22. In his article about Selvadurai’s novel, Rajiva Wijesinha discusses the reception of the novel in Sri Lanka, including “the dismissal of Funny Boy as filth” ( Breaking Bounds 84) by Maureen Seneviratne, a prominent Sri Lankan journalist who associated homosexuality with such social ills as pedophilia.
23. For a fuller examination of the role of authority in Selvadurai’s novel, see Rajiva Wijesinha’s chapter “Aberrations and Excesses: Sri Lanka Substantiated by the Funny Boy” in Breaking Bounds.
24. Jose Santiago Fernandez Vazquez has pointed out that throughout the novel, openly challenging the effects of power is shown to be ineffective, if not wholly disastrous (when Arjie confronts Ammachi, he gets a beating; when Daryl questions the government’s activities in Jaffna, he is murdered). Arjie is able to get his way not by openly flouting authority but by appearing to conform to it and then undermining it from within (114-15).
25. It may be significant that this is the first name of the leader of the second JVP insurrection, Rohana Wijeweera. The JVP was a Marxist organization, and Wijeweera modeled himself on Che Guevara.
Chapter 5
Diasporic Differences: The Sri Lankan Conflict from a Distance
Not all diasporic writers seek to speak directly to their erstwhile compatriots or attempt to intervene directly in the affairs of the home country like Sivanandan and Selvadurai do in their respective novels, as discussed in the previous chapter. This chapter begins with an exploration of the works of Romesh Gunesekera and Michael Ondaatje, two diasporic writers who are very aware of their global audience and thus write about the situation in Sri Lanka from a perspective of distance. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Channa Wickremesekera’s Distant Warriors and V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage, both of which explore the ways in which the conflict helped to shape diasporic identities in the West, Australia in Wickremesekera’s case, and the United States and Canada in Ganeshananthan’s case. For Wickremesekera and Ganeshananthan, distance is built into the very plots of their novels, but the central role that diasporic Sri Lankans have played (and continue to play) in the conflict and its aftermath means that in some ways their works seem closer to the sources and emotions of the conflict than those of diasporic writers who set their narratives in Sri Lanka.
R. Radhakrishnan reminds us that “places are both real and imagined… we can know places that are distant as much as we can misunderstand and misrepresent places we inhabit” (126). As an Indian expatriate in the United States, Radhakrishnan goes on to say, however, that diasporics do have a responsibility in the way they represent their homelands: “As diasporan citizens doing double duty (with accountability both here and there), we need to understand as rigorously as we can the political crises in India, both because they concern us and also because we have a duty to represent India to ourselves and to the United States as truthfully as we can” (128). What Radhakrishnan assumes here—and, I believe, rightly so—is that diasporics do have to be accountable to the “there” of their respective countries of origin as well as to the “here” of their current location. Diasporics might not want or choose the burden of being considered as representatives of their countries of origin. This burden is often thrust upon them, however, when diasporic writers focus on their homelands in particular texts. In such cases, the biographical information provided in the paratext more often than not mentions the writer’s origins. 1 This information regarding the writer’s identification with a particular place would lead many readers to assume that what the writer says about his/her homeland in the text would be trustworthy, believing that the writer is acting in the role of native informant.
In discussing how some critics have responded negatively to the way certain diasporic Sri Lankan writers have represented their country of origin, Minoli Salgado has asserted that such criticisms are “politically and ideologically prescriptive” (6). 2 Salgado writes:
They [the negative responses of the critics] are based upon a homogenized conception of migrant sensibility and a belief that migrant writers are honor-bound to narrate the past and their former homeland in ways that will deepen a reader’s understanding of the ethnic conflict from a unitary perspective. (6)
Salgado’s call for an acceptance of writers’ heterogeneity and plurality is valid. I would argue, however, that expecting a diasporic writer to show some sense of responsibility when writing about his or her country of origin does not entail the writer having to present the country from a “unitary perspective.” Indeed, rather than presenting some sort of propaganda or oversimplifying issues, a diasporic writer’s responsibility, when choosing to write about his or her homeland, would be to attempt a rich and complex negotiation of the questions and challenges pertaining to that country. Likewise, Chelva Kanaganayagam in his thoughtful consideration of critical responses to Ondaatje’s novel acknowledges that “to insist that the novel must validate a particular position is to reduce the text to an ideological construct,” but he also argues that “it would now be futile for the postcolonial critic to jettison the need for a nuanced awareness of local conditions” (“In Defense” 19).
