Twenty-five years after publishing his first book, Shyam Selvadurai continues to thrive on the writing process. Crafting a new story is an unpredictable journey each time, even for authors with Selvadurai’s rich experience. But the exhilarating sense of uncertainty is what fuels Shyam’s powerful, provocative, and immensely relatable tales. Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Selvadurai moved to Canada with his family when he was nineteen years old. His debut novel, Funny Boy (1994), won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. The story is currently being made into a feature-length film directed by Deepa Mehta, with a screenplay adapted from the original text by Shyam himself. His other novels include Cinnamon Gardens (1998), Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2006), and The Hungry Ghosts (2013). Besides writing fiction, Selvadurai has also edited two anthologies of South Asian and Sri Lankan literature, titled Story- Wallah! (2004) and Many Roads Through Paradise (2014). 

In fall 2018, Selvadurai was welcomed to the Department of English as Writer-in-Residence, where, as part of his role, he facilitated a popular creative writing workshop. The English Department also featured him as a keynote speaker in November’s Distinguished Speaker Series, during which he read excerpts of his upcoming novel, Mansions of the Moon. Selvadurai’s involvement in these events provided the White Wall Review with a unique opportunity to sit down with the acclaimed author and discuss his motivations and methodology, as well as the architecture of the novels themselves. By focusing on Selvadurai’s first and final works—Funny Boy (1994) and The Hungry Ghosts (2013)—the WWR was able to encompass and explore the author’s literary and personal journey. 

Both novels are written from the perspective of children coming of age in the midst of political upheaval. In Funny Boy, a young boy named Arjie must navigate the burgeoning atmosphere of hatred and violence which permeates his sheltered life in Colombo. The novel is set during the conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic groups of Sri Lanka; it begins in the 1970s and ends with the July 1983 riots. In The Hungry Ghosts, a young boy named Shivan, now grown-up, prepares to leave Canada and return to his native city of Colombo to bring back his dying grandmother. Selvadurai contrasts the greyness of Scarborough with memories of a verdant Sri Lankan environment, while also infusing Shivan’s journey with elements of Buddhist mythology. These two tales address the difficulties of growing up in a violently shifting and transformative space. Selvadurai’s prose is smooth and intoxicating, yet it effectively conjures the ethnic animosity and diasporic trauma experienced by Arjie and Shivan. 

White Wall Review had an opportunity to speak with Selvadurai and learn more about his literary influences, writerly impulses, and current projects. 

 

WWR: What book are you currently reading? 

Shyam Selvadurai: Chéri by Collette. It’s a nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century novel set in Paris, and it’s about this courtesan and her relationship with a young man. It’s fun, pleasurable reading, you know? You don’t get a lot of that in modern novels.

WWR: So, in preparation for our chat, we were doing a little bit of research and we discovered that a group of scientists in Sri Lanka named a spider after you in 2016! How did that come about?

S: Yes, I found out too, I was rather thrilled! Honestly, I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know these scientists, I don’t know why they named these species after Sri Lankan authors, but they did. I’ve never met them in my life. 

WWR: What made you decide to tell stories for a living?

S: I didn’t think about telling stories for a living, I thought about writing a novel and wanting to be a novelist. I think I just had something to say—that I wanted to say—and it was burning in me to be said. I think I liked writing, and I was just drawn to it. I feel the most alive, comfortable, and in the middle of myself when I’m writing. That’s what keeps me writing too, that kind of passionate engagement.

WWR: So, would you say you wanted to see your ideas on paper?

S: It’s not so much ideas, because novels are not really ideas, they’re characters and plots that express a sort of idea. I know by now that what you think you are going to write and what ends up actually coming out and being published are often quite different, so the idea—and that’s part of the excitement of it—is that you don’t know where it’s going to go. There’s a kind of journey, you know?

WWR: What was your favourite book to write?

S: I enjoyed writing them all. I was also agonized by all of them, each in their own way. Funny Boy was the most innocent experience writing; I wasn’t published, so I had nothing to “keep up.” But it was anxiety-provoking because I didn’t know if I had what it took to get published. They each come with their own problems. And then there’s the period in which you write the novel in your life, that has both its pleasures and difficulties, and they become part of your memory of writing the book.

WWR: Which one was the longest or perhaps the most challenging?

S: The Hungry Ghosts. It took me 13 years to write that. 

