Uma Parameswaran
Dispelling the Spells of Memory: Another Approach to Reading our Yesterdays
Since I am both a writer and a critic, bear with me if I wear both hats, alternately and sometimes concurrently. The title of my talk addresses what we need to do as writers and critics. I see neocolonialism on one hand, and the increasing prominence of diasporic communities on the other, as the new realities of the contemporary era. One would think they are antipodal forces, but there is a danger that they may conflate unless there is constant dialogic friction between the forces. Today I hope to focus on diasporic realities, to consider the unique notions of history and identity arising among diasporic populations, and to think aloud on possible ways of reading our yesterdays.
I do not plan to give you a linear, logical exposition on a specific thesis substantiated by secondary sources and textual quotations; I leave that for the enthusiastic and conscientious young scholars who are presenting carefully prepared papers at this conference. I merely hope to lead you through a series of tenuously connected thoughts on my present area of research, which is in the literature of the Indian Diaspora. More specifically, I am interested in what I see as a reticence among Canadian writers of the Indian diaspora to deal directly in their works with the Canadian locations in which they live. Because of the intersections of Caribbean Canadian literature with SACLIT, for the sake of comparison I have used some literary and cultural examples from the Caribbean diaspora in Canada. It is my hope that as each of us looks into the writings and experiences of our own ethnocentric communities, we’ll be able to trace commonalities that would help formulation of diaspora theory.
Exile, Memory, and Desire are concepts which have been dealt with in different ways in each era—the colonial, the Postcolonial and the present that I see as past the Postcolonial age and call the Diaspora age. In the decades before 1950, for instance, for Colonial writers in English, exile was a matter of having left Britain, and desire was directed towards such goals as bearing the white man’s burden and making sure the sun never set on the British Empire. But with the end of Empire came a series of shifts.
Each of the last four decades has formed a distinctive approach to what we now call Postcolonial literatures; each has re-named this body of literature in line with its own new reading strategies. The sixties and seventies were the beginnings, when we saw the recognition granted to writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Wilson Harris, Witi Ihimaera, Patrick White, Raja Rao and R.K.Narayan, to name a few. Here were people from the erstwhile Commonwealth whose writings blew us away because as readers we were given entry into unfamiliar cultures and traditions. Though Salman Rushdie, in Imaginary Homelands, satirizes the emergence of Commonwealth Literature as an academic ploy (the essay refers to the Gothenberg Conference of 1982, where I first saw him) I think the term served the cause at least as well as its later names such as ‘New Literatures in English’ and ‘World Literature in English,’ and now ‘Postcolonial Literatures.’
As readers in the eighties, due to new approaches in critical theory we became more aware of the nature of Orientalist discourse. We re-read earlier classics in light of the presence in them of what Mary Louise Pratt calls the Imperial Eye or Imperial Gaze, a technique of power that denigrated and objectified the colonized by ‘othering’ them; we became aware of what Edward Said and Frantz Fanon expounded about the way Orientalism and Colonialism brainwashed whole generations of English-educated members of colonized countries into denigrating their own cultural heritages. The re-reading process started in this decade saw the imprint of colonialism not only on colonial and Commonwealth Literature but also in works of the traditional canon, such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest , Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe , Melville’s Moby Dick, Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and so on. For example, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse see Jane Eyre as donning the garb of helplessness in order to be powerful; they identify the character of Jane Eyre as a prototype of the missionaries who wielded great power through appearing to be totally powerless. By the end of the 1980s, the term Postcolonial Studies had come to stay.
In the nineties, we got acquainted with the concept of hybridity in such texts as Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest in 1989, Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory and Partha Chatterji’s The Nation and its Fragments in 1992, and Homi K. Bhabha’s Location of Culture in 1994. Viswanathan makes an intriguing point: using the Gramscian notion of hegemony, she demonstrates that cultural domination "works by consent, and can, and often does precede conquest by force." Bhabha, on the other hand, sees both colonizer and colonized undergoing a splitting of their identity positions in Lacanian terms.
I was never happy about the term ‘postcolonial literature’ because, as I have argued elsewhere, it can often give more weight to colonial power than is warranted. Moreover, postcolonialism soon became a scholarly hold-all into which a great many concepts got thrown in, the assumption being that world literature could be seen through a common lens because the whole world in one form or another had been influenced by the commercial and territorial takeovers of European colonialism. While this outlook has a core of truth, it certainly is not the whole truth. It perpetuates the privileging of the west by taking western paradigms as the yardstick, the west as the normative base: in short, all it does is continue the oppressions of western hegemonic orders.
