Reality and symbolism in the South Asian Canadian short story

By Prof. Sunanda SUGUNASIRI

(Part 1)

If there is a predominant feature that characterizes the South Asian Canadian short story, it is realism. This feature is evident even in stories which contain folklore and village superstition, for example Cyril Dabydeen’s “A Vampire Life,” “Bitter Blood,” and “Funny Ghosts” (1980a), or which incorporate elements from mythology, such as M.G. Vassanji’s “Waiting for the Goddess” (1982), Surjeet Kalsey’s “Mirage in the Cave” (1982a; written 1976), and Lino Leitao’s “The Miracle” (1979; written in 1977).

Iqbal Ahmad’s “The Kumbh Fair” (1969; written in 1965), perhaps the first South Asian short story in English to appear in Canada, provides an excellent example of this realism in operation. The main character in the story, a rural girl named Vimla, ends up in a city whorehouse as she goes in search of her parents, who are lost among a crowd of a million people assembled at a religious (Kumbh) fair.

The Kumbh Fair in India

Even though she comes to the whorehouse, and remains there, against her will and conscience, she tells the policeman who has been summoned by the well-meaning but naive university student to help her that she is there on her own accord! Worldly wise though village bred, she knows, as an older man points out to the narrator, that “she couldn’t go home after what has happened.”

If our sympathy is immediately drawn to the girl, we are also puzzled initially when she tells the narrator that she hopes her parents are dead. But this apparently heartless statement becomes a bitter social comment when we read later that her father had indeed wished to die at the fair in the belief that those “who die there go straight to heaven.”

In one stroke, Ahmad incorporates superstition into social reality, and adds another dimension to Vimla’s character—that of dutiful daughter. Her practical wisdom is further demonstrated by her kind words for the old woman who runs the whorehouse and her customers. Stranded in a big and impersonal city, with parents dead, what would become of her?

If the story serves as a comment on the poverty, helplessness, and the superstition-governed life of the average Indian (the family comes to the fair “eager for a dip in the holy waters that would rid them of their sins and ensure their salvation”), it also serves as a comment on the naiveté of a westernized, urban middle class that is out of touch with cultural reality. What Vimla, a young girl, and the old uneducated man know about life, the narrator, the educated university student, does not.

“The Kumbh Fair,” then, can he said to move at two levels. At one level it is an ordinary story, which could take place in any city in the Third World, of a helpless, rural, but practical young woman and an urban but naive young man. At another, symbolic level it is the story of a traditional society threatened by urbanization and its associated values and of the inability of the victims of such urbanization (and westernization) either to solve the problems of the society or to leave it.

To the extent that Ahmad in “The Kumbh Fair” gives a realistic portrayal of a social condition in the Third World, he could be called (to use Woodcock’s phrase though in a different sense) a “realistic chronicler of the region” (1980, 30). The five writers with published collections of stories—Stephen Gill, Lino Leitao, Saros Cowasjee, Cyril Dabydeen and Clyde Hosein—can all be said to fit this description. All of Leitao’s stories in Goan Tales and all but two of Cowasjee’s in Nude Therapy (1979) are situated in India; all of Hosein’s The Killing of Nelson John (1980) and seven of Dabydeen’s fifteen stories in Still Close to the Island are set in the West Indies; and four of Gill’s fourteen stories in Life’s Vagaries (1974) in Africa.

Among single works, Harold Sonny Ladoo’s “The Quiet Peasant” (1973) is based in the Caribbean, M. G. Vassanji’s “Waiting for the Goddess” (1982) in East Africa and Suwanda Sugunasiri’s “Fellow Travellers” (1982) in Sri Lanka.

The poverty of the landless peasantry is a proverbial truth in relation to the Third World. But, surprisingly, in chronicling the region only a single story, Ladoo’s “The Quiet Peasant,” can be said to be on the theme of survival in Margaret Atwood’s (1972) sense. In Gobinah’s struggle we see the rural poor in their never-ending, and often never-winning, relationship to man’s earliest adversary and asset, land.

The absence of stories dealing with the landless peasantry does not, of course, take away from the social realism of these stories. As we have seen, Vimla also represents the rural poor, and the obstacle to her survival is the social system, in an urban rather than a rural setting. The same can be said of Cowasjee’s character in “His Father’s Medals” (in Nude Therapy), the so-called untouchable who is charged with the theft of medals which, in fact, he had inherited from his father, who had earned them through services rendered to a British Imperial officer.

