Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing 3031463455, 9783031463457

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT · MAX SAUNDERS

Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing Esther Pujolràs-Noguer Felicity Hand

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing Series Editors

Clare Brant Department of English King’s College London London, UK Max Saunders Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern Literature and Culture University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

This series features books that address key concepts and subjects in life writing, with an emphasis on new and emergent approaches. It offers specialist but accessible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on connecting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal. The series aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars and students looking for clear and original discussion of specific subjects and forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative risks with potent materials. The term ‘Life Writing’ is taken broadly so as to reflect its academic, public, digital and international reach, and to continue and promote its democratic tradition. The series seeks contributions that address global contexts beyond traditional territories, and which engage with diversity of race, gender and class. It welcomes volumes on topics of everyday life and culture with which life writing scholarship can engage in transformative and original ways; it also aims to further the political engagement of life writing in relation to human rights, migration, trauma and repression, and the processes and effects of the Anthropocene, including environmental subjects and non-human lives. The series looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing is understood and practised, especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media; that deepens and diversifies knowledge and perspectives on the subject; and which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the world relevance of life writing.

Esther Pujolràs-Noguer • Felicity Hand

Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing

Esther Pujolràs-Noguer Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures University of Lleida Lleida, Spain

Felicity Hand Department of English Autonomous University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain

ISSN 2730-9185     ISSN 2730-9193 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ISBN 978-3-031-46344-0    ISBN 978-3-031-46345-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46345-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Emily McCormick / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Foreword

Unlike the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean is bound by a relatively unified number of littoral states. I use the words “relatively unified” because except for Australia (an ex-white settler colony) the other states were subjected to a recognizable form of colonization and in the case of South Africa colonial apartheid. Esther Pujolràs-Noguer and Felicity Hand, the writers of this path-breaking book, have, implicitly, recognized this unity by gathering together the literary output of a number of postcolonial Indian ocean states from Africa and Asia. These states include South Africa, countries in east Africa, Mauritius, and Sri Lanka. Earlier disciplinary models used to explain the socio-cultural “unity” of Indian Ocean littoral states (economics, politics, history, and so on) failed to enter into the traumatic after-effects of colonial interventions because these disciplines had no capacity to read the life worlds of the colonized subjects. The writers of the book argue, persuasively I think, that it is in the life writings of these subjects that we discover the lived experiences of people. In their memoirs especially (often regarded as autobiography’s poor cousin) one finds real, visceral engagements with the traumatic aftermath of colonization. What then is the argument of this book? Its theoretical paradigm is drawn from recent studies in memory and trauma that persuasively suggest that life writings (memoirs, testimonies, and the like) carry traumatic experiences in the body of the texts. One school of thought indeed makes a strong case in favour of disturbances in language itself as a marker of mourning. The writers of this volume are aware of this—that is, aware of the power of language—by making the case that language captures an aesthetics of remembering trauma. Implicit in the argument is an v

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understanding that the work of art is an exercise in the sociology of life worlds and as such is able to enter into those conflicting, paradoxical, messy experiences that characterize the simple act of being human. In the context of the thesis of this book, the authors of this volume would claim that the most powerful expression of traumatic memory is to be located in works of art, hence the value of an “aesthetics of remembering” when it comes to engaging with the lives of marginalized selves. In short the literary work of art remembers. It is a powerful claim, and a necessary corrective to our understanding of the complex legacies bequeathed on subject peoples under imperialism. The next critical move by the authors of this book is to argue that an aesthetics of remembering (which they occasionally hyphenate as “re-­ membering”, echoing an erstwhile deconstructive move, now less common) enables the subject to think through proactively and creatively difficult and traumatic memories of colonization. More forthrightly it is argued that the power of art is “co-extensive” with the power of resilience (and resistance). The work of art has in this respect a redemptive quality, a healing presence that may make whole broken lives. This, it seems to me, is at the heart of a book for which the primary works are life writings of two or three well-known writers (M G Vassanji, Michael Ondaatje, and even Lindsey Collen, herself a challenging Mauritian writer) and a number of lesser-known male and female writers. It is these lesser-known writers— notably Parita Mukta, Neera Kapur-Dromson, Shailja Patel, Dr Goonam, Indres Naidoo, and Amina Cachalia—who bring another perspective to the argument. Indeed, the book gathers rare power and originality when these writers form the crux of the argument. In their writings we discover an important corrective to instrumental Enlightenment’s reading of a universal self-hood or subjectivity defined uncompromisingly in terms of a rational, European individual male self. For what we get in these writers is a deep-seated awareness of a gendered communal self that affects the aesthetics of “re-membering”. Mourning as a way of coming to terms with colonial trauma is both an individual and a collective act. In this context the discussion of the literary representation of the early Indian migrants to East Africa is exemplary. Both Parita Mukta and Neera Kapur-Dromson turn to wives of railway workers or dukawallas to think through questions of resilience, resistance, and fortitude as a collective enterprise. This is especially true in the context of the strict gender constraints South Asian women in East Africa had to conform to. A further twist is given with reference to the twice-displaced diaspora in Shailja Patel’s Migritude,

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where the act of wearing a sari functions as an allegory of displacement. Patel’s work also raises a useful theoretical problematic as “Migritude” echoes Khal Torabully’s influential idea of “Coolitude”, itself a very rich and productive engagement with the odyssey of Indian indenture. The book ends with three South African Indian memoirs, written by activists who were part of the anti-apartheid struggle: two women and one man. Indres Naidoo in fact spent many years on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela too was imprisoned. Life writing and Indian Oceanness—the overriding theme of the book—is a very productive and challenging theme through which discrepant modes of resistance and resilience are given a unity. The unity of the field of Indian Ocean studies in this instance is to be located in zones of contact marked by communal solidarity. Where history fails, literature succeeds as aesthetics provides different ways in which collective social solidarity is given expression. Feelings and emotions—in fact reflective judgement—are equally important as our emotional responses often take us directly into the act of mourning that a writer productively works through in the act of composition. As readers to be able to mourn with the subject (as an individual and as a community) makes us understand and respond to an overriding question that is at the heart of this book: “What makes for a grievable life?” All these writers, covering as they do four Indian Ocean geographical sites, are brought together in the book as instantiations of how one thinks through “traumatogenic” life narratives. In literary life worlds traumatic experiences are made into meaningful acts and these acts suggest, in the context of a postcolonial Indian Oceanic world order, a writer’s own ethical responsibilities towards history itself. These personal traumas enter historical formations because they typify the latent underside of colonial histories. Through close textual analysis of both canonical and lesser-known texts the authors make a powerful case for the place of literature in our understanding of mourning and trauma. The book stands as an original contribution to the field of Indian Ocean life writing and, additionally, to the field of Indian diasporas generally. The texts selected—and especially the “non-canonical” ones—require better exposure and this volume is clearly aimed at achieving precisely that. Murdoch University Perth, WA, Australia

Vijay Mishra

Contents

1 Mourning  as a Resistance Trope. Trauma, History, and Memory in Indian Ocean Life Writing: An Introduction  1 Esther Pujolràs-Noguer and Felicity Hand Life Writing and Indian Oceanness   1 Resistance and Resilience   7 Mourning as Resistance  11 References  19 Part I Mourning Memoirs  25 2 The  Ectopic Insider: Exploring the Interstices of Travel Writing, Memory, and History in M.G. Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo 27 Esther Pujolràs-Noguer Introduction: The Ectopic Condition and the Discourse of Négritude  28 Displaced History and the Trauma of Return  34 Conclusion: “I Have a Visceral Response to the Sounds of Africa; I Speak the Language There”. The Asian African Writer and the Open Question of Belonging  52 References  57

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3 Of  Father and Son: The Configuration of the Trauma of Return in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family 59 Esther Pujolràs-Noguer Introduction. The Ectopic Condition and the Prodigal Son  60 Belated Mourning: Redemption of the Father and Survival of the Son  66 Conclusion: Running in and from the Family  82 References  86 Part II Female Resilience  89 4 Rhizomatic  Perennials: Resilience and Survival in Kenyan Asian Memoirs 91 Felicity Hand Resilience  93 Tradition and Izzat  95 Community 100 Conclusion. Tough Plants 105 References 108 5 “Learning  to Wear a Sari Is a Rite of Passage”: Shailja Patel’s Inventory of the Migrant Body in Migritude111 Esther Pujolràs-Noguer Introduction. The Construction of Migritude in Migritude 112 Saris, Roots, and the Transnational Experience 118 Conclusion: I Am Forging a Ship of Glittering Songs 131 References 135 Part III Indian Ocean Crossing 139 6 Lindsey  Collen: Transnational, Transoceanic Optimism141 Felicity Hand Collen as Storyteller 141 The Indian Ocean as a Unifying Force 144 Class Conflicts and Oppression 149 Environmental Concerns 153 Conclusion: We Are All One 155 References 158

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7 Banyans  Behind Bars: Three South African Indian Memoirs161 Esther Pujolràs-Noguer and Felicity Hand Coolie Doctor: Mourning the Shade of the Banyan Tree 163 Island in Chains: Resilience and Reflection 168 When Hope and History Rhyme: An Activist’s Life in Images 175 Conclusion: Celebrating Indianness in South Africa 185 References 187 8 Conclusion.  Ecotonic Selves: Survival and Indian Ocean Life Writing191 Reference 193 Appendix195 Index197

List of Images

Image 2.1 Bagamoyo, picture on page 196, And Home Was Kariakoo. Reproduced with the kind permission of Mr. M.G. Vassanji Image 2.2 Bagamoyo, front cover, And Home Was Kariakoo. Reproduced with the kind permission of Mr. M.G. Vassanji Image 5.1 Front cover, Migritude. Reproduced with the kind permission of Kaya Press Image 5.2 Sigiriya Frescoes, www.alamy.com Image ID: CEXP78 Image 7.1 Amina Cachalia, picture on page 122, When Hope and History Rhyme. Reproduced with the kind permission of Ms. Coco Cachalia Image 7.2 Amina Cachalia, picture on page 136 When Hope and History Rhyme. Reproduced with the kind permission of Ms. Coco Cachalia Image 7.3 Amina Cachalia, When Hope and History Rhyme. In fact, the photograph included here is of Amina Cachalia outside her home in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, 1984, photographed by Sue Williamson. Reproduced with the kind permission of Ms Williamson. It has been impossible to trace the copyright holder of the photograph “behind bars” discussed in the chapter but Cachalia is wearing the same clothes and her expression is practically the same Image 7.4 Back cover, When Hope and History Rhyme. Reproduced with the kind permission of Ms. Louise Gubb

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CHAPTER 1

Mourning as a Resistance Trope. Trauma, History, and Memory in Indian Ocean Life Writing: An Introduction Esther Pujolràs-Noguer and Felicity Hand

Life Writing and Indian Oceanness Postcolonial literary criticism has recently focused its scrutiny on life writing, that is, the memoirs and experiences of citizens from former colonized countries. The subsidiary status that autobiography was granted within the field of literary criticism has long been contested by the current inscription of life writing as a fecund and insightful area of research as numerous academic studies testify to (Smith and Watson 2010). Although the first critical inception of autobiographical studies veered around the construction of an Enlightenment persona, that is to say, a rational, sovereign subject, usually male and invariably white, we wish to highlight that alongside the formation of this persistently white and male individual, another line of autobiographical studies was developing. This centred on those selves that due to gender and/or race could not accommodate to the Enlightenment ideals of subjecthood. Thus, women’s autobiographical writings, on the one hand, and slave narratives, on the other, questioned the maleness and whiteness of the rational Enlightenment self to the extent that, as James Olney Jr. states in relationship with the African-­American literary tradition, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Pujolràs-Noguer, F. Hand, Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46345-7_1

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autobiographical writing via slave narratives is to be considered the first distinctive manifestation of written literature produced by black America (Olney 1988). Autobiography emerges as a resisting genre which embraces the life stories of people that were regarded as inherently inferior and of little interest and hence has strategically moved them from the colonial margin to the postcolonial centre. The proliferation of postcolonial theories has widened the understanding of selfhood and has challenged the notion of a unified, unique selfhood which could express universal human nature (Anderson 2001, 5). The changing nature of identity formations has contributed to the continued exploration of and experimentation in the generic forms of life writing, autobiography, and memoir (Driver and Kossew 2014). According to Julie Rak, memoir, as opposed to autobiography, falls into the category of nonprofessional, non-literary productions and for this reason it has been labelled the poor relation of autobiography (Gusdorf 1980; Misch 1950). As Rak points out, traditional autobiography criticism dismisses memoirists to a predominantly passive role which contrasts with the belief that autobiography involves agency. Hence, “the autobiographer shapes events, while the memoirist foregrounds events that may shape her/his perspective” (Rak 2004, 310). We contend that this hierarchical morphology that subjects memoirs to a subordinate generic category conceals a colonial mindset that denied agency to subject peoples—read non-whites and/or females. In other words, white males wrote canonical autobiographies whereas women and subalterns wrote less sophisticated memoirs. The reassessing mission of postcolonial writing entails an engagement with history and memory. Therefore, and as Paul John Eakin affirms, memoir—and not autobiography—“retains a fundamental orientation towards history” (Eakin 2020, 68) which is why we favour the former over the latter. In the field of postcolonial studies, the accepted term to deal with the recounting of one’s life experience(s) is actually “life writing”. The very term “autobiography” has tended to be relegated to the work of Western authors and has been replaced with this more inclusive category (Whitlock 2015, 3). The elasticity of the genre of the “memoir” mirrors the porousness that characterizes the Indian Ocean space that rejects any fixed demarcation, either generic or geographical. Within an Indian Ocean framework, the Enlightenment subject is decolonized and space is made for former minor genres to flourish, such as memoir. The inclusion of previously overlooked writing subjects and the straining at the seams of the genre has brought about a need to read across national borders. Since the 1980s Indian Ocean studies have gained impetus as social scientists, in particular, have

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gradually understood the Indian Ocean as a network rather than as discrete geographical regions. In fact the area is being construed as a rhizomatic cultural and historical network endowed with a natural sense of transnationalism (Kearney 2004; Simpson and Kresse 2007; Hofmeyr 2010; Moorthy and Jamal 2010; Sheriff 2010). Historian Markus P.M.  Vink singles out certain key terms in his landmark article on the “new thalassology” in Indian Ocean studies. Porousness, permeability, connectedness, flexibility, and openness of spatial and temporal boundaries must inform any contemporary study of the area (2007, 52). Taking into account Sugata Bose’s warning of the danger of overlooking the flexible internal and external boundaries  (2006), scholars from various ­disciplines seem to agree on the need to regard the Indian Ocean as a unifying element, connecting peoples and events across the ocean and at the same time a divisive element that fragments and distances communities through space and time. These paradoxical notions of integration and fragmentation feature in much recent discussion of Indian Ocean writing, despite the fact that our area of research has not received enough critical attention from literary or cultural scholars in part due to its “messiness” as political frontiers fail to contain or explain with sufficient rigour the fluidity of its borders and the connectedness of its communities. It is our belief that literature, unlike other fields of knowledge such as history, sociology and anthropology, feels at home with “messiness”. Otherwise put, literature studies are nurtured by paradox, its academic rigour tempered with an instinctive drive towards inconclusiveness, therefore releasing, rather than curtailing, multifaceted interpretations. The literary critic faces the text with extreme caution and utmost care, endowed by LaCapra’s “empathic unsettlement” (2001, 71), a strained, yet engaging, balance between “full identification” (2001, 148) and “pure objectification” (2001, 148). Henceforth, literature can deal with the paradoxical nature of the Indian Ocean’s inherent fluidity and aversion to Western-­ engendered political frontiers. Postcolonial communities—Indian Ocean societies are no exception— are transnational in outlook and filiation, which has encouraged scholars to propose new strategies for reading and analysing these cultural productions. Recent critical work on life writing by people who have directly or indirectly experienced colonialism has often revolved around traumatic experiences because their lives have been shaped by the shifting boundaries of what it actually meant to be human in these societies (Craps 2013; Hassan and Álvarez 2013; Whitlock 2015). Craps highlights the traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority groups, which have been ignored

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in favour of the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity. The special issue of Biography edited by Hassan and Álvarez engages critically with postcolonial studies and autobiography by exploring the continued relevance of the term “postcoloniality”. Whitlock’s comprehensive study includes insightful analyses of powerful testimonies of social injustices and oppression and Moore-Gilbert’s work (2009) points out the differences between Western autobiographies and life writing in a postcolonial context. The wide range of life writing that is being produced in Africa and Asia involves a careful negotiation between the public and the private, and between individual histories and the histories of larger communities. One crucial issue is the treatment of memory and history. There is also the other side of memory—forgetting, gaps and silences, which may be deliberate because the past is too painful to contemplate. Gudmundsdóttir (2017) insists on the necessity of the forgotten in what is remembered, as she argues that without the doubt created by the hesitations and gaps in memories, the memories themselves might seem overly insistent and thus suspect. Lives that are situated at the social, political, and cultural margins of the national and the global need to be represented but this is itself problematic, as Gayatri Spivak eloquently reminds us. The danger can be reduced to how the Western critic can explore the narratives of particular lived situations or personal histories which may remain trapped within the logic of the colonial past without fossilizing or essentializing them. The postcolonial present itself needs to be approached with extreme caution. The spectres of colonialism may continue to haunt the contemporary, but we aim to reconsider the critical preoccupations of subjecthood and resistance and/or resilience through careful readings of Indian Ocean–based memoirs. Some of the texts that we explore are self-consciously focused on narrating lives in their proximity to physical and/or social death—hence our spotlight on mourning—conditioned by the legacies of colonialism. However, we wish to go beyond the pessimism of the past and explore how other texts move forward—and this is where resilience enters the equation. What we ultimately propose is an exploration of the configuration of mourning as a trope of resistance that features entanglement as the cornerstone of its aesthetic representation. This entanglement, we claim, is forged within the confluence of trauma, history, and memory. The corpus of the volume responds to the flexibility inherent in the memoir. The result is a collection of life writing texts configured around

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an eclectic understanding of aesthetics including travel writing, confession, performance, poetry, prose, and visual material. The de-­hierarchization embedded in the genre of the memoir has demanded that attention be addressed to both literary writers—M.G.  Vassanji, Michael Ondaatje, Lindsey Collen, and Shailja Patel—and lesser studied authors—Parita Mukta, Neera Kapur-Dromson, Dr Goonam, Indres Naidoo and Amina Cachalia. We are aware of numerous other memoirists in the Indian Ocean arena but the authors we have selected epitomize the rhizomatic nature of our project. Many of the memoirs by better known South or East Africans have been the subject of much critical attention such as Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom and Fatima Meer’s Prison Diary. One Hundred and Thirteen Days 1976, so we have opted to focus on lesser-known authors whose narratives fit neatly into our paradigm of mourning and resilience. Renowned South African freedom fighters such as Ayesha Dawood and Ahmed Timol never wrote their memoirs, although Zubeida Jaffer (Love in the Time of Treason. The Life Story of Ayesha Dawood, Kwela Books, 2008) and Imtiaz A. Cajee (The Murder of Ahmed Timol. My Search for the Truth, Jacana, 2020) have published their biographies. Jay Naidoo’s Fighting for Justice. A Lifetime of Political and Social Activism (Picador Africa, 2010) and Pregs Govender’s Love and Courage. A Story of Insubordination (Jacana, 2007) both deal at length with the day-to-day business of organizing pressure groups and the trade unions and as such fail to illustrate our concept of mourning. Hand has discussed Zubeida Jaffer’s memoir Our Generation in her analysis of narrative empathy (2018a). Pujolràs-Noguer mentions Sophia Mustafa’s The Tanganyika Way (1961) in Chap. 2 and a thorough discussion of the memoir can be found in Tina Steiner’s publications (2011 & 2021). We should also note that the majority of our authors are diasporic Indians, so an in-depth study of Indian Ocean memoirs by black and white citizens remains as yet to be written. Our texts illustrate the variegated ramifications—temporal, geographic, cultural, genealogical, and aesthetic—of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1988). Vassanji and Ondaatje’s personal quests are formulated upon their survival as writers whereas the Kenyan Asian memoirists—Patel, Mukta, and Kapur-Dromson—celebrate the powerful female legacy bequeathed by their ancestors. The aesthetic exuberance of Patel’s work contrasts vividly with the sociologically grounded memoirs of Mukta and Kapur-Dromson. We make a vehement claim for South Africa’s inclusion as an indisputable component of the Indian Ocean imaginary.

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South African–born Lindsey Collen articulates the transoceanic ethos of our geographical area in her recent exploration of identity. Collen, like former anti-apartheid activists Goonam, Naidoo, and Cachalia, laments the loss of utopian ideals and their respective memoirs encapsulate acts of resistance and resilience. Much of the archival and textual work so far conducted by our research group (see Hand and Pujolràs-Noguer 2018) was monitored by a close look at the “individual”, that is to say, on how specific human beings performed their identities within a larger community structure. However, we realized that this individual-focused line of analysis began to falter and, therefore, could not be fully sustained, since a deep sense of community seamed through the individual identity performance. In other words, the communal self pervaded in a manner that challenged but simultaneously guided the formation of a satisfactory identity through conciliatory acts of empathy via calculated episodes of mourning. This recognition of a deep-­ seated communal self is a key factor in the functionality of what we call an aesthetics of re-membering—in the sense of both recalling and assembling—which brings to the fore the rhizomatic nature of the Indian Ocean cultural geography. Critical work on the specificities of a potential corpus of “communal life writing” is practically inexistent. Davis remind us that “personal and collective memory creates a space where fact, truth, fiction, invention, forgetting, and myth are so entangled as to constitute a renewed form of access to the past” (2007, 11). We agree with them when they claim that “individual identity is constituted in relation to family and national history” (ibid., 13) which upholds our aim to home in on the life writing of communities, in order to debunk the myth of belonging. This dismantling of the myth of belonging is an attempt to denounce the still pervasive myth of origins that surreptitiously intrudes in identity constructions and, at the same time, enhances the “in-betweenness” that defines a rhizomatic understanding of historical, socio-cultural, and national affiliations. Glissant (2010) and Deleuze and Guattari (1988) have long disclosed the multiplicity of cultural identities that configure individual identities. Thus, our point of departure is that life stories express the need to belong, but they highlight the fact that there is no unilateral sense of belonging. Likewise, and considering the traumatic essence enveloping these life stories, we should add Leigh Gilmore’s assertion that “trauma is never exclusively personal, it always exists within complicated histories, both individual and collective” (Gilmore 2001, 886).

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In our previous work (Hand 2011, 2018a, 2018b; Pujolràs-Noguer 2015a, 2015b) we have shown that the term “diaspora”, when associated with success stories, sits uneasily in the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean has been home to failed diasporas, especially those people who have not embarked on distinct, clear-cut projects of cultural memory and constructing homelands. In this respect, the Indian Ocean space can be read through the lens of Mishra’s powerful Tolstoyan opening sentence in his introduction to the diasporic imaginary: “All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way” (Mishra 2007, 1). Hence, in this volume we seek to unveil the way in which the Indian Ocean diaspora has aesthetically narrated its own unhappiness. In the specificity granted to our geography, certain themes like purity and pollution have had to be reinvented and Indian diasporic communities cannot be dealt with in an impressionistic or essentialist fashion and, at the same time, the transoceanic connections that bind Indian Ocean people together must be emphasized (Hand 2010, 2011; Pujolràs-Noguer 2015b, 2018, 2019). In the aforementioned volume (Hand and Pujolràs-Noguer 2018), we explore the way in which narratives by authors of Indian origin in South Africa, East Africa, and Mauritius reflect cultural and memory projects while at the same time they manifest the transoceanic connections that unite the peoples of the Indian Ocean rim.

Resistance and Resilience Resistance appears to be a relatively straightforward category in opposition to domination. As domination is regarded as being diametrically opposed to resistance, it tends to be viewed as a relatively fixed and institutionalized form of power, which makes resistance an organized opposition to such power (Ortner 1995, 174). However, these categories are not that clear-cut as Foucault has shown that power does not always take on institutional robes as it can be a pervasive part of our everyday lives (Foucault 1976). Likewise, resistance can be manifested in diverse ways, ranging from active civil disobedience to a refusal to conform to prevailing fashions. Besides, the intention of the resisting subject needs to be taken into account as certain actions may be a simple, survival tactic such as stealing a loaf of bread to ward off starvation. History has proved that things can and do get changed, regardless of the intentions of the persons involved in the action of resisting. For this to happen, the dominating power can offer the resisting subject a compromise—read bribe—in order

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to retain his or her power. In the same way the resisting subject may find her-/himself in an ambiguous position as regards acceptance or refusal of the compromise. The psychological ambivalence and the social complexity of resistance, which takes into account the subject’s gender, age, social class, ethnicity, and so on, have been taken on board by several postcolonial theorists, Homi Bhabha (1993)  being the most quoted. Resistance can thus be both creative and transformative. Resilience, which we understand as being a higher degree of resistance, has been defined in several disciplines, those of social scientists and psychologists being the most frequently cited. A simple definition is that a person who can bounce back after enduring some adversity exhibits resilience but psychologists go deeper into the issue. Iacoviello and Charney (2014, 2) state that resilience, as a psychosocial construct, “is generally described as adaptive characteristics of an individual to cope with and recover from (and sometimes even thrive after) adversity”. Social scientists in turn argue that the term is far more complex than is often thought. They claim that “when defining resilience, little attention is paid to issues of agency, conflict, inequality, and power that shape and reshape social processes and co-determine their outcomes” (Shrestha 2019, 494). In the field of environmental sciences and hazard studies it has long been argued that resilience differs from everyday resistance because resilience building is always envisaged as threat-dependent, in other words the danger of flooding or an earthquake looms on the horizon (Wandji 2019, 290). In exploring the possibility of resilience as resistance, resilience could become a means to an end, if we consider the agency and objectives of the communities who are engaged in this resilience-building project. In this respect Ortner reminds us that “an understanding of political authenticity, of the people’s own forms of inequality and asymmetry, is not only not incompatible with an understanding of resistance but is in fact indispensable to such an understanding” (Ortner 1995, 180). As far as textual representations of resilience are concerned, Ortner claims that “ordinary people can and do resist textual as well as political domination [because] texts are shaped by the lived reality of the people who a colonial text claims to represent” (Ortner 1995, 188). Postcolonial responses to colonial texts have highlighted the lived reality of former colonized people, such as Chinua Achebe’s now classic Things Fall Apart (1958), which showed that precolonial Igbo society was not a long night of savagery. With this view in mind, Ortner cites as an example of the misrepresentation of subalternity, the 1985 Indian Supreme Court case which

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awarded a divorced Muslim woman with five children alimony from her former husband. The sentence was contested on the grounds that the state was interfering in Muslim Personal Law and owing to extreme pressure from her religious community, Shah Bano finally withdrew her claim. While this may seem anything but an example of resistance, Shah Bano’s final rejection of the award can be read as a final—perhaps desperate—act of resilience. Ortner argues that “for certain kinds of compounded powerlessness (female and poor and of minority status), ‘the refusal of subjectification’ may be the only strategy available to the subject” (Ortner 1995, 184). Shah Bano’s rejection of the award, which seems to be an act of surrender to the patriarchy of the community, may be read as her refusal to be pigeonholed by mainstream society as a submissive Muslim woman. We should be wary about romanticising resistance from below as it can take on many shapes and forms, including complicity with dominant powers, and an absence of tangible resistance can actually conceal a form of resilience as a survival strategy. This means that hasty value judgements on resilience need to understand the context in which this reliance is enacted. Minority peoples, especially those of the South, tend to be praised for their ability to bounce back when faced with economic, climatic, or social adversities. Whether or not the alleged resilience of non-Western people has any basis in truth or is a hackneyed stereotype, it is undeniable that they need to be more prepared for political, social, legal, or environmental onslaughts than their counterparts in more affluent parts of the globe. In psychology, people’s patterns of thinking and core beliefs are analysed in stressful or traumatic situations (Iacoviello and Charney 2014; Norris et al. 2008). Those people who are able to reappraise their perception are capable of generating self-confidence so that they can endure and survive adversity. Rigid perceptions of reality can only lead on to negative and painful consequences so the reappraisal of new tragic situations implies a desire to find meaning and positive outcomes. This suggests that even the most traumatic experience, if dealt with in a positive way, can actually provide an opportunity for personal development (Robinson and Carson 2016, 117; Shrestha 2019). A degree of optimism, or simply a recognition that the current situation cannot last forever, can bolster up the traumatized person, which in turn helps her or him to survive. Logically, the tools necessary to face up to a challenging experience in a resilient way are often provided by a strong network of social support. In the Indian Ocean world (East and South Africa, India, Sri Lanka), where people tend to consider themselves part of a community rather than as individuals, people from

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underprivileged backgrounds can often rely on this kind of support. The solidarity of the poor is a reality in many parts of the world but in the geographical zone that is our focus, we observe that indeed the community is always there to help out in case of need (Robinson and Carson 2016, 116; Shrestha 2019). Similarly, the role of religion in people’s lives in the Indian Ocean context should not be overlooked. Religion (Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Animism) all provide a rich repository of beliefs and cultural values, which are to be honoured. This does not mean to say that religion can only foster obedience as history has shown that dissenting practices—read resistance—can also emerge from communities with strong religious beliefs as witnessed in the Maji Maji rebellion in what was then German East Africa in 1905 (Hand 2014). Wandji, in his discussion of the Cameroon-Gabon border as a site of contested practices, points to disruption as a primordial component of resilience. He argues that the postcolonial border should be read as a silenced/silent disruption (2019, 289). For Wandji it is important to approach our understanding of resilience from the origin of the problem not its consequence: Rather than defining resilience through the extraordinary ways in which certain developed behaviours seek to circumvent a disruption, we should use them as tools to question our understanding of this perceived disruption. (Wandji 2019, 291)

Structural inequalities of class, gender, age, or ethnicity must be taken on board when understanding how resilience works. Not all responses are drawn from individual behaviour, so the community plays a crucial role in confronting and solving certain situations. The case of the presence of imposed borders proves the vitality and relevancy of community responses. Strategies were thought up in order to take advantage of the inherent vulnerability of the colonial border in order to maintain their livelihoods, communal ties, and social organisation (see Vassanji, The Book of Secrets 1996; Pujolràs-Noguer 2015a). Spatial organization was originally disrupted through the dynamics of these colonial impositions but many African communities disregarded the essence of the border—it made no sense to their daily lives—and continued to pursue the movements, trade and social interactions they had before the Europeans traced a new frontier (Wandji 2019, 292). Despite this almost unconscious form of

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resistance, the side effects of these borders took their toll on language, culture, and identity with the onset of nation-building discourses that discouraged solidarity among former relatively homogeneous communities (divided Kashmir and Bengal are clear examples). Linguistic and cultural divisions could be said to have been spawned by the establishment of an artificial border. The materiality of borders becomes an integral part of the lives of the people living on either side but, in the case where mobility is not a problem (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda), the political frontier remains a mere silent disruption. Resilience then is clearly context-determined and represents another example of how simplistic definitions fail to encompass all the nuances of this term. It is vital to take into account the historical moment of the act of resilience, as well as the culture, ethnicity, religious grouping, geographical location, socioeconomic standing, and even language of the people who are exerting the resilience. Agency is always present in acts of resilience but it is frequently necessary to unpick the intention behind the act as for some marginalized groups agency can appear to take the shape of complicity with the dominant power.

Mourning as Resistance Resistance performances are irresistibly connected with trauma and mourning. In its status as both deferred experience (Mishra 2007, 109) and unassimilated experience (Mishra 2007, 114), trauma, or, to be more precise, the successful or unsuccessful overcoming of trauma is compellingly associated with resisting acts and rituals of mourning. As a deferred experience, trauma is that which, by definition (Caruth 1996; LaCapra 2001) resists linguistic representation. The traumatic event as it happened cannot be fully absorbed by language since the transcription of the traumatic event into language always “occurs after the event” (Mishra 2007, 109). Thus the representation of trauma is enveloped by a forceful aura of inconclusiveness (Freud 1990; Derrida 1987), a systematic deferral of meaning which is but the result of the incapacity of memory to incorporate, and hence assimilate, remembrances into a “meaningful context” (LaPlanche and Pontalis 1980). The narrative of trauma is encapsulated by this seemingly perennial linguistic irresolution: a systematized deferral that precludes assimilation. However, trauma studies have long relied on literature to delineate possible strategies to assimilate aesthetically an a priori unassimilable

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experience. Henceforth, LaCapra differentiates between “acting-out” and “working-through” trauma (LaCapra 2001, 21–22). The former enslaves the trauma victim to a traumatic past that s/he consistently re-lives in the present. In LaCapra’s own words, in post-traumatic acting—out “one is haunted or possessed by the past and performatively caught up in the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes—scenes in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fatalistically caught up in a melancholic feedback loop” (21). What is more, he adds, in acting-out, “tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past reliving the traumatic scene” (21). Contrarily to acting out, working-through trauma permits the trauma victim to liberate her-/himself from the compulsive repetition of this particular traumatic past event by reflecting upon it through critical distance and calculated doses of empathy. Working-­through trauma functions at the level of the present and imbues the present with an unequivocal glance into the future. As Mishra incisively concludes in his LaCapran rendering of history, despite history’s indebtedness to trauma, “trauma cannot be part of historical form because trauma disrupts the linear flow of historical narrative with its, history’s basis in an originary moment. […] In other words, history repeats itself as a recurrence of the traumatic moment” (118). So, we could affirm that where historical discourse fails, with its reliance on linear flow, literary discourse, with its entrenched tradition of disrupting linearity, succeeds (Pujolràs-Noguer & Hand 2019; PujolràsNoguer 2021; Pujolràs-Noguer et al. 2021). But, how does literature represent trauma and thus succeed where history fails? Our answer is that this is accomplished through mourning. We understand mourning as a remembrance performance whereby past and future are potentially reconciled. Not all mourning processes are equally enacted and not all mourning processes are complete. As a matter of fact, when mourning is incomplete, the result is melancholia and, in LaCapran terms, melancholia positively falls into the acting-out paradigm, leaving the traumatic event in a compulsive repetitive circuit. Conversely, complete mourning dismantles the death drive that, according to Freud (1990), resides at the core of trauma by socializing and ritualizing this repetition compulsion. In doing so, mourning generates a space for reflection, to wit, a space for working-through. Nevertheless, it is paramount to notice how the right to mourn is not automatically granted to all subjects and it is from this predicament, namely the recognition of mourning as privilege, that our analysis of Indian Ocean subjecthood draws its force. As the visible sign of grief, mourning allows acts of memory to be constructed

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as meaningful performances and hence, the denial of mourning results in a perpetuation of trauma as compulsive repetition and condemns the traumatized subject to meaningless acting-out rather than productive working-­ through. As Butler contends in Precarious Life, the simple act of making grieving public is a statement on the relevance of a universally acknowledged corporeal vulnerability, to put it in other words, it is a recognition of a common humanness in contraposition with the biased belief that there are certain lives that “do not qualify as grievable” (2004, 32). It is at this juncture that mourning takes on a resistance dimension since it overtly materialises Butler’s questions: “What counts as human? What lives count as lives? […] What makes for a grievable life?” (20, italics in original). The subjects that inhabit our Indian Ocean life narratives—be their resilience the outcome of instinctual survival or conscientious resistance—are all imbricated in a trope of resistance that makes their lives both literally and literarily grievable and, therefore, worthy of being accounted for. These are narratives carefully conceived as mourning practices, in which the inherited inter-generational trauma is worked-through by the descendants of, as Caruth would have it, an unclaimed experience (Caruth 1996). Our selection of life narratives sheds light on traumatic periods of recent Indian Ocean history, specifically East Africa, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius. These life narratives are to be identified as “traumatogenic” texts (Eaglestone 2008; Kurtz 2014, 2020) and, as a consequence, the construction of “self” that they unveil is contingent upon the successful, unsuccessful, or partially successful overcoming of trauma. In this volume we endeavour to explore the ethical dimensions of personal narrations by envisioning the written document as an exercise on mourning. We conceive Indian Ocean life writing as a site for mourning the past by resorting to the ethical claims of historical responsibility in an attempt to empower the present and the future. Unlike melancholia, mourning’s embedded temporariness, a deeply felt sense that mourning is a period, and as such, it has a beginning but also an end, becomes a forceful tool to transform the experience of trauma into a meaningful act. In an aesthetic manner, mourning alleviates the disorders attached to trauma and, we could infer, puts an end, albeit symbolically, to trauma. Our theoretical paradigm, the “aesthetics of re-membering”, aims at delineating structures of feeling, that is to say, traces of lived experiences of an Indian Ocean imaginary distinct from the institutional and ideological organisation of national frontiers, which themselves have been, most often than not, the origin of trauma. By means of an “aesthetics of re-membering”,

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traumatic experiences via mourning performances are recalled and constructed as tools of resistance in order to bring to the fore the struggles of the past and highlight the emotional connectedness and resilience capacity of the peoples inhabiting the Indian Ocean rim. Last but foremost, this book aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on transoceanic studies that seek to contemplate the Indian Ocean and Atlantic regions as intimately related spaces around which people, discourses, ideologies, and cultures circulate (Cohen 2017; Stern 2006). Therefore, our four geographical sites—East Africa, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius—are apprehended as a historical and cultural network wherein, as the title of Gaurav Desai’s article reveals, “Oceans Connect” (Desai 2010). According to Desai, this transoceanic connection is crucial to understand the role of Africa in the face of today’s globalization and, in this manner, “to challenge the dominant reading of Africa as having somehow escaped or bypassed the processes of globalization” (Desai 2010, 715). Mourning and Resilience is a consciously literary intrusion in the conspicuously history-oriented field of transoceanic studies so as to connect aesthetically the lives of M.G.  Vassanji, Michael Ondaatje, Neera Kapur-Dromson, Parita Mukta, Shailja Patel, Lindsey Collen, Amina Cachalia, Dr Goonam, and Indres Naidoo with the “cross-currents of Indian Ocean histories” (Desai 2010, 718). The first part of the book entitled “Mourning Memoirs” is based on the autobiographical accounts of two of the most iconic contemporary writers in English, M.G.  Vassanji and Michael Ondaatje. Both memoirs display a search for origins encoded in the trauma of return, a trauma intently associated with the displacement that, according to Mishra, forges the diasporic imaginary (Mishra 2007). Their journeys of return bear the mark of the “ectopic insider”. Borrowed from the field of medicine, “ectopic” resonates with a pregnancy whose fertilized egg implants itself outside the womb and, therefore, is placed in an abnormal position. The term “ectopic insider” is thus fashioned after the displaced, removed, and uprooted position of the fertilized egg whose “true” home, so to speak, is the uterus, to invoke Vassanji’s and Ondaaje’s peculiar homeland displacement. The second chapter, “The Ectopic Insider: Exploring the Interstices of Travel Writing, Memory, and History in M.G.  Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo” explores the ultimate experience of the diasporic Indian Ocean existence as embodied by the author himself, Moyez G. Vassanji. Born in Nairobi, Vassanji’s family moved to Dar es Salaam when he was only four and he lived there until he reached the age of eighteen and went

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to the US to study Nuclear Physics. Later on, he moved to Toronto, where he is currently living as a Canadian citizen. Moreover, the Indian origin of Vassanji’s familial ancestry adds yet another layer to his diversified Indian-­ Ocean cosmopolitanism. Vassanji’s African memoir—as And Home Was Kariakoo is referred to in contrast with his Indian memoir, A Place Within—is a beguiling rhizomatic narrative whose roots encompass an indebtedness to (1) négritude’s most representative exponent, Aimé Cesáire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), (2) nineteenth-­ century orientalist travel writing, and (3) postcolonial memoirs. This ectopic inside-ness regulates also the book’s third chapter, “Of Father and Son: The Configuration of the Trauma of Return in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family”. Ondaatje’s return to Sri Lanka one year before the outbreak of the Civil War and consequent writing of his memoir is a response to his “perverse and solitary desire” to “touch […] into words” (Ondaatje 1982, 22) a whole generation of Sri Lankans, namely his parents’ generation. In reality, Ondaatje’s desire conceals an urgent need to come to terms with that key figure—his father—from the past that keeps eluding him and which he must recover in order to maintain his fictional narrations in motion and thus safeguard his identity as writer. Vassanji’s and Ondaatje’s indulgence in history and reliance on memory give shape to a mourning performance constructed upon an aesthetics of re-membering that is contingent upon a trope of resistance, the resistance to forget. Their respective memoirs are to be read as acts of creative survival; the self that is at stake is the one that identifies them as writers. “Female Resilience”, the title of the second part of the volume, veers around the complex and ambiguous relationship between resilience and the in/visible silence of what we call gendered suffering. “Rhizomatic Perennials: Resilience and Survival in Kenyan Asian Memoirs” features the memoirs of two East African Asian women: Parita Mukta and Neera Kapur-Dromson. One of the significant characteristics of both memoirs is the authors’ insistence on three factors: resilience, tradition, and community. Another frequently recurring trope is that of laying down roots in the new land leading to the spreading of the Indian rhizome—the extended family and communal network—in East African territory. This suggests that the Indian migration to East Africa can be read in socio-ecological terms as the first pioneers—Lala Kirparam Ramchand and his wife Hardei in Neera Kapur-Dromson’s From Jelum to Tana (2007) and Muktaben (Ba) and her husband Himmatlal in Parita Mukta’s Shards of Memory

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(2002)—all show strong belief systems and know how to survive on the minimum. The trope of perennial plants that resonates throughout these memoirs refers to the orthodox outlook and hold on traditions which describes the East African Asian community to perfection as these are characteristics of plants which have strong root systems and which are conservative in their use of water and nutrients (Schmitt 2017). Thus the analysis of these memoirs shows how Mukta’s and Kapur-Dromson’s ancestors survived and thrived in the new land through forthrightness and resilience. Recalling Vijay Mishra’s insistence on the traumatic nature of the crossing of the kala pani (2007), the sense of loss permeates the memoirs but the women portrayed by Mukta and Kapur-Dromson have no time to pine for the homeland. In this sense, these women are portrayed as fighters and survivors, who continually refuse to mourn what cannot be recovered and instead resist the gender-based limitations of their time. Their constant reappraisal of their situation in times of trouble underscores a cognitive flexibility which allows them an optimistic view on the future. “‘Learning to Wear a Sari Is a Rite of Passage’: Shailja Patel’s Inventory of the Migrant Body in Migritude” introduces Patel’s text as a body-­ shaped memoir whose self-discovery narration is harmonized by the saris she has inherited from her mother. The five and half metres of cloth that configure the “sari”, the Indian female garment par excellence, envelop Patel’s body in a minute dissection of her existence as a “migrant”. A Kenyan-born of Indian descent, educated in both the UK and the United States, Patel literally performs her story of displacement on stage. The physicality of the theatrical ambience wherein her memoir is being elicited intensifies the bodily essence of her “unfiltered, unedited, unmanipulated” (Patel 2010, 85) performance which, unlike writing, actually places “a body in front of other bodies” (Patel 2010, 85). Patel’s sari-clad body is the inventory that Gramsci signalled as the first thing to do in the human crusade “to know thyself” (2003, 24). Otherwise put, it is her attempt to unravel “the infinity of traces” (Gramsci 2003, 24) that the historical process has deposited in her. Her migrant body bears, as Cavarero (2002) and Butler (1990, 2004) would have it, the heavy materiality allotted to the female body, but this is a materiality increased by the non-whiteness of her skin. Patel’s is a body conceived against an imperial body politic, a state whose civilizing rationality rested majestically on maleness and whiteness. This is a body politic machine that manufactures borders and locates “bodies” within state delimitations. It is a body stamped by the traumatic

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memory of colonialism. As such, Patel’s mourning performance is an act of resistance against colonial history and a statement of female resilience. The migrant body that Migritude propounds cannot be encapsulated by the political demarcation of the nation-state since its “trans” nature positions it in a trans-historical, trans-national, trans-cultural, and, ultimately, trans-oceanic territory forged within the female energy that emanates from a life of learning how to wear a sari. Migritude’s resisting ethics is formally expressed in its poetic combination of words and images, archival documentation and personal letters. Eccentric and unsectarian, Patel’s memoir joins the other Kenyan Asian memoirists in its accurate delineation of a female genealogy written against the canvas of transoceanic experiences. The third part of the book entitled “Indian Ocean Crossing” is shaped around the transoceanic ethos that imprints the life experiences of the South-African-born Mauritian writer Lindsey Collen, on the one hand, and the South African Indians Dr Goonam, Amina Cachalia, and Indres Naidoo, on the other. Collen’s “The Indian Ocean as a Unifying Force: A Memoir” is an implacable testimony of the transoceanic potency that delineated—and is still delineating—the course of her own life, both geographically and epistemologically. This is a memoir written with and against the currents of a trans-oceanic cartography which she deliberately and efficaciously places amid the most contemporary episode that connected humankind worldwide: the Covid-19 pandemic. The ad hoc quality of Collen’s memoir, together with its prescient uniqueness, is due to the fact that she was commissioned to write a life writing piece for a Special Issue of the journal Revista canaria de estudios ingleses (edited by Pujolràs-­ Noguer & Oliva 2021) which was devoted to Indian Ocean Writing as the title of the volume, Indian Ocean Imaginaries, clearly indicates. The memoir exhibits the Indian Ocean as an essentially relational space that connected people in the past and continues to connect people in the present. However, the manner in which this connection is articulated varies depending on who experiences this Indian Ocean crossing and when this Indian Ocean crossing is experienced. In her text Collen reveals the postcolonial and inveterate transnational/transoceanic and optimistic view, which can be contrasted with the underlying message of many of her novels. The seventh and last chapter, “Banyans Behind Bars: Three South African Indian Memoirs”, argues that South Africans of Indian origin can be likened to the banyan tree in the sense that they, like their botanical counterpart, have grown immensely and can even shift and drift away from

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their original trunk, India, at a certain distance (Shanahan 2018). The South African Indian diaspora, the largest in the world, claims allegiance to their host country, South Africa, but, at the same time, retains certain cultural characteristics of the homeland of their forebears. The three memoirs—Dr Goonam’s Coolie Doctor. An Autobiography by Dr. Goonam (1991), Indres Naidoo’s Island in Chains. Ten Years on Robben Island. Prisoner 885/63 (1982), and Amina Cachalia’s When Hope and History Rhyme (2013)—are vehicles to explore the tenacity and resilience of these three freedom fighters. Despite their restraining orders and prison sentences, they, like the banyan tree, could not be tied down and neutralised. All three spent some time in apartheid prisons, Naidoo having been retained on Robben Island the longest, from 1963 to 1973, while the two women were continuously in and out of state custody. Naidoo’s memoir insists on the community spirit that reigned on Robben Island but he also dwells on the failed state that South Africa represented during the apartheid regime. Dr Goonam, one of the first Indian woman doctors in South Africa, also centres on community links in her autobiography but she betrays a certain nostalgia for the ethos of middle-class Indian life. Whereas Naidoo’s mourning is for an inclusive South African nation, Goonam appears to long for a lost, class-blind world. Cachalia’s memoir likewise cherishes the community spirit that held neighbours and friends together but what differentiates her work from that of Naidoo and Goonam is the enormous amount of visual material, including numerous photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and identity cards included in the text. The extensive photographic material serves to belie the passive role Indian women were expected to assume and forcefully reinserts them into recent South African history. The chapter concludes by claiming that the three examples of Indian Ocean life writing, written from a South African perspective but fully conscious of the roots of the Indian banyan tree, play a crucial role in commemorating the active participation of countless South African Indians, men and women, in the struggle for a democratic and just society. The four authors analysed in this final part share a common South African root which, like the banyan tree, spread from Durban and Cape Town across the ocean to the Mascarene Islands. All four authors devote their textual energies to building a fairer society but their memoirs reveal the breakdown of an idyllic community where citizens could flourish regardless of ethnicity, gender, social class, or intellectual ability. Collen’s work is by far the most optimistic but even she cannot avoid mourning

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what could have been achieved. These memoirs show resistance and resilience but evince a telltale sorrow for an Indoceanic utopia. Resilience and Mourning in Indian Ocean Life Writing is the result of the imaginative “looking forward” motif that guided the Special Issue on the future of auto/biography studies launched by a/b: Auto/Biography Studies journal. The volume is nurtured by the “radical inclusion” (2017, 140) that the introductory article by Hipchen and Chansky pointed out. Indeed it is only through a spirit of radical inclusion that the Indian Ocean, given its robust rhizomatic communal nature, can be successfully addressed. The selection of texts together with the eclectic theoretical framework employed by the authors fortifies the transnational and transoceanic ethos of present critical work on life writing, on the one hand, and on the other contribute to effectively untangling the factors that feed complicated networks of “unresolved imperialisms” (Hipchen and Chansky 2017, 147).

