M. G. Vassanji

Last updated

M. G. Vassanji

CM
BornMoyez G. Vassanji
30 May 1950 (1950-05-30) (age 72)
Kenya
Occupationnovelist and editor, academic
NationalityCanadian
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of Pennsylvania
Genrenovels, short stories, memoir, and a biography

Moyez G. Vassanji CM (born 30 May 1950 in Kenya) is a Canadian novelist and editor, who writes under the name M. G. Vassanji. [1] [2] Vassanji's work has been translated into several languages. As of 2020, he has published nine novels, as well as two short-fiction collections and two nonfiction books. Vassanji's writings, which have received considerable critical acclaim, often focus on issues of colonial history, migration, diaspora, citizenship, gender and ethnicity. [3] [4]

Contents

Early life and education

M. G. Vassanji was born in Kenya to Indian immigrants and raised in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). [5] He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialised in nuclear physics, before moving to Canada as a postdoctoral fellow in 1978.

Career

From 1980 to 1989 Vassanji was a research associate at the University of Toronto. During this period he developed an interest in medieval Indian literature and history, co-founded and edited a literary magazine (The Toronto South Asian Review, later renamed The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad), and began writing fiction. Between 1989 and 2012, Vassanji published six novels, two collections of short stories, a memoir of his travels in India, and a biography of Mordecai Richler.

In 1989, after the publication of his first novel, The Gunny Sack, [6] [7] Vassanji was invited to spend a season at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa. The Gunny Sack won a regional Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1990. He won the inaugural Giller Prize in 1994 for The Book of Secrets. That year, he also won the Harbourfront Festival Prize in recognition of his "achievement in and contribution to the world of letters," and was one of twelve Canadians chosen for Maclean's Magazine's Honour Roll. In 1996 he was a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla, India.

He again won the Giller Prize in 2003 for The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, the first writer to win this prize twice. [8] In 2006, When She Was Queen was shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. The Assassin's Song , released in 2007, was short-listed for the 2007 Giller Prize, the Rogers Prize, and the Governor General's Prize in Canada, as well as the Crossword Prize in India. In 2009 his travel memoir, A Place Within: Rediscovering India, won the Governor-General's Prize for nonfiction. He has also been awarded the Commonwealth Regional Prize (Africa).

His novel The Magic of Saida, set in Tanzania, was published in Canada in 2012, and in 2014 he published his memoirs, Home Was Kariakoo, based on his childhood and recent travels in East Africa. [8] and in 2016 he published another novel, Nostalgia. [9] In 2019, his ninth novel A Delhi Obsession was published to wide acclaim.

He is a member of the Order of Canada and has been awarded several honorary doctorates. In 2016, he received the Canada Council Molson Prize for his career achievement.

Themes

Vassanji's works have been extensively reviewed by literary critics, such as in works edited by 2021 Nobel prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah. [3] Several themes emerge. [10] [11] [12] Mainly, his characters are the Asians of East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania), whose historical record, as of that region as a whole, is sparse. In telling the story of his subjects, in his earlier novels he has used memory, written record, and folklore, in an intersection of oral and written histories. Thus in The Gunny Sack, his first novel, he starts with many memories, but his narrator has to delve into written history, primarily through colonial journals and travelogues, to complete and give shape to his created history. His third novel, The Book of Secrets starts with the journal of a colonial administrator at the border between German and British East Africa and brings to his creation memories and archival material. In The In-between World of Vikram Lall, he looks at the condition and involvement of the Asians of Kenya during the Mau Mau War of the 1950s. The past and unresolved issues cast strong shadows in his works. In his other works, for example No New Land, his characters have undergone a second migration, starting in the 1970s, to Europe, Canada, or the United States. Vassanji then examines how the lives of these characters are affected by their migrations. [13] [14] [15] Though few of his African Asian characters ever return to India, the country's presence looms throughout his work. His 2007 novel The Assassins Song, inspired by the devotional, mystical songs of his Khoja Ismaili community, which deeply influenced him in childhood, is set almost entirely in India, where it was received as an Indian novel and short-listed for the Crossword Prize. His second novel, No New Land, describes the travails of Asian immigrants arrived in Canada from Tanzania; as the title implies, there is no new land, the characters continue in their minds to lead the same lives. In the dystopic novel Nostalgia Vassanji tackles the topic of assimilation, in which characters can have their memories erased and replaced by new ones in order to be better integrated. But, the novel asks, is the process of erasure perfect?

Vassanji writes about the effects of history and the interaction between personal and public histories, including folk and colonial history. [16] Vassanji's narratives follow the personal histories of his main characters; the historical perspective provided often leaves mysteries unsolved. The colonial history of Kenya and Tanzania serves as the backdrop for much of his work; [17] in the Assassin's Song, however, he tackles Indian folk culture and myths.

