DisPossession & Entitlement

Published in Ceylon Today

Recently we have been informed about the granting of land title deeds as well as houses to some of the most disenfranchised people in this land. Our current Sri Lankan political leaders, as recently as late April this year, have decided to grant each of the 200,000 families of Indian Origin Tamil workers in the estate and plantation areas 7 perches of land, with documents which legally authorise & prove their right to ownership of the land and the houses they build on it.

         Prior to this new legislation, the plantation workers and their families had experienced 200 years of existence and occupation in the regional areas of Sri Lanka such as Nuwara Eliya and Hatton, without the entitlement and security of the right to own the land on which they lived.
These workers were employed by successive generations of British, and then Sri Lankan, owners of plantation estates, and lived in 'line houses' near the plantations where they worked, in conditions which many urban Sri Lankan people have often never witnessed or been aware of.

    Their daily actual experiences, and their acute awareness of their own compromised status, have  been in striking contrast to those conveyed by the iconic tourism portraits of 'smiling tea plantation workers in their colourful clothes' which are used to sell Sri Lankan tea to tea-drinkers all over the world.

       The new recognition of their right to own land is a historic decision, which brings into focus some of the most marginalised communities in Sri Lanka. While the land title deeds and documents were being finalised and presented to the first groups of families concerned, in regional areas such as Badulla, I attended the recent launch in Colombo of a book of poetry, which contained several 'portraits' in poetry, of members of these communities.

'Sedahamy, Selvakumari & Others' is the poet Sakuntala Sachithanandan's most recent collection of poems. There are in this volume poems written on a diverse range of subjects, but the ones that stood out most starkly to me are those that dealt with the dispossessed citizens of the plantation and estate sector.

       'Selvakumari of Hatton' is a portrait of a woman, who had been 'A street-sweeper by day and a street-walker by night', now seen in later life 'destitute, homeless' and in abject distress, as she 'crouches on the pavement,
         her face crumpled, shivering,
         by the wall of The Happy Food Corner'.

    We can see that the poet uses both conceptual and visually symbolic juxtaposition very effectively in this poem to contrast not only this lady's present debased condition with that of her 'former,/ comely, loud-mouthed self', but to show the socio-political ironic significance of her physical positioning, 'right next to the Happy Food Corner':

     In her 'grimy, thread-bare rags, /her hair in stiff unwashed grey skeins', she observes with interest and excitement (but remarkably without envy) the other town dwellers emerging with their groceries from the stores: 'Swinging bulging bags in their happy hands!/ Maybe rice - dried fish - coconuts - or bread?/ Or - her heart leaps up - a lovely shiny bottle/ To warm them through the rainy night ahead?'

      Sachithanandan's acute and sensitive eye for detail exists concurrently with exceptional socio-economic and legal awareness, and her poetic portraits therefore enable us to clearly perceive the political and sociological issues underlying the situations she describes. The lexical sets of images of brokenness and decrepitude in the poem 'The Half-Built House Of Dreams' create an unforgettable and cumulatively structured image of the despair and exhaustion experienced by the poorest people in the land:

   'The half-built house of dreams stands/
     on the wind-blown hill
     under a blinding bell of hot blue sky./ From a corner beam hangs
     a lantern from last Wesak,
     or maybe the one before,
      its paper torn, mildewed, struts askew.

      Planked up on many sides where
      the cement blocks ran out,
      wads of newspaper replace
      its broken window-panes.
      Above, a slab now long-abandoned, moss-adorned,
      Sprouts bouquets of bent steel wires, rusted, forlorn.

       A soiled, dusty curtain flaps across the door - it sports/
      faded beauteous damsels from Sigiriya, row on row,/
       bejeweled, heavy-bosomed, lotus-eyed, -
      and, from within, one hears the "krus-krus"/ of the brisk scraping of a coconut -
      then a slap -
      and a little child bursts forth,
      sobbing loud'.
   
         The sudden emergence of the sobbing child, accentuated by poetic use of plosives, is startling evidence of the existence of young and energetic life, even amidst these bleak conditions, as noted by Vivimarie Van Der Pooten in her speech at the launch of this collection of poems. The serried insights into real life contemporary poverty in this scene are ironically contrasted with the faded images of iconic Sigiriya fresco ladies, privileged beauties of an ancient royal court. Sachithanandan's  descriptions of these 'faded beauteous damsels', with their bounteousness described in long, luscious rounded vowels, sharply and significantly counterpoints these pinup girls of ancient days with the lone dog in the last stanza of the poem, 'a bitch of many litters' who 'slowly crawls...
through listless weeds, / and rests its weary head upon its paws'.

     There is unyielding irony in the portrayal of the hope expressed in the enduring religious beliefs which lead the house's inhabitants to inscribe on 'one bare, dejected wall', the  'devout legend, / Hopeful of protection from all harm:
    "Budu saranai - Devi pihitai" (May one receive the blessings of the gods)
     in a giant, shaky scrawl.'
   
These scenes, with their deliberate amassment of bleak realistic detail, are distressing, but I suggest that the poems which show Sachithanandan's awareness of the humiliations and experience of everyday ethnic and linguistic exclusion experienced by the more prosperous members of this community, affect us in a more complex and disturbing way:

'Language Issue - 1994' and 'Language Issue - 2011' are printed adjacent to each other in the book, and likewise counterpoint each other in both title and theme. Both are in a sense like mini-documentary films, portraying scenes in which citizens speaking the minority language come up against the linguistic barriers which block them from equal status in everyday life.

      In 'Language Issue - 1994', an extremely well-dressed and dignified gentleman enters the Land Reform Commission Office:


    'on his lips a genial smile.
       A white jasmine perched upon his ear
        He wore spotless verti and shawl,
       And with holy ash upon his brow
       He walked tall'.

     This gentleman, coming to transact a property claim, is initially confident, and on solid ground. He views the three young ladies seated there to assist him as 'fresh and pretty, untroubled, / Like his own grand-daughters,/ He fondly thought'.

      The gentleman at first feels calm, at ease, and respected, as a fellow- citizen. But he suffers a rapid and dizzying fall in self-esteem, as he speaks to the young ladies 'all in his own language, Tamil:

  "I am Sivagnanam Muthiah
    From Bogowantalawa, thangatchi (little sister).
    I was given a land in Bogowantalawa,
    What should be done to obtain the deed?
     I heard there is a delay here.
     Please look into it and tell me -
     Much merit will be yours"'.

   It is a tragic experience to even witness this courteous and well-spoken man's unwarranted humiliation at the hands of the trio of damsels who shockingly transform, via their insensitivity and cruelty towards him, into harpies:

   'The pretty smiles vanished - they drew together - Their delicate ears having been assaulted by the language of the Other - they questioned him in Sinhala, over and over/ Which they implied he ought to know,
And he went plodding on, pleading in Tamil, / his sweat began to pour.'

The poet is a witness to this act of cultural and generational disrespect, and observes herself as partially complicit, for not intervening:

'No one else was called in to help.
I now regret I had not gone to his aid
It was a pity I only watched, fascinated,
And finally the man, lost and dejected,
gave in, gave up, and left'.

   The abbreviated monosyllabic utterance of the last line draws our attention to the irrevocable undermining of the Mr. Muthiah's identity and self respect, as a consequence of this incident.
   
