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The Magic of Saida, by M.G. Vassanji
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Giller Prize–winner M. G. Vassanji gives us a powerfully emotional novel of love and loss, of an African/Indian man who returns to the town of his birth in search of the girl he once loved—and the sense of self that has always eluded him.
Kamal Punja is a physician who has lived in Canada for the past forty years, but whom we first meet in a Tanzanian hospital. He is delirious and says he has been poisoned with hallucinogens. But when Kamal finds a curious and sympathetic ear in a local publisher, his ravings begin to reveal a tale of extraordinary pathos, complexity, and mystery.
Raised by his African mother, deserted when he was four by his Indian father, married to a woman of Indian heritage, and the father of two wholly Westernized children, Kamal had reached a stage of both undreamed-of material success and disintegrating personal ties. Then, suddenly, he “stepped off the treadmill, allowed an old regret to awaken,” and set off to find the girl he had known as a child, to finally keep his promise to her that he would return.
The girl was Saida, granddaughter of a great, beloved Swahili poet. Kamal and Saida were constant companions—he teaching her English and arithmetic, she teaching him Arabic script and Swahili poetry—and in his child’s mind, she was his future wife. Until, when he was eleven, his mother sent him to the capital, Dar es Salaam, to live with his father’s relatives, to “become an Indian” and thus secure his future. Now Kamal is journeying back to the village he left, into the maze of his long-unresolved mixed-race identity and the nightmarish legacy of his broken promise to Saida.
At once dramatic, searching, and intelligent, The Magic of Saida moves deftly between the past and present, painting both an intimate picture of passion and betrayal and a broad canvas of political promise and failure in contemporary Africa. It is a timeless story—and a story very much of our own time.
- Sales Rank: #1149168 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-03-05
- Released on: 2013-03-05
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Vassanji’s (The Assassin’s Song, 2007) remarkable new novel is a magic trick that reveals how it’s performed while in process. It has an old-fashioned, Conradian narrative construct: while recovering from malaria or madness, Kamal Punja, the befuddled protagonist, tells his story to Martin Kigoma, a publisher who may well be an unreliable narrator. And the story is complex. Kamal is a golo, or half-caste, the son of an Indian father and an African mother who was raised in Kilwa, a coastal backwater in colonial Tanzania. He escaped and found success as a doctor in Edmonton, Canada. What may or may not be an ordinary midlife crisis has brought him back to his origins, and led him to track down his first love, an African girl named Saida. As Kamal relates the colonial history—the successive waves of occupation, degradation, resistance, and modernization of his beloved Kilwa and its surroundings—Vassanji’s tactile, occasionally sentimental prose amounts to the best sort of historical fiction because the history is integral to the story. Once the trick is completed, the magic must be shown for what it is: tragedy. Vassanji has won Canada’s Giller Prize twice. This book also seems bound for glory. --Michael Autrey
Review
Amazon.ca - Best 100 Books of 2012
“The Magic of Saida is the sort of novel that, upon finishing, one wants to immediately read again, to examine, to study just how Vassanji works his narrative magic, and to allow oneself to savour it just that little bit longer. It’s simply baffling to me that such a book – that this book – appears on none of the major short lists this fall. It’s more than an oversight; it’s a crying shame.”
—The Globe & Mail
“A gripping narrative . . . . [Vassanji’s] material is so compelling that he needs little more than to adopt the role of a chronicler . . . . A humble village, in the imagination of this chronicler, becomes a vortex of varying belief systems and ways of life.”
—National Post
“M.G. Vassanji’s new novel offers an experience as mysterious and haunting as hearing the sudden beat of drums in the middle of the night. . . . The seductive power of Vassanji’s prose mesmerizes. . . . One of Canada’s best novelists . . . . Vassanji’s new novel is darker and far more complex than any of his previous books.”
—Quill & Quire
About the Author
M.G. VASSANJI is the author of six novels, two collections of short stories, and two works of nonfiction. His first novel, The Gunny Sack, was winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Canada and the Caribbean. He has won the Giller Prize for both The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, and the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction for A Place Within: Rediscovering India. His novel The Assassin's Song was shortlisted for both the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. He was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania, and attended university in the United States. He lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife and two sons.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A man without a country
By TChris
Martin Kigoma, a publisher in Tanzania, meets Kamal Kunja in a hospital in Kilwa. As Kunja recovers from his sickness, he tells his story to Kigoma. Kunja's story interweaves with the story of Kilwa, its people and its myths. Kunja's trip from Canada to Kilwa ultimately becomes a journey of self-discovery. As he explores his past, Kunja contemplates his sense of rootlessness (not quite African, not quite Indian, certainly not Canadian), and begins to question whether he wants to be buried under several feet of snow on a continent to which he does not belong.
