Presentation

Imagine! living in such tough circumstances, where the very concept of expressing
one-self; be it poetically, metaphorically or sensually, is considered taboo by the
made-up rules of society. Shyam Selvadurai depicts this exact scenario, in his book
‘Funny Boy’. Rife in the middle of an ongoing civil war between the Tamils and
Sinhalese groups of Sri Lanka, is our cast of characters beaten and bruised by the
happenings of their personal lives and the hostile environment they reside in.
Funny boy, written by Shyam Selvadurai, is an engrossing tale that tackles the
topics of ethnic conflict as well as apartheid. In addition, the primary focus of this
paper is on the way in which the Sinhalese and Tamil characters in the book serve
as focal points for the unfolding of the country's ethnic conflict. It's a far more
intricate story than that, with multiple themes in various aspects on several levels,
the back bone of which is an ethnic catastrophe. In addition to this, he has utilised
the theme in such a manner that has made it possible for the protagonist to find a
different path in the process of discovering his identity as a comedic individual.
The author Selvadurai's goal in writing the novel funny boy was to shed light on
the racial tensions that existed in Sri Lanka at the time.
The book deals in two significant themes; gender and ethnic crisis. These crises are
often characterized by deep-rooted historical, cultural, and social inequalities that
affect different groups in distinct ways. Selvadurai has masterfully shown this in a
very impactful manner in his novel funny boy. In many cases, gender and ethnic
discrimination intersect, leading to compounded forms of marginalization and
exclusion. These crises have far-reaching implications for individuals and society,
including increased violence, social unrest, and economic instability.
Ethnic crisis as a term designates a sense of collective belonging, which could be
based on common descent, language, history, culture, race or religion. In funny
boy ethnic crisis and ethnical conflicts are constantly present, and they play a
major part in how the characters live their lives. Arjun Chelvaratnam’s queer body
and gender play in the novel dislocates the neat identity categories imposed upon
the citizen by the nation.
When referring to a group of people, the term "ethnic crisis" denotes a strong
feeling of solidarity based on shared characteristics such as ancestry, language,
history, culture, race, or religion. Ethnic crisis and ethnic disputes are pervasive in
funny boy and have a significant impact on the lives of the characters. As a result,
the violent history of the country is crucial to comprehending the novel. Different
groups in Sri Lanka can be identified from one another based on their ethnicity,
religion, and spoken language. There are, however, two major ethnic groups who
call Sri Lanka home: the Sinhalese and the Tamils. Between the years 1000 and
1400, people survived with as little strife as possible. The Tamils did not begin to
feel unfairly discriminated until the British arrived and split the country. It was
after the British withdrawal in 1948 that the community conflict became
entrenched. The Sinhalese mobs' attacks on the Tamil separatists escalated in 1981.
The orders had been to go to Jaffna and put down the Tamil movement there so
that they wouldn't win their independence or be able to enter Eelam. There was a
rise in militancy and occupation in Jaffna. After raids on villages that sheltered
Tamils and sexual exploitation of women, thousands of people fled to Christian
missionary convents. Consequently, the Tamil people were uprooted from their
homeland. In his book ambivalence at the site of authority, the raging dispute over
the figure of Arjie as a witness of enslavement suffered by many different groups,
including but not limited to gays and women, at the hands of the majority
Sinhalese. As a result, his concept of home becomes a safe haven from the racial
discrimination he faces in Sri Lanka. Simply put, he attaches a great deal of
significance to this location. When he is expelled, he will lose his safe haven.
There are two approaches to quantify the effects of losing a home. First, when
Arije is fighting with his own homosexual emotions, he learns that home will not
be a safe haven. When he comes to terms with his sexuality, his family represents
the oppressors, and his own home takes on the characteristics of a sex- and gender
specific space. Secondly, at the novel's conclusion, he will know what it's like to be
homeless. This is because the Sinhalese had stolen from the family by torching
their home, leaving them with nowhere to go and no means of rebuilding.
This paper aims to contextualise Shyam Selvadurai’s funny boy as a novel that
deals with the coming-of-age of a queer protagonist amidst the conflict-ridden
nation of Sri Lanka. It will provide a brief introduction to Sri Lankan history,
especially the long and arduous ethnic conflict and civil war between the Tamils
and the Sinhalese. It will also study the processes through which individuals
establish their social, national and sexual identities. This will be done by taking a
closer look at gender constructs in society and how they influence the young
protagonist’s journey from innocence to maturity. Finally, it will attempt to
comprehend the nuances of the word ‘funny’ in the title with respect to queerness
and homosexuality.
