DOCSLIB.ORG

A Critical Study of Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy And

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
A Critical Study of Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy And International Journal of Management (IJM) Volume 11, Issue 7, July 2020, pp. 1488-1493, Article ID: IJM_11_07_133 Available online at http://iaeme.com/Home/issue/IJM?Volume=11&Issue=7 ISSN Print: 0976-6502 and ISSN Online: 0976-6510 DOI: 10.34218/IJM.11.7.2020.133 © IAEME Publication Scopus Indexed MANAGING GENDER (ED) IDENTITY: A CRITICAL STUDY OF SHYAM SELVADURAI’S FUNNY BOY AND BUCHI EMECHETA’S SECOND CLASS CITIZEN Puja Sarmah M.Phil. Research Scholar, Dibrugarh University, Assam, India ABSTRACT Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy and Buchi Emecheta’s novel Second Class Citizen are considered as the groundbreaking works of postcolonial literature where the protagonist’s quest for identity in their prevalent society is clearly depicted. The word ‘funny’ itself in the title of the novel Funny Boy shows that living a queer life is considered as funny in the context of Indian society and how language dominating public and textual discourses is rendered funny and the word ‘second-class’ denotes the class in which the women, specially the black women are put in the society. Thus this paper aims to explore the identity crisis faced by the two protagonists, Ajrie, from the novel, Funny Boy and Adah, from the novel, Second Class Citizen. By exploring the interconnections between queer adolescence, gendered identity and postcolonialism, this paper attempts to study the neat narratives of postcolonial modernity to suggest the reorientation of South Asian and African fiction as a crucial outcome of the crossings. Key words: Gender, body, homosexuality, black, identity, LGBTQ Cite this Article: Puja Sarmah, Managing Gender(Ed) Identity: A Critical Study of , International Journal of Management, 11(7), 2020, pp. 1488-1493. http://iaeme.com/Home/issue/IJM?Volume=11&Issue=7 1. INTRODUCTION The Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist Shyam Selvadurai has significantly contributed to the increasing visibility of homosexuality in the cultural domain of contemporary Sri Lanka, making way for positive configurations of same-sex love in the public imagination and his novel Funny Boy (1995) is now one of the best known contemporary queer classics. It was also a national bestseller and was winner and finalist for many awards. Selvadurai was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He went to Canada with his family at the age of nineteen and has a BFA from York University. As a South Asian Canadian writer, Selvadurai mostly concentrates on Selvadurai can be considered a member of what James http://iaeme.com/Home/journal/IJM 1488 [email protected] Clifford describes in as those communities where critical alternatives [to systematic social injustices] can be and the novel Funny Boy can be viewed as inviting a critique of the social discourses that target queer sexualities, genders, and ethnicities in Sri Lanka. The protagonist of the novel Arjun or Arjie, is the son of an affluent Tamil family in Sri Lanka. He serves as both the adult post-immigration and the young pre-immigration narrator who looks back on his Sri Lankan childhood from a Canadian setting. Arjie describes his transition from childhood to adolescence by narrating a series of memories and experiences and the emergence of his queer sexuality in a post-colonial Sri Lankan landscape that otherises non-normative sexuality and communalises ethnic differences and hatred. The recollections of the past describe multiple levels of where Arjie is alienated from familiar discourses due to his identity. Though Arjie takes up a nostalgic rhetoric to structure his outlook as narrator, these nostalgic - of a fragmented history are undercut by his description of the sharply escalated tensions between Sinhalese and Tamil communities that eventually culminate in the symbolic and literal destruction of his and the subsequent exile from Sri Lanka. While examining th ways language dominates textual discourses which are rendered funny, and comparing its another a stabilizing but violent and castrating forces as imperialism and nationalism. The novel poses challenges to the British colonialism which framed modern Sri Lanka. The novel, Funny Boy, and sexual ideologies. Queen Victoria Academy, the school where Arjie studies before leaving Sri Lanka, can be seen as the nexus of these potent tendencies: the nationalist versus the separationist, the postcolonial versus the colonial, and the heteronormative versus the The novel includes six chapters/stories recounting