V. V. Ganeshananthan is an author and former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association.
She has served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and currently holds board positions with the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
Her book, "Brotherless Night," was recently shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Set during the early years of Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war, the novel offers a heartrending portrait of one woman's moral journey, highlighting both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home.
In a recent interview with Asian Voice, Ganeshananthan discussed her book, its central character, and the impact she hopes her work will have.
Can you share with us the inspiration behind Brotherless Night and what drew you to explore the themes of war and moral ambiguity?
Brotherless Night traces history that runs parallel to the earliest years of my own life. I grew up hearing stories about the war. The impact of that is reflected in the book and other stories that I didn't initially hear and learned later are also reflected in the book. I came to know a number of people who were in Jaffna during this time, and I was interested to hear from them what it was like to endure that period, particularly as Tamil civilians. I was interested in hearing from women, students, political dissidents, and people whose stories had been somewhat less represented in the histories of this period.
How did you develop Sashi's character and her relationship with her homeland? What challenges did you face in portraying her evolution?
Sashi arose from my desire to portray a hunger strike that was in some ways adjacent to one that took place at the Nallur Kandaswamy temple in Jaffna, Sri Lanka in 1987. In searching for a point of view from which to tell that story, I ended up inventing a young woman—a medical student who was observing the hunger strike: Sashi. She gave me a lot of opportunities to learn things that I was interested in, including medicine and the particular challenges of getting an education under these circumstances.
Can you elaborate on the role of feminism, shaping Sashi's journey, and the broader themes of the book?
Most of my work is in some way feminist. This is very much part of my worldview, so on some level, it's hard for me to think about conscious decisions I might have made—this is my subconscious at work. Even at the very beginning of the book, we know that Sashi is the granddaughter of someone who provided reproductive health care to women in Colombo, and she wants to follow in his footsteps. So to some extent, she's coming from a lineage of men who care about women. This is not always the version of masculinity that we see portrayed in Asian narratives, but it's one that is pretty familiar to me. I wanted to represent—in Sashi's life—how she feels both dutiful to the men in her life in a way that we might recognise as coming from patriarchy, but also that they support and have respect for her. They understand her to be deeply intelligent.
Some of my most powerful interactions with my own students and teachers have also been shaped by feminism and its role in making us think of ways that we can support one another, and so that educational theme also emerges in the book. Sashi participates in a feminist book club. That space for women to talk through ideas with each other is a space that has been important to me, and I thought it was a space that would be interesting to depict for her. Through interviewing people about that time period, I came to understand that such a space that did exist then and was vital for some of the people navigating these politics in the 1980s.
What do you hope readers will ultimately take away from Brotherless Night, and what message would you like to impart to those who embark on Sashi's journey?
This question is very generous and also broad. Readers fall along a huge spectrum. There are, of course, readers who are connected to Sri Lanka in some way and have some awareness of the history, and there are other readers who are Sri Lankan and don't know all the history. There are readers who are not Sri Lankan and know the history, and there are readers who are not Sri Lankan and don't know the history. Those are four very loose groups, most likely better represented along a spectrum.
I am primarily writing to and for people of Sri Lankan heritage, but I'm also interested in interrogating the question of who is expected to explain a history like this. Who is expected to do the work of figuring out what that history actually is? Who thinks that they're owed an explanation? Who are the listeners and who are the tellers of the story here? Throughout the book, Sashi addresses the audience directly, and asks those questions. She asks who the audience is, who are her listeners, and what is she assuming about them. Is she perhaps wrong? That's part of the structure or the way that the book is written—she's talking to you, really.
Beyond that, I will leave readers to take away what they will from Brotherless Night, because now that it is out of my hands, it is up to them. It's been a great privilege to hear from people who have read the book. They've shared exciting and surprising and thoughtful interpretations, and it has been wonderfully gratifying to have people enter Sashi’s world so wholeheartedly.
