Ideas - Can you return home? This author offers radical possibilities

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

"The first kind of return before language or story is a return to one another," says novelist Janika Oza. She looks at the ways in which the narrative arcs of ordinary lives are shaped by ruptures like colonialism, war, and the Partition of India — and what it means to continually seek to return through stories, memories and objects. This episode is the fourth in a series collaboration with Crow’s Theatre in Toronto.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered.

Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. And welcome to a live recording of Ideas at Crow's Theatre in Toronto. The play Trident Moon takes place entirely in motion in the back of a coal truck hurtling across what was once an undivided land. It is 1947, the midst of the partition of British India. The border between India and East and West Pakistan

is still fresh and bleeding. This year, 14 million people will flee in both directions. The arc of their lives suddenly altered by a line on the map left behind by a colonizer. The truck holds six women, three Hindu, three Muslim. The Hindu women have kidnapped their former employers, and as the truck speeds towards the new border,

the lines between victim and perpetrator blur. The fictional lives played out on stage are very much like our own. They're urgent, oftentimes painful, and always unpredictable. With that in mind, we have invited five thinkers to meditate on ideas raised by one of the plays in the Crowes Theatre season. This is the fourth in the series, inspired by Anushree Roy's play, Trident Moon. Today, novelist, Janika Oza, considers Aftermaths, what happens to a life remade by ruptures

like colonialism, war, and partition. Once your life has been set in motion by forces outside your control, can you ever go back home? And if the story of your life is not linear, what other forms can it take? Janika Oza is the author of the novel A History of Burning. It follows four generations of a family from India to East Africa to Canada, a family shaped by multiple forced displacements from Partition to the 1972 expulsion evasions from Uganda under dictator Edi Amin. Janika's talk today is titled, The Radical Possibilities of Return.

Please help me welcome Janika Oza. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I have built my life around narrative. For as long as I can remember, I have been using stories to make sense of the world, turning to narrative as a container for the overwhelming experience of being alive. Story, to me, is a vessel that makes sense,

that helps me decide what to let go of and what to continue carrying. I come from a family whose first language is silence, because like many families who have experienced loss, the violence of dictatorships and the trauma of displacement, we did not speak these memories out loud. My great-grandfather migrated from India to East Africa, from one plundered British colony

to another to work at a railway station. Three generations of my family were settled there in Kenya and Uganda until they were forced to leave in 1972 under Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians. My family sought refuge in India, which they were denied, eventually finding asylum in the UK. Only recently have I begun to find the language for the particular silence of my family, that in a moment, a memory can transform from past to present.

Somewhere between the vast magnitude of what happened and the precision of language, another instinct steps in, an urge to look away and move forward. If we cannot return, then let us not try, not even in the untethered space of the mind. And yet, I wanted to return. To find language for the unspeakable and the unspoken. To find my way through fiction to the places we could not return to in reality.

To the places we could barely touch in memory. One of the few stories my father told about growing up in Kampala was the moment every evening when bats would eclipse the sky. I wanted to walk the streets he walked. I wanted to look up and experience that fleeting night. About two years ago, my novel, A History of Burning, was published. I've been asked often about my hopes for the book, what I wanted it to do in the world. But to answer any of these questions, I need to go all the way back to the beginning, or

to a beginning, several lifetimes before mine. My novel is about four generations of one Indo-Ugandan family that spans a hundred years and multiple forced migrations from pre-partition India to Kenya and Uganda to Canada and the UK. It follows the way this family and community make and fracture and remake themselves over and over under the forces of colonialism, exile, displacement, and political instability. During their lifetime, my grandparents could not ever go back to the places they left.

As I wrote the novel, I was asking, what kinds of return are possible when you can't return home? Lately, I have been thinking a lot about return. I have been trying to answer that first question, what the purpose of writing this story was, and all I can do is go back. We live in a culture and society that emphasizes the importance of moving forward and up. The shapes of our stories too follow that motion. An arc, an arrow

launched purposefully and powerfully into the air, ascending, ascending, until, with resolve, it falls. I've just described the shape of the classic Western novel, as outlined by Aristotle, and then, 2000 years later, by Freytag. Beginning, middle, end. Introduction, climax, denouement. It is famously a triangle. Aristotle called this form energetic,

meaning, quote, the actualization of the potential that exists in character and situation, end quote. The hero's arrow, launched with purpose, reaches its full height, and there its potential is actualized or not, either way leading to a resolution. I have learned this shape in school, studied it in craft books, taught it myself in my own creative writing courses. And yet, I can't help but think,

what if you didn't have the chance to actualize your potential, because your life, your ordinary existence somewhere, was cut short by forces larger than you, like colonialism and war? What of those who didn't have the time, the space, the freedom to find resolve? I am speaking here about the shapes of stories, which also means the shape of our lives.

