'Being an academic you invariably become a critic'

The author of The Sweet and Simple Kind, previously short listed for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize, Emeritus Professor of Macquarie University Yasmine Gooneratne is a critic, a poet and a short story writer as well as a novelist, specialising in Post Colonial literature and 18th century English literature.

Educated at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya and at Cambridge University, she's the author of The Pleasures of Conquest, A Change of Skies and family memoir Relative Merits. Among her published books are also studies of Jane Austen, Alexander Pope, Leonard Woolf and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

She has won numerous awards, such as The Order of Australia for distinguished service to Literature and Education in 1990, the Marjorie Barnard Literary Award for Fiction for A Change of Skies in 1991 and The Raja Rao Award for outstanding contribution to the Literature of the South Asian Diaspora in 2001.

Q: What sort of themes do you write on?

A: My themes depend on things I see, read, hear or experience. I've written about peace, the act of writing poetry itself and on things other people say to me. But what ever I write seems to come out as humour, even if I am angry!
 

In my personal experience I have never started a novel with a theme in mind. People may write according to various structures but it never works for me. Novel-writing starts for me with a short story which develops itself into a novel.

Q: What do you gain from the act of writing?

A: Well, I can tell you it's not money! It's great if your book attracts a lot of recognition, but there's no guarantee. But in ways other than money, the gains are enormous. You can create characters that live by your principles, which is quite satisfying. The other gain is the feedback. In fiction you cannot provide answers, but you can explore issues that concern you.

Q: Does personal experience help, or is your writing totally based on imagination?

A: It's based partly on memory, things that had happened to me or to others, and partly on imagination. But the basis is definitely experience. The death of my father compelled me to write my very first original poem, Review.

My father was, among other things, a lover and collector of books, and I named the poem Review because in it I treated his personality as though it was a book - with a cover, and a permanent place in a library. It was a memorial to my father: I was looking back, reviewing what he had meant to me.

The poem The Peace Game arose from an article I read in Time magazine, on a massacre that had taken place during the Vietnam War. The theme of the poem became the contrast between the affluent and powerful, and those who are powerless.

I wrote a short story How Barry Changed His Image around twenty years after I went to Australia. It's about a couple who has emigrated to Australia, and are astonished by what they find there. My second novel The Pleasures of Conquest had its beginning in an incident I learned of when I was in the USA, about a professor who plagiarized the work of a brilliant student. A novel can begin anywhere, with anything.

Q: You were originally a critic-poet, why?

A: Being an academic you invariably become a critic. The process of teaching invariably involves one in making judgments, about good writing and bad, about writing that 'works' and writing that doesn't.

Q: Later on you switched to fiction, why?

A: It just happened. I found it difficult to write poetry in Australia.

Q: Why did you experience difficulty writing poetry in Australia, which you didn't experience in Sri Lanka?

A: When you move from one country to another you are leaving behind all the visual and aural images that shaped your sensibility. My poem Sydney Suburbia is based on this scenario. In fact I remember writing fifteen separate poems on how difficult it was to write poetry in Australia.

Q: Why did you emigrate and how did the experience of being in Australia influence your writing?

A: We at first wanted to just have a look around the world. I had no intension of living anywhere but in Sri Lanka. Our decision to settle in Australia came several years afterwards. Concern for our children's education was a motivating factor, also the fact that my husband and I were both happy in our work.

As to how being in Australia influenced my writing, I felt freer in Australia. The answer to this question lies in my books. You should trust the tale and not the teller.

Q: Why didn't you experience difficulty writing fiction in Australia?

A: Well in fact I did experience difficulty. My first novel was written twenty years after I went there. But by then I have got to know the society quite well.

Q: You have written books of criticism on Jane Austen and Alexander Pope, is there any special reason you selected these particular people?

A: They selected me! Both writers employ language in a way I admire. They look at society in a way that is partly critical, partly amused.

Q: How did the Augustan writers influence you?

A: They demonstrate in their writing the importance of putting the right word in the right place.

Q: Did Jane Austen influence your writing?

A: Yes, of course. Her characters are always on the verge of making decisions, like the characters of my latest novel The Sweet and Simple Kind. She is also a master of irony, irony in the plot as well as in the narration.

Q: What sort of things influenced you when writing fictions?

A: I'm very interested in observing society. Why people act the way they do.

Q: What made you write Relative Merits, your family memoir?

A: It was originally a letter meant for my children, they were very young when they went to Australia and they didn't know much about my family history. I began writing it on a very special day: Macquarie University had just given me its first higher doctoral degree, a D.Litt. and I wanted my children to know that there had been others in my family before me who had achieved a great deal in the sphere of letters and the arts.

I found that the manuscript kept getting longer and longer. Frustrated and dissatisfied, I put it away. When my husband suggested that I take it up again, I sent parts of the manuscript to five relatives, who wrote back with their own accounts. Wonderful material! With that kind of backing, the book practically wrote itself.

Q: The name 'Tsunami', one of the main characters of The Sweet and Simple Kind, was it a coincidence, or did you write it after the tsunami?

A: I wrote it after the Tsunami. As every other novel it was originally a short story, which I published with six other stories about the same character, in a book titled Masterpiece & Other Stories in 2002. For me 'Tsunami' it was just a Japanese name which I happened to like.

But when something as tragic as the tsunami happened I could not associate that name with humorous or light-hearted incidents, so I put the novel away. Eventually, I introduced 'Latha', Tsunami's cousin, who has, I think, come to be the most significant character in the book.

Q: The Sweet and Simple Kind has been short listed for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. How do you feel about that?

A: Three of my books have been short listed before. But I never saw myself as a professional writer of fiction. I have always seen myself as a teacher of literature, not as a writer.

This was partly because I taught such great writers Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden and Pope for example; when you teach such writers on a daily basis, you never dream of becoming a writer yourself. So this, as many others came as a surprise. A very pleasant one.

[email protected]