The making of “Brotherless Night” by V.V. Ganeshananthan
Author V.V. Ganeshananthan discusses her novel “Brotherless Night,” shedding light on the Sri Lankan civil war and its impact on civilians.
A few weeks ago, I spoke to V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage and most recently Brotherless Night.
Brotherless Night follows a 16-year-old Tamil girl called Sashi, whose life and studies are upturned due to the Sri Lankan civil war, a complex and prolonged conflict between government security forces and Tamil militants, primarily the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The conflict was marked by widespread violence and a quest for political and ethnic autonomy.
Ganeshananthan takes readers through Sashi’s life two years before the war began in 1983, its evolution and end in 2009, while facing multiple heartbreaking ruptures within her family, village and friends.
I spoke to Ganeshananthan about her research and writing process to create this magnificent piece of historical fiction.
Unveiling hidden narratives
Ganeshananthan began writing Brotherless Night in 2004 when she came across research for her debut novel that didn’t fit into Love Marriage. She wrote a story around the event for a workshop and continued to build on it for 18 years to create Brotherless Night.
“I wanted to write about the Indian Peacekeeping Force, the brutality of the state and various militant groups, specifically the Tamil Tigers,” Ganeshananthan told me over a Zoom call.
“I also wanted to write a story that centred civilians and specifically women who it seemed to me had to borne the brunt of keeping society afloat in certain ways that hadn't been written about as much as I wished they would've been.”
Ganeshananthan was inspired by The Broken Palmyra, a book written by four Tamil university professors, which documents the violence in Jaffna in the 1980s.
Rajani Thiranagama, one of the co-authors of the book, is the inspiration for one of Brotherless Night’s characters called Anjali Acca, an influential medical professor who encourages Sashi to document all her experiences.
“Brotherless Night is a fictional homage to The Broken Palmyra, which also centres civilians and puts forward the stories of ordinary people who were facing three different forms of militarisation,” said Ganeshananthan.
“I wanted to pay homage to the clarity and meticulousness of their documentation but also, as a self-critique, to think about what it means to come from a community that gave rise to these militant groups.”
Of course, as historical fiction, Brotherless Night is inspired and dives into events of the civil war and uprisings, including the burning of Jaffna library in 1981. But Rajani Thirangama wasn’t the only inspiration of Ganeshananthan’s characters.
The piece of research that Ganeshananthan first created a story from was in fact based on Thileepan, a member of the Tamil Tigers, who died while on hunger strike against the Indian government. Ganeshananthan was inspired to base Sashi’s friend K from Thileepan’s story. Although as she continued to write the novel and more about K, Ganeshananthan created a more fictionalised character and one of her own inventions.
From research to novel
Overall, Brotherless Night is an extremely detailed novel about the war in which Ganeshananthan captures its impact on civilians especially women. The war lasted 26 years and Ganeshananthan spent over half of that amount of time creating the novel.
So, I was interested in learning about Ganeshananthan’s research and writing processes in writing Brotherless Night, as well as how it had evolved over the course of the war. I was surprised to hear that the original version of the book, which she started in 2004, had very small edits but she shifted much of the novel set in New York to Sri Lanka.
Unsurprisingly, however, Ganeshananthan carried out a lot of research into the novel.
“I had to teach myself how to do a lot of things in order to write the book, and that was very rewarding and also extraordinarily time consuming,” she said.
Furthermore, as Ganeshananthan was born and raised in the US, her position on writing about the civil war was unique.
“I learned a lot of things that were, I think, easy as a diasporic person,” she explained. “I was born and raised in the US, and often a kind of a dominant society. I'm put in the position of being a native informant, but I'm not a true native informant because I didn't grow up in Sri Lanka.”
Of course, when writing histories as a diasporic person, there are sensitivities when researching and asking questions to ensure that trauma is not triggered or re-triggered.
As Ganeshananthan has journalism training, she was able to investigate and interview Sri Lankans about their experiences.
“I found that many people had not been asked and actually wanted to speak about their experiences during that time,” she said. “Many people who were glad to talk to me.”
However, she had to learn different ways of reading and interpreting what they were telling her.
“Within the community there are ways that people talk about the war and certain kinds of language they use,” Ganeshananthan said.
“There are certain things that get left out or are not spoken about — this is something I had to learn how to read to understand what people were saying, and also when they weren't telling me complete stories in the clearest terms because they couldn't or because they didn't want to.”
Consequently, Ganeshananthan took her time researching and found that while talking more to her interviewees, she found them trusting her more as she was able to highlight her expertise about ‘hidden’ histories.
“There are ways you can signal to the interviewee you’ve researched, for example, ‘yes, I know about what happened in 1985 in the Eastern Province’ and they’ll be a little surprised that I had known about what they were talking about.”
“I did a lot of homework,” she joked. “You know, a good South Asian kid who did a lot of homework.”
Feeling weight of writing historical fiction
I was intrigued to know if Ganeshananthan felt any pressure when writing Brotherless Night, a novel that delves into violent and traumatic history.
While there was some pressure in writing about events that haven’t been represented in culture, Ganeshananthan said this feeling could put you in a “trap of representation.”
“Feeling pressure means I have to assume that there isn’t going to be a book that comes after mine that includes these things,” she said. “I'd like to think that there will be and that my book is entering a conversation with other books and oral histories and other stories.”
There were other aspects of writing the novel that were difficult as Ganeshananthan didn’t want to trigger her readers.
“There's a major rupture in the family in 1983, and I had to decide, first of all, would I do that? How would it happen? What extent of violence was I willing to impose on my characters? How would I depict that in a way that wouldn't be trauma porn?
“These are all factors I thought about while wanting to honour realistic experiences that people went through.”
Future plans
Ganeshananthan spent 18 years writing Brotherless Night so unsurprisingly she plans to have a break from historical fiction writing for a while.
While writing the novel, Ganeshananthan taught a comedy class as a means of relief.
“It's possible I'll try to write something funny, something very light on research,” she said. “You know, just a novel called “Screwing Around” by V.V. Ganeshananthan!”
As I wait for Ganeshananthan’s comedy novel, I’m sure I’ll be reading and learning more about the Sri Lankan civil war. If you haven’t already, I would highly recommend ordering the heartbreaking novel Brotherless Night.
V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications.
Truly appreciate your work!