Cousin Brothers ... and the sisterhood of authors

First, it was in Blue-Skinned Gods.

And then it was in The City of Good Death.

And now in The Death of Vivek Oji.

In all those three works of fiction, the stories revolve around two cousins who grow up more as brothers.  The authors are all women, about the same age too, and writing about the (inner) lives of young men.

The first, S J Sindu, is a Srilankan-Canadian with Tamil roots.  The second, Priyanka A. Champaneri, is an Indian-American whose parents migrated from Gujarat.  Unlike these two authors, Akwaeke Emezi immigrated to the US from Nigeria, where she was born and raised. 

Emezi, unlike the other two authors, was born to parents of two different ethnicities: Her father is Nigerian (Igbo) and her mother is Tamil.

A Tamil married to a Nigerian?  This real life story appeals to me far more than the fiction that Emezi weaves.

The authors represent how much humans have moved around, unlike all the previous centuries when humans lived and died pretty much near where they were born.

Champaneri's parents migrated halfway around the world seeking better opportunities in the US.  A story that is familiar to me and millions of others.

On the other hand, if there hadn't been a raging civil war in Sri Lanka, Sindu's parents might not have emigrated.

Emezi's mother is a Tamil from Malaysia. "My dad went to medical school in Russia and met my mom in London while she was at nursing school."

What a fascinating world in which we live!

Three non-white women telling stories that are set in non-white land reminds me of Orhan Pamuk's comment about non-white authors in the English language:

When I began writing, no one cared about Turkey, no one knew about Turkey. In 1985 I went to America for two years and began to write The Black Book around then. Finding that my voice was getting stronger, I really remember thinking, ‘my God these Latin American writers are so lucky, who cares about Turkish writers or Middle Eastern writers or Muslim or Indian or Pakistani writers?’ That’s what I thought then. But the situation has changed in 25 years and during that change my books boomed, I am happy to say that. There are political reasons, cultural reasons, history, all of which changed the world. And now I would say that a big writer from Turkey or the Middle East or India is more visible. Salman Rushdie, for example, was visible in 1981. It all began after that. ...

I'm sure we will be reading more Indian literature, because Indian literature in English is slightly more visible, than say, Chinese or Latin American. But I would say, the private lives of non-western nations will be more visible in future. That I can only say. Non-western writers will be more visible and domination of the European-American small world – they were dominating the whole world – that domination will be less. But it's not an animosity, it's not a clash, it's a friendship. We have learned the art of the novel from them – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Mann. These are my brothers; I am not fighting with them.