Like Sivanandan, Selvadurai is very much aware that he is not writing for his homeland or on behalf of its people, but to them. In a lecture, Selvadurai specifically articulated his awareness of the question of audience when he was writing Funny Boy:
To myself, the question with regard to cultural appropriation that asked about who speaks for whom did not raise the question of who I spoke for but rather who I spoke to. Right from the start I found it utterly implausible to consider myself a spokesman for my “community” since no one had elected me to do that. Hence, the question of whom I spoke for was irrelevant, but whom I spoke to was extremely relevant. (“The Influence” 6)
According to Selvadurai, his awareness about the debate concerning cultural appropriation made him realize that his intention to focus on the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka in his novel might result in an orientalization of his homeland and a stereotyping of its people as inevitably barbaric and violent. 17 Therefore, in order to avoid such a result, he consciously chose his audience:
I must write with a Sri Lankan readership in mind. It must be them that I should address. My book, rather than being an exposé of the “evils” of Sri Lanka, must be a dialogue between me and the Sri Lankan reader on our common problem, our common tragedy, our common vision of a peaceful and tolerant society. (“The Influence” 7)
At the same time, Selvadurai admits that even after he made his decision concerning whom he should address, he could not ignore the fact that since his novel would be published in the West, it would be accessed mainly by a Western audience—readers whose opinions of Sri Lanka might be shaped by his depiction of the violence that had occurred and continued to occur in the country. According to Selvadurai, “I could not ignore the trap of catering to the notion of the east as barbaric and uncivilized. In order to avoid this trap I knew that I must thus keep in mind I was addressing a Sri Lankan readership and hence how much and why it was necessary to discuss the violence in Sri Lanka” (“The Influence” 7-8).
As a diasporic living in Canada and as a gay man, Selvadurai uses certain narrative strategies to reach his implied Sri Lankan readership. One of these is to have a naïve narrator recounting the span of years between childhood and adolescence. Since a naïve narrator is, by definition, not always able to understand what he/she observes or experiences, this strategy makes it possible for Selvadurai to avoid the appearance of assuming too overwhelming an air of authority vis-à-vis his Sri Lankan audience when he addresses them about the ethnic conflict. At the beginning of the novel, Arjie—the youngest child in an affluent, relatively cosmopolitan Tamil family living in Colombo—is only about seven years old, sheltered and unaware of either his own sexual orientation or the fact that he belongs to an increasingly alienated minority group in the country. For example, when Ammachi, his grandmother, forbids her daughter, Radha, from accepting the rides offered by Anil, a Sinhalese admirer, Arjie is unable to understand the implications. He reflects that he is immersed in Sinhalese culture and so is his family, so the idea that the prospect of Radha’s marriage to a Sinhalese man would infuriate his grandmother seems incomprehensible. When Radha consequently calls Ammachi a racist, Arjie has only a vague notion of what she is talking about: “I looked at Radha Aunty. I did not understand the meaning of the word ‘racist,’ but I could tell that it was not a nice thing” (57-58). 18 The understatement draws attention to the young narrator’s innocence and naiveté. Selvadurai is thus able to start with a clean slate: a child, someone without any apparent prejudices. The choice of a youthful narrator therefore also allows Selvadurai—the offspring of a Sinhalese mother and a Tamil father, who would, however, immediately be identified by Sri Lankans as a Tamil since his last name is easily recognizable as such—to address his implied readers from as seemingly neutral a standpoint as possible. The narrator learns about ethnic prejudice only gradually, by means of questioning his elders and processing the information he gets from them in relation to his own experiences.
“Why?” I finally asked. “Why did somebody do that [murder his great-grandfather]?”
“Because he was a Tamil.”
“But you’re a Tamil and I’m a Tamil and nobody’s killing us.”
“This was twenty years ago, in the fifties, son. At that time, some Sinhalese people killed Tamil people.”
“But why?” (59)
The narrator’s youthful ignorance makes him ask questions that, to adults, would seem too obvious for consideration or discussion. Selvadurai shows that the child’s “But why?” questions actually need to be raised in order to understand the arbitrary and nonsensical—yet all-too-powerful—nature of racialized discourse, and to remind us, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. has pointed out, that race is “a dangerous trope” despite the fact that it is used as an objective term of classification (5).
Despite the fact that the narrative is told from the perspective of the youthful Arjie, there is a sudden break in the middle of the first chapter, when we are made aware that there is a gap between the events of the novel and the “present”—time has passed and the adult narrator is looking back at the events of his childhood from a different location:
It is a picture made even more sentimental by the loss of all that was associated with them [the days of his childhood]. By all of us having to leave Sri Lanka years later because of the communal violence and forge a new home for ourselves in Canada. Yet those Sundays, when I was seven, marked the beginning of my exile from the world I loved. (5)
This unexpected intrusion of the naïve narrator’s adult self is a very significant move on the part of Selvadurai. It highlights the fact that this is a novel written from the standpoint of exile. This is no simple coming-of-age story; it also brings with it the baggage of exile, including a sense of loss, nostalgia, and mourning. This single intrusion of the exiled adult narrator into the story of his younger self seems to indicate an acknowledgment by Selvadurai of his own diasporic status. Selvadurai, just like Sivanandan, is positioning himself and creating a space within the text for questions concerning his authority to give this account of the ethnic conflict. At the same time, the passage quoted above stands in stark contrast to the rest of Selvadurai’s narrative; while the passage spells out a point in Arjie’s life as an exile, a point at which he focuses on looking back on trauma with mourning and nostalgia, the rest of the novel is a gradual unfolding of that trauma as experienced by Arjie in the midst of the suffering.