So it was good to hear the counter-discursive arguments forwarded in the mid- nineties by such critics as Abdul JanMohamed and Harish Trivedi. In this new decade, however, we need to formulate new paradigms for where we are at: a post-postcolonial age where the two new realities, I repeat, are neo-colonialism and diasporic movement of people across the world.
A common anguish and outrage expressed in the works of diasporic writers is against the loss of mothertongue that colonists impose on the colonized. Ngugi w’a Thiongo of Kenya and R. Parthasarathy of India turned away from English and started writing in their mother tongue. For others, it was not as easy. Derek Walcott, of the Caribbean, in his poem "A Far Cry from Africa" has his divided self cry out:
I who am poisoned by the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
And Kamala Das, of India, responding to those who say she should write in her mother tongue says:
Leave me alone...
The language I speak becomes mine...
Half English, half Indian, funny perhaps,
but it is honest...
Before I take up the Indian diaspora, I would like to start with a poem that exemplifies for me the interconnections between Exile, Memory and Desire in the context of many diasporas. The handout you have is the first two pages of a four-page poem by Marlene Nourbese Philip, whom I consider an exemplar of a diasporic writer who says what can and should be said about exile, memory and linguistic desire; as a writer, I give priority to linguistic desire and so have chosen this poem. Nourbese Philip was born African-Caribbean and is now one of the most forceful of Canadian poets—if you haven’t done so already, I would urge you to read her A Genealogy of Resistance and Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, both of which are volumes of essays interleaved with poems.
Nourbese Philip uses her father tongue, the language of oppression, to put the oppressors in place and then to break free. Philip’s counter-discursive strategy uses both words and the page; the way I read this poem is that Exile is flanked by Memory and Desire. The legacy of the colonists is that they very effectively imposed on the colonized an exile from their mother tongue. Exile is thus centre-stage. But to the left, and subverting the standard layout of the page is Memory in the image of the mother cat licking its newborn: note that she licks her kitten "clean of the creamy white substance covering the body." In Kristevan terms, when the child moves from the Symbolic to the Imaginary, the white cream of identity will accrete again, but the fact remains that the original stamp of the father was at one point cleaned out.
In exile, the movement of the tongue is varied to denote loss: "I have no mother/tongue/no mother to tongue/no tongue to mother/tongue/me." The open-ended "tongue/me" is an imperative to action, an imperative which is continued on the next page where the vertical lines of Memory in summary say that the mother then put her fingers into her child’s mouth and blew "her words, her mother’s words, those of her mother’s mother, and all their mothers before--into her daughter’s mouth."
My reading of the third column is that the blank white under ‘Edict I’ is where Nourbese Philip has written a subversive call to action which she herself carries out—namely, a clarion call to others to come together and foment rebellion and revolution. The irony lies in that this revolution will be engineered through the very language of the masters. Philip thus gives a twist to Audre Lorde’s assertion that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
Not much has been written on the characteristics of the Indian diaspora. Unlike those who have arrived in North America from central Europe and South America, Indians have not come as refugees fleeing from an oppressive regime; unlike those who have come from Africa or the Caribbean, Indians do not come with the widely-shared cultural memory of slavery and forced exile from their original mothertongue which we see in the poetry of Nourbese Philip. The sense of exile, so strong a component of the Jewish diaspora, means something else entirely to the way I see my diasporic experience, in which I have felt a sense of both exile and of home within Canada.
Any literary or sociological theory of Diaspora must consider the significance of borders. My own positioning as a member of a diaspora is fraught with a variety of tensions, and I know I am not alone in this. People who move away from their native countries not only occupy but also bequeath to subsequent generations a liminality, an uneasy pull between two cultures. I call this pull Trishanku’s curse, after the mortal king in Hindu lore who was disowned by both heaven and earth, and, as a face-saving device, was given his own constellation. Added to that tension is a problem peculiar to diasporas in Canada: as a Canadian, I believe in borders but as a diaspora member I can see that strength lies in the erasure of borders.
As a Canadian I know I am part of the oppressor group. I get distraught at the presence and pace of global neocolonialism, by the fact that the rest of the world is being consumerized by the Coca Cola-McDonald’s empire, and enslaved by multinational conglomerates seeking to acquire patents and monopolies for the natural fauna and flora of the world. This is imperial history all over again: cotton being taken from India, made into cloth in the mills of England and sold back to India.
