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Overview

Shyam Selvadurai was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1965. He is the son of a Sinhalese mother and a Tamil father, members of conflicting ethnic groups whose troubles form a major theme in his work. Ethnic riots in 1983 drove the family to immigrate to Canada, where he studied creative and professional writing as part of a BFA program at York University. He teaches at York University, and lives in Toronto. Selvadurai’s books have been published in the US, the UK and India, and published in translation in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey and Israel. Funny Boy, published in 1994, is his second novel. It is regarded as one of the novels that pioneered a new era of contemporary Sri Lankan writing in English, winning the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Award for Best Gay Male Novel as well as the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award for 1994. Selvadurai’s young adult novel Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2005) won the Lambda Literary Award in the children’s and youth literature category and was a finalist for Canada's most prestigious literary award, the Governor General's Awards, in the category of children's literature. His latest novel, The Hungry Ghosts, was published by Doubleday in 2012.

Discussion Topics

1. “Funny boy”:

What are some of the ways Arjie is “funny”? We understand that the word is not meant to describe someone who makes us laugh. If anything, Arjie’s homosexuality is far from “funny”; it is a very serious matter indeed. Yet, if we were to explore the word further, we would see that there are ways in which Arjie’s being different, “odd,” uniquely equips him to tell the story of the novel. For instance, because he would rather be home-bound, Arjie’s closeness with his mother and Radha Aunty allows him access to their inner thoughts. The author alludes indirectly to this unique capacity of Arjie’s when he chooses the uncle’s carelessly cruel words as the novel’s title. How is Arjie’s being “funny” an effective way for Selvadurai to tell his story? How is Arjie’s homosexuality an effective lens through which the larger story of the family, the community, and the country may be narrated?

2. Ethnic conflict:

How do the national politics, in particular, the ethnic conflict and riots between the Tamils and the Sinhalese (see Background on Sri Lanka) play out in the novel? Draw upon three examples in the text to illustrate ways in which the larger tensions of the nation are encapsulated in the local interactions, especially to do with love and marriage, between the characters. One of your examples must derive from the chapter “The Best School of All.”

3. Gender:

In the first chapter, “Pigs Can’t Fly,” the young Arjie’s fondness for dressing as the bride comes into direct conflict with his cousin’s, “Her Fatness.” There is much in this chapter about gender construction and gender roles. For instance, the grandparents’ house has clearly marked boundaries for the formation of gendered identities, the front (the outer or public) belonging to the boys, the back (the inner or private) belonging to the girls and Arjie. While Arjie, the “girlie-boy,” plays with his girl cousins, a girl cousin, Meena (the “tomboy”?), plays with the boys. How does this chapter illuminate the socializing process by which gender identities and gender roles get constructed in the novel? In what way does Arjie end up resolving this chapter’s conflict of gender in the remainder of the novel?