On Sal Mal Lane: A Novel
In July of 1983, volatile tension in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority erupted in a series of armed attacks and violent riots. Freeman, who situated her first novel, A Disobedient Girl (2009), amid life on the island nation of her birth, here explores more intimately the country’s complex social and political dynamics. We enter the fray in the years leading up to Black July, and we see the effects of civil unrest on the inhabitants of Sal Mal Lane, an otherwise quiet neighborhood. Family ties begin to dissolve as the Sinhalese Silvas try to win over the newly arrived Heraths, Catholic nuns scold schoolchildren for name-calling, and the bin Ahmeds observe Ramadan with increasing caution. Freeman’s gift for verisimilitude is manifest with searing clarity: ivy crawling over glass-crowned walls, wax-paper lanterns alighting, the bulbous trunks and bursting orange bulbs that give the lane its name. And in fictionalizing Sri Lankan history, Freeman accomplishes what reportage alone cannot: she blends the journalist’s loyalty to fact with impassioned imagination. --Diego Báez