the life of relocation to Canada following the 1983 riots that presented a direct physical threat to the lives of the Tamil minority. The novel opens in 1972, when Arjie is about seven years old. The f communal riots in Sri Lanka. The Tamil/Sinhalese struggle appears as an on-going cycle of also his relationship with his Sinhalese boyfriend Shehan. Triggered by a Tamil protest against the -grandfather died (ibid.), followed by the pogroms of 1971, 1977, 1981, and the outbreak of civil war in 1983 . Themes of queerness, homosexuality, ethinicity and postcolonialism have been explored throughout the novel. The term Gender usually refers to social or cultural distinctions and the development of a gender variant category is totally unacceptable. It is either treated as a defect or transvestism that needs to be corrected. The polarization of the sex and gender into what theori largely eradicated legitimate third or fourth gender roles. Those who do not behave in ways considered appropriate for their biological sex are regarded as transgendered, for they have crossed over the socially constructed boundaries of gender. Third gender roles and cross http://iaeme.com/Home/journal/IJM 1489 [email protected] Puja Sarmah dressing in traditional societies entails a system of multiple genders that can exist only outside dichotomous gender systems, which polarise sex, gender and sexuality into categories of male and female. Thus in a binary system androgyny becomes the only available alternative. ( Manisha 2) Movies, for instances, shows the ideal family where a boy meets a girl, and after many songs, dances and fights finally gets married to each other giving birth to a child a boy, of course). This represents a perfect family where the women are beautiful and submissive and males are in charge along with the fact that they are all straight leaving no room for gay or The boys and girls were discriminated and even they had their own The gender stereotypes that is imposed by his family, explicitly delimit the distinct worlds of boys and girls, leaving Arjie caught between the two worlds of boys and girls. For instance, Arjie always wanted to be a bride in the game played on the world of girls and due to which discovered the reality. Arjie's sexuality is negotiated merely within the confines of gender, male and female within these early incidences. His segregation from both the girls and boys indicates that Arjie himself occupies some third space in between these two worlds, but that third space is only defined as "funny" and never specified. (ibid.) There emerges a traumatic situation between Arjie as a gay young adult and the conservative society that does not accept him unfolds throughout the course of the story. His sibling, Diggy, and the other boys mock him for being too feminine, and his father forces him into a harsh new school to toughen him punishments for minor infractions, and Arjie must make an impossible choice as a result. As he grows older, Arjie becomes more aware of his growing attraction to men. Arjie is torn between his desire and the shame fostered by his conservative society. Although Arjie does have mentors and friends who accept him as he is, such as Radha Aunty and Jegan, these people ultimately leave him. The only true friend that Arjie has is his lover, Shehan, through whom Arjie learns to embrace his own sexuality as a gay boy. However, due to the increasing to flee the country as a refugee with the rest of his family. Cathy Caruth, in her work Unclaimed Experience – Trauma, Narrative and History discussed the theory of trauma in f the wound of the psyche, is an event that is originally experienced too unexpectedly and overwhelmingly to be fully known, and is unavailable to the unconscious until it inflicts itself again in repetitive actions and nightmares of the survivor. The theo neurologist Sigmund Freud, but later he abandoned his theory and shifted to the realm of psychoanalysis. incest); identification of the phenomenon of post-traumatic stress disorder in (Vietnam) war veterans; and awareness of the psychic scar inflicted by torture and genocide, especially in The ideas of trauma, memories of trauma are fundamentally important in shaping one individual as it causes further damage to the psyche. he by some type of shock, violence or unanticipated incident and it usually results from adverse life experiences that http://iaeme.com/Home/journal/IJM 1490 [email protected] 1996). And usually, there are diverse types of trauma such as complex trauma that includes exposure to traumatic events which are usually severe and invasive; post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma caused by sexual abuse, etc. As in