Book of the Week: Novel of the Year
I met Saraid de Silva at a Palestine rally in Auckland over the summer. She told me there would be a Wellington launch for her new book, Amma. I attended it on a Wednesday, bought the book, read it by Saturday and gave it to my visiting sister to take back with her to Auckland on Sunday. She read it at the gate, read it with her breakfast, read it with her dinner and finished it a few days later, sending me crying emoji faces and ‘this book’. Soon after she bought it for her friend’s birthday.
I’m an avid user of our public library system (world class) and don’t buy new books often (rent, etc.). But, Amma. I had to have it: the big capitals on the cover practically bellowing at me, giving me a gold-toothed grin. Good thing, too, because Amma also taught me something I’d forgotten about buying versus borrowing: how good the act of sharing books is, passing them round and talking to friends and family about them, who then buy a copy for their friend, or their own, and so the circle keeps expanding, people reconnect with their local bookshop and look it’s a double rainbow! Good in the world!
Amma is a family saga that follows three generations of Indian and Sri Lankan women. A cropped genealogy chart opens the book:
Family
Josephina (Amma/Gran)
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Sithara (Mum)
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Annie
In a sense that’s the whole book right there: tugging those umbilical cords and all that they carry. Josephina migrates with her husband, Ravi/Appa (father), and their two kids from Colombo to Invercargill in the early 1980s. This scene from the second chapter got me. Sithara doubles her little brother, Suri, on her bike one icy and dark southernmost morning. They’re escaping his bully: “She throws her plait over her shoulder. Now … Slowly Sithara picks up speed, her knees churning round. Suri leans his face into the wind, urging them forward. Sithara hits her stride, and Suri releases the ground … Just before she rounds the corner she slows her pedalling, letting the momentum of the bike carry them through the sharp turn. Then she whispers a prayer to Appa.”
As well as the expanses of Invercargill (“A section on the other side of the road is home only to a few sheep fenced in with wire”), the book also inhabits Hamilton, Christchurch, Dunedin, Auckland, Singapore, Colombo, Sigiriya, London and, circling back around, Melbourne.
One of the reasons I love Amma is how these characters are so palpably crafted from love; you can really feel their pulse. (De Silva thanks her mother and grandmother in the acknowledgements, writing, “I wish I could have known you at every age. This is my attempt to.”) We meet Annie in the opening line: “Annie Ano Fernando doesn’t care much for men.” Shortly followed by another ripper, “It is painful, so pathetically Christchurch of her to be in awe of London.” It’s 2018. Here’s Sithara, in Invercargill in 1984. “Maria Louisa Sithara Fernando sits on the floor of her bedroom getting ready for school … Her hair, long enough to kiss her waist, is dead.” There are many, glorious descriptions of hair, so much so that I felt like I was in a hair salon with framed pictures on the walls. I found myself acutely aware of people’s hair for a week after I read it, intently staring out the bus window.
One step further up the family line, “Josephina Colette Paluvettaraiyar sets her family’s breakfast on the table and looks down the length of the dining room. Down the hallway, in the good room, a solid marble statue of the Virgin Mary looks back, open palms offering benediction.” It’s 1951 in Singapore, Josephina is 10 years old, and that statue is about to put in work.
The different locations and times are fully-fleshed, fully-sensed. I marvelled at how every chapter carried itself, carried tension, humour and lush and swift detail. Even the background characters are vivid in their own right; they swim in and out again, flashing. My favourite is Kanthi Mummy. “At six foot two, Kanthi Mummy is the largest woman Josephina has ever seen.” Kanthi Mummy runs a brothel that Josephina lives above for a time with her grandmother, Pātti, and her mother. “The day they moved in, Kanthi Mummy’s eyes widened at the sight of Josephina. She walked up to her and slowly took in every inch. Then she pressed her palms together in prayer and lifted Pātti up the stairs with her big arms like she was a young bride.”
There’s Fraser Duncan, the school crush (with “thick blond hair”.) A colleague called Brendan: “He’s friendly and less racist than the others.” The bartender in Hamilton, Mojdeh, who asks Sithara where she is from. “Invercargill, Sithara says instinctively. Well, Sri Lanka.” And there’s Hunter and Frances. who “drive into the city every Saturday morning from Waiuku” to take Annie’s self-defence classes.
In an interview with her editor, Lamorna Ash, de Silva talks about how her acting study – she’s a script editor for Shortland Street – influences her writing: “One thing that is always discussed in the rehearsal room is the way that the scene changes when a character enters or exits it. So you’re just constantly thinking about the room around you, and how the people in it change its temperature. You’re also always thinking about how a scene opens and closes.” That stage direction comes through in Amma.
I re-read Amma for this review, tagging the pages with post-it notes where I found things funny, or poignant, or striking. There were so many, and now my book looks like it’s wearing a ghillie suit. I doubled back on this one: “Annie had taken one last job, a horror movie, in which she was short enough to play the lead actress post-decapitation, and then booked flights.” There are lots of very funny comments on whiteness (in Christchurch, where most of her class are blond): “Her first entrance to the classroom felt like walking up the boarding ramp of a UFO … It was just Annie and a whole room of pale eyelashes blinking at her.” And this one: “Sithara remembers coming to this country as a child and seeing a naked white body for the first time, being fascinated and a bit put off by it, the same way she can’t look directly at yoghurt being stirred with a spoon.”
The bedrock of Amma might be grief and trauma, but there’s also triumph. Shortly after relocating to Invercargill from Colombo, Appa (Sithara’s dad) dies. We can hear Josephina’s outrage-in-grief, hear her thinking, you moved us here, of all places, away from everyone, where your patients at Southland Hospital wouldn’t even let “The Indian touch them”, and now you’re dead? Families tend to go one of two ways when someone dies: closer-closest together or big-bang style, trajectories set for the ever-distance. But in Amma, the grandmother and grandchild bond defies this logic (maybe it always does?). Josephina on her grandmother, Pātti: “Although they make her cry, thoughts of Pātti are still a comfort. Josephina turns her face towards them like a fan on a hot afternoon.”
On the subject of sexual abuse: I noted there was no trigger warning to readers and figured this decision was made because the story doesn’t stay in the trauma, it punches it in the face. But still, there it is. They add up, don’t they, on the bookshelf, books with female protagonists written by women that start from a place of sexual abuse. There’s an argument around not giving something energy – there are other stories to tell – and there’s also a life-saving need for exorcism.
I’m looking forward to reading what de Silva writes next, and here are two more testimonies before I go. Grace Wang’s radio show Footnotes, which features books on diaspora, dedicated an episode to Amma. Featuring music from Sri Lanka and Aotearoa, you’ll “Traverse through Baila folk, dub, electronic and deep house”. (She’s also done an episode inspired by another of my favourite NZ books, Kōhine by Colleen Maria Lenihan.) I bumped into my friend Rina Patel who was halfway through reading Amma. She kept me updated on her progress. She said when she finished it, she “thumped it against her knee in appreciation”. That’s the only endorsement I’ll ever need.
Amma by Saraid de Silva (Moa Books, $37.99) is available in bookstores nationwide and through Bookhub, the fast and easy way to buy NZ books.
