Abstract
Over the last fifteen years scholarship on postcolonial literatures has increasingly turned to readers as the focus of empirical study. While such research has helped make visible the agency of postcolonial readers in global literary exchanges, it has tended to overlook the many ways in which postcolonial subjects’ encounters with texts can exceed or circumvent literal reading. The Asian-African-Canadian novelist M.G. Vassanji has been particularly attuned to the physicality of paper, most definitively in two of his novels set in East Africa, The Gunny Sack (1989) and The Book of Secrets (1994). In this article I analyse how Vassanji’s characters, both literate and illiterate, engage paper’s physical properties to ground their everyday practices of memory, valuation, and interpretation. By attending to paper’s materiality in Vassanji’s work postcolonial studies can situate its own reading practices in the context of material ways of doing things with texts.
Among the varied physical objects that constitute the elaborate material world of M.G. Vassanji’s fiction, perhaps the most vital and vexed are those made from paper. In his novels, stories, and travel writing, which recreate the lives of South Asian migrants in India, East Africa, and North America from the nineteenth century to the present, Vassanji examines how subjects whose lives have been shaped by migration narrate their individual, familial, and communal pasts. His work has twice won Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize for fiction, and he has been “recognized as a major voice of the East African diaspora” (Desai, 2011: vii). In investigating the claims that memory and belonging make on his characters, Vassanji’s careful interest in food, trinkets, songs, games, heirlooms, and other stuff of everyday life has become a hallmark of his style. His attention to everyday materiality locates his work in a contemporary literary moment that “lend[s] to images of lived African experience a quality much more textured and varied than the monotones presented in the older, classical texts of decolonization” (Ojwang, 2011: 70).
Paper is at once the most common and the most singular of the objects through which Vassanji reconstructs the movements of his mainly Asian African characters. 1 His mobile characters trail flurries of paper in their wake: letters, ledgers, secret diaries, passports (often forged, expired, or confiscated), tiny reeking scraps, sacks or suitcases stuffed with currency, bills, posters, secret wartime messages, spice packets, newspapers, notebooks, bureaucratic forms, and so on. As such, paper serves as one of Vassanji’s most reliable techniques for producing what Roland Barthes (1986) called the “reality effect”: it provides apparently insignificant details that, by seeming to exist without being subsumed into the logical flow of the narrative, make the fictional world seem that much more plausible. At other times pieces of paper can carry a narrative’s central tension. For instance, when the eponymous servant in the short story “The Driver” holds in his hand and then lets flutter away a paper chit, it signifies his defiance of his master’s avarice and false piety (Vassanji, 1991: 56). His master Nurmohamed “Pipa”, the shopkeeper with a barrel of a stomach who appears in The Gunny Sack (1989), Uhuru Street (1991), and most prominently in The Book of Secrets (1994), has a particularly involved relationship with paper and is discussed in detail below. Elsewhere paper objects evoke complex cultural and social configurations. Thus in The Magic of Saida (2012) when the Swahili poet Mzee Omari requests “fine paper from Syria” on which to write, as did poets “in olden times”, the paper locates his East African poetic practice within a longstanding Indian Ocean exchange of objects and texts (Vassanji, 2012: 10).
In these instances, as in many others throughout Vassanji’s fiction, paper’s physical presence is just as salient as the messages it bears, if not more so. The ways paper moves — blown by the wind, dropped by planes, twisted into packets, locked in cupboards, gently fondled, sold by the pound, secreted away in trunks, salvaged from scrap heaps, borne through a city by a parade of elephants, or negotiated into bodily cavities — indicate the extent to which paper’s physicality exceeds, but does not negate, its linguistic function. Sometimes these pieces of paper bear writing, sometimes not; sometimes that writing is read, sometimes ignored. What remains constant is the struggle of Vassanji’s characters, both those who read and those who do not, to incorporate paper into rituals of memory, practices of interpretation, and debates over value. Paper’s materiality provides the essential basis for what can be glossed, following Leah Price, as the somatic “operations” through which Vassanji’s characters “do things” with paper (2012: 5−6). His characters do not treat paper exclusively as a medium that supports a text but engage in sensuous, emotive, and ritual relationships with paper objects in ways that belie the common wisdom that “To take in a text is to tune out its raw materials” (Price, 2012: 5). Attending to the materiality of paper in Vassanji’s fiction can thus respond to James Procter’s call to “defamiliarize professional reading within postcolonial studies” and to “move beyond the formalism of specialist postcolonial reading […] by reconsidering the text’s relationship to the contingent cultures of reading that surround and in a sense produce it” (2009: 182).