Unlike Sivanandan, Selvadurai does not attempt to trace the series of historical events that resulted in the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka; in fact, his use of the naïve narrator means that there is no contextualization about the ethnic conflict in Funny Boy as there is in When Memory Dies. Selvadurai does, however, seek to bear witness to the fact that the racialization of a society is a gradual process. Individuals are not inherently communalist or racist; they become so due to specific reasons—a change that apparently is difficult to reverse. For instance, Ammachi’s communalism is motivated by a family tragedy—her father was massacred by a Sinhalese mob during the riots of 1956. As Janaki, the Sinhalese servant, reminds Radha, “You were too young to remember when they brought the body home. …. It was as if someone had taken the lid of a tin can and cut pieces out of him” (58). In this instance, Janaki is bearing witness to the suffering of the Tamils, a witnessing that is all the more powerful because the perpetrators of the violence that she is describing are her own people, the Sinhalese.
Selvadurai’s positioning of his narrator as both a naïve child and a character gradually becoming aware of and coming to terms with his sexuality is inextricably linked with the depiction of ethnic tensions in the novel. Arjie, due to his emergent sexuality within a heteronormative society, is marginalized: he is “caught between the boys’ and the girls’ worlds” (39) of play, as well as between childhood and adulthood. The very fact that he is pushed out, isolated, alienated, and denied the possibility of belonging to a definite male or female realm gives him the opportunity to see and hear a
nd participate in things that other people, those who are not “funny,” cannot. As he engages in acts of gender insubordination, he gets an unexpected vantage point on the ethnic polarization of his society. 19
Due to his marginal position, Arjie is able to function as a witness and recorder of the ways in which various characters in the novel subscribe to prejudice or succumb to the effects of prejudice. Because he is punished for cross-dressing in the game of “bride-bride,” Arjie is ousted from the children’s world of play at the end of the first chapter and left alone. Therefore, in the second chapter, Radha Aunty is able to use him at various times as a chaperone or as an excuse for seeking the company of Anil. Thus, Arjie becomes the almost-invisible witness in this relationship between a Tamil woman and a Sinhalese man, which, despite their initial optimism, fails. 20 In the third chapter, Arjie’s outsider status within his own family—particularly in relation to his father and older brother, who look upon him with suspicion and contempt—makes him an unwitting yet sympathetic accomplice to his mother when she begins a clandestine extramarital relationship with Daryl Brohier, a former boyfriend whom she was not allowed to marry because he was a Burgher. Daryl, a reporter for an Australian newspaper investigating government intimidation of the Tamils in the north, is killed, and Arjie begins to realize the extent of state involvement in the persecution of the Tamils. In the fourth chapter, Arjie’s marginal position in his family motivates him to form a close bond with Jegan, the son of Arjie’s father’s childhood friend, who is ultimately fired because of the ethnic prejudice of other employees. In each episode, it is the liminal space in which Arjie finds himself due to his homosexuality that enables him to act as a smokescreen for, or accomplice in, other people’s transgressive activities.
A difficulty that Selvadurai has to deal with is that his implied readers—the Sri Lankan audience living in a heteronormative society in which homosexual acts continue to be illegal 21—might be resistant to a gay coming-of-age narrative. Selvadurai’s choice of a naïve narrator is essential here. Arjie, the child, is unaware of his sexual orientation at the beginning of the novel. He has no understanding about the variety of homophobic theories and assumptions that a heteronormative society produces to explain away, decentralize, and make invisible same sex desire. Arjie reflects that the description of his behavior as “funny” by his father does not fit with any of his own previous understandings of the word (as humorous or strange), noting that when his father had applied this epithet to him, “there had been a hint of disgust in his tone” (17). Arjie sees nothing wrong or “funny” about a boy rejecting cricket in favor of dressing up as a bride, or reveling in such activities as reading love comics and painting his nails. Such behavior, which draws attention to the constructed nature of gender, “disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality” (Butler, Bodies 25), and causes so much consternation in the adults around him, seems entirely natural to Arjie—the actions are not the result of a specific choice on his part but natural desires that stem from who he is in a very organic way. In the narrative, other people constantly and carefully police and regulate Arjie’s actions and behavior and label him: his girl cousin Tanuja calls him “pansy,” “sissy,” and “faggot” (11), while his father, uncle, and Diggy view him as “funny.” The fact that other people recognize his sexual orientation before he does reinforces the idea that Arjie’s sexuality is not a choice, it is the way he is. According to Selvadurai, his goal was:
To portray homosexuality for what it was, another norm, something that was as intrinsic to a gay person as heterosexuality was to a straight person. It must come naturally out of my main character. He would have to be, of course, startled into an awareness of his sexuality but it would be an awareness that would quickly become normal to him. (“The Influence” 9)
