Trembling strength: Migrating vulnerabilities in fiction by Sharon Bala, Yasmin Ladha, and Denise Chong

Abstract

The Boat People by Sharon Bala, Blue Sunflower Startle by Yasmin Ladha, and Lives of the Family: Stories of Fate and Circumstance, by Denise Chong, are texts that engage with vulnerability as it relates to immigration, one of the most precarious of states or sites that Canadian literature chronicles. The abstract and concrete politics of adaptation are exemplified in these narratives of displacement, inspired by the Tamil refugee crisis of 2009–2010, the Indo-Tanzanian immigration wave of the 1970s, and the resourcefulness of Chinese immigrant families in the mid-twentieth century. These narratives effectively investigate vulnerability within spaces of interconnection, imprisonment, relation, visibility, and transformation. This paper works with their explorations of the Canadian trope of immigration as a process that moves from the vulnerability of strangeness to the vulnerability of adaptation to the vulnerability of commitment. Addressing the ways that these stages are subverted, the paper examines the extent to which migrancy and its resolution resist a “national” narrative in these texts, undercutting the prototype of success through adversity. How they model Hirsch’s “openness to unexpected outcomes” recites the complexity of their depictions of vulnerability.