Sunil Govinnage's fictional world and cultural otherness

By Prof. Wimal DISSANAYAKE

The protagonists of Sunil Govinnage's stories encode the anxieties and desires of the diasporics, caught as they are between the two chimeras of home and exile. The dialectic between localism and globalism only serves to intensify the pains of this phenomenon.

Sunil Govinnage

The notions of cultural Otherness and difference, which are vitally connected to cultural identity, run like an underground stream throughout these stories. One has only to glance at the contemporary Australian political landscape to realize the salience of Otherness and difference. The bellicose rhetoric coming out of Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party has struck a deep chord of resonance in nearly a quarter of the Australian population as reflected in the recent Queensland election, while campaigns, like, 'Living in Harmony', promoting slogans like 'You, Me, Australian' are seeking to counteract this pernicious trend. Many of Sunil Govinnage's short stories need to be understood against this background. In fact, in one of the stories, there are clear references to the One Nation Party. The idea of cultural Otherness, therefore, carries a heavy freight of social meaning in Govinnage's stories.

Roland Barthes once remarked that when the bourgeois individual is confronted by the Other, he 'blinds himself, ignores and denies him (the Other), or else transforms him into himself.' How the dominant class seeks to contain the Other is most revealing. It caricatures the Other, silences and marginalizes the Other, and turns the Other into a comic spectacle. All these are, needless to say, strategies of negation. Hence, the compelling need to invest the Other with a complex human agency and construct alternative discursive horizons within which the Other could be purposefully situated. Sunil Govinnage has understood, as revealed in his stories, the importance of this move. He is constantly seeking to constrict more complex images of the Other through two imbricated registers of articulation: narrativity and reflexivity. In his stories, Govinnage is aiming to put into circulation more multi-faceted self-images of the immigrants in Australia and their social imaginary.

What is interesting to note about Sunil Govinnage's stories is his desire to institute a more complex dialectic regarding black Australians. There is a widespread tendency to lump all black Australians together without taking into consideration the cultural differences among, say, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans. In his stories, Govinnage has sought to point out the importance of recognizing differences among black Australians as a way of acquiring a more complex and nuanced understanding of black Australians. Secondly, he has endeavored to institute another dialectic, namely, that between collective and personal identity. It is indeed true that Sri Lankan-born Australians share a set of common cultural traits and behavioral patterns. But, at the same time, as a writer, he is also interested in charting the relationship between personal identity and collective identity. In many of the stories collected in this volume this facet of cultural Otherness receives attention.

As one begins to roam in Govinnage's fictional world, one begins to realize how important the ideas of hybridity and border-crossing are to the density of that world. The protagonists cross national, geographical, cultural and linguistic boundaries with no perfect destination in sight. In-betweenness is the primary condition of their life. The protagonists are Sri Lankans who have chosen to settle down in Australia. But the pull of the past, the attachments to the culture left behind, exert a strong influence in their day-to-day life. They like the modern material comforts-cars, home appliances etc-as well as the respite from the ethnic conflict that has engulfed their native land. At the same time, they cannot totally turn their backs on the past. In one of the stories, while the rest of the family has opted for Australian passports, the protagonist tenaciously holds on to his Sri Lankan passport. The bilinguality and biculturality that traverse the narrative discourse points to this in-betweenness and the tensions it generates. There is a sense of irritability that characterizes many of the protagonists which admirably suggests the predicament of the immigrant. In these stories, we find an interesting interplay between home and exile. Both terms are constantly being inverted. At times, the home is full of peril and exile offers sanctuary, and at other times the exact reverse seems to be the case.

How an emigrant becomes an immigrant and attains full cultural membership is a question of great significance that seems to engage the imagination of the author very deeply. The shadow of his past and cultural heritage inexorably falls across his new Australian life. The narrator occupies an interstitial space from which he could explore both roots and routes. Unable and unwilling to occupy a single territory, the protagonists shuttle back and forth through social imaginaries in search of contentment that always seem to elude them. The idea of hybridity, therefore, becomes very important to the meanings and meta-meanings of these stories. In bringing the concept of hybridity to life on the page, Sunil Govinnage underlines the necessary self-understanding of writers as both reflectors and shapers of social reality. The concept of hybridity, though not without its share of problems, has proved to be a useful analytical construct as proved by thinkers as diverse as Bakhtin and Homi Bhabha. Homi Bhabha has remarked that hybridity can be interpreted as unexplored moments of the history of modernity. The experiences that Govinnage is recounting are products of modernity and post-modernity and hence it is only natural that he should focus on the idea of hybridity.

Along with the topics of cultural identity, Otherness, localism and globalism and hybridity, the author of these stories has fore grounded the idea of Australianness. Australia, despite the predilections of many, is not a unified and integrated entity, but represents a coming together and negotiations of multiplicities. It is not a monolith, nor is it an immutable and permanent entity. It is, rather, a discursive construction, a representational space, in which an incessant contestation of meaning is taking place. It is a land of the Aborigines; it is a settler society; it is a post-colonial society; it is a multi-cultural society which is inhabited by people of European and Asian descent. Given these facts, Australia has always to be understood by its multi-layerdness. Therefore, the unified meta-narrative of Australian nationhood that is being propagated has to be challenged from different vantage points. In many of the stories contained in this collection, this is precisely what the author is seeking to do. How a nation tells its unifying and legitimizing story to its citizens is exceedingly important in the understanding of nationhood, and writers like Govinnage who see literature as a vital adjunct of the public sphere in the Habermasian sense are desirous of presenting alternate perspectives and submerged voices to challenge the official efforts. In Govinnage's stories there is an inverted sense of attachment and detachment. He moves towards a cultural world in order to extricate himself from that world, and he moves away from it in order to get close to it. He has an ability to see extraordinariness in ordinariness, thereby undercutting the deceptively simple structures of his stories. His sharp eye for the shape and feel of little things serves to direct our attention to the larger issues concealed in the ostensibly simple events. Govinnage narrates his world with controlled emotion and narrative economy, rather than taking the easy route of oversimplification and excessive self-display-routes that almost always lead to artistic diminution. In many of the stories, Sunil Govinnage works at the interface of cultures, struggling to explore emotions he cannot quite name and his narrative economy aid in this effort. His desire to untangle some important strands in the knotted fabric that is Australian culture is well served by his artistic choices and representational strategies.

In Sunil Govinnage's case, he writes, for the most part, in standard English. His is a clear and uncomplicated prose without any ostentatious desires to dress it up in ornate finery. However, he has tried to combine standard English with Australian and Sri Lankan English to encode the complexities of diasporic existence in Australia. The dialogue between the husband and wife or the statements made by the father addressing his children are somewhat stilted, thereby capturing the dynamics of Sinhalese sensibility as it inflects Sri Lankan English.

Despite the worries, fears and frustrations that the characters in these stories have to contend with, one recognizes the writer's desire to experience the joy of life, and even more importantly, to experience the joy of recording that joy.

(Professor Wimal Dissanayake teaches at University of Hawaii, USA. This write up is an edited version from Professor Dissanayake's Introduction to Sunil Govinnage's short story collection, Black Swans and Other Stories and published with permission of the author)