 More than a decade and a half later, however, the poet intervenes to help a lady who is humiliated by being at the receiving end of what is clearly differential treatment at the Bank. Confronted by legal paperwork in two languages she did not understand, this lady was bewildered:

  'I saw the woman hesitate,
   look askance at the forms in her hands -
   I could see she was a Tamil and poor,
   Didn't know any English, for sure...

In broken Sinhala she tried to inquire
But my good lady brushed her a side,
she was too busy, she just turned away,
I looked on unbelieving in shock and dismay
And I then filled the forms, myself,
For the woman seated
by my side'.

  Here, the physical positioning of the two women underlines the humane, co-operative collaborations that are made possible through awareness of and sympathy for another's distress.

     Sachithanandan's use of structured and positioned contrasts in her poetic portraits clearly reveal inherent sociopolitical injustice in Sri Lankan society, and the suffering and paradoxical hardening of hearts it causes. The poems give us vivid and dramatic insights into the lives of people who inhabit experiences and conditions which are largely unknown to us. Yet compassion is not the only perspective generated in the poet by sustained awareness of these prevailing social inequities.


Sachithanandan scathingly satirises the callousness and insensitivity of some of the more privileged Colombo citizens towards the relatively unentitled, in what I think of as 'the comedy of manners poem': 'Land Reform 1975'. This poem depicts the 'keening lament' of 'distraught ladies (who) sipped from dainty tea-cups... In certain mansions of Colombo' when faced with the 'ramifications' of the 1975 Land Reform legislation:

'They discussed the news, heavy with
portent of loss and doom
as they sniffed into embroidered handkerchiefs
beneath a cloud of stifling gloom'.

As they commiserate with each other, it becomes clear that their calculating callousness has become a way of life:

'Our men were awf'lly clever:
 Where our lands are to be acquired,
 They stopped paying the wages/ of the workers as required!"...

  "I hear some workers have left
  the estates where we do not pay!"
  "Really? Oh well - " a shrug, a sip -
 "Let's be pious, let us pray!" '

The second half of the poem is a devastating portrayal of the condition of the destitute and dispossessed workers, a contrast which highlights the heartlessness of those to whom these poor people actually seem to be less than human, after being treated as such for so long:

  'Zombies, - / what a sight!
 Ragged humans huddled
Round a fire, cooking a meal -
 To ward off the bitter cold, they'd thought to
Smear themselves with grease!

A desperate, dreary broth they brewed
In an old empty can of paint,
Of some weevilly rice and dhal and salt
They'd begged off the shops that day:
some half-rotten discarded vegetables too,
from the Municipal market stalls:
And they fell like starving wolves
upon their meals - hardly sufficient for all!'

'Otherisation in action', could be the alternative title of this poem. And the poet rightly calls the subject matter 'a grim drama':

'I will not forget the shock I felt, to see a woman die
There, by the road,/
A bag of bones,
eyes rolled up to the sky'.

Law is based on the principles of causality, of cause and effect, of actions and consequences. So Sachithanandan's combination of legal training and humanitarian insight makes these poems a valuable counterpart to the new legislation which is designed to remedy the dispossession and its human impact, which this poet  memorably portrays in her work.

I was interested to find, when I interviewed this writer, that her close and sympathetic observation of the people, in situations of various forms of distress, who appear in these poems, derives from long professional and personal acquaintance with them.

Darkness On The Edge Of Town

Published in Ceylon Today

Channa Wickremesekara's recent novel 'Tracks' is his fifth work of fiction. When I looked up his list of previous publications, I found that he is an expert on military history, and in particular the history of the Kandyan kingdom and its fight for independence against the British colonial forces.

Wickremesekara is based in Melbourne, Australia, and this novel is a work of young adult fiction, set amongst a group of teenagers who are about to graduate from high school. Wickremesekara's knowledge and insights into combat and aggression are very relevant here, because what he portrays is the war zone of adolescent life, in the suburbs of 'the most liveable City in the world', a phrase people often use to describe Melbourne.

Contemporary Sri Lankans have a strong presence in Melbourne: there is a vibrant and diverse community of immigrant people living in this City, and it is one of the most sought after destinations for Colombo students, for overseas education and further professional development.

It is a City of wonderful restaurants, shops selling food and clothing of every cultural and ethnic hue, of bookshops and vegetable markets and beautiful parks and old hotels and theatres. But on the edges of this beauty, as there are in every City, there are human lives lived in desperation. Shehan, the young protagonist of this story, and its narrator, has wonderful parents, Sri Lankan, broad minded, wise, compassionate, tolerant - and plain speaking:

'My dad thinks it was a tragedy we could not have avoided... There are people... trapped in lives they cannot escape from. Lives which are vicious holes of filth and violence. The only way you can escape them is through death'.

Sri Lankan parents, and of course most parents, generally shield their children from these kinds of dangers as much as they can. This story is confronting, because it shows how darkness encroaches into the everyday lives of people, and how it enters our lives through our longings and desires. When we send our children to cities like Melbourne, driven by educational imperatives, we sometimes do not think of the social context in which they will be living; of the sometimes chaotic lives their peers will have experienced; of the dark side of liberated Western lifestyle freedoms and the confusions and complexities these freedoms can generate.

Shehan's parents try to help their son as much as they can, not only by providing for him a home and shelter that he understands and appreciates, even when most stretched by his dilemmas, and offering his friend acceptance and support as well, but by withholding judgment of his choices, and not suppressing or attempting to control or censure him, or forcing him to comply with their preferred moral standards. They actually do what people say that parents should do, which is to let their child be himself. Or, to be more specific, to let their child try to really find out who he is. Their lack of anger and criticism is a remarkable example of loving-kindness, in the bleak emotional and moral world their son inhabits, outside their home.

Shehan is in love with his best friend, Robbie, a physically beautiful, charismatic but violent youth, the product of a violent and dysfunctional home. The novel shows how Shehan, assisted by his parents' loving and compassionate understanding, navigates this relationship and its ending, in his final year of school. This volatile situation is presented with subtlety and precision.

The idiom and vernacular for Shehan and Robbie are absolutely accurate. The terse, abbreviated syntax is completely believable.

The graphic, sensory matrix of young adults in Australia, and their unembarrassed physicality and often implicitly evoked emotion is realistic.

The story takes place at the most apparently recogniseable crisis point of young people's lives: the year they access their future via their ATAR (the mark accorded to their final university entrance exams) and decide if their previous choices are going to get them where they want to go, or not. This is the year that the outside world collides with everyone's personal lives and formative experiences and alliances. The neat, externally imposed academic barrier of the VCE (A-level exam) Shehan is working towards will qualify or disqualify him for life afterwards, and this measuring point throws into sharp relief the emotional and moral chaos & volatility that he is traversing.

His relationships with his group highlights in many ways his own wholeness and integrity. There is an infusion of personal pride in his description of the members of the group as all 'halfies': half 'Aussie' and (in a cross-section of the diverse ethnic spectrum typical of Melbourne) half Scottish/Italian/Islander:
'All teenagers and except me, all mongrels...Then of course there is me. One hundred percent Sri Lankan, second generation.'

His use of the word 'mongrels' here is significant, conveying from the outset his unacknowledged awareness that his friends are in many ways comparatively debased and dispossessed individuals. Robbie, son of a criminally violent father and emotionally damaged by an abusive home life, quarrels like an animal for territory, and is ruled by survival instincts; and in the end dies as a result of retaliatory violence in response to his own actions, 'killed like a dog'.

