What Is Home? A Conversation with M G Vassanji
14 September 2021
“DOWN BELOW, out the airplane porthole, lay the vast unconquered landscape of Africa — so different from the parcelled geometry of Europe which I had crossed over or the grey, highway-girded northeastern United States where I had made my home for the time being. The red earth and green scrubland, a few huts, a solitary figure wending its way on a trail to somewhere, perhaps carrying water, all under a cool morning sun that would in no time replenish its fires and begin to bake the earth. It must have been the arid north of Kenya, south of Somalia, down there below me, but it didn’t matter, the familiarity was unquestionable and it filled me with a huge emotion. This was my country. This was East Africa, and I was returning home.
“I was twenty-one, it was only sixteen months since I had gone away, but that was a long time then. Mine was the overwhelming emotion of someone who had feared he might not see home again. The people, the places; the music, the language: everything that was suffused into my pores and my very being, now crowded out by new challenges and pushed back into memory. That feeling about my African home would never change over the years and decades that followed, during which I would go to many places, including Canada, which gave me a home, and my Indian ancestral homeland, which partially claimed me back.”
– From And Home Was Kariakoo — A Memoir Of East Africa by M.G. Vassanji
The London Reader’s Forward:
M.G. Vassanji is the author of seven novels, two collections of short stories, a travel memoir about India, a memoir of East Africa, and a biography of Mordecai Richler. He is twice winner of the Giller Prize for best work of fiction in Canada, the Governor General’s Prize for best work of nonfiction, and the Commonwealth First Book Prize, among many others. His work has now been translated into over ten languages.
He was born in a community of Indian diaspora in Nairobi, Kenya but spent most of his youth in Tanzania. He studied in the United States, where he received a BSc from MIT and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, before immigrating to Canada. He is a member of the Order of Canada and has been awarded several honorary doctorates. He lives in Toronto, but continues to visit his native East Africa and his ancestral India.
M.G. Vassanji’s work has often focused on the role of family histories in providing identity to the present generation. In doing so his novels have explored both the colonial history of East Africa and the successive waves of migration that people and families go through. His most recent novel, Nostalgia, published in September this year, imagines a world in which people live longer lives through rejuvenation, which grants them new memories and identities. It is also a world with a Long Border separating the rich North from the rest: failed states, militias, routine violence, and hunger.
The London Reader: You’ve said before that, “Non-fiction can give us important data and first-hand descriptions (which need not always be accurate!). Fiction has its own logic, I believe, and I believe can get to a deeper truth about people, revealing inner lives, ambiguities, the conflicts, the grey areas.” What deeper truths do you try to explore in your work?
M.G. Vassanji: Fiction obviously describes and develops fictional characters; within that canvas it gives them depth — history, motives, moral ambiguities, their anguish. There is of course a logic to that, it’s what I call fictional truth and reveals something for us all. Even when a character is inspired by a real person, the work of fiction by placing him or her in situations reveals — I believe — possible truths about them, and about all of us.
LR: Home is something you’ve explored often in your writing, right up to the title of your second-most recent book, And Home Was Kariakoo. Speaking of Toronto, you’ve said, “This is home, I have a house, I mow my lawn, I clear my snow. I have two boys who were born here.” But you’ve also said, “There is the home of the spirit, the home of history.” What is the ‘home of the spirit’?
MGV: The home of the spirit is where something inside you draws an inner comfort and identity. It’s intangible. For me that home is India. I realize that India has changed since I first visited and saw it as an integral part of my identity, and that I’ve learned more about it after many revisits; there are aspects of it that are completely alien to me. Still, something keeps drawing me back. I assume a level of comfort as soon as I arrive there.
LR: You have said, “My empathy is with those who are travellers on some mission yet who somehow lose their way.” Can you elaborate on that?
MGV: I think what I mean is those who have a naive certainty at the outset and then lose their way, which means life becomes a constant quest and process of discovery. I see my own life as such. I see Dostoevsky, Conrad, and even Greene describing such characters.
LR: In And Home was Kariakoo, you wrote that, “Living in Toronto has its own insecurities, with a fractured being and an in-betweenness that draws me into thoughts such as these... In Toronto I would ask myself, Am I a real Canadian? What is such a thing? And I would pull out my hyphens.” What does it mean to you to be Canadian?
MGV: Toronto is in many respects home; and Canada has evolved to make me feel at home. I have contributed to its culture and modern identity. And yet there are always concerns. The dominant cultural representations — opera, symphony, drama, literature — are always western and aligned to America and Europe. Politics, ideology, history are linked to Europe and America. And so there are times when I ask myself, where am I in all this? To me to be a Canadian is to be part of an identity that consists of diverse components, one that evolves away from Euro-America to include — equally — all who live here, including the Aboriginals, who are paid only lip service.
LR: You’ve said, “I have a problem with the term ‘immigrant’, especially to describe a writer.