Yet an equally critical aspect of Vassanji’s focus on paper appears in the instances when his characters’ operations with paper butt up against its stubborn resistance to being fixed instrumentally. If other physical objects in Vassanji’s fiction such as a heavy trunk, a gunny sack, or an ivory-handled fan signify a material reality that exceeds the ability of colonial metaphors to capture it (Cooper, 2004), so too do paper objects exceed the rituals, practices, and debates in which Vassanji’s characters situate them. Instead of serving as a reliable vehicle, paper exemplifies a relationship of resistance that Bill Brown (2001) calls “thingness”. As Brown elaborates:
We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. (2001: 4)
Paper acts as a thing when it challenges the ability of Vassanji’s characters to incorporate it into stable structures of value and meaning. As such, it exemplifies the larger struggle they face to establish and maintain enclaves, both literal and symbolic, in which they can determine social, cultural, and economic value(s). If Vassanji’s fiction often evokes the threat that African independence represented to “the small autonomous cultural enclaves which the empire had previously allowed to exist within it” (Simatei, 2000: 38), paper’s thingness situates this vulnerability in reference to the obstinacy, fragility, and sensuality of the material world itself.
In what follows I turn to two of Vassanji’s early novels, The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets, to identify sites of creative tension where sensuous, emotive, and ritual engagements with paper both depend on and are betrayed by paper’s materiality. The themes that I discuss in depth — memory, interpretation, and value — overlap to some extent and should not be interpreted schematically; rather they represent a partial list of Vassanji’s central concerns, and thus indicate how strongly paper flows through the heart of his work. Similarly, while paper appears as a motif throughout Vassanji’s work (including his non-fiction), and performs a wide variety of functions, The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets establish the characteristic contradiction in his work between paper as object and paper as thing; or, more broadly, between material experience as the basis of meaning-making practice and materiality as that which resists incorporation into structures of meaning. I supplement my readings of these two novels with references to several places in Vassanji’s later fiction where these themes and motifs recur. I conclude by imagining how Vassanji’s emphasis on paper, focused as it is on individual encounters with singular, auratic documents, might be extended to situate academic postcolonial reading in the context of the textual operations in which his characters engage.
Memory
If “the past and its possible recovery in memory” forms one of Vassanji’s most pervasive concerns (Ojwang, 2013: 174), the vesting of memory in material objects is the most enduring and fraught means through which he and his characters access it. Vassanji’s characters are particularly attentive to the way that certain objects — especially those intimately associated with a person, like a journal or a bloody shirt — reappear cyclically throughout a person’s life and in doing so elicit memories of the earlier times and spaces in which they featured. The links, both metaphoric and literal, between the mobility of objects and the transience of memory demonstrate “the uncontainable slippage between the two categories that [Salman] Rushdie has called the ‘invisible’ and ‘cardboard variety’ of luggage” (George, 1996: 176). Similarly, as Brenda Cooper (2004) points out, in Vassanji’s novels physical objects serve as metonyms for the people and events that are attached to them, such that the appearance or even the recollection of objects provides occasions for his narrators to launch into the stories that those objects jar loose in their minds. Moreover, the chaotic order in which objects and people encounter each other in Vassanji’s fiction serves as a check against a single memory or a single story dominating all other narrative possibilities. For instance in The Gunny Sack the character Ji Bai removes objects from her gunny sack at random, and as each is removed she tells another story. By binding her narration to the contingent appearance of physical objects which can be arranged and rearranged in any order, Vassanji creates a narrative structure that avoids “the strictures of teleology and closure” (Simatei, 2000: 30).
