Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy


Shyam Selvadurai: Funny Boy
·         Neluka Silva (University of Colombo)

Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965 in Sri Lanka and moved with his family to Toronto, Canada in 1984. Funny Boy is Selvadurai's first novel. It is set in Sri Lanka, and is constructed in the form of six beautifully rendered stories about a boy growing up within an extended upper-middle-class Tamil family in Colombo during the seven years leading up to the 1983 riots, when he and his family sleep in their shoes so they can flee from the Sinhalese mobs. When Selvadurai's Funny Boy was published in 1994, it was hailed as one of the most powerful renditions of the trauma of the prevailing ethnic tensions in contemporary Sri Lanka. Selvadurai brings together the struggles of class, ethnicity and sexuality. These issues are discus
The magic of fiction seems to be the more specific you are, the more universal you end up becoming. -- Shyam Selvadurai, in an Outlines Interview, May 1996.
If post-colonialism is said to be "The Empire" writing back, many Sri Lankans have had to write back to an Empire they now reside in. Emigrating to the United Kingdom, Canada, or the United States to escape the political, religious and racial violence that has consumed their home country, expatriate Sri Lankans such as Michael Ondaatje and Romesh Gunesekera have carved out respected positionsfor themselves within the world of letters. Newcomer Shyam Selvadurai is a Sri Lankan author whose first novel, Funny Boy, has established him as a new talent capable of earning a place next to some of his more well-known expatriates.
Born in 1965 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Selvadurai's mixed Tamil/Sinhalese family emigrated to Canada in 1983. While in Canada, Selvadurai came to terms with his homosexuality, and took a degree from York University. He currently lives in Toronto and is at work on his second novel.
Funny Boy
Funny Boy could be read as a Bildungsroman, the story of one young boy's interior formation and integration set against the backdrop of his country's disintegration. The boy, Arjun "Arjie" Chelvaratnam, is the second-son of a privileged middle-class Tamil family. It is amid rising waves of Sinhalese and Tamil violence that Arjie must understand and come to terms with his own homosexuality. Coming out is no small feat for any gay teen to undertake, and on top of the usual feelings of loneliness, isolation and fear of rejection by family and friends, Arjie must negotiate his painful transformation to adulthood in the midst of a country gone mad.
It is the socio-economic, racial and religious tensions within Sri Lanka that occupy most of Selvadurai (and consequently Arjie's) time and attention within the novel. In fact, while Arjie's awakening sexuality serves as an undercurrent throughout the book's five sections (plus an epilogue) it is really only the main theme of one, "The Best School of All." That is the section in which Arjie's father sends him to The Queen Victoria Academy, a terribly cruel English-style school.
The Queen Victoria Academy serves a symbol for colonial, aristocratic and middle class privilege--male privilege. This is the tradition Arjie is expected to be a part of. To be gay would, for Arjie, mean failing in the eyes of his Father and the larger world of middle class Tamil patriarchy in which he lives. Indeed, Arjie's father tells him that the academy "will force you to become a man," clearly indicating that the school is to indoctrinate Arjie in the ways of middle class male privilege. Arjie's older brother warns him that their Father suspects and fears his homosexuality ­ his move to the Academy is clearly meant to "cure" him of (what his Father sees as) the homosexual affliction. Within this context, it is extremely ironic that the Academy is the very place in which Arjie meets Shehan Soyza, a Sinhalese classmate whom he falls for and carries on a sexual relationship with.
The five sections of the novel and its epilogue could each be read as lengthy short stories or novellas in their own right. "Pigs Can't Fly" examines Arjie's early childhood and his gravitation towards the imaginative games his female cousins play as opposed to his male cousins' beloved game of cricket. The section concerns cultural constructions of gender and the negative developmental effects incurred by one who naturally falls outside of said constructions. "Radha Aunty" is the tale of Arjie's Aunt Radha, and her doomed affair with a Sinhalese man. It foreshadows some of the conflicts Arjie is to face in his own relationship with Shehan. In "See No Evil, Hear No Evil" Arjie plays an important role in his mother's extra-marital affair with a childhood sweetheart. This is his introduction into the world of covert or secretive relationships between adults ­ and the prices anyone may pay for loving the "wrong" kind of person. "Small Choices" chronicles one of Arjie's first crushes ­ a puppy love obsession with a young man employed by his Father, while the novel's epilogue "Riot Journal" is Arjie's frightening first hand accounts of anti-Tamil violence. The book ends with the family's imminent emigration to Canada.
In an interview, when the question of autobiography was raised, Selvadurai had this to say: "I'm gay and Arjie's gay and both families left Sri Lanka, but that's where it ends. Arjie's first experience and acceptance of himself happened in Sri Lanka and mine happened in Canada. My family is also much more liberal. My father is Sinhalese and my mother is Tamil which was a huge thing at the time of their marriage so we were brought up differently from other kids. There was a lot of tolerance for difference."
Selvadurai's latest project is a historical novel, Cinnamon Gardens, set in Sri Lanka in the Twenties.
Awards and Honors
Funny Boy won the Lambda Literary Foundation's Award for Best Gay Male Novel as well as the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award for 1994.
Selected Bibliography
Keehnen, Owen. "Sri Lankan Author Shyam Selvadurai's A 'Funny Boy.'" (May 1996) 24 par. Online. Outlines: The Voice of The Gay and Lesbian Community. Internet. Nov. 5, 1997. Available: http://www.suba.com/~outlines/may96/srilanka.html.
Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. San Diego: Harvest Books, Harcourt Brace & Company. 1994.
"'The Breach'": Three Sri Lankan-Born Writers at the Crossroads." (Summer 1997) 19 par. Online. Outlook: The Weekly News Magazine. Internet. Nov. 5, 1997. Available: http://www.is.lk/is/spot/sp0151/clip5.html.

Shyam Selvadurai (born 12 March 1965) is a Sri Lankan Canadian novelist who wrote Funny Boy (1994), which won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Cinnamon Gardens (1998). He currently lives in Toronto with his partner Andrew Champion.[1]
Selvadurai was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka to a Sinhalese mother and a Tamil father--members of conflicting ethnic groups whose troubles form a major theme in his work. Ethnic riots in 1983 drove the family to emigrate to Canada when Selvadurai was nineteen. He studied creative and professional writing as part of a Bachelor of Fine Arts program at York University. [2]
Selvadurai recounted an account of the discomfort he and his partner experienced during a period spent in Sri Lanka in 1997 in his essay "Coming Out" in Time Asia's special issue on the Asian diaspora in 2003.
In 2004, Selvadurai edited a collection of short stories: Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers, which includes works by Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali, and Hanif Kureishi, among others. He published a young adult novel, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, in 2005. Swimming won the Lambda Literary Award in the Children's and Youth Literature category in 2006. He was a contributor to TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 1.[3]

[edit] Bibliography

Born in 1965, Shyam Selvadurai spent most of his adolescence in Sri Lanka. However, after the 1983 riots in Colombo, he and his family moved to Canada. This experience provided the historical and personal background for the novel Funny Boy. Selvadurai then went to York University and earned a B.F.A. in creative writing and magazine writing. He has won both the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Men's Fiction.

