Kala Korner by Dee Cee

Prolific writer Down Under

Baldwin was always interested in Sinhala literature and theatre and used to write a weekly column on Sinhala theatre in the 'Dinamina' in the 1950s. I can still picture him walking lazily down the Lake House corridor leading to the 'Dinamina' editorial with his hand written copy. We would then meet for a leisurely chat invariably on the goings- on in the field of Sinhala theatre or cinema.

Equally fluent in English and Sinhala, Baldwin's publications are a mix - both in subject matter and language. He has written a number of short stories and translated stories from other languages to Sinhala. And then he started translating the stories he wrote in Sinhala, to English. He began with 'Teeny Tiny Sri Lanka', a translation of the first collection of short stories he wrote in Australia based on his experiences there. He followed it up with 'At My Father's Feet' dealing with his childhood and later experiences in Sri Lanka. 

Baldwin's creative effort is mainly in the sphere of short stories. In 'Anthima Upan Dina Sadfaya' and 'Nara Vala Saha Kalu Hila' , he continues to relate stories based on experiences in Australia. And they invariably revolve round the Sri Lankan community living in Melbourne. Thus the reader gets a picture of how Sri Lankans live there and about their favourite pastimes. 

A typical Sri Lankan Australian

"But he never calls his son by his name. Always the typical Sinhala address, 'Putha'. He trained his son to call him 'Appachchi', the traditional Sinhala term used to address the father in his village in Sri Lanka. The son did in fact get used to it, but only till he started school. Appacchi gave way to the term Dad. Loku Banda did not like it. He still does not like it. However, he had no success in getting the son to fall in line. "The son has gone a step further. He has shed a part of his name as well. He is Tikiri Banda, the name given by the father. L.B would very much like to see his son being known and addressed as T.B, short for Tikiri Banda. But he uses only Tikiri as his given name calling himself Tikiri Marapana. His friends have shortened his name further, to Tiki and at times even Tik. He does not mind it. He actually likes to be called by the shortest name possible.

"Tikiri, born and bred in Australia, does not share his father's devotion to his motherland. In fact, he finds his dad's talk about Sri Lanka boring. To L.B, a man of Sri Lankan origin must know about the land, its people, its history, its language and its culture."

L.B discusses his disappointment with his wife. She has a three-point formula. Be patient with Tikiri. Learn to listen to him. Try not to force yourself on the son. 

Cinematic play with power politics

They accidentally run into each other at the railway station. Dhammika is from the village and Lionel from the city. Together they both dream of travel, adventure, romance and prosperity. They do not wait too long for that dream to turn into seeming reality. As they wait in Lionel's ramshackle makeshift room in the slums of Colombo, the lackey of a political big wig comes in with a mission. 

From being marginal underworld figures, they quickly move to centre stage, as political violence rapidly engulfs the entire country. They perform the task of eliminating political opponents of powerful politicians. But in turn they become part of the hunted. They become part of a tale of intrigue, suspense and corruption. They are scapegoats like the women around them, like the Tamil lodger from the north, awaiting his passport.

They move from house to house, place to place, woman to woman seeking refuge, escape on one side and power and prosperity on the other. But wherever they go they are confronted with the violence of their own making. Lionel tries to transcend this condition by dreaming of power, through masculinity, by claiming the woman on the road, by desiring beautiful and wealthy women. Dhammika returns to the village longing for the past. The story unfolds in a rapid succession of events, where their personal story of desire and longing is acted out in the backdrop of culture roller coasting toward disaster and tragedy.

The basic structure of the story is that of cops and robbers, but with one crucial difference. There are no victors or victims here. The film is evocative of the political violence that has engulfed Sri Lankan societies from the mid '80s onwards. The popular and the avant-garde are mixed together in this film, resulting in a thriller, comedy and tragedy at one and the same time. The deceptively simple narrative dynamically describes the land of violence, its national boundaries and international aspirations. It forges a cinematic idiom that intersects with the multicultural, the idyllic, the popular, the urban, and a global cultural economy.

