It is evident that Selvadurai is envisioning this last type, a common Sri Lankan nationalism, particularly in the final chapter. It is entitled “Riot Journal”—ostensibly written by Arjie—but it is very obviously autobiographical. Starting with the first hints of trouble, the journal entries describe the increasing violence as Tamil shops and houses are burned and looted by Sinhalese mobs, apparently with the support of Jayawardena’s government. Written in the very thick of trauma—as indicated by phrases such as “we have just heard the news” (292) and “my hand shakes” (293)—the immediacy of the account makes the journal entries particularly powerful. As Sharanya Jayawickrama notes, “Arjie’s voice as weapon becomes the power of the writer as violence is used to radically redefine the self and its place in the world” (“At Home” 135). Even though the fear, disbelief, sadness, and anger that Arjie and his family, as beleaguered Tamils, feel during this traumatic and dangerous time is described very poignantly in the journal entries, Selvadurai carefully includes details about non-Tamil neighbors and friends who strive to help and protect the Tamil Chelvaratnam family despite the danger of doing so: their next-door neighbors, the Pereras, hide Arjie’s family in their house when the mobs arrive and proceed to burn down the Chelvaratnam house. Later, other neighbors bring them food and provisions though they themselves are running short of supplies. Sena Uncle and Chitra Aunty, (Sinhalese) family friends, hide the Chelvaratnams at their house despite being threatened by an anonymous caller, who “called Sena Uncle a traitor for sheltering Tamils and said that he and other ‘patriots’ were coming tonight to kill us and burn down Sena Uncle’s house” (293). In these instances, the Sinhalese (and possibly other non-Tamil) neighbors are not allowing the government or the mobs to guide their actions and responses to the situation, but making their own decisions and judgments. It is also significant that Arjie is bearing witness even in the act of suffering. After his grandparents have been brutally killed by the Sinhalese mobs and his parents have made the decision to leave the country, Arjie—unlike his younger self—acknowledges ethnic difference, but he does so without succumbing to ethnic prejudice. As he listens to Shehan talking, Arjie says that “something occurred to me that I had never really been conscious of before—Shehan was Sinhalese and I was not. This awareness did not change my feelings for him, but it was simply there, like a thin translucent screen through which I watched him” (295). The erstwhile naïve narrator has, by the end of the novel, certainly gained in maturity. At this point, he is aware of ethnic differences as well as sexual differences. Selvadurai seems to be saying through his narrator that in a racialized society, it is impossible not to become aware of ethnic difference. This awareness, however, does not have to dictate one’s reactions to others; one should be guided by one’s own interpersonal relationships and experiences instead.
Selvadurai, as we have seen, chose Sri Lankans as his implied readers for Funny Boy, with its harrowing depiction of the ethnic conflict. This begs the question as to why he selected a gay protagonist for his novel when Sri Lanka is a heteropatriarchy. In his examination of homosexuality in the African context, Spurlin has shown how many postcolonial nation-states refer to homosexuality as a Western import that sullies “authentic” culture. This type of discourse, Spurlin argues, is related to a belief in essentialisms and discourses of purity about particular ethnic groups or national origins. Therefore, even though Hawley has commented on the “the novel’s comparatively tame treatment of sexual situations” (125), the choice of his protagonist’s sexuality in Funny Boy is one of Selvadurai’s most radical interventions because it stresses the interrelatedness of oppression in all its forms by calling into question all discourses of purity, whether it applies to race, sexuality, or any other determinant of identity. Gayatri Gopinath asserts that “ Funny Boy refuses to subsume sexuality within a larger narrative of ethnic, class, or national identity, or to subsume these other conflicting trajectories within an overarching narrative of ‘gay’ sexuality” (275). It is this refusal to defer the fight against certain types of discrimination—based on gender, sexuality, or class—until discrimination based on race/ethnicity has been dealt with that gives Selvadurai his moral authority.
Going Home: At the Water’s Edge
Pradeep Jeganathan complicates the category of diasporic interventions with his collection of seven loosely connected short stories titled At the Water’s Edge. The MIT- and Harvard-educated anthropologist, who has taught at various American universities and is now resident and working in Sri Lanka, delicately delineates tensions among the Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims in Sri Lanka, but, like Sivanandan, also underscores class as an important factor in the country’s long-running conflict. Jeganathan’s work challenges the boundaries between diasporic and local experience, showing that some Sri Lankans do indeed go home again, with the result that their time in the West both interrogates and is interrogated by their Sri Lankan experiences.