Shehan discovers how socially and emotionally isolated Robbie was, only after his death:
'...I know the hospital got in touch with Dad because he had my number in his phone. There had been only two numbers. One was my mobile. The other was my home number... He had no one else. No family. No friends'.

Shehan's social life & his family life are binary opposites: his parents are functional, and co-operative and despite their predictable stability, progressive. His friends are violent and destructive, and despite all their violent activity, stuck in an arid and desolately futile situation of passive resignation & frustration.

Shehan when we first meet him is enmeshed via his obsessive love for Robbie in a demeaning connection, led by his emotions & physical attractions, unaware of his own increasing moral disquiet, which convincingly escalates, in seemingly repetitive but subtly differentiated crisis spirals, until the final catharsis of Robbie's death. 

The first person narrative powerfully immerses the reader into Shehan's point of view. This engages us to inhabit his perspective, taking us past the point of judgment or personal distaste, latent homophobia or prejudice against violent yobbo youth. It is an insider's perspective, documented at a flashpoint in the character's story arc, where he finally and at last becomes emergent: utterly unable to inhabit his past relationships. Having sought security in them, for years, he has now outgrown them, and the repetitions and diminishments of self they required.

He wants to make different choices, ones which generate a future, and increase his necessary sense of hope. He has still unresolved feelings, and it is not a clean or clear cut severance. But he moves onwards, and outwards, into a more stable and suitable environment. From the train station and its urban decay to the sun-filled lawns of the university. Sri Lankan parents everywhere will be relieved! Shehan's life is 'back on track'.

It could have been a clichéd story, as adolescent 'crossroads' stories often are. Many young adults have difficult psychological terrain to cross in their late school years, and have a hard time determining who they really are amidst an influx of dizzying lures and contradictory messages. Shehan's cultural and sexual identity is in formation and the process is complex, and probably alien to many readers, yet never do we feel relief that he has chosen to be respectable and heterosexual and go to the hallowed portal of university, leaving the railway tracks and dead end friends behind him, like a burnished brown contemporary Melbournian Prince Hal.

An intense insightful novel. Authentic voice. Believable and unsentimental. Completely uncliched. Liberatingly specific and non-stereotypical.

Review of 'Elephant Complex' by John Gimlette

Published in Ceylon Today

Title: 'Elephant Complex - Travels In Sri Lanka'
Author: John Gimlette
Non-fiction
Travel writing 

Published: October 2015 

This book has a paradoxical cover. The title is baffling, and at first glance inexplicable. A Sri Lankan military officer, head down and gaze averted, walking towards us in the foreground, away from a beached and rusting giant military ship, damaged and listing, situated in the littoral, midway between the sea and the beach: a surrealistic parody of the picture postcard view of Sri Lanka that tourists often have offered to them at the outset of a visit to this country. My first thought was that this would be a book about the debris and rubble, both physical and psychological, of the recent Civil War. And it is. But it also deals directly with 'the elephant in the living room' - or in this case - the elephantine issues  looming in the picture postcard landscape, which we expect promotional literature to gloss over.

        There is not an actual elephant in sight, on the cover! But the writer explains the reason for his choice of title in his introduction. This is a book about not only what the writer sees and experiences as he travels the length and breadth of this island, but a story which he narrates, in episodic structure which makes the 475 pages easy to digest piece by self-contained piece, and ponder as you go. This is a well-wrought narrative, in which the writer both observes, and comments, in an insightful and interesting way, on the landforms, the habitat, the people and the customs he witnesses. 

      What is an 'Elephant Complex'? A history-laced, geographically-influenced situation-specific psychological condition which seems to be offered as an insight into the condition of the entire land of Sri Lanka, and its native inhabitants. Complexes are psychological paradoxes. Paradoxes are apparent contradictions. And resolving those contradictions is arguably the purpose of the human race, as we struggle with our mortal restrictions, and our immortal aspirations, in the human condition which we share in such varying ways. 

      I was reminded of the best definition ever made, of this broader human 'complex', from Alexander Pope's 'Essay On Man', written almost exactly 300 years before this book, at a time when English colonisation of this land was starting to ramp up and take hold. 

It is this wholistic observation of humanity as entangled in a cryptic webbing of mortality, immortality and matter that Gimlette offers us. Facing a dense and impenetrable conundrum, he refrains from slashing a path with judgmental truisms, stereotypes and put-downs. He manages to identify and occupy a 'middle state' himself, neither insider nor outsider of this Resplendent Land. An observer but never wholly a believer. Unsentimental, but able to connect where the interstices allow a person of insight and instinct and compassion to see things others more acquisitive or vainglorious have failed to notice.

  In the Introduction to this maze of a book, Gimlette sets out his personal navigational overview: 'Unsurprisingly, elephants have loomed large in the island's history... Perhaps the wild elephants say more about the complexity of this Island than anything else. It's said they follow the same paths all their lives, and from generation to generation. These paths are everywhere, and are often unknown to human beings. This means that Sri Lanka is densely criss-crossed with invisible corridors that have remained unchanged for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Sometimes an alimankada, or elephant path, won't be used for a while, and people will forget that it's there. But once the elephants are back on their path, there's little that will divert them... All that's clear is that, in the collective elephantine mind, there is a great plan of this island.
   Maybe the human mind works in the same way. Looking through Ceylonese or Sri Lankan history, it never feels quite circular. Rather, there are a recurring series of points of arrival and departure, with everything between lying disrupted and broken. Civilisations appear and flourish, and there's a great surge of progress before it all suddenly vanishes. No one is quite back where they started, and yet the same story will begin again, perhaps somewhere else. It's as if the island's history is a dense mesh of lines and pathways which... simply have to be followed. The issues and the protagonists have barely changed in thousands of years, and always there's that same sense of obstinacy and destination driving them along. Perhaps these pathways exist in some great and mysterious map, or perhaps it's just a state of mind, an elephant complex.'

From the suburb of Tooting in England, where he had observed immigrants from Sri Lanka settling, and practising their cooking and worshipping and the cultural rituals which were familiar to them, in a transplanted form, Gimlette researched the historical and cultural accounts of the island, and embarked on an unfolding and kaleidoscopic quest. His technique was immersive, to say the least.

     He described his self-imposed mission as 'daunting'. It involved a resilient self-discipline: of consciously NOT seeking simplistic resolution or trigger-happy imposition of order onto what he comes into contact with. I find his self-awareness and realism refreshing, as he tells us, in retrospect: 'What lay ahead was not the search for comprehension but a battle with perplexity'.

    The result of this battle is a book which offers us non-vicarious and open-ended experience, rather than self-aggrandising pronouncements. And Gimlette came here prepared to listen to a variety of people, and to see, degree by degree, beyond the surface, of a culture which is freighted with complexity. He achieves this successfully because he did not presume to 'solve' the paradoxes or penetrate the mysteries, but has the resilience and endurance to accept the contradictions as they present themselves, identify them and hold his ground while exploring them.

   Gimlette's narrative style is impressionistic in its vividness but detailed rather than sketchy, and he keeps it interesting by varying his syntax, modalities and registers, to reflect and keep in step with the variety of his experiences. His anecdotes edge us into the best seats in the house, by degrees, and his commentary is neither overpowering nor opinionated.

