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

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Immigrant Voices from Indiawhich is metafictional in character, the author-narrator’s parents are seen toexcitedly pore over “The Tales from Firozsha Baag” that their son has senthome from Canada. The father likes the last story the best because it is aboutCanada, and he muses: “if he continues to write about such things he willbecome popular because I am sure they are interested there in reading aboutlife through the eyes of an immigrant, it provides a different viewpoint...”(248). Despite these intimations, however, Mistry’s work continues to explorethe old world; he has even affirmed at a public forum that the current novel heis working on continues to have Bombay as the locale. 18 Undoubtedly,Vassanji’s second novel, No New Land, 19 and Nazneen Sadiq’s first novel, IceBangles, 20 are set in Canada though they continue to explore the lives of theirown communities. By and large, however, since the novel as a genre deals witha complex network of relationships and has a large social frame, the firstgeneration,immigrant novelist might find it problematic to reach out to thatkind of experience in the relatively “foreign” homeland of Canada. It is easierfor him to tread homeground, even when, by doing so, he can tread that muchmore firmly on alien soil. The long gestation period might also be owing to thefact that even mainstream Canadian writing is relatively young. Ghosh (albeitin the British immigrant context) points to yet another reason for the immigrantwriter’s emphasis on and preoccupation with his land of his origin rather thanof adoption. “The voice of the immigrant” Ghosh writes, “is very easilymarginalised within the culture of the new ‘mother’ country; beingimperfectly British, the immigrant is simply excluded as a player in the motherculture. It is no coincidence, therefore, that so many diasporic Indianwriters...so often choose to write about India or about Indian communitiesabroad” (77).Hence, it is through the more manipulative genre of poetry that immigrantwriters can speak more directly of actual Canadian existence, of the historicalpresent, of the experience of alienation and of racism. Concomitantly, thepoetry of women immigrants conveys still more intensely what it means to beon the periphery. 21 In this context, Suniti Namjoshi’s reinterpretation of thePhilomel myth embodies the desperate need of a woman of colour to find herown “voice”.She had her tongue ripped out, and then she sang down through thecenturies. So that it seems only fitting that the art she practises shouldbe art for art’s sake and no never spelt out, no — never reduced tomere message — that would appal. (Feminist Fables 102) 22In this verse, a cultural symbol and, moreover, a western myth, servessubversive ends. Not only does it protest against the violence done to womenthrough the convert reference to Philomel’s rape, it suggests the violence doneto women’s writing which perforce had to possess the sweet serenity of thenightingale’s song. The voice of protest, necessitated by gender and, in thiscase, by racial marginalization, would sound too raucous to ears attuned to theaesthetic pleasures of poetry.91
IJCS/RIÉCFor immigrant women, writing becomes a political act. A violent butconstructive anger wells up through their poetry. The poets’ personal sense ofmarginalization as women, as women of colour, as immigrants, makes themfiercely search out, relate to and emphathize with fellow victims. A passionateexhortation is made to them to arise out of their victim positions, by channelingtheir fear and hatred and by using them as some “kind of weapon” (HimanioBannerji). In Bannerji’s poetry there is the constant identification with thecolonized other, whether Indian, Canadian or African. As she remarks, “Thenoose they put around/the neck of the first black man has expanded throughthe/centuries taking in the world” (“terror” 44). In the prose-poem whichforms the preface to her collection of poems, doing time, Bannerji comparesher crushed identity to a prisoner entering jail; simultaneously she suggeststhat this very negation of personal identity helps in achieving identificationwith the “other”, so that she can speak in the voice of the other:... a personal life is constructed with a personal history, personaltokens, which you give up at the warden’s office as you enter andwear clothes others do. Yes, I have no personal life—but then again,don’t I? I have become so many people. (11)The emphasis on the Canadian scene is palpably felt in immigrant poetry. Thesense of alienation, so much a part of the immigrant psyche, is dramaticallyillustrated in the poets’ evocation of the Canadian ethos: its geography, climateand cityscape image a sense of desolation, perceived even more sharply whenjuxtaposed against the home environment. This is not to say that immigrantpoetry is nostalgic reminiscence of the world left behind. Instead, it reflects theexperience of being in no-man’s land; at other times it gives impetus to theneed to assert, to affirm, to protest. Hence Lakshmi Gill’s poem “Revolution”interfuses “Canada the Cold” with the warm, tropical homeland; the poem isconceptualized in terms of death and barrenness, giving way to birth andcreation, and couched appropriately in images of earth:Five years I have lain fallowall around me this arid countrystretching from the stretch marksof my belly to beyond my reachrippled cracks, pattern of deadphotographed images, untilled linesthat fall from the edge to otheruniverses I dream of -therewhere flowers bloom from navelshot lands of my birth -fallinto a full revolution. It’s time,isn’t it time to go? O Soil, turn over. (30)92
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Review Essays/Essais critiquesLorna
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