Fiction, Creativity and Politics:
Reading Gunadasa Amarasekera’s Gamanaka Meda – Part I
By Sasanka Perera
Gamanaka Meda
by Gunadasa Amarasekera, 2006. Boralesgamuwa: Visidunu Publishers Pvt Ltd. ISBN 955-9170-84-8.
Pages: 202. LKR. 290
Dr. Amarasekara
The Context
Gunadasa Amarasekera’s latest novel, Gamanaka Meda (In the Midst of a Journey) was launched in Colombo on April 27th 2006. I was asked by the publisher Gevindu Kumaratunge of Visidunu Publishers to make a comment on the sociological context of the novel, which I accepted particularly because like many people in my generation who were educated in the Sinhala language, I also grew up reading Amarasekera’s novels and poems that became at a certain level of consciousness a partial vehicle of our cultural and political socialization at a certain level of consciousness.
After reading the book, I realized that the endeavor I had undertaken was no easy task. It was clear for a number of reasons that a mere summary of the contents of the book and some cursory and obligatory comments would not do justice to the book or to its author even though this is the usual fashion in which book reviews are generally formulated in this country. Let me begin by articulating these reasons, and then proceed on to my approach and finally to a brief commentary on the book’s thematic orientations. Without doubt, Gunadasa Amarasekera is Sri Lanka’s and certainly Sinhala society’s foremost cultural intellectual. He is also the best-known and most articulate public intellectual in the Gramcian sense that the Sinhala society has produced in recent times. The fact that some of his political and cultural commentaries and ideological positions, including the notion of ‘jathika chinthanaya’ (national thinking or consciousness) and its extensions have been controversial in general, and in some senses reductionist and simplistic, is a separate issue. I have dealt with this issue in some of my earlier writings, and do not wish to engage with it here.
On the other hand, he stands out as one of the few individuals whose creative abilities were not destroyed by the ‘scientific’ professional education he received at the university. As we know quite well by now, our higher education system particularly in fields like medicine, dentistry, computer science, engineering and so on churns out individuals seemingly proficient in their chosen professional fields while dismantling whatever creative, intellectual or artistic potential they might have had/possessed. More clearly, despite being a dentist by profession, Amarasekara’s creative efforts did not die with his formal education. Instead, they expanded. At the same time, Amarasekera has been an active poet and novelist in Sinhala society for a very long time. In this context, his latest fictional attempt is not merely something that has emerged out of the blues. It is something that has to be historically and culturally contextualized and has to be seen as a part of a long-term process that has evolvedbeen in motion for over forty years. So when reviewing Gamanaka Meda it is simply inadequate to look at the mere book alone, but the overall context of its production and its intellectual pedigree has to be taken into account. This review would essentially constitute such an effort, which in any case would be the reading of a single individual in a cultural field where many other readings would be possible.
Amarasekera’s Poetry and Fiction: A Brief Overview
In my view, Amarasekara’s poetry and fiction have made a serious impact on the cultural history of Sinhala creative writing in general. However, when I refer to his novels in this fashion, I specifically refer to his earlier creations. In a sense, Amarasekera’s poetry began as both a creative and ideological reaction to the two dominant schools of poetry that held sway at the time he began writing in the 1950s. He was reacting againstto the Colombo School of Poetry marked by its superficial use of idioms, sentimentality and what Wimal Dissanayake has described in his recent book Enabling Traditions as ‘ill-defined emotions’ and ‘shallow experiences’ (2005: 113).
On the other hand, he was also reacting againstto the University of Peradeniya based free verse poets with whom he was more closely associated. Amarasekere’s issue with the latter group was that they based their creations on the models espoused by Elliot, Pound and Lawrence, and therefore were creating "an artificial idiom based on English tropes" (Dissanayake 2005: 113-114).
