Abstract
The present essay is concerned with the twice-removed diaspora—those whose ancestors had migrated (or exported as indentured labour) to the Caribbean islands but later moved away to other countries such as England, States or Canada. Their negotiations with their multiple dislocations reflect several other concerns besides the average immigrant anxiety of survival and visibility. In the case of the two writers under discussion, an additional factor that is present in their background is the Naipaulian inheritance and their need to cast it off. Other concerns which surface in their ‘writing’ home is the need to realise the double framework: Which home are they writing to or about, where do they belong and how do they negotiate the double layer of memory—ancestral and experienced, and wherein lies the significance of history, tradition, language and family ties? Both Neil Bissoondath and Cyril Dabyeen gave up their Brahmin pasts and migrated to Canada, not Britain. Their memory recall is also not India but Caribbean politics and histories. Their affiliation with the land of their ancestors is all but erased and they find it unfamiliar. Bissoondath rejects multiculturalism on the grounds that ethnicity leads to ghettoisation and alienness. How do they formulate their images of self and identity—are some of the issues raised and discussed in the present essay.
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Notes
- 1.
George Lamming, The Pleasure of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960).
- 2.
Naipaul, The Middle Passage (1962) (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 1985. The two epigraphs are from James Anthony Froude from his work The English in West Indies (1887). Both are damaging to the enslaved people. The first ends with the sentence, ‘There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and a purpose of their own’, and the second contrasts the affluence of imperial powers with the financial ruins of the islands. The reference to Trollope is also to a passage dated 1860 and gives an additional evidence of Naipaul’s remaining locked up in the imperial past and his heavy dependence on Western perspectives. Trollope’s passage praises Demerara as the Elysium of the tropics, the one ‘true and actual utopia of the Caribbean seas’ (MP 92).
- 3.
My Brahmin Days and Other Stories (Toronto: Tsar Publications, 2000).
- 4.
Naipaul, Finding the Centre: Two Narratives. (Harmondsworth Penguin, 1985). Naipaul’s successive engagements with different cultures—both in the islands and during his travels were ways of negotiating his ‘many-sided background’ (9). Travel, despite the demands it made, ‘broadened my world view, it showed me a changing world and took me out of my own colonial self and it is because the substitute for the mature social experience—the deepening knowledge of a society—which my background and the nature of my life denied me’ (11). But one may well ask how could this actually become possible with the critical (and cynical) observer’s eye and can social interaction be fruitful if entered upon through unequal positions?
- 5.
Digging Up the Mountains: Selected Stories (Toronto: Macmillan, 1985).
- 6.
Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Penguin, 1994).
- 7.
In Digging Up the Mountains. 39–57.
- 8.
Ibid., 1–20.
- 9.
Ibid., 68–77.
- 10.
Ibid., 78–97.
- 11.
‘Jet Lag’, My Brahmin Days and Other Stories, 73–82.
- 12.
The Wizard Swami (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1989).
- 13.
The Mystic Masseur (London: Andre Deutsch, 1958).
- 14.
The Dark Swirl (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1989).
- 15.
‘My Brahmin Days’ in My Brahmin Days and Other Stories, 11–25.
- 16.
‘Short-Story Seminar’, My Brahmin Days, 114–125.
- 17.
In Visible Ink (Edmonton: Newest Press, 1991).
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Jain, J. (2017). Routes of Passage. In: The Diaspora Writes Home. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4846-3_9
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