1The personal itinerary of Moyez Vassanji is an important parameter in understanding his work and in particular his conception of the role of literature. Born in Kenya in 1950 to parents of Indian origin, Vassanji grew up in Tanzania. In 1978, he settled in Canada where he still lives. As such, Vassanji is a good example of the double diaspora, of the twice displaced, which explains why alienation, in-betweeness and unbelonging are recurrent themes in his novels, in particular Amriika (1999), No New Land (1991) and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003). Unlike his grandfather who grew up in India, Vassanji, like Vikram, the protagonist of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, does not have a place he can go back to, hence his need to recreate in writing what he has lost in real life. In an interview with Susheila Nasta, he explained the necessity to document in writing the Asian diaspora in East Africa and to write about their experience there in order to keep it alive.
I live in Canada and at some point I felt a tremendous sense of loss at being away from the place I grew up in, and what I did was try to recreate the life that we lived. But I think a more important motive perhaps is that that life has never been lived ... I mean never been written about. It’s something that is slowly being wiped out, and as the people who’ve experienced that life die away, die off, then there’s no more record of that life. (Vassanji in Nasta, 70)
- 1 In an article entitled ‘The Migrant Experience in East African Asian Writing’, Peter Simatei explai (...)
- 2 Many critics have stressed the fact that the literature of the South Asian diaspora is often a lite (...)
2His interesting slip of the tongue ‘has never been lived’ instead of ‘never been written about’ sheds some light on his reasons for writing. For him writing is a way of according a degree of reality to a hyphenated life, that of Asian immigrants who did not find their place in the grand narrative of the anti-colonial struggle and whose existence and life in Africa was likely to be forgotten after they left Kenya.1 In this respect, his diasporic narratives, which often revisit the African experience from some foreign place of exile, are not so much aimed at reviving the cultural heritage of the Indian diaspora as at bearing witness to its presence in Africa. In this respect, his novels do not fit into the category of diasporic texts described by Emmanuel Nelson, texts which aim at what Nelson calls “an aesthetics of reworlding” (Nelson, 1992, XVI) which originates “in a subtext of home” (Brah, 1996, 199). Vassanji’s novels look more toward the present and future rather than look back on the past2 as toward the present and future. They seek to establish and immortalize the actual experience of diasporic Indians away from India. This does not mean however that Vassanji seeks historical accuracy; the Kenya he recreates is also an ‘imaginary homeland’ – to borrow an expression coined by Rushdie (1991).
3The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is set in two countries, Kenya and Canada, or rather revisits the protagonist’s life in Africa from Canada, where he now lives. The protagonist, who is also the narrator, undertakes to tell his story in a narrative which hovers between testimony and self-justification. In the prologue, Vikram introduces himself as someone who has been charged with corruption. Despite his claims that the text is not a confession, his narrative, which is both self-explanatory and self-reflexive is also an attempt at understanding what lies behind the scenes of political power and an attempt at recalling the eventful progress that has led him from passive acceptance of bribes to full-time corruption. The gap between the beginning of the story, when Vic is still a child, and the moment of the narration, when Vic as a middle-aged man remembers his past, allows for a shift in perspective which reveals, though incompletely, the darker side of Kenyan independence and what the narrator calls “the morass that is now our malformed freedom” (5). Kenya thus emerges in the interstice between the naive and partial understanding of the protagonist as a child and the more cynical understanding of the now adult narrator. The heart of darkness of the doings of politicians as well as those of the protagonist remains beyond our understanding, leaving us somewhere between innocence and experience. In this paper I propose to focus on the resilient opacity of the novel, which contrasts with the apparent process of unveiling at work in the text. Interspersed throughout the text are descriptions of pictures, sometimes seen long after the moments they immortalized. Yet rather than lifting a veil on the past, they seem to suggest its unreadability and are more often idols, used to build up a family mythology half-real half-invented, than actual icons bearing the truth.