At the same time, as a Canadian, I also feel a victim. I believe in borders because I feel strongly about the threat to Canadian sovereignty by the United States’ acquisition of Canada’s industries, cultural properties and natural resources. I don’t suppose you, my American neighbors, are even aware of the one-way movement of lumber and wheat across the border that is chomping away at our Canadian sovereignty, or of how Canada’s cultural industries are being bulldozed by American super-bookstores and television stations. I get angry at the way the history of my native land is repeating itself in my new homeland, with a foreign power taking over our resources and browbeating us at every turn, be it about fishing waters off the west coast, or grain control in the prairies, or the diversion of water potentially harmful to our waterways from Devil’s Lake, North Dakota to Manitoba.
But as a literary member of the Indian diaspora, I actually feel closer to my fellow Indians south of the border than to fellow Canadians. The internet has opened up a whole new world of links to men and women born in India, people who have occupied the same geographical, historical, literary, linguistic, social and political spaces that I did growing up in India. I have been saying for years that Salman Rushdie’s most appreciative readers are the ones he seems to scorn: the English-educated people of India, many of whom are now spread all over the world but connected by computers.
Publishers and editors too have joined in this realization of the strong bonds between members of diasporas. The anthologies that erase borders speak not only to a larger market but are also useful in the formulation of critical parameters. For example, Cyril Dabydeen’s second edition of Another Way to Dance contains poems by writers on both sides of the border, the binding element being that all the poets are non-white. The two Her Mother’s Ashes anthologies of short stories, likewise, span the continent, the binding elements being that all the writers are women and of South Asian descent. Contours of the Heart is another such anthology. Even more pertinent to the critical charting of diasporic writing are volumes such as Between the Lines, edited by Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudev, and Living in America, edited by Roshni Rustomji-Kerns.
William Safran contends that "diaspora consciousness is an intellectualization of an existential condition," a sad condition that is ameliorated by an imaginary homeland to which one hopes one will some day return (87). Though this statement might apply accurately to the earlier Indian diaspora in the Caribbean so eloquently delineated in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, I do not see it as applicable to the modern Indian diaspora. Instead, I make a slight distinction of direction between Diaspora consciousness and Diaspora experience. Diaspora consciousness is a positive and celebratory linking across political borders, of people who are of the same family. A.K. Ramanujan has a half jocular poem that is half profound; titled "Love Poem for a Wife," it begins:
Really what keeps us apart
at the end of years is unshared
childhood.
This is truly a metaphor for the divided self of an immigrant who is a member of a distinct diaspora. Wedded though we are to the new homeland, our deepest bonds are often with our diaspora family.
The danger of this literary bonding is as deep as social bonding is in everyday life—namely, that a diaspora could end up ghettoizing itself, as is happening in bigger centres of North America where one can have all the social and emotional networking one needs without going outside one’s own ethnocentric community. In "New Lamps for Old," Vijay Mishra says that diasporic cultural identity is "by its very nature predicated upon the inevitable mixing of castes and peoples." While I would welcome that mixing, I do not see it happening. I have myself seen an increasing trend towards self-ghettoization over my last thirty years in Canada: from the initial access to spice stores and restaurants to sate culinary hungers, to live music and dance concerts that make western ballet and orchestra needless, and now the easy access to videos from one’s original homeland which has accelerated the insularization of Indo-Canadians in our larger cities.
Such self-ghettoization is unhealthy, in life and in literary studies. I see ghettoization as a pothole that just might throw the much vaunted Canadian policy of multiculturalism off the road. Ghettoization comes from two sources—from within and from without the diasporic community. Once the numbers of any particular ethnic group increase, there seems to be a bigger move towards self-ghettoization. This phenomenon has to be considered in any formulation of diaspora theory. Both exile and home are here, within the new homeland.
When I first started working on this talk about counter-discursive strategies of understanding diasporic experience, I chanted to myself the three theme words of the conference like a mantra—Exile, Memory, Desire. I tried to visualize something that would get me started on what I wanted to say today. What I first saw was the inside of a composite cathedral and temple: a large hall with carved pillars of deities holding up Gothic arches, stretching symmetrically in a pattern of visionary splendor, with the altar in the far end of the distant regress of pillars. And on either side of me and above were stained glass windows brilliantly lit against the sky.
