'Brotherless Night' book review: Notes from a mourner’s life
A decade and a half ago, this is what American writer V V Ganeshananthan replied to Indian novelist Amitava Kumar while discussing ‘South Asian diaspora, literature, war and conflict’ for the Guernica magazine: “I am always fascinated to watch characters dealing with their personal lives without explicitly acknowledging the hold politics has on them, even as it affects everything they do. Have they become desensitised? And how does one write about violence without fetishising it?”
This fascination consumed 20 years of Ganeshananthan’s life. They were spent researching the early years of the Sri Lankan civil war and resulted in the author exploring its untold facets in her second novel a historical fiction par excellence—Brotherless Night.
Rarely does a novel manage to align the scale of events it covers without losing its grip on the complexity that it must possess in order to present a holistic picture of the personal cost of living in a war-torn country as a minority. The novel shows the ease with which Ganeshananthan positions a non-masculine way of reading into violence through the eyes of a teenager, Sashikala, who wants to be a doctor, but is steered into navigating a tumultuous journey that cost her her brothers, and establishes how one risks their narrative getting co-opted and appropriated if they don’t choose to tell it on their own despite all odds, fostering a new way of thinking and writing about war stories.
The winner of this year’s Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and Women’s Prize for Fiction, Brotherless Night begins with the question of identity. But the conflict arises when a collective identity is forced by either side, sandwiching ordinary people.
On one side there are hyper-nationalistic sentiments imposed by state machineries, and on the other, there are militant organisations who label anyone questioning their agenda. Conflict, as a result, becomes inevitable, leaving people distraught in the larger scheme of things, compelling them to choose one identity over the other.
Here’s how Ganeshananthan underlines it in the Prologue to this book: “We were civilians first. You must understand: that word, terrorist, is too simple for the history we have lived—too simple for me, too simple even for this man. How could one word be enough? But I am going to say it anyway, because it is the language you know, and it will help you understand who we were, what we were called, and who we have truly become.”
Divided into five parts, the novel also centralises the everydayness amid major historical events. For example, the love that blossoms between Sashi and K—a militant in the separatist group Tamil Tigers. On his insistence, she becomes a medic at the separatists’ camp as a tribute in gratitude of the latter’s street-smart solution to heal Sashi’s burn in the beginning of the story.
Furthermore, Ganeshananthan’s mastery of the craft is visible in the incidents she creates. They propel the reader into finding out how people’s lives eventually turn out to be, as the author notes she’s interested in underlining what they “become”—their journey. And it’s a disturbing one at that. Sashi loses her eldest brother Niranjan, a doctor, in anti-Tamil riots. Then, Dayalan and Seelan, who decide to join the “movement” much to the dismay of the family, especially Sashi’s mother. To that end, a reflection by the narrator summarises the fear of what’s getting lost and what’s yet to be lost: “How seamlessly we had moved into the space of censoring ourselves around those we loved the most.”
It’s Aran, however, the youngest, with whom Sashi has conversations that attempt to highlight the contesting truths that can—and perhaps should—coexist in a narrative as complex and baffling as this one. Sample a conversation between the siblings when the Tigers kill one of Aran’s classmates. “Was it someone you knew well?” asks Sashi. Aran replies, “Does he only matter if we know him?” Grieving then transforms not only as a form of a journey towards healing that one must go through, but also an impetus to act. That’s what Sashi decides to do. She begins documenting the unsaid, the overlooked.
At the heart of Brotherless Night is a push towards a feminist understanding, a political statement, and an ode to storytelling itself; be it the way Sashi mourns the burning of the Jaffna library, or the manner in which the author helps readers empathise with the trauma of being displaced or to be perpetually forced to think of help, a saviour, which India ungainly decides to become.
Then, there’s a critique of Gandhi’s limited understanding and notion of Satyagraha and the gendered violence that the Indian Peacekeeping Forces inflict in the island nation. This novel, as a result, becomes a form of a record, an impeccable account of people’s report on war in their language, claiming from the powerful their right to tell their stories.