Kunja was born in Kilwa to an African mother and an absent Indian father. He was the childhood friend of a girl named Saida, the granddaughter of Mzee Omari, a renowned poet who doubled as a national historian. The second part of the novel recites the history of Kilwa as it was understood by Omari, beginning with Kunja's ancestor in India who, in the 1870s, answered the call of jihad against the Germans who claimed the right to lead the Africans out of darkness (at gunpoint, if necessary). Omari tells how his own life is shaped by betrayal and forgiveness as Kilwa moves from the harsh rule of Germans to the gentler oppression of the British.
After her grandfather's death, Saida becomes a mganga (spiritual healer or advisor). She gives Kunja a tawiz (locket) in which is sealed a prayer. Although Kunja eventually studies medicine in Uganda and becomes a physician in Canada, he never parts with the tawiz and never forgets his promise to return to Saida. As he continues his search for her -- a difficult task given the reluctance of villagers to discuss her -- Kunja recalls his life after his mother sent him from Kilwa to Dar es Salaam. The final chapters, in which Kunja finally learns about Saida's fate, have the flavor of a supernatural soap opera.
As much as it is Kunja's story, The Magic of Saida is the story of Kilwa. We learn enough about Kilwa's history and culture to understand the place, but not so much as to bog down the story. Celebrated in Milton's Paradise Lost and ruled by Persian sultans before becoming an important port in slave traffic, M. G. Vassanji describes the modern Kilwa, its culture and its people, in terms that are alternately loving and stark. It is a place possessed by djinns, haunted by the spirits of the dead who were hung from mango trees. Vassanji contrasts the old and the new Kilwa, questions whether the changes it has experienced are entirely for the better. What has become of tribal pride, Kigoma asks, now that Tanzania depends so much on foreign generosity? Even Kunja, who can well afford to be generous, doubts the value of charity as a response to "the outstretched hand of Africa." The tension between change and tradition and the struggle for African independence are the novel's strongest themes.
Unlike the chapters that take place in Kilwa, those that are set in other locations are less compelling. The frequent flashbacks to Kunja's life after leaving Kilwa interrupt the narrative flow while doing little to advance the reader's understanding of Kunja. His ill-treatment as a half-caste Indian is well illustrated in a couple of powerful scenes, but too many chapters seem determined to relate the history of Tanzania and Uganda. Kunja's time in Canada and a visit to India are covered in a whirlwind of words. The uneven pace and unnecessary scenes mar an otherwise enjoyable novel. The Magic of Saida is nonetheless worth reading for the picture it paints of Kilwa and for its intriguing story of a man struggling to connect his present to his past.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Saida
By Nergesh Tejani
I lived many years in E. Africa so many names, places, events filled me with nostalgia. But removed from this personal angle the book was poorly written and trite. Not up to Vassanji's usual standard.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
The Past is the Present
By Beverly Jackson
• The Magic of Saida is the story of Kamal Punja, a successful doctor from Edmonton, Canada, returning to his birthplace a small coastal town called Kilwa, part of what is now known as Tanzania to search for his childhood sweetheart, Saida.
• What started out as story with a theme of looking for a lost love morphs into a fully complex storyline that examines identity, abandonment, love, hope, and dislocation wrapped up with magic realism elements and infused with history of the past and present.
• Once again I was drawn into the skillful storytelling of the author as he looks at East Africa through a lens that explores history, politics, religion, ethnicity and societies yet making it personal and intimate.
• As the storyline fluidity moves between the past and the present in Kamal’s life and the past and present of the history of the region, it is Kamal’s background of having an African mother and Indian father that allows for the exploration of the cultures from an inside view. The reader gets to see sectarian conflicts get ignited by forces that have little to do with many who bear the burden of these conflicts and have even less power to resist.
• As Kamal is given “opportunities” that he is “pushed” to accept, often the price he pays is abandonment by those he loves.
• At times some of the historical parts dragged the story down but they are really so necessary to this story and to our understanding of migration and relocation of this area.
• I learned much about the German colonization of East Africa, the role of WWI on East Africa, and the changeover from the German rule to the British rule
• While all of my questions did not get answered by the end of the book relating to some of the outstanding questions/concerns that Kamal has questioned throughout his life – I did see how the past (even the past we are not aware of) so influences the present. As I look around the world and wonder about conflicts that seem to just sprung up I am learning that that the past is the present.
• This is my second book by the author and once again my knowledge has been enriched in an enjoyable reading experience.
• I highly recommend this book for readers of historical fiction.
• One of my favorite quotes from this book is – “Still, he was different. His features announced it plainly, spoke of provenance, posed questions. There were reminders, the small and large ones, accidental or aimed to wound. He had his memories, his private world to turn to at night. No one could interfere with his memories, they were his solace, his hope for some future resolution in his life. They chained him to his past.”
• Second favorite quote – “But, beware of the mouse who caresses you as he knaws.”
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