Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy

The connected stories in Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy create an intergenerational history of an Indian Tamil family from the first generation who left India to work in the tea estates of Sri Lanka to children born in America. 

The stories are heart-breaking, some addressing the discrimination and murder of Tamils in Sri Lanka while others explore the immigrant experience. I am haunted by these characters with their complicated back stories. The storytelling is mesmerizing. Sometimes I felt a bit lost, as if a visitor in a foreign land whose culture and reality jolt me outside my comfortable reality. 

America has its horrors and violence, but for someone like myself who has been comfortably sheltered, it is an awakening to read lines like "They all loved people who were born to disappear," or "Refugees can't be picky," or "the real difference between India and American...there is no rule of law in India. You need to bribe everyone to live a normal life." 

Imagine an engineer who in America must work as a butcher. A Tamil professor in Sri Lanka who receives death threats and whose son disappears. An old man who returns home to find his entire village missing and replaced by a hole in the ground. A Tamil man memorizes books because he saw the burning of books in his language.  

The family patriarch in Half Gods is descended from Tamils who came to Ceylon harvest tea. The family experienced the end of colonization when the British left Ceylon, reborn as Sri Lanka. They suffered during the Anti-Tamil riots when their village was destroyed, fled to a refugee camp, and finally immigrated to America.

Sri Lanka, once called Ceylon, is an island first inhabited in the stone age. Beginning in the 16th c European countries colonized the island--first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and finally the British. They built rubber, coffee, and coconut plantations. When the coffee plants were decimated by a fungus, tea was grown, and to harvest the tea, Tamils from southern India were brought over as indentured servants.

When the country gained its independence, the Sinhalese were the dominant group, making their language the official one. The Tamils were marginalized and tried to gain a political voice. Anti-Tamil riots arose; Tamils were killed and others left the country. Out of this conflict, the Liberation Tamil Tigers were birthed and civil war ensued. 

Nearly 300,000 displaced persons were housed in government camps and 100,000 people died during the war. Sri Lanka ranks as having the second highest number of disappearances in the world.

I mistakenly thought the book was a collection of stories, which I usually read one at a time. After a few stories, I realized the interconnectedness and so suggest reading as you would a novel.

Akil Kumarasamy received her MFA from the University of Michigan. This is her first book.

I received a complimentary ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Half Gods
by Akil Kumarasamy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub Date 05 Jun 2018 
ISBN 9780374167677
PRICE $25.00 (USD)

from the publisher:

A startlingly beautiful debut, Half Gods brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. Following the fractured origins and destinies of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past in their lives. 

These ten interlinked stories redraw the map of our world in surprising ways: following an act of violence, a baby girl is renamed after a Hindu goddess but raised as a Muslim; a lonely butcher from Angola finds solace in a family of refugees in New Jersey; a gentle entomologist, in Sri Lanka, discovers unexpected reserves of courage while searching for his missing son. 

By turns heartbreaking and fiercely inventive, Half Gods reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.