The Ectopic Insider: Exploring the Interstices of Travel Writing, Memory, and History in M.G. Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo

This chapter explores the ultimate experience of the diasporic Indian Ocean existence as embodied by the author himself, Moyez G. Vassanji. Born in Nairobi, Vassanji’s family moved to Dar es Salaam when he was only four and he lived there until he reached the age of eighteen and went to the US to study Nuclear Physics. Later on, he moved to Toronto, where he is currently living as a Canadian citizen. My coinage of the term “ectopic insider” responds to the need to account for the traumatic journey of return of the displaced individual who travels back to his native land. Borrowed from the field of medicine, “ectopic” resonates with a pregnancy whose fertilized egg implants itself outside the womb and, therefore, is placed in an abnormal position. From his condition as ectopic insider, that is to say, as someone from the outside but of the inside, Vassanji designs a narrative wherein négritude’s most representative exponent, Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and nineteenth-century orientalist travel writing are simultaneously acknowledged and questioned as bastions of his proclaimed Africanness.