Being called a “dirty brown monkey” while walking her little daughter on Mount Royal on a beautiful fall day. Constantly being asked where she’s “really” from when she says she’s from Montreal. In the racism experienced by the character of Rani, a young woman of Indian origin who grew up in Quebec – and heroine of the novel A convergence of solitudes –we guess that there is a lot of Anita Anand’s own experience.
Perhaps out of modesty, the author simply answers in the affirmative when asked the question, before escaping into her thoughts. “You feel like everything is fine and you’re walking around, like in a dream, and then someone comes and smashes it,” she said softly.
It doesn’t matter that she is as comfortable in French as in English, Anita Anand tells us how prejudices are stubborn. It starts with this neighbor who keeps telling him that she can’t understand certain things because she didn’t grow up here – while she keeps telling him that she was born in Montreal. Then it happens occasionally with these people who think that she is a sort of living encyclopedia of India, even though she only went there once, with her father, when she was a child.
They don’t see me; they see this other representation of something. They look at my skin color and they decide that, even though I speak to them with this accent, I know everything about India. It’s reductive. I don’t even speak Punjabi because my parents thought it would be a disadvantage for their children to speak in that language.
Anita Anand, author
Identity questions
A convergence of solitudes explores the complex notion of identity by tackling it on all fronts, and this is what makes its great strength. It is a novel that sits at the crossroads of Where I hide, by Caroline Dawson (which Anita Anand translated into English last year), from The heirby Michael Gouveia (which she is currently reading), and by Hotlineby Dimitri Nasrallah – with the particularity that it brings together all these points of view on immigration, and much more.
Through a gallery of characters united by their respective solitudes, Anita Anand succeeds in showing us that no matter where we come from or the language we speak, we are all looking for the same thing, deep down: a little place of our own in this vast world.
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
Anita Anand
There is Rani, who feels neither Indian nor truly Canadian. There is Mélanie, an adopted girl from Vietnam who also embodies, in her own way, the identity questions of Anita Anand, who admits to having always shared with adopted people this feeling of never finding her place anywhere. There are also these parents who immigrated to Quebec after experiencing the violence of the partition of India; then, on the other hand, this star singer who is a leading figure in the independence movement of the 1970s and who plays a central role throughout the story – perfect double of Serge Fiori.
Need to write
It is a kaleidoscopic novel which takes place over several decades, against the backdrop of referendums, and which follows the quests of these characters without ever judging them. “I don’t write with the intention of being didactic or sending a message. I write what I need to write,” insists Anita Anand.
His previous book, the collection of short stories Swing in the House and Other Stories (which notably won a prize from Concordia University), brought together stories inspired by the racism she suffered as a teenager. Because beneath the surface, there is always “something boiling” inside her, at least just enough to emerge again at one moment or another, she confides.
Since she left teaching, when she is not writing, Anita Anand searches for texts that inspire her to translate. In addition to Caroline Dawson, she has already translated Quebec authors like Juliana Léveillé-Trudel and Fanie Demeule, always juggling between these two languages which are both part of her identity. Her own way of bringing together the solitudes that saw her grow up.
“The very definition of a crush”
A convergence of solitudes was originally published in English, in 2022, by a Toronto publishing house; it would perhaps have gone unnoticed in La Belle Province if it were not for the author and translator Daniel Grenier – even if there is nothing more Quebecois than this novel, according to him. It was quite by chance that he came across it in the English section of the Pantoute bookstore in Quebec, while he was looking for a translation project. “I fell in love with the title and the cover of the English version. Then I read it. It was the very definition of a crush. Then I made Maxime Raymond read it [le directeur littéraire des Éditions de Ta Mère] and, for him too, it was instantaneous. For me, it is one of the few English-speaking works which, paradoxically, helped me to better understand Quebec. »
A convergence of solitudes
Editions Of your mother
448 pages