Romesh Gunesekera
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Biography
Romesh Gunesekera was born in 1954 in Reef (1994), his first novel, won a Yorkshire Post Book Award (Best First Work) and was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction Prize. The book is narrated by a young Sri Lankan boy named Triton who is sent to work for a marine biologist, Mister Salgado. Forced to leave
Romesh Gunesekera lives in
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REEF
Romesh Gunesekera
New Press, 190 pp., $20.00
by Neil Gordon
In
contemporary
As
they exchange a few words inside the lighted booth, the Sinhala envisages the
Tamil's home, Silavatturai, "[o]nce a diver's paradise. Now a landmark
for gunrunners in a battle zone of army camps and Tigers." Then the
Tamil boy closes shop, flicking off the lights, and as the stars appear
beyond the window in a London winter, the Sinhala experiences a long fugue of
memory that transports him 30 years and 6000 miles away to his boyhood on an
island off the southwest coast of India called until 1972, Ceylon.
Romesh
Gunesekera's acclaimed first novel, Reef -- shortlisted for the Booker
Prize in Gunesekera's adopted country,
Over
perhaps ten years Triton becomes indispensable to Mister Salgado and when,
some time in the 70s, mounting Tamil terrorism forces Mister Salgado into
exile, there is no question but that Triton, by now attending to all of
Mister Salgado's domestic needs, will go with him. It is after twenty years
in
Mister
Salgado, in '60s Sri Lanka, is a marine biologist, and his tracking of the
island's protective coral reef's slow destruction by pollution and
over-fishing provides the title and central metaphor for this story -- set,
as we will very soon understand it to be, in a world heading for
self-destruction. He is a kind man, and while he accepts without question the
social hierarchy of his household -- Triton's first job is to serve Mister
Salgado his morning tea in bed -- still Triton is never so much subservient
to a master as he is respectful of a teacher.
Triton
is a deeply creative and intelligent boy -- the descriptions of his cooking
and quiet command over the houshold are some of the novel's most satisfying
passages -- with some education, and he's smart enough to learn everything
Mister Salgado can teach: "...I watched him, I watched him unendingly,
all the time, and learned to become what I am." He learns his habits,
the intimate details of his tastes for clothes and food; watches his work,
listens to his coversations with his friends. When Mister Salgado travels on
his marine studies, Triton travels with him. When, ultimately, Mister Salgado
will go into exile, Triton will go with him. And when Mister Salgado falls in
love with Miss Nili and so undergoes the great -- the only -- sentimental
education of his life, Triton, never transgressing his observer's distance,
falls in love with her too.
So
far, it sounds like we're dealing with an essentially domestic tale, and
that's true. But only to a point: there is another perspective within the
narration that breaks the unity of the very young houseboy's view; Gunesekera
insists on injecting references to the evolving disaster of Sri Lankan
politics in the late '60s and early '70s. Of course, since independence from
She
had served Mister Salgado's grandfather whisky and coffee during the riots of
1915. She had seen politicians with handlebar moustaches and tortoiseshell
topknots, morning coats and gold threaded sarongs, barefoot and church-shod.
She had seen monkey suits give way to Nehru shirts;
Instances
of terrorist violence, too, rock the placidity of Mister Salgado's household,
a violence that not only in its occurrence but in its very nature is a
harbinger of change.
There
were no death squads then, no thugs so callous in their killing that they
felt no pleasure until they saw someone twitch against a succession of
bullets. In my childhood no one dreamed of leaving a body to rot where it had
been butchered, as people have had to learn to do more recently.
This
is no doubt perfectly true, and a sense of the tragedy, the brute waste of
the violence that will soon tear this island paradise apart, does inform the
text. And yet, Gunesekera never really manages to make it an organic part of
Triton's story. "I was trapped inside what I could see, what I could
hear, what I could walk to without straying from my undefined boundaries, and
in what I could remember from...my mud-walled school." So centrally
important, to the narrative voice, is this limitation that the political
observations -- of the cook's background, of the growth of terrorism -- no
matter how beautifully written, feel tendentiously imposed on the text
instead of implicit to it, as if the author, more than the characters, feels
the importance of the march of history on his plot. And it feels labored, as
if, doubting the inherent dramatic interest of Triton's domestic life, the
author were stretching for a Naipaul-esque relevancy to his story. And in
fact there are strong commonalities with Naipaul. There is the long reach of
the
But
the prose is too original to allow much comparison. The story relies less on
Naipaul-like telling detail than on the nostalgia, the regret that the prose
captures in structure as well as subject, a careful progression of exactly
described venues, like photographs of the past, a succession of tableaux more
than a sequence of dramatic scenes. It seems forged in the timelessness of
the tropical noon, etched on the eye by the sun. And the sensation is carried
down to the nicest decisions of syntax, when in its subtlest and most
impressive moments the language conjures a temporal suspension in its
rhythms, constantly throwing the reader off guard in his expectation of
lyricism with an unexpected word. This is wholly original, very ambitious
language, and it is often, like the descriptions, exquisite.