That a story to be understood as a story must follow a linear, progress-oriented arc is an erasure of other ways of telling stories and other ways of living. A story whose purpose is ascendancy and whose end goal is resolution sounds not far off from the colonial capitalist patriarchal narratives of nation building and empire that historically and presently undergird the widespread destruction of land and communities and the displacement of people from their homes and lives. Because instead of resolution, couldn't I say domination? Conquered?

Couldn't I say the hero wins? History is also a story. And in capital H history, when the capital H hero wins, who is it that suffers loss upon loss, including the loss of the potential to actualize, to live out a full and satisfyingly ordinary life? I could not write a story in the shape of an arrow. That was not my story to write.

After all, shouldn't the shape of our stories approximate the shape of our experiences, or at the very least, grow out of them? I am much more interested in what happens when that arrow falls, and the wood from which it was fashioned rots and decomposes into the soil, and the soil sprouts a plant,

and from that plant arise seeds that travel on the wind until they too fall somewhere, nearby or far, same soil or different, and attempt to root down and survive and grow. If you could follow that, I am much more interested in the shape of a circle. I am interested in the radical possibilities of return. To write this novel,

I could not return physically to the site of the traumas, not really, because in the concrete way of exile, the community of South Asians in Uganda no longer exists. The place where my ancestors made home bears only traces of them now. The streets remain, the bats too, but the people, the community, their homes and shops, the corners in which they gossiped and played and fought

and turned to one another after a long day, these are no more. So I turn to the history books and archives and public records. But no, those too held barely a footnote about the expulsion of upwards of 80,000 South Asians from Uganda, let alone any record of why and how they had ended up in East Africa in the first place. No, the vehicle of my return could not be physical or archival. And so I understood that my vehicle would have to be

my family and community, the stories and memories they held. Much like the play Trident Moon, which was first staged on the 70th anniversary of the partition of India, and offered a way of returning to that site of trauma and fracture through the lives of ordinary people trying to survive and care for one another and themselves.

I, too, would return to the places my family left through story. I am so grateful to stories. Writing a novel became a pathway of return, a kind of scaffolding to approach a tender, almost forbidden subject. I felt immense trepidation starting out on this path. I thought, who was I, a generation removed from the dislocation and struggle to ask anyone to unearth what they'd buried? But when you're descended from something, being removed from it physically does not mean you're removed from it internally, psychically.

I trusted that I could approach it with care, because in a way I had been trying to approach it my whole life. Storytelling became my vehicle towards community. I want to hear your stories, I would say, whatever you want to share with me. I was given the chance to return for a little while through the memories of others. There were stories of pet kittens and first elevator rides and boiled cabbage and eggs in the British resettlement camps and long picnics with soda and oranges in Kampala. Joan Didion writes about the audacity of ordinariness,

how there often exist tonal discrepancies during times of horror, like a perfectly cloudless day. But what I know of spice is that it comes with sweet. What I know of mourning is that it comes with laughter. And there is nothing more alive than having the space to be ordinary, playful, to insist even, that there were ordinary, playful, to insist even that there were ordinary, playful times. I felt during those long conversations over Skype and WhatsApp, that this

ordinary was absolutely precious because we were capturing something that cannot be grasped or taken by capital H history, that can only exist through collective remembering, through oral storytelling, through the stories that are unseen and ignored by dominant narratives, the unwritten stories, the women's stories, the kitchen stories, the stories swapped in the back of a truck, shared with trust. For years, I returned to these conversations as I tried to piece together a narrative. I am asked often what kept me coming back to the work when the outside structures of

my life didn't really support the writing of a novel. For the creative writing students and hopeful future novelists out there, I always wished I had a one-byte, easily replicated answer, like I just told myself to write for 20 minutes a day and that was enough to keep me going. But that wasn't the case. For me, it was just a sense I had that there was something I was working out. There was, inside me, a psychic movement towards something that a deeper part of me had chosen. I am reminded of Natasha Trethewey's memoir, Memorial Drive, which explores her mother's murder by an abusive ex-husband when Trethewey was

