International Journal of English
and Literature (IJEL)
ISSN(P): 2249-6912; ISSN(E): 2249-8028
Vol. 4, Issue 6, Dec 2014, 53-62
© TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.
RELUCTANT “INNER SPACE” AND FORBIDDEN “OUTER SPACE”:
QUEER IDENTITY IN SHYAM SELVADURAI’S FUNNY BOY
MUKESH YADAV & SHALINI YADAV
Assistant Professor, Al-Jouf University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Sakaka, Saudi Arabia
ABSTRACT
Shyam Selvadurai’s debut novel compellingly speaks of negotiation of the cultural values invested in girls' play
and boys' games, of strong- headed mothers and emancipated daughters, of the nationalist struggles between Tamils and
Sinhalese, and of gay versus heterosexual relationships. It is a story of Arjie, a young boy’s passage to adolescence and
maturity with the upheavals of growing political unrest. The paper argues Arjie’s journey to his own ‘queer identity’.
The paper investigates not only how sexuality exiles the protagonist from the girls, different feminized sites and eventually
his own family, but also how ethnicity plays a major part in exiling from each other. Against this backdrop the paper
analyses the protagonist’s development of queer identity and the protagonist’s ability to transgress the borders of gender,
ethnicity and desirability.
KEYWORDS: Gender, Ethnicity, Desirability, Queer Identity, Transgression
INTRODUCTION
Funny Boy can be read as a Biludungsroman the story of one young boy's interior formation and integration set
against the backdrop of his country's disintegration. The boy, Arjun "Arjie" Chelvaratnam, is the second-son of a
privileged middle-class Tamil family. It is amid rising waves of Sinhalese and Tamil violence that Arjie must understand
and come to terms with his own homosexuality. Coming out is no small feat for any gay teen to undertake, and on top of
the usual feelings of loneliness, isolation and fear of rejection by family and friends, Arjie must negotiate his painful
transformation to adulthood in the midst of a country gone mad. It is the socio-economic, racial and religious tensions
within Sri Lanka that occupy most of his (and consequently Arjie's) time and attention within the novel. The novel is the
true longings of the human heart come up against the way things are. As Alberto Manguel (1991) says:
Shyam Selvadurai has brought back from his Sri Lankan childhood a glittering and wise novel. Funny Boy keeps
repeating with quiet conviction that the human condition can, in spite of everything, be joyful. You are not alone,
it says to the reader. I understand you. I too was there, I remember." (114)
Although his characters are confronted with the social difficulties that revolve around gay identity and the ethical
and ideological questions raised by what Paul Gilroy calls 'ethnic absolutism; Selvadurai, wisely, avoids moralising about
their dilemmas. This is a refreshing, indeed an honest, way of writing about such politically volatile issues. The story
Selvadurai tells so compellingly speaks of contesting desires, of the need to understand identity as a process that constantly
demands negotiation. Be it a negotiation of the cultural values invested in girls' play and boys' games, of strong- headed
mothers and emancipated daughters, of the nationalist struggles between Tamils and Sinhalese, or of gay versus
heterosexual relationships-this process is dramatised in the novel through the corporeality of desire.
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SUMMARY
Funny Boy is a classic example of a novel about a subject-in-formation, a narrative that follows the cultural
education and sexual and racialist awakening process of its child protagonist. We see Arjie, for example, receiving a
'lesson' from his father about racism and about the historic tensions between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, or from Daryl
Brohier about the Burghers. These are 'lessons' delivered in response to Arjie's curiosity about things he fails to understand,
but the answers he gets are also meant to fill in gaps in our knowledge of Sri Lanka's history and social realities. These
instances of double-speaking, of addressing at once the protagonist and the reader are an effective narrative device, but one
which is not always employed subtly enough. Often, the didacticism of these scenes is too pronounced, as it occurs while
all action is suspended. Still, most of the narrative movements are executed deftly through Arjie's perspective.
