In Funny Boy we find characters who do not conform and who, at the same time, have to live their lives with the feeling of the imminent danger that they risk transgressing societal norms. Therefore, a brief period of liberation followed by an acute sense of alienation is what brings the individual experiences of the novel under the same umbrella, and also highlights the individual characters as fellow sufferers. This leads us to explore the nature of the connection that different characters share with each other and how this solidarity challenges the demarcated lines of difference and the nature of marginalization based on class, race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. Furthermore, we notice in the novel an overlap between ethnicity, gender and sexuality, which leads us to understand how the different experiences of exile in the novel are interconnected. The political exile of Arjie's family, as it turns out, is not the only instance of exile in the novel. This essay therefore focuses on how the sense of solidarity that these outcasts forge towards each other often blurs the boundary between one minority group and the other, and how this interconnection between the categories mentioned above illuminates and reinforces the experience of exile. for the outcasts of the novel. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay In the first section of the novel, Pigs Can't Fly, Arjie sees himself as belonging to the garden world to which he "seemed to have gravitated naturally. (p 3) » It's girls' territory and he's the only boy there, but at this point he feels no shame or guilt about playing with his cousins ​​and dressing up as a bride in their favorite game, the bride. -bride. Rather, it allows him to give free rein to his imagination, something he feels he cannot do if he instead plays the boring game of cricket with his male cousins, as the childish narrator tells us: "The pleasure that the boys stood for hours on a cricket field… it was incomprehensible to me. (p.3) » The process of getting dressed is important to him because it is only when he is dressed in a sari that he is no longer weighed down by stereotypical gender roles. This is illustrated by the following line in which Arjie describes the bride's dressing ritual: "I was able to let go of my constraints and rise to another self, brighter, more beautiful, a self for whom this day was devoted, and around which the world, represented by my cousins ​​putting flowers in my hair, draping their palms, seemed to revolve. (4-5) » We thus notice how Arjie overcomes the inhibitions of his gendered body through this beautiful transformation, but this freedom is only short-lived. After his mother forbids him from playing with the girls, he often sits alone on the porch steps of his grandparents' house. Geographically, it is a space that belongs neither to the territory of boys nor to that of girls, which symbolizes its expulsion from these two worlds. This isolation now leads him to a completely opposite experience of his body. When he is dragged to the living room by his aunt, the same draping of the sari that was previously an act of liberation becomes a source of embarrassment for him and his parents. We thus see how the same action of draping oneself in a sari goes from being liberating to being humiliating. He no longer embraces her body like he used to. This crisis is captured by the following line: “The sari suddenly felt stifling around my body, and the hairpins that held the veil in place pricked my scalp.(13) » This expulsion causes Arjie to experience the familiar world of "boy-girls", neatly divided between the back garden and the front garden, through a completely different lens. This process of distancing or displacement from his gendered subject position haunts him throughout the novel. To discuss this process of defamiliarization of geographical spaces, we can examine different instances of the novel. The first example is the beach near his grandparents' house. He writes: "Now the beach and the sea, once so familiar, were like an unknown country to which I had traveled by chance...I was caught between the world of boys and that of girls, neither belonging nor wanted in the world. 'one or the other. (39) » Like the veranda steps, the beach constitutes an appropriate setting here given that it is the meeting point between land and sea, another marginal space. Then we have his school as an example of this defamiliarization. Just before Arjie is about to shuffle his poems at the annual ceremony, which is an important event in this novel as a bildungsroman, he finds himself looking at the school building and wondering how it was different in the evening: “The light changed. above the Victoria Academy… how peaceful and majestic it looked. (273)” This ability to be able to look at his school, where he is brutally beaten for the most trivial mistakes, in such a positive way is one of the most powerful examples in the novel. It's the only time Arjie thinks about his future with hope when he mentions that this is how he will remember his school. The decision not to identify with the proud schoolboys in the poem “The Best School of All” brings Arjie closer to self-realization. It is through the rejection of these imposed identities that Arjie experiences freedom in the novel. The