The ability of paper objects in particular to elicit memories and to order the narratives that those memories produce occupies a central place in Vassanji’s fiction. In a tender passage from The Gunny Sack, Salim, the narrator, invokes paper to explain the fate of a prized model steamship. As he remembers it years later, the model — a gift to his late father Juma — sat in a locked glass case on a table next to his mother’s bed. The children of the family (Salim, his siblings and cousins) call it the “SS Nairobi”, Nairobi having been their home before Juma’s death and their consequent move to Dar es Salaam. “It looked so real”, Salim remembers. “We would look at it admiringly, every time discovering something new and delightful about it: three lifeboats suspended on either side, decks protected by railings, the exquisite little cabin doors and ladders and cargo hatches that opened” (Vassanji, 1989: 126). 2 The family creates traditions around the ship, such as a game they invent of searching in Dar’s harbour for an original on which the model might be based. These little rituals honour the ship’s place in their family’s emotional life and so become a way of memorializing Juma. Similarly Kulsum, Salim’s mother, hides banknotes in the ship’s locked case, thereby reinforcing its status as a hallowed and protected space.
Yet it is precisely the reverence involved in the act of hiding banknotes that contributes to the model’s eventual destruction. As Salim explains:
One day the key got lost, the hundred-shilling note was urgently needed, and the lock had to be forced. After that, important pieces of paper like electric and water bills found shelter behind the ship, and then in front, and sometimes on the funnel. Some time later the glue inevitably came off a cowl and it toppled; then the cable supporting a lifeboat broke; a ladder slipped; the main antenna broke, a cargo boom became detached and hung from a mere pulley thread .… until finally we had a capsized ship, a memory burdened by day-to-day worries like unpaid bills and unanswered letters (127).
The “important pieces of paper” that initially signified the model’s importance give way to “day-to-day” bills and letters. If the model ship embodies the family’s collective memory of Juma, then the bills and letters illustrate how untenable was the quarantined emotional space in which they preserved his memory. Just as the model ship capsizes in a flurry of paper, so too does the reverence in which the family holds Juma’s memory collapse under the weight of everyday cares. Ironically it is the honoured position in which the ship is held that guarantees its disintegration: the model’s locked case is first its protection and then the cause of its reappropriation as the household’s dead letter office.
Salim, glossing this episode, laments that “the past is just this much beyond reach, you can reconstruct it only through the paraphernalia it leaves behind […] and then who would deny that what you manufacture is only a model” (127). His sense of the past as irretrievably alien, and of historical reconstruction as “a creative intervention rather than just the mechanical retrieval of a determinate set of data”, suggests that he regards the transmutation of memory into history as “an act of sorcery” (Ojwang, 2013: 185). Yet from another angle it is the paper and not Salim that seems to possess enchanted power. Crucially, the pieces of paper do not just signify the model’s (and the memories’) decay, but participate in it; they become actors in the family drama by physically invading the space of memory. The passage highlights the papers’ motility by stating that they “found shelter behind the ship” rather than being placed there, as if they were refugees from the everyday, seeking the ship’s lifeboats. After Kulsum places the first banknotes behind the ship the process of decay shifts out of her hands, so that the key “got lost” and the lock “had to be forced”, emphasizing the agency of the things themselves over and against the agency of the people whose memories they are supposed to preserve. The ship’s decline takes on its own momentum until at last there are no characters to be seen forcing locks or stacking bills, but only things inexorably piling up and breaking down. Like the things in Ji Bai’s gunny sack which irrupt into the narrative in their own order, so too does paper’s materiality introduce an element of chaos that interferes with stable rituals of memory.
Paper’s relation to memory figures differently in an episode from The Assassin’s Song (Vassanji, 2007). The novel centres on Karsan, the heir to an ancient Gujarati line of Sufi mystics, who rejects his birthright for a secular life in North America. While at college in Massachusetts Karsan receives a package from his mother filled with Gujarati snacks and a copy of their favourite Filmfare magazine:
The feel of that magazine in my hand, its pages against my cheeks, with a faint aroma of spices, was like being touched by her, so many memories it carried of our moments together. She had gazed at the same photos of the stars, run her hands over their glossy feel, held them to her cheeks (2007: 207).
