Abstract
One must write for one’s age, so says Sartre, arguing that the writer needs to go beyond a passive reflection of his/her age to want to maintain it or change it (1988: 243). But there is no such thing as a passive reflection where history is concerned and the need for constant questioning of held or handed down beliefs, as propagated by the postmodern approaches, re-situates the writer and his/her audience into newer and more dynamic definitions of and reflections on that age. This paper, by looking at M. G. Vassanji’s kaleidoscopic constellation of characters, an other way to look at Kenya’s history around those defining moments of the struggle for independence and thereafter in his novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2005), seeks to discuss the notions of identity and especially how it is informed by nationalist movements. Vassanji, in all his books, has consistently attempted to situate the often-ignored Afro-Asian within the often ethnocentric African history. In this text, this attempt is placed within the backdrop of several histories and as such it reflects, not passively, but actively and questioningly and at certain points even subversively on what it means to be Kenyan.
Highlights
LITERATURE AS SUBVERSIVE HISTORYNovels arise out of the shortcomings of history (Gomez n.d.) and can be looked at as a deliberate critical and creative medium of producing as well as filling in gaps in officially sanctioned knowledge (Kahyana 2003: 98)
Just to mention a few scholarly engagements with his works: Simatei (2011) notes the counter-nationalistic discourses inherent in the works but zeroes in on the enactment of the difference of the diasporic subject. He traces the histories of Asians in East Africa in Vassanji’s No New Land (1991), The Book of Secrets (1996), The Gunny Sack (1989) and The In-between World of Vikram Lall (2003) concentrating more on the discourses of home
This paper is complementary to the foregoing scholarship: departing from the already stated constructions of the South East Asians in East Africa as a “buffer” community and as “in-betweeners” with a crisis of identity, this paper focuses primarily on the narrative strategies used to achieve the above, while arguing that the strategies are employed to deconstruct the prevailing discourses of the majority that seek to position the South East Asians within the “buffer” and “in-betweener” perceptions
Summary
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history (Gomez n.d.) and can be looked at as a deliberate critical and creative medium of producing as well as filling in gaps in officially sanctioned knowledge (Kahyana 2003: 98). As a counternarrative of the positions and positionings of the South Asian individual and community in East Africa, the novel at once gives voice to the children and grandchildren of those indentured South Asians who, “as part of the labor mobility within the British empire” (Malak 1993: 277), built the MombasaKisumu railway for the (in)famous ‘Lunatic Express’, while at the same time challenging their sometimes self-imposed non-belonging and ambivalence, with feet planted in both countries, ready to flee, when one place gets too hot (Vassanji 2005: 342) In this counter narration vein, it sets itself against the “truth-discourses” (Black 2000: 87) of history and belonging by providing an other plausible history; effectively partaking in the discourse on Kenyan-ness. The historical portrait of a nation that emerges in his narration renders the extant historical accounts contentious
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