Review

A fruitful strangeness

by Dilshan Boange

There is a certain sumptuousness in Strange Fruit by Afdhel Aziz, which is not necessarily flavourful as bearing a sensuous vivacity upon the reader’s palette.

What one finds is an assortment of many threads that weave together a stream of emotions that deal with different states of mind and body, and soul, in different settings of geography, and tonalities that speak of textural richness in story structure with epigraphy from song and poetry that add depth to better gauge characters that simply refuse to stay one dimensional.

As one turns pages one sees how the principal characters crafted by Aziz, realise that the worlds they inhabit, like them, do not stay static. The strangeness encountered by the characters of Maya and Malick in each other is an alluring and endearing one.

Therefore, it is that very strangeness that turns fruitful for them. There is sorrow and bitterness, romance and beguiling landscapes, heartache and anxiety, hidden frustrations and lustful allure.

There are also silences, working as inertia of the hapless, and the wordless quiet shared between lovers. Sri Lanka is a land of countless emotions. We are a people in that sense who defy one dimensionality. That plethoric variety is a symbolic sumptuousness.

Epic

Strange Fruit isn’t a sweeping epic of a romance saga, nor is it a stringently ideologically pinned book that banks completely on the separatist war episode and the 1983 July riots to be the sole driving force to capture its readership.

What the author has designed, it appears, is to depict a story about characters who aren’t as adults in the folds of the ‘average Sri Lankan’, whose lives unfolded in a period that was inescapably affected by the horrors of suicide bombers in Colombo, civil riots and also jungle warfare.

The life of the character of ‘Soldier boy’ too happens in the same country that the central characters Maya and Malick find their romance blooms, but the urban lovers and the soldier of rural roots are worlds apart.

But this is a story of our generation, and I feel the Sri Lankan children of the next decade may find this past depicted in Strange Fruit very much estranged from their world of experience.

With each passing generation the voices of the previous era get entrenched more firmly in the firmament of advancing society’s ‘imagination’, and will be more readily read as ‘fiction’.

Perhaps that is the beauty of what literature is destined to be in its relation to the past, as ‘stories’ with manifold facets.

Being a child of the 80s and 90s myself whose childhood wasn’t ‘wired’ to the ‘cyber age’, I couldn’t help but relate to the nostalgic tones the book carries in relation to the Colombo centric urban landscape before the 21st century arrived.

It is an era that marked a turning point in the pace and pulse of a people. And one that children of this decade will never relate to.

Not in the city, not in the villages, because the era of internet and cell phones, and its gamut of digital dynamism has pervaded from coast to coast. The world Aziz unfolds in Strange Fruit is thus a world to be found only in the memories of those who actually lived those times. Perhaps in this sense Aziz sought to create a narrative that records an era that shaped his days of boyhood, which of course sadly has faded into the ‘past’. This is very much a novel that moves with the generation whose ‘impressionable age’ was in the previous century.

July riots

Like Maya who migrated as a result of the July riots of ’83 who finds her home estranged, perhaps the author Aziz now living in New York, may be subconsciously dealing with the possibility of gradual strangeness that will face him from his beloved homeland since with each passing day Sri Lanka changes and any Sri Lankan living overseas on return is bound to feel some sense of change that left him or her behind.

And like Malick whose very being is bound to his lifestyle in Sri Lanka, Aziz too possibly feels that his inner pulse speaks of being Sri Lankan more than anything else.

Perhaps in this vein the characters of Malick and Maya carry facets of the author himself. I couldn’t help but feel the subtext of the novel may be woven with tones of those emotional concerns of the author himself.

After all the story unfolds to be a labour of some considerable emotional investment on the part of the author.

The texture of the novel has a notable element of music woven in it. The epigraphy which adorns the beginning of each chapter says that different tonalities have given shape to what the author feels exemplifies the essences in the story as it progresses in segments.

The variety in the epigraphs is remarkable. As I was reaching the end of the book I found playing in my head the track ‘Make it with you’ sung by British pop band ‘Let Loose’, who sang it as a cover of the original song by the band ‘Bread’.

Although the lyrics of that song were not in the text, my experience of reading the book shows there is a strong element of music bound to the bones of this story.

One must also take note of the fact that the novel’s title was also inspired by the doleful song of the same by Billie Holiday. Music defines Malick in many ways and so to give context about how he is also perceived culturally may be pertinent to cite the following line–“His love for Sri Lanka was bone-deep; where he was from was an inherent part of who he was.”

Fusion

Like vignettes the life of Maya and Malick unfold with snapshot discursive at times which perhaps symbolically may be seen as something of a jazzy motif.