It is the story of Arjie Chelvaratnam and his family, beginning when he is seven years old, in1977. Arjie’s
preference for the company of girls and delight in dressing up like a bride mark him as a ‘funny boy’ in a way that alarms
his family, but the most striking aspect of the youngster’s story is his persistent determination to go his own way.
He frustrates his father’s attempt to straighten him out by deliberately failing at cricket, just as he will later frustrate the
school principal’s attempts to use him by deliberately failing in his recitation at the award ceremony. Arjie is at first
confused, unsure of his identity, and oblivious to his family’s fears about his sexual orientation, but he always pursues his
own path. Selvadurai casts Arjie in the role of the best and most trustworthy ally adults in distress can find. Acting at once
as their strong alibi and a silent witness, Arjie is present when Radha Aunty, a Tamil, has her clandestine meetings with
Anil, the Sinhalese man in love with her. Radha Aunty admits she also loves him, but only after it becomes clear that the
enmity between their ethnic communities cannot be overcome even by the force of love. This impossibility for love to
grow across ethnic and racial boundaries is one of the novel's central themes. Despite this, desire offers the only hope,
indeed the only means, however precarious, of transgressing and negotiating those destructive boundaries. And this is
where the poignancy of Selvadurai's novel lies.
Pigs Can’t Fly
The images of a romantic young boy parading in worn-out sari are deliberately described in a humourous fashion.
Events that another author might have treated as soul-killing trauma become instead an amusing celebration of
individuality. During 'spend-the-days,' the Sundays when his extended family gathers together in his grandparents' house,
Arjie is the only boy in the family who does not play cricket with the male cousins in front of the house. He belongs to the
territory called 'the girls; the territory confined to the back garden and the kitchen porch. Arjie is there because the rules of
the boys' game do not appeal to him: he opts, instead, for 'the free play of fantasy.' There, in front of the kitchen porch,
his female cousins select him as their leader 'because of the force of [his] imagination: and because of the game he has
made up, 'bride- bride.’ Indeed, he is 'the bestest of brides.’ As Arjie tells us, "The dressing of the bride would now begin,
and then, by the transfiguration I saw taking place in Janaki's full-length mirror... I was able to leave the constraints of
myself and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self, a self to whom this day was dedicated....1 was an icon,
a graceful, benevolent, perfect being upon whom the adoring eyes of the world rested."[4]
Play-acting and cross-dressing is by means of these perfomative acts-through saris and veil, through rouge and
lipstick, through kohl- accented eyes and a crown of flowers on the head-that Arjie's body reveals its otherness, that he
learns the mysteries and power of transgression. Little Arjie delights in constructing a palimsestic self, for his
cross-dressing is at once the product of his rich imagination and an act of double mimicry, enacting as it does the ways in
Impact Factor (JCC): 4.0867
Index Copernicus Value (ICV): 3.0
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Reluctant “Inner Space” and Forbidden “Outer Space”: Queer Identity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy
which 'the goddesses of the Sinhalese and Tamil cinema' represent the sexual and social codes of his culture. But it is not
merely Arjie's childish and excessive romanticism that bride-bride represents. The game takes him a step ahead of himself,
for it already embodies the script of his future self, his gay identity.
When another cousin, naughtily nick-named Her Fatness, begins to covet Arjie's bride role, Arjie's playacting
ceases to be just that. Her Fatness, recently back from America, suspects his sexual otherness and, encouraged by some of
the uncles and aunts, begins to call him names: pansy, faggot, girlie-boy, funny boy. It is in response to his family's fear
that he might turn out to be 'funny', a euphemism for being gay, in retaliation to their elaborate (and often comical)
attempts to dissuade him from playing with the girls, that Arjie begins his relentless questioning of what is taken to be
normative behaviour: why should he play cricket despite his hating it? Why can't boys play with girls? What's wrong with
playing with his mother's make-up and jewellery? Why can't he paint his nails with red polish? The answers he receives to
these whys vary, but they can be summed up by his Amma's reply: "Because the sky is so high and the pigs can't fly, that's
why,”. Although he is exiled at the end of “Pigs Can’t Fly” from both the boys’ and girls’ worlds, we see him not crushed,
but trudging stolidly off towards the future.