Having other people make Arjie gradually aware of his sexual orientation instead of having Arjie attempt to identify himself as a homosexual to them is, I contend, a strategy to make the gay protagonist more appealing and less of an aberration to the implied readers. 22
Arjie’s incipient sexuality leads to confrontations between him and those who have power over him. 23 Confrontations with authority, however, are not limited to Arjie. Throughout the novel, Selvadurai shows characters who challenge authority, only to ultimately submit in fear of the repercussions. Authority—who wields it, how it is wielded, at what point it should be challenged—is thus a major theme in Funny Boy. Radha attempts to override the pressure exerted by those with authority over her—her family—to end her relationship with Anil, but finally gives up after she herself is injured by a Sinhalese mob; she is intimidated by the difficulties she would have to face in an interracial relationship. When Daryl, Amma’s lover, is killed in Jaffna—obviously by paramilitary agents of the government—and his servant Somaratne is harmed, Amma begins to try to find out what happened to Daryl and the servant. She decides to end her investigation after her visit to Somaratne’s family because she realizes that her following up and her witnessing will increase the danger to Somaratne’s family at the hands of the authorities. In the case of Appa, his main goal is to succeed financially as an entrepreneur, and the people who allow his business to function and prosper therefore have power over him. When the news about Jegan’s former affiliation with the Tamil militant organization filters out and Appa’s Sinhalese employees—as well as ruthless Sinhalese business rivals—call for Jegan’s dismissal, at first Appa attempts to override it. In the end, he reluctantly asks Jegan to leave his employment at the hotel even though he knows that Jegan has done nothing wrong. Ultimately, each of these characters feels compelled to submit to some manifestation of authority.
Of all the characters in the novel who challenge authority, Arjie is the only one who refuses to back down. The setting is his school, the Victoria Academy. He is ordered by the sadistic principal, nicknamed Black Tie, to memorize two poems and recite them at the prize-giving in order to gain the support of the chief guest, a cabinet minister, to stop the chauvinistic vice principal from turning the school into an institution only for Sinhalese students. Even though Black Tie’s cause is just—he stands for racial tolerance—Arjie wonders whether this worthy goal is actually worth achieving through the despicable means that Black Tie employs, such as his needless cruelty to students like Shehan, Arjie’s Sinhalese boyfriend, to maintain his control over the school. He questions, “How was it that some people got to decide what was correct or not, just or unjust? … Was it not possible for people like Shehan and me to be powerful too?” (267-68). Arjie makes a decision to stand up for Shehan and for all those who have been terrorized by the principal’s brutal authority; he sabotages Black Tie’s plans, not by open defiance, but by embracing failure and risking shame: he agrees to recite the two poems and then makes them meaningless by jumbling all the words. 24 As Wijesinha points out, Arjie does this despite knowing what the consequences would be—possibilities ranging from being punished by the enraged principal and embarrassing his parents to allowing the vice principal to get his way regarding the school’s future: “[Arjie’s] act of commitment then shows up the inadequacies of all the others who had acquiesced in violence and authoritarianism and thereby perhaps allowed them to grow to the excesses of 1983” ( Breaking Bounds 82). According to Wijesinha, what Selvadurai is trying to convey through Arjie’s act in quite a didactic way is “the importance of asserting individual feelings and relationships in defiance of the dictates of authority” ( Breaking Bounds 82), when authority is both arbitrary and excessive.
Selvadurai clearly sets up the Victoria Academy as a microcosm of Sri Lanka and draws parallels between the two respective authority figures: Black Tie and President J.R. Jayawardena. Thus, some critics discuss the novel in terms of Fredric Jameson’s theorizing that all Third World cultural productions are national allegories: “The story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled structure of the public… culture and society” (67). R. Raj Rao, for ex
ample, argues that Jameson’s theory does not apply to gay narratives like Funny Boy, “which are validated instead by some feminist theories, especially Kate Millet’s that sees the personal as the political” (124). Rao calls for a mapping of gay fiction that differentiates it from issues of race, gender, and nationality. However, as William J. Spurlin has pointed out in his examination of homosexuality in postcolonial societies, “The sexual is not separate from regimes of power” and the sexual does indeed need to be considered “within specific material conditions” (199).
John Hawley, while acknowledging the validity of Aijaz Ahmad’s critique of Jameson’s theory of national allegories as a generalization, disagrees with Rao’s assessment, arguing that Funny Boy can be considered a national allegory because it shows a gay protagonist who is attempting self-definition in a heteronormative society in which he has no role models. According to Hawley, because Arjie “becomes politicized by his personal struggle as a sexual being,” he functions “as a symbol for new ways of building the nation” (133). Hawley’s assertion that Funny Boy is a national allegory is complicated because “nation” is a contested term and there are competing nationalisms in Sri Lanka. On the one hand, there is the nationalism of the Sinhalese chauvinists. On the other hand, there is the nationalism of Tamil separatists. There are also Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, and Burghers who desire a common Sri Lankan nationalism.
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