Of Suitcases and Gunny Sacks: The Poetics of Travel in M. G. Vassanji and Shailja Patel

Abstract

In his work on Indian Ocean crossings and Coolitude, Khal Torabully delineates how the routes of migrant workers and indentured labourers create a wide-reaching web that spans across oceans and continents, connecting India, China, and Oceania to African and European shores. Taking up Torabully's thinking on global encounter and exchange, this article turns to M. G. Vassanji's The Gunny Sack (1989) and Shailja Patel's Migritude (2010), two literary texts which interlink East Africa with India via the water space of the Indian Ocean. It will argue that both expand the oceanic passage at the heart of their stories to address other, less geographically graspable poetics of travel. By connecting an early, seminal novel of the East African Asian diaspora with a more recent and experimental text, I will extrapolate the ways how these two texts give voice to journeys between Asia and East Africa across the Indian Ocean, and, situated at the borderlands between Africa and Asia, shed light on multiple, often contested, South-South connectivities.