Romesh Gunesekera's Monkfish Moon: Loneliness and Failure in Human Relationships in War-torn Sri Lanka

Abstract

Sri Lanka, known as Ceylon until 1972, is a beautiful island country with full of natural beauty in South Asia which contains tropical forests and various scenes with biodiversity. Multilngual and multicultural people live in the country. The culture of this country is influenced primarily by Buddhism and Hinduism. There are two main traditional cultures here – the Sinhalese and the Tamil. Later the British colonial culture has also influenced the local people. Though Tamils co-existed with the Sinhalese from 3rd century, the latest history of this country has been faded by a thirty-year civil war which positively ended when Sri Lankan military defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.Monkfish Moon (1992), a debut of Romesh Gunesekera (b. 1954), is a collection of nine beautifully modulated and outstanding short stories in which the direct reference to specific historical and political event, the conflict between Tamil and Sinhalese, becomes vital to understanding the context of the stories. This paper suggests a revision of the ethnic and political tensions that have endangered Sri Lankan people's lives since independence in 1948. It also investigates Gunesekera's preoccupation with collision of human relationships for political and social turmoil and how individuals lead to loneliness.