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Hipchen, Emily, and Ricia Anne Chansky. 2017. Looking Forward: The Futures of Auto/Biography Studies. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32 (2): 139–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2017.1301759. Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2010. Universalizing the Indian Ocean. PMLA 124 (3): 721–729. Iacoviello, Brian M., and Dennis S.  Charney. 2014. Psychosocial Facets of Resilience: Implications for Preventing Post Trauma Psychopathology, Treating Trauma Survivors, and Enhancing Community Resilience. European Journal of Psychotraumatology 5 (1): 23970. https://doi.org/10.3402/ejpt.v5.23970. Kearney, Milo. 2004. The Indian Ocean in World History. London: Routledge. Kurtz, J.  Roger. 2014. Literature, Trauma and the African Moral Imagination. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 32 (4): 421–435. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/02589001.2014.979607. ———. 2020. Trauma and Transformation in African Literature. London and New York: Routledge. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Laplanche, J., and J.-B. Pontalis. 1980. The Language of Psycho-analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, intr. Daniel Lagache. London: The Hogarth Press. Misch, Georg. 1950. A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Vol. 2. London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Mishra, Vijay. 2007. Literature of the Indian Diaspora : Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. Routledge. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. 2009. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-­ Representation. New York: Routledge. Moorthy, Shanti, and Ashraf Jamal, eds. 2010. Indian Ocean Studies. Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives. London: Routledge. Norris, Fran H., Susan P. Stevens, Betty Pfefferbaum, Karen F. Wyche, and Rose L. Pfefferbaum. 2008. Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities, and Strategy for Disaster Readiness. American Journal of Community Psychology 41 (1-2): 127–150. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-007-9156-6. Ondaatje, Michael. (1982). Running in the Family. London: Picador. Ortner, Sherry B. 1995. Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1 January): 173–193. Patel, Shailja. 2010. Migritude. New York: Kaya Press. Pujolràs-Noguer, Esther. 2015a. The Scramble for Home: World War I in the East African Imagination. In Writings of Persuasion and Dissonance in the Great War. That Better Whiles May Follow Worse, ed. David Owen and Cristina Pividori, 155–172. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi. ———. 2015b. Between Memory and Desire: The Historical Novel as a Shadow Genre in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion. CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 45 (1): 41–66. ———. 2018. Desiring/Desired Bodies. Miscegenation and Romance in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion. Critique. Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59 (5): 596–608. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2018.1459456.

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———. 2019. Imperially White and Male. Colonial Masculinities in M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1994) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion (2005). International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21 (1): 131–149. https://doi. org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1487323. ———. 2021. Trauma, History and Desire in the Indian Ocean Imaginary. A Reading of M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets as Material Culture. Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies 7 (3): 219–238. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/23277408.2021.1898267. Pujolràs-Noguer, Esther, and Felicity Hand. 2019. In/Visible Traumas: Healing, Loving, Writing. Kampala: Femrite. Pujolràs-Noguer, Esther, and J.I.  Oliva, eds. 2021. Indian Ocean Imaginaries/ Imaginarios indoceánicos. Revista canaria de estudios ingleses 82: 13–26. Pujolràs-Noguer, Esther, Emma Domínguez-Rué, and Maricel Oró-Piqueras. 2021. Exploring the Interstices of Aging and Narrative Agency in M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea. Revista canaria de estudios ingleses 82: 79–93. Rak, Julie. 2004. Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity. Genre XXXVI (Fall/Winter): 305–326. Robinson, Guy M., and Doris A.  Carson. 2016. Resilient Communities: Transitions, Pathways and Resourcefulness. The Geographical Journal 182 (2 June): 114–122. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12144. Schmitt, Carolyn. 2017. Finding the Root Cause of Plant Resilience. The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Welcomes Plant Ecologist Dave Des Marais to the MIT Faculty. 10 October. https://news.mit. edu/2017/mit-plant-physiologist-david-des-marais-joins-cee-faculty-1010. Shanahan, Mike. 2018. Ladders to Heaven. London: Unbound. Sheriff, Abdul. 2010. Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean. Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam. London: Hurst and Company. Shrestha, Anushiya. 2019. Which Community, Whose Resilience? Critical Reflections on Community Resilience in Peri-urban Kathmandu Valley. Critical Asian Studies 51 (4): 493–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/1467271 5.2019.1637270. Simpson, Edward, and Kai Kresse, eds. 2007. Struggling With History. Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean. London: Hurst & Company. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stern, Philip J. 2006. British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections. William and Mary Quarterly 63 (4): 693–712. Vassanji, M.G. 1996. The Book of Secrets. London: Picador. Vink, Markus P.M. 2007. Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘New Thalassology’. Journal of Global History 2: 41–62.

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Wandji, Dieunedort. 2019. Rethinking the Time and Space of Resilience Beyond the West: An Example of the Post-colonial Border. Resilience 7 (3): 288–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2019.1601861. Whitlock, Gillian. 2015. Postcolonial Life Narratives. Testimonial Transactions. Oxford: OUP.

PART I

Mourning Memoirs

The names of M.G. Vassanji and Michael Ondaatje have long been authenticated as bedrocks of the English literary tradition. Their connection to the English language in which they write unmasks a series of often contradictory alliances and foreboding collusions which reflect the aftermath of colonization, on the one hand, and animate the present postcolonial condition of the world, on the other. From the safe positioning that their Canadian citizenship endows them with, both Ondaatje and Vassanji have explored the interstices of communal belonging and cosmopolitan universalism in the complex identity formation process of their fictional characters. Nevertheless, I believe that it is in their memoirs where they manifest a more nuanced approach to the complicated issue of postcolonial belonging focussed as they are in the conscientious construction of their own non-fictional selves. Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo (2014), the text analysed in Chap. 2, collects, in a Gramscian fashion, the disseminated historical traces of a heavily scented Indian oceanic East Africa. And Home Was Kariakoo is a consolidated author’s claim of Africanness before the overwhelming materiality of his Canadian passport and the problematic “Asianness” of his ancestral Indian origins. Vassanji’s travelogue exhumes an “emotional reclamation” (And Home, 2) of the East African land he left at the age of eighteen as his home and his “need to return” (And Home, 3) is formalized as an act of mourning whereby belonging is restituted. Published in 1982, Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, the subject of Chap. 3, gives vent to his “perverse and solitary desire” (Running, 22) to “touch […]

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into words” (Running, 22) a whole generation of Sri Lankans, namely his parents’ generation. In reality, Ondaatje’s desire conceals an urgent need to come to terms with that key figure—his father—from the past that keeps eluding him and which he must recover in order to safeguard his identity as writer. Running in the Family is literally a mourning memoir in which the son in his stature as writer brings the father back to the family history. The survival of the son is contingent upon the redemption of the father and since the father is tied to the land of colonial Ceylon, the son’s search for the father entails a revision of the is-land of Sri Lanka. In other words, both the father and the Sri Lankan land are redeemed by a son-­ writer whose relationship with the is-land is marked by his uncomfortable position as unnatural outsider—he felt Sri Lanka when he was eleven years old. Enshrouded in the identity of prodigal son, Ondaatje’s return to Sri Lanka is a recognition of the blood that runs in the family as much as a desire to run from a past, embodied by the traumatized figure of the father, that might imperil his survival as a writer. However, Ondaatje-the-­ writer knows that liberation from a traumatizing and constraining past can only be successfully enacted via the mourning performance that his memoir ultimately is. Both memoirs display a search for origins encoded in the trauma of return, a trauma intimately associated with the displacement that, according to Mishra, forges the diasporic imaginary (2007). Their journeys of return bear the mark of what I call the “ectopic insider”. Borrowed from the field of Medicine, “ectopic” resonates with a pregnancy whose fertilized egg implants itself outside the womb and, therefore, is placed in an abnormal position. I fashion the term “ectopic insider” after the displaced, removed, and uprooted position of the fertilized egg whose “true” home, so to speak, is the uterus, to invoke Ondaatje’s and Vassanji’s peculiar homeland displacement. Thus, the two chapters that form this section present two different manners to articulate the trauma of return through acts of mourning and demonstrate how Vassanji’s “emotional reclamation” (And Home, 2) of East Africa as his homeland and Ondaatje’s “travelling back to the family [he] had grown from” (Running, 22) are deliberate constructions which their respective authors authenticate via their status as professional writers.

CHAPTER 2

The Ectopic Insider: Exploring the Interstices of Travel Writing, Memory, and History in M.G. Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo Esther Pujolràs-Noguer

One day I decided I would visit and experience that land as much as possible; travel to its different corners and write—not about the country per se but about myself in it; not as an outsider reporting to outsiders but as someone from there, who understood. If in the process I could provide a context, or indulge in history, which is a passion, or in memory, which is a form of history, all the better. —M.G. Vassanji, And Home Was Kariakoo (Preface, XIV) The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. The first thing to do is to make such an inventory. —Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Pujolràs-Noguer, F. Hand, Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46345-7_2

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Introduction: The Ectopic Condition and the Discourse of Négritude Within the vast oeuvre of M.G. Vassanji, And Home Was Kariakoo (2014) is referred to as his “African memoir” to distinguish it from his other memoir, his “Indian memoir”, A Place Within. Rediscovering India, which was published in 2009, five years earlier. Both memoirs encapsulate effectively the identity contest that underlines Vassanji’s imaginary, that is to say, the concomitant Asian (Indian) and African component of his subject formation which he sometimes finds hard to reconcile in a harmonious, coordinated and congenial manner. Kenya, the country of his birth and Tanzania, the country of his childhood and adolescent years, claim him as African and yet India, and to be more precise, Gujarat, his ancestors’ homeland, calls him back in a persistent and persuasive manner, professing its vivid hold onto its ancestral subject. The “home” in the title of the African memoir seems to indicate that Vassanji’s allegiance to Africa is somehow more compelling than the one exerted on India which is consigned a “place within”. The former endows Kariakoo, the African quarter of Dar, with the earthy solidness of utter physicality and urgent belonging, whereas the latter locates “India” in the heart, in an ethereal position that contravenes the compactness and firmness of “home”. Unlike the re-­ discovery process that he undertakes on his travels around the Indian subcontinent and that configure the texture of A Place Within, his African journey should be understood as a compelling, “emotional reclamation” (Vassanji 2014, 2)1 of East Africa as “[his] country” (1), and this is enacted as he is “returning home” (1) in the possession of the Canadian passport that safeguards his now Canadian citizenship. This journey of return to the native land is thus performed with the anguishing desire to chronicle with the veracity, accuracy and “mad belonging” (2) allotted to those from the inside, as “someone from there who understood” (xiv) while being aware of the heavy foreignness that his Canadian citizenship invests him with. Vassanji’s return journey exposes what I call the ectopic condition which grants him the category of ectopic insider. The term “ectopic” is borrowed from the field of medicine and, most commonly, it refers to a pregnancy whose fertilized egg implants itself outside the womb; this fertilized egg is therefore placed in an abnormal position. I fashion the term “ectopic insider” after the displaced, removed, and uprooted position of the fertilized egg whose “true” home, so to speak, is the uterus, to refer to those chroniclers who, like Vassanji, find themselves in a peculiar situation, the outcome of their claimed inside-ness

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before their flagrant outside-ness. To put it bluntly, M.G.  Vassanji is a Canadian citizen claiming his native Africa as homeland. The abnormal position is, in this particular case, formally emblematized by his Canadian passport. This ectopic condition conditions—pun intended—his journey on East African territory as the following passage testifies to: The bus stops and an officious-looking fellow in his mid-thirties gets in and walks down the aisle, then back up. He stops, singles me out, asks for my identification. Who does he think I am? I ask for his ID, he’s an immigration officer, and I show him my passport. The bus goes on. It’s humiliating to be treated this way. Do I so obviously look like a foreigner? Am I a foreigner? I don’t think so. I try to think of circumstances to mitigate this humiliation. My camera, for one thing, marks me out, though I’ve done my best to keep it out of sight; we are in a part of the country beloved to foreigners, and I’m the only brown man in the bus. There are always explanations. (217)

Are there always explanations for the treatment as foreigner this “brown man” (217), this self-acclaimed African, receives from the African immigration officer? I contend that Vassanji’s African memoir is a recurrent search for explanations to rationally consolidate his indisputably emotional belonging since, as he affirms, “leaving a place does not sever one’s ties to it, one’s feeling of concern and belonging” (328) and, he adds, “a returnee has some claim to the land that formed him” (328). What is more, this returnee, M.G. Vassanji, bestows “distance” (328) a privileged stature, that of allowing one “to see a place as the world sees it” (328). In other words, the ectopic insider of And Home Was Kariakoo turns the prejudices attached to his ectopic condition, his abnormal position as one from the outside but of the inside, into a source of authenticity and truthfulness which he aligns with the discourse of négritude expressed through the lines from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) that open the memoir. The connection established between And Home Was Kariakoo and Césaire’s iconic négritude work, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is not gratuitous. Césaire’s poem is constructed upon the trope of return and his emotional reclamation of the native land, “this land whose mud is flesh of my flesh” (Césaire 1971, 60), justly reflects the intensity of Vassanji’s own “mad belonging” (2). Furthermore, Césaire’s poem also alludes to two aspects ingrained in the discourse of négritude which render Vassanji’s memoir a powerful signification: a diasporic essence and an African-centred ethos. Césaire was born in Martinique, West Indies, and moved to his colonial metropolis, Paris, to get an education. It was in the midst of his

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immersion in the culture of the colonizers that the awareness of his own colonized condition emerged. Hence, his poetic journey to the native land is monitored by a profound sense of guilt at having assimilated the colonizer’s discourse which prompted him to see his country and his people as dark and uncivilized; the poem is a gradual and vivid process of decolonization whereby his native land is resurrected from the dregs of imperialism and rises as an energetic source of inspiration that lets him debunk the colonizing myth of decadence and backwardness that enveloped it. This trope of return that shapes the discourse of négritude is, notwithstanding, as Césaire’s experience demonstrates, articulated from a diasporic perspective which is itself formulated upon the belief that there exists a black world, a world that encompasses “the world’s five continents and most of its inhabitable islands, especially the islands of the Atlantic, the Pacific, even the South Seas” (Anyidoho 1989, 2) and whose original seed is to be located in the African continent. What binds this black world is its alleged blackness2 and a common history of suffering substantiated by the slave trade. Therefore, this trope of return that, as I have insisted, moulds the discourse of négritude is constructed upon another trope, which I call the trope of the displaced home and which captures the forced diaspora inflicted upon those who were enslaved and forcibly transported to other lands. The trope of the displaced home is an evolution of Vijay Mishra’s notion of displacement as that which forges the diasporic imaginary (2007), and this is an imaginary, he sustains, enshrouded in trauma. In his task in theorizing the diasporic imaginary, Mishra asks himself whether the source of the original trauma can be traced, “I want to ask if there is something in the language of the subject that bears the traces of an original trauma” (2007, 106) and so, my reading of négritude under the lens of Mishra’s diasporic imaginary permits me to identify slavery as the manifestation of this original trauma and Africa as the physical location wherein the trauma was perpetrated. The trope of the displaced home that lurks behind négritude’s trope of return is what infuses Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo with a distinctive négritude quality that motions him to situate his “African home” (2) in a sensitively higher position to the one granted to Canada “which gave [him] a home” (2) and his “Indian ancestral homeland” which only “partially claimed [him] back” (2). Césaire’s language unveils Mishra’s traces of the original trauma of slavery and it is through writing Notebook of a Return that négritude displays its vigour. Likewise, it is writing the means whereby Vassanji will deploy the traces of his original trauma which, as I will show later, also bears the marks of slavery.3

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Although Vassanji’s memoir is deliberately animated by the energetic language of négritude, and, more specifically, Césaire’s Notebook, noticeable differences separate one text from the other. The spirit of celebration and hope that sets up the rhythm of the language of négritude sometimes falters in Vassanji’s memoir and his attempts at maintaining an exultant and victorious mood are, on occasions, strenuously enunciated. This is, up to a certain extent, self-evident when the circumstances surrounding the coinage of négritude are considered. Négritude writers are imbued with the decolonizing spirit of those who visualize the independence of their respective nations on the horizon; their discourse is carved within the language of hope, the hope for the new independent era awaiting Africa and Caribbean colonies. Theirs is a glimpse into the future framed within the parameters of youth. Césaire returns to a native land on the verge of independence. Vassanji, on the contrary, returns to a native land which has been independent for fifty-odd years and still has not fulfilled the dreams of independence. His is a perspective from an older, more experienced traveller who must reconcile négritude’s deconstruction of the unidirectional Eurocentric view of Africa as “poverty […] begging and sullen unemployment” (xiv) with the acknowledgement that poverty, begging, and sullen unemployment exist in Africa. Henceforth, in a most genuine négritude style, Vassanji’s text dutifully displays the “joy” (xiv) and “music and colour” (xiv) that emanates from African streets and yet “the vast diversity” (xiv) of a “varied and teeming country” (xiv) must be balanced with “the sad truth” (337) that Africa “depends on foreign aid like a patient permanently hooked to life sustenance” (337). This antithetical symphony punctuated by intimate attachment and reflective distancing is the aftermath of the oftentimes difficult-to-reconcile knowledge of the subject who is at once the insider and the outsider, in short, the subject who is subservient to the ectopic condition previously outlined. There is still another divergence that further differentiates Césaire’s Notebook, and by extension négritude, from Vassanji’s memoir: whereas the Atlantic Ocean and the trauma of the Middle Passage nurture and modulate the language of négritude, Vassanji’s writing is transparently delineated by the Indian Ocean. And Home Was Kariakoo is an Indian Ocean–centred memoir and it is from this accented Indian Oceanness that the uniqueness of the text stems. As noted by Carter and Torabully in Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora, “the ethnic complexity of post abolition societies that developed in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean” (2002, 1) challenged négritude’s belief in the existence of a universal black

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identity. As a result of the term’s shortcomings, “more ethnic inclusive concepts” (2002, 1), such as creolité, antillanité, and Indiocéanisme, alongside Carter’s and Torabully coolitude, emerged in an attempt to “replace négritude” (2002, 1). Deeply aware of the Indian flavour of his African memoir, on the one hand, and his Indian origins, on the other, Vassanji does not “replace négritude” (2002, 1) but, on the contrary, he uses it to infuse his journey of return with the powerful poetic cadence of a decolonizing strategy rooted in an emotional reclamation of the land (Vassanji 2014). Vassanji’s négritude allegiance ultimately reinforces his claim that the African land is truly his home and therefore his postulation on belonging demands a more nuanced reading of “blackness”. And Home Was Kariakoo definitely complicates the equation of Africanness with blackness. The concentrated local flavour of Kariakoo, the African section of Dar es Salaam, accommodates the porousness that Vink attributes to the Indian Ocean (Vink 2007). The Africanness of Kariakoo melts with the Indianness of Gaam, “the first Indian settlement of Dar” (6) through the vanishing frontier of Uhuru Street, the “single, long street” (6) that painted the area with “Indian stores and homes” (6). “It was here, between Gaam and Kariakoo”, Vassanji perceptively notes, “that my mother opened her ‘fancy goods’ store, when we moved fatherless from Nairobi to Dar” (6). The conclusive remark exhibited by the memoir’s title, namely that Kariakoo was home, is the result of previous reflection as the conjunction “and” ingeniously points out. It is the experienced chronicler, the insightful ectopic insider who can afford to announce that Kariakoo was indeed home. But this recognition of Kariakoo as home adds yet another layer to Vassanji’s ectopic condition, one which is by no means shared by his négritude literary ancestors and which complicates his declared Africanness, to wit, his Indian heritage. His Asianness leaves him in an in-between position literally materialized by his childhood territory, an “African area called Kariakoo […] lined all the way with Indian stores and homes” (6).4 Vassanji’s longing for home, contained as it is in the very title of the memoir, is his public and emotional recognition of East Africa as his legitimate home. The memoir itself is the projection of his need for an inventory elaborated under the aegis of Gramsci’s history-grounded process of “knowing thyself” (1971, 324). In other words, at the core of one’s subject formation there resides history which, as Gramsci puts it, has deposited in us an “infinity of traces” (1971, 324) without the correlation of a catalogued, discernible and unique inventory. Thus, I argue, And Home Was Kariakoo is Vassanji’s attempt at accomplishing such an inventory, at

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coming to terms with himself, at ultimately knowing himself. To know himself means to materialize and rationalize the trope of a displaced history, a history tainted by multi-layered diasporas that have left little traces from which to build his self. Négritude’s trope of the displaced home metamorphoses into this trope of a displaced history which is the source of Vassanji’s obsession with history and which stamps the rhythm of his memoir with a matter-of-fact rationality interspersed with vivid moments of affection expressed as memories. History and memory—the recording of his and other people’s recollections plus the past he unveils from the museums and monuments he visits—are themselves entangled with the rough, down-to-earth experience of the land itself, “there was life, there were people. There was the geography” (xiv). It is the land that orchestrates this symphony nurtured by both history and memory and it is the land that blends the individual experience with the communal experience and, therefore, it is the geography-grounded genre of travel writing the one that Vassanji utilizes to ground his geography-oriented memoir. The twenty-five chapters that structure the memoir are engulfed in a cyclical narration that is attuned to the traveller’s—Vassanji’s—various destinations. The land instructs the ectopic insider’s search for self and designs his yearning, that is, the need to feel the crude materiality of the African geography. A map outlining the author’s travels precedes the actual text of the memoir, a gesture that recalls those colonial maps from the past that accompanied travellers’ accounts and that authenticated their validity. Vassanji’s journey starts and comes to an end in Dar es Salaam, and in-­ between, delineating the East African contour of the travelling cycle, the following places are visited: Tanga, Kilwa, Quiloa, Bongoland, Kigoma, Ujiji, Tukuyu, Mbeya, Zanzibar, Nairobi. The aim of this chapter is to uncover how Vassanji arranges the infinity of traces that had been deposited in his self by a rhizomatic (Glissant 1997; Deleuze and Guattari 1987), intricate and deep-seated colonial historical process. Vassanji, I suggest, shapes his African memoir via the trope of a displaced history which impregnates the text with the cadences of communal trauma and individual mourning. The remembrance performance that Vassanji deploys through the writing of his African memoir is a mourning exercise that authorizes him to exorcise the ghosts that displace history and menace communal identity. And Home Was Kariakoo is not enveloped by nostalgia, but by an individual resilience that Vassanji has acquired through a deep sense of community that equips him with the affective and linguistic tools to resist forgetting and return to his native land.

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Displaced History and the Trauma of Return Vassanji’s conspicuous affiliation with history is evinced through his fiction.5 He does not shy away from confidently asserting that “history is addictive, is an obsession […] There’s so much around, layers to peel back, enigmas to uncover” (Vassanji 2009, 53). It is in his Indian memoir, A Place Within, where Vassanji offers a pungent reflection on his pressing necessity to, using his own words, uncover those enigmas that constitute him as a subject-in-history (Falk 2007): Why this obsession with the past? I can only conclude that it reflects the deep dissatisfaction of unfinished, incomplete migrations, a perpetual homelessness in my life. My colonial existence—in which memory and the past were trampled upon in a rush to better our lot—and the insecurities of an unorthodox communal culture, in the process of extinction and reinvention by the exigencies of globalized living and modern politics, have both created an uncontrollable and perhaps vain desire to know and record who I am. There are the ways of the mystic and the scientist, to answer this question; and there is the way of history and fiction, which I find more compelling. In how I connect to the history I learn about myself. (Vassanji 2009, 53)

There are three aspects from the passage above that I want to highlight: (1) the unfinished, incomplete migrations that create a perpetual homelessness in one’s life and how this is tied to the colonial existence; (2) the import of communal culture; and, finally, (3) the necessity of searching and recording who one is. The perpetual homelessness that unfinished, incomplete migrations generate resonates with Mishra’s assertion that, firstly, the history of diaspora is a history of trauma which is “written out as impossible mourning” (2007, 114), and, secondly, it is “both a history of forgetting and the experience of that forgetting” (114). As far as the import of communal culture is concerned, I would like to draw on Dominick LaCapra’s argument that trauma can be the basis of communal identity, “something traumatic, disruptive, disorienting in the life of a people can become the basis of identity formation” (2001, 161). The necessity of recording who one is takes us irremediably to Gramsci’s inventory, to discerning the traces that the historical process has deposited in the self. The question that ensues is therefore the following: how does Vassanji integrate and articulate the diasporic trauma of perpetual homelessness, with its individual and communal ramifications, in the inventory of the self carried out in his African memoir? Does And Home Was

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Kariakoo ultimately prove that, contrarily to Mishra’s positioning, forgetting can be resisted and, henceforth, mourning can turn into a possibility? My response to the second question is affirmative: And Home Was Kariakoo is a cogent and deliberate act of resistance against forgetting and as such, it allows Vassanji to, employing LaCapran terminology, work through trauma (LaCapra 2001) but mourning will only be possible as long as “the belief that trauma can be transmitted to those who may not have experienced it” (Mishra 2007, 116) is contemplated. Vassanji’s memoir is rooted in transgenerational transference; he stands as member of the community—be that community the Khoja-Ismaili community in Dar or the larger community of East Africa or the still more encompassing community of the whole of Africa—and from that position he experiences the historical trauma of the community. However, the articulation of this experience of historical trauma is further problematized by the double positionality of the narrator; the status of chronicler as member of the community overlaps with his stature as writer/observer/traveller. At this point, LaCapra’s notion of the “contagiousness of trauma” (2001, 142) is particularly useful since it speculates on “the way it [trauma] can spread even to the interviewer or commentator” (2001, 142). As a member of the community, Vassanji’s experience of trauma is inherited but, as a writer/observer/traveller, trauma is experienced at an individual level, as an empathic, sought-after contagion, as it were. The confluence of inherited-­communal trauma with individual trauma is the source, the raison d’être of the ectopic insider and, I vindicate, the trauma of the ectopic insider is the trauma of return. How Vassanji phrases his particular trauma of return, how he confronts his perpetual homelessness and builds his inventory of the self—the first question I have previously postulated—is what I will answer in the following pages. The trauma of return is conveyed at the interstices of travel writing, memory, and history. Travel writing is a genre manifestly suited to explore the entanglement of memory, history, and land that frames Vassanji’s memoir insomuch as it opens up spaces for intervention. In its search for history, And Home Was Kariakoo unwittingly exhumes nineteenth-­century orientalist travel writings since these are the only written accounts that have survived historical erasure. There is no record on the part of the natives of the land, except for one notable exception, that of Tippu Tip, which will be analysed later; “native” history and memory, as it is, have been expunged from colonial discourse and so, the inventory is filled up

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with the traces of the colonizers. Vassanji’s travel writing provides us with the native account but, as his incessant historical digging demonstrates, the fabrication of his native inventory is not a straightforward task. The travel writing that shapes Vassanji’s memoir feeds upon the previous colonizers’ accounts—explorers and/or writers—and sets up a dialogue with them thereby flaunting their foundational inconsistencies but also, in a strategic manoeuvring, illustrating their perceptive intuitions. Although pre-British Empire travel writings are called forth, among them those by the Arab Ibn Battuta and the Portuguese Gaspar Correa, the dialogue is mainly performed with those accounts signed by big nineteenth-­century and early-twentieth-century names, such as Richard Burton, John Speke, H.M Stanley, David Livingstone, Francis Brett Young, Von Lettow-Vorbeck, Captain James Frederick Elton, and Evelyn Waugh. Encoded within the grammar of empire, their inventories are irrefutable recipients of Orientalist discourse in which the Orient—as embodied by Africa—turns into, as Said puts it, “a living tableaux of queerness” (Said 1978, 103). Their writings become ineffectual endeavours to translate a foreignness they did not quite apprehend and they hide an almost irrepressible desire to domesticate hostility. The end result is a display of, in Said’s words, “unresolved eccentricity” (1978, 103). Vassanji confronts these Orientalist travellers’ accounts from his stature as ectopic insider. The concurrent distance and closeness that his ectopic condition ensures, “it was a strangely moving experience, to come to the place of my origins, but by this time I could also manage a sense of detachment” (38), dissociates him from those Orientalist travellers whose perennial outside-ness blinded them to see the natives’ native land. They wrote with the pen of disillusionment, either because they did not encounter what they were pursuing or because they were overwhelmed by a strangeness they failed to successfully adjust to their respective experiences. Conversely, Vassanji does not write with the pen of disillusionment despite the fact that he detects and himself feels disappointment on his journey, but rather, his writing is impregnated with the négritude impulse to disclose the “true” land of his people, to resolve Orientalist eccentricity by exploring the interstices of travel writing, memory, and history that his ectopic condition entitles him to. As an ectopic insider, he is endowed with an acumen that allows him to be both disillusioned and optimistic. The caveats Vassanji finds in Orientalist travel writing are furnished with the information he extracts from the monuments and museums he encounters on his journey—and which emerge as sometimes rudimentary

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history lessons—on the one hand, and from the memories of the people he meets, on the other. The episode that best exemplifies Vassanji’s methodical strategy to talk back (hooks 1989) to Orientalist discourse is his version of the Burton-Speke expedition. I am borrowing the term “talk back” from bell hooks, the African-American literary and cultural studies critic, who, in Talking Back. Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, defines the act of “talking back” as “speaking as an equal to an authority figure. [It means] to disagree and sometimes it just [means] to have an opinion” (5). It is with the spirit of “talking back”, therefore, that Vassanji establishes his dialogue with Orientalist travel writing and this is particularly prescient in his re-telling of the Burton-Speke expedition. From their stature as authoritative texts, Vassanji confronts Orientalists’ travel accounts as an equal, often disagreeing with them and always offering his own opinion on the matter under discussion. In short, he demonstrates how those Orientalist accounts are not, as hooks would put it, “definitive” (1989, 46), but just another version and, from this perspective alone, as “one among many”, they are, in Vassanji’s view, worth considering. Vassanji first introduces this central chapter of the memoir as an integral constituent of the Orientalist imagination, an imagination that elevated explorers to the category of heroes and heralded travel writing books as best-sellers. “It was”, he declares, “in this climate of celebrity exploration and best-seller travel writing that the Burton-Speke saga took place” (118). He proceeds by signalling how the prevailing authoritative Eurocentric version of the expedition obviates “the country itself” (119)— read the land—and instead focuses entirely on the “very human drama […] that grabbed the western imagination in the decades that followed” (119). The Burton-Speke expedition, Vassanji surmises, has inhabited the western imagination as a tale about two men’s obsession with the discovery of the source of the River Nile and the rivalry between them that ensued and which culminated with Speke’s committing suicide.6 In Vassanji’s own words: The story of that expedition has now become one mainly of the conflictual and tragic relationship between the two men, so opposed in their personalities, that developed during the return leg of the journey and continued to its tragic end after their arrival back home. That story is linked to the obsession with the discovery—at least from the European point of view—of the source of the River Nile. It has been retold many times. (119)

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So, Vassanji is aware of telling a story that “has been retold many times” (119), but this time this story is going to be told from the perspective of the ectopic insider. Burton’s and Speke’s own accounts of their respective travels are utilized by Vassanji to unmask “the biases and misunderstandings” (118) of these two distinguished celebrity-narrators, but in a Machiavellian turn, he is also capable of pinpointing the power that emanates from their “fascinating descriptions of the country, Tanganika, the mainland of Tanzania, that they travelled through—the landscapes, the peoples, the cultures in all their diverseness” (118). He concludes, “they are even more fascinating when you come from the place itself and see a piece of history revealed through this objective yet infuriatingly faulty lens” (118). By presenting his position as someone of the land as that which empowers him with the perspicacity to appreciate more intensely these descriptions than, presumably, the Europeans they were originally intended for, to immediately after denunciate their ingrained prejudices—their infuriatingly faulty lens—is a strategy that buttresses his inside-ness and reinforces his criticism. There lies a cautiously built stratum in Vassanji’s memoir that enhances the functionality of the Burton-Speke expedition and the connection it bears with “the” other prominent episode of the East African exploration, that is, the momentous encounter of Livingstone and Stanley after the former’s apparent disappearance. The presence of these two Western exploration episodes in Vassanji’s experience is so potent that he confesses that on his first visit to London, “the first place I went to see, as a wide-eyed colonial abroad […] was Westminster Abbey and specifically the exact place where Livingstone lies buried” (133).7 The vehemently emotional gesture of this moment, “it was a moving moment for a variety of reasons”, is rapidly undermined by the ensuing question: “Where was I in all this history?” (italics in original, 133). Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Stanley, and their respective stories function as the catalysts Vassanji needs to guide his narration towards the core of his trauma of return, that is to say, the displaced history of the Asian Africans, “those unknown others” (125) whose key participation in the European expeditions was incontestable and paramount. It is now the turn for the stories of Ladha Damji, Tharia Topan,8 Sidi Mubarak, Musa Mzuri, and Tippu Tip to enter the narration since, as Vassanji observes, “they were part of my projected completion as a person” (133) and therefore they are required to assemble the historical sediments of his Gramscian inventory. He gives credit to the Orientalist travel writing of Burton, Speke, Livingstone, and Stanley for having provided

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him with the opportunity, “to find them [unknown others] in the pages of [their] accounts, therefore, regardless of ignorance and jaundice perceptions, [it] was a thrilling experience, and I was thankful to these men who wrote” (133). It is, though, in the dialogue he sets up with these texts and, specifically, at the interstices of travel writing, memory, and history that Vassanji’s interactive mechanism dispels, that the true people emerge. It is Vassanji, the writer, in an imaginative performance, that restores their humanity: Who were these men as people? As fathers, husbands, community men? To some commentators, Musa was a drug addict and a greedy businessman. An easy enough caricature. I see him as an Indian who arrived penniless and went native in East Africa way back in the mid-1800s, whose mixed children spoke no Indian language, who welcomed the white strangers to his home, and who knew quite casually that the Nile began at Lake Victoria. And then he disappears from view. Did he write home? What were his relations to India? There is even scanter information about Ladha Damji; I imagine him in his shop worrying about his mother as Indian men are wont to do. Tharia Topan’s descendants are known. Once I had tea with a grandson in London, and he had some stories about the old man. A descendant was superintendent of a hostel in Mombasa. (italics in original, 133–134)

Who were, factually speaking, “those unknown others”? Zanzibari-­ based Ladha Damji was “a vania, the quintessential Indian trader” (126) who “facilitated the journeys” (126). Tharia Topan is described as “a stout, fair-skinned man with a red-dyed beard […] Mohammedan Hindi […] more flamboyant and travelled than Ladha Damji” (128). Topan achieved imperial recognition when he was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1875 in London “apparently for helping the British government’s efforts to end the slave trade” (129). Sidi Mubarak Bombay, “the so-called African factotum” (129), allows Vassanji to overtly denude Orientalism in a manifest Saidian fashion. Quoting straight from Burton’s text, Sidi Mubarak is presented as the perfect exponent of nineteenth-century racial—and racist—theories (Young 1995), “his head is a triumph to phrenology; a high narrow cranium, denoting by arched and narrow crown, fuyant brow and broad base with full development of the moral region, deficiency and reflectives, fine perceptives, and abundant animality” (129). Burton’s ruthless and debasing description of Sidi Mubarak is the backdrop against which Vassanji paints the other portrait of the man revealing the crucial figure that he was in four emblematic expeditions: one with

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Burton “on a tour of the coast in 1857” (130), the Burton-Speke expedition, the Speke-Grant expedition and Stanley’s expedition to find Livingstone. By dint of his “reading Stanley about him”, the ectopic insider uncovers “an independent-minded, opinionated, and passionate man” (130) who dared to confront the white man on several occasions. “Sidi Mubarak Bombay stands”, Vassanji irrefutably concludes, “as an example of the contradictions in the wild and racist generalizations made by these explorers about the Africans” (131). The penultimate name in this list of “unknown others”, Musa Mzuri, is introduced as a refined Indian trader “who dressed smartly, wearing a ‘snowy skull-cap’” (131) and “who perfumed himself with jasmine and sandalwood” (131), a self-­ made man who started from “twenty loads of cloth and beads” (131) and ended up living in an abode that resembled “a village, with lofty gates, crowded with buyers and sellers” (131). By making “those unknown others” visible, Vassanji questions the veracity of those Orientalist travellers’ accounts that contained them. Communication, understood as the amalgam of language and culture, stands at the core of the ectopic insider’s criticism on those Orientalist narrators of the past. He, the ectopic insider, contrarily to them, speaks their language and, henceforth, his linguistic-cultural knowledge of East Africa sustains his argument that confusion and misinterpretations must have abounded among the diverse participants in the expeditions. As an example, he prompts readers to imagine “Speke’s message in English and broken Hindi, conveyed to Sidi Mubarak, fluent in neither, and reaching a Mgogo9 via a Swahili in which he is not fluent” (italics in original, 135). “The problems of communication”, he explains, “were entirely glossed over by either the travellers themselves or their numerous commentators and admirers” (134). And yet, the understanding “outside of language” (italics in original, 135), as Vassanji explains, did not fare any better. Explorers’ accounts are often contradictory, “Burton and Speke do not always tell the same story” (135), remarks Vassanji, and Stanley repudiates Burton’s physical description of Sidi Mubarak, and so, their narrations are blatantly disputed since, considering the inconsistencies of their discourse, “how much can we trust their accounts of Africans, Asians, and Arabs?” (135). The ectopic insider, versed in the linguistic nuances of Swahili, knows when a native is pulling one’s leg “in the Swahili manner of ‘kutania’” (135), something that was completely lost to the Burtons and Spekes of the time; his account, as opposed to their accounts, is stamped with the seal of authenticity, the same he is entrusted with at the airport of Dar es

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Salaam upon arrival whilst carrying his Canadian passport. This passage is worth recovering here: I proceeded to an immigration wicket, where the officer asked me, a little aggressively, in Swahili, “Why were you waiting?” I replied, “I was waiting for my companion.” “Where did you learn your Swahili?” he countered. “Uhuru Street,” I replied to his question, naming the street where I grew up. There was a pause. A smile. And I knew why. If I had named the street as I do in English, with the stress on the second syllable of “Uhuru,” I would be a foreigner. But I had said “Uhuru Street,” as I would in Swahili. There is no other way to respond in that language, which comes to the tongue as readily as the taste of a much-loved fruit: a mango, say, or a ripe jackfruit. The man responded, “Hongera.” Meaning, well done, congratulations. He stamped my passport. I was back. (16)

The placement of this scene at the beginning of his journey is a calculated, premeditated stratagem to legitimize his account. This scene authenticates him—as one from the outside but of the inside—and his journey. From this assurance of belonging, he will experience the land, foster memory and unearth history. This land-memory-history convergence will progressively imprint his journey with the irredeemable traces of the feared and undesirable slave caravan route. He too, like négritude writers, recovers the original moment of trauma in the slave trade, that primal moment of forced displacement which marks, strictly speaking, the historical inception of the trauma of return. It is now the time to restore Tippu Tip, the last name in the list of “unknown others”, back to the story. Tippu Tip enters the pages of And Home Was Kariakoo at the exact moment when Vassanji’s search for “historia” (192) grows into an unnerving, demoralizing, and discouraging enterprise. He has reached Ujiji, a town which in the past held an influential position in East Africa that is no longer maintained in the present, determined to elucidate how the people of today “relate to the past, what and how they remember” (192). To his utter disappointment, he is faced with the disheartening and demoralizing evidence that the past is still European. The only visible remnants of the past are the Livingstone monument, “a stone with a plaque on it to commemorate the arrival in Ujiji of Burton and Speke on February 14, 1858” (194) and a museum that peremptorily “reflects the prevailing attitude to the past: negligent, perfunctory, ignorant” (194) embodied as it is by the “grotesque, amateurish sculpture of the ‘I Presume’ moment” (194–195)

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that welcomes its visitors. Livingstone’s monument itself is not the reason for Vassanji’s despair since he understands that “we can hardly blame the others for celebrating their own heroes, writing their own stories” (133), but, rather, his people’s complacent disinterest in producing their own stories. In Ujiji, there is only one history, the one enveloped by the Livingstone monument and the Livingstone sculpture commemorating the memorable—and possibly fictitious—“I Presume” moment. He knows another history is lurking behind Livingstone, the history that conjures up Tippu Tip, the slave and ivory trader, who, unlike the rest of “unknown others”, did leave a written memoir. Slavery and Tippu Tip are so closely related that when Vassanji mentions his name first to the guide and later to two women, he is directed towards “some ruins […] in an area called usugara, at the mango trees” (194) and, when approached, a road is made visible. There, at the end of the trail, Bagamoyo, “the great slave market” (196), is awaiting him. The sight of Bagamoyo, as befits the trauma it purports, eludes language (Caruth 1996; LaCapra 2001) and, in lieu of a verbal description of the place, readers are confronted with an image, a picture taken by Vassanji himself.10 (See Image 2.1.) The picture reveals a strangely peaceful and yet eerie sight, a path circumscribed by two parallel lines of huge, hefty trees leading towards a sea-like infinite horizon. The ominous silence that emanates from the empty path and limitless horizon resuscitates the horror of the original trauma, as the narrator-cum-traveller realizes, “This then, is the slave road, planted periodically with mango groves where the caravans rested. It is a stirring site” (197). The arresting beauty of the path is suddenly counteracted by the recognition of it as the slave road that branded Bagamoyo with the dubious honour to have been one of the most influential locations in the East African slave past. The deferred experience of trauma (Caruth 1996; LaCapra 2001) is here expressed by the ectopic insider as an impossible reconciliation between the desolate aesthetics of forgetting that prevails in the present—and which is reproduced via the picture—with the terrifying historical sediments that moulded the past. In a still more symbolic twist, this simultaneously alluring and enigmatic picture is the one that appears on the front cover (see Image 2.2) and hence, I propound an interpretation of this act as Vassanji’s ultimate recognition of slavery as the image that etches his trauma of return. “Finally”, he says, “I make my way uphill to my host’s house—all the time the long slave traders’ road to Bagamoyo on my mind […] the image persists, demands” (201).

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Image 2.1  Bagamoyo, picture on page 196, And Home Was Kariakoo. Reproduced with the kind permission of Mr. M.G. Vassanji

How Tippu Tip’s life gets connected with that of Livingstone’s lays bare the ambiguities associated with slavery. Livingstone’s determination to end the slave trade is well reflected in his Missionary Travels and, nevertheless, he accepted gladly the assistance of Tippu Tip when he was in dire straits while being perfectly acquainted with the nature of Tippu Tip’s business. Slavery’s ramifications extend to “the Indian creditor in Zanzibar, the Arab—and Swahili—trader in the interior, the African tribesmen who captured and sold each other. The freed slave often became a trader himself” (197). Finally, echoing the ambiguities of the imperial machine, “even the European explorer who heartily condemned it in his writings relished the hospitality of the trader” (197). As a matter of fact, Tippu Tip accurately personifies the ambivalences of slavery: he became sultan of Utetera, in eastern Congo, and was later appointed governor of the province of the Congo State by the Belgian Government, but after all, as Vassanji lucidly indicates, Tippu Tip “was a trader, disdaining the vanity and idealism of the explorers and missionaries” (199).