In both these stories, we find the obstacle (society) turned “oppressor,” the theme itself now shifting from mere survival to something like “survival under oppression.”

Traditional society as oppressor is also the theme in Vassanji’s “Waiting for the Goddess,” where Didi, a young woman in an East African town, is chastized by society (branded a “whore”) for, among other things, being alone in a room with a white man, although all that the goondas (hooligans) found on tearing into the flat was her “having tea and chatting.”

Still within an urban context, but in a West Indian setting, we find society as oppressor, although with a difference, in Hosein’s “I’m a Presbyterian, Mr. Kramer” (in The Killing of Nelson John).

Here the oppressor is not traditional society but the imposed colonial order as represented by Mr. Kramer, the president of a soap company for which Reginald Cornelius Hassan had worked for an entire lifetime, beginning at a time when Mr. Kramer was an infant and his father was president.

Now he is fired for having the courage to stand up to Kramer’s sexual advances to several women employees and his immorality in general. What we find here is a world where wealth, power, and arrogance, embodied in Mr. Kramer, endowed as it is upon him by a colonial system, are pitted against the virtues of honesty, commitment, conviction, and uprightness, as embodied in Hassan. (Note the religious reference in the title.) The story thus deals with both physical and spiritual survival.

These stories, then, concern the predator-victim relationship. There is a different kind of victim in Sugunasiri’s “Fellow Travellers” and Dabydeen’s “Mother of Us All” (in Still Close to the Island): the domestic servant in an urban Sri Lankan household in the former and an entire rural Guyanese household under the overpowering influence of an “auntie” in the latter.

Here there is no “predator” as such, the “victimization” being of a mild order in the sense that it doesn’t threaten physical, spiritual or cultural survival, but simply takes place in the ordinary process of living, with no conscious intention of exploitation attributed to the predator.

In “Fellow Travellers” the potential predator is also the provider, the housewife who agrees to take under her care a woman subjected to social ridicule and harassment, though once under her care, the treatment the women gets is less than enthusiastic.

The stories above, and many others like them, tell us about particular geographical regions, but taken together, they paint for us a fairly comprehensive picture of the range of social, economic, and cultural life of that part of the world we call the Third World—a picture, by and large, of a rural society, where the problems of survival are compounded by an implicit or explicit oppression, resulting from, urbanization, colonization, and/or westernizing, with a resulting conflict in values, and where both predator and victim contribute to the ongoing individual and societal process. Collectively, then, the Canadian writers of South Asian origin could be called “Third World chroniclers,” (Woodcock 1980) though by no means are they mere fictional historians.

Characterisation is the second element through which these stories acquire their realism.

The characters in these stories reflect accurately and convincing the societies to which they belong. We have seen this in Vimla in “The Kumbh Fair.” The woman of similar name, Wimala, in Sugunasiri’s “Fellow Travellers” accepts, just as Vimla does, the reality of her fate with a depth of understanding and even abandon, when she, a domestic servant, says almost graciously (if also gratefully): “It is true that the lady beats me and scolds me, but it was she who gave me shelter.” What we see in Wimala is a round and realistic character, one who is realistic about her situation. Another example of such a well-developed character, an ordinary man with a good understanding of his position, is Gobinah, Ladoo’s “Quiet Peasant,” who admonishes his son:

Now Beta, you modder kinda sickly. A few days each week, try and go to school and learn something. Take education, Beta, so when you come a man, you wouldn’t have to kill you yourself for a bread like me. (1973, 15–16)

Unlike someone of the middle class, education to Gobinah is not something valued for its own sake but something very practical, something relating to one’s very survival.

Hosein’s Hassan in “I’m a Presbyterian, Mr. Kramer,” by contrast, sees the reality of Kramer’s injustice, but is agitated enough by his religious and moral convictions to stand up to him. But what he fails to realize—perhaps due to a lack of capacity to discern character, as Vimla, Wimala, and Gobinah, all village characters, can, or to a weakening of a survival instinct through a lengthy master-servant relationship where the security of a regular income may have resulted in complacency—is that his employer could, unlike his father, the former master, be ruthless. This kind of character falls entirely within the realm of plausibility in a colonial situation, as does the ironic situation in which imported religion governs more the life of the colonized than of the colonizer. The character of Kramer, as the spoiled, ruthless, selfish, and machiavellian son of a rich and moral father, is plausibly drawn and thus well developed.

