{"id":81868,"date":"2023-05-02T00:54:20","date_gmt":"2023-05-02T04:54:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=81868"},"modified":"2023-05-03T13:16:47","modified_gmt":"2023-05-03T17:16:47","slug":"v-v-ganeshananthan-the-american-writer-of-ilankai-tamil-descent-seeks-to-dismantle-the-very-language-of-terrorism-in-her-sophomore-novel-brotherless-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=81868","title":{"rendered":"V.V.Ganeshananthan the American writer of Ilankai Tamil descent, Seeks to dismantle the very language of terrorism in her Sophomore Novel \u201cBrotherless Night\u201d."},"content":{"rendered":"

\n<\/p>\n

By<\/p>\n

Avantika Shankar<\/strong><\/p>\n

The opening line of V.V. Ganeshananthan\u2019s sophomore novel, Brotherless Night, will give you pause. Maybe you\u2019ve settled down in an armchair with a cup of tea, or maybe you\u2019re leaning against a shelf in a bookstore, on the prowl for your next big read. Either way, the opening line will disarm you.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cI recently sent a letter to a terrorist I used to know.\u201d In a way, the line speaks to the specific challenges of documenting the Sri Lankan civil war. Thousands of narratives clamour for precedence, and no single strand of politics, empathy or logic can do justice to them all.<\/p>\n

What Ganeshananthan, 43, American writer and journalist of Ilankai Tamil descent, seeks to do is bring obscured voices back into the conversation. And for that, she first dismantles the very language of terrorism. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things that the rhetoric of terrorism seeks to do is to make the terrorist unintelligible,\u201d says the author over a Zoom call from Minneapolis, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota. \u201cThe majority of people who have been referred to in that way are not unintelligible. Discussing their motivation doesn\u2019t justify it, it just tries to understand it and to think about how someone might have arrived at that point.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Ganeshananthan had been working on her first novel, Love Marriage (2008), about a Sri Lankan family fractured by the civil conflict, when she stumbled upon a significant piece of research. In 1987, a Tamil Tiger had gone on a widely-publicised hunger strike at the Nallur Kandaswamy Temple in northern Sri Lanka. His speeches were broadcast on some TV channels, and people from all over the Jaffna peninsula came to watch and to participate. After 12 days of abject theatricality, he died. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe incongruity of that setting, the broad spectrum of people who were in attendance, the different stories that people were attempting to tell, and the way that those stories argued with each other\u2026 It was one of the first ways that I found my path to the point of view that I eventually used in Brotherless Night,\u201d Ganeshananthan says. <\/p>\n

Real-life inspirations<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even though her book isn\u2019t really about the hunger strike, it does manifest a lot of its broader themes. What motivates someone to become a militant? What makes them a martyr? And what happens, then, to the people they love and who love them? The character of Sashi, an aspiring doctor, coming of age during the first years of the war, was initially conceived to be the vantage point from which Ganeshananthan could question the events surrounding the hunger strike. Eventually, she emerged as a quiet but resolute protagonist in her own right. <\/p>\n

\u201cSashi sometimes doesn\u2019t actually know if she is doing things of her own volition or not,\u201d says Ganeshananthan. \u201cSometimes she is and people think she is not, and sometimes she isn\u2019t and people think she is and sometimes she herself can\u2019t tell the difference.\u201d <\/p>\n

As the novel progresses, Sashi\u2019s expression of her free will grows stronger, nurtured by University of Jaffna professor Anjali Premachandran. This character was inspired by real-life professor and activist Dr. Rajani Thiranagama, who was assassinated allegedly by the LTTE for speaking out against their atrocities, and was most recently commemorated by Shehan Karunatilaka in his Booker-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Interestingly Thiranagama\u2019s sister, Nirmala Rajasingam, narrates the audiobook for Brotherless Night.<\/p>\n

The book is the product of over a decade of research into the Sri Lankan civil war, which saw Ganeshananthan poring over written accounts, unearthing old photographs, and speaking to those who had lived through it first-hand. Over the course of her conversations with survivors of the war, she repeatedly came across narratives that hadn\u2019t often been documented.<\/p>\n

In one chapter in the book, a militant comes to Sashi\u2019s neighbour\u2019s house and asks her to prepare food for his battalion. \u201cHow generous of you to say \u2018ask\u2019 when she has no choice,\u201d Sashi\u2019s brother Aran responds, articulating the sort of coded coercion that was often imposed on the civilian community.
\n\u201cSome of that coded language is easier to represent in fiction,\u201d Ganeshanthan says. \u201cThe form itself has an elasticity that allows me to represent truths of the community without subjecting them to a kind of verification that might be painful. I don\u2019t think the people who went through this should have to prove it.\u201d
\nWomen in the war<\/p>\n

In another chapter, the government requests all Tamil boys of a certain age to come in for what they claim will be a simple security check, necessitated by the increase in anti-state violence. Citizens are made to believe that if they comply, they will be absolved of all suspicion. Instead, all the boys who present themselves for checking are detained without cause, and released only after the women of Jaffna protest. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been stories of women in the war, but the ones that have taken centrestage have by and large been of women who took up arms,\u201d says Ganeshananthan. \u201cThe stories I grew up with were of women civilians who were doing things like helping their elderly move homes every time they got displaced, or studying by candlelight, or waiting it out in their houses when there was shelling. I have a lot of respect for these women.\u201d<\/p>\n

In many ways, Brotherless Night is a feminist novel, one that centres on women, students and civilians whose lives have been disrupted by war. It is a novel that exalts domestic labour and caregiving as valiant war-time efforts, and especially honours the sacrifices made by the medical fraternity. <\/p>\n

It is also, in a way, a coming-of-age novel dedicated to young people whose lives have been defined by a conflict they had no choice but to respond to. \u201cI\u2019m not interested in justifying atrocities committed by either the state or non-state actors. What I am interested in, is restoring all people to the conversation,\u201d Ganeshananthan signs off. <\/p>\n

Courtesy:The Hindu<\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Avantika Shankar The opening line of V.V. Ganeshananthan\u2019s sophomore novel, Brotherless Night, will give you pause. Maybe you\u2019ve settled down in an armchair with a cup of tea, or maybe you\u2019re leaning against a shelf in a bookstore, on the prowl for your next big read. Either way, the opening line will disarm you. …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘V.V.Ganeshananthan the American writer of Ilankai Tamil descent, Seeks to dismantle the very language of terrorism in her Sophomore Novel \u201cBrotherless Night\u201d.’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81868"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81868"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81875,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81868\/revisions\/81875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}