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Image 2.2  Bagamoyo, front cover, And Home Was Kariakoo. Reproduced with the kind permission of Mr. M.G. Vassanji

Within the fabric of Vassanji’s memoir, slavery’s tentacles are even more corrosive in their dexterity to absorb emotional responsiveness and guilt. Otherwise put, slavery is the junction site where the inherited trauma of the community conflates with the individual one. This is the meditation that follows “the stirring site” (197) of Bagamoyo: Slavery is not an easy subject to deal with. No one who has seen photographs or read descriptions of a slave raid, and of slaves yoked together in their long march to the market, can fail to be moved by the enormous

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i­njustice and cruelty of the practice; or even to feel a trace of guilt—some ancestor could have been involved in the capture or trade of slaves, or owned one or more. (197)

Vassanji’s rhizomatic community projects an eclectic network with links in East Africa and Asia that draws him perilously to this hypothetical ancestor who could have been embroiled with the slave caravan route. His return to the native land impels him to examine his right, as a descendant of Asians, to claim Africa as his home; his Asian Africanness becomes the crux of the articulation of this trauma of return. In the language of négritude, the colonized who returns to the native land must unlearn the colonial training he has been subjected to in the West and learn to literally see his native land anew, with the eyes of the decolonized and liberated individual. The end is always celebratory, the trauma of return satisfactorily overcome. Indeed, in négritude literature, a conscientious struggle to incorporate historiography as an intrinsic element of the subject’s development is not, in actuality, detected. History is simplified as a homogeneous, common history of suffering with a clearly demarcated origin, that of slavery. The trauma unleashed by slavery is what unites the entirety of the black world. Seen from this perspective, the trauma of return as experienced by Middle Passage descendants fulfils LaCapra’s insight into the unifying identity marker that trauma can potentially elicit (2001, 161). Vassanji cannot reduce his communal experience to a unilateral history of suffering by re-enacting, in a négritude fashion, the route of the caravans of the slave trade because at the root of his trauma, and in contraposition to the trauma of return experienced by négritude writers, there stands his Asianness complicating the task of assembling the debris of his distinct displaced history. There lies the conundrum of his identity as African. There is another pivotal episode in the history of Africa which, alongside that of the Burton-Speke expedition, confronts the ectopic insider with the original trauma of displacement—slavery—and this is the Zanzibari revolution. In contraposition with the colonial flavour that enfolded the Burton-Speke expedition, the Zanzibari revolution is energetically impregnated with the postcolonial scent of independence. Vassanji devotes three chapters to the Zanzibari Revolution, in a futile intent to unknot the dilemma that this small island in the Indian Ocean symbolizes. “A full, authoritative account of the Zanzibar revolution”, Vassanji states, “continues to remain elusive” (282) and he further admits

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that “ironies abound in this postcolonial drama” (285), but nonetheless he conscientiously delves into the variegated sources within his range to decode the historical traces that might lead to a sensible understanding of why this revolution which he regards as “the bloodiest revolution on the continent” (271) ever happened in the first place.11 This process of decoding he undertakes leads him inexorably towards the issue of race. As he poetically conveys, “there is a smell, and that smell has to do with race” (289). The smell he lyrically evokes is duriani, a fruit that exhales a repulsive “foreign odour” (287) to those who are not Zanzibaris. He recollects how his mother, Zanzibari-born, relished the smell when one day the fruit appeared on the streets of Dar but, unfortunately for her, “it repelled enough people on our street that we never saw it again” (287). Duriani and Zanzibar are metamorphosed into smell; a potent, heavily unpleasant smell that disturbs the ostensible peaceful and intimate banter of a mix-­ raced society, disclosing instead, the undertows of the racial fusion hailed as a banner of the fluidity of Indian Oceanness. Nowhere else in the memoir does the blending of history and memory flow more seamlessly than in the chapters committed to the narration of the Zanzibari revolution, and nowhere in the memoir does the community merge with the individual more convincingly. The adult narrator recalls a repugnant line uttered by Asian boys in Dar, “a grotesque attempt at humour” (275), that exposed the hideous persecution that Arabs were the victims of: “‘they’—the Zanzibaris—had duriani in the morning, biriyani in the afternoon, and an Arabiani at night, the latter referring to an Arab woman” (275).12 He feels relieved at not having shared this grotesque humour and to this day he remembers “distinctly a feeling of distaste, a queasiness” (275). The irony of the line is self-evident in view of history; Asians had also been persecuted in Zanzibar, although, as he mentions, “according to some people today the violence against Asians was underreported” (275). The communal self intrudes in his narration when he pungently recalls how in the khanos—the prayer houses—of Dar, “there were special prayers said every day at noon for our people on the island” (italics mine, 275). The question concerning why the Zanzibari revolution took place still persists in the present times. The root of the revolution tenaciously resists, as Vassanji infers, being uprooted. For there is truly a root, “the blunt racism, the racial hierarchy that preceded the revolution” (276) that derogated Africans to the bottom of the social ladder whereas Asians and Arabs enjoyed a privileged

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status. So deeply implanted in the Zanzibari psyche is this root that Zanzibaris, even today, avoid, out of shame or out of fear, verbalizing the profoundly raced-grounded ethos that fostered the revolution. What independent Zanzibar missed in its construction of the new nation was the fact that these Africans confined to the bottom of society had memories and that their memories took them back to “the days of slavery” (276). The answer to the question “What brought this upheaval?” (272) is the cognizance that “there is no denying that beneath the placid surface of island life there has lurked the memory of a historical grievance: many of the Africans were descendants of slaves” (274). The missing link of the narration of the revolution is, according to Vassanji, slavery. Henceforth, on one level, slavery is presented as the key to understand the conundrum of the Zanzibari revolution but, on another level, slavery, once more, proves to be the key to understand the conundrum of Vassanji’s own trauma of return, namely his doubtful Africanness because, as present-day Zanzibar illustrates, “despite the mixing of races, the ambiguity of origins, […] the division of the population into Africans, Asians, and Arabs existed and still does” (290). This division of the population into the abovementioned ethnic alliances does not solely apply to Zanzibar but to the whole of East Africa and so, his position as “Asian African” remains still an undecided quandary. The following scene in Dar sheds light on the ongoing and uncomfortable “Asian African” question in East Africa whilst underlining the disturbing and intruding gaze of the ectopic insider: One afternoon I was asked to speak to a group of professionals in town, and at the meeting I had noted, indiscreetly and perhaps ungraciously, my surprise to see that all of them were Asians and no African was present. There was an uproar—who was I to judge them, coming from abroad. I still debate with myself if I should have been more prudent and refrained from that comment. I was being naïve, but I had also hit a nerve. My offence was that these were the educated, progressive elite, and I had embarrassed them. (310)

Where are the Asians in the history of Africa? Neither white nor black, the brownness of their skin allocated them in an “in-between” position that was often strategically handled to suit their own interests in detriment of those of black Africans (Young 1995; Gupta 1975). Colonial discourse, shaped as it was around the omnipotent power of “whiteness”, attributed to them a somehow higher standing in the Western-defined evolutionary

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ladder that placed “blacks” at the bottom and which they used to their advantage. The colonial administration, while displaying its successfully pragmatic “divide and rule” policy, simultaneously protected them and despised them. Their trading enterprises were immediately associated with those of the “Jews” in Europe, and just like the Jews in western territory, these “Jewish” Asian Africans were, as Vassanji indicates, “rarely appreciated” (62) in the colonial world. The “white” imagination threw them ostensibly into invisibility: To the white colonials they were often an irksome, alien presence, the bone in the kabab—to use an Indian metaphor—spoiling their pure black-and-­ white picture of Africa—the whites the superior race out to convert and civilize the blacks; and later the benefactors bringing aid, the blacks the beneficiaries. In their writings and nostalgic musings about East Africa, the white settlers seem to have simply wished the brown man away. The “White Mischief”13 television romances set in Kenya, for example, rarely figured the Asians. (62)

With the advent of independence and the consequent emergence of blackness as the defining trait of Africanness, these Asian Africans struggled to find a place in the new postcolonial nation. Ironically, their “in-­between” position prevailed, since their brownness stood in the way to achieve full African status. A case in point with dramatic consequences is, understandably, Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda. Although it is true that some of those Asian Africans banished from Uganda were wealthy entrepreneurs, it is also true, as Mahmood Mamdani exhorts, that some of them owned modest small businesses and there existed a substantial group that could, to all extents and purposes, be classified as poor (Mamdani 2011). What is more, some of those “in-betweeners” were active participants in the fight for independence of their respective African nations as Vassanji exemplifies through the Jhaveris and Sophia Mustafa, respectively (Jhaveri 1999; Mustafa 2009). The former published a bulletin, The Tanganyikan, in which they projected their desire for a national future markedly democratic and non-racial, whereas the latter, an Indian-born woman with, according to Vassanji, a flawed Swahili, professed in her memoir, The Tanganyika Way, her belief that citizenship be placed above racial allegiances. So, the script laid out by Vassanji, an inveterate “inbetweener” on different fronts, complicates the narration of the Asian African presence in East Africa by deliberately juggling with the heterogeneity of the Asian African population. As a Tanzanian, he uses

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comprehensibly this nation and, more explicitly, his first President, Julius Nyerere, as an example of the intricacies of the “in-between” position. Despite his being an unflinching supporter of socialism, one of Nyerere’s most decisive political actions was the nationalization of private property which mainly affected the Asian population. However, Nyerere never endorsed a racial politics that undermined Asians in the style of Idi Amin and prominent Asian Africans featured in his government. The irony is well spotted by Vassanji: The irony of course is that with the broad brush of racist generalizations of the period, most Asians were portrayed as greedy Shylocks and exploiters, with long straws to suck the blood of the poor, and it was Nyerere’s nationalizations of private property that largely contributed to Asian flight. Still, among the Asians, in Tanzania and abroad, Nyerere has left a deep impression, he is still respected, even loved, for his honesty and humility. He was a man of the people. (325)

It is an embedded trenchant impulse that makes Vassanji’s narration waver between incurable hope and utilitarian disillusionment. Enveloped by optimism, he explains how perfectly at ease he felt giving a workshop “to a group of young Asians and Africans” (366) during his visit in Nairobi; this “new generation” (366) seems to have moved beyond “the acrimony of racism and colonial rule” (366). His enthusiasm is subsequently intensified by his visit to a primary school where he is introduced as “an African like you” (366), despite his skin colour. “It was a moving moment” (366), he touchingly avows. And yet, this moving moment of utter belonging does not last long since only one page onward, he relates how Neera Kapila, “a member of the audience” (366) and former host on a previous visit to Nairobi, presents him with a book written by herself about “the Asian contributions in the formation of modern Kenya” (366) intended as a “corrective to the fact that ‘we’ have not been represented adequately in the national narrative” (366). Disillusionment comes in the form of reflection. This reflection is a by-product of the ectopic condition that moulds his narration and enables him to understand Neera Kapila’s “grievance and […] ache” (366) while admitting that those “feelings and sentiments […] are quite beyond [him] now” (366). The trauma of return makes its presence palpable once again. Because the ectopic insider does not flinch away from the trauma, he embarks on this writing exercise—his African memoir—the objective of

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which is to grasp those feelings and sentiments that confuse him and threaten to leave him speechless, literally deprived of the words that can transform a history of forgetting into an act of remembrance. Mourning can only be made possible through writing. As a foreigner in search of “mad belonging”, this trauma of return, the entrenched un-­representability of trauma notwithstanding, must be linguistically apprehended if his Africanness is to be restored and approved. He will search for this mad belonging from his unquestionable stature as writer. What history denies to Asian Africans, literature bountifully provides for and so, he conjectures upon the possibility of modelling an Asian African identity through literature. The excitement of post-independence turned Makerere University into a literary hub and Asian writers—Rajat Neogy, Bahadur Tejani, Peter Nazareth, Amin Kassam, and Yusuf O. Kassam—were, as Vassanji stresses, “part of this emerging East African literary consciousness centred in Kampala” (348). His words do not leave room for speculation when he states that “here was an opportunity for forming an Asian African identity through literature” (348). This effervescent literary production of the years following independence that he describes reverberates with the ebullient optimism he felt when introduced as an African despite his visible brownness, but just as this optimism was abruptly dented by Neera Kapila’s observation that Asians were not given their due in the construction of national history, so is his literary-orientated eagerness of belonging halted. Rootedness creeps in the memoir once again. In the encompassing spirit of négritude, Vassanji notes how Wole Soyinka’s poetic anthology, Poems of Black Africa (1975), included the poetry of Asian African poets such as Amin Kassam, Yusuf O. Kassam, and Bahadur Tejani. The word “black” was all-inclusive and yet, to these Asian Africans, as Vassanji, the writer, ascertains, “the African literary consciousness around them must have been intimidating” (349). “Theirs”, he continues, “was not an easy place to be” (349). Their unresolved otherness was still part of their historical inventories. India intruded in their consciousness “through religion and language, customs, foods, and traditions” (349). India’s presence, he declares, manifested “in most of us” (italics mine, 349); the use of the plural thus testifies to Vassanji’s deliberate identification of himself as an “Asian African” writer for whom the ancestral land must be necessarily called forth in the completion of his inventory. How to incorporate Indian roots harmoniously in their poetry is the germ of Amin Kassam, Yusuf O. Kassam, and Bahadur Tejani’s failure at

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engineering a genuine Asian African consciousness, according to Vassanji. They, and, by inference, their poetry, cringed before the dynamism and firmly grounded Africanness exuded in the poetry of black African poets such as the Ugandan Okot p’Bitek. That which in p’Bitek came naturally from the simplicity of sheer belonging and materialized in an affective exercise of feeling the land, in the aforementioned Asian African poets assumes the form of “the universal, the minimal, the casual observation— and even the obscure and abstract, shying away from their gods and languages, their traditions and personal lives” (350). The difference is one of rootedness. Overwhelmed by the exigencies of their Indian community, Vassanji, from his ectopic condition, admits the almost insurmountable difficulty assailing these Asian African literary creators in their attempt to write according to aesthetic demands. Communal exigencies interfered severely with artistic exigencies, because “to write meant to write with your whole being, and that was hard to do, with family looking on, the community watching nervously, and presumably the father wondering what the future was in all that scribbling?” (350). The narrator, shielded behind his ectopic condition, can afford to tell “them”, indirectly, what they should have done in order to orchestrate harmoniously their Asianness with their Africanness: To ground their creative output in Africa, it would have to be grounded in Asian Africa, their own lives and experiences as Asians from their respective communities, which could not have been easy—on one hand to produce a genuine aesthetic and make yourself understood and accepted; on the other, not to offend the home gallery. The result was a nervous uncertainty to the writing, a wavering aesthetic. (350)

What is worth emphasizing here is how in a subtle, understated manner, the ectopic insider, by advertising the weaknesses of those former Asian African writers, manages to inscribe his own literary name in African literature. Without stating the particularities of his fiction, he instigates readers to acknowledge the community—his Indian community—in his own fiction as an endemic trait of East African identity. To put it otherwise, he, unlike his predecessors, writes from the rootedness of Asian Africa, his fiction does not conceal the profound locality of his Khoja Ismaili community behind a presumed curtain of universality. It is this ingrained communal self that finally grants his writing the certainty and solid aesthetic of one who belongs. Writing is actually the means whereby

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this mad belonging, stigmatized as it is by the trauma of return, is transmitted. Community, history, and memory are so intimately intertwined in this experience of the land that the “knowing thyself” dictum can only be effectively recorded as an eternally in-flux inventory, an inventory that simultaneously and contradictorily seeks and resists conclusion and that is manifest in Vassanji’s wavering optimism and disillusionment.

Conclusion: “I Have a Visceral Response to the Sounds of Africa; I Speak the Language There”. The Asian African Writer and the Open Question of Belonging According to Vassanji, Peter Nazareth, an unquestionably eminent figure in African letters, epitomizes the plea befalling the Asian African writer’s ever-eluding experience of belonging. Nazareth left his native Uganda due to Idi Amin’s regime and has remained an exile in the United States for the rest of his life. His department in the University of Iowa emerged as a reference site for African literature abroad. African writers passed through his department every year leaving an indelible testimony of the vibrancy and potency of African literature worldwide. His unyielding devotedness to African literature, as a scholar and a writer, is thus unequivocal and yet, Vassanji is intrigued by Nazareth’s refusal to visit his native Uganda once the upshots of Idi Amin’s repression were mollified. “I have given this phenomenon much thought”, he ruminates, “and have convinced myself finally that the turning-away from Africa by many Asians was not from bitterness, entirely, but also from pain and grief” (354). Pain and grief are trauma-related exteriorizations and so, what Vassanji is obliquely implying is that Nazareth’s refusal is not so much a rejection to visit the native land, but a resistance to confront the trauma of return. In Nazareth’s most representative novel, In a Brown Mantle (Nazareth 1972), the protagonist, Deo D’Souza, a young Goan who fought for the independence of Uganda, leaves the country when he realizes that the new nation will never fully accept his Asianness. D’Souza utters his disappointment with the new independent nation with a sentence, “Goodbye Mother Africa—your bastard son loved you” (353), which Vassanji uses as the starting point of an acute deliberation on belonging:

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A tough, moving testament. But one has to pause here: loved you? No longer loves you? What then does it mean to belong? There were Asians who never left Uganda even after Idi Amin’s dictat—and were never heard of again. I met an Asian woman in Vancouver who told me, after visiting her Ugandan homeland more than twenty years after Idi Amin, “I did not mind seeing that Africans had taken my father’s business. At least that way they could come up.” That’s belonging, from the gut. (italics in original, 353)

This is a reflection that aligns seamlessly with the persevering question that delineated his version of the Burton-Speke expedition and which, I claim, directs the whole narration: where are the unknown others? The Asians that decided to stay in their native African land are not leading characters of the Asian African experience, nor are those whose generosity of thought harbours the down-to-earth wisdom that allows them to accept contentedly that it was not unnatural for Africans to “come up” (353) the social ladder. This is mad belonging; a belonging that cannot be rationalized because, as Vassanji insists, it does not come from the intellect, it comes from “the gut” (353). Where does this reflection leave the ectopic insider that is writing his mad belonging to Africa? His distancing from Nazareth is premeditative. Nazareth’s unpreparedness to return to his native land is a testament of his perennial exile but, as expressed by fictional D’Souza, the land is presented as the culprit of the protagonist’s—and, it could be claimed, the author’s— enforced displacement; it is the land that cannot accept its “bastard son” (353) as it is. Vassanji, a man from the outside but a man of the land, does not bend easily to capitulate belonging in the name of bastardy and therefore he is adamant in reclaiming his indigenousness through his journey of return.14 But he is an experienced traveller and very much aware of the fact that the process will not be smooth, innocent, and painless. He is, though, ready to pay the price, that is to say, he is prepared to face the trauma of return. The abnormality attached to his ectopic condition, he manages to transform into his, after Berger, “way of seeing” (1972), a view from the outside firmly rooted in the inside. His return must be apprehended as an act of responsibility; the responsibility he has towards the land, towards history, towards his community and, above all, towards himself. Curiously enough, this return journey to the native land, with its inherent traumatic component, is not new to Vassanji. He has undergone this trauma of return reiteratively through his creations. Pius Fernandes in The Book of Secrets, Kala in The Gunny Sack, Vikram Lall in The In-between World of

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Vikram Lall, and Kamal Punja in The Magic of Saida, among others, are literary witnesses of their author’s impending allegation of African belonging. They all, in their own modalities and cadences, share their author’s “visceral response to the sounds of Africa” (Fisher 2006, 55) because they too, their Asianness notwithstanding, “speak the language there” (Fisher 2006, 55). The title of the last chapter conjures up the cyclical inflection of the narration, “Closing the Circle”, and hence the circle is duly closed in Dar es Salaam, the origin of his journey and the city of his childhood and adolescent years. In it, Vassanji recollects a speech he made before a class of “graduating kids […] from an early-childhood learning program” (369) and optimistically relates how “the majority of the kids are Asian, but there are some who are African and mixed-race, and all belong to the community” (370). They are the mirror in which he wants to see both his past and his future reflected: the kid “who at their own age played in the mud of Uhuru and Sikukuu streets” (370) and also the adult “who sits here now wrenched, having been where [he’s] been to and done what [he has] done” (370), because just like him, “they’ll go where they want to, and become many things, and perhaps some of them will even return” (italics mine, 370).

Notes 1. Further references to this book are henceforth indicated by page number. 2. Kofi Anyidoho in The Pan African Ideal in Literatures of the Black World insightfully points out the slipperiness of the meaning “black” that defines the existence of a black world. He notes how, due to racial mixing, there are “blacks” whose skins are indeed very “white”. Thus, the use of “blackness” as the element that gives meaning and, therefore, grants existence to, a global “black world” is problematic. 3. I feel two cautionary remarks should be made here: (1) I am well aware of the differences between the Atlantic Slave Trade that guides Césaire’s négritude and the Indian Ocean Slave Trade that instructs Vassanji’s memoir; (2) I am also aware of the fact that Mishra’s original trauma is expressly articulated as indenture and not slavery per se. However, as Hugh Tinker contends in his conceptualization of indenture as a “new system of slavery”, the difference between slavery and indenture is practically inexistent since both systems were entrenched in an imperialistic discourse that targeted the white man as the legitimate recipient of freedom. See Hugh

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Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Oversees, 1830–1920. 4. The “in-betweenness” of Vassanji’s African Asian heritage is the cornerstone of some of his most emblematic works, for example, The Gunny Sack (1989), Uhuru Street (1991), The Book of Secrets (1994), and The In-between World of Vikram Lall (2004). 5. I would dare to say that almost all of Vassanji’s fiction is an attempt to assemble the bits and pieces—the sediments in Gramsci’s terminology— that history has left in the diverse characters that inhabit the world in his fiction. Imbued with the sense of perpetual homelessness that comes as a result of forced displacement, these characters must face the fate of those afflicted by the syndrome of a displaced history. In an interview with Susan Fisher, Vassanji alludes to his fiction as a means to “bring alive the past to show how historical time and historical events affect personal lives” (Fisher 2006, 57). 6. The mythical dimension of the Burton-Speke expedition that Vassanji points out is certainly reinforced by the strange circumstances surrounding Speke’s death. Although the usual explanation is that Speke’s death was due to a tragic accident, Vassanji seems to be more inclined to follow the romanticized version that depicts Speke’s death as a suicide. 7. It is worth mentioning the fact that Livingstone’s heart was actually buried in African soil but Vassanji does not make any reference to this at all. 8. Tharia Topan is written as Tarya Topan in Stanley’s account and Sidi Mubarak is referred to as “Seedy”, “Sudy”, and “Seedee” in Burton’s text (134). Vassanji uses these variations in spelling as an indication of the explorers’ faulty pronunciation and puts them forward as a sign of the difficulties at a communication level among the different parties involved in the expeditions. 9. Mgogo, singular for the Gogo people, refers to a tribe of Bantu-ethnic origins that was based in the region surrounding Dodoma, current capital city of Tanzania. 10. The pages of And Home Was Kariakoo are interspersed with pictures taken by Vassanji himself. These are pictures of places he writes about in the memoir but it is interesting to note how neither Vassanji nor the people he meets or the people that accompany him on his journey appear. An analysis of the relationship between text and images is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this present study. 11. I feel I must highlight the fiction of Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2021 Literature Nobel Prize winner, as a decisive contribution to locating the Zanzibari Revolution as a key element of the contemporary history of Africa. His novels feature exiles from Zanzibar who were forced, for reasons linked with the revolution, to leave the island. In this sense, I would like to argue

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that Gurnah’s oeuvre, which Vassanji’s memoir does not mention at all, should be read as a Gramscian inventory wherein the Zanzibari revolution branches out into the moulding of the lives of his characters. It is the Zanzibari ­revolution that prompted Gurnah’s own “reckless flight from [his] home” (2022, 2). In his Nobel Prize Speech, Gurnah describes how “a profound chaos descended on our lives in the mid-1960s, whose rights and wrongs were obscured by the brutalities that accompanied the changes brought about by the revolution in 1964: detentions, executions, expulsions, and endless small and large indignities and oppressions. In the midst of these events and with the mind of an adolescent, it was impossible to think clearly about the historical and future implications of what was happening” (2022, 2). The adolescent Gurnah could not think clearly about those historical and future implications but “writing”, incidentally the title of his Nobel Prize Speech, allows the adult Gurnah to delve into these very implications. See https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2021/ gurnah/lecture/. As I previously mentioned, Vassanji does not employ Gurnah’s fiction as documentation for the Zanzibari Revolution, but he refers to Gurnah once, to be more precise on page 296, when he relates an encounter with Kassam, a Zanzibari Asian who lives in Toronto. As Vassanji explains, Kassam attended “the prestigious King George VI Secondary School, with high-­achievers of all races” (296) and, “among his classmates was the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah” (296). 12. It is not within the scope of this chapter but I feel that a reference to the gender-specific aftermath that the Zanzibari revolution provoked should be mentioned. Women’s bodies were the principal vessel of racial hatred, forcing Arab and Asian women to either marry African men or have sexual intercourse with them. Needless to say, these were straightforward cases of rape. 13. White Mischief is a 1987 British film based on a murder case that took place in Kenya in 1941, when the country was still under British rule. The murder involves entirely white characters and native Kenyans are but an insignificant presence in an all-encompassing white canvas. The television romances set in Kenya that Vassanji alludes to throw non-whites, in a White Mischief fashion, into utter invisibility. Evidently, the title of the film White Mischief evokes another title, that of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief (Waugh 1986) which, incidentally, is set on an island off the Indian Ocean. Vassanji does not make any reference to this novel and yet he does engage with Evelyn Waugh’s essay, A Tourist in Africa, on two occasions to illustrate the biased perspective of Orientalist travel writing. See And Home Was Kariakoo, p. 87 and p. 237.

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14. Peter Nazareth believes that Vassanji’s interpretation of his novel, In a Brown Mantel, is incorrect. In Nazareth’s own words: “I do not think he [Vassanji] really understood my novel In a Brown Mantle since he was not from Uganda. Vassanji is not a good literary critic. He said in a review of my first novel [in And Home was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa (2014)] that I expected my narrator [Deogratius (or Deo) D’Souza] to be an idealist when in fact the character was corrupt. I thought this was obvious”. Later on, when referring specifically to the last line of the novel, Nazareth contravenes Vassanji’s reading by affirming that the word “bastard” has in fact “a double meaning”. As far as Nazareth’s never returning to Uganda is concerned, he assures that had he returned to Uganda, most of his writing would never have taken place. In Nazareth’s view, his journey of return was realized through writing: “I did not return to Uganda for a visit. My writing went back. There was much more writing than there would have been if I went back”. See Ferrão, Benedito R. “Interview: Author Peter Nazareth on Working with Idi Amin, the Goan Diaspora in East Africa and More” https://scroll.in/article/1003177/interview-­ author-­peter-­nazareth-­on-­working-­with-­idi-­amin-­the-­goan-­diaspora-­in-­ east-­africa-­and-­more .

References Anyidoho, Kofi. 1989. The Pan African Ideal in Literatures of the Black World. Accra: Ghana Universities Press. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books. Carter, Marina, and Khal Torabully. 2002. Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. London: Anthem Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Césaire, Aimé. 1971. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Paris: Éditions Présence Africaine. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Falk, Erik. 2007. Subject and History in Selected Works by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yvonne Vera, and David Dabydeen. Karlstadt, Sweden: Karlstadt University Studies. Ferrão, Benedito R. Interview: Author Peter Nazareth on Working with Idi Amin, the Goan Diaspora in East Africa and More. https://scroll.in/article/1003177/interview-­author-­peter-­nazareth-­on-­working-­with-­idi-­amin-­ the-­goan-­diaspora-­in-­east-­africa-­and-­more. Accessed 14 August 2023.

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Fisher, Susan. 2006. History, Memory, Home: An Exchange with M.G. Vassanji. Canadian Literature. Littérature Canadienne. A Quarterly of Criticism and Review 119: 49–62. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Harbor: University of Michigan. Gramsci, Antonio. [1971] 2003. Selection from the Prison Notebooks. Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gupta, Akhil. 1975. India and the Asians in East Africa. In Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Asians, ed. M. Twaddle. London: The Anthlone Press. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Writing. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2021/gurnah/lecture/. Accessed 8 February 2022. hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back. Thinking Feminist. Thinking Black. Boston, MA: South End Press. Jhaveri, K.L. 1999. Marching with Nyerere: Africanisation of Asians. New Delhi: BR Publishing. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. [1973] 2011. From Citizen to Refugee. Uganda Asians Come to Britain. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press. Mishra, Vijay. 2007. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. London and New York: Routledge. Mustafa, Sophia. [1961] 2009. The Tanganyika Way. Toronto: TSAR. Nazareth, Peter. 1972. In a Brown Mantle. Nairobi: EALB. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin Books. Soyinka, Wole. 1975. Poems of Black Africa. New York: Hill and Wang. Vassanji, M.G. 1989. The Gunny Sack. London: Heinemann African Writers Series. ———. [1994] 2006. The Book of Secrets. Edinburgh and London: Canongate. ———. 2004. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. Toronto: Anchor Canada. ———. 2009. A Place Within. Rediscovering India. Toronto: Anchor Canada. ———. 2014. And Home Was Kariakoo. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. Vink, Markus P.M. 2007. Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘New Thalassology’. Journal of Global History 2 (1): 41–62. Waugh, Evelyn. [1960]. 1986. A Tourist in Africa. Boston: Little Brown. Young, Robert C. 1995. Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

Of Father and Son: The Configuration of the Trauma of Return in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family Esther Pujolràs-Noguer

A literary work is a communal act —Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (205) And my father. Always separate until he died, away from us. The north pole. —Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (173) Not all narratives are conventional, and the history of significant modern literature is in good part that of largely unconventional narratives—narratives that may well explore problems of absence and loss. —Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss” (711)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Pujolràs-Noguer, F. Hand, Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46345-7_3

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Introduction. The Ectopic Condition and the Prodigal Son The abnormal position that besieges the ectopic insider and which defines her/his ambivalent stance as one from the outside but of the inside is, as I have illustrated in the previous chapter, articulated within the paradigm of the trauma of return. Shrouded in his Canadian citizenship, M.G. Vassanji returns to East Africa to claim his inside-ness (Vassanji 2014); his is a call of belonging to the land. The “home” the title alludes to—And Home Was Kariakoo—is unequivocally the East African land that Kariakoo, the African section of Dar es Salaam, epitomizes. There is no faltering in Vassanji’s expression of his conviction that, despite his Canadian passport, he is East African and so his trauma of return is encapsulated by his fear that he might not be recognized as such by the “authentic” insiders. On the contrary, in Michael Ondaatje’s memoir, Running in the Family, we are confronted with an ectopic insider whose allegiance to the land, Sri Lanka, is not initially his primal concern. Whereas land orchestrated the writing of Vassanji’s memoir, I argue that, in the case of Ondaatje, the writing is harmonized by blood, in other words, the family he left at the age of eleven and which he tries to recover in Running in the Family. The book, he declares, “is a composite of two return journeys to Sri Lanka, in 1978 and 1980”1 (Ondaatje 1983, 205), which significantly encompasses the immediate years before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1983.2 So deeply ingrained in the family is the memoir that the actual writing becomes a family enterprise. Thus, he acknowledges the key role played by his siblings, namely, Gillian who “took many of the journeys of research with me all over the island” (205) and Janet and Christopher who “were central in helping me recreate the era of my parents” (205). “This”, Ondaatje affirms, “is their book as much as mine” (205). In view of the intense family-centred flavour that monitors the writing of Ondaatje’s memoir, what follows is an attempt to elucidate how the trauma of return is configured by an ectopic insider whose outside-­ness is stamped by a family dislocation that is, I contend, entirely embodied by the father. To put it otherwise, the father, Mervyn Ondaatje, is the source of the displacement wherein the trauma of return originates. Nowhere is the trope of the displaced home more clearly exemplified than in Ondaatje’s family’s displacement and nowhere is the source of this displacement more distinctly pinpointed. Ondaatje’s father’s severe alcoholism is the reason why his mother divorces him, taking all the children with her. Ultimately, this divorce condemns the Ondaatje family to a physical and geographical

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dislocation that affects all members. Upon her decision to leave Sri Lanka and move to England, Ondaatje’s mother goes to a fortune-teller “who predicted that while she would continue to see each of her children often for the rest of her life, she would never see them all together again” (173). As Ondaatje testifies, this indeed “turned out to be true” (172) since, Gillian stayed in Ceylon with me, Christopher and Janet went to England. I went to England, Christopher went to Canada, Gillian came to England, Janet went to America, I went to Canada. Magnetic fields would go crazy in the presence of more than three Ondaatjes. And my father. Always separate until he died, away from us. The north pole. (172)

The unifying force that emanates from the description of the Ondaatjes as a magnetic field that attracts all members to a common shared space is placed against the abnormal familial displacement that they are subjected to. The paradox that lies behind this image cannot be left unnoticed: the father, the source of the family displacement, is simultaneously also the source of the family unity, “the north pole” (173), the fixed point to which all other points are referred, that is, the family member to which all other family members are affectionately attached. By applying the same methodological framework I employed in my analysis of Vassanji’s memoir, I want to ask, after Mishra’s fashion, if there is something “in the language of the subject that bears the traces of an original trauma” (2007, 106) which will subsequently delineate the diasporic imaginary displayed in Ondaatje’s memoir. The quote above provides me with the answer: the original trauma is embodied by the figure of the father and the whole memoir revolves around the father figure in its attempt to re-connect his—Ondaatje’s—past childhood which he admittedly “had ignored and not understood” (22) with his adult present. In a radio interview, Ondaatje phrases very clearly his disconnection from Sri Lanka and posits Running in the Family as an exercise in re-connecting. He is, nonetheless, very much aware of the fact that this reconnecting exercise is enacted from the perspective of an adult. The reconstruction of the world that he left at the age of eleven is carried out from an adult Ondaatje whose childhood memories are prudently mediated by his adulthood reflections. In his own words (Ondaatje 2017) I left Sri Lanka when I was 11 to go to school in England. There was a kind of franticness about being in a new country. I felt that in order to survive, I had to focus on England and how things worked. So for the next eight years that was my preoccupation, and I guess I did forget Sri Lanka at that point.

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The community of family in England was very connected with Sri Lanka, and my mother was there, but it was separate from the original country. So when I went to write Running in the Family, it was really having to go back as an adult and begin again from the age of 11, and to try to see what had happened at that age in a context of not just a childhood memory, but as an adult.3

I classify Running in the Family as literally a mourning memoir whereby Ondaatje mourns the father whom he left at the age of eleven. This early familial and geographical displacement he tries to overcome through the mourning performance that is the essence of the memoir can only be successfully enacted by recovering all that surrounds the father figure, that is to say, a whole generation of people that inhabited a land, remarkably apprehended as colonial Ceylon not postcolonial Sri Lanka. Amidst the comfort of a farewell party held in the familial space of his home in Toronto, he reflects on the emotional scope of the writing project he is about to initiate: I had already planned the journey back. During quiet afternoons I spread maps onto the floor and searched out possible routes to Ceylon. But it was only in the midst of this party, among my closest friends, that I realized I would be travelling back to the family I had grown from—those relations from my parents’ generation who stood in my memory like frozen opera. I wanted to touch them into words. A perverse and solitary desire. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion I had come across the lines, “she had been forced into prudence in her youth—she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning.” In my mid-thirties I realised I had slipped past a childhood I had ignored and not understood. (22)

As the quote reveals, the whole planification of the journey back is determined by the family; the maps, and any type of material culture for that matter, as I will later on demonstrate, are intimately attached to the family. The history that Ondaatje unravels is, first and foremost, a family history. What I mean by this is that, unlike the conscientious historical unearthing carried out in Vassanji’s memoir (Vassanji 2014) which far surpasses in scope Vassanji’s distinct family history, Ondaatje’s sense of history is subservient to the specificities of the recordings of his own family.4 This is a family history that materializes as a “frozen opera”, thus highlighting the dramatic scent that the whole memoir is infused with and which undermines truth claims in favour of “confused genealogies and rumour” (205). Authenticity is measured against the capacity to generate a convincing fictional account because, as Ondaatje surmises, “in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts” (206). But most importantly, this is a memoir

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which is perceived by the author himself as an “unnatural beginning” (22). Just like Anne Elliott, the protagonist of Jane Austen’s novel was persuaded to ignore romance when young, Ondaatje feels he was, in a similar manner, and due to his new life in England and later on in Canada, enticed to ignore his childhood, his Sri Lankan past. But life grants Anne the possibility to experience romance at a later age, an opportunity she does not miss. Anne’s “unnatural beginning” is thus redressed through her willingness to re-initiate her interrupted romance with Captain Wentworth. Likewise Ondaatje redresses his “unnatural beginning” by restoring a family history that brings back the father to the narration and this he accomplishes from his stature as writer. What propels him to right this unnatural beginning, so to speak, is his position as a writer. Throughout the memoir, Ondaatje is profoundly aware of his writing profession as the section entitled “Tongue” testifies to. His exploration into the origin of his talent for words leads him to humorously, but not for this less significantly, recall the impression that his “first memory” (4) takes him back inside his mother’s womb at the precise moment that she was observing “a pair of kabaragoyas ‘in copula’” (4). The kabaragoyas are reptiles whose rasping tongue is supposed to grant the gift of eloquence to those who eat it. Although Ondaatje does not recollect the actual eating of a kabaragoya’s tongue, the intimate relation between mother, son, and kabaragoyas that he is laying out cannot be dismissed. In an ironic allegation of authenticity, he lays claim to a “reference made to this sighting in A Coloured Atlas of Some Vertebrates from Ceylon, Vol. 2, a National Museums publication” (75). He is the writer of the family and, therefore, the “perverse, solitary desire” (22) to “touch” (22) his parents’ generation “into […] words” (22) exposes a responsibility towards the family. As a writer, this search for origins that his quest for the father evokes, conceals a need to safeguard his future career as a writer. In order to further his writing career, he must come to terms with his past and so, the mourning exercise that Running in the Family ultimately is becomes the book that substantiates his survival as a writer.5 The centrality of the family in Ondaatje’s Running in the Family has already been explored in works such as Waddington’s “Running in the Lear family: Familial and Cultural Patrimony in Michael Ondaatje’s Autobiography” (Waddington 2007), Snelling’s “‘A Human Pyramid’: An (Un) Balancing Act of Ancestry and History in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family” (Snelling 1997), and Cummins & Barnwell’s “Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and the ‘Familia-Graphic’ Gaze” (Cummins & Barnell 2022), but they all overlook what to me is the definitive trait of the memoir, to wit, its

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mourning cadence. This family-centred memoir, whose calculated doses of drama and humour resonate with the flavour of classical Shakespearean tragedies, is crafted as a mourning ritual whereby the fragments that put flesh back onto the father figure are carefully imagined to allow the soncum-writer to properly grieve.6 Considering the ectopic condition of this son-cum-­writer, I am interested in decoding how the inside-ness/outsideness game inherent in his return journey is expressed. The return to the father which stands at the core of his journey conjures up the figure of the prodigal son and hence, I infer, the ectopic condition professed by Ondaatje is framed within and against this mythical tale, and, I will add, he is very much aware of this since, not in vain, one section of the memoir is entitled “The Prodigal” (131–162). The prodigal son is a story about unconditional love, forgiveness, redemption, generosity, and sinfulness. Whereas in the original biblical story these concepts were unilaterally attributed to the characters—the father is forgiving, his love is unconditional, and his generosity towards the son remains unquestionable whilst the son’s sinfulness is finally redeemed by his realization and acceptance of his father’s unconditional love—the fragmented narration that shapes Running in the Family resists this unidirectional distribution of qualities. We enter the realm of ambiguity, uncertainty, and inconclusiveness. Ondaatje’s search for and consequent mourning of the father is imbued with an urgent need to forgive the father and reveal his father’s generosity and unconditional love which, unlike the biblical story, is not taken at face value. The redemption of the father is contingent upon the disclosure of the man behind the father, in order to lay out the “ceremony” (180)—the mourning memoir—that will release him from being “a father” (180). The father’s sinfulness, understood as his incapacity to keep the family united, is tested against the son’s unawareness of the father’s illness, a depression that throws him into a state of suffering when affronted with the crude reality that he will not see his children again.7 Hence, sinfulness is, in Running in the Family, and unlike the biblical tale, fairly administered. What is more, the union between father and son which marked the biblical parable is denied to Michael and Mervyn Ondaatje due to the latter’s death. In a way, the return journey of this prodigal son is doomed to be inconclusive—the son will never actually see the father again, and this lack of closure regulates his ectopic condition. In other words, Ondaatje treads upon Sri Lankan soil carefully, which stands in stark opposition to the self-assuredness that characterized Vassanji’s East African travelling. The prodigal son knows

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that he has to earn his right of belonging which he relinquished when he left; his inside-ness is thus compromised.8 The chapter entitled “The karapothas” opens with three quotes by travellers to Ceylon. The first quote dates back to the year 1875 and in it, Edward Lear has no qualms in describing “the brown people of this island” (78) as “odiously inquisitive and bothery-idiotic” (78), “savages” that “go on grinning and chattering to each other” (78). The other two quotes, by D.H. Lawrence and Leonard Wolf, are less aggressive in their phrasing but equally colonialist in their bias. To D.H. Lawrence, Ceylon “is an experience” (78) but “not a permanence” (78), whereas to Wolf, “all jungles are evil” (78). Edward Lear, D.H. Lawrence, and Leonard Wolf are all presented as “karapothas”, foreigners who, just like “the beetles with white spots who never grew ancient here [Sri Lanka]” (80), “stepped in and admired the landscape, disliked the ‘inquisitive natives’ and left” (80). The description of the karapothas is actually uttered by Ondaatje’s niece, an insider, a “proper” Sri Lankan. Where does Ondaatje place himself in this karapothas’ textual landscape he is painting? Drenched in sweat, “back within the heat of Colombo, in the hottest month of the year” (79), while sitting “in a house on Buller’s Road” (79), he pronounces the following statement: “I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner” (79). This statement can be read against the following question: To what extent can the prodigal claim inclusiveness? Ondaatje, the prodigal, distances himself from the karapothas who found the Sri Lankan heat unbearable, “this is the heat that drove Englishmen crazy”, since to him the heat is “delicious” (79). However, throughout the narration, it is possible to detect an almost obsessive tendency to expose Sri Lankan heat as if it were a source of strangeness to the narrator.9 I believe Ondaatje is struggling to incorporate Sri Lankan heat to his self so as to earn back his genetic right to the land. It is not surprising that the whole chapter is devoted to finding the roots—the ancestors—that guarantee his right to the land. This is, however, and unlike Vassanji’s memoir, a claim to the land mediated by ancestry, that is to say, by blood. William Charles Ondaatje, who “knew of at least fifty-five species of poisons easily available to his countrymen” (81), is resurrected alongside Ondaatje’s first memory of handwriting, which was, in Sinhalese, “the most beautiful alphabet” (83), whose shape poetically recalls “the bones of a lover’s spine” (83). These incursions into the past in the form of childhood memories and reconstruction of family history conceal an anxiety to fend off the foreignness that lies at the heart of the journey of return of the prodigal son.

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This is indeed a journey of return of a son and, therefore, his anxiety is tied to the harrowing perception that his father is, to a certain degree, a foreigner to him. How can the son properly mourn a father he hardly knows? The elusiveness of the father figure and how Ondaatje, the prodigal son-cum-writer, manages to flesh him out via writing is what will be analysed in the remaining pages of this chapter. As I shall outline by employing a LaCapran methodological framework, Ondaatje’s unconventional narrative examines the polemical relationship between absence and loss. At the core of this polemics stands the father, the crux of an intriguing absence-loss diatribe.

Belated Mourning: Redemption of the Father and Survival of the Son Both Caruth in Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) and LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001) envisage trauma as a deferred experience. The traumatic episode does not take place at the same time that it occurs; it appears rather unexpectedly resulting in a disruption of perception that perilously blurs the frontiers of past and present. The fact that rationally no meaning can be attached to the traumatic episode renders trauma an unassimilated experience. As such, the disruption of perception embedded in trauma is often expressed belatedly as dreams and/or nightmares. In Freudian terminology, this is the realm of the repressed (Freud 1990).10 This is what LaCapra identifies as “acting-out” and, as he puts it, “in acting-out the past is performatively regenerated or relived as if it were fully present rather than represented in memory and inscription, and it hauntingly returns as the repressed” (1999, 716). However, trauma can be assimilated when the traumatic episode from the past is confronted from the perspective of the present. This LaCapra terms “working-through” trauma and it functions in opposition to “acting-out” (2001). Working through trauma requires a temporal distance, in other words, the realization that the traumatic episode belongs to the past and, therefore, the present can be liberated from the delirious repetition of the disturbing experience via a process of reflection which will ultimately lead to the recognition of the origin of trauma. It is from this perspective of trauma as a deferred experience that I approach the analysis of Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. The traumatic episode around which the memoir revolves as an attempt to work through

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it is the absence/loss of the father. The memoir thus becomes a mourning performance. Mourning as an exercise in working-through and as opposed to acting-out “involves a different inflection of performativity: a relation to the past that involves recognizing its difference from the present” (LaCapra 1999, 716) and therein Running in the Family could be labelled a somewhat typical mourning memoir for it indeed delimits—recognizes—what is present from what is past. Nevertheless, the mourning inflection of Ondaatje’s specific performance is not conventional in the sense that the mourning, understood as the writing of the memoir, takes place years after the actual death of the father occurred, or, to put it in other words, the death of the father is acknowledged and accommodated to the son’s life experience years after it has happened. What we are dealing with in Running in the Family is a belated mourning performance in which the father is introduced to the reader as a mystery, as an enigma that must be unveiled in order for the mourning to be successful. Working-­ through trauma means resolving this mystery. The core of the enigma is the unresolved conundrum presented by the father figure: is the father an absence or is the father a loss? This is a question that I will tackle later on. That the father is the raison d’etre of the memoir, placed at the centre of the mourning ritual, is made clear from the very beginning of the narration through Ondaatje’s detailed description of a nightmare that assailed him and which he acknowledges as the origin of the performance: “What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto” (21). The dream, or rather, nightmare, disrupts his placid sleep “at a friend’s house” (21). In it, he sees his father, “chaotic, surrounded by dogs […] all of them […] screaming and barking into the tropical landscape” (21). It is the noises from the barking and screaming of the dogs that wake him and transport him to a new confusing scenario in which present and past, Canada and Asia, cold and heat conflate with each other and leave him emotionally devastated. The disruption in perception integral to the traumatic experience that impairs rational assimilation is manifested thus in the following passage: I sat up on the uncomfortable sofa and I was in a jungle, hot, sweating. Street lights bounced off the snow and into the room through the hanging vines and ferns at my friend’s window. A fish tank glowed in the corner. I had been weeping and my shoulders and face were exhausted. I wound the quilt around myself, leaned back against the head of the sofa, and sat there for most of the night. Tense, not wanting to move as the heat gradually left

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me, as the sweat evaporated and I became conscious again of brittle air outside the windows searing and howling through the streets and over the frozen cars hunched like sheep all the way down towards Lake Ontario. It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia. (21–22)

The unsettling image of the father surrounded by barking dogs is later on recovered in the memoir as “a story about my father I cannot come to terms with” (181). In one of his numerous drunken exploits which often involved escapades, the father is found coming out of the jungle, completely naked, holding five ropes in one hand. From each rope a black dog hung and none of the five dogs touched the ground: He is holding his arm outstretched, holding them with one arm as if he has supernatural strength. Terrible noises are coming from him and from the dogs as if there is a conversation between them that is subterranean, volcanic. All their tongues are hanging out. […] The dogs were too powerful to be in danger of being strangled. The danger was to the naked man who held them at arm’s length, towards whom they swung like large dark magnets. (81–82)

This harrowing image of the naked man with “supernatural strength” (81) holding the dogs in a most cruel manner is contraposed to that of a man “who loved dogs” (182). Gentleness or cruelty, what man lurks behind the figure of the father? Who is the father really? Henceforth, the father becomes the object of study which Ondaatje examines from the empathetic position of the researcher who, while putting himself in the position of the subject under study, refrains from taking his place. In short, Ondaatje adopts LaCapra’s empathic unsettlement which, as he asserts, “involves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place” (1999, 722). This empathic unsettlement that Ondaatje practices works at the level of his stature as simultaneously son and writer. The presence of Ondaatje in the memoir as “a physical writer” (Davis, 272) had also been noted by Linda Hutcheon’s reading of Running in the Family as a postmodern challenge in which the author features as both subject and writer (Hutcheon 1985). What I want to stress in my reading of Running in the Family and which adds another layer to Hutcheon’s and Davis’s analyses is the identification of the subject explicitly as the son. In this viewpoint, the peculiar prodigal

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son that Ondaatje embodies seeks the redemption of the father in order for him—the son—to survive. His survival as son-cum-writer is dependent on the redemption of the father. The two identities, son and writer, are indissoluble in the enactment of the mourning performance: there is a son that is trying to understand and get to know the father that, to all extents and purposes, appears as the source of the family displacement but it is the writer that orchestrates the mourning ritual that is taking place. In its appreciation of grief made visible, mourning allows the son to feel and show sorrow for the death of the father but the performance is entirely guided by the writer. The performance being displayed is a dramatization of the highest order as the term conscientiously chosen by the son-cum-writer to describe it, “frozen opera” (22), confers. The world he re-creates in his memoir is genuinely filled with drama; it looks as if the lives of the “relations from [his] parents’ generation” (22) he is recovering, were naturally drawn to dramatism. The memoir is ripe with tragicomic episodes involving different members of the family, friends of the family, and, of course, the parents themselves. The unexpected engagement of his parents—the father had been earlier engaged to another woman whom he was about to marry (31–35); the life and death of his eccentric maternal mother, Lalla (113–129); and the incestuous romance between his by then-nine-year-­ old mother with her uncle Trevor (105–109) are but a few examples of “stories of elopement, unrequited love, family feuds and exhausting vendettas” (53–54). And always, right at the centre of the dramatic performance that the memoir offers, there stands the greatest tragicomic hero of them all, his father, Mervyn Ondaatje. The most extravagant episodes star the father as a sort of fallen drunken tragicomic hero. His maniacal train rides (144–150), his inebriated feats, and lunatic obsession with hiding bottles in most bizarre places (58–60; 176) highlight pivotal scenes of the (hi)story of a displaced family. The quest for the father is entangled with the family history and the family history is, in its turn, intertwined with the colonial history of the island. As Kim (Kim 2015) observes, when writing the past, the postcolonial memoirist operates within “the shadow of colonial histories” (402). Yet, as I indicated earlier on in the introduction, the recording of this peculiar colonial opera is arranged through “rumour” (64), and thus historical discourse is absorbed by the unofficial and alluring family stories that might be true or invented. Cartography is staged as the product of the imagination. The contour of Sri Lanka unfolds a fallen tear (147) or

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exhibits a pendant (64). “Ceylon”, the narrator evocatively conveys, “floats on the Indian Ocean and holds its naive mountains, drawings of cassowary and boar who leap without perspective across imagined ‘desertum’ and plain” (italics mine, 63). The maps on his brother’s wall in Toronto are referred to as “the false maps” (63); maps “reveal rumours of topography” (64) and the whole family history that the close examination of a map of Sri Lanka eludes is reduced to a rumour on the map: This pendant, once its shape stood still, became a mirror. It pretended to reflect each European power till newer ships arrived and spilled their nationalities, some of whom stayed and intermarried—my own ancestor arriving in 1600, a doctor who cured the residing governor’s daughter with a strange herb and was rewarded with land, a foreign wife, and a new name which was a Dutch spelling of his own. Ondaatje. A parody of the ruling language. And when his Dutch wife died, marrying a Sinhalese woman, having nine children, and remaining. Here. At the centre of the rumour. At this point in the map. (64)

The Sri Lankan origin of the family history is hence legitimated through a rumour, the arrival of this first ancestor from a land that is not even mentioned. There exists a website called “Genealogy.com” which interestingly enough offers more comprehensive information about the surname “Ondaatje”. According to the information gathered on this website, “Ondaatje” is a Dutch variation of the South Indian “Ondaatchi”—a linguistic transformation obliquely indicated in the memoir as the new name awarded to this first ancestor “which was a Dutch spelling of his own name” (64)—from which we can establish the origin of this first ancestor in the Indian subcontinent. The story of family origins Ondaatje relates finds its “historical” counterpart in the following excerpt (Ondaatje n.d.): The Ondaatchiis (Ondaatje) were, originally, from Tanjore South India. Michael Jurie Ondaatchi was physician to the King of Tanjore. He was summoned by the Dutch Governor Adrian Van der Meyden to treat his sick wife. He treated her with a bath of water in which 23 jungle herbs were boiled. The Dutch Governor’s wife recovered. Ondaatchi was converted to Christianity, married a Portuguese wife, and adopted the name “Michael Jurgen Ondaatch”. He died in 1714. His son Rev William Jurgan Ondaatchi married Hermina Quint of Holland. Their son was Peter Philip Juriaan Ondaatchi (1758–1814). He had his entire education in Holland. He was a

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distinguished academic, and poet, publishing books on physics, philosophy and history.11

