Debate

Great writing is not male writing:

by Vijita Fernando

The Sahitya Month of September has been specially fortunate for women writers writing in English. Anne Ranasinghe, reputed writer for many years of both poetry and prose , was awarded the highest honour in the literary genre, the Sahityaratne at the presentation of the state literary awards last month.

A number of other women also won special awards. Among them Ransiri Menike Silva for her collection of short stories intriguingly titled "The Seeing Eye", Padma Edirisinghe for her translation into English of a novel by professor A.V. Suraweera, Janaki Suriarachchi for children's literature and several others. Mostly women.

In the international sphere we had two outstanding achievements by two women writers in the last few weeks. Still writing at the ripe age of 88, Doris Lessing, author of the first publication containing feminist ideas "The Golden Notebook" became the 2007 Nobel Laureate in Literature.

Her impressive body of work extends over half a century in practically everyone of which she looks unflinchingly at society's ills. Feminists today may not be aware that it was Doris Lessing who, through her work, inspired a number of other feminist writers as far back as the 1960s.

In the citation in awarding the Nobel prize the judges noted that her work though the years has been "of great importance to other writers and to the broader field of literature".

Close on her heels we have another woman writer of distinction, Anne Enright, who won over a very popular novelist Ian McEwan, one of the most prestigious awards in the literary world, the Booker prize.

In the Booker short list of five were three women and two men. Our thoughts go not very far back to another woman, Kiran Desai whose "Inheritance of Loss" won the 2006 Booker Prize. Several years previously it was still another woman, Arundhati Roy who won the Booker Prize for her "God of Small Things"

The Booker prize has familiar overtones for us, Sri Lankan writers in English. It was the Canadian (Sri Lankan born ) writer Michael Ondatjee, who after his winning the Booker several years back ,instituted the Gratiaen prize, an award for the best creative writing in English annually.

In the past fifteen or so years since the award was instituted, several women have been the winners - more I think than the men, though I cannot swear to this!

Winners or not, this award has spurred many to write, take writing seriously, even if they are not all hoping for a win. As one woman writer said, "I have taken out some of my fiction from the mothballs and am polishing them up without letting my efforts gather dust-who knows I might send something to the Gratiaen Award."

Just as Doris Lessing wrote of feminine sexuality at a time when such writing was not quite acceptable, or of the relations between the races especially in one of her first novels, "The Grass is Singing" which examines the relationship of a white farmer's wife and her black servant , so does the new Booker winner Enright lay bare the dark secrets, the sexual hurts and the festering of family relationships in her award winning novel "The Gathering." The judges called it "powerful, uncomfortable and, at times, an angry book" of an "impressive novelist."

And just last week we had the short story writing competition by the Daily News in which all three winners were women, with Usula Wijesuriya,a prize winning writer in both English and Sinhala winning the first prize with her entry "Nothing Grows Under the Banyan Tree" which gave the first ever collection of short stories by the Daily News its title.

Among the twenty four writers whose entries were selected to be included in the anthology, fourteen were women!

Women writing in English is a phenomenon mostly of the latter years of the last century, in Sri Lanka. Elsewhere too. The situation of women writers prompted Virgina Woolf, another distinguished woman writer to say - with some feelings of outrage -that no women appeared in the English literary scene before the 18th century.

Yasmine Gooneatne, in her book "Celebrating Sri Lankan Women Writing in English' notes, however, that the first novel written in English by a Sri Lankan woman was in 1928 when "The Tragedy of a Mystery" by Rosalind Mendis was published in London. Since then, Sri Lankan women, according to one critic (a male) " have become the standard bearers of writing in English in the last fifty years."

Themes have also changed over the years. In the fifties and sixties critics felt " and articulated " that women wrote only about " womanly" subjects, limiting themselves to domesticity and particular women's experiences.

Or so they were looked upon. However, times have changed drastically and women writers now explore the gamut of social and political experiences. They explore the "dark" side of life, though homosexuality and lesbianism are only hinted at here in Sri Lanka!

The war, in its several aspects, is a perennial topic. Social problems abound in our country providing 'meat' to writers.

