Sharon Bala. (Facebook)
On a summer day in 2010, MV Sun Sea, a Thai-owned rickety boat carrying 492 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers reached Vancouver harbour, triggering an unprecedented course of action by the Conservative government, known to take a hardline approach against illegal migrants.
Sharon Bala’s extraordinary debut, ‘The Boat People’, is based on this incident and its aftermath. Though the author admits that the novel is a fictionalised account of what must have happened during the Canadian government’s feverish attempts to prosecute the migrants, her characters take the readers back to the day-to-day struggle of ordinary Tamils caught between the de facto rule of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and the Sri Lankan security forces.
The novel on one level revolves around a father, Mahindan, and his six-year-old son Sellian, who left Jaffna, the Tamil homeland, just as the 30-year civil war ended.
Their destinies, like hundreds of compatriots who chose the dangerous voyage for freedom, are at the mercy of Grace Nakamura, a descendent of the Japanese refugees, sitting in judgement.
Through Grace the writer portrays the travails of the Japanese Canadians who had to face rigorous repression and a crackdown following the Pearl Harbour attack, any modern-day immigrants have yet to face. In 1934, her grandparents opened their laundromat and then incarceration came in 1942 after the attack on Pearl Harbour and the family was separated, forcing her grandfather Hiro ‘to haul rocks at a labour camp’.
Through a second-generation Canadian Tamil law student, Priya, and her family members, Bala reminisces about the deteriorating relations between the Tamil and Sinhala communities from 1956 and beyond the 1983 violent anti-Tamil riots in Colombo which internationalized the ethnic problem. Priya who regrets her inability to speak fluent Tamil watches with amazement as a white Canadian man works as an interpreter at the hearing, speaking chaste Tamil.
Bala, a Canadian Tamil living in Newfoundland and Labrador who is described as a new young voice of Canadian literature, doesn’t take sides while writing about the conflict.
In her ‘Author’s Notes’ she pays tributes to late newspaper editor and journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge, a Sinhalese, who faced a violent death in a Colombo street for telling the truth.
“The novel’s Tamil characters have a dangerous habit of dismissing all Sinhalese people as villains,” she says. “The truth is, there were heroes on the other side too, men and women like Wickrematunge, who at great personal risk and cost, protected Tamils and advocated for their rights.”
There were many unsung Sinhalese who protected Tamils during the Colombo riots. Shyam Selladurai in his debut ‘Funny Boy’ too describes how his protagonist’s family was protected by their Sinhala neighbours.
Bala says the character of Prasad, a Tamil journalist who comes aboard the refugee ship, is modelled on Wickrematunge. Prasad, one of the most educated, organised and compassionate among the lot, speaks good English and finds an entry level job in an established newspaper after he was granted asylum. Priya describes him as a model immigrant.
Refugees in Bala’s work of fiction are quite different from the original boat people of Vietnam as portrayed in Canadian writer Kim Thuy’s latest novel Vi. Most of the Vietnamese had a relatively easy time being accepted by western nations in the 70s though they had a far more torrid time on the sea as they were subjected to rape, murder and other harassments from pirates.
The asylum seekers in Bala’s novel hail from the downtrodden sections in Jaffna who were not rich enough to pay for their passage to leave Sri Lanka when the asylum laws in the west were lenient. Mahindan who works as the mechanic in Jaffna finds passage money by stealing from a man and a woman who were killed in shell attacks, and pays Rs.500,000 to the human smuggler, a woman ‘dressed like a Westerner in jeans and a shirt with thin straps that bared her shoulder’.
When the people who have lost everything in their life haggle for passage fare the woman asks: “Do you think we are doing this for a profit? What about the risks we are taking? If any of us gets caught-”
Mahindan who repairs vehicles for the LTTE is in the crosshairs of the Canadian authorities as he is implicated in an incident where a lorry was rigged to detonate a bomb in Ratmalana airport killing 17 Sinhala civilians including a government minister. At the end, he is still awaiting a decision on his asylum claim, watching with trepidation how his son, who is being adopted by a white family, turning into a Canadian kid. Mahindan, who is not sure whether he would be granted asylum at the hearing, hopes his son would have a bright future in Canada.
Bala’s characters survive death and mayhem after being stranded on a narrow strip of land caught between the shelling by the government forces and retaliatory fire from the LTTE. Her work of fiction draws parallels with Anuk Arudpragasam, who in his award-winning novel ‘A Story of a Brief Marriage’ portrays in vivid details the death and carnage on this narrow strip of land during the last few days of the war.
According to an article in the National Post in April, Canadian courts and refugee boards are still grappling with the Sun Sea aftermath — ‘and the man (Lesly Emmanuel) who steered the ship is fighting to stay in the country’. Emmanuel had protested that he was one of the few passengers with naval training and had only taken over the ship’s command after its Thai crew abandoned it off the coast of Thailand. He said he steered it to Canada for humanitarian reasons, not for any material benefit, according to the article.
A Toronto-based immigration lawyer represented nearly 100 Sun Sea passengers and about a dozen of his cases are still working their way through the courts. He said ‘the refugee system has been inconsistent, with some Sun Sea passengers getting rejected while others are accepted despite very similar cases’.
At least one of the passengers from the MV Sun Sea who was deported faced torture by Sri Lankan authorities. Sathyapavan Aseervatham was deported to Sri Lanka in July 2011. He was arrested by upon his arrival in Sri Lanka and detained for over one year. He was subsequently killed in Sri Lanka when an unknown motorist struck him on the street.
A sad postscript to the Sun Sea saga is a passenger named Krishna Kumar Kanagaratnam whose refugee claim was denied. He became a victim of alleged Toronto serial killer Bruce McArthur who is on trial charged with first degree murder of eight men. People believe Kanagaratnam would not have met such a cruel fate if he was granted asylum.
(Toronto public library has 104 copies of the book with 112 holds in addition to eAudiobooks (15) and eBooks (50). – newstrails.com