MGV: Of course I am literally an immigrant, but one’s sensibility, inspiration, and memories do not immigrate, they keep evolving, of course. I’ve recently described myself and (many) people like me as belonging in several places (Africa, India, Canada) and therefore nowhere precisely.
LR: In response to the Brexit vote in the UK, the Prime Minister, Theresa May, claimed that, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” How would you respond to that?
MGV: I would agree, wholeheartedly. But there’s nothing wrong with that. It allows us a universal empathy as humans. What would she propose to do with people like me — send us to concentration camps? All the people who grew up in the colonies, with conflicting and multiple loyalties — there must be thousands if not more such people in Britain. We have our consciences, and perhaps the world needs people like us. Would the Prime Minister have had Germans remain loyal to Hitler’s Germany, come what may? Many people left and became, truly, world citizens. But it should go without saying that in terms of our ordinary loyalty and commitment, those go first to our neighbours, people we live with, who check our mail when we go away, look out for our children, and so on. That is common sense and instinct.
LR: Throughout your many novels, you have often grappled with the interaction between nationality, culture, and identity — a struggle which has many parallels to your own life. What do you see as the source of your identity now?
MGV: I see my identity made up of all the places and cultures I have touched — or that have touched me. But that’s not enough, and I have come to see myself as a historical person, beginning in medieval India, whose songs and worldviews have had a profound impact on me; and then going on to post-independence East Africa, where I grew up during times of great excitement; and the US in the 1970s at a time of great upheaval, where I feel I had a second birth, intellectually; and finally arriving in Canada, which gave me the opportunity to express myself and feel relatively safe. I don’t see my identity as exclusive.
LR: Your novels span four continents and at least as many centuries. From the outside, it seems as though your multi-cultural background has given you a richer and wider context to draw on as a writer, yet many of your characters have gone through a migration similar to your own. Do you feel that your source of inspiration has been broadened by your background, or is it no more than your own experiences?
MGV: I believe all writers bring themselves into their work. That is the raw material. But we all change and evolve and that adds to our experiences and concerns. I disliked history as a child; now it’s a passion, it is often the central concern in my novels. “Background” is a flexible term reflecting change and evolution.
LR: The Book of Secrets, your first of two novels to win the Giller Prize, deals with love and conflict that arises across the ethnic and cultural divide of your characters. The story takes place a century ago. What inspired it?
MGV: It was not love that inspired it. I was intrigued by two phenomena. One was the irony of the First World War having a theatre — if that’s the correct word — also on East African soil: Africans fighting Africans, Indians fighting Africans, all for a European quarrel. This is not funny, as it has sometimes been described. The second idea arose from the fact that in my first novel, The Gunny Sack, I used memories, all sorts, to create history and a mythology of the past. The Gunny Sack was a bag of incoherent, disconnected memories. I come from a people whose history is broken and vague. But memories by themselves are not enough to recreate the past, you need texts — records produced by explorers, travellers, colonial administrators. These are eye-witness accounts and histories. And so I asked myself, why not start a novel from the opposite end — a written text instead of memories. That was The Book of Secrets — a journal left by a fictitious colonial administrator. In the process, here was a brown person writing about a white person.
LR: Canada initiated an official policy of multiculturalism in the 1980s, just a few years after you moved there. Globalization has since increased the national and racial diversity in many countries but also provoked backlash in North America and Europe from conservative elements that prefer homogenized nations. From your perspective, how is Canadian culture responding to the growing diversity of the 21st century?
MGV: Very positively. Canada is one country that has continuously redefined itself in response to its growing diversity. A far cry from the 1970s, when it often was a very intimidating and hostile place for new Canadians.
LR: In your most recent novel, Nostalgia, which is set in the near-future, you describe the “Long Border” between a prosperous north and a poverty stricken south. With walls being built around Europe in response to the refugee crisis, not to mention Trump’s talk of building a long wall to the south, this is particularly pertinent. Do you feel we are facing an increasingly divided future?
MGV: The world has always been divided between the rich and the poor. With increasing speed and ease of communication, no wall is going to keep people out. People will keep walking, and climbing walls, and swimming the seas. We’ve seen it in recent times. That gives me hope.
LR: In the same novel, in a prosperous future Toronto, you explore people who, thanks to technology, may live forever, but who forget their past and have new biographies constructed for them. Do you think in Canada, and in the west, are people in danger of forgetting their past, forgetting where they come from?
MGV: This question draws together a complex set of phenomena. Establishing new lives in other countries means forgetting the past. And yet the need for an identity also seems essential. People want to preserve language and culture; even, as a last resort, the memory of their origins. Canadians of European descent have not forgotten their origins after decades and centuries. And even as we feel the need to forget the past and subscribe to the mythology that we are all Americans and Canadians, that we are all immigrants, the Internet makes research easier; it draws people with common links together so they can record — and here is the catch — even rewrite their history. I know of people whose roots are in Gujarat who somehow slip into the belief that their origins are in Iran!