Most
of all I missed the closeness of the . . . reservoir. The lapping of the dark
water, flapping lotus leaves, the warm air rippling over it and the
cormorants rising, the silent glide of the hornbill. And then those very
still moments when the world would stop and only colour move like the blue
breath of dawn lightening the sky, or the darkness of night misting the globe;
a colour, a ray of curved light and nothing else.
As
the book progresses, it is the prose rather than the wider political
framework that involves the reader, the power of the descriptions and the
emotional complexity of Triton's world that carry the story, and the wider
perspective begins to seem less relevant. And that's difficult, to dismiss
the central, tragic injustice of the political turmoil that is engulfing
But
emotional realities are what this book, in its perceptive, quiet voice, is
most convincingly about. Of course the "distant thunder" of
political events is always present, and often foregrounded: when it becomes
loud enough, Triton and Mister Salgado go into exile. But in the continuum of
Triton's consciousness, as it is here narrated, Gunesekera fails to assign
these exterior political events a believable place. Of course the historic
tragedy of
Nowhere
is this better shown than in Reef's central scene, the Christmas
dinner that Mister Salgado hosts, and which will usher in his love affair
with Miss Nili.
The
preparation, serving, and consuming of the meal at Salgado's house -- eight
to dine with Miss Nili -- compose the most sustained dramatic seqence of the
book. Sitting at the middle of the story, the action of the dinner scene
proceeds with sure logic, rising tension, and entire believability. And
within its pace Gunesekera is able to make us understand something about the
place he comes from, beyond its meticulously described locales, and far
beyond its distant politics. As Triton listens to Mister Salgado talking to
his guests, he is "spellbound."
I
could see the whole of our world come to life when he spoke.... The past
resurrected in a pageant of long-haired princes clutching ebony rods;
red-tailed mermaids; elephants adorned with tasselled canopies and silver
bells raising their sheathed, gilded, curved tusks and circling the bronze
painted cities of ancient warlords. His words conjured up adventurers from
The
tensions between the characters at the table -- all revolving around Miss
Nili -- come as dramatically clear as the perfectly-cooked turkey cleanly
parting from the bone under Mister Salgado's knife.
Perfume
rose up from her, and when I moved in to spoon the potatoes on to her plate
it seemed the scent was stronger. It rose up from below her throat down
inside her flapping dress. She had her elbows on the table her body was
concave. She must have smeared the perfume with her fingers, rubbing it in
like honey paste to enrich the skin.... My sarong, tight around my hips,
brushed her arm. She didn't notice. She was looking across the table. Robert
had caught her eye; he was smiling, his head shyly cocked to one side. A
piece of turkey tumbled from her fork. She quickly retrieved it and said,
'Jesus.'
Everything
is here: the American Robert's attraction to Nili that will later cause
Salgado's fit of jealousy and Nili's flight; Triton's deep attraction to
Nili; the insistence on the British trappings of mashed potatoes and turkey
that, with all it represents, has thrown this island country into permanent
political turmoil; the deeply-felt background of jungle myths and generations
of colonialists. An entire narrative at this pace, with this sure subtlety of
touch, might sacrifice some of Gunesekera's description, as well as analysis,
but in exchange it would gain a terrific level of intensity, and the payoff
in terms of emotions it could encompass would be huge.
A
writer who would have made this dinner his whole story is Joyce, and the
result would be, like that other story of an evening's entertainment,
"The Dead," both a classic of English language but also cinematic
enough for John Huston to make it a film. Gunesekera is the only contemporary
writer I have encountered good enough to do the same. The perceptive,
thrilling drama of his narration seems to burst the limits of his framing
device, a tribute to the power of his story. I look forward to reading every
word he writes, not only for the pleasure of following one of the two or
three best writers I've encountered among my contemporaries, but also in the
hopes of seeing his stories escape his rather tendentious narrative bias
toward literary relevance and speak more simply and dramatically for
themselves.