What is interesting to remark at this point is how this allegedly historically grounded website relies also on Ondaatje’s memoir for documentation. In the chapter named “St. Thomas’ Church”, Ondaatje discovers the tomb of yet another ancestor, Natalia Aserappa wife of Philip Jurgen Ondaatje, “born 1797, married 1812, age 25 years” (66). When the same tombstone is referred to on the web, Ondaatje’s memoir is recognized as the primary source of documentation. The exact words from the website are, “there is a tombstone in St Thomas Church Gintupitiya which reads ‘Natalia Aserappa wife of Philip Jurgen Ondaatchi 1787–1812 d age 25’ (Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatchi p.66)”. It is noteworthy that the spelling of “Ondaatje” recovers its original South Indian essence on the web. The quote above is followed by the brief mention of Dr William Charles Ondaatje, Rev. Jurgen Ondaatje and his son, Simon, three ancestors that Ondaatje expands on in the “St. Thomas’ Church” chapter of the memoir.12 The web’s frugality of information regarding these three ancestors contrasts with the profusion of rumour with which Ondaatje narrates their stories. That the web resorts to Ondaatje’s individual memoir as a source of documentation does not belittle the information we can find on the website and, as witnessed in the process of providing the actual names to the protagonists of Ondaatje’s story of origins, it proves that rumours and history can benefit from each other. Displacement carves a diasporic imaginary wherein the real and the imagined, fiction and non-fiction, are mutually dependent on each other (Mishra 2007; Rushdie 1992). The story of the Ondaatjes becomes a collective history and this the memoirist is perfectly aware of when he ponders on the effects of seeing one’s own family name publicly exposed “on the floors of a church built in 1650” (65). The name, Ondaatje, “stretches from your fingertips to your elbow in some strange way removes vanity, eliminates the personal. It makes your own story a lyric” (65–66). “Overpowered by stone” (66), Ondaatje inscribes his name onto the collective history of a colonial past he is mourning side by side with the mourning of the father. A preoccupation with classifying Ondaatje’s memoir generically has unleashed a considerable number of critical works (Russell 1991; Huggan 1995; Davis 1996; Snelling 1997; Saul 2001; Solecki 2003). What unites these critical interpretations is the admission that the text’s deliberate swerving between fiction and non-fiction resists a clear-cut generic

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conceptualization. The value of these critics’ analyses notwithstanding, I interpret this effort to reconcile the fictional with the non-fictional in Ondaatje’s memoir as a commitment to translate into literary terms the “portrait or ‘gesture’” (206) whereby the author authenticates his book. As observed in the introductory chapter of Mourning and Resilience, the formation of the postcolonial self deployed in autobiographical writing very often involves experimentation with the generic forms of life writing, autobiography, and memoir. Viewed in this way, Ondaatje’s challenge of a clear-cut separation between fiction and non-fiction is a good example of the generic experimentation carried out in Running in the Family. A “portrait” introduces the idea of interpretation; it is the observant and subjective eye of the painter that captures the lives exhibited and hence, the fictionality of the resulting product should not be validated against claims of veracity. Whether the portrait-memoir is fictional or non-­ fictional does not really matter. As far as the definition of the memoir as a “gesture” is concerned, it suggests a proximity towards another being based on generosity and respect. Furthermore, to view Ondaatje’s text as a “gesture” places the memoir in an ethical, rather than epistemological, relation with the real (Caruth, 102). Running in the Family is hence a gesture towards the father, the north pole, and, in related manner, the memoir is also a gesture towards Sri Lanka, the land that runs in the Ondaatjes’ blood. In a more specific manner, Running in the Family is a gesture aimed at redeeming the father and the land. They are both enigmas stigmatized by the trauma that the son must work through in order to safeguard his survival as writer. As Caruth illustrates in her interpretation of Freud, the enigma of trauma is both a narrative of destruction and survival (Caruth 1996, 91–112) and this survival/destruction interplay is what drives Ondaatje, the son-cum-writer, to uncover, in the sense of coming to terms with the enigma posed by his father which correlates with the enigma of the Sri Lankan land. As a consequence, Sri Lanka’s colonial history is similarly apprehended as a narrative of destruction that must be decoded and exhibited. The “rumours of topography” (64), the son reads in the maps, are decrypted as “routes for invasion and trade” (64), as “travellers’ tales” (64) that appear “throughout Arab and Chinese and medieval records” (64). The mystery of an island that “seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English” (64) lies there for the son to work out alongside the enigma of the father. “Serendip, Ratnapida (‘island of gems’), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon” (64), the

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different names the island has been endowed with and which the prodigal son unmasks, delineate a narrative of destruction but the very act of denuding the colonialism ingrained in the names lays out the script for a narrative of survival. From the abnormal position of an ectopic insider, Ondaatje’s eclectic historical approach enhances indeed an ethical relationship with reality (Caruth 1996). In this sense, his “gesture” towards the land is mimicking the filial gesture, respectful and generous. The belatedness of Ondaatje’s mourning memoir is imbricated in the absence/loss controversy with regard to the paternal reference. The necessity to differentiate between absence—that which one has never had—and loss—that which one has had but lost—underlines LaCapra’s discussion on how to work through trauma (1999, 2001) effectively. According to LaCapra, “the very ability to make the distinction between absence and loss […] is one aspect of a complex process of working-through” (1999, 699). The conflation of absence with loss, LaCapra surmises, results in misplaced nostalgia or endless melancholia, two related acting-out articulations that undermine a healthy process of recovery from trauma. I would like to return to the question I posed earlier on as to whether the father, Mervyn Ondaatje, was an absence or a loss. If, “in terms of absence, one may recognize that one cannot lose what one never had” (LaCapra 1999, 699), a reading of the father as absence would invalidate Ondaatje’s memoir altogether since the mourning motivation that propels the performance would be rendered useless, totally unnecessary. As a matter of fact, the memoir would not have been written at all, at least not as a mourning memoir. Mourning implies the recognition that the death of the person being grieved is a loss; in other words, it is conditioned by the assumption that the person being mourned was there in the first place. One cannot miss an absence; one can only miss a loss. Without falling into a conflation of absence with loss, I claim that the father was both an absence and a loss in the son’s life. Before that fateful moment in his mid-thirties when he is assaulted with the haunting image of the father holding the dogs, the father has been an absence in the son’s life, someone not to account for. The traumatic episode that the son’s nightmare—the father, naked, holding the dogs—unfolds turns the father into a loss because it makes him present in and relevant to the son’s life. The transformation of the father’s absence into a loss permits Ondaatje, the writer, to initiate the return journey and construe from rumours the mourning memoir. The narrative of trauma as destruction embedded in the father figure is pungently recreated in the episode in which he, utterly drunk, “removed

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all his clothes and leapt from the train, rushing into the Kadugannawa tunnel” (149). Ondaatje’s mother is called to retrieve the father from inside the tunnel, rescuing him from a literal darkness, the one inside the tunnel, which the son-cum-writer immediately associates with the existential sojourn exhibited in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “My mother”, Ondaatje explains, “clutching a suit of civilian clothing […], walked into that darkness, finding him and talking with him for over an hour and a half. A moment only Conrad could have interpreted” (149). The harshness of the scene notwithstanding, the encounter between Mervyn and Doris inside the darkness of the tunnel resonates with a primal moment in their recent past—they had only “been married for six years” (149)—in which they were “happily” united. This is a moment the son covets and recuperates through a photograph he has been “waiting for all [his]life” (161), a picture of his “father and mother together. May 1932” (161) taken right after they got married.13 In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes remarks on the power of photography to legitimate the existence of what is projected in the picture, captured, as it is, by the camera. “The photograph”, Barthes asserts, “is literally an emanation of the referent” (1981, 80). Similarly, Susan Sontag expresses a reciprocity between photographic image and referent when she defines photographs as “something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask” (1977, 154). The photograph of Ondaatje’s parents redeems a primal moment of unity that precedes the trauma of the familial displacement and hence becomes “a footprint” (154), after Sontag’s fashion, that corroborates the existence of a couple perfectly suited to each other. The photograph, which shows Mervyn and Doris Ondaatje, newlyweds, making “hideous” (161) faces, was turned into a postcard “sent through the mails to various friends” (161–162) with the following message written on the back: “What we think of married life” (italics in original, 162). As footprint and death mask (Sontag 1977), the photograph emerges as the only remnant within reach of the son to bring to life the light behind the darkness, the promise that “everything” (162) was there: “Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual humour, and the fact that both of them are hams of a very superior sort” (162). In short, “the evidence [he] wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other” (162). As the only existing photograph “of the two of them together” (162) that has survived the material displacement of the family, this photograph materializes as the “certificate of presence” (Barthes, 87) the son requires to write his narrative of survival.

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The pervasive figure of the father is felt throughout the memoir but it is on the last pages when the son’s quest for the father takes absolute control of the narration. Once the son has recognized the father as a loss to account for, “words such as love, passion, duty” (180) are meaningful inasmuch as they relate to the father. And yet, the son is ruthlessly confronted with the bitter reality that he “never knew what [his] father felt of these ‘things’” (180). “My loss”, he continues, “was that I never spoke to him as an adult” (180). The father’s death haunts the son as those conversations that never took place, as the words that were never exchanged between them, as a lack of filial-paternal intimacy. With no physical father to go to, the son is forced to create him through the conversations he has with family members and friends that, unlike him, knew him well. These conversations are transcribed in the penultimate chapter of the memoir, “Final Days. Father Tongue”. The journey of return has come to an end— these are the “final days” (192)—and the father is finally redeemed via words; it is the “father tongue” that lastly makes its presence felt in the narrative through the recollection of Jennifer, Mervyn Ondaatje’s step-­ daughter, and two of Mervyn’s best friends, V.  C. de Silva and Archer Jayawardene. From Jennifer’s memories, the son recovers a loving father who missed his first family terribly—“He missed you all terribly, he longed for you” (194)—whereas from both V.C. de Silva and Archer Jayawardene, he discovers a loyal friend who did not doubt one minute to drive down to Colombo to visit “his old friends, Derek and Royce” (197) who had been imprisoned for political reasons. Yet it is also the father tongue that gives vent to the distressing guilt of the prodigal son when faced with the crude reality of the father’s depression. “He longed to hold his children in his arms” (199), Archer Jayawardene, his father’s friend relates, but, unfortunately, “all this was happening while his first family was in England or Canada or Colombo totally unaware of what was happening to him” (199). This lack of awareness of the father’s mental illness should be read as the culmination of a life—that of the son—construed upon the absence of the father. “That would be the curse on us”, he concludes, “the guilt we would be left with” (199). The use of the plural “we” labels the guilt as family-grounded and it is my belief that Ondaatje, as the writer of the family, assumes the responsibility to transform the absence of the father into a loss through the writing of the mourning memoir. He, in his stature as writer, organizes the mourning ritual as it is but the enterprise is a family one. “You must

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get this book right” (201), his brother Christopher tells him, “you can only write it once” (201). The physical inaccessibility of the father, Mervyn Ondaatje, hinders the encounter with the prodigal son, Michael Ondaatje, but Michael Ondaatje, the writer, by means of the imagination, turns this impossibility into a fictional reality. The loneliness of the father, perceptively captured by the Sinhalese word “thanikama”, touches the son who, from his condition as writer, converts it into words. This is a critical point in the memoir in so far as it re-creates in the mind of the son a scene in which a desperate father is trying to recover his wife and his family. The son-cum-writer enters thus the father’s mind and imagines in scrupulous detail all the steps the father took in his attempt to reunite the family. He goes to the hotel where his wife is working in the hope that she will notice his presence and “come down to speak with him properly, truthfully […] Had to speak with her. He could hardly remember where the children were now. Two in school in England, one in Kegalle, one in Colombo” (185). But time goes by and the conversation between husband and wife never takes place. Enshrouded in irretrievable loneliness, Ondaatje’s father begins one of his habitual journeys into darkness and drinks until exhaustion. The narration starts with a clearly differentiated “he”, the father, and an “I”, the son. However, as the narration progresses, the son gets closer and closer to the father, a mark of intimacy that is intermittently expressed through the use of the pronoun “you”. In an imaginative turn, the son can at last address the father; the “you” he is approaching is a beaten father who knows he has failed in his mission to keep the family together. With the bottle in his hand, the father is looking for an old book of his, “it was not Shakespeare, not those plays of love he wept over too easily. With dark blue bindings” (188) and what starts as a narration in the third person conducted by an omniscient narrator-son evolves into an affectionate “you” as expressed in the sentence that immediately follows, “you creaked them [the books] open and stepped into a roomful of sorrow” (italics mine, 188). Later on, the bottle already “half empty beside him” (189), he makes for the bathroom and, little by little, wilderness invades him. An abundance of cobwebs and undusted glass ratify that no sweeper has been working there for weeks and so nature has advanced at its leisure, “tea bush became jungle, branches put their arms into the windows” (189) and, in the middle of this wilderness, the presence of a son that feels the father, “the paper money in your pocket, wet from your own sweat, gathered mould” (italics mine, 189). Nevertheless, the son as writer respects the father’s place and

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never trespasses his position as kind observer. This is empathic unsettlement (LaCapra 1999, 2001) at work: the growing wilderness surrounding the father, both literal and metaphorical, is never entered by the son. The son witnesses and understands the father’s enveloping darkness but he does not share it. The redemption of the father is possible because there is a writer that fleshes out from rumours a character that the son understands. Running in the Family underlines a paternal quest that is, as has been argued earlier, intertwined with the exhumation of a Sri Lankan past that starts at the very moment that the son decides to “recreate the era of [his] parents” (205). Loss works at a historical level (LaCapra 1999, 2001) and so, an acknowledgement of the father as loss presupposes an inclusion of the memoir in history. Absence works at a transhistorical level and, for this reason, while the father remained an absence, the land—Sri Lanka/Ceylon— did not interfere in the son’s new English / Canadian life. Once the father is apprehended as loss, his mourning cannot be separated from the mourning of a past that outweighs the felicitous mood of a Ceylonese community that celebrates its “Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood” (41). To express it differently, Ondaatje’s parents’ generation functions as a stepping stone to reach a more insidious understanding of the colonialist undertows that configure Sri Lanka and that were somehow undermined by the privileged, “wild and spoiled” (53) position of a middle-/upper-class community whose cultural allegiances with the English were, despite apparent divergences, relatively close.14 In a parallel move and just as the father, in its quality as loss, is presented to the son as someone relevant to his life, so does Sri Lanka emerge as a historical presence to be registered. The son’s search for the father is balanced with the discovery of the is-land and the inscription of the prodigal son in the land is, I argue, enacted through poetry. It is not coincidental that the “Tongue” chapter, in which the son explains, albeit humorously, the origin of his talent for words—the mother’s attentive observance of two kabaragoyas copulating is woven into the myth that the eating of the tongue of these reptiles is rewarded with eloquence—is followed by a poem entitled “Sweet like a Crow”. Michael Ondaatje, who has been legitimated as the writer of the family in “Tongue”, accepts full responsibility of this task in his poetic response to a remark made by the writer Paul Bowles: “The Sinhalese are beyond doubt one of the least musical people in the world. It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line, or rhythm” (76). “Sweet like a Crow” writes back, in a postcolonial fashion, to a colonial mindset that misconceives the

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musicality of Sinhalese art and culture. The images used in the poem to counterattack Bowles’s colonialist bias are Asian/Sri Lankan scented: vattacka, mango, curry, pappadans, brinjals, betel juice, sarongs, ankle bracelets (76–77). They all contribute to dig up the sweetness of sounds alien to European ears. This is a transition poem insofar as it paves the path towards the next chapter that is devoted unreservedly to the karapothas, the foreigners that “came originally and overpowered the land obsessive for something as delicate as cinnamon” (80). Intoxicated by the abundance of “a perfumed sea” (italics in original, 81), European explorers missed the island altogether since “the island hid its knowledge” (82). It takes someone of the inside and from the outside, an ectopic insider, to unveil this knowledge. This is the instant in which Ondaatje’s ectopic condition shines through while his stature as writer is vindicated. The knowledge hidden by the island unfolds as writing. It is to be found in the Sinhalese handwriting the son retrieves from his childhood memories and thereafter links with the Sigiriya graffiti poems from the fifth century BCE, on the one hand, and the charcoal drawings done by an insurgent in 1971 “on the walls of one of the houses he hid in” (85), on the other. The past as encoded in the Sigiriya poems dissolves in the present of this anonymous artist whose works are “as great as the Sigiriya frescoes” (85) and therefore, “they too need to be eternal” (85). The solidity of these works encased in stone emulates the resilience of an is-­ land adept at responding to violence with poetry. When the University of Ceylon reopened after the Insurgency of 1971, the students were met with an explosion of poetry, “the walls, ceilings and hidden corners of the campus” (84) were filled with “quatrains and free verse about the struggle, tortures, the unbroken spirit, love of friends who had died for the cause” (84). The students, in an act of defiance and identity preservation, “went around for days transcribing them into their notebooks before they were covered with whitewash and lye” (84). As textual representations of survival, these poems accentuate the communal ethos of resilience building (Robinson and Carson 2016; Shrestha 2019). In the defiant act of writing the poems on the wall to make their resistance visible, the insurgents planted the seeds of a narrative of resilience which the students materialized in their transcriptions of the poems onto paper. The interdependence of resistance and resilience in a conflict setting is somehow decisive to communal survival (Ortner 1995) and, in this regard, the prodigal son’s intuitive act of joining these poems with the Sigiriya frescoes fulfils a desire to inscribe himself in the ancestral memory of the land. It is a

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recognition of his act of survival—his writing—as communal, as the very first quote that opens the present chapter conveys, “A literary work is a communal act” (205). The Insurgency of 1971, which is mentioned several times in Ondaatje’s memoir, is never explained under historical terms. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) Insurrection was the outcome of a communist-­ sympathetic revolutionary movement which attracted a significant number of rural Sinhalese Buddhist youths who fought against a government that they felt did not care for the needs of a working-class majority. The revolution was quelled three months later by the then Ceylonese Government which counted with the support of Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, India, Pakistan, and China (Kearney 1977). This crucial event in the history of Sri Lanka Ondaatje uses as a backdrop against which his father’s kindness, on the one hand, and the resilience of the land, on the other, are imprinted. His father’s natural generosity is enhanced by the fact that the insurgents, who had ransacked many houses, left Rock Hill, the Ondaatjes’ residence, intact in recognition for the father’s former donation of several acres of land to build a playground (100). In Ondaatje’s text, and as the tangential references to the 1971 Insurgency confirm, historically conscientious readers must move outside the memoir to satiate their historical thirst. In that sense, Ondaatje’s historical flair is diametrically opposed to the minute historical dissection Vassanji performs in the writing of his memoir as seen in the previous chapter.15 As a gesture towards the land, Ondaatje begins a search for writers in Ceylon that take him to the library at Peredeniya and, more precisely, to the librarian, Ian Goonetileke. He is the one who leads him to the poetry of Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, a contemporary of Ondaatje’s—they studied in the same school though never met—and a stern denouncer of colonialism. The section of the memoir “Don’t Talk to Me About Matisse” is a straightforward reference to Wikkramasinha’s poetry. In the poem, Matisse’s paintings are stripped of their orientalist beauty and exposed as artefacts of savagery, exponents of a history about “how the murderers were sustained / by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote / villages the painters came, and our white-washed / mud-huts were splattered with gunfire” (86).16 These are “the voices” (85) that the prodigal son “didn’t know” (85), “the visions that are anonymous. And secret” (85) and which Ondaatje will assuredly engrave in his own poetry. Hence, the prodigal’s poetry completes the section of the memoir entitled “Don’t Talk to Me

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About Matisse”, which is devoted to exhume the hidden knowledge of the is-land; the perfect closure for—read culmination of—a mourning ritual. The four poems that mark the end of the “Don’t Talk to Me About Matisse” section are thus to be read as constituent ingredients of the whole mourning performance that the memoir puts forward. The invisible traces of the Sri Lanka that the Ceylonese community of his parents’ generations neglected are restored back to the family narrative. “High Flowers” resurrects “The woman my ancestors ignored” (87), sitting “at the doorway chopping coconut / cleaning rice” while “Her husband moves / in the air between trees. / The curved knife at his hip. / In high shadows / of coconut palms / he grasps a path of rope above his head / and another below him with his naked foot” (87–88). The land-based simplicity of the scene depicted differs sharply from the ornamented and decadent performances of the middle and upper-class Ceylonese community to which the Ondaatjes belonged. In “To Colombo”, the poetic voice returns from Sigiriya and still engulfed by the beauty of the ancient frescoes notices the “brown men / who rise knee deep like the earth / out of the earth” (90). Against the Sri Lankan landscape, they too, in line with the Sigiriya graffiti, emerge as icons of endurance, resilience and fortitude. “To Colombo” is followed by “Women like You”, a poem crafted in and out of the Sigiriya frescoes. It is introduced as “the communal poem— Sigiri Graffiti, 5th century” (92) and in it, the women that had been sculpted in the rock far back in the past are brought to life again in the present moment of the poem. The prodigal son’s reconciliation with the land that this poem evokes is emotionally attached to the redemption of the father, as “The Cinnamon Peeler”, the last poem of the sequence testifies to and which I will show in the following lines. The juxtaposition of Ceylon and cinnamon shapes an impassioned narrative of desire and conquest. The smell of cinnamon is “delicate” (80) but, at the same time, destructively powerful. As has been discussed earlier, it is this smell that attracted the karapothas, the foreigners that ravished an is-land they did not understand. The delicacy of the cinnamon is compellingly contraposed to the power that emanates from its indestructible smell. The poem enhances the humble profession of the cinnamon peeler to the extent that the whole poem could be read as a plea on the part of the poetic voice to become one: “If I were a cinnamon peeler / I would ride your bed/ and leave the yellow bark dust / on your pillow” (95). This is a profession firmly rooted in love and thus the cinnamon peeler fuses with the lover of both the woman and the land. The intimacy

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that the poem generates is predicated upon a land that is not ashamed to proclaim that it is the cinnamon peeler’s wife and as such, it/she grants the poetic voice the right to “smell” it/her: “I am the cinnamon / peeler’s wife. Smell me” (97). The prodigal son as cinnamon peeler has earned his right to the land, and, eventually, redeem the Ondaatjes’ legacy.17 The smell of cinnamon permeates the tale about the father that the son creates at the end of the memoir in his attempt to understand him, redeem him, and restore him back to the family history and so I would like to return momentarily to this story. Saddened by his futile efforts to speak to the mother, a drunk Mervyn Ondaatje drives back to the family house and on the way picks up a cinnamon peeler, a Tamil with whom he feels he shares “a mutual ancestry” (187). “Proud of that mutual ancestry” (187), they strike up “a conversation about the stars” (187). The cinnamon smell spreads all over the car. The father holds onto the intoxicating yet liberating odour and resists letting the man get out, “he did not want to stop, wanted to take him all the way past the spice gardens to Kegalle rather than letting him out a mile up the road” (187). It is as if the cinnamon peeler of the son’s poem materialized and invaded the father’s story. The inside-ness and outside-ness game implicit in the ectopic condition is distressingly affronted by the prodigal son of Running in the Family when he makes the following assertion: “We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders” (81). The son’s realization that the sin of colonialism may run in the family in the same manner that drunkenness may also run in the Ondaatjes’ blood—“Most Ondaatjes liked liquor, sometimes to excess” (57)—moulds the narrative of redemption and survival that lies at the heart of the mourning performance. The cinnamon peeler conjures up blood and land and thereupon saves the ectopic insider from an irretrievable position as either “foreigner” or “native”. Michael Ondaatje, the prodigal son, has written blood and land on his body as he reveals in his last morning in Sri Lanka: My body must remember everything, this brief insect bite, smell of wet fruit, the slow snail light, rain, rain, and underneath the hint of colours a sound of furious wet birds whose range of mimicry includes what one imagines to be large beasts, trains, burning electricity. Dark trees, the mildewed garden wall, the slow air pinned down by rain. […] There is nothing in this view that could not be a hundred years old, that might not have been here when I left Ceylon at the age of eleven. My mother looks out her Colombo window thinking of divorce, my father wakes after three days of alcohol, his

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body hardly able to move from the stiffness in muscles he cannot remember exerting. (203)

Conclusion: Running in and from the Family One of the most memorable passages that Ondaatje offers in his memoir is the one in which he describes a dream or, as he puts it, “an image that repeats itself” (27). In this dream, he realizes that his body forms part of “a human pyramid” (27) that walks slowly “from one end of the living room to the other” (27). The bodies flow in unison, no shadow of strangeness meets their cumbersome movements. They are all rooted in the same familial soil. As they advance towards the door, Ondaatje notices that in order to be able to pass through, the pyramid will have to turn sideways. Instead of turning, and to his astonishment, “the whole family ignores the opening and walks slowly through the pale pink rose-coloured walls into the next room” (27). This presentation of the Ondaatje family as a human pyramid should be read as an indication that the memoir unfolding before the reader is by no means a conventional chronicle of a family saga. The metamorphosis of the customary genealogical tree into a human pyramid and the dream-like narrative that envelopes it adumbrates a story entrenched in trauma. The image that repeats itself resonates with LaCapra’s acting-out (2001), a persevering reiteration of the traumatic episode that resists rational assimilation. In the reiterated image Ondaatje depicts, the materiality of the bodies is deceived by the ghost-like property of a family that traverses walls. The family, in its spectral configuration as human pyramid, invokes the dream-like quality that Caruth and LaCapra identify as a key component of the manifestation of trauma (Caruth 1996; LaCapra 2001). Running in the Family is Ondaatje’s wilful determination to transform the human pyramid into a meaningful articulation of a family history encircled by trauma. Ondaatje’s belated mourning of his father is an act of responsibility that he assumes in his quality as both son and writer. The physical and emotional separation between father and son created an affective void that only the adult writer can appease. Writing grants the son the possibility to turn the father’s absence into a loss (LaCapra 1999, 2001) and hence bring the father back to his life. It is not by chance that Ondaatje encounters a sort of soulmate in the character of Edgar from King Lear since, not in vain, this family-grounded Shakespearean tragedy also features the

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frustrated relationship between a father, Gloucester, and a son, Edgar. Edgar longs for reconciliation with his old, emaciated, blind father and cares for him and yet he conceals his true identity. In this respect, the tragedy enclosing Gloucester is that he never fully recovers his son. The reconciliation between father and son is doomed to never happen. This is the fear assaulting the son, Michael Ondaatje, who is made to confront his father’s actual death: I long for the moment in the play where Edgar reveals himself to Gloucester and it never happens. Look I am the son who has grown up. I am the son you have made hazardous, who still loves you. I am now part of an adult’s ceremony, but I want to say I am writing this book about you at a time when I am least sure about such words … Give me your arm. Let go my hand. Give the word. “Sweet Marjoram” … a tender herb. (180)

Mourning, in Ondaatje’s case, delineates the way towards reconciliation. That is the reason why I classify Running in the Family as explicitly a mourning memoir written by a prodigal son whose journey of return charts a map of reconciliation wherein father and is-land are entangled. The desire to capture the colonial Ceylonese world of his parents’ generation evolves into an eclectic narration in which the Ondaatjes’ family history is made subservient to a more encompassing apprehension of the traumatic colonial history of the Sri Lankan land. The trauma of the loss of the father is intertwined with the disturbing history of colonialism that plundered the cinnamon-scented island of Sri Lanka. As a remnant from “the earlier generations that were destroyed” (179), his job as a writer is aimed at keeping “peace with enemy camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and with ‘the mercy of distance’ write the histories” (179). The title of the memoir, Running in the Family, denotes both a reclamation of blood—a recognition of belonging—and a desire to escape from this blood, as conveyed in the word “running”. The ectopic insider that in this particular memoir manifests himself as a prodigal son is ominously aware of his “abnormal” position as son and as Sri Lankan. The apparent fragility of his ectopic position is, however, undermined by the resilience that he inherits from an is-land that resists its entrapment as colonial Ceylon and which he resurrects in the form of poetry. Ondaatje’s memoir is thus to be understood as his simultaneous running in and from the family, as an acknowledgement of his stature as son to a father figure

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while resenting the paternal world’s participation in the trauma of colonialism.

Notes 1. Ondaatje, Running in the Family. Further references to this book are henceforth indicated by page number. 2. It is interesting to remark that the novels that follow the publication of Running in the Family in 1983, In the Skin of the Lion (1987), and The English Patient (1992) move away from Sri Lankan soil altogether. He literarily returns to Sri Lanka in the year 2000 with Anil’s Ghost, a novel focused entirely on the Sri Lankan Civil War. It is also in 2000 when his collection of poetry Handwriting was published. The poems that configure the collection recover the Sri Lankan landscape and people he left at the age of eleven so, in this respect, it somehow complements Running in the Family. Unlike his memoir, and for obvious reasons—the war had not broken out as yet—some of the poems of the collection vividly capture the horrors of the Sri Lankan war. 3. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/how-­c anada-­m ade-­ michael-­ondaatje-­a-­writer-­1.4180245, Posted: Jul 02, 2017 12:08 PM ET | Last Updated: July 2, 2017. 4. M.G. Vassanji’s oeuvre is notorious for its recreation of family histories that bear a close resemblance to the author’s own family. It is worth mentioning that the presence of his family in his memoir is scant and limited to few comments. In Vassanji’s case, if readers want to know about his family history, they are recommended to read his fiction rather than his memoirs. The opposite is true regarding Ondaatje’s family-centred memoir. 5. Running in the Family features as the second book written by Ondaatje. This memoir was written at an early stage of his writing career which I believe, when taken his whole oeuvre into consideration, strengthens the survival quality inherent in the narration. 6. The text makes specific references to King Lear (179–180) and Othello (81). For an in-depth analysis of the King Lear relation, see Waddington’s “Running in the Lear Family: Familial and Cultural Patrimony in Michael Ondaatje’s Autobiography”. 7. Mervyn Ondaatje married a second time and “by 1950 […] he was living with his wife and his two children from his second marriage, Jennifer and Susan” (58). So, the children Mervyn was estranged from were the ones from this first marriage. 8. The ambivalent position of Ondaatje in the outside-ness/inside-ness game that his ectopic condition elicits, has been noted by other critics such as (Davis 1996) and (Kanaganayakam 1992) but they phrase their arguments

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in the language of “foreign” versus “native” and thus re-activate a vocabulary based on dichotomies which is precisely what I try to blur with the coinage of the term “ectopic insider”. See Davis, “Imaginary Homelands Revisited in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family” (1996) and Kanaganayakam, “A Trick with a Glass: Michael Ondaatje’s South Asian Connection” (1992). 9. The weather is a frantic presence throughout the memoir. From the contrast of the Canadian cold with the Sri Lankan heat to the constant threat of heavy rains, Ondaatje’s incorporation of the weather as a persistent element of the narration helps to create an atmosphere of strangeness. 10. The compulsive repetition of trauma is presented and analysed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, first published in 1920. 11. https://www.genealogy.com/forum/regional/countries/topics/ srilanka/622/. 12. The website passage reads as follows: “Dr William Charles Ondaatchi was the first Ceylonese Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens Peradeniya. He introduced the olive to Ceylon. Rev. Jurgen Ondaatchi was translator and Chaplain. His son Simon was the last Tamil Colonial Chaplain of Ceylon”. 13. I would have liked to reproduce this photograph in this chapter but, unfortunately, the publisher has remained unresponsive to my several attempts to request permission. 14. Ondaatje’s father was sent to England after he finished school in Sri Lanka, and although he never passed the entrance exams for Cambridge, he lived there as if he were a student. As Ondaatje ironically puts it, he “simply eliminated the academic element of university” (31). As for Ondaatje’s grandfather, Bampa, his cultural inclination towards Englishness is clearly exposed in his grandson’s memoir when he admits that “Bampa had a weakness for pretending to be ‘English’ and, in his starched collars and grey suits, was determined in his customs” (56). Both Ondaatje’s father and grandfather could be classified under Bhabha’s category of “mimic men” (Bhabha 1994). See Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 85–92. 15. The aim of Ondaatje’s memoir is not historical accuracy but I want to stress that this does not in the least undermine his work. This is one of the main differences between Ondaatje’s memoir and that of Vassanji’s. As shown in Chap. 2, Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo and, as is also the case of A Place Within, is guided by a rigorous historical approach. 16. The first part of the poem reads as follows: “Don’t talk to me about Matisse … / the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio / where the nude woman reclines forever / on a sheet of blood” (85). 17. Ondaatje’s “The Cinnamon Peeler” follows a poetic tradition markedly masculinist that presents the woman as the object of desire and the man, the poetic voice, as the subject of desire. Considering the feminization of

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the land that the poem puts forward, “The Cinnamon Peeler” could be listed among the poems that envision the nation, subjected by some colonial power, as a woman. As remarkable examples of this poetic trend, W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” and Seamus Heaney’s “Ocean’s Love to Ireland” and “Act of Union” should be mentioned. However, it is fair to remark on a crucial difference between Ondaatje’s poem and those of Yeats and Heaney. Whereas in the case of Yeats’s and Heaney’s poems, the subjected land is being raped by the colonial power, in the case of Ondaatje’s poem, the poetic voice is the prodigal son that, on his return to the land, discovers the land’s beauty, embodied by a woman, and falls in love with it/her. Yeats’s and Heaney’s poems articulate violence through the depiction of a rape; Ondaatje’s poem is a love poem. Eavan (Boland 1996) offers an insightful analysis of this poetic tradition, firmly rooted in Irish poetry, in her autobiographical work Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time.

References Barthes, Roland. [1980] 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New  York: Routledge. Boland, Eavan. 1996. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cummins, Joseph, and Ashley Barnwell. 2022. Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and the “Familia-Graphic” Gaze. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 58 (3): 388–401. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2022.2037270. Davis, Rocío G. 1996. Imaginary Homelands Revisited in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. English Studies 77 (3): 266–274. https://doi. org/10.1080/00138389608599027. Freud, Sigmund. 1990. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Norton Library. Huggan, Graham. 1995. Exoticism and Ethnicity in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. Essays on Canadian Writing 57: 116–127. Hutcheon, Linda. 1985. Running in the Family: The Postmodern Challenge. In Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, ed. Sam Soleki. Montreal: Vehicule Pr. Kanaganayakam, Chelva. 1992, Spring. A Trick with a Glass: Michael Ondaatje’s South Asian Connection. Canadian Literature 132: 33–41. Kearney, Robert N. 1977. A Note on the Fate of the 1971 Insurgents in Sri Lanka. Journal of Asian Studies 36 (3): 515–519.

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Kim, Lee-Von. 2015. Scenes of Af/filiation: Family Photographs in Postcolonial Life Writing. Life Writing 12 (4): 401–415. LaCapra, Dominick. 1999, Summer. Trauma, Absence, Loss. Critical Inquiry 25 (4): 696–727. ———. 2001, Summer. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mishra, Vijay. 2007. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. London and New York: Routledge. Ondaatje, Michael. [1982] 1983. Running in the Family. London: Picador. ———. 2017. How Canada Made Michael Ondaatje a Writer. https://www.cbc. ca/radio/writersandcompany/how-­c anada-­m ade-­m ichael-­o ndaatje-­a -­ writer-­1.4180245. Accessed 12 August 2022. ———. n.d. Genealogy.com. https://www.genealogy.com/forum/regional/ countries/topics/srilanka/622/. Accessed 12 August 2022. Ortner, Sherry B. 1995, January. Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1): 173–193. Robinson, Guy M., and Doris A.  Carson. 2016, June. Resilient Communities: Transitions, Pathways and Resourcefulness. The Geographical Journal 182 (2): 114–122. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12144. Rushdie, Salman. 1992. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta. Russell, John. 1991. Travel Memoir as Nonfiction Novel: Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 22 (2): 23–40. Saul, Joanne. 2001. Displacement and Self-Representation: Theorizing Contemporary Canadian Biotexts. Biography 84 (1): 259–272. Shrestha, Anushiya. 2019. Which Community, Whose Resilience? Critical Reflections on Community Resilience in Peri-Urban Kathmandu Valley. Critical Asian Studies 51 (4): 493–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/1467271 5.2019.1637270. Snelling, Sonia. 1997. ‘A Human Pyramid’: An (Un) Balancing Act of Ancestry and History in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 32 (1): 21–33. Solecki, Sam. 2003. Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje. University of Toronto Press. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Vassanji, M.G. 2014. And Home Was Kariakoo. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. Waddington, George (2007). “Running in the Lear Family: Familial and Cultural Patrimony in Michael Ondaatje’s Autobiography.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 22:1, 66–93, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2007.10815174

PART II

Female Resilience

In this section we explore the resilience of East African Asian women through two different but very meaningful examples of life writing. Chapter 4 analyses two memoirs written by women of East African Asian origin—Neera Kapur-Dromson’s From Jelum to Tana (2007) and Parita Mukta’s Shards of Memory (2002)—who trace the history of their forbears from India to Kenya and highlight the strength and determination of the women in their families. The ability to prosper in what must have seemed a hostile context—British East Africa with its tripartite racial hierarchies— is likened to the survival strategies of perennial plants that are obliged to preserve their nutrients—read traditions and values—in order to subsist. The two memoirs discussed in this chapter bring out the gender constraints that the different generations of women had to adhere to or, in some cases, rebelled against. East African Asian men had to contend with being resented for their alleged privileged class position, compared to the Black Africans, and their ethnicity, but the women of this community also had to succumb to the internal dictates of the community as regards family honour, a burden placed heavily on the shoulders of the females. Therefore, we contend that both Kapur-Dromson and Mukta’s memoirs offer powerful testimonies of resilience as a form of natural pragmatism that allows their female ancestors to navigate gender constraints and survive as both East Africans and women. We view Shailja Patel’s Migritude, the text studied in Chap. 5, as a contemporary continuation of the narration of the female resilience exerted by East African women of Indian origin. As a matter of fact, Patel’s mother

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shares the natural pragmatism of Kapur-Dromson and Mukta’s female ancestors and, in view of her daughter’s reluctance to get married and have children, finally decides to give her the trousseau—a suitcase containing eighteen saris—that should have come to her as a married woman. Single and empowered by the eighteen saris inherited from her mother, Patel, the artist, embarks on a self-quest orchestrated by the non-white female body that she intentionally places at the centre of imperialist practices. This is a body engendered in what Said identifies as “the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass migration” (Reflections, 174); this is a transnationally created body that heralds the voyage as the essential marker of identification and shuns the nation-state as the articulator of belonging. We read “migritude” as an evolution of négritude and coolitude in the sense that Migritude, Patel’s performance/poetic memoir, puts forward a de-territorialized way of being in the world that complicates identitarian allegiances. Unlike Patel, Parita Mukta and Neera Kapur-Dromson’s memoirs celebrate an Indian diaspora in East Africa which still claims a certain allegiance to what Lisa Malkki has called the grand genealogical national tree (Malkki 1992). Patel’s female resilience, as exemplified by the material fluidity that emanates from the saris she has inherited, transcends Indian and East African affiliations to claim a transnational way of being that re-writes tradition.

CHAPTER 4

Rhizomatic Perennials: Resilience and Survival in Kenyan Asian Memoirs Felicity Hand

A tree whose roots have not dug deep can easily be blown off by the wind – nor will it blossom. —From Jhelum to Tana (2007, 419)

The two memoirs that I propose to explore relate the family histories of two East African Asian women who have chronicled the determination and pioneering spirit of their forebears. The late nineteenth century witnessed the arrival of many South Asians in what was then British East Africa mainly lured by the promise of an “America for the Hindu” which in actual fact was a campaign to recruit cheap labour for the construction of the railway that would run from Mombasa to Nairobi and later on to Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria (Lepper 1915; Tinker 1977; Elder 1992). One of the significant characteristics of both memoirs is the authors’ insistence on three factors: resilience, tradition, and community. Another frequently recurring trope is that of laying down roots in the new land leading to the spreading of the Indian rhizome—the extended family and communal network—in East African territory. This has led me to read the Indian migration to East Africa in socio-ecological terms as the first pioneers—Lala Kirparam Ramchand and his wife Hardei in Neera © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Pujolràs-Noguer, F. Hand, Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46345-7_4

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Kapur-­Dromson’s From Jelum to Tana (2007) and Muktaben (Ba) and her husband Himmatlal in Parita Mukta’s Shards of Memory (2002)—all show strong belief systems and know how to survive on the minimum. Plant ecologist Dave Des Marais describes perennial plants as “naturally grow[ing] back as they have an advantage of strong root systems and generally conservative use of water and nutrients” (Schmitt 2017). The combination of a conservative outlook and hold on traditions together has, to my mind, described the East African Asian community to perfection. A traditional mindset, however, is not inconsistent with a certain degree of flexibility nor does it preclude a move towards modernization as it is part of the malleable idea of resilience. Resilience is a versatile concept as it is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from psychology to environmental science and thus can be utilized as a means to address social processes or as a metaphor for the adaptability of a socio-ecological system over the long term. I borrow the original descriptive and ecological meaning of resilience from sustainability science as a trope to explore the determination and survival strategies of the East African Asian community in Kenya as revealed in the two memoirs. What Brand and Jax call “ecosystem resilience” refers to “the amount of disturbance that a system can absorb before changing to another stable regime, which is controlled by a different set of variables and characterized by a different structure” (2007, 2). By “disturbance” I fall back on Vijay Mishra’s theory (2007) that Indian indentured migrants suffered a trauma as they had to come to terms with something irretrievably lost—the homeland—even though they could and would “change to another stable regime” and become accustomed to “a different set of variables”. Adger (2000, 347) defines social resilience as “the ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political, and environmental change”, a clear description of the upheaval undergone by the Indian migrants who ventured to cross the kala pani to seek a better future. While it may seem unexpected, bizarre, or even disrespectful to analyse the migration and settlement of persons in terms of plant life, I draw on these ecological theories as the nature-culture divide is arbitrary and artificial because humans are intrinsically part of the ecosystem. Moreover, through an ecocritical framework I echo Crosby’s claim that “perhaps the success of European imperialism has a biological, an ecological, component” (2009, 7).

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Resilience Walker et al. (2006, 2) state that resilience is the capacity of a system to experience shocks—read traumas—while retaining essentially the same function, structure, and identity. They defend the concept of resilience as the amount of disturbance a system can absorb without shifting into an alternate regime. In the case of East African Asians I understand this to mean the ability of this migrant group to adapt to the colonial Kenyan context but at the same time preserve their idiosyncrasy. Walker et al. go on to claim that “the more resilient a system, the larger the disturbance it can absorb without shifting into an alternate regime” (ibid.). For East African Asians, due to the strength of their beliefs, customs, and traditions, the community adapted to life in British East Africa without abandoning their essential identity and—it must be said—avoiding any undue physical contact with black Africans. In Parita Mukta’s Shards of Memory. Woven Lives in Four Generations (henceforth SM), Ba, her grandmother, was widowed in 1948 at the age of thirty-three with nine children to raise on her own. Mukta’s memoir relates the lives of four members of the family: her grandmother, Ba; her father, Harshad; her uncle, Raj and her daughter Sonpari. She shifts from past to present, the present often resorted to in order to compare the relationship she had with her forbears and her current status as a university lecturer. Neera Kapur-Dromson goes back even further in time to her maternal great-grandfather, Lala Kirparam Ramchand, who set out from Karachi bound for Mombasa in a dhow in 1898. In her memoir, From Jhelum to Tana (henceforth JT) she combines a factual account of Kirparam’s rise in fortune—he started as assistant to a halwai (confectioner) travelling along the railway construction line gradually working his way up to successful dukawallah status, the owner of businesses in urban Nairobi and in the more remote rural areas of Kenya—with an intricate description of Punjabi society as it developed and adapted to local conditions. While Mukta bases her work on the facts she can gather from her relatives—her grandmother Ba was still alive at the time of writing the memoir—Kapur-Dromson recreates her forebears’ thoughts and reactions allowing her imagination full rein. Mukta’s memoir dwells at length on the “shared history of hunger” (SM 76) that Harshad, her father, grew up on. Bhakhri, a crumbly chapatti, was the daily diet of her grandmother and her nine children for seven years, which forged an indelible mark on the family consciousness:

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“[t]o traverse this universe carrying a story of hunger as the origin of one’s family beginnings is to hold a very specific set of relationships with the world around oneself” (SM 74). If we return to the botanical analogy, Ba and her family represent the resilience of the perennial plant, which, as Des Marais argues, “[will] grow, harvest, die down but later naturally grow back as a result of their underground mass and efficient use of resources” (Schmitt 2017). Surviving for seven years on such a meagre diet is an example of this “efficient use of resources”. Harshad, Mukta’s father, will not only survive but also, as the eldest son, become the “family bhakhri earner” (SM 82). Harshad joins the East African Railways Office which links the improvement in the family fortune to the evolution of the British colony. By the time Harshad was old enough to seek employment, the railway had been completed for over forty years. As an Indian, Harshad could aspire to skilled labour or a clerical position, over and above the basic manual work carried out by the Africans but below the supervisory jobs occupied by the whites. Kapur-Dromson’s maternal great-grandmother, Hardei, shines through as a bold and independent woman. That Hardei would stand out as a determined character, not just capable of enduring life with forbearance but also holding her own in a society that was not conducive to women working outside the home, is made clear at the very beginning of her life in East Africa. She travels to Nairobi with her six-year-old son in search of her husband, Kirparam, who abandoned her shortly after their wedding in order to “take destiny in his own hands” (JT 19). Kapur-Dromson seems to condone his behaviour as, according to her, he had felt “the responsibility of a wife […] was too much, too sudden. He could not cope” (ibid.). Among the tangible evidence of his existence is a portrait painted by an Italian prisoner of World War II, discovered by the author when she was already forty-two, which goaded her curiosity to find out why her ancestor had taken the momentous decision to try his luck in Africa and inadvertently found an African branch of the family. Hardei, his wife, quickly understands that a woman can feel fulfilled outside marriage. She sets up shop, becoming an urban dukawallah, specializing in materials of all kinds, despite being unable to read or write. Her business acumen and endless energy—she never had the time to “indulge in superstitions, nor of long-drawn conversations—so much the hallmark of the women of her generation” (JT 191)—single her out as the exception that proves the rule, her small shop becoming “her source of freedom” (JT 195).

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Likewise, her husband realizes early on that in order to survive in the new land the Indian migrants could not cling too fast to strict Hindu notions of purity. He is described as being “adaptable and culturally flexible, and therefore possibly better equipped [than other migrants] to withstand the dramatic changes that he was experiencing, [his] unusual range allowed him to easily shed the rigidity of caste and food taboos” (JT 35). Both great-grandparents, together with Mukta’s grandparents, dug their roots deep into African territory and weathered the changing political climate as a survival strategy that would allow them to found a new dynasty.

