Fall book launches

For the last eleven years, I have not missed a single Mawenzi House’s fall launch event. It used to be held at the Gladstone hotel till a couple of years ago and now, for the last couple of years at the cozy, comfortable almost homely Centre for Social Innovation at Bathurst.

For the last four decades, Mawenzi (earlier known as TSAR) has become the authentic voice of multicultural Canada, by focusing on providing a platform to authors from different ethnicities who have made Canada their home.

Mawenzi House has introduced me to many contemporary authors, some of whom have supported me in different ways in my attempt to become an author. It has published some of the best books that I’ve read in the last decade.

An illustrative (not exhaustive) list would include Chelva Kanaganayakam’s translation of R. Cheran’s Tamil poems You Cannot Turn Away; Kwai-Yun Li’s The Palm Leaf Fan and Other Stories; Safia Fazlul’s The Harem; Saima Hussain edited The Muslimah Who Fell on Earth; Dawn Promislow’s Jewels and Other Stories; Ava Homa’s Echoes from Other Land; Loren Edizel’s Adrift; Sheniz Janmohamed’s Bleeding Light just to name a handful.

Earlier this month, at the fall launch, Mawenzi again unveiled some excellent titles. I was at the launch and based on the readings by authors, I bought Lamees Al Ethari’s Waiting for the Rains – An Iraqi Memoir and Sohan S. Koonar’s Paper Lions (fiction).

Here’s an extract from Al Ethari’s memoir:

We knew that the Americans intended to erase us; if they had wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, there were less violent ways of taking him out. No one was safe. In the first Gulf War, they had bombed Al-Amiriyah Shelter, which had housed hundreds of civilians, mostly women and children. Father and husbands had dropped off their families there, hoping they would have a better chance of surviving the air raids. Four hundred and eight civilians died that night. Three missiles that hit the shelter led to the doors locking from impact and imprisoning people within the burning walls. I had seen images of the shelter and went to the annual memoriam at the site; the remains of bodies were plastered on the walls of the shelter.

Shock and Awe, as George W. Bush called it, was exactly that. Everything was a target; we saw smoke rising from different parts of the city, until the smoke was all we could see.

You may buy the books here: Mawenzi House

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Also, in November, my friend Fraser Sutherland’s collection of poems Bad Habits (Mosaic Press) was launched at the Yorkville Library. Fraser has published nearly 20 books – mostly collections of poems, but also a short story collection and a number of nonfiction titles. He is great editor, who has contributed to turning unreadable and badly structured writing into scintillating and compellingly readable prose or poetry.

Bad Habits has a section titled An Introduction to Fraser Sutherland, which has a page-and-a-half of Fraser’s idiosyncratic observations that are pithy, epigrammatic and memorable. 

Here’s a sample:

“Poetry can’t defeat ongoing ignorance, repetitive wrong-doing, physical deterioration nor persona extinction. But to say a few meaningful words about being in the world in the face of infinity and eternity – well, that’s something.”

“The idea of poetry-writing as therapy is especially seductive; if you’re writing a poem and it’s going well, there’s no better feeling in the world.”

“Somehow a good writer has to work aslant to the existing order. For a writer to be popular, to win prizes, to be feted by the media – those to me are grounds for suspicion. If the trappings of public success, however welcome, began to descend on me, I’d start to suspect myself.”

And here’s a poem from the collection

You may buy the book here: Mosaic Press

Last Night of the World – Joyce Wayne

Joyce Wayne and her new novel Last Night of the World

The relationship between the West and Russia has remained troubled for over a century. Both are unable to overcome deep-rooted animosity that is based on an unwillingness to understand the perspective of the other side.

Winston Churchill, who had termed Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” at the height of World War II, realised that the compromise of befriending Stalin to defeat the Nazis was a mistake and quickly made amends.

