ABSTRACT
This article looks at two expatriate Sri Lankan English novels published during the Civil War (1983–2009): V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008) and Mary Anne Mohanraj’s Bodies in Motion (2005). Both these novels re-imagine the communities left at home, by decoding relationships and desires within predominantly and often oppressive heteropatriarchal familial spaces. Both these novels, in my reading, square well with emerging discourses of transnationalism and sexuality, which seek to dismantle ‘what is authorized as knowledge, what counts as theory, the wisdom of conventional categories’ (Puri et al., 2). Writing in the tradition of the erotica, Mohanraj seems to reclaim the body from the destructive heteropatriarchal gaze much in the same manner as Frantz Fanon attempts to rewrite the body of the colonized man, recuperating it from the dismemberment and castration inflicted by the gaze of the colonial master in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The female body is often the register of colonial and indigenous heteropatriarchal violence, not always in the literal sense of the term. Violence is often unleashed on the female body symbolically, the psychological effect of which is so deep that the scars continue to show in generations to come. Clothing the female body in a certain way, or setting certain constrictive behavioural codes for women is no less brutal than the actual violence of rape, molestation, and physical aggression on the body. By enabling a female gaze on the female body, facilitated by the female writer’s deep erotic as well as sympathetic engagement with the female characters she has produced, the novel decentres received notions of understanding femininity emanating from an authoritative capitalist heteropatriarchal knowledge system. This is challenged to a certain extent by Love Marriage.
