Literary tapestry of rare distinction

Textual Tapestry offers a rich harvest of poetry, prose and short stories by Dilshan Boange. His forte seems to be his ability to apply literary techniques effortlessly with a remarkable agility across the literary genres in a manner adding values to his creations. Apart from their literary exquisiteness, the poetry, prose and short stories in the anthology serve as object lessons for those who are keen to study the multiple applications of literary techniques and devices across the literary genres. TextualTapestry would serve as a model text for both students and teachers of literature who are particularly keen on studying structuralism and post-structuralism in literature. The book is also noted for its extensive application of literary theories in general and structuralism and post-structuralism in particular.

Reviewed by Ranga Chandrarathne

In the context of Sri Lankan literature in English, Textual Tapestry marks a commencement of an intelligent literary movement deviating from the anecdotal legacy of storytelling and loose prose affixed onto a poetic structure.

Textual Tapestry Author: Dilshan Boange Samaranayake publishers

Dilshan has divided the anthology into several segments according to the diverse literary genres; Silken scriptures, The Swan collection, Verses, Musings and beyond and Climbing the Mango tree-Short stories (The segment contains ten short stories).

Silken scriptures

The segment Silken scriptures, contains seven pieces of prose on diverse themes. In a way, they are like the author's recollections, impressions and experiences that are impinged on his memory. In the piece of prose entitled She can read his silence..., the author recreates an instance of remarkable encounter of lovers. The girl is sensitive to the emotional needs of her reluctant partner who, seems to have been almost intoxicated with desire though he shows reluctance on his part. However, the girl seems to read his silence, which is sychronised well with the romantic semi-darkness only disturbed by a beam of light from the street lamp post. The significant aspect of this narrative prose is to map out the emotional landscapes of the characters and the author's ability to recreate the emotional landscape through the ingenious use of metaphors and imagery.

"She moves to him, cutting through the pallid ghostly light falling off the street lamp outside the room's only window. He is like a wounded phantom, in the dark. Afraid to meet what scarce light permitted to his domain for fear of over exposure. But afraid still greater of remaining a complete shadow, and becoming invisible altogether. So he stays on the line of grayness. A weak light's comforting shade. "

'The line of grayness' symbolises not only the longing on the part of the lover but also rigid cultural constraints in a conservative Asian society where the pre-marital affairs are looked down on and sex is almost a tabooed subject. Although the setting of the meeting is in the metropolitan, the lovers seem to be from conservative families where strict a regime of customs and traditions are imposed upon the members.

The author, Dilshan brings to light this aspect in the final couple of paragraphs; "The relaxed, relieved air departing from his lips conveys salutary happenings. Her hands are disciples of Apollo."

In "Her breath sweeps over his shoulders like a frail breeze against the might of a stony mountain", the author offers a rather grotesque description of love making in refined terms. As implied the context is conservative society.

'It is a desperate beseecher, her sighful exhale. A shapeless messenger with little time to meet its destination. ... between them lies only a breath stream's distance. But it has become a gorge, an unquestionable divide. Across this still valley is a world she loves, longs for. Him.

His covering is a geography of a most loveable kind. Slopes, mountains, ridges, plateaux, crevasses, plains of altering altitude and forest. ...No fingers of hers play blindly in the thickness of the Bavarian black forest. Many a terrain later, comes ground much thinly scattered in its forestage. And then, there is a secretive country. Nestled in a valley of warmth, shrouded in dense shrubbery, it holds a privacy almost sacred. And those travellers, her fingers, had never been denied admission. Those emissaries were after all from a world he had loved."

The pieces of prose such as 'Unlikely the other he passed...', 'I taste you in the sweetness' and 'The Wick on the heavy stump of candle' deal with myriad aspects of love and nostalgia. For instance, 'The Wick on the heavy stump of candle' is about an old woman's recollection and she has lost her friends, relations and lovers and leads a lonely life. The increasingly decaying old mansion, in which she lives, symbolises her life and contains happy times she enjoyed in it.