The most insistently recurring character in the collection of short stories is Krishna, whom we initially encounter in the first short story, “The Front Row,” which is set in 1975. As a seventh-grade student, Krishna is a Tamil who has converted from Hinduism to Buddhism—perhaps an early indication of his independent thinking, perhaps an indication of an attempt at assimilation—being educated in the Sinhala medium instead of the Tamil. It is implied that Krishna’s parents have chosen to educate Krishna in the language of the Sinhalese majority, following the ascendance of Sinhala since the 1956 language reforms. Krishna is conscious of his class privilege, which has enabled him to get a prime seat in the front row of the classroom, over poor classmates such as Rohana 25 (the latter calls attention to his underprivileged status by saying, “‘Come early,’ the rich boys say. It’s easy for you rich people with your cars. Do you know how long it takes me to get to school? Two hours, and sometimes the bus doesn’t even come” [18]). At the same time, Krishna is acutely aware of his status as the only Tamil in a Sinhalese class. He shudders upon seeing a poster of the famous medieval battle in which King Duttu-Gamunu, venerated by the Sinhalese, defeated Elara, the Tamil king. Krishna also feels keenly the insults hurled at him by his peers, who ape the prejudices of their parents. It is not only ironic but very telling that Rohana is the one who says, “If you give them [Tamils] a little bit they will ask for everything, that’s what my father always says” (17) and later tells Krishna, “This is our land, the Sinhala Land, and we have to clean out scum like you. Prince Duttu-Gamunu did it before. … He beat up your jathiya, and threw them out and cleaned up the country. But that was a long time ago, and we will lose the little we have now if we don’t do it again” (19). The day ends with Krishna fighting with his Sinhalese classmates and being reprimanded by the teacher. The story points towards the hostility inculcated even among children towards other ethnic groups, and the way in which the narrative of ethnic difference apparently easily trumps the narrative of class difference.
We meet Krishna again in the story “Sri Lanka,” set in the 1980s, when he is an undergraduate at MIT. While he is manipulated by a white American female student as a source of firsthand information for the paper she is writing on the violence in Sri Lanka, we see how the trauma of the 1983 race riots have marked Krishna. He has also begun reading about his country and sees class as contributing to what most people see only as a conflict based on ethnicity:
“There is this paper I read. … It had an unusual argument. It isn’t the relative deprivation of the lower classes theory that Tambiah offers. I mean I think that is kind of true. But this paper argues that different sections of the capitalist classes benefited differentially from the structural economic reforms the IMF wanted.”
“Different sections? So how does that become Sinhala vs. Tamil?”
“Some Tamil sections benefited more from the import trade, he says. And they then outdid their Sinhala competitors. There is more to it, but that is the gist of it. He is a Marxist anthropologist in Sri Lanka, Gunesinghe.” (59)
While various stories emphasize the prejudices of both the Sinhalese and the Tamils toward each other, the final story, “At the Water’s Edge,” shows a mature Krishna, now complete with a doctorate and a job at a prestigious American university, on holiday in Sri Lanka discussing gender and politics with his Muslim friend Iqbal and the latter’s wife, Siddha. Youthful political involvement and idealism have apparently given way to professional complacency, even though Krishna can still feel disturbed by the various manifestations of prejudice (for example, Iqbal’s sexist attitude towards his wife and Siddha’s obvious bias against gay people). Jeganathan’s portrayal of Krishna stops short, however, of Jeganathan’s own, much more intimate engagement with the nation’s travails. Even as Jeganathan himself lives the life of a Sri Lankan who has departed the country and returned to the homeland, he seems uncertain of how to give this experience representation in literary terms.
Unlike the works of local writers that we have considered, both Sivanandan and Selvadurai end their novels in 1983, with the July riots and militant uprisings that started the ethnic conflict. But Sivanandan and Selvadurai, just like the local writers, primarily address Sri Lankan readers. Their texts, to borrow Ismail’s term, “abide by Sri Lanka” in the sense that they see Sri Lanka as a very particular place and “speak to the problem of Sri Lanka” (xxxii). For Jeganathan, meanwhile, the relationship between local audience and diasporic experience becomes even more complex, as he has chosen to abide, not merely by, but in Sri Lanka. The diasporic writers whose works we will examine in the next chapter have a more universalizing aim. Their texts do not necessarily seek to intervene directly in the situation in Sri Lanka by addressing a primarily Sri Lankan readership, but rather to relate Sri Lanka’s complexities and travails to a non-Sri Lankan readership and to seek to understand the role of the diaspora in the conflict.
Notes
1. The term “diasporic” is a contested one. In its broadest sense, it has been used to indicate anyone living away from the homeland and has been applied interchangeably with terms such as “migrant,” “exile,” “refugee,” and “expatriate,” while other, more restricted definitions are based on the Jewish dispersal. See, for example, James Clifford (“Diasporas”); William Safran (“Diasporas in Modern Societies”); and Kim Butler (“Defining a Diaspora, Refining a Discourse”). My usage of the term is closest to that of Khachig Tololyan, who has urged that the term be used specifically for people still connected to and invested in their homeland.
2. For example, Sivanandan’s novel was published in India by Penguin and in London by Arcadia Books; Selvadurai’s novel was published in London by Jonathan Cape and in New York by Harcourt Brace. The novels of Romesh Gunesekera and Michael Ondaatje that we will be considering in the next chapter were published by Granta and Knopf, respectively.
