Vision encountered

Glamour of modern cannon:

Dr. Sumathy Sivamohan teaches English Literature at the University of Peradeniya. Her latest film ‘oranges’ is both autobiographical and fictitious, like the rest of “like myth and mother”.

It explores relations between a Tamil woman and a Sinhala man, played out in the backdrop of the encroaching war. She wanted to have a middle class Tamil woman as the central figure. Very often the Tamil woman is seen only as victim.

In NGO circles Tamil means people from the north and east. She once asked somebody in an NGO, ‘there is a large body of displaced people in Colombo. You do not want to work with them?’

For the Tamil and the Muslim in Colombo, the bomb blast carries dual meanings. One is the fear of death and the horror of the blast, the destruction it brings on. The other is the fear of harassment by the forces and by Sinhala neighbourhoods.

How does one negotiate this double edged sense of mourning? Who does one mourn for here? The bodies lying gruesomely dead on the TV screen? Or does one mourn the lack of capacity to mourn fully and unrestrainedly? That is the dilemma. About Malinda Seneviratne’s comment that her politics is ‘utter crap’, She queries Who is Malinda Seneviratne? Am I supposed to take it as a compliment?

Q: Your book “like myth and mother, a political autobiography in poetry and prose, is about the postcolonial history of Sri Lanka. You use homeland a lot. Can you say something about the use of homeland in the book?

A: You are quite right in saying that it’s a take on the postcolonial history of Sri Lanka. It’s a partial history. There is a definite construction of self around the idea of ‘Tamil,’ ‘woman’, ‘traitor’, ‘postcolonial’ and ‘black’. The ‘home land’ is about Scapes, political, social, emotional and imaginative scapes etched in language.

Q: In the poem “beginnings” you set out your views on many important aspects of one’s life. Does it state your world view? What are the steps society could take to change the mind-set of people with regard to war and peace?

A: ‘Beginnings’ is about the birth of life with a capital L. This poem is about opening the reader to the rest of the book, to direct her attention to the language of the poetry and the prose, which in my view encompasses everything I say.

I would shudder to suggest anything as boring as changing the mind-set of society. Any idea of wanting to change the mind set of society suggests that one has absolute confidence in one’s positions, the correctness and superiority of those positions. I do not have that kind of certainty about my positions.

Q: In the poem “my teacher talks of a Sri Lankan English” you have taken a sympathetic view on the language puritan who does not recognise the assimilation of new idioms and words or even expressions as people try to express their hearts out. What is your view on Sri Lankan English?

A: It is written as a ‘tribute’ to Lankan English. This was one of my very first poems and was written in ‘85 when we as students were being introduced to the idea of Sri Lankan English which was so exciting and empowering to be told that the way one speaks is poetic and can convey depth of feeling was really empowering.

But at the same time, for me coming from Jaffna, this Sri Lankan English thing seemed too limiting. While I was entranced by the idea of Sri Lankan English, I was also alienated by its assumptions.

Q: “Thin veils” is a poem in which you describe the reality of so-did-marriage and what actually happened beyond the ‘thin veil’ of morality. How do you define conventional morality, traditional Tamil society and feminist view on it?

A: You know the poem from Songs of Experience by Blake ‘My mother groaned/ my father wept/ into the struggling world I leapt.’—For me that poem suggests the violence that underlies the idea of family. ‘thin veils’ is a tribute to the long line of women of my family who, in their different and contradictory ways, are part of me, go into making what I am today. I like that poem because its written like a riddle. It’s the only poem about my mother and she is there not as my mother but as a daughter-that too I like.

Q: “In Search of a Road”, by Dharmasena Pathiraja, in which you collaborated, the genesis of the conflict is documented in the form of a train journey. How do you think the ‘Sinhala Only’ Act has contributed to the escalation of the conflict?

A: As a child I grew up listening to tales of how one uncle returned penniless after the riots of ‘58, how another uncle retired because he did not know Sinhala and so and so forth. These stories make up the folk lore of our modern lives and became the driving force of the Tamil nationalist movement.

In the film, the episode surrounding ‘Sinhala Only’ is one of the most moving sequences and is there poised delicately within the narratology of the violence that was there before and the violence that was to come. ‘Sinhala Only’ as I see it was successful in making the middle class Tamil population disengage from the politics of the nation, the Sri Lankan nation.

It is interesting for me to see how easily the average Sinhala person talks about being Sinhala as Sri Lankan quite non-chalantly, with confidence and certainty. I do not know how much ‘Sinhala Only’ contributed to this.

Q: In “love in the time of the city you juxtapose the ugliness of the city with overflowing love which engulfs you in its magnificent spell. What would you like to say about it?

