ICES: Lankan writing and literary buffoonery
By Rajpal Abeynayake
Last Monday the International Center for Ethnic Studies (ICES) organized the first - as the organizers promised - of a series of discussions that are meant to bring Sri Lanka's English language creative writers, critics, and interested readers together.
Good thinking. First, the event showed how badly Sri Lankan writers in English have been disadvantaged by the fact that there isn't a community of dispassionate yet well-meaning critics and readers -- by and large -- who can offer these writers some valid constructive criticism of their work.
What was put on, was a show of 'you scratch my back I scratch yours' criticism which was of course typical of the kind of incestuous literally culture that is present in Colombo's circumscribed English writers milieu. Some quoted Anita Desai. Good. It would be nice if these writers could write as one thirteenth as well as Desai does.
Mediocrity
The whole exercise was funny, because it took off from a standpoint of critiquing work which is in large part so seminal and sketchy yet, that it doesn't stand the test of that kind of scrutiny. Some might say that these are work that has been recognized by the Gratiaen Awards Committee.
Let us get that contention out of the way first. Senaka Bandaranaike seems to be the only good thing that came out of the Gratiaen awards -- his Gratiaen awards oration has been the point of origin for a discussion on Sri Lanka's intellectual milieu, circa post independence Peradeniya.
The Gratiaen awards stands for nothing in terms of really being a yardstick of creative work in English. Really, the point should not have to be argued. But in this mediocre creative scene it has to be argued - - and the fact that it has to be, is perhaps the most striking facet of that mediocrity.
Take the fact that the Gratiaen award went to a translation this year -- I am sure a good translation -- by Vijitha Fernando. Fernando is not to blame, her translation was better obviously than any of the creative work on offer.
Forgettable plays
But it goes to show the Gratiaen has nothing to honour. It can be set out in many ways, but just one practical way is to take a random look at a given panel of judges. Senaka Abeyratne headed one, once in the history of the awards. Now, Abeyratne's plays, as everyone knows, bombed in Colombo's theaters. That's saying a lot in culturally parched Colombo.
If people are asked whether they remember any plays by Senaka, the answer would have to be "Senaka who''? The plays were so transient a phenomenon, that nobody remembers anything about them except that somebody descended on the Colombo scene, from abroad I think, called himself a playwright, and launched a series of forgettable plays.
Not against the law of course. Anybody is free to do it -- my little cousins do it too in their backyards every now and then, alongside a cute lemonade stand. Good fun, and a good way to get yourself insinuated into the energizing world of arts, and the magical world of theater.
But then what happens? Senaka Abeyratne is suddenly resurrected and made a judge of the Gratiaen awards. The chimerical tyro in theater who bombed is made a Gratiaen judge by virtue of it - -and he makes a speech that was called actually an exercise of "over fondness of cliché" by Ajjith Samaranayake writing in the Observer.
Drinks counter
By now one should be able to say “so much for the Gratiaen”. But Colombo is so utterly persistent in its mediocrity, and will not give up on its dogged ways of institutionalizing the patently barren. Next year they will find another Senaka Abeyratne to grace the Gratiaen panel of judges, and will seek to apotheosize what most of the time borders on drivel if it is not drivel in fact.
This will not do. It has to be deconstructed. True, if the panel has fun, if they have some silly fruit-punch under the palms on Barefoot, and make polite politically correct conversation, it is some sort of a social event, and it will be like a rugger match which doubles as a social promenade. Difference is that at a rugger match you have rugger - whereas the only interesting scrumming that goes on at the Gratiaen is close to the drinks counter.
If anyone challenges me -me and a few like-minded maybe -- to deconstruct the why and the how of it -- we will do so. It can be done point by point. The Gratiaen award is generally given for the near mediocre or totally mediocre, if not downright unreadable -- barring of course a few exceptions such as Carl Muller's Jam Fruit Tree. (I haven't read Tissa Abeysekera's Bringing Tony Home and maybe one or two of the others.) If you even talk about the shortlist, you do not know the meaning of the word literature.
Taken apart
So it is into this milieu that we enter, when we seek to showcase Sri Lankan writing in English, and what do we proceed to do? At ICES we were sent on a critique of this work that was an exercise quite like feeling about the emperor's (…you know which one’s) clothes to see how finely textured they were.
Work will be critiqued, and academics will 'position' the work, they will discover narrative tensions and cultural spaces for it, and this deconstruction is of course the necessary pursuit of the informed literary critique.
But books are critiqued that way - - they may be even read that way in an intellectual sense -- but they are never written that way. This is why an academic can never understand that one cannot de-construct work that's not already ‘constructed’ - - work that is so seminal that it still doesn't hang together to be taken apart.
Now, Neloufer De Mel, of the English Department of the University of Colombo is an awful nice person - - and I am sure, she as the Chair, had her heart in the right place. She might then take issue with me, for saying that she can't do her job (the one that she usually does, holding up literary work to criticism) with our Sri Lankan books in the English language.
