“Ambiguity is the driving force or the nuclear reaction behind my creativity”: An E-

conversation with M. G. Vassanji

Author(s): Gaurav Desai
Source: Research in African Literatures , Vol. 42, No. 3, Asian African Literatures /
Gaurav Desai, Special Guest Editor (Fall 2011), pp. 187-197
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/reseafrilite.42.3.187

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“Ambiguity is the driving force or the
nuclear reaction behind my creativity”:
An E-conversation with M. G. Vassanji
Gaurav Desai
Tulane University
gaurav@tulane.edu

N
ote: This email correspondence with M. G. Vassanji took place between
November 10 and December 30, 2010. It was intended as a broad-ranging
conversation on topics that arise from Vassanji’s work. At the end of
the exchange, the transcript was edited for clarity, but the general tenor and
development of the conversation were retained.

Desai: Mr. Vassanji, thank you for taking the time out of your busy writing sched-
ule to engage in this email exchange, which I hope will allow us to discuss both
specific issues that are raised in your books as well as more general questions
about the nature of interpersonal and intercultural relations that all of your work
addresses. In deference to Miss Penny [The Gunny Sack], let us begin at the begin-
ning—India—which in your specific case ironically means beginning with your
latest work, A Place Within: Rediscovering India. As I read through this marvelous
travelogue and memoir, I kept asking myself to be on the lookout for the specifi-
cally African traces in the book. After all, there have been many who have written
on India, but few, I think have reached it, coming originally from East Africa and
routed through the US and Canada. There are, of course, experiences you describe
that resonate with your earlier work, such as Juma’s peeping at Bombay through
the porthole of a ship (based, we now know, on a similar story told about your own
father), but there are also other points of connection. In what ways, might you say,
your African heritage influenced what you saw or didn’t see in India?

Vassanji: My African heritage was of course an African-Indian heritage. I was

brought up on the streets of Dar es Salaam, so to speak, as a member of an Indian
community. In the US and Canada I had already studied the history of East
Africa in the colonial period, which pertains to my history. When I went to India,
I couldn’t help but try to understand or find myself vis à vis India. Before I went
there, I saw India as ancestral and alien, but also as being familiar. When I arrived
there it seemed so much less alien than I had thought. It looked familiar! But
there were little things which I noticed in India as an East African that delighted

•  REsearch in african literatures, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Fall 2011). © 2011  •

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188  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 42 Number 3

me—“East African Motors” in Gujarat, the name of a car dealership; a taxi driver
who was on his way to work in Dar es Salaam; a “hundred”-year-old woman who
had been married away to a man from Dar. Jamnagar reminded me in many ways
of the Dar in which I had grown up, but that area was of course the Indian area, its
architecture Gujarati. I recall the thrill of seeing African Indians—the Sidis—and
feeling some affinity with them, noticing the irony or coincidence that my ances-
tors hailed not far away from the area where these African Indians lived; I had the
near temptation to speak to them in Swahili! In Gujarat, particularly, people knew
of Zanzibar, and Dar es Salaam, etc. So I would say that these visits I made were
basically to understand and reconnect to my Indian-ness, but any reminder I saw
of East Africa interested me, sometimes thrilled me. I could not help but notice,
from the beach at Calicut, the direction in which Africa lay.

Desai: I’m glad you mentioned the Sidis, because in many ways they are a commu-
nity that most other observers to India would probably not have noticed, had they
not come from Africa or perhaps the African diaspora. What you note about your
encounters with them, though, is telling—in many ways they have been so Indian-
ized over the generations that the genealogical connection with Africa seems to
remain in many cases a trace. Such Indianization has not necessarily resulted in
any form of upward mobility or access to mainstream society. As a contrast, I was
struck by your candid discussion of the divisions among Hindus and Muslims
that were heightened during and after Partition. You have a careful discussion in
the book of the disadvantages that Muslims continue to face in postindependence
India, but you also are critical of a minoritarian identity on the part of Muslims.
“Instead of asserting their essential and primary Indian-ness, shouting it from the
rooftops and from their guts, (Muslims) had fallen into the trap of allowing them-
selves to be seen as minority and as outsiders, accepting a primary identity defined
by faith . . .” (83). One of the dilemmas of postindependence Asians in East Africa,
was “how to insist on one’s Kenyanness or Ugandanness without letting go of long
held cultural/religious/ethnic identities?” Do you think there are parallels here?