"She wonders what decay is presumably devouring in a fatal quiet, eating the high ceiling overhead. None of which she can see at present. But she can say with great detail and remarkable accuracy what she knew to be. A delightful place where treasured memories are still sacredly held of a cherished childhood. They are still here, the memories. They simply need a reviver. A resurrrector."

The Swan collection

'The Swan collection' contains 17 poems and some of the poems are in Haiku structure. One of the insightful poems in this segment is 'The White of Chastity'. Although 'Chastity' is synonymous with purity, maiden-ness and all encompassing unblemished nature, particularly of a woman, it is essentially an Asian concept rooted in its cultural mosaic. The author, who seems to have cognised of this cultural aspect, has used the potent symbol of white, which is associated with purity.

"The White of Chastity

My Chastity is the White of a lily,

Which emphasises with the heart sincere...

.... My devotion to you, the Whiteness of Chastity

Rests in beauty and truth of fidelity"

Interestingly, the author does not speak about purity of a girl but a purity, beauty and 'truth of fidelity' on the part of the boy who is in love. Throughout that poetry which deals with love, sacrificial element is present. Strangely, it is, on most of the instances, on the part of the boy. The author has effectively used exaggeration to convey the deep love for the girl on the part of the boy.

"A drink of breath and being

Let your exhales cascade upon my face,

As wisps and tendrils of unseen lace

Within mine breath I will drink it, an elixir true

Within me, the sprit that rests' neath my skin is you"

In the poem 'Let me fount you a river of pearl', the author has extensively used hyperbole; 'And thus the river of pearl I fount shall flow...proclaiming of your beauty for all the lands to know"

Haiku poems

The six Haiku poems, in the anthology, deal with love in, perhaps, most intimate terms. Though the theme is almost same to all these poems, the author demonstrates a marked fluency in the Haiku structure capturing its essence of brevity and depth.

"A full moon glows in a starless night sky

The land beneath is silent

She is a jewel in the gaze of the Taj Mahal"

It seems that the Haiku poems are dedicated to a girl whose beauty and virtues are extolled in the poems.

Among the 'Verses', the verse 'Glimpses' sums up what life constitute in Sri Lanka. Amidst contradictions, life flourishes. The author offers a kind of snap shots of the social life in Sri Lanka. In a way, it is like a photo essay.

"Glimpses

A new born babe, with a noisy cry

Beggars on the road, dusty and dry ...

The joy of youth, when lovers are met..

Musings and beyond...

In the segment ' Musings and beyond' , the author offers pieces of prose on diverse themes such as ' As youngsters we imagine...', ' Despair is the one of the faces of mortality' and 'the Past walks among us'. In 'the Past walks among us', the author describes how we carry a baggage of memories from the past. In essence, past is part of us.

"The past appears whenever we think of what we used to be...staring at a mirror we see an ever changing present. An illusion that troubles us...the Past seems a fixed place where things would play and replay at a mere stimulus that causes recollection..."

Climbing the Mango tree

This segment contains short stories. The short story 'Climbing the Mango tree' deals with a past goal of the protagonist Sunera. However, the moot point is that the pivotal role that the Mango tree plays in the plot. It is a conduit between the past and the present and provides an excuse for the writer to retrospect the personal history of Sunera touching on the collective history in the process.

"It was upon recalling those moments that Sunera rediscovered the first goal which he had envisioned in his life. And how simple and innocent it seemed now. ...Sunera once told his dear grandparents that he would one day climb his mango tree...but as the years passed, and Sunera grew up, so did his tree, but the world around him which intruded into his carefree life, filled him with other fascinations that made him soon forget his first goal.... He had climbed his mango tree."

Clash of pseudo customs and morality with the modern day realities is ably brought to light in the short story 'A Crimson kiss and a veil of white". 'Veil of white' symbolises the conservative regime of customs that are impinged upon new generations. However, the stark reality is that the generation gap is widening although the older generations reluctant to admit the fact. The story is woven around an incident of meeting of old lovers who have been proposed by their parents. The girl has lost her chastity due to the love affair. Later the affair breaks down and two personalities grow up to become different persons.