the context of female bodies the trauma shapes the narrative, similarly while in the case of the queered bodies, the trauma emerges which reshapes the narrative of the discourse. Correspondently Buchi Emecheta was one of the first African women novelists to point out the various ways in which prevailing social norms and values deny women the chance to develop to their fullest potential. In novels like In the Ditch (1972), Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Joys of Motherhood (1979) and Double Yoke (1982), she portrays female characters who heroically struggle for survival and progress in the face of enormous odds placed in their way by an obdurate male-dominated social structure or patriarchy made up of fathers, husbands, brothers, lovers and bosses.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Sexual/Textual Tendencies in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny
    Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 44.2 September 2018: 199-224 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.201809_44(2).0008 Sexual/Textual Tendencies in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy Louis Lo Department of English National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan Abstract The word “funny” is examined as it is used throughout Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1994) from the early chapters describing the family’s domestic life, to the ways in which language dominating public and textual discourses is rendered funny. Through an examination of the multivalent meanings of the words “funny” and “tendencies” in the novel, its intertextual references, and allusions to British canonical literature, this paper explores how the novel’s “critical funniness” negotiates such forces as imperialism and nationalism, seemingly stabilizing, but also violent and castrating. Critical funniness poses challenges to the history of British colonialism that frames modern Sri Lanka. This paper shows how the text of Selvadurai’s novel resists the essentializing discourses implied in the country’s national and sexual ideologies. Keywords Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy, Sri Lankan Canadian literature, postcolonial theory, homosexuality, Henry Newbolt, British imperialism I wish to express my gratitude to Jeremy Tambling, who first introduced Funny Boy to me 12 years ago. His generous intellectual engagement was essential for the development of central ideas in this paper. I am indebted to Thomas Wall, Joel Swann, Kathleen Wyma, and the anonymous readers for their incisive feedback. Thanks also go to Kennedy Wong for his timely assistance. Finally, the present version of this paper would not exist were it not for the invaluable support and encouragement of Grace Cheng.
    [Show full text]
  • Indigenizing Sexuality and National Citizenship: Shyam Selvadurai's
    Indigenizing Sexuality and National Citizenship: Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens Heather Smyth The intersection of feminist and postcolonial critique has enabled us to understand some of the co-implications of gendering, sexuality, and postcolonial nation building. Anne McClintock, for instance, argues that nations “are historical practices through which social difference is both invented and performed” and that “nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference” (89; italics in original). Women’s reproduction is put to service for the nation in both concrete and symbolic ways: women reproduce ethnicity biologically (by bearing children) and symbolically (by representing core cultural values), and the injunction to women to reproduce within the norms of marriage and ethnic identification, or heterosexual endogamy, makes women also “reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups” (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 8–9; emphasis added). National identity may be routed through gender, sexuality, and class, such that “respectability” and bourgeois norms, including heterosexuality, are seen as essential to nationalism, perhaps most notably in nations seeking in- dependence from colonial power (Mosse; de Mel). Shyam Selvadurai’s historical novel Cinnamon Gardens, set in 1927–28 Ceylon, is a valuable contribution to the study of gender and sexuality in national discourses, for it explores in nuanced ways the roots of gender norms and policed sexuality in nation building. Cinnamon Gardens indigenizes Ceylonese/ Sri Lankan homosexuality not by invoking the available rich history of precolonial alternative sexualities in South Asia, but rather by tying sexuality to the novel’s other themes of nationalism, ethnic conflict, and women’s emancipation.