Vassanji: If you mean parallels between Muslims in India and the Asians of East
Africa, absolutely not. The majority of the Muslims of India are ethnically as Indian
as the Hindus or Jains or Buddhists or whatever. This is what many Indians forget,
including the well-meaning liberals. Muslim Indians have a claim to the ancient
Indian traditions, whether Sanskritic or folk. Don’t forget that in any region in
India they share the language; they have not learnt it in the last two or three gen-
erations. The problem with Muslims anywhere is that they often identify primarily
as Muslims. In India I realized that this separateness is sometimes forced upon
you. The Asians in East Africa are ethnically different from Africans; they have a
different color; their faith, even when it is Islam, is often linked to Indian culture
practices. This poses a real dilemma, which gets softened when one realizes that
among Africans there is also a great diversity. And so people have to learn—or
have learnt—to live in a truly multicultural society.

Desai: The long-established ethnic claims of Muslims in India, and the often
syncretic worshipping practices that they have shared with Hindus is, of course,
a central concern of A Place Within, which, along with books like Amitav Ghosh’s

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 GAUR AV DESAI  •  189

In an Antique Land, is saddened if not angered by the increasing rise of religious

fundamentalisms that seek to divide people rather than unite them. But as you
mention, identities are both self-generated as well as oftentimes forced upon you.
The social taboos generated, the puritanical policing that emerges often cuts both
ways and yet is often expressed as a complaint by one community against another.
So, for instance, one of the things that struck me was the similarity in the discourse
on intercommunity marriages. In East Africa, the common note was that Asian
men had access to African women but African men did not to Asian women. On
the streets of India, you heard a similar complaint—Muslim men had access to
Hindu women but Hindu men did not have access to Muslim women.

Vassanji: As has so often been stated, all Muslims and Hindus cannot be grouped
together, nor Africans or Asians. To me those who generalize thus are simply mis-
chief-makers. And it’s not that Africans have been dying to marry Asians—they
too have their ancient traditions and concerns with identity, language, etc.; and one
can imagine how a Brahmin mother would accept a Muslim daughter-in-law. But
attitudes change. Marriage taboos are a complex business, often existing within
communities (jaatis); they also have to do with the tenets of one’s faith, which are
not so easily brushed away by observant people. Complaints such as you mention
are often made by those who would justify violence or look away: “What else can
they expect?” Thus, Uganda, 1971, and Bombay and Gujarat in 1993 and 2002. I
myself heard such complaints in India in 1993 as the violence was raging. But
enough of this endless subject.

Desai: Frustrating as the subject is, the anxieties and difficulties of intercommu-
nity marriages/sexuality are central aspects of your work. When you write about
Basheer (in A Place Within) persuading his Nair girlfriend that she should not
marry him (because her parents have threatened to kill themselves), anyone who
has read your earlier books can’t help but notice the similarity with the plight of
Njoroge (in Vikram Lall) who too lets go of Deepa (if only in the sense of not mar-
rying her) out of a sense of loyalty and compassion to her mother. The Gunny Sack
is structured around the original interracial relationship between Dhanji Govindji
and Bibi Taratibu and the later postindependence one between Salim and Amina.
The Book of Secrets makes the possibility of interracial sexuality (this time between
a white colonial administrator and an Indian woman) a topic of speculation. Fic-
tional depictions are, of course, always open to multiple interpretations, but were
you hoping to make particular claims about the nature of these relationships?

