Abstract
Introduction
The conjoining of “Politics and Poetics” in titles has become popular in the contemporary academic world especially in relation to research on Sri Lanka. To cite two examples, in 2016, Suvendrini Perera published Survival Media: The Politics and Poetics of Mobility and the War in Sri Lanka. Two years later, Harshana Rambukwella has come up with The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: The Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism, which is to a great extent based on his PhD research at the University of Hong Kong. These titles further demonstrate how those who graduated with degrees in English Literature from the University of Peradeniya and elsewhere in Sri Lanka over the last forty years or so have changed their foci of research, as their careers developed unlike their predecessors. This re-classification of what constitutes English Studies is a worldwide phenomenon, but it is interesting that, in 1968, Yasmine Gooneratne brought out English Literature in Ceylon, 1815 to 1878 and, in 1977, D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke Developing Countries in British Fiction. These works are also based on doctoral research and, though history and related subjects are brought in, prominence is given to literature in English. Their subsequent work, too, followed the same pattern. Although they employed postcolonial theory and other modern insights, their research was indubitably anchored to literature. Rambukwella’s investigation includes literature, but his is emphatically a product of the cultural studies age, which also brings in an awareness of deconstruction, orientalism, discourse analysis, sociology, history, politics and much more. Furthermore, many of the original texts he deals with are in Sinhala so an advanced knowledge of Sinhala, and the ability to translate are required as well. All these studies are seminal but products of their time.
Rambukwella’s strategy is to examine the life and works of three figures associated in different ways with Sinhala Buddhist nationalism: Anagarika Dharmapala, the 19th century Buddhist revivalist; S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the Oxbridge educated Anglophile who invoked Sinhala Buddhist nationalism to become prime minister in the 1950s, and Gunadasa Amarasekara, a writer and professional, whose stridently Buddhist rhetoric was influential during the time of the ethnic conflict. The critic Sumathy Sivamohan argues that “Rambukwella looks not so much at the recovery of the past in the making of the modern Sinhala and Buddhist identity, but at the makers of such identities and the complex process of self-fashioning that they undertake”. For Rambukwella himself, there is “a fine line between critically rethinking ‘Western’ assumptions about non-Western societies and adopting a nativist stance that builds a line of defence between a perceived inside and outside” (151). Rambukwella concludes, “To disentangle the historical genealogies of the many forms of authenticity that continue to inform and shape nationalism in the present will require a critical position that can rise above such a filial relationship with the nation” (151–52). While some commentators, like Sivamohan above, have generally applauded his effort, others, such as Kalana Seneviratne, while acknowledging its importance, have suggested that he has been merely iconoclastic and that the philosophy he is debunking should have been replaced by another orientation. The author would argue, of course, that his book was not conceived as some kind of replacement for Sinhala Buddhist nationalism.
2018 was a year of transition for the Gratiaen Trust. Details of the Gala event which celebrated its 25th anniversary along with citations of the shortlist and the winning work were provided in the previous bibliography because the judging that was completed in 2018 focussed on entries that were submitted in 2017. However, there are other projects undertaken by the Trust that need to be included here. On an initiative by Michael Ondaatje, its founder, S.W. Perera, the chair, and trustee Harshana Rambukwella visited the Seagull Foundation in Calcutta to discuss the possibility of the Foundation carrying out editing workshops for the Gratiaen Trust. The lack of a proper editing culture in Sri Lanka had resulted in the production of many sub-standard texts, it was felt, which also led to very talented local writers failing to achieve much in international competition unless their work was published elsewhere. Even established publishers who also functioned as editors had no formal training. The negotiations were successful, and the Seagull Foundation agreed to hold such a workshop in 2019. It is hoped that such a venture will fill the lacuna.
A few years after it was founded, the Gratiaen Trust held a creative writing workshop for writers. In 2018, a much more substantial project was instituted in two segments in collaboration with Commonwealth Writers. The resource persons were Sunila Galappatti from the Trust (who was responsible for the project), Jacob Ross, fiction writer, editor and Creative Writing tutor born in Granada but now based in the UK, and publisher and workshop facilitator Ajitha Gangadharan Sushama from Bangalore. An extract from the relevant press release reads: The workshop will comprise two segments, one taking place 11–14 May and the next, with the same group of writers, 18–21 October. At the workshop writers will have a chance to work in detail on their own manuscripts with two experienced practitioners – one local and one visiting – enjoying both one-to-one attention and work as a group. After the session in May, writers will have five months to progress their work on their own before returning for further mentoring in October […]. Over a number of years, the question has been raised both within the Trust and by judges, friends and critics of the Gratiaen Prize, whether prizes are the thing most needed by writers in Sri Lanka. The Gratiaen Trust celebrates all efforts made for writers in Sri Lanka, believing there is a role both for encouragement and critical rigour. While the Trust is only mandated to administer the Prize, it is fortunate to have forged a partnership with Commonwealth Writers to deliver this year’s workshop.