In contrast to the bills and letters that invade the space reserved for Juma’s memory, here the magazine, as a particular paper object both Karsan and his mother see and touch, successfully carries the imprint of an absent parent. Unlike the fiction by African men that Neil ten Kortenaar has studied, which “consistently measures its distance from the mother and its capacity to incorporate her in a medium from which she is excluded” (2011: 24), here it is precisely Karsan’s capacity to share the magazine with his mother that imbues it with affective intensity.
What makes this vignette even more telling is that one of the novel’s central motifs is a secret song, or bol, that the men in Karsan’s line pass verbally from father to son. Vassanji here reverses the modernist association of women with tradition and orality and men with modernity and writing. If his father’s bol speaks of the world of deeply embedded oral culture that Karsan renounces, his mother’s magazine provides a quintessential example of what Arjun Appadurai has called “diasporic public spheres”: imagined social formations in which the rapid flow of media to “deterritorialized” subjects facilitates “self-imagining as an everyday social project” (1996: 4). Yet Karsan has no interest in the Indian film stars that the magazine features, nor in using its images to imagine himself as part of a polity. While his mother sends him the magazine as a memento of the times when they used to read it together, it is more important to him as an auratic conduit of his mother’s presence than as mass media. When Karsan touches and smells the magazine rather than reading it, he points to operations other than reading through which diasporic subjects engage the deterritorialized paper that flows around them.
Interpretation
If Salim and Karsan invent rituals of memory that attempt to exclude paper’s content, others among Vassanji’s characters explicitly engage paper’s materiality as a way to supplement their interpretation of the language it carries. This interpretive enterprise often turns on a text’s idiosyncratic material properties, such as the curves of its handwriting, the texture of the paper, or its ability to be hidden away and preserved. The materiality of interpretation is especially prominent in The Book of Secrets, a work dedicated to historiography. It begins in the novel’s opening scene when the narrator Pius Fernandes unexpectedly encounters a book. This object, the book of secrets, is revealed to be the diary kept by British colonial administrator Alfred Corbin during his posting to a small Kenyan town in 1913. Over the course of the novel Fernandes develops a narrative by expanding on the bare facts of Corbin’s diary, trying to “recreate the world of that book” and to “breathe life into the many spirits captured in its pages so long ago and tell their stories” (Vassanji, 1994: 4). 3 This narrative, along with Fernandes’s account of its production and reception, is what becomes The Book of Secrets.
Fernandes characterizes his engagement with the diary as a kind of necromancy: he animates not merely the words on the page but the departed spirits of those whose secrets the diary conceals and preserves. But before his textual engagement with the diary there is simply the thing itself: “an object, distinctly foreign to the scene” (the scene being the back room of a newly refurbished shoe shop in late-twentieth-century Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) (5). Inside the book, Fernandes observes,
were brittle, yellowed pages, encrusted with open, dry capsules of cockroach eggs; insect remains, thin like fossils, releasing the pungent dust of their own decay. Several pages were torn off, many were stained; there were sections which had been neatly burrowed through by silverfish. (6)
The diary’s “faint odour”, with its invitation to appreciate what nature has nearly ruined, conditions Fernandes’s reading: it motivates what becomes a sensitive and generous interpretation, with a delicacy commensurate with the book’s physical fragility. To tell the diary’s stories, Fernandes must first “breathe life” into it; the scent that he inhales is thus recycled as the narrative’s motive force. His linguistic analysis is but one aspect of a sensuous, embodied relationship of care.
