Problematic Identities in Women's Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora (Cross/Cultures, 180) 9004299254, 9789004299252

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Problematic Identities in Women’s Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora

Cross/Cultures ReadinGS in Post/Colonial LiteratureS AND CULTURES in English

Edited by Gordon Collier Geoffrey Davis Bénédicte Ledent †Hena Maes-Jelinek

VOLUME 180

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cc

Problematic Identities in Women’s Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora By

Alexandra Watkins

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: © Robert Young (2015) Library of Congress Control Number: 2015941781

ISSN 0924-1426 ISBN 978-90-04-29925-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-29927-6 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.



Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

vii 1

1 Mimicry and Detection:

Dismantling Identity in Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case

9

2 In Fear of Monsters:

Women’s Identities and the Cult of Domesticity in British Ceylon

39

3 Combatting Myths:

Racial and Cultural Identity in Postcolonial Sri Lanka

79

4 Chandani Lokugé and Yasmine Gooneratne:

Deconstructing Postcolonial Tourism, Exoticism, and Colonial Simulacra

123

5 Diasporic Identities:

Inscriptions of Celebration and Psychic Trauma in Western Locations

165

‘Pretty Little Tales’ of Substance: A Conclusion

209

Works Cited Index

213 227





Acknowledgements

T H I S S T U D Y W O U L D N O T H A V E B E E N P O S S I B L E without the excellent support, guidance, and patience of Drs Maria Takolander and David McCooey, my PhD supervisors at Deakin University, who read many drafts of my dissertation, which ultimately became the manuscript for this book. I would also like to thank my mother, Jillian Watkins, and my husband, Martin Dawson, for their significant support and compassion along the way. For their talent and kindness in creating the cover image, I would like to thank Robert Young, who took the photo, Chatu Gunaratne, who modelled the red sari, and Nowman Kareem. I would like to thank my editor, Gordon Collier, for his work and expertise in producing this book. And, finally, I would like to thank the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University for their grant.

v



Introduction

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the representation of problematic identities in women’s fiction of the Sri Lankan diaspora. Women of the Sri Lankan diaspora have, in the last few decades, made a significant contribution to the field of postcolonial writing, studies, and politics. As indicated by the title of this book, their fiction – which is characteristically political, critical, and subversive – is particularly concerned with the problematic of identity. It warrants a comprehensive reading as a subset of diasporic literature, which is the aim of this book. Nine novels by women writers of the Sri Lankan diaspora will be analysed: Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case (2003); Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991), The Pleasures of Conquest (1996), and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006); Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Turtle Nest (2003); Karen Roberts’s July (2001); Roma Tearne’s Mosquito (2007); and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008). Each of these novels has been published internationally and several of them, by Gooneratne and Lokugé, both Sri Lankan-Australian, and Ganeshananthan, a Sri Lankan-American, have been the subject of formal literary criticism.1 The others have also received critical attention. De Kretser, a Sri Lankan-Australian, was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize in the South East Asian and South Pacific category in 2004 for The Hamilton Case. Tearne, a British Sri Lankan, has received significant media coverage for Mosquito.2 The American-based Roberts has also been reviewed in British 1

HIS BOO K WILL EX A MINE

Ganeshananthan was also long-listed for the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in

2009. 2

See, for example, Christopher Ondaatje, “Dear, Unhappy Isle,” The Spectator Books (15 March 2007), http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/28574/dear-unhappy-isle/ (accessed 15 August 2010).

