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| Sunday, 23 March 2003 |
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Sunday Essay by AJITH SAMARANAYAKE Over a decade ago Sunil Govinnage was a familiar presence in the newspaper offices of Colombo and the studios of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, the only radio station at the time. Although he worked in the Health Department he was intensely interested in literature, poetry and the allied arts. In a note to his first collection of short stories titled 'Black Swans and other stories' it is explained that his family's economic circumstances and the uncertainty created in the aftermath of the 1971 Insurrection (Govinnage was then 21 years old) forced him to give up his ambitions of becoming an academic. Yet he gained a vicarious self-fulfilment engaging in an intense love affair with the Muse while pursuing his unlikely profession as a Public Health Inspector. self-transfiguration Today at 53 he lives and works in Australia as an Information Technology professional having effected a magic act of self-transfiguration. He has lived in Perth for the last 15 years and it is from this vantage point that he takes a studied look at the problems associated with exile, transplantation in a new social milieu and the question of identity and loyalties inherent in the whole process. Sometimes he does this with nostalgia and sometimes with irony but all these stories are eminently readable and pose relevant questions for our times. The first wave of migration to Australia occurred, of course, in the 1960s when the Burgher community which felt abandoned in the wake of the SLFP Government's Sinhala Only Policy left in large numbers for Down Under as it was dubbed in the press. They were later joined by the more affluent Sinhalese and perhaps Tamils who felt isolated for various reasons in this new Swabhasha milieu. But with Govinnage and his ilk we are in a different terrain. The typical Govinnage protagonist (who swings between Siripala Wickramasinghe and Jayadeva) is dominantly Sinhala-educated but bi-lingual, a middle class professional with a couple of children who has come to Australia either because of the recent dislocations in Sri Lanka or for the education of his children. A constant refrain which runs through these stories is that they did it for the children. But the children have grown away from their roots and have settled down quite comfortably in the Aussie milieu. They call their parents Dad and Mum although a father might still address his son as 'putha.' It is generally the fathers in Govinnage's stories who are seized by feelings of nostalgia for home and even a sense of patriotism from afar while the mothers are less prone to culture shock. Great people Govinnage sketches the Australian scene dexterously. On his first day at work Siripala Wickramasinghe is told that his name sounds funny and with typical Aussie insouciance it is suggested that he shorten his name to Singh. When he protests that this might make him sound a Sikh he is informed that there is a Tamil called Frank because that is what his wife calls him although his real name is Bala. The upshot is that the name is shortened to Siri, Aussie being great people at shortening names although Wickramasinghe, of course, is a bit of a mouthful. The tone here is light but the story has an ironic edge. The Aussies don't care for Wickramasinghe's lineage but as he tries to explain to the puzzled Darryl any other Sinhalese would know from his name what his origin is, the fact that he is not a Tamil, and even his caste. But the whole point is that if Siri is to become integrated into Australia he will have to shed that whole race-caste baggage he has brought from Sri Lanka. In 'The Black Australian' Siri in Amsterdam allows himself to be mistakenly identified as a Black Australian although he is no Aborigine. But then who is he? In 'Painted Sky' Jayadeva refuses to support the Australian Cricket team because of Australia's harassment of the Sri Lankan cricketers but his wife Malini is quite happy to support the Aussies even referring to the Sri Lankans as 'Dad's team' in conversation with her children. Again in 'The Black Australian' siri sports a beanie and a scarf in support of the West Coast Eagle only to be greeted by a remark from a young scamp 'I didn't know the Eagles had supporters in India as well!" Realism In 'Painted Faces' Siri goes to Cairns in search of Aboriginal culture only to be treated to a dance and a music alien to him in a cultural park where the blacks are obviously kept as exhibits. What is more the wet weather makes him ill suggesting his disenchantment and it is feared that he might have caught dengue which a white taxi driver suggests might have been brought by Asians. In 'Painted Sky' Jayadeva is pained when his wife condemns the Aborigines for living on welfare money and being drunk the whole day and juxtaposes this with Captain Cook's description of the early Aboriginal life he had encountered as a 'Tranquillity which is not disturbed by the Inequality of the Conditions'. But yet after the Sky Show he has to hustle his children away from some black children who are sniffing petrol although Jayadeva's children with the realism of the young are not disturbed at all by the sight. In Sri Lanka on a short holiday Siri has to grapple with other dilemmas. He comes back to the familiar sights and sounds of his adolescence best personified by his mother, the one unwavering symbol of everything which is constant, but both the countryside and the town have changed. One of his younger relatives had joined the Army and had been killed and another who accompanies Siri for a bath is intent on joining the Air Force. On paying a visit to his old office he is received cordially enough but told that he had acquired an accent but given tea in the set which is reserved for the World Bank people! At the heart of Govinnage's fiction therefore are the problems of identity and loyalty as experienced by a Sri Lankan who has migrated to Australia and is struggling to establish an identity of his own. He wishes to integrate fully with his new ethos but cannot but recognise the deformities and distortions of this society. At the same time he is also haunted by ancestral memories of his forsaken Sri Lankan home typified for Siri by his lost love Anula now herself living abroad and married to a doctor. There is a melancholic lyricism running through these stories most sharply represented by the images of darkness common to most of them. Painted faces Surrounding this situation is the situation of the writer himself. In a foreword to this collection Prof. Stephen Muecke says that he likes to think of Govinnage as a writer of the Indian Ocean rather than in terms of national identities. After all he is a resident of Perth a city lapped by the Indian Ocean whose currents and winds also link him to the country of his birth. In 'Painted Faces' Siri says that there is no place for non Anglo-Celtic writers in Australia. Govinnage then is a Sinhala writer who has had to adjust to the Anglo-Celtic milieu and you can see here the marks of his creative struggle. On the whole he comes out well. He writes simply but evocatively and has the gift of the story-teller. The conversational language is somewhat stilted but this Prof. Wimal Dissanayake in his Introduction ascribes to the need to 'capture dynamics of Sinhalese sensibility as it inflects Sri Lankan English. Finally Govinnage almost defiantly throws a quotation from Somerset Maugham as his motto. "If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.' Waving thus the banner of Maugham Govinnage's is an impressive debut.
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