Originally
published in the April/May 1995 issue of Boston Review
Romesh Gunesekera's Reef
begins with the story's narrator, Triton, filling up his tank at a petrol
station in
Triton begins his recollections from
1962, when he was a boy of eleven. That year, he was taken by his uncle to
work as a houseboy for Mister Salgado, a marine biologist. His first year at
the bay-fronted house was tough because he was under the supervision of
Joseph, Mister Salgado's servant. Triton describes Joseph as deceitful,
mean-spirited, and jealous of him. One weekend, after Mister Salgado had gone
away for a short stay on a tea-estate, Triton found Joseph in Mister
Salgado's room rubbing his employer's cologne on his chest. In anger, Joseph
assaulted the boy, then left the house and stayed out all night. Mister
Salgado returned to find Joseph still out. When the servant returned drunk,
Mister Salgado fired him immediately and gave Triton full responsibility for
the housekeeping.
Triton grew and learned to be a good
housekeeper. He also educated himself by reading a neighbor's schoolbooks
whenever he had the chance. When old Lucy-amma, the cook-woman, retired,
Triton took over all the cooking as well, and became an accomplished chef.
One day, a woman came to the house to
have tea with Mister Salgado. It was the first of many visits, and the
beginning of a romance between the two. Triton liked Miss Nili and felt that
she made their house better with her presence. Mister Salgado, who had never
celebrated any festivals or holidays before, had a Christmas Eve dinner party
for Nili and their friends (mostly her crowd). Triton's turkey was a great
success, as was the party. A few days later, Nili moved into the house with
Mister Salgado, much to Triton's joy. The arrival of Miss Nili was, for them,
"the beginning of a new era." She brought out profound changes in
Mister Salgado, who now smiled more and grew both softer and stronger. The
big changes in the house coincided with even bigger changes in their nation:
"The rest of the country, sliding into unparalleled debt, girded itself
for change of a completely different order: a savage brutalizing whereby our
chandiyas-our braggarts-would become thugs, our dissolutes turn into mercenaries
and our leaders excel as small-time megalomaniacs" (pg. 118).
On a visit with to the bungalow ocean
observatory, with Nili and Mister Salgado, Triton learned that even Mister
Salgado's once mild assistant, Wijetunga, had been directly influenced by
what was happening: "You know brother," he told Triton, "our
country really needs to be cleansed, radically. There is no alternative. We
have to destroy in order to create" (pg. 121).
Wijetunga was expressing a sentiment
that was spreading rapidly among the dissatisfied masses. Mister Salgado,
Nili and their friends were not a part of that group. They were
well-educated, wealthy socialites, and were often cynical of the
revolutionaries-criticizing them as thugs and misguided Marxists. It wasn't
until a popular millionaire was killed that shockwaves went through the whole
society.
The relationship between Mister
Salgado and Nili eventually ended when Mister Salgado went into a jealous
rage over Nili's liaison with an American friend. She, in turn, insulted him
and walked out of his life. As Mister Salgado's life fell into turmoil, so
did the island nation. The revolutionaries won the General Election by a
landslide, and the socialites' way of life changed drastically. Many of them
began to leave the country.
Mister Salgado and Triton soon moved
to
In 1983, there was another major
uprising, but news of Nili's mental breakdown sent Mister Salgado back to
find her. Triton stayed in
Consuming desire: Identity and narration in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef
Sharanya
Jayawickrama (Faculty of English,
The identity of Sri Lankan English Gunesekera’s novel pivots between the memory of a tropical childhood in a lush island and the self-consciousness of an urbanised identity in a vibrant global metropolis. Transplanted from his village home to work in the
All over the
globe revolutions erupted, dominoes tottered and guerrilla war came of age;
the world’s first woman prime minister - Mrs Bandaranaike - lost her
spectacular premiership on our small island, and I learned the art of good
housekeeping. (45) 1
In the downturn from revolution, warfare
and global instability to the intimacy of the cocooned world the novel
presents, the art of cooking and of theorising about the vanishing reef that
surrounds the island are greater preoccupations than the social and political
events of the time period in which the novel is set. Gunesekera’s writing is
deeply invested in the imaginative potential his memories of Sri Lanka have
given him, from his collection of short stories Monkfish Moon (1992),
the novel The Sandglass (1998), to his most recent novel Heaven’s
Edge (2002) which draws on the physical and psychological terrain of
conflict that has been Sri Lanka’s reality for the past two decades. In Reef
Gunesekera offers a text resonant with luminous description that expands through
the mouthwatering detail of Triton’s delectable ingredients, to the sensuous
evocation of the ocean and Mister Salgado’s whimsical tales of the mythical
past. However, the surface allure generated by the descriptive passages of
food, where the detail and images of food, cooking and consumption yield some
of the most luscious and responsive language of the novel, can become a
redundant or superficial aspect of the text for certain reading
communities, such as a Sri Lankan audience sensitive to representation,
especially from one of its diasporic sons. In Reef, the growing
self-awareness of a blissfully ignorant servant boy is expressed with more
immediacy than the violent coming-of-age of a whole generation of youth that
culminated with the 1971 insurgency in Sri Lanka in which, along with their
hopes for the future, thousands of young men and women gave up their lives.2
The ‘breach’ between the lyrical immediacy of the text itself and the wider
socio-political framework becomes particularly problematic when read against
the circulating ideologies of identity and representation that are performed
in a conflicted society.3
In any society that undergoes a period of intense social
conflict and crisis, the function and status of the artist is a contested site.
