“Dwelling-in-Travel”: Of Ships, Trains and Planes in M.G. Vassanji's Fiction

Abstract

M.G. Vassanji's prominent thematic concerns of movement, diaspora, memory, and the formation of migrant subjectivities can be traced and apprehended by paying close attention to the intersecting paths across the Indian Ocean, across railroad tracks into various East African territories and across the invisible lines of international air travel around the globe. The journeys of the characters in Vassanji's narratives propel them into a world with shifting borders and regimes that become navigable and inhabitable, albeit with serious limitations at times, by particular modes of transport. These modes also come to stand for specific historical periods in Indian Ocean Africa, that is, the ship connects and thus produces Africa as the Western edge of the Indian Ocean World prior to and during the colonial era, the railway connects the littoral to the interior and brings thousands of Indians to East Africa, while the plane, particularly when airfares become more widely accessible in the 1960s, coincides with the establishment of the nation-state. This article investigates the representation of different modes of transport and the kinds of journeys and forms of belonging that they enable.