In Telling One Story, A Novelist Speaks For a Country

V.V. Ganeshananthan writes in the Outlook section on the struggle to discuss all of Sri Lanka’s complex history while talking about her novel, a story of one family’s experience. Hear her read an excerpt from her book “Love Marriage.”

By V.V. Ganeshananthan

Sunday, July 13, 2008; Page B02

Yalini, the protagonist of my novel “Love Marriage,” turns 25 this month. “I was born in the early hours of the morning, on a day in late July,” she says in the book. “And as I entered this new world, my parents’ old one was being destroyed.” Moments after she is born, her Sri Lankan father watches on television as the country he left erupts into violence — the anti-Tamil riots known as “Black July.” With the anniversary of those 1983 riots, Sri Lanka’s war also turns a quarter-century old this month — and I find myself still debating how to describe it.

In practically every interview I give about the book, I am asked an unanswerable question. This morning, in San Francisco, the interviewer is Aimee Allison of radio station KPFA. We’re live, talking about Sri Lanka.

“Can you lay out what the landscape is there, and what is the source of the conflict?” she asks.

I never have more than a few minutes to capture decades — centuries? — of labyrinthine history. In recent years, especially following the 2004 tsunami and the collapse several months ago of a tattered cease-fire between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist militant group, Sri Lanka has appeared in the news slightly more than usual. But even this isn’t very much, so I can understand why the question is asked. Who’s willing to give it more than those few minutes?

I’m never sure, and so I find myself wrestling to construct responsible boilerplate that at least suggests Sri Lanka’s historical and political complexity. Of course, when I wrote the book, this was not a job I aimed to do. More…