This is ironic because in Sri Lanka girls her age were being drafted into the Tamil Tigers at the height of the civil war - or going clubbing in Colombo.
But as she became more independent and aware of her desires, her parents told her they should have sent her to a convent school in Sri Lanka. It was very typical immigrant drama, she remembers - big fights when she came home followed by her mother cooking her favorite curries. "I started dating white boys and started several years of arguments with my parents," she says. When Mohanraj left her sheltered von Trapp family life in Connecticut and moved to college in Chicago, she began experiencing some of these collisions of sexuality and race firsthand. "The interconnected stories are as much about sex as gender." And sexuality and race and class and how they all rub up against each other, Mohanraj adds. "This book is bigger than its treatment of sex," says fellow author Abha Dawesar, whose own book "Babyji" raised eyebrows with its subversive take on South Asians and sexuality. Or as Mohanraj puts it, "Will you do what is conventionally expected of you and can you find pleasure in that?" "It's a more wide-angle lens than my erotica," says Mohanraj, 34, who is currently a visiting professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago.īut whether it's 1939 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, or 1999 in Berkeley, California, some things don't change - the secrets and silences around sex and the collision of desires and expectations.
0 kommentar(er)
