There is certain honesty about a child in that children are mostly free of the restrictions and responsibilities of society. This can be attributed to their lack understanding the world around them. Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef and Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men explore the journey of child narrators as they try to make sense of the world. As child narrators both main characters are trapped inside of a world that is limited by their perception of it. There is a constant questioning of themselves and others in an attempt to make sense of everything. The narrators tend to personify a naïveté about their interaction and understanding of the world. The challenges faced by these children seem to hinge on the distinction between how they perceive the world, how that perception is restricted by their innocence in the world, and how that perception is often times founded in their ability to discover themselves. Gunesekera describes the predicament of the child narrator when Triton, the narrator in Reef, explains, “I was trapped inside what I could see, what I could hear, what I could walk to without straying from my undefined boundaries, and in what I could remember from what I learned in my mud-walled school” (Gunesekera, 30).

Gunesekera explores the various challenges of the young Triton as he expresses his understandings of the world through his desire to cook. It begins with the onion its “omnipresence…constantly appearing like the heart’s throb of our kitchen life.” This sets the tone for the book as it outlines a metaphor for Triton’s life: “I learned about cutting onions mostly by watching Lucy-amma, but she also taught me by getting me to do it. I became her kitchen assistant–an apprentice onion cutter. I was grateful for that role even though at first, I suppose because I was young and small and near to the cutting-surface, I would weep as I did it. I could do nothing about it except grow older and taller. Only much later did I learn the tricks to minimize the effects: like washing the onion, sticking bread on the tip of the knife, winding a damp cloth around my hand. But even now, most of the time I still do none of these: I just cry, crying cathartically” (Gunesekera, 14).

Triton recounts his life as a young boy who is trapped within a particularly sheltered upbringing. “Mister Salgado’s house was the centre of the universe, and everything in the world took place within its enclosure. Even the sun seem to rise out of the garage and sleep behind the del tree at night” (Gunesekera, 17). Most of the challenges faced by Triton originate from his inability to know the world outside of his domesticated life. He “had no notion of the future” and as such Triton was concerned only with “what he could see and what he could hear.” His “head was like a balloon that had only a few puffs of air in it. Not enough to float up in the sky; not helium but a sadder more mortal air that only allow it to loll about bumping into chairs and footstools and sleep huddled on the floor. But at least it had not been completely deformed by the spite so prevalent in our surroundings, the whole of our world” (Gunesekera, 30).

For Triton his domestic life becomes his medium for understanding the world, as it is something that allows him to communicate his place within it. “All over the globe revolutions erupted, dominoes tottered and guerrilla war came of age; the world’s first woman prime minister–Mrs Bandaranaike–lost her spectacular premiership on our small island, and I learned the art of good housekeeping” (Gunesekera, 45). Most of the challenges faced by Triton seem to be about his self-discovery. His constant understanding of how the house worked became his means of understanding how the world works. “I would have plenty of time on my own: the world became boundless. There was a lot to do. I learned early on that nature takes her course unless you work hard: things go out of control…. But I found I could keep order in a few hours and still find time for a life of simple pleasure” (Gunesekera, 51).

There is a sense of frustration that only a child can know, and it is this frustration that Triton feels about his awkward relationship with the world. He is lost in his uncertainty and is trapped by what he knows and what he has learned and now wishes that he could start over and find new meaning to his life: “I despaired of ever proving my worth. I could not understand it. I wished I could turn myself inside out and start all over again. I wished I knew more about people, women like her” (Gunesekera, 120). And so Triton reflects on his understanding of the world as limited but recognizes that this trapped sense thought is something that could not have been any other way. He says, “I began to wonder what it would have been like if I had gone to work in a restaurant from the beginning, or gone to hotel school as he had once suggested. To have been right at the centre of events rather than having always to imagine. There seems to be more of a future in an institution, I thought in my innocence then, than being in a house; but one has to take these things as they come” (Gunesekera,124). He then recognizes his challenge in the understanding the world and that was in his innocence.

Writing within this framework of a culinary world Gunesekera explores this theme of the immigrant’s memory (Jazeel, 583) within a broader political and social context. Unaware mostly of the world outside of his kitchen, Triton’s knowledge of the world has been catered by Mr. Salgado and Triton’s encounters with Salgado’s friends. This mediated existence is what brings about Triton’s challenges in understanding the world. It is only after he is separated from this mediation that he makes sense of the world and his place within it, not as a cook, but a piece of human history. “I was learning that human history is always a story of somebody’s diaspora: a struggle between those who expel, repel or curtail–possess, divide and rule–and those who keep the flame alive from night to night, mouth to mouth, enlarging the world with each flick of a tongue” (Gunesekera, 174). There is a constant comparison between the memory of the child and the history that accompanies it, yet little is ever spoken about the history of the dark time that shadows the end of the book. This might be due to Gunesekera’s “cautions against alleged “histories” generated and maintained for nationalist and oppressive ends” (Mallot, 84).