Perhaps it is because Arjie learns how aberrant logic can be while he is still very young that he becomes so adept
at receiving what is 'other' to the norms of his immediate environment, ultimately at mediating difference.
His bewilderment as to why he is not allowed to play bride-bride soon gives way to a bitter- ness and frustration that
gradually reveal to him how similarly arbitrary other social and cultural codes can be. As the plot unfolds, Arjie's loss of
innocence comes to represent the misplaced desires of adults like his mother, for example, desires that could have been
fulfilled had she been strong or fortunate enough to resist the e long-established boundary lines of ethnicity and class.
'Funny,' Arjie discovers, signifies what society decides is queer-strange, unpredictable, unmanageable, ultimately
threatening to the status quo, 'Funny,' as in 'funny life,’ functions n in the novel as a sign of difference and
misunderstanding, of marginalisation and excess.
Radha Aunty
“Radha Aunty” takes place immediately after the events in the first chapter, in 1978, as Arjie finds a companion
and ally in his Westernised, bell-bottom-wearing aunt. The story of her romance with a Sinhala boy is the first in the series
of relationships destroyed by events stemming from Sri Lanka politics. That she meets him in production of The King and I
is particularly ironic because the latter stresses the importance of overcoming racial prejudices. Radha is not only an ally,
but a role model for Arjie as she determinedly pusues her romance with Anil in defiance of her family’s opposition and
interference. It is true that Arjie learns from her experience that love does not necessarily conquer all, but he does not
acquiesce in her ultimate submission.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
Set in 1979, “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” takes the theme of forbidden love to a more serious level in two ways: it
involves Arjie’s own mother, and it involves Arjie’s own mother and it involves the death of the beloved. Whereas Radha’s
beloved was Sinhalese, Amma’s is a burgher investigating the abuses of the Sinhala Government against Tamils.
Selvadurai artfully depicts the slowly dawning realization of the fact that she disagrees with Daryl Uncle’s politics, his
mother is having affair with him. Their story is told in a way that vividly conveys a childish loss of innocence.
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Like Radha Aunty, Dary Uncle is a sympathetic adult who has lived abroad and helps open up the world of possibility for
Arjie, in this by validating his love for Louisa Alcott’s novels. This time the outcome of the romance is determined by
forces beyond the family. Each chapter is growing successively more entangled with Sri Lankan ethnic and religious
tensions. Arjie realizes much more this time how thoroughly love has been overwhelmed by hatred and violence.
Small Choices
In “Small Choices,” set in 1982, Selvadurai drives straight to the heart of national conflict by introducing the
character of Jegan, an admirable young man who- like Velutha in Roy’s The God of Small Things- has radical connections.
He formerly belonged to the Tigers, and this history condemns him forever in the eyes of the Sinhala police, although he
has left them for the more benevolent charity organization specializing in assistance to Tamil children victimized by
violence, that Gandhian movement. Selvadurai is careful to apportion blame for unjust violence to both the Sinhala and the
Tamil factions in society.
The failed relationship in this case is not a romance, but the friendship between Arjie’s father and his late friend,
Jegan’s father. Amma’s betrayal of her husband is not portrayed as harshly as is father’s betrayal of Jegan, for she acts out
of love, and he acts out of cowardice. Indeed, Amma again proves to be fearless investigator of injustice in this story as she
had in the previous one. Quite intentionally she is modeling for her son the virtue of defiant courage in the face of
oppression.
Jegan also plays a role in the story of Arjie’s maturation, for at age thirteen the boy is beginning to feel attracted
to men. Whereas his affection for Daryl Uncle was straightforwardly childish, he feels more complicated emotions for
Jegan. Whatever sympathy we might have felt for Father because of his wife’s affair is blunted by the revelation in this
chapter that he had himself had an affair with an English girl, and his feelings about her are much ore crass and selfish than
those Amma felt for Daryl.