Soon after the above projects had been implemented, or plans finalized, S.W. Perera who has been on the Board of Trustees for 16 of its 25-year existence decided to step down as Chair, a position he had held since 2010. Neloufer de Mel, an English Professor, like her predecessor, replaced him.
Literary awards are often controversial – the non-award of the Fairway Literary Prize after a short list of four announced earlier in the year could be described as such. This prize, which is the richest (albeit one of the most recent on offer), has from its inception depended on former Gratiaen judges to be on its panels and, invariably, the winners and shortlisted authors also had previously won the Gratiaen or been shortlisted. There were many such links this year as well. Among the judges, Professor Dushyanthi Mendis had previously chaired a Gratiaen Prize panel and another judge, Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe, was shortlisted for the Gratiaen on more than one occasion. Furthermore, the shortlisted works included Sandali Handagama’s Rao’s Guide to Lime Pickling, which had been shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize as a manuscript in 2014, and Charulatha Abeysekara Thewarathanthri’s Stories that had won both the Gratiaen Prize (2015) as a manuscript and the Godage National Awards (2017). Furthermore, on the advice of the Gratiaen judges, Thewarathanthri had her manuscript professionally edited by renowned creative writer and senior academic Yasmine Gooneratne who has created a group called the Guardian Angels to vet such manuscripts before publication. While the Gratiaen allows a non-award, judges are informed that if the prize is not going to be conferred, it should be announced at the shortlist event in fairness to the sponsors who would not take too kindly to being told at the final gala that no prize is forthcoming after they have incurred major expenses. The decision not to award a prize after coming up with a shortlist which included entries that had won more established awards or had been highly commended by other judges is novel indeed and reopens the old argument about the subjective nature of literary awards.
The Gratiaen Prize for 2018 was won by Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke for his drama manuscript “The One Who Loves You So”. A write-up of this play given by the author himself is found in the section of the introduction which focuses on drama. The play was first produced in 2018. The young author prevailed over multiple award-winning novelist Shehan Karunathilaka and others in winning the Gratiaen Prize. The official citations of all four shortlisted manuscripts, as provided by the judging panel of Gill Caldicott, Ramya Chamalie Jirasinha and Andi Schubert, are given below:
Set in the after-life, which apparently is no better than a government tax office, “Chats with the Dead” is a chilling account of the horrifying extra judicial liberties that the Sri Lankan State has taken over the years. The protagonist of this well-crafted novel challenges us to join him and his compatriots in their struggles to pursue justice in the confusing times of terror that marked the second JVP uprising. Full of dark humour, Karunatilaka’s novel bears witness in times that are both tragically personal and personally tragic. It is a novel that will ring true each time the choice is made to value authoritarianism and political chaos over and above the pursuit of peace and justice.
“Youthful Escapades” is an exploration of the growing sexual and emotional maturity of young men that draws you in and slowly reveals its secrets. Viewed through the lens of the abuse of under-aged men and the lives they subsequently endeavour to build, the novel presents us with complex characters, relationships, and situations that ask us to consider our own biases and responses when confronted with difficult choices. Mahaliyana reminds us that the most pervasive of legacies are those that wrap around our everyday lives and relationships, they enmesh themselves in our conversations, they keep us awake at night, they gnaw at our doubts and undermine our fears. To read Youthful Escapades is also to be reminded of the power of dialogue – how over a cup of tea, late at night, with a friend or partner we might all overcome our past experiences and build a better future.
A play in two acts, “The one who loves you so’’ is a consummate work of art in one of the hardest of genres to realize success – both on the page and on the stage. An evocative dramatization of two young men navigating their relationships and sexualities in today’s Sri Lanka may seem like a story about a casual sexual encounter in a harsh world. However, its frank and bold telling of a transient and largely physical relationship and the expression of hope for something more is both poignant and revealing. The strength of the dramatic dialogue between the two actors is underpinned by the detail and subtlety of the stage directions. Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke has clearly mastered the art form – both in form and content, he understands the power of what is said and what remains unsaid, what is seen and what is surmised.
