When tragedy struck the heart of the city on that sunny day
"Help create a non-killing society," appealed Sarvodaya chief
A T Ariyaratne to all creative people. "You can contribute a lot towards
that effort through your creations."
"Wherever we go, what we see and hear today is about killings.
At this rate, we may not be able to survive for too long," Dr. Ariyaratne
said at the launch of Punyakante Wijenaike's latest book An Enemy Within.
"We have got used to thinking that politics can only be solved
by violence. What we need is a society free of this kind of violence,"
he said.
According to him, what we have today is a gun-toting culture. "Even
when a president is elected, he or she is greeted with a 21 gun salute.
And whatever we do is connected to killing. We even advise our cricketers
to have a killer instinct. 'Go for the kill,' they are told. To make money,
investors must make a killing at the Stock Market. Children are asked to
run like a bomb."
Dr. Ariyaratne, who was guest of honour at the launch, said he enjoyed
reading An Enemy Within.With his keen interest in non-violence, he devotes
time to read a lot on the subject. He was also happy that one of the Sarvodaya
organisations, 'Vishva Lekha' had published the book.
A fine piece
"A fine piece of story telling," is how Tissa Abeysekera summed
up Punyakante's An Enemy Within.
Giving the keynote address at the launch, he traced Punyakante's career
over three decades. He quoted from several of her works to illustrate her
writing skills.
Chief guest Dr. Rajiva Wijesinha lamented at the treatment meted out
to local English writers by university academics. "They always prefer
English writers to the local ones, however good the latter's creations
are ," he said. He described the struggle he had in getting Punyakante's
works prescribed for university students.
Punyakante describes An Enemy Within as a collection of traumatic experiences
of some of the victims of the Central Bank bomb explosion in January 1996.
"They are only a few of the tragic events that took place and are
linked into a single story by the bomb itself which went off at 10.55 a
m on a bright sunny day."
The second novella titled To Fall In Line portrays two young
women at the cross-roads of life. As school girls they both had dreams
which came into conflict with parents and tradition.
The book opens with a short story about a young soldier mentally damaged
because of the war. The concluding story is about a refugee boy who has
lost his family.
Requiem for Earth
Quiet, soft spoken music composer-conductor Lalanath de Silva is a worried
man. Worried at the dying earth - dying because of environmental and military
degradation.
"The earth, our only home is being slowly but surely destroyed
by the actions of human beings. We pollute the seas and the water, we render
extinct species and we lay barren the land. But worst of all we wage war
with increasingly lethal and destructive weapons bringing misery, hunger,
pain and suffering to innocent people. The earth as conceived by God is
in danger of destruction by man and woman. When it is dead we would be
too - we can sing its requiem only now and through it make people aware
of the perils we create," Lalanath laments.
Lalanath's latest composition is titled 'Requiem Orbis Terrarum"
- a Requiem for Earth. The work will have its premiere at the St Michael
and All Angels' Church, Polwatta next Saturday (March 27) at the Deva Surya
Sena Memorial Concert. The work is scored for three solo singers, choir
and orchestra (the inimitable duo Ravibandu and Krishna will be there too
playing the tabla and ghatam).It also uses sound effects such as whale
and bird song, sea sounds and thunder.
Nirmali launches her first novel
By Ayesha R. Rafiq
Nirmali Hettiarachchi is no stranger to the literary world. As a teacher
of drama and literature she actively participates in the field. But a field
as wide as the creative arts always holds something new for even its senior
practitioners.
And so it was for Nirmali with the completion of her book 'Replacements'.
Although having written short stories for more than ten years and having
them published as a collection- 'The Lost One and Other Stories',
writing a novel was a different challenge.
In a country where the 'birds and the bees' is talked about little and
written about even less, Nirmali has dared deal with the forbidden fruit
- homosexual relationships. These relationships are intermingled with heterosexual
ones with the same depth of sensitivity and understanding of someone who
has seen both.
Has she then based her book on a homosexual couple she is in close contact
with? "Having lived some 50 years on this earth, of course I know
gay people, but the book is not based on any of them, definitely not,"she
emphasises.
'Replacements' explores relationships of many different natures,
that between an employee and an employer, a husband and a wife and how
in every relationship, money and power play a dominant role, however unnoticed
they may seem.
Nirmali says that the main story line- of a servant boy who is sexually
abused by his employer, who is married - is something she sees going on
around her all the time and therefore felt the need to talk about.
But it is not an anti-gay novel. To her being gay is 'no big deal'.
What is a big deal and what Nirmali feels passionately about is when somebody
in power can persuade another to do something he or she does not want to
do.
"That is probably also another reason why I picked this particular
theme, because nowhere is the display of power more prominent than in sexual
relationships," she says.
But she makes no judgments. Here is a boy who is being abused by his
master, but taken care of very well in other ways. He is, for example,
sent to school. Instead of growing to hate his master for the abuse, the
servant boy, Charles develops a special affection and protectiveness, in
fact feeling much of what a wife would feel for her husband.
But he is, nonetheless, always painfully aware that however much he
may glean about social niceties and the like, and however close he becomes
to his master, at the end of the day, he is still only a servant.
The title captures the summary of the book as it shows how everything
and anything can be replaced, that nothing is indispensable, and 'if you
haven't got something to satisfy yourself with, the next best thing would
do" as Nirmali says.
Far from being judgmental about such vices, the novel tries to understand
the abuser's emotions, and successfully gets the reader to sympathise with
him.
"It's easy to paint people in black and white and say this is good
and this is bad, but in the course of the story you come to realise that
everybody has their good and bad points."
The book took Nirmali two years to complete, and she says that by the
time she finished it, she had gained a healthy respect for all writers.
"It is definitely one of the most disciplined jobs in the world.
The amount of information you have to keep in your head - the story line,
chronological events, not making any slips in time and place, weaving actual
events into the correct part of your story, making it operative, aesthetic,
have a coherent plot. It's actually quite scary now that you think about
it."
Although she enjoyed herself while writing the book, Nirmali does admit
to a huge sense of relief when it was finally sent off to the printer.
'The first thing I did was sleep.'
She says that many have given her constructive criticism, for which
she is grateful. She also adds that if anyone tears her work into pieces
she would have the satisfaction that she did her very best on the book.
She also believes "there are no bad books, only bad readers."
'Replacements' will be launched on March 24 at the British Council
Hall.
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