The Best School of All
“The Best School of All” is the bitterly ironic title of the chapter depicting the nightmare that is the Victoria
Academy. (Set in early 1983) Arjie is sent there much as a boy considered weak in another society might be sent to a
military academy, “to make a man of him.” But this attempt by his father to steer his son away from homosexuality fares
no better than did his earlier determination to force him to play cricket. Not only does he defy the sadistic principal and his
fellow students, Arjie finally finds a lover of his own at the academy: Shehan Soyza, who is actively gay and unapologetic
about it. Shehan, a boy who, dares to wear his hair longer than allowed and who, as rumours have it, has sex with the Head
Prefect. Amidst the tough attitudes of the other boys, Arjie is grateful for Shehan's gentleness and the two become close
friends. Their growing affection and love for each other culminates in a wonderfully intense scene that initiates Arjie into
sexuality. Arjie and Shehan play hide- and-seek with Arjie's younger sister and her girlfriends. In the dark of the garage
where they hide, the subliminal desires that have suffused Arjie's relationship with Shehan are finally released. Through a
language that is delicately erotic, but which lacks the kind of sentimentalism that often accompanies the adolescent
discovery of sex, Arjie describes their tentative movements, their charged emotions, the heightened sensitivity of their
bodies. "The entire world," he says, "became the sensation in my mouth and Shehan's tongue probing, retreating,
intertwining with mine:' That they are almost found out by Sonali, the catcher of the game, that immediately after this
sexual experience Arjie is agitated and feels as if he 'had committed a terrible crime against... the trust and love [his family]
Impact Factor (JCC): 4.0867
Index Copernicus Value (ICV): 3.0
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Reluctant “Inner Space” and Forbidden “Outer Space”: Queer Identity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy
had given' him, is emblematic of how Arjie has intemalised, to an extent, the 'straight' values of his society. He begins to
understand that his coming to terms with his gay identity reinforces, instead of doing away with, his sense of responsibility
toward his ethnic community, and more specifically his family.
His intiation into sex by Shehan is sensitively depicted. Arjie is simultaneously attracted and frightened. He has
feelings he doesn’t completely understand, and the surprising actions that result from those feelings are messy,
uncomfortable and disturbing. But they are also exciting. Any young person who has struggled with similar feelings of
repulsion or desire-whether gay or heterosexual- can identify with Arjie’s story. But again Arjie do not let himself
defeated. He moves past his initial revulsion to enter into a true love affair –the first of his life. Selvadurai does not
sentimentalise this affair. The two will part on an unsatisfactory note that reflects adult ambivalence rather than childlike
black and white thinking.
Riot Journal: An Epilogue
From this climactic scene during which Arjie discovers the pleasure as the social perils that are to accompany him
as a gay man, the narrative goes on to unravel the other central theme of the novel, that of racial tensions. The last story,
titled Rio journal: An Epilogue, covers the “last two months of the Chelvaratnam family's ambushed life in friends' houses
and in their own during the Colombo riots in the summer of 1893. Arjie's diary entries record the wave of violence
unleashed by the Sinhalese against the Tamils which includes the burning of his grandparents in their car and the burning
down of his own house. Arjie writes down his thoughts and feelings in a diary because as he says: “the only thing for me to
do is write” (287). He writes in his home which is under threat from the Sinhalese mob, in a country that is ravaged by
violence. Jayawickrama (2005) convincingly states that:
[i]n the midst of intensely fraught space, when Arjie assumes the position of the diarist he also enters a liminal
space: as his journal entries connect, interpret and preserve the expression of his subjective experience in a
moment of extreme change, they also mediate between times so that the entire narrative becomes a negotiation
between childhood in an island of the past and adulthood in a continent of the diasporic present. (135)
Arjie, like the rest of his family, no longer feels safe or at home in Sri Lanka. Indeed, as Arjie confesses to his
diary, he 'will never feel safe again: It is, then, all the more telling that it is during this period of anguish and loss that
'something occurred to [Arjie] that [he]had never really been conscious of before-Shehan was Sinhalese and [he] was not:
"This awareness;' Arjie admits, "did not change my feelings for him, it was simply there, like a thin translucent screen
through which I watched him.'