Pathiraja is one of the most controversial Sri Lankan film-makers today. The controversy arises not so much from what he says as how he says it. He has attempted in film after film to look for the new and the unfamiliar. He also has a knack for taking on marginality, the unusual and turning it into an event of the everyday. This has firmly placed him within the tradition of the avant-garde. In this film, he does something which he has rarely done before and thereby breaks with his own tradition and cinematic conventions. 

In Mathu Yam Dawasa, he draws upon the popular narrative of the road/buddy movie, the thriller and action film - the conventional male idiom of violence, heroism and bravura. 

He takes on the popular and even the populist here. Instead of turning all of these on their head as the modernist narrative should typically do, he teases out these elements of the popular, not to dislodge them from their privileged position, but to place them on a political terrain and to infuse into the popular a politics of engagement. This he does through a narrative and idiom of the gaze.

This is the radical positioning of the film. It locates politics firmly within cultural politics, ideologies of nation and land, of class and sexuality. Eschewing deliberate irony, the film attempts to politicize what we normally take to be issues of the everyday. 

From taking on the centres of power and political manoeuvering, it effortlessly moves to the periphery, overturning our expectations about the centre/periphery dichotomy. Alas, politics is too often understood as the arena of politicians. But Mathu Yam Dawasa does its utmost to question that. In bringing matters of what we have taken to be the politics of the politicians and that of the ordinary and the everyday together, the film becomes searingly political about the everyday, about ourselves, and about our locations. 

Desire is the driving force of the film. Its resonance is everywhere in the film. The film's meanings are mediated through an erotic idiom of desire. Desire activates the two protagonists to go in search of literally greener pastures. 

But at the same time, the film's textuality too activates a trajectory of desire in the reader/viewer. This desire is both violent and loving. It is also sensuous in drawing us to contemplate the visual. For instance, when the slums of Colombo come into view with sudden force, it is shockingly contrasted with the polish of the shopping mall. But here too desire mediates the shift; the desire to intimidate a female body of obvious upper class belongingness. When the two underworld characters plunge into their adventure, the entire political world attains a socio-erotic and sexual dimension that is carried through to its logical end in the many liaisons the two men have with the women in the film. Class and sexuality are mediating factors of desire as land and space get described and desired in ways that are deeply ideological. Within all of this, meaning making becomes a political act. 

Pathiraja's forte is his non-literary grasp of the visual medium. He is a non-philosophical film maker. The break with literary forms of narrative is underlined in this grasp. At the same time, he tries to break free of the avant-garde as well, and develop a narrative that is free of "gimmicks". The cinematography rests largely on an outmoded classical Hollywood style, mixed with neo- realist/avant-garde forms. The film avoids the romantic in composition, even when it flirts with the genre of the romance. It subverts the dramatic too by insisting on that basic distance between camera and object. 

It finally displaces our knowledgebase and our structures of thought into an inability to comprehend and embrace reality. Eventually, we recognize ourselves and others in the inevitable conclusion that violence leads us into. 

The writer is attached to the Dept. of English, University of Peradeniya.

Channelling a stirring collection of passionate English writings

"Channels" Vol. 10 - A Compendium of Creative Writing, 1989 - 2001. Edited by Anne Ranasinghe. English Writers' Co-operative of Sri Lanka, 2001, pp. 128. Reviewed by Carl Muller

Another book launch! I thought with the characteristic impatience of a man with too much time on his hands and too little money. Such people are hard to fathom, and so am I. But Anne Ranasinghe, bless her Jewish heart, did invite "Dear Carl" to the British Council, Colombo, on December 12, so I'd like to make my own small contribution (call it my two-cents-worth) on the book.

As the Editorial recounts, it was in l989 that a few writers rubbed noses and decided to form an English Writers' Co-operative. Happily (and with a twinge of family pride) my cousin Maureen Seneviratne was Editor of Channels Volume l No. 1 which was released in November 1989. Maureen talked of the channel for the publication of good creative writing: "....stories, poems, plays, belles lettres and translations in English." As she then noted, "In a milieu where writers find it almost impossible to find publishers for their work and the encouragement they need, we hope to spur them on to ever more creative writing."

A goodly thought indeed, and this is how Channels was born, thanks to Maureen's professional midwifery. A system of rotating editorship also helped the publication to assume many identities and reflect the characters of the many who held the keys to the conduit. Channels grew to be a literary venue - a launch-pad and a strong voice to many who lent their own voices to increase its resonance. 

