Looking before, after and abroad

Modern Sri Lankan Literature:

by Dr. Wilfrid JAYASURIYA

Ignazio Silone, the Italian author who won the Nobel prize for literature

The story of the return to a once beloved place or person is a common theme, perhaps an archetypal theme, focusing on the validity of memory and the concepts of space and time in our lives. One could abstract oneself from the specifics of time, place and memory and think of these stories as having a commonality about existence. Ignazio Silone, the Italian Nobel prize winning author, who was very popular in Ceylon in the early post independence decades, was well known for his story, “Return To Fontamara”. Fonatmara is a village located in Southern Italy, which was a poverty stricken agricultural area, in the post war period. The protagonist in the story returns to his village and listens to a story about a man who was sent to gaol for a long period, for a crime which involved the death of the man’s girl friend.

Later, when the man came back from gaol, it appeared he had gone to gaol to cover up for his girl friend’s reputation, though he was himself innocent.

The theme of return is therefore tied up with the theme of revelation.

The theme of return is developed in Chitra Fernando’s “Bird of Paradise,” a short story about a Sri Lankan migrant . This theme was developed as a full length novel but this story seems to encapsulate a recurring theme in the return story: the loss of a loved one when the returnee was absent from the scene. The death of the loved one enables the writer to develop the theme of nostalgia for the past, as it existed when the returnee lived there, and contrast it with the present, while also developing a contrast between her feelings for her new “home” in Australia and for her old “home” in Ceylon, as it is seen here and now.

Remembering how she had fled from Negombo, back to Sydney almost twenty one years ago, she thought of Dominic Perera the immediate cause of her departure...What would her life have been had she married Dominic Perera? But it was Ray Maxwell she had married...She had been looking for something: a being unconstrained by custom and tradition, a splendid freedom. Yet she’s settled so easily for comfortable ordinariness, not really different from her mother or Aunt Mary, from Srini. Her thoughts drifted...The smell of jasmine was in her nostrils. She was sitting in a latticed verandah with potted ferns lining the steps. Was it Aunty Mary scolding Jose or simply a chatter of crows? And then out of the purple blaze of the bougainvillea flew out the shining bird. “Its you-you I always wanted,” she called out jumping up from her chair. But the bird had vanished. She only saw the endless distances of the sky as she stood alone in the verandah of the silent house. (Kaleidoscope 69)

In this last paragraph, from the story, Chitra Fernando displays her truly gifted mastery of the narrative mode. Within the forty year period from the 1950s to the 1990s, the consciousness of Sri Lankans, which was limited in aspiration to the immediate environment of their newly independent country had expanded to possibilities in other continents and other roles, and literature reflected these changes.

Isankya Kodituwakku, in her collection “The Banana Tree Crisis” includes a story titled “The House In Jaffna” which deals with the theme of the longing for return to the homeland, this time from England to Jaffna instead of from Australia to Negombo. In her story about Jaffna, a Tamil family from London comes back with great optimism to Jaffna, when the peace agreement or the ceasefire of 2000 is confirmed. They find their house destroyed and occupied and their former servants and neighbours are extremely unfriendly. They don’t see any future for themselves and get back to London.

The impact of the story consists of the disparity between the internal vision that Nadarajah has of his native land and family house and childhood environment and the reality of the present. It is a simple contrast between London and Jaffna but it is real. Its quality is what Aristotle describes in one of his books as the “taste of the real.” James Joyce, when theorising about literature in a passage from “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, touches on this quality as a marker of high achievement, the sense of being out there, outside the mind of the narrator, there in its own right. In Joyce’s translation of that quality it is called the “whatness.” That is a quality, which Carl Muller’s fiction does not share, marked as it is by the power of the imaginative fantasy, communicating, as it does, the wonderfully shaded vision of the creator himself. When Isankya talks of Nadarajah we know that she is not talking of herself. She is talking of the “whatness” of Jaffna. One has to read the whole story to appreciate the reality. I shall quote the beginning and the end:

The House in Jaffna

When Nadarajah rode the train each evening from Waterloo Station to his home in Teddington, he almost always had a bright peaceful look on his face.

