Janika Oza's new novel is about how 1 act of rebellion changes a family for generations
The Toronto writer discusses generational trauma of displacement and her novel A History of Burning
A History of Burning sheds light on an often forgotten chapter of colonial history and its current impact. In the process of writing a multigenerational saga, Janika Oza was able to open dialogues with her own community and beyond as a way of reclamation and healing.
Oza is a writer, educator and graduate student based in Toronto. She won the 2019 Malahat Review Open Season Award in fiction for her short story Exile, the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Award and the 2022 O. Henry Award.
Oza made the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for her story The Gift of Choice, which is a chapter in A History of Burning.
A History of Burning is an epic novel about how one act of rebellion can influence a family for generations. It's 1898 and a 13-year-old boy in India named Pirbhai needs to make money to support his family and ends up inadvertently being sent across the ocean to be a labourer for the British. He has a choice to make, and what he does will change the course of his life, and his family's fate, for years to come. The story takes readers to Uganda, India, England and Canada in the wake of Pirbhai's choice as the novel explores the impacts of colonialism, resistance, exile and the power of family.
Oza talked about how history repeats itself on The Next Chapter summer edition with Ryan B. Patrick.
You can definitely feel that you put your heart and soul into this book. How important was it to tell this story?
It felt urgent for me to tell this story. When I started working on this novel, that urgency was definitely what was driving me forward. I had never felt that kind of sense of purpose in writing anything before. I think that was coming from a place of this family feeling very intuitive to me. That comes from the fact that this is also coming from my own family history. At the same time, I felt that there was so much I didn't know about our history and about this particular time and place. I was writing into that space in between what I knew, what felt very familiar and what I didn't know at all.
This book made me feel a lot about the lasting impacts of colonialism and about the choices we make. How much research did you do to write this book?
The first couple of years that I was working on it, I was just trying to do book research, reading journal articles, looking in the archives, finding newspapers — whatever I could find in the textbooks and the history books. But it became pretty clear to me that in fact there was very little documented about this time and place, and particularly the time where the South Asian community settled in East Africa before the expulsion. That's of course not a coincidence, it's an erasure of this marginalized community and in a way that we don't exist in the Western archive. So it became clear to me that if I wanted to write this book, I would have to actually speak to the people who had experienced some of this and that meant beginning with my family.
This was the biggest hurdle for me in writing this book because I come from a family where we didn't speak very much about this history. There's a lot of silence around what happened, around the story of migration and displacement which, of course, comes from a place of loss. But I had to bite the bullet and talk to them. What happened after that was that my family became these incredible connectors to community spread across the world in all the different places that we scattered when the expulsion happened in the 1970s. I would have these long Zoom calls with people who were in India, in the U.S., in Australia and all over. Those calls were a way for people to share stories, sometimes for the first time. My research process was very much about listening and holding those stories. I just tried to centre a lot of love in that research process.
There's a lot of silence around what happened, around the story of migration and displacement which, of course, comes from a place of loss.- Janika Oza
What did you learn about how the Indian and African communities interacted at that time?
The hierarchy that you're referring to is the colonial sandwich. So it's where the white Europeans were at the top, the South Asians were in the middle and the Black Africans were at the bottom. That kind of stratification extended across jobs, across the literal way that the city was set up and the ways that people lived.
That is a pretty well documented artifact of colonialism, and it's a way that the Europeans set up this system to pit the Africans and the Asians against one another — stop any sort of coalition or community between them. The reason why this is so important to this novel is that it meant that the Asians became the scapegoats. So when things were falling apart, when there was a scarcity of food and scarcity of jobs, all of that landed on the shoulders of the Asian community and of course that led to Idi Amin's expulsion in the 1970s. So it felt important for me to look at that structure and the ways that it affected generations. In terms of the communities during my research I found that people had very mixed answers of the kinds of interactions that were happening. There were people who said that some of their closest friends were Black Africans or they worked together in the workplace and then there were others who said that they only interacted in the market, that their communities were actually very separated.
We come to 1972 and that is the flashpoint where the people of Indian descent are forced to flee Uganda due to Idi Amin's brutal expulsion. There's a clock ticking, there's about 90 days and you have to get out or face the consequences. How does the family react to that time?
In the novel, that's a time of extreme chaos. When I was speaking to people about that time, nobody understood what was going on. Nobody even knew if they should believe that it was true because Idi Amin said all sorts of things. So many people in the research process actually said to me, "We thought it was a joke. We thought he would the next day come back on the radio and say that he'd changed his mind." But of course that's not what happened and it soon became very real that people were going to have to leave their homes and they were going to have to leave everything behind. They were not permitted to take more than one suitcase per family and they were going to have to find somewhere to go. So it became just a scrambling and of course there was the maybe overlying fear of what would happen if they didn't manage to get out.
Amin made different claims about what he might do to the population if they stayed and so there was a lot of fear. When I was writing those chapters of the novel, I was trying to hold those emotions at the centre and that sense of deep uncertainty about the future. This impending loss and grief but also something that's so large. The idea of having to leave your whole community, leave the place that you were born, the only place you've ever known for an unknown.
The descendants of Pirbhai start their lives over again in Toronto in the 90s. Without giving too much away, what's happening in the city of Toronto at that time?
So where the novel ends up, we're in the early 90s and it's during the Yonge Street racial uprising that was happening in Toronto and was connected to the uprising happening in L.A. after the beating of Rodney King and the police officers who were acquitted.
It's not the first social movement or protest that you see in the novel, it's one of several. That was intentional for me to write these cyclical political movements and uprisings and think about the ways that we've been here before. We will be here again. Also to think about these characters in the 90s who are carrying this whole history of migration, displacement and also this lineage of resistance in their family and in their community. What are they bringing with them now? What do we know that allows us to move differently and maybe make different choices?
That was intentional for me to write these cyclical political movements and uprisings and think about the ways that we've been here before. We will be here again.- Janika Oza
Essentially this book is about hope, but what do you hope for this book?
I hope that the book continues to allow for conversations in the way that it is allowed for them in my own life. Writing this book and getting to engage in that research process with different generations of my family and my community served as an opening. It was a way for us to start talking about memories and experiences that we had never talked about before. Now as the book is making its way out into the world, I'm starting to hear some of that feedback from other people, both from my community as well as outside of my community. We all have these sort of buried stories, memories or secrets in our families and yet there can also be so much healing if we have the space to talk about them. I'm starting to hear some of that happening and I just hope it can continue.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
