Most people are not likely to pick up this novel at a bookstore. That would be a grave mistake. Despite its quirky title and theme, Yapa’s novel is an excellent illustration of the craft of fiction writing.
This is a story of seven characters in search of truth and reconciliation, during the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO). This is also the story about the inevitable conflict between those who dissent and those who maintain law and order at any cost. Three of the characters are anti-WTO protestors, three are city cops, and the seventh is a WTO delegate from Sri Lanka.
The most poignant narrative is about the biracial 19-year-old Victor, who goes to pieces after the death of his brilliant activist African-American mother. He leaves his white policeman father, in order to become a world traveller, with a side business of selling marijuana. At one level, this is a parable about the reconciliation of father and son, policeman and civil disobedience, perpetrator of violence and victim of violence. There are, of course, other parables about soul-damaged dissenters and cops, not to mention the Sri Lankan delegate who, curiously, learns the art of trade negotiation from the protestors. All these find redemption of some sort by the end of the anti-WTO protests, which is also the end of Yapa’s narrative. Yapa, after all, is the storyteller, and he firmly believes that “another world is not only possible, she is on her way”.
One of the leaders of the protest, John Henry, would like to believe that victory is on the side of the angels, even as he chants, “We are winning, we are winning...”. In the true Gandhian spirit, Yapa may not really be concerned about who won on that fateful day in 1999 in Seattle—the protestors or the cops. He is concerned with the transformation of souls. Even as lost boy Victor is being brutally beaten by the cops, he realises that he doesn’t want to die: “Simple things this young man loved. The color of the leaves in bright morning, how the green seemed lit from within and the sky so endlessly blue. The smell of woodsmoke high in the mountains. The mottled brown-gray of a river in flood. An open window and whatever sounds might drift through. The song of that world, taxicabs, laughter, birds. Just one bird washing herself in the rain gutter beneath his open window. The quality of attention, to idly watch a bird flutter and preen, to hear the soft whirr of her wings, to hear her whistle” (pg 264).
As mentioned earlier, the novel is a good example of the art and craft of fiction writing. Yapa has a raw talent which, as raw talents go, often reaches its mark, but sometimes overreaches it. John Henry’s girlfriend, King, emotionally recalls the night she shot an innocent man, as she crosses the border from Mexico: “How she stopped and rose up behind a dense clump of brush, a slick of conflicting emotions turning slowly inside her, the inner reaches of which she did not want to plumb because on top was not just the dumb animal gratitude of returning home, but that familiar foreign fear twisting around her insides like a coil of razor wire, icy to the touch” (pg 214).
This is Yapa’s first novel, and it has been constructed with the help of a few writing workshops. This will explain the exquisite writing as well as the overwriting. The strength of the novel really lies in the force of the narrative. A few readers are likely to quibble with the haste with which loose ends are tied up towards the end. But this reader is eagerly awaiting Yapa’s next offering.