 

A long-standing rivalry between Tamil and Sinhalese inhabitants of Sri Lanka has ensured an extremely volatile relationship between the two groups. The combination of religious and ethnic differences continues to create violent conflicts between the parties although they have shared Sri Lanka for innumerable centuries.
The Tamil minority originated from India, immigrating to Sri Lanka between the 3rd century B.C. and the 13th century A.D. Making up a small portion of the population, Tamils constitute almost the entire Hindu population of the land. In the 5th century B.C., Indo-Aryan emigration from India created the Sinhalese population in Sri Lanka. It still holds the majority today and thus, much political power. The greater part of the Sinhalese populace considers itself to be Buddhist. Religious tension intensifies the struggle for supremacy between Tamils and Sinhalese.
Prior to colonial occupation, Tamils controlled the northern part of Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka in 1972), while the Sinhalese ruled the southern regions of the land. In 1505, the Portuguese took control of the country and began its history as a colonial settlement. Throughout its relationship with the west, Sri Lanka has been dominated by world powers that have their prevented self-rule. Finally, in 1948 Sri Lanka gained independence and thus, sovereignty over its lands. Prior to this momentous occasion, Tamil and Sinhalese forces combined to fight for their common freedom. However, this alliance did not last long.
The Sinhalese have retained power throughout most of Sri Lanka's history because of its size compared to the Tamil population, the second largest group in the country. With unquestioned economic and political power, the Sinhalese inhabitants face the anger and bitterness of the minority Tamils, who must struggle to have their voice heard. Conflict between the Tamil and Sinhalese rose to a new degree in 1956 as Solomon Bandaranaike was instated as Prime Minster and declared Sinhala the official language of what was then Ceylon. The Tamil minority was outraged by this act and opposition to the Sinhalese dominated government grew as the state backed Buddhism on an official level. Bandaranaike was later assassinated and proceeded by his wife who became Prime Minister in 1960. In 1983 civil unrest could no longer be contained and the country broke out into civil war.
Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy leads the reader through a narrative of the Sinhala/Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka, which first erupted in the early '80s. Even though the novel is very much about the personal growth of the protagonist, Arjie, each individual episode in some way highlights the growing unrest occurring in the nation. Arjie's own journey, then, can be read as the journey of the nation, moving towards the social upheaval and violence that the book eventually culminates in. Over the course of the book a through-line emerges which tells the story of the escalating conflict, first foreshadowing it lightly, but ultimately bringing it to the forefront of the narrative when the riots begin. All significant relationships in the text are dictated by this conflict, and almost every pivotal event that can be linked to the impending riots. When the conflict finally comes to a head and becomes the primary subject of the narrative rather than a link between the events, the linear form breaks down. Since the Sinhala/Tamil tension is the cohesive glue of the novel, the lens through which the reader can view all events, when it is highlighted the narrative no longer has a point to refer back to. As such, the final chapter is a choppy and disjointed journal entry, often omitting events and calling the reader's attention to the absences.
In order to elucidate the conflict's growth in the narrative, culminating in the disjointed final chapter, let us examine the book event by event to better understand the arc. In "Pigs Can't Fly" the reader is barely made aware that any such tension exists. The first reference to the two ethnicities occurs when Arjie describes how he feels when he is dressed up for the game "bride-bride". Arjie explains that he feels, "like the goddesses of the Sinhalese and Tamil cinema," (5). From this reference the reader cannot surmise that these two kinds of "goddesses" are in any opposition to each other. However, in the next paragraph Selvadurai foreshadows the riots when he describes the picture as one made "even more sentimental by the loss of all that was associated with them," and refers to the eventual move to Canada (5). Other than these events, the first chapter remains blissfully free of the conflict. Arjie is young, and not yet aware of the problems facing his country. However, as he grows, so too does his awareness of the conflict itself.
In "Radha Auntie" the tension begins to enter more significantly into the narrative. Anil and Radha Auntie's relationship cannot exist, given their ethnic differences. However the couple attempts to give it a chance until violence intervenes. After Radha Auntie's direct experience of the violence, she no longer has an open mind with regard to her love for a Sinhalese man. She reflects the view of her extended family, in transferring the feelings of hatred towards her attackers onto Anil. Ammachi and Kanthi Auntie's feelings when they say, "'Haven't you people done enough?' 'Please go... You are not wanted here,'" (89) are indicative of Radha Auntie's transformation as she does not stop them or intervene in time. Arjie's opinion is altered as well. Whereas once he romanticized weddings and hoped fervently for Radha Auntie's, when the time finally arises he is not pleased, as he has been altered by the tension and violence around him.
From this point on the conflict pushes further towards the surface of the novel. In "See No Evil, Hear No Evil" we are introduced to Daryl Uncle, and with him the government's role in the conflict and "The Prevention of Terrorism Act." We have moved from the personal (Radha Auntie's failed relationship with Anil) to the political (Daryl Uncle's tension with the government). The reader is also aware of the growing stakes surrounding the characters interactions with the tension. In "Radha Auntie" there was violence and tragedy, but in "See No Evil, Hear No Evil" there is death. This is also the first time that violence directly affects Arjie, shocking him into accusing Amma and destroying his idolatry of her (144). By the end of the vignette Arjie's perception of his life has been forever altered. In a stunning passage he describes "little clay lamps" Amma has lit around their garden: "They provided the only light, and in their flickering illumination, the guests, the waiters, the tables of food, and indeed the whole garden, seamed insubstantial" (150).
In "Small Choices" the violent events come at an even more rapid pace. Arjie is again directly affected by them, and at no point is there any more than a moment where the reader is not cognizant of the tension at hand. By "The Best School of All" Arjie is able to formulate his own opinions about the conflict, and even as he is beginning a relationship with Shehan, a Sinhalese boy, he is made more aware of the hostility around him. He opts not to "choose sides" but asks instead, of the distinction between Black Tie and Mr. Lokubandara (the Principal and Vice Principal of the school, who the reader is made to understand represent a microcosm of the larger tensions), "Was one better than the other? I didn't think so. Although I did not like what Mr. Lokubandara stood for, at the same time I felt that Black Tie was no better" (242).
Finally, in "Riot Journal: An Epilogue" the conflict culminates, both in the narrative structure and Arjie's own life. Since the tension can no longer be the thread that holds the story together, the linearity of the text breaks down. The journal is disjointed and entries, which begin in rapid succession soon begin to come farther apart, representing Arjie's relationship to the riots. He is not able to write for days, and as time lapses, events that have occurred are told in brief passing synopses, rather than given the attention to detail that has thus far been characteristic of the novel. Because the conflict has come to fruition it can no longer hold these details together, and can no longer function as the adhesive for the events in Arjie's life.
Both the narrator in Funny Boy and in Cereus Blooms at Night are non- heteronormative diasporan individuals. While Arjie, Funny Boy's narrator speaks as an adult in diaspora reflecting on his childhood in his native country of Sri Lanka, Tyler in Cereus Blooms at Night tells his story as an individual born and raised within a diasporan context. Each struggles to reconcile their own perception of their sexual selves with other's (often disapproving) perceptions of them. Although nonheteronormative sexualities are alluded to in both works, in neither of the novels is this sexuality explicitly named. Neither author employs the phrases "gay," "homosexual," or "transgender" that are often used within a Western framework to label sexual tendencies or preferences. Without these descriptive labels, the authors appeal to alternative significations of this situation, often representing their respective characters as excluded from the categories of male and female, and instead, somewhere in between. Just as individuals in diaspora cannot be placed within any one cultural or ethnic categorization, both Arjie and Tyler must occupy a space outside of normal gender and sexual categorizations. The choice by Mootoo and Selvadurai to place their narrators in a nameless middle space in between demarcated sexual and gender boundaries in many ways mirrors the inability of diasporan individuals to be placed within cultural and ethnic boundaries.
The title of Funny Boy itself evokes the nature of the environment in which the main character and narrator Arjie negotiates his sexuality amidst family and political tensions. As a child and young adult, Arjie displays "certain tendencies" (162), as his father calls them, that defy accepted norms of the ways men and women are expected to behave. During spend-the-days at his grandparent's house, Arjie relishes in donning a sari and jewelry to play the role of a female in "bride-bride," his favorite game. The older Arjie describes this ritual as a "transfiguration" (5) in which he "was able to leave the constraints of [him]self and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self" (5). The experience of dressing in women's clothing somehow allows him to attain a level of freedom and appreciation of himself that remaining within the confines of a boy's world does not. Although this ritual is nearly sacred to him, it earns him the adjective of "funny," a word whose significance he does not fully understand, but that he can sense nonetheless has a shameful connotation.
