Talking With Vassanji in Toronto
M G Vassanji, who describes himself as an Indo-African Canadian writer, was born in Kenya on 30 May, 1950. Being of Indian descent, raised in an Indian-African community in Tanzania and having studied in the US, several languages and cultures have contributed to the making of the man and the author. In 1989, with the publication of his first novel, The Gunny Sack, he wound up a career in nuclear physics. He was awarded the Giller prize twice in 1994 for his The Book of Secrets, and for In-Between World of Vikram Lall in 2003. His most recent novel The Assassin's Song was published in 2007. His other works include novels No New Land (1991), Amriika (1999) and two short story collections: Uhuru Street (1992), and When She Was Queen (2005). When the literary editor of The Daily Star suggested an interview of Vassanji (since both of us live in Toronto), I got excited about it. Checking his website, I emailed his publicity contact requesting an informal meeting or interview. She promptly replied that she would let me know. To my amazement, a little later she gave me the personal email of Vassanji and asked me to contact him directly. I wrote to him and told him about The Daily Star and he agreed to meet me the following week. When we reached his house, the man who opened the gate and took us inside appeared to be a very simple man in an ordinary house. He offered us coffee which my husband readily accepted but I declined; even in this cold a cup of tea in the morning is enough for me. Setting the coffee to brew, he came back and sat with us. Ahsan quickly took a few snaps while we're getting started. M.G Vassanji has an easy air about him and from the start I felt quite comfortable talking to him. To my question about when he started writing, his honest reply was "I can't remember" for him, writing had always been there and he had enjoyed writing even during his school days. But growing up in Tanzania, East Africa, meant that "writing was not an option" in terms of a career. That led me to ask about his somewhat startling switch from being a physicist working at the Canadian Chalk River nuclear agency to being a writer. But to him the switch had been smooth, stating that he had been already involved in writing for eight or nine years before his first novel The Gunny Sack came out, and that he had almost finished writing a collection of short stories when he decided to quit physics and concentrate solely on writing. I wondered if anybody had inspired him in all his success, but again he gave an unexpected answer: "Nobody" he chuckled, adding good-humouredly that "nobody encouraged that sort of thing in those days, though nowadays we encourage our kids…" Presuming that sheer delight in writing must have led an MIT graduate and Pennsylvania PhD in physics decide to take up the pen without being inspired by anybody, I asked what he enjoyed about writing the most. "It's not enjoyment …" was his direct answer. He elaborated, "I write because I have to…sometimes I enjoy it, but it is something I have to do; it's hardly enjoyment - a struggle is involved, to get a drive, to worry about publications and what will happen afterwards, to decide whether it is the right thing to write…trying to make something as good as possible, even better than possible…" In other words, even for a successful writer, it's a hard row to hoe some days of the week! I asked him about his time at MIT. As a student in the US, Vassanji had wanted to go back to Africa, to teach, and that had influenced his choice of studies. First, he could not decide between electrical engineering, physics and maths because though he liked all three, electrical engineering would take him further away from his Tanzanian home. He chose physics. When he finished his studies in 1978, teaching positions, however, were scarce. He came to the Toronto University in 1980 and began to teach one course but mostly did research work. He also had a job at Chalk River atomic power station but missed being in a city. As he plainly admitted, "It's a small place, very beautiful but I can't live there. I love the countryside but I like to come back to the city." So why did he choose Toronto to settle down? His reply was illuminating regarding his view of Toronto, in comparison with other places where one was also a minority: "Coming to work at U of T…I felt Toronto was perhaps the only place where I could live in Canada. Though there were problems, in the 1980's, in the communities in Don Mills (away from downtown, immigrant communities), there've been problems but…even then it was diverse…I've been a minority in Africa, a so-called minority in India…but Toronto makes one feel comfortable. " Had he visited India? Yes, he said, though it was only in 1993 that he made his first visit. When I asked him about it, he quickly replied, "It's like my soul was released." And then added, laughing, "Though I do not believe in a soul but whatever it stands for..." It was also a painful experience, specially witnessing the division between the communities and the events in Gujarat (where his ancestors came from). The community in Africa when he was growing up was never split along such lines. As he explains, "…the word 'partition' was not even there in our vocabulary. … To go there and suddenly see such divisions…" It was the only thing that alienated him from an otherwise all familiar set-up. He mentioned Pakistan, which he considered a worse example of such divisions. He asked me whether I had seen the Pakistani movie Khuda Ke Liy. It was, Vassanji said laughing, overall a progressive movie, anti-terrorist, but in the end, "this man who lives in the US tells his white girlfriend, 'a thousand years we lived as conquerors and then we left'… this statement, the essence of the Pakistani mind." He added that it made sense, since Aisha Jalal (a Pakistani novelist in the US) had told him that the history syllabus in Pakistan is government controlled. We turned to his last novel Assassin's Song, which deals with these issues. It was launched in India in August 2007, where it had garnered wide praise. Since most of his works deal with the complex issues of exile and migration, as well as of communalism and its impact, I asked him how he wanted to address readers not very familiar with the experiences most of his characters go through. He said he didn't want to address them. That raised the question of his target audience. He replied that while young people might say that they didn't care who read their books or not (adding jocularly, "Why send it to publishers then?"), to him it was very important. He has to think of his readers in Canada, and also India, as well as Africa, and added that it was impossible for him to ignore any of them. I asked him whose works he admired most among the contemporary writers. The way he said "Nobody" and broke into a hearty laugh made me join in the laughter immediately. But I asked him again, "Nobody?" "Well," he explained, "I've liked one here and there but that was more like when I was young." So I followed that one up with who he liked when he was young. And again an unexpected answer: "I read garbage when I was young." His tone of self-ridicule made us all laugh, but I couldn't coax him into telling me what sort of garbage he read! His reading had been very random, a mix of the popular and less popular. Despite his school having an excellent library in high school, he hadn't read most of the great writers, though one or two had left a lasting impression. He discovered James Baldwin by accident, and had been struck by his Another Country (1962). Lawrence Durrell had been another such author. After coming to MIT, a world of books had opened up to him: Conrad, Germans and Russians like Gunter Grass and Dostoyevsky, specially when he took literature courses. When asked if anyone had influenced his writing, he first said, "Very hard to tell!" And then gave an interesting example to make his point. He had liked Lawrence Durrell a lot as a young reader. But four or five years ago when the Lawrence Durrell society asked him to give a talk and he went back to the books he used to read and reread, he found that he didn't even like Durrell's work, let alone as much as he used to do. It reminded me of the Bengali short story Pathoker Mrityo (Death of the Reader), where the narrator, when reading an old favourite at a later age, discovers how the reader in him who had once liked the adventure stories as an adolescent has died. But he did acknowledge that there were probably some influences: Rushdie's Midnight's Children, for example, which he read long before it became so famous and had been "quite excited" by it. So perhaps he was influenced to some extent, though I felt these two authors have very different and strongly idiosyncratic styles of their own. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked him about his upcoming book. It is about India but it's more about him in India, not as a tourist of course. He brings in folk stuff again, not something grand like the stories of Mughals, he admits, rather the stories of small communities (the Khoja community), the Gujarat situation and the like. Though he wondered aloud who was going to read it, just as he had wondered before Assassin's Song was published, since it would seem to be of little relevance to most people. But there lies the author's secret which we know as readers. Crossing boundaries, and making it possible to relate to the apparently irrelevant and complex issues from lives unknown, on some simple human ground, or often on not so simple, but on intriguing terms. Rutba Yasmin taught English at Darul Ihsan and North South universities, Dhaka. She is now a freelance writer in Toronto.
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