Fates untold thro' narratives

By Dilshan Boange

Violence, as a reality of human civilisation is documented in numerous ways. Literary narratives too give an insight about how violence shapes not only history but also the psyche of people, and at times entire generations who become exposed to atrocities that leave deep mental scars to the extent that the episode of violence tends to be what 'defines the age' for those whose lives were forever changed due to the conflict.

It is on this theme of how the impact of violence on the lives of people is captured through literary narratives in recollection, looking back at the past, and interpreting the emotions that engender through reminiscences that Parvathi Solomons Arasanayagam crafts her stories in the two works of short fiction of the titles 'The Door' and 'The Silent Intruder' found in her book of short stories titled Recollections.

Observing and interpreting the world

What the reader will encounter in these narratives are words that paint pictures that speak of the inner beings of the characters while imbuing the world around them with reflections of their personae and shades of their emotions that may gush like streams or rush like the wind or flutter like leaves or waft like the mist.

The manner in which the authoress creates a world of outward calm that is pregnant with the latent and silent fears of people shows the duality of the world we live in and how as an artist who paints her pictures with words she, the writer can become sensitive to the anxieties of the victims but also view the geography around her as an aesthete. To an extent there is in her narratives a tone of detachedness that functions as setting the balance within the authorial voice to be an observer while also being a sympathiser.

The two works of short fiction selected to be discussed in this article are of two different 'narrative voices'. 'The Door' is narrated in the first person while 'The Silent Intruder' is in the third person narrative voice. The first is the story of a female graduate from the Peradeniya University while the second is the story of Ariyawathi a female factory worker. What is similar and dissimilar in this case is that the authoress has chosen protagonists of the same gender but of different social strata.

And interestingly enough the protagonist of 'The Door' can be her own voice, while the story of a disempowered person in society as the Ariyawathi portrayed in 'The Silent Intruder' is narrated from a third person's voice. This difference is a symbolic representation in certain ways of how society's disempowered seldom has the capacity to voice 'their own story'.

Bonding with the environs

Parvathi as an authoress evinces she is a lover of Kandy and the serene lushness which characterises its climes and landscapes. This inner bond with the geography that surrounds the characters show in the course of her narratives. Significance is attributed to images from nature by 'situating' them in the manner of somewhat monumentalising them as for example what one finds in the following lines in 'The Silent Intruder' -"Violent encounters of the past were being repeated.

The fragile tree which had provided shelter for the British captives of the early nineteenth century in the Kandyan wars was now a reminder of the violent past. The large teak trees and the tall flamboyant trees were silent witnesses to the changes in the waterway. Branches mingled with the truncated bodies swirling in the swift flowing water."

The mist can be a powerful image and a metaphor that indicates ambiguity and shapelessness; it can veil reality into becoming half truths or even illusions. The mist is a notable element that finds its place in the narratives of the two stories. For example in 'The Silent Intruder' the following line is found -"Their vague and nebulous shapes could be discerned through the almost opaque layers of mist which had settled in the valley." And in 'The Door' one finds the following line that makes a strong element of the imagery described -"In the background stood the mist bound coniferous trees which stood like toothbrushes against the distant sky."

Contrast between man and the landscape

The literary craft of the authoress is certainly one that places a strong emphasis on imagery of the world surrounding the characters as evinced by her narratives. Perhaps it is by describing such beautiful environs and the sereneness that one imagines by being transported to those surroundings through the narratives that one is provoked to realise in horror that a stark contrast is seen in the acts of humans whose violence in such locales are in complete disharmony with the beauty and poetry of the natural environs.

Perhaps it is the subtle way of the authoress through her literary craft to question how it is possible that there is such an incongruity, such a horrendous incompatibility between the natural environs and the humans inhabiting those locales.

It is in a way a subtle stage set for the reader to see the disharmony existing in this world of ours between man and nature when violent conflict rules the day.

The power of ideology

Ideology can be a powerful means of persuasion and coercion. This comes out rather remarkably in the stories where the protagonists see at different levels of course in the two stories, how leftwing politics work with vulnerable segments. In 'The Door' it is the varsity students who find it persuasive as well as a force that works coercively through the most seemingly innocent conduits -friends and lovers. 'The Silent Intruder' speaks of leftist ideology as something that is distant in its intellectuality to the village lass Ariyawathi but nevertheless it is a factor that changes her life by claiming her lover Sunil into its nefarious folds.