The ensuing Cold War that lasted for a better part of the 20th century caused the world to be divided into two distinct camps, inimical to each other and one that precariously co-existed (with stockpiles of nuclear weapons aimed at each other) in the maniacal Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

The collapse of Soviet Union in the 1990s did bring about a temporary truce and cooperation, but that didn’t last long, and Russia under Vladimir Putin has taken the relations to a new nadir. If it was the annexation of Crimea some years ago that brought the two on the verge of a war, it is the poisoning of a former spy that has caused an unprecedented diplomatic row. The West and Russia always find a reason to bicker.

Communism is dead everywhere, and it’d be hard to find a serious defender of the October Revolution a century later.  Although one is pleasantly surprised to find a strong and sizeable section of the millennials who prefer socialism to the inherent indecency of a form of government where the government appears keener to defend a corporation's right to profit rather than defend the rights of a human being to live.  

For a considerably long time, there were many across the globe who were convinced that the communism represented the best and the most representative form of a government that was of the people, by the people and for the people, and that only the communists ensured a true form of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Stalin’s murderous excesses shattered those illusions quickly and decisively in the developed world, and the socialist fantasies harboured by the elite in West were abandoned hastily. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s classic Gulag Archipelago exhausted the last remaining illusions about communism, although it was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon that became a precursor of the narration of disillusionment with the communist dream.

And yet, in large parts of the developing world in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the communist ideology successfully took strong roots and flourished for many decades after the West flushed it out and came down heavily on its sympathisers. The exile of Charlie Chaplin is a stunning example of this reappraisal. 

The cruel fate of the communist sympathisers in the Western societies has not found adequate representation in popular culture or literature. Yes, the excesses of the McCarthy have been periodically portrayed in Hollywood films because Joseph McCarthy, the philistine, had a blacklist of Hollywood personalities branded as communist sympathisers.

While reading Joyce Wayne’s Last Night of the World (Mosaic Press, April 2018), I couldn’t help but think of the swift and sudden extinguishing of the communist dream. Joyce’s second novel evocatively brings alive the story of the post-World War II Soviet Spy Scandal, which rocked Canada and ushered in the Cold War.

The novel combines the racy pace of an espionage thriller with a mellow unfolding of love and loss. It’s a gripping narration of the inner and outward journey of Freda Linton, a young Jewish woman, who flees the Soviet Union to escape the Nazis, and works for the Communist cause only to be used and disillusioned; Freda is a survivor who sacrifices all and gives everything that is hers in return for chimerical longings.

I was unaware of the spy scandal that rocked the Canadian public life in the 1940s. The novel was, therefore, educative. It recreates a murky and sordid world of comrades who are spies and is centred on Freda, the spy who is used by the Canadian Communist Party on behalf of the Soviets to ensnare highly placed public figures in the Canadian establishment to get hold of secrets that would assist the communist cause. Freda is a true example of naïve commitment to a lost cause.

Nikolai Zabotin, Freda’s boss and lover, and a charming functionary in the high-powered world where diplomacy and politics meet, dispatches her to the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories to get nuclear secrets that would assist the Soviets in building nuclear weapons. Zabotin has to decide on which side of history he wants to be and guide Freda accordingly. 

What they decide will determine their future and the future of the world.

The novel brings to life an era that saw large sections of the Canadian establishment branded as anti-national and how it is permanently banished into oblivion even though nothing concrete was ever proved about their alleged involvement. 

The tragic case of Fred Rose is a classic example of how public mood can be and is swayed away from the truth to grievously harm people who don’t necessarily subscribe to the prevailing dogmas of the day.

Donald Trump is re-enacting McCarthyism in America right now, and nobody is able to stop him. Paraxodically, he is Putin's friend.

Last Night of the World also recreates the world of Jewish newcomers fleeing the Nazis in East Europe. The section that describes the Nazi cruelties on the Jewish people are terrifying and one has to stop reading and take a break. The pathos is palpable in the compromises and adjustments that Freda has to make in the brave new world where she has to sleep unwillingly with men (invariably much older) for what is considered as greater good.

The book is structured as tightly woven, breezy spy thriller. And it retains its momentum and pace throughout. However, the climax, set in Chernobyl, is really the pièce de résistance. Joyce’s imagination, as well as creative prowess, take flight here while depicting the desolation of the place devastated by the nuclear disaster; she creates imagery that has the quality of ethereal otherworldliness.