4The novel is divided into four parts and follows a strict chronological order. The first part, which starts in 1958 when Vikram is an eight year-old boy, narrates the days spent in Nakuru, a world of innocence where Vic and his sister Deepa mix freely with other children like the African boy Njoroge or Annie and Bill Bruce who are from England. These days of innocence come to an abrupt end after the murder of the Bruce family by Mau Mau rebels, and despite the parents’ efforts to conceal from their children what has happened, they will remain haunted by it throughout their lives. The second part, which starts in 1965, focuses on Vikram’s teenage years and early adulthood, relates the years spent in Nairobi after Jomo Kenyatta became President. The narrator, now a college boy, has a better understanding of racial tensions and prejudices. In the third part, set in the 1970s, tensions and interrogations settle into resignation and acceptance of imposed rules and structures which seem impossible to overthrow. Part Four describes the homecoming of Vikram Lall in the guise of Victor de Souza to Nairobi where the Anti-Corruption commission is being disbanded and fire breaks out in the building where he is staying.
5In the narrative of his childhood years spent in the Kenyan town of Nakuru, Vikram sketches a world of innocence and pleasant joyfulness, a world where children of different races mix freely, a world free of the grip of colonial power. When William Bruce and his sister Annie arrive in town, they become friends with Vic and his sister and the trio William Bruce/Vikram Lall/Njoroge represents a peaceful coexistence between the white population, the Asian community and the native population. However this world is not devoid of barriers and hierarchies, but rests on a subtle compartmentalization which escapes Vic’s notice. Only at times, in the reflections of adult characters, do we understand that the situation is tenser than Vic thinks, when he says that “these barriers of class and prestige were not so inviolable or cruel at our level, and we did become friends” (9). In the interstice between childhood memories and the reflective stance of the narrator as an adult, a more complex image of Kenya gradually takes shape, a double-layered one where violence, conflict and tensions loom large, as in the following paragraph:
I call forth for you here my beginning, the world of my childhood, in that fateful year of our friendships. It was a world of innocence and play, under a guileless constant sun; as well, of barbarous cruelty and terror lurking in darkest night; a colonial world of repressive, undignified subjecthood, as also of seductive order and security […]. (5)
- 3 The act of renaming is a well known trope in postcolonial literature. In his book Fear and Temptati (...)
From the outset of the novel it becomes clear that the narrative voice not only hovers between the double polarity innocence/experience but literally plays with it. This shift between the two poles is echoed in the very structure of the chapters which open onto the African plot and go back to the embedding narrative which concentrates on the narrator’s new life in Canada. Sometimes, our understanding is limited to what the protagonist as a child had perceived, and sometimes, some comments or hints dropped almost randomly or so it seems, suggest that underneath the harmonious world-picture lies a more complex, less ideal situation. For example, we realize that Njoroge (Vikram’s African friend) was called William up to the moment when another William enters the stage, William Bruce (the English child). The African boy then becomes known as Njoroge, as if the English boy were the only one entitled to be called William. Ironically enough, the act of renaming, which is a common trope of postcolonial writing,3 is here dealt with in an original way. Instead of referring to the process whereby the native finds himself deprived of his name by the colonist and given an English name, the renaming process restores the initial name, yet not in a liberating way but in a way which suggests that anything that has been bestowed upon the colonial subject can be taken back almost at any time. In the presence of the colonist, Njoroge/William becomes the subaltern with a native name, an identity not chosen out of pride but by default. Vikram finds himself in a similar situation with William Bruce from the moment of the first encounter between the two children. Vic, who was riding his cart immediately offers William a ride, not only putting himself at William’s disposal but also sharing his belongings with him. The rest of the meeting suggests that rather than being unaware of the barrier between them and the Bruces, Vikram is trying to reassure himself. For example, Vikram notices their “refined accents, and their language sharp and crystalline and musical” beside which theirs “seemed a crude approximation” of a language they knew was “the language of power and distinction” (8).
