WRITERS ON YOUR MARKS
The spring Ottawa writers festival begins April 25. Meet Shyam Selvadurai, Michael Crummey and Guy Gavriel Kay.
The Hungry Ghosts Shyam Selvadurai (Doubleday Canada; $29.95)
OTTAWA CITIZEN
Sri Lanka is a paradise lost.
In some pictures, I have seen, it is a place of flowing palm trees, beautiful flowers and gracious sweeping beaches washed by a gentle ocean.
In reality, it has been ripped apart by war and by wave. It is a place of death and of destruction amid the beauty, and it is full of ghosts.
For the writer Shyam Selvadurai, it is also his home for half of every year. He left many years ago, fleeing the war between the Tamil Tigers and the Sinhalese government, but has returned more regularly recently; first as the curator of a literary festival and more recently as the driving force behind a project that attempts to use writing as a means of reconciliation called, rather straightforwardly, Write to Reconcile.
The pull of Sri Lanka is strong for Selvadurai.
“It really does exert itself on me, not just as a person, but as a writer. I feel very strongly the need to spend a lot of time there. For the last few years, I’ve been spending almost half my year in Sri Lanka and the other half in Canada.
“I feel these last years like I am not just going back as an ex-pat writer returning to sniff around for a story. Now it’s something much more solid because I have a project. This is very satisfying to be able to do and to be able to come.”
The pull of his birthplace is also very strong in his writing.
As in Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens, his new novel. The Hungry Ghosts. takes on an autobiographical feel. It has taken a long time to arrive. He has been writing The Hungry Ghosts for about 13 years.
“Generally, I would say that it takes me a long time, but you never know. It depends on the book, I think.”
The central character is a young gay man named Shivan, half Tamil and half Sinhalese, who leaves his homeland to settle in cold and not very welcoming Scarborough, Ont. These are the signposts of Selvadurai’s own life, and he does say the book is autobiographical, but not quite in the way one might think.
“I think of it as an autobiography of time and place and feeling, but not an autobiography of story or character.”
Canada in the 1980s was not a particularly hospitable place for immigrants.
“That feeling of the toil of it, the gruelling routine, the greyness, the feeling completely displaced, the fear of winter, the terror of winter was all real. I really felt that. It’s just that I translate that into a fictional experience.”
Selvadurai finds Canada still not a very welcoming place for immigrants.
“Not initially. Somebody said to me it has it got better since the 1980s, and I said no. I think it’s got worse because there are less jobs to go around. It’s very hard.
“Migration is traumatic. There is a very small minority who come here who are coming for the adventure of it. Most are leaving because the places they call home have ceased to be hospitable to them. They are already feeling that sense of forced migration. Here it’s very hard, and most end up in inner ring suburbs where they have to make lives for themselves.”
The heartening side of the story, he says, is that so many people are able to wrest a life of dignity and of fulfilment. “People find a way to make their lives worthy,” he says.
In Sri Lanka today, the capital, Colombo, has returned to being the garden city of South Asia, he says.
“On one level, Colombo is looking more beautiful than it ever has before. It’s a pretty city, and everything in it is geared for people like me (well-off and westernized). At the same time, there is a sense that there is no rule of law in Sri Lanka.
“Colombo feels incredibly free, but in the north, there is an incredible amount of surveillance of people. There are checkpoints at every little intersection, with armed guards. It’s very disturbing. The ramifications are felt on me. I can’t imagine what it’s like if there is one of those checkpoints near your house and those people know everything that goes on in your house. Everybody who comes in and out. And they are not your people, and any day they can turn against you. If you are a young woman, my gosh, nobody allows their women to go anywhere alone.
“I don’t have much hope (for Sri Lanka).”
Running though the book are parables based on Buddhist teaching. These are charming and not-so charming stories that set out a way of life. He says he wanted these stories to be part of the novel’s structure as a way of announcing its themes.
Selvadurai is not a religious person, but he does appreciate the philosophy of Buddhism.
“I find it a very useful way to live one’s life. A way to check in with yourself during a day. It’s all about living a good life based on simplicity.”
Desire, he says, is the root of unhappiness in Buddhist thinking. The Buddha thought, Selvadurai says, there was a middle way that avoided the extremes of life. If you despair or if you desire something too much, there is a chance you, too, will become a hungry ghost in your next life.