Last Night of the World is an important book because even though it is about an era long gone in Canadian history, it is a stark reminder that we are never too far from facing such hostilities suddenly and for no logical reason.

Read an extract from the book here: Extract

Buy the book here: Last Night of the World 

A Matter of Geography – Jasmine D’Costa

Different areas of old Bombay had their own individualistic and peculiar characteristics acquired from the different ethnic groups that dominated those areas. For the first ten years of my life, at the intersection of Kalbadevi Road and Princess Street in old Bombay. 

My grandfather's father came to Bombay in the late 1890s, and since then, for a little over a hundred years,  we lived in Bombay for four generations, till I decided to make Toronto my home in the 21st century.

From north of that intersection, Kalbadevi Road was predominantly a Gujarati locality, right up to Bhuleshwar. The temple of Mumbadevi, the goddess that gives Bombay its name – Mumbai, is on this road. The cotton market (Mulji Jetha), the gold market (Zaveri Bazar), the hardware (of the hammer and nails variety, because then there were no computers) market (Lohar Chawl) were all linked to Kalbadevi Road and the Princess Street.

The road parallel to Kalbadevi Road – Jagannath Shankar Seth Road – is the one that I’m more familiar with as that’s the one I took to go to my school every day. This road was predominantly Marathi in character. Till the late 1960s and the early 1970s, this road has a significant presence of the Christian community, too. To its west is the famous Parsi Dairy Farm and it leads up to the Marine Drive flyover. To its south is Dhobitalao. Jagannath Shankar Seth Road led to Chira Bazar, Thakurdwar, the St. Teresa’s church. The road to the right of this intersection went to Prathna Samaj and to the left went to Charni Road station.

Pydhonie, which was to the north of Kalbadevi Road, was predominantly Muslim, and further north was Mazagaon, which had a significant presence of Christians. Bombay was cosmopolitan, but its localities were insular, dominated by a specific ethnicity. This world gradually changed, as many locals moved to the suburbs in the 1970s and the 1980s. I haven’t been to the old areas of Bombay in a very, very, long time. But it stays etched sharply in my mind.

Reading Jasmine D’Costa’s A Matter of Geography revived those memories. The novel, Jasmine’s first, is set in Mazagaon, and is a story of a handful of neighbours who live in the Billimora Building, which is what Bombay calls a chawl (single-file tenements, connected by a corridor, with shared toilets).

The novel is about the love between Peter and Anna, what separates them, brings them together and keeps them apart. It is set in the backdrop of the 1992-93 communal violence between the Hindus and the Muslims after the Babri Masjid was demolished in Ayodhya (a town in north India, linked to the birth of the Hindu God Ram according to the mythological classic epic Ramayan).

Jasmine’s book brings alive the horrors of the communal carnage that left hundreds dead across India and broke the back of Bombay, changing it completely and permanently. A significant part of the novel is about the valiant efforts a group of Christian families undertake to save the lives of their Muslim neighbours – Ali and his mother (Saving Ali) from the rampaging Hindutva mobs.  The beauty of the novel is that the violence and the constant tension that forms its backdrop doesn’t ever overwhelm. Jasmine’s pithy observations about people and their lives keep the tone of the novel light and often hilarious.

Also, the characters that form the novel are all sharply carved, each distinct in their own unusual way. Anna, of course, is the one that is developed most lovingly by the author. The unpleasantness that makes her immigrate to Canada makes her stronger. When she returns to Bombay after a long time, as a mature, level-headed young woman, she is a caring person who is unwilling to be swayed by emotions and makes hard choices both for herself and for Peter.

The title of the book gets explained in what turns out to be the books most heart-wrenching scene when Anna decides that although she loves Peter and Peter loves her, she would return to Canada without him, and not want him to wait for her, because Canada is no place for first generation immigrants who are in their late 30s or older. Those who come to Canada when they are young have a generally successful and better life than those who come here when they are older. 