6The divide between colonist and coloniser is paralleled with other forms of compartmentalization such as racial divisions. These tensions are not experienced directly by Vikram but by some members of his family, like his uncle.
Mr. Innes, whose wife and daughter were slaughtered that Saturday, was a big ruff, red-haired and –whiskered bully of a man, who always refused to serve Mahesh Uncle at Innes and McGeorge. Hey you, son of a coolie – he would bark briskly and harshly as soon as my uncle pushed through the glass doors. Out! Go back to cowland, Neglee bastard! (25)
- 4 In Hindi, ‘angrez-log’ means ‘English people’.
Besides, racial exclusion is practiced not only by the British (colonizers) but also by Indians (the colonized) such as Vic’s mother who keeps her distance both from the “angrez-log” (16)4 and the Kenyans. However, if Vic’s perception of events allows us to become aware of certain tensions, we are not able to fully fathom them because he fails to understand the balance of power that lies beneath them; for example, the fact that his mother’s hostility towards the Bruces probably originates in her resentment about what they stand for: colonisation, political, economic and cultural domination. Although the children live under the illusion that hierarchies do not weigh heavily upon them, the sometimes tense relationships between their families point to the fact that the country’s population is, in fact, a tightly compartmentalized cultural mosaic. Certain episodes, not fully understood by the narrator-as-child are easily decoded by the reader. For example, the description of the Lalls following the coronation ceremony of Elizabeth II brings to the fore the context of colonial domination. So does that of the rose given to the Lalls by Mrs Bruce and which Mr Lall names Elizabeth. When delegating his black gardener to plant it in the African soil, Mr Lall metaphorically enforces the colonial order and acts as an instrument to root colonial domination in the African soil.
7The last factor of tension between the different communities is the role of women in a patriarchal system, as objects traded and exchanged. Interestingly, even as a child and despite his misunderstanding of the actual political situation, Vic has developed a certain awareness of the dos and donts of friendship between children from different communities and in particular between children of different genders. If he fails to perceive the potentially transgressive nature of his attraction to Annie Bruce, he does not fail to notice the transgressive nature of Njoroge’s attraction to his sister Deepa and almost seems to consider that Njoroge is preying on her, as if he was programmed to enforce the patriarchal order from a very early age. Later on, as a teenager, he is officially asked by his father to look after Deepa and chaperone her.
8The technique which consists in shifting from a child perspective to that of an adult is used by Vassanji in a rather atypical way. Rather than suggesting a move from innocence to experience, Vassanji seems to imply that sometimes the child’s understanding of certain issues is quite intuitive and accurate, while the protagonist as adult occasionally fails to understand certain predictable situations (for example when he truly believes that he can go back to Kenya and clear his name). This ambiguity in the shift from innocence to experience is also conveyed at the level of literary genres. To some extent the novel is based on an interlacing of several plots which all tie in with the main one, the narrative of Vic’s life. Among them are the romance plot between Njoroge and Deepa, Vic’s narrative of exile, and the narrative of Njoroge’s proximity with and distancing from political power, which offers an interesting counterpoint to Vic’s own itinerary. Vic’s narrative, which as we said follows him from childhood to adulthood is reminiscent of the Bildungsroman and takes up some of its tropes, such as the move away from the family unit, the acquisition of skills and the return to the home town or family circle. Yet as is often the case in postcolonial writing, the rewriting is partial and superficial so as to convey the specificity of the postcolonial context and the limitations of a transfer of aesthetic forms from West to East. The rewriting of a genre like the Bildungsroman is interesting in so far as it touches upon the idiosyncrasy of cognitive systems and shows that what is valid in the West does not necessarily apply to the East. Whatever knowledge Vic may gain is constantly challenged by unexpected changes. When Vic is finally prevailed upon to return to Africa and clear his name, the narrative chronicles the circumstances of his return and the strategies devised to prepare his homecoming. The minute description of the logistics devised to avoid being caught revives the atmosphere of plotting described in part three and foreshadows his tragic death. It also makes this gesture seem unreasonable; not only is the outcome predictable, but the risk to his family, particularly his father, is obvious. The reader is progressively led to the conclusion that whatever the moral standards that are valid in the West, they are not applicable to the East, not because the East is intrinsically corrupt but because the disruption of existing power structures under colonial rule has generated a situation of general degeneration of the political fabric. The Bildungsroman and its traditionally triumphant ending and celebration of gained knowledge therefore appear out of place in the East African context. So does the rake’s progress in a country where things are falling apart. In other words, rather than rewriting certain canonical genres, Vassanji superimposes several traditional Western narratives onto the Kenyan context where they seem totally out of place.
