Happy to see promising new crop of writers, says Romesh
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At the Gratiaen: Romesh Gunesekera (right) chatting with Shehan Karunatilaka
It is telling of Romesh Gunesekera’s abiding passion for words that he has thoroughly enjoyed reading every one of the Gratiaen entries this year – a task that many would have found onerous.
For Romesh, it has been part of what he gives back to the island that gave him his eternal Arcadia – the paradise he sets most of his novels and short stories in – whether it is a Colombo Seven house with a wild garden as in Sandglass; the sunny beaches of our idyllic coast as in Reef; or Sigiriya or the less salubrious Maradana; the slummy Mariyakade.
While in Colombo he also hosted a workshop for a group of writers, some ten handpicked from this year’s shortlisters and former winners.
After we sit down Romesh as always is obliging and humours my ‘wide ball’ questions. As ever he is humble and unruffled whether being feted by literary festival organisers or being roasted by critics who sometimes get obsessed over red herrings that they smell out in his novels (and turn out to be other fish entirely).
As for the Gratiaen and the scribes it has fostered, Romesh is very positive, and enthusiastic.
“To me it is really gratifying and rewarding to see so many writers emerging each time I come back… every year there are more and more writers with Sri Lankan connections who are getting published, who are getting heard – here and abroad.”
This is vital as a lone voice cannot often get heard or develop, he feels. “I think it’s culturally more important to have many voices and a kind of community of voices out of which one or two will emerge stronger (and many more not be very strong) but there are many who are really, really good.”
The longlist of eight itself he says, “we judges felt need to be read by everyone”.
It is with the same glimmer of hope he views the expanding world of English fiction. The International Booker Prize (for translated books) is catching on and the interest in translated literature in the UK is expanding ‘than ever before’.
As to the question of his own writing (an area he often circumvents) and what he has discovered through his own writing?
He continues to be a poet (his vocation) and his last poem was on the Aragalaya, homing in on Galle Face.
“It wasn’t easy,” he says “because it’s very hard to write about contemporary things as they happen – usually it takes a lot of time… W.B. Yeats wrote a beautiful poem about Easter 1916 but he took two years to do it.”
“I think we do need time for things to get a perspective, understand both yourself and what is going around you.”
“But sometimes you feel you need to act a bit more urgently – in a way what I learnt from writing Noontide Toll was that sometimes you want to respond soon to some moments or it would pass away.”
Noontide Toll which was about the immediate aftermath of the war, had to be written quickly – “I was trying to make it relevant then as well as make it relevant now – so many years after.”
This relevancy is equally important to him in poetry if hard to attain. “If your poem is very much to do with today only, then it becomes an utterance for the moment rather than a poem that will last.”
As for the red herrings and the ‘Inspector Japps’, Romesh takes them all in his stride. He hardly batted an eyelid when Jay in Suncatcher (his last novel) was mistaken to be an allusion to The Great Gatsby and so much else deduced from there.
He is no strident defender of his work. He does not often care whether he is completely accepted or not, but there’s no denying that this gentle poet, to borrow the words of Michael Ondaatje, has taken the ‘portrait of Sri Lanka’ to the English speaking world with much tenderness.
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