In this context, Amarasekera was attempting to find a structure of poetic expression from Sinhala folk poetry and to use it to narrate poetry that commented on contemporary issues or personal experiences. In this fashion, his first collection of poems published in the 1950s, Bhava Geetha, were rooted in the memories of his childhood in the backdrop of the cultural mosaic of village life in southern Sri Lanka. His second collection, Uyanaka Hinda Liyu Kavi moves to the city and its experiences. These are particularly the experiences of the middle classes almost in keeping with the experiential passage of the poet himself and the generation that he represented.
Many poems in his third collection, Amal Biso, introduced a new subject matter to Sinhala poetry that had until then not been successfully engaged with. This is the interplay between different manifestations of desire in human beings, particularly carnal feelings on one hand and spirituality in the form of a Buddhist sensibility on the other. Commenting on this collection, Disaanayake quite accurately observes that Amarasekera through individual poems, communicated a modern sensibility and structure of feeling by utilizing various forms of folk poetry (2005: 115).
Amarasekera’s other well-known collections of poems include Gurulu Vata and Asak Da Kava, both of which unfortunately I have not read.
His best-known novels that I remember reading as a student are Karumakkarayo and YaliUppananemi. Despite obvious limitations in the context of comparable global literature, in my opinion these works of fiction still remain his most creative novels in so far as the narrative structure is concerned. Both took as their subject matter issues like sexual desire and morality that he also dealt with in the poetry collection Amal Biso.
Even in today’s context, these are not issues that have been dealt with in a sophisticated fashion in Sinhala creative writings except perhaps in selected writings of Simon Navagattegama and Sunethra Rajakarunanayake. I specifically mark out these novels not simply because they dealt with subject matter that was and remains controversial in our somewhat puritanical society, but also because they marked a certain serious intersection in the progression of the Sinhala novel that cannot be missed. These were novels that both had elements of creativity in narrative as well as the development of characters and issues dealt with, which in many senses diminish in Amarasekera’s own latter fiction including the present novel, Gamanaka Meda.
As my friend Harindra Dassanayake reminded me during a recent discussion, Ediriweera Sarachchandra also commented admiringly on these two novels while Martin Wickramasinghe criticized them saying that the characters in them were not persons one would meet in real life Sri Lanka, and the texts themselves were modeled after D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Interestingly, later on Amarasekera also distanced himself from his own novels essentially agreeing with Wickramasinghe’s critique and declaring that the characters in them were mere ‘manas puttu’ or creations of his own mind which had nothing to do with reality. Some of Amarasekera’s self-criticisms are to be found in his book Abuddassa Yugayak. However, these characters whether figments of Amarasekera’s imagination or not, are constantly inhabiting our time, space and imagination whether we havebear affinity with their desires, lust, and other feelings or not. In a sense, this debate is somewhat regressive, and has direct relevance to Amarasekera’s latter work.
A novel or any work of fiction is necessarily a product of inter-textual borrowings. That borrowing may be from ‘texts’ in the post modern sense produced in our times, in another time, in our region or beyond. As such, the influence of Lawrence is not really an issue, but merely one source of influence among many others.
On the other hand, the dominant manifestations of the contemporary novel do not have to reflect reality. Its is precisely the margins of reality, hyper-reality, nature and the supernatural that writers of magic realism constantly strived to blur and transgress. In any event, different people can perceive reality itself quite differently at the same time. It is to reflect ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, that we have things like news bulletins on radio, television and newspapers even though these texts themselves often construct only ‘versions’ of ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ reminding us of the plurality of reality and the potential for its multiple interpretations. What happened in this debate was the public emergence of a particular moralist and puritanical backlash on issues of sexuality and sexual relations from the articulate sections of the Colombo middle class typified by Martin Wickramasinghe.
In my mind, Amarasekera became a prisoner of the barrenness and the prudish middle class morality that he often comments on in his latter novels.
