January 22, 2024
A History of Burning, by Janika Oza
While A History of Burning arrived in my mailbox months ago, it’s taken me some time to finally get to it, because it’s a big book, in terms of scope and word count, and the literary autumn is always overwhelming, and so I’ve been glad for the slowing-down-ness of January and the chance to finally get to dig in to this book that’s garnered so many accolades from writers I admire, plus an honoured spot among finalists for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.
Spanning almost 100 years, the novel begins with Pirbhai, aged 13 in 1898, tricked into leaving his mother and sisters and boarding a boat for Kenya where he spends the next few years as an indentured worker building a railway for the British. Eventually he marries Sonal, another Indian in Kenya, and together they set off for Uganda in pursuit of a better life, which they achieve, and their son, Vinod, grows up happy and hale. He has dreams of pursuing a university education, but his parents don’t have the means for that, and so he does the best he can with his marriage to Rajni, who doesn’t want to marry a stranger, but Karachi in 1947 is dangerous, and Rajni’s parents feel she’ll be safer in Uganda, so she goes, and the two build a life upon the foundation of Pirbhai and Sonal’s big dreams for life and prosperity, though it’s not long before their world is disrupted by Uganda’s independence, a movement embraced by the Vinod and Rajni’s spirited eldest daughter, Latika. And in 1972, as Asians are expelled from Uganda under the brutal tyranny of Idi Amin, the family loses everything, forced to begin all over again in a new life in Toronto.
The narrative moves between these family members, as well as others, to paint an ambitiously broad picture of this family’s story, the exiles they’re forced into together and apart. And while there were moments I wished the story had drilled down deeper into specific characters’ experiences, the story’s broadness and grand sweep were necessary to show the ways in which the same patterns of loss, heartache and exile recur so many times over a century, the unrelenting violence of colonialism and its echoes. The many ways too in which human beings are able to other their neighbours, regard them as inferior, fall under the spell of autocracy. Such gorgeous writing: “They held their voices low, because they knew: how a dictator’s word becomes the world, how he bends reality before him, how it was not the facts that would determine their lives, but the whispers, the rumours spilling between.”
