Shorelines by Alycia Pirmohamed review: 'what is home?'
Alycia Pirmohamed’s thought-provoking new book explores the changing meanings we attach to the word ‘diaspora’, writes David Robinson
Vilna, Alberta. I’ve never been, but if you look it up on Google Maps, you can see a photo of its tiny main street, almost as wide as a motorway, but unmarked and eerily empty. Hardly anyone lives there - just 260 people - and unless you plan on seeing the world’s largest mushrooms (6ft tall) you would hardly bother turning off the state highway. If you want the big city, you have to go to Edmonton, nearly 100 miles away.
Oddly, you don’t get a sense of what it must have been like to grow up in the only Muslim family in Vilna from Alycia Pirmohamed’s book, even if it was only for two years between the ages of ten and 12. There are no descriptions of her school, friends, family, her parents’ restaurant, the surrounding countryside - pretty much everything in her childhood apart from a memory of swimming in a lake and hearing her mother’s shrieks of laughter. Yet that’s where the book opens, along with the recollection of how much she wanted to belong - “to assume the shape of someone who is familiar to the white gaze that surrounds me” - even though to a young brown girl this was “an excruciating contortion”.
What, presumably, made it so was the fact that 9/11 happened while she was living in Vilna. Deliberately, she doesn’t spell out details. “It’s a kindness, isn’t it?” she writes. “To let the abstractedness of what’s unknown linger casually in my art rather than to excavate my triggers for the curious onlooker.” (Is it though? Couldn’t it trigger empathy?)
Side by side on the page with this memory is another. Again, she is swimming, this time in the warm waters off Zanzibar. Again, she desperately wants to call this place home. She is accompanying her beloved father back to Tanzania to rediscover the country he left more than half a lifetime ago to emigrate to Canada, where he met his wife, also an East African Indian. So: two strands of rootedness, no white gaze, and she even finds herself once more understanding Kutchi, the language her parents spoke to each other in her childhood, which she then understood but subsequently thought she had lost.
Is this, then, the longed-for wholeness, the answer to all her feelings of loneliness, depression, panic attacks and fears that she is starting to fall for the lure of assimilation rather than forging her own identity? Is it home?
Ultimately, no. Her father visits his childhood village to find it has become a town, searches for his mother’s grave only to learn it has been lost in floods, and discovers that there are only two Ismaili Muslim families there and that the mosque at which he used to worship is now an abandoned building. You can’t, in the words of Thomas Wolfe’s great novel, go home again.
Then again, what is home? Her grandfather came to Tanzania from Gujarat, just over the Indian border from Pakistan, her own first home was Alberta, and she studied creative writing in Oregon. Yet it is in Scotland where she has found most recognition, taking a PhD at Edinburgh, winning the Edwin Morgan Prize in 2020 the Nan Shepherd Prize in 2023 with the manuscript for this book, and earlier this year she started a year-long fellowship to reflect on the theme of “Unfolding Scotland”.
Such familial wanderings around the globe are increasingly common - so much so as to change the meanings we attach to the word diaspora. Since the 1980s, Pirmohamed points out, it no longer means dispersal from a single country and “a yearning to go back not only geographically but temporally”. Now it means embracing a multiplicity of identities, in her own case both poetically and viscerally. “I embody a profound plurality,” she writes, “one that has simultaneously involved turning away from my heritage and looking at it straight on.”
Shorelines, by Alycia Pirmohamed, Canongate, £18.99. Alycia Pirmohamed is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 27 August
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