In conversation with Shyam Selvadurai

MONICA MEHMI

This year’s fourth annual Gryphons Read book is Funny Boy, a novel by Shyam Selvadurai. Funny Boy chronicles seven years in the life of a young Tamil boy named Arjie as he discovers his sexuality, and is set against a backdrop of rising tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamil people that lead to the 1983 riots in Sri Lanka, known as Black July.

Selvadurai was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1965 and immigrated to Canada at 19. His writing is fictional, but largely autobiographical — readers can draw parallels between his real life and the lives of his protagonists.

I spoke with Selvadurai about Funny Boy in early September, and learned a bit about his life, along with his motivations for writing the book.

According to Selvadurai, his household growing up was a happy one, but also “unusual,” as several things set his family apart from the traditional and cultural norms of the time, rendering them “different from other people.” The first was that his parents had a marriage based on love rather than an arranged one. They were also a mixed marriage, his mother being Sinhalese and his father a Tamil.

His mother was a medical doctor, which set her apart from all of his aunts, and further differentiated his immediate family as an unusual bunch.

“There was a high tolerance for difference, and a high tolerance for plurality, having already been built into my family,” Selvadurai said.

As a child, Selvadurai was precocious and creative. Growing up in an upper-middle class household where differences were tolerated, his creativity was celebrated and he was encouraged to do theatre, elocution and ballet. Like Arjie in Funny Boy, Selvadurai would play the Bride-Bride game that he wrote about in the novel, “except I would want to be the wedding planner and arrange it, and boss all of the girl cousins around,” he recalled, with a laugh.

In the novel, when Arjie is discovered in a sari playing the role of the bride, his father worries that he may be “funny” and his mother forces him to play cricket instead of playing with the girls.

Selvadurai’s own father knew his son was gay from a young age.

“He never emasculated me, ever, but he was quite stern with me in the sense that he felt I was a timid kid and I needed to know how to handle myself as a man,” he laughed, “so, I had to play tennis. Going to the club is my first childhood memory, going to the club in my pram with my iron.”

Similar to Arjie’s experience in the novel, the Tamil and Sinhalese conflict rose during Selvadurai’s youth.

“From the mid-seventies onwards, I became increasingly aware of the threat of being Tamil. Your friends were Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and some of them were foreign and some of them were burgher. The things that bound you were the English that you spoke and the schools you went to. That was more of an identity than being Tamil, really, but it became an identity that was pushed on me,” Selvadurai said.

“Just like when you come to this country and you suddenly find yourself a racialized minority. It’s an identity that you don’t choose but you’re actually racialized and it became increasingly difficult for us to live there.”

After speaking openly about his childhood, Selvadurai became guarded on the subject of leaving Sri Lanka.

“I don’t talk very much about what happened because I don’t like to. It’s kind of a personal thing and it’s also a place of pain from which I write my novels, it’s precious. But we had to leave the country, we lost everything.”

At that time, he said, the Canadian government was offering an expedited immigration program, “but really it was a refugee program.” His family applied, and they got it. Upon their arrival in Canada, Selvadurai went straight to York University where he studied theatre. He worked throughout university to pay his way through school.

“I was happy to be in Canada, I was happy to be studying theatre and then when I came out at 21, I was very happy to come out.”

It was during a play writing class that he discovered his love for writing and realized he wanted to be a writer.

“At that time there were no racialized minorities as actors or a chance to put on theatre, and so I really switched to creative writing.”

After taking a course in creative writing he moved to Montreal where it was cheaper to live, to focus on writing. It was there where he wrote Funny Boy.

However, his transition as an immigrant came with challenges.

“The trauma catches up to you later. About four years in, I began to really think about it a lot, and I think I started to realize that my life was here, and you know, I think that was kind of a shock, and a very hard thing to accept,” Selvadurai said.

“Racism was much more [prominent] than it is now. I mean it was subtle, but crushing at the same time. But because I spoke English really well and went to university, I already had middle class aspirations and knew how to negotiate the system as a middle-class person. It was good and bad.”

I asked Selvadurai how he came to terms with the many aspects of his identity: being a gay man, and a Sri Lankan immigrant in Canada.

During the early 90’s the identity politics movement was gaining momentum. Much like today, outrage stirred in the streets over police brutality after the highly publicized Rodney King beating. Then, closer to home for Selvadurai, the fatal police shooting of Raymond Constantine Lawrence, a black man in Toronto, which sparked the Yonge Street Riot.

Selvadurai said that as he grew tired of racism in the gay community, he discovered Khush, a South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association, where he was able to meet other like-minded queer South Asians, who shared stories and learned from one another.

He was also one of the founding members of Desh Pardesh, a progressive, multidisciplinary South Asian Arts Festival which, according to their website, was dedicated to “providing a venue for the underrepresented and marginalized voices within the South Asian diaspora.”

“All of [my] identities sort of

Written by Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy details the

came together [in those groups], and solidified so that I was able to then go out into the world with a clear sense of who I was, and understand that an identity can be formed and celebrated in opposition to the mainstream identity, and that that could be your identity, and it could act and function in opposition,” Selvadurai said.

At that time, the members of Desh Pardesh had banded together and made a support system for each other so that it could make positive and progressive changes for the South Asian diaspora.

To Selvadurai, it’s puzzling that young people today still identify with Funny Boy.

“I don’t really understand the reception of any of my books because they are so personal. I don’t understand why one book does better than another or why people identify with it, but I am so glad they do.”

So, what did writing this book mean to Selvadurai as a member of the LGBTQ community?

“Part of being in Desh Pardesh and Khush was meeting other South Asian men and exchanging stories about what it was like to grow up queer in South Asia and the diaspora. I began to realize and regret that when I was growing up there were no examples of how to be gay for a young South Asian queer person and so writing the book was a way to fill that void,” he said.

“I wrote it for those young people who might pick up the book by some chance and find themselves in it. When I write gay characters it’s a way to give visibility to something that’s invisible.”

However, the message he wants to convey the most with Funny Boy deals with power.

“Why do some people get to decide what is right and what is wrong? It has to do with power. So then, can you not seize power too?” he said.

After over two decades in print, and writing a script for the novel himself, Selvadurai had Indo-Canadian director Deepa Mehta come on board to adapt Funny Boy into a movie.

“It was a wonderful experience working with her. She is very passionate about what she does and so am I, so it was a good match. There was nothing we wouldn’t do for the film, between the two of us,” Selvadurai said.

Though it hasn’t been released yet, Selvadurai has already watched the finished product.

“I think it’s extraordinary actually, and I think it’s a really wonderful film.”

The movie was to be released this year, but due to COVID-19 its release date has been pushed back and it is now set to debut at TIFF next fall.

Along with several events scheduled this month for Gryphons Read, Selvadurai is also back this fall as a professor for the creative writing department at the University of Guelph, teaching second and fourth year courses.