Vassanji: I make no claims in my fiction. I look at characters in particular situations

and they are often contradictory. Interracial or -communal or -whatever relations
come naturally to me because of my own upbringing in a multicommunal, multi-
racial, multireligious environment. And I suppose, in a small community a major
dynamic is to break away; and the condition of living for many is at the border. My
characters also often don’t think of themselves as either one or the other, which
frustrates everybody except me, of course.

Desai: In terms of characters not thinking of themselves as one or the other, I am

reminded of the exchange between Rita and Pius in The Book of Secrets where the

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190  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 42 Number 3

issue of Pius’s knowledge of his own desires is brought into question. One of the
things that I have found refreshing in your work is your willingness to engage
with issues of homosexuality which have for long been considered taboo. Not only
am I thinking of the character Gregory but also of the story “Farida” in which the
narrator comes to terms with his son’s gay relationship and identity. It is a very
moving story.

Vassanji: If I can be rash for a moment, I think ambiguity is the driving force or
the nuclear reaction behind my creativity.

Desai: I would have said it is sexuality not ambiguity that seems to underwrite
much of your work (ambiguous sexuality is certainly a part of it). In addition to
same-sex desire, your fiction is also very concerned with voyeurism both as a
sexual act and as a metaphor for seeking truths that are hidden from view. I can’t
remember all the countless permutations of “peeping” that permeate The Book of
Secrets. It is something that we encounter in the Kariakoo of The Gunny Sack, and it
is the central violation in the story “The Girl on the Bicycle.” Why this fascination
with voyeurism?

Vassanji: I don’t know. I don’t think of these things when I write. I don’t even recall
the instances you mention, though there is a very explicit scene of peeping in my
story “Ali” in Uhuru Street. I suppose it has to do with the mysteries of life and
discovering hidden truths when you are young. There’s also the mystery of the
“other,” sexually and otherwise. For a teenager there is no greater mystery than
sex, and surely peeping—into real scenes or into books—in traditional societies
must be very common.

Desai: Your answer here, prompts me to ask something I have been thinking
about throughout our exchange so far. Do you think that your own relationship
to your writing, both the craft as well as the politics, has changed over the years?
I ask specifically because in your earliest interviews, you came across as being a
more deliberative writer, thinking quite consciously about the choices you made
in your fiction and the potential consequences among the readership. Today, you
sound more distanced, more removed, as though the novels just write themselves
without any conscious political, aesthetic, or even ethical choice on your part. As
an example, you once said that you specifically gave Kala (Gunny Sack) part Afri-
can heritage so that he would seem more connected to the continent. Yet, earlier
in our conversation, when I asked about any conscious choices that you made
about interracial relationships in your work, you seemed to imply that they just
enter the fiction because they happened to be around, and not because of any
particular decision on your part. With due respect, as a reader of a book such as
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, I just don’t know that I can quite believe that.
Have you seen a change in your own relationship to your work from the time of
being a young writer to a mature, well established one?

Vassanji: It definitely would have changed. Now I think of writing more as some-
thing that I simply have to do. I must have thought so in the past too, at least to a
degree, though I was conscious that I must tell stories that are not or never have

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 GAUR AV DESAI  •  191

been told, and would soon be forgotten. As for some writing choices, I didn’t mean
to imply that there are no conscious choices or decisions that occur when I write.
But they are of a different degree, I think, than the sort of details you mentioned
previously. And they are few. Once a story gets going, I let it go where it wants
to. I couldn’t write if I had to pause before every scene to reflect on its possible
sociological meaning. In Amriika, I was conscious and a little nervous about writ-
ing about Islam the way I did; this was after Satanic Verses. In Vikram Lall, I picked
a Panjabi protagonist to pay tribute to the community that built the railway, and
let it go from there; and I was a little wary of writing about the Mau Mau initia-
tion ritual as an outsider; but I did so anyway. But there is no message as such in a
novel—that would kill it for me. I put in inter-racial relationships when they come
naturally, and they do so for me. But novels don’t just happen. I have ten revisions
of my current one in my computer. The revisions have to do with language and
style, internal consistency or integrity—how well the novel “works”—and some
details.

