Books and Belonging

The prizewinning author M. G. Vassanji has written a lively, perceptive, and angry book that in many ways is a throwback to the screeds of yesteryear. His target: the stuffy attitudes that deny new Canadians a place in Canadian culture. Given the tribalism so prevalent today, one can only welcome his cogent argument for a common citizenship that encompasses all our separate identities: a “more sophisticated essence of Canada,” he calls it, where we can accept that “your history is mine, your stories mine, your imagination mine.”

Nowhere, Exactly begins by acknowledging the country’s transformation from a racially restricted society to a much more diverse population with liberal attitudes. Vassanji concedes that Black and Indigenous authors have elbowed their way into the mainstream recently. Then he opens fire, arguing that the narrow-mindedness he encountered when he arrived here forty-five years ago still rules Canadian culture. In Vassanji’s disgruntled...