In relation to the above questions, this chapter first explores Gunesekera’s novel Reef and Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, before proceeding to the work of Wickremesekera and Ganeshananthan. We will see that Gunesekera’s somewhat sensationalized depiction of the happenings in Sri Lanka is, ironically, less potent than Ondaatje’s attempt to relate these happenings to global concerns such as human rights and terrorism.
A Taste of Paradise? Reef
Romesh Gunesekera, a Sinhalese, was born in Sri Lanka but moved first to the Philippines when he was about twelve years old, and then to London, where he has lived ever since. His first novel, Reef, was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1995. The slim volume revolves around a young boy, Triton, who is brought as a servant to the home of Ranjan Salgado, an amateur marine biologist and a representative of the upper middle class in Sri Lanka in the 1960s. The boy hero-worships Salgado and strives to emulate him in every way. 3 Within a relatively short period, Triton becomes the sole servant and general factotum ministering to his master once the cook, Lucy, retires and the abusive caretaker, Joseph, is dismissed. The boy grows up learning to cook, clean, and do whatever needs to be done in the house and garden. Triton becomes obsessed with food, and cooking becomes his means of creativity and self-expression. Ultimately, he follows Salgado to England, remaining in London even after his erstwhile master decides to return to Sri Lanka.
Gunesekera seems to target a non-Sri Lankan audience in his novel. In addition, he attempts to both use and escape the place or setting for this particular novel—Sri Lanka. 4 Gunesekera has stated in an interview:
Stories are not located in places. There are places that exist in stories. It is just very convenient for us and it is actually quite a pleasure to think of a book being about a place. But a book—a good book anyway—the sort of books that I am, in a sense, interested in—is about a place only in a very tangential way. A book is about itself. (Davis, “‘We Are All Artists’” 47)
This is a curious position for a writer who has relentlessly focused on one particular imagined place with a very precise real-world referent. In order to privilege the story over the setting in Reef, Gunesekera uses the narrative strategies of an expatriate narrator and a frame narrative.
The narrator of the story is actually the mature Triton, who has been living as an expatriate in London for several decades (12). His nostalgia for Sri Lanka is brought on by a chance encounter at a gas station with a Sri Lankan Tamil, a newly minted immigrant working there, whose face is “almost a reflection of my own” (11)—an observation which cleverly conveys the fact that there is not much physical difference between the ethnic groups in conflict, the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The framing device emphasizes to the reader that there is a considerable distance between the narrative voice, which has been “protected from the past” (12) for a long time, and what is happening currently in S
ri Lanka: “Now a landmark for gunrunners in a battle zone of army camps and Tigers” (12). The literal distance between the narrator’s location and his subject matter—“six thousand miles” (13)—is also highlighted. Right from the very beginning of the novel, therefore, what is emphasized is that the narrator is distant in time and space from his homeland. Gunesekera seems to be suggesting that the narrator is objective and politically open-minded as a result of this distance.
The framing device employed by Gunesekera, by means of which the adult Triton returns to the scenes of his childhood through his imagination, is useful, according to Rocio Davis, because we get a dual perspective: “It is the interplay of two focal points—that of the experiencing child and that of the observing or reminiscing adult—which offer a double vision: the child’s experience, and the adult narrator’s use of that experience” (“‘I Am an Explorer’” 15). In Reef, however, this sense of double vision is not consistent. At times we seem to be getting only the child’s perspective unfiltered through the adult consciousness, while at other times the adult narrator provides commentary on the child’s experiences. This allows Gunesekera to focus on the boy and his cocooned existence within the haven of Salgado’s house and to generalize the sociopolitical events in the country. An examination of how and when Gunesekera chooses to have the adult Triton comment on, gloss, or judge his youthful experiences shows us that the commentary falls into a pattern that separates the personal from the political, focusing attention on the narrator’s youth and away from the political upheavals in Sri Lanka. Unlike Shyam Selvadurai, who shows how the personal is the political in Funny Boy, and in contrast to “A House in the Country” and “Batik”—two finely wrought short stories that mesh the personal lives of the respective protagonists with political acts of violence in Gunesekera’s own collection Monkfish Moon 5—in Reef Gunesekera firmly concentrates on the personal and excludes the political.
