A “Wave” Comes Calling
How Sonali Deraniyagala’s heartbreaking and brilliant memoir landed on my bookshelf
There are books that you are called to and there are books that call to you.
In the Fall of 2012, I studied abroad in London. It was my first time on that side of the Atlantic, and it was the longest I’ve ever spent outside of the United States. Like many American’s traveling to new spaces in the world, I couldn’t wait to soak in the culture, see the much talked about sites (Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, etc.), and make my way to neighboring cities and countries (Bath, Cambridge, France, Belgium, Amsterdam). As a student, however, I had other, more pressing obligations. I was taking five classes — British Fantasy Writing, Islam and the West, Internet Marketing, Sales, and a communications class I can’t remember the name of — that required me to study daily. Near the entrance of the university’s small and quaint library, my primary study space, there was a rack of books with a sign that read “Good Reads.” It was on this rack that I encountered Junot Diaz and Zadie Smith for the first time. And to this day, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz) and White Teeth (Smith) are two of my favorite novels.
One of today’s most precise and erudite writers is Teju Cole, a Nigerian American author who has written two phenomenal works of fiction: 2007’s Everyday is for the Thief (reprinted in the U.S. in March 2015) and 2011’s Open City. Reading Cole is a pleasure and a journey. His knowledge is vast, inciting a little jealousy from the reader, and you find yourself wanting to dig deeper into his subjects. I’ve yet to read Derek Walcott (in fact, I don’t read much poetry), but now find myself wandering to the poetry section of a bookstore. I don’t read much about photography, but Cole’s column “On Photography” in the New York Times Magazine is a must-read for me. And it was the essay “A Better Quality of Agony” in his new book of essays, Known and Strange Things, that made me want to pick up Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir, Wave.
In “A Better Quality of Agony,” Cole writes:
Readers who are looking for a neat story of loss and redemption, a simple narrative arc, catharsis on the cheap, will find no such thing here: the particularity of Deraniyagala’s suffering, and the intensity with which she feels it, is immense. But something does shift in the course of the narrative. As Deraniyagala said in a recent interview, she found that “Writing is a much better quality of agony than trying to forget.” In accurately describing her family’s life — and I’m drawn here to the root word “cura,” care, from which we get “accurate” — she rescues her family from uncaring, careless fate. Losing them plunged her into darkness. Writing about what happened brings them back into the light, a little.
Cole’s enthusiasms inevitably become your own, and thus I added Wave to my book wish list on Amazon. But here’s the thing. Books on my wish list have a long history of never making it to my mailbox. I was called to Wave, but unlike Oscar Wao and White Teeth, it didn’t call to me.
Until it did.
A couple of days after reading Cole’s essay, I found myself browsing Barnes & Noble, as I usually to do, after work. I was looking for Mona Eltahaway’s book Headscarves and Hymens: Why The Middle East Needs A Sexual Revolution. After about ten minutes of browsing and failing to find it, I made my way to the biography section, looking for nothing in particular. And then, not twenty seconds later, there it was, Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala. There was only one copy. It was calling to me.
Wave is a quick read, but it’s immense. Deraniyaga has experienced a tragedy so surreal that one could mistake it for fiction. On December 26, 2004, a tsunami hit the resort she and her family were vacationing at in Sri Lanka. She lost everyone. Her husband (Steve), her two sons (Malli and Vik), five and eight, and her parents. Wave is her account of this moment, and the years to follow.
In his essay, Cole writes, “evocations of summertime ease and sweet familial conviviality would be a pleasure,” but, “in Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir…they are among the most difficult things I’ve ever read.” I agree. I can’t imagine coping with losing my girlfriend, parents, and siblings in a tragic natural disaster. I’m not sure there’s even a way to imagine it. “What if, even for one single moment, I thought nothing has changed, that no one is dead,” Deraniyagala writes. I can’t imagine. She has to.
As Deraniyagala reflects on her past — Vik gushing at starlings, Malli asking why humans need to sleep, Steve jumping into the ocean at midnight, her parents helping to negotiate life in Columbo — you are reminded that the little things in life truly do matter. And that dreaded cliché: don’t take things for granted. A few days after finishing Wave, my girlfriend wanted a glass of orange juice. She opened the fridge, closed it quickly, looked at me, and said, “You never leave me any orange juice.” I laughed, and responded: “Babe, you know you love it. I don’t want this to happen, but if I, like, died tomorrow, you would miss not having any orange juice to drink.” Wave was on my mind. If I were to lose someone important in my life, not only would I miss the things they did that made me happy, I would miss the things they did that annoyed me.
As Cole writes, “very few of us will ever experience loss on this scale, but, somehow, her having written about hers is a kind of preemptive consolation.” I wish Wave didn’t need to be written. But I’m fortunate that it was.
