Sunburnt Home - an Australian Sri Lankan novel

Introduction:

By Ranga CHANDRARATHNE

One of the unique features of Govinnage's fiction is that his capacity for grasping Sri Lankan sensibility. He does not engage in his narrative discourses as a detached orientalist looking at his exotic native land and unique cultural features that he has left behind. In this regard, Govinnage differs from writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunasekara and Shyam Selvadurai who also write on Sri Lankan plots, protagonists and themes from overseas. Govinnage's extensive knowledge of Sinhala language and his familiarity of Sri Lankan cultural nuances have helped him to portray Sri Lankan sensibility genuinely and skilfully.

Sunil Govinnage's second novel Sunburnt Home is absorbing, straightforward, explicit and marked by a unique hybrid narrative prose. In his first novel, The Black Australian, previously serialised in The Sunday Observer, Govinnage represented the life of a Perth-based Sri Lankan engineer and his journeys in Australia and elsewhere.

In this novel, Govinnage's focus is on a married family man, Jayadeva Gamage who is also domiciled in Perth, Australia. This novel captures the hopes and despair of this Sri Lankan centric protagonist who faces various social and cultural encounters that act as deterrents to adapt a new home, where as his wife, Malini, a medical partitioner who later gave up her professional career to be a real-estate agent adapting to a new life in Australia, unlike her partner.

Sunil Govinnage is a good story teller. Australian academic, Dr. Stephen Muecke, currently the Professor of Writings at University of New South Wales in his foreword to Govinnage's short story collection Black Swans and other Stories writes: "You can stroll along these avenues enjoying the breezes of the Indian Ocean bringing flavours and perfumes of South Asia to these shores, and yet so much more; an intensity of experience and a tenderness of perception which make Sunil Govinnage one of the most unique and compelling writers to emerge-from anywhere-in recent years."

Govinnage's narratives are not a series of sociological analysis of Sri Lankan life in Australia. Govinnage artistically portrays interesting aspects of Australian history from an outsider's perspective. For example, one chapter of this novel is about how Govinnage's protagonists look at the Australian National day usually celebrated on January 26 coincides with the celebration of arrival of the First Fleet.

Broader issues and notions of cultural Otherness, identity, cultural differences and oneness, which are important aspects of diasporic writings, run in most of the stories in this novel like rays of light in a dark labyrinth. Govinnage does not incorporate these issues in a superficial manner but place them as a part of his narrative communication in the context of the contemporary Australian social, political and cultural landscape to highlights the characteristics of Otherness and cultural identity. For example, a Sri Lankan family arrives in Perth without having any friends or relatives to learn from a taxi driver who was previously a thoracic surgeon in Lebanon to learn that it is not easy for any immigrants to practice medicine in Australia. Once again, the newly arrived Sri Lankan immigrant father, through experiences of his very young daughter not only understands the realities of racism but also the greatness of multiculturalism in Australia through his discussion with his daughter's teachers and school principal.

Despite these realisations and their abilities to have wealth and material comforts, the protagonists are caught between nostalgia and other issues which are encountered by migrants in a far off country. On another occasion, a father and his son who is setting his roots in Australia go out to eat ice-cream but they encounter ramifications of multicultural Australia and racist behaviour among migrants. Through these kinds of encounters and incidents Govinnage portrays and decodes the expectations, desires of Sri Lankan diaspora in Australia representing multiple chimeras of home and exile.

As one begins to enter Govinnage's fictional world, one begins to encounter how important the concept of identity and hybridity as a result of living in a world between home and exile. Govinnage's protagonists have not only crossed national, geo-political, cultural and linguistic frontiers as a consequence of global migration but also look for new meanings of home.

In their journeys some of Govinnage's protagonists get accustomed to new cultural mores and life styles but some fail to embrace these for various reasons. Through such dilemmas Govinnage portrays how "an emigrant becomes an immigrant and attains full cultural membership" and why others fail. But he does not discuss these issues as an anthropologist or sociologist but portrays incidents, encounters and conflicts both internal and external as an experienced novelist who has mastered the craft of his art.

In my view, one of the unique features of Govinnage's fiction is that his capacity for grasping Sri Lankan sensibility. He does not engage in his narrative discourses as a detached orientalist looking at his exotic native land and unique cultural features that he has left behind. In this regard, Govinnage differs from the writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunasekara and Shyam Selvadurai who also write on Sri Lankan themes, plots and protagonists from overseas. Govinnage's extensive knowledge of Sinhala language and his familiarity of Sri Lankan cultural nuances have helped him to portray Sri Lankan sensibility genuinely and skilfully.

For example, in one of the early chapter of the novel entitled Arrival, Govinnage portrays some of the Sri Lankan religious and cultural mores through his understanding of Sinhalese Buddhist practices. His protagonist not only believes but also embraces them in his new country right from the beginning. Govinnage writes: "He [Jayadeva] carefully stepped out of the arrival lounge, placing his right foot first, as he was setting out on an important journey, a custom he had learnt as a child from his parents.

He struggled against the cold wind which seemed strong enough to lift him off the ground. Jayadeva worried that he couldn't recite a stanza from Maha Mangala Sutta or Maha Pirita when he was stepping out into a new country to lead a new life."

Govinnage's work is also evidence of a new trend in Sri Lankan literature and how his Australian experience could enrich our literary tradition. Undoubtedly, Govinnage's work is a continuation of a tradition established by Professor Yasmine Gooneratne whose classic 'A Change of Skies' was published in 1991.

'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).

Through this novel, Professor Gooneratne established a tradition of representing the Sri Lankan diaspora in the Australian literary scene. This work has been followed by both English and Sinhala writings from Australia. Among them Chandani Lokuge who has published two novels in English merits our attention. There are other writers such as D. B. Kurruppu, Palitha Ganewatta, Saman Dissanayake, Luxman Kodituwakku and Jagatah J Edirisinghe who have published Sinhala fiction and also poetry. Govinnage who has also published three books of Sinahala poetry is now translating his own English fiction into Sinhala. The work emerging from Australia in both English and Sinhala merit the attention of Sri Lankan academics and critics.

We hope that Sunil Govinnage's second English novel will expand the scope of not only the Sri Lankan English novel but also diasporic literature in general and open up a dialogue with a view to examining new trends of Sri Lankan as well as Australian literature.