Blue Sunflower Startle

by Yasmin Ladha

A home harbours secrets. Father has cancer. He is dying. Not a word. Mother tells me to take care of my little brother. In the early 1960s, a young girl and her brother move to their grandparents' flourmill in Dodoma in newly-independent Tanzania. Her grandfather bellows his love for East Africa, where he and other Indian merchants have thrived. But the ground is shifting. President Nyerere is calling for the widespread nationalization of property. The hum of the mill has quieted. The young girl prays at the jamatkhana ( Give me back my father ) and spends evenings at the cinema watching cowboy films?grief and grievances, if only momentarily, disappear. Hush, not a word. Years later, the girl and her family immigrate to Calgary, Alberta and she begins a love affair with the prairies. Wary that her grandfather's passion for his country consumed him, she is unwilling to settle for geographical monogamy. She travels to Chonju, South Korea to work as a language teacher, and Delhi, India for trysts with her Kashmiri lover. Frequently, she is startled by the appearance of things that remind her of the prairies, but show up in other countries. She aches for a home that beckons her the Canadian West, the hero that pulls a U-turn for its beloved. Would you come for her, all ribby hair, or slicing the air like a boomerang, hollering at God? Would you strike a wild deal with Him, do anything to get her back? Yasmin Ladha offers readers an exquisite exploration of the ways in which one can love a country. Written in unusual, intoxicating, and poetic prose, Blue Sunflower Startle is a modern day Romance for frequent travellers and nomadic spirits.

Genres: Fiction

168 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2010

About the author

Yasmin Ladha was born in Mwanza, Tanzania. She immigrated to Canada in 1978 at the age of twenty. Numerous journeys to India, the rich talk-stories of her youth, and the influence of female role models like her mother and grandmother provide a constant energy to her work. Yasmin is currently completing her master's degree in English at the University of Calgary. She has one previously published book "Bridal Hands on the Maple"(DisOrientation Chapboook, 1992 and has been featured in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including "Alberta Rebound"(NeWest Press, 1990) -Bio from back page of "Lions Granddaughter and Other Stories"

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

As its title suggests, Blue Sunflower Startle is jolting and often disorienting. Ladha’s language surprises, as in “little mounds of jasmine beds, gentle as babies’ graves.” The novel opens in Tanzania in 1964, when the unnamed narrator is six years old. Among a dizzying plurality of ethnicities, religions and languages, she struggles to construct a coherent identity. ‘Home’ for these characters is not so much a place as an emotion, often triggered by food. Indeed, Ladha’s most common metaphors are culinary; she consistently renders food a symbol of comfort and nostalgia: “Puddings assert home” and “Home is where kebabs are served with coriander chutney.”

(Full review in Wasafiri literary magazine, Volume 29, Issue 1.)

[Coralie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I would have appreciated this book more had I been familiar with any of the locations mentioned.

[Deirdre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful.