M G Vassanji Books In Order

The Gunny Sack

Memory, Ji Bai would say, is this old sack here, this poor dear that nobody has any use for any more. As the novel begins, Salim Juma, in exile from Tanzania, opens up a gunny sack bequeathed to him by a beloved great aunt. Inside it he discovers the past his own family’s history and the story of the Asian experience in East Africa. Its relics and artefacts bring with them the lives of Salim s Indian great grandfather, Dhanji Govindji, his extensive family, and all their loves and betrayals. Dhanji Govindji arrives in Matamu from Zanzibar, Porbander, and ultimately Junapur and has a son with an African slave named Bibi Taratibu. Later, growing in prosperity, he marries Fatima, the woman who will bear his other children. But when his half African son Husein disappears, Dhanji Govindji pays out his fortune in trying to find him again. As the tentacles of the First World War reach into Africa, with the local German colonists fighting British invaders, he spends more and more time searching. One morning he is suddenly murdered: he had spent not just his own money but embezzled that of others to finance the quest for his lost son. Well, listen, son of Juma, you listen to me and I shall give you your father Juma and his father Husein and his father Part II of the novel is named for Kulsum, who marries Juma, Husein s son; she is the mother of the narrator, Salim. We learn of Juma s childhood as a second class member of his stepmother s family after his mother, Moti, dies. After his wedding to Kulsum there is a long wait in the unloving bosom of his stepfamily for their first child, Begum. It is the 1950s, and whispers are beginning of the Mau Mau rebellion. Among the stories tumbling from The Gunny Sack comes the tailor Edward bin Hadith s story of the naming of Dar es Salaam, the city Kulsum moves to with her children after her husband s death. And gradually her son takes over the telling, recalling his own childhood. His life guides the narrative from here on. He remembers his mother s store and neighbours intrigues, the beauty of his pristine English teacher at primary school, cricket matches, and attempts to commune with the ghost of his father. It is a vibrantly described, deeply felt childhood. The nation, meanwhile, is racked by political tensions on its road to independence, which comes about as Salim Juma reaches adolescence. With the surge in racial tension and nationalist rioting, several members of his close knit community leave the country for England, America, and Canada.I see this comedy now as an attempt to foil the workings of fate: how else to explain, what else to call, the irrevocable relentless chain of events that unfolded The title of Part III, Amina, is the name of Salim s great unfulfilled love, and will also be the name of his daughter. He meets the first Amina while doing his National Service at Camp Uhuru, a place he feels he has been sent to in error. Amina is African, and their relationship inevitably causes his family anxiety, until the increasingly militant Amina leaves for New York. Salim becomes a teacher at his old school, and marries, but keeps a place for Amina in his heart. When she returns and is arrested by the more and more repressive government, Salim is hurriedly exiled abroad. He leaves his wife and daughter with the promise that he will send for them, knowing that he will not. The novel ends with Salim alone, the last memories coming out of The Gunny Sack, hoping that he will be his family s last runaway.

No New Land

Nurdin Lalani and his family, Asian immigrants from Africa, have come to the Toronto suburb of Don Mills only to find that the old world and its values pursue them. A genial orderly at a downtown hospital, he has been accused of sexually assaulting a girl. Although he is innocent, traditional propriety prompts him to question the purity of his own thoughts. Ultimately, his friendship with the enlightened Sushila offers him an alluring freedom from a past that haunts him, a marriage that has become routine, and from the trials of coping with teenage children. Introducing us to a cast of vividly drawn characters within this immigrant community, Vassanji is a keen observer of lives caught between one world and another.

The Book of Secrets

In 1988, a retired schoolteacher named Pius Fernandes receives an old diary found in the back room of an East African shop. Written in 1913 by a British colonial administrator, the diary captivates Fernandes, who begins to research the coded history he encounters in its terse, laconic entries. What he uncovers is a story of forbidden liaisons and simmering vengeances, family secrets and cultural exiles a story that leads him on an investigative journey through his own past and Africa’s.

Amriika

Amriika is a novel of betrayal, disillusionment, and discovery set in America during three highly charged decades in the nation’s history. In the late sixties, Ramji, a student from Dar es Salaam, East Africa, arrives in an America far different from the one he dreamed about, one caught up in anti war demonstrations, revolutionary lifestyles, and spiritual quests. As Ramji finds himself pulled by the tumultuous currents of those troubled times, he is swept up in events whose consequences will haunt him for years to come. Decades later in a changed America, having recently left a marriage and a suburban existence, an older Ramji, passionately in love, finds himself drawn into a set of circumstances which hold terrifying reminders of the past and its unanswered questions.

The In-between World of Vikram Lall

So begins Moyez Vassanji’s award winning epic, The In Between World of Vikram Lall. Sweeping in scope, both historically and geographically, Vassanji weaves a rich tapestry of vivid characters, both real and imagined, in a Kenya poised between colonialism and independence. Vikram Lall, like his adopted country, inhabits an ‘in between world’: between the pull of his ancestral home in India and the Kenya he loves passionately; between his tragic past in Africa and an unclear future in Canada; between escape from political terror and a seemingly inevitable return home…
a return that may cost him dearly. A master storyteller, Vassanji intertwines the political and the personal the rise of the Mau Mau in the last days of imperialism looms large over a plot centring on two love stories and a deep friendship. The result is a sumptuous novel that brilliantly explores the tyranny of history and memory, and questions the individual’s role and responsibility in lawless times.

The Assassin’s Song

M.G. Vassanji’s magnificent new novel provides further proof of his unique, wide ranging and profound genius. The Assassin s Song is a shining study of the conflict between ancient loyalties and modern desires, a conflict that creates turmoil the world over and it is at once an intimate portrait of one man s painful struggle to hold the earthly and the spiritual in balance.

