NEIL BISSOONDATH
HUNGERING FOR AN IMPERFECT HOMELAND
Sunday Guardian
February 25, 2001
Page 7
CELIA SANKAR, a Trinidadian journalist and writer living in Canada, interviews Trinidad-born author Neil Bissoondath.
Neil Bissoondath's characters are mostly disillusioned immigrants who restlessly wander the "promised land" of North America, all the while hungering for the imperfect happy isles they fled.
But the internationally-acclaimed author himself feels no connection to Trinidad, where he was born 45 years ago.
"I feel today about Trinidad the way I feel about, say, China," he says. "It's another country in the world. I've never had a single regret about leaving, or the slightest desire to return."
Bissoondath, who today lives in Quebec City, maintains little of the trappings of the life he knew before he migrated at age 18.
He does not hunger for curried food and he shuns movies from Bombay. He never sought out the concerts of Sundar Popo when the late folk-singer toured North America. In fact, Bissoondath says he has never heard of him. Nor has he heard of singers such as Kanchan and Babla.
"My sense of my heritage," he says, "has little to do with superficial things such as food, dance or music, but more with the story of my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, of the struggle these people had to endure in order to rise out of poverty.
"These people have given me a chance to live the kind of life I would like to. They've freed me from labour in the rice paddies. It's a great story, and one that makes me grateful to them. But it's not a story I wish to relive or worship.
"My duty is to appreciate what they've done and to create my own life, another chapter, if you will, in that continuing and ever-evolving story."
For Bissoondath, it's all about being true to the central philosophy which runs through all his writings: that individuals should have the freedom - from the culture and circumstances into which they are born - to shape themselves in the image and likeness of their choice.
Many of the characters suffer because they are so caught up with the context of their past, they feel overwhelmed to deal with present circumstances.
The New York Times Book Review praised the stories in his first collection, Digging up the Mountains, as "alive with movement and flight, leaving and returning, insecurity and impermanence."
The Washington Post Book World said the collection comprises "powerfully compressed tales of distorted nationalism and cultural divorce." The title piece concerns a Caribbean businessman who longs to retire back home, but is faced with a paradise ruined by political corruption and violence.
The title piece of his other collection, On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows, tells of the agonising wait aliens face when they appear before the immigration authorities for the right to live and work in Canada.
In another story, a cleaning lady pines away for her husband who fled the degradation and hardships of life in Canada to regain his dignity as an immigration officer in the Caribbean.
The New York Times Book Review said the book's power comes from "the reader's sense that these fictions will not let go of their subject until we have acknowledged a whole people's pain."
In his first novel, A Casual Brutality, Bissoondath presents the wrenching choice of permanent exile a Canada-trained doctor opts for after returning to the turmoil of his Caribbean island.
Bissoondath followed that with The Age of Innocence in which middle-aged immigrants try to hold on to the stability o the simple routines they have created even as their offspring get entangled in worlds they don't comprehend.
His most recent novel, "The Worlds Within Her," deals more with personal history than cultural heritage. The central character, Yasmin, leaves Canada for Trinidad, the land of her birth , to scatter her mother's ashes.
From her aunt and uncle's stories and particularly the revelations of the servant woman who has worked with the family since childhood, Yasmin confronts truths about her own identity and about her parents' lives.
"Out of all that comes our sense of self and I find that fascinating," Bissoondath comments. "It says how fragile the human sense of self really is and how easily it can be changed and played with and shaped in almost frightening ways."
His broader examination of these themes in a 1994 critical essay, Selling Illusions, the Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, sparked a round of intense national political debate in Canada.
In that best-selling book, Bissoondath criticised the Canadian government's policy of multiculturalism. Under that policy, the government gives financial and other support to immigrant communities to preserve their cultural an ethnic traditions.
"I believe that knowledge of one's past is vital to help the individual understand his or her place in the world, but that is the responsibility solely of family to transmit that familial, social mythology," Bissoondath says. "The moment government gets involved, the deeply personal gets simplified and transformed into a kind of propaganda."
Bissoondath argues that by remaining in the cocoon of their cultural heritage, immigrants cut themselves off from wider possibilities.
An official policy that encourages the preservation of those cultural cocoons perpetuates limitations on immigrants, he says. The end result, Bissoondath argues, is that ethnic groups are isolated into cultural ghettos whose members end up being viewed as stereotypes by outsiders.
Even if it results in the discarding of trappings of the past on the one hand, openness to myriad influences can, on the other hand, lead an individual to connect with his cultural heritage in a profound way, as Bissoondath discovered in 1992 when his mother, Sati, died suddenly.
"Hers was the first death to touch me to the quick," he comments. "Her cremation was done in the traditional Hindu manner. Under the direction of a pundit, my brother and I performed the ceremony, preparing the body with our bare hands, a contact more intimate than we'd ever had when she was alive...
"As I walked away from her flaming pyre, I felt myself soaring with lightness I'd never known before. I was suddenly freed from days of physical and emotional lassitude, my first inkling of the healing power of ritual, the solace that ceremony can bring."
His mother's death left him, he says, with an unspeakable sense of loss." She, perhaps more than anyone else, had a powerful influence on his life and career.
As he tells it, the love of literature is in his genes. His maternal grandfather was a Hindu pundit, a Trinidad Guardian journalist and a short story writer, Seepersad Naipaul.
He passed on his interest in books to his daughter, Sati, who became a teacher of literature at St Augustine Girls' High School, and to his sons, Shiva Naipaul, who gained much literary acclaim before his early death at age 40, and Sir Vidia Naipaul, considered in some circles the best living writer in the English language.
It was the environment that his mother created that took Bissoondath on his career path.
"The desire to write came early, around the age of nine or ten. I already loved books and reading, thanks to my mother. And one day, on her bookshelves, I saw my uncle's books and I realised that my mother's brother earned his living by creating these things - books - that I loved. That's when the idea of becoming a writer came to me. It never left."
Encouraged by Sir Vidia, Bissoondath packed his bags and headed for Canada's York University.
"When I arrived in Toronto, I got a letter from my uncle who told me to remember it was a big world. It's an adventure, he said. Discover."
He studied French language an literature as well as Russian language and literature, and read extensively, including novels in Spanish (in which he is fluent) and much Japanese literature in translation.
"It was freedom," he says. "There was a kind of wonderful intellectual freedom in which I explored as widely as possible."
After university, he settled in Toronto, where he taught French, and English as a second language by day and wrote short stories at night.
When he had about a dozen stories, he sent them off to Macmillan, Canada, which published them after the public radio aired two and a national magazine published another. His writing career was established.
After nearly two decades of exploring the themes that captivated him, he feels ready to move on. His most recent book, now with his agent, has no West Indians or immigrants or refugees, "and no question of identity," Bissoondath says.
Doing The Heart Good is the story of a 70-year-old anglophone Montrealer, after a lifetime of refusing to speak French, finds himself obliged to live with his daughter and her bilingual family after his house is destroyed in a fire.
Such a language mix reflects Bissoondath's own life. His partner of 15 years is Anne Marcoux, a francophone medical ethics lawyer who was once his ELS student.
Their nine-year-old daughter, Elyssa, attends a French school but is bilingual. "At home, we live easily in both languages," he says.
Bissoondath is a visiting professor at Laval University, where he conducts graduate seminars on the modern Canadian novel and teaches creative writing - in French. And he continues to write in English. He is already at work on his fourth novel, which is based in Spain.
"No writer is ever satisfied with past achievements," Bissoondath says. "One would stop writing then. I want only to continue writing, exploring characters' lives, telling their stories. Writing helps me understand the world."