Before Arjie is even aware of the repercussions of his "tendencies," any un-stereotypical gender inclinations he may have are discouraged by his family. His parents (particularly his father), out of fear that he will turn out "funny," forbid him from playing "bride-bride". However, when playing with the boy children proves equally problematic because of his "girlie-boy" (25) status, thus separating him from the possibility of being either a girl or a boy. Gender stereotypes imposed by his family explicitly demarcate the separate worlds of boy and girl, leaving Arjie "caught between the boys' and the girls' worlds, not belonging or wanted in either" (39). Within these early episodes, Arjie's sexuality is negotiated solely within the confines of gender, male and female. His exclusion from both the boys and girls suggests that Arjie himself inhabits some third space in between these two, but that third space is merely described as funny and never named. Just as the space Arjie occupies between male and female is not clearly defined, so too are the words employed to describe this space vague and shifting.
The various stories and language that Tyler uses in Cereus Blooms at Night echo Arjie's experience in the space between male and female. The fact that Tyler describes himself as "neither properly man nor woman but some in-between, unnamed thing" (71) emphasizes the idea that, as a non- heteronormative individual, he exists sexually outside of distinct male-female categories. Tyler's "perversion" (47), just like Arjie's funniness, sets him in an "in-between" space that is neither strictly male nor female. Like Arjie playing "bride-bride," Tyler feels a particular comfort in inhabiting the role of a female. In one particular scene, when he puts on the female nurse's costume that Mala steals for him, he feels as though his body is "metamorphosing" (76) from male into female. As Mala's reaction to Tyler suggests, Tyler more closely resembles his inherent nature dressed as a female than he does as a man. By costuming Tyler as a female, Mootoo signifies Tyler 's in-between nature without specifically titling it .< /p>
Both authors elude the placement of an official title or label on their narrators. While references such as "funny" and "perversion" certainly suggest behavior that would typically be described in Western culture as homosexual, that explicit naming does not occur in either text. Arjie and Tyler are caught in between the worlds of male and female, man and woman, and in therefore cannot be given a definitive title within these axes of identity. Even at moments of revelation for Arjie and Tyler, their gender/sexual orientation remains an unnamed entity. When Arjie invites Shehan , the object of his attraction, to his home, Arjie's brother Diggy remarks that Arjie's father will now "definitely know that you're . . . " (Selvadurai 249), and fails to actually name what Arjie is. Likewise, when Tyler , through his relationship with Mala , finally comes to terms with his own insecurities about what he is, Tyler says: "I decided to unabashedly declare myself, as it were" (Mootoo 247). He proceeds to wear makeup and perfume, feminizing himself, but what this declaration signifies is again not represented by any specific title or label. Tyler's declaration is not merely one of his sexuality or gender, but of his self.
Both authors, as individuals themselves in diaspora , describe sexuality and gender of their diasporan characters not as having a specific name, but rather, as being an in between. Tyler and Arjie's location within male and female stereotypes and modes of behavior fails to be representable as one moment in time or one descriptive word, just as the identity of individuals in diaspora , with ties to several different locations and places, cannot be fully encompassed by any one cultural or ethnic label. Selvadurai and Mootoo's refusal to encompass their character's identities by titling them thwarts a Western desire to categorize sexuality, and parallels the vague nature of diasporan individual's location within the framework of cultural and ethnic belonging. Arjie and Tyler 's sexual and gender location, like the cultural and ethnic location of individuals in diaspora , can only really be described as an "in-between".
In the initial stories of Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy, the narrating character, Arjie, is obsessed by ideas of romance, love, and marriage. This interest, which governs most of his childhood, leads him to discover and understand more serious aspects of his life, such as his homosexuality and the political tension in his homeland.
At the spend-the-days at his grandparents' house, Arjie conducts the game of "bride-bride," where he and all the girl cousins create an elaborate pretend wedding in which Arjie stars as bride. In the world they construct, gender does not play a part until Her Fatness, a cousin who has recently returned from time overseas, intervenes. Her insistence that "A boy cannot be the bride ... a girl must be the bride" imposes gender roles onto the idealized world of "bride-bride" (11). In this way, the world of the adults intrudes into the pretend world of the children and requires them to even play in ways that are socially proper. In doing so, they become aware of conventions of the world outside of their game. A similar insistence from Amma that "boys must play with other boys" shows the opposition between reality and the idealism of "bride-bride" (20).
The role of bride is given to the person who plays it best, namely Arjie, instead of a girl cousin. The bride is not even seen as particularly female, as is evident in the scene where Arjie is dressing up as bride. In that passage, he considers the activity not dressing up as a woman, but rather as inhabiting the highly symbolic role of bride as "icon." Arjie as bride is free to acknowledge himself as transcending the "constraints of [him]self, and transcend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self" (4). There is no language of gender or sexuality, only of idealized, neutral forms. Arjie's awareness that he perhaps does not belong with either the girl cousins or the boy cousins can be seen in this genderless language. His unwillingness to associate himself with a gender in his "more beautiful self" shows his recognition that he is "caught between the boys' and the girls' worlds, not belonging or wanted in either" (39). This concept is a precursor of his later recognition of his homosexuality, but in the innocent, simplified terms of a child.
Radha Aunty's appearance marks another rift between the innocence of childhood and the realities of life. When Arjie first hears of her return to Sri Lanka and her engagement, his imagination works to produce a mental image of his aunt as someone "separated from everyday people, because she inhabited the realm of romance and marriage" (45). Although his idealization of her is shattered when he meets her, they become close friends because she is willing to indulge his excitement for weddings. Through their friendship, Arjie is exposed to the social problems that the Tamil/Sinhalese conflict creates. Radha and Anil's tense relationship and the secrecy it requires contradict Arjie's conceptions of love and romance, which have been lifted mostly from movies and love comics. His investigation into the cause of their strange and secretive relationship leads him to discover the racial tensions in Sri Lanka plaguing society. As his awareness of the political problems in Sri Lanka grows, so does the severity of the conflict until it finally culminates in violence.
As Arjie grows older, his eyes open to things that would have previously gone over his head, such as civil strife and culturally appropriate gender roles. His love for romance only serves to make these things more clear, as they disrupt the idealizations that he holds dear. These broken ideals usher out the era of his childhood and prepare him for the tumultuous events of his later life.
1. In Funny Boy, the Western world often merges with the Sri Lankan culture, sometimes to a disastrous effect. The influences of the West bring additional tension to pre-existing problems. For example, the conceit displayed by "Her Fatness" about having spent time abroad adds another facet to the conflict between she and Arjie. "Her Fatness" uses Western objects and words to try to gain power over the other cousins, only to end up as their enemy. Why does this attempt to gain power backfire? Is the appeal of the West as strong for the children as it is for the adults? Do the Western words she learned abroad, such as "faggot," hold any power inside of Sri Lanka? Later in the novel, the construction of a Western-style hotel provides a center for the escalation of civil conflict. Why does this instance of Sri Lankan social strife take place in a Westernized setting? What aspects of the conflict are heightened by the juxtaposition of the Western world with Sri Lanka? Does the presence of a Western object, such as a hotel, compel Sri Lankans to strengthen their ethnic identity?
2. The account of Arjie's youth contains a number of relationships in which at least one person is a woman. Of these relationships, the most nurturing ones tend not to occur between mothers and their children. Mothers take the role of enforcer and disciplinarian, coming down strictly on their children when they think that they have erred. For example, Ammachi interferes with Radha Aunty's relationship with Anil because of her need to make her child follow her politics. How does the strength of the maternal figures in the book compare or contrast with the larger societal structure of Sri Lanka? What messages could the mother's role as a strict disciplinarian convey about the role of family in Sri Lankan life? Is respect for tradition the main driving force behind maternal discipline? Additionally, women outside of the immediate family structure are shown as being nurturing and loving. Radha indulges Arjie's love of dress-up, just as Janaki allows him to read her love-comics. Do their nurturing tendencies display their maternal tendencies that are yet untapped, or do they express their opposition to the harsh role of mother? Why is it that Arjie consistently turns to women when he is in need of emotional support?
3.
Now I was beginning to understand why Ammachi had been so angry. Part of her anger was because Anil was Sinhalese, but another part, I now saw, had to do with her fear that Anil and Radha Aunty were in love. [65]
In what forms do the different ethnic identities (Tamil, Sinhalese, Burgher) dictate the power structures of relationships among characters? Examine specifically the relationships between Radha Aunty and Anil, Amma and Daryl Uncle, and Arjie and Shehan. Do these relationships manage to subvert their ethnicities, or do they simply reinforce already existing conflicts?