Bibliography

Novels

Short story collections

Non-fiction collections

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Canadian literature</span> Field of literature from Canada

Canadian literature is the literature of a multicultural country, written in languages including Canadian English, Canadian French, Indigenous languages, and many others such as Canadian Gaelic. Influences on Canadian writers are broad both geographically and historically, representing Canada's diversity in culture and region.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o</span> Kenyan writer

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a Kenyan author and academic who writes primarily in Gikuyu and who formerly wrote in English. He has been described as having been "considered East Africa’s leading novelist". His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩiri. His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright, is translated into 100 languages from around the world.

Postcolonial literature is the literature by people from formerly colonized countries. It exists on all continents except Antarctica. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism. A range of literary theory has evolved around the subject. It addresses the role of literature in perpetuating and challenging what postcolonial critic Edward Said refers to as cultural imperialism.

Farida Karodia is a South African novelist and short-story writer.

Indian English literature (IEL), also referred to as Indian Writing in English (IWE), is the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language but whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao contributed to the growth and popularity of Indian English fiction in the 1930s. It is also associated, in some cases, with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who subsequently compose works in English.

Cyril Dabydeen is a Guyana-born Canadian writer of Indian descent. He grew up in Rose Hall sugar plantation with the sense of Indian indenture rooted in his family background. He's a cousin of the UK writer David Dabydeen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hinduism in Uganda</span> Overview of the presence, role and impact of Hinduism in Uganda

Hinduism in Uganda arrived when the colonial British Empire brought Hindus along with other Indian workers to its East African colonies in late 19th and early 20th centuries. The largest arrival of Hindu immigrants to Uganda, some educated and skilled but mostly poor and struggling from the famine-prone areas of Punjab and Gujarat, was to help construct the Kenya-Uganda Railway connecting landlocked parts of Uganda and Kenya with the port city of Mombasa. The largest departure of Hindus from Uganda occurred when General Idi Amin expelled them and seized their properties in 1972.

<i>The In-Between World of Vikram Lall</i> 2003 novel by M. G. Vassanji

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a novel by M. G. Vassanji, published in 2003 by Doubleday Canada. The novel won the Scotiabank Giller Prize that year and narrates a story of Vikram Lall in the colonial and post-colonial Kenya. The title for the novel also inspired the title for Elizabeth Nunez's novel Anna In-Between, published in 2009.

The Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa consists of approximately 3 million people of Indian origin. Some of this diaspora in Southeast Africa arrived in the 19th century from British India as indentured labourers, many of them to work on the Kenya–Uganda railway. Others had arrived earlier by sea as traders.

TSAR Publications is a Toronto-based nonprofit book publisher focusing on multicultural literature, particularly Canadian authors and subject matter.

<i>The Assassins Song</i>

The Assassin's Song is a novel by M. G. Vassanji, published in 2007 by Doubleday Canada. It is the story of a young Indian boy whose dream is to escape his family's religious legacy. He wants to be ordinary: to go to school, play cricket, talk to girls, and make his own choices. He tries to escape by traveling to the United States for college and eventually settling in Canada. The novel also contains the in-depth narrative of his ancient forebear.

<i>The Book of Secrets</i> (novel)

The Book of Secrets is a novel by M. G. Vassanji, published in 1994.

Simon E. Gikandi is a Kenyan Literature Professor and Postcolonial scholar. He is the Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University. He is perhaps best known for his co-editorship of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. He has also done important work on the modern African novel, and two distinguished African novelists: Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. In 2019 he became the president of the Modern Language Association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abdulrazak Gurnah</span> Novelist and Nobel laureate (born 1948)

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; Desertion (2005); and By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elleke Boehmer</span>

Elleke Boehmer, FRSL, FRHistS is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies, internationally recognised for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory. Her main areas of interest include the literature of empire and resistance to empire; sub-Saharan African and South Asian literatures; modernism; migration and diaspora; feminism, masculinity, and identity; nationalism; terrorism; J. M. Coetzee, Katherine Mansfield, and Nelson Mandela; and life writing.

Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. More specifically, it is a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of imperial power.

Up to the second half of the 20th century, Tanzanian literature was primarily oral. Major oral literary forms include folktales, poems, riddles, proverbs, and songs. The majority of the oral literature in Tanzania that has been recorded is in Swahili, though each of the country's languages has its own oral tradition. The country's oral literature is currently declining because of social changes that make transmission of oral literature more difficult and because of the devaluation of oral literature that has accompanied Tanzania's development. Tanzania's written literary tradition has produced relatively few writers and works; Tanzania does not have a strong reading culture, and books are often expensive and hard to come by. Most Tanzanian literature is orally performed or written in Swahili, and a smaller number of works have been published in English. Major figures in Tanzanian modern literature include Shaaban Robert, Muhammed Said Abdulla, Aniceti Kitereza, Ebrahim Hussein, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Penina Muhando.