And I knew I was in the corridor of time, standing between the past and the future. I made a full turn, thinking I would get a further clue as to the topography of the space and as to which direction lay desire. But, as Eliot says in "Burnt Norton," a cloud passed and the lotos that had risen quietly quietly, disappeared. I then walked out of the pillared hall with its ribbed vaults and flying buttresses and frescoes of dancing deities. Once outside, I knew where I was. I was in exile.
Stained glass windows—that image has always had a spell on me. Brilliant and magical when seen against the light, they are dark, jagged lines of dull opaque glass when seen from outside. Inside looking out; outside looking in because only from the inside can one enjoy the stained glass; inside looking at the altar; inside looking at the brilliant stained glass windows; outside wanting to get in, outside not wanting to get in. All the permutations and combinations of memory, exile and desire, past and future. But, most importantly, even from the outside, going away altogether was out of the question, because that would be perpetual exile.
Later, I thought about the vision to see how it could be developed. What was the icon at the altar? Maybe it was Memory for some and Desire for acceptance for others; or (as many contemporary scholars would argue) Memory itself could be the Desire. In this context, the diasporic longing for the homeland becomes both the altar and the trajectory of being. Stuart Hall says in "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" that the bitter racial memories of a culture’s colonial past begin to be deployed productively only when the ruptures and discontinuities of the experience of slavery and migration are once more set in place (394). Nourbese Philip sets this in place in her works, especially in A Genealogy of Resistance and in Livingstone. This reference to bitter racial memories needs to be changed somewhat for the more recent wave of the Indian Diaspora.
Indian diasporic literature, then, differs from other North American diasporas in its retrieval and recording of Exile. Wilson Harris says that if one lives in a country without history, one has to discover it or invent it, for Memory is the cornerstone of identity. Harris, in fact, has carried out his self-imposed mandate in his Palace of the Peacock. Authors of other diasporas have done this work of retrieval and invention with power and poignancy: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for instance, is a sustained lyric of excruciating pain that discovers and records through stream of consciousness the memory of exile and slavery. But there is no such epic in miniature in the Indian diaspora. The writings of such authors as Moyez Vassanji, Rohinton Mistry, and Rienzi Crusz do not display the sharp pangs of separation one sees in the writings of Canadians of African origin. Mistry in Tales of Firozsha Baag and Vassanji in Uhuru Street sensitively record their past but there is no anguish of exile. On the other hand, in Creation Fire, an anthology of Caribbean women’s poetry, there are sixteen poems by twelve writers in the section titled ‘Exile.’ In the life-writings included in Hazelle Palmer’s . . . but where are you really from, one feels the throbbing pulse of pain.
For the literature of exile among the larger Indian diaspora, one needs to go to South Africa, East Africa, the Caribbean and Fiji. I know a little bit about the Caribbean and Fiji but am quite unfamiliar with the others. The sense of exile in the Indian diaspora of Fiji is well documented in Subramani’s Indo-Fijian Experience and Vijay Mishra’s Rama’s Banishment. Elsewhere, Mishra has written extensively on the Indian diaspora and especially the double displacement of those who went as indentured labourers to the Caribbean and Fiji. Also, Ramabai Espinet and Frank Birbalsingh have edited anthologies that record Indo-Caribbeans’ exile in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Indo-Canadians, especially of the second wave, romanticize the past, tending to see no evil and brooking no negative views about their native country. Given this sociologically-proven observation, one is led to wonder why better-known writers of the Diaspora such as Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee, and Anita Desai tend to foreground some of the most negative images of India. These authors are like Canadian writers of Caribbean-Indian origins such as Neil Bissondath, the short-lived Harry Sonny Ladoo, and the new writer Rabindranath Maharaj, all of whom tend to have bitter memories, not of the colonial masters but of their native cultures. I find this dissonance between diasporic feelings as held in real life and as delineated in diaspora fiction very curious. Is it that writers are usually loners and so position themselves outside their ethnic communities? Or is it that they write what readers outside of diasporic communities wish to hear? Or is it that the establishment imposes its slants on what comes into the market? Nourbese Philip, for her part, argues that the Canadian media colludes with establishmentarian moghuls in "acting as handmaiden to the elites of the dominant culture, and airing an apparent range of opinion" (Showing Grit 61).
Rather than having only memory OR desire as icon, I then thought of the cathedral having two altars, with Memory on one side and Desire on the other. The cathedral, then, is like Coleridge’s pleasure dome in Kubla Khan, and we must stand "where was heard the mingled measure of the fountain and cave."