4. What had happened between us in the garage was not wrong. For how could loving Shehan be bad? Yet if my parents or anybody else discovered this love, I would be in terrible trouble. I thought of how unfair this was and I was reminded of things I had seen happen to other people, like Jegan, or even Radha Aunty, who, in their own way, had experienced injustice. [267)]
Examine the way in which Arjie's understanding of his identity as sexual "other" develops alongside his understanding of himself as ethnic "other" or outsider. Look specifically at his conception of "justice" and how it is informed by the incidents in the text. Is this parallel between sexuality and ethnicity visible in any other characters in the novel?
5. As Kanthi Aunty reveals Arjie's "funniness" to the adults, his role in the familial structure suddenly changes. No longer is he just a child playing an innocent game of dress-up. Although he does not fully understand why, he becomes the frequent familial accomplice. Kanthi Aunty's action creates a new role for Arjie to play in his close-knit family.
Arjie's "secret" (which he does not even understand) builds a bond between his family members, particularly women, who also conceal something. Both Radha Aunty and Amma take him into their confidence to keep their individual secrets from the rest of the family. Radha Aunty uses Arjie as a pretext when meeting with Anil. She claims to Mala Aunty " 'Our friend' - meaning [Arjie] - 'has to use the toilet.' She pressed my hand hard, warning me not to seem surprised" (80). Although no one else can know of her relationship with Anil, Arjie is entrusted with the great secret. Arjie's own mother expects him to keep her own affair with Daryl Uncle private. Amma trusts Arjie not to reveal that "Daryl Uncle was with us all the time" while on their vacation in the hill country (113). Both women exploit Arjie's trust, innocence, and "funniness" for their own benefit. A definite commonality between all three's secrets bind them together.
Why do two adults put so much trust in a young boy? How is the kinship created? Is there a connection between the two women's secrets and Arjie's, as dealing with sexuality? Can Arjie truly understand the familial ridicule Radha Aunty and Amma will experience if their secrets are revealed? Do they share their secrets with him because he may understand their desire to commit an act that directly contradicts the norm?
6. Initially, Arjie does not even understand what Cyril Uncle is inferring when he claims "looks like you have a funny one here" after Arjie's Bride-Bride costume is revealed (14). Arjie takes the word funny to me an "humorous or strange," not "homosexual reference," as his uncle intends (17). Arjie's father sees "funny" as a negative state of being, something Arjie can become that will result in ridicule and contempt from everyone else. Eventually, Arjie understands his father and uncle's conception of "funny" when his friendship with Shehan escalates physically. He finally realizes that "the difference within me that I sometimes felt...it was shared by Shehan" (250). In this instance, Arjie defines "funny" as a deviation from the norm that both he and Shehan experience. However, Arjie does not hold the same disgust that his own father has for individuals who are "funny." Yet, he is riddled with guilt after he commits another revealing and defining act, like his Bride-Bride game.
How else is "funny" used throughout Selvadurai's novel? What role does "funny" play in other people's lives? How does Selvadurai's manipulation of the word "funny" affect the meaning as each character holds a different understanding of the word?

