In the context of diaspora, where the past is quite literally another country, return narratives have long been recognized as a central feature. In contemporary diaspora studies, however, the return has almost always been understood in stubbornly mythological terms.Footnote 1 As Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller note, “The very definition of diaspora depends on attachments to a former home and, typically, on a fantasy of return,” and yet “diaspora’s classic writings tend to defer that fantasy.”Footnote 2 Indeed, for scholars such as Vijay Mishra and William Safran, it is the “myth of return” that animates diasporic communities rather than any real expectation of physical migration,Footnote 3 while James Clifford suggests that diasporas “usually” contain a “constitutive taboo on return, or its postponement to a remote future.”Footnote 4 Overwritten by its mythological elements, the literal return by the diasporic subject becomes impossible, nearly by definition: to the extent that “‘home’ is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination,” writes Avtar Brah, “it is a place of no return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of ‘origin.’”Footnote 5 For the many postcolonial critics who have argued for hybridity as the dominant marker of diaspora, even the expressed desire for a literal return may evince a troubling, ethnocentric nostalgia for origins, a vestige of what Stuart Hall once defined as the “old, the imperializing, the hegemonizing, form of ‘ethnicity.’”Footnote 6
In a critical context where the concept of return is understood to be mythical, impossible, taboo, or regressive, how should we read the decidedly literal diasporic return journeys that continue to be both lived and written? Do these return narratives, with their emphasis on border crossings and multiple sites of belonging, constitute evidence of the hypermobility and empowered hybridity of the contemporary subject? Do they reestablish the local and the specific against the hegemonic rootlessness of a falsely universalized transnational condition? Or are they dreams of purity, indicative of what Ien Ang calls the contemporary “intensification of the appeal of ethnic absolutism and exclusionism which underpin the homeland myth,” which would hold that, “ideally, all diasporized peoples should return ‘home’?”Footnote 7
Given that the concept of diaspora has historically been aligned with traumatic and enforced dispersals, conditions under which the return to a former homeland is particularly difficult, it should not be surprising to find a gap around physical return journeys in contemporary diaspora scholarship. Until recently, however, a similar gap could be found in the wider scholarship on migration. In 2000, for example, Russell King identified return migration as “the great unwritten chapter in the history of migration”;Footnote 8 five years later, Marjory Harper could still call the return the “one crucial theme [that] has largely been neglected in terms of serious attention.”Footnote 9 Agreeing that return movements “have largely been ignored” by migration scholars, Anders H. Stefansson speculates this oversight is a result of the return “run[ning] counter to the dominant paradigms of our era, which is supposedly characterized by increasing global mobility and cultural hybridity.”Footnote 10 This may be particularly true in the context of contemporary literary studies, where diasporas have long and loudly been celebrated as “exemplary” transnational communities, and where diaspora has widely been understood as a form of consciousness rather than as a lived experience.”Footnote 11 The tendency to imagine Canada and the United States as teleological endpoints for migration—what King calls “the myth of non-return”Footnote 12—further works against its consideration specifically within the North American context.
This paper looks to foster greater critical engagement with diasporic return narratives by juxtaposing two Canadian novels that explore the complexities of the return in a global Indian diaspora: M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003) and Neil Bissoondath’s The Worlds Within Her (1998). These two novels make for a productive pairing in the context of the return, as their compelling overlaps emphasize what is at stake in their sharp differences. Both novels explore Indian diasporic identity and its relationship to Canada, as well as the nature (and even the necessity) of a return journey. Both focus on extremely mobile characters within what is often referred to as India’s “new diaspora,” yet each is set against the history of indentured labor, British imperialism, and racialized independence movements that animated the “old” Indian diaspora. India is a powerful force in both novels, yet no major character travels to the country in either book: instead, the conceit of a simple homeland/host land binary is complicated though surrogate Indian homelands (in Kenya and the Caribbean, respectively), troubling ancestral notions of origin, belonging, and home without releasing the drive to return. Finally, each novel includes a migration to Canada that is explicitly political: in In-Between, Vikram flees his own government when he charged with corruption; in Worlds Within, Shakti flees with her young daughter when her husband is assassinated while running for office. Despite these significant overlaps, however, Vassanji and Bissoondath offer starkly different engagements with the Indian diaspora, with the function of history in the diasporic imaginary, and, ultimately, with the politics of the return journey itself.
