“But What is Home?”: Exploring Diasporic Imagination and Identity Relations in M.G. Vassanji’s Uhuru Street

Abstract

Having positioned himself in the “beyond”, M.G. Vassanji’s diasporic self, in his collection of short stories Uhuru Street, visits and revisits the double migration of Indians settled in the Uhuru Street of the city of Dar es Salaam on the east coast of Africa. The story cycle implicates the highly stratified tripartite society - which includes Indians, Africans and Arabs - within the folds of immense socio-political tensions that transform these communities over the course of pre-independence and independent Tanzania. The history of the dislocation of diasporic Indians is foregrounded by essentializing the cross-cultural transactions and complex identity relations engendered by the strategic importance of the Indian Ocean that problematizes any static notion of belonging. Thus, this paper attempts to analyse the corresponding themes of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and universalism which come to permeate the socio-cultural lives of the people of Uhuru Street as their hybrid, interstitial identities resist any monolithic categorisation. As the Shamsis - a hybrid, minor community - is fictionalised by Vassanji to navigate the possibilities of belonging and de-categorizations, his story cycle reinforces the in-betweenness of identities that corresponds closely to a cosmopolitan turn of a globalised world that imagines permanence in constant flux and movement(s). However, the paper also seeks to expose the gaps within this perpetual discontinuity in belonging to come together as a community due to socio-economic and racial differentiation that inhabits this landscape as sub-categorisations. While the already syncretic immigrants from Uhuru Street aspire to make the world their homeland, their collective experience of migrancy post-independence draws another critical attention to the question of diasporic imagination - what can the new configurations of transnational spaces offer to these fluid identities?