 

Filling the Void: Oppression in Funny Boy


Summary:   Social contrasts and gender boundaries create oppression and injustice amongst the characters in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy. Oppression emerges within the Chelvaratnam family, who are displeased by Arjie's "tendencies", and the likelihood that he will grow up "funny." Oppression also surfaces between the Sinhalese and Tamils with ethnic riots in Sri Lanka's society.
Social contrasts and gender boundaries create oppression and injustice amongst the characters in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy. This injustice affects the composure and behaviour of the characters throughout the novel and it appears in every aspect throughout Funny Boy. Oppression emerges within the Chelvaratnam family, who are displeased by Arjie's "tendencies", and the likelihood that he will grow up "funny." Oppression also surfaces between the Sinhalese and Tamils with ethnic riots in Sri Lanka's society. Even when Arjie is not involved, he still manages to appear at the center of every oppressive and unjust situation.
Arjie experiences his first gender boundary when he is no longer permitted to play with the other girls during his spend-the-days. He is forced to conform to his family's' belief of normality. This is an interesting situation, because the fact that the only boy was the bride every time the girls played was never an issue to the other children. The only time Arjie's gender became an issue was when jealousy became a factor; he was forbidden to have any part of the girls' game, unless he took on the male's role. "That Her Fatness wanted me to swallow the bitter pill of humiliation was clear, and so great was my longing to be part of the girls' world again that I swallowed it" (30). This was Arjie's first direct experience, (but not to be his last) with a gender boundary. Even the setting in the novel is divided into gender territories, at the grandparents' house, the boys and the girls had specific play areas. "Territorially, the area around my grandparents' house was divided into two" (3). The front yard belonged to the boys and the back yard to the girls. "It was to this territory of "the girls," confined to the back garden and the kitchen porch, that I seemed to have gravitated naturally..." (3). The girls' territory, being near the kitchen and the garden is typical of the female's role; a woman works in the kitchen and around the household. The boys' territory, pertaining to the road and the field; is typical of the male's role in society, a man does hard labour and comes home to a well kept household.





Fortunately for Arjie's self esteem, his newly returned Radha Aunty takes pity on him, and recovers what is left of his self-respect by letting him play with her jewellery and make-up. Radha Aunty feels the direct impact of injustice and oppression from her family. The families' attitude towards Radha Aunty is an inflexible disapproval, when it is discovered that she is secretly seeing a Sinhalese man. The classic matriarch, Ammachi, takes control in determining the fate of her daughter. The relationship between Anil and Radha Aunty causes tension not only within the family, but also gossip within the community. Anil and Radha Aunty realize that their relationship could not possibly work out optimistically in the end .".. [I] believed that if two people loved each other everything was possible. Now, I knew that this was not so" (97). Maintaining a good reputation for the family name was more important to Radha Aunty's family, than for them to put aside ethnic differences for her happiness.
Daryl Uncle helps Arjie's sense of confidence by giving Arjie the sequels of his favourite novel: Little Women, Arjie would not ask his father to buy these sequels for him. "I wanted to reach out and hug him, but, feeling that this was inappropriate, I thanked him instead" (109). This simple act shows Arjie an adult male's acceptance that he desperately needed. There is an immediate sense of disapproval by Amma towards Daryl Uncle for his act of kindness towards Arjie; Daryl does not recognize the situation with Arjie that Amma and Appa are trying to reverse. "She was looking at Daryl Uncle and there was an expression on her face I had never seen before" (109). The sudden arrival of Daryl Uncle to the Chelvaratnam family also brought a new set of problems. Arjie's attachment to Daryl Uncle is quickly followed by the death of Daryl Uncle, this forces Arjie to grow up much faster than he should have to. When Arjie is reminiscing about Daryl Uncle, he turns to a chapter in Little Women that no longer brings him pleasure "The world the characters lived in, where good was rewarded and evil punished, seemed suddenly false to me" (149). Daryl Uncle's torturous death at the hands of the Sinhalese police forecasts Sri Lanka's deteriorating ethnic situation. Amma brings Arjie along with her as she throws herself directly in the center of the violently, oppressive situation between the two opposing ethnic groups. Arjie learns that there is nothing that can be done to bring the killer of Daryl Uncle to justice, and this is would be a harsh reality for any adult to understand, let alone for a young boy to have to face.
Arjie's non-masculine qualities leave his father no choice but to transfer his son to the Victorian Academy. This transfer appears to be Appa's final attempt to correct Arjie's future. "The Academy will force you to become a man" (205). Once Arjie becomes accustomed to his new school, he becomes what his family had always feared. Arjie's sexuality is no longer deniable by him nor is it changeable by his family any longer. The cultural spitefulness also transfers to the school yard between the Tamil's and the Sinhalese. A power struggle develops between the Buddhist and cruel, yet non-discriminatory school principal and the Sinhalese-chauvinist vice-principal; it is believed that Black Tie is associated with the harassment of the minority Tamil students by their Sinhalese peers.
Arjie's innocence and confusion make him such an appealing character. When the oppression he experiences from his family is added to his character, this makes Arjie even more engaging. The social contrasts between the ethnic groups in Sri Lanka and the difficulties experienced by Arjie are what truly make the overall presentation of the novel so enticing and powerful.
Works Cited
Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.

 


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Romesh Gunasekara and Reef


Romesh Gunesekera

Romesh Gunesekera




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Photo: © Granta Books
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Biography

Romesh Gunesekera was born in 1954 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He grew up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, moving to England in 1971. He gained an Arts Council Writers' Award in 1991. His first book, Monkfish Moon, a collection of short stories reflecting the ethnic and political tensions that have threatened Sri Lanka since independence in 1948, was published in 1992.

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 Sri Lanka by the worsening political situation, they move to London where Triton opens a restaurant. The Sandglass (1998), his second novel, centres on the character of Prins Ducal, a Sri Lankan businessman, and his search for the truth about his father's death. It was awarded the inaugural BBC Asia Award for Achievement in Writing and Literature. His novel, Heaven's Edge (2002), is set on an island in the near future.