WWR: How do you think the experiences of your characters speak to your own experience with both Sri Lankan and Canadian politics? Both in Funny Boy and The Hungry Ghosts?

S:  Well, I mean they’re very different novels. Funny Boy is more about somebody in a Sri Lankan context, trying to come to terms with their sexuality within an increasingly violent situation, amidst tension between the Sinhalese and Tamils. It’s a personal story set against a political background, in which I also clearly have an agenda, which is to portray both sides and both sides’ points of view and to talk about it through the perspective of a child coming into adolescence. Arjie’s innocence is contrasted with this growing violence. But I think for The Hungry Ghosts, I was interested in the idea of migration, and the racism and the problems one faces here, but I was also really interested in writing about Scarborough—being able to put that down in literature because, at that point, nobody else had done it. I think that is where the immigrant experience now happens. It happens in these inner-ring suburbs that are kind of a no man’s land where you try to make sense of a world that doesn’t have any centre; the only centre in this place is the mall. And I was really interested in that.

WWR: On that note of immigration: in The Hungry Ghosts, the protagonist discovers that his new home in Scarborough is not as accepting of diversity as he previously imagined. Do you find that the racism Shivan experiences is still present in Toronto—in Canada?

S: I think it is still present. I listen to the stories of my niece and nephew and I think yes, it is there. We have a ways to go. 

WWR: While reading Funny Boy, the audience learns a lot about Sri Lanka and the rising ethnic tensions of the 1970s and 80s; did you have to do a lot of research in order to portray those conflicts?

S: I lived through that period, so I knew it fairly well, but I did do research. I went back to Sri Lanka and did research because I wanted to understand what had happened. I had experienced it, but I hadn’t understood it. And I didn’t know what slant I wanted to take, so I did read some other writers who had written about it as non-fiction, as well as a whole bunch of articles and stuff like that about it.

WWR: And Funny Boy is currently being made into a film! How did you find the process of transforming your novel into a screenplay?

S: I found it relatively easy because a screenplay has a very set format; I find it very comforting. A novel finds its own structure, and that’s very agonizing and difficult—it’s such a big work compared to a screenplay that everything wobbles and you’re never quite sure if it’s tying together. So I found it relatively easy to find those things that fit that structure in Funny Boy, and also because it’s my novel, I could throw out as much as I wanted to.

WWR: Do you think your illustration of political tensions in the novel will translate onto the screen the way you want to see it?

S: Yes, but you have to put it externally. You can’t have people talking about it.

WWR: In terms of mechanics, Funny Boy is written in six ‘stories,’ whereas The Hungry Ghosts follows a non-linear structure, bouncing between time periods. Why did you choose to write them this way? 

S: I think it’s about finding a form that fits the content. So you have the content and now you have to find the form that makes it work. And with Funny Boy, the idea of the stories allowed me to bring in the larger world through Arjie’s point of view and to focus on different characters who represent different things in this growing violent situation. And then, of course, the [final story] Riot Journal is written as a journal because a riot does not happen in a steady arc with a climax and an epiphany; it happens in bursts. I wanted to try and capture that sense of how things happen—it’s quiet and then it’s suddenly not quiet. So I thought the journal was the best form for that. And also there’s a present-tense breathlessness to it, and excitement and tension, so again it was the form matching the content. 

 

With The Hungry Ghosts, I think I needed the framing device of the present day in order to move swiftly through bits of material because I think that it would’ve been too plodding and slow and lacking in tension if I went at it bit by bit. I needed Shivan to be able to summarize and move on. I wanted to end with that sense of how he’s going back into trauma and that trauma is such an important part of the novel. 

WWR: How do you find the perspectives of Arjie and Shivan differ within their coming-of-age stories?

S: Arjie’s much more innocent and he has a reasonably nice family, whereas Shivan’s relationship with his grandmother in the earlier years really twists him as a human being. He’s longing to escape and he’s hoping that in the West he’ll find himself, which is also tied to the Buddhist tropes of the work. Because I am very interested in Buddhist narratives and the idea that, within the story, a character is born or gained, but carrying their karma. And I wanted to replicate that in an immigrant situation—you do come from an old life into a new life, but you carry that old life and all its good and bad into your new world.

WWR: You finished writing The Hungry Ghosts roughly nineteen years after Funny Boy; do you think Arjie was ever an inspiration for Shivan? 

S: No, no, they are very different characters for me. And also I’m a very different writer. That makes the difference.