negation of imposed identities also means that one must begin to find new identities, hence the effort to look at familiar geographical spaces in a different light and to make peace with this new ignorance. And finally, we have his own house as an example. When Arjie realizes that a difficult path awaits him in Canada, he returns to his house burned by the mob and all he feels is a strangeness in front of the debris: As I examined the charred objects on the floor, I suddenly realized that the records were not music but plastic, which had now melted into black puddles, that my books were only paper which had turned brown and was now falling apart between my fingers. The familiar furniture legs, posts, and arms, once polished, smooth, and a rich brown hue, now that they were cracked, revealed the whiteness of common wood (298). So, through these examples, we see how, when Arjie moves from one phase in his life to the next, there is this defamiliarization of the familiar, after his expulsion from the world of boys and girls, before his decision to defending Shehan whom he loves, or his anticipation of a new life in another country. Arjie's sense of "who am I" is always evolving, and the defamiliarization of geographical spaces acts as a mirror to a similar process occurring psychologically in Arjie's mind. The idea here is to show how Arjie must construct his own definitions and see the world in a new light after realizing that he is a marginal subject. It captures the nature of the exile Arjie experiences on a psychological level. Furthermore, this psychological experience is the result of an intersection between two different types of marginalization that Arjie faces as a member of the Tamil minority and as a gay boy. This pushes us toexplore how different identities in the novel experience subjugation and, consequently, how individuals possessing these identities face exile. As mentioned at the beginning, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality overlap in the novel in such a way that the experience of marginalization operates on multiple levels. Arjie's understanding of his otherness is grounded in both his sexuality and his ethnicity. The experience of belonging to an ethnic and sexual minority, and therefore of this double exile, helps him connect to the other group of characters in the novel who are discriminated against based on their sex, i.e. -say the women of the novel. Both Amma and Radha Aunty confide their secrets to Arjie because being a "girly-boy" contradicts and also challenges social norms, as Esa Svensson points out. Likewise, Amma is more sensitive about her sexuality than her father. She fails to find any convincing argument when Arjie asks her why he is no longer allowed to play with girls. She simply says: “Because the sky is so high and pigs can't fly (…) Life is full of stupid things and sometimes you just have to do them. (20) "Part of the reason she at least recognizes that these childhood notions are stupid is that she herself is caught between what she believes in and how she is supposed to behave and conduct herself in a conservative postcolonial state struggling to build itself. a hyper-masculine national identity. She also trusts Arjie with her affair with Daryl, which is another example of her challenging the stereotypical image of a wife, and Arjie becomes her confidante. Radha Aunty also confides in him when she dates Anil against her family's wishes. She also lets him wear makeup and jewelry, promises to make him a bridesmaid, and indulges her fantasies of a real wedding in the house, and as a result Arjie understands her better than his own parents because she has gave Arjie the free space to be himself and he knows what it feels like to be an outcast. Radha is happiest in the novel during her dates with Anil when she does not conform to what her family expects of her. Arjie shares this happiness with her by becoming an agent of their love story. This semblance of liberation is the closest these characters come to true self-expression, and one maverick seems to uplift another maverick. Uncle Daryl is a good example. Daryl, as a bourgeois, is another outsider in Sri Lanka's predominantly Tamil and Sinhalese society and he helps Amma find her identity as a woman, as Jayawickrama argues: "it is only when we hear Daryl pronouncing her name, 'Nalini', which we learn. his name. Before that, it was simply reduced to the name of Amma, mother. Amma, Radha and Arjie are the characters who don't really wield much power in the novel, but we see that it is not just the powerless but also the powerful who have to suffer the ramifications of this hostile and stifling environment where people are not. allowed to choose for themselves. Arjie's father is an example of this. He is a victim of dominant ideas about manhood, as his relationship with Jegan's father suggests: My father handed Amma a yellowed piece of paper. We gathered around her so we could read it too. The paper had been torn from an exercise book and the writing on it was poorly formed and contained spelling mistakes. “We, Robert Chelvaratnam and Buddy Parameshwaram, make the following declaration: We will always protect each other's families until death do us part. Signed with our mixed blood…” At the bottom of the page were two colored thumbprints-, 1994.