Bahadur Tejani is a Kenyan poet, novelist, playwright and literary critic.

Kenyan crime fiction is a genre of crime fiction that is set in the country of Kenya, and usually written by Kenyan authors. According to G.J. Demko of Dartmouth College, "The fundamental premise of all [crime fiction] is a society that is ordered and real but becomes disordered as a result of a crime imposed on that society. In the normal case, a hero arrives - an officer of the law, a private detective or an amateur sleuth - and via logical deduction, hard work or luck, solves the crime, identifies the perpetrator, and order is restored." However, Kenyan crime fiction differs slightly from Demko's definition because of the following reasons: crime is often so pervasive in societies portrayed in Kenyan crime novels that it becomes almost a part of the order, and many times crimes are not conclusively solved by the end of the stories, mimicking the real-life cyclical nature of crime.

<i>Anna In-Between</i>

Anna In-Between is a 2009 English novel by Trinidadian American author Elizabeth Nunez. Anna, the lead character of the novel, finds herself in a situation where she is made to ponder on the differences between her native Caribbean, where her parents live, and her adopted lifestyle in Manhattan, and how race affects it. The novel was longlisted for the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award.

References

  1. ↑ W. H. New, ed., Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. p. 1166.
  2. ↑ Desai, Gaurav. `Ambiguity is the driving force or the nuclear reaction behind my creativity": An E-Conversation with M. G. Vassanji' Research in African Literatures forthcoming.
  3. 1 2 Neloufer de Mel, "Mediating Origins: Moyez Vassanji and the Discursivities of Migrant Identity," in Essays on African Writing: vol 2, Contemporary Literature, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995): 159–177
  4. ↑ Dan Odhiambo Ojwang, "The Pleasures of Knowing: Images of ‘Africans’ in East African Asian Literature," English Studies in Africa 43, no. 1 (2000): 43–64.
  5. ↑ James, Jamie (1 April 2000). "The Toronto Circle". The Atlantic .
  6. ↑ Tuomas Huttunen, "M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack: Narrating the Migrant Identity," in Tales of Two Cities: Essays on New Anglophone Literature, ed. John Skinner (Turku, Finland: Anglicana Turkuensia, 2000): 3–20
  7. ↑ Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan, "M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack: A Reflection on History and the Novel," Modern Fiction Studies 37, no. 3 (1991): 511–518
  8. 1 2 Charles Foran. "M.G. Vassanji travels back to Tanzania". Maclean's, October 19, 2014
  9. ↑ Philip Marchand. "Don't look back: Nostalgia can be fatal in M.G. Vassanji's near future-set novel". National Post , December 14, 2016
  10. ↑ Amin Malik, "Ambivalent Affiliations and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji," World Literature Today 67, no. 2 (1993): 277–282;
  11. ↑ Dan Odhiambo Ojwang, "Between Ancestors and Amarapurs: Immigrant Asianness in M. G. Vassanji’s Fiction," in Re-Imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives, eds. Sue Kossew and Diane Schwerdt (Huntington, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers, 2001): 57–80;
  12. ↑ Tuomas Huttunen, "M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack: Emplotting British, Asian and African Realities," The Atlantic Review 3, no. 2 (2002): 56–76
  13. ↑ Ashok Mohapatra, "The Paradox of Return: Origins, Home and Identity in M.G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack," Postcolonial Text 2, no. 4 (2006): 1–21
  14. ↑ Rosemary Marongoly George, "`Traveling Light’: Home and the Immigrant Genre," in The Politics of Home (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 171–197.
  15. ↑ Godwin Siundu, "The Unhomeliness of Home: Asian Presence and Nation Formation in M. G. Vassanji’s Works," Africa Insight 35, no. 2 (2005): 15–25
  16. ↑ Jeanne Delbaere, "Re-Configuring the Postcolonial Paradigm: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji," in Reconfigurations: Canadian Literatures and Postcolonial Identities, eds. Marc Maufort and Franca Bellarsi (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2002): 159–171.
  17. ↑ Brenda Cooper, "A Gunny Sack, Chants and Jingles, a Fan and a Black Trunk: The Coded Language of the Everyday in a Post-colonial African Novel," Africa Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2004): 12–31
  18. ↑ Zane Schwartz. "M.G. Vassanji delivers a dystopian story". Maclean's, October 1, 2016
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.