Despite the unfortunate regressive turn of events referred to above, the point I want to make in the context of the above summary of Amarasekera’s creative energies is quite simply this: this is a novelist and poet who has both exhibited the ability to deal with controversial topics as well as utilize different forms of expression (for example, drawing from different folk traditions in his poetry) to narrate his ideas, and whose writings in both prose and verse have acquired a permanent presence in the mosaic of Sinhala creative writing. All this is in addition to his political and cultural commentaries and critical analyses of poetry. So we are not dealing with just any novelist but a writer of our times who has effectively made his presence felt. It is from this background that one has to assess both Amarasekera’s latest novel and its immediate predecessors.
Gamanaka Meda and its
immediate Predecessors
Just as much as Gamanaka Meda is difficult to be reviewed out of context of Amarasekera’s overall creative writings, it clearly also cannot be removed from the six novels that immediately preceded it. In order of appearance, these are: Gamanaka Mula, Gam Dorin Eliyata, Ini Mage Ihalata, Wankagiriyaka, Yali Maga Wetha, and Duru Rataka Dukata Kiriyaka.
Finally, the present novel, Gamanaka Meda emerges as the seventh in this series. While initially published by different publishers over time, at present all six previous novels have been republished by Visidunu Publishers along with the present novel making the entire series relatively easily accessible. In effect, the present novel is better understood as the latest installment of a mega narrative that attempts to capture the social history of the Sri Lankan, or specifically the Sinhala, middle class.
As such, this review is a comment on all of them rather than Gamanaka Meda in isolation. One could argue that taken together, the entire series is not unlike the Mahawamasa in terms of its grand narrative format. If the Mahawamsa attempts to narrate the story of kings of Lanka in both mythic and historical splendor, Amarasekera in a more organized fashion attempts to narrate the evolution of the Sri Lankan (read Sinhala) middle class through various periods focusing on its strengths, victories, weaknesses and failures as he sees them.
The beginning of this series of novels marks a clear departure from the creative practice Amarasekera had established in his earlier period as a novelist when he wrote Karumakkarayoand Yali Uppannemi.
According to Wimal Dissanayake, Amarasekera’s changed approach to fiction from Gamanaka Mula onwards is marked by his focus on "the larger social currents that influence and inflect human relations and the progress of society" (2005: 131). In other words, what is seen in this entire series as a mega narrative is Amarasekera’s attempts to paint a large and broad canvass depicting social and political changes on the one hand, and to locate these changes in the context of the evolving Sinhala middle class and increasingly urban experiences on the other. Naturally, the evolution of different segments of the middle class is also necessarily part of the migration of individuals from villages to the city, urbanization and the emergence of an urban and suburban population with an urban identity and nostalgic memories or claims to the village. It is this nostalgia that so clearly manifested in the paintings with highly idealized village scenes in the work of the ‘43 Group’, the modernist Sri Lankan visual arts movement. While uncomplicatingly representational, realist, straightforward and therefore quite unlike the major novels of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Eg., One Hundred years of Solitude) or Umberto Eco (Eg., The Name of the Rose and Baudolino), Amarasekera’s mega narrative however is not a mere descriptive canvas. On the one hand, taken together, all the novels in the series also constitute a moral commentary in the sense that the entire series describes the recent history of the country’s extended Sinhala middle class that has hitherto not captured the consistent attention of social historians. On the other hand, the series also vehemently criticizes what the author thinks is the cultural barrenness of middle class life and proposes that it be revitalized by drawing upon Sinhala Buddhist cultural values. Some of these ideological positions are more clearly and directly articulated in his political commentaries contained in collections such as Ganaduru Medeyama Dakinemi Arunalu, Jathika Chianthanayai Jathika Artihikayayi, Samaja Deshapalana Vichara 1 and 2 etc. In his reformulated role as interventionist novelist, Amarasekera combined the personalities of commentator, describer, critic, moral judge and reformer. Dissanayake further describes this metamorphosis in the following words: "Amarasekera now sees his role as that of an imaginative social historian dedicated to uncovering the diverse social forces at play in society and offering a pathway towards moral clarity amidst the confusion and cacophonies generated by these forces" (2005: 132). I think Dissanayake is correct up to a point. Amarasekera certainly becomes a critical social historian of the Sinhala middle class as well as its moral judge and pathfinder. However, in the combination of the multiple roles of