Awards or badges of shame?

"Awards are like piles. Sooner or later every bum gets one"

- Maureen Lipman

It is up to the readers to decide how true the above saying is, with regard to the plethora of awards and honorary titles that are being conferred upon personalities of diverse hues. An award is a token of recognition conferred on a person or group of persons to recognise excellence in a given field or realm of study.

An award is denoted by trophies, honorary titles, certificates, commemorative plaques, medals, badges and pins or ribbons. Sometimes, award may be a prize like the Nobel Prize or the Pulitzer Prize. However, the recognition of an award is, by and large dependent on the institution that confers the award.

Mock awards, which recognise the failures or a kind of achievements, are given by organisations of low esteem or of an average prestige and individual writers. The badges of shame are typical yellow ones that Jews were compelled to wear in Nazi Germany. They were intended to publicly ridicule or humiliate the wearers. The term badges of shame may also be referred to marks that are associated with shame. For instance, the biblical 'Mark of Cain' is synonymous with badges of shame.

The societal acceptance of an award is also determined by a number of factors such as the worth of the recipients of the awards and the panel of personalities who decide upon the awardees in a specific field. The objectives of awards and prizes such as Nobel Prize may vary from one organisation to another and from one field to another. Although the awards may differ from one another, the fundamental premise remains, sans mock awards and badges of shame, that an award intends to encourage excellence in a specific field.

Awards tradition of Sri Lanka

In ancient Sri Lanka, though the king did not confer honorary titles or awards periodically, the some people were given honorary titles and prizes in recognition of their literary works of excellence. There are some instances where entire villages were given to as a prize and named the village after the awardees. Obviously, those honorary titles and prizes were given to literati who entertained the king and did some work in praise of the royalty.

However, the fact remains that works by those literati who were conferred with honours, are classics on their own rights and they are worthy of emulation.

For instance, it was a well established fact that Ven. Thotagamuwe Rahula Thera was honoured by the king for his extraordinary literary achievements and for works such as 'Hansa Sandeshaya', 'Kavya Shekaraya' and 'Guttila Kavya'. They are considered as masterpieces in Sinhalese classical literature and are still appreciated by thousands of readers.

However, this age-old award tradition was tampered with by the so-called change of regime from capitalism to socialism and the advent of the culture of politicising institutions. The literary awards which were recognised as impartial and secular up to that point, were virtually turned into mock awards recognising only the doctrinaire allegiances on the part of the awardees rather than the literary merits of the work considered for the awards. It was a wave of go-red. The so-called red comrades occupied every nook and corner in the field of literature as well as in other sectors such as government service.

The wave of politicising once hallowed institutions was thus set in motion by the subsequent culture of crowning buffoons in the name of party politics. On examining the list of awardees particularly during the hay days of red - rule, it is obvious that the awardees on most instances were persons with doctrinaire allegiances to the power that be. The subsequent regimes also adapted the culture with only change of political colour of the awardees and panels of judges who decided upon the awardees.

However, the tragedy is that the alternative award structures in Sri Lankan civil society, which were professedly intended to rectify the discrepancies of the state sector, were also affected by the same blight. The latest discovery of literary award ceremonies seems to be the one-man selection committee which decides on the works and the authors that are to be conferred with the awards.

Rotating panellists

The strange phenomena with regard to panellists who often occupy the high positions in the literary selection committees is that most of the panellists who have chaired literary selecting committees in the state sector, also happened to be panellists in the alternative structures with only some changes of order in sittings. Some of the awards have not only produced a generation of writers of dubious standing and poets of Haiku fame but also a heap of literary works specifically aimed at the awards.

The fact is common to Sinhala writers as well as writers in English. The so-called 'The Golden book' has become a bane of contention owing to financial advantage that the book gains against the corresponding contenders in the limited literary market and literary quality of the 'Golden Book'. It is often cited that the financial reward that a writer gets from the 'Golden Book', is not even a fraction of the huge profit the publisher would amass from the sales especially given the time and venue of the awarding. Owing to the higher profit margin, there is a stiff competition among the publishers to grab 'The Golden Book'.

The qualifications and literary abilities of most of the panellists are dubious with a long established track record of failures in their particular fields; some are academic failures while others are literary failures. It is doubtful whether how many of these panellists read the latest books and are aware of the latest trends in literature and art. Most of the journalists in the panels also seem to be equally ignorant of, as their academics counterparts. Most of the panellists are also ignorant both of contemporary writers such as Paulo Coelho, Milan Kundera, Tony Morrison, and Isabel Allende and of their literary criticisms. Most of them access world literature in translation and do not seem to bother reading criticism even by Sinhala writers such as Prof. Wimal Dissanayake, Prof. A.V. Suraweera or K. Jayatilake and Martin Wickremasinghe.

Ungracious Award

The criterion adopted by 'ungracious award' seems to encourage the artificial insertion of colloquial idioms and words in their raw form into literary works. Instead of recognising the literary work on the basis of merits and de-merits of the work at hand, the panellists seem to be preoccupied with promoting a regionalised version of an international language. The 'modus' operandi' of this sinister scheme is to promote filth and figments of imagination in the name of literature. Another significant aspect of the panel of judges of the award is that yesteryear's awardees become this year's panellists and the award rotates among members of an exclusive club. For instance, one diasporic writer influenced the panel of judges and the award was granted to a book with flawed structures of language.

The book which was marked for its heaps of lies and flowery language in the form of a biography has, perhaps, the longest sentence in fiction which stretches from Wijerama junction to Pannipitiya!

If Sri Lanka nurtures the present award tradition, the awards will lose the residual social acceptance, if there is any. It is the prime responsibility of both the literati and readers to make sure that those awards would not become mock awards or badges of shame.