In relation to Triton’s growing sexual awareness, for example, the adult narrator comments clearly and decisively on the young boy’s experiences and perspectives. At first, it seems that Triton is intensely attracted to his young employer, whose physical attributes are lovingly delineated by the narrator. The reader begins to wonder whether this evident attraction is merely a form of adulation or whether there is a homoerotic relationship between the master and his “disciple.” Triton says, for instance, that he became not only Salgado’s cook, but also “ everything else” [emphasis added] (18). When Salgado begins a relationship with Miss Nili, a young woman working in a hotel, Triton himself seems to be attracted to her and describes his intense physical awareness of the young woman. He relates what he would have liked to have done to or with her sexually, but is quick to point out that he, at that time, lacked the knowledge or the experience to fully understand, let alone express, his feelings, emphasizing as he does that he was a virgin at the time (108). In this instance, the narrator takes great pains to underscore the fact that this is commentary from his adult persona.
When it comes to the political developments in Sri Lanka, on the other hand, Gunesekera allows little or no commentary from the adult Triton. For instance, no gloss or commentary is provided by the adult narrator about what his youthful self overhears concerning the events leading up to the 1971 insurrection, as discussed by Salgado and his friends during their beer- and chicken-curry-fueled card games when they describe rural youth seeking economic justice as “young thugs” addicted to “Marxist claptrap” (161). Through this exchange between Salgado and his friends, Gunesekera nods to middle-class anxieties about the rural youth belonging to the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP—People’s Liberation Front)—referred to derogatively by Salgado’s coterie as “half-baked ruffians with nothing better to do” (161)—who would later participate in the 1971 insurrection. As Walter Perera has suggested, Salgado and his friends respond this way since a revolution would negatively affect their own socio-economic status (“Images” 70); however, Gunesekera’s narrator does not provide context. It is perhaps understandable that the young Triton, who overhears the above discussion among his master’s circle of friends, would not challenge those views. As a servant whose school education has come to a grinding halt when he was eleven, and whose time is taken up with manifold household duties, he has neither the time nor the inclination to be cognizant about political developments. 6 What is surprising is that Gunesekera chooses not to have the mature, self-educated, diasporic restaurateur provide any commentary about why Salgado and his cronies are denigrating the imminent rebellion and its perpetrators or explain that the “half-baked ruffians” being referred to were actually university-educated rural youth with valid grievances and an ambitious agenda for social reform based on Marxist principles.
It could be argued, of course, that Gunesekera’s omitting of contextualization indicates that he is actually directing his novel to Sri Lankan readers, the majority of whom would be aware of the reasons for the 1971 insurrection and would probably not need any explanations about such an important historical moment. However, other aspects of the novel undermine this argument and make it evident that Gunesekera’s implied readers are non-Sri Lankan. For example, even though Gunesekera uses a plethora of Sinhala words in the text, they are, more often than not, carefully italicized and glossed, presumably not for the sake of the Sri Lankan readers, who would find such glosses redundant: “ ko” is “where” (16); “ miris” means “chillies” [ sic] (30); “ kavun” are “little coconut cakes” (74); “ cadju” are cashewnuts (75); “sereppu” is “a leather sandal” (112). At a time when cultural difference has become a commodity, the inclusion of these Sinhala words in the text provides local flavor and adds to the appeal of the novel for non-Sri Lankan readers, while the respective glosses provide ease of consumption.
