In Funny Boy we find characters who do not conform and at the same time have to live their lives with the feeling of imminent danger of transgressing social 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 sheds light on the individual characters as fellow sufferers. This leads us to explore the nature of the bond 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 note an overlap of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in the novel in a way that leads us to understand how the different experiences of exile in the novel are interconnected. The political exile of Arjie's family, in the end, is not the only case of exile in the novel. This essay, therefore, focuses on discussing how the sense of solidarity that these marginalized people create for each other often blurs the line between one minority group and another, and how this interconnection between the aforementioned categories illuminates and strengthen the experience of exile. for the marginalized of the novel. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In the first section of the novel, Pigs Can't Fly, Arjie thinks he belongs in the back garden world to which he “seemed to have gravitated naturally. (p 3)” It is the girls' territory and he is the only male there, but at this stage he feels no shame or guilt in playing with his cousins ​​and dressing up as a bride in their favorite game, bride-to-bride. Rather, it allows him to give free rein to his imagination in a way that he feels he cannot do if he instead plays the squalid game of cricket with his male cousins, as the child narrator tells us: “The pleasure the boys took in defending hours on a cricket pitch... it was incomprehensible to me. (p.3)” The process of cross-dressing is important to him because it is only when he wears a sari that he is no longer burdened by any stereotypical gender role. This is illustrated by the following line in which Arjie describes the bride-to-bride dressing ritual: “I was able to leave the bonds of myself and ascend into another self, brighter, more beautiful, a self for whom this day was dedicated, and around which the world seemed to revolve, represented by my cousins ​​who put flowers in my hair, draping the palm. (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 forbade him to play with the girls, he often sits alone on the porch steps of his grandparents' house. Geographically it is a space that falls within neither boys' nor girls' territory, which symbolizes her expulsion from both of these worlds. This isolation now leads him to a completely opposite experience of his body. When he is dragged into the living room by his aunt, the very draping of the sari which was previously an act of liberation becomes a source of embarrassment for him and his parents. We thus see how the very action of wrapping oneself in a sari goes from being liberating to humiliating. He no longer hugs his body like he used to. This crisis is captured through the following line: “The sari suddenly felt suffocating around my body, and the hairpins, which held the veil in place, pricked my scalp. (13)” This expulsion leads Arjie to experience the familiar 'boy-girl' world, sharply divided between the back garden and the front garden, through acompletely different. This process of estrangement or relocation of his gender subject position haunts him throughout the novel. To discuss this process of defamiliarization of geographical spaces we can examine several cases in the novel. The first example is the beach near the grandparents' house. He writes: “Now both the beach and the sea, once so familiar, were like an unknown country I had traveled to by chance… I would be trapped between the worlds of boys and girls, without belonging or wanting to either. (39)” Just like the steps of the veranda, the beach also finds an appropriate context here, being the meeting point between the land and the sea, another marginal space. Next, we have his school as an example of this defamiliarization. Just before Arjie is about to mix his poems at the annual function, which is a significant event in this novel as a Bildungsroman, he finds himself staring at the school building and wondering how different it was in the evening: “The light was changing 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. This is the only time Arjie thinks about his future with hope as he states that this is how he would remember his school. The decision not to identify with the proud schoolchildren in the poem "The Best School of All" brings Arjie one step closer to self-realization. It is through the rejection of such imposed identities that Arjie experiences freedom in the novel. The denial of imposed identities also means that he must begin to find new identities for himself, and hence the effort to look at familiar geographic spaces in a different light and to make peace with this new strangeness. own home as an example. When Arjie realizes that a difficult road lies ahead for him in Canada, he returns to his mob-burned house and all he experiences is a strangeness at the debris: As I examined the charred things on the floor, I suddenly realized that the records weren't