Tradition and Izzat In my approach to the study of the Kenyan Indian community as chronicled by Mukta and Kapur-Dromson, I focus on the intersection between environmental sciences and literary studies—more specifically life writing—as ecosystems include not only humans, flora, and fauna but also natural resources, in short one’s surroundings. If we single out humans from this equation, they form a social system described as “a group of people who interact long enough to create a shared set of understandings, norms, or routines to integrate action, and established patterns of dominance and resource allocation” (Westley et al. 2002, 107). This could be applied to a small unit such as a family, or to a much larger entity such as an ethnic community. While nature cannot be separated from human social systems, neither can the symbolic dimension—the myths, beliefs, or ideologies—abstract itself forever from the local environment. Therefore, in time, a certain degree of flexibility—read fitting in—is brought about. In this section I look at how the ideologies of the Indian community slowly begin to evolve through the, albeit reluctant, interaction with other social systems, that of the whites and that of the Africans. The ideology governing gender relations in the early twentieth century was based on the necessity to control and safeguard women’s sexual purity, men’s honour, and social status being heavily dependent on it. In the East African context this translated into an excessive enclosure of the various Asian groups within their own communities for fear that their daughters (or wives) would be led astray by African men. This cultural exclusivity was further underscored by the growing racial segregation instigated by the British colonial government. Women’s purity was worshipped at the altar of tradition and it led to girls being groomed for the only career that was left open to them: marriage and motherhood. This led to an overprotection of young

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women as the purity of the ethnic group was a priority. A relationship with the wrong kind of Indian would have been deeply frowned on while a liaison with an African was unthinkable.1 The Punjabi compound described by Kapur-Dromson stretched the limits of paternal tolerance when regular nocturnal visits to the communal toilet were discovered to be a midnight love tryst between an erring daughter and a neighbour’s son: The family’s izzat had been muddied. … The scandal was too much to bear. … They could not show their face in their social circle any more. Almost puritanical in its morals and conventions, illicit, premarital love was forbidden; virginity was sacred. (JT 223)

Izzat, family honour—or khandaanity as M.G. Vassanji refers to it in The Gunny Sack—was thus the glue that bound the community together, despite more obvious internal linguistic, regional, or religious differences, not to mention class or even caste.2 Kapur-Dromson’s position as narrator offers her the epistemological privilege of reconfiguring the history of her two grandmothers, Hardei’s daughter Yashoda and Bebe Gurdei, her father’s mother, whose daily lives, pleasures, and frustrations take centre stage for a large part of the memoir. Her proximity to her own parents, Krishnaa (Muni) and Krishen, pushes them into a more secondary role, their engagement and marriage only taking place three chapters before the end. Yashoda and her mother have a strained relationship as Hardei resents her own daughter’s love marriage: “Whoever heard of a girl having her own way? This is scandalous” (JT 159) and even towards the end of her life: Somewhere in a corner of her heart, Hardei had not forgiven her daughter Yashoda … [n]or had she learnt to liberate her own soul from the torment amidst the many grandchildren that Yashoda had given her. (JT 284)

Marriage was embarked on like a business venture and Hardei’s worries were founded on her future son-in-law’s lack of means. Love was something that women of Hardei’s generation and background were unable to grapple with. Her psychological estrangement from Yashoda can be traced back to a possible perceived failure as the guardian of culture and the transmitter of traditional values to crush the tell-tale signs of rebellion in her daughter: “Are these the fruits of my karma?” (JT 159). Kapur-Dromson later describes the ritual confirmation of her parents’ engagement: “There

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was little idea of individual interest; marriage was a social duty towards the family, the community” (JT 334). Through these memoirs the power of patriarchal constructions of femininity can be seen to override the possibility of fulfilment of many individual female yearnings. Muni, KapurDromson’s mother, was obliged to leave school at seventeen as she was deemed “wise enough. She can read and write a letter, thread a needle, cook a dish. What more is there to know for a woman?” (ibid.). Likewise, Mukta recalls the frustration that educated young women in Asian families had to suffer in order to preserve the integrity of their family honour: The four aunts were caught up in the contradictory tides of the era, whereby the nationalist fervour which swept through all the Indian-funded schools saw the teaching of a patriotic history of India, which had to jostle with Shakespearean sonnets for attention. … To be able to write, however – and through this to give full expression to [women’s] great feel for the texture of the language and its usages – was denied them. [a girl would never write to a male friend as this] would show an unseemly ease and freedom on her part. (SM 44–45)

Educating girls beyond what was considered necessary for their future as mothers and homemakers was not encouraged until the Arya Samaj movement, a “renaissance movement among the Hindus” (JT 74), was firmly established. I will return to the Arya Samaj in the section on community but suffice it say at this point that honour and reputation also featured largely on its agenda. Kapur-Dromson jokingly lists its major teachings, including vegetarianism, abstention from alcohol, frequent recitation of the Vedic mantras, and “[s]o long as you can tie a white turban, you are khandani, a worthwhile citizen” (JT 74). Gender roles were firmly established, men went out to work, and women remained at home and took care of the children and, most importantly, the kitchen. Food and cooking were an ideal scenario for establishing community networks and both memoirs offer ample examples of food as the way to cement family ties and ethno-religious loyalties. Preparing a meal ceases to be a daily routine, undertaken out of necessity rather than choice, instead of which it takes on a communal aura, becoming the manifestation of a shared culture. Mukta’s memoir constantly returns to the years of scarcity, she even states that “[t]his originary hunger story inhabits my skin, it snuggles in my mouth, films my eyes, flavours my experiences” (SM 74), while Kapur-Dromson revels in the creativity and folklore surrounding cooking. The kitchen was clearly a woman’s domain as “[m]ale members of the

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family rarely, if ever, entered the kitchen” (JT 211). She recreates the culinary rituals of her paternal great-grandmother, Bebe Gurdei: Eating food was not first of all an act of pleasure. It was anna [grain]. An act of giving energy to the body [….] The first small chapati was thrown into the fire. This is for the ancestors, she muttered to herself. Perhaps, it was also to avert the evil eye. May my children eat in peace, she said. Sometimes Bebe also burnt two red chillies in the open fire to blow away the evil present in the home, especially when someone in the family was ill, or when there were financial problems. (JT 211; emphasis in original)

In 1944 with the death of the patriarch Kirparam, his son-in-law, Lajpat Rai, saw fit to improve his living conditions and he built himself a new house taking advantage of the new urban “multi-racial” plan of 1948 designed for Nairobi. As South Africa was the model, the separate development of neighbourhoods was instigated in order to “protect” the Europeans from other inhabitants. As Kapur-Dromson records, “[n]o mechanism had been created for people of one culture to communicate with another” (JT 313). Lajpat Rai’s new compound “was open, with empty spaces that we never had before” (JT 314). The problem was the uprooting of his mother, Bebe Gurdei, who resented the lack of contact with the (Indian) community and the fear of the wide, open African spaces that were so unlike the compactness of a tightly knit village. However, even Bebe Gurdei learns to adapt to the suburban situation, such is the power of perennials to survive in the most inhospitable and unlikely situations. Within the Asian community, traditions were to be religiously observed with the women themselves being the most vigilant when it came to observing the limits of modesty, humility, and respect. Mukha hints that the female complicity behind her grandmother’s impoverishment has not allowed her family to dispel the ghosts of her family’s struggle for survival in 1950s Kenya: It is not, however, the dispossession of everyday movable goods  – chair, beds, a cupboard – which haunts us. It is the moment when male society (guarded by its female henchmen) wreaked its vengeance on her in a terrifyingly personal way, which stalks us always. (SM 16)

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Mukta’s grandfather remains a shadowy figure in the memoir but she suggests that he flouted convention. After their wedding, when he was obliged to return to Nairobi, he left his young bride “writing paper, already addressed envelopes, and a fountain pen filled with ink” (SM 11), little realizing that it would be regarded as a subversive act for a woman to correspond by letter even with her husband. The conservative nature of the community is manifest in the response by the extended family network, who frowned on a husband’s desire for his wife to learn English in the British colony: the sorority conspired to keep her firmly within the confines of the vernacular language and vernacular knowledge, for adoption of English was thought to lead to an espousal of the mores of this language community. (SM 12)

Her female relatives kept Ba, an Indian bride, catapulted into a different world on the other side of the Indian Ocean, subservient. She also had the misfortune to be widowed at a very early age. Himmatlal died of a heart attack at the age of forty-three, leaving his wife with no economic resources and nine children to raise, and unable to fight the stigma of widowhood that the community enforced upon her. An upper-caste widow, unsophisticated in financial affairs, had those possessions that were left in the house confiscated by those who claimed to be her husband’s creditors. The move from a two-room rented property to a one-­ room dwelling accompanied the assumption of the mantle of widowhood. (SM 19)

As stated in the previous section, Mukta’s family suffered great hardships because of the sudden, unexpected death of their grandfather in 1948, this becoming “the moment when they were made conscious of a hostile world, not only brutal in its race and class privileges, but ruthless in the very fibre of the community” (SM 75). The double standard of the more affluent Asians—who clung inexorably to patriarchal mores—is denounced by Mukta as a profound discrimination that linked class and gender intimately together: at the same time as men were performing good works and taking up the weapons of political nationalism in Kenya, within the inner recesses of the segregated communities, women’s bodies were being marked to ensure distinct ethnic and community identities. (SM 38)

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Similarly, when Hiralal, Kapur-Dromson’s paternal grandfather, died in 1954, his widow, Dhanwanti, found herself relegated to an inferior social position, excluded from the burial ceremony itself. The grief at losing a loved one becomes an even harsher burden to bear as she “felt isolated, deprived of the solemnity of the occasion” (JT 374). Six years separate the two deaths, but Mukta and Kapur-Dromson both record the inhuman treatment meted out to these women, whose upper-caste status did little to free them from their fate. Ironically, Mukta records how her grandfather “spoke out angrily against community depredations. When a male cousin died, and they did what they did to his widow, he was in a towering temper and made his views known loud and long” (SM 15). That both Mukta’s grandfather and Kapur-Dromson’s maternal great-grandfather were advanced in their thinking as regards gender equality—despite Kirparam’s youthful act of selfishness—singles them out as unusually flexible, notable perennials. Undoubtedly the early male pioneers had to fight British apathy bordering on contempt and African resentment in order to prosper in the new land but the women had an added obstacle to overcome: the gender constraints that kept them tied to the home and children. Interestingly, Mukta briefly mentions her maternal grandmother, Ma, who migrated as a widow, but an independent woman, to Moshi, then Tanganyika, in order to teach in the Aga Khan school. She acknowledges that “[s]he was plainly disliked by the male elders, who venomously declared that God had destroyed a hundred men in order to be able to give form to her” (SM 20). Mukta’s textual dismissal of her maternal grandmother, as Ma disappears completely from the memoir after page 21, speaks volumes of the author’s personal bias. Ba is venerated as having suffered enormously in her life and must be sheltered, while Ma returned to India but “was unable to win the affection of those around her, reducing them to a state of abject dread” (SM 21). Mukta’s preference for the abject victim rather than the fighter is curious and reveals an unexpected family bias. One wonders why she decided not to investigate Ma’s background more fully. Is she herself falling into a patriarchal trap?

Community Before discussing more deeply the community of East African Asians and how it is portrayed in the two memoirs, I would like to incorporate another feature from environmental studies which is pertinent to the analysis of the coexistence of the three major ethnic groups in colonial Kenya.

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“Ecotone” is a term used in ecology to indicate “a narrow ecological zone which possesses a mixture of floristic and faunistic characteristics in between two different and relatively homogeneous ecological community types” (van der Maarel 1990, 135). An ecotone indicates a zone of transition between two different habitats, which “rather than being border zones between discrete social entities, are zones of social interaction, cross-fertilization, and synergy wherein people not only exchange material goods but also learn from one another” (Turner et al. 2003, 440). Thus in literary studies ecotones represent cultural spaces of encounters, conflicts, and potential renewal between communities. In the East African context, where three major ethnic groups were established in hierarchical terms, it makes sense to talk about the tensions produced in these man-­ made ecotones. However, it is questionable whether one can actually talk about East African Asians as a “community” because they are fragmented into a multiplicity of religious, linguistic and caste groups. They include Hindus; Sunni, Shia, and Ismaili Muslims; Sikhs; Jains; Roman Catholics; and Protestants. They speak Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, and Telugu. In the words of Austrian-born Hindu monk and anthropologist Agehananda Bharati, in his social survey of Asians in East Africa, “there is virtually nothing of sociological significance about the minority which would hold for all its constituent groups” (Bharati 1965, 15). Despite Bharati’s claim, there is a sense in which East African Asians are a community—in colonial times they were a racial caste of intermediate status between the colonial masters and the “natives”.3 They were destined to play the role of pariah middlemen so the Asian “community” became a buffer group created by socio-political forces outside their group with the shared experience of rejection, prejudice and scapegoating forming the basis for solidarity and group consciousness (Hand 2015, 23). After independence Asian communities came to realize that the only means of survival in postcolonial East Africa was to unite despite their internal fissures because where “everyone else saw ‘Asian’, the Asians saw Shamsi, Bohra, Ismaili, Hindu, Sikh, Memon, Ithnashri” (Vassanji 2005a, 178). Kapur-Dromson laments that “Indians were never a cohesive group [and] … nothing had been done to integrate them in [East African] society” (JT 313). Even within the general category of “middlemen” groups, East African Asians constituted an extreme case because they were caught up in the racist dynamics of colonial or white settler societies. The almost inevitable antipathy of the underprivileged masses was further exacerbated by the

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racism of the dominant white minority, as well as, of course, by the social distancing and segregation that prevented any interaction between Africans and Asians. Moreover, Asian pride in their cultural heritage led them to look upon European culture with ambivalence and accept as axiomatic their ethnocentric belief in their cultural superiority over Africans (JT 382). Kapur-Dromson relates how, in the aftermath of the Great War, the Indian community began to rebel against unjust discrimination on the part of the British, who were slowly driving a wedge between their native subjects to prevent any kind of class solidarity from growing. Class and ethnicity were not viewed as separate entities in the former British colony; instead, the East African Asian community was read as an economically powerful, close-knit community separated, on the one hand, from the African population by both economic power and ethnicity and on the other, viewed as inferior in class and race by the whites. The East African Standard of February 3, 1923, reported that “Asiatics, imported for pick-­ and-­shovel work, [were] a people alien in mind, colour, religion, morality” (quoted in SM 72). Moreover, they were caught up in a perpetual political dilemma: “If they sympathized with the Africans, they were ‘opportunists’, if they kept aloof, ‘they did nothing for the native’” (JT 154). The Asians were portrayed as being rapacious and exploitative of the Africans, so “the community found itself trapped between two fires. Damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t” (JT ibid.). Notwithstanding this tension, once Kenya morphed into a colony and the rupee ceased to be the official currency, the last link with India was severed and gradually the Asian community would regard Kenya as their home. At the time of independence in 1963, despite the friendly rapport that many Asians like Kapur-Dromson’s parents enjoyed with their African neighbours, feelings of insecurity grew amongst the community. The Africanization policy meant that attitudes towards Asians would become strained as the wahindi were accused of having obtained their wealth through the deprivation of the black Africans. “Class and ethnicity meshed together to deepen social and cultural divisions, holding the country back” (JT 394; and see Hand 2011 on the concept of clethnicity). Parita Mukta’s family uprooted themselves during the decade of the 1970s owing to the gradual implementation of restrictive Africanization policies which did nothing to favour the integration of Kenyan Asians into the new postcolonial nation. She relates how the move to Britain “was accompanied by the reconstitution of the togetherness of the family in a radically different form” (SM 98). She reflects on the second generation

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that grew up in Nairobi and who now live in the US, Canada, the UK, or India, and concludes that “despite comfortable living standards, there remains a puzzling lack of assertiveness” (SM 90) as if the tough perennials of the earlier generations have not survived the removal to places with easier lifestyles. Perennial species of plants have the ability to grow on land not currently in use (Schmitt 2017), such as the undeveloped parts of colonial East Africa which explains the rapid settlement of Asian migrants in this part of the empire and, consequently, points to the paucity of resilience of migrants located in a more prosperous context or simply that resilience on Western soil is articulated differently and is endowed with an even greater degree of flexibility. Despite the improvement in the extended family’s income after migration to Britain, Mukta insists on the traditional values such as sharing what little one had with the rest of the community: “[i]t was a hallmark of extended family living that any resources that were available were shared out” (SM 88). Likewise, the notion of sacrifice resonates throughout the memoir: “you deny yourself in order to enhance the ‘common good’ in the family” (SM 154) and members of the extended family were expected to conform for the benefit of all. Mukta’s uncle Rajni followed this unwritten rule to such an extent that, according to his niece, “we ate him up. We drew from the roots of a tree that bore sweet fruit” (SM 153; emphasis in original). The botanical metaphor—albeit not particularly positive in this context—echoes the epigraph to this chapter proving the aptness of the analogy. Mukta devotes a whole section of her memoir to this uncle who migrated to the north-east of England in the late 1950s to study pharmacy. He proved himself to be a rhizomatic perennial as he struck up a lifelong friendship with his landlord and landlady and would remain in the country until his death. Even though he was completely integrated into British life he was still very attached to his family in Nairobi. He was torn between his success in Sunderland and the weight of the hunger story of his youth, which brought with it the duty implied in izzat (SM 137–138). In fact, the families “back home” would constantly remind the young migrants of the dangers of becoming too friendly with the locals. The conservative values of the East African Asian community were constantly watching out for any deviations from acceptable behaviour because “everyone knew that England was full of tantalising young women who lured innocent young men into their snare, entrapped them and made them push a pram in public streets (SM 124; emphasis in original). Rajni eventually married an Indian girl unlike his friend Pratap, who would be

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ostracized from his family in Kenya for marrying an English woman. He was told “never to show his face – ever” (SM 129), such was the stigma attached to sullying the family name. Kapur-Dromson anchors her memoir more firmly than Mukta within the political arena of colonial East Africa. She relates the fate of political activist Isherdass which illustrates the ambiguity and awkwardness of the middle position occupied by the Asians. Class turned his fellow Asians against him but it would be both his economic position and his Indianness that combined to make him a hated figure by all: The [second] world war was not their war. Psychologically, Indians in Kenya never really identified with it, and they would soon forget it. Indian artisans of the time refused to cooperate with the war effort. A deputy director of manpower, Isherdass took upon himself the duty of devotion. He was as committed as he had been during his radical days when he used to advocate non-cooperation with the colonial government. He abused the men with hostile language and tough measures. Isherdass became the target of public anger and hatred. [he was shot and his two murderers were tried and executed] … In their death, contractor Balwant Rai and electrician Harbux Singh were accorded the highest honours normally reserved for saints. A huge crowd attended the funeral processions. (JT 244–245)

Men like Isherdass, who seemed to desire favours from the colonial government, would become the target of hatred and envy of his fellow Indians and Kenyans alike, unlike figures like Makhan Singh, general secretary of the East African trade union movement, or Manilal Desai, who was secretary of the Nairobi Indian Association, to this day revered as stalwarts in the independence movement.4 Poignantly, Kapur-Dromson recalls that “[t]he road that ran behind Jamia mosque and McMillan library, right opposite Jeevanjee market, came to be called Kirparam Road. […] But after independence, the street no longer bore his name” (JT 302). If the great [Asian] names of the colonial struggle for independence have been wiped out, what can one expect for a simple dukawallah? When discussing the Asian community and its influence on the ecotone formed between it and the neighbouring African population, the significance of the Arya Samaj cannot be underestimated. The “Noble Society”, founded in Nairobi in 1903, is a monotheistic Hindu reform movement that promotes values and practices based on the belief in the infallible authority of the Vedas. Its members believe in one God and reject the

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worship of idols. With the increase in the Indian population in Nairobi, the need for educational facilities grew and the Arya Samaj started the first school for girls in Nairobi in 1910. Kapur-Dromson (JT 74–79) mentions the reform movement in detail as her grandmother Yashoda was one of the first girls to attend a special school designed for them. Her mother Hardei had not been enthusiastic but Kirparam did not hesitate to send his daughter to the new school, even though he, unlike his wife, was not particularly religious. Kapur-Dromson describes her great-grandfather as “[l]iberal, non-conformist and unconventional, he was obviously not the traditional, stereotypic image of an Indian father of the early 1900s” (JT 111). The Arya Samaj played—and continues to play in Kenya—a considerable role in improving the life conditions of its converts, including Africans.5 As mentioned above, class would continue to play an ever-important role in determining one’s allegiances but the lethal combination that would stereotype Asians as fence-sitters would be middle-class affluence plus non-African ethnicity: Indian defiance of the European colonizers subsided … It looked as if the so-called Indian leaders were more willing to accept colonial rule and the injustices that went with it. Was it because they possessed a lesser degree of the fighting spirit of their forefathers – despite a higher level of education and perhaps more skills? Or was it because, as distributors of consumer goods, some had profited from war-time shortages? One could see it as a period of accommodation  – both with the white rulers as also with the emerging nationally conscious Africans, who had the force of numbers. (JT 303)

Conclusion. Tough Plants Mukta tends to idealize her grandmother and uncles and aunts, the family members who survived on a meagre diet of bhakri and salt for several years. “Within the generation of those nine children there is a fierce loyalty between those members who have actually partaken of this meal of scarcity” (SM 65). She hints at the need for “restitution” (SM ibid.) but acknowledges that her grandfather—unlike Kapur-Dromson’s great-­ grandfather—did not emigrate to East Africa as a result of impoverishment but rather to seek “wider intellectual horizons” (SM 69). Kapur-Dromson’s memoir relates Kirparam’s success story, which is interspersed with landmark historical events, such as the founding of the Arya

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Samaj in Kenya (JT 74–79 and 177–183); the introduction of the rupee as common currency in the East African colonies and the hut and poll taxes that alienated the Africans (JT 57–59, 155 & see Desai 1993, 118–126), and the notorious “Indian Question” that would define the future of these colonies, among many others (JT 99–103 & 162–163; see also Ramchandani 1980, 176–183; Twaddle 1990, 155–161, 1997 passim). In the last chapter of her memoir entitled “Uneasy Balance”, and the two final sections, “Epilogue” and “Epitaph”, Kapur-Dromson reveals the rationale for her work. A return journey to what is now Pakistan closes a cycle and remains a homage to the early migrants. Both writers cover three eras: colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalization by illustrating how their families—and by extension many East African Asian families—carved out a space in an unknown land, learnt to love it, and, as good perennials, left their trace behind. Kenyan culture owes many of its characteristics to the formerly despised wahindi, many of whom fought hard for independence and the prosperity of the host country. Indian participation in Kenyan culture and politics is an aspect that Shailja Patel also vindicates in Migritude, the text that will be analysed in the next chapter. In the context of an independent Kenya that failed to fulfil people’s dreams of liberation, Patel affirms that “just as black Kenyans who challenged single-party rule and the betrayal of Kenya’s independence were exiled, imprisoned, or killed, so also were dissenting brown Kenyans silenced—through assassination, deportation, stripping of citizenship” (94). It cannot be denied that Kapur-Dromson and Mukta both adopt an anthropological stance as “native informants”, only just managing to avoid an excessive romanticization of their forebears’ trials and tribulations. They succeed in showing how migrants frequently become frozen in an India of the past and their attempts to preserve their culture translate into rigidly holding on to the values that were prevalent at the time of their departure, although in time, and often despite themselves, a slow hybridization process sets them apart from the natives of the homeland. In other words, the tension evoked by the idea of an ecotone has generated a truly hybridized culture. On KapurDromson’s trip to Pakistan, to what she calls the ancestral land, she is amazed, perhaps even a little disappointed, that the children in the street call out Afreeka ke log (people from Africa) “How do they know, we wonder?” (JT 415). Her own grandfather, Lajpat Rai, made a second trip back to India after twenty years to “trace the family heritage, to feel the familiar surroundings, to run into people he had known and grown up with” but

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he discovered that “it was as if he were negotiating a labyrinth. so much had changed; perhaps, somewhere, Africa had changed him” (JT 288). Africa indeed changed these Indians to the extent that, as related in Chap. 2, the Indianness (or Asianness) of M.G. Vassanji, another East African, is fully absorbed by the Africanness that he seeks to identify with in his memoir. To Vassanji, home is unquestionably Kariakoo, the African quarter of Dar es Salaam. The two memoirs that focus on two large extended families bring to life the Indian banyan tree, the roots of which spread laterally and in this way grow over a wide area. Secondary roots sprout forth that hang down and take root wherever they touch the ground, all being connected directly or indirectly to the primary trunk. Hence the use of the metaphor of a rhizomatic community, an Indian diaspora that has reached as far as East Africa and parts of the Western world while still claiming a certain allegiance to the homeland, makes sense. Mukta and Kapur-Dromson emphasize the idea of establishing new roots in Kenya and after several years, being uprooted, in the case of Mukta’s family’s decision to move to Britain. Social resilience is manifest throughout the two memoirs as the first generation of migrants—and in particular the women of the family— struggle to overcome what environmental scientists describe as “external stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political, and environmental change” (Adger (2000, 347). The adherence to the strict code of conduct inscribed in izzat—often with the complicity of women themselves—together with a powerful sense of community informs these memoirs. The rhizome has spread across the Indian Ocean and formed strong networks of support, friendship, and obligations. The family members that Mukta and Kapur-Dromson have brought to life serve as a homage to several generations of East African Asians, struggling to survive in often hostile circumstances and demonstrating the toughness and resilience of what I have called rhizomatic perennials.

Notes 1. So-called mixed relationships were not encouraged as shown in M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2005b), which highlights the social stigma and incomprehension surrounding the love affair of Njoroje and Deepa. Jameela Siddiqi’s novels (2001, 2006) take a more humorous approach to these alleged cultural transgressions by revealing the hypocrisy and double standards of the Asian male. See Hand 2015.

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2. Vassanji coins this Hinglish expression from the Cutchi-Gujarati word khandaan meaning respectability. Awal, the stepmother of Juma, the father of Salim, keeps her daughters-in-law perpetually on their toes: “If your pachedis keep slipping off your heads, use a nail,” she would rail, in her constant efforts to preserve her home’s khandaanity: that snobbish form of respectability which every family, however crooked, lays claim to. (The Gunny Sack, 83) 3. M.G. Vassanji is adamant in his delineation of an East African Asian community. See Pujolràs-Noguer’s chapter on And Home Was Kariakoo (2014). 4. For further information on Makhan Singh, see Zarina Patel. 2006. Unquiet. The Life and Times of Makhan Singh, Oxford: Zand Graphics. However, it should be pointed out that Desai Memorial Hall, constructed along Tom Mboya Street near Nairobi Fire Station by funds from the East African Indian Congress, has since been demolished, although the road named after him in Ngara, Nairobi, still stands. See https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/ article/2001288116/how-­k enya-­h as-­u nderrated-­t he-­r ole-­p layed-­b y-­ asians-­in-­the-­struggle-­for-­freedom. 5. Much of the work inspired by the Arya Samaj has been taken over by the Asian Foundation; see https://asianfoundationkenya.org/website2/.

References Adger, W.N. 2000. Social and Ecological Resilience: Are They Related? Progress in Human Geography 24 (3): 347–364. Bharati, Agehananda. [1965] 1972. The Asians in East Africa. Jayhind and Uhuru. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Brand, F.S., and K. Jax. 2007. Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience: Resilience as a Descriptive Concept and a Boundary Object. Ecology and Society 12 (1): 23. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss1/art23/. Crosby, Alfred W. [1986] 2009. Ecological Imperialism. The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge: University Press. Desai, Niranjan. 1993. The Asian Influence in East Africa. In Global Indian Diaspora: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, ed. Jagat K. Motwani, Mahin Gosine, and Jyoti Barot-Motwani, 118–126. New York: Global Organization of People of Indian Origin. Elder, Arlen A. 1992. Indian Writing in East and South Africa: Multiple Approaches to Colonialism and Apartheid. In Reworlding. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. New York: Greenwood Press. Hand, Felicity. 2011. Impossible Burdens: East African Asian Women’s Memoirs. Research in African Literatures 42 (3): 100–116. https://doi.org/10.1353/ ral.2011.0065. ———. 2015. Coping with Khandaanity in Diaspora Spaces: South Asian Women in East Africa. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 70: 13–40.

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Kapur-Dromson, Neera. 2007. From Jhelum to Tana. New Delhi: Penguin India. Lepper, G.H. 1915. An America for the Hindu. The Empire Review XXVIII 164: 108–117. Mishra, Vijay. 2007. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. London: Routledge. Mukta, Parita. 2002. Shards of Memory. Woven Lives in Four Generations. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Patel, Zarina. 2006. Unquiet. The Life and Times of Makhan Singh. Oxford: Zand Graphics. Ramchandani, R.R. 1980. Indians in East Africa: Past Experiences and Future Prospects. In India and Africa, ed. R.R.  Ramchandani, 171–194. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Schmitt, Carolyn. 2017. Finding the Root Cause of Plant Resilience. The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Welcomes Plant Ecologist Dave Des Marais to the MIT Faculty. 10 October. https://news.mit. edu/2017/mit-­plant-­physiologist-­david-­des-­marais-­joins-­cee-­faculty-­1010. Siddiqi, Jameela. 2001. The Feast of the Nine Virgins. London: Bogle-L’Overture. ———. 2006. Bombay Gardens. London: Lulu. Tinker, Hugh. 1977. The Banyan Tree. Overseas Emigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Oxford: O.U.P. Turner, Nancy J., Iain J. Davidson-Hunt, and Michael O’Flaherty. 2003. Living on the Edge: Ecological and Cultural Edges as Sources of Diversity for Social-­ Ecological Resilience. Human Ecology 31 (3): 439–461. Twaddle, Michael. 1990. East African Asians Through a Hundred Years. In South Asians Overseas. Migration and Ethnicity, ed. Colin Clarke, Ceri Peach, and Steven Vortovec, 149–163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa. History in Africa 24: 309–336. Van der Maarel, Eddy. 1990. Ecotones and Ecoclines are Different. Journal of Vegetation Science 1: 135–138. Vassanji, M.G. [1989] 2005a. The Gunny Sack. Anchor Canada. ———. 2005b. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. Edinburgh: Canongate. ———. 2014. And Home Was Kariakoo. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. Walker, B., L.  Gunderson, A.  Kinzig, C.  Folke, S.  Carpenter, and L.  Schultz. 2006. A Handful of Heuristics and Some Propositions for Understanding Resilience in Social-ecological Systems. Ecology and Society 11 (1): 13. http:// www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art13/. Westley, Frances, Steven R. Carpenter, William A. Brock, C.S. Holling, and Lance H. Gunderson. 2002. Why Systems of People and Nature Are Not Just Social and Ecological Systems. In Panarchy. Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, ed. Lance H.  Gunderson and C.S.  Holling, 103–119. Washington: Island Press.

CHAPTER 5

“Learning to Wear a Sari Is a Rite of Passage”: Shailja Patel’s Inventory of the Migrant Body in Migritude Esther Pujolràs-Noguer

O monarch, as the attire of Draupadi was being dragged, after one was taken off, another of the same kind, appeared covering her. And thus did it continue till many clothes were seen. And, O exalted one, […] hundreds upon hundreds of robes of many hues came off Draupadi’s person. And there arose then a deep uproar of many many voices. And the kings present in that assembly beholding that most extraordinary of all sights in the world, began to applaud Draupadi and censure the son of Dhritarashtra. —The Mahabharata. Translated by Pratap Chandra Roy, ebook, Book 2, Sect. 68, pp. 144–145. [o]ur age—with its modern warfare, imperialism, and the quasi-­ theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers—is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration. —Edward Said, Reflections on Exile (174) Art is a migrant – it travels from the vision of the artist to the eye, ear, mind and heart of the listener. —Emanuele Monegato, On Migritude. A Conversation with Shailja Patel (137) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Pujolràs-Noguer, F. Hand, Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46345-7_5

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Introduction. The Construction of Migritude in Migritude In Stately Bodies. Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender (2002), Adriana Cavarero explores the centrality of the “body” in the identity-­ construction process of human beings and, in doing so, she reveals how the fleshly corporeality of the female body is used as a canvas on which the logocentric un-corporeality of the male body is framed. The representation of the two sexes engendered in classical Greece assigned “the fleshly component of existence” (2002, ix) to women whereas men were accredited with “the more glorious component of the logos” (2002, ix), which incidentally was the feature attributable to human beings only. Furthermore, Cavarero unveils the inherent contradiction of a bodily discourse that dates back to classical times and which, on the one hand, aims at enhancing the un-corporeality of the state perceived as the domain of reason, and, on the other hand, represents this very un-corporeality through precisely the body, as the Platonic coinage of the term “body politic” illustrates. As Cavarero perceptively notes, “something very strange indeed seems to characterize the history of the West: while politics rejects the body from the specific categories on which it founds itself, it also retrieves the body as the shaping metaphor of political order” (2002, viii). In other words, the Platonic rejection of the body as the site of unrestrained passions places the “body” as the figure of speech whereby the rational body politic is phrased. The paradoxical nature that delineates Western philosophy is grounded upon the recognition that the rational body that stems from the body politic is that of an adult male in opposition to the banished female body whose materiality condemns it to remain silently outside the sphere of reason and, consequently, of the state, that is to say, of power. The polis links the female body to the “naturally unregulated, cannibalistic, and incestuous” (2002, ix), the “prelogical, prehuman, and nearly animal” (2002, x) that permanently threatens the civilized community of men. Woman as body becomes man’s dreaded Other, the second sex, in Simone de Beauvoir’s words (The Second Sex, 1949) or the sex which is not one as expressed in the title of Luce Irigaray’s book (This Sex Which Is Not One, 1977). In his study on the construction of whiteness, Richard Dyer adds another layer to Cavarero’s critique of the gendered logocentrism of the West by incorporating “race” as a determining component of the bodily trope. Dyer’s White (1997) demonstrates that the logocentrism that

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characterizes Western thought is both male and white. Imperialism played a decisive role in the consolidation of whiteness as the master signifier around which the world was configured (Dyer 1997, Schwarz 2011, Pujolràs-Noguer 2018, 2019). The entrepreneurial spirit that prompted imperialism was apprehended as something which was endemic in white people, forever lacking in non-white people. “Will power, far-sightedness, energy” (Dyer, 31) and, most importantly, the capacity for self-restraint, were the qualities required for leadership. The white male body was the recipient of these qualities in clear contraposition to the non-white bodies, both female and male, of the conquered territories, drawn as they were to let loose their unrestrained passions. The body politic of empire, itself an upshot of the classical polis, is therefore essentially and unequivocally white and male. It is also a body politic entrenched in the fixity and rootedness that characterizes the nation-state, the political unit around which empire was structured (Anderson 1983). Shailja Patel’s Migritude, published in 2010, is a body-shaped memoir first envisioned as a one-woman show to be performed on a Californian stage. A Kenyan born of Indian descent, educated in both the UK and the US, Patel displays a story of displacement, her own, which she orchestrates around the saris she has inherited from her mother. In Migritude, the materiality of Patel’s female body, intensified as it is by the brownness of her skin, is conscientiously harmonized by the fluidity that radiates from the five and half metres of cloth that shape the “sari”, the Indian female garment par excellence. Therefore, the flowing saris enveloping Patel’s female, non-white body serve as the trope that will deconstruct the imperial body politic whose civilizing rationality rested majestically on maleness and whiteness. This is a body politic machine that manufactures borders and locates “bodies” within state delimitations. The migrant body that Migritude propounds cannot be encased in the political demarcation of the nation-state that lies at the core of imperial ideology since its “trans” nature—the incessant desire to move beyond—positions it in a trans-­ historical, trans-national and trans-cultural territory forged within the distinctively female energy that ensues from the material fluidity of saris. Needless to say, the question that begs to be answered is encapsulated by the title of Patel’s book itself: What is migritude? Migritude, I contend, must be formulated against three ideological configurations—the national genealogical tree, négritude, and coolitude—which are predicated upon Simone Weil’s insightful perception about the human need to be rooted. I think it is worth quoting Weil’s affirmation in full: “To be rooted is

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perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul” ([1952] 1987, 41). What follows is an examination of how the envisioning of the nation as a genealogical tree firmly rooted in the imperial metropolis denaturalized displacement and circumscribed bodies within national delimitations. Négritude and coolitude are conceived as postcolonial alternatives to the imperial genealogical tree but, I argue, their dependence on arborescent metaphors to elaborate new identities falls back on constraining ideologies of rootedness. I read migritude, the concept that is being laid out in Patel’s eclectic memoir, as an invigorating outlet for the migrant body to free itself from stagnant formulations of rootedness. Without underestimating Weil’s powerful statement on the human need to be rooted, what migritude offers is another understanding of what it means to be rooted, another way to record the infinity of traces deposited in a body (Gramsci 2003) that is presented as unashamedly female and brown. As the work of Ernest Gellner, one of the prime theorists of nationalism shows, the concept of the nation-state is predicated upon rootedness. Gellner’s apprehension of nations as entities that are naturally fixed on a map (1983) reinforces a type of arborescent rootedness whereby metaphors of kinship and home are articulated to create a sense of legitimate attachment.1 In “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees” Malkki expresses this genealogical ethos of the nation-state as follows: Motherland and fatherland […] suggest that each nation is a grand genealogical tree, rooted in the soil that nourishes it. By implication, it is impossible to be part of more than one tree. Such a tree evokes both temporal continuity of essence and territorial rootedness. (28)

As a consequence of this, “people are often thought of, and think of themselves, as being rooted in place and as deriving their identity from that” (Malkki 1992, 27) naturally arborescent “rootedness” (Malkki 1992, 27). Culture, a term that derives from the Latin word “cultivation”, blends easily in this arborescent national trope since, as Clifford notes, “the idea of culture carries with it an expectation of roots, of a stable, territorialized existence” (1988, 338). The rootedness that emanates from the configuration of the nation as a genealogical tree that expands in a hierarchical manner across the colonized territories lies at the root—pun intended—of the body politic of

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empire. And yet, the placidness of this imperially rooted scenario is disrupted the instant in which displacement, especially the forced displacement that results from slavery and indenture, is to be accounted for.2 How do the heavily materialized bodies of non-whites fare in a genealogical tree that subjects them to the bottom of the evolutionary ladder? (Young 1990, 1995) Négritude and coolitude are theoretical paradigms that attempt to reconceptualize rootedness in the face of the forced displacement experienced by non-white imperial subjects caught at the juncture of independence. What I mean by the juncture of independence is that they find themselves at the fateful moment in which they will become subjects of the new emerging independent nation, formerly a colony of empire, which they claim as their homeland. In that sense, it is important to highlight how both négritude and coolitude are terms framed within the same metaphors of home and kinship that delineated belonging in the imperial discourse. Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (2001), as has been shown in Chap. 2 in relationship with Vassanji’s memoir, is a poem about the reclamation of a formerly colonized homeland as one’s free land; it is a poem about rootedness that replaces the logocentric body politic of empire with the emotional materiality granted to the non-white body. In other words, négritude enhances that which was despised by imperial discourse, the seeming irrationality of a body steeped in passion. Coolitude is, up to a certain extent, a response to négritude. Before négritude’s essentialist philosophy expressed as a belief in the existence of a universal black world, coolitude stresses the specificities involved in the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural identities that stand at the core of Caribbean and Indian Ocean societies (Carter and Torabully 2002). Coolitude intends to explain the métissage of societies whose complexity far surpasses the simplification and unilaterality deployed by the discourse of négritude. Placing indenture at the core of the coolie experience, coolitude centres on the voyage itself, on the traumatic transoceanic crossing of coolies understood as a historical migration as well as a site of cultural encounters (Bragard 1998, 2008). It is, as Bragard infers, by focusing on the centrality of the journey (1998, 2008) that coolitude fends off essentialism and connections with idealized motherlands, for example, India.3 However, this disconnection with an idealized motherland does not preclude coolitude’s urge to create a new identity in the new land that has become their motherland. To put it differently, coolitude seeks a rootedness that is fundamentally land based. The transoceanic crossing is

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employed as a differentiating identity marker that will be incorporated in the newly acquired national stature. From this perspective, coolitude fails to accommodate the deeply transnational character of the specific migrations that are taking place in our contemporary times, “the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration” (Said 2001, 174). And it is precisely in the age of the refugee, the displaced person, and mass immigration that Patel’s inventory of the migrant body must be located. In the foreword of Patel’s Migritude, Vijay Prashad, in reference to the migration that is the basis of the book, pinpoints the contemporaneity of a displacement that rests at the junction of “older social oppressions” (ii) and “the technology of the modern State” (ii). “This linkage between older ideas and new technologies”, he asserts, “makes immigration of the past […] different from migration of the present” (ii). Migritude as a concept that embodies the contemporary condition of migration simultaneously feeds on and moves beyond the négritude and coolitude of the past because both négritude and coolitude prove to be ineffectual to comprehend the experience of displacement contained in her—Patel’s—migrant body. Although Patel acknowledges her indebtedness to négritude in the coinage of “migritude”, she nonetheless discards Césaire and Senghor as “direct influences or primary sources” (Reddy 2010, 144). Migritude shares with négritude the contesting and celebratory “attitude” (Monegato 2009, 237) that stimulates thought and creates political and cultural spaces wherein novel identities can flourish. But migritude moves away from the “emotional reclamation” (Vassanji 2014, 2) of a land physically lost due to migration. Interestingly enough, coolitude, unlike négritude, is never mentioned by Patel as an influence and yet I believe that coolitude’s emphasis on the voyage somehow resonates with the movement evoked by Migritude’s flowing saris. But whereas coolitude uses the voyage instrumentally as a help to articulate a new belonging in the new motherland, migritude preserves the voyage itself as the essential marker of identification. The migrant body that Migritude exhibits is a straightforward challenge to the imperial body politic enclosed in the nation-­ state. In the introduction to A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani point out how, “in the study of diasporas and transnationalism” (5), the nation-state is “no longer the default mode of exemplification” (5). In sight of today’s migratory experiences, the rubric of the nation-state cannot explain

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contemporary identity formation. The meditation on the condition of migration (Prashad 2010, iv) that the concept “migritude” epitomizes contests the arborescent—read vertical and hierarchical—structure of the nation-state by vindicating a sense of belonging that moves horizontally and refuses, in the words of Patel, “to choose between identities of origin and identities of assimilation” (Monegato 2009, 237). In this sense, migritude aligns itself with Deleuze and Guattari’s plateau-shaped rhizomatic model which renders the unique root that sustains the arborescent construction as meaningless. A rhizome calls forth a mass of roots that expands on planar, horizontal, non-hierarchical ramifications wherein origins are forever deferred.4 Migritude is conceptualized as inevitably transnational and necessarily fluid. Migritude is the theatre and written performance that shapes the particular transnational identity of the individual named Shailja Patel. The travels that transpire from Patel’s sari-clad body forge a rhizomatic fabric that unfurls, Draupadi-style, across history, nations and cultures to embrace “the voices of women living in the bootprint of Empire” (Monegato 2009, 236). In drawing a connection between Patel and Draupadi, I intend to delineate a genealogy of female resilience embodied by saris. Draupadi, one of the protagonists of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, is married to five husbands, the Pandavas, who fail to protect her when they lose all their possessions to the Kauravas, a rival family, in a game of dice. Draupadi is humiliated by Dushasana, one of the Kauravas’ brothers, who attempts to disrobe her by pulling the sari she is wearing off her body. However, Lord Krishna takes pity on her and protects her by turning the sari covering her into infinite layers of fabric. In this way, her naked body is never exposed. Draupadi’s unending sari and Patel’s inherited saris function as a means to protect their female bodies. The sheer materiality that saris exhume in their quality as clothes is beautifully balanced by the fluidity that seems to emanate from them. At the crux of this materiality and fluidity is where the resilience of the female body is born. Veering from sheer materiality to fluctuating buoyancy, the saris of Patel’s Migritude write a new agenda for the dreaded female body. Hence, migritude in Migritude is constructed as a form of female resilience punctuated by not only the saris that “strangled women” (21) “doused [them] in paraffin” (21) and “burned” (21) them, but also by those that permitted women to go “into battle” (21), work “the fields”, and labour “on construction sites” (21).5 Put differently, Migritude’s saris may be recipients of subjection but, as Patel discovers on her journey, they can also project boundless forms of liberation.

