Style, power, coherence

The poignant story of an honest farmer and his relationship with the rich dark earth beneath his hoe:

by Aditha Dissanayake

Title : Sarubima

Author : Senarathna Weerasinghe

Publisher : Praba Publishers, Weyangoda

Wang Lung looked for two things in the woman he hoped to take as his wife; she should not have scars leftover from chicken pox on her face, and her upper lip should not be cracked. When he meets O-lan, a slave girl in the rich house of Hwang he is happy she has neither scars nor cracks on her lips.

But, even though he discovers the happiest moment in his life on his first night with her, he still maintains his distance, displaying neither open affection nor love for the woman who shares his life.

". . . she was like a faithful, speechless serving maid, who is only a serving maid and nothing more. And it was not meet that he should say to her, 'Why do you not speak?' It should be enough that she fulfilled her duty.

"Sometimes, working over the clods in the fields, he would fall to pondering about her. What had she seen in those hundred courts? What had been her life, that life she never shared with him? He could make nothing of it. And then he was ashamed of his own curiosity and of his interest in her. She was, after all, only a woman."

Through the story of this honest farmer and his selfless wife, Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life; its terrors, its passions, its ambitions and rewards, in her novel The Good Earth, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1932, which has now been translated into Sinhala as Sarubima, by Senarathna Weerasinghe.

"Much praise has been heaped on this novel with good reason" says Weerasinghe. He believes unlike Rudyard Kipling and many other western writers who wrote about Asia through a western perspective, Pearl S. Buck's portrayal of the life of a poor farmer and his bondage with his land is authentically Asian.

"Kipling portrayed Indians as barbarians. He and most other Western writers showed no compassion towards the poor in Asia. But like Leonard Woolf who exposes the weaknesses, the sorrows of the down-trodden Buck too presents an authentic view of China during the reign of the last emperor when the vast political and social upheavals of the twentieth century were yet to take place".

Buck's words "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there," reiterates this view.

Describing what induced him to translate The Good Earth to Sinhala, Weerasinghe says he is grateful to the guidance given by his English teacher, Mr. Premaratne when he was a student at Veyangoda Maha Vidyalaya.

"He taught us not only the subject he was supposed to teach in class but opened a wide variety of doors to us".

Weerasinghe believes the poetry of Wimalarthne Kumaragamage, the character of Silindu in The Village in the Jungle and the character of Wang Lung, in The Good Earth thus introduced to him by this wonderful teacher spurred him to take up pen and paper to create his own short stories as well as to translate a numerous number of classics into Sinhala.

He also recalls with gratitude Ranjith Gunawardene and H.A. Siriwardene for further deepening his knowledge, which could be why he was prompted to translate The Good Earth and its sequel.

Even though he has translated non-fiction work as well Weerasinghe says it's the cinema that he loves the most. After having translated Adur Gopal Krishnan's The Rat Trap as "Sira Medura into Sinhala and Meera Naiyar's "Salam Bombay" he says he was surprised that the screen play which he considers as more important than the other two, Chess Kreedakayo (from Satyajit Ray's Chess Players) had gone virtually unnoticed by the Sinhala readers.

Then he adds "This is nothing surprising after all. Most critics today, live in very narrow worlds. If the cinema and the literature are to improve this situation should be changed."

Talking once more about Sarubima, Weerasinghe confesses there were moments when he took only the meaning of Buck's words in order to keep the narrative flowing. He reveals the secret behind his success. "I omitted most of the biblical language".

The result is a style which is powerful, coherent and which has the ability to mersmerize the reader, even though most of the events described seem inconceivable to those living in the 21st century.

The story of Wang Lung and the way he relates to his father, his wife, his children and above all to his land is so absorbing that when the last page is finished you feel as though a significant part of your life too has come to an end.

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About Pearl S. Buck

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her parents were Southern Presbyterian missionaries, most often stationed in China, and from childhood, Pearl spoke both English and Chinese.

She returned to China shortly after graduation from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1914, and the following year, she met a young agricultural economist named John Lossing Buck.

They married in 1917, and immediately moved to Nanhsuchou in rural Anhwei province. In this impoverished community, Pearl Buck gathered the material that she would later use in The Good Earth and other stories of China.

Pearl began to publish stories and essays in the 1920s, in magazines such as The Nation, The Chinese Recorder, Asia, and The Atlantic Monthly. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published by the John Day Company in 1930.

John Day's publisher, Richard Walsh, would eventually become Pearl's second husband, in 1935, after both received divorces.

In 1931, John Day published Pearl's second novel, The Good Earth. This became the bestselling book of both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1935, and would be adapted as a major MGM film in 1937. Other novels and books of nonfiction quickly followed.

In 1938, less than a decade after her first book had appeared, Pearl won the Nobel Prize in literature, the first American woman to do so. By the time of her death in 1973, Pearl had published more than seventy books: novels, collections of stories, biography and autobiography, poetry, drama, children's literature, and translations from the Chinese. She is buried at Green Hills Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The debate continues:

Great writing is not male writing

by Padma Edirisinghe

Though taking part in raging controversies currently going on, is not my hobby I got an impulse to write this on behalf of our discriminated sex.

To be very genuine counting winners gender-wise at a State Literary competition is apparently a frivolous and non-academic game. (Pardon me, I have been labelled as a non-academic by a certain "academic" spurred mostly by his surmise that in a male dominated assembly a woman thus spurned would not retort and bite).

But surely that does not deter me using the word "Academic." The writer Daya Dissanayake who retaliated to the article penned by a well-known female writer, himself being "academic" enough to put out a book like "Moonstone" was compelled to give the percentage of male winners at this competition since the initial article that served as a catalyst to the controversy gave the female percentage of winners.

Vijita Fernando, a Gratien - award winner herself (if my memory is correct) cannot be accused of a non-intellectual approach and I feel her counting the number of winners was simply symptomatic of her attempt to focus on the growing number of successful women writers. Well, one can very sarcastically question why only women indulge in crowing about their success. And the answer just glares in the eye.

It is almost superfluous to mention that over the years almost all areas of human endeavour have been male bastions except limited areas as intricate embroidery and cooking, which latter field too is questionable if one starts counting the number of male chefs with their ridiculously elongated white caps.

This is definitely not due to a lack of intelligence, originality, initiative and talents in our women kind but due to the preponderance of factors that block a woman from promoting and exhibiting her talents.

Who or what stands in the way personifying the mighty boulder that blocks a woman, except in the case of a very few, from distinguishing herself in any field including the writing field now under focus? One is the bossy male who exults in marginalizing the woman, the other the role a female plays as ordained by nature.

The world runs on the process of reproduction and the male's part in this process is only temporary. But the brunt of the child bearing and child rearing process is carried out by the female.

That is no universal statement but something that any average person is aware of. Society expects this duty from the female gender and there is nothing wrong about this expectation. And women from time immemorial have done their utmost duty in this sphere. But the unfairness creep in when males set taboos on women going beyond this ordained area.

So Vijita, as she wrote that article, was perhaps having this unenviable state of women in her mind. Despite such discouraging factors, many women today not only in our island but in the rest of the world have made it to the top.

A historical survey of the writing careers of the bolder women who took to writing despite a negative attitude, here and abroad would be most apt here but that would be too vast a field to deal with. The writer must admit too that she has not done an intense research into the area, even in the local scene.

It is an area that a young scholar can take up, especially a female, since her gender intensifies the interest. Just generalizing, here are a few relevant facts. The world of classical and scholarly writings of the ancient and medieval periods including that fascinating field of travel have been almost monopolized by males.

Why? For the obvious reason that males are much more mobile leading to their nourishment with worthwhile information, have so many useful social contacts and opportunities of advancing their knowledge and can easily indulge in travel without any thought of a suckling infant though he or she be a result of his lust.

This trend of males lording over the area of writing seems to have continued till a few women braving sniggers began bombarding into the field. I will here have recourse to 19th Century writing by women writers of England since data in the field is available.

Before that I will mention our own two female writers who barged into the more modern phase of writing, Gajaman Nona alias Dona Isabella and Ranchagoda Lamaya, both poetesses.

