Writing Sri Lanka

Literature, Resistance & the Politics of Place

Minoli Salgado

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134220182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Focusing on ways in which cultural nationalism has influenced both the production and critical reception of texts, Salgado presents a detailed analysis of eight leading Sri Lankan writers - Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunasekera, Shyam Selvadurai, A. Sivanandan, Jean Arasanayagam, Carl Muller, James Goonewardene and Punyakante Wijenaike – to rigorously challenge the theoretical, cultural and political assumptions that pit 'insider' against 'outsider', 'resident' against 'migrant' and the 'authentic' against the 'alien'. By interrogating the discourses of territoriality and boundary marking that have come into prominence since the start of the civil war, Salgado works to define a more nuanced and sensitive critical framework that actively reclaims marginalized voices and draws upon recent studies in migration and the diaspora to reconfigure the Sri Lankan critical terrain.

Part I

1
Literature and territoriality

Boundary marking as a critical paradigm

Etymologically unsettled, ‘territory’ derives from both terra (earth) and terrere (to frighten) whence territorium, ‘a place from which people are frightened off’.

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture¹

Sri Lankan literature in English constitutes an emergent canon of writing that has yet to find settlement in the field of postcolonial studies.² It occupies an uncertain territory, which, in recent years, has itself been marked by the competing ethnic nationalisms of civil war and of contestatory constructions of home and belonging. The upsurge of literary production in English in the past thirty years has corresponded with the dynamic growth of postcolonial studies from the metropolitan centre, the international acclaim granted to writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Romesh Gunesekera, and, as significantly, with a period of heightened political unrest in Sri Lanka – a context of production and reception that is shaped by a politics of affiliation and competing claims to cultural authority. It is worth reminding ourselves that unlike most postcolonial nations, Sri Lanka’s national consciousness developed significantly after Independence and did so along communal lines.³ The 1950s witnessed the dramatic decline of Ceylonese or multi-ethnic Sri Lankan nationalism in favour of Sinhala linguistic nationalism along with the sharpening of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism⁴ – a combination that culminated in the communal violence of 1983 and the start of the military conflict. As a result the accelerated production of Sri Lankan literature in English is historically situated within a context of evolving and contested claims to cultural legitimacy. The precise location of Sri Lankan writers within postcolonial studies and the extent to which their work is domesticated and habilitated within a corresponding emergent Sri Lankan canon thus depends on a complex range of social, cultural and historical factors demarcating different lines of affiliation from diverse and divergent sites of production, reception and accommodation. In determining the boundaries of what constitutes ‘Sri Lankan literature in English’ there is therefore a need to engage with the contexts of cultural contestation in which postcolonial canonisation meets the legitimating strategies of national affirmation – a context of social and cultural instability whereby a resident writer may well be rendered an outsider, and ‘Sri Lankan’ writers abroad may find themselves deemed foreigners in their native land.

Chelva Kanaganayakam’s nuanced consideration of some of the difficulties of evaluating the emergent canon of Sri Lankan writing raises several important issues that are pertinent here. Having attested to the crucial role played by literary critics in ‘filtering’ Sri Lankan literature for an international audience – a task that directly affects the pedagogic construction of the canon – he reveals the radically different evaluations of a Sri Lankan writer which puts him in the ‘awkward situation of being praised for [his] Sri Lankan sensibility by one critic and condemned for not being Sri Lankan by another’ so that a non-Sri Lankan reader ‘would have a hard time deciding whether a writer is a traitor or patriot, an essentialist or an authentic voice’.⁵ It is a critical context in which, according to Kanaganayakam, ‘the line that separates aesthetic criteria and political conviction becomes extremely thin’. It is notable that he is conspicuously attentive to the role of critics in Sri Lanka, ‘a small group’ of people working within the context of conflict and violence in which ‘the polarization that has taken place between the major ethnic groups has made a common ground increasingly difficult’, so that ‘what is offered as literary criticism may well be the expression of a personal bias’.⁶