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literary supplements. Despite this attention, however, these authors have received considerably less critical recognition than their more prominent male counterparts, such as Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, A. Sivanandan, and Shyam Selvadurai. This book aims to correct this imbalance, and thereby to illustrate the collective significance of fiction by diasporic Sri Lankan women. The fiction of diasporic Sri Lankan women, when discussed in scholarly contexts, is often grouped together with the work of other diasporic South Asian writers, and particularly with the work of Indian writers, both male and female. This broad diasporic ‘Asian’ classification downplays the unique context of diasporic Sri Lankan fiction, which relates to the various aspects of Sri Lanka’s three-tiered colonial experience, with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, the Dutch in the seventeenth century, and the British from the end of the eighteenth century.3 This regional clustering also dilutes the case-specific significance of nationalism, linguistic conflicts, and civil war in the production of diasporic Sri Lankan fiction. These issues, which will be discussed throughout this book, have had a massive impact on the identities of the Sri Lankan people, and have largely influenced the Sri Lankan diaspora. They are significant to the writing of diasporic Sri Lankans, which thus warrants a more culturally extensive reading, as offered by this book, as well as the aforementioned gender-specific approach. The more extensive studies on diasporic Sri Lankan fiction have tended to group it together with English-language fiction by permanent Sri Lankan residents, as is the case in Yasmine Gooneratne’s Celebrating Sri Lankan Women’s English Writing (2002). This book is a collection of biographies, many analytical, of seventy-four Sri Lankan women authors who write in English, both within Sri Lanka and abroad. Another study that takes this approach is Minoli Salgado’s Writing Sri Lanka, which offers a comparative reading of writing in English by Sri Lankan-based authors and diasporic Sri Lankan writers. Salgado, by focusing on spatial registers – territory, space, place, and home – [develops] a grammar of critical analysis that intervenes in [. .. ] nationalism while addressing political conditions in which the literature has been produced.4 3

K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005): 163, 184, 275. Minoli Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (London: Routledge, 2007): 3. 4

v Introduction

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She provides an excellent account of ‘insider’ Sri Lankan, and ‘outsider’ diasporic Sri Lankan,5 perspectives on postcolonial nationalism as represented in fiction. Her ‘outsider’/diasporic perspectives are all male, relating to the major names of the Sri Lankan literary diaspora, Sivanandan, Selvadurai, Ondaatje, and Gunesekera. While recognizing the value of this ‘insider’/‘outsider’ approach, the present book demarcates the fiction of diasporic Sri Lankan women from the rubric of Sri Lankan English writing. In doing so, it intends to establish its worth as a significant body of work in its own right. By considering the fiction of diasporic Sri Lankan women as an independent body of work, this book will reveal certain insights about this work relating to the specificity of Sri Lanka’s colonial and postcolonial contexts, its nationalist histories, and the diasporic and gendered perspectives of the work. These insights all relate to the issue of the problematic nature of identity, which manifests itself as a collective concern in this fiction. The novels selected for examination are concerned with the production of gendered identities, and, in relation to these, are preoccupied with themes of mourning and psychic disturbance. ‘Problematic identities’ is a linking motif in this book, an overarching thematic through which the literary works are investigated. The characters in women’s fiction of the Sri Lankan diaspora have ‘problematic identities’ because of cultural, social, and gendered experiences. They are challenged by gendered experiences in colonial, postcolonial, neocolonial, and diasporic contexts, with these experiences further complicated by racial identities, class standing, and prejudice, Sinhalese, Tamil, and Western. The anxiety of being and not being particularly inscribes the dilemmas of these Sri Lankan characters, as well as characters belonging to the Sri Lankan diaspora, who are mostly westernized. The authors of these novels present character identities as psychic crises, liminal, difficult, and problematic states of being, which are exacerbated in the diaspora. In diasporic circumstances, separation from the homeland plunges certain characters into mourning, melancholia, and, in some cases, schizophrenia, marking existential crisis and divided consciousness. The problems of character identities are also invariably connected with the issue of language. In some of these novels, characters are menaced by their English-language acculturation, while, in others, characters must negotiate the serious ramifications of postcolonial language conflicts between the Tamil and Sinhalese inhabitants of Sri Lanka. They are forced to negotiate personal and political identities within this conflict. Representations of the 5

Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka, 6.

