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Pickle Me This

February 2, 2023

Brotherless Night, by V.V. Ganeshanathan

In her novel Brotherless Night, V.V. Ganeshananthan writes about the way that Tamil fighters would take over ordinary homes in 1980s’ Sri Lanka, during that country’s brutal, decades-long civil war, and how, when they were finished with these spaces, they’d leave them laden with traps and mines, which seems like an appropriate metaphor for what such tumult, violence and devastation from civil war does to the notion of home in general. Though I suspect Ganeshananthan’s protagonist, Sashi, would have something to say about my employment of metaphor at all, about my liberty to have one thing stand for another, war being, for me, an abstract concept, which is something Sashi doesn’t take for granted in her telling: “Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.”

I learned so much from Brotherless Night, a story whose title comes from Sashi’s loss of her revered elder brothers to violence and also from how even those with loyalty to the cause of Tamil freedom were used and made to suffer in its name. And while the specifics of the political events, between 1980 and 1989, were new to me, the overall narrative is a familiar one—of people yearning for liberation, about noble causes hijacked by ego and violence, and how women are always collateral damage in war, the ways in which their suffering, by some, is simply expected.

When the story begins, Sashi is dreaming of becoming a doctor, following her elder brother in this dream, and her greatest hardship is that her father has forbidden her and her brothers to ride their bicycles against the backdrop of political tension. And as the tension builds and violence and ensuing traumas begin to rob Sashi of her innocence and her youth, ordinary life proceeds as best it can—when most electricity is no longer functioning in Jaffna, Sashi and her medical school colleagues gather by the hospital with their school books to study under the outdoor lights there.

Eventually Sashi takes a job working in a Tigers field hospital, dismayed by what their cause has done to the boys she’s grown up with, including her own brothers, but also feeling obligated to offer care to any person who needs it. All the while, however, she works with her charismatic feminist professor to keep an apolitical record of atrocities committed by all sides in this complicated conflict, which means that eventually her protection by the Tigers is compromised.

As much as Sashi’s story itself was fascinating and illuminating for me, however, it’s the way she tells it that is the most compelling aspect of the narrative, instances of direct address (such as the passage about the burning library above), her evasions, her unwillingness to choose definitiveness, and also her acknowledge of how language and translation complicates and obscures—the nuances of Tamil that cannot be conveyed in English, all those parts of this story that those of us reading from a distance will never actually understand.

Beautiful, devastating, brutal and meticulous at once, Brotherless Night is a read that’s unforgettable.

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