    Each experience has its danger, its humour, its flashes of beauty and dullness and we are introduced gradually to the cathartic distilled fusion of the mild form of pity and terror that it produces in him. His descriptions of both the people he meets by appointment, and encounters by chance, and who share their travails and observations with him, are pithy, and edged, but largely benevolent.

  His sound-bites and one liners act as mini summings-up, adding zest and variety to the complex way he sees and writes. His ability to record direct speech and give a sense of the dramatic idiom of those with whom he converses is riveting. His assessments of the former rulers of the land would probably have been considered treasonous just a few months before the book was published, and certainly while it was being conceived and written. His investigative forays take him into some dark territory, into the undersides of the picture postcards, and into landscapes of the human mind which are the inversion of the promotional images.

     The great appeal of this book is that we travel alongside him, not as an armchair traveller but as a mobile companionate conversational partner. His erudition does not burden us, or over-complicate the conveyance of his meaning. His 'Further Reading' appendix is clear and helpful, but not annotated, and the references to research in the individual chapters are not painstakingly footnoted.

   Gimlette's account makes one factual error: he refers to the University of Kandy, when it should be cited as The University of Peradeniya.

   Irreverent as his approach is, at times, this is not a hatchet job. The text is charged with goodwill.  On the back cover, the author is described as one who 'seeks the soul of a country that is struggling to free itself from trauma and embody an identity to match its vitality, its power and its people'.

  He has certainly enlarged his own mind to respond to the paradoxes presented to him by his experiences in Sri Lanka, but I believe Gimlette himself would not presume to say he was seeking the country's soul. Rather, like the elephants of old, he was seeking to make a path of his own through a country in which people lived with whom he shared some time and experiences for a while. Writing this, he seems to have found that his new path was leading him to tread some ancient overt trails, and that uncovering these has left him personally unharmed but not unscathed.

Thus Spoke Theena: A Review of First Utterance.

Published in Ceylon Today

First Utterance, a self-published book by Theena Kumaragurunathan, has just been given the first prize in the second Fairway Literary Award, in the English category. It is a breakthrough book, in several aspects: it is short, it is extremely affordable at Rs.150, it is a work of mythic fantasy fiction, it successfully incorporates elements of poetry, drama, satire and magical realism, and it is the first volume in a story cycle. Above all, it is a self-published work, and this augurs well for future writers in Sri Lanka.

I suggest that the judges of the 2016 Fairway Award should be awarded a Commendation Prize for thinking outside what have come to be seen over the past few years as the usual parameters of Sri Lankan literary culture to value a work of mythic fantasy. This award is literally a ground-breaking event. 

The subject matter is epic. The back cover introduces us to 'The story of three men, deemed mad in a dystopian world, who shirk reality for dreams, music for silence and sanity for peace,' and urges us to 'Plunge into Mirage as their collective fate brings a world to its knees and heralds the end of time itself'. 

Most works of fiction created in Sri Lanka have been set in a world which is recogniseable to us: contemporary reality, rural or urban social realism. This story immerses us, as the energetic exhortation 'Plunge' indicates, in a wholly otherworldly hyper-reality which is recogniseable and accessible to us in an imaginative, allegorical and metaphorical way.

The other world created in this story is called 'Mirage' and its name evokes not only an oasis in a desert, a respite in a Wasteland, but Maya, Samsara, the illusions of this material world, from the Indian legends, which positions the realities experienced by human beings as occurring in a realm which is a testing ground for the soul. The characters, linked by their conditions of mental instability and problematic relation to the 'real' world, are on quest. The outcomes of their quests are not predictable. 

As I read, I sensed modernist and archetypal as well as apocalyptic aspects whirring simultaneously in the text. Huxley's 'Brave New World' is invoked, and T.S. Eliot's apt comment on the twentieth century as being 'a vast panorama of chaos and anarchy' is evocatively present, and there are distinct elements of prophecy resonant of Yeats' Byzantium poetry  - the unmistakeable breakdown of one form of reality and the emergence of a new form - the need to create a new language to express a new condition of the heart and mind and spirit - to which the story provides access, and for which it creates a resonant vehicle. 

This is the most transitional of times, in which we live: all the structures which formed and informed our lives and created continuity are being taken down and shaken off. The radical indeterminacy, the constant reactiveness into which we are compelled by rapidly changing external circumstances, the continuously interrogative nature of our response, is a highly stressful and volatile way to exist. 

The inherent stress and distress of our human condition is perfectly expressed in Kumaraganathan's fusion of elements, and the dystopic society he delineates is permeated with the dissonance and discord which characterises our own world. Warring elements never really resolve into harmony. Tense exertion holds dualities in place, but we sense this will devolve into another form in the next phase. This friction and disquiet is reflected in the integrating vision which connects the structure, the imagery and the syntactical rhythm of the book.

The book is a medley of utterances, and the first is female: Mirage herself speaks, in the form of a Mother, a Cosmic Mistress, counterpointing the book of Genesis and the imposition of order on primordial chaos. She, with her female energy, pre-empts and pre-dates patriarchy. 

The female human figures in the rest of this story cycle will I hope take their cue from this multi-dimensional inception: most women in contemporary fiction are presented almost exclusively as vessels and objects of sexual release for the men. In an alternate universe, a more evolved state of relating would surely be imaginable between the sexes. The creating vision in Part V is a blend of strength and gentleness, an antidote to testosterone-fuelled Shock and Awe:

'We heard a voice from atop Peak, the voice of a woman - so powerful that all of Mirage could hear her but so gentle that it blew out the flame of fear in all of us.' 

The three tribes evoked in the story, each with their patrilineal lineages and books of scriptures, allegorically envision the political struggles of people from different faiths and belief systems to co-exist in one land. 

The big picture offered to us of struggling human beings, with its potential for chaotic veering and derailment, is grounded by the stories of variations on the nuclear family: a father, his wife, his daughter, Adi. His detailed concerns about how he can protect and sustain them. 

In the section 'Naming The Nameless', we meet Anne, whose husband, 'one of the outspoken  critics of President Mahasen's administration, particularly the little-debated but speedily-enacted Psychological Cleansing Act 2190 that targeted the mentally frail', had been made to 'disappear'.

On February 2nd, 2222 President Mahasen VIII apologises for acts of violence committed against citizens by his father, the previous President. This section of the story is so poetic that it conflates myth and reality into wholly specific and original political satire. 

The divergent elements and rapid scene shifts move us into close-up and then back up again to panorama, and the author's narrative control is powerful, because it is inter-aligned, segmented, and flexible. The tone is temperate and detached. Nothing tips into chaos. 

Imagistic elements such as The Peak of Butterflies and the empty Emergency Room rest interred in our minds, as we read, in the cubic centimetres of space that remain our only possession, in Orwellian-speak, and which are under threat in an era in which not only people's ethnicity or religion are targeted by those in authority, but their personal mental and emotional states. 

The cast of characters includes a President (Mahasen VIII), a mass of journalists and editors, and administrators, doctors and staff of asylums and hospitals for the mentally aberrant. Could there be more appropriate people presiding over the ending and beginning of worlds? There is also a Chorus, mediating between the action and the spectators, and entertainingly operating as a nervous MC, so frequently interrupted he finds it difficult to do his job. 