Romesh Gunesekera lives in London, but travels widely for festivals, workshops and British Council tours. In recent years he has held writing residencies in in Hong Kong, Singapore and Denmark, and in 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His latest book is The Match (2006).



REEF
Romesh Gunesekera
New Press, 190 pp., $20.00
by Neil Gordon
In contemporary London, a Sri Lankan man stops at a gas station, pumps his gas, goes to pay. In the face of the boy in the cashier's booth, he sees a great familiarity, "almost a reflection" of his own. It is night, they are alone, and although compatriots, their only common language is English, of which the boy speaks little: the man is Sinhala, the boy Tamil, the two sides of their country's long civil war.
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, England -- is this Sinhala man's narration in flashback of his life, from his boyhood to young adulthood. It is a servant's life that he tells us: as a boy, Triton is steered into the service of Mister Salgado, a bourgeois Sinhala intellectual from a landowning family. At first he is a houseboy on a staff of three, but before long, with his cool efficiency, he supplants the other two, becoming Mister Salgado's cook and caretaker.
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 London that Triton stops at a gas station in Mister Salgado's car and meets the young Tamil refugee. But those twenty years in England are only briefly described: Triton is concerned with narrating, in detail, the ten years or so he lived with Mister Salgado in Sri Lanka.
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 Britain in 1948 -- and even more so since the 1956 de-anglicizing of the country by the Sri Lankan Freedom Party, which so fatally decided on Sinhala as the national language -- these politics are always immediately present in the story. This is a place on the verge of massive political upheaval, with social inequities and ideological rifts deep enough to find expression in terrorism, and then in decades of civil war. And yet when Gunesekera refers to the historical or political, always within the narrative point of view of this young boy, the integrity of the book's voice seems broken. Describing Mister Salgado's cook, he writes
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; Sheffield silver replaced by coconut spoons.
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 British Empire, and there is the brutal irony of independence leading to violence beyond that which the British imposed. Gunesekera captures, like Naipaul, the peculiarly apt blend of British formality and tropical fecundity, as if the cold cultural eye of the English made even more movingly colorful the parrots, gekkos, orioles -- the "promise of cinnamon, pepper, clove" in this "jungle of demons"; the "perpetual embrace of the shore and the sea, bounded by a fretwork of undulating coconut trees, pure unadorned forms framing the seascape into a kaleidoscope of bluish jewels" -- of the island paradises they corrupted or, Gunesekera will suggest, were corrupted by.
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 Sri Lanka as less important than a servant's domestic tale.
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 Sri Lanka is implicit to the story -- so implicit, perhaps, that Gunesekera's explicit insistance weakens its importance. History may be a nightmare in which Gunesekera is struggling to entrap us, and yet no matter how often these political realities are referred to, they never become as relevant as the more immediate, more compelling emotional realities of the story.
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 India north and south, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, each with their flotillas of disturbed hope and manic wanderlust. They had come full of the promise of cinnamon, pepper, clove, and found a refuge in this jungle of demons and vast quiet waters.
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 England. When he goes to pay, he notices that the cashier is someone who looks like him. In answer to his inquiry, the cashier confirms that he is indeed from Sri Lanka. The cashier is a new refugee, but the narrator has been in the country for twenty years and is the owner of a restaurant. Talking together about their country and the war there makes the narrator start thinking of his life in Sri Lanka and of the events that brought him to England as a refugee.
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 London. There, they moved from place to place until, five years after their arrival, Mister Salgado decided it was time to buy a permanent home; the chaos was only getting worse in Sri Lanka as the years went by. Triton thought they should open a restaurant, and Mister Salgado eventually bought him an old snack-bar to start him on the path to making his dream come true.
In 1983, there was another major uprising, but news of Nili's mental breakdown sent Mister Salgado back to find her. Triton stayed in London, realizing that deep down he had always wanted to be on his own. Without Mister Salgado by his side, he was finally free to pursue success as a restaurateur and find his own place in the world.
Consuming desire: Identity and narration in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef
 
Sharanya Jayawickrama (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge)