Desai: To point to ten versions of a novel is, of course, to talk of the process of
writing as craft, and I’d like to discuss some aspects of your craft. One of the fea-
tures of your work that I have begun to see as a signature is the ability to present
those characters who have traditionally been negatively stereotyped as having at
least some possibly redeeming qualities. Readers noticed in Corbin, for instance,
a colonial officer who was, despite his structural position of a colonizer, not inca-
pable of having some sympathies with the colonized. In The Gunny Sack, Salim,
when discussing the shopkeeper Pipa, who in the eyes of both his own community
as well as the Africans around him comes across as a relatively rich but miserly
fellow, also stops to ask “[Was he really] as evil as he was made out to be?” (185).
The epitome of such relatively sympathetic characterization is, of course, Vikram
Lall. By any objective measure he is a despicable man. But you structure your
narrative such that you almost defy your readers to really despise him. Indeed,
by showing him as a child, as a relatively obedient son, as a loving brother, as a
good friend to Njoroge and so on for a good three quarters of the narrative, by
the time we really get to see his acts of corruption, you have already stacked the
cards heavily in Vikram’s favor, thus playing havoc on our moral sensibilities. Now
that the achievement of that novel has been recognized by the Giller Prize, would
you mind sharing with your readers, in as much detail as you can, some of the
decisions of craft that went into the writing of that novel?

Vassanji: I am not quite sure I could do that but let me try. After Amriika, I thought
I would go back to Africa. I had always wanted to write about and explore the
Asian response to Mau Mau—I recalled instances of fear in the home when I
was four years old in Nairobi. I also wanted to pick a character who had worked
on the railways, to pay tribute. For some reason I made him Hindu Panjabi. The
Goldenberg scandal was going on in Kenya when I visited there for my research,
and a List of Shame had been announced. There was a commission on corruption.
But corruption does not disappear like that. There was a comic element to all this.
Anybody in Nairobi could point out the buildings owned by Moi, and explain
the thuggish doings of Mama Ngina—extortion, high-level corruption, and so
on. That was the setting that suggested itself for the latter part of the novel—how

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192  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 42 Number 3

would the Vikram Lall I had created in the early part of the novel cope with that?
That was not hard to imagine. I visited Nairobi often in the 1970s. Corruption is
very easy to fall into—it’s all around you, a mode of life and business. You don’t
need to be a Mobutu or Idi Amin to be corrupt. And so Vikram Lall could not
be simply evil. There was also research I did about Mau Mau oaths, and Kenyan
Panjabi history, Panjabi customs, Jomo Kenyatta, the murder of J. M. Kariuki. The
railways fascinate me and I used them to describe the country, and the grip it had
on Vikram.

Desai: I often suggest to my students that the In-Between World of Vikram Lall is
among other things a wonderful expose on how corruption enters the world. It
does so in little acts, small transgressions, favors turning into obligations, requests
into demands, and so on. It is at the same time a meditation on how violence
enters the world in ways both big and small. If the dramatic killings associated
with the Mau Mau (on all sides of the conflict) are the most visible markers of such
violence, it is the personal betrayals (for instance the servant Amini wrongfully
accused of stealing the gun) and the resentments (e.g., the young Vikram’s resent-
ment of being made to take the oath by Njoroge) that embody the more quotidian
violations. One of the debates staged in the novel is that between violent and
non-violent means of obtaining social justice and independence. Here the figure
of Gandhi looms large. I take it you were writing Vikram Lall even as you were
immersed in your travels in India where you were often reminded of the ideals of
Gandhi and the incomplete project of Gandhian nonviolence in India. What role
has Gandhi played in your own thinking and work? I ask not only in your role as
a writer, but also as an East African Asian. Did Gandhi mean much to you as you
were growing up? Did his early career in South Africa have any resonance with
you and your friends?