I begin with close readings of these two compelling return narratives before closing with a consideration of how their juxtaposition invites a broader engagement with the diasporic return. More than simply calling attention to the literal return journey as an overlooked experience in diaspora literary studies, I want to draw on my reading of these two novels to consider the broader implications of its relative absence in the field to date. What are the unspoken parameters that have allowed the return to remain largely outside the purview of the field? What interests are served, and what assumptions remain unchallenged, when we imagine diasporic movement to be unidirectional? And what possibilities emerge for diaspora studies when we emphasize the return?
In-Between World and Worlds Within
In M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), the middle-aged Vikram reflects on his experiences as an Asian in colonial Kenya.Footnote 13 Together with his sister Deepa, his Kikuyu friend Njoroge, and his childhood British friends Bill and Annie, Vikram is at once defined and overwhelmed by the complex and competing worlds between which he is caught. In the post-independence reshuffling of political and economic power in Kenya, Vikram takes advantage of the British and Asian exoduses to become fantastically wealthy. While many Kenyans of British and Indian descent “return” to England and India, Vikram remains in Kenya, first capitalizing on a depressed real estate market, then becoming involved in increasingly dubious business deals that are facilitated by a corrupt ruling party. When the political leadership so beneficial to Vikram changes, however, he finds himself a ready example of the former regime’s corruption, and of the exploitative “foreigners” that had “stolen away” the country.Footnote 14 He becomes—at least in his own mind—the country’s “convenient scapegoat, the disposable outsider.”Footnote 15 Finding himself on top of the country’s very literal “List of Shame,” Vikram flees death threats and charges of corruption to the confines of a cottage on Lake Ontario, Canada, in which he had shrewdly invested years earlier. The novel is presented as his written attempt to come to terms with his much vilified past. It concludes, in a final section entitled “Homecoming,” with his return to Kenya, where he hopes to respond to the charges against him.
In Vassanji’s remarkable novel, the diasporic return journey refracts the concepts of belonging and home through the historical minutiae of British imperialism and the Kenyan independence movement. Several critics have read the relationship between the novel’s chief characters as allegorical representations of broadly defined British, Asian, and local “African” populations.Footnote 16 Such readings are certainly available in the text, which illustrates how simplistic notions of cultural authenticity and racial purity function within the strained context of postcolonial Africa: the shifting power brokers consistently set racialized blocks of the population against each other, for example, and with few exceptions, the white British characters in the novel come across as a uniform mass of privilege. In such a frame, the dramatic and affect-laden massacre of Vikram’s young British friends by Kenyan rebels stands out as a highly politicized passage ripe for interrogation.Footnote 17 At the same time, however, such readings risk the problematic of an all-third-world-narratives-are-allegories logic,Footnote 18 and it requires us to overlook how clearly the larger narrative of In-Between draws on historical detailing to disaggregate the artifice of homogenous communities. Vassanji’s novel carefully details the inner contradictions of the bio-logic that buttressed the post–World War II independence movement in Kenya; it emphasizes the circuitous history of conflict between the Kikuyu and Masai peoples; it explores the conflicted history of the Mau Mau rebellion; it recounts the indentured labor that brought the first major waves of Indian migration to the country to construct imperial railways, and so on. Vikram’s narrative is imbued with myriad details drawn directly from Kenyan history, including many of the politicians with whom Vikram works, as well as highly specific locations and carefully examined political tensions, and even the “List of Shame” upon which Vikram ostensibly sits atop. Although it is important not to assume Vassanji’s amassing of historical details to be fully accurate or politically neutral, the novel’s emphasis on the complexity of Kenyan history thoroughly destabilizes the binary or tertiary racialized logic that would allegorize the novel’s characters or otherwise simplify the competing interests at play in the country. In-Between is a novel in which, as Charu Sharma puts it, “history acquires the centre stage.”Footnote 19