I will state for the record that I have no expertise in musicology but the observations one can make in this regard is how the fusion of moments may show a sense of weaving fragments together to create a larger picture almost in the light of a collage.

Although one of the most demonstrative examples I can think of in this regard would be Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Strange Fruit while certainly being worlds apart from the aforementioned novel of Ondaatje in both narrative structure and story theme, still has an approach of in certain respects which appears to build on the ‘fusion of moments’ to show a progression of the lives of the lovers Maya and Malick.

In Chapter 4 through the vignette titled, ‘Between two worlds’, the reader finds what is a counterpoint to the common belief ‘English is empowerment’ in the context of language politics in Sri Lanka.

Identity

Maya who grapples with the unsettledness of a hybrid identity finds an agonising truth which perhaps some foreign visitors to our country, or a Sri Lankan who had lived overseas for a considerable time and developed the noticeable ‘expat veneer’, is likely to encounter, which is that in certain contexts not being proficient in Sinhala like the average Sri Lankan can be critically disempowering.

At the heart of this novel is an introspective investigation through the characters of Maya and Malick over what matters to a person to call a place ‘home’. Even the character of ‘Soldier boy’ finds the ‘tour of duty’ creates change in him to an extent that his familiar home environs seem estranged to his psychology.

Maya and Malick find that in each other’s love they find a meaningful ‘home’ which transcends definitions of geography and national cultures.

If one takes on something of a more academically inclined critical incision at the text of the novel related to how Sinhala words have been incorporated to an English prose narrative, one will notice how Sinhala words have been elucidated in the narrative itself through description.

To every Sri Lankan, words like kottu and kasippu are explanations by themselves.

I certainly do not intend to make a complete list of the words from the Sinhala language that have found their way into Strange Fruit to be listed out in this review but I cannot help but raise the question as which readership Aziz intends the book to ‘speak out to’ exactly?

While there are some marked elements in the novel that lend to make Sri Lanka ‘exotic’ which are also I must say done tastefully to tantalise the unacquainted with our tropical emerald isle, some of those facets mentioned may lend to making the narrative voice seem somewhat even distanced from the landscape it seeks to bring to life convincingly to the reader.

Dialect

In this sense I wonder whether it is a distant overseas gazer’s pulse that wove in a ‘distanced’ note or two to the tone of the narrative with regard to the aspects aforementioned.

A glossary of terms can serve a reader unfamiliar with whatever words of a local language or dialect that finds voice in a story set in a setting not familiar to the reader. It is somewhat a noticeable practice among novelists.

Prose that carry description of the irregularly occurring non-English word either preceding or succeeding the placement of the non-English word, in my opinion, tends to disrupt the tones of familiarity between the text and the reader, if the reader is one who is of the culture that is sought to be portrayed by the text.

If anyone cares to consider as food for thought, the intrigue sparks in the reader unfamiliar with the non-English words will create a desire to get better perspective of it through reference to a glossary in the novel with lexical definitions and even descriptions with context of the non English words and readers of that nature may even be persuaded (depending on the prowess of the writer who crafted the narrative) to do further research about what is represented by those non-English terms in this day and age where Google can guide you to nearly anything explained under the sun!

Investigating themes such as ‘homeland’ and ‘identity’ the question of ‘patriotism’ is also raised in the novel, with something of a resolution to that burning question found in Chapter 10.

If patriotism is epitomised through self sacrifice to what end should the ultimate sacrifice of one’s life be made? Without giving way too much for the benefit of those who have not yet read the book, let me simply offer this excerpt: “He wasn’t a patriot in the sense that he died for his country. But he died for something. Someone. Strangers, actually.’ ‘Maybe that’s a better definition of a patriot,’ said Maya. ‘Someone who dies for strangers.’ ”

Maya as a returnee to her estranged ‘homeland’ is stung by the question of ‘what is home’ much more sharply when she finds her love for Malick compelling her to accept that unlike her, Malick’s conception of home collides with hers.

“‘This is where you grew up. This is your home. But it’s not mine,” says Maya to Malick at the point where it seems decisive that they must pragmatically approach what future their relationship has in the wake of choosing what kind of life together is or isn’t possible for them.

It is interesting to see how Aziz draws on that age-old saying ‘home is where the heart is’ which has a simple yet indelible truth and beauty, as he charts the direction of the story’s end. Every love story has its share of laughter and tears. And every love story has its share of partings.

But how exactly do these partings work for Malick and Maya? This article is only a review, not a detailed synopsis, nor the story itself.