The theme of gender and society is acutely relevant to the current circumstances;
when the gender roles are being questioned, and the freedom to become whatever a
person desire to be. However, it is very much important to understand how the
current circumstances of the world come to be. For this very reason it is pertinent
to address and understand the past, so as to not to leave the mistakes in a recurring
loop. To understand the past, one must not just look through what’s stated in the
history books but to comb through the literature of the specified past to wholly
understand the feelings of the people who actually lived through times of peril. It is
important to understand their perspectives and their hardships. To that extend, this
paper will work to comprehend and analyse one of the controversial works of the
past i.e., Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy.
Selvadurai’s 1994 novel, funny boy is made up of six discrete episodes tracing the
childhood of an upper middle-class Sri Lankan in Colombo against the backdrop of
the ethno-cultural conflicts between the Dravidian Tamil’s and Aryan Sinhalese.
These conflicts are a direct allusion to the riots of 1983. Studies have traced the
postcolonial dynamics of nation building, migration and the diaspora; however,
have often failed to address the queer body which implicitly and explicitly frames
the discourse of nation and nationhood in this novel. In the present world scenario,
even though the homo-sexual marriages have been legalized, the homophobic
judgment and criticism against them continues to exist. However, literature always
acts as a confessional ground for the community to voice out their feelings and
emotions. Shyam Selvadurai, being gay himself, deals with the issue in many of
his novels. While dealing with the political theme of ethnic conflict as a major
element in his novels, he also includes the personal theme of sexuality. He cleverly
illustrates the dilemmas of being homosexual which is considered to be
unconventional in a conventional land. His protagonists face the risks associated
with being non-conformists in a country with persistently traditional and
conformist norms about sexuality. Selvadurai begins the novel by introducing the
readers to a game of ‘bride-bride’ where Arjie is rudely disciplined for wanting to
play the part of a ‘bride’. This childhood indulgence of gender transgression is first
identified and chastised by his cousin, Tanuja, who even at a young age is made
aware of gender roles within Sri Lankan society. She says, “The groom cannot help
with the cooking…because grooms don’t do that.” funny boy revolves around the
protagonist Arjun Chelavartnam aka Arjie. It deals with his personal growth and
traces his life from childhood to adolescence. It is interesting to note that, though
the novel is predominately cantered on homosexuality, the word doesn’t appear
even once in the entire novel. Since the novel captures Arjie’s development and
growth from a child to an adult, it also can be considered as bildungsroman genre.
There are two types of construction, both of which have a common stem: there is a
construction of masculinity which Arjie’s father defends and another which he
scorns. And among them is Arjie, dressed as a bride. Since it follows that we are
dealing with a one-sided vision of reality, Arjie’s cross-dressing is read as a sign of
homosexuality, although this specific word is never said. Moments of Arjie’s cross
dressing as well as his pleasure in watching his Amma dress up in her sari, a
specific idea of gender performativity is introduced. According to butler this
performativity is a set of parodic practices that disrupt categories of the body,
gender and sexuality. Selvadurai’s gender play is transformative and whilst Arjie’s
queerness disrupts that gender hierarchy, Selvadurai also introduces several other
facets of information to reiterate how the gender politics works within the post
colony. Arjie’s amma for instance is described only through her motherhood; the
fact that she has an agency of her own is not explored by Arjie until he meets
Daryl, his mother’s former lover. It is only through this introduction that he
realizes the engendered nature of Sri Lankan society. Whilst the female/cross
dressing/queer space is conflated within the perimeters of this novel we would
argue that this space of transgression and gender performance is also acutely
saturated with the discourse of homonormativity, an area which needs further
exploration. The space of gender play also allows for Arjie’s queer desires to be
articulated and express. Desire here is literally transformative in the imagination of
an accepted social space and a way in which Arjie can reclaim his ‘home’. Arjie
ponders, “I knew something had changed. But how, I didn’t altogether know.” the
heteronormative ideology is imposed on or injected into children. In this way,
children are expected to perform gender roles at an early stage when they are still
immature. The play area which is divided into “the girls” and “the boys” and how
kids are expected to divide themselves accordingly is an example of the division.