This passage, where Anna describes to Peter the slow disillusionment her parents experience after immigrating, is one of the most severe indictments I've read (fiction or non-fiction) of Canada’s utter failure at integrating its newcomers to enable them to have more fulfilling lives. Jasmine writes with empathy, which is a rare gift; and she writes with confidence.

The novel is published by Mosaic Press. Click here to buy the book: A Matter of Geography

The Cook’s Temptation - Joyce Wayne

Joyce Wayne

My friend (also teacher, mentor) Joyce Wayne’s first novel The Cook’s Temptation is being published by the Mosaic Press, Canada early next year. She worked on the book for the last five years.

Set in Victorian England – an era that Joyce finds fascinating – the novel is about Cordelia Tilley, a strong-minded Jewish woman’s dilemma: to be true to herself versus her desire to be accepted in the English society.

“It’s a story of an outsider trying hard to adjust and be a part of her new environment,” Joyce explains. “In that sense, the novel will find resonance with immigrants who experience such transition. The adjustment is easy initially but becomes difficult as time passes, and this is because the society is unwilling to go beyond superficial acceptance.”

The Cook’s Temptation brings to life the complexities of Victorian life, first in County Devon and then in London’s East end.

“I’m fascinated by the Victorian era and especially fiction from that era. George Eliot is one of my favourite authors. I also like Sarah Walters and Michael Cox, both of whom wrote about the Victorian era. And you tend to write what you read,” Joyce says.

The novel portrays one woman’s life, class conflict, religious intolerance, suspicion and betrayal. Cordelia is the daughter of a Jewish mother and an Anglican father. Her mother has groomed her for a life in English society while her father, a tough publican, has shown no tolerance for his wife’s social climbing or the conceits of their perspicacious daughter. 

Cordelia’s mother dies from typhoid fever, she tries to run the family’s establishment, she falls prey to a local industrialist, she gives birth to a son, she is tormented by her husband and his family. Finally, she is rescued by suffragette friends and sets off to start a new life in London.

“The idea of the novel came when I visited a graveyard at Holsworthy village north of Devon and I saw a grave with the name Cordelia on the stone. It was then that I decided that I’d write about Cordelia,” Joyce says. 

“The book is also about the many layered British society, the complicated relationship that an outsider has with a society. It also explores the not-so-subtle antisemitism of the British society in that era.”

The Cook’s Temptation is about one woman’s life, class conflict, religious intolerance, suspicion and betrayal. It’s about a woman who is unpredictable, both strong and weak willed, both kind and heinous, victim and criminal.  It’s a genuine Victorian saga, full of detail, twists and turns, memorable scenes, full of drama and pathos.

According to Joyce, “Cordelia isn’t just one woman, she’s many women.”

After reading the manuscript of The Cook’s Temptation, author Jasmine D’Costa, who has been instrumental in turning many newcomers to Canada into writers, publicly applauded Joyce. She wrote: “Reading books written by people I know is always a shock. I read Joyce Wayne’s manuscript of The Cook’s Temptation soon to be out in print, and discovered a new person. Wow what a story she wove! And from where did all those sex scenes come from? I am hoping it is purely from imagination.”

Joyce has an MA in English literature and has taught journalism at Sheridan College, which is where I met her in 2009. She revived my interest in literature, and for the first time, under her guidance, I formally studied literature. 

We argued intensely over what constituted good literature, and I remember an especially intense argument over Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes. She was convinced the book was a modern Canadian classic, and I was niggardly in praising it because I felt it was similar (in theme) to Alex Haley’s Roots. 

I re-read Hill’s novel recently when my son Che said he enjoyed the book. And I must admit Joyce was, indeed, right. The book is uniquely Canadian. I didn’t get the quintessential 'Canadian-ness' of the novel when I read it in 2009 because I wasn’t familiar with Canada.

Joyce is a winner of the Diaspora Dialogues contest for fiction, and has been awarded the Fiona Mee Award for literary journalism. She is the co-writer of the documentary film, So Far From Home in 2010, a film about refugee journalists persecuted for their political views, and various of her other works have been published in Parchment, Golden Horseshoe Anthology, Canadian Voices, TOK6.