The problems arising out of female migration, the drug habit and women's insidious role in the drug business of storing and distributing narcotics, sexual abuse of women and children, domestic violence, problems arising out of the acceptance of a conventional role for women by some sections of society - all these have been explored in their varying aspects by women writers, writing in English today.

They have disproved the idea articulated by two academics in 1957 that Sri Lankan women writing in English belong to an elitist section of society, affluent and with enough leisure to spend in writing.

With the enormous changes, both socially and economically and certainly politically during the past several decades, especially in the years since independence that have taken place, these views have undergone a sea change.

Please send your comments on this issue to [email protected]

The uninvited guest

by Yasmine Gooneratne

It is perfectly true that nothing prepares you for the life-changing experience of writing poetry. A gymnasium or a personal trainer can teach you to keep your body fit, a good school and a good university can - if irresponsible politicians don't meddle, teach you to flex your intellectual muscle.

A diploma in education or a class of receptive students can make a teacher out of you. But when poetry enters your life it does so, literally, out of the blue, the uninvited guest at your table whom you may have encountered casually in other people's houses, whose style or panache you may even have admired from a distance, but with whom you never thought of seeking a closer acquaintance.

"Why did I write? What sin to me unknown
Dipt me in ink, my parents' or my own?"

asked Alexander Pope in 1735, achingly aware that to the dedicated poet, verse-writing is a baptism of fire. In an earlier age and another place, the poet Jayadeva attributed his masterpiece, Gita Govinda, to the hand of the god Krishna. Vivimarie Vanderpoorten approaches verse-writing from a different angle.

Nothing prepares you for
Pain.
It hits you like a bus
In the street
While you're trying to shield your eyes from the glare
Of the mid-day sun
While you are Thinking ordinary thoughts
Like "where did I leave my keys"

There are here no sacramental rites or gods, but the result is the same. Her readers know they are in the presence of true poetry, and that the voice that rises from the page is an original poetic voice.

A first book of poems is often, like a first novel, autobiographical in nature. It is very natural that this should be so, for in locating her own place in the world a writer will always look back at the people who shaped her response to that world, and at the experiences which have brought her there.

There are many poems here that memorialize a beloved parent, especially notable among which are "Talisman", in which the poet fashions a protective amulet from a recollection of

you, making a toy for me
with a coconut shell,
lighting a Petromax lamp
with your lips pursed
answering my many questions
about how purple turns into
orange inside the glass
Your hands making a swing
For me out of a plank of wood
and pushing me high
so I could touch the sky

and "Going Home" (my own favourite among many), a poem in which the changes that time has wrought in a garden lay bare, quite simply and without unnecessary explanation, the extent of the poet's loss

Only the Na tree and the
Four pines survive.
I remember the exact day
They were planted,
I was fourteen and
you asked me
To help you
Proud when you told me
I had a gift
For growing things.

Vivimarie's poems mirror her responses to things seen and experienced. In "Bridesmaid", the 'radiant' bride's sweet smile, the fragrance of incense and flowers, and the 'flash' of cameras, lights and jewels, contrast with the period 'after the show', as the speaker watches

the flowers droop and fade
(Hears) the music waver into silence
And die
Like a smile
Like the flowers in my hand
Like love
Like happiness
Sometimes dies.

Many of them tell a story or, like the poem just quoted, hint at hidden or potential tragedy. But since Vivimarie Vanderpoorten has been gifted with a talent for saying things succinctly, even the poems that have a narrative element or explore themes of death and loss rarely run over into a second page.

Like most beginning poets, she has experimented with haiku, and uses that form, so often employed to communicate the tranquil beauty of natural things, to comment on grotesque contradictions in our present day existence:

Housemaids return home
From the flames of Lebanon
to poverty's blaze
Time to vote again
Cheerful faces on posters
Pasted promises
A man pees against
The wall, smiling lies can wait:
Nature's call is strong

But such acerbic statements directed at public life are rare. The overriding themes of the volume are deeply personal: they celebrate occasionally the joy of intimate relationships, but much more frequently they record at multiple levels the poet's vulnerability to the confused emotions which come when such connections break.

