Giving a face and story to political refugees
Award-winning writer brings individuals to the fore with debut novel grounded in history
The headlines are overwhelming.
We are in the midst of an ongoing refugee crisis; according to the United Nations, more than 65 million people were displaced, driven from their homes, in 2017 alone. Success stories about Syrian refugees in Canada share space with bitter, parochial railing from both the comments sections and the political right. Bodies wash up on European beaches while asylum seekers cross the Canadian border from an increasingly hostile United States.
Most of us, no matter our sympathies, are having a hard time keeping up. What do we know of political turmoil halfway around the world? How are we supposed to react? And where do we go to learn more?
It might seem strange, initially, but sometimes the greatest clarity comes not from the news, but from fiction. With her debut novel The Boat People, St. John’s, N.L., writer Sharon Bala (who was awarded the Journey Prize for short fiction last fall) chronicles the arrival of a group of Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka on Canada’s west coast. Rooted in actual events, Bala uses the tools of fiction to excavate the human truths hidden under the headlines.
The Boat People begins in 2009 aboard “a sixtymetre freighter, past its prime and jerry-rigged for five hundred passengers,” refugees fleeing the war in Sri Lanka. Mahindan, a Tamil mechanic travelling with his 6-year-old son Sellian, is delighted when the ship is greeted by a Canadian helicopter and boats — “the red-and-white flag snapped definitive” — rather than by the Americans. He feels “their new life . . . just beginning.”
His relief is somewhat premature. Mahindan, Sellian and the other passengers are taken to CFB Esquimalt, then into detention to await their refugee hearings. Mahindan and Sellian are separated, the boy first placed in the women’s quarters, then into foster care as the hearings stretch into weeks, then months. Mahindan’s story (which we read through the contemporary storyline of his life in Canadian custody and in harrowing flashbacks of what brought him to be aboard that ship) is woven through the book with two other storylines. The first is that of Priya, a second-generation Tamil Sri Lankan-Canadian, an articling law student who is drawn into representing Mahindan and a handful of other claimants from the ship by rumpled, boozy senior partner Gigovaz, who is shocked when he discovers that Priya doesn’t speak Tamil. A success story of acculturation.
The third storyline belongs to Grace Nakamura, one of the adjudicators, a new political appointee and a longtime associate of the Minister of Public Safety, who arranged for her position (and gives her a series of admonitions about strictness and restrictiveness). Nakamura is a thirdgeneration Japanese-Canadian, whose mother, in the early stages of dementia, has become obsessed with the family’s relocation to an internment camp during the Second World War and the confiscation of their property. Readers, and Grace’s two teenage daughters, are drawn into the history, while Grace herself founders with the responsibility, and the seeming impossibility, of her new position.
As should be clear, Bala has stacked the deck with these three narrative viewpoints, sample stages of the Canadian immigrant story. While this risks the novel being overtly message-driven, it is, in fact, key to the success of The Boat People. By exploring these three very different lives, Bala shifts the focus from the abstract and bureaucratic to the individual. We are not, the book seems to indicate, statistics or demographics; we are human beings, each with our own stories.
And stories, the creation of identity, are at the core of the novel. We see this most acutely through Mahindan, a mild-mannered, happy mechanic who, owing to forces completely outside of his control, is forced to take steps that not only stretch the boundaries of his own morality but may, through the hearing process, rob him of the safety for which he has continually struggled.
The Boat People succeeds not because it has answers, but because of how it foregrounds the questions: Who are we as individuals? Who are we as a culture, as a society? How do our beliefs, our empathy, survive in the face of confusion and the threat of deception and violence? It may not be a perfect book, but The Boat People is a book perfect for our times, essential reading to bring context to questions which we are, perhaps, more inclined to ignore. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Black Feathers.