Against Vassanji’s detailed accounting of East African political and social history, the novel’s brief glossing of its Canadian context stands out in stark contrast. In fact, at first glance the portrait that emerges from the novel’s sporadic vignettes of Vikram’s relatively prosaic Canadian experiences is almost painfully conventional. In the brief two-paragraph passage that opens the novel, for example, Vikram self-consciously juxtaposes the “clement retreat” of his Ontario cottage against the “torrid current temper of [his] own country,”Footnote 20 a politicized binary that extends throughout much of the book. Even if it is true that In-Between is ultimately a “book about survival,”Footnote 21 Vassanji shows himself to be invoking a garrison mentality strategically, as Vikram’s Canadian “hideaway”Footnote 22 proves much less isolated than it initially appears. Vassanji repeatedly draws attention to Vikram’s proximity to the bustling multicultural space of Toronto, for example, where, as Vikram says, he would “only seem too commonplace” among “its India- and Chinatowns.”Footnote 23 The local librarian is able to easily uncover Vikram’s scandalous past on the Internet, and Joseph, Njoroge’s son, joins an online diasporic Kenyan chat group advocating a violent response to the corruption of the country’s leadership. Moreover, Vassanji quietly reminds readers of the global economic networks that tie contemporary countries together, having Vikram ask a moralizing Canadian friend if she is sure she knows “exactly where [her] retirement funds are invested.”Footnote 24 Similarly, we are told in passing that the town nearest Vikram’s cottage was founded by British Loyalists, and Vikram draws a quick but firm parallel between the trans-Canadian and Kenyan railway systemsFootnote 25—subtle reminders that Canada, too, is part of British imperial history, with its own history of racialized indentured labor. When Joseph is sent to join Vikram in Ontario until he begins school at the University of Toronto, the trope of Canada-as-refuge has been neatly inverted, with the isolated cottage becoming the intimate site of the very danger Vikram has fled: sneaking into the house late one night, a drunken Joseph presses a small knife to Vikram’s neck, drawing blood as he declares that killing the notorious Vikram Lall would be “a service to [his] country.”Footnote 26
It is in the context of these interwoven historical, geopolitical, and economic networks that Vikram struggles to negotiate a sense of belonging and the coordinates of his return. In a valuable recent essay, Takeyuki Tsuda identifies an important distinction between “ethnic” and “natal” diasporic homelands that is relevant here, suggesting the former be understood as “where their ethnic group originated,” the latter as “where they were born and raised.”Footnote 27 Writing from the distance of Canada, Vikram notes his constant worry that his Indian heritage, his ties to what Tsuda would call his “ethnic homeland,” has positioned him poorly in Kenya, his “natal homeland.” In response to what he repeatedly refers to as his “in between status,” Vikram emphasizes his familial connection to the indentured Indian laborers who built Kenya’s railway network, repeatedly heralding his grandfather’s role in establishing the country’s modern economy.Footnote 28 Never mind that an authenticity claim based on the railway serves only to reaffirm the Indian community’s connection to the colonization of the country—after all, this is the same railway used to relocate the Kikuyu on reservationsFootnote 29—for Vikram, it is evidence of his belonging in the country and constitutes his family’s key “claim to the land.”Footnote 30 At one point, Vikram’s self-described “desperate need to belong to the land I was born in” leads him to fantasize that his grandfather had a Masai lover—a dream that appeals directly to the very racialized framework that has called his belonging in Kenya into question, while offering an apt image of the challenge of claiming the country as his ethnic homeland.Footnote 31
Importantly, Vassanji makes clear that Vikram’s efforts to establish his legitimacy in Kenya are both encouraged by and mediated through the country’s nationalist rhetoric encouraging all “Asians” to return to their Indian homeland. India remains an important touchstone for Vikram, albeit less as a distinct geopolitical location than as what he calls a “fantasyland—he has never been to the country and has little interest in visiting. In fact, thanks to another independence movement, the city where his grandfather was born is no longer in what is ostensibly his “ethnic homeland”: “By some perverse twist of fate,” explains Vikram, “Peshawar, our ancestral home, had become an alien, hostile place.”Footnote 32 It is in this paradoxical sense, then, that I earlier referred to Kenya as a “surrogate” homeland for Vikram, complicating Tsuda’s division between natal and ethnic homelands by reminding us of the host of competing histories at play in the racialization of geopolitical territories and of the competing interests in