“They Failed to Kill Her” powerfully depicts the lived realities of women and their families as they come to terms with the disabilities that result from a traumatic illegal abortion. Speaking to us through the perspectives of multiple characters, Zaneer’s novel is commendable for its explorations of the ways in which guilt, faith, love, and compassion shape their choices and priorities. It is an extraordinary story, touching the lives of ordinary people, revealing depth and unexpected character development as they face and overcome difficulties and challenges. But over and beyond all of this, the reader’s lasting impression of “They Failed to Kill Her” is the power of hope to keep us fighting for those we love, the lives we build, and the opportunities.
In 2018, the Gratiaen Trust also offered the H.A.I. Goonetileke Prize for Translation which was won by Vini Vitharna for his translation of the classical work the Kav Silumina (Crest-Gem of Poetry) from Sinhala into English.
The most refreshing work of poetry to appear in the year under review was Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe’s Love Poems from a Frangipani Garden. Readers familiar with Sri Lankan English poets who over-use images of flowers and make their poems hyper romantic and exotic would approach a collection with such a title with caution, but after internalizing the entire volume, one is reminded of Keats’ famous lines “Ay, in the very temple of Delight/Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine”. The reader’s expectations are dashed all too soon. As Renuka Sadanandan remarks in reviewing the collection, in this slim volume are also musings on the human condition, one’s inner self and the questions that come to us all at some quiet place – what is life all about. This is one of the book’s binding threads – mortality and surely, how our connections with people, fragile and fleeting though they be, define our lives.
Some readers would expect a poem with the title “The Frangipani Garden I Grow” to have an exotic appeal, but they would be in error. The poet makes it plain that “In this small tropical land/the tree shelters no man’s/Tahitian fantasies” (a reference to Gauguin’s paintings). Instead, the garden – which is perhaps a metaphor for Sri Lanka – provides the background for suicide and the presence of “noisy bees”, “greedy crows” and the “president’s men”. These are negatives images in the context of the poem. “Sita’s Story”, for its part, reverses the traditional story that involves Rama, Sita, and Ravana. Situated in the region where according to myth Sita was hidden in Sri Lanka, the story centralises Sita’s assertions over the men who have tried to victimize her: In this story kings will monkey about While Sita emerges, breaking The cave door, eschewing fire, To send them tumbling, limp, Crown broken, to the foot of the hill.
Other poems in the collection dwell on issues faced by Sri Lankans who emigrate in “We Travelled under Cover from Home” and the tsunami in “Tsunami Villagers”. Jirasinghe’s poetry is not without other Sri Lankan literary influences. The thrust of the poem “Skin” and especially its ending – “kindness will be our only shield” – is reminiscent of Anne Ranasinghe’s line “Memory is our shield, our only shield”, which was itself influenced by Elie Wiesel, while “The Shape of Cinnamon” echoes to some extent Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cinnamon Peeler”. It must be stressed, however, that Jirasinghe uses these influences as a point-of-departure only. These poems are not imitative. They have an integrity of their own.
The publication of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy in 1994 was regarded as path-breaking because it depicted gay themes in a novel based in Sri Lanka. The play “The One Who Loves You So” by Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke could prove to be a watershed as well. It was introduced to Colombo theatre goers at the Namel Malini Punchi theatre in August. Although attitudes to gay relationships have changed somewhat since 1994, the island is still governed by colonial laws on sodomy. Plays such as “The One Who Loved You So” will no doubt enable audiences to discuss such issues in the open and perhaps bring about necessary change. As already mentioned above, the script of the play won the Gratiaen Prize. The following account is rendered in the author’s own words. Editing has been reduced to a minimum: A regular Friday night finds a wealthy trust-fund Colombo native on a gay dating app trying to find someone for a few hours. In walks a British expat, looking for a few moments of pleasure and not much else. What is supposed to be just a run-of-the-mill one-night experience becomes something quite different. Over two one-day encounters, mostly confined to a crummy one-bedroom apartment, the two men make love, tell stories, inebriate and commiserate, and in the process share their lives with each other. As the pair tangle between lovemaking and connection, sex and sexuality, love and lust, “The One Who Loves You So” grapples with the complexities of short-term intimacy and asks what becomes of love when it has no recourse to future illusions. “The One Who Loves You So” is a candid and honest love story, a play about our universal struggle for connection.