Most people who saw him probably thought he was a man with a happy family life, who rode the train in anticipation of home. Although the assumption about his family life was correct, they were wrong when they thought it was a look of anticipation. Rather it was a look of memory. Because the home he was thinking of was not his present home forty five miles out of London but an old, white walled house in Jaffna. (from The Banana Tree Crisis)

The reader is brought into a discussion, with the writer, about correct and incorrect assumptions and so the story becomes a participative event the reader has with the writer. The maintenance of this tone of confidentiality is the special characteristic of Isankya’s narrative. The various shocking and unlikely events that happen, when the family moves to Jaffna, include the rude rebelliousness of the family’s former servant’s son, who touts an AK47. But this scene is given a wonderful twist when the old servant, Siva, turns up and drags his LTTE son away by the neck, as he would have done when Nadarajah was a child, in the good old days, when he was the little master of the house. So a bizarre social situation is created and Nadarajah realizes that everything is far from being on all fours with his dream of home.

Siva [the old retainer] walked out of the compound and Nadarajah stared after the old servant for a few minutes before he turned to face his mother, standing a few feet from him. When she caught his eye she came over and patted his shoulder absently. “The fish that has a narrow escape from the heron fears all that is white,” she said, her eyes already drifting away in another direction.

The tension and confusion created in the mind of the returnees is aptly conveyed in this pithy analogy. Who is the heron and who the fish? But the incompatibility of the two is the essence of the Jaffna situation where Nadarajah still remains “Mr Nadarajah.”

In other stories such as “Michelle de Kretser’s “The Hamilton Case”, the writer who has left the colonized territory and resettled in another country reverts back to her country of birth and sees it with a distancing and satirical vision, implicitly measuring it against the preferred new cultural home which she has adopted. Though there is a certain nostalgia in the detailed memories of the past in another country, where interesting things happened because you belonged to an elite group whose activities were significant, yet those very activities are now seen as both exciting and irrelevant to the writer’s own future. One of the most interesting characters, if not the most interesting, is the character of a Sinhalese landowner who moves around in the elite Burgher circles but is at the same time the true symbol of the darkness, which the European enlightenment had hoped to dispel, once and for all, from the country and society which they had colonized. I often wondered whether this Sinhalese landowner in the Burgher social network is a figure for D. S. Senanayake, (also known as “Jungle John”)who appears to have been a figure of fun, among sophisticated and westernized Ceylonese groups. Diyonisius Sumanasekera in De Lanerolle’s play “Fifty Fifty” appears to be a figure for “D.S.” too.

In Chandani Lokuge’s novel, “If The Moon Smiled”, a Sri Lankan Sinhala woman, who has emigrated to Australia still feels a longing for home expressed as a need for self fulfilment and an escape from loneliness.

“As a young woman in Sri Lanka, Manthri marvels at the promise of life and yearns for a future of fulfilled dreams. Years on, she finds herself in a loveless marriage, in a foreign land, and estranged from her two Australian children.

Torn between an idyllic past to which she cannot return and a present that breaks her heart, she never loses touch with those dreams, nor abandons her passionate enchantment with life.

“I go down to the river, unheeding my mother’s disapproval. I dip into the lazily flowing water. Here, at least, nothing has changed. The bath-cloth balloons around my body and I press it down. I loosen my hair and let it spread where it will. I open my hands upwards on the water’s surface, languidly remembering. All, all that is familiar. The promise. The promise of life.”

However, when she revisits Lanka, in her search for a fulfilling experience, that she has not found in Australia, she is set upon by young men on the beach in the south of Sri Lanka, and that experience of near rape, is a countervailing lesson depleting her desire for the past.

Thus in the works of Chitra Fernando, Michelle Kretser, Ishankya Kodituwakku and Chandani Lokuge a variety of experiences pervade the narrative of arrival and departure, the genre of literature which looks before and after and also abroad.

We look before and after

And pine for what is not

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught

Our sweetest songs are those which sing of saddest thought