Arjie’s classification by normative consent as a “sissy” immediately provokes a
certain understanding of his behaviour: he cannot have courage, he cannot commit
any deed of honour, indeed, and he cannot survive in the field of normative
homosociality. Selvadurai’s triumph consists in portraying such construction of the
character at the dialogical level and subverting it at the end, when Arjie becomes a
modern male held: a hero fighting for new male concerns, but hero and male
indeed. The text is saturated with the narrative of desire. Arjie is attracted to
Shehan almost instantaneously. Whilst this is physical, he is also fascinated by his
rebelliousness and defiance of power and authority. Arjie’s father took an instant
dislike to him. Arjie at one point wonders if his father had sensed Shehan’s
‘difference’. Arjie’s father’s dislike for homosexuality is unacceptable to his
maleness. Homosexuality threatens to destroy his patriarchy and posed a threat to
his masculinity. This is demonstrated when he forces Arjie to join the Victoria
academy where ‘the academy would force him to become a man’. “The best school
of all” takes Arjie’s sexuality to a practical stance. Here he meets Shehan, who
becomes his secret sexual partner. Only in this stage Arjie is exposed to
homosexuality and he begins to get aware of it: “at fourteen, I was aware of what
sex act between a man and a woman entailed. But between two boys?” Shehan is
treated by the other classmates as a marginalized child, because of being a
homosexual. He is sexually exploited by the head prefect and the others in the
school. This is evidence of how homosexuals are treated in society when their
identity is discovered. What is also interesting to note is Arjie’s own development
and sense of identity. When Shehan first seduces Arjie in a garage behind his
house, he feels violated although Shehan had already kissed him once before. He
cannot come to terms with his sexual desire and feels repulsed by what has just
happened, but as the narrative progresses Arjie realizes that Shehan’s act was not
to degrade him but was rather his act of offering his love. However, Arjie is also
quick to reflect that this desire was something queer and needed to be hidden from
the policing eyes of his family and the society at large.
The aim of Selvadurai’s novel funny boy is to dedicate the racial difference that
excited in Sri Lanka. The importance of economic tension as one of the sources
which contributed to the outburst of the 1983 riots in Sri-Lanka must not be
underestimated. It is no secret that Tamils had been already, for quite a
considerable lapse of time, seen as the unlawful usurpers of white-collar positions
by a large part of the Sinhalese majority, something bound to disrupt the fragile
balance of economic tension with remarkable facility, particularly in the neuralgic
centres of the country, most notably in the capital city, Colombo. When referring
to a group of people, the term "ethnic crisis" denotes a strong feeling of solidarity
based on shared characteristics such as ancestry, language, history, culture, race, or
religion. Ethnic crisis as a term designates a sense of collective belonging.
Different groups in Sri Lanka can be identified from one another based on their
ethnicity, religion, and spoken language. There are, however, two major ethnic
groups who call Sri Lanka home: the Sinhalese and the Tamils. In funny boy ethnic
crisis and ethnical conflicts are constantly present, and they play a major part in
how the characters live their lives. Therefore, in order to fully grasp the novel, it is
necessary to understand its context, the country’s violent background. Sri Lanka is
a country with many different ethnical groups that can be distinguished from one
another on ethnic, religious and linguistics grounds. It was the British who came
and divided the country that the Tamils started to feel unjustly marginalized. After
the British departure, in 1948, the communal conflict was set. In 1981, the
Sinhalese mobs increased their violent assaults against the Tamil militants. They
had been given orders to go to Jaffna and crush the Tamil movement so they could
not get independence and gain access to Eelam. Thus, the Tamils were exiled from
their own country.
That is why Arjie’s mother could not marry her real love, Daryl uncle, and as their
affair was reborn during Arjie’s father’s absence, she was harshly condemned by
her family —with the exception of Arjie. Religion and culture are always linked to
power, not only in cultural institutions but also, in society itself. In funny boy,
religion and ethnic crisis are linked to power on several levels and the linking
dictates how the characters live their lives in their society. It affects them
personally and in their relationships with others. In some cases, it even leads to
outspoken racism. This is the case when the families of Radha and Anil hear about
their relationship. Both Radha’s mother and Anil’s father are very outspoken in
their feelings about their children’s romance. Ammachi’s remark makes Radha call
her a racist. She does not realize why her mother cannot put this incident behind
her and move on. She does not feel that her grandfather’s murder is a reason to
hate every Sinhalese. Moreover, Radha is lacking the collective memory that has
shaped her mother’s behaviour. If she would have had the memory of her
grandfather’s brutally mutilated body then she also would have behaved
differently. As it is now, her behaviour and open mind have been influenced by her
living abroad for a longer amount of time. It has made her start to question issues
like ethnic crisis. From the perspective of race in the Sri Lankan society, after
Ammachi’s anti-Sinhalese sentiments, Radha being attacked by Sinhalese rioters in
a train, Daryl uncle being murdered presumably by the Sinhalese police, and the
whole issue with Jegan —his affiliation to the Tamil tigers and his father’s hotel
being boycotted by local Sinhalese youth—, Arjie falls in love and starts a
relationship with a Sinhalese boy. And that could be, to our understanding, another
key to a reading of the text from the perspective of race. Once he recognizes the
true nature of what had happened between them, Arjie realizes everything is a
