Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

Roshan G. ShahaniIn Quest of a Habitation and a Name:Immigrant Voices from India 1AbstractThis article explores some of the major thematic concerns of South Asianimmigrant writing in the Canadian context. It examines the immigrant writers’need to “journey” home not merely to satisfy a nostalgic impulse but toreclaim the past and to create a collective history and myth of their peoples.Often, the immigrant writer writes as the “Other”, alienated by cultural andracial differences. This results in a “resisting”, “fighting” literature, creatinga disturbing impact on the comfortable conformity of the canon.RésuméCet article explore les principaux thèmes qui traversent les écrits desimmigrants de l’Asie du Sud installés au Canada. Il scrute le besoin de cesécrivains de « revisiter » leur pays non pas tellement pour répondre à un appelnostalgique, mais pour récupérer l’histoire et les mythes de leurs peuples.Souvent, ces auteurs s’expriment en tant qu’« Autre », aliénés qu’ils se sententpar les différences culturelles et raciales. Cela donne naissance à unelittérature de « résistance » et de « combat » qui perturbe sérieusement larassurante conformité aux normes.The narrator of Shame, Salman Rushdie’s quixotic novel, muses thus: “What isthe best thing about migrant peoples...? I think it is their hopefulness ... Andwhat’s the worst thing? It is the emptiness of one’s luggage ... We have comeunstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from history, frommemory, from Time” (Shame, 87) 2 .Paradoxically, however, it is exactly this sense of displacement, this floatingupwards, which compels emigrants to look homewards in the midst of theirexiled state. The very words “exile,” “emigrant,” “expatriate” are, as a criticremarks, “sad prefixes that conjure up states of exclusion.” However, theexcluding “e” has its antonymous companion—“in”, as in immigrant orinclusion (16). 3 Thus, emigrants/immigrants occupy a borderland country,which provides them with a double vision, often propelling them into the act ofwriting. The impulse to take the literary journey home towards “history,”towards “memory,” towards “time,” is a result of the migrant’s long journeyaway from home. A case in point is Rohinton Mistry, who confessed he had nointention of becoming a writer until he emigrated to Toronto. 4International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes6, Fall/Automne 1992