiders’ are to be excluded. What she clearly forgets is the mix-up of
Arab-African races in her Swahili blood. The barriers of class and race that
separated Amina from Kala Juma would not come in-between herself and Mark, for
the white man from the first world enjoys universal preference in the global
cultural economy for his racial superiority and imperial strength.
Amina comes home to Tanzania. She is charged with
conspiracy to overthrow the government. Kala Juma fears that he too may be
implicated in the same crime due to his association with Amina. So he runs away
from the country and arrives in Canada via Lisbon and Boston. Many others,
namely Uncle Goa, Zera Auntie, Hassan Uncle, Jamal Juma alias, Sona, Kala
Juma’s brother too leave Tanzania, which proves hostile to the Indian diaspora
in the post-independence period. Even in the New World they are treated badly.
In such a situation the diasporic Vassanji’s fate or that of his fictional
characters become really precarious, and they belong neither here nor there. As
a result their identities become ambiguous and inauthentic both at the native
home in the First World.
The diasporic subjectivities that Vassanji and his
characters illustrate are transfigured many times over in multiple sites
through self-chosen migrancy or enforced wanderings as well as exile. Since
diasporic identities get constantly ruptured together with their language,
class, race and gender denominations, and get mutated as well as reconstituted
in the trans-local spaces, the originary notions of home which are imagined
over and over again in different ways across borders and boundaries become
ambiguous in Vassanji’s case as well as in case of other diasporic writers.
Having been removed from a place of supposed origin and without emotional, political
and cultural affiliations, to territorially bound, static localities diasporic
people move on, as indeed their homes do. Like tortoises and their shells.
Peter G. Mandeville, therefore, comments that ‘identity and place’12
of diasporic communities ‘travel together’13 and these communities
practice ‘the complex politics of simultaneous here and there’. 14
For Vassanji, home is multi-locational in urban sites. Land
based ties and strong social bonds that would generally hold together people
rooted in native, rural places do not apply to this Kenyan-born-Tanzanian
expatriate writer of Ismaili-Indian descent, domiciled in Canada. Owing to his
over-hyphenated identity, the question of exilic condition in the urban
landscape for him becomes entwined with the notion of home away from home in
one sense and no home in particular in another sense. Home in his case is
freighted with enormous investments of the imaginary. At least this is
impression he casts on us when we read his interviews. In an interview with Sayantan,
Vassanji says:
I am more comfortable defining myself
in terms of my locale and city. That way Dar es Salaam would be probably the
first place that figures as home. Every writer, I think belongs to his city, to
the streets and his urban landscape, assuming he is part of an urban ethos.
Another place I could call home in that sense would be Toronto in Canada.15
In another interview with Gene Carey, Vassanji says:
Once I came to the United States I had
a fear of losing my link with Tanzania. Then I feared going back because if I
went back I feared losing the new world one had discovered.16
Vassanji’s statements make it clear that he is caught
between the homes ‘there’ and ‘here’. On the basis of the idea of
multi-locational home he conciliates between the nostalgic desire for home and
community through his characters. These characters are people living on the
fringes of host society and dreaming of a home, replete with intimate memories
and feelings of emotional affiliations. The narrator’s remark in The Gunny
Sack sums up the lives of the Indian traders:
Among the trading immigrant peoples,
loyalty to a land or a government, always loudly professed, is a trait one can
normally look for in vain. Governments may come and go, but the immigrant’s only
concern is the security of their families, their trade and their savings.17
Their lives that unfold a saga of self-survival through
countless dispersion, losses, separations, ruptures are never mapped onto the
history of the nation they have either left behind or the one they have come to
as immigrants. Their family lore across generations builds up an intimate
domestic context that is far removed from nationalist politics and recorded
public memory.
