An Interview with Shyam Selvadurai by Jeff Colvin
Internationally acclaimed writer Shyam Selvadurai leads a busy life in Toronto. In addition to teaching, mentoring students, and working on his own writing, he serves as Associate Director, Narrative, at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity which is how I first met him. Shyam was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka to a Sinhalese mother and Tamil father and was 19 when he left Sri Lanka in 1983 for Canada, where he studied theater directing and playwriting at York University and later received an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. His debut novel, Funny Boy (1994), was a national bestseller in Canada where it won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. In the U.S., Funny Boy was awarded the Lambda Literary Award, and named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Shyam co-wrote the screenplay for the film version of Funny Boy with the award-winning filmmaker Deepa Mehta, who also directed. His other novels include Cinnamon Gardens (1998) which was shortlisted for the Trillium Award, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2006), and The Hungry Ghosts (2013). Selvadurai has also edited two anthologies of South Asian and Sri Lankan literature, Story-Wallah!: A Celebration of South Asian Fiction (2004) and Many Roads Through Paradise (2014). His books have been published in the US, the UK, and India, and published in translation in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, and Israel.
Let’s begin with your most recent novel The Hungry Ghosts. The title conjures up ideas of spiritual presences. I imagine Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Michael Ondaatje’s Anhil’s Ghost or even Shakespeare’s Hamlet, not so much for how these storytellers present or evoke ghosts and spirits, but how they complicate and expand their tales beyond the literal, especially with ideas of trauma past and present, real, and imagined. How did you come up with the title? Did you give serious consideration to other titles? What role, if any, did history and trauma play in your decision?
That’s interesting you mention these two works. I wasn’t thinking of them when I wrote my novel, but I can see what you mean about their similarity to mine. For myself, I was trying to see how Buddhist concepts—expressed narratively through stories but also through mythical beings, like the hungry ghosts—could be made relevant in a modern context. Buddhism is often thought of, particularly in the West, as some mystical Eastern philosophy but actually it’s just a set of guidelines for living a human life and is very practical. Moreover, what is seldom known is that Buddhism is an urban religion and not a forest religion and arose out of the problems of urbanization during the Buddha’s time, particularly the rapid growth of materialism. The Buddha sought to address these issues through his philosophy. His monasteries were either in urban centers or just outside them. The first lay person he went to preach to after enlightenment was the Emperor Bimbisara, who at that time would be the equivalent of the US President in terms of his power and influence over that part of India.
What I liked about the hungry ghosts was their liminality. They linger on the edge between worlds and don’t quite belong in either. This felt very much like both the immigrant experience, but also the experience of BIPOC queer people. I also like that they embody the idea of the impossibility of ever satisfying one’s desires—as they can never feed their enormous bellies because their mouths are the size of the eye of a needle. The notion of trauma, or trauma carried from generation to generation, from country to country, is not really tied to hungry ghosts. Rather, I used the concept of karma and reincarnation to express this. Just like the way one carries one’s karma from one life to the other, an immigrant carries their past trauma into their new life.
This is not your first published novel, however it continues many of the powerful preoccupations of your earlier work, particularly those in your debut novel, Funny Boy. Not the least of these preoccupations is characters whose lives unfold against larger political and cultural events. The Hungry Ghosts is set against the backdrop of heightened conflicts between the Tamil and Sinhalese factions in Sri Lanka. How soon into the writing did you decide the role that these conflicts would play in the novel? How has your own familial history shaped how you present these conflicts?
I don’t think there was ever a time when I didn’t think the civil war would be part of any contemporary work of mine. Even my historical novel Cinnamon Gardens shows the beginnings of this conflict in the 1920s. I guess the main reason for this is that my own life and the lives of my family and friends were powerfully affected by the civil war that forced us to leave Sri Lanka and come to Canada. So, in that sense, the political has always felt personal. However, I think politics is like salt. The correct amount gives a nice flavor to a story, but too much spoils the story. What I mean is that one shouldn’t hector the reader or create situations or characters just to narrate the history of the civil war. The civil war must be intrinsic to the character’s emotional development and what they seek. It must be part of their personal journey.
I was taken with the character Aacho, the powerfully complicated grandmother of the main character, Shivan. Certainly, how she dresses and the food that she serves say important things about how she wants to be seen in society and her familial relationships. But I was especially taken with how confidently she conducts her business affairs and by her family lineage. She is a powerfully-rendered character whose life reflects many of the larger cultural forces at play in Sri Lanka and in Canada. Is the grandmother based on characters from your own life? Was it difficult to write the not-so-pleasant aspects of her personality?
She is based on a number of women of that generation who were strong like that. My grandmother was one of them. I didn’t find it hard to write the negative aspects of her character because, from the beginning, she marched onto the pages, fully formed. All I had to do was give her room to move and grow. It felt very satisfying to write her and, despite her flaws, I am very fond of her.
Many reviewers and critics extol the merits of books that speak to contemporary issues and reach wide audiences. How important are these aspects of a book’s reception to you?