In the last sequence of this story, the President throws his broken wristwatch into the bonfire in which the Book of Mirage is burning. With, as is the manner of Presidents, a few, well-chosen words: 

'And when it ends, those of us who have the task of sitting idly by have already made our choice because we know things end. Everything ends, doesn't it? Things just stop working for no rational reason. This hasn't worked in the 19 years, 43 days and 18 hours since you died. It is the way of the world. Everything ends. And yet, I didn't stand idly by. I stood up and fought against forces you couldn't imagine, old man. I tried. And I failed.' He looks up and sees all eyes upon him.

It is refreshing to hear the words of this mythic President deal not with war or economics but existential philosophy! 

The Miragian Cycle has started to spin. A testing ground in which we see the universe we used to think we knew become a multiverse in which we see ourselves reflected more fully. 

Review of 'Phoenix', a collection of poems by Anupama Godakanda

Published in Ceylon Today

RE-CALIBRATIONS OF THE SELF

'If I had a black box instead of a heart

Where the heart should be, 

wherever it is, /

That faithfully recorded my life,

That, I believe, would take the joy,

The sheer wicked thrill, 

Out of the telling of all those tall tales I tell'...

('The Black Box') 

This collection of poetry, published earlier this year, has a clear and persistent discernible pulse. As the title implies, there is a portrayal of struggle, episodic and cyclic flights from frustration, a dialogue or altercation between binary oppositions and dualities, and eventual emergence, stark or muted, in every poem.

The poet herself identifies her recurrent theme in her Preface:

Her focus is on 'serendipitous moments of honesty' which cause her to 'meet [her]self face to face naked of all subterfuge'. This brings into focus the idea of a dulled and mundane, at times chaotic, reality, interspersed and riven with aspirations and fierce strivings. The struggles are internal: longings for access to an alternate, exalted sphere, triggered by external events. The reader sees, across the range of poems, that the longed for portal opens for the poet only in intermittent moments of awareness and clarity.

Godakanda says of herself that in those moments 'something in me dies and in its place something finer, I would like to think, emerges from the ashes of the perverted thing that has died. In between these unceasing moments of life and death my time is mostly spent on waging a constant battle against those forces within me - which are not really of me, but smuggled in by those forces from without and grafted against my wishes to my very being - that try to keep me from that enriching cycle of death and rebirth'.

 Here the poet introduces her persona as a combatant, experiencing her psychological and socio-emotional life as a form of constant warfare, with her essential self drawn into unremitting skirmishes, but yearning for unencumberment, full personal  franchisement, and peace.

Many of these skirmishes are dialogues (or partial dialogues) with lovers, and deal with the failure of physical love, with its often egotistical misapprehensions and
limitations, and inevitable and messy sharing of the partially discovered self, and its continual failure to provide the access to
the personal peace that the persona longs for. Some are evocations of friendships which have become unsustainable, with life's remorseless individuation process drummed into their unravelling, in cycles that seem inevitable.

 These personal conflicts take place in a wider and more fractured and destabilised societal sphere, in which injustice, condemnation, shallow judgment, misapprehension and cruelty distort the communication that could provide release and solace for people. The strength of these poems is that, although they are often clearly responses to personal experiences, they are not all merely personal accounts, but are of interest and relevance to the reader.

     Central to their effectiveness is the poet's own frank admission of her impatience with the falseness of the norms and expectations levied on us. She invokes the social forces she is often warring with in prose in her Preface, in the form of the third person reported strictures of those who seek to scold her into conformity with acceptable contemporary models of conservative female behaviour:


'It is better to go on as it is, they say. Toe the line, less trouble, they say. But I choose not to. A declaration of war... And rarely does myself emerge victorious from these many skirmishes. However, these defeats, instead of crushing myself down, are often the very stuff that set me on fire so that I could turn to ashes once again and emerge from my pyre a little closer to myself'.

 I find this powerful claiming of this 'pyre', as a form of wholly personal redemption and renewal, liberating. In my mind's eye, in response to these words, and as I read the poems, I think of the fire of purification, of Rama and Sita, circling the sacred flame, the ordeals of social sanctification endured by women, and the fire of suttee in which faithful wives were expected to immolate themselves for their husbands' greater spiritual ascension. The woman's identity often seemed subsumed in the relationships women had with men.

So this poet's embracing of a life created by internal self-immolations is subversive. Even in its often perceived overall or individual 'failure', tracked in each poem, I find the tracing of the poet's challenges to the dominant paradigm of female compliance very effective as a portrayal of an alternative to mainstream behavioural conformity.

    Images of fire, of comets, and transcendence, operate to integrate the poems thematically across their diverse forms. Martial imagery and astronomical references are invoked, appropriate for a celestial appreciation of life's required combats.

   It is evident that these personal wars and battles are clearly more important to the poet than the political struggles of the country around her. These are invoked but she does not allow them to extinguish the flames of her personal anguish, or douse her personal rebellions and uprisings with a collective mass of depersonalised sorrow. There is a capacity for objectivity, detachment and broad perspective manifest in her work, which makes her direct treatment of everyday and personal disappointments very interesting.

   Godakanda uses references to Classical mythology and archetypes to expansively broaden the framework of several of the interchanges showcased in her poetry: and allusions to Indian as well as Greek and Roman mythology, and Christian doctrine.

   'Narcissus! Narcissus!', addressed to a younger lover, shows the persona strongly inhabiting an imaginative space of cultural strength not usually accorded to women who cross age lines in their romantic relations with men in traditional societies, and using classical archetypes for her personal self-empowerment:

'You beautiful boy-man
Looks fade and you grow old, sweet boy-man/
I, Echo, have seen so many like you
Preening and posing
On the surface of my lake...

Men come, sweet Narcissus,
To my life-giving pool,
And then they go,
When it is time to go -
But I, Echo, the keeper of life
Stay.'

  The self-esteem and self-respect in the poet's tone here are further explored in 'Lucifer, I See You In Me', where the persona's identification as a woman with the socially condemned pride of Lucifer is portrayed as a necessary strength, in a world where she is often called into action, to affirm as well as defend herself:

 'Pride goes before a fall
  I have heard many mutter
  As they pick themselves up
  Dust and put the pieces of their broken lives
  Back together -
  Little pieces missing
  Lines not exactly meeting
  Humbled beyond words
  Looking for meaning
  In dusty volumes
  Until the next fall.

  I march towards my end,
  No heaven or hell,
  Until I too fall down -
  Yet, no Book would I turn to
  In despair for hope.
  Instead, reach deep within my being
  And gather

  That slow-burning Promethean Gift
  Between my sheltering palms.
  With that to guide and light the way,
  Once again
  I walk head high,
  Battered and bruised,
  But not broken.
  Lucifer, I see you in me.'

  The relatively cliched final phrases 'battered...bruised/But not broken' are not threadbare but original in their placement in this cumulative sequence, as the evocation of the image of the 'slow-burning Promethean Gift' of fire held by the persona in her 'sheltering palms' suggests an invocation of the sacred which enables her to transcend the struggles and frequent indignities she encounters in the path of her life. Images of the vulnerability and fragmentation of the self cited during the passage of the poem are thus denied by the alliterated end focused phrase 'But not broken'.

