diss/ed banded nation

Nanette Morton teaches English at McMaster University.

diss/ed banded nation is the story of jazz singer and illegal alien
Benedict Ochieng, a transplanted Kenyan living in Vancouver. His life at
its nadir, Benedict drinks through his days and makes music at night.
His one emotional connection in this alienating urban landscape is his
sometime girlfriend, Anna. However, she too belongs to a disrespected
and scattered—disbanded—nation and, with hurts of her own, she is
unable to sustain a relationship.

The book is a well-written, restless flow of images. Vignettes are each
headed by a date and time. The narrative moves back and forth, from
Benedict’s life in Vancouver to his early humiliation at school in
Kenya. The latter sections show that Benedict is not new to either
alienation or disrespect. Taken away from his grandmother when his
missionary parents die, he is alternately a “thick as a brick”
native or a “noble savage” to the racist English schoolteachers
representative of colonial rule. A return to Kenya will not mean a
return to a precolonial, prediasporic past, although it could be a new
beginning. The reader never finds out, which is just as well: a tidy
ending would have been an artificial solution to a dilemma just
beginning to be resolved.