19. In the memoir, Trethewey reflects on her decision 16 years after her mother's death to move into a house just a few miles from the site of the murder. Quote, all those years I thought I had been running away from my past, I had, in fact, been working my way steadily back to it," she writes. Her return was a lifelong movement towards something, which at a certain point opened the doorway for an attempt to articulate that something, to retell it in her own way, to return to it with new words, and through this self-guided reconstruction to transform.

The something that I had always been writing towards was my grandmother. Here again, let us go back. My grandmother died three years before I was born, when my mother was pregnant with my older brother. I had always felt a kinship with her. I knew she had been a school teacher in Kampala, just as I had been in Boston and Toronto. From her photographs, I could see we shared features. The soft face in a family of sharp angles, the wide nose. She was born into a Hindu family in Karachi before partition,

when it was still a part of British India. She and her family lived in the Hindu quarters of a predominantly Muslim city. In 1947, when the British divided the country, My family lived in the Hindu quarters of a predominantly Muslim city. In 1947, when the British divided the country, the place my grandmother had lived her whole life was given a new name. My family, alongside millions of others, fled in search of somewhere to resettle across the new border. My grandmother, with her siblings and parents, became a refugee

for the first time, but not the last. Later, she sailed to Uganda after marrying my grandfather. But that was about all I knew of her. She was another piece of the past that we didn't speak of. Here were the grand shapes, but what of the small and vital details that make up a life? Still, I was told at different times that I was like her. And I feel this in a way I can't quite describe, that something of her is in me. I may never have known her, quite describe that something of her is in me.

I may never have known her, but I have been moving towards her all my life. Her absence was a grief that I had always held but never confronted. The questions she left in her wake were ones I never had the chance to ask. And what is more circular than grief? Grief is a story that has no clear beginning or end. It loops over and over. It does not resolve. It comes back again and again.

I could not end this grief, but perhaps I could encounter it on the page. I could write towards it,, but perhaps I could encounter it on the page. I could write towards it, where the finish line would be not domination, but confrontation. A story organized not by progress, but by return. If the vehicle of my return was the stories of my community, the driver of my return was the desire to know my grandmother who I never met. An impossible task in linear time, but that is the power of story.

And here is where I complete one rotation of the circle. When I sold my novel, my parents gave me a congratulations card, inside of which my father had inscribed that not only had my grandmother been a teacher, but she had also written poetry. I had not known this, but it had always been true. It was a stunning revelation to me, a confirmation of something I had always felt connecting us. Here, a small, ordinary detail, unrecorded by history, and yet to me, it was the world.

I had felt this kinship throughout my life, though I could never have known the ways mine might echo hers. There is a page on which my grandmother and I can coexist. Some years later, my aunt casually mentioned that my grandmother had published a poem in Gujarati once, sometime in the mid-1970s in London, after the second time she became a refugee, reflecting on the experience of expulsion and resettlement. My aunt didn't know the specifics of where it was published, nor did she remember the poem itself, no matter how much I probed.

But even this detail shook me. I had grown up believing my family had no language for what had happened, that I had been the first to try to return through words, to reconstruct after the rupture. But no, my grandmother had already. And here the circle loops back and over again. You're listening to Ideas. You can hear Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America,

on SiriusXM, on World Radio Paris, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.com. You can also find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayaed. In the fall of 2001, while Americans were still grappling with the horror of September 11th, envelopes started showing up at media outlets and government buildings filled with a white,

lethal powder, anthrax. But what's strange is if you ask people now what happened with that story, almost no one knows. It's like the whole thing just disappeared. Who mailed those letters? Do you know? From Wolf Entertainment, USG Audio, and CBC podcasts, this is Aftermath, the hunt for the anthrax killer.

