Books in Canada
If the broad canvas of migrant lives and colliding national cultures that is our globalised era has given new life to the deliberately sprawling form of the novel in the hands of authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anar Ali’s collection, Baby Khaki’s Wings, offers an eloquent reminder of the ways these entanglements lend themselves to the short story. These self-contained worlds are simultaneously complex and circumscribed, replete with all of the assumptions and aversions that make any narrative ring true, but necessarily resistant to the sorts of continuities which can be developed over the course of the novel.
Ali’s stories chart the struggles (psychological and occupational as much as political) of a series of characters, usually depicted within the fraught ecosystems of domestic life, as they negotiate the changing circumstances of their lives across different countries. Many of the stories are set in Calgary, or in rural Alberta, but Ali never allows her stories to settle for simple native-immigrant oppositions. Many of these characters were already outsiders in their original circumstances: Asians in Africa, forced to flee Idi Amin’s war on Uganda’s Indian population or Julius Nyerere’s socialist politics in Tanzania, making their way to Canada via England or Austria.
The geographical expansiveness of these transitory lives is balanced, again and again, by a claustrophobic sense of encroaching horizons as immigrants struggle to cope with poverty and cultural displacement. Determined to refuse the easy moral authority of the political margins, Ali relentlessly charts the ways in which the anger triggered by various forms of subjugation can be converted into almost unnoticed patterns of household tyranny-the scolding misogyny of irritable husbands or the indignant howls of ambitious wives. Imperial brutalities find their outlet in petty snobbery; painful compromises are bandaged over by swaggering bravado.
Ali never allows her stories to surrender the whiff of contingency that is the hallmark of any good tale. They unfold as the palimpsestic traces of worlds that are better evoked than summarised. “A Christmas Baby” conjures up the predicament of Mansoor Visram, a kind of diasporic Willy Loman, trying to make ends meet at Visram’s Speedy Gas & Convenience on a lonely stretch of highway near Red Deer during the recession of the early 1980s, while his wife struggles with the pain and pressures of a pregnancy they cannot afford. Caught between the paternalistic impatience of a bank official and the bellicose racism of local rednecks, Mansoor takes refuge in the clarity of his multicoloured business plans. He puts up with endless slurs on Pierre Trudeau and “all this National Energy bullshit,” swallowing his gratitude to the Prime Minister who “generously opened Canada’s borders to Uganda’s Asians, including the Ismailis.” “Samuel Matthews” explores the foiled hopes of Shiraz Mitha and his family, who plan to open a Bottle Recycling Depot in Canmore, only to discover that they have been fleeced by Jimmy Uncle, a brother-in-law who had supposedly been helping the family to smuggle their money out of Tanzania.
The weight of these endlessly layered struggles is balanced by an often comic sense of celebration, either in the magic realism of stories such as “The Weight of Pearls” or “Baby Khaki’s Wings”, in the wonderfully off-balance romance of “Bombshell Beauty”, or in the sheer energy of “Open House”, which offers an appreciative glimpse of the struggles of Runina Mawji, a leading agent with Stampede Realty, who is given to recycling Oprah Winfrey’s words of wisdom- “Luck is when Preparation meets Opportunity,” “Power equals Strength over Time.” The final story of the collection, “The Rubbermaid Princess”, which blends a subdued account of personal endurance with a tribute to the redeeming power of friendship, culminates in a burst of sympathetic pain as intense as it is unexpected, and which scrambles the distinctions between imperial privilege and immigrant hardship. Ali’s ability to mix shrewd insight with profound empathy enables her to register her characters’ faults without the rush to easy judgement, in part because of her insistence on the ways that personal frailties can sometimes reflect the pressures of broader histories.
Paul Keen (Books in Canada)
Book Description
These richly imagined tales, by turns playful and dark, and shot through with magic, depict the lives of East African Ismailis, a Muslim community with origins in India and a history of upheaval and dislocation. Set variously in Canada and East Africa, these stories portray characters caught between home and exile, between what is real and what is imagined, what is lost and what is found. A baby with wings, a disappeared life savings, a pearl diver's magical secrets—in each story, what is cursed is also blessed, and redemption, when it comes, will take your breath away.
Reminiscent of the stories of Singer and O. Henry, Baby Khaki's Wings is an unforgettable reading experience and the mark of a singularly new and luminous literary talent.
