Brotherless Night

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SM: What’s your personal stake in the book? It comes through, the passion that you have, the feeling for the characters. How necessary was this book for you to write?

Hundreds of thousands of civilians were caught between the armies while the United Nations and the world watched without sending aid. In the middle of all this, as Sashi is studying to become a doctor, there’s Seelan’s friend K, with whom Sashi’s relationship is neither romantic nor wholly platonic. K is the novel’s agent of chaos. He is the harbinger of transformation (even his first encounter with Sashi, thrillingly recounted in the first chapter, changes how she looks at herself) and that necessarily includes destruction. She was the Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan through 2014. [2] In 2015, she began teaching at the University of Minnesota. [2] Ganeshananthan will launch the book with a conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld at the Magers & Quinn bookstore in Minneapolis on Thursday, Jan. 26.So it’s been going on for about twenty-five years by most people’s count. But it’s important to realize that like any war, it’s the result of things that happened for decades before. The Sri Lankan government started discriminating against Tamils very shortly after the country gained independence from the British in the late 1940s. This has been well documented. The riots of 1958, for example. The war is really a culmination of previous events. It doesn’t justify the Tigers’ violence, but it does provide appropriate context. Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.” SP: I loved all the emotional appeals you made to your readers. Can you speak more to writing from such an intimate perspective and why you made that choice? ETA: I need to add just a few words; I cannot stop thinking about what I have read, learned and experienced, as though firsthand. Atrocities were committed by all involved—the government, the terrorist groups, the Indian peacekeepers and the UN that failed to act. In shining a light on all sides, the book is balanced and fair.

While Kumaran’s loved ones gather around him to say goodbye, Yalini traces her family’s roots–and the conflicts facing them as ethnic Tamils–through a series of marriages. Now, as Kumaran’s death and his daughter’s politically motivated nuptials edge closer, Yalini must decide where she stands. Ganeshananthan’s first novel, Love Marriage (2008), was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Smart money says that before this year’s awards season is over, Brotherless Nightwill receive more than a few nominations as well. Brotherless Night is an absolute triumph. It is a masterpiece, giving us one woman's perspective of the Sri Lankan Civil War, and simultaneously showing us how in that one perspective lies everything. It is the story of coming of age into a world that becomes increasingly fragmented and horrific, where every lesson comes at a painful cost, and every lovely memory seems to exact an exorbitant price. And yet despite the pain, there is so much beauty in this book, at a fundamental, granular level. Every sentence is stunning, bringing a complicated world and unforgettable characters to life. VG: My parents are Ceylon Tamils, which means that my mother’s uørand my father’s uørare both in Jaffna. My parents came to the United States in the 1970s, and there was quite a wave of immigration then. That’s very anecdotal, but my father, and my father’s classmates from medical school, many of them emigrated around that time.A beautifully written story of resilience, loss, human connection and survival amidst the complexities and violence of war Ms Magazine Lynne, a GR friend, recommended this to me. I trust her opinion. Once again, her advice has proved to be right! One of the novel’s big themes is the idea of multiple allegiances. Two of Sashi’s brothers end up joining the Tamil Tigers. As a medical student, she herself agrees to work at a field hospital to treat Tiger cadres. But she does not agree with their authoritarianism, nor their blatant targeting of other rebel groups as well as civilians they consider “traitors” (and as the novel shows us, this happens with increasingly smaller excuses/justifications provided). Of course, I don’t think I can say — as some people have said — that this was a war without witness or that nobody knows the stories. Obviously, that’s not true, because there were people there who witnessed it, and they’re Sri Lankan. And there are people who know these stories, and they’re Sri Lankan, too. And those were the people who told me these stories. Those were the people who wrote down these stories, so they were in books for me to find. Sashi's family is part of the Tamil minority, and as the bloody violence erupts, each of her brothers is pulled in different ways into the fight. Women in war

