“I belong here—just as you!”: A Human Rights Claim over a Sense of Belonging in Diaspora as Portrayed in Cyril Dabydeen’s “The Puja-Man”

                                                                       

                                                                                          

“I belong here—just as you!”: A Human Rights Claim over a Sense of Belonging in Diaspora as Portrayed in Cyril Dabydeen’s “The Puja-Man”

                                                                                                R. Viswanathan

                                                                                                Assistant Professor of English

                                                                                                NMSSVN College of Education

     Today, Literature and Human Rights can be considered as a transnational interdisciplinary branch of Comparative Literature. In fact, Humanities and Human Rights are mutually illuminating: “Humanities can meaningfully bring our modes of analysis and interpretation to bear on human rights discourse and in turn our teaching and research can become richer, more nuanced and more relevant by engaging with the ethical and philosophical imperatives of human rights” (Stanton qtd. in McClennen n.p.). While literature reflects human rights certain human rights in turn help in shaping literature also. Especially in Diasporic literature writers try to be realistic by focusing on the human rights issue of the diasporans (in many cases writers themselves are diasporans). Indo-Caribbean Canadian diaspora is also not an exception, for “literary theorists have spoken of the transforming power of the imagination” (Dabydeen 1989, 250).

     Cyril Dabydeen is an Indo-Caribbean Canadian who vehemently writes about the challenges and difficulties faced by his family in Diaspora. Dabydeen is popularly known as a fiction writer whose best works include the short-story collection Jogging in Havana (1992). One of the stories entitled “The Puja-Man” narrates the predicament of the narrator’s brother Duleep who migrates from Guyana to Canada wishing to settle there.

     Having entered Canada on a visitor’s visa along with his wife Beti, Duleep overstays, for “Canada somehow seemed to have brought about a change in him” (34) and the authorities try to evacuate him. Duleep’s attempts to do away with a Caribbean sense of placelessness indirectly compel him to search for a permanent identity in his own self. It is apt to quote Rosemary Sullivan’s explication on identity here: “…a re-definition of the conventional understanding of nationhood: from one viewed solely in terms of physical place to that which is based on a concept of the landscape of the mind wherein place and psyche become intertwined” (1988, 26). Dabydeen also thinks of Canada in the same line: “my view of Canada as an intrinsic place to fashion dreams, all conceived despite the overwhelming, over forbidding, sense of the Great White North, far different from the tropical milieu I grew up in; and increasingly, Canada became the place of possibilities, unlike the U.K. or the U.S. in my formative years” (1999, 231). Duleep constantly tries to be a Canadian by redefining the understanding of nationhood.

     The narrator describes that Duleep succeeds in whatever he sets his mind to do. He also figures that “the authorities would have difficulty with him, hardened as he was” (33). Duleep too thinks of slipping across the border to New York. However, he prefers living in Canada “…something about being here, the people being civil; once or twice he’d commented on this” (34). Their mother at Guyana also wants him to live in Canada and she goes to the extent of consulting a Hindu-holy man (the puja-man) and worries about Beti’s relatives who have the mischievousness of informing the authorities. One of the reasons why Duleep chooses to live in Canada is understood when he quotes Graham Greene’s views of the world: “Third World societies being inevitably corrupt. Haiti was the best example” (35). Also, “Deportation also meant that everyone would laugh at them” (35). At the same time, they cannot avoid deportation. The sour-grapism creeps in as he says, “It’s not the best place in the world here. You na see how it cold!...the tropics in our part of the world always seemed like paradise” (37).

     Amidst such pressures Duleep is confused: he tries to run away to Vancouver leaving his wife; he thinks of getting a lawyer. However, at the end of the two weeks of grace time Duleep resorts to his “new-found ‘Canadian ways’: he was almost benign, passive; even obedient, willing to conform” (38). On the other hand, Beti is unhappy about leaving Canada, for, back at Guyana Duleep might resort to his earlier habits of visiting whorehouses and hence she refers to Canadian way of modest living (as shown in the Canadian TV shows) and insists him to follow the same back at homeland. During occasions of supporting each other Duleep and Beti become unusually intimate. In spite of Beti’s taunting him he is “plagued by his torturous feelings” and he hates himself “because of his incapacity to do much…a sense of powerlessness: what Canada had done to him, I figured; now he was just a shell of himself” (41). He watches the immigrants in crowds coming and going: “Hundreds seemed to be coming in, smiling, happy….He looked at them—and it was as if only he was being sent back home, deported!” (43). Being an immigrant he does not want to be disappointed and defeated in his diasporic existence.

     Duleep rehearses his deportation: when he is ushered into the Air Canada jet, he gets wild on hearing the official’s words “Get the hell out of Canada” (43). He shouts back with insolence: “I will, see. I have relatives, family here! In Canada…I belong here—just as you!” (43). He feels like an assimilated diasporan participating in the politics of the nation saying “See, my brother is here—he could, well, become Prime Minister one day?” (43); this is more than a diasporic anxiety, a claim over human rights to belong everywhere. At this juncture, the narrator has to console his younger brother by “shaking his hand, embracing him as never before; telling him with earnestness, that he was welcome, he belonged here—the Prime Minister that I now was in Ottawa” (44).

     Finally, to everyone’s applauding Duleep complies with the Immigration laws “reassuring everyone of his new ways, new self almost” (44). However, the narrator visualizes his brother’s running away with his wife at Miami airport where “all his former instincts, the old self, would return!” (44). This is his defiance against unwillingness to go back to “the inescapable Third World” (37) and his strong exercising of his right to live anywhere he chooses. It is again Cyril Dabydeen’s reinstatement that the idea of placelessness can be transformed to be belongingness and nationhood is not to do with physical place but with landscape of the mind. It is evident that Dabydeen’s real-time humanist struggles have enlightened his art of writing and his writing in turn will enlighten many of the human rights activists.

Works Cited

Dabydeen, Cyril. “The Indo-Caribbean Imagination in Canada.” Indentures and Exile: The Indo-  Caribbean Experience. Ed. Frank Birbalsingh. Toronto:TSAR, 1989: 250-258. Print.

…, “The Puja-Man.” Jogging in Havana (Short Stories). Oakville: Mosaic Press,

      1992: 33-45. Print.

…,

“Places we come from: Voices of Caribbean Canadian Writers (in English) and Multicultural    Contexts.” World Literature Today 73.2 (Spring 1999): 231-237. Print.

McClennen, Sophia A. and Alexandra S. Moore, eds. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. N.P.: Routledge, 2015. Web.

Sulllivan, Rosemary. “The Multicultural Divide.” This Magazine 22.1 (1988): 26. Print.

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