South Asian Canadian Writers from Africa and the Caribbean
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SOUTH ASIAN CANADIAN WRITERS FROM AFRICA AND THE CARIBBEAN Frank Birbalsingh N.I от ALL SOUTH ASIANS NOW living in Canada came directly from India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka; many came from India, via Africa or the Caribbean, where their ancestors had settled in British colonies either in nineteenth century or the early twentieth. After most of these colonies gained independence from Britain in the 1960s, many of their Indian citizens immigrated to western countries such as Britain, Canada and the U.S. They immigrated for variety of reasons — economic deprivation, ethnic rivalry, political victimisation or sheer physical insecurity. Whatever their reasons, since many of these Indo- Caribbean or Indo-African immigrants were the children or even great-grand- children of Indians who had migrated from India, they could be regarded as migrating for a second time, and becoming thereby doubly displaced from India. The first writing by South Asian Canadian writers1 from Africa or the Caribbean was produced in the 1970s by Harold Sonny Ladoo (Trinidad), Reshard Gool (South Africa), and Cyril Dabydeen (Guyana). Ladoo wrote two promising novels—No Pain Like This Body (1972) and Yesterdays (1974)2—but this promise was cut tragically short by his murder while he was on a visit to Trinidad in 1974. No Pain Like This Body and Yesterdays are the first two works in a projected series of novels that Ladoo apparently planned to explore Indo-Caribbean experience. As such, these novels provide a foretaste of the essentials of Indo-Caribbean society-— physical toil, economic hardship, pain, frustration, uncertainty, and entrapment; for Indians came to the Caribbean to replace African slaves who had been freed from British-owned sugar plantations in the 1830s, and Indians in Ladoo's novel still bear the marks of this plantation inheritance, as evidenced by the harsh and demanding circumstances in which his characters are forced to struggle for basic needs. No Pain Like This Body and Yesterdays achieve success as robust narratives of local colour capturing the pungent speech idioms of rural Trinidad, together with 94 BIRBALSINGH the violence, duplicity, and sprawling rawness of colonial deprivation. Yesterdays for instance, is so explicit about matters of sex and excretion as to give offence in more than one quarter. Implicitly, both novels indict British colonialism in the Caribbean, and Yesterdays mentions the imperialism of Canadian Presbyterian missionaries who, in the process of converting Indo-Trinidadians to Christianity, instilled in them western European cultural values that tended to replace their ancestral, cultural habits inherited from India. Yesterdays also expresses a retalia- tory desire to send Hindu missionaries to Canada. Although this would have appeared ludicrous and utterly far-fetched in the early 1970s, it would no doubt please Ladoo to know that there are several Hindu temples in Toronto today. It would have been interesting to see how Ladoo's writing might have developed. In No Pain Like This Body and Yesterdays, at least, he has achieved a robustness not easily found among his Canadian contemporaries except in the early writings of Mordecai Richler. 3 Rk,ESHARD GOOL'S FIRST novel Price (1973) portrays the society that he left behind in his homeland. This time the portrait is one of racism in South Africa, in the 1930s and 1940s. The novel successfully evokes mixed social conditions involving white racists, imperialists, and Marxists who fight among themselves and are equally corrupt. This historical portrait is heightened by the author's technique of employing frequent flashbacks and diary entries to emphasise the confusion and fragmentation in South Africa's social and political structure. Price has won more critical than popular acclaim, no doubt because of the novelty of its narrative technique. Gool's second novel Nemesis Casket* is even more experi- mental in technique, incorporating sections of diaries, notebooks, letters, and other materials in an attempt to reconstruct and probe the central relationship between the narrator and his wife. Not only does the social and political interest of Price give way to psychological issues of personal identity in Nemesis Casket, but the setting of the novel moves away from South Africa to Canada, indicating a pattern common among South Asian writers who deal with their countries of origin in their earliest work before moving on to Candían subjects or settings. In the writing of Cyril Dabydeen there is a more continuous relationship between subjects taken from his homeland and those taken from Canada. Dabydeen is very productive — probably, to date, the most prolific of all South Asian Canadian authors — and his poems and stories furnish perhaps the most complete record in Canadian literature of subjects, themes, interests and approaches of writers from his ethnic cultural and regional background. Dabydeen's early volume of poems Goatsong (1977)5 and his first novel The Wizard Swami (1989)6 evoke colonial Guyana with its combination of physical squalor, poverty, and raw boisterousness, 95 BIRBALSINGH within an environment of brightly variegated tropical colours and blistering heat. Goatsong describes everyday Guyanese scenes and childhood experiences, while The Wizard Swami exposes Indo-Guyanese, religious charlatanism in the fashion of V. S. Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur, the story of a Hindu priest turned masseur and politician. Although Dabydeen's work considers specifically Caribbean themes of exploita- tion, resistance and mimicry, it also includes the concerns of immigrants who face hostility, racism or neglect in Canada. In Goatsong he writes : Walking along Heading for the Citizenship Court Kent Street/Ottawa I have been here seven years Yet the same question Where do you come from ? ( 33 ) Such feelings of displacement, anonymity and alienation become an increasing preoccupation in Dabydeen's work, and as the persona of another poem states: I yearn still for the buttressed domain of silk cotton and mangrove trade winds shouting familiar voices echoes all around7 The persona in this poem admits that, although he is impressed and engaged with his new life in Canada, he is still "mudbound in memory" and misses the familiar sights and sounds of his Caribbean past. As an immigrant he is caught by divided loyalties to his present home in Canada, and memories of his former home in the Caribbean. This ambivalent nature of immigrant experience in Canada remains a constant preoccupation throughout Dabydeen's poems and stories. Some of his stories in- clude Caribbean and Canadian characters living in Canada or the Caribbean. Some stories in Monkey Jungle ( 1988),8 for instance, are set entirely in northern Ontario, while others, like the title story, describe the experience of a Canadian working on a cocoa plantation in the Guyanese forest. In many cases, especially in his poems, Dabydeen's persona may be pictured reflecting on his life in Canada, when suddenly, involuntarily, his/her thoughts may shift back to past experience in the Caribbean, or vice versa. This is the phenomenon of "here" and "there" that Dabydeen regards as an inescapable part of the subject of his writing — an almost Jungian predilection for thoughts and ideas welling up from one's racial or cultural subconscious and mixing freely with one's current thoughts. Dabydeen's attempt to mediate between the competing demands of "here" and "there" affects the quality and tone of his writing. In the poem "New Life" in 96 BIRBALSINGH which the persona has already been quoted as being "mudbound in memory," the effort to balance his Canadian and Caribbean experience takes a toll on the force of the emotions being expressed, whether they are grief, loss, confusion or nostalgia. The persona's feeling may be sincere or earnest, but it lacks urgency or force. Far from being torn apart by divided loyalties or competing passions, the persona appears to mediate between Canada and the Caribbean, and the result is one of detachment or accommodation. This does not necessarily reduce the artistic value of "New Life," but it gives the poem — and Dabydeen's writing in general — a sense of being inhibited, holding itself back, so that it fits most properly into a minimalistic category of literature, mainly concerned with the balanced or detached observation of reality within a deliberately selected small focus of human experience. L»ADOO, GOOL AND DABYDEEN were succeeded (although Daby- deen is still writing ) by a new batch of writers whose work began to appear in the 1980s. The Trinidadian Clyde Hosein is notable for his volume of thirteen stories The Killing of Nelson John and Other Stories (1980)9 which vividly capture the mixture of dereliction, confusion and futility in colonial Trinidad, in the middle decades of this century. Like Ladoo, Hosein writes mainly of Indo-Trinidadians. In the first story "The Signature," the narrator recalls his mother's efforts to write in English, although she spoke and recited poetry in Bengali. If it is poignant when the thirteen-year-old narrator instructs his grown mother to write her own sig- nature, or to count in English, it is positively heart-wrenching to learn that his mother bleeds to death from an accident in the cane fields where she laboured, leaving the narrator with one tangible memento of herself — a piece of paper torn from a brown shopping bag, on which she practised writing her name each morn- ing, before readying herself for work in the fields. The narrator of "The Signature" speaks of keeping this cherished memento of his mother in his wallet "even though so many years have passed and I am exiled to a far country." This sense of exile is not investigated because it is not relevant to the story; but since the events of the story are recollected in a "far country" not unlike Canada, it allows us to make comparisons between Hosein's recollections and those of Ladoo and Dabydeen.