Reading Yasmine Gooneratne's award-winning first novel "A Change of Skies"

By Sunil GOVINNAGE

My purpose is not to examine the literary merits of Yasmine Gooneratne's novel, 'A Change of Skies' but to share a few observations on how the author has captured the Sri Lankan diaspora and represented Australia through a set of journeys covering colonial and national boundaries. These boundaries include a large geographic location mapped out clearly as a part of the British ownership of Asia, and provide several discourses that explore the identity of Australia. These discourses, packed with Gooneratne's satirical insights, need to be considered as experiences, of the migrants who contribute to 25 percent of Australia's population. In this regard an observation by Mycak (2006) provides a context:

Prof. Yasmine Gooneratne

Almost one quarter of Australia's population were born overseas, and a further fifth are the children of parents from abroad. And the remainder has been host to successive waves of new arrivals from many countries. (2006:14)

One extension of Mycak's observation in connection to Gooneratne is that her protagonists represent immigrants from another ex-British colony, who have already made journeys between colonial and national borders prior to their arrival in Australia.

Providing first a brief account of Gooneratne's educational background as a pathway to better understanding of several key issues covered in the novel, I will also look at these familiar and unfamiliar connections with the British Empire as an essential element of the representation of the Sri Lankan diaspora and of Australianness in Gooneratne's work. Gooneratne's fictional work explores the notions of diaspora, hybridity, and transcultural negotiation with humour and irony.

'A Change of Skies' is a story of a journey by a Sri Lankan couple who had only known Australia through fissured and distant visual images as "a blank pink space shaped like the head of a Scotch terrier with its ears pricked up and its square nose permanently pointed westward, towards Britain" (1991: 11)

When Gooneratne published 'A Change of Skies' in 1991, she also established a tradition of representing the Sri Lankan diaspora in the Australian literary scene. This is an important issue that many of the critics who have evaluated Gooneratne's work have tended to overlook.

Nevertheless, there have been other writers who have portrayed the Sri Lankan diaspora in Australia. They include Ernest McIntyre (1981), who has used drama for this purpose. Following that, Chandani Lokuge (2000, 2003) has also provided her perspectives on Sri Lankan diaspora "Down Under"; my own writing (Govinnage, 2002) has followed a similar path.

Unlike Lokuge's work and my own, Gooneratne's novel explores the experiences of early Sri Lankan immigrants who arrived in Australia at the end of the White Australia policy. Her novel, awarded the Marjorie Barnard Prize for literary fiction and short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, represents a portrayal of early Sri Lankan migrants, their socio-economic status, and also their connection with the British Empire as a journey between colonial and national borders.

These journeys take her protagonists into "culture that is once familiar and unfamiliar."

(Paranjape, 2003: 288) The issue of familiar and unfamiliar journeys has been observed by Paranjape in his analysis of the South Asian diaspora in Australia. Although he has failed to provide observations on Gooneratne's work, Paranjape's observations of familiarity and unfamiliarity of Australia supply an important discourse when we examine the journeys as represented by Gooneratne.

He writes that Australia has "a culture that is once familiar and unfamiliar. It is familiar because of the shared and enduring connection with the British Empire" (2003: 288)

Gooneratne has close links with the influential Bandaranaike family who dominated the social and political fabric of Sri Lanka for several decades after Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) gained independence from the British in 1948. Even after Independence, upper class Sri Lankans faithfully followed the British by sending their children to universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. Gooneratne combined satire and social history in an account of the westernised lifestyle of her ancestors in "Relative Merits: A Personal Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka" which was published in 1986.

This memoir "has the meticulousness of a researched social history but also the charm and intimacy of personal reminiscences." I would like to extend the same praise to her novel under review. I would even extend my praise to say that "A Change of Skies" is an informative social anthropological study of a class of early Sri Lankan immigrants "fixated on the mother-country" even after their migration to Australia.

Like most Sri Lankans of her generation who studied literature, Gooneratne's formal education exposed her only to British canonical texts. After receiving a first class Honours degree from the University of Ceylon, Gooneratne attended Cambridge University in the late 1950s. For her doctoral thesis she selected Sri Lankan Writing in English. It was, as far as I am aware, the second Ph.D. awarded by Cambridge University on a topic outside its Euro-centric orbit, the first having been E.F.C. Ludowyk's thesis on English education in Ceylon. On her return to Sri Lanka, Gooneratne continued her teaching career at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya where she first focused on British literature by examining satire and irony, key elements which later turned out to be important features in her own critical and creative writing, particularly in "A Change of Skies".

