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| Sunday, 26 January 2003 |
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Hybridity all the way by FACTOTUM Appropriately enough Kumari Jayawardena chaired the proceedings that launched the book 'The Hybrid Island' edited by Neluka de Silva. Kumari dew attention to her eligibility to chair the sessions introducing herself as a classic example of hybridity. The tittering audience acquiesced. 'The Hybrid Island' is in itself a hybrid collection of eight essays starting off with aboriginal Vaddas and rounded off with the invasionary music form Baila with six other essays in between taking up issues of the Aryan\Dravidian divide and other scenarios such as the Burgher phenomenon, the 'Juta' shoe and mimic men. Of course, there can be howls of protest that the very term 'hybrid' raises the issue of the existence of ethnic purity which can not be substantiated when the entire species homo sapien is a happy mix. The differences spoken of among humans are after all purely conventional. Raelians claim to have cloned Eve has still to be backed up with real evidence. Upto now no one appears to have been guided by any natural or supernatural phenomena to the spot where the baby lies but in such an event this subject of hybridity is sure to assume a new dimension. Gananath Obeysekera's observation that Vaddas become rice farmers and most of them drop their Vadda identity and become members of the dominant farmer caste is sure to cause heartburn among those who have illusions of being representative of a pure unadulterated stock. Arjun Gunaratne referring to the past, comments that the Sinhala hero - King Dutugemunu would share no common identity with Sinhalese today. 'He would have far more in common culturally and be able to communicate with greater ease with his enemy Elara than he would with those who invoke his name as a cultural ancestor'. It is then not only another country, it is another culture. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake does remind us that until relatively recently, native and foreign ethnographers almost routinely remarked on the more or less peaceful co-existence of its diverse and hybrid cultures. In the context of the prevailing 'no war' situation this certainly has a sobering effect. Nira Wickremesinghe pointedly remarks that 'Hybrid' contradicts itself by implying the existence of 'pure' and separate 'parents'. 'If hybridity is taken in this sense it extends rather than contradicts the colonial and national privileging of 'purity' as the supreme value and can then only fail to become an instrument of empowerment'. Yolanda Foster calls on artists to interrogate and challenge the hegemony of the state by offering alternative cultural images as opposed to romanticized 'tradition' alleging that the state media produces the nation as a homogeneous narrative. Quoting artist Chandragupta Thenuwara 'To prolong the war, a warped mentality is essential. War cannot be justified. There are no just wars in the world". Yolanda underlines that war is insanity. Neluka Silva referring to Lakdasa Wikkramasinha's poem 'Don't Talk to Me About Matisse' highlights the 'deep-seated rancour bred by prolonged cultural colonisation and the overarching need to rehabilitate the indigenous culture'. To emphasise her point she quotes. Talk to me instead of culture generally. - Lakdasa Wikkramasinha Vikram Singh is quite unable to reconcile democratic thinking of imperialist powers with what Joseph Conrad graphically narrates in the words of Marlow who watching a French ship shelling the jungle says 'In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent" Colonial hybrids were harbingers of a new order in which almost everyone, almost everything is somehow mixed, she declares. Although Baila music has 'failed to cross over to the immensely profitable world music industry' Anne Shereen makes the point that any evening falls flat without a final round of dancing usually referred to as the Baila session. The popularity of the hybrid Baila then only reinforces the fact that racial hybridity manifests itself all the way. |
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