In The Gunny Sack Salim’s words touch on the points
of rupture in the articulation of Asian African subjectivity and experience. It
appears that the reclamation of his subjectivity through his keen memory offers
propulsion into an empowered self-definition and self-knowledge, which is one
of the keen areas of postcolonial discourse. The exiled space, Toronto, from
where Salim reminisces is actually a location of dislocation. This is a realm
that resounds with the pressures of dislocation such as want, discomfort and
nostalgia. Interestingly, his story also speaks of certain pleasure of
dislocation such as relief and the possibility of dreaming another future
again. It is this line of thought that Bhabha appears to be grappling with when
he says:
The recesses of the domestic space
become sites for histories most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the
borders between home and the world, become confused and uncannily, the private
and the public becomes part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is
divided and disorientating.18
East Africa, seen from the exile location from where Salim
Juma speaks, is not just a recess of the domestic space, but also an excess of
that same place. It is excess in the sense that much as Salim and other Asian
Africans who flee the region after independence may want to forget it and forge
on, they may never be able to do so. They carry the region with them within
their minds. In this way, Salim Juma is like Vassanji who says that no matter
where he goes, he carries the East African world with him, indeed within him.
The writings of all the Indian diasporic writers usually
focus on the discrimination, differentiation, injustice and inequity that have
been a part of life of almost every East Indian immigrant. Such treatment of
life has compelled them to become nostalgic. Perhaps that is the reason why
these writers tend to draw upon the reservoir of memories from their homelands.
In The Gunny Sack Salim Juma’s remarkable remembering includes finding
the significance of ancestral genesis and genealogy. Vassanji, double diasporic
Indian writer, talks more about East Africa than anything else. His novels The
Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets and his collection of
short stories, Uhuru Street – are all focused on the lines of
Indians in East Africa. Vassanji says:
I write about my own people because we
are a people without any sense of history and place. A person without history
is like an orphan. We know the name of the place we stay, we know our immediate
surroundings, but we tend to look towards a future – tomorrow and day after
tomorrow – of a better future may be. But where is our past? Where are our
roots? 19
By Rosemary Marangoly George The Gunny sack has been
treated as a work of immigrant genre for characteristics such as disregard of
national schemes, the use of a multi-generational cast of characters, a
narrative tendency, full of repetitions and echoes and above all “curiously
detached reading of experience of ‘homelessness’, which is compensated for by
an excessive use of the metaphor of luggage, both spiritual and material.”20
She seems to distinguish this genre from exile literature for its “detached and
unsentimental reading of the experience of homelessness”21 and its
refusal to engage in the politics of either home or nation. This distinction is
confusive. If indifference to the politics of nation and rootlessness is the
crux of the matter, what is important is how one whether an immigrant or an
exile, has to reckon with one’s past, return to one’s cultural roots and
conceive of one’s cultural identity despite the anchorage of real nationhood
and home. In an interview M.G. Vassanji says to Kanaganayakam:
Once I went to the United States,
suddenly the Indian connection became very important: the sense of origins,
trying to understand the roots that we had in us.22
Later while teaching physics in Toronto, Vassanji “began to
encounter his East-African past.”23 For him the past is an aesthetic
necessity, and it has great sacral, heuristic value. In this context we can
recall Pius Fernandes in Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets. Fernandes says:
Of course the past matters, that is
why we need to bury it sometimes. We have to forget to be able to start again.24
In Vassanji's Gunny Sack the historical past
concerning origins engages his characters in a tortuous way, mediated through
memories of countless displacements and ruptures:
…. wisps of memory. Cotton balls
gliding from the gunny sack, each a window to the world….Asynchronous images
projected on multiple cinema screens….Time here is not the continuous
co-ordinate ….but a collection of blots like Uncle Jim drew in the Sunday
Herald for the children, except that Uncle Jim numbered the blots for you so
you traced the picture of a dog or a horse when you followed them with a
pencil….here you number your own blots and there is no end to them, and each
lies in wait for you like a black hole from which you could never return. 25
Since a black hole is a condition in the outer space from
which no matter and ray can escape, Vassanji uses this figurative as a dark,
endless one way passage from which the diasporic self can’t return, nor indeed
can he progress towards any closure or resolution unless it is forced and
deliberate. In this fictional scheme, migrancy turns out to be basically an
interminable narrative journey without any beginning or end.