"You see, it's not that they didn't know each other, it's just that they were different people back then...A relationship of young lovers may have in it, connotations of marriage, unspoken. Its collapse renders them as two young people who are looked at with a question mark by those who see them as ones as ones who were once in love...and didn't make the pledge of matrimony."

Perhaps, the most successful of the short stories is 'Dinner with the devil'. The essence of the story is not the physical death but the moral decadence. The guest is served a strange meal 'Avarice, seasoned with the herbs of gluttony' and 'The main course is Ego, garnished with the elixirs of immortality. And for desert a culinary creation of my own, crème de vanity" The irony is for many who have been entrenched in excessive consumerism, the prince of darkness's main course is the very essence and the objectives of life.

'Private traversing on a publish ride' is one of the interesting short stories which reveals perceptions created by attire. It is about an encounter between a young woman and a would be client or customer.

"'There is a new recruits, just joined the place. I am sure you'll approve.' He gave his consent, and the middle aged female keeper of the establishment jabbed a button on the intercom on the counter and spoke into it in a law tone.

A mere moment passed, and then she was standing in his view.

And as he stood there in front of her, she held her in her vision the clear skinned, clean shaven young man, who bore the demeanor of a casual and benign being. The sight of him made a smile incipient on her face, to which he smiled back with sincerity. She saw the very same youthful persona from the morning bus ride, in front of her, with his unchanged look of innocuousness"

What is obvious is that the attire of a person and simplicity is not always mistaken for position in society and or social status.

'The Beheldment' is a short story which reveals diverse aspects of love. At first, it is the physical attraction which draws partners in love in the metropolitan of Manhattan. They are 'bodily lovers'.

However, towards the end of the story, the casual relationship becomes more deeper and deeper unraveling the 'heart-wounds' of the person. The narrator of the story is a woman who walks into the apartment of her lover who is now weak and almost on the verge of being an invalid.

"His call on that late drizzly evening was the least expected of intrusive happenings. ...the earnest request made by the suave voice turned somewhat debilitated, in need of healing, was unrejectable.

True, he had been only one night stand with no strings attached. And a phone call for other the physically intended reason, resulting from such impromptu union of the most temporary kind is undoubtedly a breach of unwritten covenants between pleasure seeker. But to refuse him was cruel."

As the narration progresses, it is proven that the pleasure seekers' temporary bondage is going to be deeper than it thought out at first. The story ends with memorable lines which is the totality of emotional architecture of the man who had only been a 'one night stand'.

"I stood in the elevator, and he in the hallway, holding each other metaphysically, clutching on with our eyes. I held his countenance with my whole spirit while still uncertain how his face should be classified in my catalogue of clearly defined relations with people. Friend, lover, confidante, sleeping companion?"

The stories such as Morality, Unitary world-Solitary minds, Once the fourth citizen and the The Last Latte, are akin to snap shots from the complex and equally diverse mosaic of life out there. Textual Tapestry is good and insightful read for lovers of letters as well as for those students who are interested in diverse literary techniques at play.

Though the author has been successful most of the instances where he applied diverse literary techniques, there are instances where the author has failed to achieve the expected outcomes from such exercises. For instance in the short story, Private Traversing in Public Rides, the author failed to convey the idea that the girl walks into a brothel in a more direct and clear way but has made it very ambiguous and vague with only descriptions of the environment as clues for the reader.

"There is a new recruit, just joined the place. I am sure you'll approve"

Another instance the author failed to maintain the momentum is in the short story 'Once the Fourth Citizen'. The detailed extracts from the Constitution have virtually killed the readers' interest. Though it is part of the story, at times, it seems rather redundant. However, the views about the story may differ from one reader to another. After all, it is the marvel of the literature.

Rich imagination buttressed by life experiences

Reviewed by Sulochana Wickremasinghe

It was rarely that a fiction writer would create a structure demanded by the creation although modern Sinhalese fiction takes diverse courses in terms of structure and context in which the creation is made.

