Surviving the diaspora

By Proe Yasmine Gooneratne

In The Practice of Writing, a series created especially for readers of MONTAGE, award-winning novelist, poet and critic Yasmine Gooneratne considers aspects of literary composition from a writer's point of view.

Part vi

It was once a common article of belief that a genuine and substantial literature could only be created by writers who remained rooted in 'one dear, perpetual place', and used their imagination and skill to explore the distinctive character of that place and its inhabitants. Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen in England and R.K. Narayan in India have all, at different times, been cited as proof of this principle. But the times, as we know, have changed, and the wars and economic developments of the twentieth century saw a great many writers uprooted, sometimes violently, from their homeland, and set down thousands of miles from the source of the sounds and images that had shaped their sensibilities. A good many more, who have never seen the homeland from which their forefathers came, have achieved international success and fame. Our earlier theories about literary creativity, which were based on pre-colonial experience, have had to adapt to the facts of modern life; and our enjoyment as readers has deepened as a result of the new freedom with which modern writers are able to draw from a multitude of inspirational sources, rather than (as was the case not too long ago) from one or two.

('The Writing Life', in Masterpiece and Other Stories 2002, p. 12)

From a writer's point of view, travel and expatriation can also bring with them the drying up of creative inspiration. This is usually unexpected, because the travelling author regards his journeys abroad as opportunities for extending experience (much as well-heeled British travellers undertook 'the Grand Tour' of Europe in the 19th century), not for limiting or confining it. A good example of inspiration dwindling with the experience of deracination, may be seen in one of our early writers in English, Jinadasa Vijayatunga (1903 - 1989), author of Grass For My Feet (1933), an evocation of life in the village setting in which he had grown up in the south of the island. Published in London, the book was acclaimed as confirming that a Ceylonese could handle English as well as the leading Indian writers known at that time to the West, for example Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan. Vijayatunga spent many years abroad, in India and in Britain, and he continued to write and publish. However, none of his later books, of prose or poetry, published mainly in the 1940s, equalled the excellence of Grass For My Feet. When he returned to Sri Lanka in 1989, it was at the invitation of President Premadasa. He died a few months after his return.

In contrast with Vijayatunga are certain writers who left Sri Lanka as established authors in mid-career, and continued their writing abroad, taking up subjects from viewpoints related to their Sri Lankan experience. Among them, one interesting example is S.B. Bandara, former Assistant Librarian at the University of Ceylon in Peradeniya, who emigrated in mid-career to Jamaica, and is today Librarian at the University of the West Indies, compiler of bibliographies of Caribbean writing.

Another is Frederick Ludowyk (1934), who had his early education in Ceylon, and emigrated to Australia when he was not quite twenty, having put in two years as an English Honours student at the University of Ceylon in Peradeniya. Ludowyk is today an editor of dictionaries for Oxford University Press Australia, and edits Ozwords in Canberra, a bi-annual magazine that focuses on Australian language and idiom.

Very well-known to an earlier generation, who deserves to be better known in the present one, was Tarzie Varindra Vittachi (1921 - 1992), a newspaper editor and author, born and educated in Sri Lanka, who gained international prominence as a communicator and columnist. He was the author of Emergency '58, an account of the Sri Lankan ethnic riots of 1958, for which he received the Ramon Magsaysay Prize. As the editor of the Ceylon Observer 1953 - 1960, he became well-known for a satirical column, "Bouquets and Brickbats", written under the nom de plume Flybynight for the Sunday Observer. Some of the pieces he wrote in the satirical mode were published as a collection, Trials of Transition in the Island in the Sun (1987).

Further studies of Sri Lankan society from Vittachi's hand were The Brown Sahib (1962) and The Brown Sahib Revisited (1987) , published after he left Sri Lanka for the USA. In the mid-1970s he joined the United Nations in New York and worked for several UN organizations in succession, serving as Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF, the UN Children's Fund in the 1980s. As a columnist for Newsweek International for several years, he articulated an independent Third World viewpoint on topical issues. Michelle de Kretser is an author who emigrated with her family to Australia at the age of fourteen, discovering and developing her skills overseas, but keeping her contact with the homeland. Michelle graduated with the degree of BA (Hons) in French from the University of Melbourne in 1979. In 1984 she received the degree of Maitrise-es-Lettres from the Université de Paris III. In 1999 she won the Short Story Award presented by Melbourne's newspaper The Age, awarded annually for an unpublished story of not more than 3000 words.

