Writers of one family

Reviewed by Daya Dissanayake

Writers of the world have to unite, to be one family. As a first step, let us extend our nuclear family to include all our neighbours, who come under one group now as SAARC. Whatever the political, social, religious and economic issues could be still keeping us apart, culturally we had been and can be one family.

To gather the SAARC writers into one family, the SAARC Cultural Center, Sri Lanka, published two anthologies in 2012. There were short stories and poems from all SAARC countries, written in many languages, and translated into our common link language, English.

They have published the second pair of anthologies this month, giving further opportunities to get to know our brothers and sisters, the fellow writers among the neighbours.

Short stories

They gave us two short stories from Afghanistan writers last year, and this year we meet five authors writing in Dari, Pashto and Urdu, through four short stories and eleven poems. It is a rare opportunity to meet these authors and to learn about their creative talents and about life in Afghanistan through the eyes of writers.

We read about the suffering of the people, specially in the remote villages, and how violence is continued to be promoted exploiting the inherent weaknesses in mankind. The poets tell us of mountain springs which once tasted like honey, taste of blood now. Every tree is bearing fruits of hatred. When will they taste of honey again and nightingales could return to the apple orchards?

The stories from Bangladesh take us back to their struggle for independence, to save their language. The sacrifices they had to make. There are many talented poets in Bangladesh, writing in Bangla and also in English, and another wonderful development is that they publish their poetry and are appreciated by their readers. This year there are thirty four poems contributed by eight poets.

Last year we missed the Bhutan poets, while there was only one short story. This year we have four short stories from four writers, and five poets contributing a poem each. As from Afghanistan, we do not get many opportunities to read Bhutanese literature and get to know their writers. This is a wonderful opportunity we have now, from SAARC.

Diversity in culture

India's diversity in culture and language is well represented in the anthologies with writers from Kerala writing in Malayalam and Kannada, from Tamil Nadu in Tamil, from Andhra in Telugu, from Assam in Assamese, from Odisha in Oriya, then writings in Gujarati, Manipuri, Kashmiri, Bengali and Marathi and also in Hindi and Urdu. Their works translated into English in these two anthologies will be a link even within India for readers not familiar with these languages.

India has been close to us as our immediate neighbour and big brother, but the editors have been careful not to let them dominate the anthologies, which could have pushed out the smaller neighbours like the Maldives.

We get to meet one Maldivian poet and short story writer, as last year we missed them. Like this author many Maldivians write in English, because writing in Dhivehi limits the publications only to their total population of 350,000.

Nepal has developed her own literary style in poetry and fiction. There are many young and creative writers emerging from Nepal who are also willing to share their creative work with the other SAARC countries. They also write in Nepalese and in English.

We meet many writers from Pakistan, their poems and short stories written in Urdu and English, and then our writers from Sri Lanka.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, has eight member countries. Maldives and Sri Lanka are separated from each other and from the other countries by a geographical barrier, the Indian Ocean. The others are separated by political barriers only. The barriers of languages and religions are only in our minds, because in real life we have all lived in harmony from the beginning of history, communicating in so many different tongues. It has never been an obstacle for our people for religious discourses, education, philosophical discussions and for trade.

Writers in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan write in Urdu and Hindi. They also speak in Panjabi. There are many writers in the SAARC region who are fluent in many languages.

The author from Maldives who has contributed for these two anthologies is said to be fluent in eight languages in addition to his own mother tongue Dhivehi.

Until we can all pick up a few more languages, we have to settle with English, to bring us all together. That is what we have achieved with the anthologies, and with all the international conferences and workshops arranged by the SAARC Cultural Center.

Medium

The medium is English and it is the standard international English that is used, so that it is common to all the countries.

As I suggested last year with the launch of the first anthologies of short stories and poetry, let us now try to bring them out in translations of the indigenous languages of each of the SAARC member countries. It is not an easy task, but a task we have to consider, if we are to all become one family. Such translations should also be direct from the source language and not from the English translations that have been made for these anthologies.

It is only then, that we can realise how close we are culturally and linguistically to our neighbours. How much we share, and feel for each other. And that is because we are descendants of those who had contributed to the development of some of the worlds oldest and greatest civilizations.

In the words of Wimaladasa Samarasinghe, Director SAARC Cultural Centre, "We hope that this collection would be embraced by impassioned readers, and that it would command the interest of the explorers of the South Asian short stories and poems and also would serve as a rich source of literature for the literary critics, students and academics.