  Godakanda in her most effective work does not clutter or freight her poetic syntax with overwrought description, and her images are free of self-referential and self-conscious posturing. In 'A Closer Fit', she directly addresses us, the reader, with an abruptness that is endearing, and revelatory in its indication of her awareness of our shared human condition:

 'My skin does not fit right;
  An imposter in clothes
  Borrowed, begged, or stolen,
  That is how I feel, day in and day out;
   In places it pinches sorely,
   Too young to be me;
   In others, hangs loose
   In wrinkled, flabby folds
   That looked not even remotely like me,
   From afar, at least.
   Slink I into shadows cracks and nooks,
   In shame when among those
   With tailor-made skins, just right,
   The way they hang, chameleon-like,
   In vain, I know, do I stretch and shrink,
   A caterpillar gone mad in its chrysalis,
   Nip, tuck, and suck, endlessly,
   Looking for a closer fit.'

   The frustration of the process of emergence from felt constraint is powerfully expressed in the climactic metaphor 'A caterpillar gone mad in its chrysalis', and the diction derived from dressmaking is particularly appropriate as a description of a woman rejecting the ill-fitting and unsuitable measurements made of her by her society. Here in Sri Lanka we are particularly aware of the many 'fittings' required for the dresses and garments that are tailored for us, and the various efforts required for us to feel as if we are physically appealing, and approved of. Even the most liberated of us wonder at times if we fit, or fail to fit, the models held up to us of female beauty and desirability.

   The poet's evocation of youth and age here, as equally uncomfortable extremes, shows her prevalent desire to find the unique 'fit' that expresses her sense of her true self, rather than the 'imposter' that she rejects, who is constructed often inadvertently in response to the dictates of society.

  In 'The Cup Of Life', she describes herself as 'waiting for my cup to fill,
   With memories bittersweet,
   Dissolved in sweat and tears.
   One final drop,
   And then I will drink it
   And fade in a euphoric mist
   Into an eternity beyond everything.'

   In this first stanza, the phrases 'bittersweet' and 'sweat and tears' seem slightly tired, but the syntax and enjambement ensures overall clarity of meaning. The flow of the second half of this poem, however, is disrupted by unrendered words, which cluster claustrophically and do not allow Godakanda's own voice to free itself from the trappings and implications of well-known phrases:

 'Yet, I have lost count
  Of those drops,
  Seeping through the very cracks of life,
  Trapped in a hazy, labyrinthine mist
  Of life-choking mind-numbing memories
  And am still awaiting
  Breathlessly, hesitantly,
  For that final drop,
  That magical catalyst,
  To fall.'

The blurred abstractness of this idea, its unconnectedness to any specific image, obscures its meaning. Godakanda expresses a similar idea more effectively in a more physically concrete form in 'To Be Joyful Of Little Things':

 'A drop of nothingness
  Hanging pendulously,
  Swinging, quivering
  In the morning chill
  On a blade of the sidewalk's crushed grass;
   A little no-name plant
   Pushing itself staunchly
   Through a crack
   On the pavement,
   Despite being smashed,
   To pulp, day after day,
   By the pounding feet
   Hurrying along to nowhere;
   The one true note
   In the repertoire of screeches
   Of the fake-blind man
   With the cracked violin
   At the corner by the lights;
   One perfect ray
   That cuts across the choking smog
    And falls at my feet
    And follows me, and then guides me
    On my way
    To yet another yesterday, today, and tomorrow;
     Little things, they surely are,
     And they are all I have,
     Yet to find joy in them, I have learnt, finally.'

  The inverted syntax used here in the end focus of the last line very effectively positions the persona's unexpected realisation of joy inherent in the diurnal progress in which we pursue our various sacred grails.

  The most powerful overtly political  statement in the collection is the long poem 'Let Me Cast The Last Stone', a portrayal of the state-sanctioned ritual murders of women which take place in countries adopting punitive and manifestly unequal measures to publicly condemn adultery and sexual 'impropriety'.

 'Let me cast the last stone
  At that Brown-bodied Woman
  Buried waist-high
  Runnels of sweat and blood
  Streaming down...
  Straining, as she braced herself
  For me to let go of that sharp-edged flint
  Whizzing through the air
  And hit her bloodied, ravaged body
  Once more.'

The poem, with its topical subject matter, runs the risk of being usurped by the 'incident reportage' style in which real events are responded to with emotiveness and often gratuitously violent faux profundity, and simulated outrage. Godakanda prevents this by her positioning of the textures and physical details, and judicious use of sequential plosive and sibilance to portray the perpetrators in relation to the victim of the unfolding events.

  The woman being stoned here fragments from within. Initially, she is:


 'Confident, still...
     That those sons and daughters
     Of her ancient line
     Would shield her from more stones,
      Chase the infidels out
      And let her breathe once more
      A lungful of liberty.'

    The scene of her dissolution is simultaneously shown in 'real time' and placed in a historical contextual framework, in which the first stone is 'Cast by the White Sahib', and the last metaphorically by the persona herself. The persecutors are disturbing versions of the victim's own 'darling child,/ Savouring the often regurgitated cud
Of post-imperial anti-capitalist cant'.

The sado-masochistic and self-justified cruelty of the perpetrators of the killing is as accurate as a televised replay in its close-up poetic, measured detail, evoking and summoning the covert voyeur in the reader:

'Picking up a jagged piece
Running a testing finger
Over the sharp edge, sensuously
Weighing the thing
Turning it this way and that
To get a better grip
Before letting it fly
Whizzing through the hot noon air.'

The persona expresses the wish to cast the last stone to 'free her/ So we could bury her
Under the cloak of the approaching night'. But this action is not merely motivated by mercy, or compassion. It is an incitement to finish it off, to get it over with:

'So we could get on with our lives
Wading our way through
A quagmire of the post colonial slush
Sucking it up to the White Sahib
In absentia.'

The deliberate use of the inclusive plural pronoun 'we' in this implicates us all in the event, and indicates the eroded problematic situation of anyone in a moral void, where indeterminacy prevails, and post colonial issues create a 'quagmire of...slush', trying in vain to locate ground on which to stand. Any certainty here dangerously devolves into judgment or condemnation of an 'Other'.

Human connection eroded, other people's suffering is seen as a vacuous spectacle, an enactment in which the figures' claim to life, through relationship, constitutes the reason for their death, and their existence, judged, and castigated, is mindlessly and heartlessly absorbed by the machinery of the state.

'Phoenix' is a guided tour through the thoughts and impressions of a person of interest to us. The sentimental caterwauling we are, regrettably, as readers subjected to, in various forms, by writers of contemporary poetry, is refreshingly absent here, where the 'black box'  of the awareness which has been substituted for the 'heart', often clearly registers the re-calibrations which generate and renew the poet's equanimity.

'When Life Touches Life': Review of the Memoirs of Leonard de Alwis by Devika Brendon

Published in The  Sunday Times

Leonard de Alwis's decision to publish his memoirs was made as a result of the suggestions of his friends and family. In the Afterword, his son Chamika tells us that 'This.. is a book about a man who has dedicated half a century of his life to the cause of education in Sri Lanka... the book gradually evolved from a mere collection of anecdotes, into one mapping the vagaries of the education system in Sri Lanka, and his experiences in the U.K. and in Pakistan, as a source for others in education'. Leonard de Alwis was a long serving Principal of Trinity College, Kandy, and also a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army.