Her prize-winning story, "Life with Sea Views", is set in a locality that has a striking resemblance to seaside settings in Sri Lanka. Reading it when it was first published, I was struck by the remarkable ease and confidence with which she acquits herself, in writing about a place and period so far removed from her own childhood background. Her first novel, The Rose Grower (1999), is set in pre-Revolutionary France. Her second novel, The Hamilton Case (2003), which won her the Tasmanian Pacific Fiction Prize in 2005, is set in 1930s Ceylon.

Michael Ondaatje (b. 1943), who gained international fame when he jointly won Britain's Booker Prize for fiction in 1992 with The English Patient, was born in Ceylon, and left the island with his mother at the age of eleven, studied at Dulwich College in London, and emigrated to Canada in 1962. He graduated from the University of Toronto, and gained an MA from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. He frequently returns on holiday to Sri Lanka, and has established an annual award (the Gratiaen Prize, named after his mother) for creative writing in English by writers in Sri Lanka. Ondaatje recreated the life style of his Sri Lankan family in a memoir, Running in the Family (1983). While identifying and identified as a Canadian author, Ondaatje has written several books among which are at least two - The Cinnamon Peeler (1991) and Handwriting (1998) - that have reference to Sri Lanka. A novel set in Sri Lanka, Anil's Ghost (2000), uses the violence of insurgency and repression in the 1980s/1990s as a backdrop

Outstanding in this group of expatriate authors is Karen Roberts (b. 1965), who lives in the USA, and works as Creative Director of an advertising agency in California. Her first novel, The Flower Boy (1999) celebrates life on a tea plantation in Ceylon as it was lived before World War II. Her second looks back to 'Black July', 1983, when she was herself eighteen years old, and lived through the race riots which occurred in which Sinhalese mobs were incited by elements connected with the Government then in power to torture and kill Tamil residents of Colombo and torch their homes.

In July (2001), the peaceful Colombo suburb in which she lived with her family at the time is fictionalized as 'Araliya Gardens', the deteriorating relationships between ethnic communities that had up to that time lived in amity and friendship, and the terrifying events of 1983 that resulted from uncontrolled communalism are recorded by a writer on whose youthful mind and memory they had evidently made impressions so powerful that it took the writing of a novel to exorcise them.

Finally, we should remember the outstanding work of the linguist and fiction-writer Chitra Fernando (1935 - 1998). Her career, probably to a greater extent than those of any of her talented contemporaries, gives the lie to the old idea which I cited at the start of this essay, that 'home' is an author's necessary anchor.

She lived and taught in Australia, but did not allow the land of her adoption to enter her fiction until her last years, focusing her thoughts and her writing on Sri Lankan small-town life, yet striving continually to escape from what she called in her journals "the well-kept households of country aunts". Two aspects of her life and writing that do not yield such perplexing paradoxes and contradictions are, however, her dedication to the life of writing, and her attachment to Buddhist ideals. On the most personal and intimate level, the life and teachings of Gautama Buddha were the single, most powerful influence in her life and in her writing. Besides the guidance they provided as regards day-to-day living, they provided her with the "explanation necessary to counter and control the overwhelming apprehension of death". Her best work in fiction - stories such as "The Grandfather", "Missilin", "Kundalini" and "The Perfection of Giving" - turns on Buddhist themes.

Chitra Fernando constantly returned to, and re-worked her early fiction. She built, for example, on her novella "Between Worlds" in writing her novel Cousins, developing themes that she had put forward earlier in the shorter work. Her aim was always to produce writing that satisfied her own standards: she was uninterested in achieving international recognition, and she was aware that the effects she worked hard to achieve were often beyond the grasp of the majority of readers, in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

By living overseas for half her life, Chitra Fernando was able to pursue her craft of fiction-writing "as a free individual", liberated to a great extent from emotional involvement with Sri Lankan events, and from the "labels" relating to caste and social class that she believed to be inescapable in her homeland. Looking back on her life a few years before her death (of bone marrow cancer in 1998), she observed in her journal: "Sri Lanka gave me my soul, but Australia gave me my freedom", and added: "Without that freedom, my soul would have shrivelled".