However the novel does not rest at associating material habits of interpretation with care and delicacy. When the First World War arrives in East Africa, the brutal Captain Maynard, known as “Fisi” or Hyena, directs a British commando force that develops military intelligence out of scraps of paper. Maynard’s scattered agents bring information to Nurmohamed Pipa the shopkeeper, at this point a young man who had come to Kenya to find a wife, and he passes it along the proper channels:
Much of what he [Pipa] received, he was sure, was rubbish, picked up on the road by those on Maynard’s payroll. But then there were those other items that had the reek of authenticity about them, the look of having travelled far […]. There were the photographs, newspaper cuttings, scraps of paper with writing, maps, sketches, all crumpled, stained, smelly from the numerous hands, the hiding places. And even among these, there were one or two special ones, scraps of paper with a peculiarity all their own: used, written on, encrusted with brown dirt, they had the revolting odor of human shit. (154)
The words and images that the papers bear are not sufficient to produce intelligence, so other senses — tactile, olfactory — have to be brought to bear as hermeneutic aides. The pressure that wartime imposes on information, identities, and loyalties (even Pipa is forced at one point to become a double agent for the Germans) finds expression here in the sensuality of textual interpretation: “these bits of information would be sniffed at by Maynard, the Fisi […] who would piece together a truth, a story, the secrets of the enemy” (154). Against the tenderness of Fernandes’s life-giving breath, Maynard’s sniffing shows one way in which attending to the material properties of paper can serve as a form of colonial mastery.
That being said, it is important not to overplay the difference between Fernandes and Maynard. The parallels between their olfactory engagements with scattered scraps of paper may serve as the grounds to distinguish their approaches, or it can emphasize their shared ambition of establishing interpretive closure over difficult material (Ball, 1999: 95). In that regard Pipa’s own habits of interpretation may represent an alternative approach to paper’s materiality. Pipa received little formal education and does not read, but he is closely associated with paper. This is Fernandes’s description of him, a portrait that varies only slightly from earlier ones in The Gunny Sack and Uhuru Street:
a plump wheezing man in singlet and loincloth inside a produce shop, perched atop a tire-seat in the middle of all his wares, his fingers constantly at work folding and refolding squares of paper into packets of spices, dropping them in one fluid motion into a basket at his side, measuring time as it were with grains of turmeric, coriander, chillies. (3−4)
Pipa appears from the beginning of the novel in an intimate, tactile relationship with paper, one that creates an embodied link between the movement of paper and the passage of time. Rather than being meaningful as a bearer of text, paper becomes meaningful to Pipa by serving as a physical inducement to meditation. Pipa’s paper ritual is at once an earthy disavowal of paper’s authority as medium and a transfiguration of paper into spiritual aid.
In that context, Pipa’s engagement with Corbin’s diary — though it takes place years before he is pictured as a shopkeeper — partakes of the same kind of ritualistic association of paper and person. When his wife Mariamu is raped and murdered during the First World War, Pipa finds Corbin’s diary among her possessions. Suspecting an affair between the two, Pipa nevertheless comes to treasure the book; he believes that “it was from her and she must be in it, described in it. The book contained her spirit” (172). Though Pipa cannot confirm whether or not the diary contains information he seeks about her fidelity, he preserves it in his storeroom:
One morning, on a Sunday, when the shop was closed, he went into the room, fetched the book from the trunk, sat on the floor. He flipped the pages, examined closely the sloping hand, the dates, the printed advertisements on the endpapers; he noted the change from ink to lead pencil and back, and the varying length of entries: all these signified, said something, he could not know what […]. He went and brought a white sheet, covered the trunk with it, and with reverence placed the book on it […]. Thus began his long period of private idolatry. (208−9)
Because Pipa is shut out of the diary’s language he compensates by attributing unspecified meaning to even the most ephemeral material aspects, such as the diary’s printed advertisements and the kind of writing instrument used. It is not a matter of Pipa inventing what the diary means, or establishing interpretive mastery over its meaning; on the contrary he imagines that even the most obscure physical details have a meaning from which he is excluded. He fetishizes the diary and its writing as external and unavailable rather than claiming ownership over its meaning.
If The Book of Secrets “reveals a correspondence latent between historiography and colonialism (that they are both an imposition of one order over another)” (Rhodes, 1998: 191), Pipa’s “private idolatry” acknowledges his inability to impose any such order. Interpreting paper’s material characteristics, for Pipa, means creating rituals of memory that reverentially point to a meaning that is unreachable. Yet as Alison Toron points out, when Pipa caresses the pages of the diary in place of the absent Mariamu, he “foreground[s] the enigmatic power of the feminine made possible only in the absence of an actual female body” (2009: 2). Moreover, his struggle with Corbin’s diary locates him in a changing East African social world where the creation of mass literacy in English “created a new category of disadvantage called illiteracy” (Kortenaar, 2011: 8). By substituting private significance for linguistic signification Pipa acknowledges but does not contest the hegemony of English-language literacy. His reverence for the diary postpones, but does not preclude, its interpretation.
