The World is Here: Novels Navigating Love and Conflict

From L to R: Manjushree Thapa, Josh Scheinert,  Eva Salinas
Uzma Jalaluddin and Sharon Bala
at a discussion on
'The World is Here: Novels Navigating Love and Conflict
at the Festival of Literary Diversity  

The Festival of Literary Diversity’s fourth edition was held recently in Brampton. The festival has grown steadily in participation and popularity over the years, attracting the best literary talent that Canada offers.

In 2016, just prior to the launch of the first festival, I interviewed Jael Richardson, the founder and artistic director of the festival, for TAG TV (see the interview here: https://youtu.be/vDklJugI6Xg). Jael said the idea of the festival came to her in 2014 when she participated in a book conference in New York and was stunned at the lack of diversity in the lineup of the authors. Dalton Higgins, author and events organiser, pointed out to Jael that the situation wasn’t too different in Canada.

Jael and a group of people who shared her interests got together and decided to launch a Festival that would celebrate diversity in all its forms – race, faith, sexual orientation, abilities (physical and mental). The purpose was to create space in the world of literature that would reflect the Canadian reality of multiculturalism. Earlier this year, the Writers’ Union of Canada recognised Jael and FOLD with the 2019 Freedom to Read Award.

Since its start in 2016, I have attended all the four festivals in Brampton. In 2017, I was privileged to be invited as an author. And every year, the festival has featured many authors who congregate in the first week of May to talk about themselves, their books, their readers, other authors, Canada, diversity, multiculturalism, and have fun.

This year, the festival’s main venue was the landmark Rose Theatre in Brampton. Spring had finally arrived, and the longish commute from Toronto didn’t seem too arduous, especially because the session that I’d chosen to attend – ‘The The World is Here: Novels Navigating Love and Conflict’ – had fine authors, all of whom had their debut novels published in Canada recently.

The panel included

Sharon Bala (The Boat People which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2018 and was awarded the 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award);

Uzma Jalaluddin (Ayesha At Last, a revamped Pride and Prejudice that is soon to be made into a film);

Josh Scheinert (The Order of Nature, set in Gambia, portraying the struggles and fears of being gay in West Africa) and

Manjushree Thapa (All of Us in Our Own Lives is her first novel to be published in Canada).

Eva Salinas, managing editor of foreign affairs news site OpenCanada.org and a freelance journalist, moderated the discussion.

Sharon’s and Uzma’s novels are about their protagonists coming to Canada, and Josh’s and Manjushree’s novels are about their protagonists leaving Canada. In all four novels, the borders between home and away get blurred, and lives are transformed because of physical and emotional dislocation.

Eva asked the panelist about the different kinds of borders in their stories, and how their characters and they as writers respond to these borders.

Sharon, whose novel is about Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, landing off the coast of British Columbia, says that more than personal, physical, and geographical borders, her characters navigate the liminal spaces of silences and secrets. 

In Uzma’s Ayesha At Last, the boundaries are purely personal. A character in the novel, Khalid, knows he appears weird to the world because of in-your-face refusal to abandon his ethnicity and cultural rootedness; but he doesn’t worry overtly about this because he contends that he is who he is because of his belief; the reader is not expected to like him rather spend time with him to understand him.

“People cross borders often without having a choice,” Josh says. In his novel, which explores the relationship between an American (Andrew) and a Gambian (Thomas), the protagonists cross the continental borders, and the borders of control drawn by the society and families. In Manjushree’s All of Us in Our In Our Own Lives, Ava Berriden goes from Toronto to Nepal to find meaning in her life, but realises that she is unwanted despite her power.

The discussion dealt with issues that are common to Canadian milieu – issues such as acceptance, belonging, identity and home. “What gives us our identity, and how much of it is related to race?” asked Eva, whose careful choice of questions accentuated the inherently Canadian character of these authors.

Festival of Literary Diversity-2017

From L to R: Mayank, Katherena, Naben and Jen

To those who respect status quo, diversity is a contentious concept that connotes the absence of merit, tokenism, arbitrary categorisation and even exclusion. On the other hand, to its advocates, an absence of diversity is a perennial dominance of majoritarian culture and an enforced opacity that prevents conversations about different identities that make up the Canadian mosaic. 

In a multiracial, multicultural society, diversity is necessary to ensure that different cultures and voices find adequate representation. In the world of writing and publishing, the absence of diversity is probably not as glaring as it was some years back, although opinions would differ. In the Canadian context, many small presses are aggressively putting out works of authors from diverse backgrounds. It doesn’t mean that it’s time now to sit back and rest; a lot more needs to be done and ceaselessly.