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Tamil–Sinhalese conflict also reveal the problematic national identity that is considered in this book. Diaspora is a key rubric, and the focus of the final chapter, which examines representations of diasporic identities in this fiction. Immigrants and the children of immigrants are said to live in ‘diaspora’, defined as the state of “people who have spread or been dispersed from their homeland.” 6 As Brian Castro describes in “Caesura,” diaspora is “A seed word. A spore”: “a scattering; dispersing; [or] sporadic dissemination”7 of body and mind. It is a condition related to the problematic of memory, distance, and language. Diasporic writers are said to live in-between cultures: that of their ‘homeland’ and that of their ‘host’ nation. They are said to negotiate a “diasporic consciousness,” which permeates their fiction.8 English-speaking Sri Lankan elites (including members of the Sinhalese, Burgher, and Tamil communities, which are the respective origins of the authors) have emigrated from Sri Lanka to Western nations en masse since the 1960s as a result of the Sinhala-Only language policy and the related politics of postcolonial nationalism.9 The host nations of these diasporics include Canada, the U S A , the UK , and Australia.10 This is a largely privileged diaspora. Those with wealth and an English-language education dominate it, as is indicated by the backgrounds of the writers selected for this study. The experience of the authors is not my primary focus, though it influences their work and brings them together as a literary cohort. Their personal experiences inevitably shape their fictional representation of Sri Lankan identities, the significance of language, and diasporic Sri Lankan identities. This book consists of five chapters, looking at novels that represent different phases of Sri Lanka’s colonial and postcolonial history, as well as the 6

Angus Stevenson, ed. Oxford Dictionary of English (Oxford UP , 3rd ed. 2010), http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/views/ENTRY.html?subview =Main&entry=t140.e0223680 (accessed 19 February 2012). 7 Brian Castro, “Caesura,” Griffith Review 6 (Summer 2004–2005): 43. 8 Kezia Page, Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature: Remitting the Text (London: Routledge, 2010): 22. 9 Chandani Lokugé, “‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’: Yasmin Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies,” in Shifting Continents /Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Ralph J. Crane & Radhika Mohanram (Cross /Cultures 42; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2000): 22. 10 Lokugé, “‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 22.

v Introduction

5

experiences of characters belonging to the Sri Lankan diaspora in the postcolonial era. These novels include different modes of representation, which are juxtaposed and examined throughout this book: comedy and parody, tragedy and realism. The discussion of these novels, moreover, is organized to follow a trajectory, from the colonial to the postcolonial – hence, into diasporic contexts. The first chapter, “Mimicry and Detection: Dismantling Identity in Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case,” analyses colonial identities. It explores de Kretser’s parody of British influences in Ceylon and discusses the phenomenon of colonial ‘mimic men’ as conceptualized by V.S. Naipaul, Frantz Fanon, and Homi Bhabha.11 It analyses de Kretser’s use of the detective genre as a lens through which to ‘detect’ the colonial identity of Singhalese elites. This chapter is particularly concerned with Said’s theory of the ‘worldliness’ of canonical British texts.12 The second chapter, “In Fear of Monsters: Women’s Identities and the Cult of Domesticity in British Ceylon,” explores the spectacle of Victorian domesticity in The Hamilton Case and in The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne. Both of these novels question the patriarchal tropes of femininity, which were supported by the Victorian literary canon: the images of ‘angel women’ and ‘female monsters’. It considers the problematic of these tropes for women in the colonial era, as discussed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.13 It also examines the relationship between Orientalism and the angel–monster dichotomy, as suggested by Gayatri Spivak.14 It relates the ideal of the ‘angel in the house’, made iconic in Coventry Patmore’s eponymous poem, to the education of elite women in colonial Ceylon.15 11

V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (1967; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles L. Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952, tr. 1967; London: Pluto, 2008); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 12 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1983): 4. 13 Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven C T : Yale UP , 1979). 14 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985), in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Reina Lewis & Sara Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003). 15 Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House,” in Patmore, The Poems of Coventry Patmore, ed. Frederick Page (London: Oxford UP , 1949): 59–208.

