M.G. Vassanji’s ‘The Magic of Saida’ explores rootlessness, love and loss

TORONTO – There is a sense that M.G. Vassanji shares an uneasy feeling of dislocation with the main character of his new novel, “The Magic of Saida.”

Set in East Africa, the novel by the two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner explores the story of Kamal Punja, a doctor from Edmonton who returns to Tanzania to search for a woman who’d been a special childhood friend in the ancient coastal town of Kilwa.

The gifted Kamal has a mixed heritage, with a Swahili mother and absent Indian father. As a child, his mother sends him to be raised by his uncle in Dar es Salaam, where he’s taunted for being a “dark Indian.” He never meets his father or sees his mother again.

Not only does Kamal have to deal with a change in environment and difference in class, but he also has difficulty with language and almost drops out of school. But he turns his life around and goes to university during the turbulent 1970s in Uganda.

The one constant during his forced relocation to Dar es Salaam is his wish to be reunited with his beloved Saida. He sees her briefly before going to university and then once again before moving to North America.

Some 35 years later, Kamal returns to his homeland to try to find her.

“That memory of her, of a friend, I think for a child can remain for a long time,” Vassanji said. “I had a young friend as a child. I don’t remember much about her, but I remember playing with her and then when we left Nairobi and went to Dar es Salaam I was carrying that memory of playing with her. So I think we all carry those childhood memories and we wonder what could have happened to that person.”

Kamal spends much of “The Magic of Saida” (Doubleday Canada) trying to figure out where he fits in.

“In a sense he’s more rooted than I am because he has an origin in Africa,” the author of “The Assassin’s Song” and “The Book of Secrets” said during an interview at his publisher’s office.

Vassanji’s parents were a part of a wave of Indians who immigrated to Africa. He was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1950 and raised in Tanzania. He later moved to North America for his education and now lives in Toronto. He makes frequent trips to East Africa and India.

“I have friends in India now and when I see them there’s a whole sense of belonging to the place…. I realize I don’t have that sense of complete belonging that these people have. It’s a very sad feeling, you know,” he said.

“Some people have that complete sense. But I suppose in North America, especially in Canada, not many people have that. They all come from somewhere…. We have to acknowledge it and then move on.”

The last time Kamal sees Saida he makes a wild promise that he cannot keep.

“Saida was trapped by her circumstances, by the old tradition of giving away the girl to whoever was available, I suppose. It’s a very traditional kind of thing,” Vassanji said. “She would always remain a mystery in the sense we don’t know what happened to her until the very end, what she’s become.

“I guess in a way she stands for the elusive past, but which comes with a shock at the end. It’s not just something that slipped away. Kind of the Orpheus story too — get your lover back from the dead — but here she disappears with a vengeance.”

Interwoven with Kamal’s story is the tragic tale of two brothers who are poets in Kilwa “which in a way is more profound than the love story itself. The idea of collaboration versus survival and the idea of poetry tradition,” Vassanji said.

He travelled to Kilwa, about 160 kilometres from where he grew up, to capture its spirit. He describes the history of the area and the coming of the modern age.

“I think the book basically is that, how we became what we are. In this case Kamal becomes a doctor. There’s a whole history right from the beginning of the 20th century that contributes to what he is and to what the place is, so then there are many ways of discovering not only the place, the history, the traditions and also the tradition of magic, which I always found fascinating.”

Vassanji said he recalled magic in its different forms, such as potions and being prayed over by someone, from his youth and also gleaned knowledge of its practices during his travels around Tanzania.

“There was a guy in my mother’s family who was supposed to call the dead back. My father died when I was four, so I would ask my mother why we couldn’t go to the guy and have him revived,” Vassanji said.

Another theme in the novel is slavery. Kamal’s grandmother was a slave and Kamal’s son is most disturbed to learn he had an African grandmother.

“Ironically I noticed after I’d done it — more or less I was revising — that his mother actually had given him away, almost sold him in a sense. That bit of irony, I think he’s aware of that. Not that his mother was an evil person. She thought she was doing it for his own good,” Vassanji said.

In his first career, Vassanji was a nuclear physicist but said he always had “a need to express myself since childhood…. But writing itself was not seen as a career. It was always engineering or medicine.”

He went on to the University of Nairobi and MIT, then specialized in theoretical nuclear physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Atomic Energy of Canada in Chalk River, then moved to Toronto in 1980. He and his wife, Nurjehan Aziz, started the Toronto South Asian Review in 1981, which continues today as Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad.

One thing he liked about university was doing research, “asking questions, which in a way is what I’m doing in my novels also. Ask questions and just get obsessed by finding out what’s beneath the surface.”

Vassanji was the first person to win the Giller twice, in 1994 for “The Book of Secrets” and in 2003 for “The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.” He’s won many other awards for his work, which includes seven novels, two collections of short stories, a travel memoir about India and a biography of Mordecai Richler.

“But that’s not why you write. There’s no guarantee anyway. You write and every book is the best possible you can write. I think that’s the main criterion. Every book is honest, as much as you can make it and then you go to the next one.”

Writing is like a drug to him, Vassanji said. “It’s a compulsion. I have to write. I can’t imagine life without writing.”

He is crafting a travel memoir about Tanzania and “slowly” working on a new novel. He has a draft of it but is keeping details under wraps.

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