I spoke about this metaphor of stained glass windows to two colleagues. Neither agreed with what I had in mind, but what they said is worth sharing. One cited Kristeva to say that memory and desire cannot be differentiated; they both occupy the same space and devolve to the centre; but the centre is located in a sense of exile, in a place that never was, and hence the perpetual interplay, the endless torment. The second colleague said that the cathedral had lost its privilege of centrality in pluralistic Canada, and that each ethnic community had built its own figurative churches and temples and mosques, thus preempting the need to enter the cathedral.
I disagree with both. The cathedral is Canada and I think we, racial minorities, just have to make room for ourselves within that space, and not on the peripheries, no matter how spacious and independent the alternative cultural space. The centre is not a space of exile, nor the original homeland that never was. The centre is here and now, the place, as Earle Birney says, on which we stand. What is needed, though, is that we stand facing the windows of Desire, with Memory energizing us from behind. There will always be an interplay of tensions, but it will be empowering and not crippling as it would be were we to face any of the other ways.
And I think we are on our way to claiming that space within the cathedral. Two months ago, India-born Ujjal Dosanjh, the new Premier of the Canadian Province of British Columbia, took the oath of office to the sounds of Punjabi drums and distribution of Indian sweetmeats. I think the metaphors that I have used in my cycle of poems—of Trishanku suspended between the two worlds who will one day see and make everyone else see Ganga in the Assiniboine—will become reality. One day, soon, the dancing deities of the pillars in Hindu temples will be part of the cathedral.
In an unpublished essay titled "Towards an East-West Aesthetics," Shehla Burney comes close to what I am searching for. She says:
An East-West aesthetics is a Brechtian cultural practice, a deliberate discursive strategy, that uses the East and the West as equal, simultaneous, and important referents of "our" culture, thereby undercutting the hegemony of Eurocentric, ethnocentric, and dominantly Western literary discourse that creates marginalization and exclusion of the ‘other.’ It is a practice where both East and West work deconstructively as what Derrida calls the ‘supplement of knowledge’ as ‘brisure’ or ‘joining,’ cut and paste . . . .
I look forward to the time when our writers engage in this Brechtian cultural practice. Though I celebrate the browning of Canadian politics, in literature, the writers of the Indian diaspora in Canada have not yet fully found their diasporic voice. Writers, of course, have the freedom to choose their subjects, but as a diaspora reader, I have my opinions on what I would like writers and critics to do.
We often think of minority literatures as writings in opposition to mainstream writings; however, in being less "oppositional," and more devoted to claiming space within larger national discourses, diasporic literatures can perform cultural work that is actually more subversive to hegemonic ideologies. As Nalini Natarajan says in the introduction to her Writers of the Indian Diaspora, "the transnational potential of diasporic populations can go a long way toward interrupting the monologic discourses of contemporary nation states" (xix). It is thus more productive to see diasporic writings as works which enlarge national consciousness by introducing new elements both in style and content. Immigrant writings need not advocate assimilation; they can assert differences and move out of the insecurities that encourage protectionism.
How can writers dispel the spells of memory and how do we read our diasporic writers? The first question is, of course, should we dispel them? Not entirely, but I believe that both writers and critics of the Indian diaspora need to shift their focus from the original homeland to the present homeland. In our Creative Writing classes, we tell students to write about what they know best because one, that will evoke the authentic voice in themselves, and two, it is safe space.
As critics, we have to recognize that while writers are entitled to write on what they will, we should read between the lines of their content and intent, and see where the text fits in with the larger context of diasporic realities. If we note that most of our diasporic writers are still occupying that safe space of their original homelands, we need to figure out why this pattern persists. Are they afraid of writing about the place they are standing on? Or is it that they are not really standing here but back there? Or is it because they have realized it is more marketable to stand there and not here? Is it because the world around us dictates the marketability of our writings in the eyes of publishers, establishment, and readers? Do we write what readers want to hear? Or rather, is it that only those who write what the establishment wants readers to hear get published? Is it that writers too are conscious of these pressures and so choose to write in a safe space where they can narrate, satirize, and occasionally celebrate the obsessions of their original homeland?
Let me take two specific examples of writers who wrote about their adopted homeland. The theatre of protest, as I call it, is strong in SACLIT. Playwrights such as Rana Bose, Rahul Varma and Sadhu Binning write about life in Canada. They are totally unrecognized. The second example concerns the novelists Kamala Markandaya and Moyez Vassanji.
