Gender, the Subaltern and the ‘Construction of Silence’ in M.G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets

Abstract

This essay explores the depiction of female characters in The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets in an effort to understand the extent to which M.G Vassanji’s writing perpetuates or breaks with (neo)colonial epistemology. Vassanji’s understanding of gender in these two novels is linked to dominant notions of femininity and masculinity and his (re)imagining of the shifting issues of subjectivity and agency, especially in relation to the processes of (de)colonization and migration. His portrayal of female characters can be characterized as ‘enlightened compassion’ (Spivak 1988a 140), and what Busia calls ‘the peculiar construction of silence or silencing’ (87). In exposing women’s multiple subaltern positions, Vassanji’s narratives stage their powerlessness by presenting ‘typical’ women and then representing them in a manner that intensifies their voicelessness.