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Moyez
Vassanji was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1950 and raised in Tanzania.
His family was part of a community of Indians who had emigrated to Africa.
When he was 19 Vassanji left the University of Nairobi on a scholarship
to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Kanaganayakam 20).
He studied nuclear physics which he later earned a Ph.D. in at the University
of Pennsylvania. From there he immigrated to Canada, working at the
Chalk River atomic power station (Authors 433). In 1980 Vassanji
moved to Toronto and began writing his first novel, The Gunny Sack,
which was published in 1989. That year he, with his wife Nurjehan
Aziz, founded and edited the first issue of The Toronto South Asian
Review (TSAR). After the publication of The Gunny Sack Vassanji
began writing full time and ended his career in physics. Studying
Sanskrit and Indian philology prompted Vassanji's career change (Authors
434). In an interview with Chelva Kanaganayakam, Vassanji said
this of his decision to leave the field of physics: It is the kind of thing you can keep on doing. I had reached a point when I could just churn out things. Unless you are at MIT or Harvard, or a place like that, you are not really at the forefront. Sometimes I miss that life because of the way of thinking it demands. My writing, however, is much more important. It seems to be the mission in life that I finally achieved (34).
Vassanji has published four books: The Gunny Sack, No New Land (1991), Uhuru Street (1991, short stories), and The Book of Secrets (1994). The Toronto South Asian Review has survived under a new name: The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, and has branched out into publishing (see links). Vassanji won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1990 (best debut novel in the African region) for The Gunny Sack (Authors 434). He has also won the Giller Prize (in 1994), the Bressani Literary Prize and the Harbourfront Festival Prize.
Themes
Vassanji's work deals with Indians living in East
Africa. Some members of this immigrant community later undergo a
second migration to Europe, Canada, or the United Sates. Vassanji
then is concerned with how these migrations affect the lives and identities
of his characters, an issue that is personal to him as well: "[the
Indian diaspora] is very important...once I went to the US, suddenly the
Indian connection became very important: the sense of origins, trying to
understand the roots of India that we had inside us" (Kanaganayakam
21). For example, in The Book of Secrets Vassanji focuses
on the interaction between the Shamsi (Indian) community and the native
Africans, as well as the colonial administration. Even though none
of the characters ever return to India, the country's presence looms throughout
the novel. Vassanji himself has never been to India yet he sees himself
"as an Afro-Asian."
Another major concern of Vassanji's is how history affects the present
and how personal and public histories can overlap (Malak 279). The
colonial history of Kenya and Tanzania serves as the backdrop for The
Book of Secrets, but it is the personal history contained in the diary
of a colonial administrator that fuels the story. While the narrator,
a retired schoolteacher, reads the diary and attempts to trace the events
that occur after the diary stops he eventually finds himself revisiting
his own personal history. Vassanji's presentation of the past is
never crystal clear: "the past in [The Gunny Sack] is deliberately
murky to some degree. I did not see, nor wanted to give the impression
of, a simple, linear, historical truth emerging. Not all of the mysteries
of the past are resolved in the book. That is deliberate. It's
the only way" (Kanaganayakam 22).
Bibliography and Works Cited
Contemporary Authors. "Vassanji, M(oyez) G." Detroit: Gale Research Inc. Vol. 136: 433-4.
Kanaganayakam, Chelva. "`Broadening the Substrata': An Interview With M.G. Vassanji." World Literature Written in English. 31, 2 (1991): 19-35.
Malak, Amin. "Ambivalent Afflictions and the Post-Colonial Condition: The Fiction of M.G. Vassanji." World Literature Today. 67, 2 (Spring 1993): 279-82.
Vassanji, M.G. The Book of Secrets. New York: Picador USA, 1994.
---. The Gunny Sack. London: Heinemann International, 1989.
---. No New Land. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991.
---. Uhuru Street. London: Heinemann International, 1991.
http://collection.nlc-bnc.ca/100/201/301/literary/vassanji.htm
A short biography and bibliography
http://www.cofc.edu/~lewis/tz.htm
A page about Tanzania and its literary geography
http://www.mehfilmag.com/nov96/feature.html
An article which discusses TSAR and Indian-Canadian literature in general
http://www.theatlantic.com/atlantic/atlweb/aandc/brfrevs/brv9604.htm
A short review of The Book of Secrets
http://candesign.com/tsarbooks/profile.html
The homepage of TSAR Publications, the publishing branch of TSAR
Author: Robert Hunt, Spring 1998.
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& Issues(Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J. Cosentino's Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995].)