Review: "Gorilla" - Rechristening and Running

“For years, I had felt a small thrill at the sight of the sentence, `I read all morning.' The simple words spoke of the purest and most rewarding kind of leisure. It was what I did now: I read all morning..."
- Pankaj Mishra, An End to Suffering

The central disappointment of my life has been my inability to read Tamil literature. My reading life is restricted to English translations, which can never express the subtleties in the original. One of the finest novels, I have read this year is Anushiya Sivanarayanan’s English translation of Anthony Jesuthasan Shobhasakthi’s Gorilla. The book made a quiet, undistinguished entry into bookstores and was not loaded with the now obnoxious bollywood-like publicity seen for every popular novel. In her review of Gorilla, Subhashree Desikan writes, “Tamil readers can enjoy the additional aspects of the original, such as the musical quality of the spoken Jaffna Tamil, which is used by the author.” This is mere consolation for the deeply created void in me.

Gorilla is disturbing and provides a graphic account of a LTTE child soldier and his subsequent attempt to get political asylum in France. I opened it with trepidation, that it may sound glamorous as Chimamanda Adichie, “Half of a Yellow Sun”. The prose is stripped bare of emotion and does not sound preachy. By his own admission, diaspora writer sounds too elitist and Shobasakthi calls himself a “refugee writer”. Sivanarayanan calls the narrative technique employed as ‘auto-fiction’ or fictionalized true story, where the author is the narrator and the protagonist and he “employs the creative license of fiction”.

There is something unique about critical writings on Tamil Movement in Sri Lanka, in that there is not much insider material available, except biographies mostly written from an Indian perspective. Unlike, the reactionary prose of Latin America or writings about drug lords of West Africa, not many Tamils have survived or escaped the ideology to write censoriously from outside. This may be the first instance, where a Sri Lankan Tamil is almost critical of the functioning and recruitment program of the LTTE. The autofiction style arms Shobasakthi to quote leaders from his group and write about the hierarchical structure of the organization.

The story begins in Mandataivu, Jaffna, where several groups are vying to spearhead the Tamil Eelam Movement. Fifteen year old Rocky Raj, works as a pamphleteer and a speech writer. He is credited with introducing the phrase “Salute Valorously” into Tamil Eelam. Deep ideological hatred among groups lead to slow death of several groups and sometime in 1983-84, LTTE (referred to as Movement) announces itself as the true leader behind Tamil aspiration. At around the same time, Rocky Raj wants to escape his abusive father, who is referred to as Gorilla in his neighborhood. He volunteers himself to the nearest training camp.

His unsatisfactory stint at the camp begins on the first day of induction, where the trainers are addressed to as ‘Sir’. The induction also begins with erasure of the birth name and rechristening. The narration is brusque and the humour is understated. And to not lose credence from the original, Sivanaraynan’s punctuation is sparse and I think she has carefully avoided unnecessary embellishment.

“As the trainers called out the names, the boys would hurriedly write them out on the form. Though however carelessly the ones in charge came up with new names, there was a connection of sorts between the right hand name and the left hand one.
Reagan – Jimmy Carter
Rajini – Kamal (The two superstars of Tamil Cinema, who throughout the late 70s and 80s were seen as markedly opposite to each other in terms of look, attitude, and the roles they played.)
Manian- Akhilan (Two writers from TamilNadu who were seen as two opposite poles of popular Tamil literature.)
Malli – Nangi (Sinhala words indicating younger brother and younger sister, respectively)”

Rocky Raj is given the name Sanjay (Gandhi). But soon everyone calls him Gorilla. Besides, he is posted at his home village to work at the sentry point. He gets frustrated at seeing his father abuse his family and is also wrongly framed for stealing a buried cylinder explosive. His subsequent torture and incarceration by the local leaders of the Movement leaves him disillusioned. He flees to Colombo and finally finds his way to Paris. Gorilla is primarily about identities and slur cast on an individual on the basis of given name. Rocky Raj repeatedly tries to disassociate himself from his Sri Lankan name, but in a pivotal moment in Paris, he realizes the “Gorilla” continues to haunt him.