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The third chapter, “Combatting Myths: Racial and Cultural Identity in Postcolonial Sri Lanka,” analyses representations of Ceylonese and Sri Lankan identities in the postcolonial era. It considers the ways in which the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict and the trauma born of it have shaped identities in the postcolonial period. This chapter links postcolonial problems in Sri Lanka to the colonial practice of linguistic classification: the ranking of Indo-Aryan languages, including Sinhala, above Tamil. The case studies for this chapter are Gooneratne’s The Sweet and Simple Kind, Mosquito by Roma Tearne, and July by Karen Roberts. Each of these texts critiques the politics of nationalism, and linguistic nationalism, in postcolonial Sri Lanka, linking the politics of language to the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict, and this conflict to Sri Lanka’s colonial history. This discussion examines the writers’ use of the ‘starcrossed lovers’ trope and the ‘wounded body’ metaphor as strategies that illustrate the damage wrought by the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict. The fourth chapter, “Chandani Lokugé and Yasmine Gooneratne: Deconstructing Postcolonial Tourism, Exoticism, and Colonial Simulacra,” continues to focus on the postcolonial era, examining the problematic of sex tourism, exoticism, and neocolonialism. The case studies for this chapter are Turtle Nest by Lokugé and The Pleasures of Conquest by Gooneratne. Lokugé’s Turtle Nest is a serious novel about the problems of child-sex tourism in Sri Lanka. It presents this humanitarian crisis as being the compound result of poverty, persisting colonial structures, touristic exoticism, and neocolonial issues. Gooneratne’s The Pleasures of Conquest is markedly different – a postmodern comedy lampooning Orientalist simulacra in elite Sri Lankan hotels, satirizing nostalgia tourism, and deconstructing neocolonialism. The chapter draws on the touristic theories of Dean MacCannell, on Jonathan Culler’s critical theory, and on the postmodern theory of Jean Baudrillard.16 The fifth chapter, “Diasporic Identities: Inscriptions of Celebration and Psychic Trauma in Western Locations,” examines representations of the Sri Lankan diaspora in Australia, Canada, and the U S A . Its case studies are Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies, Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled, and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage. Each of these novels renders the diasporic 16

Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; New York: Schocken, 1989); Jonathan D. Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, tr. Sheila Faria Glaser (Simulacres et Simulation, 1981; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1994): 1–42.

7

v Introduction

condition as a challenging state of being, invoking the problematic of ‘doubleconsciousness’, dual and/or multiple states of cultural awareness, and psychic crisis. It considers the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Vijay Mishra, who, in The Diasporic Imaginary and the Indian Diaspora, uses Freud’s theories on mourning and melancholia and Lacan’s theory of the ‘imaginary’ to explore the diasporic condition.17 It also considers Salman Rushdie’s concept of ‘imaginary homelands’.18 These chapters illustrate how fiction by diasporic Sri Lankan women is collectively concerned with the problematic of identity, especially with regard to the production of gendered identities, mourning, and psychic disturbance.

v

17

Vijay Mishra, The Diasporic Imaginary and the Indian Diaspora (Wellington, New Zealand: Asian Studies Institute, 2005). 18 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1991).





v 1 Mimicry and Detection Dismantling Identity in Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case

T

H E H A M I L T O N C A S E (20 03) B Y M I C H E L L E D E K R E T S E R provides a colourful, critical, and astute representation of the identity of Ceylonese elites during British colonial rule. It parodies this ruling minority, who modelled their identity on all things British. And it illustrates that this identity was the product of their elite British education. In fact, as per the work of Edward Said, de Kretser suggests that this group was acculturated by the “worldliness” of English texts.1 De Kretser’s novel appropriates the English detective genre as a lens through which to “detect” the identities of this beguiling social set of British mimics. This chapter will investigate the paradigms of mimicry and detection through which de Kretser examines the cultural identity of this group.

The ‘Mimic Man’ The phenomenon of British mimicry in the Indian subcontinent can be traced to nineteenth-century colonialism, which represented itself as a civilizing mission. British colonialism involved two acculturating forces: religion (Christianity) and an English education. The Charter Act of 1813 renewing and revising the commercial charter of the East India Trading Company, was of particular importance. This Act brought two significant changes to the relationship between Britain and her Indian subjects. First, it projected a duty of care involving the education of “natives”; secondly, it allowed British mis-

1

Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge M A : Harvard

U P , 1983): 4.

10

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sionaries into India who had hitherto been denied entry, as per the government’s former “policy of religious neutrality.”2 These changes were informed by certain documents, including Charles Grant’s Observations on the State of Society among Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain (1792; publ. 1813). This tract, which suggested that the colonized subjects of India were in dire need of moral salvation, thus promoted the establishment of a missionary education scheme involving a syllabus of Western literature and Christianity.4 As Gauri Viswananthan explains, Grant supposed that this balance of Christianity and Western literature would affect the “moral improvement of the subjects without having to worry about the possible danger of inculcating radical ideas that would upset the British presence in India.”5 Grant’s scheme modified the ideology of the Enlightenment, avoiding liberal thinking by, as he explained, focusing on an empty “imitation of English manners [so as to]… induce them [the colonised subjects of India] to remain under our [imperial] protection.”6 Thomas Macaulay’s Minute on Education (1835)7 was another text that encouraged the teaching of British mimicry. This famous (or infamous) document was intended to resolve a debate that was circulating at this time, the question as to whether Indian literature and Oriental teachings should be used in colonial schools.8 Macaulay’s verdict was a definite nay, based on his comparative assessment of Indian and British literatures: I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and 2

