The Boat People

by Sharon Bala

By the winner of The Journey Prize, and inspired by a real incident, The Boat People is a gripping and morally complex novel about a group of refugees who survive a perilous ocean voyage to reach Canada – only to face the threat of deportation and accusations of terrorism in their new land.
 
When the rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees reaches the shores of British Columbia, the young father is overcome with relief: he and his six-year-old son can finally put Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war behind them and begin new lives. Instead, the group is thrown into prison, with government officials and news headlines speculating that hidden among the “boat people” are members of a terrorist militia. As suspicion swirls and interrogation mounts, Mahindan fears the desperate actions he took to survive and escape Sri Lanka now jeopardize his and his son’s chances for asylum.
            Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer Priya, who reluctantly represents the migrants; and Grace, a third-generation Japanese-Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan’s fate, The Boat People is a high-stakes novel that offers a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis. Inspired by real events, with vivid scenes that move between the eerie beauty of northern Sri Lanka and combative refugee hearings in Vancouver, where life and death decisions are made, Sharon Bala’s stunning debut is an unforgettable and necessary story for our times.

• ISBN10: 0771024290
• ISBN13: 9780771024290
• Publish Date: 2 January 2018
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: CA
• Imprint: McClelland & Stewart
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 416
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/isbn/9780771024290

Reviews

[dpfaef]

In August 2010, the merchant vessel Sun Sea arrived at Esquimalt naval base in British Columbia, carrying hundreds of Sri Lankan asylum seekers. Sri Lanka had been in a state of civil war for twenty-five years.

Before Sri Lanka gained independence, the British brought in millions of Tamil to work their vast cash crop plantations of coffee, and later of rubber and tea. Colonial officials brought in approximately a million Tamil speakers from India to work as plantation labor. The Sinhalese majority, resented the Tamil as the British treated them better.

Once Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was known, upon gaining independence in 1948, with the Sinhalese who were in the majority began passing laws that prohibited the freedoms the of Indian Tamils brought to the island by the British. After decades of ethnic tension, civil war broke out in August 1983, the Tamil insurgents and Sinhalese majority engaged in a bloody battle. Both the Tamil and Sinhalese were involved in committing hideous atrocities leading to some 100,000 deaths.

Canadians of Japanese descent, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 through 1949,  were interned in camps across Canada. The Canadian government shut down all Japanese-language newspapers, took possession of businesses and personal property. To fund these internment, property belonging to Japanese Canadians was sold, including fishing boats, motor vehicles, houses, and personal belongings.

Sharon Bala’s uses these two occurrences as the basis of her debut novel The Boat People. This book touched me as it addressed the issue of who is the terrorist and who isn't? How can we judge others when at times our actions have not always been pure of heart? How do politics and prejudice affect our lives?This review was originally posted on The Pfaeffle Journal