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

IJCS/RIÉCTheir old colonial heritage and their new, marginal situation lead theimmigrant writers to write as the “Other.” As Amitav Ghosh points out, “Indiahas always been constituted as much by the notion of the periphery as it has bythe notion of the centre”; this notion of the periphery “has now expanded toinclude the diaspora” (78). 14 Such writers are both “hostage” and“representative,” and so are their protagonist/persona. However, they are notrepresentatives of the glories of newly won national freedom and national selfdetermination.They continue to speak from the margin. In that sense, historyhas “always belonged to the colonizers, never to the colonized.” 15 Toarticulate the past historically, as Walter Benjamin points out, “does not meanto recognise it ‘the way it was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashesup at a moment of danger.” 16 Hence, the immigrant writers’ focus is offcentred.Likewise, their protagonist/ persona hardly ever takes centre-stagebecause it is not “his-story” that is being related. Instead, the narrative givesvoice to community life, to local or national politics, to the experience ofcolonialism. The quest-motif, which seems the archetypal pattern in theliterature of the predominant culture, and which is also conceived in terms of ametaphoric and sometimes an actual voyage, undergoes here a sea-change. AsArun Prabha Mukherjee points out, the “artist-as-hero-creating-in-theisolation-of-hissoul” type of protagonist or the “connoisseur-of-chaos” typeof writer are nowhere to be seen. Here lies instead, “an encounter with historyand hence with one’s otherness” (48). 17 It would be relevant, at this juncture,to once again refer to The Gunnysack.Although the quest-motif gives this narrative its very being, The Gunnysackdoes not belong to the bildungsroman genre; the individual quest for selfhoodand identity is replaced here by the quest for a collective, and communalidentity. The Afro-Asian community, an ethnic minority, forms the focus ofthis narrative. It was marginalized first by the German settlers, then by theBritish colonialists and then by the native African of the “flag independence”era. Nor does this narrative foreground the main chapters of history; ourattention is being drawn here to history’s foot-notes. Vassanji’s very choice ofnarrator is in keeping with this low-keyed approach. Salim or Kala the Afro-Asian, is literally and figuratively the black sheep of the family and the secondsibling in every sense of that term. He is very much the Caliban figure, the darkother in Prospero’s kingdom. Even as Salim opens the gunnysack to let out itsmemories of the collective past, he modifies his own earlier comparison of thishomely, humble sack to Sheherazade, the compulsive story-teller of the exoticArabian Nights Tales. He states parenthetically: “This drab gunnysack is nomore Sheherazade than I am Prince Sheriyar. She is more your home-growntype, a local version, ... whom I name this instant Sheherbanoo... SheherbanooSheherazade, how close in sound, yet worlds apart” (GS 5-6).The world that many immigrant writers have initially explored has often beenthe world they have left behind rather than the world they have newly adopted.It is the old world that the new immigrants seem to inhabit still and that appearsto inhabit them. In Mistry’s concluding story “Swimming Lessons” (Tales...),90