    [Show full text]
  • Indi@Logs Vol 8 2021, Pp 11-28, ISSN: 2339-8523
    Indi@logs Vol 8 2021, pp 11-28, ISSN: 2339-8523 https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/indialogs.178 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “IS GANDHI THE HERO?”: A REAPPRAISAL OF GANDHI’S VIEWS ABOUT WOMEN IN DEEPA MEHTA’S WATER PILAR SOMACARRERA-ÍÑIGO Universidad Autónoma de Madrid [email protected] Received: 26-11-2020 Accepted: 31-01-2021 ABSTRACT Set in 1938 against the backdrop of India’s anti-colonial movement led by Gandhi, the film Water (2005) by Deepa Mehta crudely exposes one of the most demeaning aspects of the patriarchal ideology of Hinduism: the custom of condemning widows to a life of self-denial and deprivation at the ashrams. Mehta has remarked that figures like Gandhi have inspired people throughout the ages. Nonetheless, in this essay I argue that under an apparent admiration for the figure of Gandhi in the context of the emancipation of India in general and widows in particular, Water questions whether Gandhi’s doctrines about the liberation of women were effective or whether, on the contrary, they contributed to restricting women to the private realm by turning them into personifications of the Indian nation. In this context of submission and oppression of women in India, Gandhi did try to improve their conditions though he was convinced that gender is destiny and that women’s chastity is connected to India’s national honour. I argue that Mehta’s film undermines Gandhi’s idealism by presenting images of him and dialogues in which he is the topic. As a methodological approach, I propose a dialogic (Bahktin 1981) reading of the filmic text which analyses how a polyphony of voices praise and disparage the figure of Gandhi in Water.
    [Show full text]
  • Shyam Selvadurai: Multiple Identities
    MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE Shyam Selvadurai: Multiple identities Bachelor thesis Brno 2015 Superviser: PhDr. Irena Přibylová, Ph.D. Written by: Kateřina Halfarová Prohlášení Prohlašuji, že jsem závěrečnou bakalářskou práci vypracovala samostatně, s využitím pouze citovaných literárních pramenů, dalších informací a zdrojů v souladu s Disciplinárním řádem pro studenty Pedagogické fakulty Masarykovy univerzity a se zákonem č. 121/2000 Sb., o právu autorském, o právech souvisejících s právem autorským a o změně některých zákonů (autorský zákon), ve znění pozdějších předpisů. ………………………… Kateřina Halfarová 2 Acknowledgment I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor PhDr. Irena Přibylová, Ph.D. for her inspiration, support, valuable advice, and time she devoted to me. I am very thankful for her guidance that helped me finish my thesis. 3 Anotace Bakalářská práce „Shyam Selvadurai: multiple identities“ se zabývá vlivem střetu kultur na hlavní hrdiny knihy Swimming in the Monsoon Sea napsanou Shyamem Selvaduraiem. Hlavním cílem práce je zjistit, zda a eventuálně jak, střet kultur ovlivňuje vývoj hrdinů knihy v jejich dospívajícím věku. Zda má multikulturalismus dopad na změnu stávající identity. Teoretická část práce se věnuje popisem multikulturalismu jako celku, multikulturní literatuře se zaměřením na autory pocházející z jižní Asie, protože autor rozebírané knihy pochází ze Srí Lanky. Další kapitoly jsou věnovány přímo autorovi Shyamu Selvadurai a jeho knize Swimming in the Monsoon Sea. Praktická část bakalářské práce analyzuje román a zaměřuje se na vývoj hrdinů v důsledku střetu kultur v oblasti rodiny, školy, náboženství, kultury, jazyka a osobního života. Klíčová slova Multikulturalismus; identita; literatura pro dospívající čtenáře; Shyam Selvadurai; střet kultur; Swimming in the Monsoon Sea.
