V. V. Ganeshananthan
Winner of the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan is historical fiction set against the background of the Tamil’s fight for autonomy during the 1980s Sri Lanka civil war. The novel is in five parts, beginning in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in 1981, and concluding in New York in 2009. Although the novel is fictional, it builds on actual events that transpired during the civil war.
The narrator is Sashi, a young Tamil girl with aspirations of becoming a doctor. She lives in Jaffna with her parents and four brothers. As the conflict between the Sinhalese-dominated state and the Tamil separatist groups heats up, Sashi’s eldest brother is killed in anti-Tamil riots. Two of her remaining brothers join the militant Tamil Tigers, leaving Sashi and her youngest brother alone with their parents. The war becomes increasingly violent with both sides perpetrating atrocities and with civilians caught in the crossfire. It isn’t long before the Tamil Tigers kill members of other rebel groups to eliminate all potential opposition to their dominance. Civilians are accosted from all sides. They live in fear of the Sri Lankan army, the Tamil Tigers, and, later, the Indian Peace Keeping force which has ostensibly entered the fray to maintain peace between the two sides but which ends up terrorizing the population by committing rape and murder at will.
Sashi’s determination to pursue her medical education is unwavering. She navigates a path in her war-torn community. She juggles her studies with volunteering at a medical facility that treats civilians and rebels. She teams with a medical professor and her husband to document human rights violations perpetrated by the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan army, and the Indian peacekeepers. After her professor is murdered, Sashi escapes to England and then to New York where she continues to advocate for justice for the civilian population.
The novel is well-researched, drawing heavily from actual events and representing a powerful illustration of man’s inhumanity to man. The brutality and violence perpetrated by all sides is graphic and described with unflinching honesty. All too often, a group formed to advocate justice for its ethnic population turns against that very population by intimidating and terrorizing it into submission. In such situations, as Sashi demonstrates, the space for movement and for freedom of thought and action shrinks immeasurably. Moral certainties are questioned; moral ambiguities proliferate; conflicting impulses abound. One does the best that one can under the circumstances by handling daily struggles one step at a time.
Sashi’s voice is deliberative. At times, her interiority can be long-winded, repetitious, and somewhat self-indulgent. She frequently pauses from the narrative to address the reader directly to invite empathy and consideration. The prose is unadorned and somewhat labored. In spite of these shortcomings, the novel powerfully evokes the deleterious impact of civil war on all concerned, particularly civilians. It explores how and why individuals are sucked into a conflict. And it does so with simultaneous outrage, empathy, and compassion.