Vassanji: In the culture of Uhuru Street that I was growing up in, we were quite
ignorant about modern India. I had seen photos of Gandhi, but all he meant was
a weird-looking person in dhoti. Dhotis were not usually worn in the East Africa
of my childhood. It was at MIT that I discovered Gandhi—after first discovering
Nehru through his autobiography—realizing that he was a Gujarati (from the
same town as my mother’s father), and had lived in South Africa. It was when
I read about Gandhi in Erikson’s book, in a history-and-psychoanalysis course,
that the full impact of Gandhi came to me. (My term paper was on Nehru, by the
way.) This was the time of the “identity crisis” and of course because I had come
away from a very close community culture, I was going through my own crisis.
What struck me about Gandhi was the sheer courage of questioning oneself—and
of course the nonviolence, but it was the personal courage that hit me very hard.
I turned him into an ideal; I was shocked to learn that he would sleep with his
nieces, even though he was elderly then and it was to test himself, as he said; and
later to find out about his son Harilal. Recently I was asked to write a foreword to
a new Canadian edition of his autobiography, and I realized that it was all about
him—it was his truth, his conscience, all the time, the family had to go along. But
there was his courage in the Calcutta riots, and in Delhi before his assassination.
During my travels in India, I soon realized that he had become more or less a pic-
ture, on banknotes and so on, he hardly mattered. I asked several people explicitly

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 GAUR AV DESAI  •  193

“Is Gandhi relevant in modern India?” The most frequent and convincing answers
were “No.” But for me in some ways the ideal stands; the weaknesses or failures
we see in him are often because he shows them to us through his honesty.

Desai: At the risk of self-indulgence, I want to share a similar personal experience.

For me, growing up as a teenager in Dar, having just moved there from Nairobi,
the ideal was Mwalimu Nyerere. He was a stark contrast to President Moi with his
several limousines and security details. I would see Mwalimu almost every day on
my way to school when he would go to church and would take the time after the
church service to receive anyone who would want to speak to him. This was no
more than a matter of a few minutes of his time, but it made a big impression on
me. The whole aura of the time, the ideals behind Ujamaa, made a profound mark
on my thinking. I remember telling people long after, that yes, we stood in long
lines then to get bread, yes, we’d have to have scouts out there to find out when
milk might be available in the local dairy, but still, life in Dar was better then than
it was in Nairobi. As your novels have shown, there was something about that
coastal place—the long history of cosmopolitanism, perhaps? Mwalimu’s insis-
tence, at least in his speeches, that Tanzania was and would remain a nonracialist
space? In any case, I cried the day Nyerere died, and by then I was a grown man!
But over time, I too have begun to see that Nyerere was not a perfect man—the
political detentions that you allude to in The Gunny Sack, the various villagization
experiments that he insisted on and that failed. Incidentally, The Gunny Sack was
my first introduction to a more critical reading of that period. Gandhi, too, as you
rightly point out was a compromised man. You mention the absence of his family
in the autobiography, but in addition, in the African context that interests us, his
South African legacy is also compromised by some of his paternalistic comments
about Africans. I’m trying to deal with some of this legacy in the book that I am
working on, but it is difficult to come to terms with it. Since we are on the subject of
leaders and ideals, would you say something about Mwalimu Nyerere? I remember
you saying somewhere that “we” (as in all Tanzanians) are all Nyerere’s children.
Yet, on reading the Gunny Sack, I can’t help but guess that as a young man you were
less enamored of Nyerere than I was?

Vassanji: I suspected you might be from East Africa, but Dar . . . that’s a pleasant
revelation. About Gandhi, he was paternalistic, as you say, but this was a long
time ago. He was willing to nurse the Zulus when others were not. As for Nyerere,
my friends and I (in high school) were of two minds. We had no doubt we were
Tanzanians; we enjoyed Nyerere’s informal bantering ways, we approved of his
modesty. We supported ujamaa in principal. But there were the detentions, the
restrictions, the corrupt bureaucracy that the wealthy could easily circumvent. I
would never have left the country if that bureaucracy had not pushed me to study
at university a field I did not want—on purely arbitrary grounds, and once I left,
Nyerere and Tanzania meant even more to me. After my PhD, I even applied for
a job at the university—out of a sense of patriotic duty—but ultimately the fear of
being trapped there, unable to travel, kept me out. But now I keep returning there
when I can. Nyerere’s idealism is long gone from Tanzania, a nation that seems
to be run on foreign aid and by NGOs, but he does stand like some kind of moral
measure, the same way Gandhi does.