the deeply political way in which such histories are mobilized. For Vikram, then, the complexities of homeland and return must be negotiated in a shifting political context in which geography and race are all but conflated in the doubled signification of the term Asian, where the natal is nearly completely subsumed within an ethnic understanding of homeland and where both the urgency and the coordinates of the return are projected onto a population that has been reframed as “foreign.” In spite of the significant pressures that lead other members of Vikram’s friends and family to return to India, or to construct a life in Toronto,Footnote 33 Vikram is ultimately unable to resist what he describes as the “lure” of his Kenyan homeland, returning to the country of his birth. “[Y]ou are home,” he tells himself after arriving at the Nairobi airport under an assumed name. “[F]or better or worse, this is where you belong.”Footnote 34
Vassanji’s novel, then, reminds us that although the return journey may well be mythologized in the context of diaspora, it is hardly reducible to myth. Having invoked and inverted another myth—that of Canada as a utopian space outside of history—the larger narrative of In-Between emphasizes the competing historical, political, and personal contexts of Vikram’s past to the point that his return to Kenya is not only a compelling and believable conclusion, it feels all but inevitable. Although some critics have suggested that Vikram’s decision to return to Kenya “falls flat” because “it appears that he is doing it for selfish reasons,”Footnote 35 such concerns may tell us more about our assumptions regarding the emancipatory politics of diasporic subjects than it does about the novel. The very fact that In-Between refuses to romanticize this return—Vikram’s motives are questionable, and he appears to die in a suspicious fire at the novel’s closing—serves to further underscore the complex and conflicting forces at play behind his journey back to the country he continues to insist is his home.
As in Vassanji’s In-Between Worlds, the return narrative in Neil Bissoondath’s beautifully written The Worlds Within Her is set against the backdrop of a racially volatile independence movement in a former British colony, with a protagonist of Indian descent struggling to negotiate the relationship between her family’s past and her own present. Although Vassanji’s Vikram is only temporarily in Canada before returning to the country of his birth, Bissoondath’s novel tells the story of forty-year-old Yasmin Summerhayes, who immigrated to Canada from an unnamed Caribbean island when she was a child. At the novel’s opening, Yasmin is set to return to the country of her birth for the first time, to fulfill her late mother’s request that her ashes be spread on the island. Key revelations of her parents’ past make Yasmin’s return journey an important process of self-discovery, but she eagerly makes another return—this time to her Canadian home—at the novel’s close. For Yasmin, the journey to the country of her birth helps her to better understand her past primarily in order to more fully move beyond the group-based identity claims of nation, ethnicity, and family and to forge her own present in Canada.
Although Worlds Within ultimately questions the value of the enduring Indian diaspora, the novel does recognize a wide spectrum of its influence, including its affective and strategic importance for older generations. Much as Vassanji presents the idea of India as being central to the Lall family’s understanding of their own identity, Bissoondath allows, albeit more reservedly, for its mythological value to the Ramessar family. Yasmin’s mother, Shakti, calls the relationship of Caribbean Indians to India a “grand illusion,” but she nonetheless insists on its role for the community as providing “a shared, if false, notion of a larger belonging, for we believed ourselves to be still of India.”Footnote 36 Yasmin’s father, Vernon (Ram), however, is a political leader who routinely invokes a sense of Indian peoplehood as part of a more cynical deployment of identity politics. “[M]y husband liked to talk about our people as being crushed, oppressed, humiliated, that kind of thing,” explains Shakti. “It was a favourite theme […] not so much because he believed in it as because it was a guaranteed crowd pleaser.”Footnote 37 If Ram’s politics are shown to have at least the potential to productively challenge the established racialized hierarchies on the island, this promise is undermined both by Ram’s invocation of a potentially atavistic understanding of collective identity—we are told he views the entire world “through a racial prism”Footnote 38—and in his naked instrumentalization of his personal relationships. Ram uses his own wedding as an occasion to challenge the unspoken “whites-only” policy of a prominent hotel, for example; it proves successful as a political maneuver but disastrous as a way to begin a marriage.