A: ‘love in the time of the city is an intense love poem and an intense political one. It’s primarily a love poem. That’s its strength and its entry point into everything. It has the qualities of a narrative poem. I see in that poem a capacity in me, to narrate a story, to push it toward the epic which I did not know I possessed.

It narrates a love story of sorts through a mapping of the city, not comprehensively, but partially and there is a yearning to move out of the bounds of what we know as nation, Sri Lanka, Tamil and all. I don’t know about the ugliness of the city. There is an elocution class close to my home in Colombo.

In the afternoons all the four wheeled drives and other opulent looking vehicles the children are driven in and are parked down the road create a mini traffic jam, as they throw their weight around in trying to jostle their way out, pushing us poor pedestrians into the ditches.

The cars, when they are not being driven by chauffers, are driven by another kind of slave called ‘mother’ or ‘wife.’ Is learning to drive the car a new kind of slavery for the middle class woman? And the poor children who will perhaps turn out to be the writers and readers of Lankan English literature? It’s the small person in the city that I identify with and its love for the small person that I want to celebrate. I love three wheelers. I see it as the most heroic thing in the city.

At times when I am in a bus I look out for the three wheeler passing by, dwarfed by the large looming monster of a bus that edges it to the side. But the three wheeler comes charging back to over take it. It’s so funny. Last year I went to see the Tamil hit Sivaji played by Rajanikanth.

On my way back from the film, I got into a fascinating conversation with a three wheeler driver, who brought me up to date on all the interesting details of the film, the technological dazzle of the production, the budget, the intricacies of make up, and the idea of reception. The sophistication of his interpretation of the film is something lacking in mainstream literature.

In ‘love in the time of the city’ I try through a very personal medium to extend the boundaries of our belonging. Walking is an activity that I see happening in the city. Bloom in Ulysses, Joyce’s Ulysses walks, mapping Dublin in a postcolonial act of appropriation.

Bloom is a Jew in an intensely Catholic country. Ulysses has always fascinated me. Joyce makes a mapping of the city, this dying colonial city, and infuses it with a fantastical energy that connects the two main protagonists and the woman Molly to place, land and earth.

Q: As you have mentioned “Standing at the top of the staircase” a poem steeped in a load of emotions and subtle nuances of love, was a difficult one to compose. Why so?

A:The difficulties are about turning an instance of personal longing for love and the anticipated loss of love into something that is of epic proportions. I am driven by the epic, with an insistent longing to make the personal take on a meta-historical, meta-literary meaning.

Also my love is about princes, castles and fair dreaming tales. Where do you find love like this? What do you think the meaning of the working maid in the poem is about? In ‘Easter 1916’ the line ‘a terrible beauty is born’ is a reference to fascism, which Yeats had apparently had a sympathy for. What is fascism doing in my own yearning for love and life, for commitment?

Q: With regard to your poem ‘home/land’ what you think are the repercussions of the concept on a hapless population languishing in refugee camps waiting to go back to their ‘home/land’?

A: I wrote the poem as a joke, trying to work things out about the merger. On the other hand, when the state is looking after the Tamil people so well, why do you say they are languishing in refugee camps?

Q: In “we have come a long way”, you end with the lines, “clutching our broken symbols/we cling on, breakingly/clutching our broken symbols/we journey on, broken heartedly”. What do you want to convey here?

A: This is a song from my play ‘wanted (tamil) woman.’ It is about Tamil militants, their slogans and the rhetoric of nationalism and where it has led the Tamil people to. There is a kind of pathos here brought on by the lost feeling of the people who have come a long way and still do not know where they are going.

Q: What is your view on Sri Lankan writing in English and the Gratiaen Prize? Are they of international standard?

A: For me the problem with much of Lankan English literature today is that it is too steeped in the complacence of a Colombo English speaking middle class. As a body of work it is written in a way that validates the preoccupations and the centrality of an English speaking middle class. I am at the moment writing a paper on ethnicity in English literature, Sri Lankan English literature.

It’s called ‘Placing Ethnicity’ and there I say that for the English writer ethnicity is about the suicide bomber and the war is about bomb blasts in the city. Lankan English literature invariably renders the Tamil as the ‘other.’ English writing has not been able to handle the minor, the marginal and the minority, the Tamil (and Muslim) well at all. I take this up in the prose section like myth and mother where I talk about the milieu that produces the writers.

Again, there is little about the Muslim in English literature. As Gayathri Chakravorty Spivak says, in another context, the English writer in Sri Lanka must ‘unlearn her privilege as loss.’ For me a certain kind of bilinguality or trilinguality is important. I am at the moment engaged in translating a fascinating novel from the Tamil to English, called mm by Shoba Shakthi and the poetry of Penniya and Anar, two writers from the east.

There is a certain kind of power in the poetry of these two women, almost unschooled in the conventions of poetry. There is a challenging subversiveness of what we know as literature that I find refreshing.

The lack of sophisticated critical work on Sri Lankan English literature puts little pressure on the writer to seek beyond the comfort zone of middling middle class. I think our Departments of English too are somewhat to blame. I think we have not begun to produce work, critical work that looks at Sri Lankan writing as a whole and explore the way it is shaped politically and aesthetically.

I find works like Jam Fruit Tree very interesting. I may not like the masculine assumptions of the novel too much, but I do see it as working with the marginal, which fascinates me.

Unfortunately, Carl Muller has not been able to reproduce the literary success of Jam Fruit Tree. Ruwanthie de Chickera’s Middle of Silence is again, though ‘flawed’ in many ways, carries a certain kind of power in its dialogue with the marginal.

Ruwanthie is someone who tries to make a difference within the English speaking establishment viz a viz the ethnic conflict and other related issues. But Ruwanthie too is not in dialogue with the ‘Tamil.’ Her forum theatre pieces, particularly the one on the ethnic conflict, are rather problematic.

She is not listening enough to the ‘other’ I think. ‘Unlearn your privilege as loss’—and that is not easy. The unlearning has to come with a certain kind of humility, political humility, not personal. I don’t care for novels like Funny Boy. I will not reject it outright. It has a narrative credibility though the militant in the book is straight of some newspaper. Much of it is oddly clichetic, both the queer side and the ethnic aspects of the novel.

Yet it has achieved a kind of canonical status within Sri Lanka. Is it because there is so little skilful writing available to us, that anything that is passing nice is turned into a masterpiece? The Gratiaen Trust and the Award: Most awarding bodies are conservative by nature. They are elitist in composition, and are too scared to dare and to look beyond the familiar and the comfortable.

In the case of the Gratiaen Prize, given the lack of a good critical establishment supporting it, the judging becomes really lopsided and subjective to the degree of being ludicrous at times. I am fond of the Gratiaen. It is trying to, or at least pretending to, reach out to Sinhala and Tamil literatures.

But the Gratiean is too embedded in the English speaking milieu of Sri Lanka to make for any kind of radical change in the critical thinking of the establishment. An award says a lot about the work receiving the award, but it also says a lot about the judges and the critical establishment that produces the judges.

The Gratiaen is too much of a symptom. But what is more troubing than the Prize itself is, that it is taken too seriously by the critical establishment. I think that we from the Universities, political actors and cultural workers, should begin to develop a critical mass that may not necessarily question the Gratiaen Award, but dislodge it from its centrality.

When I won the prize in 2001, there was not the hype about it that we have now. I was invited to a couple of places. I was also invited by the Tamil Women’s Society based in Colombo, whose President when she called to talk to me, was really sweet and very apologetically said, ‘you know, we are the Tamil Women’s Society, but we do not speak any Tamil.”

This time round, after the award ceremony and the short listing, I have been receiving all kinds of invitations and some of these invitations are from commercial establishments as well. This is somewhat unnerving. This kind of publicity from the commercial sector puts pressure on the critical establishment and on the writer.

I am not against marketing literature, but if one is supposed to produce light hearted stuff, literature that is entertaining in the trivial kind of way, in order to make it available to the market, then there is a problem.

This goes for the Galle Literary Festival as well. It’s rather tragic that this brazenly ‘colonial’ and touristy event has become, like the Gratiaen, another, at least seemingly, defining moment of Lankan English literariness. I did ask Nasreen Sansoni, one of the organizers, in some correspondence I had with her, why the promotional material sounded so frothy and why there were so few minority writers? Cyberspace might provide some kind of space for emergent writing.

But I was slightly scandalized by the classiest over tones of the name ‘WriteClique” - the British Council website. ‘WriteClique’ might be an interesting space. I don’t know too much about it. I am just appalled by the name— “The Right Set?” We discussed the discursive issues with the name ‘Write Clique’ in one of the theory classes at the Department. In fact the students only pointed out the ideological underpinnings of the name to me.

The Wadiya Group too sounds interesting. I don’t know how much it costs to go to the Wadiya, but it does nurture a kind of bilinguality that I find very interesting. Those who want to make money have the license to make money in whatever way they can. We do not expect businesses to produce radical literature. But our centres of critical thinking that want to promote literature in Sri Lanka, like the Gratiaen, must try to encourage production that is not just good in the comfortable familiar kind of way, but brilliant, subversive, radical and outrageous.