Dramsoc 2018 was held at the E.O.E. Pereira Theatre, as usual, and the variety of plays on offer demonstrates that the University of Peradeniya alone among universities in Sri Lanka maintains the English theatre culture that was once vibrant in several universities. The plays performed this year included “Waiting for Godot” (Faculty of Arts); “Neat, or on the Rocks” (Faculty of Engineering); “Let’s Give Them Curry” (Faculty of Dental Sciences), “Christmas at the Grand Orient” (Faculty of Science) and “Awaiting Patients” (Faculty of Management). The Faculty of Engineering had enjoyed much success in recent years, leading pundits to ponder whether Engineering is able to practise regularly in their own theatre (where the drama competition is held), whereas other faculties had limited time to do so, which gave this group an unfair advantage. Be that as it may, the Arts Faculty has been resurgent over the last two years. “Waiting for Godot” won awards for the best play, the best actress (Shanilki Yalegama), best actor (Vasika Udurawana), best supporting actress (Sumudu Rupasinghe) and best director (Banduka Premawardena). Engineering usually carries awards relating to Props, Costumes, Sounds and Light. 2018 was not an exception. The other awards were best supporting actor (Suran Weerasekera of the Faculty of Engineering) and best stage management (Faculty of Science).
Giving centrality to crows in narrative is not unprecedented (witness Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow) but unusual. In Kakiyan: The Story of a Crow Elmo Jayawardena has brought out an excellent novel which features the Sri Lankan crow, a much derided even hated scavenger bird but, as the novel demonstrates, one that has much to offer. The volume’s editor, Yasmine Gooneratne comments: In reading the autobiography of this remarkable author, the reader gains a bird’s eye view of the human condition, for Kakiyan’s adventures have led him into law courts, football fields and many other places where people foregather, usually oblivious of the fact that a beady eye is trained upon their activities. His insights are valuable, his judgements reliable: he is not “just a crow”, he is a just crow. We have a lot to learn about our own world from Kakiyan, from his mother, the matriarch Alice Crow, from old Roy Crow, the optimist who unfailingly finds “the silver linings” in every cloud, from his philosophical brother-in-law, the meditative Cameron (“Cato”) Crow, and from all the other characters who fly in and out of his pages.
It is precisely because crows congregate wherever humans are to be found that they can furnish unique insights into human psychology, motives and actions. Kakiyan is rendered with compassion, humour and much understanding about the human condition. It is an absorbing read.
Alagu Subramaniam is a writer whom many Sri Lankan literary aficionados have heard about but not actually read. This is because this barrister who gave up a potentially lucrative career to become a writer died young; furthermore, many of his stories were lost or not easily available at the time of his death. It is for this reason that the publishers Perera-Hussein should be thanked for bringing out The Big Girl and Other Stories, a collection that captures life in Jaffna about half a century ago with an immediacy and assuredness that others have attempted but not always succeeded. As Sam Perera, one of the partners of Perera-Hussein concludes: In summary, The Big Girl contains 17 finely-written episodes of humour, surprise, pathos and rare insight into the daily lives of Sri Lankans, with all the historical, religious, cultural and psychological diversity and complexity this implies, during a tumultuous and formative period. A period now past but, thanks to these reprinted stories, present and vivid once more. The stories may seem quiet, but they are likely to echo in readers’ minds long after their last page has been turned.
Former Gratiaen award-winner Vihanga Perera brought out another work this year entitled Under Attack. In the words of the author, Under Attack follows the story of two journalists who report from Colombo, Sri Lanka, during the last months of the Sri Lankan civil war and its immediate aftermath. It attempts to frame the conflicting forces that operated within the metropolis – specifically, in the fringes of independent reporting – during that decisive phase of the war in late-2008 and early-2009, with insinuations that suggest covert state terrorism, tracking and intimidation of journalists and activists, and attacks carried out on “marked civilian targets”. In a parallel trajectory, the novella also maps the failing efforts of a young journalist who strives to publish a book on Richard de Zoysa, the journalist who was abducted and killed by paramilitary operatives, twenty years earlier, in February 1990.
