INTERVIEW
Homelands and imaginary lands
RENUKA RAJARATNAM
|
Exploring the fictional world of Romesh Gunesekera.
|
Gunesekera deals with significant differences which signal contrasting perceptions on history, myth, ethnicity, diaspora and culture
Lyrical descriptions: Romesh Gunesekera.
CONTEMPORARY Sri Lankan literature in English is largely shaped by the country's recent political history. This is, perhaps, owing to the fact that Sri Lankan literature is increasingly read in terms of its relationship to the on-going ethnic crisis in the country and the readers' curiosity to widen their understanding of the country's complex social history and its present day politics.
As a result, critical reception of Sri Lankan writing in English is evaluated in terms of its potential to represent the authenticity of history despite the fact that it is blatantly managed and `made' by politics.
In such a context, some of the vexing questions that writers from Sri Lanka may have to grapple with are: how does one narrate historic events authentically when history is being made up? Is the writer's role as a social or a cultural voice of a country an assumed one? And how does one negotiate the relationship between historical events and literary fiction?
Fictional aesthetics
In relation to these contradicting issues in literature, it is interesting to explore the world of Romesh Gunesekera's fiction. Moving between his literary productions ranging from the Booker-nominated Reef to Heaven's Edge and to his new novel The Match published by Bloomsbury this month, Gunesekera deals with significant differences which signal contrasting perceptions on history, myth, ethnicity, diaspora and culture. The deployment of his fictional aesthetics stems from his heterogeneous conception of migrant sensibility. Defying the "bogy of Authenticity" as termed by Salman Rushdie, Gunesekera attempts to transcend critical and cultural parameters, choosing to flesh fictional events with the substance of historical ones thus moving beyond the concept of real homelands to imaginary lands.
Born in Sri Lanka in 1954, Gunesekera moved to the Philippines at the age of 13 and after a brief sojourn in the U.S., he arrived in England at the age of 17. He lives now in London, a place that has facilitated his aesthetic privileges and freedom to write about the concerns of his country and the world environment at large. With regard to Sri Lanka, one wonders if the spatial distance enabled him to see Sri Lanka more clearly than he could if he was actually there. Gunesekera's response to this query was: "Although I had lived in London for many years, I have always travelled a great deal. My books have been written in many places, including Sri Lanka as well as other countries. Writing fiction involves an imaginative leap just as reading fiction does."
How does the significance of place matter in Gunesekera's fiction? Very often the provincial place forms a setting for the novel in a realistic sense, such as Sri Lanka or Britain and then evolves to an imaginary one. In Heaven's Edge, a well defined yet invented place like Eldon brings out a powerful story of social issues, spiritual and mythical ideas. The Sandglass captures brilliantly the movements of time and places shifting from the present to the past while charting the lives of the characters who travel from their homelands to dreamlands. The novel offers a moving tale of leave-taking and settlement focusing on the uncertainties of ethnic hybridity and co-existence.
At the heart of Gunesekera's writing, one recognises a calm poetic assurance seen particularly in his lyrical descriptions of the natural scenic beauty and in his evocation of vivid images of exotic birds. Gunesekera's stories sprout from within these luscious landscapes often illustrating a shocking contrast between human violence and the fragility of natural beauty.
Central to Gunesekera's fiction is perhaps the Keatsian anxiety of loss and change. Most often Sri Lanka transforms metaphorically into an image of the modern world as a lost paradise existing precariously on its edge threatened by power politics. The fear is poignantly perceived by Mister Salgado in Reef when he wryly comments, "`The politics of envy is the master of all our industry,' Mr. Salgado used to say to characterise the times and tussle everywhere for power."
Spatial distance
Romesh Gunesekera's literary position has been most often identified as a diasporic writer from Sri Lanka. It is a precarious position for writers like Gunesekera and Michael Ondaatje whose access to the social realism of their native country is limited owing to the spatial distance from it. For this reason, critics have flayed their "expatriate" cultural perception of Sri Lanka and their projection of it with "selective" historicisation and exoticism.
While the factual setting of Sri Lanka has given these writers legitimacy to their work, they view fiction "legitimately" as stories of "unhistorical" and "unofficial" lives. As for Gunesekera, fiction for him is all about "creating an accessible imaginative world for readers and negotiating between the real and the imaginary. And the story is as powerful as a real life".
The writer is a Research Fellow, Manchester Metropolitan University, U.K.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