In The Assassin s Song, Karsan Dargawalla tells the story of the medieval Sufi shrine of Pirbaag, and his betrayal of its legacy. But Karsan s conflicted attempt to settle accounts quickly blossoms into a layered tale that spans centuries: from the mysterious Nur Fazal s spiritual journeys through thirteenth century India, to his shrine s eventual destruction in the horrifying ‘riots’ of 2002.

From the age of eleven, Karsan has been told that one day he will succeed his father as guardian of the Shrine of the Wanderer: as the highest spiritual authority in their region, he will be God s representative to the multitudes who come to the shrine for penance and worship. But Karsan s longings are simpler: to play cricket with his friends, to discover more of the exciting world he reads about in the newspapers his friend Raja Singh, a truck driver, brings him from all over India.

Half on a whim, Karsan applies to study at Harvard, but when he is unexpectedly offered a scholarship there he must try to meld his family s wishes with his own yearnings. Two years immersed in the intellectual and sexual ferment of America splits him further, until finally Karsan abdicates his successorship to the eight hundred year old throne.

But even as Karsan succeeds in his ‘ordinary’ life marrying and having a son, becoming a professor in suburban British Columbia his heritage haunts him in unexpected ways. And after tragedy strikes, both in Canada and Pirbaag, he is drawn back across thirty years of silence and separation to discover what, if anything, is left for him in India.

Both sweeping and intimate, The Assassin s Song is a great novel in the grandest sense: a book that captures the intricate complexities of the individual conscience even as it grippingly portrays entire civilizations in tumult.

Uhuru Street

A collection of stories set in the Asian community of Dar es Salaam, depicting the changes in Uhuru Street from the sheltered innocence of colonial rule in the 1950s to the shattered world of the 1980s. The author received the 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize for his novel ‘The Gunny Sack’.

When She Was Queen

My father lost my mother one evening in a final round of gambling at the poker table, writes the narrator of When She Was Queen, the title story of a new collection by bestselling novelist and two time winner of the Giller Prize, M.G. Vassanji. That fateful evening in Kenya becomes the obsessive and dark centre of the young man’s existence and leads him, years later in Toronto, to unearth an even darker family secret. In The Girl With The Bicycle, a man witnesses a woman from his hometown of Dar es Salaam spit at a corpse as it lies in state at a Toronto mosque. As he struggles to fathom her strange behaviour, he finds himself prey to memories and images from the past and to perilous yearnings that could jeopardize his comfortable, middle aged life. Still reeling from the impact of his wife s betrayal, a man decides to stop in on an old college friend in Elvis, Raja. But he soon realizes that it s not always wise to visit the past as he finds himself trapped in a most curious household, where Elvis Presley has replaced the traditional Hindu gods. The other stories in the collection also feature exceptional lives transplanted. A young man returns to his roots in India, hoping to find his uncle and, perhaps, a bride. Instead, he becomes a reluctant guru to the residents of his ancestral village. A mukhi must choose between granting the final sacrilegious wish of a dying man and abiding by religious custom in a community that considers him a representative of God. A woman is torn between the voice of her dead husband a cold and grim natured atheist and her new, kind and loving husband whose faith nevertheless places constraints on her as a woman. On Halloween night, a scientist lays bare his horrifying plan to seek vengeance on the man who thwarted his career. Set variously in Kenya, Canada, India, Pakistan, and the American Midwest, these poignant and evocative stories portray migrants negotiating the in between worlds of east and west, past and present, secular and religious. Richly detailed and full of vivid characters, the stories are worlds unto themselves, just as a dusty African street full of bustling shops is a world, and so is the small matrix of lives enclosed by an intimate Toronto neighbourhood. It is the smells and sentiments and small gestures that constitute life, and of these Vassanji is a master. Vassanji s seventh book and his second collection of short stories, When She Was Queen was shortlisted for the 2006 Toronto Book Award. The jury said: ‘Vassanji’s Naipaulian language is like a sharp short knife that cuts through the superficial and gets to the heart and soul of the narrative.

A Meeting of Streams

At no time in history has there been such a massive movement across geographical, political, and cultural barriers as the one we are witnessing in our own time. The South Asian presence in Canada and the West is a result of this movement. It originates predominately from the countries of South Asia India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka and those of the Caribbean and East and South Africa. The essays and articles in this volume comprise a concerted and many sided look at the literature of this group. Several of them are also informative surveys of the important branches of this literature. Altogether they provide the contexts for appreciating it, and understanding it as an esthetic, social, and cultural phenomenon. At the same time they address several fundamental issues, regarding the relationship of this literature both to traditional South Asian and Third World and to mainstream Canada and North America languages, literatures, and themes. They probe the past, appraise the present, and throw a glance at the future.

A Place Within

A Globe and Mail Best Book

It would take many lifetimes, it was said to me during my first visit, to see all of India. The desperation must have shown on my face to absorb and digest all I possibly could. This was not something I had articulated or resolved; and yet I recall an anxiety as I travelled the length and breadth of the country, senses raw to every new experience, that even in the distraction of a blink I might miss something profoundly significant.

I was not born in India, nor were my parents; that might explain much in my expectation of that visit. Yet how many people go to the homeland of their grandparents with such a heartload of expectation and momentousness; such a desire to find themselves in everything they see? Is it only India that clings thus, to those who ve forsaken it; is this why Indians in a foreign land seem always so desperate to seek each other out? What was India to me?

The inimitable M.G. Vassanji turns his eye to India, the homeland of his ancestors, in this powerfully moving tale of family and country. Part travelogue, part history, A Place Within is M.G. Vassanji’s intelligent and beautifully written journey to explore where he belongs.