In Sri Lanka, the English language originated as a colonial import in
mid-nineteenth century Ceylon and gave birth to an elite class of westernised
English-educated Ceylonese.4 The linguistic nationalism of the
1950s culminating with the 1956 ‘Sinhala Only’ Act by the government of
S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, and the consequent changes in the constitution of
language education have put the status of the English language in Sri Lanka
under acute duress. However, this sense of ‘crisis’ in linguistic and social
representation has provoked a conscious search for identity by writers using
the English medium, especially since the events of 1971 acted as a
politicising catalyst for the writer.5 English language writing
has been practised and maintained by a small community of writers, mainly in
the urban centres and now increasingly from the diaspora. Within the context
of the civil war and ethnic conflict that has scarred the country
immeasurably, the responsiveness of the writer in English to contemporary
problems of ethnicity and identity, social inequality and gender relations
becomes an urgent question. In a country in which the majority of people
primarily speak Sinhala and Tamil, the politics of expressing oneself in
English and commanding a fluency of this global language is inextricably
linked to issues of social privilege and to community and class identity. In
conceptualising a national literature in Sri Lanka, where the notion of
national identity and of individual and communal relationship to the nation have
been brought into crisis by ethnic conflict and where language is a key
implement in defining identity, the Sri Lankan English writer occupies an
ambiguous space. Creating desire and consuming identity In Reef, narration and the representation of identity are articulated as conditions of the relationship between desire and consuming. Triton’s sense of identity is dependent on suppressing certain aspects of his past while mystifying others: he enters the narrative nameless, and becomes "Triton" only in his relationship with Mister Salgado, the master of whom he becomes a disciple. When Triton first hears Mister Salgado talk he is "captivated" (7) by the sound of his voice, whose intonation is far removed from the "strangulation of the spirit" (7) of his uncle’s speech. Mister Salgado’s measured and melodic voice and his house that is the "centre of the universe" constitute the epitome of aspiration for the young Triton. Early in the narrative, Triton declares triumphantly "We would undergo a revolution" (41) for "Mister Salgado had reversed everything in our world" (41). This sense of "revolution," invoked with very different nuances from the way it is being applied and performed in the world outside the house, lies in the possibility of "reversing" and playing with meaning, as Triton fashions his identity within the space of the house and the space of the narrative. This process involves Triton placing himself in the lineage of Mister Salgado, who "came from a line of people who believed in making their own future" (24) and to whom "there were no boundaries to knowledge" (24). The master-servant dialectic is qualified by Triton’s conception of Mister Salgado as gurunanse - teacher - and by his assertion that "I watched him unendingly, all the time, and learned to become what I am" (43). Within the text the processes of cooking, the culinary creations and the social situations in which food is consumed constitute the main medium and register of Triton's self-expression, self-awareness and social knowledge. The central scene of the novel is the Christmas dinner party, where as the company encounter one another, the host Mister Salgado responds to the vegetarianism of one Western guest as "divinely primitive" (88) and the American guest Robert salivates more at the thought of the local women dressed in "wet skin-clingers" (86) than at the mouth-watering feast laid before him. The luscious description and presentation of food is a potent expression of the frisson of desire generated by the act of consuming in this social milieu and a volatile social atmosphere is created by the challenge and synthesis of identities and cultures in their encounter with one another. Triton achieves his greatest culinary feat, creating a cross-cultural fusion as he marinates, stuffs and cooks a turkey to perfection with local ingredients and spices and decorates the table with "temple flowers and some left-over Christmas tinsel" (79). Meanwhile, Mister Salgado welcomes the mixed crowd of Sri Lankan and foreign guests and concocts an eclectic mix of familiar stories and exotic unknowns to entertain and tantalise them. Listening from the edges of the party, Triton is "spellbound" (85) by his master’s story telling of the "past resurrected" (85). In typical droll manner, Mister Salgado reminds the