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Saris, Roots, and the Transnational Experience At the very end of Migritude, in the section entitled “The Shadow Book”, Patel relates her journey of return to Kenya, the country of her birth. After seventeen years abroad, first in the UK and later in the US, Patel returns literally to a “home”, her parents’ home. There she is dutifully fed as if she had “come off a month-long fast” (93). Food becomes the signifier upon which the protection, comfort, and welcoming that surround the idea of “home” builds its signified. In the simple, albeit far from simplistic, act of nurturing—the “luscious mangoes” (93) her father had carefully “ripened for [her], the “comical dance” (94) of her parents “leaping up every few minutes to bring [her] […] herbal salt, pickles, yogurt” (94) urging her to “eat, eat, eat” (italics in original, 94)—a profound sense of belonging is being carved. This intimate, homely belonging is immediately juxtaposed to her being interrogated by journalists about the unusual “radical politics” (94) shown in her work which, to their mind, does not fit in the category “Indians in Kenya” (94) who they disregard as agents in the making of Kenyan and, by extension, African history. Patel’s ingenuous reply, “I don’t really have any knowledge about Indians in Kenya. But I have a lot to say about brown Kenyans” (italics in original, 94), unmasks the journalists’ bias in their apprehension of Asianness as a deterrent to Africanness and, at the same time, validates her Asian African allegiance. “Brown Kenyans”, she dauntlessly affirms, “were exiled, imprisoned or killed” (94), silenced through “assassination, deportation, stripping of citizenship” (94) and so, she infers, they gained their right to be accounted for as rightful Africans. This is, of course, the same identity questioning that Vassanji had to go through on his return journey (see Chap. 2) and in both cases their ectopic insider position is conducive to a more nuanced understanding of belonging. However, whereas Vassanji’s travelogue/memoir is construed as an emotional demand for a territorialized existence, Patel’s performance/poetic memoir is a vindication of a de-territorialized way of being in the world, a testimony of a citizen from the global South, “a brown minority citizen of a post-independence black Africa” (96) who knows that, for the likes of her, privileges are “painfully won” (96). Migritude is Patel’s gift of return. As a returnee, she is expected “to display wealth” (96) but instead of the conventional, contemporary articulations of “achievement, accomplishment and accumulation” (96) exhibited through “German cars, iPods, and designer goods” (96), she proudly spreads out Migritude, “a tapestry of poetry, history, politics,

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packed into a suitcase, embedded in my body, rolled out into theatre. An accounting of Empire enacted on the bodies of women” (96). A cautionary remark must be made at this point. The gift of Migritude is what Patel rolls out into theatre but what I intend to analyse is the written form of the performance, the translation from theatre to book which she approaches tentatively: “Theatre is relationship. A body in front of other bodies. Unfiltered, unedited, unmanipulated. In real time. If I screw up on stage, everyone participates in the moment. What then, is writing?” (85).6 I reformulate Patel’s question as: What does the translation from performance to writing really entail? I read Migritude as an intensely visual experience that manages to transform words into material entities by fusing the purely theatrical performance with writing. Patel manages to set up a dialogic space where the actual performance and the written product interact at such an intimate level that the “Shadow Book”, the section that explains the process of gestation of the performance, demands to be read alongside the section entitled “Migritude”. Migritude is the amalgam of Migritude, Shadow Book plus the minute description of the saris we are offered in the section “What Came out of the Suitcase”. The three parts are horizontally, non-hierarchically related and meant to deliberately complicate the generic classification of the memoir, an aspect that stimulates and complements the trans-essence—transnational, transhistorical, transcultural—of Migritude. Patel herself views Migritude as a trans-generic work: “Poetry. Spoken-word theatre. Text-based performance for stage. Fully embodied poetry. Story! [What I do breaks new ground in melding genres and dissolving boundaries—it is fluid, multifaceted, and constantly evolving” (Monegato, 138). The rhizomatic constituency of Migritude is enhanced by presenting the sections “Shadow Book” and “What Came out of the Suitcase” as a simultaneous communal and individual reflective output. “Shadow Book” is described as “an extended debrief with an old friend: behind-the-scenes and after-the-fact vignettes, memories, and associations […] the underside and the offshoots of the stories” (74) whereas “What Came out of the Suitcase” are “observations harvested from sari-­ viewing by eight friends and director Kim Cook, blended with my own associations and responses” (65). Patel describes Migritude, “the book you are now holding” (2), as an “incarnation” (2) of the “90-minute theatre show” (2). The particular choice of the word “incarnation” is intriguing. In its apprehension as corporeal manifestation of a deity, an incarnation is the meeting point of body and spirit, of the material and the abstract, but an incarnation also alludes

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to a physical form or condition of something or someone that is changing or developing (Cambridge Dictionary), forever in flux. Migritude as incarnation of the original theatre performance is formally imbued with “the interactive co-creation of the stage” (86) and so, the saris that spectators see are materialized through words in the “What Came out of the Suitcase” section. Otherwise put, saris are actually read. What readers read is not a mere description of the fabric, but rather, a whole array of sensorial data that combines individual remembrances with historical intimations.7 The saris that come out of the suitcase are, after Rothberg’s fashion, knots of memory (Rothberg 2010), that is to say, historical, cultural, and emotional entanglements that “exceed attempts at territorialisation (whether at the local or national level) and identitarian reduction” (2010, 7). Draupadi from the Indian epic Mahabharata (67), Oshun, Yoruba deity of love, sensuality, and femininity (69), and Yeats’s poetry (69) blend with the Sex Pistols (65), the ANC and Rastafarians (70), Superwoman and Almodovar sic (70) in a textile narrative that moves diachronically and synchronically. The saris are de-territorialized; as the recipient that contains them, “a battered red suitcase” (2), saris travel and the stories attached to them constitute a multidirectional memory network that connects divergent traumatic histories (Rothberg 2009). By sharing the saris with the community of readers (and spectators), Patel is consciously de-­ exoticizing what may be perceived as “Indo-chic orientalia” (Reddy 2016). Patel’s saris are loaded with a history of colonization that locates the female body at the core of the imperial enterprise. Migritude is, Patel affirms, “the mantra that unlocks the suitcase, that releases the saris” (2). As a mantra, a word endowed with a special spiritual power, Migritude emerges as a liberating performance set to unlock and release Patel, the individual that inherited the eighteen saris “collected by [her] mother” (2) but, as a knotted act of memory, Migritude reconceptualizes historical responsibility by implicating all of us—spectators-cum-readers—in the traumatic stories woven in the saris. The multidirectional memory mood that guides Migritude is established in “The Prelude” where the story surrounding the origins of the paisley pattern found in saris and pashmina shawls is presented as a violent act of colonization. Patel approaches the eighteen saris she has inherited from her mother as objects to be studied, to be analysed and dissected. Only by addressing saris as products of material culture can she release the traumatic stories woven into them as a result of imperialistic practices. Jules David Prown

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defines material culture as “the study through artifacts of the beliefs—values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions—of a particular community or society at a given time” (1). Hence, the value of objects, the saris in this case, does not derive uniquely from the fabric itself but, most significantly, from what Prown designates as the “transient and variable [values] “that have been attached by the people who originally made or used the object, by us today, or by people at any intervening moment” (Prown 1982, 3). The conflation of past and present that a material culture approach to Patel’s particular object of study—the saris inherited by her mother—elicits is monitored by an understanding of the historical experience as both factual and emotional. The three phases Prown distinguishes in the material culture methodology, namely, description, deduction, and speculation, are present throughout Migritude. As a synchronic exercise, Patel describes the saris “at a particular moment in time” (Prown 1982, 7), but she immediately links the description with her own experience. The deduction exercise that ensues is diachronic and “it involves the empathetic linking of the material (actual) or represented world of the object with the perceiver’s [Patel’s] world of existence and experience” (Prown 1982, 8). This empathetic transportation into the depicted world of Patel’s saris culminates with the speculation phase which “fuels the creative work that now must take place” (Prown 1982, 10). The affective materiality of saris is thus relayed (Leetsch 2021). It is my belief that the three phases that Prown detects in a material culture investigation and that he presents as occurring in chronological order, in Patel’s Migritude, description, deduction, and speculation happen concurrently. The story behind the paisley pattern that characterizes saris is an example of Patel’s eclectic material culture investigation. The front cover of Migritude features a black female body on which a single paisley pattern is printed. The black female body corresponds to a mother carrying her son on her back.8 (See Image 5.1.) This image transports us back to an episode that took place during the colonial period and which involves the violence Kenyan women had to endure at the hands of British soldiers, a scene I will discuss later on. By painting a pattern traditionally associated with the Indian sub-continent on the body of a Kenyan woman, Patel is visualizing the common history of suffering impressed on the female body as an upshot of imperialism. This is also the pattern that accompanies the written text and which I read as a constant, pervasive reminder of the beauty and violence that nurtures Migritude.9 “The

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Image 5.1  Front cover, Migritude. Reproduced with the kind permission of Kaya Press

Prelude” unveils the story of beauty and terror behind the denomination “paisley”; it reveals the story of how the original “ambi” pattern became “paisley”. In the “Shadow Book”, Patel explains how she was unaware of the fact that “paisley” was the name of the village in Scotland “to which the British abducted India’s textile trade” (75). This discovery, she states, “launched my investigation” (75). A focus on this pattern, described invariably as “form of a mango” (4), “a shape like a peacock feather” (4), “half a heart […] an image a child could draw, single stroke, free form, and still produce something elegant” (5), unleashes a multidirectional narration of colonization that surprises Patel herself. In her role as investigator, Patel discovers that

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ambi didn’t originate in India, but went all the way back to Babylon. I was crestfallen. I’d wanted a story to be a one-way, straightforward colonial appropriation. Instead, I had to engage with multiple migrations, roll back several eras of history. (75)

How Patel engages creatively with these multiple migrations follows Prown’s deduction and speculation phase (8–10) since she, the investigator-­ artist, is able to inhabit the world captured in the ambi design through the connection she makes with the “large framed poster of a cave painting from Sri Lanka on my parents’ dining room wall in Nairobi” (75).10 (See Image 5.2.) The pattern is poetically transformed into a “teardrop in Babylon” (4) where “Astarte, shameless goddess of the fecund feminine” (4) is to be found. This is the Goddess “in stone, earth, and sepia tones” (75) that appeared in the poster and that she creatively remodels as Astarte. The translation of the Sri Lankan goddess of the cave paintings into Astarte takes on a personal dimension when Patel recognizes this Goddess as “[her] picture” (75).11 The Sri Lankan “carvings and paintings of the

Image 5.2  Sigiriya Frescoes, www.alamy.com Image ID: CEXP78

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goddess in the mountain caves are called shailaja” (75), a representation of her name. The name, Shailja, is materialized—incarnated—as a goddess. The Sri Lankan goddess becomes Astarte and, as the Prelude progresses and the story of the ambi design unfurls, she turns into Parvati. It is Parvati’s footprint, “as she ran through the Himalayas at the dawn of time” (4) that the ambi design now seizes. The meaning attached to the ambi pattern is forever deferred—teardrop, foliaged shape of a herbal, cone, tadpole, footprint, form of a mango, peacock feather, half a heart— but all meanings point towards the same multidirectional history of colonization that shapes Patel’s migrant and female body. How ambi became paisley invokes the story of how mosuleen became muslin and how Kashmiri became cashmere. The three linguistic variations of the original names—ambi, mosuleen, and Kashmiri—illustrate the linguistic colonization that was concomitant with the economic, political, and cultural colonization carried out by the British Empire. In an attempt to protect the British textile market, makers of mosuleen had their index fingers and thumbs chopped off so as to secure that they would not be producing a fabric that sold at a much lower price than British cloth. In a similar manner, the ambi pattern that characterized Kashmiri shawls was copied by weavers from the Scottish village of Paisley excluding Kashmiri weavers from any kind of profit. However, the history of British colonization stamped on the ambi pattern and which Patel uncovers is further connected with the Roman Empire when “the heavy feet of Roman legionaries” (4) that “tramped over the Alps” (4) intruded in the pattern’s natural dancing through Celtic art. The opposition between dancing and tramping that Patel depicts, “It danced through Celtic art, until the heavy feet of Roman legionaries tramped over the Alps” (4), sets beauty side by side with violence. The gracefulness and etherealness of the pattern’s dancing through time and places—Babylon, India, the Celtic world— clashes with the roughness exhibited by the heavy tread of the legionaries. The migrant body that contains the experience of Migritude is made out of the confluence of beauty and violence that Patel’s inherited saris releases. Patel’s search of her migritude which she expresses as “My-gritude” (7) must be inscribed in a more encompassing search, the search of “the missing half” (7), the history that “isn’t shapely, elegant, simple. The half that’s ugly, heavy, abrasive” (7), in short, the history that places her body in a transnational, transhistorical, and transcultural scenario. In this trans-­ scenario, Shailja Patel’s my-gritude, her migration out of Kenya to the UK and the US, is performed against the backdrop of the multiple untold

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stories of terror that converge in the beautiful ambi pattern that singles out saris and en-gender, in the sense of giving rise while infusing with gender, Migritude. As a consequence, the saris are de-rooted and de-­ exoticized. They are presented as harbingers of a shared collective multidirectional memory that binds her own trauma to the trauma of the Asians that Idi Amin expelled from Uganda in the 1970s (10–11) and to the trauma of the Maasai women who were abused by British soldiers during colonization (15–19). Furthermore, the multidirectional memory pattern Patel is construing is much more inclusive. It calls forth a set of apparently divergent traumatic stories, geographically and temporally separated such as those of the Arawaks and the Ohlone children from Latin America (35), the Congolese population under Belgian rule (35), Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (36), Iraqi soldiers in Guantánamo (38), and even “the four hundred dolphins sonar-blasted to death in the Indian Ocean by the US Navy” (36). All these traumas are empire-grounded and, hence, the present American imperial outbursts are intricately related to the violence perpetrated by the Spanish and Belgian empires of the past. The damage that imperial policies have on the environment is not lost to Patel’s critique when she adamantly affirms that “I want the gutters of Berkeley to float plastic bottles, like the ditches of Nairobi. I want the poodles of New York to choke on plastic bags like the cows and goats of Zanzibar” (36). Migritude unmasks the violence endemic in “neoliberal rhetorics of globalization and market-based forms of human value” (Kulbaga 2016, 76). From the perspective of Rothberg’s theory of the “implicated subject” (2019), Migritude urges readers to recognize themselves as implicated subjects. “Without being direct agents of harm” (Rothberg 2019, 1), we readers, “contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination” (Rothberg 2019, 1) without originating or controlling such regimes. Readers of Migritude are turned into the spectators of the 90-minute show that Patel directly addresses from the stage and they are challenged to read their “cosmopolitan hipness” (34) through the prism of implication. Many are the implicated agents in the transnational experience deployed before us, from the “wanna-be-radical parents” that “joke about how [their] kids will do social justice work in Palestine as teenagers” (34), passing through “the housemate who offered” (35) Patel the “heavily used bedding” (35) that she was about to throw out, to the “man [she] once dated, an award-winning Israeli filmmaker of social justice documentaries” (35) who gave her “a broken lamp as a housewarming gift” (35) on the grounds that she knew how to fix things.

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Insofar as Patel’s Migritude is understood as a Gramscian-style inventory that records the infinity of traces that history has deposited in the migrant body, it could also be claimed that the search of origins that it delineates reverberates with Simone Weil’s postulation on the human need to be rooted mentioned before in this chapter. In Chap. 2, we saw how M.G. Vassanji’s obsession with history had to be interpreted as his strategy to root his transnational existence. When Deleuze and Guattari urge us “to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’” (26) and render the questions “Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for?” (26, italics in original) useless, they were not considering the impending need to be rooted of those individuals who, like Vassanji and Patel, are made to be confronted with a life of continued displacement.12 However, whereas Vassanji’s memoir struggles to define an East African identity, Patel’s rejects ethnicity, nationality and racial identity (Reddy 2010, 144) as identity markers and opts instead for a Saidian position in which “a fixed ‘identity’” (Reddy 2010, 145) is discarded in favour of “a confluence of tides, or currents, a sea of moving selves” (Reddy 2010, 145). To Patel, the nation-state is not an identity marker. In Migritude, she postulates migration as the identity marker and yet, she knows that the migrant body is always on the verge of illegality. Hence, rootedness is expressed in terms of how her migrant body can be made legal while reinforcing the very condition of migration that identifies her as an individual. This is how she half-humorously relates her legal migration to the US: I got my green card in New Orleans. City of big dreamers. Start of my American odyssey. All my possessions fit in my backpack. No fixed address, no fixed destination. First stop: post office, to collect mail. First envelope: my green card. Forwarded by my uncle in Columbus, Ohio, which had been my landing airport, my official “Port of Entry” into the United States. Second envelope: a check. Ten dollars. For a poem I’d sent to a tiny journal in Columbus, the Short North Gazette. I knew it was a sign from the gods: in a land where I was finally legal, I could be paid ─for a poem. (88)

In contraposition to the emotional reclamation of the land exhibited in Vassanji’s memoir, Patel’s pragmatic approach to land emphasizes the fluidity of an identity she constructs around the resilience of the saris that envelop her female body. Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda is explained through a Gujarati proverb she grew up on: “The night is short and our garments

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change” (10, italics in original). The meaning of the proverb, Patel asserts, is “Don’t put down roots. Don’t get too comfortable. By dawn, we may be on the move, forced to reinvent ourselves in order to survive. Invest only in what we can carry. Passports. Education. Jewellery” (10). Women’s bodies, enveloped by “gold ornaments” (11) and “valuable saris” (11), emerge as the carriers of the family’s wealth. They and, to be more precise, their bodies “were respected” (11) because of this. This protection fails in the face of Idi Amin’s regime. The defilement of the female body that Ugandan Indian women endured under Idi Amin, Patel links with the ordeal that Kenyan women withstood under British rule when, as a consequence of the Mau Mau uprising, they were put in concentration camps. This is, as she puts it, “the history we didn’t read” (17) in school. The national version of the struggle for independence precludes any reference to the tortures inflicted upon these women: The white officers had no shame. They would rape women in full view of everyone. Swing women by the hair. Put women in sacks, douse in paraffin, set alight. […] You were forced to work even if the children were sick. If you had a sick baby, you strapped it to your back while you worked. The home guards would beat you if you stopped to attend to it. You would finally bring the child around to check on it, and find it was dead. You would start screaming in shock and anguish. The home guards would order the others to come and help you bury it. They [the children] would be tied in bundles of six babies. Each of us would be ordered to take a bundle and bury it with the rest of the bodies in the graves. (17–18, italics in original)

The inscription of the oral testimonies of Kenyan women that survived the camps in Patel’s self-quest is performed through “the crimson sari” (80). Patel confers the crimson sari with agency. It was the sari that told her that “it wanted to be knotted for the oral testimonies of the women in the camps” (80). In the “Shadow Book”, she explains how, while performing on stage, the sari and her body become one, “when I lay the knotted sari in a circle, then gather it up in my arms, it feels like a part of my own body” (80). “Each knot” (80) of the sari is a reminder of every child Empire killed. And since the sari conflates with Patel’s own body, the traumatic experience of these Kenyan women is passed on to her. Patel hangs the knotted crimson sari “on the bar on the stage” (80), a visual testimony of the resilience of the female body. The image of the Kenyan woman

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carrying her child on her back that appears on the front cover is a clear allusion to this tragic episode. Patel’s mother is a powerful presence throughout the entire memoir. The mother is unquestionably a remarkable representation of female resilience. The image of the mother travelling every year from Kenya to the UK to store the family jewellery in the safe deposit box of Midland Bank to safeguard a future for her daughters is imprinted in Patel’s imagination. The mother is “the general” that “arms her daughters / to take on every citadel” (26), but to Shailja, the daughter that is performing Migritude, the mother resides at the centre of the conflict she, as an artist, must confront in order to survive. The relationship between mother and daughter is, to say the least, problematic and, Migritude, inasmuch as it foregrounds an ambivalent mother-daughter relationship, could be read as an interesting counterpart of the ambivalent father-son relationship Ondaatje explores in Running in the Family. Many are the differences in both style and content between Patel’s and Ondaatje’s memoirs as my study of these texts reveal, the most obvious one being the maleness professed in Ondaatje’s text and the femaleness exuded in Patel’s. And yet, differences notwithstanding, these two texts are contingent upon the authors’ urgent need to reconcile themselves with their progenitors in order to survive as artists. As seen in Chap. 3, the conflation of son with writer modulated the shaping of Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. What I want to demonstrate now is how Patel’s inventory of the migrant body is articulated alongside her search for an artistic voice. This artistic quest can only be accomplished by positioning the mother at the centre of Migritude. The pragmatic “general” that counts shillings obsessively so as to allow her daughters “to take on” the citadels of the Western world cannot digest her daughter Shailja’s inclinations towards an artistic profession. What is more, she wishes for her daughter to have a family, to be settled in a sort of traditional way. The daughter tries to content her mother and studies hard to fulfil her mother’s dreams of success but fails. Notwithstanding, the very failure to fulfil her mother’s dreams is to be understood as Patel’s success in becoming the artist she is destined to be. How Patel turns this failure into success is captured in what I consider to be a crucial chapter in her self-quest, the meeting with her sister Shruti in London. The two sisters are in England; Patel in York and Shruti in Bristol. Because Patel has a job interview in London, they decide to meet there. The economic constraints they endure are easily detected in their “heavy, ugly coats. Cheap trousers. Thick sneakers” (40) and so, when they enter

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a nearby hotel to have some tea, they are welcomed with disdain from the waiters. Patel’s sister, Shruti, gives her her “twenty-first birthday present” (40), “a pure wool scarlet cape” (40) that cost her fifty pounds. Fifty pounds, Patel explains, meant “twenty-five hours of scraping dishes, loading washers in the college kitchens” (40). Fifty pounds is a cost Shruti, Patel knows, could not afford. In an act of love but, most significantly, confidence, Shruti’s gift was her way of saying to her “I see you. I believe in you. You shine” (40, italics in original). Patel does not get the job despite wearing the red coat; she fails her exams although she has studied hard but the memory of Shruti handing her this gift is rekindled through a dream she has while writing Migritude. This dream, which is part of the “Shadow Book” and, therefore, is not shown in the theatre performance, is described as “the most vivid dream of my life” (87). In it, she is with her sister Shruti “on the Ngong Hills escarpment in Kenya, overlooking the Great Rift Valley” (87). While she is impatient to leave because “the moon has risen, and we have a journey before us” (87), Shruti “insists on it not being the time yet” (87) and then, Patel observes “a gauzy cloud swirl around the moon like a chiffon scarf” (87). This very cloud is not much later devoured by flames emanating from the moon and to Patel’s exclamation “Shruti, look! The moon’s on fire!” (87, italics in original), Shruti responds with “That means it’s time […] now we can go” (87, italics in original). The fact that Patel presents this dream as the propeller to write the story about Shruti’s gift prompts a related reading of “Migritude” and “Shadow Book” that associates the red moon with the red coat. Therefore, I propose a reading of the red coat that Shruti gives to her as a premonition of the fulfilment of her own, not her mother’s, dreams. I read Shruti’s words, “That means it’s time” (87, italics in original) under the lens of the self she is articulating in Migritude to indicate that now it is the time for the artist to flourish. But my point is that this self is the outcome of the saris handed to her by her mother. Patel’s artistic self is the product of “Shilling Love” (25–28; 56–58), the recognition that her parents may have not told her that they love her but they did; the assurance that the mother has indeed armoured her to take on any citadel. The section that contains Shruti’s story, “Under and Over”, ends with what I identify as the raison d’etre of Migritude: female resilience. I have been unprotected. I have been naked and exposed. I have been clothed and armoured. I know what I carry in my suitcase. I carry my history. I carry my family. Over my saris, I wear my sisters. (41)

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Armoured by her mother’s saris, Patel, the artist daughter, reconciles with the mother. In the gesture of handing her saris to her daughter there is to be read, on the part of the mother, a willingness to accept her daughter. Prior to the saris, the mother has already given her a mangal sutra, the pendant necklace that the bridegroom places around the bride’s neck on the wedding day: “Since you have stubbornly refused to get married, it seems your mangal sutra has to come from your mother instead of your husband!” (59). The mother, the “traditionalist” (93), appoints herself “the revolutionary” (93) and shows her daughter that, as Patel relates, “the three granthis of the mangal sutra could be a blueprint for a creative life. An activist life. My [Her  – Patel’s] life. Intention. Declaration. Execution” (93). The mangal sutra paves the path towards the apotheosis of the final chapter, “Born to a Law”. Here the daughter addresses the mother and reassures her that, as the artist she has grown into, she has managed to listen to the saris she [the mother] bequeathed to her. Migritude is the material reproduction of what the saris tell. “When saris speak” (62), “deep, hard, / complex beauty […] unfurls” (62). The saris melt in poetry—“I am forging a ship of glittering songs / to sail your jewels in, / staking a masthead of verbs / from which to fly your saris!— and words unfold like Draupadi’s sari, which flows, infinitely resilient, over the violence perpetrated on the female body. Mother and daughter are born into the same law, a law “that states” (62) that “before we claim a word, / we steep it / in terror and shit, / in hope and joy and grief” (63); its meaning is not handed over to them effortlessly, but on the contrary, and as captured by the very last words of the “Migritude” section, “With the very marrow / of our bones / we have to earn / its meaning” (63). This corresponds to the finale of the performance and, as Patel informs us in the “Shadow Book” section, this is the moment when she opens “the suitcase fully” (95) and shares the saris with the audience. The audience has been persuasively drawn into the law she and her mother were born into and so, they have “earned the right to see the saris in all their splendour” (95). As mentioned earlier, the suitcase is likewise opened fully to the readers through the minute description of each one of the saris Patel offers in “What Came out the Suitcase”. Nevertheless, as Patel has revealed, “saris speak” (62) and so, what she is sharing with an audience composed of spectators and readers is “the violence and violation” (95) woven into the saris. Saris are, therefore, de-­ exoticized. Once “the voices of women from within the bootprint of

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Empire” (95) have been listened to, saris can no longer be perceived as mere objects of “beauty, sensuality” (95).

Conclusion: I Am Forging a Ship of Glittering Songs The symbolism that emanates from the ship as the embodiment of journeys was debunked by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, published in 1993. Gilroy’s book engages in an exploration into the dark side of the Enlightenment discourse and reveals how the freedom heralded in the West as a proof of civilization was gained through the enslaving of people from the southern hemisphere. Instead of thinking of the ship as “an abstract embodiment of the triangular trade” (Gilroy 1993, 17), Gilroy proposes to envision ships as material objects that played a distinctive role in the process of industrialization and modernization and, consequently, emerged as distinct modes of cultural production. Gilroy’s ship, with its black Atlantic allegiances, is forcefully attached to the trauma of displacement. Ocean crossing defines the traumatic forced displacement that lies at the core of the experiences of négritude and coolitude. Evocations of the Middle Passage, in the case of the Atlantic, and of the kala pani, in the case of the Indian Ocean, are entrenched in the figure of the ship. Patel’s Migritude and, therefore, the migritude experience she deploys should be inscribed within this cultural tradition that locates the ship at the heart of the trauma of displacement. Just as Gilroy demonstrates how ships, when treated as “cultural and political units” (17), turned into meaningful counterdiscourses of modernity, Patel’s “ship of glittering songs” (62) forges a new transnational identity attuned to the specificities of the displacements of contemporary times. After Gilroy’s fashion, Patel also embarks on the disclosure of the dark side of globalization in her search for “the piece that isn’t shapely, elegant, simple” (7). Unlike négritude and coolitude, migritude is unabashedly constructed upon the female body.13 Patel declares in an interview that “my trousseau of saris, passed down by my mother [reveals] how imperialism and colonialism, in India and Kenya, were—and continue to be— enacted on the bodies of women” (Monegato 2009, 237). The materiality that empire assigns to the female and non-white body is the basis of Patel’s counterdiscourse. Enveloped by the material fluidity of the saris, the female body that Migritude creates resonates with the porousness, permeability, and connectivity associated with the Indian Ocean world. As “a ship of glittering songs” (62) Migritude enhances

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mobility as a possible source of identity construction. I believe a paradox best illustrates the sense of being in the world expressed through the coinage of “migritude”: to be rooted means to acknowledge one’s subjectivity as a continuing flux of histories, cultures, and languages. The migrant self she is decoding is the aftermath of rooted dynamism, a legacy that “snakes across borders” (62) and “dodges visa controls” (62), a forthright challenge to the nation-state. Among the eighteen saris that came out of the suitcase, the “pink faux crepe de chine with raffia work” (68) stands out because, in parenthesis, the following message appears: “The mother sari” (68). Hence, this sari is closely associated with the mother who, as has been shown, plays a definitive role in the daughter’s affirmation of her artistic self. The line “learning to wear a sari is a rite of passage” (68) is drawn from the description of this sari in particular. A rite of passage invokes a ritual, an official ceremony that portrays the transition from childhood to adulthood. The sheer act of putting on a sari, a banal everyday action, is transformed into a transcendental performance whereby Shailja Patel becomes the artist she is intended to be. Patel’s evolution is inflected by the mother. The pragmatic mother readers encounter in the description of her annual trips to England to deposit jewellery in British banks contrasts heavily with the “regal grace” (80) of the woman that transforms the action of putting on a sari into a “ritual, a ceremony” (79–80). Female resilience is to be found in the pragmatic mother that protects the family’s jewellery as well as in the beautiful “empress” (79) that emerges out of the ceremony of putting on a sari. Most insidiously, Patel writes Migritude in the mother tongue. The Gujarati “[she] murders in [herself] (51) when she was eighteen is resurrected in her dreams in which children “speak in Gujarati” (54). Through the Gujarati of the mother tongue, she learns to savour words, “bright as butter, succulent / cherries, sounds I can paint on the air / with my breath, dance / through like a Sufi mystic” (54). “This tongue” (54), she concludes, “I take back” (54). Shailja Patel shares with M.G. Vassanji and Michael Ondaatje a determination to grant visibility to the stepchildren of empire from their stature as artists. Migritude, however, and, unlike Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo, does not build an identity rooted in the East African land. Patel constructs a transnational identity that surpasses national affiliations and turns her ectopic condition into a natural state of being. Whereas Parita Mukta and Neera Kapur-Dromson’s memoirs (see Chap. 4) celebrate an Indian diaspora in East Africa which still claims a certain allegiance to what

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Lisa Malkki has called the grand genealogical tree, Patel opts for a rhizomatic model of belonging that incorporates the inherent porousness, permeability, and connectivity of the Indian Ocean to the larger network of displacement of our contemporary times. In contraposition to the distinct masculine streak of Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, a memoir written in the father’s tongue, Patel’s Migritude offers a persuasive vindication of the feminine as epitomized by the saris. Out of the suitcase comes “fragile finery” (65), “strength and delicacy” (69), “depth, dignity, royalty, vibrancy, celebration […] uncertainty” (69), and, above all, the responsibility to wear each sari according to the specific stories it tells.

Notes 1. The work of Gellner contrasts with that of another prominent scholar on nationalism, Benedict Anderson. Gellner and Anderson’s different understanding of the nation revolves around the value they attach to the concept of fabrication in the process of nation-building. Whereas Gellner measures fabrication in terms of falsity, Anderson reads it as a manifestation of possibilities. In its stature as imagined community, as Anderson surmises, a nation could potentially be configured in different ways. In Anderson’s own words, “Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates ‘invention’ to ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity’, rather than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’”. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. As far as this article is concerned, both Gellner and Anderson rely on an arborescent notion of rootedness to think about the nation-state. 2. As a matter of fact, the unresolved problem of the nation-based imperial ideology was that nation and empire were incompatible. Anderson makes this observation in Imagined Communities when he analyses the case of Bipin Chandra Pal who no matter how Anglicized he became, he was “always barred from the uppermost peaks of the Raj” (Anderson, 93). The nation did not, in practice, welcome its distant imperial subjects. 3. Incidentally, the work of Bragard shows an inveterate indebtedness to unveil the gendered component of this transoceanic journey, something that deeply resonates with Patel’s own display of the gendered-grounded journey of her migration. See Bragard’s “Gendered Voyages into Coolitude: The Shaping of the Indo-Caribbean Woman’s Literary Consciousness” (1998) and Transoceanic Dialogues: Coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Literatures (2008). 4. The etymology of the Greek word “rhizome” reveals its meaning as a mass of roots (Deleuze and Guattari 2013).

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5. Further references to Migritude are indicated by page number. 6. Jennifer Leetsch and Vanita Reddy also use the textualized version Migritude in their insightful analyses of Patel’s work. See Leetsch, “Playing with Saris: Material and Affective Unfoldings of Violence and Resistance in Shailja Patel’s Migritude” and Reddy, “Histories of the Cloth and Sartorial Sentiment in Shailja Patel’s Migritude”. 7. Note that the information readers obtain from the “What Came out of the Suitcase” section is not offered to the spectators of the show. Unlike the readers, the spectators are allowed to see the saris but the particularities attached to each single sari are lost to them. In a similar vein, I would like to argue that the book Migritude, with its inclusion of the “Shadow Book” section, opens the way to a more nuanced interpretation of the whole performance since readers are given valuable information related to the gestation of Patel’s work. 8. I am referring to the Kaya Press publication of 2010. There is a previous edition of Migritude published by Lietocolle, an Italian publisher, in 2008. This is a bilingual edition and the translation into Italian was carried out by Marta Matteini and Pina Piccolo. In this particular edition, the picture that appears on the front cover is that of Shailja Patel wearing the “yellow and red bhandni – mirrorwork” (70) sari, while “crossing the bridge, carrying the red suitcase, looking back over [her] shoulder” (70). She describes this image as “the iconic Migritude photo” (70). 9. The textualized version of Migritude combines text with drawings. The paisley/ambi pattern I refer to is one of the many images that accompany the written translation of the original performance. Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a conscientious analysis of the many compelling images that appear in Migritude. 10. This cave painting reproduced in the poster of Patel’s parents must surely correspond to the Sigiriya frescoes Ondaatje refers to in his memoir (see Chap. 3). It is interesting to see how both authors use the paintings as references of resilience and survival. 11. It is actually Patel’s mother the first to tell her that this painting of the Sri Lankan goddess is her picture: “My mother always told me it was ‘my’ picture” (75). Later on in Migritude the mother affirms that Shailja was “named for Parvati, the flowering of stone in temples, the cave paintings of the goddess in Sri Lanka” (23) and, she perceptively adds, “no wonder she became an artist” (23). I read this statement from the mother as her recognition and acceptance of the daughter as an artist. 12. Although Deleuze and Guattari critique Western thought, I find that there are moments in which their criticism is still Western-centred. 13. I mentioned before (see endnote 3) how Bragard inserts gender in her analysis of the transoceanic journey represented by the kala pani. However,

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as DeLoughrey points out, “the fictional rendering of the transoceanic crossing” (DeLoughrey 2011, 72) has been markedly enacted by male-­ authored texts. In this sense, Patel’s Migritude offers a valuable contribution to the transoceanic experience for two reasons: first, it focuses entirely on the female body; and, second, it articulates a transnational identity that accommodates the experience of displacement of our contemporary times.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Bragard, Véronique. 1998. Gendered Voyages into Coolitude: The Shaping of the Indo-Caribbean Woman’s Literary Consciousness. Kunapipi: Journal of Post-­ Colonial Writing 20 (1): 99–111. ———. 2008. Transoceanic Dialogues: Coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Literatures. Frankfurt am Main/Berlin and New York: Peter Lang. Carter, Marina, and Khal Torabully. 2002. Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. London: Anthem Press. Cavarero, Adriana. [1995] 2002. Stately Bodies. Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender. Translated by Robert de Lucca and Deanna Shemek. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Césaire, Aimé. [1939] 2001. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. De Beauvoir, Simone. [1949] 1997. The Second Sex. Translated by H.M. Parshley. London: Vintage Classics. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2013. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury Academic. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2011. On Kala Pani and Transoceanic Fluids. New Literatures Review (Special Issue: The Literature of Postcolonial Islands) 47 (18): 71–90. Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London and New York: Routledge. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gramsci, Antonio. [1971] 2003. Selection from the Prison Notebooks. Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

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Irigarary, Luce. [1977] 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kulbaga, Theresa A. 2016. Sari Suasion: Migrant Economies of Care in Shailja Patel’s Migritude. Prose Studies 38 (1): 74–92. https://doi.org/10.108 0/01440357.2016.1151786. Leetsch, Jennifer. 2021. Playing with Saris: Material and Affective Unfoldings of Violence and Resistance in Shailja Patel’s Migritude. Interventions. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 23 (5): 691–711. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1369801X.2021.1885469. Malkki, Liisa. 1992. National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology. 7 (1): 24–44. Monegato, Emanuele. 2009. On Migritude Part I: When Saris Speak  – The Mother. A Conversation with Shailja Patel. Altre Modernità / Otras Modernidades / Autres Modernités / Other Modernities 10 (2): 235–239. Patel, Shailja. 2010. Migritude. New York: Kaya Press. Prashad, Vijay. 2010. Foreword: Speaking of Saris. In Migritude, ed. Shailja Patel. New York: Kaya Press. Prown, Jules. 1982. Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method. Winterthur Portfolio 17 (1): 1–19. https://doi. org/10.1086/496065. Pujolràs-Noguer, Esther. 2018. Desiring/Desired Bodies: Miscegenation and Romance in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion. Critique. Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50 (1): 596–608. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2018.1459456. ———. 2019. Imperially While and Male: Colonial Masculinities in M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion. Interventions. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21 (1): 131–149. https://doi. org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1487323. Reddy, Vanita. 2010. Come for the Saris, Stay for the Politics: An Interview with Shailja Patel. In Migritude, ed. Shailja Patel. New York: Kaya Press. ———. 2016. Histories of the Cloth and Sartorial Sentiment in Shailja Patel’s Migritude. In Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2010. Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire. Yale French Studies 118/119: 3–12. ———. 2019. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Said, Edward W. 2001. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. New Delhi: Penguin India.

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Schwarz, Bill. 2011. The White Man’s World. Memories of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Mahabharata. Translated by Pratap Chandra Roy, ebook, Book 2, Sect. 68, pp.  144–145. http://www.holybooks.com/mahabharata-­allvolumes-­in-­12-­pdf-­files/. Vassanji, M.G. 2014. And Home Was Kariakoo. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. Weil, Simone. [1952] 1987. The Need for Roots: Prelude towards a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills. London and New York: Routledge. Young, Robert J.C. 1990. White Mythologies. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 1995. Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge.

PART III

Indian Ocean Crossing

This final section of the volume is dedicated to resilience in the shape of activism, often resulting in a prison sentence, although a longing for a lost past seeps through all the memoirs to a greater or lesser extent. Chapter 6 focuses on the short memoir by Mauritian author and tireless fighter for human rights, Lindsey Collen. Collen was born and brought up in South Africa during apartheid and has lived in Mauritius for almost fifty years. Her memoir reflects on the power and influence of the Indian Ocean on her political activism and her literary output. Collen’s memoir presents the reader with her personal view of colonial history which cannot hide a touch of wistfulness for bygone days before the arrival of European colonialism and capitalism. However, when read alongside her novels and political essays, the sheer force and intrepid resolution of the writer to make changes that can improve our society shine through. Chapter 7 is dedicated to three Indian South African freedom fighters, all of whom spent time in apartheid prisons. Apart from mapping out the courage and tenacity of Dr Goonam, Indres Naidoo, and Amina Cachalia, the chapter hints at the suggestion of regret and longing—one could say mourning—for a past time when a community spirit united people in the struggle for equal political rights. Naidoo’s memoir evinces a certain nostalgia for a utopian nation; Goonam’s narrative betrays her class prejudices, and Cachalia’s self-styled autobiography with its large amount of visual material reclaims the Indian contribution to the forging of a new South Africa. These three memoirs by South African Indians were written from a South African perspective but, like so many diasporic communities, retain invisible but tenacious links to the Indian banyan tree.

CHAPTER 6

Lindsey Collen: Transnational, Transoceanic Optimism Felicity Hand

Collen as Storyteller Lindsey Collen very graciously agreed to write a short memoir for a special issue of the Spanish academic journal Revista canaria de estudios ingleses (2021), dedicated to “Indian Ocean Imaginaries” and guest edited by Juan Ignacio Oliva and Esther Pujolràs-Noguer.1 Collen is the author of six novels in English, one in Mauritian Kreol as well as numerous articles and essays, many of which are published on the webpage of LALIT, https://www.lalitmauritius.org/. Collen has been an active member of this organization since its foundation in 1976 as a socialist “free-­expression monthly magazine”. It gradually developed into a political party at the forefront of left-wing protest and with a firm commitment to improving the lot of working-class people.2 Her public engagement with the struggle against capitalism and wage-slavery is reflected in her creative writing as well as in her essays, so any discussion of her memoir must by necessity make diverse references to her literary oeuvre. In fact I intend to read her memoir alongside her fiction as it was especially commissioned for a special issue devoted to Anglophone Indian Ocean literature. To date, Collen has not published a memoir, which is why we asked her to write a short piece for the Canarian journal. It may seem surprising to include a ten-­page memoir in a volume on life writing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Pujolràs-Noguer, F. Hand, Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46345-7_6

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but Collen’s own political agenda and literary output together with this brief excursion into autobiography justifies to us this chapter on her life work. Moreover it is clear that Collen refuses to contemplate any “strategic erosion of established distinctions between the public/political and private/ personal spheres” (Moore-­Gilbert 2009, 78), which in reality is precisely the major characteristic of life writing. She undoubtedly would disagree wholeheartedly with Krishna Guha, writing in the Financial Times on former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan’s autobiography, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, when she claims that “The superhero in his story is capitalism” (2007). Collen’s memoir is a mordant attack on societies—not just in Mauritius as LALIT has a firm international agenda—that do not prioritize equality, freedom, justice, humanism, women’s liberation, and ecology. These are big words but Collen’s determination to raise awareness among people has no limits. Moore-Gilbert uses the term “life writing” to describe “work which is autobiographical without necessarily observing the classical rules of the genre” (131, n.1.) and it is my contention that Collen’s memoir fulfils this category to perfection as she combines significant events in her past life with a constant reference to the influence and attraction of the Indian Ocean on her life and work. In her analysis of Collen as a storyteller, Helen Cousins argues that her novels are part of “a network of activity that enables the political and activist elements of her work to be foregrounded” (2018, 87) and I claim that this memoir is another example of the dialogue that Collen sets up with her readership, which, following Cousins, is her gift to her readers. John Paul Eakin has described autobiographical writing as the gathering of “scraps of identity narrative [which serve to] make up all forms of self-­ narration and life writing” (2020, 4). He goes on to state that resorting to “remembered consciousness and its unending succession of identity states” is of more interest than plain facts and actually constructs “the history of one’s self” (7). I do not intend to treat Collen’s memoir as a source of biographical facts, however revealing these might be but instead let her speak through these “scraps of identity narrative”. As Eakin puts it, “the biographical references reflect more on the “‘I who writes” rather than the ‘I’ written about” (45). For a writer like Lindsey Collen, who was raised in South Africa, what was then a white settler colony, and so received a colonial education, memoir-writing provides an incisive fusion of both history and postcolonial criticism. The agency of culture and its institutions plays a vital role in an individual’s encounter with models of identity (Eakin 48), something which

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becomes painfully apparent when Collen discusses what she calls the “fault line” (Memoir, 183) that is the ability to see both sides of the story in South African society. Collen’s insistence on the fault line resonates strongly with the concept of ecotones, a term borrowed from geography and ecology. An ecotone initially designated a transitional area between two ecosystems, for example, between land and sea, which is highly relevant to texts based on the Indian Ocean littoral. Ecotones also include a cultural space of encounters, conflicts, and the eventual redefinition of identities of local communities (Arnold et  al. 2020), which is precisely what Collen refers to in her memoir. As her father was posted in various parts of the country she came into contact with diverse cultures and actually spoke Xhosa, Sotho, and Afrikaans as well as English when a child. She reveals that the authentic eye-opener for her was when she attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and she discovered for the first time in her life the deeply rooted imbrication of whiteness and economic power. In her own words, she “finally began to see the light of day” (Memoir, 186) as class with its blatant inequalities and injustices ceased to be shrouded in a protective veil of secrecy. Paradoxically, she would learn about the privileges of the bourgeoisie while attending one of the most liberal universities in the country, an institution where students regularly protested about the injustices of the apartheid regime. For Collen, living on the fault line, had not come into contact with real wealth as “this class was not only out of sight. It was out of mind” (ibid.). Her fictional output has constantly critiqued class discrimination, which in both the South African and Mauritian contexts is deeply entrenched in race (Hand 2010). Life stories express the need to belong, but they highlight the fact that there is more than one way of belonging. Collen’s memoir celebrates what she calls the unifying factor of the Indian Ocean as she has lived on its western rim in South Africa and in its midst in Mauritius—so clearly a contact zone—where she can feel at home regardless of state or national borders. Her memoir starts by seemingly echoing Dr Goonam’s fond recollections of her privileged Tamil background in the early twentieth century3 as the details of her childhood do betray a hint of nostalgia: I was born in the village of Mqanduli, some 15 miles from the Indian Ocean on a dirt road that meandered through the most beautiful hills in the world, where each family lived in a perfectly round hut with thatch so beautifully laid that it reflected sunlight, a small herd of cattle in the kraal, some

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c­ hickens, and a plot of mielies and pumpkins. Women wore ochre robes and turbans and old ladies smoked long pipes. (Memoir, 181)

However she quickly thwarts the reader’s expectations of a sentimental trip down memory lane by previously reminding them that “I was born— fate had it—within days of the apartheid regime being voted in by the white minority electorate in South Africa. It feels like a curse” (ibid.). Throughout the memoir, Collen intersperses her present thoughts on her story; by beginning various sentences or paragraphs with “anyway”, “and”, “and so”, she makes use of her storytelling talent and thus appears to invite the reader to challenge or rework her ideas. In an extended interview she gave to the journal Triplopia in 2005, Collen reveals that “[w]riting is collective also, in the way I find myself writing for people. This feeling that writing is a kind of instinct to give” (18). Collen’s novels all contain this proximity of the author as storyteller to her readership as her creative energy and earnest political commitment to work towards a fairer, more humane society are amply demonstrated in her fiction. Roland Barthes observes that “in ethnographic (sic) societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’—the mastery of the narrative code—may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’” (1977, 142). Certainly Collen’s narrative code, the vivid immediacy of her style together with the courage to speak out against injustices and outmoded conventionality makes her such a committed and inspiring storyteller, not just for Indian Ocean writing, but for contemporary literature all over the world.

The Indian Ocean as a Unifying Force After various sojourns in Britain, the Seychelles, and Tanzania, Collen— unlike so many other authors from our geographical area, for example the East African Asian women discussed in Chap. 4—was able to choose her final location so voluntary displacement was indeed liberating for her (Moore-Gilbert, 67) as it opened up a whole new landscape for action. I say “new” meaning her new home, Mauritius, where she and her husband took up residence and became the place where she could devote herself wholeheartedly to her vocation. In this respect she should be counted among the privileged few who can make their own decision about where they wish to take up residence. She had already learnt her trade as teacher, communicator, and activist in London and Dar es Salaam. In her novels

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Collen has constantly sought to recognize a deep-seated communal self, which, as we argue in this volume, is a key factor in the functionality of an aesthetics of re-membering, that is, recalling from memory and at the same time assembling in the right place. The rhizomatic nature of the Indian Ocean cultural geography thus finds echo in her fiction. Scholars of various disciplines all underline the Indian Ocean as a contact zone which bears witness to centuries-old “patterns of connectedness” (Simpson and Kresse 2007, 2), a network of all the diverse people that “have crisscrossed its waters” (Hofmeyr 2007, 10); “a region constantly in circulation and recirculation, in flux, suppliant and yet enormously resilient” (Moorthy and Jamal 2010, 3) and, in more poetic terms, “an inexhaustible source of ideas and materials, yet it is fluid and rhythmic” (Muecke 2016, 85). Mauritius, the star and key of the Indian Ocean as its motto claims, was where Collen decided to lay down roots. Those were exciting times for young committed people (1974) as she recalls: And Mauritius, coming out of the post-Independence state of emergency, was so interesting, socially speaking, that we stayed, moved into a house in a village, and got involved in grassroots struggles and left-wing politics. Right here in the Indian Ocean. (Memoir, 190)

In her literary world, Mauritius is a blueprint for a new world order, a laboratory where the great human experiment somehow sadly went wrong but which, according to her echoing and reconfiguring of the colonial motto, can also provide the key to putting things right (Hand 2010, 3). The memoir underlines the evidence of the effects of centuries of trade and population exchange (Simpson and Kresse 2007, 4) as both Mauritius and South Africa reflect each other’s globality. The South African Indian diaspora is made up of many individuals who arrived via the Mascarene Islands, although curiously few scholars have linked the histories and cultures of the Indian Ocean islands with South Africa (Hofmeyr 2007, 22). This essential linking is just what Collen’s memoir fulfils. It is, however, this sharing and intermingling of diverse cultural values that has contributed to the rhizomatic network that configures the Indian Ocean. Collen herself acknowledges that she soon “saw how long it had been that there had been links across the whole of the Indian Ocean” (Memoir, 189). As befits a memoir, Collen traces her ancestry back to her Scottish maternal grandparents but she dwells much longer on the colonial history that shaped her birthplace into a country full of blatant inequalities and

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the inhumane treatment of non-European citizens. Her parents clearly occupied an awkward position in the South Africa of the time as they did not support the apartheid regime but as her father was a native affairs commissioner stationed all around the country, he was “an implement for setting it up and enforcing it. He was the state” (Memoir, 184). Following Rothberg’s notion of the implicated subject, and echoing Pujolràs-­ Noguer’s discussion of Migritude in Chap. 5, Collen’s father—and to a lesser extent her mother and Collen herself—occupied “positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm” (Rothberg 2019, 1). According to Rothberg’s theory, although Collen’s father was not a supporter of the apartheid regime, he represented “the state” (Memoir, 184) as he willingly or not helped “propagate the legacies of historical violence and prop[ped] up the structures of inequality that mar the present” (ibid.). This white ambiguity, which Collen does not judge, although it may lie behind her personal fight against her family’s implication, highlights the fault line that is “the gift of seeing both sides at once” (Memoir, 183). She explains how the fault line shows how things were before things were like they are now and even gives a hint as to how things were before then. And also perhaps to envision how things can perhaps be afterwards, what they might be like. (Memoir, 183; italics hers)

Her own in-between status, as insider and outsider, South African–born and –bred but deeply immersed in Mauritian culture and politics and a keen defender of the Kreol language, echoes—but is decidedly different from in terms of class and ethnicity—the ambivalent situation of East African Asians who were obliged to contend with British apathy bordering on contempt and African resentment in order to prosper in the new land (see Hand 2015 and Chap. 4 in this volume). The need to juggle identities and to overcome local hostilities is nowhere more explicit than in the Indian Ocean contact zone where different cultures learnt to live side by side in relative harmony. Collen’s own life story, an example of blending in with the local and forging new identities, underscores Moorthy and Jamal’s plea to humanize the ocean, that is, to address a “specific human factor” that has shaped the dynamics of the Indian Ocean rim (2010, 13).4 The memoir celebrates this human past when our forefathers, our foremothers […]. roamed the mountains and hills, and stared over the Indian Ocean.

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They knew that the purpose of life was to visit people and listen to their stories. And they left art-work on the walls of caves to remind us of this. And they made musical instruments from the fencing wire with which the colonizers fenced them out of their immense lands. (Memoir, 183–184)

This is not to suggest that Collen romanticizes the precolonial era but she demands a reevaluation of today’s society which, she argues, has had to suffer the consequences of a pandemic in order to understand the importance of solidarity and community values. As she points out, it has taken “something as small as a virus to make us see, even if momentarily, our destinies as one. Humanity as one. Humanity must be one” (Memoir, 181). Collen retraces the exploitation and attempted subjugation of the autochthonous people on the part of the British imperial forces in order to vindicate the strength and resilience of the former. She writes: This part of South Africa was really only subjugated from 1856 onwards after the mass movement to kill cattle and burn crops—in a desperate attempt to get rid of the invaders—after which resistance seemed broken. But it was not. The fight was still there. I could feel it as I grew up. (Memoir, 182–183)

The mention of the cattle killing recalls the mass passive resistance movement led by the prophet Nongqawuse in which large numbers of the Xhosa people of the Eastern Cape—Collen’s birthplace—slaughtered their cattle and deliberately destroyed their crops between 1856 and 1857 as they believed their dead ancestors would return to life and the white invaders would be overthrown.5 Likewise, in her diatribe against the excesses of the State, pre-, during, and post-apartheid, after a brief mention of the notorious police responses to demonstrations in Sharpeville, Soweto, and more recently Marikana, she recalls the 1922 Bondelswarts rebellion in present-day Namibia, former South West Africa, administered by South Africa after World War I, and the unwarranted reaction by the South African forces.6 On two occasions in her memoir Collen mentions the former South African prime minister Jan Smuts and not precisely to praise his legacy. In 1922 Smuts, who was one of the best known and most respected colonial statesman in the first half of the twentieth century, sent aircraft to bomb the people who were demonstrating against the

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imposition of a tax on dogs. The Bondelswarts people were protesting about an exorbitant tax on dogs, used for hunting game and protecting their cattle and sheep. The administrator of the mandate, Gysbert Hofmeyr, requested two aeroplanes from Pretoria, which Smuts did not hesitate to send. One hundred Bondelswarts were killed and almost 500 people were wounded. Smuts was indeed ruthless and an unrepentant white supremacist all his life (Schwartz 2011, 279 and 292; Mathews 2022) but the fact that Collen targets him as the arch-villain reveals more about her than the man himself. When Eakin states that what appears to be an allegiance to truth very often reveals to be an allegiance to one’s own history (7), he could well be describing Collen’s personal agenda. She clearly wishes to insist on the centrality of class in all human interactions. She writes: “they are the ruling class. They still rule. They still divide and rule” (Memoir, 188). That events such as the Bondelswarts rebellion form part of “our collective memories” (Memoir, 187) reinforces her understanding that the present-day rampant inequalities in South Africa are merely the inevitable historical consequences that led to the creation of the South African state. The vilified Jan Smuts played a crucial role in the birth of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and, despite his belief in the superiority of the white “race”, he “stood against South Africa’s National Party and thus against the injustices of apartheid” (Schwartz 2011, 291). Collen would doubtlessly argue that Smuts was no founding father of the nation as he had plans for a white settler dominion in sub-Saharan Africa (ibid., 303–305) and was reluctant to accept black people as political equals deserving full citizenship rights. However, it is curious that she prefers to ignore his vast achievements as one of the most famous South Africans of the twentieth century, overshadowed only by Nelson Mandela. The Johannesburg Airport, now OR Tambo Airport, was previously named after Smuts and one of the major streets in the city is still called Jan Smuts Avenue to this day.7 Moreover, it is surprising that Collen neglects to mention two of South Africa’s most ruthless apartheid prime ministers, H.F. Verwoerd and B.J. Vorster, in office during the Sharpeville Massacre and the Soweto Uprising respectively. Clearly memoirs are by definition selective but it is striking that Smuts, rather than two more notorious South African politicians, deserves her vitriolic condemnation. In her memoir Collen constantly hails the Indian Ocean as a source of personal stability. She recalls how she spent “five weeks out of 52 looking over the Indian Ocean” (Memoir, 182) as her family spent her father’s leave at the same holiday resort in the Eastern Cape for eighteen years.

