Content warning: colonial violence, racism, white supremacy
On September 29, literature enthusiasts from in and around Montreal gathered at Le Gesù to attend the fourth edition of the Kabir Cultural Centre’s “Garden of Literary Delights.” Established as part of the centre’s NexGen MultiArts Festival, this event aims to highlight South Asian writers in Canada who are emerging onto the literary sphere. Each writer read a selected section from their books, before converging in a panel discussion and taking questions from the audience.
The panel was curated by writer and journalist Veena Gokhale, who has written several books herself and takes part in organizing this event each year. For the 2024 iteration of the Garden of Literary Delights, she proudly introduces two new genres: translation and children’s literature. As she introduced the panel, Gokhale emphasized the “pluralism and diversity” of the authors present in the room: Janika Oza, Mariam Pirbhai, Shahroza Nahrin, and Mitali Banerjee Ruths.
Janika Oza kicked off the panel by reading from her recent debut novel, A History of Burning. Oza comes from a long lineage of migrants who left British-ruled India for British-ruled East Africa, where they lived for multiple generations until the 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda. As the first person in her family to be born in Canada, she wanted to tell the untold stories that arose from this history of immigration. A History of Burning is a result of this dream. Shortlisted for the 2023 Governor General’s Award for English Fiction and the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, her novel is a striking historical epic that charts the genealogy of one family from 1898 onwards. Oza read from a chapter about Rajni, a character who moves from Karachi to Uganda after getting married, giving us insight into the subaltern voices that often go unheard when discussing history from a broader perspective.
It is these unexplored histories that Oza wants to bring our attention to. When asked about her research process for this novel, she explained that she initially tried to consult historical resources, but found that there was a huge lack of written material about Indians in Kenya and Uganda. She turned to asking around her family for information, and filled in the rest of the gaps with fiction. By having these conversations with real people in her life, she says she realized the importance of collective memory and highlighting these stories from within her community.
As Oza shares her experience of visiting Kenya for the first time to promote her book, an audience member stands up to say: “I was born in Nairobi, and the way you described Kenya is so realistic that I can hardly believe you’d never been there.” It felt like a full-circle acknowledgement of the stories she set out to represent while writing A History of Burning.
The problem of representation is one that all the authors on this panel contend with. Mariam Pirbhai is a professor of English literature at Wilfrid Laurier University, who joined us via Zoom all the way from Waterloo to discuss writing her work through a decolonial lens. She presented two of her most recent books: Isolated Incident, a fictional novel about the lives of Muslim Canadians on the heels of a hate crime against a mosque in Toronto; and Garden Inventories, a work of creative nonfiction that reflects on how gardens contain histories of culture. The scene she read from Isolated Incident showed the difference between how two characters confronted an Islamophobic parade in Montreal, an incident based on a real white supremacist demonstration that took place in Quebec City. Pirbhai explained that she tried to cast the lens inward and show the friction that exists within Muslim communities as well, in order to counter how reductively Muslims are represented in the media.
Garden Inventories, which was a finalist for the 2024 Foreword Indies Book Award for Nonfiction/Nature Writing, takes on a similarly introspective tone. It draws inspiration from Pirbhai’s own garden in Waterloo that she spent years cultivating. It was there that she realized that plants were not so different from people, which in turn led her to question our relationship to nature in our everyday lives. Through rich, visually-immersive writing and evocative imagery, Pirbhai draws connections between her human experiences and gardening. She reflects on her position as someone who has moved through multiple continents before settling in Canada, and how this history of immigration affects the way she interacts with the land around her. As a surprise for the audience, Pirbhai even shared a few photos of this titular garden – and it is every bit as stunning as she described it to be!
The next panelist moved us away from landscapes and back to history, as Shahroza Nahrin introduced her translation of works by Bangladeshi author Shahidul Zahir, entitled Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas. A graduate student from McGill, Nahrin has a background in academia and literary translation. She was recently featured on CBC’s “All in a Weekend with Sonali Karnick,” where she spoke about Zahir’s influence on Bengali literature. Before reading from her book, she posed an important question to the audience: “Who makes the decision of which books get translated and which don’t?”
For Nahrin, a translator becomes an activist when they translate a book from a marginalized community and bring these voices to the forefront. She describes Life and Political Reality as a “frictional work,” a “thorny text” that goes against the mainstream grain. The excerpt she read from the book exemplified this perfectly, as it brought attention to the effect of the Bangladeshi genocide on a small locality in Dhaka, highlighting the silenced voices there.
Nahrin is extremely passionate about Zahir’s work, which was evident from the heartfelt way in which she outlined the importance of his legacy on Bangladeshi literature. Similar to the fictionalized accounts of Dublin and Macondo which characterize the works of James Joyce and Gabriel García Márquez, Zahir mythologizes Old Dhaka and creates a unique world through magical realism. Nahrin spoke about the struggles that come with translating the works of such an iconic literary figure, explaining how she and her co-translator tried to keep Zahir’s musical writing style alive throughout their translation. They also made the decision to retain some Bangla dialogues within the text, in order to challenge English hegemony and stay true to the original tone wherever possible.
The importance of bringing South Asian voices into the spotlight, which has been expressed by all the authors so far, is exemplified through the work of children’s author Mitali Banerjee Ruths. A self-proclaimed “Texan-Quebecois” born to Indian Bengali parents, Ruths’ main intention as a children’s author was to write the kind of books she wanted to read as a child. She uses a creative metaphor to describe the lack of South Asian representation within children’s literature: since monsters are often considered non-human because they cannot see their own reflection, Ruths wanted to provide children with their own reflection so that they would not feel less than human. Her latest series, The Party Diaries follows the main character Priya Chakraborty as she plans different parties for the friends and family in her community.
Ruths explained that she wanted children to be able to see different foods and cultures represented in their picture books, both as a valuable source of learning and a way of identifying themselves in what they are reading. She is grateful for the opportunity to shape children through her writing, as she herself harbours a huge appreciation for the books she read as a child. “My kids are always my first critics,” said Ruths, laughing, when a member of the audience asked her about her own children’s response to her books. “If there’s a joke they don’t laugh at, I know I have to go back and rework it!”
From historical fiction to children’s literature, the wide range of authors present in this year’s Garden of Literary Delights leaves me with hope for the future of South Asian representation in Canada’s literary scenes. If you’d like to get more involved, the Kabir Centre’s NexGen MultiArts Festival will continue to highlight emerging Canadian artists across different fields over the next month, including a visual arts exhibition and celebrations of classical music and dance.