9The uncertain shift from ignorance to knowledge is also complicated at the metatextual level by the uncertain status of the narrator. So far this paper has focussed on the voice of innocence which resonates throughout the first part of the book and which is linked to the use of a child narrator (or rather an adult reminiscing about his life as a child). However, one should not forget the prologue and the clues it gives the reader, in particular the indications in the form of confession given by the narrator himself (“I have the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa’s most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning.” (4)). In other words, the innocent point of view of the child masks the presence of the protagonist as an adult, charged with corruption and accused of receiving bribes. This situation may even warp our perception of the events, since there is always a suspicion that the narrator is unreliable.
- 5 In his book The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary, Vijay Mishra (...)
10The problematic shift from innocence to experience links up with another specificity of the novel which lies in the handling of the relation between fiction and reality, the blurring of the frontier between the two and the destabilization of the status of the ‘real’, which can be illustrated through the analysis of the aesthetics of partial unveiling at work in the novel. Interspersed throughout the novel are descriptions of several photographs, all seen through Vikram’s eyes. Among them are family pictures, like those of his uncle Verma and his grandfather Anand Lal, who was part of the first wave of Indian diaspora5 and came to East Africa to work for a railway company. As a child, Vikram likes to look at these photographs in an attempt to discover where he comes from. Even as a child, Vikram develops a certain awareness of not being part of a grand narrative, whether it is the narrative of colonisation or that of resistance and nationalist struggle against colonisation. While both his friends William and Njoroge have narratives they can relate to, Vikram laments the lack of heroes he can use as role models, as in the following paragraph in which he asks his mother why it is that the Indians do not have historical heroes.
‘We don’t have heroes, I grumbled to Mother once.
She glared at me, then looked offended. What do you mean, we don’t have heroes? Think of Shree Rama, who was so gentle—
I mean heroes!
He slew the ten-headed Ravana! That’s a hero! And Bhim of the Pandavas took on a whole army alone in the great battle of Mahabharata—
Not those kinds of heroes, Ma! Not gods!
What kind, then? What better heroes than gods?
Bill as Field Marshal Montgomery riding high on his tank [...] searching for the lurking enemy [...] behind a sandpile in Tunisia. (52)
The heroes Vic is referring to are not gods but the actual heroes of history. In this context, the discovery of pictures representing members of his family stimulates his imagination. The fact that they are visual signifiers without a written narrative provides room for imagination, invention and even a certain poetic license. They are fragments of an unwritten narrative waiting for a competent narrator which he ventures to become. The following extract shows how Vic produces an epic of which Asians are the heroes, a narrative of life on the frontier which celebrates the courage of these men and exaggerates the hardships they have been through.
Our people had sweated on it, had died on it; they had been carried away in their weary sleep or even wide awake by man-eating lions of magical ferocity and cunning, crushed under avalanches of blasted rock, speared and macheted as proxies of the whites by angry Kamba, Kikuyu, and Nandi warriors, infected with malaria, sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, cholera; bitten by jiggers, scorpions, snakes, and chameleons; and wounded in vicious fights with each other. (17)
The fact that Vikram’s family helped build a railway line is interesting, for it represents a form of settlement which is not rooted in the land and yet which allows the land to be explored. As such it becomes emblematic of the role of immigrants from South-Asia and of their relation with the British Empire as instruments of expansion.
