Ismith Khan

Mohamed Ismith Khan[1] (March 16, 1925 – April 24, 2002), better known as Ismith Khan, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born American author and educator.[2] He is best known for his novel The Jumbie Bird, a semi-autobiographical work which blends Indian and Afro-Caribbean mythology and experience to explore the creation of a new Indo-Caribbean identity.

Ismith Khan
Born(1925-03-16)March 16, 1925
Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
DiedApril 24, 2002(2002-04-24) (aged 77)
New York City, United States
OccupationWriter
EducationQueen's Royal College;
Michigan State University;
The New School for Social Research (B.A.);
Johns Hopkins University (M.A.)
GenreTrinidad and Tobago literature, West Indian literature, postcolonial literature
Children2

Early life and education

Ismith Khan was born to Faiez and Zinab Khan in Port of Spain, to a Muslim family of Indian Pathan descent.[3][4][5] His paternal grandfather, Kale Khan, left British India after participating in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and migrated to British Guiana. He later moved to Trinidad and Tobago, where he established a jewellery business. After surviving the Hosay massacre in 1884, Kale Khan settled in Port of Spain where he established what his grandson later described as "the largest and most famous jewellery shop in Port of Spain". He lived with his son Faiez and his family when Ismith was a child, and inspired one of the main characters in The Jumbie Bird.[1]

Ismith Khan attended Queen's Royal College, where he completed the Cambridge School Certificate and graduated in 1945. In 1947 he enrolled in the Indiana University Fort Wayne to study engineering, but dropped out after a year because he was short on funds. He returned to Trinidad and Tobago in 1948 and took a job as a reporter at the Trinidad Guardian newspaper at the recommendation of Sam Selvon. Khan had met Selvon in 1941 when Khan's sister, Betty, and Selvon's brother, Dennis, were married.[1] Khan and Selvon worked together at the Guardian and became "lifelong friends". Khan considered his friendship with Selvon to be "the single most powerful influence on him becoming a writer".[6]

While working at the Guardian, Khan was assigned to interview Mariam Ghose,[1] a graduate student[7] at Michigan State University who was in Trinidad and Tobago doing research. Ghose encouraged Khan to apply for a tuition scholarship to Michigan State University, and in the fall of 1948 Khan left Trinidad and Tobago to pursue a degree in sociology. Khan and Ghose were married in 1949. He completed his course work, but was unable to graduate because he was unwilling to take a course in physical education, which the degree required.[1] In 1952, two courses short of a degree, Khan transferred to The New School for Social Research in New York, where he completed his degree in sociology. Originally interested in journalism, Khan took several fiction-writing workshops at The New School, which prompted him to pursue fiction instead of journalism.[7] In 1958, Khan became an American citizen.[8][9][2]

While living in New York, Khan wrote his first two novels, The Jumbie Bird and The Obeah Man, and most of his short stories. In 1964 Khan met Vera Reichler and became romantically involved with her. They moved in together in 1966, and were married in 1969 after his divorce was finalised. In the fall of that year they moved from New York to Baltimore after Khan was admitted to the creative writing program at Johns Hopkins University. In 1970 Khan received an M.A. in creative writing and submitted The Crucifixion, which he had started writing before leaving New York, as his thesis.[1]

Career

Khan's first novel, The Jumbie Bird, was published in 1961. His second novel, The Obeah Man, was published in 1964 and his third novel, The Crucifixion, which was written as part of his master's thesis, was published in 1987. A collection of short stories, A Day in the Country and Other Stories, was published in 1990.[3]

Khan taught at The New School and Johns Hopkins University between 1955 and 1970. Between 1970 and 1982 he was based in California, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, University of California, San Diego, University of Southern California, and California State College, Long Beach. After the end of his third marriage in 1982, he returned to New York, where he continued to write and taught as an adjunct at Medgar Evers College.[10]

Khan's work was overshadowed by his two more prominent Indo-Trinidadian contemporary novelists – V.S. Naipaul and Sam Selvon.[11] Khan's relative obscurity may have been due to the fact that he was based in the United States while his contemporaries were based in London, which "functioned as the English Caribbean's literary capital" and provided a support network.[12]

The Jumbie Bird
Main article: The Jumbie Bird

Khan's first novel, The Jumbie Bird, was published in 1961, on the eve of Trinidad and Tobago's independence from the British Empire. It tells the story of three generations of men – Kale Khan, the grandfather, a Pathan from India who migrated to Trinidad as a free immigrant (not an indentured labourer); his Trinidadian-born son, Rahim; and Rahim's son, Jamini.[11] The book is semi-autobiographical (Khan based Kale Khan closely on this grandfather, using both his name and personality).[7] The novel also blends Indian and Afro-Caribbean mythology and experience to explore the creation of a new Indo-Caribbean identity.[11]