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Her reminiscing on “the smell of the Indian Ocean as the trade winds hit us” (ibid.) recalls Dr Goonam’s fond memories of her youth when the smells of Tamil school, the ship that transported her to Edinburgh, and the flowers she came across in Britain were a source of immense joy (Hand 2018, 567). Ironically, Collen’s own admission that she “acted as the forest guide to a botanist doing the collecting of species of plants for the University of Natal” (Memoir, 184) forges a curiously unexpected link between herself and the berated Jan Smuts as “he was recognised as a botanist of international standing and foremost expert on African grasses” (Du Pisani 2021).

Class Conflicts and Oppression The historical episodes that Collen has singled out in her memoir resonate with many of the issues that are recurrent in her fictional output. Her novels bridge the slippery slope between fiction and history, folk memory and active pedagogy, aesthetics and ethics are “all set in the Indian Ocean […] mainly in the social reality I live in, in Mauritius among the rural working class” (Memoir, 190). She insists on the imperative need to recuperate and come to terms with the slave past of her adopted country Mauritius and the vindication of the role of the working class in the forging of a democratic state in her debut novel There Is a Tide (1990). In one of her most controversial novels, The Rape of Sita (1993), she denounces the transnational constraints of heteropatriarchy.8 In Getting Rid of It (1997) she condemns injustices and gives a voice to the dispossessed. Boy (2005) claims the need for an active response to discrimination and provides a recipe for productive solidarity. Her belief in the strength of community as a means to make changes in societies is manifested in her two novels on rebellions: Mutiny (2001) and The Malaria Man and Her Neighbours (2010). What she calls another “Indian Ocean eye-opener” (Memoir, 190) was a visit to India in 2006 when she attended a Conclave of African and Asian Writers held in an old palace. Apart from the stimulus of sharing ideas with so many different writers, because of the elaborate venue, Collen is able to contrast her previous view of India when she had “booked six of us into a hotel [in Mumbai] that was both a brothel and in a shit canal and situated in a squatters area” (Memoir, 191). So she was confronted with two different Indias: one featured the dispossessed, the other one, the privileged few. The 2006 meeting served to remind her of her lifelong crusade: the

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battle against class inequalities. The palatial surroundings of the writers’ conclave set off a warning call that conjured up the reality of millions of less fortunate people, the kind of people she writes about in her novels. It is worth pointing out the enormous difference in Collen’s recognition of class differences in India and the response to the land of her forebears experienced by fellow South African Dr Goonam (see Chap. 7). Goonam romanticizes India to such a degree that she fails to mention the poverty and hardship that millions of peasants suffered at the time. While Collen sees class injustice everywhere, Goonam seems to ignore it. Both women have worked hard to improve the lot of their fellow citizens but while Goonam only sees political rights, Collen also aims to improve the material well-being of the people. She confesses to her readers in her memoir that her Indian experience allowed her to see class, the importance of which is underlined in her discovery of class as a university student in Johannesburg in 1965: “But at Wits, I saw the class. So I got to know it was here. And to keep it in mind” (Memoir, 186). Keeping class in mind has been Collen’s constant project as her novels attest to. Collen dedicates her third novel Getting Rid of It (1997) to “the brave women of Vallée Pitot”, an extremely run-down district of Port Louis, rife with delinquency and drug addiction. At the time she was one of the founding members of an association called Muvman Lakaz (the House Movement) which was involved in a series of actions to prevent people, mostly women with children, from becoming homeless. A large number of people had constructed illegal dwellings on State Land around the area called Vallée Pitot as well as in other less-sought-after districts such as Camp-Chapelon. The government decided to send in bulldozers to destroy their tin houses on the grounds that they had not obtained permission to do so and therefore were breaking the law as squatters. Muvman Lakaz rallied around these people and organized protests, in many cases actually sitting on the ground to stop the bulldozers from carrying out the destruction. In her novel Collen empowers these women to seek an alternative to accepting social defeat expressed through disapproval and unemployment in the context of submerged economic inequalities despite the so-called Mauritian miracle. Collen frequently resorts to this catchphrase, which describes the increasing economic success of the nation since the early 1980s, as an ironic commentary on the people who have been completely untouched by the miracle (Hand 2010, 17 and 86). There Is a Tide (1990), Collen’s literary debut, contains three separate but overlapping storylines which mimic the three main ethnocultural

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strands that Mauritian society is woven out of: Hindu, Muslim, and Creole (i.e., persons of African origin). The three narratives are an indictment of contemporary Mauritian and, by extension, Western-oriented societies immersed in—from Collen’s point of view—a hedonistic bourgeois capitalist consumerism that has lost sight of the commitment to egalitarianism, solidarity and universal fraternity (Hand 2011, 42). In one of her political articles Collen (2009) argues that vested interests lie behind many of the so-called “culture clashes”. She cites three “flashpoints” as examples of economic or class-based violence: the “race wars” at independence; the general strike movement in 1979; and the 1999 “Kaya riots”. Collen’s character Melomann, in her latest novel to date, The Malaria Man and Her Neighbours (2010), is modelled on Kaya, whose suspicious death provoked unrest verging on outright rebellion similar to that featured in the novel. Collen’s long list of colonial and post-apartheid atrocities—if we include the Marikana massacre—is sadly complemented by the overreaction of the post-independent Mauritian government. Joseph Reginald Topize, popularly known as Kaya, was a highly significant figure on the Mauritian music scene. He had pioneered a style of Mauritian music known as “seggae”, a fusion of West Indian reggae and sega, the traditional folk music of the island nation. Kaya was arrested under the Dangerous Drugs Act for smoking marijuana and three days later was found dead in his cell. Kaya’s supporters and fans accused the police of brutality and riots ensued, with several people being killed.9 I have mentioned the Kaya riots as they provide the background to two of Collen’s novels—Mutiny (2001) and The Malaria Man and Her Neighbours (2010)—which both envisage the possibility of an outright class war. Neither actually succeeds but as Collen herself states in the acknowledgements in Mutiny: The young people of Mauritius, who, during the February 1999 riots over the death in detention of the popular singer, Kaya, forced the gates of the prison at Borstal open, thus show[ed] the possibility of the kind of things already written down, by that time, in early drafts of this novel. (2001, 343)

Likewise, class conflict lies at the heart of Collen’s most recent novel as the four protagonists—some deliberately, others as collateral damage—are conveniently removed as they challenge the power of what Collen calls finance capital, which, she argues, “is in open war-fare against the rest of the globe and against its people” (Collen 2019). In her memoir she rallies

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against the “small, powerful class that most people cannot even see” (Memoir, 187). Collen’s forceful, almost blunt, didactic social message may discourage a certain type of literary critic, more attuned to gender or ethnic identity politics rather than, what may seem to be, old-fashioned class differences. In a country like Mauritius, whose inhabitants pay allegiance to a diversity of ethnic backgrounds, it takes a dedicated writer to pursue what she feels to be the great social divider: class, an identity category that features as the cornerstone of her memoir. Collen soon came to understand how class or the power of the colonial empires actually functioned worldwide. She looks at the current world map and sees that there are numerous conflicts that are the dying embers of colonialism, two of which rank highly on her personal and political agenda: Palestine “at the top end of the Indian Ocean, colonized today by the US-Israel alliance” (Memoir, 188) and “Diego Garcia, part of Chagos, part of Mauritius, bang in the middle of the Indian Ocean, with a US military base on it” (ibid.). The Chagos Islands, of which Diego Garcia was the most populated, were handed over to the Americans by the British to be used as a military base. The Chagos formed part of what was then the British colony of Mauritius, which gained its independence in 1968. The two thousand islanders were unceremoniously deported from their homeland and left to their own devices in Mauritius once they were disembarked in Port Louis and relegated to the lowest position in society. The British declared the area a marine reserve in 2010, but their refusal to allow the Chagossians the right to return to their homelands is not to protect the environment, but rather to safeguard the political agreement based on economic and military imperialism. The Chagossians have waged a long legal battle to return, which finally came to an end with the 2019 United Nations Resolution, which demanded the UK return control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.10 However, Britain is dragging its heels over the return of the islands, so it still remains a highly contentious issue to which Collen has devoted a great deal of time and energy.11 Collen’s inclusion of a Chagossian woman in her novel Mutiny serves as a recognition of the marginalization of this community, who, in Eakin’s words, are “de-storied individuals” (5). Collen is one of the few writers who have made an attempt to chronicle the human tragedy of the expulsion of the Chagossian people, callously informed that the islands were closed to them. Mama Gracienne’s intense sagren (sadness in Mauritian Kreol) is a reminder of the plight of the abandoned Chagossians: “The Islands are in my heart and head and eyes and ears and understanding, and I am in them. I’ve got nothing left” (Collen 2001, 258; italics in original).

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Environmental Concerns Lindsey Collen has incorporated ecocritical concerns in her work, for example, in Boy where the main character discovers the geography of the island as he learns about the evolution of the country from a slave-owning society to a democracy (Hand 2010, 156–157), and in There Is a Tide and Getting Rid of It, where, in her own words, the characters are “fractured socially from an exploiting, dominating, warring class” (Collen 2019, 47). The Malaria Man and Her Neighbours therefore is a continuation of this concern coupled with the author’s belief in the power of solidarity and the need to join forces. The action that triggers the deaths of the four protagonists is their discovery of why the water supply to their land has been cut off and the crops are dying. The sugar estate bosses intend to drive the small farmers off the land so they can buy it up cheaply and make a huge profit. So determined are they to drive what they call “scavengers off the land … the hard way” (Collen 2010, 82) that even rivals team up in order to “eradicate vegetable planters, first divert their water, then get at their land, eradicate the weak” (ibid., 83). Ownership of the water supply becomes the key battleground in environmental conflicts around the globe. As far as environmental movements are concerned, the 1973 Chipko movement in India has inspired popular movements all over the developing world as local communities have joined forces to defend their right to use and control natural resources such as local water supplies, which often involves entering into disputes with multinational corporations and their regional representatives. As Guha and Martínez-Alier suggest, these disputes represent a “a new kind of class conflict” (2006, 5) because low-­ income workers find themselves in opposition to economically and politically powerful elites, the local factory manager having morphed into a faceless exploiter from overseas. Likewise, in her book Making Peace with the Earth, Indian activist Vandana Shiva argues that Land, for most people in the world, is people’s identity; it is the ground of culture and economy. Seventy-five per cent of people in the third world live on the land and are supported by it—the earth is the biggest employer on the planet. (2013, 30)

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Access to basic natural resources—land and water—lies behind the conflict that sets off the tragedy in the second part of her trilogy on rebellions, The Malaria Man and Her Neighbours, and the subsequent popular reaction that the four highly suspicious deaths provoke is Collen’s belief that the underprivileged can become empowered through union, that participation and joint, communal effort can make a difference. Her solidarity with traditional and unsophisticated lifestyles is made manifest in her creative writing where working-class characters are the ones who drive the plots and who are placed centre stage. In that respect, cyclones, a common meteorological phenomenon in the South-West Indian Ocean, affect everybody but Collen uses them as a metaphor for class as they destroy implacably without selecting their victims while the effects depend very much on one’s economic situation (Hand 2010, 58). In Mutiny the cyclone is used as a narrative device to centre all the attention on the bid for freedom of the women inmates, arrested and sentenced for bizarre reasons (ibid., 167). The unfortunate oil spill caused by a Japanese cargo ship that ran aground on a coral reef near Mahebourg, in the south-east of Mauritius in August 2020, is an ecological tragedy as the consequences on local marine fauna may take years to heal. The incident served to remind people of the value of nature and the sea in particular. Collen continuously expresses her relationship with the sea in both emotional and devastating terms: Behind and below the illusion of the stereotypical welcoming and beautiful Indian Ocean and its islands, […] there is the deep surface of historical lived experiences involving those same waters, filled with diasporic and displaced pain extending back over years. (Matteau Matsha and Stiebel 2017, 6)

In her memoir she constantly alludes to the historical links that have unified people and cultures from both sides of the Indian Ocean. The sight of a traditionally built dhow ploughing through the waves on her voyage to the Seychelles reminded her that “colonization [was] a recent phenomenon” (Memoir, 189). The pull of the ocean has been a constant in her life as she recalls how she and her husband bought an old fishermen’s pirogue and began fishing in the traditional ways off the west coast of Mauritius. I learnt the ways of dolphins and whales and birds and turtles and fish, and the currents, the winds, the different kinds of

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rains, and how to smell a cyclone’s approach. And so it was that I learnt the ways of traditional fishermen, as we became of them. (Memoir, 190)

Collen laments the constant harassment of traditional fishermen by the Mauritian state “as Hilton Hotels and others take over the lagoons and as international fishing companies […] fish the territorial waters of Mauritius” (Memoir 190). Her cry for action strongly echoes that of Amitav Ghosh, one of the iconic writers on the Indian Ocean contact zone. In his recent book The Nutmeg’s Curse. Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), Ghosh vindicates the importance of the Indian Ocean basin stating that “roughly three out of every five people in the world live in a country that adjoins these waters” (2021, 112). Collen’s plea to save “our beautiful little planet. A planet threatened” (Memoir, 190) is in line with Ghosh’s timely reminder that “humanity [is] so closely entangled with the products of the Earth that the past cannot be remembered without them” (2021, 91).

Conclusion: We Are All One Collen begins her memoir with her reflections on how the pandemic has forced the world to acknowledge the vulnerability of the human species and, at the same time, the need to work together to share the world’s resources. Her call to action “We are all one” (Memoir, 184; italics hers) proves her work to be by far the most optimistic of the four South Africans discussed in this volume but even she cannot avoid mourning what could have been—but was not fully—achieved. Her appeal for a united humanity does not preclude respect for linguistic diversity. As mentioned earlier, her love of mother tongues arose when she was a child and was able to communicate with neighbours in Xhosa, Sotho, and Afrikaans. She explains how “being born on a fault-line” (Memoir, 187) she and her parents were able to have access to “both worlds, by not just hearing both, but by listening to them” (Memoir, 185). Her emphasis on listening is a reminder that she has dedicated her life’s work to paying and giving attention to the less fortunate members of society in her struggle to make the world a fairer place for everybody. It therefore comes as no surprise that after taking up residence in Mauritius she would soon learn to love Kreol, the national language spoken by the majority of Mauritians (just under 1.3 million people) as she observed that it cuts neatly across social class and as such acts as great leveller. This may appear to be a somewhat naive comment as French is frequently used in the public sphere precisely to

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distinguish oneself or to aspire to an alleged superior social class but this points to Collen’s utopian desire for a classless society. As Kreol belongs to no ethnoreligious group and therefore does not categorize anyone a priori, it is indeed a label-free language. As regards her own creative writing in Kreol, her novel Misyon Garson (1996), which she later reworked into her prize-winning novel Boy (2005), celebrates her contribution to its establishment as a literary language in its own right. Since then she has published several short stories in Kreol and continues to be one of its staunchest defenders and a tireless campaigner for its recognition as the official language of Mauritius.12 Collen’s memoir, despite its creation during the coronavirus pandemic and its harsh critique of the capitalist class, remains optimistic as Collen retains a firm belief in the unity of humankind and that “our destinies are one” (Memoir, 191). It is an inspiring piece of writing that raises many issues and reads like a story. As she herself said in an interview: “I see story-telling as something like making a gift. A kind of gift relationship. And when people like the gift, it is a source of pleasure in addition to the preparing of it” (Triploplia, 19). Collen’s gift of this memoir responds to Eakin’s claim that “The I-character in an autobiography [gives] a degree of permanence and narrative solidity—or ‘body’, we might say—to otherwise evanescent states of identity feeling” (12) as, despite its brevity, in “The Indian Ocean as a Unifying Force: A Memoir” Collen manages to incorporate all her wisdom and experience, her tireless campaigning for equality, her knowledge of the material needs of ordinary people, and her commitment to making the world a better, more liveable place for everybody. It is a solid piece of writing that ominously lays bare a degree of permanence as eighteen months after Collen composed it Putin would invade Ukraine, so her words of warning as regards the future of our planet resonate even more now.

Notes 1. “The Indian Ocean as a Unifying Force: a Memoir”, 2021. Henceforth cited as “Memoir”. 2. On their webpage they claim that “in Mauritius LALIT is almost synonymous with the struggle against the military base on Diego Garcia, the struggle for women’s emancipation and liberation, the homeless peoples’ movement, the working class struggle against trade union bureaucracy, and the struggle to popularize Mauritian Kreol and Bhojpuri, as well as

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getting them recognized by the State”. All of these issues feature largely on Collen’s literary agenda. 3. See the section on Dr Goonam in Chap. 7, “Banyans Behind Bars”. 4. Her own standpoint as an insider-outsider brings to mind the title of the first novel of the Goan-Ugandan writer Peter Nazareth, In a Brown Mantle (1972), taken from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and mentioned in Chap. 2: Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle. 5. Collen’s viewpoint clashes with conventional historical accounts which deny any agency on the part of the amaXhosa. See Ross (2008, 57–58) and Zakes Mda’s fictional rendering of the cattle killing in The Heart of Redness (2000). 6. The Sharpeville massacre of 1960 was one of the first and most violent demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa when police fired on a crowd protesting about the pass laws, killing or wounding at least 250 people. In the Soweto Riots of 1976 at least 176 students were killed by the police for protesting against the enforced use of Afrikaans in schools. The Marikana massacre was the killing of thirty-four miners by the South African Police Service in 2012 during a six-week strike at a platinum mine. The Namibia rebellion that Collen mentions actually occurred in 1922, not 1917. 7. Collen would no doubt sympathize with the students at the University of Cape Town who campaigned to have the name of Jan Smuts Hall, one of the men’s residences on the main campus, changed. See Du Pisani (2021). 8. In 1993 Collen became the butt of a highly unexpected surge of Hindu fundamentalist rage as The Rape of Sita awakened accusations of blasphemy and insult against a revered Hindu heroine. For further details, see Hand (2010), chapter 3. 9. For more details on the Kaya episode see Hand (2021) and United States Department of State (2002). 10. For further discussion of the Chagos see Pujolràs-Noguer and Hand (2021). For a recent example of Collen’s involvement in the Chagos conflict, see her open letter (co-authored with Ragini Kistnasamy) to Human Rights Watch https://www.lalitmauritius.org/en/newsarticle/3118/ urgent-­open-­letter-­to-­human-­rights-­watchbe-­careful-­not-­to-­fall-­into-­uk-­ trap-­on-­chagos-­issue/.

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11. As a cautionary note, in a one-day conference held in the University of Worcester on May 26, 2023, Challenges and Prospects for the Chagos Archipelago, two of the speakers, David Snoxell and Professor Philippe Sands K.C., both asserted that the Chagos have been officially handed over to Mauritius and the Mauritian Government is in charge of negotiation with the Chagossians for their return to the islands. A volume of essays from the conference entitled Challenges and Prospects for the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean will be published by Routledge at the end of 2023. 12. Collen is a regular contributor to Collection Maurice, published annually by Immedia and edited by Rama Poonoosamy.

References Arnold, Markus, Corinne Duboin, and Judith Misrahi-Barak, eds. 2020. Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean. Cultural and Literary Perspectives. Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée. Barth, Roland. 1977. The Death of the Author. In Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 142–148. London: Fontana. Collen, Lindsey. 1990. There Is a Tide. Port Louis: Ledikasyon Pu Travayer. ———. 1993. The Rape of Sita. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 1997. Getting Rid of It. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001. Mutiny. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2005. Boy. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2009. Another Side of Paradise. New Internationalist 422, May. http:// www.newint.org/features/2009/05/01/mauritius-­class/. ———. 2010. The Malaria Man and Her Neighbours. Port Louis: Ledikasyon Pu Travayer. ———. 2019. Lindsey Collen Looks at Ecology in Her Novels. English Studies in Africa 62 (1): 45–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2019.1629684. ———. 2021. The Indian Ocean as a Unifying Force: A Memoir. Revista canaria de estudios ingleses 82: 181–191. https://doi.org/10.25145/j. recaesin.2021.82.13. Cousins, Helen. 2018. Lindsey Collen’s Narrative Gift: A Challenge to the Commodification of African Literature. Research in African Literatures 49 (2): 87–106. Du Pisani, Kobus. 2021. ANALYSIS.  Jan Smuts’ Name Could Be Erased from a UCT Building, But It Won’t Erase His Legacy. news 24, 10 June. https:// www.news24.com/news24/opinions/analysis/analysis-­j an-­s muts-­n ame-­ could-­be-­erased-­from-­a-­uct-­building-­but-­it-­wont-­erase-­his-­legacy-­20210610. Eakin, Paul John. 2020. Writing Life Writing. Narrative, History, Autobiography. London: Routledge.

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Guha, Krishna. 2007. Autobiography’s Real Hero Is Capitalism. Financial Times, 16 September. https://www.ft.com/content/b48da02a-­6479-­11dc-­9 0ea-­0000779fd2ac. Guha, Ramachandra, and Joan Martínez-Alier. [1997] 2006. Varieties of Environmentalism. Essays North and South. Oxford: Earthscan Publications. Hand, Felicity. 2010. The Subversion of Class and Gender Roles in the Novels of Lindsey Collen. Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press. ———. 2011. Lindsey Collen: the Courage To Be Parochial. Wasafiri. Special Issue on Indian Ocean Writing 26 (2): 41–45. ———. 2015. Coping with Khandaanity in Diaspora Spaces: South Asian Women in East Africa. Revista canaria de estudios ingleses 70: 13–40. ———. 2018. Narrative Empathy in Dr. Goonam’s Coolie Doctor and Zubeida Jaffer’s Our Generation. Life Writing 15 (4): 561–576. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14484528.2018.1426969. ———. 2021. The Fight for Land, Water and Dignity in Lindsey Collen’s The Malaria Man and Her Neighbours. Revista canaria de estudios ingleses. 82: 63–77. Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2007. The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South—Literary and Cultural Perspectives. Social Dynamics 33 (2): 3–32. Mathews, Stuart. 2022. When Jan Smuts Sent Fighter Planes to Bomb, Machine-­Gun Peasant Stock Farmers. Daily Maverick, 23 May. https://www. dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-­05-­23-­when-­jan-­smuts-­sent-­fighter-­planes-­ to-­bomb-­machine-­gun-­peasant-­stock-­farmers/. Matteau Matsha, Rachel, and Lindy Stiebel. 2017. Deep Sea Writing: Recent Conversations with Lindsey Collen, Writer and Activist from Mauritius. Journal of the Indian Ocean Region. https://doi.org/10.1080/1948088 1.2017.1355962. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. 2009. Postcolonial Life-Writing. Culture, Politics and Self-­ Representation. London: Routledge. Moorthy, Shanti, and Ashraf Jamal. 2010. Indian Ocean Studies. Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives. London: Routledge. Muecke, Stephen. 2016. Writing the Indian Ocean. Performance Research. 21 (2): 85–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.1162495. Pujolràs-Noguer, Esther, and Felicity Hand. 2021. The Myth of the Empty Territory: The Tragedy of the Chagos Islanders. Revista canaria de estudios ingleses. 82: 155–172. http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/22465. Ross, Robert. 2008. A Concise History of South Africa. Cambridge: University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2019. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. Schwartz, Bill. 2011. Memories of Empire. Vol. 1. The White Man’s World. Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press.

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Shiva, Vandana. 2013. Making Peace with the Earth. London: Pluto Press. Simpson, Edward, and Kai Kresse, eds. 2007. Struggling with History. Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean. London: Hurst & Company. Triplopia. 2005. Interview by Triplopia with Lindsey Collen on Her Novels https://www.lalitmauritius.org/modules/docpool/files/interview-by-triplopia-with-lindsey-collen-on-her-fiction.pdf. United States Department of State. 2002. U.S.  Department of State Country Report on Human Rights Practices 2001—Mauritius, 4 March. https://www. refworld.org/docid/3c84d9994.html.

CHAPTER 7

Banyans Behind Bars: Three South African Indian Memoirs Esther Pujolràs-Noguer and Felicity Hand

O you shaggy-headed banyan tree standing on the bank of the pond, have you forgotten the little child, like the birds that have nested in your branches and left you? —Rabindranath Tagore, “The Banyan Tree” (1914)

This chapter is titled “Banyans Behind Bars” as South Africans of Indian origin can be likened to the banyan tree in the sense that they, like their botanical counterpart, have grown immensely and can even shift and drift away from their original trunk, India, at a certain distance (Shanahan 2018, 46). Only one species from India—Ficus benghalensis—was the original banyan, named after the Hindu traders or merchants that conducted business under the shade of the species. Banyan takes the name from the Sanskrit word banias which literally means traders. Since they sold their merchandise under the shade of this tree during the colonial period, the tree was named banyan by the British.1 During India’s struggle for independence from Britain, the British hanged hundreds of rebels from banyan trees (Shanahan 2018, 49) and as a consequence independent India made it its national tree to honour the freedom fighters who met their deaths hanging from banyans during the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Pujolràs-Noguer, F. Hand, Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46345-7_7

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struggle for independence. In cultural-religious-mythological terms, Lord Krishna is believed to have stood beneath a banyan tree at Jyotisar when he delivered the sermon of the sacred Sanskrit scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Lord Shri Krishna continued: This phenomenal creation, which is both ephemeral and eternal, is like a tree, but having its seed above in the Highest and its ramifications on this earth below. The scriptures are its leaves, and he who understands this, knows. Its branches shoot upwards and downwards, deriving their nourishment from the Qualities; its buds are the objects of sense; and its roots, which follow the Law causing man’s regeneration and degeneration, pierce downwards into the soil.2

Hugh Tinker called his classic study of the South Asian diaspora The Banyan Tree (1977) as he acknowledges that like the banyan tree which draws “sustenance from diverse unpromising conditions”, migrants from the subcontinent “have demonstrated an inner strength which has enabled these persistent people to survive” (19). The roots of this unusual tree grow aerially and laterally and remain relatively shallow in the soil, which suggests that diasporic Indians do not establish long-standing affiliations with their host country, but, as has been manifested in the chapter on East African Asian women, secondary roots sprout forth that hang down and take root wherever they touch the ground, all being connected directly or indirectly to the primary trunk. I emphasize here indirectly as South African Indians—unlike East African Asians, possibly because of demographics or the political situation of the country—needed to regard themselves primarily as South Africans. Clearly the anti-apartheid struggle shaped many of the writers of the memoirs I will examine in depth, emotionally and politically in their allegiance to their host country. I have included three lines from a well-known poem by Rabindranath Tagore, “The Banyan Tree” to point to, not just the spiritual essence of the banyan tree—a powerful icon in Indian society and mythology—but also the physical reach of its seeds in a literal sense. It is an established fact that the South Asian diaspora has spread to the four corners of the earth. South Asian diasporic communities have formed in countries as diverse and far apart as Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, to name just a few.3 In South Africa Indians make up approximately 2.6%, 1.5 million people, of the total population, the majority of whom live in Durban, which boasts the highest concentration of people of Indian origin outside the subcontinent.

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I read the three memoirs—Dr Goonam’s Coolie Doctor. An Autobiography by Dr. Goonam (1991); Indres Naidoo’s Island in Chains. Ten Years on Robben Island. Prisoner 885/63 (1982), and Amina Cachalia’s When Hope and History Rhyme (2013)—as vehicles which explore the tenacity and resilience of these three freedom fighters.4 Despite their restraining orders, prison sentences and exile, they, like the banyan tree, could not be tied down and neutralized but notwithstanding this common thread, I approach these three examples of South African Indian life writing from different angles. The emphasis in these memoirs runs from grieving for the dismantling of a close-knit community in Coolie Doctor through the reflective nostalgia for an unachieved utopia in Island in Chains to an upsurge of female resilience in When Hope and History Rhyme.5

Coolie Doctor: Mourning the Shade of the Banyan Tree Goonam’s text relates most of her life, but the second half focuses especially on her public persona during the 1940s and 1950s. Goonam— Kesaveloo Goonaruthnum Naidoo—could have centred her autobiography on her “public” life but she wished it to be a conventional memoir starting from her birth—a bildungsroman type of life history. She does not pretend to extrapolate her experience to the community as a whole but the first eight chapters—especially the first four—are totally Tamil, middle-­ class-­centred: “The main artery of my childhood world was [Durban’s] Grey Street” (13).6 It is only once she practises as a doctor that we hear about Indian poverty and discriminatory laws in South Africa. While the second half celebrates the activist’s resilience and courage, I claim that the first part of her memoir is her mourning process for a lost era. Durban novelist Aziz Hassim dedicated The Lotus People (2002) to Dr Goonam, “lest we forget”, no doubt thinking of her prominent role in the anti-apartheid movement especially in the 1940s and 1950s. Devarakshanam Govinden refers to Coolie Doctor as a “struggle autobiography” (2001, 22) in which Goonam shapes her identity based on her political commitment rather than on any specific Indianness and Antoinette Burton refers to it as the “now-classic anti-apartheid life history” (Burton 2011, 217). The first part of her autobiography relates memories of her privileged background which allowed her to travel abroad to study medicine and become one of the first Indian woman doctors in South Africa. The first eight chapters out of a total of twenty-one reveal a sentimental recollection of her childhood,

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youth, and the years leading up to the institutionalization of apartheid in 1948. These early chapters are infused with a strong sense of community, with its bonds of reciprocity and mutual obligations, which suggests that Goonam—perhaps unwittingly—mourns for a romanticized past. John J. Su (2005) claims that nostalgia is a reactionary response to the events of the present, what Svetlana Boym has categorized as restorative nostalgia (2001, 5). Goonam’s ethical vision seems to have been shaped by loss and yearning as she forgets or rather chooses not to remember how the economic, social, and political forces of late modernity have evoked widespread nostalgia within the South African Indian community, to which she claims allegiance despite her insistence on her South Africanness. Goonam, like the other two activists dealt with in this chapter, spent time in apartheid prisons, and the second part of her memoir describes her experience of these institutions in vivid detail. However, the memoir is somewhat shaky as a piece of polished writing as there are numerous typos and a clear lack of any coherent structure. In fact it was a long drawn out exercise as she started it years before its final publication and had it not been for the intervention of fellow activist Fatima Meer, it may never have seen the light. Goonam’s younger daughter, Vanitha Chetty, in an interview with Judith Lütge Coullie, confessed that her mother was disappointed with the published version as she realized that there was a lot more that should have been included, such as her terms of imprisonment and especially the time when she was locked up with her friend … I think it was Amina Cachalia, and Nelson Mandela came to visit them while they were in prison. (2006, 193)

Chetty herself is a little vague here as the friend was in fact Betty du Toit, who was the former wife of Amina Cachalia’s husband and Mandela came to visit the two women as their solicitor. Goonam may have had no clear model on which to base her autobiography (Govinden 2001, 27) but the editing process thus leaves a lot to be desired. It is not clear how much is owed to the efforts of Fatima Meer, who collaborated with Goonam and how much she shaped the style and tone of the work. An early unedited manuscript of her autobiography reveals that Goonam wished her work to be almost a history of the Indian community in South Africa rather than the story of her personal role in the anti-apartheid struggle.7 The two parts of the autobiography are notably very different in tone and perspective. In the first eight chapters Goonam portrays her Indian Tamil community, the years she spent in Scotland studying medicine and her early

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career as a doctor in Durban. In Chapters 9–21 Goonam writes of herself “almost biographically” (Govinden 2001, 27) and “[i]n narrating herself Goonam selects those aspects that are pertinent to the construction of her political identity” (Govinden 23).8 The existing criticism of Coolie Doctor ranges from Devarakshanam Govinden’s circumscribing of it into the larger body of struggle narratives (2001, 2008) to Antoinette Burton’s emphasis on Goonam’s “embodied, materialist account of African-Indian relationships in the context of apartheid politics in KwaZulu-Natal” (Burton 2011, 213–214). Both readings skim over Goonam’s account of her childhood and youth, although Govinden suggests that “[i]t was her supportive family and community background that contributed to the development of a strong and assertive personality and that helped her counter the calculated denigration of colonialism and apartheid” (2001, 29). A loving family does, of course, provide security and self-esteem but what stands out in the early chapters is the support Goonam obtained from her extended family and the Indian community at large, something she seems to mourn in her later years. Nostalgia can indeed function as an element that interweaves imagination, longing, and memory in an effort to find a way out of the ambiguities of the present situation. Goonam published her autobiography in 1991—so the transition period between apartheid and democracy—when expectations for a truly egalitarian society were uppermost. Her preface is in this sense revealing as she recalls that the writing process had been postponed on several occasions: As the years rolled on, I experienced disappointments and heartaches. The outmoded traditions of the Indian people, their lifestyle, the social structure with its insurmountable barriers, the evils of apartheid, all compounded to make me feel helpless. (9)

The “sheer despair” (9) she refers to is perhaps not so much due to the writer’s block of a novice author as to the difficulty of interpreting the present in relation to an inaccessible or lost past. There is a profound ethical dimension in Coolie Doctor, not unlike that which inspired Native Nostalgia, (2009) Jacob Dlamini’s powerful vindication of the community links and values of the townships during the apartheid regime. As Daniel Roux points out, apartheid memoirs can take on different interpretations depending on when they were actually written and published and especially on what he calls the “shift in the addressee” (2021, 99). Although Goonam finally published her work three years before the first

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democratic elections and so technically not yet post-apartheid, the political context of the time including the violence that broke out in the context of the struggle for political power in South Africa between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party and the hectic negotiation of the National Peace Accord may have influenced her nostalgic turn.9 When the Naidoo family home was expropriated,10 seeing her despair at the turn of events, her family suggested she take a holiday. Her mother had recently returned from India bringing “glowing accounts of the country” (71),11 so a trip to India seemed an obvious choice. Moreover Tamil culture clearly made its mark on the young girl, which meant that she was clearly keen to visit the land of her ancestors. Goonam makes several trips to India where she frequently spends prolonged visits travelling around the country. She becomes immersed in the culture and way of life of the country retaining an almost idyllic vision of India: “I was loving India, loving every sound, loving every chick pea, every black face, every Tamil nuance – I had such a sense of ‘my country’” (76; emphasis hers). On her trip in 1956 she meets Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and thanks to his intervention she is appointed Assistant Director of Family Planning in Delhi. By then she has three children and spends two and a half years in India entrusting them to the care of a nanny and the supervision of her sister in London. Goonam never marries and her reticence about her children’s father is in stark contrast with her analysis in Chap. 5 of the emotional conflict she undergoes when she jilts her future husband, Gaffar, an Egyptian medical student, literally at the door of the registry office. The experience—almost a narrow escape into domesticity and possibly even undesired subordination—toughens her for her future medical and political careers: “[t]he thought of marriage never entered my head again” (51). From this moment on she becomes a political subject and the remaining pages of her autobiography (pages 52–173) conform to the more linear development towards a goal, more focused on the public world of the author. Despite her dedication to her work and to improving the lot of poorer people, Goonam makes no bones about being “part of the upper set, enjoying cocktail parties at embassies, being driven in official cars to glittering state banquets, and occupying a VIP seat at the India Independence Day celebrations” (147). While she is entitled to enjoy the company of influential people, the fond reminiscences that she describes in great detail overshadow the horrors of the time she spent in prison. The lack of a more detailed account of her many detentions may be due to the poor editing of her memoir but clearly Goonam is enchanted with India

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and wherever she settles she sets up Indian cultural associations. Obviously the political climate of South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s was inimical to the ambitions of a politically minded person like the activist Goonam but her excessive romanticization of India begs the question as to whether she actually witnessed the poverty and hardship that millions of peasants suffered at the time. India constantly beckons to her and while there was no Group Areas Act and no Immorality Act, despite the newly passed Constitution, caste discrimination was alive and well even in the big cities.12 An ideal India—what Salman Rushdie called “imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” (1991, 10)—substitutes her real homeland, South Africa, with which she becomes seriously disillusioned (71). Goonam tells us that on her return to Durban after graduating from Edinburgh, she opens her surgery under the name Dr Goonam, as she “had decided to drop the Naidoo, considering it clannish, even casteish” (54; emphasis mine), but she never makes any open statement about the evils of caste, which seems incomprehensible for a person so articulate about racism and sexism. Her daughter Vanitha Chetty relegates Goonam’s apparent lack of concern about the caste system in India to a matter of priority: “Caste never featured in her upbringing. It didn’t really matter. But you know she never really discussed caste systems with us” (Coullie 2006, 295). The Group Areas Act played havoc with many non-white people and Goonam herself loses two houses through this nefarious piece of legislation (157) but her network of contacts and her generally buoyant financial situation allow her to opt out of the oppressive climate of apartheid South Africa: We [her cousin Thunga and herself] took a six month trip to India and Britain and returned refreshed and bubbling with stories of meeting with film stars and politicians. (151)

Class or caste concerns do not seem to be high on Goonam’s agenda. In all fairness she continues to work hard against the apartheid government, although by the 1970s she decides to flee the country as she “had had enough of imprisonment and saw no point in wasting [herself] in incarceration” (167). After staying in Britain, Australia, and Zimbabwe for several years, she is finally allowed to return to her homeland in 1990. The final paragraph of her memoir is, to my mind, enlightening as she states: “And now I await, with all freedom loving South Africans, for negotiations to proceed, the violence to end, and the new non-racial, non-sexist

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democracy to be born” (173). Goonam clearly mourns a lost community, following Dlamini’s claim that “[t]here are many South Africans for whom the past, the present and the future are not discrete wholes, with clear splits between them” (12). In the words of Svetlana Boym (2001, 5), Goonam’s memoir evokes a transhistorical reconstruction of the vanished home—an Indian community that acted as a cocoon that insulated them from outside hostilities—and one can only wonder where class stands for this offshoot of Tagore’s banyan tree.

Island in Chains: Resilience and Reflection South African prison narratives occupy a significant position within the country’s literature as thousands of people, including activists, human rights campaigners, trade unionists, intellectuals, and writers, were regularly imprisoned from 1948 to 1990. Given the diversity of people in jail during the apartheid era, this subgenre of life writing ranges from the private confessional and introspective reflection to the overtly political construction of a collective identity. The autobiographical act is itself the construction of a self, a self that evolves as he or she is being written about. In the case of political prisoners suffering torture and endless humiliations, the construction of the self takes on wider implications as the whole purpose of torture was to rob the activists of their sense of self. As Graham claims: South African prison diaries are written with the express purpose of challenging apartheid by exposing the abuses of its agents. There is thus a political urgency to these texts’ documentation of the past. (2005, 30)

Subjective accounts were deemed vital in order to convince public opinion that the government was abusing its power, hence the plethora of prison memoirs that saw the light especially after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960.13 Indres Naidoo, anti-apartheid activist and member of the African National Congress, was imprisoned for ten years on Robben Island from 1963 to 1973. All the Naidoo family were involved in political activism including both his parents and his brothers and sisters, all of whom were imprisoned at some point (Naidoo 2000, xxi–xxii).14 His memoir Island in Chains. Ten Years on Robben Island. Prisoner 885/63 (2000) [1982] penned in collaboration with fellow activist and later justice of the

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Constitutional Court, Albie Sachs, after his release from prison and expulsion from South Africa, reflects on his arrest and subsequent imprisonment on the island, while simultaneously recording for posterity how the prison community resisted the power of the coercive state in a productive manner. Robben Island narratives, of which the most famous is undoubtedly Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994), portray the island prison as an icon of immense symbolism, as a site of heroism and resilience. Naidoo’s memoir, like Mandela’s, provides “a blueprint for the post-­ apartheid state” (Ndlovu 2012, 17) and Gready claims that “Robben Islanders provide a powerful manifestation of a common characteristic in prison literature: an autobiographical agenda linked to a collective and political identity and mission” (Gready 1993, 515). Following sociologist Fran Buntman’s theories of resistance, I claim that Naidoo’s narrative, far from being simply a nostalgic view of anti-apartheid camaraderie despite the chilling descriptions of torture and humiliations, actually elaborates a political and social order that would serve to transform the state that had abused its power so disproportionately. However, as I will argue below, his narrative also reveals a grieving process for a failed nation and a sense of loss of opportunities and sheer waste of human potential. Following Svetlana Boym, Naidoo’s reflective nostalgia, can be ironic and even humorous as it can reveal that “longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another” (2001, 5). According to Buntman, resistance on Robben Island took on a particular characteristic, that is, it evolved from a simple refusal to obey orders to what she refers to as a productive means of creating a whole new set of rules. Eventually control shifted from the state and its penal institution to the inmates themselves (Buntman 2003, 236). The men incarcerated on Robben Island believed in a long-term resistance which would not merely bring about a breakdown of control but in fact would and could only culminate in a complete overthrow of power (ibid., 237). The inmates imposed a strict discipline on themselves as a group. In other words, resistance was the collective decision to subject themselves to a disciplinary regime of their own choice rather than accept prison norms. As such it was viewed as a positive choice but it carried with it an unwritten code of conduct which regulated the social and political behaviour of the inmates. This meant that prison authority was replaced with a self-imposed discipline, whenever this was feasible, and the political prisoners “actively used the prison to attempt to further long-term political ends” (Buntman

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2003, 238). For this system to work it was imperative that the inmates should act as a community when it came to confronting the prison guards, the representatives of the state. The code of conduct that thus regulated the actions of the community may have seemed restrictive but it provided mutual support for each and every one of the prisoners and saw to the needs of the community as a whole. However, failure to conform to the code of conduct implied that if any inmate strayed from this enforced discipline, he would be ostracized as a consequence. The rationale behind this was the insistence on being treated as a political community and not as individual criminals so their public image and the dignity of their struggle would be preserved. Albie Sachs, in his postscript to the first edition (1981), asserted that memoirs such as Island in Chains “keep the flames of resistance burning in people’s hearts throughout the country” (294). One of the resistance strategies used by Naidoo and his fellow inmates was to insist on using the first person plural: Every warder and officer told us that prison regulations forbade us to use the word “we”, that we were in prison as individuals and not as a group, but we persisted in saying “we” and “us” when speaking to those in charge, however high their rank. (232; and see Jacobs (1992, 82))

While the short-term goal was obviously their release from prison, much more important was the long-term objective: the demise of the apartheid state and the establishment of political equality in South Africa. Buntman explains that: Prisoners challenged the prison status quo not only because of poor treatment or the fact of their imprisonment, but also with the goal of using the prison as a laboratory for micro-experiments in creating the social order they sought and as a training school to develop social change agents to revolutionize the world outside and beyond the prison. (2003, 250)

Naidoo’s Island in Chains has indeed been read as another contribution to the series of apartheid prison autobiographies or struggle narratives. Herman Charles Bosman’s Cold Stone Jug (1999) [1969] is regarded by scholars as “the foundational text” (Gray 199, 34) of South African prison literature but Bosman was not a political prisoner and in fact he confesses to the murder for which he has been imprisoned. However, he talks about the solidarity and feeling of community that reigned in the prison, which

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foreshadows political prison memoirs such as Naidoo’s and their emphasis on inmate solidarity. Island of Chains frequently alludes to the willingness for “sacrifice on behalf of the group” (117), the high point of which were the numerous hunger strikes the inmates participated in (see Chapters 33, 40, and 48). Prison narratives written during or about apartheid clearly query notions of community, belonging and resilience, which evolved continually as new inmates arrived and the men who had served their sentences were released. Gready points out that the advantage of prison accounts written by longer term political prisoners is that they enable the reader to see prison conditions not simply as static and unchanging but as a set of principles which were constantly contested and manipulated, and therefore changed over time. (1993, 499)

In Naidoo’s case, by positioning himself to speak back to the apartheid regime, he becomes self-aware of his role as a writer and the dilemma of the memoir comes to the fore: what is uppermost, individual introspection or the need to speak as a collective? He wrote the memoir with Albie Sachs in exile in Mozambique. While the experiences and the political urgency related are clearly Naidoo’s, the literary flourish belongs to Sachs15 and this combination has produced a compellingly vital narrative that, twenty-­ nine years after the demise of apartheid, can still evoke anger at what happened but also grief over what could have been but never was. The political prisoners’ determination to desire and achieve a new democratic state can now be read as a naïve venture in view of the current inequalities of an ANC-led South Africa, frequently accused of corruption and nepotism.16 Naidoo’s depersonalized act in his constant use of “we” seems to render Island in Chains more of a testament rather than an autobiographical narrative. However, autobiography or memoir can be much more than a record of past events in the life of the author, as it can actually function as the medium for the construction of the author’s self (Graham 2005, 32). Naidoo’s “we”, despite its aim to speak inclusively for his fellow inmates, can only be self-selective and therefore limiting. His descriptions of the disagreements between the ANC and the PAC (Pan Africanist Congress) inside the prison bear witness to the impossibility of effectively speaking for all the political prisoners and, by extension, for all South Africans. One of the major differences between the ANC prisoners and the PAC inmates was their attitude. The plays that the PAC men put on were, according to

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Naidoo, “well acted [but] they offered so little. […] sketches about suffering and oppression in South Africa, never showing the way forward, never giving them courage to fight, or showing a way out” (217). On the other hand, the plays acted by the ANC men “inspired us, made us warm to each other, and part of a struggle for freedom that was worldwide and was winning its own victories” (ibid.). Even though the PAC finally acknowledged that the ANC inmates were “the force on the island” (219), they lacked a coherent strategy and were not inspired to fight for a truly non-racial society. While it is true to the extent that Naidoo assumes a first-person narrator in the guise of speaking for his fellow inmates, I argue that his text has a twofold reading. Undoubtedly it can be claimed that he bears witness to the “erosion of the rule of law and the concomitant emergence of the police state in apartheid South Africa” (Coullie and Meyer 2006, 22) on Robben Island and sets out the foundation for a new, democratic nation but I also read Naidoo’s prison memoir as a plea to mourn the failed state, that nation where a South Africa of diverse ethnicities could have cohabited in harmony regardless of ethnic origin, however utopian this may sound. In other words, not only does Naidoo look forward to an egalitarian Rainbow Nation but he also inscribes within his narrative a lament for past fears, racial hostilities and gross injustices. Island in Chains deals extensively with the humiliations inflicted on the black and Indian political prisoners by the white, mainly Afrikaner, guards. The disgust felt by these guards at non-white bodies is made apparent by their contemptuous rudeness towards the inmates and the complete indifference to any physical discomfort the latter might feel. The complete absence of any recognition of these men as fellow human beings deserving of respect and dignity underlines what Julia Kristeva has described as being the cause of abjection, “the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (1982, 4). The non-white political prisoners disrupt the Afrikaners’ sense of order and identity as the guards, many of whom were barely literate, treat the highly educated political detainees worse than animals. While their hands searched our bodies in the most humiliating way possible, they told us that here the white man was boss, and they hurled as many insults at us as they could, crude insults, repeated over and over again, as though they could not be in our presence or touch our bodies without saying something vile, reminding them and us of their power to do with us exactly what they liked. (54–55)

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In the early part of his narrative, Naidoo records the mutual animosity that permeated the prison. “We felt the constant pressure to humiliate us, perpetually to reduce us to nothing in the warder’s presence. They hated us and we hated them, it was quite simple” (93). In the fourth chapter of the memoir, before he is sent to Robben Island, Naidoo recalls the attempts by the apartheid police to undermine any non-white solidarity: What’s the matter with you Indians? You’ve got a long history of civilisation, you wore silk long before the white man, and here you are jumping from tree to tree with these barbarians, what’s wrong with you, man? (29)

Naidoo’s Indianness is invariably relegated to a secondary concern. He may be a banyan but his mission far surpasses any claim to a superior category of South African. He records that on the way to the quarry where the inmates were required to do arduous, pointless work, hammering at large pieces of rock, they passed by the houses of the married warders. The children were brought up to despise the non-whites as they shouted at them “‘Kaffirs … coolies’ and some even began to throw stones” (59). This kind of indoctrination meant that the whites grew up to believe in their inherent superiority despite the obvious intellectual capacity of many of the political prisoners. In spite of their ignorance, the warders never doubted for a moment that they were totally superior to us. They would tell us that we might be lawyers, or Nelson Mandela, or have a BA degree, but we were still kaffirs, and a kaffir was a kaffir, and that was all. (169)

In many cases, there was an enormous intellectual breach between the political prisoners and the guards. Naidoo records that there was a very low level of education even among the senior officers, even though over the years more educated men were recruited. While not all the political inmates were well educated, in fact some could barely read and write, they were united in a common goal and in a shared suffering. The guards, on the other hand, often fought amongst themselves and competing with or even informing on their colleagues was common practice and was covertly encouraged by their superiors. The total lack of comradeship among the warders served to highlight the solidarity of the inmates and their dedication to an ideal. Language classes were improvised, despite the fact that reading or writing materials were banned, as the inmates came from all

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over South Africa and the less-educated men knew little or no English, which soon became the lingua franca and the language of political struggle. These rudimentary classes—rudimentary for lack of proper resources, not for lack of enthusiasm—helped bring them together and allowed more men to participate in their political discussions. The prisoners aimed to analyse the power of the state in order to undermine it and finally to appropriate it. The inmates saw their acquisition of knowledge as a form of power in order to challenge both the prison and the apartheid status quo (Buntman 2003, 251). Naidoo, writing in 1982, is reticent about the means resorted to in order to smuggle newspapers into the prison. He merely states that the authorities failed to discover all their methods which “must remain secret” (142). Whenever an inmate was caught red-handed with a smuggled newspaper he was severely punished: “[a] scrap of paper could result in anything from two weeks’ spare diet in isolation to three months’ solitary confinement” (143). The success of the inmates’ strategies became apparent as the white warders gradually came to respect the political inmates: Delport [one of the cruellest warders] no longer used terms like “kaffir”, “coolie” and “boesman”, and even started referring to us as “kêrels - chaps”. He was impressed by us, by our determination and willingness to struggle to the limit of our abilities to achieve something we felt to be right. He had also seen the unity which we maintained, despite every effort of the Department to break us up. (231–232; emphasis in original)

In this way the recreation of a new state takes shape as the ultimate act of resistance was precisely this, disobedience, strict discipline, and a gradual shifting of power from the prison guards to the prisoners. After the first hunger strike on the island comes to an end when the deputy head of the prison agrees to hear their complaints, a step towards the reorganization of society is taken. Naidoo recalls the feeling of achievement when the first hunger strike is called off: “How permanent would be the gains, we did not know. But whatever the authorities did to us, they could never take away our sense of victory or our sense of power” (163). In this regard “[c]entral to the change in power dynamics on Robben Island was the prisoner’s collective power of transformation” (Gready 1993, 519). Naidoo’s memoir constantly demands a reconfiguration of what a South African belonging actually amounts to. His interactions with the mainly white Afrikaner prison guards suggest that he was determined to

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forge an integral South African identity regardless of colour, creed, or class affinity. But a unified nation is still a utopia—the individual’s hopes and desires are to be sacrificed in favour of the communal good. But who decides what this good actually is? Therefore, I conclude by suggesting that Naidoo’s prison narrative mourns the failed nation while it makes an earnest plea for an integrated South Africa. Naidoo does not sacrifice his Indianness; simply it takes second place in his political ambition for a South Africa where past fears, racial hostilities, and gross injustices could really have been avoided. However, while Naidoo’s memoir is a powerful testament to the resilience of the inmates who suffered intolerable brutalities, and therefore deserves a place in the South African canon, the collective identity that Island in Chains presents hints at a kind of dystopian South Africa where the individual no longer matters and the common good must prevail.

When Hope and History Rhyme: An Activist’s Life in Images The need for women to tell their stories and cross the threshold between the private and the public has stimulated a great deal of autobiographical work in contemporary South Africa. Amina Cachalia’s When Hope and History Rhyme (2013) is one of the many examples of the surge of women’s memoirs in the years following the demise of apartheid, demonstrating the therapeutic value of life writing (Coullie and Meyer 2006). Cachalia’s autobiography revisits the harshest years of the freedom struggle and focuses on her own activism and that of her fellow Indians, a role that has until relatively recently been ignored or, at best, underestimated (Govinden 2008). Like other South African Indians who suffered discrimination, Cachalia is capable of revisiting the past with Dlamini’s “native nostalgia”, which engages with the hardships of the struggle years without forgetting the community spirit that held neighbours and friends together. South African Indians were anything but a homogenous group (Hand and Pujolràs-Noguer, 2018, 3–5) but Cachalia, like Goonam before her, reflects on the ethnic network that they were forced to rely on during the decades of repression. In Cachalia’s case, however, a combination of postcolonial life narratives and feminist visual studies brings to the fore her dogged resilience rather than the backward look of Coolie Doctor. What makes Cachalia’s autobiography particularly significant is the large amount

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of visual material in the text, including numerous photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and identity cards. As Cachalia’s written memoir follows a clearly linear pattern, I prefer to focus on this immense amount of visual material, from which I have singled out a small selection of photographs in order to tease out the tension between the desire to affirm ethnic and gender identity and the inevitable process of objectification as described by Roland Barthes. Photographs force themselves into a space lodged between the desired ideal and the lived reality and by observing many of the photographs in Cachalia’s memoir we can witness how over the years they become “powerful weapons of social and attitudinal change” (Hirsch 1997, 8). Following Linda Haverty Rugg (1997, 25), I argue that the visual material in When Hope and History Rhyme fulfils two functions. It draws the reader back into the notorious apartheid era, and at the same time, it creates communal history for South African Indians. Moreover, I would add that Cachalia’s extensive photographic material belies the passive role Indian women were expected to assume and forcefully reinserts them into recent South African history. Amina Cachalia writes as a South African Indian, that is, as a member of a minority community both distrusted and envied by the majority of black South Africans not directly involved in the struggle.17 This hostility was, of course, due to the racial hierarchy established by the apartheid state. In any postcolonial life writing, “the act of writing about one’s past is performed in the shadow of colonial histories” (Kim 2015, 402). Cachalia’s memoir is what Kim calls “autobiography as history” (407; emphasis in original) and I will endeavour to explore the meaning of these photographs in the memoir. The large number of visual images included points in one clear direction. Cachalia wished to establish her physical presence in what clearly was a man’s world. On the other hand, and following Rugg, the obvious posing may simply underscore ideological assumptions (see the front cover photograph in the Appendix). The way Cachalia pictures herself can create a conflicting discourse, does she wish to enforce her role as activist or does she intend to foreground her Indianness? Of course, the memoir contains pictures of various people, her parents, grandparents, husband and children, friends, and so forth but it is the choice and position of these photographs which needs unpicking. I have chosen just four out of the 160 photos and that is not counting the numerous letters, newspaper cuttings, and court orders that are included and which “complement and augment the memoir’s documentary imperative” (Kim 2015, 407).

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In Roland Barthes’s investigation into the nature of photographs in his 1980 study Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography the referential power of photography is asserted. Photography is understood as being a faithful representative image but photographs are not simply the things they represent—they must be read through the culture that creates and consumes them. They participate in a system of signs that are unreliable at certain levels. They point to a plurality of selves and insist on the embodied subject. This insistence on the embodied subject draws attention to the referential power of autobiographies which cannot help but focus on culturally defined bodies and the cultural and historical constructions of these bodies. Adams, on the other hand, suggests that photographs can be regarded as being actually more referential than words if we consider them as physical traces of a real object in the same way that fingerprints are traces of a real body (2000, xix). Rugg points out the tension between photographs, as they point to a plurality of selves and at the same time highlight the materiality of the embodied subject (Rugg, 13). The introduction of photos into autobiographies offers a possibility of reconciliation of one’s own and others’ selves as one can observe and/or cherish photographs of people one has lost contact with or come to terms with one’s own younger self. Moreover the presence of photographs in life writing visualizes “the decentred, culturally constructed self; [and] it asserts the presence of a living body through the power of photographic referentiality” (Rugg, 19). Postcolonial and feminist readings of autobiography therefore demand to see the material body and its constructed nature at the same time. Cachalia’s focus on the body somehow recalls the manner in which Shailja Patel constructs her memoir upon the non-white female body as seen in Chap. 5. Notwithstanding the formalistic differences between the two texts, the fact that both memoirists are of Indian origin and employ saris as bodily signifiers attests to the existence of a shared narration of female resistance that connects activists such as Cachalia and Patel diachronically. Photography acquires the power to supplant memory and bring about a confusion between remembrance of things past and the photographs of those things. Of the 160 photographs that Cachalia has decided to include in her autobiography, many are faded and it is extremely hard to distinguish the people she claims they portray. These very old photographs— some date back to the early twentieth century—were taken before Cachalia was even born so they can only function as a fragmented narrative that she has treasured for years. The inclusion of these—for want of a better

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word—historical documents in what the author herself subtitles “an autobiography” converts Cachalia’s text into a memorial, that is, an attempt to integrate the reader into a past before he or she may have been born or who may even come from a completely different geopolitical, cultural context. The memoir then becomes a desire to create communal history, so the fate of ancestors or even strangers becomes as important as one’s own. The family album also can “accommodate narratives of familial disharmony and fractured relationships” (Kim 2015, 406). How can text and image interact and reflect on each other? Cachalia doesn’t actually integrate the photographs into her text. The photographs are inserted in groups in a more or less chronological order but she provides a caption for most of them so the reader can trace the event or persons pictured. The fact that Cachalia does not refer to any of the photographs directly in the text allows the reader to approach the memoir as a photographic autobiography or a life in images. It is clear that Cachalia kept many photographs and she herself says that she continually noted down anecdotes and hoarded all the pieces of paper for future use. The writing of her autobiography is then an example of memory work in action as she had to look at these old photographs and supply an appropriate caption. Adams claims that “photography operates as a visual supplement (illustration) and a corroboration (verification) of the text – that photographs may help to establish, or at least, reinforce, autobiography’s referential dimension” (2000, xxi). Cachalia is not consistent in her choice of tenses for the captions, she drifts between the past and the present tense, nor in the way she refers to herself, sometimes in the first person, sometimes as “Amina”. To work in chronological order, the first photograph I examine is placed right at the end of part 2, the 1950s (Cachalia 2013, 122)18 and it features a group of black men and women who have gathered in a hall in order to defy the curfew regulations (see Image 7.1). The picture is not dated, so we can only guess the year from the information Cachalia gives us in the text about the defiance campaign against the curfew order in 1952 and this one shows her “in the background, against the wall” (122). The fact that she is one of the only Indians, if not the only Indian, in the photo underlines how the South African Indian community underwent a steady evolution from the days of zealously preserving their Indianness to joining forces with the other South Africans in a common fight for justice (Hand and Pujolràs-Noguer 2018, 4–5). The photograph is clearly not posed, so it acts as an objective piece of history because Cachalia’s presence in the picture is by chance and only one woman in the foreground is

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Image 7.1  Amina Cachalia, picture on page 122, When Hope and History Rhyme. Reproduced with the kind permission of Ms. Coco Cachalia

actually smiling at the camera and another man is looking at it. Barthes emphasizes “how the conventions of the pose signify an identity beyond the control of the subject” (Jay 1994, 207) but the smiling woman suggests what I am calling a half-pose. The young woman in the photograph smiles as she is aware of the photographer but is not really prepared to be snapped, whereas I argue that Cachalia in later photographs is clearly willing to pose for the camera. Clearly the camera loves Amina Cachalia as shown by the two photographs, clearly posed, on page 136. One of these photographs, which was taken by a photographer from the Post for a magazine cover, was chosen for the front cover (see Image 7.2) rather than one featuring her speaking at a political meeting. Cachalia herself provides the caption that Yusuf, her husband, “was not happy about me appearing on the cover of a magazine – a little chauvinistic perhaps” (136). Without this revealing piece of information, the text presents Yusuf as a modern, liberal, caring husband. However, the fact that Amina did pose for the photographs highlights her determination to be her own person and the choice of this very picture for the front cover of the autobiography reinforces her autonomy as an Indian

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Image 7.2  Amina Cachalia, picture on page 136 When Hope and History Rhyme. Reproduced with the kind permission of Ms. Coco Cachalia

woman. The front cover does not bear the telltale caption, so what the reader is faced with is a photograph of a young, smiling, sari-clad woman meeting the camera head on but with just a hint of demureness so her ethnicity is clearly foregrounded. South African Indian women suffered double discrimination, as non-whites and as women, and it should be remembered that not all Indians were willing to embrace a more Westernized culture. In this respect Dr Goonam stands out for challenging conservative Indians in Durban both by her social behaviour and by her politics (Coullie 2006, 294). Photographs are indeed located somewhere on the border between fact and fiction as they may “undercut just as easily as they reinforce [the text]” (Adams 2000, xxi). Cachalia worked hard all her life to fight against any type of discrimination but in the 1950s and 1960s there were still many South African Indians who were reluctant

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to throw in their lot with the blacks. It is worth remembering that the Natal Indian Congress was founded in the late nineteenth century and by the time the Mahatma had left South Africa a certain number of concessions had been obtained from the government. Perhaps more importantly, a timid collaboration between Indians and the black majority was starting to take shape but this was no easy achievement as both ethnic groups were inherently economically and socially unequal at this point in history, which would prevent an easy transition towards anti-apartheid solidarity in later years. From the early 1950s, two distinct ideological grounds of protest and compromise become manifest. The more radical South African Indian Congress sought mass support and identification with Africans and thus promoted interracial political action. Indians were becoming identified more and more with the oppressed black majority (Ebr.-Vally 2001, 95). On the other hand, the South African Indian Organisation, who defended the interests of traders and merchants, feared African nationalism as they believed it would seriously challenge their hard-won position. Through all the photographs that Cachalia includes, she stages—on the pages of her autobiography—the strong community, black and Indian, that apartheid could not break. All posed photographs are fictional, as Adams reminds us (3) because a stage is set by the photographer, the subject has to smile or show the mood required by the photographer. In the photograph which is placed at the beginning of part five, the 1980s, Amina is pictured wearing her usual sari behind the grille of her home, so the effect is that of a woman confined behind bars (see Image 7.3). The caption acknowledges that this is indeed a posed photograph as an Italian photographer travelled to South Africa in 1989 in order to take pictures of women involved in the struggle. Cachalia’s choice of this particular photograph to head the chapter on the 1980s is curious as during this decade Amina and Yusuf travelled to Zimbabwe, recently decolonized, and were finally allowed to visit Mandela in prison. It was also the decade when Walter Sisulu was released after twenty-six years in jail. Sisulu and the Cachalias were close friends and she juxtaposes a photograph of herself “behind bars” with one of her embracing a newly freed. Amina is clearly being posed as a prisoner, even though her jail is a comfortable one, a far cry from the conditions that she and other activists suffered during the 1940s and 1950s. Despite the obvious fact that Cachalia is much older here than in the previous posed photograph we have commented on, she no longer smiles at the camera; it is as though her serious stare together with the tightly grasped bar in her left

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Image 7.3  Amina Cachalia, When Hope and History Rhyme. In fact, the photograph included here is of Amina Cachalia outside her home in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, 1984, photographed by Sue Williamson. Reproduced with the kind permission of Ms Williamson. It has been impossible to trace the copyright holder of the photograph “behind bars” discussed in the chapter but Cachalia is wearing the same clothes and her expression is practically the same

hand needs to transmit the pain but above all the determination that the freedom fighters possessed. This photograph also contributes to commemorate the Indian participation in the struggle, still far too often overlooked. Despite all the techniques that can be marshalled in order to enhance or alter a photograph, they are still believed to have a direct connection to the real (Adams 4). It is well known that a camera can manipulate the reflected light in order to create the desired ambience and this “behind bars” picture has engineered the light so that Amina’s sari and, by extension, her persona outshine her supposed confinement. The manufactured result is therefore an artificial representation of Cachalia’s life, in the same way that her memoir cannot reveal all of this woman’s life. There is a

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certain romanticization in this photograph of the trials and tribulations suffered, which may function as a legacy for the young, born-free generation. It is also a way of forgiving—but not forgetting—the past, a kind of photographic Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Cachalia forges a healing connection with the past by revitalizing it through the incorporation of photographs in her autobiography. Her life becomes a textual account and at the same time a photographic documentary of this life. It could be argued that by including so many—160—photographs, Cachalia actually conceals more than she reveals about her life. How can one photograph fear, racial hostility, racial slurs, blatant discrimination, the pain of house arrest, and so forth? She describes these emotions, events, occurrences but to what extent do her photographs endorse this reality? Even the photograph of her behind a grille—imitating an imprisoned subject— does not—cannot—mimic or represent the anguish of being deprived of liberty. So the photographs actually downplay the horrors of apartheid and what it meant to be Indian or black in South Africa in the twentieth century. Therefore, is the incorporation of these photographs actually counter-­ productive if Cachalia’s purpose in writing her autobiography was to leave behind a well-documented legacy for later generations? Photographs freeze moments of time or they also freeze memoirs. Can Amina Cachalia have such a prodigious memory that her autobiography seems to suggest? It is true that she herself explains how she collected—hoarded?—all the photographs and often looked through them and reorganized them, so hers is a life recalled through visual images rather than through actual memory. If Cachalia wanted her photographs to represent any South African Indian girl or woman living under apartheid, she fails as she cannot efface herself—her personality, her personal beauty, her exceptionality is far too great. As Adams reminds us, photographs are always specific rather than general (20). What Adams calls “autobiogenic”—meaning that some people’s lives are more compelling than those of others (20)—seems applicable to Amina Cachalia’s autobiography. Autobiographies and photographs operate in a parallel fashion because both of them blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, between representation and creation (20). The final photograph I will comment on is the one chosen for the back cover of the autobiography (see Image 7.4). It features Amina in the centre towered over by Nelson Mandela on her left and her husband Yusuf on her right. They have been photographed with their backs to the camera,

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metaphorically leaving behind the horrors of the struggle years. It also shows the fragility of the three subjects’ bodies, all three being now advanced in years; in fact, the caption Cachalia provides tells us that “this was the last time the three of us were together [a]s Yusuf died four months later [in 1995]”. The fact that all three are now deceased can only add to the poignancy of this photograph. It is clearly a posed photograph which illustrates Paul Jay’s words when he claims that “[i]dentity is in part a function of specifiable political and social forces beyond [one’s] personal control” (Jay 1994, 206). Of the three subjects in this valedictory photograph, Amina Cachalia is actually the only one who stands erect and, figuratively speaking, remains determined and fearless right to the end. Amina’s diminutive size, thrown into special relief by her walking Image 7.4  Back cover, When Hope and History Rhyme. Reproduced with the kind permission of Ms. Louise Gubb

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alongside a tall, although clearly frail Mandela, negates the passive role Indian women were expected to assume and forcefully reinserts them into recent South African history. Cachalia definitely embodies the sturdy branches of the banyan tree that reach far beyond their original site (Shanahan 2018, 46) even as far as South Africa.

Conclusion: Celebrating Indianness in South Africa The three authors analysed in this chapter share a common South African root which, like the banyan tree, spreads from India across the ocean to Durban and Cape Town. All three authors devote their textual energies to building a fairer society but their memoirs reveal the breakdown of an idyllic community where citizens could flourish regardless of ethnicity, gender, social class, or intellectual ability. These memoirs show resistance and resilience but evince a telltale sorrow for an Indoceanic utopia. Naidoo’s memoir insists on the community spirit that reigned on Robben Island but he also dwells on the failed state that South Africa represented during the apartheid regime. Dr Goonam, one of the first Indian women doctors in South Africa, also focuses on community links in her autobiography but she betrays a certain nostalgia for the ethos of middle-class Indian life. Whereas Naidoo’s mourning is for an inclusive South African nation, Goonam appears to long for a lost, class-blind world. Cachalia’s memoir likewise cherishes the community spirit that held neighbours and friends together but what differentiates her work from that of Naidoo and Goonam is the enormous amount of visual material, including numerous photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and identity cards included in the text. The extensive photographic material serves to challenge the passive role Indian women were expected to assume and celebrates the resilience they displayed. The three examples of Indian Ocean life writing, written from a South African perspective but fully conscious of the roots of the Indian banyan tree, play a crucial role in commemorating the active participation of countless South African Indians, men and women, in the struggle for a democratic and just society.

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Notes 1. https://www.thehindu.com/features/homes-­and-­gardens/bend-­it-­like-­ banyan/article5664068.ece. 2. Chapter 15 lines 1–6, translated by Shri Purohit Swami, http://www.holybooks.com/bhagavad-­gita-­three-­modern-­translations/. 3. According to The Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora (eds. Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook, 2013), over twenty-five million people of South Asian descent make up one of the most widely dispersed diasporas in the world today. 4. All three have passed away: Dr Goonam (1906–1998); Amina Cachalia (1930–2013), and Indres Naidoo (1936–2016). 5. Svetlana Boym (2001, 5) has famously distinguished two types of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. “Restorative nostalgia stresses nóstos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in álgos, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately”. 6. Dr. Goonam, Coolie Doctor. An Autobiography by Dr. Goonam, Madiba Publications, 1991. Subsequent page numbers will be inserted in the text. Grey Street has since been renamed Dr. Yusuf Dadoo Street. 7. I am grateful to Professor Sandra Young of the University of Cape Town for sending me this manuscript. 8. In Hand (2018), I argue that Goonam’s memoir should be approached compassionately rather than empathetically. The reader feels for rather than with her struggle. 9. For a detailed analysis of the complex political situation from Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 to the first democratic elections in 1994 see Liz Carmichael, Peacemaking and Peacebuilding in South Africa: The National Peace Accord, 1991–1994 (Boydell and Brewer 2022). 10. The Riverside area in Durban which includes Umgeni was designated a white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950, so the Indian residents were obliged to abandon their homes. 11. It is enlightening to observe the difference in the reaction of these two activists, Dr Goonam and Amina Cachalia, to their forebears’ homeland. The latter states that “India was a complete shock to me” (2013, 239) and “I thanked Papa for having left India all those years ago to seek a better life in South Africa” (ibid., 240). 12. Article 15 of the Indian Constitution forbids discrimination against any citizen on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth, or any of them. Article 17 abolishes untouchability. https://www.constitutionofindia.net/constitution_of_india/fundamental_rights/articles/Article%20

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15 and see https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/09/11/ indias-­caste-­system-­remains-­entrenched-­75-­years-­after-­independence. 13. See Roux (2012) for a detailed analysis of South African prison literature. He classifies Naidoo’s memoir, the subject of this section, as part of the first wave of prison autobiographies. (2012, 552). 14. Henceforth, only the page numbers will be cited. 15. Albie Sachs himself wrote his prison experiences in The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966), which is more of a confessional introspective testimony. 16. See “Governing party is battling the enemy within. For the ANC to live, greed, corruption, deception, lies, betrayal, and murders must die”, Cape Times, 19 January 2022. 17. The campaign of passive resistance “saw African, Indian, and Coloured people united in South Africa”. See Hand and Pujolràs-Noguer (2018, 4). Chetty (2017, 106) discusses how Ronnie Govender’s short story “1949” shows how “the Zulu were worked upon by colonial and racist forces who did not wish to see Indians and Zulus uniting in an anti-establishment movement”. 18. Henceforth only the page numbers will be cited.

References Adams, Timothy Dow. 2000. Light Writing and Life Writing. Photographs in Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Barthes, Roland. [1980] 2000. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Buntman, Fran. 2003. Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid. Cambridge University Press. Burton, Antoinette. 2011. The Pain of Racism in the Making of a ‘Coolie Doctor’. Interventions 13 (2): 212–235. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1369801X.2011.573219. Cachalia, Amina. 2013. When Hope and History Rhyme. Johannesburg: Picador Africa. Chetty, Rajendra. 2017. At the Edge: The Writings of Ronnie Govender. New York: Peter Lang. Coullie, Judith Lütge. 2006. Mummy, the Coolie Doctor Is at the Door. In Selves in Question. Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography, ed. Coullie Judith Lütge et al., 291–302. University of Hawai’i Press. Coullie, Judith Lütge, and Stephan Meyer. 2006. Auto/biographical Identities: Placing Selves in Question. In Selves in Question. Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography, ed. Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani H. Ngwenya, and Thomas Olver, 1–115. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

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Dlamini, Jacob. 2009. Native Nostalgia. Johannesburg: Jacana. Ebr.-Vally, Rehana. 2001. Kala Pani. Caste and Colour in South Africa. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Goonam, Dr. 1991. Coolie Doctor. An Autobiography by Dr. Goonam. Durban: Madiba Publications. Govinden, Devarakshanam. 2001. Coolie Doctor: Woman in a Man’s World. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 13 (1): 22–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2001.9678092. ———. 2008. “Sisters Outside” the Representation of Identity and Difference in Selected Writings by South African Indian Women. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. Graham, Shane. 2005. Albie Sachs, Indres Naidoo and the South African Prison Memoir. Scrutiny2 10 (1): 29–44. Gready, Paul. 1993. Autobiography and the ‘Power of Writing’: Political Prison Writing in the Apartheid Era. Journal of Southern African Studies 19 (3): 489–523. Hand, Felicity. 2018. Narrative Empathy in Dr. Goonam’s Coolie Doctor and Zubeida Jaffer’s Our Generation. Life Writing 15 (4): 561–576. https://doi. org/10.1080/14484528.2018.1426969. Hand, Felicity, and Esther Pujolràs-Noguer. 2018. From Cane Cutters and Traders to Citizens and Writers. In Relations and Networks in South African Indian Writing, ed. Felicity Hand and Esther Pujolràs-Noguer, 1–14. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. Hassim, Aziz. 2002. The Lotus People. Johannesburg: STE. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jacobs, J.U. 1992. Narrating the Island: Robben Island in South African Literature. Current Writing 4 (1): 72–84. Jay, Paul. 1994. Posing: Autobiography and the Subject of Photography. In Autobiography and Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, 191–211. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kim, Lee-Von. 2015. Scenes of Af/filiation: Family Photographs in Postcolonial Life Writing. Life Writing 12 (4): 401–415. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Naidoo, Indres. [1982] 2000. Island in Chains. Ten Years on Robben Island, Prisoner 885/63. Sandton: Penguin Books. Ndlovu, Isaac. 2012. Prison and Solitary Confinement: Conditions and Limits of the Autobiographical Self. English Studies in Africa 55 (1): 16–34. Roux, Daniel. 2012. Writing the Prison. In The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Attwell and Derek Attridge, 545–563. Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2021. Writing from Robben Island. National Identity and the Apartheid Prison in South Africa. In Prison Writing and the Literary World. Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice, ed. Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall, 93–109. London: Routledge. Rugg, Linda Haverty. 1997. Picturing Ourselves. Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta. Sachs, Albie. [1966] 1990. The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. London: Paladin Grafton Books. Shanahan, Mike. 2018. Ladders to Heaven. The Secret History of Fig Trees. London: Unbound. Su, John J. 2005. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge University Press. Tagore, Rabindranath. 1914. The Banyan Tree. In The Crescent Moon. New York: The Macmillan Company. Tinker, High. 1977. The Banyan Tree. Overseas Emigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion. Ecotonic Selves: Survival and Indian Ocean Life Writing

Markus P. M. Vink heralded the Indian Ocean as the “New Thalassology” in his groundbreaking 2007 article. Porousness, permeability, and connectedness imprint this new thalassology with the synergic force that defines the ecotone, a delicate ecological zone that embraces the diverse traits of two antagonistic ecological community types. The littoral essence of the Indian Ocean rim is the upshot of the ecotonic meeting of land and sea which creates a peculiar amphibian space (Samuelson 2017) in a permanent state of flux. We read Vink’s new thalassology under the lens of ecotones, that is to say, as a transitional area wherein cultural encounters, harmonious as well as conflictual, contribute to the construction of subjecthood. This Indoceanic fluctuating space is imbued with the strength and vulnerability that stems from a conglomerate of forced displacements, historical erasures, and traumatized memories. It is precisely at the crux of these forced displacements, historical erasures, and traumatized memories that we have located the distinctive self-quests deployed in the memoirs that have constituted the corpus of our present volume Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing. M.G. Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Neera Kapur-­ Dromson’s From Jelum to Tana, Parita Mukta’s Shards of Memory, Shailja Patel’s Migritude, Lindsey Collen’s “The Indian Ocean as a Unifying Force: A Memoir”, Dr Goonam’s Coolie Doctor. An Autobiography by Dr. Goonam, Indres Naidoo’s Island in Chains. Ten Years on Robben Island. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Pujolràs-Noguer, F. Hand, Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46345-7_8

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Prisoner 885/63, and Amina Cachalia’s When Hope and History Rhyme are all testimonies of survival. Whether their survival is ingrained in their stature as professional authors—as is the case of Vassanji, Ondaatje, Collen, and Patel—or whether their survival is entwined with communal memory—as is the case of Kapur-Dromson, Mukta, Dr Goonam, Naidoo, and Cachalia—the truth is that in the act of writing their selves they have explored and exhibited new articulations of belonging. We claim that these articulations of belonging are the resultant of an ecotonic consciousness that in some cases is expressed as national belonging—Vassanji’s emotional reclamation of the East African land as his home; Kapur-Dromson and Mukta’s reassessment of their Indian-East African selves; Dr Goonam, Naidoo, and Cachalia’s nostalgic alignment with South Africa—whereas in other instances a transnational move is being delineated—Ondaatje’s cosmopolitanism, Patel’s conscientious construction of a transnational self; and Collen’s inveterate Indoceanic being in the world. Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing illustrates how survival is intimately tied to belonging. More specifically, in this volume we have sought to achieve four main objectives. Firstly, we have shown that the Indian Ocean should be conceived as a rhizomatic cultural and historical network, where texts should be approached with flexibility, fluidity, and, above all, empathy. Secondly, we have engaged in a careful reconsideration of subjecthood and resilience in a selection of Indian Ocean–based memoirs. Thirdly, we have vindicated the genre of memoir as a highly apt tool with which to reassess the life stories of formerly colonized peoples whose traumatic memories and personal or communal narratives have too often been erased from canonical literary studies. Lastly we have explored how the trope of mourning conditions the narration of lives stamped by the legacies of colonialism with its inherent violations of human rights and civil liberties. The perhaps unexpected combination of tropes—mourning and resilience—exhibited in the title of the volume, has nonetheless served to highlight the need to abandon any vestige of self-pity and instead work-­ through, after LaCapra’s fashion, the traumas of the past that impinge on the construction of Indoceanic selves: slavery and indenture, displacement, forced emigration, discrimination, imprisonment, and the guilt of the implicated subject. To a greater or lesser degree the memoirs we have analysed share the need to reflect on the traumatic pasts in order to move on. Resilience, which permeates all of the texts in this volume, is strategically used to weave a narrative of self forged in the instinctual human thirst

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for survival. In their very different ways the authors in this volume are striking examples of steadfastness and conviction. We aim not to romanticize them and/or their life stories as the chapters point out some of their inconsistencies and weaknesses but, despite their plausible flaws, we definitely wished to pay homage to a group of writers who have survived and have left behind or will leave behind a remarkable legacy. One of the leading objectives of our volume was to emphasize the sense of belonging that our authors manifest despite or because of their condition as diasporic people or persons who have migrated to other parts of the world and thus examine how they have contributed to articulate transnationalism. An exploration of their memoirs from a transnational perspective demanded the coinage of new terms to capture their peculiar form of belonging. Therefore, the term “ectopic insider” helped us to move beyond the outsider/insider dichotomy to epitomize someone from the outside but of the inside (Vassanji, Ondaatje, Patel, Collen). We have resorted to botanical terminology—“rhizomatic perennials” and “banyans”—to envision the longing for rootedness that some memoirs radiate (Kapur-Dromson, Mukta, Dr Goonam, Naidoo and Cachalia). To conclude, we would like to recover the ecotonic mood that marked the beginning of these closing remarks and make a somewhat daring assertion: Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Writing is a transitional academic work that, in a sheer Indoceanic spirit, hopes to be expanded, transformed, and probably amended by further studies on Indian Ocean life writing. We are perfectly aware of the limitations involved in selecting a representative corpus but we are also confident that the authors and corresponding memoirs that constitute Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Writing are the ones we believed had to be included. The responsibility is, therefore, entirely ours.

Reference Samuelson, Meg. 2017. Coastal Form: Amphibian Positions, Wider Worlds, and Planetary Horizons on the African Indian Ocean Littoral. Comparative Literature 69: 16–24.

Appendix

Photographs Page 39, reproduced with the kind permission of Mr. M.G. Vassanji. Page 39, reproduced with the kind permission of Mr. M.G. Vassanji. Page 115, Image ID: CEXP78 www.alamy.com. Page 167, reproduced with the kind permission of Ms. Coco Cachalia. Page 167, reproduced with the kind permission of Ms. Coco Cachalia. Page 168. In fact the photograph included here is of Amina Cachalia outside her home in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, 1984, photographed by Sue Williamson. Reproduced with the kind permission of Ms Williamson. It has been impossible to trace the copyright holder of the photograph “behind bars” discussed in the chapter but Cachalia is wearing the same clothes and her expression is practically the same. Page 170, reproduced with the kind permission of Ms. Louise Gubb.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Pujolràs-Noguer, F. Hand, Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46345-7

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Index1

A Absence, 66, 67, 73, 75, 77, 82 Acting-out, 66, 67, 73, 82 Activist, 163, 164, 167, 168, 175–185, 186n11 Adulthood, 61 Affiliation, 162 African National Congress (ANC), 166, 168, 171, 172 Africanness, 32, 47, 48, 50, 51 Agency, 2, 8, 11 Ambi, 122–125, 134n9 Amin, Idi, 48, 49, 52, 53 Ancestor, 5, 16 And Home Was Kariakoo, 27–57 Apartheid/anti-apartheid, 143, 144, 146, 148, 157n6, 162–165, 167–176, 181, 183, 185 Arborescent, 114, 117, 133n1 Arya Samaj, 97, 104–106, 108n5 Asian African, 118

Asian African identity, 50 Asian writers, 50 Authenticity, 62, 63 B Bagamoyo, 42–44 Banyan tree, 161–168, 185 Beauty, 121, 122, 124, 130, 131 Belonging, 28, 29, 32, 41, 49–54, 60, 65, 83, 115–118, 133 Blood, 65, 72, 77, 81, 83, 85n16 Body, 112–117, 119–121, 124, 126, 127, 130, 131, 135n13 Body politic, 112–116 Borders, 2, 3, 10, 11, 16 Boy, 149, 153, 156 Brownness, 47, 48, 50 Buffer group, 101 Burton, Richard, 36, 38–40, 55n8 Butler, Judith, 13, 16

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Pujolràs-Noguer, F. Hand, Mourning and Resilience in Indian Ocean Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46345-7

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198 

INDEX

C Cachalia, Amina, 163, 164, 175–185, 186n11 Cachalia, Yusuf, 179, 181, 183, 184 Camera, 179–183 Canada, 61, 63, 67, 75 Capitalism/finance capitalism, 141, 142 Caruth, Cathy, 42, 66, 72, 73, 82 Cashmere, 124 Caste, 95, 96, 101, 167 Cavarero, Adriana, 112 Césaire, Aimé, 29–31, 54n3 Ceylon, 61, 62, 65, 70, 72, 77, 79–81, 83, 85n12 Chagos, 152, 158n11 Childhood, 61–63, 65, 78 Cinnamon, 78, 80, 81 Class, 96, 99, 102, 104, 105, 143, 146, 148–156, 167, 168, 175 Collective history, 71 Collective power, 174 Collen, Lindsey, 141–156 Colonial history, 145 Colonialism, 73, 79, 81, 83, 84, 131 Commitment, 141, 144, 151, 156 Communication, 40, 55n8 Community/community spirit, 3, 4, 6–11, 15, 16, 18, 91–93, 95–105, 107, 108n3, 163–165, 168–171, 175, 176, 178, 181, 185 Connection, 7, 14, 17 Conservative, 92, 99, 103 Contemporary, 116–118, 131, 133, 135n13 Coolie, 115 Coolie Doctor, 163–168, 175 Coolitude, 32, 113–116, 131 Corporeal/corporeality, 112, 119 Criticism postcolonial, 142 Curfew, 178 Cyclones, 154

D Damji, Ladha, 38, 39 Darkness, 74, 76, 77 De-exoticized, 125, 130 Deferred experience, 66 Deleuze, Gilles, 117, 126, 133n4, 134n12 De-rooted, 125 De-territorialized, 118, 120 Diachronic, 121 Diaspora, 7, 18, 30, 33, 34, 145 Diasporic imaginary, 61, 71 Discrimination, 167, 175, 180, 183, 186n12 Disillusionment, 36, 49, 52 Displaced home, 60 Displacement, 30, 41, 45, 53, 55n5, 60–62, 69, 71, 74, 113–116, 126, 131, 133, 135n13 Dlamini, Jacob, 165, 168, 175 Draupadi, 117, 120, 130 Dukawallah, 93, 94 Durban, 162, 163, 165, 167, 180, 185, 186n10 Dyer, Richard, 112, 113 E East African Asian, 91–93, 100–103, 106, 107, 108n3 Ecology/environment, 142, 143, 152 Ecotone, 101, 104, 106 Ectopic, 14, 15 Ectopic insider, 60, 73, 78, 81, 83, 85n8 Emotional, 115, 118, 120, 121, 126 Empathetic, 121 Empathic unsettlement, 68, 77 Empathy, 5, 6, 12 Empire, 36, 113, 115, 125, 131, 132, 133n2 Enigma(s), 67, 72

 INDEX 

Equality, 142, 156 Ethnicity, 102, 105 Eurocentric, 31, 37 F Father, 60–84 Father tongue, 75 Fault line, 143, 146, 155 Fishermen, 154, 155 Flexibility, 3, 4, 16 Fluidity/fluid, 113, 117, 119, 126 Food, 95, 97, 98 Foreign/foreignness, 65, 70, 85n8 Forgetting, 33–35, 42, 50 Forgive, 64 Freedom fighter, 161, 163, 182 From Jelum to Tana, 92 G Gellner, Ernest, 114, 133n1 Gender, 152 Gender roles, 97 Genealogical tree, 113–115, 133 Genealogy, 117 Gesture, 72, 73, 79 Getting Rid Of It, 149, 150, 153 Ghosh, Amitav, 155 Goonam, Dr., 143, 149, 150, 163–168, 175, 180, 185, 186n8, 186n11 Gramsci, Antonio, 32, 34, 55n5, 114 Grieve, 64 Guattari, Félix, 117, 126, 133n4, 134n12 Guilt, 30, 44, 45, 75 H Hindu, 161 Hindu, wahindi, 102

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Historical responsibility, 120 History, 62, 63, 65, 69–72, 77, 79, 81–83, 84n4 Home, 28, 30, 32, 33, 37, 39, 45, 51, 56n11, 114, 115, 118, 127 Homeland, 115 hooks, bell, 37 Humanity, 147, 155 Humiliation, 168, 169, 172 Hunger, 93, 94, 97, 103 Hunger strike, 171, 174 I Identity (ies), 114–118, 126, 131, 132, 135n13 Ideology, 95 Imperialism, 113, 121, 131 Implicated subject, 125 Implication, 114, 125 In-between, 47–49 In-betweenness, 6 Incarnation, 119, 120 Indenture, 115 Indianness, 32 Indian Ocean, 1–19, 31, 32, 45, 56n13 Indoceanic, 19 smell, 149 stability, 148 Inequalities, 8, 10 Inmates, 169–174 Inventory, 32, 34–36, 38, 50, 52, 56n11, 112–133 Island in Chains, 163, 168–175 Izzat, 95–100, 103, 107 J Johannesburg, 143, 148, 150 Journey, 115, 117, 118, 129, 131, 133n3, 134n13 Justice, 142

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INDEX

K Kabaragoya(s), 63, 77 Kala pani, 92 Kapur-Dromson, Neera, 91–93 Karapotha(s), 65, 78, 80 Kashmiri, 124 Kaya, 151 Kenya/ Kenyan/Kenyan Asian, 92, 93, 98–100, 102, 104–107, 113, 118, 121, 124, 127–129, 131 Kinship, 114, 115 Knots of memory, 120 Kreol, 141, 146, 152, 155, 156, 156n2 L LaCapra, Dominick, 3, 11, 12, 35, 42, 66, 67, 73, 77, 82 Lakaz, Muvman, 150 Lalit, 141, 142, 156n2 Land, 28–33, 35–38, 41, 45, 50–53, 60, 62, 65, 70, 72, 73, 77–81, 86n17 Language, 30, 31, 39–42, 45, 50–54 Life writing, 1–19 Literary output, 142 Livingstone, David, 36, 38, 40–43, 55n7 Loss, 66, 67, 73, 75, 77, 82, 83 M Mahabharata, 117, 120 The Malaria Man and Her Neighbours, 149, 151, 153, 154 Mamdani, Mahmood, 48 Mandela, Nelson, 164, 169, 173, 181, 183, 185, 186n9 Mangal sutra, 130 Map(s), 62, 70, 72, 83

Marriage, 94–97 Material body, 177 Material culture, 120, 121 Material fluidity, 113, 131 Materiality, 112, 113, 115, 117, 121, 131 Material well-being, 150 Mauritius, 142–145, 149, 151, 152, 154–156, 156n2, 158n11 Meer, Fatima, 164 Melancholia, 12, 13 Memoir, 1, 2, 4–6, 14–19, 113–115, 118, 119, 126, 128, 132, 133, 134n10, 141–152, 154–156 Memory/memory work, 1–19, 120, 125, 129, 165, 177, 178, 183 Métissage, 115 Migrant body, 112–133 Migration (s), 115–117, 123, 124, 126, 133n3 Migritude, 111–135 Migritude, 112–117, 119, 124, 129–132 Minority peoples, 9 Mishra, Vijay, 7, 11, 12, 14, 16, 30, 34, 35, 54n3, 61, 71 Mosuleen, 124 Mother, 113, 120, 121, 128–132, 134n11 Motherland, 114–116 Mourning, 1–19, 33–35, 50, 62–64, 66–83, 163–168 Mourning memoir, 67, 73, 75 Mubarak, Sidi, 38–40, 55n8 Mukta, Parita, 92–95, 97, 99, 100, 102–107 Multidirectional memory, 120, 125 Muslin, 124 Mutiny, 149, 151, 152, 154 Myth, 6 Mzuri, Musa, 38, 40

 INDEX 

N Naidoo, Indres, 163, 166–175, 185 Nairobi, 91, 93, 94, 98, 99, 103–105, 108n4 Nation-state, 113, 114, 116, 117, 126, 132, 133n1 Nazareth, Peter, 52, 53, 57n14 Négritude, 28–33, 36, 41, 45, 50, 54n3, 113–116, 131 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 166 Nostalgia, 163–165, 169, 186n5 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 29, 115 Nyerere, Julius, 49 O Ondaatje, Michael, 60–84 Optimism, 141–156 Orientalist, 35–38, 40, 56n13 Origin(s), 117, 120, 126 Orthodox, 16 P Paisley, 120–122, 124, 134n9 Pan African Congress (PAC), 171, 172 Pandemic, 17, 147, 155, 156 Pashmina, 120 Patel, Shailja, 112–133 Patriarchy, 96, 99 Perennial, 91–107 Performance, 5, 6, 11–17, 117–120, 129, 130, 132, 134n7, 134n9 Photography/photographs/photos, 74, 85n13, 176–179, 181, 183, 185 Pioneer, 91, 100 Political agenda, 142, 152 Political subject, 166 Postcolonial, 1–4, 8, 10, 15, 17 Poverty, 163, 167

201

Power, 7–9, 11, 112, 113, 120 Prison guards, 170, 174 Prison/prison narratives, 163, 164, 166, 168–171, 174, 175 Prodigal son, 64, 68–69, 73, 75–81, 83, 86n17 Pure/purity, 95, 96 Q Quest, 63, 69, 75, 77 R Race, 99, 102, 112 Railway, 91, 93, 94 The Rape of Sita, 149, 157n8 Rebellion, 147–149, 151, 154, 157n6 Redemption, 64, 66–82 Religion, 10 Remembrance, 33, 50 Resilience, 1–19, 78–80, 83, 91–107, 117, 126–129, 132, 134n10, 163, 168–175, 185 Resistance, 1–19, 169, 170, 174, 177, 185, 187n17 Responsibility, 53, 63, 75, 77, 82 Return, 118 Return journey, 60, 64, 73 Rhizomatic network, 145 Rhizomatic/rhizome, 33, 45, 117, 119, 133, 133n4 Rhizome, 15, 91, 107 Ritual, 64, 67, 69, 75, 80 Robben Island, 168, 169, 172–174, 185 Rootedness, 50, 51, 113–115, 126, 133n1 Root(s), 15, 16, 18, 91, 92, 95, 103, 107, 114, 117–131, 133n4, 162, 185 Rothberg, Michael, 120, 125

202 

INDEX

Rules, 169, 172 Ruling class, 148 Rumour, 62, 69–73, 77 Running in the Family, 60–84 S Sachs, Albie, 169–171 Said, Edward W., 36, 116 Saris, 16, 17, 113, 116, 117, 119–121, 124–126, 129–133, 134n7, 181, 182 Scotland, 164 Selfhood, 2 self, 1, 6, 13, 15 Seychelles, 144, 154 Shadow Book, 118, 119, 122, 127, 129, 130, 134n7 Shards of Memory, 92, 93 Ship, 130–133 Sigiriya, 78, 80 Sinfulness, 64 Sinhalese handwriting, 78 Sisulu, Walter, 181 Slave caravan route, 41, 45 Slavery, 30, 42–45, 47, 54n3 Slave trade, 30, 39, 41, 43, 45 Smuts, Jan, 147–149, 157n7 Solidarity, 170, 171, 173, 181 Son, 60–84 South African Indian Congress, 181 South African Indian Organisation, 181 South Africa/South Africans, 142–148, 157n6, 161–185 South Asian diaspora, 162 Space/spatial, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 12, 14, 17 Speke, John, 36–38, 40, 41, 55n6 Sri Lanka, 60–62, 65, 69, 70, 72, 77, 79–81, 83, 84n2, 85n14 Stability, 148

Stanley, Henry Morton, 38, 40 Stigma, 99, 104, 107n1 Storyteller, 141–144 Struggle narratives, 165, 170 Survival, 63, 66–82, 84n5, 91–107 Survival strategies, 9 survivor, 16 Swahili, 40, 41, 43, 48 Synchronic, 121 T Talk back, 37 Tamil, 163, 166 Territorialized, 114, 118 Thalassology, 3 Thanikama, 76 There is a Tide, 149, 150, 153 Tippu Tip, 35, 38, 41–43 Topan, Tharia, 38, 39, 55n8 Traders, 161, 181 Tradition, 91–93, 95–100 Transcultural, 119, 124 Transhistorical, 119, 124 Transnational, 116, 117, 119, 124–126, 131, 132, 135n13 Transoceanic, 6, 7, 14, 17, 19 Trauma/traumatic, 1–19, 30, 31, 33–53, 54n3, 60–84, 115, 120, 125, 127, 131 Travel writings, 27–57 Trope of return, 29, 30 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 183 U Ujiji, 33, 41, 42 Unassimilated experience, 66 Un-corporeal/un-corporeality, 112 Unnatural beginning, 62, 63

 INDEX 

V Vassanji, M.G., 27–57 Violence, 121, 124, 125, 130 Visual material, 176, 185 Voyage, 115, 116 W Water as resource, 153, 154 Weil, Simone, 113, 114, 126 What Came out of the Suitcase, 119, 120, 134n7 When Hope and History Rhyme, 163, 175–185 Whiteness, 112, 113 Widow/widowhood, 99, 100 Witwatersrand, University, 143 Wits, 150

203

Women’s autobiographies, 1 female autobiographies, 1 Working-class, 141, 154, 156n2 Working-through, 66, 67, 73 Writer, 63, 64, 68, 69, 72, 73, 75–79, 82, 83 X Xhosa, 143, 147, 155 Y Young, Robert C., 39, 47 Z Zanzibari revolution, 45–47, 55n11, 56n12, 56n11