FIRST RESPONSE
Romesh Gunesekera was born in Sri Lanka where he spent his childhood and later moved to England, via the Philippines, where he has lived and worked since. His first novel Reef (1994) offers a tantalising taste of exotic flavours and textures of life embedded in the familiar model of a coming of age narrative. Reef is the story of Triton, a boy growing up in 1970s Sri Lanka, as he works in the house of Mister Salgado, an amateur marine biologist and general dilettante. The narrative unfolds in retrospect as Triton releases his imagination from his present life in England, where he has immigrated and become a restaurateur, to the memory of his childhood in Sri Lanka. Food, the processes of cooking and the wider condition of consuming become the medium and models of self-expression and social knowledge for the young Triton. In this essay, I am concerned with the ways in which food is used to generate layers of representation within the text as well as around the product of the novel as it circulates in a global market of literary and cultural consumption. The identity of Triton, of the author, and the text itself come under consideration as the novel is positioned between multiple reading audiences, in particular the Sri Lankan and the British audience. I apply the interplay of desire and consuming as a productive dialectic, both within and around the narrative, in order to understand the creation of identity, and the dynamics of cultural exchange and consumerism in the global market.
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 Colombo house of Mister Salgado, Triton declares,
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 Sri Lanka was known as the Garden of Eden: "It panders to anyone’s chauvinism, you know: Sinhala, Tamil, aboriginal. Choose a religion, pick your fantasy. History is flexible" (85). In the imagining of paradise, desire swiftly segues into the fantasy of choosing and claiming a history or narrative for oneself regardless of what other identities and histories might co-exist and be consumed in the process. In the context of the narratives of origin circulating in Sri Lankan social consciousness and of their application in media propaganda in bolstering stereotypical ethnic identities, and in relation to the crisscrossing histories of colonialism and the global relationships of power and cultural exchange existing today, Mister Salgado’s wry comment is pertinently made.6
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 Sri Lanka - the idyll contrasted with the apocalypse - a profoundly limited representation, in which there are neither faces nor identities, as in his encounter with the refugee. Remembering his early days in England, Triton recalls an encounter with a woman who asks him whether he is a refugee fleeing Africa and "that wicked Amin" (174) to which he eloquently replies, "I am an explorer on a voyage of discovery" (174). The attitude towards his identity and history that is revealed by this comment is the same one which leads him to deny identification with the refugee and which qualifies the entire narrative. Triton’s "voyage of discovery" involves re-visioning the experience of the past even as this means obscuring other versions of identity and reality. In Triton’s representation of Joseph (the elderly caretaker of Mister Salgado’s house), the underside of narratives of "discovery" or identity, whether of individual, community or nation becomes apparent as he demonises and literally banishes Joseph from the house. Gunesekera invokes tropes belonging to popular religion and superstition that allow Triton to "imagine a star-chart in the sky that would cause the fall of Joseph"(11) and to project fear and hatred onto the old man’s "devil-mask"(25) of a face. When Joseph disappears into town while Mister Salgado is away, Triton is elated that "some miracle whereby my wishes had been picked up by the spirits of the city" (30) has taken place and is "sure that the gods had intervened on my behalf" (31). The whimsicality of Triton’s belief that "some mischievous little godling would intervene with a triple-pronged arrow and prick fate towards my desires" (34) alleviates the pervasive demonisation of Joseph in which his reality is deferred and erased and any other sense of his identity is oppressed. In terms of a narrative of identity written through desire, every detail and image of description regarding Joseph registers denial, hatred and ultimately exploitation of meaning.
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 England. In a consumer-oriented cultural climate that demands difference and diversity in terms of products and processes, Triton’s culinary skill, which initially provides him with a viable mode of self-expression, becomes crucially redemptive in monetary terms. A cynical reader might compare this to the position of the author, for Gunesekera’s pervasive use of images of Sri Lanka in his fiction must lead us to consider what is on offer for reader consumption and what is left opaque and unknowable in his narrative representations. When the most available representations of Sri Lanka in the global market are those written by diasporic writers and published in Britain, North America and Australia, it is important to register the desire for difference in the global marketplace and in the creation of consumer desire. In Reef, the employment of food in textual image production foregrounds the way in which the text as product becomes a cultural commodity. The author effectively employs markers of cultural difference in the text to create a very palatable product - a novel whose allure emanates from the delectable descriptions centring around food into the imagination of the reader who feels that he is able to grasp hold of a new experience of place and time. The desire for difference that finds satiation in the text that employs exotic images is similarly satisfied in varying degrees by the increasing availability and acquirability of such markers of difference in popular culture: from the recent and ongoing "Bollywood" craze in Britain that engenders tastes and trends in high-street fashion, that modifies the rhythms of pop music and that also leads to such consumer events as the Selfridges department store in central London promoting a festival of authentic Indian cuisine in its upmarket food hall in the summer of 2002. An immediate indicator of cultural commodification is the numerous television advertisements that extract certain aspects of Indian culture in order to attract viewers’ attention and to create an attractive and different "identity" for their promotion. In the current Peugeot 206 advertisement on English television, a young Indian man’s desire for a sleek Peugeot leads him to batter a locally produced car into its shape and form. In a slick pastiche of a Bollywood film scene, the new and improved car lends him an allure that enables him to attract the attention of the female object of his desire. In the above example there is no real relevance in tying the product to these visual markers of Indian identity and culture - the markers are used for their vibrant visual potential and popular currency in order to sell consumer products and services.7 Similar to Triton’s lack of knowledge of Miss Nili in Reef that allows him to consume the piece of cake and fulfil his desire is the ability of the consumer in a global market to buy into certain cultural trends or to consume certain identities that are offered as commodities in a socio-economic and historical vacuum.
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 England, Mister Salgado expresses the futility of his failed dreams for himself and Triton:
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 Earls Court snack shop with its line of bedraggled, cosmopolitan itinerants. But they were the people I had to attend to: my future. My life would become a dream of musky hair, smoky bars and garish neon eyes. I would learn to talk and joke and entertain, to perfect the swagger of one who has found his vocation and, at last, a place to call his own. The snack shop would one day turn into a restaurant and I into a restaurateur. It was the only way I would succeed: without a past, without a name, without Ranjan Salgado standing by my side. (180)
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 England requires a dilution and consumerization of the identities and sense of history imagined in youth. As Triton acknowledges from the vantage point of his immigrant self,
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 Colombo, the conversation in Mister Salgado’s house revolves around the murder of a business magnate whose death is blamed on "conspicuous consumption" (135) and the play of black justice. As the men gorge themselves on chicken curry and beer and gossip about the American Robert buying sex on the beach in a corrupted dream of paradise consummated and consumed, Triton escapes out into the garden when he hears the order shouted from inside: " ‘Triton, kolla, beer!’" (153) This initiates Triton’s moment of socialisation - his first understanding of where he stands in a society whose dynamics are still largely opaque to him:
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 Sri Lanka and as such, its audience is even smaller. In terms of the works in these languages of Sri Lanka becoming available on a global market it seems still a dream of desire.14 The globalisation of the market that allows cultural exchange, the enjoyment of diversity and difference, the experience of a more fluid or hybrid identity, is primarily conducted and processed through the global medium of English, the consuming language, that expands and adapts to absorb other languages and the images and experiences they seek to convey.15 While a novel such as Reef, is an enriching text to read, it is essential for the future and integrity of cultural exchange, that texts in local languages be both conserved and cultivated. The existence of vibrant literatures that are responsive to the contemporary reality of any society must be increasingly informed by the global experience. However, the global market for cultural exchange is sustained by the illusion that we are at this time able to sufficiently access and understand diversity and difference without the effort of comprehensive translation between languages and without an increased cultivation of local structures of support for writers and artists. In the pathways of interaction and exchange between the arts and literatures of the world, it is imperative that we do not let the global become a consuming cultural language.
 
 
 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 Ceylon became Sri Lanka in 1972.
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, Rutherford explains the "commodification" of language and culture, where meaning becomes "spectacle": "Difference ceases to threaten, or to signify power relations. Otherness is sought after for its exchange value, its exoticism and the pleasures, thrills and adventures it can offer. The power relation is closer to tourism than imperialism, an expropriation of meaning rather than materials." (Rutherford: 1990)
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 Sri Lanka it creates through memory and imagination. Therefore to say in the words of one reviewer that writers like Gunesekera are "repatriating the skills and tactics they mastered in England to give new dignity and authority to their homelands" (Iyer: 1995) is not sufficient, for neither author nor text can be understood solely within the frameworks that posit subversion of the colonial dialectic as the key imperative.
9 For a discussion of the recent work of South Asian writers in Britain see Nasta: 2000.
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 Third World locale functions as a "calling-card in the international book markets." Brennan argues that such writers allow a "flirtation with change," by setting aside real problems and conflicts for a "trauma by inches" ? a palatable and de-politicised tendering of cultural difference.
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." (Davis: 1997)
 