Available now. Today's talk is part of a series we've developed with Crowes Theatre in Toronto, an opportunity to explore some of the ideas that animate great theatre and shape our own lives today. The play at hand today is Trident Moon by Anushree Roy, a play set in the midst of the partition of British India. To be exiled speaks not just of the past, but also of the future. You will not return. Indeed, my grandmother never did.

Though the places she left continued to exist, the versions she knew were dismantled, the familiar torn away. Had she had the chance to return, what might she have recognized? There is a way that what I am suggesting here, that storytelling can offer a kind of return that can also be a kind of return that

can also be a kind of repair, could also be an illusion. A delusion, maybe. Perhaps I'm simply falling into the alluring grip of nostalgia for homes I've never had, what Salman Rushdie called the imaginary homeland, a distinctly diasporic experience in which my own grasp of the language, cultures, and identities is a fabrication, constructed through memory and longing and artifacts, a fiction.

It's true, and let me say it, that return through story is not enough. Not in a world where people are daily being forcefully dislocated, fleeing places made unlivable by exploitation and imperialism. Not when Palestinians are denied the right of return to their ancestral homeland. Not when to sit here today today we are occupying indigenous lands

and indigenous people across the world are fighting for self-determination and decolonization. I think of this insistence on narrative return not as a stand-in for physical return, but as a part of that movement towards. Worlds beyond colonialism have always existed and will exist again. And the shape of our stories can remind us of this.

As a writer, I am invested in the unmaking and remaking of meaning. To subvert linear progress narratives and the ways that history gets told. To emphasize, as many Indigenous writers have, that history is the future. To understand return through every form, narrative and otherwise, as insistence, as persistence, as a refusal to leave,

as a denial of erasure, as resistance, to understand that the first kind of return, before language or narrative or story, is a return to one another. I am speaking here of reorienting what a story is a return to one another. I am speaking here of reorienting what a story is and what a story can do. The writer Ursula K. Le Guin in her seminal essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, puts forth the idea of a story, a novel, as a bag, following the idea that before humans were hunters, we were

gatherers. Rather than seeing a story as conflict, a weapon, a spear, think back to the shape of a novel as an arrow, she suggests seeing a story as a container, a carrier bag or a vessel, whose purpose is, quote, neither resolution nor stasis, but continuing process, end quote. What if the purpose of our stories was not resolution, but generation? And I mean this in the active sense of the word, as in generative, as in creating more, more space, more stories.

How much can a story carry? How much space can it create for other stories? In the carrier bag, the present can coexist with the past and the future, everything in relation to the other an unending story. If we consider the circle rather than the arrow or the triangular line, the possibilities of what a story can do, what a life can mean, shifts. Instead of ascension, perhaps the purpose can be to burrow, to unearth truths, to find roots,

to get not to the top, but to the bottom. Quote, the dead dig wells in the living, writes Omar Al-Aqad in his latest book, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. And indeed, maybe we would do better not to bury those wells. In the scheme of the world, it is not uncommon for an ordinary existence to be cut short

by the indifferent arc of history. The stories of the dead and the marginal are rarely a part of capital H history. But I am interested not in a project of inclusion, but a project of re-centering. Colonizers also believed they were bringing the colonized into history, while actually denying them access to their own histories and preserving them in their version of history in one fixed way. And yet, a circle can encompass not just one narrative,

but the relational narratives of the collective, the collected memories, the stories that are necessarily entangled, be they fragmented, faltering, fragile. With the circle comes the possibility for actualization to mean something else. Not one individual rising, maybe, but a community expanding, flourishing, remaking itself beyond the grasp of the machine that seeks to break it, or silence it, or erase it.

Rather than trying to force our stories into official narratives, I am concerned with our stories becoming their own center, stories rooted in relationship to our ancestors, to the land, to each other, stories that take generations to tell, stories that, like life, are carried communally. I tell these stories not to locate us in history, but to free us from it. I come from a family of movement.

