Author’s Note

In October 2009 and August 2010, the Ocean Lady and the MV Sun Sea arrived on the coast of British Columbia, bearing together just over 550 Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka. Those vessels and their passengers were the inspiration for this novel.

As a writer, I’m interested in people, and as I combed through the articles and news reports about the two ships I searched hard for clues about the asylum seekers and their journeys. What lives had they led? Whom had they lost? And what did they make of this unwelcoming new land?

Just as in the novel, there was a publication ban on the newcomers’ names, a necessary precaution to ensure their safety. But anonymity and silence also stripped these people of their identities. It was left to others – politicians, journalists, Internet trolls, armchair pundits – to frame their narratives, to conflate them into a faceless mass labelled “terrorists” or “refugees.” Occasionally, I came across something an actual claimant said – statements made at hearings, in rare media interviews, or in footage recorded from inside the war zone. These words, raw and heartbreaking, struck me as precious, so I borrowed a handful and put them in my characters’ mouths. I hope that by using the words of these anonymous individuals, I have, in a small way, given their voices a microphone.

For all the press coverage and opinion pieces, details about the actual people who made the voyage were scant and the bread crumbs I found – a claimant’s profession, another one’s jewellery, the fact that children were separated from their parents and placed in foster care – were so sparing and bland that I was obliged to rely on my imagination. As a result, the characters in this book are my own and entirely fictitious. Physical appearance and family dynamics, personal histories and motivations – these were all invented along with the specifics of each refugee claim.

Early in my research, an article about a migrant who had been a mechanic in Sri Lanka, where he was alleged to have done work for the LTTE, caught my eye. His situation made me question the notion of free will. How is personal morality maintained in the face of certain death? Mahindan was created as I wrestled with these questions; I put myself in his slippers and pondered how I’d act. Mahindan is a fictional character, of course, but sometimes I think he is me, or the person I might have become if my fate had been different.

Fred Blair is also a wholly fictional character. If he seems familiar it is because there are politicians like him in every country and era, their rhetoric predictable and unchanging.

Ranga’s suicide was inspired by stories from around the world of migrants who have taken their lives while languishing in detention and refugee camps.

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The Boat People is a work of fiction, but many of the circumstances depicted in both Sri Lanka and Canada are based in fact. Gordon Weiss’s The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers and director Callum Macrae’s investigative documentary Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields were crucial to my understanding of the war’s final days. The chapters “Witness” and “Lions and Tigers” are particularly indebted to these sources. A February 2009 Human Rights Watch report titled “War on the Displaced: Sri Lankan Army and LTTE Abuses against Civilians in the Vanni” gave me further insight into the civilian toll.

For insight into life in the LTTE-controlled north, I turned to In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka by Sharika Thiranagama (chapter one), Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life during War by Zachariah Cherian Mampilly (chapter four), articles by memoirist Niromi de Soyza, and a particularly helpful first-person account by the late K. Mylvaganam that appeared on the now-defunct website sangam.org.

The Sri Lankan civil war, and the incidents leading up to it, has been recounted as faithfully as possible in the novel, with one exception: the length of the ceasefire that began in 2002 has been compressed for dramatic effect. While in the novel it lasts only a few months, in actual fact an uneasy truce held for four years.

For a crash course on Canada’s legal system, I relied on Refugee Law by Martin Jones and Sasha Baglay, “The Complexity of Determining Refugeehood: A Multidisciplinary Analysis of the Decision-Making Process of the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board” in the Journal of Refugee Studies (volume 15, no. 1, 2002), and “Refugees Who Arrive by Boat and Canada’s Commitment to the Refugee Convention: A Discursive Analysis” by Alexandra Mann in Refuge (volume 26, no. 2). “Sun Sea: Five Years Later,” a report by the Canadian Council for Refugees published in August 2015, is an eye-opening account of how the government dealt with the arrivals of the MV Sun Sea and the Ocean Lady.

Several articles, discovered in the earliest days of my research, set the novel’s tone: “Tamil, Tiger, Terrorist?” by Fatima Cader, Briarpatch (July 7, 2011) and “Strangers by Sea: A Tale of Canada’s Boat People” by Michael Valpy, Globe and Mail (August 13, 2010). The expression “arrival of the fittest” is borrowed from Rachel Giese’s excellent piece of the same name published in the Walrus (June 2011).

Key sources on the Japanese internment were The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War by Ann Gomer Sunhahara and This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Canadians 1941–1948 by Muriel Kitagawa.

The character of Prasad was partially inspired by Lasantha Wickrematunge, a brave Sinhalese journalist who was assassinated in Sri Lanka in 2009 for his fair-minded reporting. His haunting final essay, posthumously published in the January 13, 2009, issue of the Guardian, provided fodder for Prasad’s work, as did some of the facts of the intimidation campaign that dogged his career and life. Please read it.

The novel’s Tamil characters have a dangerous habit of dismissing all Sinhalese people as villains. The truth is, there were heroes on the other side too, men and women like Wickrematunge who, at great personal risk and cost, protected Tamils and advocated for their rights.