commentator, describer, critic, moral judge, pathfinder and reformer, he seems to lose some of the more creative and imaginative manifestations manifestly (awkward but may be it’s the oomph! Yours sentence reads well without the "manifestly") evident in his earlier novels and poems. But make no mistake; the novels that make up this seven-part mega narrative are clearly the writings of a seasoned writer, passionate about Sinhala culture, its history, its practices and traditions and its uncharted and unsure future as he sees it. His novels would appeal to many who have had the experience of coming from the village, undergoing a slow process of urbanization, then getting exposed to global cultural influences that fundamentally changed their identities. The seven novels deal with the following general themes: Gamanaka Mula (The Beginning of a Journey) focuses on the early history of the middle class, particularly looking at the period between 1930s and 1948 marked by the ritual granting of Independence by the British. Gam Dorin Eliyata (Out of the Village Door) deals with the socio-political changes that took place since Independence, particularly the successes of the Sinhala nationalist forces in the domains of language and culture in the period between 1948 and 1956. Ini Mage Ihalata (Further up the Ladder) describes the further development of the middle classes focusing on the benefits vast sections of the middle class reaped from the introduction of free education in the country. Wankagiriyaka (Lost In a Maze) is Amarasekera’s most critical admonishment of the middle class where he depicts the entire class cohort as an entity that is culturally and ideologically lost. In his assessment, they are lost because they opted to forget the rural background many of them came from, and were more interested in adopting or appropriating the practices, tastes and habits of what Amarasekera describes as the upper classes who were far removed from the country’s cultural roots. This is mostly based in the social milieu of the 1960s. Yali Maga Wetha (Back to the Path) describes how the chief protagonist of the series re-embraces the traditions of his cultural background that he had until now disparagingly discharged. Duru Rataka Dukata Kiriyaka (Hard life in a Distant Country) describes the life in exile of the chief protagonist during a difficult period in his life from where he reemerges transforming himself both in emotional and intellectual terms – in effect producing a cultural reawakening. The present novel, Gamanaka Meda (In the Middle of a Journey) is set in the context of the political and socio-cultural upheavals and transformations of the period between 1970 and 1977. Here, the chief protagonist returns to Lanka from overseas in a more sedate manner than he was at the beginning of the narrative, and enters the socio-political dynamics of the time as a young intellectual. Yet, despite the knowledge gained overseas, or more clearly precisely because of it, he is depicted as an individual who does not have a clear vision, but becomes an intellectual vagabond searching for clarity but not finding it. The individual plight of the chief protagonist is meant to symbolize the attitude of the era, where the entire generation is lost and is oblivious in their slumber to the chaos and devastation of neo-colonialism that was already in their midst.
In effect, this is the story of Amarasekera himself in search of a clearer social and political vision, typifying the situation as he sees it prior to his own articulation of notions such as ‘jathika chinthanaya’ and its extensions. Through his fictionalized narrative he equates his personal history to that of the society itself or the history of the large social strata of which he is a part. In fact, throughout the series, one not only travels through familiar cultural and political terrain, but also often meets well-known characters from real life clothed in sparsely disguised names. At yet other moments, one also meets real life characters such as Ediriweera Sarachchandra in their own undisguised selves playing the roles they historically did play in society. At this point, it is worth asking whether the novels constituting Amarasekera’s mega narrative constitutes fiction, social history, autobiography, ideological commentary, prescriptive moral diktats or a combination of all of these. I would suggest, that the label ‘novel’ (or ‘fiction’) in the contemporary sense would not do justice to the series for a number of reasons, and therefore one should look at it as a different genre of writing that encapsulates all of the attributes above. More than a novel as we understand it today, I would suggest what Amarasekera has achieved through these seven texts is the creation of a genre of fictionalized autobiographic social history as political commentary. This also goes very well with his influential essays on politics and culture. If one acknowledges this categorization, then it is very clear that Amarasekera has written the most informative and detailed social history of the Sinhala middle class from a particular vantage point tempered by a preoccupation with Sinhala Buddhist cultural pride (I have desisted from using the word ‘nationalism’ here due to the problems it conjure which I do not have the time to deal with in this essay).