Many new writers who have emerged in the recent past possess a very good command of English but not the literary spark that makes for compelling fiction, or vice versa. Samantha Nanayakkara’s Professor’s Mistress, a collection of stories in which the title story is the longest, could be an exception. Nanayakkara has the versatility to draw from a range of experiences in Sri Lanka and abroad and convey scene and social interaction with much verve and subtlety. This is not to say that the technique is without fault. The title story, for instance, is overladen with intrigue as the reader is teasingly kept from knowing the identity of the woman with whom the married professor is having a relationship till the last possible moment.
The titles in fiction referenced above notwithstanding, there is nothing out-of-the-ordinary in what was available in Sri Lanka in 2018. However, Sri Lankan expatriate Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, which was long-listed for the Booker, more than compensates for this lack. Unlike Running in the Family, Anil’s Ghost or The Cat’s Table, this work does not include any Sri Lankan content, so it does not warrant an extended review but is noteworthy in terms of its echoes of his previous work. Running in the Family is an attempt to piece together facts about the narrator’s ancestors, especially his father. In Warlight, Nathaniel is perplexed when his mother first abandons him and his sister Rachel and then returns. It is apparent that she was involved in some mysterious activities during the Second World War but identifying the same is problematic. In Anil’s Ghost, piecing together an identity (via the remains of Sailor) is shown to be a painstaking, often imperfect exercise. There are similar touches here, as Nathaniel endeavours to discover “the confused and vivid dream of my youth”. That he secures a job in the Foreign Office in the second part of the novel, which allows him to unearth more information about his mother’s wartime past and her association with the Marsh Felon who got her involved in such work, is to some extent reminiscent of Anil’s preoccupations and Ondaatje himself in Running in the Family (though, once again, the search is incomplete). Nathaniel is a little older than Mynah, the narrator in The Cat’s Table, but the thrust of the narrative in both suggests a writer/author-persona trying to retrieve a lost childhood or reimagining the same as an adult. In his brilliant review of the novel, Andrew Motion comments, there exists at the centre of his [Ondaatje’s] imagination, and therefore of his work as a whole, a tussle between the urge to reveal and the instinct to suppress and/or conceal. Characteristically, it manifests and seeks to resolve itself in a profound attraction to secrets.
It is this “tussle” that makes his fiction frustrating and yet compelling.
2018 marked the Golden Jubilee of the Booker Prize and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient was conferred the title “Golden Booker” on the basis of a public vote that featured all the winning Booker entries during its 50-year existence.
This bibliography and introduction necessarily focuses on writing in English and rarely makes reference to cinema because English cinema has not broken much ground in Sri Lanka; however, a noteworthy event in the year under review was Sumathy Sivamohan’s latest film Puththu Saha Piyavaru (“Sons and Fathers” – “Thanaiyarum Thanthaiyarum”), winning the Best Film (Jury) award at the World Indian Film Festival in Hyderabad. Sivamohan is Professor in English at the University of Peradeniya and an award-winning creative writer in English but, over the years, she has also achieved much in Tamil Literature. Her most recent venture would indicate that she has added Sinhala to her productions as well – the main characters (husband and wife) are Sinhala and Tamil. These interactions among people from different ethnicities constitute some of the major talking points in the play where the theatre world is shown to facilitate such unions when conditions elsewhere are not the same.
This introduction would be incomplete without reference to the passing of Ambalavaner Sivanandan at the age of 94. He left Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) for England in the wake of the first riots against the Tamil community in 1958 and became famous for his editorship of the journal Race and Class. His arrival in England coincided with the Notting Hill riots directed at the black community. Both these events had a major impact on him. He became the Director of the Institute of Race Relations and “helped change the way Britain thought about race” (as mentioned in the memorial tribute paid by Gary Younge in The Guardian listed in the bibliography below). Sivanandan was targeted by many groups because of what was regarded as his controversial stances on issues, so he kept a low profile except in his writings. Little would be gained by my compiling an elaborate memorial to this colossus of a man. Readers are advised to access some of the tributes paid by others who are better qualified. Links to the same are found later in the bibliography. To cite my brief interactions with him, in 1999, I was on the panel of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Eurasia which chose his seminal novel When Memory Dies as the “best first book”. I subsequently wrote the first review article on the book for The Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities. He got in touch with me, thanked me for the piece, and we established an engaging correspondence thereafter. When he published his collection of stories Where the Dance Is and asked me for a review, I did so in The Book Review (India) in 2000. His is a major loss to the world of letters.