Ariyawathi's lover Sunil becomes the one who is persuaded by the ideology of the insurgents and she is finally the one whom the reader finds paying the price since her tender dreams of becoming a young bride with the man she loves are shattered.

And as a result of Sunil's disappearance, which appears to indicate a finality on the chances of him not returning, what one sees is a subtle coercion arising from the character of Nandalal who presents a proposition to Ariyawathi playing on her secret anxieties and desperations.

On the aspect of the level or degree of insight that the reader is offered about how the 'radical movement' operates, the two short stories present two different vantages. From the viewpoint of the narrator in 'The Door' the authoress gives much detail by looking at how the campus students in Peradeniya were privy to the modus operandi pro leftwing student groups adopted to spread their information and communicate their beliefs.

The night time poster pasting operations and meetings in student hostels, or Halls as they are called in Peradeniya, all show the reader how the insurgents carried out their stealthy activities, mostly under the cover of night.

The village lass' vantage

'The Silent Intruder' on the other hand is centrefold to Ariyawathi's world where what is spoken about the activities of the 'Radicals' is from the point of an observer who comes to know of the trouble from a distance. The talk that goes around the village and what becomes public knowledge about what the Radicals were up to in terms of defying and attacking the establishment is what the reader is shown as the limits to what Ariyawathi knows.

This again shows when juxtaposed how the two protagonists are of two strata that involve different levels of privilege. And the level of one's privilege in society can very well determine one's accesses to information and knowledge.

One of the strongest indications about the nexus between one's level of privilege and the paths to information and knowledge is in 'The Silent Intruder' where Ariyawathi is made to rely on the insidious Nandalal to get information about Sunil's existence after he is taken in to government custody.

The authorial intentions

As a writer who was very likely made to feel at quarters too close for comfort, the rabid tensions between the JVP insurgents and the government forces during the second leftist insurgency of the late 1980s, the authoress Parvathi Solomons Arasanayagam surely would have found her outlooks about society affected by the mindless violence that erupted on the landscape of her youth. The short stories discussed in this article would evince to a certain degree how she felt both the need to express a great deal of the anxiety that ruptured the fabric of civilian life at different levels in society.

However, her record of symbolisms and narrative of fictional situations and plots, while not being a historical account in the strict sense of the term, works as a reflection of what the past has impressed on her.

Keeping clear of actual labels

Her short stories are not presented as narratives that deliver 'labels' to the reader.

Any Sri Lankan reader will identify the context of the period of history in which 'The Door' is situated. Any Sri Lankan reader will place the story of Ariyawathi as being either during the first insurrection of 1971 or during the second insurgency of 1988-89, since unlike 'The Door' the 'symbols' and 'signals' the authoress has created in the narrative aren't as time specific as per the nature of events in 'The Silent Intruder', although one may infer it is more likely to be related to the second insurgency period rather than the first. But then why hasn't she called 'a spade a spade' in her stories and not clearly 'named' the organisation of the insurgents in their actual names without merely indicating their nature by naming them 'Radicals'?

Reaching for a universality

Perhaps, the authoress believes in keeping the message at the level of symbolic relevance.

And not make it specific in terms of creating narratives that seeks to overtly become 'recorded history'. Perhaps what the reader finds in these stories are actual stories the writer came to know of, woven into elaborate literary narratives, or stories that are the result of her imagination and creative licence at work based on what was sensible to her creative pulses about the state of human affairs in a time of history that witnessed much upheaval.

The 'truth' behind the 'text' in relation to actual history, and 'recorded history' at that may not be relevant in the intentions of the authoress, one is led to believe.

It is the world that she creates within the confines of her written word that the reader is taken to, and shown as a journey into the state of the all too human characters whose fates unfold through narratives that bespeak of a sensitive observer who was at work as the authorial hand, which feigned not to craft her fictions to bear the authority of history. Perhaps it is this very basis that will allow the emotional states of her characters to carry a sense of universality.