    [Show full text]
  • Diaspora, Law and Literature Law & Literature
    Diaspora, Law and Literature Law & Literature Edited by Daniela Carpi and Klaus Stierstorfer Volume 12 Diaspora, Law and Literature Edited by Daniela Carpi and Klaus Stierstorfer An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License, as of February 23, 2017. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. ISBN 978-3-11-048541-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-048925-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-048821-0 ISSN 2191-8457 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com TableofContents DanielaCarpi Foreword VII Klaus Stierstorfer Introduction: Exploringthe InterfaceofDiaspora, Law and Literature 1 Pier Giuseppe Monateri Diaspora, the West and the Law The Birth of Christian Literaturethrough the LettersofPaul as the End of Diaspora 7 Riccardo Baldissone
    [Show full text]
  • 2015 Tamil Studies Symposium at York University
    TAMIL STUDIES SYMPOSIUM at YORK UNIVERSITY Friday, 1 May 2015 10 am to 12:00 pm| Room 280A, Second Floor, York Lanes | York University Mental Health and Our Tamil Youth Bramilee Dhayanandhan (York University/CAMH) Trauma and Solidarity Between Indigenous and Tamil Youth Jesse Thistle (York University, University of Waterloo, Researcher for First Story) Hyphenated Self: My Identity ‘Unveiled’ post 9/11, post 2009 Fathima Nizamdeen (University of Toronto) Outside the Queer Mainstream N. Gitanjali Lena (LGBT Youth Line) Moderator: Vasuki Shanmuganathan (University of Toronto) Beyond Refuge: Shaping Tamil Studies in the Present 12:30 to 6:30 pm| Room 519, Fifth Floor, Kaneff Tower | York University 12:30 to 1:00 Welcome 1:00 to 2:30 Complicating Tamil‐ness at Home and in Diaspora Moderator: R. Cheran (University of Windsor) Caught Between Rebels and Armies: Competing Nationalisms and Anti‐Muslim Violence in Sri Lanka Amarnath Amarasingham (Dalhousie University) and Shobana Xavier (Wilfrid Laurier University) Invisible Diasporas: Can the Non‐Anglophone Diasporas Speak? Sinthujan Varatharajah (University College London) Sāyavēr Red and Slavery in Jaffna: A Social History of Commodity, Caste and Colonialism Mark Balmforth (Columbia University) Men and Ghosts: Reading Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts as Truth Claim Arun Nedra Rodrigo (York University) 2:30 to 4:00 The Ocean Lady, The MV Sunsea and the Shrinking Rights of Tamil Asylum Seekers in Canada Moderator: Jennifer Hyndman (York University) Don't rock the boat: discourses on the arrival of Tamil refugees to Canada by boat Harini Sivalingam (York University) Tamil Boat People: Bars and Barriers to Asylum in Comparative Context Sharry Aiken (Queen’s University) People Smuggling and the Erosion of the Right to Seek Asylum in Canada: Appulonappa et al v.
    [Show full text]
  • Downloads/Wiveca S.Pdf>
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sussex Research Online Excerpt from WRITING SRI LANKA LITERATURE, RESISTANCE AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE MINOLI SALGADO (ROUTLEDGE 2007) PART I pp. 9-38 1 Literature and Territoriality: Boundary Marking as a Critical Paradigm Etymologically unsettled, ‘territory’ derives from both terra (earth) and terrēre (to frighten) whence territorium, ‘a place from which people are frightened off’. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culturei Sri Lankan literature in English constitutes an emergent canon of writing that has yet to find settlement in the field of postcolonial studies. ii It occupies an uncertain territory, which, in recent years, has itself been marked by the competing ethnic nationalisms of civil war and of contestatory constructions of home and belonging. The upsurge of literary production in English in the last thirty years has corresponded with the dynamic growth of postcolonial studies from the metropolitan centre, the international acclaim granted to writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Romesh Gunesekera, and, as significantly, with a period of heightened political unrest in Sri Lanka - a context of production and reception that is shaped by a politics of affiliation and competing claims to cultural authority. It is worth reminding ourselves that unlike most postcolonial nations, Sri Lanka’s national consciousness developed significantly after Independence and did so along communal lines.iii The 1950s witnessed the dramatic decline of Ceylonese or multi-ethnic Sri Lankan nationalism in favour of Sinhala linguistic nationalism along with the sharpening of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalismiv – a combination that culminated in the communal violence of 1983 and the start of the military conflict.
