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Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion

In Funny Boy, Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel in six stories, the upper-middle-class Sri Lankan Tamil narrator traces a seven-year period of his childhood and adolescence that preceded the TamilSinhalese riots of 1983 and his family’s subsequent migration to Canada.’ This experience of migration is the grounds upon which the narrative unfolds; the novel is structured in terms of remembrance, with the narrator, Arjie, recalling a “remembered innocence of childhood . . . now colored in the hues of a twilight sky’’ (5). Such a phrase, coming early on in the novel, seems to signal that the text can be comfortably contained within a conventional genre of exile literature, one that evokes from the vantage point of exile an idyllic, coherent, preexilic past shattered by war and dislocation. Similarly, the novel’s parallel narrative of Arjie’s sexual awakening initially locates the text within an established genre of “coming out” stories, where the protagonist grows into an awareness of his “true,” homosexual identity.