guests that The discovery of narrative As the novel opens, an adult Triton finds himself in a petrol station on a cold English night, confronted with "almost a reflection" (1) of his own face in the figure of the young Sri Lankan Tamil refugee. The nameless refugee, alienated by language, begs Triton for help in operating the jammed till, sign of his confusion and impotence in the foreign environment. However, securely positioned as a successful immigrant, Triton is able to elide the identity and history of the refugee by rendering it a pathway into memory. The young man’s reality is less potent to Triton than the memories that are initiated by the encounter as Triton’s imagination reels back into the past: "I could see a sea of pearls. Once a diver’s paradise. Now a landmark for gunrunners in a battle zone of army camps and Tigers" (2). His evocation reads like a typified media image of Consuming desire in the global marketplace At the Christmas dinner party, Miss Nili is seated at the centre of the table and the centre of desire. She is described with sensuous detail as the edges of her ears "curled in like the edge of a puppadum when it hits hot oil" (89) and prompt a craving in Triton to "press the ears back with my hands and keep the entrances to her soul open like the lips of a glazed pink conch" (89). In the desire produced by the rise of perfume from her body, rubbed in "like honey paste to enrich the skin" (89), we get a sense of one and all rushing in to grab their piece of the feast. Mister Salgado, Triton, even American Robert all choose Miss Nili as their taste of fantasy - significantly it is only much later that Triton acknowledges "how little I had seen of her, really" (156). When Miss Nili first enters the lives of Mister Salgado and Triton, she is introduced into the narrative in terms of food and the amount of it that she can consume. Her appetite is initially threatening to Triton and when he first meets her she is "so hungry looking. I expected her to bulge out as she ate, like a snake swallowing a bird" (64). However, food becomes the carrier of erotic charge as "huge chunks of the richest, juiciest love-cake disappeared into her as into a cavern" (64). As Mister Salgado becomes increasingly entranced by Miss Nili, Triton secures his place in their developing relationship by concocting a routine in his head whereby he prepares food for and feeds the couple and so controls the encounters between his master and Miss Nili as she comes visiting: "It was our little ritual. I would nod, she would smile and he would look longingly" (67). Watching Mister Salgado savour the cake left over from Miss Nili’s visits he imagines the "scent from her fingers" (67) infusing the flavour and admits that "I too sneaked a piece from time to time" (68). It becomes possible for Triton to fulfil his desire by "sneaking" and eating the cake. The eroticism embodied by the cake allows Triton to satiate his desire without knowing Miss Nili. Her identity is negligible in terms of the exchanges enacted through the cake - it is a product that exploits her image but evades her knowledge: both in terms of knowledge of her and in terms of her awareness of the exchange that is taking place. Indeed, the play of exchange enacted with the cake has more to do with the sexual tension between Triton and Mister Salgado whereby Miss Nili acts as a mediating body between servant and master. The representation of Miss Nili in the novel allows us to consider the ways in which knowledge is removed from an identity in order to allow it to function as a medium of exchange. Triton, the adult who narrates the novel, is a restaurant owner whose skill allows him to survive in Gunesekera’s writing allows us to consider the cultural politics enacted through the diasporic text and the positioning of the diasporic writer. The dynamics of investment and/or exploitation of cultural images and markers in the text engage with certain niches of desire in the global market while complicating notions of identity as Gunesekera writes from both the Sri Lankan diasporic imaginary and the South Asian British experience.8 Gunesekera’s literary community is at once contemporary Sri Lankan writers, based in Sri Lanka as well as in the diaspora, and postcolonial or new British voices.9 At a moment when creative representations by South Asians of intersections of identities and cultures makes the visual presence of South Asians in popular British culture more visible than ever, it becomes imperative to keep in mind the dynamics of desire in the global market. The desire for authenticity Late in Reef, Triton articulates his response to an increasingly consumerist culture, as he creates his own baked crab recipe where "deep inside the stuffing I would bury a seeded slice of green chilli steeped in virgin coconut oil" (120). His culinary offering is organic