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194  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 42 Number 3

Desai: Just so I lay my cards straight on the table, I should clarify for our read-
ers that I came to East Africa with my parents as a young boy first to Kenya and
then to Tanzania, so I don’t claim the long history that you and several of my
East African Asian classmates back then did. But East Africa nevertheless had a
profound impact on my life. You mentioned that you keep returning there, and
while many readers are familiar with your writings reflecting back on the East
African experience, I suspect some don’t know of the documentary venture “The
In-Between World of M.G. Vassanji.” Could you say a little about how that came
about, what the experience of taking part in the documentary was like, what the
aftereffects and reception of the film were and so on? I remember, for instance, a
somewhat uncomfortable conversation that takes place in the film between you
and other East African writers and intellectuals on the opportunities available
to Asians, and another moment in the film when you are asked for a bribe to
have your books considered for adoption in schools. These could not be moments
of exposition that would please Tanzanian authorities. Have you met with any
censure on these counts?

Vassanji: The documentary happened by accident; it was supposed to be about my

trip to Gujarat, and gave me the chance to travel with company—guys who are
good at arranging taxis and bargaining at hotels, and so on. It was an enjoyable
trip but too short. Since then I made two such tours through Kathiawad (Gujarat).
In any case the project was taken over by someone else, a South African Canadian,
who wanted to take me back to Kenya and Tanzania. The filming was sometimes
awkward, but I got to do a land trip from Nairobi to Dar and that was fun. I like
travelling by land. The exchange that took place, at the Norfolk, was strange,
because there was this person who seemed to thrive on Asian guilt. I have since
realized, having gone through my own Asian guilt, that Africans could be racists
too, and some of them were rich. There is the impression that all Asians are rich,
and Africans poor. That was not true. My mother worked twelve hours a day in
her shop just to put us through high school. The chief who was murdered by the
Mau Mau in 1953 was in a Bentley. The situation is complex, and that is what I
was trying to get through. It’s easier to do this in Tanzania, but in Nairobi I faced
a wall. About the bribe scene: to be fair, the guy did not ask for a bribe, just that
the fee for a book to be even considered (evaluated) as a text is rather steep and
nonrefundable! My only fear in going back has been in Kenya after Vikram Lall,
but nothing happened.

Desai: From what I gather from newspaper reports and online articles, in your
subsequent visits to East Africa you have found an increasing interest in your work
by Tanzanians, and that you have, if I am not mistaken, also conducted some fic-
tion writing workshops for young authors? Can you speak a little about what you
see as the present and future promise of literature and the arts in East Africa? I
am interested in your take on both writers of Asian origin in East Africa and its
diaspora (many of whom have been inspired by your work) as well as non-Asian
writers.

Vassanji: There has been some interest in my work in Tanzania and Kenya. I
have conducted a very rudimentary workshop in Dar, but I hope to go back and

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 GAUR AV DESAI  •  195

conduct a more formal one. I believe very strongly that Africans (and I include
Asian Africans) need to tell their stories more. All we hear of Africa in the west
is poverty, disease, and war. I always tell people there is more to Africa—besides
the fact that it is not all one homogeneous place. If you compare the number of
books published annually in Kenya or Tanzania (a few hundred) to the number,
for example, in UK (something like 150,000), the figures boggle the mind. They are
stupefying. The implications of the disparity are also huge. I know a few writers
from Kenya, and there are a few in the East African Asian diaspora. From my last
visit to Dar, I gathered there was little patience with extended disciplined writing;
blogging seemed to have become attractive. That and spoken-word poetry.