    [Show full text]
  • Because Most People Marry Their Own Kind: a Reading of Selvadurai
    Because Most People Marry Their Own Kind: A Reading of Shyam Selvadurai's uTunny Boy" R. RAJ RAO JT\ NEW PHASE has begun in writing from the Indian subconti• nent with the emergence of the Sri Lankan novelist Romesh Gunesekera, whose novel Reef ( 1994) was recently on the Booker Prize shortlist. Gunesekera describes Reef as a story of a society in transition and as a narrative that "illuminated the political, moral and emotional realities we all live by, whatever our circumstances and our obsessions" (Literature Matters 3). Less well-known than Gunesekera is another contemporary novelist from Sri Lanka, Shyam Selvadurai, whose first novel, Funny Boy ( 1994), was pub• lished in 1994 by Jonathan Cape, and reprinted by Penguin Books in India. Selvadurai, born in Colombo in 1965, left Sri Lanka after the 1983 riots in Colombo and settled with his family in Toronto, Canada. The year 1983 marks the beginning of the secessionist struggle in the island, in which the Tamils, mostly Hindu by faith, wanted to break away from the Sinhalese majority (mostly Buddhist), and form their own homeland in the north, in and around the province of Jaffna. I propose to look at Funny Boy, a novel with a Sri Lankan boy as its protagonist, against this political backdrop, from the angles of race, sexuality, and gender, and to show that a subaltern identi• fication exists between minorities in the three groups, who con• stitute the "other" of the male fanatical self. What I mean is this: in each of the domains of race, sexuality, and gender, there are those who are empowered and those who are not; I use "male- ness" and the chauvinism associated with it as a metaphor to incorporate the other two categories of race and sexuality (thereby hinting at a fusion), and I invent the phrase "male fanatical self to explore the notion of the self as empowered, the ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 28:1, January 1997 118 R.
    [Show full text]
  • July / August 2017 Discussion Guide
    JULY / AUGUST 2017 BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION GUIDE DISCUSSION GUIDE FUNNY BOY BY SHYAM SELVADURAI CHRISTOPHER DIRADDO RECOMMENDED BY TAKE ACTION! Call on Russian authorities to protect journalists and other BOOK CLUB human rights defenders —See page 10 Elena Milashina, journalist Moscow-based newspaper Novaya Gazeta The Amnesty International Book Club is pleased to Thank you for being part of the Amnesty International announce our July/August title Funny Boy by Shyam Book Club. We appreciate your interest and would Selvadurai. This title has been recommended by guest love to hear from you with any questions, suggestions reader Christopher DiRaddo, with whom you will explore or comments you may have. Just send us an email at the novel and read beyond the book to learn more about [email protected]. LGBTI issues that Amnesty works hard to bring to light. We think you will really enjoy Funny Boy. Happy reading! In this guide, you will find DiRaddo’s reflection on the book, as well as discussion questions, an Amnesty Background section, and an action you can take to call on Chechnya to stop abducting, killing, and torturing About Amnesty International men believed to be gay. Set in the mannered, lush world of upper middle Amnesty International is a global movement of more than seven million supporters, members and activists in over 150 countries class Tamils in Sri Lanka, Funny Boy, though not and territories who campaign to end grave abuses of human rights. autobiographical, draws on Selvadurai’s experience of being gay in Sri Lanka and growing up during the Our vision is for all people to enjoy all the rights enshrined in the escalating violence between the Buddhist Sinhala Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international majority and Hindu Tamil minority in the 1970’s and early human rights standards.
    [Show full text]
  • Selvadurai, Shyam (B
    Selvadurai, Shyam (b. 1965) by Deborah Hunn Encyclopedia Copyright © 2015, glbtq, Inc. Entry Copyright © 2006 glbtq, Inc. Reprinted from http://www.glbtq.com Shyam Selvadurai. Photograph by Karen Although the literary output of Sri Lankan-Canadian gay writer Shyam Selvadurai has Fernandez courtesy Random House. been relatively modest thus far, the style, wit, and perspicacity of his three novels, Funny Boy (1994), Cinnamon Gardens (1999), and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2005), insure his place as a significant figure in post-colonial and gay writing. Selvadurai was born in 1965 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the son of a Sinhalese mother and a Tamil father, members of conflicting ethnic groups whose troubles form a major theme in his work. Ethnic riots in 1983 drove the family to immigrate to Canada where Selvadurai studied creative and professional writing as part of a Bachelor of Fine Arts program at York University. Upon graduation he produced work for magazines and television before scoring success with his first novel, Funny Boy, published in 1994, which won the W. H. Smith/Books in Canada first novel award and the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Men's Fiction. Funny Boy traces the story of Arjie as he grows from ridiculed "funny boy" more content to dress up as "bride-bride" with his female cousins than play cricket with the males, to an intelligent, reflective teenager dangerously awakened by his first love, rebellious schoolmate Shehan. The novel gives a brilliant portrait of the anxieties aroused by gender nonconformity, especially in patriarchal societies. Arjie's father is especially concerned by his son's "tendencies." Arjie's sexuality is crucial both to the coming-of-age story and, in terms of the anxiety it provokes in others, to the political conflict against which it is presented.