Far outweighing the novel’s sympathy for any of the diaspora’s affective or political possibilities, however, is its scorn for its regressive potential. In Vassanji’s novel, Vikram’s alternating resistance to and mobilization of a range of group identity claims has left some critics lamenting the novel’s lack of a clear “moral stance”Footnote 39 and risks affirming Vikram’s portrayal of himself as a mere victim of historical forces. By contrast, Bissoondath consistently emphasizes Yasmin’s individual agency over and against the forces of history, and levels a clear critique of what Mishra calls the “underside” of diasporic politics, its tendency toward rhetoric of exclusivity and purity.Footnote 40 Although Yasmin spends much of the novel deflecting the various subtle ways that her relatives attempt to lay claim to her, Bissoondath’s critique is most fully manifested in the character of Ash, a distant cousin of Yasmin, who uses a militant and caricatured faith in “mother India” to promote Indian supremacy on the island, and to justify his prejudice against the island’s black population. India is “not just a country, is a soul,” Ash declares in broken English. “And I have it inside of me, in my flesh, in the blood running through my veins,” he continues. “I ain’t know the details o’ the chemistry but it there, true and alive.”Footnote 41 When Yasmin presses Ash about his knowledge of Indian history, he responds by insisting that his belief in India as an idea is “more important than facts.”Footnote 42 Here, as throughout the novel, Bissoondath uses Yasmin to model the rejection of such claims. “[Ash’s] words chill Yasmin,” we are told. “They strike her as a denial of the mind, a return to the belief of the illogical […] the only people she fears are those with no wish to know how little they know.”Footnote 43
At the root of Bissoondath’s engagement with the possibilities and limitations of diasporic return lies a very particular engagement with the idea of history. It may be true, as Frank Birbalsingh suggests, that “Yasmin’s Indo-Caribbean diasporic consciousness is a direct product of the post-colonial history of the Caribbean,”Footnote 44 but it is worth noting that Bissoondath chooses not to attribute this “diasporic consciousness” with the history of any one country in particular. There is plenty of history in the book: the novel gestures to a history of slavery and indentured labor that peopled the island and powered its imperial economy; the unabashed Anglophilia of Yasmin’s mother and uncle clearly manifests the island’s colonial past; Yasmin arrives in the aftermath of a failed coup that has left the island on edge; and so on. Yet although such details invite parallels with the racialized politics of particular Caribbean nations—even leading several critics to mistakenly assume the country to be TrinidadFootnote 45—Bissoondath’s decision to refuse the island even the specificity of a fictional name reflects his broader treatment of the past. That is, it reflects the novel’s clear emphasis on Yasmin’s interior worlds, thoroughly affirming her description of herself as “distanced” from the island and its history: “[S]he does not wish for greater involvement with, or even greater knowledge of, the world she sees through the window,” we are told as she looks out a car window. “She is here to fulfill an obligation. And then to leave.”Footnote 46 Although Yasmin’s refusal to engage the particulars of the country’s past risks undermining the novel’s politicized critique of Caribbean history (and strangely mirrors Ash’s dismissal of Indian history as unnecessary “details”), it also allows Bissoondath to emphasize her agency as an individual able to negotiate and transcend the island’s competing histories. Unlike in In-Between, where the specificities of Kenya’s history are presented as myriad details that make up a complex network through which Vikram must struggle to negotiate his own sense of identity and belonging, Worlds Within presents a diasporic history rendered in abstract terms that enables Yasmin to transcend the limitations of a past that is shown to have informed, but not determined, her present.
Although it would be too much to suggest that Yasmin is completely unaffected by her trip to the island of her birth, the novel ultimately presents her experience in the Caribbean as valuable to the extent that it enables her to release that world forever. When Yasmin first arrives on the island, Bissoondath makes it clear that she feels no connection or sense of belonging to the country of her birth. As she approaches her former home for the first time, for example, Bissoondath describes the house in almost comically unwelcoming terms, which offers a concise image for how Yasmin comes to see her relatives’ repeated attempts to claim her as “one of us”:Footnote 47
Penny slows the car as they approach the house, turns into the driveway, stops at the gate: it is locked in the middle, heavily chained at both top and base. Yasmin sees that braided through the uppermost squares of both fence and gate are several strands of barbed wire. She sees, too, that the lower floor of the house is without windows, and that its single door sits in the wall with the flush solidity of fortification. A stairway, clinging to the side of the house, leads from the ground to second floor.Footnote 48
Lest this image of her childhood home as a high-security prison be insufficient to affirm Yasmin’s disconnection from her past, we ultimately learn that her biological mother is not the woman whose ashes she has returned to scatter, but rather the family’s long-suffering maid, who was raped by her violent father before he was assassinated. Far from opening an opportunity to reconnect with a “real” or “authentic” past, Yasmin’s disinterest in the revelation of her biological mother serves to affirm her rejection of what she earlier has called the “romance of family ties.”Footnote 49