Drawing together the many strands of Kanaganayakam’s cautious and considered evaluation it can be seen how the ideas expressed in his essay could be taken further. It could be argued that, given the context of cultural contestation that marks Sri Lanka’s recent political history, the literary criticism generated by ‘personal bias’ does not merely constitute an isolated expression of a subjective opinion operating within a culturally conflictual context, but rather enacts a form of discursive ‘boundary marking’ that engages in a politics of inclusion and exclusion that has a symbiotic relationship with the politics of cultural nationalism that informs – and is in turn shaped by – current political events. Before I continue, I would like to stress that this is in no way intended to represent Kanaganayakam’s critique. Rather it constitutes a resettlement of some of his observations within the context of territoriality – a cultural and political dynamic that I aim to use as a critical paradigm on the basis that it informs the discursive register of both literary texts and critical responses. While it has been argued that writers in English are operating in fields that are remote from political realities,⁷ the terms on which their work is assessed both from within and outside Sri Lanka are largely based upon discursive constructions of allegiance, affiliation and legitimacy that serve the needs of various forms of cultural reclamation. While all literary criticism is by definition discriminatory, the practice of critical territoriality enacts a practice of inclusion and exclusion that works not so much to interrogate or deconstruct difference or to draw lines of affiliation between diverse contexts of belonging and thereby create contexts of accommodation, but instead to further generate a practice of cultural boundary marking that has its political corollary in cultural nationalism.⁸ I am not suggesting that all Sri Lankan literary criticism is marked by such a manoeuvre – later in this chapter I will show how this is clearly not the case – but rather that there is a discernable tendency to invest in such critical practices that need to be identified and addressed at this early stage of Sri Lankan literary emergence in postcolonial studies if the concept of a Sri Lankan literary ‘canon’ is to have any useful meaning at all.

This is not an appeal for critical consensus – the sheer range of critical responses to the work of Sri Lankan writers both inside and outside the country could be read as an indication of plurivocity – nor does it stake an interest in the questionable value of canon-formation itself, rather it is a call for identifying the salient critical strands engaging in specific strategies of exclusion so that the ‘boundaries’ of Sri Lankan writing, the sites of cultural contestation and resistance, are exposed in ways that allow for a more inclusive practice of cultural accommodation that might, in turn, feed into a politics of accommodation. The increasing polarisation in Sri Lankan literary studies, with writers subject to analysis of their work on the basis of what Graham Huggan calls ‘invidious questions of “eligibility”’,⁹ reveals the urgent need to generate a mode of critical inquiry that works to dismantle cultural prescriptives of authenticity and allegiance and engage with a mode of discourse attentive to alternative lines of affiliation and, as significantly, sensitive to the varied and contrastive dynamics of belonging to be found in the texts themselves. Such an inquiry is particularly pertinent given that writers are increasingly scripted as cultural ambassadors – both within the country, where anglophone writers are in the privileged position of having the potential to reach an international audience,¹⁰ and abroad, where such writers effectively do. It is necessary therefore to analyse the terms that demarcate the authenticated ‘Sri Lankan writer’ from his or her ‘expatriate’ counterpart – a subject central to this chapter. This process is enabled by a critique that draws into alignment ‘resident’ and ‘expatriate’ writers, creating a context for comparative analysis that is nevertheless attendant to their radically different sites of textual production and reception – an approach that informs this study as a whole, shaping its structural dynamics. The need for such an engagement, addressing and deconstructing critical territoriality, can be seen when the cultural contradictions underpinning accommodation into an authenticated Sri Lankan experience are exposed – evident here in a Sri Lankan critic’s consideration of the emergent canon:

the responsibility for that part of the post-colonial struggle which involves the making of the Lankan canon in English falls very squarely on bi-culturals who more obviously than most others are characterised by their symbiotic natures. These biculturals [sic] are called upon to engage with the relationship/tensions between the two aspects of their symbiotic personalities in a manner that allows what can be felt to be an authentic contemporary Lankan experience to emerge with conviction.¹¹

Here the mediatory position of those who occupy a borderland identity are recoded and ruptured into the dualistic logic of ‘biculturalism’ – a term split in its conscription to the service of an essentialised ‘authentic Lankan experience’. I will be analysing this passage in more detail later, but use it here to reveal the way in which the very terms of accommodating culturally liminal subjectivities have, as their basis, a monocultural centrism that resists rather than engages with the complex sites of affiliation that such subjectivities can occupy.