Volume 10 is a "compendium" - which means that it has put all eager writers on the back burner in order to honour those who have flowed down channel. 

Thiagarajah Arasanayagam, husband of Jean and father of writer/poet Parvathi (Jean features in this volume too), is a strong and extra-talented writer who has his own strong views on the literary scene. He keeps a low profile, however, and it was cheering to read him. His story, "Aunt Yoga", is of the sort of ding-dong battle, quite psychic, when a young woman has to parry bride-hunters in order to keep her heart in God's hands.

Uthpala Gunatilake takes us back to the old Kala Oya legend of the Aukana Buddha:

"The shades of the western sky made a halo as the Buddha faced the east. The Buddha faced the east so that, as the sun rose each morning, the figure would catch fire and become alive."

This is romantic writing of a rare order and it has that quality that tugs at the heartstrings of our own Sinhala-ness.

Madhubashini Ratnayake's "The Proposal" is typical of the psyche - the artist, the lover, the lady who sits, stretches her legs, then breaks spells with a yawn. People tell me that Madhubashini is hard to grasp. Her mind seems to have been fashioned in a large hall with psychiatrists' couches! And yet, deeply satisfying, her stories call to the inner being and we are always discomfited when the subconscious responds.

"Cousins" by the late Chitra Fernando, was her novel of the post-independence period. The extract in this volume only reminds us of the gap Chitra left behind. She gave us a sample of the town and country dweller and how a free nation stopped being a servile one. 

We have another kind of sense conflict in Faith J. Ratnayake's "The Gift". Toleration is so well rendered in this story that we see the waves rise, threaten, then subside and all is calm, all is bright.

Anthea Seneviratne needs little introduction. Her story, "Shut ln's" is compelling. It draws nourishment from so many like situations and, at the same time, we see how the silent Sarath battens on Jeannie, denies her a life. Yet, she finds a fierce, yet tender contentment in caring for him.

Of course, we must have our Punyakante who keeps asking me how I am. I think I am privileged indeed to know her deeply caring side. Her story, "Monkeys" is one of rare contrast and contrapoint. A meditative samanera and the cavorting monkeys. What could be more different? But they forge a bond:

"Climbing back to the hermitage, he could feel his friends, the monkeys, calling to him from the treetops. But he does not lift his eyes to them for fear the other priests would see."

Yasmine Gooneratne takes us to Sri Lanka in Australia in "My Neighbour's Wife". It's a sort of cultural salad, tossed slowly, because Dr. What's-his-name did not allow Maureen's sari or Thilaka to upset the absent-minded tenor of his bookish ways. Neil Fernandopulle takes us into a simmering stewpot of deception in "Calm", and Maureen Seneviratne analyses pain as another ecstasy of mind-searing passion, as real and as red as the Christ-blood on the Cross. Wipul Jayawickrama's story of abduction and torture is pain of another kind - the hopelessness of a pain that ends in the shock of death: while Sita Kulatunge's 'A Diptych' skips - in the midst of death there is goat-life to tend to; a Jayamangalam to sing. 

The poets featured in this volume are Buddhika Dassanayake, Aparna Halpe, Sita Kulatunga, Regi Siriwardena, Gayathri Kurukulasuriya, Gillian Ranasignhe-Conly, Indrakanthi Kotelawala, Kamala Wijeratne, lndrani Samarasekera, Arjuna Parakrama, Premini Amerasinghe, Balayogini Jeyakrishan, Amila Weerasinghe, Suvimalee Karunaratne, Jean Arasanayagam, Lakshmi Wijesinghe, Alfreda de Silva, Ramya Jirasinghe, the late Bill McAlpine and Thilini Rajapakse. Anne Ranasinghe also offers translations from the Rose Auslander portfolio.

What I need to say is that this Volume 10 is the finest representation of Sri Lankan writing in English it has been my fortune to read; and that it is a must for all who wish to know and realize how well and with what stirring passion the English writer's world has developed into. "Channels" will always be the pipeline our writers will take - a pipeline that reaches from the starlit wells of their own minds to a limitless lake where dreams call to the moonshadows that kiss the water.