Chasing History

The Magic of Saida takes us back to the East Africa of M.G. Vassanji’s earlier work (and Giller wins), after a departure to India with A Place Within: Rediscovering India and his last novel, The Assassin’s Song.

For Vassanji, though, India is never a departure, or rather, being of Indian descent is not, because it is this experience of dual and sometimes dueling heritage that consistently defines his fictional worlds. He marries the two quite explicitly in the creation of Saida’s protagonist, Kamal Punja—a mixed-race man born in the Tanzanian town of Kilwa who has returned from that third realm of influence familiar to Vassanji’s readers, the Canada of his adulthood.

All has presumably not gone well on this visit home, for we first encounter Kamal through the eyes of a publisher who, while visiting a hospital in Dar es Salaam, chances upon a curious patient lying delirious in a hospital bed. Martin Kigoma is positioned as a man...