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.

Sharon Bala's Debut Novel, The Boat People, Explores The Refugee Experience

We may have all come on different ships but we're in the same boat now. Martin Luther King Jr.

Who leaves their home unless under duress? The place of one's nativity, where one's ancestors are buried, the house that contains so many memories are not given up lightly. To be a refugee, an immigrant, means to be cast off freewheeling into the unknown mists of the future, without mooring or a known destination.

The Boat People is Sharon Bala's debut novel.

Mahindan fled Sri Lanka with his son Sellian when there was nothing left. The Tamil Tigers had been fighting for their rights under the Singhs for years, turning both the willing and the unwilling into terrorists. The United Nations had pulled out and there was no protection. His wife dead, his village bombed, Mahindan and his son join the stream of refugees, ending up in a camp. Their suffering becomes unendurable, the dream of Canada enchanting. Mahindan raises money for a boat out of Sri Lanka.

Arriving in Canada, the 503 refugees are secluded in holding places, women and children in one place and the men in another, families broken apart. Mahindan is on trial to prove he is not a Tiger terrorist, while his son goes to a foster home and becomes Westernized.

Priya represents the legal counsel for the refugees, sidelined into the work because of her Tamil heritage. She is resentful as she wanted experience in corporate law, and because she identifies as Canadian whose grandparents happen to be from Sri Lanka. The refugee work is exhausting and disturbing. Then her uncle reveals the truth of her family's past.

Grace is a temporary government assigned lawyer. Canada is immersed in xenophobia and fear. All Tamils are considered possible terrorists and she is to do everything possible to find reasons to deport the boat people back to Sri Lanka.

Grace's grandmother in suffering the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, which brings old memories to the forefront. An Issei, first generation Japanese Canadian, she becomes an activist for the Japanese Canadians who were interred during WWII, losing their homes and businesses which now have become valuable real estate. She warns Grace that she is participating in the same kind of racism experienced the Japanese--everyone in a group considered an enemy until proven innocent.

I learned about Canada's parallels to American fear of foreigners as potential terrorists and about the history of Sri Lanka in modern times.

The Boat People is similar to other books I have recently read, such as This Is How It Begins by Joan Dempsey, warning about the implication of current events through the lens of our admitted past mistakes, and involving a courtroom setting.

Sharon Bala's book is interesting and thoughtful, a fine addition to recent novels addressing timely issues in immigration, post 9-11 fears, and learning how to connect our past mistakes to our current policy. Read an excerpt at http://sharonbala.com/excerpt

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

The Boat People: A Novel
by Sharon Bala
Doubleday Books
Pub Date 09 Jan 2018
ISBN: 9780385542296
PRICE $26.95

River of Ink by Paul M. M. Cooper: Resistance in 13th c. Sri Lanka

Writers and artists employ powerful tools that can shape how a society views itself, its past, and how it envisions its future. They are often the front line of resistance.

River of Ink by Paul M. M. Cooper came to my attention when the author followed me on Twitter. I downloaded a sample of his book and enjoyed his writing and bought a copy of River of Ink. (Yes, I bought a book, this was not a free review galley!)

The novel is fiction but the downfall of Sri Lanka under a destructive military takeover is history. It was fascinating to read about a time and place so foreign and unfamiliar.

"Do you remember the mynah birds that used to live in the courtyard outside your room? On the day the city fell, they were all twittering louder than I'd ever heard them, and flying from tree to tree in a flock. The noise was tremendous...You must remember this. You were sitting right there beside me, your back straight and your forehead furrowed, murmuring the letters to yourself as you cut them." from River Of Ink chapter one

Asanka is the court poet in the diverse, international Sri Lanka of the 13th c. He enjoys a pampered and luxurious life. He writes love poems for men wishing to please the women they love. His own love life is murky; his wife disdains him for he has a mistress, a palace servant, Sarasi. He is teaching her how to write.

The ink is mixed of charcoal and oil. A metal stylus cuts the palm leaf paper into sinuous shapes.

Life in Polonnaruwa changes in an instant when Kalinga Magha comes from the mainland with his army and elephants, intent on destroying the Sri Lankan civilization, looting and murdering his way to the capital. He murders Asanka's king, forces the queen into marriage, and demands that Asanka translate his favorite Hindu sacred text into Tamil, the language of the working class. Magha intends to enlighten the Buddhists with a story of dharma, the battle between lord Krishna and Shishepal over the girl they both love. Magha demands the burning of books as part of his cultural takeover. And finally, Magha decides to take Asanka's love for his own queen.

The downfall of a society, a city, a culture is a horrible thing to read about, and I was very aware that it has happened over and over again throughout the ages. Powerful men believe they bring a better religion or government to justify their motives. And the ordinary people are trampled and murdered, and yes, resistance groups rise up. In the story of the particular lies the story of human history.

In his acknowledgments, Cooper finishes by saying "Finally this book goes out to all the translators, artists and writers around the world who continue to create beauty and freedom from beneath the heel of oppression. Today you are more necessary and powerful than you could possibly imagine."

River of Ink is an impressive book that both entertains, enlightens, and inspires.

River of Ink
Paul M. M. Cooper
Bloomsbury