3. Neither Sivanandan nor Selvadurai translates Sinhala or Tamil words that each uses or explains proper nouns such as place names within his respective text. Selvadurai, however, provides a glossary at the end of his novel, as does Jeganathan at the end of his collection of short stories.
4. Sivanandan is director of the Institute of Race Relations in the United Kingdom and editor of the journal Race and Class.
5. Given Sivanandan’s politics, this narrative seems to relate to socialist realism as a genre. Sivanandan is making a statement by eschewing the more fantastic style of writers such as Rushdie.
6. Perera asserts that “since Rajan survives all the principals, it is possible then that he is the real narrator” (“Attempting the Sri Lankan Novel” 26).
7. Rajan’s being able to tell the stories of his father and son due to their natural connection suggests a similar connection—which exile cannot sever—that gives the diasporic writer the authority to tell the story of his/her homeland.
8. “Hartal” is a term used for a strike.
9. Sivanandan’s valorizing of bastardization is similar to the move made by Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children: the protagonist and narrator of the novel, Saleem Sinai, is the illegitimate child of a departing British colonial and an Indian Hindu woman who is raised by Muslim adoptive parents with the assistance of a Christian nanny. The implication in Rushdie’s novel is that Saleem, like India itself, is the bastard child—understood here in the positive sense—of many parents and therefore heir to many legacies.
10. There is a tendency in Sri Lankan books and media to elide the distinction between race and ethnicity that commonly obtains in other regions.
11. Sivanandan has commented in an interview on the importance of storytelling for his mode of writing: “I am not a novelist. I am a storyteller. Novelists are made. Storytellers are born. Novelists are made in these writers’ workshops. I am not interested in being a novelist. I want to tell you a story” (Interview with Raj Pal, n.p.)
12. According to anthropologist Arjun Guneratne, “The opposition between the concepts Sinhala/Tamil is a modern one, arising out of a modern situation beginning in the economic and social transformation of the colonial period, and unlikely to have been meaningful to our ancestors. To assume that the Sinhala-Tamil dichotomy had the same highly politicized meaning in the past that it has today is to beg a whole host of questions” (26).
13. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake asserts that “nationalism in post-colonial Sri Lanka… has a distinctive politics of memory and forgetting, and… a racial science of identity construction” (41).
14. In order to emphasize the need for counterhistories that include subalterns and past generations, Sivanandan uses this excerpt as the epigraph to Book Three, and part of the excerpt as the title of the novel. It is noteworthy that the words of a fictional character are juxtaposed with those of two well-known British poets: the epigraphs to Books One and Two are quotations from Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins, respectively. Sivanandan seems to suggest that what Para, the fictional Sri Lankan character, says is as important as what is said by the two British poets. Simultaneously, Sivanandan seems to be highlighting the effects of his own “bastardization”—of his own belonging to multiple cultures—through the epigraphs that he has chosen.
15. The gender bias in Sivanandan’s novel is discussed at length in Minoli Salgado’s “Writing Sri Lanka, Reading Resistance: Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies” as well as by Qadri Ismail in Abiding by Sri Lanka.
16. In his second novel, Cinnamon Gardens, Selvadurai focuses on certain pre-independence events—particularly the arrival of the Donoughmore Constitutional Commission in Ceylon—that set in motion various political reforms that would later contribute to the ethnic conflict.
17. Indeed, Selvadurai’s preliminary consideration of the orientalizing outcome that a depiction of the violence
in Sri Lanka might effect is actually predicated on the assumption that the audience would consist of non-Sri Lankan readers, specifically a Western readership.
18. Radha Aunty’s use of the term “racist” illustrates the way in which the discourse of “race” has been imported into discussions of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict. Although strictly speaking race is inapplicable to the conflict, racialization has shaped the rhetoric on both sides.
19. For a reading of Funny Boy informed by queer theory, see Sharanya Jayawickrama’s “At Home in the Nation? Negotiating Identity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy,” in which she argues that “it is Arjie’s ‘funny’ qualities that enable the queering of spatial configurations and the social categories they represent” (125).
20. There are many inter-ethnic relationships in this novel—Radha and Anil (Tamil/Sinhalese); Amma and Daryl (Tamil/Burgher); Aunty Doris and her husband (Burgher/Tamil); Arjie and Shehan (Tamil/Sinhalese). Each of these inter-ethnic relationships, which begins and continues despite the policing of families and society, ultimately fails—just like the inter-ethnic relationships in the novels of de Silva and Sivanandan.
21. According to Act 365 of Sri Lanka’s Penal Code, “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or any animal, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to a fine, while according to section A of the above Act, any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of an offence, and shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years or with a fine, or with both and shall also be liable to be punished with a whipping.” (Tilakaratna and Abeywardena)
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