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A jazz ‘base’ for his latest book
Tissa Abeysekara talks to Madhubhashini Ratnayake on the experiences that have led to new horizons in English writing
Years ago, at a conference on literature at the Sabaragamuwa University, I heard Tissa Abeysekara read an excerpt from a novel in progress. In a black shirt and a sarong, he read of love and heartbreak between a virgin carter and a prostitute - and as the afternoon filled with the deep voice of the reader, something delicate, something poignant, something heart-felt, hung in the air, riveting the audience to their seats. Later, when I had shaken myself out of that spell, I remember telling him, "That was lovely. Only I am not sure how much of the spell was due to the personality of the reader and how much on the writing itself."

Only just having read that novel about six years later, named In My Kingdom of the Sun and the Holy Peak, which is due to be released on September 2, by Vijitha Yapa Publications, I get the feeling again that the importance of the event hangs as much on the writer's personality as on the beauty of his writing.

In which ways does this personality stand out? Tissa Abeysekara is one of the rare people in this country whose co-ordinate bilingualism enables him to move between the worlds of Sinhala and English with equal ease, leaving his significant touch in the world of art - in the spheres of cinema and literature specifically. Having first made a name in the Sinhala speaking world (I am using the concepts of different worlds here because these two spheres very rarely overlap in Sri Lanka.), he blazed into the world of English writing with his first novel Bringing Tony Home winning the Gratiaen Award for 1996, and the Booker Prize winning Michael Ondaatje calling it a "lost masterpiece". Subsequently, he has been able to balance the different aspects of his personality as he journeyed the different realms of art , writing Sinhala film scripts, music reviews, critical essays, and English novels - all with a touch of finesse, unfortunately all too rare these days.

"The Sinhala and English languages were both my inheritance in my rather complex childhood," says Abeysekara. "My father, a lover of English literature even though he studied law, had instilled the love of a very Catholic reading of English texts when I was small, and had a library to match his taste, so that by the age of ten I had read much. My Sinhala input, which I got from my mother, on the contrary, was mainly aural, for she was the one who was an endless source of Sinhala folk tales, myths and legends, which she in turn had inherited from her mother. Not only that, the Sinhala classics like Pujavaliya and Rajavaliya also passed through her to me."

In his latest novel, it is easy then to guess whose influence is mainly manifest both in style and content. Tissa Abeysekara too writes "aurally" - "I hear most of the sentences that I write - so that the rhythm and the music of the sentence structure matter a lot to me," says he .

In content, the book is structured as three novellas, the first specially based on the myths and legends that have passed down among the people, the other two also basically dealing with stories told and events remembered, coloured with imagination, stained with rumour and fattened with exaggeration and the fancies of collective memory.

The first part "A White Horse and the Solar Eclipse" deals with the fall of the Kandyan Kingdom, and spans the time period of AD 1796-1815; the second which has the time of Independence as its background is called "Crossing at Dark Point"; and the last, spanning the years 1956-1989, is "The Bull, The Cobra and The Golden Swan". This book, much more ambitious in scale than his first, is a multi-layered, multi-textured work, very different from the poignant simplicity found in Bringing Tony Home.

The perspective of the narrative passes from one character to another, the events move from one time to another, and this calls for a careful reading. "I love music. And that has influenced my writing as well. Specially, I am a great Jazz fan. What I tried to do in this book is actually to follow the principles of Jazz music in my writing - of having a base from which to improvise, go anywhere I please and then come back to that base,” he says explaining the recurring phrase, passage or motif that he employs in this novel.

This disjointedness, be it intra-sectional or inter-sectional is also very much a part of the technique that he wanted to achieve here, says Abeysekara. The first section is "Recounted in Samudraghosha" according to the subtitle - and the use of that metre should give a clue as to what the writer is attempting to do.

With regard to content, the three novellas can be said to represent three important phases in the history of Sri Lanka but apart from the first, which deals with national history, the second and third are more personal histories which nevertheless, through their unfolding, give a view of what is happening in the country as a whole. A common motif that links the three stories is the pilgrimage that butterflies are supposed to make to Adam's Peak at the end of their lives, and the fact that there are no butterflies in the last section is telling of the political degeneration and corruption that has overtaken the country since Independence.

All three sections are centred on women, the first, Subamma, according to legend, the lover of Pilimatalawe who might have murdered Keerti Sri Rajasinghe. Its on that incident the story is woven around. The second is on Dingiri, the village woman whose husband is released early from prison because of Independence Day. The third is Sarojini, the 'kept' woman of a politician-to-be. Though their stories are different, they share a common bond in being the victims of political expediency.

Also, all the stories deal with what the writer calls "the twilight world", the world of the dead, a world he has always been fascinated with, having spent his childhood in the Depanama, Hokandare area, where every evening he could hear the devol drums of a nearby devale or a thovil ceremony somewhere, pounding into the night. "I am fascinated with the low country drum - that drum that I heard so much in my childhood. In that sound, there was a communication with the dead. There is a sub-culture of folk ritual in our villages that kept in touch with the dead, and this I have always found enthralling," says Abeysekara. It is that fascination that has come out in all the stories, and specially in the second section, which incidentally has one of the most unexpected suicide scenes I have ever read in English literature - the juxtaposition of everyday life with the world of the dead.

The stories also show how myth and legend grow in a community - the psychology of a people that allows such beliefs to exist and finally, its negative aspect - the dependency, even among the 'leaders' of the country on the supernatural and the occult - which might one day be the driving force of the destiny of the land.

So, though the novel cannot be rightly said to belong to the category of magic realism of Marquez and Kundera, it does not belong to the realistic mode that many English writers of Sri Lanka write in today. In content and style, Tissa Abeysekara is creating new horizons.

And such startling and effective changes are welcome as they can only broaden the limits of English writing in Sri Lanka, and that is a very positive thing.

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