KAMALIKA PIERIS

Brotherless Night (2023) by Vasugi.V. Ganeshananthan won UK’s 30,000   pound sterling Women’s Prize for Fiction in   2024. The book   was also a   New York Times Editors’ Choice. It was   shortlisted for the Carol Shields Prize and was a finalist for Minnesota Book Award and the Asian Prize for Fiction.

Ganeshananthan is a journalist, essayist and novelist. She has degrees from Harvard and Columbia. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. She has served as visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the American Academy in Berlin have awarded her fellowships.

Ganeshananthan was a vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association and served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She is presently   on the Board of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. For other positions held by Ganeshananthan see https://nineteenquestions.com/2017/05/25/v-v-ganeshananthan/

Her first book, Love Marriage, (2008) which I have not read, was on the Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka. It was long listed for the Orange Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction and named one of the best books of the year by Washington Post.

Love Marriage is the story of a young American woman of Ceylon Tamil descent who travels to Toronto with her family to meet her estranged uncle when he resurfaces after many years. A founding member of the Tamil Tigers, he is now dying of cancer. As she asks him questions about their family, a rich and complex past emerges, along with challenging truths about the long consequences of Sri Lanka’s civil war, said a review.

 I wrote Love Marriage partly to think through the connections between the present realities of our Diaspora communities and the histories of Sri Lanka that younger generations do not always know, Ganeshananthan said.

Ganeshananthan grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. her father was a doctor there. My friends and I talked about politics all the time. We read the newspaper voraciously and liked to dissect things going in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

She was exposed to Diaspora thinking from a very young age.    I knew many people who were sympathetic to the Tigers and were strong supporters of them. Certain strands of Tamil nationalism have a stronger hold outside the country, she observed.

 To the question, what inspired you to write Brotherless Night, Ganeshananthan replied, I grew up listening to the stories of friends and family who had lived through this period in Jaffna. She heard her parents, relatives, and family friends tell many stories of that period. Her cousin who emigrated   from the Eastern Province in the 1990s also told of her experiences there.

In January 2004, I was returning home from Sri Lanka. On my way back to the US, I stopped in London, where a relative who was a librarian gave me a copy of a rare book titled The Broken Palmyra, by University Teachers for Human Rights, which records atrocities committed not only by the Sri Lankan state and its security forces, but also by the Tamil Tigers and Indian peacekeepers.

Four Tamil professors at the University of Jaffna taught themselves how to document human rights violations during the war. They were critical of the state, but also critical of the Tigers, Indian peacekeepers, and the international community. They were secretly distributed. I remember the UTHR reports that were smuggled into the HR Library in Colombo where I worked, recalled Nan in her column.  

Reading The Broken Palmyra   was the beginning of understanding how much I did not know. I followed the arrows of The Broken Palmyra into multiple university libraries. I held books up against each other, comparing one account to another. As I worked, I learned to admire the meticulousness of their work.  Brotherless Night   is a fictionalized version of their story.  The character Anjali is thinly veiled Rajini Tiranagama. The book also  reported in detail, under a fictional name, Thileepan’s fast and death.

Ganeshananthan took 20 years to write Brotherless Night. She worked on the book from 2004- 2022.  It necessitated much research and interviews. She conducted numerous interviews with people who had lived through Sri Lanka’s civil war  and with people who were in Sri Lanka during Black July 23, 1983. People took time to speak to her. They held her to a high standard, she said. She compared the different versions given to her.  She constantly checked her draft with her informants.

People I spoke to who had lived through this era offered me versions I never saw in any book. I was especially moved by the stories of women who worked to keep their families safe in this difficult time. She said that the women who had lived through it were angry as well as sad. The author also felt anger when she thought of the events. She also found that people had informed on each other. Surveillance also happened in the Diaspora, she noted.

As a quarter-century of fighting drew to a grim close, in 2009, Diaspora Tamils were, like me, thinking of the unknown number of Tamil civilians trapped between the security forces and the Tigers, said Ganeshananthan. My novel,Brotherless  Night, is an attempt to contend with the war’s end by returning to its beginning, said Ganeshananthan. The Diaspora had   watched, in disbelief, the   defeat of the LTTE. They found it difficult to stomach.

I wrote Brotherless Night because I wanted to read a book set in Jaffna during the 1980s period, one focused on civilian lives, particularly those of Tamil women, students, teachers, and political dissidents. I wanted to record their   stories, [which would otherwise be]   erased and marginalized.  The book aims to portray characters at the margins of the conflict, especially individuals who were not officially in militant groups, but were near enough to them.

The narrator in Brotherless Night is Sashikala Kulenthiran, 16 when the story starts, daughter of a government surveyor, often out of home.  She had four brothers. The elder brother is killed in anti-Tamil riots in Colombo, another is sent abroad, two join the Tamil Tigers rebel army,   and one of them is killed by army shelling.

The book deals with the period 1981-1989.   The author manages the plot and structure of the story so that her protagonist Sashikala is present at all the significant occurrences. Sashi is taken to Colombo by Niranjan to do her ALs to enter medical college.

 While living with her grandmother whose late husband was a doctor, the July 83 riots occur. Thus the author, through Sashi, is able to give an authentic, first hand sounding description of what occurs. She and her grandmother are rescued by Sinhalese neighbors as the mob torches their home. ‘One escaped girl, one escaped child, one escaped grandmother.’ . They are taken to a refugee camp and then to Jaffna by boat. (CONTINUED)