The Queer “Outsider”: Family and Sexuality in Shyam Selvadurai's Swimming in the Monsoon Sea

Abstract

In Shyam Selvadurai's fiction, family is a contested site. In the novels Cinnamon Gardens, Funny Boy, and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, Selvadurai's protagonists are in strained relationships with their families; while they desire the family, they fail to accommodate their queerness in the heteronormative structure of the family. Yet the family remains crucial to each protagonist. This paper focuses on Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, in which the protagonist Amrith de Alwis, who has lost his parents, is literally an outsider in the Manuel-Pillai family. This paper explores the politico-cultural coordinates of family and sexuality in Sri Lanka, where alternative sexual desires still fall under the purview of criminal law.