One needs to be conscious of what Amarasekera means by the ‘middle class’ here since the entire series is conceived of and marketed as a narrative of the Sri Lankan middle class. Martin Wickramasighe also wrote about the social transformations of the same period that Amarasekera is interested in through his trilogy Gamperaliya, Kaliyugaya and Yuganthaya. These narrated the story of the changes manifest in a different section of the middle class. Wickramasinghe deals with the disintegration of the traditional rural elite epitomized by the image of the crumbling ‘walauwa’ or the manor house, and the emergence of a bourgeoisie through trade and the subsequent expansion of this segment of the middle class that became the new social and political elite. Amarasekera however, in an explanatory blurb at the end of Gamanaka Meda dismisses the members of this entire social strata as the ‘foreign (meaning rootless) upper class.’ If one looks at the sociology of the major characters in Amarasekera’s narrative, it would be obvious that these are the individuals from the rural Sinhala south, who benefited from the introduction of free education, reaped its benefits of social and cultural mobility, migratedand migrated to the city and into the professional domains that mainly the city provided for. In fact, the main character of the series is the epitome of this class. However, in his vast canvas one would hardly meet anyone other than southern Sinhalas lost among a confusing clutter of cultural artifacts and landscapes. Tamils from Jaffna for instance, who also took the same path of social mobility and came to occupy the same professional domains as did southern Sinhalas, which in the post Independence period led to a severe competition for resources, are generally absent in this grand narrative. An exception such as the chief protagonist’s visit to Jaffna to meet a Tamil intellectual, possibly based on the personality of Professor Kailasapthy in Gamanaka Meda stands out precisely because it seems out of context in the overall scheme of things sketched in the narrative. Of course, these things become issues only if we go by the logic that novels should be a reflection of reality, which I do not personally subscribe to. A writer also has the option of picking the vantage point he wants to approach his writing from, particularly when it is formally categorized as fiction. In any event, once we reconcile with the restrictions and lapses of his canvas, it is evident that what remains in its partiality is a thorough macro description of the Sinhala middle class from the south.
Conclusion: Issues with Creativity
Let me take a brief moment to further articulate why this series could be seen better as fictionalized autobiographic social history rather than regular novels. In my mind, a novel is a project that takes as its point of departure ‘creativity’ that has to do with the selection of plot, the narrative formats used, exposition and exploration of themes and the inter-textual associations with, and borrowings from other sources of knowledge and inspiration. As an example and further exploration, let me draw from an essay I wrote in 2005: "if one were to read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Baudolino, a number of characteristics stand out that enhance their ‘creativity’. They are not simply about writing in an acceptable or ‘excellent’ language. To weave the narratives these and other similar novels represent, it is simply not adequate to master a particular language or be able to narrate the circumstances one is living in or her historical context in some detail along with the introduction of some fictional characters and circumstances. Eco would not have been able to accomplish The Name of the Rose and Baudolino if he did not have access to enormous extents of historical and philosophical knowledge, his own academic interests in linguistics as well as in notions such as interpretation, over interpretation, reality and hyper-reality, an active but creative re-engagement with social theory and philosophy in weaving the overall narrative structure of the books as well as each character. To do this kind of thing, one must have the required discipline and commitment to undertake painstaking research, engage in serious thinking, allow imagination to work, and finally the ability to interpret events and information and the mastery of the language itself" (Perera 2005). Amarasekara certainly has the breadth of knowledge at this stage in his career to adopt from such diverse sources than he had when he undertook the writing of Karumakkarayo and Yali Uppannemi. Even so, those two early novels are far more interesting in a creative sense than the seven I have briefly referred to above. In a recent discussion, one of my students argued that this limitation comes from Amarasekera’s self-imposed restriction in terms of the size of his recent works which