Vassanji’s Gulu, in “Waiting for the Goddess,” is an embodiment, as seen earlier, of an exopetalized, or outward-looking, middle class. He yearns for everything that is foreign. To him, the visitor “from there” (presumably a white American) even smells different! Not surprisingly, as an extension in the opposite direction, Gulu is over critical of his society and has little respect for its institutions (he desecrates a place of worship), and looks down upon his own people, proudly claiming, “I’m not one of them”—all rather typical manifestations of a colonized mind, as we know from the works of Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon and others.

To take one final example of characterization, Bull, in Dabydeen’s “Bitter Blood” (in Still Close to the Island) gains his authenticity of character through skilful handling. Though Bull’s hand is “like a sledgehammer,” and “even the bakraman from England who runs the sugar estates” is terrified of him, he is the ordinary villager subject to the village belief in vampires (“ole higue”)—he is afraid of his grandmother because “he used to hear people say that ... grandma was an ole higue” (1980a, 9).

The third element that constitutes the realism of these stories is the conscious or functional use of language to authenticate the other two elements, place and character. A specific example is the use of pidgin, or dialect, by the West Indian characters in Ladoo’s “The Quiet Peasant” and in certain stories by Dabydeen, particularly “Bitter Blood,” subtitled “A Short Story Written in West Indian Pidgin.” While both Dabydeen and Ladoo put pidgin in the mouths of the characters and use standard English for narrative, the difference in “Bitter Blood” is that even the narrative is attempted in pidgin. Thus the initial sentence reads: “When Bull is walking down Canje road everyone watching him twice.” Dabydeen, however, hasn’t succeeded in maintaining consistency in this story; in places the narrative lapses into standard English for no apparent functional reason, and standard English usage sneaks up on dialect usage, as for example in the inclusion of “is” in the sentence just quoted.

The functional use of language is also pronounced in certain stories written in the Canadian context, Dabydeen’s and Alan Annand’s being good examples. While Cowasjee’s use of scatological vocabulary in “Nude Therapy” seems more artificial than functional—the story being that of a professor—and thus appears graamya (vulgar), to use a term from Indian esthetics, Dabydeen’s use of them adds authenticity. The “chicks” whom Memphis attracts are characterized by a “guy” as “just prick teasers,” the words not only being used about fast-life teenagers but by an average person (a “guy”) as well. Memphis’s response to “other fellas” who pass by in their fancy cars and honk at them is “Fuck off!”—apt words from the mouths of “prick teasers.” If this is authentic North American idiom, matching well with the characters, in Annand we find the most native-like use of language, but, of course, in the mouths of native-born characters. Thus we find in “Rosie Was a Good Old Dog,” (1975) for example, Tom Banner “dunking” Garold in the river, and then “yanking” him out—expressive vocabulary usage. Authentic grammatical forms of the average Canadian—“Ain’t nothin,” “since the other kids growed up and took off,” “the pups is comin’ along real fine,” expressions such as “real fine,” “what the livin’ Judas is makin’ that?” and spoken abbreviations such as “There’ll be more’n two or three pups” and “C’mere, lad”—are not wanting either.

While realism runs as a common thread in the words of the South Asian Canadian short story writers, several effectively exploit the symbolic and, to a lesser degree, the mythological; for example, Leitao’s “The Miracle” (in Goan Tales) employs the miraculous and the mythical element in the narrative. Other stories function at both levels, making effective use of symbolism in a realistic situation.

We have already drawn attention to the symbolism present in Ahmad’s “The Kumbh Fair.” While Cowasjee’s “His Father’s Medals” describes the plight of an oppressed “untouchable” individual, it also tells of the plight of a whole oppressed population under the heavy hand of the caste system. Hassan, in Hosein’s “I’m a Presbyterian, Mr. Kramer,” is an individual rendered helpless at the hands of a ruthless employer, but his plight reflects that of the colonized, just as Kramer symbolizes, the colonizer. In Ladoo’s “Quiet Peasant” the whole Third World peasantry fights for survival. Finally, Vassanji’s “Waiting for the Goddess” is not only the story of Gulu and Didi (the “goddess”); it is also a story of different responses to colonialism in the Third World—the reaction of traditional society in the wake of social change on the one hand and middle-class one-upmanship and escapism on the other.