Towards the end of the book, you write, “Whose stories will you believe? For how long will you listen? Tell me why you think you’re here, and that will be as true as anything I can say,” signalling an interiority that’s deeply personal. Could you reflect on the internal conflicts you may have dealt with while writing Brotherless Night?
The part that you quote is from the point of view of Sashi [the narrator]. Throughout the book, she is
Towards the end of the book, you write, “Whose stories will you believe? For how long will you listen? Tell me why you think you’re here, and that will be as true as anything I can say,” signalling an interiority that’s deeply personal. Could you reflect on the internal conflicts you may have dealt with while writing Brotherless Night?
The part that you quote is from the point of view of Sashi [the narrator]. Throughout the book, she is asking the reader why they’re here, which is always a good question. What is the space between writing and action? Often during conversations, people ask me if writing is activism, and I think it isn’t because it doesn’t actually change anything. It might cause someone to think about changing something, but it’s not actually doing that kind of work itself, right?
So, I think it’s that juncture at which Sashi is acknowledging [this dilemma]. Then, certainly the trauma of the people who lived through those years was massive. It was very generous of people to spend that much time telling me about what it was like. It’s an incredibly complicated period of time in the war, and I think that there were people, probably myself included to some extent, who thought that perhaps it couldn’t be depicted in fiction, particularly by someone who hadn’t lived through it. So that was a good challenge for me.
And I think, if I had known that I could do it, then I wouldn’t have tried [doing it]. It was interesting because I wasn’t sure if I could. I had a sense of how violent the material was, and that’s probably part of the reason that it took so long [to write this book]. I had to take a lot of breaks. Speaking to people over the years, I also noticed that they’d tell me something on the fifth occasion that they didn’t tell me the first time. I learned a lot of patience [during the process]. And I’m not naturally a patient person. There’s a lot of work that has gone into any patience that I have now. So that was a good lesson for me.
Writing gender-based violence often becomes titillating and voyeuristic, reducing wartime traumas to cheap entertainment. What sort of technical challenges did you wrestle with?
That’s a great question. So when I was in college, I covered sexual assault at my university. In my opinion, I didn’t do a very good job. But I learnt how it can seem like the rules are the same for everyone, but that’s not the case. There are all these codes around sexual violence, right? In Tamil, there are all sorts of words, and a new vocabulary arose during the war, too. If I’m remembering correctly, there are these euphemisms for sexual violence. But that’s what you expect from a smart reader, to catch these euphemisms. If you lead readers far enough down the path, you don’t have to describe the violence. They’ll do it themselves. And anyway I didn’t want to write sexual violence [that explicitly]. While some people [have] tried to erase it from the history of the war, many people went through a great deal of trouble to ensure that it was documented, including the people who wrote The Broken Palmyra: The Tamil Crisis in Sri Lanka, an Inside Account [by Rajani Thiranagama, Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram, and Kopalasingham Sritharan].
Particularly, the Rajani chapters in The Broken Palmyra are partly about sexual violence and the experiences of women, so to honour that [in fiction] was really important. Also: I move through the world like anyone else, and I do assume that in a variety of spaces I could be assaulted too. I’m a woman, so to assess my safety this way is part of my psyche. But while writing, I didn’t have to put too much [violence] on the page. And I believe if you write about the characters with some kind of tenderness, then it isn’t voyeurism.
Brotherless Night’s prologue contextualises the use of the word ‘terrorist’ in the media. Then, Sashi also says that someday the story of the Sri Lankan Civil War will begin with the word ‘civilian’, with the word ‘home’. It could have easily been the end. Why did you choose to start with it?
Certainly, the first page was a provocation. It was very intentional. I wrote that page not very long after 9/11. I grew up in a community where the word ‘terrorism’ was used on us all the time. And very glibly, many people would crack jokes, which weren’t particularly funny. When I write non-fiction, I don’t use the word terrorist. I say militant. On a rare occasion, when I must vary my vocabulary, I’d say insurgent. But I won’t say terrorist, because we don’t have an apparatus or a vocabulary to talk about state terror. So, I was trying to dismantle that vocabulary. There’s even a novel called The Terrorist. How could you write a novel that was particularly good, subscribing exclusively to that vocabulary?
The prologue was brewing in me for a long time. Then, the sentence about civilians and home comes out of engaging with the work of the activists I admire most, like the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), who focused on civilian safety in military spaces.
Despite the overarching political forces that determine the trajectories of your characters, the entry points of both your novels is family. As a novelist, what comes first — do you tend to scale up and extrapolate the familial conflicts and make it a larger story about a nation?
Oh, that’s interesting. Do I have thoughts on how I do that? I don’t know.