In this context, Jael Richardson’s The Festival of Literary Diversity is a breakthrough event that has suddenly created space for Canadian authors from a diverse background.  I interviewed Jael prior to the first FOLD for TAG TV (watch the interview here: Jael Richardson).  Her dedication and commitment come through in the interview. I attended the first edition of the festival in 2016 and was enthralled by the level of participation – both by authors and readers – at the festival’s main venue, the PAMA.

See post about the first FOLD here: Faith and Fiction.

Thanks to my publishers Mawenzi House, I was invited to the second edition of FOLD as a panellist. It was my first-ever participation in a literary festival as a published author, and it was undoubtedly a privilege to be on the same panel with Canada’s latest literary phenomenon Katherena Vermette, whose The Break has won many accolades; and Jen Sookfong Lee (Shelter).  The subject of the discussion was What a Crime, and the moderator Naben Ruthnum, a journalist-author, who had read all the three works and asked pertinent questions. Of course, Katherena and Jen were far more evocative and interesting in their responses as compared to me. 

I also participated in several other panel discussions and was able to meet and interact with many authors such as Amanda Leduc, Eden Robinson, Kamal Al-Solaylee, Gary Barwin, and my friends Farzana and Sheniz. 

Faith & Fiction at The FOLD

In his memoir Joseph Anton that describes his nine years of living underground, Salman Rushdie, writes about his fascination with faith. “It was curious,” he says about himself, “that so avowedly godless a person should keep trying to write about faith. Belief had left him but the subject remained, nagging at his imagination. The structure and metaphors of religion (Hinduism and Christianity as much as Islam) shaped his irreligious mind, and the concerns of these religions with the great questions of existence – Where do we come from? And now that we are here, how shall we live? – were also his, even if he came to conclusion that required no divine arbiter to underwrite and certainly no earthly priest class to sanction and interpret.”

A few pages earlier, he describes his father Anis thus: “Anis was a godless man – still a shocking statement to make in the United States, though an unexceptional one in Europe, and an incomprehensible idea in much of the rest of the world, where the thought of not believing is hard even to formulate. But that is what he was, a godless man who knew and thought a great deal about God.”

I remembered these lines from Rushdie’s memoirs when I attended a panel discussion on Faith and Fiction at the first Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) at the grand Peel Art Museum and Archives (PAMA). Canadian authors Vivek Shraya, Zarqa Nawaz, Ayelet Tsabari and Cherie Dimaline held a lively discussion on the subject. Eufemia Fantetti moderated the discussion that delved deep into questions about faith.

“How does faith influence the creation and the shape of our stories? Do traditions and beliefs inspire or inhibit the worlds that arrive on the page?” The four authors with diverse religious backgrounds (although none counted themselves as deeply religious) “discussed the development of plot, character and stories and the inspiration behind them.”

The panelists reflected on how they were deeply influenced by the manner in which they had been raised, and how, in small yet significant ways, they had begun to question at a young age the received wisdom of their respective faiths to develop their own understanding of rituals and religion. They shared their journey of reflection which awakened in them a quest to find their identity that while not quite uprooting their faith, certainly made them question the fundamentals, and redefine their faith into something that was substantially more accepting and tolerant.

For Zarqa Nawaz, the egalitarianism of Islam was obvious in the community in which she was raised. But she also found several aspects of this culture such as the segregation of women in mosques fundamentally unfair. In a telling comment, she said, “You can be secular or religious, but by being fundamentalist in your belief, you can deprive women their basic human rights.” Ayelet Tsabari, articulating what many writers feel, said in order to write you need tremendous amount of faith. She said fiction has the ability to make “tiny little changes” and “make someone feel something deeply.” Ojibway and Métis writer Cherie Dimaline described her structured upbringing where nobody talked about things that could disturb the status quo. “Stories are my faith,” she said; stories of seven generations back and forward assume importance to the First Nations culture especially when they are rapidly losing geography. Vivek Shraya spoke about her fascination with Hindu male gods who wore jewelry and had women friends – something she could relate to when she was young and trying to understand herself and her orientation. Raised in an orthodox atmosphere, she began to question the portrayal of the “other” in narratives deployed to define faith-based identity.

Faith and Fiction panel discussion was held on May 7, on the second day of the three-day Festival of Literary Diversity. The FOLD brought together writers in a celebration of Canadian diversity. I had interviewed Jael Richardson, the artistic director of FOLD for my show Living Multiculturalism on TAG TV. Here’s the video clip of the interview: