The complexities of crosswriting

Namel Weeramuni's new book of English poems,' Damsel of Death', was launched a few days ago, at the Namel -Malini Punchi theatre.

A distinguished group of literary connoisseurs - writers, academics, civil servants-turned- writers, administrators, and journalists- was in attendance. In my talk, I alluded to, among other things, the issue of what I term cross-writing between Sinhala and English.

This is indeed an issue that, to my mind, is central to Namel's endeavour. After the talk, some of us had the opportunity to explore this topic over 'konda kavum', 'halapa' and 'plain tea', generously provided by Namel and Malini; incidentally, this was the best 'konda kavm' I had eaten since the days of my childhood in a remote Wanni village, when my mother used to make the finest 'konda kavum' in the world!

We all know the crucial role Namel has played in the world of arts and letters in Sri Lanka; he has distinguished himself as a short story writer, dramatist, actor, play producer, cultural critic, and with the establishment of the Punchi theatre, as a benefactor of arts.

Namel's poems, in interesting ways, open little windows onto the complex and multi-faceted world that he inhabits. He recounts and dissects experiences, both local and foreign, and focuses on intensely personal emotions - loneliness, love, despair, confusion, and anxieties provoked by the march of time.

There are also poems in this collection that engage deep social issues. I would be the first to admit that not all of Namel's poems reach their target. However, those that succeed merit close attention.

As I stated earlier, one issue that I find particularly intriguing is that of cross-writing; hence, I wish to pursue this topic in this column in very broad terms.

A friend of mine once observed that writing in a second language is like having an adulterous affair. If this analogy holds - and I don't think it does - a cross-writer is an avowed bigamist, who experiences, in return, a bilingual guilt, excitement and a sense of adventure.

However, to my mind, a cross-writer is more wholesome, purposeful and moral than such a trope would have us believe. One has only to read the works of Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov or Rabindranath Tagore, who practised a form of cross-writing between English and French, English and Russian and English and Bengali respectively, to realize how important their efforts are.

(Incidentally, Nabokov called Tagore a 'formidable mediocrity'; but then, don't forget, he denounced Plato, Dostoevsky, Camus and Faulkner as well!)

To write in a foreign language, at one level, is an act of betrayal; but at another, it constitutes an act of liberation, growth, self-enlargement and audacity.

It is to commute between two linguistic topographies, to negotiate the treacherous terrain between two literary cartographies; it is to live in a world of alien phonetics, imagery, lexicalities and syntax. It is also a way of separating language from blood.

The phenomenon of cross-writing can be explained from diverse vantage points - psychological, cultural, political, and so on. For example, the eminent cultural theorist Edward Said who wrote in English and Arabic and French said that, 'more interesting for me as author was the sense I had of trying always to translate experiences that I had not only in a remote environment but also in a different language.

Everyone lives life in a given language; everyone's experiences therefore are had, absorbed, and recalled in that language.

English, the language of my education and subsequent expression as a scholar and teacher and so trying to produce a narrative of one in the language of the other - to say nothing of numerous ways in which the languages were mixed up for me and crossed over one realm to another - has been a complicated task.' As the cross-writer moves from a workaday bilingualism or trilingualism as the case may be, to a more creative endeavor, these issues assume a more exacting and significant form.

Some cross-writers have moved freely between two or three languages quite freely from their young days. Nabokov says that he was bilingual as a baby, (Russian and English), and added French to the list at four years of age. By the age of fourteen or fifteen, he had re-read all of Tolstoy in Russian and all of Shakespeare in English, and all of Flaubert in French - a staggering feat, no doubt!

As I stated earlier, cross-writing can claim to a distinguished history. However, in more recent times, it has emerged as a post-colonial representational practice, closely allied to questions of modernization and globalization and colonialism. Consequently power of imperialism, asymmetrical relations marked by domination, issues of center and periphery enter into the discussion in important ways.

However, there are crucial distinctions that need to be made that have deep and abiding implications. Goethe remarked in 1827 that, 'Nowadays national literature doesn't mean much; the age of world literature is beginning and everybody should contribute to hasten its advent.

And twenty years later, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels claimed that, 'national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the many national and local literatures a world literature arises.'

I have some problems with the easy optimism displayed by Goethe and Marx; however, cross-writers underline one aspect of these aspirations. At the same time, by moving in and out of two languages, they tend to undercut the central impulse.

Cross-writing, in its deeper configurations, is inseparable from issues of consciousness, belonging and identity. It is often said that cross-writing represents a split consciousness. This is not quite accurate, or to put it less obtrusively, does not have the plenitude of power it is supposed to signify.

A monolingual writer too, in his or her own way, represents a split consciousness; one doesn't have to be a staunch supporter of Derrida to recognize that consciousness is always already split, and that consciousness takes shape in the crucible of language.

What cross-writing does is to magnify this, to draw attention to it, in more forceful and obvious ways.

How a semiotic map fashioned in one language is forced into the linguistic terrain of another, which very often is demanded in cross-writing, raises the profile of this issue.

The question of identity and its meaning is thrown into sharp relief in cross-writing. Is Beckett, discursively speaking, a British or French writer? Is he a cosmopolitan writer? The question of identity arises from the depths of cross-writing; this has the merit of focusing on a topic that is attracting ever greater attention.

It is becoming increasingly evident that identities are by no means fixed, unified or un-fissured. On the contrary, they are internally divided, fractured and constantly on the move, making, unmaking and re-making themselves.

They are shaped by various regimes of discourse and cultural practices. Identities are problematically produced at various historical cross-roads, cultural geographies, social formations. The British cultural analyst Stuart Hall once remarked that identities are indeed points of attachment to temporary subject-positions that discursive practices produce for us.

Identity is the recognition of multiple possibilities and al identities are situated. An approach to identity along these lines, much preferred by contemporary cultural theorists, will enable us to understand better what is at work in cross-writing.

The widely accepted notion that a nation, a language, a culture, a landscape coheres into a self-contained unity is vigorously challenged by cross-writing. As we move from a position of identity-as-essence to identity-as-performance, we come to recognize the importance of writing between languages.

The writer lives in and through language; he or she is surrounded by words. The writer shapes them, and is in turn shaped by them. Monolingual writers take this fact for granted, while bilingual writers encircle it and turn it into a contestable issue.

As ordinary citizens, we are connected to the world in multiplex ways; language provides us with the most important of those links. Cross-writing, while focusing on this, foregrounds the different linguistic pathways that serve to connect us to the world.

A writer's greatest joy is to witness desire uncoil in and through language. How words toss and turn, leap and fall, on the written page, how they form themselves into similes, reinvent themselves as metaphors, transform themselves into puns and alliteration fills the writer with joy and anxiety.

How language modulates the curve and destination of imagination, how verbal images shadow thought and reflection, how words both obey and resist the writer's commands, are facets of engagement that constantly preoccupy writers.

In the case of cross-writers, who are amphibious creatures, living in two linguistic territories, inhabiting a twilight zone, encountering conflicting faiths and divided loyalties, this issue of linguistic belonging takes on an added urgency.

Michel Foucault makes the interesting point that language is a recognition of, and resistance to, death. In the work of the best writers in any language, the interplay between the imperatives of the language and the haunting presence of death sets in a motion of drama of inscrutable emotions.

Indeed, there are variously levels at which language addresses the world, and this engagement with death, it seems to me, is the most profound of them; in such instances, literature reaches its anticipated heights. In cross-writing is the death in one language followed by the re-birth in another?

Jacques Derrida, in his book on monolingualism, says, 'I have but one language - yet that language is not mine.' He seeks to tease out the implications of this statement by raising theoretical issues as well as historical particularities; he points out how questions of linguistic and cultural identity has a direct bearing on current discussions on cultural citizenship and multiculturalism.

The idea of cultural citizenship has taken on a troubling resonance in recent times in many countries; and the question of cross-writing stands at an awkward angle to it, thereby thrusting itself to center of the debate.

Namel Weeramuni's 'Damsel of Death' has, among other things, served to raise the question of cross-writing in interesting and compelling ways and to introduce it into our cultural conversation.