Despite having a confined and restricted view of the world Triton emerges from his childhood with an understanding that he has not experienced a world outside of his domestic limitations and realizes that this is perhaps a result of his innocence as a child. Triton’s journey to discover the world is often a journey to find himself and he becomes aware of his boundaries within himself as well as the world.

Hisham Matar’s story of a young boy in Libya shares the same challenge of trying to understand the world, but trapped under a different set of circumstances. The world of Suleiman seems to revolve around a few central points; namely his uncertainty, uncertainty about himself, uncertainty about his family, and uncertainty about the world. Suleiman “can only sometimes make this world coherent.” And often questions his uncertainties, about his mother who takes “medicine” but always falls ill to it. Or when he sees his father pass him in Martyr Square when he is supposed to be away on a business trip. Or why Moosa and his mother burn his father’s books when he loves them more than anything (Adams, 8).

Another point around which Suleiman seeks to understand the world is his anticipation of what is to become of him. Is he going to be like his father, a businessman, or is he going to be like his best friend’s father Ustath Rashid, an art historian, or perhaps a famous pianist. Suleiman comments on all of this by noting “how readily and thinly we procure these fictional selves, deceiving the world and what we might have become if only we hadn’t got in the way, if only we had waited to see what might have become of us” (Matar, 232). Unlike his friends who had no idea what was to become of them and had no anticipations for the future, Suleiman falls victim to what he sees as misfortune as a result of his anticipation. He says, “I think now that perhaps anticipation is the root, the source, of all misfortune” (Matar, 225). And so it becomes clear that this anticipation of what he was to become has trapped his ability to see beyond his procured “fictional selves” as only having certain options in life.

Disappointment seems to play a crucial role in how Suleiman views himself and others. He is disappointed in his mother for drinking, he is disappointed his in father for not being honest with him, and he mostly disappointed with himself. There is this constant disappointment that follows betrayal. There is also an overall feeling that Suleiman is trying to somehow discern where all this disappointment, and at times frustration, has come from. He says about one of his father’s friends, “I saw a shadow of disappointment in his eyes. I wonder now in what way I had disappointed him: was it by not picking up the book, by lacking that thing that enables people to act quickly without doubt? Was it by not obeying him when he asked me to sit down? Or was it something else, something more tangible than a single act? Disappointment was a series of shadows each pointing to the other” (Matar, 92). There is not way to tell if from “series of shadows” all pointing to one another that he did not at least project his own disappointment in situations like this. There never seemed to be any solution to this disappointment as it was something that was a part of him but he could never manage to figure out why he had set himself up for it.

A shameful submission to authority is how Suleiman describes his inability to change things around him. He is caught in a world where he is bound to those who “hold the strings of his fate”. Suleiman and his mother visit their neighbor’s house, a well-connected government official, in hopes of making some sort of appeal for Faraj, who has undoubtedly been imprisoned: “That visit has remained with me ever since. Whenever I am faced with someone who holds the strings of my fate…I can feel the distant reverberations from that day, my inauguration into the dark art of submission. Perhaps this is why I often find a shameful pleasure in submitting to authority…. I am often overcome with regret and, yes, shame that I am gloating in it, enjoying my own deprecation. And this is also why, when I finally feel I have gained the pleasure of authority, a sense of self-loathing rises to clasp me by the throat. I have always been able to imagine being unjustifiably hated” (Matar, 157-8). It was necessary to save his father but in a way they lost their freedom in having to submit to this authority over which they were harshly governed. You can also apply this submission to authority as a larger social restraint within Libya reflected in the character of Suleiman.

An interesting point can then be made that, “gradually, we begin to apprehend the ways in which any despotic system is like any boy’s inner life. Short-lived in their affections, easily offended, impressed with showboating stadiums of cheering automatons, blindly vicious, the boy and the system embody a topsy-turvy puerility” (Adams, 8). It is made apparent that in a way that the child narrator is in fact a microcosm of the world he trying to understand and so in a way the books, both Reef and In the Country of Men, become stories of self discovery as these children must recognize their limitations to perceive the world and in turn themselves.

What makes these child narrators so trapped is that we naturally see what they cannot. We see their world and what parts of it they understand, but we able to discern their unknowns and hesitations. The imaginative world of a child isn’t any less real than the rest of the world, but we can discern how they are describing that world around them, be it imaginative or real. Both Triton and Suleiman struggle to understand their place in the world, what is happening around them, and are uncertain about how they fit into everything. Their journey to understand the worlds they live in and to explain their challenges coincides with a journey of self-discovery where by they come to realize the honesty of their childhood.

Works Cited

  • Adams, Lorraine. The Dissident’s Son.” New York Times 4 Mar 2007: 8.
  • Gunesekera, Romesh. Reef. London: Granta Publications, 1994.
  • Jazeel , Tariq. “Unpicking Sri Lankan ‘island-ness’ in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef.” Journal of Historical Geography 29(2003): 582.
  • Mallot, Edward J.. ““We Are Only What We Remember, Nothing More”: History and Healing in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42(2007): 83.
  • Matar, Hisham. In the Country of Men. London: Penguin Books, 2007.