Autobiographical memoirs are written in the first person, and many memoirists choose to write the whole account of their lives in their own voice. These memoirs are constructed in the form of third person anecdotes, skilfully interspersed with narrative, and the voice of the subject is heard as reported speech, as recounted to the writer Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe. 

In the contemporary world, in which politicians and public figures are introduced to us through 'tell-all' tabloids and grand narratives, all usually written in first person voice, Leonard de Alwis' dignified choice, to speak of his professional and vocational achievements and to focus on service rather than self, is both refreshing and revelatory. The anecdotal sections in the central section of the book are written by friends, colleagues and students of Leonard de Alwis, each adding a different facet to our impression of his overall life. The key themes that I perceived in the life of the character that emerges are continuity, commitment to service, and a sense of duty, moral, intellectual and spiritual, to create and develop a life which derives its central meaning from the conscious dedication of an individual to the development of his society.

He himself introduces the motif of continuity: 'The de Alwis family has had connections to Trinity College that go back a long way. My father's family had been associated with Trinity from the 19th century... we have had an unbroken link to the College...we can count 4 generations at Trinity; there are only a handful of families that can claim such a long link to the school from around the time of the school's inception...When I was appointed principal of the school, to me, it was the culmination of my family's devotion to both God and to Trinity College.'

In a fragmenting world, ties and links like this described above simultaneously anchor an individual, through a strong sense of personal identity, and strengthen the society he lives in. While reading the accounts of Mr. de Alwis, from former pupils such as Channa Daswatte and Kumar Sangakkara, I received the sense of a person who, essentially too private to discuss his personal feelings and opinions, drew strong encouragement and motivation from his sense of being part of a tradition, and who was concerned to contribute and extend that tradition, and ensure that the links remained unbroken.

This commitment to continuity was particularly necessary in the years of civil unrest and disorder, and the tensions that have troubled Sri Lankan society during the past few decades. An incident in 1989, which took place during the JVP insurgency, showed the quality of leadership that was required of a Principal in such a context, that ensured that long-term stability was possible, amidst situations of great stress, when decisions had to be taken which would have long-term effects on all those involved. A leading attorney in Colombo is quoted as saying that, 'at a time when all the schools in Kandy had been forced by the JVP to close down...a student who had links to high-ranking members of the JVP insurgents of the '70s was working with a small group to have the school closed down...De Alwis handled the whole situation with such maturity that I will never forget the incident. With the help of two other teachers, he managed to contact the boy's mother and navigate the school out of the crisis. No one knew about it, no one was expelled or penalized, and the student concerned was able to continue his studies at Trinity. He is now a successful employee in the private sector. Trinity was the only school in Kandy that never closed down during the JVP crisis. I think de Alwis' greatest achievement was his management of the school during this time. People don't usually value the man who averts a crisis.'

In fact, we see all around us, throughout the world today, crises of every kind, and individuals in various ways benefitting from them, both directly and indirectly. The low-key intervention and restrained management style described above shows the opposite of this, with its focus on the personal rather than the bureaucratic process, principled concern and understanding for the individual and his future life, and the ability to guide and mentor students from a non-judgmental perspective.

The remarkable generosity of spirit invoked here is further showcased when we are told that Mr. de Alwis also acted as an advocate to welcome students to Trinity in ways which sought to diversify the intake of pupils: 'I always advocated that Trinity should not be an exclusive school for only those in the hill country, but that it should open its doors to children from distant towns in the island. I wanted them to gain from the opportunities that an education at Trinity could offer them'.

In these ways, he enriched the tradition he was a part of, and extended it to others. The key phrase I associate with him is 'Education for life; education for living; education which teaches the true values of life'. He is eloquent about the country's need for teachers with integrity, and proven dedication to their calling, and the need to support them as educators with commensurate pay and administrative and situational support, and the provision of opportunities for their professional development, particularly in an era where, he says, 'much is said of the deteriorating standards of the noble profession in our country...If this country is to maintain ethical standards and produce good citizens, we teachers have to recognize the great responsibility placed on us to mould a child's personality with a well-disciplined mind.Today, the profession needs individuals who are genuinely committed to the task of teaching'.

It is profoundly reassuring to read of Leonard de Alwis' belief in the 'sense of wonder' that teachers can impart to students, in an educational culture world-wide where standardisation, impersonal management of students en masse, and emphasis on processing students to fill quotas and gain funding, results in teachers who tell students who ask questions in class to stop wasting the class's time, or insensitive educators who disrespect, humiliate or even mock the students whose education they are undertaking.

There are lists rendered in point form and embedded in the narrative sections which clarify the many contributions Leonard de Alwis made to Trinity College; a section in the chapter 'A Sojourn In Pakistan', which lists the curriculum of a private school in Pakistan and the learning points observed by Mr. de Alwis that school administrators in Sri Lanka can benefit from; and of the educational reforms made to the school system after 1972. I found Mr. de Alwis' outline of the shortcomings of the education system, and his clearcut recommendations for change, one of the highlights of the book, especially as his long experience in education encompasses several forms of teaching, including, in his later life, teaching in Springfield and Greenhill International Schools. 

Here again, we see his expansive wish to benefit the greatest number through education: 'As an educationist, my desire was to take English education to many areas in Sri Lanka,...and impart quality education to a larger section of people'. The equation of English education with 'quality' education, which we can observe in this comment, shows his concern that the education received in Sri Lanka by current and future generations of students be of an international standard, so that students educated in Sri Lanka will encounter no barrier or limitation to their professional deveopment and fulfilment, as they compete, and are expected to collaborate professionally in their workplaces, with students educated in the English medium from all over the world.

Leonard de Alwis' use of the word 'quality' to describe education shows his understanding that education is, in today's pragmatic world, a business, as well as a vocation, and that it can be conducted as a business in a manner which is not limited to business principles but with a focus on the humanity and individuality of both students and teachers. 

Ultimately, it is not only a list of achievements on a resume that inspires us, however impressive that list is; nor the notable people who inspired or were inspired by him. As the title of the book shows, it is the inner qualities of a person which are most inspiring, and which are shown consistently throughout the course of their life, and the values they impart, embody and live by: 'It is life alone that can touch life, and it is only a dedicated teacher who can vitalize a classroom situation into an adventure in learning', according to Leonard de Alwis. 'A teacher who has professional training and vocational devotion plays a vital role as mediator of knowledge, a disciplinarian, confidante, and surrogate of morality.'

The title of these Memoirs, and the character of the man illuminated in them, makes me think of the way a baton is passed on in an athletics race, or a torch is passed on, down a line which, as each one who takes it up vitalizes and kindles it, makes and renews a chain of unending continuity.

Unacknowledged Desire Becomes A Tragic Fate

Published in New Ceylon Writing No. 6

The production is stripped down and the set is minimalist because the emotions take up all the space on stage. This was a charged and intensely mesmerising performance by the whole ensemble. 

The director had invited me to a rehearsal two weeks before the performance, and I had come in time to see the principal players who play the lovers, Catherine and Rudolfo, working out the positioning and movement and alignments in a pivotal scene in which he is asking her why she finds it so hard to leave the home of her aunt and uncle and be with him, and live their life together. 

The story takes place in an Italian immigrant family in mid-20thC Brooklyn, and the claustrophobia and voyeurism of the setting is evoked by the simplest of sets: steel benches in a square, with see-through plastic sheeting in the foreground, and a set of steps leading up to a central doorway/archway which leads to the streets outside. 