Ironic amusement is uppermost in "The Proposal", in which a woman academic, working against time to locate a concept that will win her a research grant, has a surprise:

But today, among my emails
there's one from him.
Sifting through junk e-mail: offers of endless credit
free porn sites and
drugs to "enlarge your penis",
I almost delete his message.
Seeing his name saying mine again
is like finding
a dead infant in the trash
but I read it and
remind myself to
breathe.

In "All My Life", it is a mother's love that has gone missing
All my life
I tried to get you to notice me
Yearned for the warmth of your hug
Strained to hear one word of praise
Fantasized about love in your eyes
Imagined that you whispered to me
That I was your bright, brave,
Beautiful child..

and in "Not My Words", it is a lover's passion that has disappeared:

What you will remember
long after
I have vanished
from the margins of your
life is
Not my words
Not my thoughts
But what you felt for me
For one moment
in time
that intense
Hot, razor-sharp
feeling
as true
and as fleeting
as a newborn's cry.

These poems are so carefully crafted that you have to look very closely to recognize the art that underpins their intensity of feeling. Many of them take the form of questions that the poet asks of herself, of a friend, of a lover, of society, of the universe.

And as invariably happens when the feeling behind such questions is genuine, they strike chords in readers' minds, creating harmonies that linger long after the book is closed.

Distinct moral lessons

From the Jataka Stories:

by D. P. L. Walter Silva

Continued from last week...

The Buddha left no written records of his teachings. His disciples who knew them well dispersed them orally to posterity. About three months after his death the compilation of the Pali Tripitaka which includes the Jataka stories was started by His pre-eminent Arahats. It might have taken years to complete the monumental work.

Meanwhile in India Buddhism was gradually declining. During this time, perhaps, a century later, a conference in Vesali city, the Tripitaka was subjected to review. At another conference two and half centuries later it was further reviewed.

Three and half centuries is an enormous time-lag. Many social, cultural and political changes would have occurred in the country by then. The new monks who reviewed the Tripitaka had radical ideas.

It was possible that these new ideas influenced the Tripitaka. This was evident in certain Jatakas. The incidence of Gods, the Lord of Gods, Sakra, mythical lands in the Vesanthara Jatakaya are instances of such proliferations. The present Jatakaya is short by three stories. The missing stories would have been set aside for some unknown reason at this stage.

The home of the Jatakas was North Western India where the Buddha wandered and preached. Their exact geographical locations as described by him in the Jatakas are the flourishing cities of Rajagaha, Baranes, Sewath, Dewram etc., Baranesnuwara is the focus as many Jatakas take place there. In many of these stories Bodhisatva is Brahamadatta.

During this time India was Buddhist and the Jatakas were very popular. Wandering Buddhist monks had penetrated the Near East taking with them the Jatakas and the Dhamma and converted people by their exemplary ways and by example overcoming the language barriers. Consequently Babylonia became a Buddhist centre.

The moralistic teachings that they spread prevailed in the area and later, did even influence the thinking of Jesus.

'Jesus was ignorant of the very name of Buddha... nevertheless there was more than one element which without his suspecting it, came from Buddhism', comments Ernest Renan. According to Prof. Rhy-Davids, 'Fairy tales, parables, riddles, comic and moral stories of which the Jatakas consist influenced the West'.

The Jatakas impacted on art too, In the stone carvings in East Afghanistan, present Pakistan and in India itself (Sanchi Gateway notably) the Jatakas could be seen even today. Some selected Jatakas according to the Mahavansa, were rendered into murals in the relic chambers of Ruwanweliseya and other Dagabas.

From this archaeological evidence and other data the time of the Jatakas could be the 2nd century B.C.

With the arrival of printing some selected Jatakas were published, Though in a crude get-up and unattractive print the Book was well received by the public. It soon become a favourite Buddhist work.

In the villages it was accorded devine status probably because of the Bodhisatva involvement in the stories. Simple readers mistook the Bodhisatva to the Buddha.

In orthodox Buddhist homes it was read daily like a prayer book. Reading the Vessantara Jatakaya was ritualistic in homes where a family member had died. Loud reading helped to dispel the sorrow and the loneliness.