 
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." (Davis: 1997) However, it is important to note that Gunesekera does not see this as a specifically or exclusively postcolonial imperative. Instead Gunesekera conveys his resistance to being categorised solely as ‘postcolonial’: "what I’m doing with language, with the English language, fits into that postcolonial model, of changing the way you use language, what it means, what it can do. I would tick that box I suppose. But I would also tick that box in a different way in the sense that all good writers have always done that from the very beginning." (Jayawickrama: 2002)
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, Sri Lanka and funded by Michael Ondaatje’s Gratiaen Trust. There are intentions to publish two subsequent volumes: translations of Tamil stories into Sinhala and Sinhala stories into Tamil but as yet they are forthcoming. The collection is published in the hope that it may go some way in the "attempt to build connections between those disparate groups many of whom neither know nor can understand each other" in Sri Lanka. To my knowledge, this collection can presently only be found in Sri Lanka bookshops. A notable recent publication is Chelva Kanaganayakam (ed.) Lutesong and Lament: Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka. Toronto: TSAR, 2003. This is a competent and elegantly translated collection of Sri Lankan Tamil short stories and poetry.
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 Eden closing" as the language spoken in Triton’s Sri Lanka falls "prey to more and more of the outside world." This comment seems to register a notion that other languages are diminished by their exposure to global influences while English is allowed to appropriate the "booty" of other meanings. (Iyer: 1995)
 
 
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 South Asia. Leiden: Brill, 1978.
Goonetilleke, D.C.R.A. "The 1971 Insurgency in Sri Lankan Literature in English." Modern Fiction Studies 39.1 (Winter 1993).
Gunesekera, Romesh. Reef. London: Granta Books, 1994.
Iyer, Pico. "The Empire Strikes Back." The New York Review of Books, June 22 1995.
Jayawickrama, Sharanya. "Interview with Romesh Gunesekera: London, 1 July 2002." Unpublished.
Nasta, Susheila. "Homes Without Walls: New Voices in South Asian Writing in Britain." Ralph J. Crane and Radhika Mohanram (eds.), Shifting Continents/ Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent.Amsterdam, Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2000.
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. Amsterdam, Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2000.
Perera, Walter. "Images of Sri Lanka Through Expatriate Eyes: Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 30.1 (1995).
Prakrti. " ‘The Breach’: Three Sri Lankan-Born Writers at the Crossroads." Outlook (Colombo), 4 June 1997.
Rushdie, Salman. "Imaginary Homelands." Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books, 1991.
Rutherford, Jonathan. "A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference." Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.
 
 
 
FIRST RESPONSE
 
 
This essay offers a thoughtful and attentive reading of Gunesekra's
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 Sri Lanka succeed in attracting and seducing European literary critics by burnishing their stories with a colonial longing for the lost Empire. The calling card is always colonial. The fictional landscape with its towns and the countryside is still as the Dutch, the Portuguese and the British left it: sun-drenched villas with modest Georgian porticos, hung heavy with frangipane and bougainvillaea; latticed mat curtains dowsed in cool water from the well in the garden, a punka driven by Victorian electrics, the smell of musk, of cinnamon and cloves, dust, heat, cow dung and the wilting jasmine of the ladies of the night. One might be forgiven for thinking that Somerset Maugham was back in fashion. Romesh Gunesekera, whose first novel "REEF" was on the Booker Prize short list it seems, is no exception to this rule of seduction.
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 London. This venue is much used for glittering occasions like these, including the one where the Chancellor of the Exchequer makes his annual keynote speech, surrounded by the Treasury and the Bank of England advisers.
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 Liverpool University, Gunesekera now works for the British Council having failed to get into Publishing. He has had a book of short stories published previously by Granta and reprinted as a Penguin paperback here and in India, although I have seen no references to this elsewhere. The story is about a young Sri Lankan who works as a houseboy and cook and comes of age under the kind and watchful patronage of Mr.Salgado, a mysterious auto-didact and a Marine Biologist. My tentative suggestion that Salgado resembled another long term Sri Lanka resident, expatriate Science Fiction writer Arthur C. Clark, a polymath even down to his preoccupation with marine biology produced a mild demur. The treasure trove of books and magazines (Readers Digest, Life, the Almanac) and conversations overheard (Chaos Theory, cooking) provide Triton the young boy a mental room of his own, "where voice is bundled in paper, inscribing the soft grey tissues of my brain."
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 England where Mr. Salgado sets him up as a snack-bar owner. The "great good place" that was Sri Lanka is lost through emigration. The main criticism of this otherwise fine novel ("a novella, not a novel") is its self-conscious description of "the colonial world as exotic", made even more strange by the description of the little known Burger community of the Dutch and the Portuguese in Sri Lanka. Germaine Greer again:" A slippery little book."  There is a bigger, better book from where this one came, says Antonia Byatt, and I agree.
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 Sri Lanka from England strikes up an uncertain relationship with Siri, a rootless peasant from the Sri Lankan outback. His talents as a builder-carpenter give Ray time to dream boldly of a house in Siri's lost countryside: a joint venture of Ray's money and Siri's skills. The urban war gets too close and scorches the dream. A local newsagent and his shop are incinerated for the political incorrectness of not taking sides. Siri's brother, so the brief news reaching him confirms, has been executed by hanging in the countryside where the house was going to be built.
  
"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 London in Batik. The inn keeper in Captives smokes with romantic and sexual longing for an English woman guest at his hotel.  He has no doubts about his high minded suitability.
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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Thursday, May 3, 2012

lwgw homnai ni lamaya

nwngkhw lwgw homnw thang nai ni lamayao
arwbao besebang gwjan???
besebang gwbao hanthi bao nangwn
swr khinthanw angnw???

swrang aa khwmsi khw lwgw homnw thang dwng mwn.

swrang aa angniyao fwinanwi gab fwi dwngmwn...
lwgw mwniyao...
da ang swr ni sigang aw gabnw?
nwngkhwo di ang dinwi sim lwgw mwnaswi!!!
ang gaba.....ang lwgw homthargwn.

swrang aa gwsw baiflenanwi dinwi asa garbai
nathai ang mabla babw garnw hanai nonga.
angni thar mwjang mwnnai aa bibdi asokhanda
janw hanai nonga!!
ang sanse blabw lwgw mwngwn.
arw,
arw be lama khw fwjwb thargwn.

ang mithigwo be lama yabw jwbthi dongo.

ang lwrbang jalangwn
angni jiu aa gwma langwn
ang nwngkhwo nebai thagwn
be lamani jwbtha bwi dwima gathwnao
jerao nwng fwi gwn, jeraw nwng fwithar nangwn
obwlanw ang nwngkhw lwgw homgwn
gwswni jesebang bathra dongmwn,
ang bungfur jwb gwn,
nwngkhw mwjang mwn nai ni, nwngkhwo gwsw thwnai ni
songsar aw raijw janai ni.

ang nwngkhwo be lama ni jwbtha bwi dwima gathwn aw lwgw homgwn
jwng sanwi jwng jo dwima ni gubun farse
bwi mwnse songsar aw raijw jahwigwn.
oraini thakhai.....
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