The man of the family, Eddie Carbone, has aspirations for a better life for his niece, Catherine, who has grown up in his home. He wants her to live in a nice neighbourhood, amongst a better class of people than those she has so far moved among. He is extremely protective of her. 

What is clear to us, viewing through the sheeting and the frames, and the mediating guidance and commentary of Eddie's lawyer, is that Eddie is in love with Catherine. And this is romantic love, not fatherly or avuncular. And it is unacknowledged by Eddie, who is unconscious that, when he looks at his niece and comments that she is walking in 'too wavy' a manner, that he looks at her as a lover looks, territorially wishing to shield her from the gaze of other men. 

The extended family situations in which many of us live in Sri Lanka are spoken to very powerfully by this production, as unacknowledged wishes, longings and desires flourish in repression and denial. 

Blurred relational lines are fuelled by physical proximity and patriarchal values, in which the man of the house, the hard-working provider, 

feels unconsciously entitled to more than daughterly devotion, when a girl becomes an adult still living at home. 

Individuation is a central theme of the play, and in an ideal world Catherine would get a job, become independent financially, and settle down in the neighbourhood with a nice young man who is worthy of her intelligence, her sweetness and her beauty. And her uncle's unacknowledged feelings would gradually subside, like flood waters that have exceeded their limit, and return back into the normal lines of acceptability. 

It is usual to castigate and scapegoat child molesters and paedophiles for unnatural behaviour. This play, and this production in particular, shows us three adults equally caught in an explosive triangle which is tragically detonated by the arrival of a young man who Catherine likes enough to marry. 

I say three, because Catherine loves her uncle dearly, and Eddie's wife, Beatrice, sees her husband's situation with agape and compassion, not blaming her niece in any way, and encourages her to grow up and actively seek and insist on her emotional independence. 

We see Eddie's dislike of Catherine's suitor as comic initially: Rudolfo is a vibrant, attractive and outgoing personality, with brazen blonde hair and an exuberance which acts like a magnet on Catherine. Eddie openly suspects him of being 'not right' (translation: homosexual), because he likes to sing and is creative in ways outside Eddie's ken. And this disapproval, fed by jealousy of him as a rival, escalates into the accusation that Rudolfo is only interested in Catherine so that he can become an American citizen. 

This unjust suspicion, which he communicates as fact to Catherine, catalyses her through outrage and confusion into clarity, where she is forced to choose, and her choice causes Eddie to confront Marco and Rudolfo, because he has not been able to confront his own unfulfillable longing to be with Catherine. 

This is romantic, because it is a dream that can never come true, in real life. And it is tragic, because Eddie allows his feelings to interfere with his niece's pursuit of her happiness independently of him. The lawyer, his devoted wife, and all of us viewing the unfolding of the story, can see that Eddie is becoming more and more isolated and obsessed, and we are powerless to stop the tragic outcome.

Harry Potter And The End Of An Era

Published in Ceylon Today

'Finite Incantatem' is what people in the world created by J.K. Rowling say when a spell has run its course, or has ended its usefulness and is now causing damage. 

I want to say these words, as a requiem for Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, because it has been 19 years since he was created, and the latest work about him, the play 'Harry Potter and The Cursed Child' that was co-written by Rowling, and published last week, marks the end of an era. Not because the readership is not interested in what happens next, but because what we are told in this play happens next is a bewildering let-down of our legitimate expectations. 

As a great fan of the series, I find myself in the equivalent of a Body Bind Curse when it comes to putting into words what I want to say about the latest instalment. Please bear with me, because I wanted so much to find that the magic never ends, that the cupboard door in the spare room which led to the magical world was still partly open, that there was still a possibility that that wonderful childhood pleasure of discovering interesting characters in a world parallel to my own, was not outgrown. 

I have heard many people with children praise the series for their story-telling, the exciting adventures, for getting kids interested in reading again, for their wit and their humour. Social commentators have praised the inclusion of characters whose situations raise even young readers' awareness of socio-political issues in our contemporary world: of injustice and inequity, of bigotry and of race, class and gender prejudice, in accessible ways. 

The 7 books portrayed a battle between Good and Evil that was only thinly rendered in metaphor, and in which the hero and his friends grow and evolve in moral awareness, and in insight into the complexities of human nature, including their own. This in itself in my view was a great literary achievement, although the story-telling itself is uneven at times in its quality, and the best sequences show up in stark contrast the labouredness of the weaker sections. 

It was a stroke of brilliance on the part of Rowling to fix the personal development of her protagonist onto the natural and familiar organisational structure of every child's Senior School curriculum and syllabus, so that his emergence into adulthood at the age of 17 was also the point at which he would meet his (un) Maker, his arch-enemy, and battle him for the last time, avenging his parents' murder and saving his generation and the wizarding world from impending doom. 

The world which was created in that parallel universe portrayed diverse ethnicities, girls known for their intellectual ability, and ways people could literally learn to successfully deal with their demons. This fantasy world was an original one, product of an interesting perspective, which, despite its stifling Anglo-centrism, its tokenism and its formulaic tendencies, brought many blessings to child readers in the form of ideas which formed the basis for their beliefs about friends, enemies, and what side to choose when life presented them with dilemmas which tested their evolving character and aspirations. 

So this play which is presented as portraying the world in which Harry and his friends are in their early middle age, and have married each other and had children, should have been interesting, even fascinating - as it is interesting and fascinating to meet a person you last saw in their teens now 'all grown up' and in the midst of their destined life. 

It is acutely disappointing to see potential in real people, in real life, unrealised. And when writers create characters who impact our imagination, we have hopes and fears for them as we do for real people. So I must say that Rowling's creation of Hermione Granger, easily the most interesting character of the original central trio, is a travesty in this play: the idealistic, sceptical, insightful girl, whose combination of despised 'Mudblood' status and brilliant intuitive talent challenges all the prejudices of her world, has become the mother of a daughter whose snobbery and sense of entitlement are qualities the young Hermione would have seen through and mocked into proportion 'at once'. 

Even alternative outcomes clumsily and confusingly accessed by Time-Turners do not outline any better alternatives. Of all the infinite possibilities available, generated by the better parts of her own imagination, Rowling in the end ultimately endorsed THIS? This shop-worn and self-limiting, parochial vision? 

It does not make sense. And the tortured central story of the second generation resolving their parents' differences ought to be interesting and morally instructive, but is not. And middle-aged, navel-gazing Harry with doubts about his ability to parent, the contrived passion and faux chemistry of the two ill-assorted married couples, the weirdly self-defining children, the lifeless dialogue, make the experience of reading the script increasingly worse. What ought to have been a longed-for pleasure has become an ordeal.

We are presented with easy answers to difficult questions. Rowling over the years created an audience who became accustomed to a far higher standard of creative characterisation and thematic presentation. Whereas great writers generally create the audience by which they are appreciated, in this case the inverse seems to have occurred. The story's worth is only in its value as a commodity by booksellers at point of sale, and tickets for performances of the play sold out two years in advance. The franchise and its dictates have engulfed the central narrative, and a light has been put out which had made the world in the late 1990s and the 2000s a much better place. 

The wishing well is dry, and the coins at the bottom of it have lost their value and their currency. 

A terrible end to the telling of a wonderful story. 

Vale, Harry Potter