Jean Arasanayagam

STRANGER AT YOUR DOORWAY
On Jean Arasanayagam

By Anders Sjöbohm,
literary critic, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Email:anders.sjobohm@alfa.telenordia.se

Creeps into a misthole to vanish
But doesn't.
Walks through the hot sunshine with
Dust between toes,
Is pressed back by huge, green military trucks
Is almost crushed


I watch her
She takes the hem of her garment and
Wipes the sweat off her brow
The thin cotton is damp and stained.


  She tells herself,
"I am common
Anonymous like all the others
Here.
No one knows that I have magic
In my brain."


In the writings of Jean Arasanayagam, I find her playing two main roles, one as a painter, the other as an explorer. These roles are both complementary and contradictory. As a painter in words, Jean Arasanayagam allows the landscape, in its broadest sense, to come to the fore. Light, colours, destinies, faces, voices and characters are all part of a painted picture, an atmosphere, a cultural pattern with a shimmer of ritual and enigma. The writer does not tell her own story. Rather, she is a medium, observing and listening. Simultaneous with the painting, comes a deeper exploration of the meanings of culture and history, the examination of injustices and painful change. Jean Arasanayagam questions the traditions that hold such fascination for her, and realizes that the picture she is painting is a transient one.

Jean Arasanayagam has written prolifically. While her writing reflects her own life and immediate experience, her short stories and poems also reflect the tragic ethnic, social and political conflicts of her native country, Sri Lanka. She refers to herself as an "outsider", and perhaps, outsiders are always the best witnesses.Jean Arasanayagam was born into one of Sri Lanka's minority communities, and married into another. By birth she is a "Dutch Burgher" - one of her ancestors was among the men who embarked on the Colonial ships in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. The "Dutch Burghers" are the offspring of intermarriages between Dutchmen and women of the i ndigenous communities - a split inheritance. "I have suckled on a breast shaped by the genetics of history."

She herself married a Tamil, and this marriage proved to be totally unacceptable to her husband's family. Her writing expresses, time and again, the pain of being ostracized by a family of high caste and high lineage. This cultural collision is embodied above all in her hidebound mother-in-law:

Can you see me, stranger at your doorway of a ruined house or standing where
your home once was, a mound of earth
and later, nothing; through my sifting fingers
seeps the ghostly light of gems that spill
from plenteous coffers, the palanquin rocks
from side to side as the swift runners
bear you on a bridal path
I wait upon the road hopeful that
the curtain lifts to see me as you
recline upon the cushions, swaying
with your glittering body adorned with
sparkling stones, gold at your throat and
ears, your nostrils, wrists and waists and ankles
...
... in my dreams
your body shapes itself from ash
fluid as water, white as shell,
your hair glittering with combs of light,
I call your name
back from time, bestow it
on a daughter, born to me,
Is that then, your answer?


In July 1983, the antagonism between Sri Lanka's Tamil minority and its Sinhalese majority culminated in bloody riots. The "outsider" and her family became refugees. Jean Arasanayagam bore a writer's testimony of these events. The outsider was no longer only an observer:

It's all happened before and will happen again
And we the onlookers
But now I'm in it
It's happened to me
At last history has meaning


At the same time, in the middle of chaos , horror and humiliation, loss of safety and a sense of home, loss of identity itself, Jean Arasanayagam experienced a paradoxical sense of freedom:

Someone smashed in the door
And gave me my freedom
To walk out into the world
Free, free from the prison of myself


It is mainly as a poet Jean Arasanayagam has at tracted attention. Collections such as Apocalypse '83 (1984) an d Trial by Terror (1987) tell the cruel story of "Black July". A Colonial inheritance (1985) explores the writer's own Burgher background and identity. Out of Our Prisons We Emerge (1987) i s a more introvert, personal collection while Reddened Waters Flow Clear (1991) and Shooting the Floricans (1993) contain some of the very best of Jean Arasanayagam's poetry.

