Joyfully capturing local experience with all its nuances
Ciara Mandulee Mendis’s collection of short stories, The Red Brick Wall, is refreshing in a literary milieu where we too often get to read about the English speaking- their pseudo-westernized concerns or villagers seen through a passing car window- their lives imagined. This collection’s voice is fresh, crisp, and as Victoria Walker and fellow judges of the Gratiaen Prize for 2020 remarked, it is packed with characters one rarely meets in local English writing.
Take, for example, the class of little imps in Mallung, a short story where students boiling under a takarang roof in mid-March are discussing their favourite foods in English. But first they have to deal with the ditty in the textbook about hot cross buns, and therein lies an unsurmountable cultural stumbling block. Was this like jam paan, or seeni banis?
This kind of postcolonial conundrum flavours the ten stories in Ciara’s debut collection. It was African writing in English “so daring and political” that taught Ciara to deal frankly and truthfully with Sri Lanka’s own postcolonial legacy, taking up a truly native standpoint. Also material was Sinhala literature–which taught her what to write about–and world literatures which put things in neat focus.
At 29, Ciara is an assistant director at the Department of Cultural Affairs, and has just submitted the thesis for her Master’s in English at Colombo University.
Writing The Red Brick Wall was ‘liberating’ she says as was the experience of using Sri Lankan English in her stories. Hers was the joy of capturing the local experience with all its nuances and cadences and not only in language with a voyeuristic eye.
The collection was drafted with Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s caution against “the danger of the single story” in mind.
Emblazoned on an overleaf of Ciara’s manuscript is Chimamanda’s quote from a TED talk:
“The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.”
Thus in the collection Ciara speaks about stereotypes- how society can reduce people to “certain boxes”, “whereas we should look at the bigger picture- because they have qualities and aspects other than the stereotypes they have been locked into.”
An example is her story about a feminist in the collection, Woman for Women, where she lays bare the nasty farrago of social prejudices and stereotypes set against women who stand up for equal rights.
The politics of language is the main theme in the stories, and drama unfolds when language becomes a barrier.
“People who speak English and people who speak Sinhala think they are very different from each other. But when they actually get to know each other and get to understand the human being, you see that the human qualities- the way you think and humanness- is very similar… the similarities have been hidden because of the differences.”
Ciara makes it a point to read all the Sinhala novels shortlisted for the State Literary Award and the Swarnapusthaka which trustily feed her with the rhythm of the local pulse. But she says it is important to read from all cultures even if in translation because each language ‘is its own worldview’.
It is the Sinhala reading that gives that wonderful immediacy to her stories, capturing the texture of island living more astutely than many an English writer.
Whilst the present collection was written during the pandemic (it began with the first lockdown, to make sense of an experience that seemed unreal) it deals with postcolonial experiences of a lifetime.
Mallung, for example, was inspired by English medium textbooks which dealt with outlandish things often more befuddlingly exotic even than hot cross buns – allusions which only give rural students the firm notion that English is ‘not for them’. Also misleading are the textbooks’ representation of women, in occupational roles reflecting the reality “of maybe half a century ago”.
In The Gotukola Patch, she writes of a woman who cannot understand her neighbour because she (the neighbour) speaks only English, and thus has to make assumptions about her – all of them actually stereotypes she had been fed with.
Ciara’s remedy for these and other predicaments is simply that we should ‘tell more stories’. “In order to make sense of the reality we should listen to a lot of stories,” she says. “That is really the best way to understand the world.”