Migration, Memory, and Mobility in Vassanji’s No New Land

Khan, Anjum

doi:10.21608/tjhss.2023.154549.1102

Migration, Memory, and Mobility in Vassanji’s No New Land

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Anjum Khan

Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science and Higher Education for Women

10.21608/tjhss.2023.154549.1102

Abstract

There's no new land, my friend, no

New sea; for the city will follow you,

In the same streets you'll wander endlessly. . . .

- "The City" by CP. Cavafy, translated by Lawrence Durrell in Justine

Agriculture made the nomads settlers, and trade and other economic opportunities made the settlers immigrants. Vassanji interweaves several such narratives of trade and opportunity diaspora where individuals migrate for commerce and occupation. These willing immigrants travel across continents carrying the memory of their land left behind, and make an attempt to reconstruct it with social and symbolic capital. Vassanji’s novel, No New Land is one such narrative relating the immigrant’s odyssey where the emotional transition spans longer than the physical passage. It is the tale of the sixty-nine Rosecliffe Park located in imaginary Don Mills in the city of Toronto, and its heterogenous immigrants representing different ethnicities. However, the physical structure of Sixty-nine Rosecliffe Park is a construction of every resident’s’ cultural memory and social capital. The edifice and its environment are an ecosystem created by its inhabitants in order to promote multicultural sustenance. The proposed essay will make an attempt to examine the environmental and cultural conflicts the Asian and African immigrants confront in Canada, followed by the triumph of their socio-cultural mobility. I intend to highlight the efforts of immigrants in reconstructing a similar land which lies in the past using collective cultural memory, and their ability to find a connecting line between both their homeland and their foster land.

Keywords