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Literary Review
MIGRANT TALES
Immigrant odyssey
SHEBA THAYIL
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It’s an old theme but one never gets enough of it.
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Black Chin White Chin; Ronnie Govender, Harper Collins, Rs 295
If you dive right into this book, without reading the blurbs and bio and the always daunting Shortlisted for Commonwealth Prize 2007 emblazoned on the cover, the first thing that strikes you is how typical the writing is with regards to sex and the I
ndian author. We just can’t do it, you see. We go all stilted and wonder ‘What will Mummy think?’ Of course, after that, it’s just a short step to floundering badly before giving up half-way.
There is something to redeem Black Chin…, however, and it’s there because one searches for it. No one writes a book without a purpose. Some write to be in vogue, some for fame, some for money, the best because a story is struggling to be told, and you can thank circumstance, serendipity, genes, etc. if it doesn’t burst grotesquely from your being like a scene from Alien. The best is unforced.
What redeems Black Chin… is the immigrant odyssey, and although it is a tired one, you can never get enough of it because it still matters so much to us. Who hasn’t felt a racist slap abroad, even Azim Premji and Art Malik can tell you a story or two; who doesn’t have family members who have made their home on foreign shores and constantly struggle between worlds; who hasn’t heard a tale second-hand of how one lives like a dog in New York’s Jackson Heights and yet continues to live there because it is, after all, New York.
Cautionary tale
The itinerant Indian is a cautionary tale and also a poster boy for adventure, as is the hero of this story, Chin Govender. Second generation in South Africa, his large family is made up of the usual suspects, the good, the bad and the ugly. He is a mixture of cultural obedience, middle-class mores and, in the end, completes the circle of life as expected.
The white woman he has a long affair with is discarded for the Indian arranged marriage, and the son he has with a coloured woman is finally accepted. He even embraces his spirituality. But none of this makes his story unique, it remains part of the universal theme. Even the way Chin buys real estate and then immediately raises prices shows his business sense but more clearly why we are disliked (anti-Indian riots in Madagascar just about says it all).
The formal writing often upstages the story. Chin’s brother Jack the boxer whose grip “established his extraordinary physical strength, belying his small stature”, or the harbour fish which “held people in hypnotic thrall” is again typical of many Indian authors, using old-fashioned language where more au courant words would have done.
The stereotypes abound, too. Along with the hard-working Indians is the racist white man who talks about Afrikaners being alright although blacks weren’t equal to the British and Michael, a black man, who is keen on asserting that he is in fact equal on his own land.
Chin himself, who prospers in the financial sense, never really emerges as a flesh and blood character either, all of which is ironic since this is a story based on real people.
There is one glaring oddity. What sets Chin off to find his way in the world is when brother Jack strikes him. For this he disappears without a word for 18 years? In India one or two tight slaps within a clan is par for the course and no one the sadder.
Vague moral
The moral of the story is a little vague. There needs to be one, of course, or why tell it. But if it is, as Dorrie tells his wife Chellamma, Chin’s sister, that “in life there was very little giving…People just took and took”, one wonders if that is enough. While Govender’s book may not be blindingly revelatory, or written in anything but simplistic terms, he is endearingly truthful keeping in mind he’s writing about his own uncle. When Greta (Chin’s white lover and business partner) opens up to Chin about her own life, and Chin is not moved enough to respond, Govender writes, “Even in the virtuous resides the grossness of self-interest” as Chin shuts out “the little voice…the voice of God” which tells him to temper his ambition.
In any case, we can now understand the strange reticence in sexually explicit scenes, that’s going too far when discussing relatives.
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