music but plastic, which had now melted into black puddles, which my books were mere paper that had darkened and now fell apart between my fingers. Legs, uprights and arms of famous furniture, once polished, smooth and of a rich brown hue, now that they had opened revealed the whiteness of common wood (298). So, through these examples we see how when Arjie moves from one phase in his life with another there is this defamiliarization of the familiar, after his expulsion from the world of both boys and girls, before his decision to defend Shehan who he loves , or of his anticipation for a new life in a different country. Arjie's sense of “who am I” is always in flux, and the defamiliarization of geographic spaces acts as a mirror of a similar process occurring psychologically in Arjie's mind. The idea here is to show how Arjie has to construct his own definitions and see the world in a new way after realizing that he is a fringe topic. It captures the nature of the exile that Arjie experiences on a psychological level. Furthermore, this psychological experience is the result of an intersection between two different types of marginalization faced by Arjie as a member of the Tamil minority and as a gay boy. This pushes us to explore how different identities in the novel experience subjugation and consequently how individuals with such identities deal with exile. As mentioned at the beginning, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality overlap in the novel such that the experience of marginalization functions on multiple levels. Arjie's understanding of hisotherness is based on both his sexuality and his ethnicity. Having experienced belonging to an ethnic and sexual minority, and therefore this double exile, helps him connect with the other characters in the novel who are discriminated against based on their gender, namely the women in the novel. Both Amma and Radha Aunty trust Arjie with their secrets because being a “feminist” is also contradictory and challenging to social norms, as pointed out by Esa Svensson. Likewise, Amma is more sensitive about her sexuality than her father. She can't come up with any convincing argument when Arjie asks her why he's not allowed to play with girls anymore. He simply says: “Because the sky is so high and pigs can't fly(…) Life is full of stupid things and sometimes we just have to do them. (20) “Part of the reason she at least recognizes that these notions of childhood are stupid is that she herself is caught between what she believes and how she is expected to behave and behave in a conservative postcolonial state struggling to build a hypermasculine national identity. He also trusts Arjie in his relationship with Daryl, which is another example of his defiance of the stereotypical image of a wife, and Arjie becomes his confidant Radha Aunty also confides in him when he dates Anil against her family's wishes also lets her wear makeup and jewelry, promises to be his bridesmaid and indulges his fantasies of a real, real home wedding, and as a result Arjie understands her better than his own parents because. she gave Arjie the free space to be himself and knows how it feels to be an outcast Radha is the happiest in the novel during her encounters with Anil when she does not conform to what her family expects of her. Arjie shares this happiness with her by becoming an agent in their love story. This semblance of liberation is the closest these characters come to true self-expression, and one maverick seems to edify another maverick. Uncle Daryl is a good example of this. Daryl as a bourgeois is another outsider in the predominantly Tamil/Sinhala society of Sri Lanka and helps Amma find her identity as a woman, as Jayawickrama argues that "it is only when we hear Daryl say her name, 'Nalini', that we learn her name Before then it had simply been reduced to the name Amma, mother Amma, Radha and Arjie are the characters who do not actually wield much power in the novel, but we see that it is not only the powerless but also the powerful who have to suffer the consequences. of this hostile and suffocating environment in which people are not allowed to choose for themselves. Arjie's father is an example of this. He is a victim of traditional ideas of masculinity, as his relationship with Jegan's father suggests: My father He handed Amma a yellowed piece of paper. We huddled around her so we could read it too. The paper was torn from a notebook and the writing was badly spelled. “We, Robert Chelvaratnam and Buddy Parameshwaram, do the following statement: 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 rust-colored fingerprints (155). There is definitely a hint of homoeroticism in this note. The words read like a marriage vow and the blood gives the image of sexual intercourse. Esa Svensson points out that Arjie is able to find an “alternative masculinity” thanks to his alliances with Uncle Daryl, Jegan, and Shehan. These male characters in the novel are the countertypes of the typical dominant and powerful male, who become a source of comfort for Arjie. Arjie's father, unlike Uncle Daryl, thinks that Little Women is a book suitable only for-, 1994.