and unadulterated in contrast to the mass-produced cuisine of the "stuffy hotel restaurant" (120) that is beginning to appear in a country opening up to commercial tourism. In the age of the cheap package holiday and the vulgarisation of local art forms into the souvenir, tourism transmutes the desire for the ‘authentic’ cultural experience/image/motif into the commercial allure of the exotic, which is often largely irrelevant to the contemporary life of a society. Although we have been taught to distrust and deny the ‘authentic,’ in terms of the dictates of poststructuralism and postmodernism, the exercise of consumer desire in the global marketplace discovers the authentic and exotic as interchangeable categories.10 Expatriated in
I used to plan
it in my head: how I’d build a jetty, a safe marina for little blue
glass-bottomed boats, some outriggers with red sails, and then a sort of
floating restaurant at one end. You could have produced your finest chilli
crab there, you know, and the best stuffed sea-cucumbers. Just think of it: a
row of silver tureens with red crab-claws in black bean sauce, yellow rice
and squid in red wine, a roasted red snapper as big as your arm, shark fin
and fried seaweed. It would have been a temple to your gastronomic god, no? I
thought of it like a ring, a circular platform with the sea in the middle. We
could have farmed for the table and nurtured rare breeds for the wild. A
centre to study our pre-history. We could have shown the world something
then, something really fabulous. What a waste. (177)
Mister Salgado’s grand vision combines
conservation and consumption in a way that would have provided both master
and servant a productive pathway into the very roots of their history as well
as a refuge through which they could participate obliquely in the life of the
island. Instead, Triton learns to earn his livelihood in an acutely
diminished version of the dream:
The nights
were long at the
For Triton, living without the claims of
the past becomes the means to survive in the present as he learns to
integrate and become nameless in the "cosmopolitan" mingling of the
city. The "cosmopolitan" becomes a deferral of particular identity in
favour of an undefined sense of belonging. The shift from Triton’s organic
creations and Mister Salgado’s dream to the urban reality of Triton’s life in
I was learning
that human history is always a story of somebody’s diaspora: a struggle
between those who expel, repel or curtail - possess, divide and rule - and
those who keep the flame alive from night to night, mouth to mouth, enlarging
the world with each flick of a tongue. (174)
The future requires new modes of
connection and habitation as a requisite of survival in a global environment
- the "enlarging" of the world is enacted within the local and
personal interrelations that constitute human history and that alter
identity. Gunesekera employs potent images of food in his text to hint at
authenticity yet manipulates these same markers to show that identity is more
reliant on adaptation, on allowing different flavours to mix and combine
anew. Authenticity is only as deep as the latest manifestation of identity in
the global environment.
The consuming language Throughout Reef, Sinhala words and phrases are interspersed and seamlessly woven into the texture of the language. The Sinhala kolla (meaning ‘boy’) is the title of the first chapter of the novel, which opens with these decisive instructions given to a young Triton: " ‘Mister Salgado is a real gentleman. You must do whatever the hell he tells you.’ My uncle pulled my ear. ‘You understand, kolla? Just do it’" (5). The Sinhala word is left untranslated for the reader yet we are able to understand that it refers to the relationship between Mister Salgado - the "real gentleman" - and the young boy. Growing up, Triton models himself on Mister Salgado, admiring and emulating this master-mentor. In a narrative embodying the process of Triton’s self-awareness and realisation, the moment when Triton achieves knowledge of his place in society is at once the moment at which he comprehends the levels of meaning available in the word kolla.11 Leading up to this moment, events in the wider world have begun to crack the veneer of his sheltered existence, such as an uneasy encounter with the socialist Wijetunga who declares that the incursions of tourism will turn Sri Lanka into a nation of "servants" (111). Wijetunga extols the "Five Lessons" (111) and it dawns on Triton that he isn’t talking about the five Buddhist precepts but rather "the simplified lessons that explained the crisis of capitalism, the history of social movements and the future shape of a Lankan revolution" (111). This is a new awareness that throws Triton’s sense of identity and place into confusion. Back in
I shoved my
arm in the air and swore at them under my breath. Kiss the sky!
