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I Wrote a Story, Not the Whole Story

Audio

In Telling One Story, A Novelist Speaks For a Country

V.V. Ganeshananthan writes in the Outlook section on the struggle to discuss all of Sri Lanka's complex history while talking about her novel, a story of one family's experience. Hear her read an excerpt from her book "Love Marriage."

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So I answer the questions, distill the history as best I can. But this doesn't make me a spokesperson. I wish that I were sure, when I was at the podium, in front of that microphone or responding to a journalist's e-mailed questions, that I was being viewed as what I am: someone with a reasonable knowledge of Sri Lanka and a member of the Sri Lankan diaspora, but also only a piece of a whole. In part for this reason, I chose as the epigraph of the book a few lines from a poem I love, Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts":

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,

We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,

We shall have what to do after firing. But today,

Today we have naming of parts.

My characters are whole characters but only parts of their communities. I, too, am only a part. Still, there are questions waiting for me.

"Can you lay out what the landscape is there, and what is the source of the conflict?" Aimee Allison of KPFA asks. No, I think. I can't. But I lean into the mike, and I try again.

"Sure," I say. "It's very hard to pin down one source . . . "

fiction@vasugi.com

V.V. Ganeshananthan, a journalist and novelist, is the author of "Love Marriage."

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