Desai: In relation to spoken-word poetry and performance art, the recent work of
Shailja Patel comes to mind. She presents a performance piece entitled “Migritude,”
which is based partially on her East African heritage. Since you have nurtured so
many younger and newer voices through your TSAR Book publications, I wonder
what you think of some of the newer voices from the Asian diaspora of East Africa?
I am thinking of writers like Jules Damji, Neera Kapur-Dromson, Jameela Siddiqi,
Parita Mukta, and also of someone like Sophia Mustafa, who while not a new voice
has only relatively recently had her fiction published. Your thoughts on some of
their writing either individually or collectively?

Vassanji: I am not sure how much I have nurtured them, but younger Asians have
kept an eye on me to find out how I have handled certain issues—community and
faith, for example. I am only vaguely familiar with some of the works; except for
Neera Kapur’s memoir, I have not come across anything that is quite rooted in East
Africa, which is not to say EA is not important to the works of others, but most
of these appear to reflect a migrant identity. Especially if you are from Nairobi,
your knowledge of the streets outside of the Asian quarters is limited. Poetry then
becomes the medium of choice, especially when identity is a problem. It is a dif-
ficult situation for young Kenyan Asians. Tanzanians would fare better, especially
the men, because many would have grown up in the streets, as it were.

Desai: What I have found refreshing in reading some of these later writings is
the emergence of many women’s voices and narratives. Neera Kapur-Dromson’s
From Jhelum to Tana is of course centrally concerned with chronicling the lives of
early women immigrants and their descendants, but there are other writers such
as Parita Mukta and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who also shed new light on Asian
women’s lives in East Africa, which for the most part received scant attention in
the scholarly histories of the community. In terms of the migrant versus rooted
perspective, there seems to be a rough divide generationally or at least in terms
of how many years the author spent growing up in East Africa. Yasmin Alibhai-
Brown’s No Place Like Home, for instance, a memoir about life in Uganda before the
expulsion is written from the space of exile (in her case Britain) but is an intimate
portrayal among other things of life at Makerere University in the midst of Amin’s
Uganda. From the Tanzanian context, Jules Damji who writes from the US but who
grew up in Upanga presents a wonderfully nuanced portrait of the area. One of
the things that intrigues me about of all these authors is the extent to which they
read and engage with other writers, both Asian and non-Asian from across the

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196  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 42 Number 3

continent. In terms of Asian African writing, as you may know, there has been
a flurry of work that has emerged in South Africa especially after the apartheid
years. But I can’t quite tell whether East African Asians (both in East Africa and
its diaspora) are reading South African Asian writing and vice-versa. Have you
yourself had occasion to read some of this literature? My general interest in asking
this is to figure out the kinds of literary traffic and connections that might exist
between East and South Africa.

Vassanji: As I said, I’m not familiar with much of that writing. Yasmin Alibhai, of
course, she’s a good friend. And Sophia Mustafa, whom I got to know well before
she died. Her work is very engaged with East Africa. One should not forget Peter
Nazareth or Bahadur Tejani, and the Kassam brothers, who were poets. I have
not read many South African Asians—in fact I’ve read only Reshard Gool, who
came from an eminent activist family—a good portion of the District Six museum
in Cape Town is dedicated to that family. Unfortunately he wrote only one book
set in South Africa. There’s so much to read, and writers, unlike scholars, make
different connections in their reading.

Desai: On the matter of different connections, I wonder whether over the years
V. S. Naipaul and his writings on Africa have had an impression on you. I am not
talking about the idea of influence as such but rather about your thoughts on him
as a fellow writer interested among other things in Africa. A Bend in the River was
of course one of the first fictional representations of an East African coastal Asian
to capture the imagination of readers worldwide. Naipaul’s early visits to Uganda
and his expressed anxieties about the fate of Asians in postcolonial Africa have
been documented by Theroux in his memoir. And of late, Naipaul has published
a new book on Africa titled The Masque of Africa which, like much of his work has
seen its share of controversy. What is your own read on Naipaul and on Naipaul’s
Africa in particular?

