Sometimes, the only choice a boy has is to pick up a gun
GORILLA
Shobasakthi
Translated by Anushiya Sivanarayanan
Publication: March 2008
Price: Rs 195
Playful yet disturbing, Gorilla plunges us into the
village of Kunjan fields, in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. Here
amusing local thug Gorilla runs wild and poor Rocky
Raj, his son, tries to distance himself from his father’s
antics. When the Tamil Eelam Movement comes to
town, he becomes a child soldier. Soon however, he
is thrown out by the Movement for not following orders
– then recaptured and tortured. What will be this
soldier’s fate?
Filled with characters as strange and violent as they
are unforgettable – young girls with bombs concealed
in their bosoms, delinquent boys, illicit liquor sellers,
wily police inspectors, murderers, prostitutes, farmers,
innocents – Gorilla is the English language debut of a
remarkable talent.
When he was fifteen Shobasakthi, born Anthony Thasan, joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Movement (LTTE), like countless others. The LTTE, commonly known as the Tamil Tigers, is the largest and most powerful of the Tamil militant organizations which arose in the 1970s to attempt to create a separate Tamil state, or Tamil Eelam, in north and east Sri Lanka. As a response to the repressive actions of the majority Sinhala Government against Sri Lankan Tamil minorities, the LTTE has waged a violent secessionist campaign in Sri Lanka since the ‘70s. And as a response to his close experience with this violence, Shobasakthi wrote Gorilla.
Shobasakthi is in his late thirties and says he does not need the trappings of a bourgeois family life; marriage and a steady job. He works as a dishwasher or supermarket shelver, and has always found employment at the minimum wage-level. He has a large network of mostly male friends. Deeply thoughtful, Shobasakthi explains his political commitments as inseparable from his everyday life. He and his writer/activist friends maintain his blog, organize literary and political meetings and activities, and ultimately maintain a network of writers and thinkers within the Tamil-speaking refugee world. With a friend, he has brought out three literary collections on dalit politics, postmodernism and anti-fascism. In Tamil communities in Sri Lanka as well as in the refugee communities, these collections have helped to spark conversations about these issues and introduced in Tamil Nadu the alternative voices of those against the Tigers.
‘There are about fifty of us: those gone wild in the literary world,’ Shobasakthi says.
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