Brotherless Night

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Retro Active: Bill Clinton can still work a crowd like no other Democrat -- which is both a good and bad thing." The American Prospect. September 16, 2003. I drew on so many different books. Another way to talk about it would be to talk about nonfiction. There’s a book by a guy named Gordon Weiss called The Cage, which has a really good amount of history in it and is written for lay readers. And then my friend Rohini Mohan wrote an astonishing nonfiction book called The Seasons of Trouble that is totally brilliant. There’s now so many excellent books that it’s impossible to have an exhaustive list. Here there is no righteous way to fight a pure fight for justice. Sashi loses her brothers and friends to the Tamil Tigers, the revolutionary group rising up in response to the oppression forced upon them by the Sinhalese majority. As a medical student she is recruited to help but discovers the leaders stooping to tactics no better than the enemies they are fighting.

In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak of only two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second. [p. 3] In 2021, she learned she has a debilitating motor disability in her hands, which makes it hard for her to write. For a while, she used voice recognition software, but she says that while it's good for composition, it's terrible for revision.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. 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.

VG: I can’t think of many Sri Lankan families the war has not affected. Sure, the war has affected my family. My father in particular comes from Jaffna, and Jaffna has of course been incredibly affected by the war. My father left Sri Lanka because he anticipated this violence. But those who are really affected are those who were left behind. V. V. Ganeshananthan: It took me a long time to understand anything about the origins of the conflict. I think that when you’re a kid and your parents tell you a certain set of stories, and parts of those stories are true and maybe also parts of those stories are colored by their perspectives a little–which isn’t to say what my parents told me wasn’t true–but it wasn’t exactly the only truth there was. So one of the things I did when I was researching the book was to read a whole bunch of books about Sri Lanka and to try and figure out exactly what historians thought was the defining truth. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were caught between the armies while the United Nations and the world watched without sending aid. In Ukraine, as in other wars, the full history will take years to tell and it will be told by women." The Los Angeles Times. December 27, 2022.

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A beautiful first novel. This intricately woven tale, with its universal themes of love and estrangement, presents an exciting new voice in American literature.” I was fortunate that there are a lot of books about this time period, many of which are specifically in university libraries. And I’ve taught in universities off and on. I’ve taught college and university since basically the fall of 2008. I’ve had access to a lot of different libraries in different places, so I made use of that. Even before that, as a graduate student, I remember discovering the University of Iowa had an enormous number of books about Sri Lankan history, which was, for some reason, a surprise to me. And that was the moment I began to understand the capacity of university libraries, which I’m so grateful for. Rather than sort of pursue a political agenda, first I think that the point is to have good fiction, and if some sort of statement about morality emerges from that, that’s great. But my priority was to make a story that revealed something, and I didn’t necessarily want what it was revealing to be so plain. It is not new to see lives obliterated by war. In “Brotherless Night” this pain is strikingly brought to life through the eyes of Sashi, a beautifully realized character who reminds us horror is often suffered by humanity in places not necessarily illuminated by our newsfeed or social media trends. SP: One of the most important characters is based on a real person, Rajani Thiranagama . How did her narrative become such an important part of this book?

Ganeshananthan is a superb writer...I wept at many points in this novel and I also wept when it was over' Sunday Times VG: It was really hard, and there are certainly things I wish I could have included that somehow didn’t fit. If it wasn’t organic to the narrative, it didn’t necessarily happen. The family in the book is a Jaffna Tamil family, and so there isn’t, for example, really the voice of the Sri Lankan Muslim in the novel. Brotherless Night is my favorite kind of novel, one so rich and full of movement that it's only later I realize how much I have learned. V. V. Ganeshananthan drew me in from the very first line, and the intricacies of her characters' lives made it easy to stay Sara Novic, New York Times bestselling author of TRUE BIZa careful, vivid exploration of what's lost within a community when life and thought collapse toward binary conflict [...] a novel for our own country in this odd time. New Yorker In spite of these grave difficulties, the novel charts Sashi’s growth into political consciousness. She fulfills her departed brother’s dream by eventually matriculating in the medical college at Jaffna. While at medical school, she is recruited by K to provide medical assistance at a clinic run by the Tigers. As Sashi gets more intimately acquainted with the operations of the Tigers, she is increasingly disillusioned by their unethical actions, their hunger for power, killing of members of other Tamil militant groups, and ruthless crushing of all dissent. She realizes that her own brother, Dayalan, is complicit in these atrocities. AM: The story reflects on the subject of women in wartime. There are plenty of strong female characters, including Sashi herself. There is a feminist reading group at the university that Sashi joins, where they read Kumari Jayawardena’s Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. One of the unauthorised Reports that circulate is about sexual violence and the status of women; it calls Tamil society to account for its conservative posture towards women. And the story unflinchingly covers the brutal fact of rape during wartime, including by the Indian peacekeeping forces. Can you say something about why this subject is so important? Ganeshananthan worked on Brotherless Night for nearly 20 years before its publication on January 3, 2023. [6] The novel follows sixteen-year-old Sashikala "Sashi" whose dream of becoming a doctor is disrupted when her four brothers are swept up by the early years of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Sashi begins work at a field hospital for the minority Tamil militants before she is convinced by a feminist Tamil medical school professor to join her dangerous journey documenting human rights violations. [7] Bibliography [ edit ] Books [ edit ] Where is K? Where is he?” Seelan said more urgently, and then they realised that none of them knew.