Images that beget more images...

A reader's response to Chandani Lokuge's If the Moon Smiled (Penguin Australia 2000)

by Ashley Halpe

"I am the silence of those who never sleep..... I weave my fingers through his curly hair. Like a perfumed araliya in a dream, the memory floats. I pull down the shutters."

I had read this sad coda of Manthri's, sitting in the back of an intercity bus to Kandy, was this the intended bouquet and this the final, civilized perception? Had the author summed up, judged, like Mr. Kurtz in the depths of the Congo and on the edge of hell?

The book's elegiac cadences and ambience intermingled in my semi-consciousness and were still percolating through the hum of the wheels, the whisperings of lovers on either side of me, and the narcotic non-music was stillthrumming into the stale "conditioned" air from the mini-baffles in the roof when I emerged with phrases forming half unsought in my mind:

It is so weird. So much has been depicted, so many remembered images and vignettes, so many episodes of conflict and wounding words and disaster. Yet the narrator remains near-transparent, a whispering to my inner ear.

But this of course is what Chandani Lokuge has been trying to tell me - us - I think. In her prime herself, a fulfilled woman, academic and writer, she has held her own vital energies in check to lend her voice to the annulled women of a certain kind of migrant experience. Torn away from the wonted pieties and domestic rituals of Lankan life before the days of blood, they found themselves required to adapt to the unaccustomed norms and mores of their new worlds. To the growing away of the children who had pretty much been their raison d'etre, to the sharp probings of less sensitive sisters of the ghettoizing migrant communities, to the schizophrenic transits to and from the exterior world of supermarket and technobusiness, to a domestic cocoon of artefacts and art and cassettes, and cookery - from " home," nurturing an impossible dream of an inviolate Lankan core reality.

To be sure Manthri is burdened by a special guilt for an "offence" that the author has the artistic judgement to imply but not reduce to the triteness of factual statement. After their first night together "the crushed white sheet bears no stain, " and Manthri's agonized repudiation of his accusation does not convince the tradition-bound Mahendra.

But this is not really so special after all. I don't mean that the points at issue were not so special, - had she not come virgin to the marriage bed? was the " Proof" so irrefutable? but that the underlying tense, utter, blind adherence to an inherited code is not so special. The particular issues here only dramatize the deeper truth that the migrants carry with them unexamined assumptions and prejudices that can be traumatically, at variance with the new socio-moral environment.

The scene in the bedroom -the tortured cleaving of Manthri to Mahendra, his disgusted rejection of her followed by a fierce domestic rape in which he demands that she lie quite still— prefigures the horrifying inadequacy of both husband and wife to cope with the challenges of the new way of life. The inadequacy will leave their son devastated and permanently damaged, their daughter a will-driven achiever, timetabling her visits to Mahendra in his isolation and Manthri in her psychiatric hospital, the parents back in Sri Lanka shaken and hurt.

Indeed, when the children were still adolescents Manthri's spirit had been beaten into a silence and a compliance that, we see, is not entirely unwilling because her "home" values are deeply entrenched. And Mahendra totally refuses to perceive the necessity to adapt to the new conditions, turning into a brutal domestic Fascist in a portrayal that would seem absurdly caricatural if it were not also so tragically tormented and lacking in self-understanding.

Is it really so comfortless a scene? And do our boasted centuries and value-systems have so little to contribute to our "soul-making" - to use Keats' wonderful phrase -to the formation of our psyches?

The tale of Manthri and her family and the conditions in which it is set do not suggest that the culture in which they had grown to adulthood had given them any sort of resources to relate to in times of trial or confusion or ecstasy or pain. For Manthri memory, even of the most beautiful or happy things, is pain or loss, while Mahendra seems to be a man without either a personal past or a heritage.

Was this, well, emptiness somehow imbricated in the migrant experience, predisposition? Did this also tell us something about ourselves, whether relocated or (seemingly) rooted? Is it that this emptiness is not fleeting but resonant of failure. The failure of a civilisation - ours? Or is it that such migrants have already, even as they contemplate departure, begun a process of dissolving the more pronounced markers of their original identities?

I reflect that in all the "migrant" or diasporic fiction by authors of South Asian descent that I have read, I have yet to experience the presence of a nourishing inheritance from the culture that has been left behind.

Through the meditations of Manthri we perceive and ponder the multiplying hurts and dubieties that seem the inescapable result of transplantation. We watch mesmerized as the novel unfolds vistas of desiccation and disintegration....

Chandani Lokuge's haunting elegy for a particular kind of unexamined life, is moving, unsettling and unfailingly attractive. The writing consistently beautiful, and its rich lyricism is not infrequently surprising in turn of phrase. It is structured with seeming ease to incorporate differing angles of vision and slabs of time. Occasional transpositions of voice vary the telling of the tale. It is very persuasive and, rather frightening.

Put it like this, perhaps. We have opted to stay, but our children and grand-children are on the move. Their minds are already hooked up to the Web, their hearts open to the winds, their psyches vibrating to many drums we know not of, well before they start counting their marks for Australia, Canada or wherever. They have the right, perhaps they are right, to become the globalists they already are in disposition.

But are the global mix and the new citizenry of the world unlikely to be enriched by the things of our cherishing ? I have floated far in meditation and reverie from Chandani Lokuge's fine novel but that is in a way a measure of the degree to which it has taken hold of my imagination -

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