11If Vikram delights in the contemplation of the picture of his grandfather, he demonstrates an awareness that some episodes of the family mythology may well be closer to fiction than reality: “I don’t know if such rails ever existed, with the Punjabi signatures upon them, but myth is more powerful than factual evidence, and in its way surely far truer” (16). Yet whether or not they actually existed, these signatures have become part of a collective imaginary and as such have taken on a certain degree of reality in so far as they have become instrumental in the shaping of the collective identity of Asian immigrants in Africa. Although Vassanji often stresses the need to write history, his books are not limited to a factual rendering of historical facts and established episodes; much of their interest lies in their understanding of the role of self-representation. Vikram even imagines a second photograph, an imaginary one which emerges as the first one – the real photograph – recedes to the background. This second photograph, which is obviously a materialization of Vic’s fantasies, represents his grandfather, no longer as a reserved character, a frail man in an awkward posture, but as a settler who contemplates the landscape as if he owned the land:
I imagine him six years later, at the end of his second contract, seated atop a small pyramid of steel sleepers at the Nakuru railway yard, with a companion or two perhaps, chewing on a blade of grass or lunching on daal and rice from the canteen. [...]... I see this turbaned young Indian who would be my dada saying to himself, this valley has a beauty to surpass even the god Shivji’s Kashmir, and the cool weather in May is so akin to the winters of Peshawar... (17-18)
12In other words, this imagined photograph turns out to be extremely relevant, for it represents Vikram’s vision of his own identity and place in Kenya as a Kenyan of Asian origin. Although the narrative of Vikram’s life is presented in the prologue as a self-reflexive narrative whose function is to elucidate certain things and lift a corner of the veil, it has finally a slightly different function. It does not aim at accuracy or a faithful rendering of historical truth. It is a narrative which takes stock of the imaginary and the perception the characters have of their own history. In this respect, Kenya as it is described by Vassanji seems to correspond to Rushdie’s conception of an imaginary homeland not as a homeland imagined and fantasized but as a homeland retold, rewritten with the poetic license inherent in the act of reminiscing.
- 6 Interestingly, Vassanji refers to the Mau Mau movement as a terrorist movement, which clearly indic (...)
13Besides, fiction is not seen as radically opposed to reality but sometimes seems to become truer than reality. An example taken from the first part of the novel, in the days when the protagonist was still a child, aptly illustrates this. One afternoon, Mrs Bruce interrupts the children who are playing a game of impersonation. Bill pretends to have arrested a Mau Mau rebel and Njoroge, who plays the part of the Mau-Mau rebel, pretends to be begging forgiveness. Mrs Bruce, who is visibly affected by the discovery of the children playing colonist versus freedom fighters6 is comforted by the Lalls and told that she is overreacting. Yet this episode soon takes on another meaning when it turns out that the Bruces have been killed by Mau Mau rebels. In hindsight, the game played by the children appears to have foreshadowed the episode of the massacre. What is more, it seems to suggest that whatever illusion children still have about the might of colonial power, reality will soon catch up with them.
Bill’s other, outstretched hand proffered a chocolate as prize for the renunciation.
I shall be loyal to the Queen of all the British Empire, Njoroge was mumbling, ... and the dominions...I renounce the Mau Mau oath I have taken...if I give help to the terrorists may I die...
Mrs Bruce had come out of the pickup and was walking toward us; suddenly she let out a terrifying shriek: Willie! Stop it at once! At once! (12)
This play on ambiguity is also suggested through the use of the discursive field of fiction to refer to reality and vice versa. Interestingly, the passages recounting Vikram’s recollections of the massacre are narrated in the present tense, which suggests his failure – as a protagonist-narrator – to convert traumatic memory into narrative memory. Moreover, the memories are described as ‘scenes’ and ‘tableaux’ and the mention of words relating to art seems to suggest that the cruel reality of the independence struggle needs to be mediated by art rather than being presented in a direct unmediated way.