Last year while I was working on a study of Kamala Markandaya’s novels, I had a profound insight about diasporic realities in the publishing world. Kamala Markandaya is an accomplished writer, with ten fine novels to her credit. She left India in 1948 and has lived in England ever since. Her first novel, Nectar in a Sieve, was published in 1954. Her first three novels were set wholly in India, while her fourth and sixth novels were set in both England and India. Her seventh novel, The Nowhere Man, published in 1972, was set in England, and dealt with the life of an immigrant who after thirty years in London suddenly awakens to the racism around him. This novel met with a conspiracy of silence. I believe that this deafening silence made her go back to the safe space of setting her subsequent novels in India.
Things have changed in England since her last novel, published in 1982. Racial minority writers like Hanif Kureishi who satirize social and political conditions are given space. One notes, though, that Salman Rushdie still feels most at home using the setting of the Indian subcontinent. In Canada, we have not yet reached that phase where we have fiction that is anchored here, not there. Moyez Vassanji’s No New Land, set in Toronto, like Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man quickly sank to oblivion. After that, Vassanji went back and set his next works, The Book of Secrets , and Uhuru Street, in his native East Africa.
I have three main points about reading our yesterdays: that is, how Diaspora writers and critics need to retrieve and record our diasporic history with a focus not on exile from the original country but on archival memories in the new country:
• One, that these writers need to introduce and establish archetypes and cultural allusions out of their own historical experiences, and make it part of the national literary culture.
• Two, that those who study a diaspora need to see where its members are located in other North American texts, and why they have been located there.
• Three, that critics need to educate themselves and others on how to read Canada in the writings of the Diaspora so that the memory and culture of each diaspora become part of the cathedral.
Let me briefly develop these three points with reference to the Indian diaspora before my time runs out.
As I have suggested, Indian diasporic writers have not done much to develop archetypes or establish cultural allusions. And it is not for lack of historical data. Two historical events that need to become the cornerstones of Indo-Canadian ethos are the Komagatamaru incident of 1914, and the Air India tragedy of June 1985. We have to write about these events, talk about them, cross-reference them at every turn until they become literary and cultural archetypes of the history in Canada.
The Komagatamaru was a ship carrying 376 passengers of whom most were potential immigrants from India with a handful who were returning to Cananda after a visit to India. It reached Vancouver harbour on the 23rd of May, 1914, but was not allowed to dock. Following a series of racist uprisings against the Brown Peril and Yellow Plague, as the inflows of Indians and Chinese were called, Wilfrid Laurier’s federal government and local British Columbia officials saw to it that the ship was sent back to India with its unwanted brown immigrants so that Canada could be kept white.
The second event is the crash of Emperor Kanishka, as the aircraft was called. On June 25, 1985, Air India flight 182 crashed off the coast of Ireland with 349 people on board, most of whom were Canadian citizens or landed immigrants. Then-Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s first reaction said it all as to how he and his government perceived Indo-Canadians’ place in Canadian society: he sent a message of condolence to Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on India’s great loss.
These two incidents should, I feel, become part of the blood-consciousness of Indo-Canadians and indeed of every Canadian, just as should other events such as the wartime internment of Japanese Canadians or the long-term discrimination suffered by Jewish Canadians.
In my effort to record what has been done to retrieve Indo-Canadian memory, I would like to mention several artists who have incorporated these incidents into their art. One is Srinivas Krishna of Toronto, who wrote, directed, and acted in a movie called Masala (1991), not to be confused with the American movie Mississippi Masala. The film’s protagonist is a young man whose family died in this air crash; the image of the crashing plane serves as a leitmotif in what is otherwise a hilarious and rather risqué satire on Indo-Canadian society. The second is a video by Leila Sujir of Calgary called Dreams of the Night Cleaners, an ambitious piece of work with several themes, including the American takeover of Canadian airlines, the contractual takeovers of janitorial services, and the history of Indian immigration to Canada’s west coast through the personal history of a Punjabi pilot as pieced together by his Caucasian wife and their daughter. This last theme is powerfully presented through clips from real newspaper headlines of the times. I have used this video in my classes, and the impact of the irrefutable evidence of those newspaper clips on the screen has always been an eye-opener to each group of students. Another film producer of significance is Charan Singh Gill, who made a documentary of the lives of farm-workers and other Indo-Canadians in British Columbia in the early 1980s. A more recent producer is Jayasri Majumdar Hart, whose documentary Roots in the Sand is about Punjabi immigrants to the west coast of the United States at the turn of the century who could not bring women from India but were allowed to marry Mexican women.