I don’t write for critics and reviewers, nor do I cater to a wider audience (by which one usually means a white audience). My work is always addressed to a very small audience: Sri Lankan readers reading in English. And yet I know that by some strange alchemy, the more particular you are, the more universal you end up becoming. All the writers I love address a small readership even though they have become so widely read like Tolstoy, Toni Morrison, etc.
I was taken with how vividly you render parts of Toronto and Colombo, Sri Lanka? Was one of the two settings more difficult to render?
Yes, Toronto was more difficult because it was new to write about. I’d already had experience writing about contemporary Sri Lanka in Funny Boy, so I knew the territory well. Also, I struggled for a long time over how to write about those inner ring suburbs where immigrants end up these days. They truly are no man’s lands, and yet people put down roots in them, and lives are led there. I think I didn’t know what to do about the lack of a main street, until I realized the obvious: the mall is the main street. Also, I think that once I discovered the notion that these immigrants are the new pioneers, then I was able to match the imagery of the suburb I was writing about to imagery from pioneer novels: for example, the tall towers remind Shivan of a forest, and then there is the fierceness of the snowstorms.
One journalist writing about the film adaptation of Funny Boy said, “For a Tamil diaspora escaping an ethnic war in Sri Lanka and feeling alienated in our new homes, Selvadurai’s debut novel was our only representation in the broader culture.” Do you feel the need to represent parts of Sri Lankan culture to the broader culture? If so which aspects of the culture are most important to you to represent in your work?
As I’ve said above, I don’t really address the wider white audience. Yet at the same time I can’t pretend innocence to the fact that if they read my novel, that is the image of Sri Lanka they will take with them. This wouldn’t matter if they didn’t have so much power over the lives of us BIPOC people. But they do, their views and opinions have power and weight.
But to let this notion in when I am actually writing the book would be fatal. I write my book in a sort of cocoon and then figure out what to do about its reception. One thing I never do is present myself as a community spokesperson. The novels are very intimate and set in a very small subgroup of Sri Lankans: upper middle class, cosmopolitan Sri Lankans in Colombo. I would hope that the discerning reader would see this and not imagine I am speaking for all Sri Lankans.
The Hungry Ghosts has been described as a novel that shows how racial, political, and sexual differences can tear apart a country and the human heart. You explore the last of these aspects through your main character, Shivan Rassiah, who is gay. Was he easy or difficult to write? Will you continue to work with these themes in future work?
He too came fairly easily. Once I could hear his narrative voice, he came alive on the page. The gay theme was also present in my protagonist Arjie’s story in Funny Boy, but I wanted to take the experience of being gay and Sri Lankan into the immigrant experience, too. I plan to keep addressing gay themes in my novels when I feel I have something to say about being gay that is relevant to the specific novel I am working on.
Your writing has been primarily anchored in Sri Lanka and Canada, two places shaped by the histories of empire. Implicitly and explicitly, how do you engage with the historical fact of empire in your work?
In Cinnamon Gardens, I engage directly with empire because it is set at that moment when Sri Lanka started to break from the British, but in my other work empire was not a big part of those novels, apart from the fact that the characters speak English and read Western novels and see Western films. I think this is partly because it was real to my life. Unlike in my father’s and grandfather’s generation, I didn’t have white teachers or a white principal at school, nor did my father have a white boss, nor did we have a white priest at church. So without that personal interaction, colonialism and empire felt like a distant thing. Sure the school I went to, like the school Arjie and Shivan goes to, is very much founded on the principles and traditions of English public schools, and there is a lot of westernization in them. And some of this I portray ironically. Yet when I was in school, or even read Western novels or saw Western films, I didn’t think, “Oh this is a symbol of my domination or indoctrination.” It just felt like a natural part of my life and the traditions felt like they were ours and part of the traditions of, say, my school. For example, we nicknamed our English teacher Madame Defarge after the character in Tale of Two Cities which we were reading at that time. And that became her nickname, and we would find excuses to mention Madame Defarge and hear her say the name and then kill ourselves laughing—or trying not to laugh. We were schoolboys being little shits and having fun, not schoolboys thinking “Oh here I am, a colonized subject.” In that way, we owned the text and made it ours.
By not mentioning empire in my contemporary novels, I also wanted to avoid another issue: the fact that politicians still, to this day, blame the colonial master, as a way to deflect from the terrible things they have done to the country. So, I didn’t want to cater to that; I didn’t want to be a part of it. I think we have made a great mess of our country all on our own, and must take responsibility for this without blaming the British at this point.
Can you talk about what you are working on now?
Yes, I am just finishing up the line edits on a novel called Mansions of the Moon. It is a historical novel about the Buddha’s wife, Yasodhara and will be out in spring 2021. Quite a departure for me in one sense, but it also continues what I started in The Hungry Ghosts—looking at the way Buddhist concepts, expressed in narrative tropes and character types in the old Buddhist stories, might be melded with the Western realist novel to make a hybrid form.
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Jeffrey Colvin’s debut novel, Africaville, was awarded a 2020 Honor Fiction Prize by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction. The French edition was longlisted for the European literary prize, Les Afriques. A graduate of the US Naval Academy and Columbia, Jeffrey is an assistant editor at Narrative magazine and was recently the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown fellow at Brown University.