It would seem difficult to imagine a return journey that could more thoroughly estrange a diasporic subject from her past, and this, surely, is the point: it is precisely this distance that allows Yasmin to leave her past firmly behind and move forward as a “free” individual. In fact, the novel’s relentless critique of collective identity—as Donna Bailey Nurse writes, it “presents the notion of collective memory as completely fraudulent and dangerous” and goes to “great lengths to invalidate the idea of collective memory and collective history”Footnote 50—has, as its clear corollary, as similarly dogged insistence on the primacy of the individual as the proper site of identity. I catalogued some examples of this prioritizing previously, with the novel parodying the notion of diasporic identity via Ash, rendering Yasmin’s home a high-security prison, severing her genealogical ties, and so on. A host of rather didactic commentaries make the meanings of such sections clear. To take a single but representative example: near the end of the novel, Yasmin sits on a bed in her family’s house in the land of her birth holding both her murdered father’s few remaining belongings and her mother’s ashes. “All the pasts, all the worlds, that they have created. All the pasts, all the worlds, that have created them” are in her hands, the narrator explains. “But that, she knows, is not all she is, for she is not a prisoner of their worlds. Hers is, even now, a future still to be made […] what it means [is] that she will return lightened to her world.”Footnote 51 A few pages later, Yasmin tosses her mother’s ashes in the air “without hesitation” and turns to walk away without watching the garland fall. Little wonder that one critic suggests that Yasmin’s return journey “should be understood not so much as a pilgrimage than as a kind of exorcism.”Footnote 52
Just as the lack of historical detailing about the Caribbean island of her birth is key to Yasmin’s ability to release her past, a similar lack of historical specificity enables her to embrace Canada as her present. Yasmin and her husband Jim live in an unnamed urban center, and although there are hints that it is Toronto (there are streetcars, it is a six-hour drive east to Montreal, and so on), Bissoondath never identifies it by name. Canada is not perfect in Worlds Within—the casual racism of Jim’s parents is the novel’s most striking concession of its limitationsFootnote 53—but it is unburdened by its history and its colonial past, all of which is set aside in the name of a more broadly inclusive present. Vassanji, I suggested, invokes the mythology of an ahistorical “empty Canada” strategically, ultimately revealing the economic and political ties between Kenya and Canada that reflect Vikram’s inability to leave his past behind. Bissondath, too, invokes the trope of Canada’s “emptiness,” but he refashions it as what several critics have noted to be a political and ontological openness that enables Yasmin to claim it as her own.Footnote 54 In contrast to the competing group identity claims that have over-determined the novel’s Caribbean island, the ontological emptiness of Bissoondath’s Canada makes it a haven for the individual subject, one who is freed from her past precisely because her new country is unburdened by any history of its own.
Whatever the legitimate virtues of Yasmin as an empowered diasporic subject, postcolonial critics will recognize the various risks inherent in Bissoondath’s vision.Footnote 55 The myth of the Canada as tabula rasa, for example, has a long colonial history with enduring political and economic consequences that are compounded rather than questioned by the novel’s juxtaposition of an impoverished Caribbean island as the site of primal and regressive group identity claims against a wealthy Canadian city as the site of an unproblematically empowered individuality. In this context, the novel’s celebration of the individual also risks replicating a neoliberal logic that would depoliticize cultural difference and read the consequences of structural inequalities—including institutionalized discriminations along gendered and racialized lines, the enduring impact of colonialism and the historical traumas of indenture, and so on—as the failures of private individuals who are unwilling to move on.Footnote 56 For a single but telling example of the ways in which the trope of Canada as a “blank slate” and the promotion of the autonomous individual dovetail in Bissoondath’s novel, consider Yasmin’s response to her daughter’s declaration that she wants to be white when she grows up. Yasmin is momentarily upset, but she quickly recalls that the conversation was spurred by a white woman trying to “get brown”—that is, sunbathing. Calling her initial reaction a “grand hypocrisy,” she wonders “Why was it acceptable for that woman to dream of being brown, but not so for her daughter to dream of being white?”Footnote 57 Such a question, earnestly posed in the context of sunbathing, is possible only if one fully embraces what Genetsch calls the novel’s portrait of Canada as a “utopia,” where individuals break not only from the collective claims of their own past, but from history and context as well.Footnote 58
Although my I suspect my own sympathies are clear enough, in this paper I am less interested in questioning the diasporic politics of Worlds Within than I am in underlining the ways in which they are revealed or manifested through its portrait of a diasporic return. It is the return that enables Bissoondath to meaningfully test Yasmin’s and Shakti’s stated arguments about the primacy of the individual and the present against the claims of group history; it is the return that allows Yasmin to discover—and ultimately transcend—the truth about her own parentage and past. And although Yasmin has little investment in her diasporic identity of which she might be disabused, the novel’s use of the return to elevate Canada aptly reflects what Tsuda identifies as the common but ironic heightening of hostland nationalism among diasporic returnees, who find the “sense of shared descent and bloodline that initially created transnational ethnic attachments across borders […] overridden by the stark national cultural differences that emerge when these co-ethnics actually meet.”Footnote 59 In this sense, Yasmin’s romanticization of Canada can be read as less revealed than constructed by her return experience, recognizable as an effort to reaffirm the country as her “true” home.