In The Gunny Sack, memory negotiates the colonial
and postcolonial history of East Africa. Throughout the narrative the history
of the struggle of imperial powers of Europe like Germany and England over
colonies in Africa, the world wars, their impact on the demographic profile of
Indian diaspora in the African east coast, and finally the decolonisation of
Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zanzibar and other nations constitute the troublesome
destiny of the people. They are forced to migrate and re-migrate to places both
imaginary and real. Throughout the novel Salim Juma negotiates communal and
individual identities, the life of the continent of Africa and the lives of
individuals. He explores the past, constructs genealogies and traces the
complex formations of the sites of subjectivity through ruptures, dispersal and
mutations.
The past is retrieved in The Gunny Sack and
reconstituted only through the backward gaze upon the gunny sack that still
carries the dust of Kariakoo, a street in Dar es Salaam where young Kala Juma,
the narrator, fortuitously meets Grandmother, Ji Bai, who conjures from the
past people, times and places for him. He admits:
Thus past gets buried, but for my
drab, my sagging ugly shahrbanoo, from which the dust of Kariakoo has not been
shaken yet.26
The dust -- metaphorically, the remains of the dead --
magically bodies forth the past and the entire line of forebears. Ji Bai speaks
to him almost like a prophet. She says to him that she will give him his father
Juma and his father Husein and his father -- And thereupon begins Juma’s
journey back into the realms of past. He says:
Ji Bai opened a small window into the
dark past for me ……and a whole world flew in, a world of my great grandfather
who left India and my great grandmother who was an African, the world of Matamu
where India and Africa met and the mixture exploded in the person of my
half-cast grand father Husein who disappeared into the forest one day and never
returned, the world of a changing Africa where Africa and Europe met and the
result was even more explosive, not only in the lives of men but in the life of
the continent.27
The knowledge of one’s origins and past, howsoever shameful
and sordid, is necessary. The search for the origins and past is also a moral
responsibility towards the posterity and future to be assumed, in addition to
the necessity for self-knowledge and survival on the part of the diasporic
self.
* *
* *
REFERENCES :
1. M.G. Vassanji, The Gunny Sack (London: Heinemann,
1989), pp. 42-3.
2. Ibid., pp. 268-9.
3. Ibid., p. 29.
4. Ibid., pp. 39-40.
5. Arun P. Mukherjee, “Introduction”, in Oppositional
Aesthetics: Reading from a Hyphenated Space (Toronto: TSAR
Publications, 1994), p. Vii.
6. M.G. Vassanji, The Gunny Sack (London: Heinemann,
1989), p. 73.
7. Ibid., p. 73.
8. Ibid. p. 74.
9. Ibid., p. 222.
10. Ibid., p. 223.
11. Ibid., p. 211.
12. Peter G. Mandeville, “Territory and Translocating: Discrepant
Idioms of Political Locality”, Columbia International Affairs On Line
July 2000, 21 October 2002 < http: // www.cionet.org/htm>.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Sayantan Dasgupta, “Coming Home”, The Statesman Review 30
May 2000. ts. Jadavpur U., Kolkata.
16. Gene Carey, “Ramji’s Amrika”, Rediff on the Net 5 May
1999, 5 July 2002 < http: //www.rediff.com/news/1999/dec/
08us.htm >.
17. M.G. Vassanji, The Gunny Sack (London: Heinemann, 1989),
p. 52.
18. Homi Bhabha, The location of Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1994), p. 9.
19. M.F. Salat, “The Need to discover: M.G. Vassanji’s Writings”, in
Jameela Begum, and Maya Dutta, eds. South Asian Canadian (Madras:
Anu Chitra Publications, 1996), p.71.
20. Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Post-Colonial
Relocations and Twentieth Century Fiction, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996),
P. 171.
21. Ibid., p. 175.
22. Chelva Kanaganayakam, “‘Broadening the Substrata’: An Interview
with M.G. Vassanji”, World Literature Written in English 31.2
(1991), p. 21.
23. Susan Linne, “Novelist Proves You Can Go Home: Asian African
Author Visits Kenya for Research”, South Coast Today, 28 May 2000. 12
March 2002< http://www.s-t.com/daily/05-00/-05-28-00/eo7ae
164.htm >.
24. M.G. Vassanji, The Book of Secrets (New Delhi: Penguin
Books, 1995), p. 298.
25. M.G. Vassanji, The Gunny Sack (London: Heinemann, 1989),
p. 112.
26. Ibid., p. 10.
27. Ibid., p. 135.
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