It comes to me always at night, this tableau, this creation of the mind; there is a sound in the darkness, a child’s whimper: No, no… Next, light has fallen on the scene and she is sitting on the floor, pathetic, knees drawn up, and looking up and begging for mercy… the assailant tall and invisible. The darkness again – the light, the light snuffed out – and enough, I say, curtain. (148)
At his juncture, another and more poignant type of picture, that of the Bruce massacre, needs to be discussed. Vikram’s obsession with these photographs is partly explained by the fact that as a child he was kept uninformed of the circumstances of the massacre and therefore tried to see beyond the reassuring narrative concocted by his father. This massacre also came as a shock to him, given his idealized view of life in Kenya. The first photograph he sees, when still a child, is the photograph released in the press of the maimed teddy bear which is used as a synecdoche by the journalist to signify the cruelty of the massacre of the Bruce family. This photograph, which suggests more than it actually shows, continues to haunt Victor throughout his life. Later on, when they are grown ups, Njoroge gives Victor the photographs of the massacre. These pictures which show what was previously unseeable do not add anything to the trauma and the subsequent haunting presence of the Bruce children, and in particular Annie. It is as if the atrocity and the trauma could not be expressed and were reduced to these photographs. On a metatextual level, this belated unveiling which fails to add anything to the impact of this event shows the banality of photographs. It therefore seems that these photographs which are expected to show things and lift up a corner of a veil always fail to perform their function, as if to suggest that there was no way of getting closer to reality. What lies behind the scenes remains hidden. If everything seems to suggest unveiling and revelation, the heart of darkness is never exposed. Much of the emotional charge of Vikram’s references comes from the fact that the trauma he experienced at the death of his friend has always remained unvoiced, inarticulate, unsaid and only hinted at through the description of other people’s sympathy with his plight, through Deepa’s show of concern or Njoroge’s effort to give something – the pictures – that will allow him to go through the mourning process. Contrary to the first type of photographs discussed – the family pictures – these photographs have a different function, they show the limits of the unveiling process.
- 7 Theorists like Gilroy have shown how the position of the in-betweener can provide a sort of ‘double (...)
14The resilient opacity of the text is not only part of an aesthetics of partial unveiling which fuels the narrative and questions the status of the real, it also serves a more general purpose and has to do with the meaning of the novel. If colonial domination somehow remains in the background, its remoteness can be explained by the fact that Vikram was a child in the days of the anti-colonial struggle and had not only a limited understanding of the situation but also limited interest in what was going on. The narrative of post-independence years however, retains the same opacity but for different reasons. The workings of political life remain behind the scenes at least to Vikram. Unlike Njoroge, who is at some point close to certain political leaders but who progressively moves away from the centre of political life, Vikram is drawn to it and made to take a part he does not fully understand. At first, he is asked to use his connections with the Asian community to convert large sums of money into dollars. His role is representative of something more complex in terms of the political situation, since Vassanji represents the Asian community as a community of in-betweeners kept away from decision-making and occasionally instrumentalised. An interesting comparison can thus be made between Vassanji’s book and Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease, which narrates the story of a young Ibo man, sent to England by his community to study and who is accused and found guilty of having taken a bribe. Achebe’s novel also opens with the end of the story, the trial scene, and works its way backwards, to the days of the protagonist’s return to Nigeria. But unlike No Longer at Ease, which is narrated by an extradiegetic narrator, The In-Between World is told by Vikram himself. Vikram’s limited scope therefore adds to the impression that as an Asian he is used as a cog in the machine. In terms of the writing, it represents a shift in the traditional use of the in-betweener as providing a metaperspective (Radhakrishnan, 1996).7 In Vassanji’s novel, the position of the in-betweener, indeed twice so is never presented as empowering. It leads to a case of double exclusion, from colonial power but also from the new regime of post-independence years.
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