This chapter marks the coming together of the two main strands of the work: Arjie’s maturation and Sri Lanka’s
civil turmoil. Tamil-Sinhala animosity pervades the academy, and Arjie almost becomes its victim. Yet, as in other stories,
love struggles with hatred. Love may defeated in that the two young lovers will be parted by sectarian violence, but at the
end of the chapter they are walking side by side, united, out of the shambles of the ceremony. Arjie realizes the experience
has changed him forever, that he is no longer a part of his family, but inhabits another world alien to them.
Queer Identity
The terms ‘queer’ and ‘queerness’ are difficult to understand as a marker of troubling or subversion. The concept
of queerness leads into Queer Theory developed during the 1990’s, largely in response to Focault’s concepts of a ‘regime
of power’(Hall 2003: 54). This regime ‘describes the mobile techniques of power, operating beyond the narrow sphere of
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Mukesh Yadav & Shalini Yadav
law, that organize the meaning of bodily sensations’ (Freeman 2007:2). This theory invites us to consider the subject as an
effect of gendered processes and practices within various regimes of power. Donna Penn states that the use of the term
‘queer’ in the names of organizations, recent books, articles, film series and academic sub-disciplines represents more than
a remedy for the increasingly cumbersome, designation lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (Penn 2006: 233). So it is
more important to see Queer theory wholly enmeshed in a discussion of identity, multiple identities, and the possibilities of
changing identity (Hall 2013:13).We examine Funny Boy in particular based on the protagonist’s potential to queer
existing identity categories.
The fixity of gender boundaries in the novel is materialized through spatial configurations. Arjie, his siblings and
all his cousins are dropped off every Sunday at their grandparents’ house, where they spend the whole day playing. During
this play the space and activities one can join are dependent on one’s gender. A male can join boys playing cricket and the
girls were confined to the back garden and kitchen porch. However, Arjie prefers the girls “sphere”, as he admits “the
pleasure the boys had for standing hours on a cricket field under the sweltering sun, watching the batsmen run from crease
to crease was incomprehensible to me “(3). Arjie enjoys a privileged position of a leader among girls, which was given to
him “because of the force of my imagination” (3). Selvadurai gives a detailed account of one of Arjie’s transition during
the game of bride-bride:
The dressing of the bride would now begin, and then, by the transfiguration I saw taking place in Janaki’s cracked
full-length mirror- by the sari being wrapped around my body, the veil being pinned to my head, the rogue put on
my cheeks, lipstick on my lips, kohl around my eyes-Iwas able to leave the constraints of myself and ascend into
another, more brilliant, more beautifu self.” (4)
The above description of Arjie’s highlights how he was reluctant inside his heart [Inner Space] to play with boys
and at the same time he was forbidden to play with girls [Outer Space].It becomes more interesting when we read it in the
light of Judith Butler’s notion of gender as drag. Butler points out the fact that drag “reveals the distinctness of those
aspects of gendered ecperience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual
coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitily reveals the imitative structure of gender itself- as well as its contingency”
(Gender Trouble, 175). With the help of clothes and make-up, Arjie becomes an icon, “a graceful, benevolent, perfect
being upon whom the adoring eyes of the world rested.” (5).
Arjie’s queer identity challenges the social norms and masculinity in particular. Judith Butler uses the term “ to
characterize a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and
make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses
female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically define through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality” (Gender
Trouble, 194). Arjie’s performance of gender- queering signals to the adults in the room the possibility of an even more
serious “offence”-homosexuality.