The cindered fireflies shaken from the trees
Fall, black rain among the parched cicadas,
The antennae of moths and insects burnt off
Fumble in the dark faltering among the wounded
Lying with their fingers pressed against their
Wounds staunching the flow of the blood
As their lives drip slow as from an hourglass
Through the sand falling drop by drop to nourish
Thorns, the fire dying out rustles, the ashes
Drop settling on the crumbling wood,
They have not known sleep for long
Dreams crawl worming through the brain
Coil in the interstices of the mind
Breeding from the seed of thought
That quivers faintly into bloodied root
Their eyes never close, the heart explodes
All they know is that death comes tomorrow
Now the wind blows through the fretting trees.


However, Jean Arasanayagam is also an eminent s hort story writer. The Cry of the Kite (1984) is a collection with intense poetic descriptions of the bare, desert-like landscape in the neighbourhood of Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka, the traditional homeland of the Tamils. It also describes the decay of the small villages , their marginalisation through rapid modernization. Peacocks and Dreams (1996), a series of vignettes from Tamil village life, narrated from the point of view of a boy, won a prize for non-fiction in 1984 but was not published until twelve years later. It is characterized by a finely tuned, precise and objective prose. Fragments of a Journey (1992) and All is burning (1995) show us once again the writer as a painter as well as an explorer. Jean Arasanayagam is, as always, an excellent observer. She seldom tells a straighforward story in the conventional sense. Different time planes, insightful character portraits, a circular composition and a rhythmic, detail-shimmering prose are some of the characteristics of her short stories. Some of the stories explore the bitter truth of ageing and loneliness, some bring the bitter fighting between the armed forces and the guerilla of the Tamil Tigers into focus.

In Jean Arasanayagam's short stories there is also something more than transience and decay. A cultural pattern is much more than a set of habits and rules. It is an attempt to give expression to the enigma of existence, the presence of God. And in this sense, Jean Arasanayagam seems to say, the old religions have to be defended against a new age of brutality, ethnic division and spiritual death: "She wakes early, the call of the prayer from the Muezzin and the Hindu theravams from the temple fill the whole city with the waves of sound. There is no contradiction, no argument between gods and prophets, only reminders of man's sinfulness and his need for both hope and penance."

Bibliography

Poetry
Shooting the Floricans (Kandy : Samjna, 1993);
Reddened Waters Flow Clear (London&Boston : Forrest Books, 1991);
Trial by Terror (Hamilton : Rimu, 1987);
Out of Our Prisons We Emerge (Kandy, 1987);
A Colonial Inheritance and Other Poems (Kandy, 1985);
Apocalypse '83 (Kandy, 1984);
Poems of a Season Beginning and a Season Over (Kandy, 1977);
Kindura (Kandy, 1973)


Prose
Peacocks and Dreams (New Delhi : Navrang, 1996);
All is Burning (New Delhi : Penguin Books India, 1995);
Fragments of a Journey (Colombo : WERC, 1992);
The Outsider (Nagasaki University: Bulletin of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, 1989);
The Cry of the Kite. A collection of short stories (Kandy, 1984)
 


On Jean Arasanayagam
 
De Mel, Neloufer: A Question of Ident ity : A Note on Jean Arasanayagam's Landscape of the Nation (Essays on Sri Lankan Poetry in English, 1995)
Kanaganayakam, Chelva: Interview. (Configura tions of exile : South Asian writes and their world, 1995, pp 12-25.)
Robinson, LeRoy: An interview with Jean Aras anayagam on aspects of culture in Sri Lanka. Keiei to Keizai, Nagasaki University, vol 67, no 4, March 1988.
Simms, Norman: Introduction. (Arasanayagam, Jean: Reddened waters flow clear, 1991, pp vii-xiv)
Sjobohm, Anders: "Someone smashed in the doo r and gave me my freedom" : on the writings of Jean Arasanayagam. Worl d Literature today. Winter, 1992.
 


Reviews of In the Garden Secretly

Evil under the sun. India Today review.
Tehelka review

Bibliography

Women, All Women
Writers Workshop, Calcutta. 2000.

Sawnet Review by Anders Sjöbohm

Fragments of a journey/ Kandy


Reddened water flows clear
London ; Boston : Forest Books, 1991

Trial by terror
Hamilton, N.Z. : Rimu Pub. Co., 1987

In the Garden Secretly, and other stories
Penguin India, 2000.

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South Asian Women authors
Sawnet Bookshelf
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