Value
If Vassanji’s characters in The Book of Secrets struggle privately to establish how paper’s material properties might be taken up in the act of interpretation, in other places establishing the material value of paper involves more public struggles. The notion of paper as an object with potential value as money becomes particularly salient in regard to the vagaries of colonial monetary policy, notably in The Gunny Sack’s portrayal of the introduction of German paper money in Tanganyika before the First World War. The paper on which the currency is printed becomes a major source of contention for the Asian African characters who are ordered to use it, as their criticism of colonial policy is expressed as a critique of paper’s value. When these unnamed characters criticize the imposition of a new colonial currency they focus on the worthlessness of paper in comparison to coinage. The motif of paper’s value provides a way to critique the imposition of standards of monetary value without their consent.
Near the beginning of The Gunny Sack, at the start of the First World War, the German colonial government in Tanganyika introduces paper currency “to conserve metal” for the war effort (46). While there had already been violent resistance to the arbitrary introduction of rupees, which devalued existing pre-German currencies (35), paper money is even more problematic. The novel’s narration slips out of Salim’s voice, which it had maintained up to this point, and adopts a free indirect communal voice:
Eti, the times are a-changing: the times have changed, my brother. Did your grandfather ever trade in paper money? Ah, I have no use for paper money … since when has paper any value? (45; ellipsis in original)
The narration invokes an anonymous group of male elders, or wazee, discussing the vagaries of the new currency regulations, sharing information, and directing their conservative, sceptical attitude against the new paper money. 4 For the communal voice the adoption of paper money is a significant temporal landmark, in that it upsets a regime of value based, however tenuously, in the material properties of metal money and substitutes a regime of value that practically flaunts its basis in colonial fiat. The scepticism towards a currency based on what another of Vassanji’s narrators calls “the manufacture of money out of thin air and paper” (Vassanji, 2004: 346) represents colloquial resistance to the colonial government’s arbitrary determination of what will have value as currency. In the uncertainty of war some members of the Asian African community do hoard sacks of German notes. However the scepticism of the wazee proves to be rightly founded, as the Germans lose their East African colony and the paper money is rendered valueless overnight. As the wazee bitterly note, “‘They [who saved it] are making fires out of it’” (53).
The concern that the wazee express over the substance of money employs a vernacular idiom to participate in a transnational debate about paper and value. In a psychoanalytic discussion of the “sensational public sphere” in antebellum America, David Anthony (2009) analyses how writers used images of paper money to represent the anxieties that attended the transition from metal to paper currency. Anthony relates this shift to a new “‘precarious’ form of male selfhood, one centred less and less on an interior form of self-possession and ‘inner being,’ and increasingly contingent on a commodified and frequently ‘elusive’ form of reputation” (2009: 4). Analogously, for Vassanji the anxiety that attends the shift to paper currency is about communal self-possession, as manifested in the (lost) ability to determine the value of materials as currency. Emphasizing the German paper currency’s reduction to kindling lays bare the fact that it was always “just” paper, or what Kevin McLaughlin identifies as “the very substance that withdraws when it becomes money” (2011: 4). Pointing to the materiality of paper money thus provides a way of illuminating the operation of imperial hegemony behind regimes of value. 5
The impact of paper in The Gunny Sack’s debates about the constitution of monetary authority lies in a subversive homology that the novel draws between ethnic enclaves, enclaves of value, and the physical enclaves through which Vassanji’s paper moves. As critics have frequently observed, the creation and maintenance of ethnic enclaves provides a central concern in Vassanji’s work. Vassanji’s characters often debate the value of ethnic distinctiveness, and many of them express deep ambivalence over the political and social consequences of maintaining ethnic enclaves. The potential positive value of the enclave is precisely its capacity to establish values, in both the economic and the sociocultural senses. As David Graeber has argued, “When it comes to establishing value, one common response to […] confusing situations is to circle off a space as a kind of minimal, de facto ‘society,’ a kind of micrototality” (2001: 250). In other words, the ideal of an ethnic or other kind of social enclave is to serve as an enclave of value: a bounded social space that enables a thing to maintain different worths inside and outside its limits. Thus the scandal of the colonial paper money lies in the fact that the wazee see that the sociality they generate through their communal voice does not and perhaps cannot constitute an enclave of value.