I am interested less in the points of departure and arrival than in the stories carried by the trains on which my great-grandfather worked, the vehicle that carried my grandmother across the newly formed India-Pakistan border during partition. The ship that my family boarded when they left Uganda in 1972. The airplane that brought my parents here. I am interested, too, in the stories held by the ocean. The land raised to lay down the train tracks. The ocean, a vessel for fish and whales and coral and sand and shells and creatures never

before seen, existing unnamed in the depths, unreached by light, and up above, on the surface, a vessel for insects and debris and row boats and ships small and large. The ship, a vessel for cargo, for food, for containers of furniture and machinery, for barnacles clinging to the outside and rats lurking within. For trunks carrying shoes and jewelry and photographs and all the things you take when you can't take much. For families, children, people. Each person, a vessel for memories and hopes, beliefs and dreams, worries grand and mundane. For organs, hearts and kidneys and lungs,

a vessel for breath, air for veins. Veins, a vessel for blood, for oxygen, for nutrients and toxins, blood that carries the memory of stress, of hunger, of famine, blood that carries the bond of stress, of hunger, of famine, blood that carries the bond of family, of lineage, a vessel for more and more life. Like a play set entirely in the back of a truck, in perpetual motion to cross a border,

the purpose is movement, continuing process, and all that the narrative vessel might hold. And here I circle back once more to another vessel, maybe a more unexpected kind. In my kitchen lives a steel pot. Before it lived in my kitchen, it lived in my mother's kitchen, used most often to soak lentils or wash rice. And before it lived in my mother's kitchen, it lived in my grandmother's, in Kampala. When I was already several years into working on my book, my parents told me that this steel pot was one of the few items that they brought over from Uganda in 1972, something that I had not been aware of.

Upon closer inspection, the pot bears a faint engraving on the rim, my grandfather's initials, and our last name, Oza. My parents explained that this was common practice at the time. You would engrave your name on your pots so that you could share food with neighbors, and they would know who to return the vessel to afterwards. It feels significant that this was one of the few items that they chose to bring when they had to leave almost everything behind. Embedded into this most ordinary of objects

is not only the journeys and losses of my family, but also the spirit of community and collectivity that defined them. I'm sure we've all engaged in that anxious thought exercise before. If your home was burning, what would you choose to take with you to try to salvage? But who among us would answer, a steel cooking pot? How devastatingly beautiful that this vessel of connection is what my family salvaged. How beautiful to imagine how many hands this pot has passed through, how many meals it has transported, how many stomachs it has filled.

That this is the legacy my family brought with them. If a story is a vessel, this one is about feeding, which is another way of saying sustaining, enduring, nourishing, continuing on. If a story is a pathway for return, what can that return do? For years, I returned to my novel manuscript and attempted to make it better. Any writer will be familiar with this painful, painstaking process of revision. I have come to think of revision as the act of returning with hope. To revise something requires you to continually return

to the site of it. To revise is to return and believe in the possibility of change. As the writer George Saunders said, quote, "'Revision is love in progress, end quote. To continue to revise our understanding of the world and our place in it, to continually return to the site of pain and joy

and the moments that have moved you with the hope or faith in transformation, this is an act of love. Revision is continual movement with a conviction that this movement is worthwhile. A few weeks ago, one of my undergraduate creative writing students said to me, a good character arc is when a person unlearns something. Unlearn as in go back, take off the armor we've donned, understand why we first put it on, try again.

Unlearn as in sometimes the goal of learning is not learning infinitely more, but learning kinder, learning softer, learning deeper. While I have been revising my writing, I have also been revising my understanding of the world, of home, of belonging, of community, of myself inside of that. of community, of myself inside of that. I have been revising my life, meaning I have been returning to its ordinary days again and again with hope. And here, I'll take you back through one final rotation. I only truly felt the possibilities of revision last year, when for the first time in my life I traveled to Kenya for a book festival in Nairobi.

The theme of that year's festival was, The Sea is History. I am still searching for the words to describe what it meant for me to go back to Kenya, where my great-grandfather had arrived in a town called Kisumu a century earlier, and my family had lived until they were no longer welcome, for the first time because of a book that I wrote out of my family's experiences. I cannot quite describe the full circle feeling of that trip, because I have never before or since felt anything like it. But I will tell you about the moment

at the end of my last event at the festival when two tall young men approached me as I walked off the stage. We are two brothers from Kisumu, they said to me, and we just want to say to you, welcome home. Years ago, from the heart of my community, an arrow was shot, whose wood became soil that sprouted a plant, whose seeds floated and found their way back. The resolution may be not in the conclusion of action,

nor in the hero conquering, but in an opening, when seeds have been sown and there exists now the possibility of growth or healing. I have been circling here around the shape of stories and the ways that language can be a tool of erasure or a means of repair. The shape of this talk, too, for those of you keeping track, is something of a circle. I don't mean to dizzy you, only to introduce you to the places that I imagine I might forever be coming back to. I am resisting the urge to contain this story, to give it a clear end.