Something in the night air infected me too. Too much was going on. Wijetunga
on the beach had worked it all out. I wished I had finished my school
certificate. Stupid, stupid boy. Stupid kolla. I felt panic in my
mouth. I saw Joseph with a poisoned skull in his hand, smeared with bali
ash, grinning by the gate. He too seemed to be floating in the air. Eat
it, kolla, eat it. Inside me, everything was burning up. (153-154)
Here kolla takes on a different
meaning: instead of being employed as an affectionate name, it assumes its
class-derived connotations of hierarchy and servitude. In startling
evocation, Joseph reappears in Triton’s momentary apotheosis, encapsulating
all of Triton’s fears in the apparition of his demonic face. By introducing
interplay between the Sinhala words and the English medium Gunesekera is able
to refresh and expand the scope of the linguistic medium in order to express
a variety of identities and experiences.12
The employment of Sinhala words, similar to the
employment of food images, provides the text with markers of authenticity: as
the author is able to access different mediums of language within the text,
so he is able to connect with the reader that can understand the Sinhala
words without the mediation of the text. The success of the novel is
registered in the fact of its translation into Dutch, French, German, Hebrew,
Italian, Norwegian, and Spanish. However, the absence of a Sinhala or Tamil
translation of the novel speaks louder. Gunesekera himself remarks that
although he hopes to see a translation in the future, he is aware of the
limited space within the Sri Lankan publishing economy for even the original
Sinhala or Tamil text.13 Although Sri Lanka has a high literacy
rate, the literary market is characterised by a paucity of publishing
opportunities, monetary restraints on the writer, and a dearth of translation
between the languages. Although Tamil writing has a considerable market in
South India, Sri Lankan Tamil literature has particular characteristics and
concerns that should be fostered and made more available to the wider Sri
Lankan reading public. Sinhala is spoken only in
NOTES
1 Line references are
to Gunesekera: 1994. 2 See Goonetileke: 1978. 3 See in particular Perera: 1995 and Prakrti: 1997. I am borrowing the term, the ‘breach’ from the Prakrti article in which it at once defines the struggle of the "post-postcolonial nation state" to find its identity and the disjunctive relationship of the diasporic writer to the nation, evinced by "an inability on the part of the writers who are located in an amorphous and transient cultural space, to grasp and come to terms with all ramifications of the issues that plague the present Sri Lankan state." 4 5 For a discussion of the reaction of Sri Lankan English writing to 1971 and an evaluation of particular texts that attempt to deal with the issues around it see Goonetilleke: 1993. 6 See Coomaraswamy: 1999 & 2000. 7 Writing on the politics of cultural difference, 8 As a diasporic writer, Gunesekera is writing on the cusp of different world-views, values and vocabularies and the conditions of the narrative itself are spatial and temporal distance from the 9 For a discussion of the recent work of South Asian writers in 10 In critiques of diasporic writers, the ‘authentic’ becomes a site of conflicting impulses, demands and desires within the cultural product. See Paranjape: 2000, for a spirited critique of the diaspora and Brennan: 1989, on the celebrity cosmopolitan whose attachment to a 11 On the interplay of language in the novel, Gunesekera explains that "as Triton frees himself and achieves his independence, his identity ? as he finds himself ? he’s getting his English. As the English becomes more sophisticated, his Sinhala is also coming back as important." ( 12 In "Imaginary Homelands," Salman Rushdie asserts that for the postcolonial writer using English, language needs "remaking for our own purposes" and argues that is necessary to see in the "linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies." (Rushdie: 1991) Gunesekera agrees with this imperative as he explains that he is playing with "the exotic idea, which is what using language is all about, really. It is to refresh the language in some sense." ( 13 See Jayawickrama: 2002. 14 A Lankan Mosaic, a collection of Sinhala and Tamil stories translated into English, was published in 2002 by the Three Wheeler Press, 15 Note the problematic aspects of Pico Iyer’s praise in his review of Reef of the texture of Gunesekera’s language, for conveying "wild and unknown booty into our mother tongue" but regretting the sound of the "gates of
WORKS CITED
Brennan, Tim. "Cosmopolitans and Celebrities." Race
and Class 31.1 (1989). Coomaraswamy, Radhika. "Of Vijaya and Maruta: Reflections on Nationalist Discourses of Race and Diversity." Nethra 4.1&2 (October - December 1999 & January - March 2000) .Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies. Davis, Rocio G. "‘We are all Artists of our own Lives’: A Conversation with Romesh Gunesekera." Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 18 (1997). Goonetileke, H.A.I. "The Sri Lanka Insurrection or 1971: A Select Bibliographical Commentary." Bardwell L. Smith (ed.) Religion and the Legitimation of Power in Goonetilleke, D.C.R.A. "The 1971 Insurgency in Sri Lankan Literature in English." Modern Fiction Studies 39.1 (Winter 1993). Gunesekera, Romesh. Reef. Iyer, Pico. "The Empire Strikes Back." The Jayawickrama, Sharanya. "Interview with Romesh Gunesekera: Nasta, Susheila. "Homes Without Walls: New Voices in South Asian Writing in Paranjape, Makarand. "Afterword: What About Those Who Stayed Back Home?: Interrogating the Privileging of Diasporic Writing." Ralph J. Crane and Radhika Mohanram (eds.) Shifting Continents/ Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent. Perera, Walter. "Images of Prakrti. " ‘The Breach’: Three Sri Lankan-Born Writers at the Crossroads." Outlook ( Rushdie, Salman. "Imaginary Homelands." Imaginary Homelands. Rutherford, Jonathan. " Reef. Its critical concerns are with exoticism, the globalisation of culture and consumerism, and these come to the fore in the latter part of the analysis where some of the material alluded to in the footnotes (especially footnote 10) would be certainly worth including in the main body of the text and elaborating on further. A text of particular relevance to its gradually emerging lines of enquiry is Huggan's The Postcolonial Exotic. This research, which is timely and promising, points to the need to address an internationalism beyond a postmodernist globalism.
