Jean Arasanayagam Writer - painter - explorer

Compiled by Ishara Mudugamuwa

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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.