But, I offer one credential to substantiate what I say to Neloufer. I am a writer, which I think Neloufer isn't, and most of the academics there aren't.
I write poetry and short stories for private consumption, and who knows, some of the academics like her do that too! But let's leave that side of my writing alone. But I W-R-I-T-E. I write a column, I write a spoof or a lampoon now and then, I try, god knows, to wield that keyboard as creatively as a columnist who writes a piece of satire often has to do.
But this no piece of satire. The fact is, from this knowledge of original writing I know that you can't write the way you critique a work. You write with a passion -- not within a “narrative space” the whole idea which at the time of writing to any writer would be as alien as apple pie is to Poramola. You write to be read, you write to convey emotion and idea, you right to capture attention and keep it captive. Therefore you write - - you don't go around creating “narrative spaces and structured binary matrixes,” and then hope it all hangs together to somehow make a work of literature.
Literary scrutiny
Now, when the work goes fully written, it can be “positioned” or trisected, even dismembered for all its worth -- and to kingdom come maybe -- but work does not reach that stage just because we pretend that it does.
Undoubtedly, one of the writers who read from her work that day, Ruwanthi Chickera was damn good. Everyone knows that. Her work stands upto literary scrutiny. It is a personal reaction, but Sumathy Sivamohan whom I had not read at the time of the meeting but now have, is getting there, at best. But only Ruwanthi writes, and does not merely contrive to. About Madubashini Ratnayake, she certainly hasn't learnt to write from the time she has learnt to critique - ergo, the less said it seems the better.
However, here is an excerpt from her work: “I was just a thread she held in her panic filled, unthinking, irreversible moment of finding answers.”
Here is another: “The rear view mirror splashed the white of her teeth between deep red lips for a fleeting moment.”
Here is even another, for being maudlin: “He was sharply reminded of something. Years ago, they had walked like this upon this beach one day. It could have been just before marriage or after, he couldn't remember times clearly. The waves had danced for them beneath a sky streaked with all colours of the rainbow. Her hand had been in his, the sea was at their feet and before them had stretched eternity.”
Sumathi writes passionately, she seethes –
Please turn to page 15
and then she ends up with things like “flat as a flat screen TV,” and even Senaka Abeyratne would wonder how that was allowed to be kept in the text.
Yes, this is seminal work. But Sri Lanka is the country for unwritten novels, the self published work, and the Gratiaen award winning egg. It is an influential milieu. One can never know what they will do next. Some of these writers have powerful connections, powerful fathers even. Rajiva Wijesinghe will write a unctuous review for anyone anytime, and he was born with enough silver spoons in his mouth to wangle a book of Madubashini's to be published, say in Singapore or even Turin -- or even Massachusetts maybe?
But it will take a lot more than that to get these people read by real readers. All of this is not to be disruptive. It means one thing: let us not kid ourselves. Seminal talent can always be worked on -- but it will never be worked on if the audience is a bunch of hurrah boys and girls who say “they are adorable” when a lot of sunsets get written about, and people write sentences such as “fire was licking at the ice in my heart.” And no. I am not talking about English -- Sri Lankan English is ‘on’ and acceptable, barring the patently incomprehensible. But it is the mawkishness of it all that gags.
This article is not meant to be politically correct, and yes, that must be very heavy on understatement. But, it is not meant to say “up yours” to a literally milieu that is so smug that the fact that there is indeed good writing and bad writing in this world, side by side, is alien to them. It is not to say “up yours” to a milieu that says whatever that gets published in a totally non-competitive milieu must necessarily be considered great. It not even to ay “up yours” to a literary milieu that thinks a little word of friendly encouragement and back patting by Amitabh Ghosh means he said you have arrived.
Why waste my time saying “up yours”. It is on the contrary, to say - good job - ICES - you have tried to do something with our writing. In the process, what you have done is expose the pitiful incapacity of the milieu to see itself in perspective.
For some good to be done about this kind of writing, these kinds of meetings must continue. Let the writers talk as writers, and not as critics, and let them hold their work first to the scrutiny of the writer -- even the writer in themselves as opposed to the critic. Drop words like “these are Sri Lankan's accomplished creative writers in English”. There aren't any except Carl Muller (he is great when he is his brilliant, and when he is bad I suspect he is just being bone lazy) and the irreverent and maturing Ruwanthi, who shows great potential, and those who write abroad, such as Ondaatje Gunasekera and Shyam - who by now are not Sri Lankan citizens. Abhor the self-promoting and that which is promoted by the influential, in a non-competitive milieu where almost anything that gets written on paper becomes “English writing” by default. No I am not being over critical. Just don't suffocate writers with undue or premature canonization. Get real - then start over, and see whether we can produce some good writing -- and when and if it does surface, don't enter it in that everyman's sweepstakes for literary buffoonery - the Gratiaen awards. That might be a start.
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