This has, unfortunately, resulted in the creation of rather artificial fictions. In a fiction where the structure supersedes the content, characters have thrown into an artificial world depriving them of their rightful places in the creation. However, there are fiction writers in Sinhalese who have rightly identified characters and portray them in a realistic light. Kathleen Jayewardene is a writer who has cognisant of the physical and diverse mind sets as well as salient psychological traits of the characters and addresses both the readers' intellect and heart.

Author : Kathleen Jayewardene Translator: Ranga Chandrarathne Samaranayake publishers

At a superficial level, her novel Agni Chakra (Circles of fire) is woven around not so unfamiliar characters. We have on many occasions, interacted with them. But we have not cognisant of their real selves or of the facts that conditioned their minds as in everyday life we are not compelled to do so. The nature of a person would not change. Therefore, nature of a person cannot be determined in terms of his or her life's style or incidents he or she may encounter or adapting certain criteria and arriving at conclusions. What we could do is to form a rather vague idea about them (characters or persons) based on the nature of the activities prompted by chain of incidents. These vague ideas about persons may change from time to time and would, sometimes, change momentarily. For human mind is so complex and diverse.

The natural law of uniformity can never be seen in mind or diverse states of minds. Uniformity in nature means that nature would always react in the same manner and grounds for such reactions are the same.

The uniformity is that same ground would result in the same reactions. However, this law of nature does not valid for human beings. Complex human being would constantly change its nature. In a second, his or her mindset would change. Such changes would complete overturn our perceptions of them. The characters we encounter in Circles of Fire are those complex characters whose nature would constantly change.

In Agni Chakra, Kathleen Jayewardene portrays these complexities, subtleties and extremely complex characters born out of specific socio-economic conditions in which they are compelled to engage in a rat race. Ranga Chandrarathne who translated it into English as Circles of Fire has done the same through his translation.

Translation is a complex and cumbersome task which can be a world for world translation or a critical translation. The translator should be well versed in both word- for-words as well as critical translation methods. He should be a one who has a comprehensive knowledge of both the source and the target languages. Ranga Chandrarathne is such a resourceful person and therefore, the readers can experience the same joy and the depth of the story in Circles of Fire as in the original Agni Chakra.

The novel peopled with characters of a Professor and his wife and others and revolves around them depicts an aspect of life. The professor that we encounter in the novel is an ordinary citizen and there is absolutely no peculiarity in his character. His physical and mental processes are as same as those of ours. I do not subscribe to the view entertained by many that he is a special person with peculiar behavioral patterns. I do not agree to reducing his complex character to the preposition that his subjective thought processes are resulted by his miserable childhood experiences.

Kathleen Jayewardene, through the character of the professor, has not created a special character or a peculiar person. What has really happened is that though he is an exceptionally knowledgeable person compared with others, he is not without his share of weaknesses and he could not control them. More or less we all are subject to such conditions. There should not be extraordinary circumstances to create such a person. In fact, it is the human nature and real self. What have we done is to suppress that real nature in us.

I believe it is this which makes up the core of the novel. How far knowledge enslaved man? If not is there a reason for the professor to hide his wife of his illness? The ego augmented with knowledge has virtually burnt us with fire. This has gone as far as the professor's premature and sudden death. The physical and mental conditions of the Professor who is the protagonist of the novel have been skilfully portrayed in the English translation in a fitting language.

A writer is not a person, who just uses diction. He or she is a one who uses a refined language which is capable of conveying complex ideas and concepts to the readers.

A fiction written in such a refined language would be absorbing even it may be written about ordinary experiences. A fiction writer is a one who immensely profited from his wide ranging experiences as well as from the gift of imagination. At the end, the novelist's rich imagination would invariably become a memorable experience for readers. The English translation of Kathleen Jayewardene's Agni Chakra ( Circles of fire) by Ranga Chandrarathne is a novel born out of rich imagination and is a one which is extremely readable and would be a novel experience for readers.

BOOK LAUNCH

Sri Lankava saha Aparadha Vidyava

Ariyasena Ediriweera's latest book Sri Lankava Saha Aparadha Vidyava was launched at Dayawansa Jayakody Bookshop, Colombo 10 recently.

It is a Dayawansa Jayakody publication.