vary from about 153 pages (eg., Yali Maga Wetha) andto 247 pages (eg., Gamanaka Mula) which does not allow the time or space to weave and narrate a more extensive and creative grand narrative as Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and Eco’s The island of Day Before or closer to home, Simon Nawagaththegama’s Sansara Aranya Asabada. But this is not a convincing argument when one looks at the narrative and creative success of short novels such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold or Memories of my Melancholy Whores. It is clear that in the case of Amarasekera, his political and reformist agenda and his preoccupation with the ancient Sinhala past have taken a toll on his creative potential and narrative skills. It is precisely this limitation in the entire corpus of Amarasekera’s recent writing that Liyanage Amarakeerthi in an essay titled Beyond Representation: Towards a Non-mimetic Criticism (Daily News, 23rd March 2005) referred to in the following blunt words: "What kind of sin have we to see one of our greatest modern writers trying to reconcile Alle Gunawanse politics and Shri Rahula poetry?" Amarakeerthi’s rhetorical question might seem harsh at one level. However, at another level, Amarasekera’s attempt to reconcile ancient traditions in his poetry and contemporary politics in his recent novels and political commentaries as symbolized by the populist politics of monks like Rev. Gunawanse, open up avenues for such criticisms.
in the face of what seem like irreconcilable ends of a single dynamic spectrum. (awkward but don’t know what to do)
Amarakeerthi, in the essay referred to above, makes the following observations about what he considers a ‘good novel’: "any good novel, take Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fiction for example, is fun to read because the world in the text has the quality of a performance: language is like play, metaphors like actors, characters like dancers. The layers of prose are like three-dimensional paintings hanging in our palace of imagination" (Daily News, 23rd March 2005). Juxtaposed against such a graphic illustration of the dynamism of a successful novel, Amarasekera’s recent fiction seem more like a stage where characters lack agency, where they behave more like puppets according to the manipulations of the master puppeteer based on a script dictated by a clearly crafted ideological agenda. However, all these would be contentious issues only if one opts to treat these books as novels. Here, we need to remember that the better known historical novels of writers such as Walter Scott, Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, while narrating stories set in a particular historical period, nevertheless develop the stories and their characters that allow these stories to flow more smoothly without getting restricted by ideological positions. This is irrespective of the fact that writers like Scott and Dickens did have clear ideological positions in some of their work. On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that Amarasekera is unaware of these lapses and criticisms. What is more likely is that these issues have been compromised consciously in the path towards creating a politics of passion and commitment as Amarasekera sees it.
This brings me back to the suggestion I made earlier: Let us consider these as fictionalized autobiographic social history as political commentary. If we accept this reclassification, then what should be expected from these texts is not creativity or an (imaginative you mean innovative ?) narrative format, but a convincing and forceful writing ability without the clutter of symbolism and inter-textual philosophical or literary borrowings. That would allow for simple and clear representation of ideas, which these texts do very well. It is precisely due to this reason that a number of young students at Colombo University insisted during a recent discussion on Amarasekera’s latest book that he was their hero. Their comments also indicate that this type of writing fulfills certain social expectations of some sections of our society and touches them deeply. As such, in their minds these novels and others like them would remain ‘good’ novels that have reached their potential whatever dissenting critics might say.
Taken in this sense, from my own perspective, I would consider the seven texts that constitute Amarasekera’s mega narrative the best and most readable fictionalized autobiographic social history of the Sinhala middle class from southern Sri Lanka hitherto written from the vantage point of Sinhala cultural pride, a vantage point that Amarasekera is quite conscious about in his own mind. In that sense, I would take them much more seriously than the incomplete and poorly written historiographies and ethnographies of our recent past undertaken by apparently ‘professional’ historians and social anthropologists.