In literature, there are two books that retrieve and record Indo-Canadian history in an involved manner. Both are from and about the Canadian Province of British Columbia. The novel Maluka by S.S. Dhami, though published only in 1978, is set at the turn of the century—‘the last century,’ should I say, since we are in the year 2000? The second is a recent book of poems by Kuldip Gill: titled Dharma Rasa, the sequence of poems in this volume reconstructs a collage of memories that foreground poignant feelings of desire, both for the past from which the persona is exiled and the present that offers no respite, thus retrieving life as lived by Punjabis in British Columbia in the early decades of the twentieth century. One of her characters, Inderpal Singh, feels exiled in Canada, and draws nurture from memories of his honeymoon in distant Punjab, but memories only stir up desires that must subside for he must "walk alone from the mill with hemlock, cedar sawdust, pitch, slivers in my skin" (15).
Then there is the question of where the Indian diaspora is located in the writings of other Canadians. In Britain, racial minorities seem to be visible not only as writers but as characters in fiction, plays and television serials. Here in North America, except for Apu on the television program The Simpsons or Asok in the cartoon strip Dilbert, we are absent in the works of non-South Asian writers. The few times we appear we are stereotyped by the Imperial Eye. We are an erased group, and we need to figure out why. I had this discussion with my online group, which consists of remarkably well-read people. They gave me titles of fiction by non-Indians in which Indians have appeared as characters. I think there is much to be done in this context, and I would be glad to share my notes with anyone who is interested. Critics need to figure out why we are either erased or caricatured.
Theorizing on this, I can see several reasons. As I said earlier, in the Canadian context, at least part of this erasure is due to the controversial ongoing debate over Voice Appropriation. It has made people walk as though on glass, wary of treading on other people’s territory and becoming more jealous of their own territorial rights, be it ethnic roots, religion or sexual orientation.
But, the fact remains that Fiction is Voice Appropriation. The moment we create a character, even an autobiographical one, we are moving into another space and appropriating a voice, often different from our own even in such basics as gender, race, class, or sexual orientation. This voice appropriation can be called cross-cultural communication. All of us who interact with a text as writers or as readers inhabit a liminal world, between cultures. So, in some way or another, all of us are outside looking in. I make this point not as a futile semantic dissection but to show that diasporic writing is doubly liminal. Often Diaspora writers are outsiders looking in at the new culture, but they are also outsiders to the homeland, looking in at a past of a space that has changed in their absence. This is an aspect of Diaspora experience we would do well to consider when studying Diasporic writings.
Furthermore, diasporas sometimes make an impact in an ironic way in that they get erased and exploited at the same time. Langston Hughes says it most eloquently when he writes:
You’ve taken my blues and gone -
You sing ‘em on Broadway
...
And you fixed ‘em
so they don’t sound like me
....
You also took my spirituals and gone.
Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, treats this idea of borrowing in his usual extravagant way.
Finally, critics need to read Canada into the setting of diaspora writings. I have said that most South Asian-Canadian writers who have achieved any semblance of recognition have set their stories outside of Canada. I believe that perhaps despite themselves, writers draw connections between the two homelands in a serendipitous way. Editors and readers resist these interconnections because they don’t like anything that strikes too close to home. It is easier to read texts against the non-threatening backdrop of a faraway space.
Here are two example of reading a text in the light of present space. In her review of Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, (TSAR, Winter 1992) Arun Mukherjee read Prime Minister Mulroney’s government in the novel’s Indira Gandhi sections. She was brilliant, as always, but the review is seldom cited. Another example: when I reviewed Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy for a Winnipeg newspaper, I pointed out the similarities between the Quebec question and the Tamil question in Sri Lanka, and did a great job, if I say so myself, of packing in old and contemporary history of Sri Lanka and Canada in two paragraphs. Sure enough, the editor excised those two paragraphs, ostensibly due to space constraints, and highlighted only the homosexual elements.
Such readings are not currently welcomed, yet represent perhaps the most potentially productive steps towards making space in the cathedral for all citizens, to the end of all of our various interconnections of history and memory becoming part of the total Canadian repertoire. That project is a long-term challenge, but we are beginning to make progress in the right direction.