Perhaps what best describes Cyril Dabydeen’s collection of short stories, Forgotten Exiles, is this exchange from his story “Jagnath and Tomby” in the third part of the book:
Tomby was thinking of writing his own book about governance with socialist ideas embedded in it. A book he would no doubt self-publish if no academic press was interested in it. Charles muttered something about the novel being the best literary form to make one’s point of view heard, more than what any government bureaucrat hoped to write. – C. Dabydeen
Forgotten Exiles could have been the very book that Tomby was hoping to write. The characters of the anthology’s 16 stories spit commentary on governance, society, academe, and Canada’s multiculturalism project. But the narrative style of the volume has the choppiness of ocean waves, and this disjointure works against the political-literary project to which Tomby might have aspired.
Dabydeen, a veteran Ottawa-based poet, was born in Guyana before migrating to Canada where he had a decorated second career as a race relations expert. The locations and premises of the short stories in Forgotten Exile may have been inspired by the worlds Dabydeen himself frequented. The characters in this anthology – civil servants, diplomats, revolutionaries, and academics – are rooted in histories of colonialism, multiple migrations, and generational trauma.
I read this book while on a day trip to Ottawa to apply for a Schengen visa at the Dutch embassy there. Traversing halls lined with orderly diplomatic offices, having lunch at food courts filled with parliamentary staff offering the impression of being busy, I couldn’t help but adopt some of the contempt expressed by Dabydeen’s characters for the procedural rhythm of policymaking that dictate ordinary lives.
Characters show equal disdain for academia and the deep state while being verily embroiled in one or both.
Many of the stories in Forgotten Exiles are set in Canada’s capital city. Characters show equal disdain for academia and the deep state while being verily embroiled in one or both. Much like other administrative centres such as Brussels or Washington, Ottawa struggles with the futility of its own self-importance. Despite hosting the physical houses of power, such as the EU Parliament or the White House, these capital cities often cannot exercise material power in the same way as centres of modernity – London, New York, Toronto – where finance capital operates as an extra-parliamentary force.
The limits of bureaucrats’ ability to change the world are as transparent to Dabydeen’s characters as they are to me as a reader. As Dabydeen writes in “Black Like Who?”: “Esmee would laugh as one male work colleague literally ran to the machine making xerox copies in order to give the impression of being so busy.”
Dabydeen’s writing excels when it explores the humanness and relational dynamics of its characters in stories such as “Black Like Who?” – which I assume is a reference to Rinaldo Walcott’s book on Black culture in Canada.
The short story “Black Like Who?” explores the nuances of race relations in Canada through the tension between two people meeting in a familiar setting that is rendered foreign through diverging life events. It tells us that Harish, an immigrant from Gujarat, and Jamaican-born Esmee worked together at the Government of Canada’s Multiculturalism Unit. They shared a deep bond, according to Harish. They would sneer at the paradox of approving funding for one diversity project after another but never really possessing the power to “eradicate racism.”
When Harish tells his Gujarati mother about Esmee, the mother is left utterly confused about why this Canadian girl is not “wheaty.” She names a number of African countries and yet doesn’t land on Esmee’s country of origin. “Is she a refugee?” Harish’s mother asks at one point, reinforcing the race essentialism that studies like Walcott’s Black Like Who? challenge.
The story cleverly dresses the Multicultural Unit itself as a microcosm of real-time society.
Alas, it is a bitter moment for Harish when a Black man is selected to head the department instead of him. Harish ultimately leaves his job for a private-sector gig, abandoning Esmee to navigate her own ambitions within the department, even if it means cosying up to the new department head. In this way, the story cleverly dresses the Multicultural Unit itself as a microcosm of real-time society. The complexities of Canada’s mosaic model of multiculturalism bubble up in this workplace story as the heartbreak of colleagues becoming lovers, then strangers, unfolds.
Dabydeen’s best writing comes through in “Leovski’s Blues,” a story about a young man struggling to process the weight of his own existence and slowly losing himself to the dogmatism of ideology. Dabydeen crafts a tale of an elder brother concerned about his younger brother who has taken up the job of a professional revolutionary in an Indian village. The spectre of a Marxist future haunts this soon-to-be-Lenin until he hits the limit of his own imagination. What would organizing workers and peasants in India truly achieve?
It’s a classic moment of confusion that many young socialists experience: between reform and revolution.
Patient organizing is a curse for those who want a shortcut to revolution. This young man’s exasperation leads him to conclude that he must travel to the belly of the beast, the United States of America! The elder brother approaches his sibling’s spiritual crisis with empathy and compassion, foregrounding that despite all odds, the social contract of siblingship retains its strength during times of distress.
Like many of the stories in Forgotten Exile, the characters’ sense of powerlessness at home creates a vacuum to be filled with images of revolution elsewhere.
“Leovski’s Blues” tenderly demonstrates how the burden of political work is not just heavy for the individual, but also for entire families and the communities that ground that person. And like many of the stories in Forgotten Exile, the characters’ sense of powerlessness at home creates a vacuum to be filled with images of revolution elsewhere. Throughout this short story collection, this is the recurring theme – yearning for an elsewhere.
Forgotten Exiles’ stories also touch on debates in the field of post-colonial literature around representation, authenticity, and subject positionality. For example, “Christine, Interrupted” is a story about a white Canadian woman, Christine, and her ideas of Africa that are periodically disrupted by the realities of Africa itself when she visits her Kenyan boyfriend’s homeland for the first time.
To prepare for her visit, Christine, a stand-in for the North American/Western audience, takes a cross-culturalism course and is utterly offended that the instructor recommends reading British novelist Joseph Conrad instead of “genuine African authors” like Chinua Achebe or Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. She is constantly seeking recommendations from her Kenyan boyfriend, a native informant, for authentic sources to understand his culture better. And, as a liberal, she is also aware of her own positionality and distance from the culture.
Despite Christine’s best efforts, her search for authenticity is plagued by a major shortcoming: she can only access Africa through texts in English. When she lands in Kenya, her romantic version of Africa is repeatedly contradicted by her lived experience there. This tension between the preconceived, perceived and lived realities brings to the forefront some key questions in post-colonial literary studies: Who gets to represent the real Africa and for whom? And of course, what are considered to be accurate representations of Africa?
These questions come up throughout Dabydeen’s anthology, as various characters from Black and Brown communities in Canada and the U.S. examine how to tell the stories of their origins, histories and culture. Several characters such as Esmeralda in “Black Like Who?” and Jagnath in “Jagnath and Tomby” are multiply displaced due to the trans-Atlantic slave trade or as indentured labour to the Caribbean from India. So the idea of one homeland or authority over a singular culture becomes further complicated.
To lean in […] would not mean abandoning the political project altogether, but rather treating it as texture layered on the narrative.
Dabydeen’s characters are constantly trying to make sense of their cultural locus by attempting to anchor their otherness and ambivalence in some kind of realpolitik approach to displacement, social policy, the neoliberal order. But the short story format combined with Dabydeen’s choppy lyrical style pits the social commentary against the relational narrative of these characters. The writing in Forgotten Exiles in many ways exposes the limitations of his character Tomby’s aspiration: to use literature as a political project. Yet it also provides a glimpse of what Dabydeen would achieve were he to lean into the depth of this character’s desire. To lean in, in this manner, would not mean abandoning the political project altogether, but rather treating it as texture layered on the narrative.