matter of control. Funny boy in terms of its representation of postcolonial memory
allows the readers to merge Arjie’s individual memory of his childhood and the
broader racial or communal memory of the Sri Lankan nation state. Funny boy
presents two important modes of postcolonial memory: first there is the nostalgic
mode, a way of longing for a fleeting colonial past which haunts the cultural
consciousness of colonial sympathizers in the novel. Second, there is the traumatic
retrospective mode. Arjie’s postcolonial memory demonstrates a compelling
rendition of cultural trauma induced by pernicious ethnic and civil conflicts and an
overpowering cultural homophobia. The two modes of postcolonial memory merge
Arjie’s individual coming-of-age story with the civil, ethnic, and social conflicts
that culminate in one of Sri Lanka’s most politically vexed years. Colonial
nostalgia is the longing for an elusive colonial past attached to western forms of
history and knowledge. Arjie’s memory of queen Victoria academy, a school
whose namesake, Queen Victoria denotes Britain’s long imperial rule over Sri
Lanka between 1815 and 1948. In the chapter “the best school of them all,” Arjie
remembers having to memorize two poems for principal black tie; one was “vitae
lampada,” and the other, the eponymous title of chapter “the best school of them
all.” both poems remember an idealized colonial past. The theme of queer
nationalism can also be seen in the novel. Because of their non-normative desires,
Arjie and Shehan are the novel’s most visibly queer figures. They suffer similar
psychological and physical violence oftentimes by the same castigators. Yet their
domestic space is vastly different. When Arjie visits Shehan’s home, there the
condition and physical appearance of Shehan’s home reveals to Arjie that Shehan’s
mother is absent. It exhibits intersections between queer desire, architectural decay,
and the mother’s place within a modern domestic space. It is important to note that
Shehan’s mother is Arjie’s mother’s doppelganger as both women express interest
for other men and are ultimately pushed out of Sri Lanka and end up in the western
world, the UK and Canada respectively. The decaying state of the house in this
scene mirrors a decaying and divided Sri Lanka and the no normative nature of a
divided nation state. Shehan’s house is a symbol for anti-modernity. It is an
allegory for lack of unity between Tamil and Sinhalese, the collapsing state of Sri
Lanka, and a representation of an attack on the modern state. Funny boy’s
treatment of the anti-Tamil riots has been a topic of interest for literary critics. As
Arjie’s queer body becomes the site of violence in the novel, so does the nation
state of Sri Lanka. Arjie’s coming-of-age narrative is told through a lens of
postcolonial memory. This type of looking back displays the ways in which the
colonial past still lingers in the cultural and political ethos of the novel’s present
Sri Lanka. Black tie, the Victoria academy, the poems “vitae lampada” and “the
best school of them all” are memorials erected for the past. Whether it is the
postcolonial nostalgia for a British imperial power and the crumbling symbols of
its reign, or Arjie’s own traumatic retrospection of Tamil-Sinhalese conflicts and
the cultural restraint and policing of his sexuality at home, the postcolonial
memory in Selvadurai’s funny boy positions a non-normative state of mind and
nation state, queered by the notion of modernity and what it means to be modern.
Sinhalese and English offer many possibilities in funny boy. Speaking Tamil,
however, has limited possibilities in a society which is dominated by the Sinhalese.
In a society where the Tamils belong to the minority many are afraid of speaking
Tamil and some even wish they were Sinhalese so they could have freedom and
possibilities. Arjie’s father is aware of these circumstances and realizes how they
have to act in order to survive.
Set in the backdrop of an ethnically divided country, Funny Boy traces the coming-
of-age narrative of a young boy who is only beginning to come to terms with his
homosexuality. The novel looks at the many ways in which social, cultural and
political norms affect the personal lives of the characters. Children are introduced
to gender roles at a tender age and Arjie soon feels alienated by these rigid
constructs. At the same time, his identity as a member of the minority Tamil
community also relegates him to a relatively marginal status. As the novel
progresses, Arjie learns, rather painfully, to mediate his way through such social
constructs and create a new form of identity for himself. He achieves this self-
acceptance by transgressing the status quo and by rejecting the prejudiced moral
order of the society, according to which homosexuality is associated with disgust
and shame. Through these tropes, the novel explores the many linkages between
the personal and the political, the private and the public. The alienation
experienced by Arjie in his school is intricately tied to his sexual identity.
Similarly, his sense of belonging (or the lack of it) to his family is heavily
mediated through his personal identity as a homosexual. And finally, his status as a
member of the nation is put under doubt because of his Tamil ancestry. The notion
of home itself gets achingly difficult to define for a character like Arjie as his
entire family is forced to leave their country behind and adopt a foreign country
(Canada) as their own. Ultimately, Funny Boy is about exploring different possible
forms of belonging to a community or a country, depending on the cultural, ethnic
and gender identity of the individual in question. By giving us a character who has
witnessed exile at multiple levels, both within and outside his home and country,
Funny Boy examines the arbitrariness and fragility of the many ties that bind
individuals and societies. The novel should be read through a set of translucent
screens, and both the ethnic crises and apartheid are evident in those screens. Their
coexistence, also known as simultaneity, ushers in a period of exile for the
narrative. This is a literal exile that Arjie is compelled to enter as a result of the
ethnic crisis he is experiencing.