Part of the significance of paper’s materiality in Vassanji’s fiction, then, is that it provides physical analogues of the failure of such enclaves of value. This is true not only in regard to paper currency, but also in other instances where a character attempts (and often fails) to establish the value of a paper object. The back room in Pipa’s shop in which he enshrines the diary is one such enclave that collapses after his death, when the diary shifts from being a sacred relic to being first a historical source and then a commodity that various characters try to buy (281). In The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2004), Vikram hides the money that he has embezzled from the Kenyan government in a locked trunk; but when he tries to publicly return it as a sign of contrition, he is prevented by unknown forces that insist on maintaining him as a scapegoat for their own corruption. The Asian African community in The Gunny Sack tries to preserve its wealth by hiding currency in sacks, but that does not prevent the notes from losing value when the German empire falls (53). The most secret interior space — the inside of a sack — is at the same time a global space, subject to the vagaries of Great Power politics. These failures of enclaves emphasize the thing-like nature of paper; it can survive you and your plans for it, but it is always vulnerable to another’s designs.
In expressing the treachery of paper money, the value of which cannot be firmly located in an interior space, The Gunny Sack expresses pessimism about the ability of a minority community to maintain an enclave in which it can determine standards of value. There is then bitter irony in the fact that the colonial currency’s collapse does not represent the failure of paper money in general, but rather the failure of one empire’s currency, both paper and otherwise. While the wazee were right to fear the instability of the new currency, they feared it for the wrong reason; German metal was just as easily devalued. They err in reading the materiality of paper by contrasting its fragile value with other substances whose value is more stable. The thingness of paper money, then, is not really about its materiality, but about the refusal of its materiality to perform the function to which the communal voice assigns it. Nevertheless, the communal scepticism of the wazee at least makes visible this impossibility. Debates over paper’s value in Vassanji’s fiction stand in for larger questions about the ability of ethnic minorities to form communities in which they can determine the foundation of economic and moral value. Paper’s materiality is then valuable insofar as it can provide the grounds on which these debates are engaged.
Conclusion
If “reading acts” have historically constituted “a central, if seldom studied, dimension of postcolonial critique” (Procter, 2009: 181), Vassanji’s attention to paper’s physicality challenges the centrality of reading as a paradigm for the circulation of texts in colonial and postcolonial societies. His characters perform “operations” with paper objects: rituals of memory, practices of interpretation, and debates over value. These operations may supplement or substitute for a linguistic meaning that is incomplete or unavailable; they may emphasize paper’s materiality as a way to critique what is written on it (and who has done the writing); or they may ignore or avoid the paper’s words or images altogether to emphasize its function as a mobile, flexible object. Vassanji’s characters may well echo Ian Sansom’s evaluation of the role of paper in modernity: “We have lived in a world of paper, and we are paper people” (2012: xxii). Attending to the exuberant profusion of paper in Vassanji’s work can therefore “defamiliarize professional reading within postcolonial studies” (Procter 2009: 182) by estranging reading itself from the paper on which (in his fiction, at least) it depends. At the same time, just as Peter Kalliney warns that academic readers are often too quick to ascribe aesthetic value to those postcolonial texts that validate the interpretive tools they carry (2008: 16), it is equally crucial to avoid simply abstracting and applying the operations that Vassanji’s texts depict to the physical copies of those texts. Recognizing that paper objects always have the potential to act as things, confounding the purposes to which Vassanji’s characters assign them, can help avoid the strictures of methodological closure.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.