"The Gunny Sack" by M. G. Vassanji. A review of the most important topics PDF Download
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Author:
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3346975169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 14
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Book Description
Essay from the year 2022 in the subject African Studies - Literature, grade: 13, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Anglistik), course: An Introducton to African Diasporic Literature in English: Mobility, Migration, and Cultural Shifts, language: English, abstract: After a short Summary, this paper deals with the themes of travelling memory and history; diaspora, displacement & diasporic imagination; cross-cultural encounters; role of the woman/gender role; and travel and mobility. Each topic has been written in the form of an essay and works closely with the novel "The Gunny Sack", i.e. the individual examples per topic are supported by text excerpts. Excerpt from an essay that deals with the topic of "Traveling Memory and History": In his novel "The Gunny Sack", M.G. Vassanji depicts the family history of Salim, whose family is in constant movement as they move from one place to another, constantly accompanied by historical events. This essay seeks to investigate the theme of travel-memory and history through a series of examples. The novel focuses on the impact of history and how history affects the present. In "The Gunny Sack", the narrator Salim Juma unpacks his family history, and thus he uncovers the past with all its attendant features. Be it the political history of East Africa or the riddles of memories. [...] It can thus be assumed that family history serves as an extension of political history. Furthermore, memory as a narrative device also builds a bridge between the past, present and future, as Salim emphasizes that history must not repeat itself and fervently hopes that he will be the last migrant from his family. [...] However, the past, which is largely in the gunny sack, should never be forgotten. In addition, Vassanji tends to preserve collective memory and present it through the experiences of individuals. The gunny sack contains many mementos, each of which tells a chapter of his family's history. "The Gunny Sack" is both a story about the arrival and life of an extended family in East Africa and a repository for the collective memory and life stories of many other Asian-Africans.
Author:
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3346975169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 14
Get Book Here
Book Description
Essay from the year 2022 in the subject African Studies - Literature, grade: 13, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Anglistik), course: An Introducton to African Diasporic Literature in English: Mobility, Migration, and Cultural Shifts, language: English, abstract: After a short Summary, this paper deals with the themes of travelling memory and history; diaspora, displacement & diasporic imagination; cross-cultural encounters; role of the woman/gender role; and travel and mobility. Each topic has been written in the form of an essay and works closely with the novel "The Gunny Sack", i.e. the individual examples per topic are supported by text excerpts. Excerpt from an essay that deals with the topic of "Traveling Memory and History": In his novel "The Gunny Sack", M.G. Vassanji depicts the family history of Salim, whose family is in constant movement as they move from one place to another, constantly accompanied by historical events. This essay seeks to investigate the theme of travel-memory and history through a series of examples. The novel focuses on the impact of history and how history affects the present. In "The Gunny Sack", the narrator Salim Juma unpacks his family history, and thus he uncovers the past with all its attendant features. Be it the political history of East Africa or the riddles of memories. [...] It can thus be assumed that family history serves as an extension of political history. Furthermore, memory as a narrative device also builds a bridge between the past, present and future, as Salim emphasizes that history must not repeat itself and fervently hopes that he will be the last migrant from his family. [...] However, the past, which is largely in the gunny sack, should never be forgotten. In addition, Vassanji tends to preserve collective memory and present it through the experiences of individuals. The gunny sack contains many mementos, each of which tells a chapter of his family's history. "The Gunny Sack" is both a story about the arrival and life of an extended family in East Africa and a repository for the collective memory and life stories of many other Asian-Africans.
Author: Moyez Vassanji
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1837930422
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
Winner of the 1990 Commonwealth First Novel Prize (Africa). The Gunny Sack follows the bizarre tale of an old and unremarkable bag and the life changing secrets within it. In exile from Tanzania, Salim Juma is given a gunny sack by his beloved, but strange, great-aunt. The bag takes him back to his childhood, when he was first mesmerised by the peculiar mementos inside. He soon begins to piece together the stories hidden within, only to discover the truth behind a fateful series of events that changed his family forever. The stories that follow stretch across four generations of Salim's family, tracing their footsteps and unravelling their loves, betrayals, and incredible misadventures. The Gunny Sack is an extraordinary chronicle into the experiences of Indian migrants in Africa as they struggled under changing power structures, from German invasions to British colonialism.
Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1250109183
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
In 1988, a retired schoolteacher named Pius Fernandes receives an old diary found in the back room of an East African shop. Written in 1913 by a British colonial administrator, the diary captivates Fernandes, who begins to research the coded history he encounters in its terse, laconic entries. What he uncovers is a story of forbidden liaisons and simmering vengeances, family secrets and cultural exiles--a story that leads him on an investigative journey through his own past and Africa's.
Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 1551997088
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 165
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Book Description
By the two-time winner of the Giller Prize for his novels The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall Uhuru Street is M.G. Vassanji’s stunning book of linked stories, set within the Asian community of Dar es Salaam. With delicate strokes, and with irony and humour, Vassanji brings alive the characters who live and work in the shops and tenements of Uhuru Street; among them: Roshan Mattress, so called because of her free and easy ways; a street-wise orphan fighting for survival; a Goan dressmaker who entertains her employers with local gossip; and a servant who opens up the world for the children in his charge, until he oversteps his bounds and has to leave. As the younger generation searches for a new destiny, and the older fiercely holds on to the past, Uhuru Street resonates with the moment of moving on, of leaving the place where we have roots, knowing that things will never be the same.
Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307513556
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
In the aftermath of the brutal violence that gripped western India in 2002, Karsan Dargawalla, heir to Pirbaag – the shrine of a mysterious, medieval sufi – begins to tell the story of his family. His tale opens in the 1960s: young Karsan is next in line after his father to assume lordship of the shrine, but he longs to be “just ordinary.” Despite his father's pleas, Karsan leaves home behind for Harvard, and, eventually, marriage and a career. Not until tragedy strikes, both in Karsan's adopted home in Canada and in Pirbaag, is he drawn back across thirty years of separation and silence to discover what, if anything, is left for him in India.
Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Emblem Editions
ISBN: 155199707X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Nurdin Lalani and his family, Asian immigrants from Africa, have come to the Toronto suburb of Don Mills only to find that the old world and its values pursue them. A genial orderly at a downtown hospital, he has been accused of sexually assaulting a girl. Although he is innocent, traditional propriety prompts him to question the purity of his own thoughts. Ultimately, his friendship with the enlightened Sushila offers him an alluring freedom from a past that haunts him, a marriage that has become routine, and from the trials of coping with teenage children. Introducing us to a cast of vividly drawn characters within this immigrant community, Vassanji is a keen observer of lives caught between one world and another.
Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0307371921
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
Giller Prize-winner M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a haunting novel of corruption and regret that brings to life the complexity and turbulence of Kenyan society in the last five decades. Rich in sensuous detail and historical insight, this is a powerful story of passionate betrayals and political violence, racial tension and the strictures of tradition, told in elegant, assured prose. The novel begins in 1953, with eight-year-old Vikram Lall a witness to the celebrations around the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, just as the Mau Mau guerilla war for independence from Britain begins to gain strength. In a land torn apart by idealism, doubt, political upheaval and terrible acts of violence, Vic and his sister Deepa must find their place among a new generation. Neither colonists nor African, neither white nor black, the Indian brother and sister find themselves somewhere in between in their band of playmates: Bill and Annie, British children, and Njoroge, an African boy. These are the relationships that will shape the rest of their lives. We follow Vikram through the changes in East African society, the immense promise of the fifties and sixties. But when that hope is betrayed by the corruption and violence of the following decades, Vic is drawn into the Kenyatta government’s orbit of graft and power-broking. Njoroge, his childhood friend, can abandon neither the idealism of his youth nor his love for Vic’s sister Deepa. But neither the idealism of the one nor the passive cynicism of the other can avert the tragedies that await them. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a profound and careful examination of one man’s search for his place in the world, with themes that have run through Vassanji’s work: the nature of community in a volatile society, the relations between colony and colonizer, and the inescapable presence of the past. It is also, finally, a deeply personal book speaking to the people who are in the in-between.
Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307961516
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
Giller Prize–winner M. G. Vassanji gives us a powerfully emotional novel of love and loss, of an African/Indian man who returns to the town of his birth in search of the girl he once loved—and the sense of self that has always eluded him. Kamal Punja is a physician who has lived in Canada for the past forty years, but whom we first meet in a Tanzanian hospital. He is delirious and says he has been poisoned with hallucinogens. But when Kamal finds a curious and sympathetic ear in a local publisher, his ravings begin to reveal a tale of extraordinary pathos, complexity, and mystery. Raised by his African mother, deserted when he was four by his Indian father, married to a woman of Indian heritage, and the father of two wholly Westernized children, Kamal had reached a stage of both undreamed-of material success and disintegrating personal ties. Then, suddenly, he “stepped off the treadmill, allowed an old regret to awaken,” and set off to find the girl he had known as a child, to finally keep his promise to her that he would return. The girl was Saida, granddaughter of a great, beloved Swahili poet. Kamal and Saida were constant companions—he teaching her English and arithmetic, she teaching him Arabic script and Swahili poetry—and in his child’s mind, she was his future wife. Until, when he was eleven, his mother sent him to the capital, Dar es Salaam, to live with his father’s relatives, to “become an Indian” and thus secure his future. Now Kamal is journeying back to the village he left, into the maze of his long-unresolved mixed-race identity and the nightmarish legacy of his broken promise to Saida. At once dramatic, searching, and intelligent, The Magic of Saida moves deftly between the past and present, painting both an intimate picture of passion and betrayal and a broad canvas of political promise and failure in contemporary Africa. It is a timeless story—and a story very much of our own time.
Author: M G Vassanji
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
ISBN: 9386815699
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
A lion on the loose; a barking cat; smoke, and a bridal veil. In an indeterminate future in Toronto, people can now live lives of two or three ‘generations’; when the time feels right, a person can transition into the next generation. Current personal history becomes irretrievable, replaced by an ideal life story of choice: a neatly concocted fiction which aids in constant rejuvenation. But one day, a strange-looking man—Presley Smith—arrives in the office of Dr Frank Sina one day, presenting symptoms of Leaked Memory Syndrome or Nostalgia; random scenes from a previous generation flash persistently through his mind. When the Department of Internal Security begins to take an interest in Presley’s case, he goes into hiding, and a public search ensues. Who exactly is Presley, and what does this mean for life as his fellow citizens know it? Dr Sina—rejuvenated in his second or third generation and feeling financially secure but sexually inadequate—struggles to solve this difficult case, even as he deals with his own life. And through it all there is the spectre of the Long Border, separating the rich North and the violence and famine of the failed states. Readers will enjoy this refreshing new turn for Vassanji, as one of the finest Indian writers in English takes us into exciting new territory.
Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
ISBN: 0307371778
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 466
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Book Description
A Globe and Mail Best Book The inimitable M.G. Vassanji turns his eye to India, the homeland of his ancestors, in this powerfully moving tale of family and country. Part travelogue, part history, A Place Within is M.G. Vassanji’s intelligent and beautifully written journey to explore where he belongs. It would take many lifetimes, it was said to me during my first visit, to see all of India. The desperation must have shown on my face to absorb and digest all I possibly could. This was not something I had articulated or resolved; and yet I recall an anxiety as I travelled the length and breadth of the country, senses raw to every new experience, that even in the distraction of a blink I might miss something profoundly significant. I was not born in India, nor were my parents; that might explain much in my expectation of that visit. Yet how many people go to the homeland of their grandparents with such a heartload of expectation and momentousness; such a desire to find themselves in everything they see? Is it only India that clings thus, to those who’ve forsaken it; is this why Indians in a foreign land seem always so desperate to seek each other out? What was India to me?