I would also suggest that it is for ease of consumption among non-Sri Lankan readers that the novel presents Sri Lanka from the very first pages in a stereotypical fashion, using the trope of a spoilt paradise: “Once a diver’s paradise. Now a landmark for gunrunners in a battle zone of army camps and Tigers” (12). When he describes the Sri Lanka of his youth, Triton says that it had been “turned from jungle to paradise to jungle again,” and that this had occurred “even more barbarically in my own life” (25). Such descriptions are problematic; since Sri Lanka has cultures that go back over twenty-five hundred years, it is difficult to conceptualize when precisely it was a jungle in either the literal or the metaphorical sense. It is also difficult to figure out when it was ever a paradise, and for whom. Was it before the arrival of the European colonizers (whom Gunesekera refers to euphemistically as “adventurers” [95] merely seeking refuge and spices, instead of as agents of territorial imperialism) from 1505 onward? Or was it during the colonial regime of the Portuguese, the Dutch or the British? When did the country stop being a paradise? Was it at the onset of the ethnic conflict in the 1980s? But—as we have seen in the first chapter—even fifty or hundred years before that, there were ethnic and class tensions in the country which would have hardly made it a “paradise.” The use of tropes such as “jungle” and “paradise” limits the ways in which the country and its cultures can be understood, making the novel echo the banality of the slogan used by Sri Lanka’s national airline in the 1990s when it promoted itself as “a taste of paradise.”
Indeed, taste is important in the novel since Triton’s métier is cooking and his milieu is, for the most part, the kitchen. A major part of the novel is about Triton’s exploits with food preparation, as he wields his utensils and combines ingredients in a hybridizing fashion (for example, the central scene in the novel is at the Christmas dinner, for which Triton stuffs a turkey—the epitome of Anglo-Saxon gastronomic abundance—with local ingredients such as “Taufik’s ganja” and “jamanaran mandarins” [87]). The many references to and descriptions of Sri Lankan cuisine—pol sambol, pittu, stringhoppers, chicken curry, patties, love cake—in the novel go beyond merely establishing Triton’s role as an artiste in
the kitchen. Like the use of Sinhala words in the text, the passages devoted to Sri Lankan food are markers of authenticity that appeal to the non-Sri Lankan readers. According to Sharanya Jayawickreme, Gunesekera’s lyrical descriptions of food and cooking processes can be linked to the consumption of his novel in the global literature market:
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 centering around food into the imagination of the reader who feels that he [ sic] is able to grasp hold of a new experience of place and time. (“Consuming Desire” n.p.)
Food in the novel, therefore, functions to appeal to readers in search of difference. Violence is also used for the same purpose—as a marketable marker of difference, presented in such a depoliticized way that readers will find it easy to consume. There are many descriptions of violence crammed and listed together in Reef, and it is worth considering one such catalogue, which follows Mr. Salgado’s expression of horror at the use of decapitation by insurgents and then connects these acts of violence with the later ethnic conflict, listing as its features “burning necklaces, flaming molten rings of fire; the Reign of Terror, abductions, disappearances and the crimes of ideology; this suppurating ethnic war” (182-83). The passage in which this list appears seems to indicate that there is no difference between the (mostly Sinhalese) rural youths participating in the first JVP insurrection in the early 1970s, the Tamil militants resorting to violence in order to gain a separate state for the Tamil people from the early 1980s onward, the Sinhalese insurgents from the south involved in the second manifestation of the JVP in the late 1980s, and the forces of different government administrations that attempted to suppress or defeat these groups over a span of more than three decades. The political situations in the country—from the 1971 insurrection to the 1983 riots to the uprising of the JVP in the late 1980s to the early 1990s—are all compressed into a single paragraph. Even though the 1971 insurrection and the JVP uprising of the late 1980s were primarily part of a class struggle, they are presented as being the same as “this suppurating ethnic war.” The description makes it seem as if there has been nothing but an endless bloodbath in Sri Lanka in the last thirty to forty years, in contrast to the “paradise” it was prior to that. The motives and goals of the agents behind all the violence are barely hinted at, which enables readers to consume the violence easily since there is no complicated socio-political history to comprehend or digest in Reef as there is in When Memory Dies and, to a certain extent, in Funny Boy. If the young Triton had not enough education, inclination, or time to grasp the reasons for or implications of the political upheavals in Sri Lanka, the mature Triton does not seem too interested in explanations or analysis either. The lack of information and explanation actually makes it easier for readers to consume the violence depicted in the novel since the violence is dehistoricized.
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