AM: Sashi has four brothers: steady, kind Niranjan, who has almost completed his doctor’s training; quiet Dayalan, who works at the public library and wants to become an engineer; hot-headed, popular Seelan, also at school; and the precocious youngest brother, Aran. The very early part of the book evokes their day-to-day family life on the cusp of the outbreak of the civil war, and then in the rest of the story, we see, through Sashi’s eyes, how the war affects each of her brothers as well as herself. The book thus shows the distinct ways in which the members of a well-to-do family, who happen to belong to an ethnic minority, are caught up in the conflict. In part, it seems to meditate on how individual agency is constrained by war and how the choices people face become limited and difficult. Is that a fair assessment? The author does a very good job of explaining the Sri Lankan civil war, which most people outside the region know little about, and I appreciated her historical rigor. I also appreciated the author's restraint. This book is filled with emotional moments, and I got to have those moments without the narrator telling me how to feel. As people lose family members and spouses, as they watch beloved people die by choice for the cause a lesser writer would have described their pain and sadness in great detail. But why? As a reader I don't want to read about feeling, I want to feel. The steadiness of the prose (which is not to say that it is cold or detached, just not overwrought) made me imagine and inhabit moments that I would have guessed were unimaginable. Empathy rather than schmaltz is a good thing. We meet the central protagonist, Sashi, at the age of sixteen. She spills boiling water over her body. A friend, passing by on the street, hears her screams. A medical student, he improvises, covering her burns with the whites of eggs. She too studies to become a doctor. To save lives, any person´s life, is what she wants to do. Her brothers are drawn into the Tamil Tigers terrorist movement. Saving life and terrorism are placed side by side. The exigencies of both are laid bare. VG: Yes. Often I don’t hear from them. I remember I mailed a letter to a cousin whose birthday it was one month, and she got the letter five months later after her birthday. And that’s a pretty mild example of what I mean.

VG: I think it’s easy to pay attention to people who are engaged in combat, and those are frequently men. In the case of the Tigers, there was also a women’s wing, and there has been some attention paid to that. That makes sense, but I think the brunt of the war was really faced by civilian women who were displaced, who were resisting militarization. I’ve seen its impact, and writing about the impact of militarization on civil life was very important to me. It seemed like a logical way to do that, in a way that would mean a lot to me, would be to write about it through experiences of women whose homes and families were ruptured by the militarization of the state, the militarization of Tamil militants, the militarization of so-called Indian peacekeepers, who were also responsible for committing some atrocities during that time. I also felt it had not really been written about, at least not very much in the lens of fiction. In both cases, I was presented with a very strong first-person voice I could just follow into the story. In that way, the process of writing was actually quite similar. My first novel was written under various kinds of guidance and supervision from other writers. Much of the first draft of Love Marriage was completed while I was in college and studying with Jamaica Kincaid, so she had a lot to do with how I thought about that book. Brotherless Night is a novel that I started as an MFA student, and then obviously, I completed it much later. So I had to learn how to work more independently after graduating and moving into the space of being a working writer. In 1981 Jaffna, sixteen-year-old Sashikala “Sashi” Kulenthiren dreams of becoming a doctor just like her eldest brother Niranjan and her late grandfather who was a renowned physician in Colombo. But as the civil war in Sri Lanka intensifies and violence ensues between the warring factions- the Sinhalese government and the Tamil militants who are fighting for an independent state free of persecution of the Tamils, life as she has known it shall be changed forever. When one of her brothers loses his life in an act of anti-Tamil violence and two of her brothers and a family friend join the “movement” Sashi finds herself making choices and being drawn into a life she had never imagined for herself- a medical student also working as a medic for those serving in the movement. As she bears witness to the politics, the violence, and the activism of the 1980s she eventually embarks on exposing the true plight of civilians caught in the crossfire between the warring factions of the Sinhalese government, Tamil militants and the Indian peacekeeping forces through the written word with the help of one of her professors taking risks that could endanger her life and those of her associates.

Ganeshananthan graduated from Harvard College in 2002, where she served as managing editor of The Harvard Crimson, and later earned her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in 2005. In 2007, she earned another master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in arts and culture journalism. You wait here for me,” Niranjan said, his face a stone. “There isn’t time to argue. Just listen for once, will you?” Then he turned to Dayalan and my father.The book takes us to a first-hand account of the horrors of war. As painful as this story is to read, it's even more frightening that this happened. Sri Lankans were a part of this horrific war that lasted three decades and never once did they receive any aid from the United Nations. And I think I often have said to my students ‘read your work aloud to yourself,’ but, like any teacher, I am sometimes a hypocrite. And so, in this instance, I had the great benefit of: No, I was forced to do that. And I think that that also just kind of turned the screws on the prose.”