Mahindan turned his back to the railing and slid down to sit on the deck. Exhaustion whenever he thought of the future; terror when he remembered the past. He yawned and pressed a cheek to raised knees, then tucked his arms in for warmth. At least here on the boat they were safe from attack. Ruksala, Prem, Chithra's mother and father. The roll call of the dead lulled him to sleep.
The Boat People means well – invoking the real life story of the MV Sun Sea (a cargo ship that arrived in Vancouver in 2010 with nearly 500 Sri Lankan asylum seekers on board), with attempts to reconsider that event in the light of today's refugee crises – but it's not a very well written book and I have a problem with rating a work highly just because the subject matter is important. There's nothing nuanced about this storyline – it's more polemic than literature – and although I suppose I'm meant to feel badly for not believing that Canada should have open arms to everyone who arrives via whatever channel, this is a preaching-to-the-choir book, not one intended to open hearts or change minds like my own. Again: important =/= good.
The plot follows the storylines of three people: Mahindan, along with his young son, is a refugee on the cargo ship, and his story is split between the past – detailing the rise of the Tamil Tigers and the dangers he faced trying to escape the ensuing Civil War – and the present, in which he is kept in a separate detention facility than his son, up against the demoralising bureaucracy of a Canadian government exercising an excess of caution with his claim. We also meet Priya – born in Canada to Sri Lankan parents who emigrated before the war, she is an articling law student who is enlisted in the refugees' defence against her wishes – and Grace, a third generation Japanese-Canadian who has been appointed, without any prior experience or law training, as an adjudicator in the refugees' processing. Of the three, Mahindan's is the most engaging story – completely innocent of any wrongdoing, he has always been a good man doing his best to keep his son safe in a dangerous world – and obviously, the fact that he is an ideal claimant for refugee status makes it especially frustrating to see him lumped in with “suspected terrorists”. Priya's character seems included to show a progression of empathy as she learns of her family's hidden history and concludes that not all Tamil Tigers (despite being labelled a terrorist organisation by the Canadian government) are bad guys. And Grace's character was the weakest to me: appointed by a Law and Order Cabinet Minister, she is under orders to take no chances with even a whiff of threat to the country; so despite the fact that her Alzheimer's-suffering mother is suddenly obsessed with the memory of having been sent to an internment camp for Japanese-Canadians during WWII, Grace is oblivious to her own role in this history repeating itself.
The narrative is totally one-sided, with the Public Safety Minister's speeches being compared to a dog whistle (a derogatory metaphor we all understand), and despite the fact that a Google search of Canada + Tamil Tigers brings up a raft of articles on those Sri Lankhan refugees/immigrants who have used Canada as a base for funneling arms and money back to the Tigers over the years (interestingly, these articles also demonstrate how nearly impossible it is for us the deport anyone once they've been let in), in author Sharon Bala's account, five hundred people who arrive illegally in our country should all be taken at their word and rubber-stamped quickly through the immigration process. When Mahindan's son is placed with a white foster family (because it seems a kindness to take him out of the women and children's detention facility and there are no local Tamil families approved to act as foster families), Priya's sense of outrage is finally engaged:
She'd already had this argument with Gigovaz. Haven't we learned our lesson on this? she'd railed. Stealing children from their Native parents and putting them in white homes? What's next? A special school run by pedophiles?So, I wasn't persuaded by the politics of this book, and as for the writing, it felt very ham-fisted; and especially in those chapters where something running in the background serves as a metaphor for the foreground action. In an early chapter, as Priya and her family first learn of and discuss the Tamils on the cargo ship, David Suzuki (of course) is on the TV in the background, narrating the film of a research study that showed monkeys acting out when they suspect that one of their number has received an unfair advantage; as the men in the detention centre discuss their cases, Mohindan is watching The Price is Right and mentally comparing the frantic face of a contestant to the poise of the model showing off a brand new car (because just living over the divide in the world of the prizes, the model was already a winner); Priya and her family having a political discussion around the Scrabble board and punctuating their points by unconsciously playing P-R-O-T-E-C-T or Z-E-A-L; Mohindan and others back in Sri Lankha trying to decide if it was time to flee as their sons play on a nearby see-saw. And there is a wearying attention to what characters are doing with their hands – no dialogue can be recounted without learning if the speaker is steepling his fingers under his chin, flicking her wrist dismissively, or “pressing the air up and down with his palms”.
I didn't like this book in the line-by-line writing, and I didn't like the overall structure and conclusions. In short, I unapologetically didn't like this (despite recognising the effort to add to an important and timely debate).