    [Show full text]
  • Funny Boy and the Pleasure of Breaking Rules: Bending Genre and Gender in “The Best School of All”
    Postcolonial Text, Vol 10, No 3 & 4 (2015) Funny Boy and the Pleasure of Breaking Rules: Bending Genre and Gender in “The Best School of All” Kaustav Bakshi Jadavpur University, Kolkata Introduction “The Best School of All,” which is the fifth of the six stories that constitute Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, can be read independent of the novel. Apart from one fleeting reference to past events—“I was reminded of things I had seen happen to other people, like Jegan, or even Radha Aunty, who, in their own way, had experienced injustice”(FB 274)—“The Best School” is a self-contained story. The pleasure in reading “The Best School” independent of the novel is to discover in it the familiarity of the school story, one of the most popular subgenres in children’s literature. The pleasure of identifying a generic code lies in observing how the expected end is reached or subverted; and “The Best School” from the very outset instigates this curiosity. I shall argue the importance of locating “The Best School”in the tradition of the generic school story, and identifying the departures from it; the departures signal the emergence of a dialogic text, as opposed to the predominantly monologic form of traditional school stories as pontifical conduct books targeting children. When located within the tradition of this colonial genre, “The Best School” engenders a discourse of resistance from within, not only as an exemplary postcolonial diasporic text, but also as a disruptive queer narrative that effectively transcribes the homoerotic onto a site of approved homosociality. “The Best School,” therefore, not only breaks rules by transfiguring an overtly masculinist genre to accommodate queer desires; it also opens up a dialogic space by confronting authoritative discourses on a colonial system of values perpetuated through the educational institutions, compulsory heterosexuality, and ethnocentric nationalism of the postcolonial nation-state.
    [Show full text]
  • Translating Taboo: Homosexuality and Violence in Shyam Selvadurai’S Funny Boy and Sugathapala De Silva’S Amutu Ilandariya
    Salwatura Manuratne (SUNY Buffalo) Translating Taboo: Homosexuality and Violence in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Sugathapala de Silva’s Amutu Ilandariya Shyam Selvadurai’s debut novel Funny Boy (1994) has achieved cult-status among readers of Sri Lankan English literature despite its highly taboo subject matter. Its two key themes, homosexuality and violence against Tamils in Sri Lanka, remain controversial and surrounded by silence. In Sri Lanka, positive representations of homosexuality remain marginal in mainstream literature. Literary representations of Sinhalese mob-violence, a recurrent theme in the novel, are negligible in the Sinhala literary scene. In 2002, the veteran translator and dramatist Sugathapala de Silva published a Sinhalese translation of the novel Funny Boy titled “Amutu Ilandariya,” introducing the novel to Sinhalese readers. Like its English counterpart, the Sinhalese translation too seems to be enjoying widespread popularity, and readers seem to remain unperturbed by its controversial material. Theories that emphasize the analogy between postcolonial writing and translation consider translation as an act of “carry over” (the literal meaning of translation) as applying to both postcolonial writing and translation theory. But this theory does not anticipate the challenges of translating a postcolonial text rooted in local culture, but written in a local variety of English, Standard Sri Lankan English. Amutu Ilandariya is an intra-national, but inter-racial and inter-class translation, and the main challenge for the translator is working out the language in which the taboos surrounding sexual and racial identity can be rendered in a native language. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s key insight that the core principle of translation is the kinship between languages rather the communication of meaning, this paper argues that the translation of taboo remains a fruitful site to examine the way two languages within a local culture negotiate strategies to circumvent political and sexual prohibitions.
    [Show full text]