Literacy Legacies

Shyam Selvadurai -Dealing with dual discrimination

Shaym Selvadurai was born in 1965 to a Sinhalese mother and a Tamil father, in Colombo. He spent most of his adolescence in Sri Lanka.

However at the young age of 19, after the 1983 riots in the country, he and his family moved to Canada. This later became the backdrop for his first novel 'Funny Boy' . Selvadurai studied creative writing and magazine writing for his Bachelors degree in Fine Arts at York University.

His works include Funny Boy , 1994 which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Male Novel, and Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1994.

Cinnamon Gardens 1998 and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea , in 2005 which grabbed the Lambda Literary Award in the Children's and Youth Literature category in 2006 as well as Best Gay Men's Fiction.

Selvadurai has also edited a collection of short stories: Story-Wallah : Short Fiction from South Asian Writers (2004), which includes works by Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali and Hanif Kureishi among others.

The Funny Boy is woven around Arjie a young homosexual boy struggling against homosexuality in a homophobic society and racial discrimination during a time of tremendous social upheaval.

Arjie falls in love with a rebellious school mate Shehan, and the whole story thus become a dual struggle against discrimination of the gay and a Tamil.

In his second novel Cinnamon Gardens set in the high class society of the 1920s, he tries to draw a parallel between discrimination of the homosexuals and oppression of women.

Balendran conforms to sexual and social expectation by getting married to a woman while being in love with another man. And Annalukshmi struggles to pursue a teaching career against the wishes of her parents.

'Swimming in the Monsoon Sea' targeted at young adult readers is set in 1980 Sri Lanka, where a fourteen-year-old boy falls in love with his visiting Canadian cousin. His infatuations are acted out with the use of a school play.

His work is backed by meticulous research and his personal know-how he had acquired while in Sri Lanka, bringing his writing a Sri Lankan flavour much sought after by the foreigners.

For a person who has been away most of his life he gives a clear picture of Sri Lanka. Although as any other post-colonial writer some critics think he demonizes Sri Lanka in the face of the world, by dwelling in violence that took place during the insurgencies.

Selvadurai takes seriously both the effect his books have on other young gay Sri Lankans and his position as a role model for other gay Asians abroad.

Talking about his place in the world he has said "My creativity comes not from 'Sri Lankan' or 'Canadian' but precisely from the space between, that marvellous open space represented by the hyphen, in which the two parts of my identity jostle and rub against each other like tectonic plates, pushing upwards the eruption that is my work."