The Obeah Man

Khan's second novel, The Obeah Man, was published in 1964. It tells the story of Zampi, an obeah man who lives at Blue Basin in the hills above Diego Martin, west of Port of Spain; his lover, Zolda, who lives in a hut at La Basse, a community built on the margin of a landfill on the east side of Port of Spain; and two other residents of La Basse – Hop and Drop, a disabled man, and Massahood, a stick–fighter. The novel spans a three-day period from Carnival Monday morning through Ash Wednesday morning.[1]

The Obeah Man is the only novel in West Indian literature to feature an obeah man as its main character.[1]

The Crucifixion

Khan's third novel, The Crucifixion, was published in 1987, seventeen years after it was submitted as part of his master's thesis at Johns Hopkins University. After being rejected by two publishers, the novel remained unpublished until Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Tree Press learned of it and agreed to publish it.[1]

The Crucifixion tells the story of Manko, a young man from the country who hears the voice of God calling him to become a preacher. Manko moves to the city, settles in a barrack yard in Port of Spain, and eventually arranges his own crucifixion on Calvary Hill in the eastern part of the city.[1] In his critical analysis of Khan's work, Roydon Salick contrasts the presentation of life in the barrack yards as presented in this book with the more hopeful picture in C. L. R. James' Minty Alley, which also tells the story of life in Port of Spain's barrack yards.[1]

Manko is based on the same character that inspired Man-Man in Naipaul's Miguel Street, Brackley in Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, and Taffy in Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance. Salick considers the underlying character to be folkloric, and "possibly real", and notes that Khan is the only one who gives the character a complete backstory.[1]

Khan's fourth work, a collection of nine short stories entitled A Day in the Country and Other Stories, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 1994. Three of these had been published previously — "The Red Ball", "Shadows Move in the Britannia Bar" and "A Day in the Country" — while the other six were unpublished. The stories are all set in Trinidad and deal with the relationship between father (or father-figure) and son.[1]

Style

Khan's work is notable for his use of Trinidadian dialect and his ability to capture its speech patterns.[3]

Themes

The themes of Khan's work are "firmly grounded in Trinidad";[3] he wrote of the Indian experience in the Caribbean and the relationships between ethnic groups in this racially diverse region.[10] Khan's work addresses the experience of childhood, the clash of cultures, and the search for identity, all common themes in West Indian literature.[13]

References
  1. Salick, Roydon (2012). Ismith Khan : the man & his work. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. ISBN 9781845231743. OCLC 757931894.
  2. "Ismith Khan, 77, Author and Teacher". The New York Times. May 3, 2002. Retrieved May 20, 2019.
  3. Katrak, Ketu H. (1993). "Ismith Khan (16 March 1925-)". In Lindfors, Bernth; Sander, Reinhard (eds.). Twentieth-century Caribbean and Black African writers. Second series. Detroit: Gale Research. pp. 48–53. ISBN 0810353849. OCLC 27109415.
  4. Daryl Cumber Dance (1986). Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 246–. ISBN 978-0-313-23939-7.
  5. Eugene Benson (November 30, 2004). Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. Routledge. pp. 765–. ISBN 978-1-134-46848-5.
  6. Singh, Kris (2016). "Archived Relationships: Pierre Bourdieu and Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora". In Dalleo, Raphael (ed.). Bourdieu and postcolonial studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. pp. 175–190. ISBN 9781781383797. OCLC 954009975.
  7. Birbalsingh, Frank (1997). From pillar to post : the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. Toronto, Ontario: TSAR Publications. pp. 139–146. ISBN 0920661661. OCLC 37653348.
  8. Daniel Lane Kirkpatrick; James Vinson (1986). Contemporary Novelists. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-912289-58-8. KHAN, Ismith (Mohamed). American. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, 16 March 1925; became American citizen, 1958. Educated at Queen's Royal College, Port of Spain; Michigan State University...
  9. King-Kok Cheung (1997). An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Cambridge University Press. pp. 200–. ISBN 978-0-521-44790-4.
  10. Dance, Daryl Cumber (2006). "Ismith Khan (1925–2002)". In Figueredo, D. H. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press. pp. 425–427. ISBN 978-0313327421.
  11. Phukhan, Atreyee (2015). "Contradictory Omens: Repatriation and Resistance in Ismith Khan's Jumbie Bird". In Brown, J. Dillon; Rosenberg, Leah (eds.). Beyond Windrush : Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. pp. 41–59. ISBN 9781628464764. OCLC 898029367.
  12. Lee, Simon (April 24, 2013). "Return of a Jumbie". Trinidad and Tobago Guardian. Retrieved April 12, 2019.
  13. Cobham, Rhonda (1986). "4. The Jumbie Bird by Ismith Khan: A New Assessment". The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 21 (1): 240–249. doi:10.1177/002198948602100125. ISSN 0021-9894. S2CID 161769099.
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