After teaching for ten years at the University of Ceylon, Gooneratne moved to Australia with her physician husband in 1972 and she spent 30 years before returning to Sri Lanka. She is the author of over 20 books in a variety of genres that include four volumes of poems, three novels and one immensely readable personal memoir of her family. In 1999, Gooneratne collaborated with her husband, the historian and environmentalist Dr Brendon Gooneratne, in researching and writing an intriguing biography of an enigmatic Englishman, Sir John D'Oyly (1774-1824). Her second novel, "The Pleasures of Conquest" was published in 1995 and was short listed for the 1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Gooneratne's latest novel is "The Sweet and Simple Kind", first published in 2006 in Sri Lanka. This 645 page long social chronicle is about two intelligent young women from a distinguished and highly political family who pursue their personal freedom in postcolonial Sri Lanka. Gooneratne has also published a number of critical works on individual authors such as Jane Austen, Alexander Pope and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, studies of the literature and culture of Sri Lanka, and essays on other Commonwealth and Postcolonial writing. Her publications are a testament to her wide range of interests and skills.

I would like to focus my observations on three key areas as represented in Gooneratne's novel:

(a) The representation of the colonial links of Gooneratne's protagonists and their connection with the British Empire;

(b) Portrayal of Australia through Sri Lankan eyes. (In fact, it is more accurate to say Australia through AusLankan eyes trained in London); and

(c) Satirical examination of Australian work ethics.

The first aspect is to provide a few observations on the colonial links of Gooneratne's protagonists and their connection with the British Empire. Similar to Gooneratne and her relatives in the Bandaranaike family, her protagonists have long established traditions with Great Britain:

For generations my relatives had been either going to, or returning from, England. And so firmly had their gaze been focused on the metropolitan centre of a pale pink imperium that they had never so much as glanced in any other direction.

For about England, of course, like the rest of my family, I knew everything. (1991:12)

Similar to herself, Gooneratne's protagonists are familiar not only with England, but also with English landmarks and literary figures:

Long before I saw Britain for the second time (as a postgraduate student) I knew London, its Dickensian fogs and its murky river, the Shakespearean Tower in which Richard III had his nephews murdered, Brooke's church clock at Grantchester which stood for every more at precisely ten to three "Where Wordsworth's inward eye had been polished by memory, imagination had burnished mine: upon it flashed like images in video on fast-forward, not just like the skittish daffodils of his description but all the meadow flowers of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Keats. (1991:12)

Despite their intimate knowledge of England, its key landmarks and rich literary traditions, Gooneratne's protagonists have no firsthand experience of Australia. When the issue of immigration comes up as a result of an academic posting to 'Southern Cross University', the main protagonist Bharat tries to recall his knowledge and understanding of Australia. He realised that his knowledge is limited to the photographs of Australian animals, cricket, Don Bradman, Bondi beach and Aborigines. But these Australian images have always been for him part of an empire; a larger geographic location mapped out clearly as a part the British ownership of Asia. Gooneratne's representation and her portrayal of Australia through Sri Lankan eyes are not only insightful, but also reveal the protagonist's familiarity with Britain and the dog-like devotion of his family to the Empire:

"The word "Australia" summoned up in my mind a single picture, one which I instantly recognised as having come straight out of the Philip's Atlas I had used as a schoolboy at Royal. On Philip's map of the world, huge areas of the earth's surface had broken out in the rash of washed-out pink patches which denoted British ownership. To the east of India and the island of Ceylon (also pink), south of Borneo and Sarawak.

That doggy devotion to Britain is something that I, familiar with the colonial traditions of my own family" (1991: 11-12)

Gooneratne's protagonists' knowledge and memories of Australia cluster around this colonial ownership and "doggy devotion" towards the British Empire. Her protagonists have also acquired their limited knowledge of Australia through Australian images and encounters with Australians in Colombo. Some of these Australian images are linked to Australian food they have consumed as children in Colombo:

There had been a poster pinned up on the wall of the Geography Room, I now remembered, in which a fair-haired, pink-cheeked little girl in a pink dress with puffed sleeves stood smiling in the middle of a field of golden grain, with a bunch of wild flowers in her right hand, and a woolly white lamb tucked under her left arm. Come, the poster said invitingly, To Sunny Australia.

And then, I recalled, there had been Sanitarium Weet-Bix, Allowrie honey and butter, Rosella tinned soups, and Kia Ora tomato sauce, items that had figured regularly on Amma's shopping lists when I was a child. (1991: 18)

This is a unique feature of Gooneratne's protagonists which makes them special, compared to others who have represented the Sri Lankan diaspora in Australia in the 90s, and also in literary texts written in Sinhala.

The class and the background of Gooneratne's protagonists are also revealed through their connections to Australian diplomats operating in Colombo. Before their planned journey to Australia to take up an academic posting, the protagonists use their social connections to meet the Australian High Commissioner and his wife in Colombo, a privilege not readily available to many other potential immigrants to Australia. In this regard, Gooneratne provides a humorous introduction to the diplomatic 'world' of Colombo. Through this close cross cultural encounter, Gooneratne also attempts to examine an emerging nation through a representation of quasi-multicultural Australia and the new Asia-oriented breed of bureaucrats who have been specifically trained to work in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Australian High Commissioner's name was Harry Whytebait. His wife's name was Barbara. According to Barbara, they belonged to a new breed of Australian diplomat.

"Until quite recently, Australians have been living in a time warp,' Barbara said, "fixated on the mother-country.

By "mother-country", she apparently meant Britain.

"It's essential that we get to know the cultures that surround Australia. Harry and I are Asianists." (1991:29)

Despite these ironic observations of multi-cultural Australia, the Sri Lankan protagonists are encouraged by the emergence of a new group of Asianists diplomats (cancelling the negative impressions they had received earlier, due to the 'White Australia Policy') to emigrate to Australia. There they change their identity, beginning with their names. Quite as deliberately as the new breed of Australian diplomats attempt to become Asianists, Gooneratne's protagonists change their identities to meet Australian needs.

From the moment we arrived in Australia, my husband started having problems with his image. Before he came to Australia I'd no idea he had an image' problem (1991: 118).

Identity transformation begins with the changing of their names, Bharat changing his name to Barry and Navaranjini changing hers to Jean. Despite these identity changes the protagonists retain certain views of their own, clearly conditioned by the journeys they have made to Britain, and by their association with the British Empire. Their British trained attitudes encourage them to make observations on Australian work ethics. One such observation relates to the Australian way of taking a sick leave or a sickie.

"Jean heard me out. She then told me I needed a holiday. "You're working too hard," she said. "Everyone says so. You should take a break. Why don't you take a sickie on Monday?"

Take a sickie. Jean, still guided by the Australian phrase book"

As I tell Jean, this is one of the problems of living in a country whose mainstream culture doesn't acknowledge (or may be even comprehend) the importance of WORK. Apart from its ill effects on the economy, consider (I tell Jean) what it does to immigrants and visitors who wish, whenever possible, to do what the locals do, and find every moral principle with which they grew up eroded as a result. (188-189).

The dilemma that Gooneratne's protagonists encounter in Australia is the difficulty of following the "locals" who are not hesitant when it comes to taking a sickie. According to Bharat/Barry, such work ethics erode "every moral principle with which [we] grew up." The important question is why and where they learned to look down upon the work ethics followed by the locals.

There is a subtle message embodied in this novel about ethical and moral questions to be encountered by immigrants who grow up in countries with different moral principles. Gooneratne suggests through this interaction, that the resistance may be the result of their familiarity and or their faithful following of their "mother country" "Great Britain" and her traditions. Does she raise this perspective because her protagonists have had exposure to good work ethics in Great Britain or Ceylon? Is this a creative suggestion that Gooneratne's British trained protagonists are more refined and could bring a superior set of work ethics and values to the new homeland, unlike those who have links with Australia's convict history?

These are difficult questions to answer. However, the key issue is that readers of Gooneratne's satirical novel need to keep asking such questions during and after reading this unique work by one of the most creative writers born in Sri Lanka.

Such questions will assist readers to familiarise themselves with the journeys explored by Gooneratne across a large geographical location mapped out clearly as a part of the British ownership of Asia.

(An earlier version of this article was presented at the 11th Asia-Pacific Symposium on the Literatures and Cultures of the Asia-Pacific Region, National University of Singapore, 7-10 December 2005).