Vassanji: I have read Naipaul’s early novels and some of his essays, and An Area
of Darkness. I am aware of what he writes. I think when he visits a place, he sees
it as an outsider. I am unable to see East Africa or India as an outsider. I find it
remarkable that persons who do not know the language, let alone the language
nuances, of a place, do not know or understand the culture, cannot sit down and
banter with its people, become the interpreters of that place, so that the world—or
the reading segment of it—hangs on to their every observation. There’s nothing
intrinsically wrong with this phenomenon; it’s just that if that place would only
pick up its pen or laptop and write, to give the world something else. If only the
traffic went both ways.

Desai: Okay, one final question and then I’d like to invite you to make any conclud-
ing comment or observation on any matter that you think we did not cover and
that we should have. The question relates to the insider/outsider aspect that you
raise but in terms of a different domain—that of academia. In your own career
you have been both an insider to the academy, having had a career as a physicist,
and an outsider as a writer independent of the university setting. In significant
portions of your work, I find a certain skepticism if not disdain towards university

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 GAUR AV DESAI  •  197

scholars and particularly those who might have an activist edge. I am think-
ing of the mildly mocking tone that The Gunny Sack’s narrator has towards the
motley crew of university-based activists surrounding Amina in Dar and also of
the general dysfunctionality of the university-based activism around which the
narrative of Amriika is structured. Perhaps the most explicit critique of scholarly
politics that you offer is in your discussion of the “Calcutta Intellectuals” in A
Place Within. Granting their general brilliance and sympathy for the oppressed, you
nevertheless find them as too sure of their political positions. “With them” you
write, “there are no two ways. The world is divided neatly between the oppressed
and the oppressors. There is right, and there is wrong. They are on the side of the
right” (32). I wonder if you could comment on this further. Are you suggesting that
writers, by virtue of their vocation, are necessarily more ambivalent or nuanced in
their political positions? Or is it the case that academics are more institutionally
or ideologically constrained by the “truths” that surround them?

Vassanji: I would not use the term “disdain,” but I do have a lot of impatience
with people who have simple answers or formulations. As a novelist I look at
what’s inside a person, and so nothing about a character is simple, unambiguous,
unchangeable; no character is pure in any sense. Among academics there are first
the activists and I realize that they are not stupid, they cannot look for ambiguity
if they have to take a stand and act. I am not made like that. In India especially you
see strong dichotomies. When I suggested to a student recently that there may be
nothing essentially wrong with a writer with BJP (Indian nationalist) sympathies,
he may still be a good writer, the student told me, “Obviously you have not lived
in India.” I think my attitude might have its roots in my East African and Gujarati
Khoja background. As East Africans, we were Asians and Africans, and my sons
feel the same way, besides being Canadian. As Gujarati Khojas we could say Ali
and Krishna in the same breath. (I am by no means religious now.)
You also have academics who work with formulas. In Canada the formu-
laic and simple-minded terms (in relation to writers or writing) “immigrant,”
“multicultural,” “nostalgic” are often used and are quite infuriating.
As far as the examples from my works that you cite are concerned, I think you
have to consider them separately. The academic in Amriika is actually very sym-
pathetic, he recurs in The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets; he simply goes a bit
far but not for the wrong reasons. The intellectuals in The Gunny Sack are patriotic
but polemical and reflect the politics of the period (the 1960s); they are patriotic in
a way that reflects the 1960s postindependence period. Terms like “imperialist,”
“colonizer,” “mabepari” (exploiters) were bandied about. The Calcutta intellectuals
I describe are a type of Indian who can be perfectly nice, but get very uncomfort-
able when you say anything positive or hopeful about India—they’ll immediately
come up with a contrary observation. And India being what it is, large, complex,
and unwieldy, they are left with a deep pessimism or cynicism about the nation.
I think we’ve covered a lot.

Desai: We have, indeed. I thank you once again for your willingness to undertake
this exchange. And I look forward with great anticipation to reading your next
novel, which I understand you have just completed.

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