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Jean Arasanayagam Writer - painter - explorer
Compiled by Ishara Mudugamuwa
[email protected]
 Born to a Burgher family as Jean Solomons in Kandy, she received her
schooling in Kandy and graduated from the University of Peradeniya. She
married a Tamil, Thiyagarajah Arasanayagam and have two daughters,
Dewasundari and Parvathi. Jean began publishing her work in the early
1970s and her work has been widely published in English and has also
been translated into Danish, Swedish, French, German and Japanese.
The insurgency of July 1983, culminated in bloody riots. The
‘outsider’ - Jean Arasanayagam and her family became refugees. Jean bore
a writer’s testimony of these events. At the same time, in the middle of
chaos, horror and humiliation, loss of home and a sense of safety, loss
of identity, Jean experienced a paradoxical sense of freedom. Her
writings markedly different in tone and intensity, to the work she
produced after “Black July.”
It is mainly as a poet Jean attracted attention. Collections such as
Apocalypse’83 and Trial by Terror tell the cruel story of “Black July”.
A colonial inheritance explores the writer’s own Burgher background and
identity, Out of Our Prisons We Emerge is a mere introvert, personal
collection while Reddened Waters Flow Clear and Shooting the Floricans
contain some of the very best of Arasanayagam’s poetry.
However Jean is also an eminent short story writer. The Cry of the
Kite is a collection with intense poetic descriptions of the bare,
desert-like landscape in the neighbourhood of Jaffna in northern Sri
Lanka, the traditional homeland of Tamils. It also describes the decay
of the small villages, their marginalisation through rapid modernisation.
Peacocks and Dreams, a series of vignettes from Tamil village life
narrated from the perspective of a boy, won a prize for non-fiction in
1984 but was not published until twelve years later. It is characterised
by a fine tuned precise and objective prose.
Fragments of a Journey and All is Burning Show, once again, the
writer as a painter as well as an explorer is, as always, an excellent
observer. She seldom tells a straight forward story in the conventional
sense. Different time frames, insightful character portraits, a circular
composition and a rhythmic, detail-shimmering prose are some of the
characteristics of her short stories. Some of the short stories explore
the bitter truth about ageing and loneliness, some bring out the
consequences of bitter fighting between the armed forces and the Tamil
Tigers into focus.
Jean Arasanayagam is recognized as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost
contemporary English literary voices. |
