SOURCE: Davis, Rocio G. “Negotiating Place/Re-Creating Home: Short-Story Cycles by Naipaul, Mistry, and Vassanji.” In Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, edited by Jacqueline Bardolph, pp. 323-32. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

In the following essay, Davis considers the importance of place and home in Tales from Firozsha Baag, V. S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, and M. G. Vassanji's Uhuru Street.

The negotiation of place and the attempt to re-create a home through memory and writing has been a common undertaking for many writers in the new literatures in English. V. S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, Rohinton Mistry's Tales From Firozsha Baag and M. G. Vassanji's Uhuru Street offer reflections on the importance of place and home in the genre of the short-story cycle. Anyone who writes about his homeland from the outside must “deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.”¹ Yet it is precisely the...