Brannavan Gnanalingam reviews the debut novel by Saraid de Silva.
One of the most baffling things for children who move to a new country is what their parents’ (or grandparents’) lives were like prior to moving – for kids in particular, they’re too busy trying to fit in in their new country to care all that much. And, as is often the case, by the time such kids are interested in their parents’ stories, it’s too late to ask those stories. It’s almost an unknowable gap for immigrant kids; that, on top of the shock of realising that our parents are human (which most kids have to go through) it’s the realisation that our parents had distinct lives in places we would never understand. In short, our parents contain multitudes, as well.
Saraid de Silva’s AMMA uses this unknowability as a starting point in her tale of three generations of Indian and Sri Lankan women. The first generation is Josephina, an Indian woman, originally from Pondicherry, who is living in 1950s Singapore with her parents, only for her family to betray her in horrendous ways – it leads her to escape to post-independence Sri Lanka. Her daughter Sithara tries to make her way in 1980s Invercargill and Dunedin. Her mother Josephina has closed up following the death of Sithara’s father, the family having moved over to Aotearoa for his medical career. Sithara and her brother Suri navigate a hostile (to put it mildly) environment in Southland. Sithara shifts to Otago for university, falling intensely into a relationship with Paul. Meanwhile, the third strand of her narrative follows her daughter, Annie, who has just arrived at Suri’s doorstep in London. She’s more sure of herself within a local context, but estranged from her mother after her nomadic childhood and her mother’s on-again, off-again relationship with the violent Paul (who’s been in and out of jail for domestic violence).
There is an annoying tendency in books that jump temporally to hold back information, and therefore use that withholding to gerrymander a climax. In AMMA, de Silva avoids that pitfall, and does not rely on that to create her narrative or build narrative momentum. Right from the outset, de Silva lays bare the traumatic events of her three characters’ lives. We learn of Josephina’s horrible treatment from her parents, Sithara’s desperation to be accepted within a Pākehā environment, and Annie’s confusion at the life she can’t quite figure out, let alone the information that she’s all too conscious of having been withheld from her.
The book uses the time differences thematically instead, to create a literal barrier between the three generations’ lives – because their key moments occur separately from the others, the three characters never actually fully come to understand each other. The thrust of the book becomes the extent to which the three of them can come to peace with each other’s flaws, while also highlighting the horrors or guilt that have shaped them. The book ultimately focuses on how people come to find themselves, despite what they – and their parents – go through.
It isn’t too blunt to say that the three women’s stories are stories of survival in spite of the men around them. Heteronormative narratives and/or misogynist men do their best to ruin the protagonists’ lives, and you see the real damage that has been done to them by generations of entitled men. Wider societal narratives also feed their way into the mix – arranged marriages among South Asian families, homophobia, sectarian violence in Sri Lanka, and Aotearoa’s struggle to acknowledge domestic violence are part of the structuring forces that affect the characters’ lives, but de Silva holds the narrative close to examine the effects on her protagonists rather than make grand sweeping statements.
In some respect the narrative is a reactive response to horrible behaviour. AMMA is a tribute to the ways in which women persist, and the way they can help each other. It’s somewhat telling that the female solidarity in the book skips a generation – Annie has a real affinity with Josephina (despite Josephina’s own mistakes), while Josephina has an intense bond with her own grandmother. The women belatedly learn from their own mistakes, and are able to help their granddaughters (you’d hope a similar process would occur for Sithara). AMMA is, also, in part a tribute to queer desire and the way her characters can also desire men who refuse to buy into such behaviour, creating this clear sense that it doesn’t simply have to be this way – there are indeed alternatives. However, the tragedy of the narrative is the extent to which people can’t escape the wider societal failings.
AMMA jumps between Singapore, Sri Lanka, Southland, Dunedin, Hamilton and London. This geographical dislocation matches the way the narrative and time works in the book – further adding to the unknowability that the characters find themselves in. There’s also a real sense of having to start all over again, all of the time, of never being able to find oneself settled. This is a common feeling for immigrants, particularly those of a diasporic background without a clear idea of what “home” is.
What really elevates the book is de Silva’s ability to put the reader within a specific location. This was crucial in a book that is so geographically unstable; what appears disorienting is typical of many South Asian immigrant experiences. de Silva has a real knack for being able to set a scene by focusing on impressionistic details that add depth to the various locations in the book. This is contained in a line about Invercargill’s wind or ice, description of a high-school party in Christchurch, or a brief moment of freedom in a Singaporean field. This perhaps is helped by de Silva’s background in radio and television, in which she clearly knows how to set a scene without taking away momentum or needing to rely on a clumsy metaphor instead. There’s a real genius in de Silva’s control of place, and the way she deploys this to ground her characters temporally – and historically.
What is obvious in AMMA is the way immigrants have to compartmentalise their lives geographically. That becomes potentially inscrutable when the reasons for one leaving are so traumatic, and that makes it that much harder for their children to understand the reason why their parents are the way they are. What’s clear from AMMA though is the way that these various histories never get revealed coherently or in a linear fashion. Instead they’re revealed in spurts or whispers. To de Silva’s credit, she’s written this book to be taken on its own terms, she never requires her own characters to justify themselves to the reader – only to themselves.
The characters in AMMA themselves cross boundaries – ethnically, sexually, and geographically. Nothing ever is really stable, despite the way people have a one-dimensional view of their parents, and the generations ahead of them. Maybe that’s where the real poignancy of the title comes in. AMMA, in all caps, means mother in many South Asian languages, but specifically in both Sinhalese and Tamil. The title hints at the misplaced and fixed view of the person who is responsible for their existence. The real sadness of AMMA, and its undoubted brilliance, is the way in which it depicts how those of us who are immigrants will never know the complexities, traumas and mistakes of where we actually come from, but that we have no choice but to try to figure it out anyway.
AMMA by Saraid de Silva ($38, Moa Press) is available for purchase from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.