In fact, if we provisionally adopt Ato Quayson’s suggestion that the “genealogical accounting” that is “constitutive” of the diasporic imaginary is often “expressed in the form of quest motif, where discovery is meant to restore the diasporic to a form of epistemological certainty about their identity,”Footnote 60Worlds Within can be read as a very particular postcolonial inversion of the diasporic return. In the person of Ash and the island-based rhetoric of blood ties and ethnic history, the book effectively contains and rejects the claims of the diaspora, rendering the post in postcolonial Canada in both geographic and temporal terms, so that the baggage of colonial history is left behind in both space and time. The novel achieves a measure of “epistemological certainty” regarding identity, then, but does so through a quest undertaken not to restore but to sever the diasporic network of meaning. The most important “return” in Worlds Within, as it turns out, is not Yasmin’s journey “home” to the unnamed island of her birth, but rather her journey “home” to the unnamed Canadian city that has enabled her to transcend that past and forge a new life.
Reading for the Return in Diaspora Studies
In a critical context where the return is conventionally understood as mythical, impossible, taboo, or regressive, close readings of novels such as In-Between and Worlds Within reveal a range of diasporic experience that has long been overlooked by the field. But why has diaspora studies been so ready to recognize the return in all its metaphorical and mythological aspects, and so reticent to explore literal returns? What interests have been served, and what assumptions have remained unchallenged, by imagining diasporic movement to be unidirectional?
There are a number of reasons that help to explain the field’s longstanding emphasis on the return as a form of mythology. Most obvious, perhaps, is that from a narrow perspective, to return from the diaspora is to leave it: to say that the return “animates” the diaspora is to recognize that it is the unrealized possibility of the return to a former homeland that sustains a sense of shared identity in a community that lives, by definition, outside that homeland. Moreover, to the extent that diaspora is a communal or group-based concept formed over time, individual returns undertaken within a single generation—Vikram going back to Kenya after a brief spell in Canada, for example, or Yasmin visiting the land of her birth after thirty-six years—could arguably be better understood outside the frame of diaspora altogether, as simple travel. Finally, to the extent that we continue to understand diasporic communities in relation to their ancestral homelands, one might argue that migrations to intermediary countries are not truly “diasporic returns”; after all, I have been discussing In-Between and Worlds Within as novels of the Indian diaspora, but neither Vikram nor Yasmin return to India.
Although such arguments no doubt help explain the relative absence of the return from diaspora studies to date, I would suggest they assume an overly rigid understanding of diaspora that projects a conceptual stability upon a dynamic and shifting experience, and thus limits, rather than deepens, our understanding of its nuances. Although it is surely true, as Quayson points out, that “the stronger the interdiction against return to the homeland, the more profound will be the affective economy for the relevant homeland,” it need not follow that the opportunity to return somehow prohibits the formation of a diasporic imaginary.Footnote 61 Such an assumption ignores the many ways that individual journeys are experienced and mediated through longer and broader collective histories, and risks reifying the ancestral homeland while underestimating the significance of subsequent migrations and intermediary homelands. Rendering Vikram’s and Yasmin’s returns as simple travel, for example, prevents us from appreciating the way that their journeys from Canada to Kenya and the Caribbean are negotiated through their family’s intergenerational migration trajectories that are intricately connected to the broader postcolonial histories of Britain and India. Attending to the return, then, allows us to identify and trace a key but often ignored trajectory in the transnational migrations that are said to characterize our era.
