Spanning decades and continents, 'A History of Burning' examines colonialism and memory

In August of 1972, Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of the entire South Asian population from the country, giving them just 90 days to leave. This uprooted over 50,000 people who had to leave everything behind as they struggled to find a home in a new country. This diaspora of epic proportions is a crucial plot point in Janika Oza’s debut novel. “A History of Burning” is an intergenerational story that follows one family over 100 years and across three continents and explores themes of erasure, colonialism, family and memory.

Oza is a Toronto-based writer and the winner of the 2022 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction and the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest. And while her time in Boston influenced her writing, the idea for the novel came from Oza’s family. Three generations lived in East Africa, worked on the railroad, and left during the 1972 expulsion from Uganda. Growing up, she was surrounded by stories of joy — “picnics and the way bats would eclipse the sky,” she described — and of pain: “violence from soldiers and regular people from the unrest during that time.” She began to ask questions: “I wondered about the silences in between the stories and very rarely was a new story told.”

At the beginning of the novel, we meet Pirbhai, a young man in India in 1898 who is tricked into a tortuous boat ride to Kenya to begin the gruesome work of building a railroad for the British colonizers. During this time, he commits an act that will haunt him for generations. As Pirbhai travels from Mombasa and eventually marries, we begin to meet the other characters of the story. But rather than an omniscient narrator curating the lineage or a story about one character looking back at their ancestors, the reader is immersed in the family through the perspective of its changing members.

"I really wanted to tell a story that took seriously the ways that stories and memories are passed down and also the ways that they are not."

Janika Oza

As she started researching and trying to piece the history together, searching for books and articles on the 1972 expulsion, Oza realized that this was an era in history that was not well documented. “That was a kind of erasure,” she said. “It was not accidental, and so it became very clear to me that I had to speak to people in order to write this book.” She connected with her father and additional family and their friends living all over the world who had all witnessed the expulsion at various ages. She then came to realize the power of writing the novel intergenerationally. “I really wanted to tell a story that took seriously the ways that stories and memories are passed down and also the ways that they are not,” Oza said. “The ways that stories and memories are erased, forgotten, buried away, too tender to talk about and maybe resurface later and maybe never do and be able to write my way through the generations.”

In the story, imagery around nature makes the vast changes in continent and landscape more intimate. Oza said this was intentional. “I was really thinking deeply about what it means to be connected to place, what it means to be connected to land, and to know the smell of the soil, the color the dirt takes on after it rains and then to be somewhere [where] that is no longer the case.” These images ground the reader and engage their senses with the characters as they cook, farm and heal with what they find in the soil after being taken from their ancestral lands and forced to find a home where they are. But it takes many generations for the family to have a piece of land that is constant, and during Oza’s own time in Massachusetts, she encountered a version of this instability.

While Oza was in Boston, one key experience allowed her to resonate with the experiences of her family and her story’s characters: a forced relocation. “I was working in Boston and had applied to renew my visa but my application was denied,” she shared. “And in the grand scheme of being uprooted and of stories of migration and change, there is so much privilege in my own story. My family lives in Canada and I was able to come back here very easily.” Still, she added that “there is a sense of something being taken and the sense that I didn’t have choice in that matter. And movement and migration and change is the story and the cycle of my family from as far back as I know.”

"At its core, this is really a novel about the ways that one family comes apart and back together over and over."

Janika Oza

Like the characters in her novel, many of her family’s moves were forced. “It has been a story of displacement at the hands of governments,” Oza said. “To me, leaving Boston feels like a little speck on the grand scale of what it means to be made to leave a place. At the same time, it gave me a different perspective on what that can look like and the many layers of heartbreak in that experience.”

During her time in Boston, Oza took her first-ever writing class, a novel writing workshop at Grubstreet. “It was really a new experience for me to share fiction with other writers,” she said. “[The class] came to me exactly when I needed it and made me feel that writing could be a part of my life.”

“A History of Burning” covers nearly a century of history which is expertly weaved in a cyclical and familial way, centering stories of land and belonging. Burning, Oza said, is meant to be seen as an image of complicity or resistance, a possibility whose effects will ripple through future generations. “At its core, this is really a novel about the ways that one family comes apart and back together over and over,” she said. “I wanted to write a novel that could encompass all the different ways that a family like this might fracture.” Readers will experience generations change and age, splice and reunite. Children become grandparents and their grandchildren carry selected pieces of their past into their own uncertain futures. It is a novel that reminds us of lineage, choice and possibility.

Janika Oza will be in-person at Brookline Booksmith on May 15 to discuss her debut novel, "A History of Burning."