I can only say that I hope to keep returning to what I love. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Janika, thank you. Thank you. Right? I feel like we should just end the morning right there. The first thing I wanted to ask you is about the shape of story. And I wonder if you could take us back to the moment when

you realized that the classic shape of a story does not serve the purpose for which you're writing. Yeah, that's a great question and a hard one. But I think it came about for me when I was writing my novel, when I was working on it, and I had been researching, as I described in the talk, through speaking to people, through having a lot of long conversations and kind of gathering stories, gathering memories and material. And as I was doing that, it became clear to me that there was no one story that I was telling. I did not want to tell just the story of my family, just the story of any one person. It was really about that kind of the collective

and about collecting these stories together and sort of braiding them together. And they required each other, these stories required each other. And I required all of them to be able to kind of create this full enough understanding of something that I had never experienced myself. And so I think that's where I sort of came in with this, this sense that I was not going

to tell one story. And actually that I wanted to almost write against that, that sort of very classic way of writing a story or writing a novel, which follows one person, one protagonist. I actually wanted to see if I could center a collective, if I could center a whole family and many generations of this one family and every person in that family. The way you described it, it's just so evocative. You say that a story, to be understood as a story, must follow, as we know, it must follow linear progress and an oriented arc that it is an erasure of other ways of telling stories and other ways of living.

Can you talk a little bit more about how the image of a circle serves as an antidote to that, sort of traditional linear story that we know? Yeah, I think the circle, it was Toni Morrison, right, who talked about centering the margins. And when I think of centering or re-centering, I think about a circle and the idea that we're not trying to bring the margins into this dominant narrative that already exists

and sort of break it open in order to include it, but actually to just move the focus to here, to the margins and let that be the center, our center, and what happens when we do that, right? And for me, the image of a circle, it's something so expansive. It's something that can expand. It can grow to hold so much more.

It does not require just one person. Actually, it requires many. And so I think that for me is a much more generative idea and image. And yeah, it feels, I guess, more inclusive, but also feels like it's not even about inclusion at that point. Can you talk about how when you look at your life through the prism of a circle, that that

changes the way you describe family and you describe relationships and even how you describe rupture and tragedy? There's something so cyclical about the ways that I understand rupture, tragedy, trauma, and the ways that that moves through a family and a community and does not live in one person in one body and is held collectively, the ways that grief is held collectively and communally. And there's a way that that can lessen its weight because it's shared, which is, I think, something soothing.

It's quite a beautiful thing. And there's also just a way that it speaks to the ways that many families, many cultures are much more communal and relational, right? It's about the whole and the ways that these things are carried together. And there are also, of course, within that individual narratives. I'm not suggesting that there aren't, but I'm really interested in the ways that they all come together. You write that, or you said today that the first kind of return before language or narrative or story is a return to one another. What do you mean by that? Well, for me, when I was working on this book specifically,

what I had to return to in order to do anything was my family. And I alluded to it in the talk, but we didn't speak about these things at home very much at all. And I tried to avoid and evade talking about it and by just doing book research. And I couldn't because our stories don't exist there. So I had to return to us. I had to return to the family. And I also throughout this whole entire thing for years, I've had to keep returning to us, returning

to that as sort of the core of why I chose to do this. And that continues to be true, you know, even as the story travels out beyond where I've, you know, even imagined. It continues to be true that the thing I must return to is us. In starting to speak about the expulsion with members of your community and family, you start to talk about concrete details. As you say, stories of pet kittens and first elevator rides and boiled cabbage and eggs in the British resettlement camps

and long picnics with soda and oranges and Campala. Like the detail is so rich. Why are those details so important? Those are the details that you cannot find anywhere but through the people you speak to. When those details were shared with me, they held so much joy or humor. They were wrapped up in stories that were really, that were full of like love and longing and like excitement. And there was laughter when people would tell me about the terrible food in the British resettlement camps. Like it was not all dark and heavy, right?

There's so much feeling, so many facets to the feeling. And that also can't be captured by history, by history books, by dominant narratives. That requires us to be sharing it around a table. And that's so important because that belongs to us. I was really struck with your description of the process of revision. The revision is an act of hope, revision is love. My God, I've never thought of it in that way. What was it like to

stop that process? What does that mean then? I mean, how hard was that for you to stop the revision and to put the book to page and publish it? What does that say about it as an act of hope or optimism? I really do think it is fundamentally hopeful. Revision, I think it's a fundamentally hopeful thing to return to something and believe in its possibilities. I think publishing a book, putting a book out there, you know, my editor's prying it out of my hands, that is like one stage of releasing it.

And that book is now released and I can't tinker with it. But I think its meaning is continually revised. People speak to me about what they are taking from it, and that revises my own understanding of things that I wrote. People reflect back at me things that I didn't know were in there, or that I wasn't so conscious of, and that revises my understanding of it. So I don't think the process of revision ends

when it goes to print. It feels sort of lifelong. I think that is the kind of magic of a book, the magic of stories, that it continues to live in so many different ways. The very beginning, again, you put such beautiful words, the things maybe some of us think about but don't know how to express quite in the way that you have. You say that story to me is a vessel that makes sense, that helps me decide what to let go of and what to continue carrying. What an incredible way to describe

the act of writing and the role of writing in our lives. Ultimately, I'm wondering whether that sorting has been successful or whether we could even be that definitive in freeing your family's story from history. Yeah, I think again, going back to the circularity of the talk and the circularity of the way that I think, I came into this talk also thinking that it allows me to decide what to carry forward and what to let go of. And then I spent 40 minutes going over and over the same things and I came back to the same place. And I'm not done with it.

I know that I'm not done with thinking about and writing about these stories, these ideas. So I don't know that, you know, there's ever any sort of like total release. And I don't know that there has to be, but it is, it does continue to be a way for me to sort of to grapple with and to grapple with things and to make sense of them and to at least contain them in some way and then to come back and revise. This is another way of asking the same question, but I want to put it in a bigger context.

And you allude to this in your lecture. I mean, there are so many people who are displaced around the world. And the question that kind of underlies your lecture is once your life has been set in motion by forces outside your control, can you ever go back? Can you ever go back? I don't have an answer to that question. I think there are ways that we can try to go back.

There are ways we can try to return. And for many people, there is no possibility of physical return. And we're seeing that in huge ways right now. So, you know, I don't want to say that it's always possible for everyone. I mean, I think in the story of my own family too, there was not a whole lot of going back. I think for me, what I'm really thinking about here is kind of the literary strategy for return and for dismantling these structures and these things that are so big and violent

and harmful. You know, we need all the strategies and this is just, this is the narrative strategy. This is the literary strategy that I'm thinking about. It's not the only one. But at the same time, story is a very powerful thing. And there are stories that are so entrenched in us from before we can even read violent stories and good ones. And so I think I'm circling around that with hope,

with the hope that that opens space for a return. You write that you were moving towards your grandmother in your writing. I'm wondering if you could speak to her now as you have been doing in your writing. What questions would you want to ask her? That poem that I mentioned in the talk, I haven't found it. I have hopes and dreams of finding it.

But there is another poem or a few poems that we found that my grandmother wrote before partition Like in a in a journal that my parents recently brought back from a trip to India And in that poem she talks about the sea She's talking about waves and the sea. I think I would want to talk to her about that Thank you so much. What a beautiful beautiful Lecture. Thank you so much. What a beautiful, beautiful lecture. Thank you. On Ideas, you've been listening to The Radical Possibilities of Return by novelist Janika

Oza. This was the fourth in a series of five talks this season produced in association with Crowes Theatre in Toronto. This talk was inspired by the current Crowes production of Trident Moon by playwright Anushree Roy. Ideas at Crowes Theatre is produced by Phillip Coulter and Pauline Holdsworth. Special thanks to Chris Abraham, Paolo Santoluccia, Katie Pounder, Ryan Borschach, Jeremy Hutton, Sean McPherson and the entire Crow's Theatre team.

For Ideas, our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. So grateful you could be with us today. Thank you and congratulations again. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you.