The absence of the words homosexual and queer in connection with Arjie are very prominent. Selvadurai has
instead chosen the word “funny” to describe the protagonist’s same sex desire. Salgado and Jayawickrama have similar
opinions about the reason for it. Salgado proposes that Selvadurai has chosen the word “funny” because that “indicat[es]
the instability of his subject-positioning” (11), while Jayawickrama argues that he chose the word because the author
refuses to constrain Arjie’s identity within a requisite essentialist notion of gender identity and instead instates the
development of an understated and sensitive political expression as Arjie’s sexuality becomes a space of liminality that
Impact Factor (JCC): 4.0867
Index Copernicus Value (ICV): 3.0
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Reluctant “Inner Space” and Forbidden “Outer Space”: Queer Identity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy
offers valuable potential for the author’s sense of identity, home and community. (125) Both of them argue convincingly.
Arjie is in a transitional state in his life in which he develops from being a young boy to a young man. When the author
chooses to describe this development with other words than homosexual, queer or gay he allows Arjie to come to terms
with his identity as a “funny one” without labelling him within a traditional gender identity. He is in “a space of liminality”
because he is positioned in between two worlds, the girls’ and the boys’, a position that is allowing him to narrate his story
for the reader from his own perspective. And it is a perspective that allows him to understand and link the events around
him together with his own feelings, beliefs and desires.
Another important label, besides the label “funny”, is the name of the game, “Bride- Bride”. Campbell-Kibler’s
notion about certain words not having any meaning until they are assigned interpretations when used, depending on the
context, can be applied to this label. It is a label that seems incomprehensible when you think what the game is all about,
that is, a wedding. Therefore, more appropriate labels could have been “Bride-Groom” or just simply “Bride” as Gopinath
puts forward. She argues that “the game’s title […] references both the unimportance of the groom and the hyper-bolic
femininity embodied by the figure of the bride, as well as the potentiality of a female same-sex eroticism that dispenses
with the groom altogether” (171). It is a game in which the groom has no significant place:
It was a role we considered still and boring, that held no attraction for any of us.
Indeed, if we could have dispensed with that role altogether we would have, but alas it was an unfortunate feature
of the marriage ceremony. (Selvadurai 6)
For Arjie, however, it is not a game about being feminine. It is his chance and possibility to transform himself,
“to leave the constraints of [him]self and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self” (4). It is his chance to be
the one he wants to be, not the one his parents or society wants him to be, and with the help of his fantasy and imagination
he is able to do it. The combination of language and sexuality creates a possibility for him to be the one he wants to be.
CONCLUSIONS
The novel documents Arjie’s journey to his own Queer identity. His sexuality, while a topic of discussion for his
family, is not confronted directly. For Arjie, Imagination, fantasy, play serve as a negotiation devise for him, in order to
overcome the borders of gender, ethnicity and sexuality. The masculine alliances with Uncle Daryl and Jegan point to
some acceptance of an alternative masculinity, a “funny” masculinity. And the alliance with Shehan is the ultimate turning
point, a point that would give Arjie the courage to refuse to be silent and explore the “powerful and hidden possibilities”
(Selvadurai 256) such a relation could give. Moreover, it gives him the courage to choose “the wrong path”, a path that is
the right path for him even if it is a path that would exile him from his family and lead him into a world “into which they
could not follow [him]”(285). Throughout the novel, he is always referred to as “funny.” He recognizes that this term
carries a negative connotation, but doesn’t understand its complexity, stating that “It was clear to me that I had done
something wrong, but what it was I couldn’t comprehend” (17). Throughout the novel, Arjie is also increasingly aware of
his feelings towards the boys in his school, accepting that he thinks of the shorts they wear and longs to be with them
(208). However, he only fully grasps his sexual identity and its familial implications after a sexual encounter with one of
his male classmates. Arjie then understands his father’s concern and “why there had been such worry in his voice
whenever he talked about me. He had been right to try and protect me from what he feared was inside me, but he had
failed” (256).
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