asianamlitfans | Sep. 5th, 2018

Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel, Story of a Brief Marriage, reminds me why bring thrown off balance as a reader and academic is of immeasurable value. I’ve read a few books now that directly depict the Sri Lankan civil war or have stories taking place with the war in the background. My training as an academic focused on Sri Lankan Anglophone literature means that I look for a certain set of questions formed within specific theoretical foundations. But as much as I can, I try to let the literature I read guide my thoughts around issues of memory, war, trauma, gender, and colonialism. Story of a Brief Marriage uses the body as an index to intersect with all these aspects, and in doing so reminds us how much more careful (re)thinking there needs to be done around a long-standing event as devastating and complex as the Sri Lankan civil war.

Here is a short plot summary from Goodreads: “Two and a half decades into a devastating civil war, Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority is pushed inexorably towards the coast by the advancing army. Amongst the evacuees is Dinesh, whose world has contracted to a makeshift camp where time is measured by the shells that fall around him like clockwork. Alienated from family, home, language, and body, he exists in a state of mute acceptance, numb to the violence around him, till he is approached one morning by an old man who makes an unexpected proposal: that Dinesh marry his daughter, Ganga. Marriage, in this world, is an attempt at safety, like the beached fishing boat under which Dinesh huddles during the bombings. As a couple, they would be less likely to be conscripted to fight for the rebels, and less likely to be abused in the case of an army victory. Thrust into this situation of strange intimacy and dependence, Dinesh and Ganga try to come to terms with everything that has happened, hesitantly attempting to awaken to themselves and to one another before the war closes over them once more.”

The novel opens during a temporary reprieve from heavy shelling. The protagonist, Dinesh, is carrying an injured six-year old boy over to a makeshift hospital/clinic, where the boy will have his arm amputated. There are details of the precise injuries suffered by the child, and soon Dinesh becomes fascinated with what the stump of the child's already amputated thigh, lost to a landmine months previously, might feel like. I was worried at this point about this depiction of violence, of maiming, wondering if it was indulgent, or reveling in our need to visualize such injury from a safe distance. This academic paranoia I am trying to unlearn, and the novel certainly helped me do that.

The doctor starts sawing off the boy’s flesh while he is awake, because there is no anesthetic. At this point, Dinesh begins to wonder: is it better for the boy to lose his right arm or his left; is it easier for a person to balance if they lose their limbs all on one side of their body, or whether it is better to lose a left leg and a right arm, or vice versa. In the wake of the traumatic scene before him, in which he must participate by holding the boy down, Dinesh deliberates in the only way he can about the life of the child. He considers not only the boy’s past injury due to a landmine (his stump), but also what he sees as the boy’s present circumstance (the boy’s arm being sawed off), as well as what this result means for the boy’s future (will he be off-balance?; which is his dominant side?). These deliberations connect past, present, and future to both the immediacy and long-standing impact of war’s injuries on both the body and the psyche. It is this list of deliberations, simultaneously ringing in as ridiculous and practical, that changed my mind about what this book was doing with its opening pages, and indeed throughout.

The novel stretches the notion of what is ‘normal’ in times of war and violence, and one way it does this is by slowing down time. The entire novel takes place over a day and a night, but it feels much, much longer than that because of the careful way Arudpragasam renders Dinesh’s response to the violence around him. When the chaos and destruction of the shelling stops, Dinesh starts noticing the movements and workings of his own body as one that is still whole and functioning. He thinks about his feet moving, one in front of the other, as he walks. He notes what it feels like to feed himself a mouthful of rice and dhal, how the food feels as his tongue and teeth and molars crush it down, what the ball of food feels like as it moves down his throat and into his stomach. While the ground beneath him and his connections to others is vulnerable, Dinesh secures himself in his awareness of his own body and its wondrous work of keeping him alive. In noticing his body, Dinesh’s thoughts stretch out time.

Arudpragasam’s background in philosophy comes through clearly as Dinesh contemplates his body and wrestles with the notion that he may soon leave it behind. This struggle is only amplified when he agrees to marry Ganga. Set against the slowing down of time, the marriage proposal should seem out of time, but Arudpragasam writes it in such a way that it seems perfectly suited to take place among the carnage, loss, and chaos occurring around Dinesh and Ganga. And after all, why should it not, when we consider that in the midst of shelling, there is so little that is under one’s control? Ganga’s father attempts his fatherly duty of ensuring his daughter is married. Ganga seems reluctant to the marriage at first; we don’t hear the words she speaks to her father, although we do know that she thinks marriage isn’t the smartest move for her in case Dinesh dies and leaves her a widow. I’m still mulling over Ganga’s position here since questions of agency are complicated many-fold in this postcolonial social context that is further complicated by the intrusions of war. Silence in this novel has to do not just with agency and voice but also with the fact that the possibility of death hangs over Dinesh and Ganga, who do not quite know what to do with themselves. They're at a loss for words because their pasts so removed from them that they don’t know how to talk about who they are, and the future is not available to them either because they know they could die at any moment.

And yet, despite this knowledge, Dinesh acts on the present as he muses desperately over what it means to have a companion, what it means to truly know someone else. He and Ganga share his makeshift bed. He washes the grime that has accumulated on his body because he is aware of Ganga’s presence. He hopes, despite the nearness of death, for something as simple as having his new wife consider him clean and acceptable. Both in the quick images that filter through Dinesh’s days in the camp (a woman eating sand, an amputee shopping for a limb among the ones scattered around, the girl who wraps a square of sari around her brother’s amputated hand and fingers) and in the events we consider ‘major’ (marriage, death) there seems to be a recognition that actions must be based on the knowledge that the violence surrounding the characters will not end.

What can be done in the spaces of immediate violence and trauma? One answer seems to be to make room for what is necessary to move from one moment to the next. This method for dealing with trauma seems to be what allows Dinesh to function, and is similar to what I’ve read in other novels – characters moving from one thing, to the next, to the next. What is refreshing and heartening about Arudpragasam’s novel is that there is also room for whatever might give one peace of mind. For Ganga’s father, it was ensuring that his daughter was married. I wonder if, for Ganga, it was giving her father this peace of mind that allowed her to carry on. For Dinesh, once married, it was washing himself up. At least then, there is this peace and union, but these are imperfect and complicated, and in no way make up for the destruction and loss that these characters are dealing with.

This novel is at once about the specifics of the Sri Lankan civil war, the lived experiences of the people who suffered through it, and the minutiae of things that makes up human life - eating, walking, sleeping, shitting, washing. I think the book manages these nodes beautifully by simultaneously contracting and expanding time through the eyes of Dinesh. I did not know quite how to deal with the end of the novel, and spent a good few days processing it and coming back from the intellectual abyss that is reading literature about the Sri Lankan civil war. This book is so very important. It left me with fascinating questions about what we think we know about how we form connections with others and to our own selves, and about the hope and futility of connection despite the closeness of death. A highly recommended book that deserves all its accolades!

Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Story-Brief-Marriage-Novel/dp/1250072409