ROMESH GUNESEKERA: AN APPRAISAL
BY:
T.R.K
Writers
of fiction of the Indian diaspora, in which one can include
When
"Reef" his first novel was published in 1994, the book joined the
mysterious process of selection for the Booker prize award, arguably the
biggest literary event of the year for British publishing.
The
Booker Prize pageant that has duly took place in October 1994, was televised
live from the Guild Hall in the City of
A panel
of literary egg heads that included feminist Germaine Greer, poet Tom Paulin,
novelist and a Booker Prize winner herself, Antonia Byatt discussed the
merits of the six short-listed books. Romesh Gunesekera's "REEF",
was described by Tom Paulin with a bon mot, as a "Pacific novel". I
had met Romesh Gunesekera earlier the previous week for an anticipatory chat.
Gunesekera with his slim good looks and a pile of well coiffeured head of
hair looks ridiculously young for a 40 year-old. He seemed cautious if not
aloof, sorrowful if not remote. Another interviewer had remarked that he
looked unusually calm and unexcited for someone whose first novel had made
the Booker short-list. A graduate of
The
book has enchanted almost all the critics, some of them novelists of good
standing. "Lovely, subtle, sensuous, poised". "Slight but
accomplished". "has a great surface." According to Tom Paulin
again, "a prose symbolist poem about the art of
cooking"! The chili-factor in this seduction of the Anglo
Saxon palates seems an insidious device. Triton grows up and fetches up
in
Gunesekera
told me that he was averse to writing Tolstoyian epics, as they are
dauntingly large and ever really read to the end. He feels that he would
rather be read. He countered the rebuke of the critics that the pace of the
story accelerated to a "galloping conclusion" and ended unsatisfactorily.
The late reviewers might have read the book too hastily and misread the
intent of the final chapters. It took Gunesekera two years, several revisions
and a near fifty percent excision to finally produce this astonishingly
beautiful novel. Although it did not win the Booker Prize with a 5:1
odds from the bookmakers, I understand that it is being translated into six
languages and an Indian hard back has just been published. Coincidentally,
1995 is the 60th anniversary of Penguin Books, a much thumbed publisher
available throughout the Commonwealth during this period.
"Reef" is one of the paperbacks that inaugurate this celebration.
Reef is
deft and economical; it evokes and subsumes descriptions of card parties,
half-heard snatches of conversations in a sun dappled colonial house where
Mr.Salgado experiences the end of an affair. All this provides the rich humus
for the self awakening of Triton: he is content in his role as a subservient
and becomes accomplished in the crafts he learns. His collection of arts are
all feminine: cooking, housekeeping, making festive lanterns. His love for
his master is very typical of such relationships in Asian countries: an
unselfish and innocent longing, without undertones of sexuality, towards a
surrogate father figure.
Gunesekera
made his literary debut with a collection short stories "Monkfish
Moon", that have an exemplary text book structure beneath their
accomplished surface. It takes a slice of life without a beginning or
an end: the anxiety of imminent dislocation of the Sri Lankan middle class
underpins these narratives. The distant civil war turns into urban terrorism.
In a House In the Country, Ray, a middle class Sinhalese who chooses to
return to
"Storm
Petrel" is a deft portrait of a Sinhalese in London dreaming about his
imminent return home to Sri Lanka to run a few cabanas for tourists and in
the process be absorbed by his crowded culture. In just a few bold outlines,
the returning native's longing predicates imminent disappointment. A few
inadvertent splashes from the brush conclude the story.
On a
larger scale, people fail to communicate. War has riven a wedge, even between
a Sinhalese wife and her Tamil husband living in
Gunesekera's
prose, as his readers have discovered "pulses with deceptively simple
precision". His observation is "as close as the stare of a
voyeur". James Wood writing in the Guardian praised "Reef"
obliquely as the only novel "that makes cooking a turkey as thrilling as
a murder." The gifted novelist Candia Mcwilliam, who missed making the
Booker short-list herself with her book A Debatable Land, said that Reef was
"a book of the deepest human interest and moral poise". Penelope
Lively in the Daily Telegraph says that the flavour of the book stays in the
mind, "as pungent as the chilli in Triton's lovingly contrived
dishes". Tom Adair, another critic wrote of "Reef": "It
sings like a glassy fountain; beads of pure light."
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