That just seems to me how the families that I know work, the families where most people have been affected in some way. There’s quite a range here in terms of novelists doing something to that effect. You could look at something as recent as A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam, but then also War and Peace. I mean, it’s a time-honoured device, but I think the story of the war has often been told through singular lives, and Sashi’s is a singular voice, but I think that the story has been dominated largely by people bearing arms, and that’s an interesting story and should be told, but I think it has been told. So to tell the story differently was interesting to me because that was a story I knew, particularly the stories of women who were maybe trying to figure out how they might maintain living in their house if it wasn’t going to be their house anymore, or what they were going to do to take care of the elderly or children if they were displaced, which most of them were repeatedly.
That’s an enormous amount of labour. A very traditional narrative is looking for a certain kind of dramatic action, and what I’m describing is actually a repeated slow labour, and it has drama to it, but it’s a little bit different as a material to construct into fiction. But I thought that it should be on the page somewhere.
READ MORE: Review: Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan
Alongside criticising Sri Lankan politics, you call out the controversial role of the Indian government and the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in the civil war. While weaving in historicity in fiction, what part do you keep and what do you leave out?
India in relation to the war is so interesting. I grew up on stories of the IPKF, and these were not nice stories. And I was aware that in Tamil Nadu, there was an enormous amount of sympathy for Tamil nationalism, but not at the centre because any ethnic affinities or sympathies that lay in the emotions of seeing people who speak a version of the same language, experiencing suffering, etc. is not the same for the country as a whole. Then, you have the regional versus the centre versus other armed actors competing for India’s attention.
Other insurgent groups from around the world were also interacting with the Tamil Tigers. I don’t even really get into that in the book. So, there are all of these different players with all of these differing interests. People’s families have also had arguments about politics. There are so many people, in my own family, too… the range of people who have great love for India alongside people who also had really terrible experiences to share. There were people who came to India as refugees during the war who were mocked because of cultural differences between Sri Lanka and India. For example, the ways that women in Sri Lanka dress differently than women in South India; Tamil women from Sri Lanka being displaced to South India facing censure for who they were. So, a real range of experiences were part of the larger story. People who did training here [in India] and who feel some loyalty to that, or who had formative experiences here. People who, after the riots, moved here and never went back: all of that. And you can usually find most of that in a single family in that period. It’s not implausible at all.
Caste also features predominantly in Brotherless Night, which is often overlooked in larger wartime stories.
The novel isn’t about caste, but caste is present in it. Sashi’s oldest brother Niranjan, for example, seems to be anti-caste; he reads and talks about it with other people at the university.
And this example, in particular, is powerful for his sister. But Niranjan, he’s a man, too. I think there are a number of people in the story with a lot of privilege who don’t necessarily recognise it. And it’s often conversations with others where either the reader or the other person becomes aware of it. But the person who’s oblivious does not necessarily themselves become aware of it. And the two characters with whom that happens the most are probably Aran and Sashi, I suppose. There are various kinds of intersectional identities where you can see that people are more at risk.
You asked me earlier about depicting sexual assault. There’s been a lot of writing about sexual violence and the conflict in relation to the people emerging from it or not successfully emerging from it or leaving their communities because they can’t find the kinds of lives that they want there anymore. And there’s a reference to that too. Some girls in Jaffna who were sexually assaulted during the time were sent to Colombo by their families who didn’t really know what to do with them. All kinds of double jeopardy were available. I think one of the things you’re referring to early on are the lamppost killings. Sometimes caste operates differently in Sri Lanka than it does in India, but it certainly operates in Jaffna. And so I think it would have been really impossible to write a novel set in Jaffna and not show that.
The last decade has witnessed a unique interest in Sri Lankan writing. How hopeful does the Sri Lankan writing scene look to you?
It looks like there’s a lot more to come. There are a lot of people who are working on things now that will come out later that I’m really excited about. And there are also people working in different genres. We’re talking about fiction writing here. I recently saw Counting and Cracking in New York City. The playwright, S Shakthidharan, is really brilliant. All of this storytelling has always been there. Sri Lanka is a comparatively small place and perhaps people got used to thinking one story was enough. Fortunately, all of us didn’t settle for that. One is never enough. Lots of the early writers tried to bring other people along. And I think Shyam Selvadurai is a remarkable example of that. He’s always bringing other people along. There would be no Brotherless Night without Funny Boy. Or Romesh Gunesekera, who’s extraordinarily generous. And so is Michael Ondaatje. All of these people have lifted other people up. In the United States, Mary Anne Mohanraj, who was one of the first people to publish literary fiction, set an example for me when I was [young]. The fruit of all this labour is starting to show.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
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