In addition to these definitional concerns, there is a perhaps less obvious set of factors that help to explain why the return has been understudied to date. Those scholars who, like myself, are firmly ensconced in countries that have historically been immigrant destinations, must remain cognizant of Edward Said’s insight that theoretical arguments are shaped by the “set of initial circumstances in which the idea came to birth or entered discourse.”Footnote 62 That is, the field’s effacement of return narratives may quietly reveal, and certainly affirms, any nationalized assumptions “Western” academics hold regarding the “appropriate” direction of transnational population flows. Given the thoroughly multi-disciplinary nature of contemporary diaspora studies, it is important to recognize such assumptions may be particularly evident in diaspora literary studies, which continues to bare the nationalizing marks of its emergence through postcolonial studies.Footnote 63 As such, we should not be surprised to find evidence of its “methodological nationalism” lingering in both its points of emphasis and areas of neglect. To the extent that it will mean engaging the transnational specificities of diasporic identity as being more than strictly mythological “elsewheres” against which to better understand our national selves, taking return journeys seriously will help to decenter the broader map of diaspora literary criticism. Although none of this would undermine the value of the ongoing critical exploration of the role of the return as myth in the construction of diasporic identity, the reading of physical return narratives could help to estrange the assumptions of the field by actualizing the myth that has long been recognized as residing at the center of diasporic consciousness.
These methodological concerns are perhaps especially acute in the context of Canadian literary studies, which remains the most immediate context for my discussion of the return in this essay. Although I appreciate Diana Brydon’s optimism that diaspora theory might help “challenge [the] necessary connection” between “nation” and “literature” that exists in postcolonial literary studies,Footnote 64 diasporic literary criticism in Canada has routinely undermined this challenge by repositioning the field into Canadian literary studies’ long and much-discussed critical tradition of “worrying the nation,” maintaining the Canadian frame for diasporic texts that are reaching beyond it.Footnote 65 This renationalizing tendency of Canadian literary criticism’s engagement with diaspora can also be located in its engagement with other ostensibly non-national concepts such as globalization or hemispheric studies, reflecting a broad (though not uncontested) argument among Canadian critics that the nation remains a necessary bulwark against the variegated tides of neoliberal transnationalism.Footnote 66 Such arguments parallel other ongoing debates, both popular and scholarly, about the “Canadianness” of particularly transient authors or of books that are set entirely abroad or in ancestral homelands.Footnote 67 My point here, however, is not to affirm nor counter such arguments but rather to note that the ongoing emphasis on the national frame in Canadian literary criticism—as opposed to in the literature itself—helps to further explain why return narratives are easily overlooked within its purview. As we turn to the return, then, we will need to acknowledge not only the broader theoretical challenges that have discouraged its study to date, but also the deeply complex and contested national literary traditions that remain the most immediate critical context for these novels.
M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and Neil Bissoondath’s The Worlds Within Her at once embody and interrogate a diasporic longing for home through their presentation of a physical return, affirming the return’s importance for understanding diasporic literature while offering deeply divergent visions of its politics and possibilities. Despite the fact that both novels are largely set outside of Canada, their framing narratives invite us to further consider the fact that Canada need not be considered a teleological endpoint in the discourses of diaspora, but rather stands as one particular site—privileged or otherwise—within the broader transnational network of diasporic identity. In In-Between World, Vikram’s hybridized identity as an African man of Indian descent is a burden of an imperial history that pulls him back from Canada to return to Kenya in spite of the dangers that await him. In Worlds Within, Yasmin’s hybridity as a Caribbean woman of Indian descent becomes the flexibility that allows her to release that past and embrace a Canadian present. Together, these novels offer a powerful reminder of the range and complexities to be explored in diasporic return narratives, illustrating how, as Hirsch and Miller argue, they can “be directed back toward the past, sideways to detours and alternate trajectories, and, as a critique of the present, forward toward the future.”Footnote 68 Attending to the return in diasporic fiction offers an opportunity to better understand a key yet overlooked element of diasporic experience, as well as to begin considering the critical assumptions that have made overlooking the return possible.