Gajaman Nona though she languished in the drought - stricken Giruwa Pattu of the deep South prostituting her poetic prowess to send epistles to British bureaucrats asking for help to feed her fatherless family, had a maternal lineage connected to Kollupitiya.

Her mother was either a teacher or pupil of the school of Our Lady of Milagris (later localized as Milagiriya) that perhaps accounts for her "audacity" of contacting Buddhist monks to promote and exhibit her poetic talents.

Poor Ranchagoda Lamaya! She wrote such pithy poems on female sufferings but no one would give her, her due. They said it was a man writing under a woman's name.

When articles of mine first began to appear in the press, many concluded that it was my husband writing under my name. But after he passed away when my articles continued to appear they were not prepare to believe that he had resurrected from the world of the dead to continue the process.

I exclaimed "Poor Ranchagoda Lamaya!" but I can expand that adjective which really means "helpless" to encompass all early women writers who barged into a male domain. That they did so with trepidation is obvious.

As reflected in the writings of the Bronte sisters, who confined themselves more or less to the domestic world. Even if the early women writers with their intuition and powers of observation could have written on life other than that confined to their four walls they were lot to do so.

They suffered from so many taboos though they were not encoded via legislation enactments. No, they were not expected to write any erotic stuff. Their writings had to act as intermediaries in giving useful and morally uplifting messages to society.

The world consists of sinners and saints as well as those in between. Women more or less were expected only to write on the saints.

The sinners and their dastardly and lascivious acts, male writers could gush on with the vigour of rivers that approach mighty deltas before they spill into the ocean. In short the women writers who hoisted the banner in the field were expected to write only silly sloppy sentimental stuff if ever they dared to write.

Mary Anne Evans who wrote under the male name George Eliot was the first woman to declare war against this trend. A woman who was a political activist, she entered into political stuff and lambasted women who wrote only about babies, milk food and napkins.

But she herself hid her identity under a male name following the trend of the times begun by the Bronte sisters who wrote under the male names, Cuurey, Ellis and Action Bell. Mary Evans had admitted doing so, for fear that her book would not sell.

Further she was living with a married man and she would have felt that her personal life would mar the sales. A male author can sleep with any number of women with no adverse effects on the market but a woman can sleep with only one man or not sleep at all.

That was in 19th Century England out of all places. One can just imagine the situation in other much less enlightened countries and climes. Charles Dickens who via his books advocated some of the most progressive moves for humanity after reading some erotic stuff in Mrs. Gaskell's fast selling book declared that if he was Mr. Gaskell he would have thrashed her left and right!

The reader may get the wrong idea that I am advocating a sort of theory that women writers too are entitled to give messages that are not salutary to society. No. An educationalist myself in addition to dabbling in writing, I contend that women can use their writing to transmit some very valuable messages.

In fact the degree of the intense nature of their lives is much higher than that of the male.

The very act of giving birth to another life after carrying that embryo within for nine months, their very nearness to the growth of their children make their awareness of the sufferings of humans supersede male sensitivity. But humans and their activities are the centre - stuff of writing and women too should have the freedom to gush over doings of not only saints but sinners too.

Incidentally doings of sinners draw more interest than that of saints. Though aspiring to sainthood many relish reading the actions of warped male and female characters and writers and film producers capitalize on this fact.

I remember someone once commenting, "These writers and film producers! A notorious woman is smelt by them a 100 miles away." So hats off to producers of films like Uppalawanna.

Talking of quotations (not by pundits but nobodies like me) in a bookshop I met a female once who came grinning to me all 32 flashing. "Madam, are you so and so?" "Yes" "I have cut and preserve a copy of your article "Lekhika Hangimuttam" (Hide and seek by women - writers) "I delved into my memory and remembered capsuling some of the above facts and doing a feature to a Sinhala monthly magazine where I had mostly focused on the fact that the early women writers wrote in kitchens and dinghy rooms away from the prying eyes of the household.

"Why do you like that article so much?" I asked. Because I do the same, was the answer. And now we are in the 21st Century. The situation of course has generally improved vastly.

Otherwise Vijita with all good intentions could not have counted so many women winnners in the State Literary Festival. However I wish to end this by stating that great writing can be produced both by male writers and female writers.

Further views on this topic are most welcome.