In a different vein, another Sri Lankan critic – resident outside the country and alert to the significance of Sri Lankan ‘expatriate’ literary production – has marked a distinction between these literary products and their counterparts from within the country in terms that could be interpreted to privilege a specific reading of culture:

The 1980s […] witnessed instances of expatriate activity that reveal a deep-reaching sensitivity to specific events at ‘home’, that have either had significant effects on the ‘home’ culture or other potential for such effects. […] Opinions may vary regarding the value of these activities. I must it leave [sic] to my readers to determine whether some of them are contributory to, or destructive of, Sri Lankan national culture.¹²

This observation is attentive to the impact of ‘expatriate activity’ on the ‘home’ culture – implicitly acknowledging the close connection between these two spaces of representation and the transformative potential of literature, its destabilising effects. It forms part of a detailed and extensive analysis of the English-educated community which gives numerous examples of the socio-cultural and political roles of Sri Lankan expatriates, effectively demonstrating the gradual fragmentation of ‘national culture’ and its expansion into what the critic calls the ‘periphery’.¹³ Yet the terms of evaluation cited here have been re-sited by a resident critic to invite an evaluation of ‘expatriate’ literature on the basis of its impact on an authenticated ‘Sri Lankan national culture’ in ways that resist critical mediation between these sites.¹⁴ This refocusing of the original terms of analysis effectively creates a context in which literary products from outside the country can be screened – or ‘filtered’ to use Kanaganayakam’s felicitous phrase – on the basis of authentication by a Sri Lankan cultural ‘centre’.

While there are numerous distinctions to be drawn between ‘expatriate’ texts and literary products from ‘home’, and there is certainly a need to address the impact of literary products legitimated in metropolitan centres on the marginalised national centres at ‘home’, what interests me here is the basis on which some of these distinctions are made. Exile and expatriation are not simply a question of geography; writers, as this study emphatically shows, can be displaced in a myriad ways at home. I will return to this point later, but now wish to raise an issue that directs much of this study: the process of ‘ex-patriating’ texts – excluding them from the borders of authenticated belonging in ways that might transform the ‘expatriate’, or even the self-exiled resident writer, into an ex-patriot. Both the passages cited above enact a form of critical boundary marking that operates within a discursive paradigm which repeats and revises broader claims to national affiliation that are themselves the subject of literary representation in the work of writers both in and outside Sri Lanka. The literature ‘of’ Sri Lanka (and what a burden of significance this small word carries) can thus be subject to conscription on the basis of contested notions of belonging in which ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ stand as symbolic markers of inclusion and exclusion. As will be seen in my analysis of the work of individual writers in succeeding chapters, texts from both inside and outside the country reflect complex negotiations of territory and identity and reformulations of the constructions of the insider and outsider which intersect with – and can entrench or challenge – cultural formulations of national identity and belonging. Thus within the contestatory dynamics of the postcolonial positioning of Sri Lankan writing in English, literature and the critical reception of texts do not simply reflect but are themselves constitutive of territorial relations in ways that intersect with the divisive discourse of competing constructions of the national space and the very real displacements and geopolitical ruptures generated by political violence. Yet while literary texts may engage with varieties of displacement, opening up for analysis the multiple mediations of belonging and affiliation and thereby revealing the contingent boundaries of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’, critical territoriality – by which I mean the overdetermined evaluation of texts in terms of an authenticated national culture – works to constrain these areas of debate, regulating the boundaries of belonging in ways that serve a specific politics of location. The interconnected dynamics between territoriality as a political strategy, as a critical manoeuvre in literary studies and as a defining framework for literary production in the context of nationalist activism thus require closer analysis. What follows is a brief consideration of these connections that works both to contextual-ise critical territoriality by revealing some of its social and political coordinates and to outline some of the connections between different readings of territoriality in order to show the ways in which they might collectively work to demarcate the boundaries of belonging in which Sri Lankan literature is evaluated.

The politics and practice of territoriality

The term ‘border villages’ is a misnomer. […] Sri Lanka is a single unitary state and has no borders within it.

D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke¹⁵

Territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it is first of all a juridico-political one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power.

Michel Foucault¹⁶

Foucault’s definition clearly links spatial practice with the practice of the state and highlights the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• 1 Literature and territoriality: boundary marking as a critical paradigm
• Part II
• 2 James Goonewardene: allegorical islands
• 3 Punyakante Wijenaike: spectral spaces
• 4 Jean Arasanayagam: fugitive selves
• 5 Carl Muller: genealogical maps
• Part III
• 6 A. Sivanandan and Shyam Selvadurai: border dialogues
• 7 Michael Ondaatje: place as palimpsest
• 8 Romesh Gunesekera: past paradise
• 9 Conclusion: destinations
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index