1 This is an extended version of a paper presented at the “Narratives of ‘Home’ in South Asian Literature” Conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 24-25 June 2004. I would like to express my thanks to all the organizers, speakers and participants for the vibrant and stimulating experience they created at the event and for the valuable comments I received on my paper.

2 Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy, London: Vintage, 1995, p. 14. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in parentheses within the text with the abbreviation “FB”.

3 Minoli Salgado, “Writing Sri Lanka, Reading Resistance: Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 39, 1 (2004), 8.

4 ibid., 9.

5 I would like here to acknowledge a conversation with Rosemary Marangoly George and thank her for drawing my attention to the importance of this sense of Arjie’s transgressions being the most empathetic acts in an increasingly bewildering world.

6 Queer theory purports ultimately to challenge and confuse our understanding and uses of sexual and gender categories. In this respect, I am interested in how taking a queer perspective on the novel might enable us to consider the potential in Funny Boy of conceptualizing the possibility of a transformative discourse of identity through Selvadurai’s interlinked representations of sexuality, gender and ethnicity. “Sexuality”, as a set of practices and meanings, often operates in conjunction with other sets of practices and meanings such as “gender”, “race” and “class.” However, sexuality can also work as a resource for challenging or disrupting the operation of gender, race or class. In his Genealogy of Queer Theory, William B. Turner writes “Queer theory is political in its insistence that the unqueer reading of identity - the perpetuation of the idea that individuals somehow ‘naturally’ fit into purely empirical identity categories - serves to distribute power among persons.” See William B. Turner, A Genealogy of Queer Theory, Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000, p. 32.

7 Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd. “Introduction: Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse: What is to be Done?”, Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, eds., Minority Discourse, New York and Oxford: OUP, 1990, p. 9.

8 Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, Introduction, in Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, eds., Violence and Subjectivity, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000, p. 8.

9 In July 1983, following news that thirteen soldiers had been ambushed and killed in Jaffna, unprecedented race riots broke out in Colombo aimed at the destruction of the lives and properties of Tamils in the capital. Rioting mobs committed horrific acts of violence and carried out the brutal destruction of lives. 1983 remains a moment of horror in memory and narrative of the post-colonial Sri Lankan nation.

10 Electoral registers were used to identify the ethnic identity of families, thus allowing mobs armed with lists of names to single out the homes of Tamil families.

11 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 9. Bhabha refers to Sigmund Freud’s essay in which he defines the unheimlich as “the name for everything that ought to have remained... secret and hidden but has come to light”. See The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, trans. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 218-52. Strachey provides the following note on the translation of the term: “The German word, translated throughout this paper by the English ‘uncanny’, is ‘unheimlich’, literally ‘unhomely’. The English term, is not, of course, an exact equivalent of the German one.”

12 ibid.

13 Gayatri Gopinath, “Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion”, Positions, 5, 2 (1997), 467-89. “Heteronormativity” refers to both the private and public norms that regulate identity in the nation: the norms of gender, sexuality, race and class that reproduce the desired national citizen-subject. This subject is necessarily heterosexual and is situated in the model of the family from which the ideal of the good citizen can be literally reproduced.

14 Gopinath’s article provides a perceptive reading of the game of “bride-bride” in the novel and links it to the experience of being queer in the diaspora, where the uncanniness or disorientation of belonging is doubly intensified as nostalgia becomes the means whereby one can imagine oneself within the “fantasied site” of the “home”. Gopinath reads queer practices and play, such as the cross-gender game of “bride-bride” in Funny Boy, as sites through which the “home”, or rather the nostalgia that fashions the remembered notion of “home”, is mediated.

15 Judith Butler, Preface, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York & London: Routledge, 1990, p. xii. See also Butler’s essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” in Sue-Ellen Case, ed., Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.

16 JanMohamed and Lloyd, Minority Discourse, p. 9.

17 Jonathan Rutherford, “A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference”, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Rutherford, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, p. 22.

18 JanMohamed and Lloyd, Minority Discourse, p. 10.

19 Arjie says “‘Vitae Lampada’ was about cricket, but not cricket the way I understood it. It said that through playing cricket one learned to be honest and brave and patriotic. This was not true at the Victoria Academy [...]. Cricket was anything but honest.” (FB, p. 233). The cricket game appears twice in the novel, initially when Arjie is forced to play with the boys at his grandparents’ house and succeeds in disrupting the order of play and the rules of the game. In its second appearance in the school playground, the game of cricket takes on communal-nationalist overtones: “Sometimes, instead of playing against other Sinhalese classes the boys in our class played the Tamil class. When this happened, there was none of the usual joking and laughing, and when the match was over the players parted without shaking hands or patting each other on the back” (FB, p. 62). Masculinity as a force that demarcates and dichotomizes meaning, expressed in the picking of sides and sense of competition that characterizes the boys’ game as opposed to the “free play of fantasy” in the girls’ game, becomes linked to the performance of power and the threat of violence. Two perceptive discussions of the role of cricket in the postcolonial nation are found in Michael Roberts, “Ethnicity in Riposte at a Cricket Match: The Past for the Present”, in Exploring Confrontation: Sri Lanka: Politics, Culture and History, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994, pp. 269-95; and Quadri Ismail, “On Cricket, Nationalism and the Swashbuckling Sri Lankans”, Social Text 50 (1997), 33-56.

20 See Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

21 I have borrowed the idea of “queering” the politics of the family and the nation from Lisa Duggan. See “Queering the State”, Social Text, 39 (1994), 1-14.

22 E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996, p. 191.

23 In developing this point on the liminal position of the diarist, I am indebted to Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph’s paper entitled “Home in the Context of Liminality and Hybridity in the Amar Singh Diary”, presented at the “Narratives of ‘Home’ in South Asian Literature” Conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 24-25 June 2004.

24 Shyam Selvadurai, “A Vacation from My Past”, The New York Times, July 5, 2004: http://www.nytimes.com.

25 bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness”, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. London: Turnaround, 1991, p. 148.

At Home in the Nation? Negotiating Identity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy1

Abstract