Sanchari Sur Reviews:

Mariam Pirbhai, Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging, Wolsak & Wynn, 2023
Sadiya Ansari, In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life, House of Anansi Press, 2024

While South Asian Muslim writers have been visibly publishing in Canada in the past four decades—Farida Karodia’s Daughters of the Twilight (1986), M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack (1989) and Nazneen Shaikh’s Ice Bangles (1989) are three of the earliest published works—there remains a gap of South Asian Muslim writers of Pakistani origin within South Asian Canadian writing. Recent non-fiction works by Mariam Pirbhai and Sadiya Ansari address this gap. As first-generation immigrants to Canada following circuitous journeys from their birth city of Karachi, Pakistan, both authors seek to define their ideas of home. In Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging, Pirbhai finds solace in her ‘garden’ as a recreated home in Kitchener-Waterloo, ON, while Ansari’s In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life searches for a grandmother’s story and, in doing so, a place to call home. 

Pirbhai locates herself—and her garden—through Edward Said’s ‘contrapuntal vision of the displaced.’ She describes this vision as a point ‘where lived experiences of different geographies or different lands coexist in counterpoint, each one unique but interdependent.’ In her case, her garden is ‘refracted through multiple and distinct geographies’: ‘hot coastal Karachi plains,’ ‘English country gardens’ and the ‘tropical landscapes of…a Manila suburb.’ Her garden becomes this ‘micro-universe’ of her contrapuntal vision, which she explores in relation to its settler-colonial ecology and history.

Pirbhai identifies as an émigré-settler, someone living on Indigenous land while ‘resist[ing] the urge to stake a claim in lands and ecologies—botanical, biological, social and cultural—already in distress.’ At the same time, she writes: ‘I cannot escape the fact of my arrival’ or her status ‘as a landowner.’ Both a (kind of) settler and a landed immigrant, Pirbhai explores what belonging in Canada means for a racialized person whose family history points to the 1947 Partition and post-Partition displacements, a legacy of the British Empire.

For Pirbhai, names become a way of thinking through identity and inheritance. She notes how colonial forces have wielded the power of naming ‘to erase entire records of a people’s history, culture, religion’ and so on. The roses in her garden, for instance, are known to Canadian horticulturalists not by their Indigenous names but by the Latinized names belonging to Linnaeus’s taxonomies. What stories are lost when names are forgotten or erased? She delves into the Farsi origins of the South Asian rose, ‘gul,’ and learns about the Anishinaabeg name for the wild rose, ‘oginiig.’ According to the story, roses were being overeaten by rabbits. As a result, the rose was ‘given thorns to protect it from the kind of greedy appetites the rabbits had displayed, and to caution others from taking for granted the delicate balance between plants, humans and animals.’ Through the stories of gul and oginiig, Pirbhai connects the power of names to the power of stories. 

Another way Pirbhai negotiates her contrapuntal position in Canada is through her relationship to cottage ownership and summer holidays. Going back to her childhood in 1970s Karachi, Pirbhai fondly recalls ‘seaside getaways’ during which ‘elders play[ed] interminable rounds of cards’ while children ‘lobbed cricket balls into the sea or took camel rides along the beach.’ In Canada, such getaways exist in the form of heading to the cottage for a long weekend or a few weeks in the summer. Tracing cottage ownership to the early 20th century, she notes how Canadian cottage country was informed by ‘imported ideas of leisure and recreation’ and became intricately ‘bound up with Canadian national symbols in the postwar period.’ For the racialized immigrant, the cottage offers a path to mainstream Canadian identity. At the same time, it represents the settler colonial project of Canada. She acknowledges it’s a fraught situation: ‘How did my plans for a summer staycation get so damn complicated?’

For Pirbhai, her position as an immigrant of colour in Canada whose trajectory involved multiple migrations allows her to create an alternate space of home and belonging through her garden. Through a nuanced understanding of her ambivalent position in Canada in relation to settler-colonial histories and to the relationships between immigrants and Indigenous peoples, Pirbhai writes her story of being a South Asian Muslim Canadian. She privileges the stories of her life, her family, the land she lives on and the land she comes from to create her version of home in Canada.

Like Pirbhai, Ansari privileges stories as she investigates the life of her paternal grandmother, Tahira. As a child, Ansari saw Tahira as the ‘lead villain.’ She resented sharing her bedroom with her grandmother from the age of five, disdained the modest clothes that Tahira sewed for her Barbies and was aggrieved when Tahira gave away her My Little Pony to her male cousins in Karachi. When Ansari was 15, her grandmother passed, leaving behind the secrets of her past. In her impulse to draw a fuller picture of her grandmother—who died a stranger—Ansari seeks to draw a fuller picture of herself and her place in the world. Through Tahira’s story, Ansari writes her own.

Ansari questions the nature of stories, their ‘plot gaps.’ She realizes that ‘the most vital element of growing up is becoming aware that the stories you are told and the stories you tell yourself have primarily been shaped by your parents’ world view.’ The friction between the plot gaps and the ‘mythology’ created by her parents holds the key to the real story. In interrogating this friction, Ansari finds a way to interrogate herself. She locates herself as a Pakistani Canadian, even though both her ‘parents’ families lived in India pre-Partition,’ a Pakistani-ness that is in question in Canada. Tahira, for instance, grew up in Ambehta in Aligarh (in northern India), and lived in Hyderabad (southern India) after marriage and before Partition. By tracing the lineage of her paternal grandparents, Ansari complicates the easy narrative of her Pakistani lineage.

Tahira’s personal narrative is complicated not only because of the colonial legacy of Partition but also because of her personal choice to leave her seven children in Karachi for a romantic relationship with Shakeel, a man in Haroonabad, Pakistan. In choosing to seek happiness with Shakeel, Tahira rejected the strictures put upon Muslim women of her time. For privileging romantic love over filial love, Tahira faced real consequences: her oldest son and stepchildren kept her away from her other children, pretending she had died along with their father. Returning to this past is difficult for Ansari’s aunts and uncles, but she believes ‘the only way into a story is to dive in.’ By doing so, Ansari counters the narrative that casts Tahira as the family villain and returns her subjecthood to her. 

By taking control of Tahira’s narrative—bringing it into the light from among the shadows of assumptions and family rumours—Ansari reveals that the power of a story lies in who tells it. In the words of Saba, Shakeel’s daughter from his first marriage, ‘when someone tells a story, they tell it in their favour.’ Privileging Tahira’s story through the interviews with all those who knew her in Karachi and Haroonabad, Ansari narrates Tahira’s story in her grandmother’s favour. Like Tahira’s decision to reconcile with her children despite years of exclusion and isolation, Ansari’s investigation into Tahira’s life speaks to hope for the future and the desire for healing. By giving voice to multiple stories, polyglottal narratives that span decades and countries, Pirbhai and Ansari define their places in the world and their ever-changing ideas of home.

—Sanchari Sur