The Immigrant Dream and the Post-Colonial Nightmare

Sharon Bala, The Boat People: a Novel

A rusty, filth-strewn freighter drops over five hundred Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka on Canada’s west coast. Among these refugees, Mahindan and his six-year-old son hope to create a new life away from the violence that cost them their wife and mother. But the Canadian government fears this ship hides members of the Tamil Tigers separatists, prepared to recruit and attack inside Canada. Soon, these poor, hopeless refugees’ status becomes a global contest of wills.

Sharon Bala’s debut novel couldn’t be more timely, hitting shelves amid such circumstances as the American immigration debate, and Brexit. As first-world superpowers debate what they owe global neighbors, Bala frames their story from the “foreigners” perspective. This ongoing battle develops through three viewpoint characters, all non-white, all outsiders to Canada’s power structure to various degrees. Since this freighter really does shelter terrorists, Bala forces the question: how much injustice is permissible to prevent violence?

Mahindan once believed the peace process would stabilize his homeland. He and his wife dared to open a business and start a family. In flashbacks, we get the episodic story of how Mahindan lost everything, except faith that the future is possible. But in Canada, he finds himself housed in a prison, his son foisted onto strangers, his legal status in permanent limbo. Picked over like an unadoptable puppy, even his faith starts to fade.

Priya Rajasekaran, in her post-law school residency, got picked to aid a veteran immigration lawyer because she’s Sri Lankan. Her mentor basically believes, because she’s brown, she speaks Tamil. But she was born in Canada, daughter of immigrants who wanted to assimilate. She doesn’t understand Tamil language or culture, much less immigration law. Getting dragged through Canada’s sluggish, politically motivated immigration courts provides a harsh education, awakening curiosity about heritage she didn’t know she had.

Grace Nakamura is third-generation Canadian. Her family business got expropriated during the war, but she considers the past a dead letter; she’s worked hard to achieve a trusted position in Canada’s government, and her future remains bright. She starts at the Immigration Review Board just as the politically unpopular refugee freighter case hits. Struggling with both these unwanted “foreigners” and her Westernized children, Grace is unprepared when her elderly mother begins divulging long-lost family history.

Sharon Bala

Bala’s three characters bring three different understandings of immigration, insidership, and the Canadian dream. Each character has dreams, which veteran readers already know will crash on the shoals of reality. The question is, when longed-for future collides with grim present, which will change? Each character also has a past, which we discover incrementally: in Mahindan’s case, though flashbacks, while Priya and Grace must tease personal and ethnic heritage out from evidence and other people’s stories.

Each character also brings an entire ensemble into the story. Mahindan’s fellow refugees have multiple reasons they fled Sri Lanka. Bala teases our expectations, keeping us guessing which is secretly the Tamil Tiger we know is aboard. Priya’s fellow attorneys, aid workers, and volunteers have different reasons they care about immigrants, some more noble than others. In order to do her job, Grace must untangle the morass of ideals and loyalties amid Canada’s entrenched bureaucracy.

Bala’s use of Westernized immigrants brings an interesting spin to post-colonial literature. Where authors like Arundhati Roy or Amitav Ghosh write from the colonized perspective, Bala reminds us that even in a successful country like Canada, with its primarily European cultural heritage, most people’s families came from somewhere else. Though Canada sloughed its directly colonial status in 1867, its history within British dominion colors its constitution today. Though seldom considered as such, Canada is post-colonial.

Therefore, immigrants have distinctive standing within Canada’s social structure: they provide a reminder that Canadian “heritage” is conferred, not innate. Bala depicts ranking politicians channeling, and possibly creating, nativist sentiment to keep these refugees in permanent limbo. Before long, it becomes clear, white Canadians fear these refugees, not because one or two might be dangerous, but because they remind Canadians how tenuous their own grip on citizenship really is. They remind us we’re immigrants, too.

This novel requires readers willing to adjust themselves to Bala’s timing. An immigrant herself, Bala captures the ponderous rhythms of Canadian immigration courts in excruciating detail. But she also captures the human drama behind the superficially joyless procedures. By turns emotionally packed and languid, Bala’s storytelling brings readers through the extremes of her characters’ experience. Not everybody gets what they want, in Bala’s unsentimental world. But she lets us glimpse what her characters really need.