Gauri Viswanathan, “The Beginning of English Literary Study in British India” (1987), excerpted in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (1995; Oxford: Routledge, 2005): 431. 4 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 87. 5 Viswanathan, “The Beginning of English Literary Study in British India,” 433. 6 Quoted in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 87. 7 Thomas Macaulay, “Minute on Education 1835,” in Selections from Educational Records: 1781–1839, ed. H. Sharp (Delhi: National Archives of India, 1965): 109. 8 Viswanathan, “The Beginning of English Literary Study in British India,” 432.

v 1 Mimicry and Detection

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Arabia. [. . . And] it is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. 9

Macaulay was adamant that the teaching of Oriental literature was a ridiculous waste of “public expense” with no benefit to be known in regards to the moral improvement of students. Teaching it, he believed, was to the detriment of reason. His opinion of English literature, however, was quite different. This hallowed ground, he suggested, was exactly right for the moral improvement of Oriental subjects, involving, as Viswananthan puts it: “the shaping of character [.. .] the development of aesthetic sense [and] the disciplines of ethical thinking.”10 Macaulay concludes his tract by insisting that English literature be used for strategic purposes: To form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.11

This document greatly influenced the English Education Act of 1835 mandating the study of English in Indian schools.12 This Act effectively implemented Macaulay’s vision, as the promotion of English in schools produced the desired ‘class’ of interpreters, mimic men or bureaucratic drones who took up governmental positions. In fact, it became a case of what Antonio Gramsci, in The Prison Notebooks, called “domination by consent,” a form of manipulation “achieved through what is taught to the colonised, how it is taught, and the subsequent emplacement of the educated subject as a part of the continuing imperial apparatus.”14 This use of education for cultural domination 9

Macaulay, “Minute on Education 1835,” 116. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India (London: Faber & Faber, 1990): 3. 11 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 3. 12 Viswanathan, “The Beginning of English Literary Study in British India,” 432–33. 14 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, “Introduction” to “Part XI I I : Education” of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin (1995; Oxford: Routledge, 2005): 425. 10

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was no secret to Macaulay and his fellow councillors, including Charles Trevelyan, his brother-in-law. As Trevelyan stated in 1838. [The Indians can see that] we have gained everything by our superior knowledge; that it is this superiority, which has allowed us to conquer India, and to keep it; and they want to put themselves as much as they can upon an equality with us.15

These attitudes were also rampant in colonial Ceylon, where the introduction of English schools, as in India, activated a twin culture of ‘domination by consent’ and demand. As was the case in India, the British encouraged the establishment of Anglican schools in colonial Ceylon, fee-paying establishments that were modelled on the British system. These schools had an outstanding success rate. They manufactured several generations of mimics: men, in the upper middle classes, who filled bureaucratic posts and thus assisted in the running of the colony. In addition to teaching mathematics, science, and English literacy, these schools actively encouraged their students to adopt English tastes, opinions, and morals. Rodney Ferdinands describes these schools thus: The stated aim of these schools was to create a colony that would look to England for its inspiration, and by example and not compulsion, modernise and westernise the country.17

According to Ferdinands, local ethnicity and religion were underplayed in these schools, where students were taught to share a collective ‘Ceylonese’ identity, as distinct from the “Burgher, Moor, Sinhalese or Tamil” identities.18 Though peddled as egalitarian, this common identity was shamelessly British, centred on “Christian England, its culture, its literature and its institutions.”19 The students who attended these schools were described colloquially as being “more English than the English” by the time they left.20

15

Cited in Viswanathan, “The Beginning of English Literary Study in British India,”

379. 17

Rodney Ferdinands, Proud & Prejudiced: The Story of the Burghers of Sri Lanka (Melbourne, Victoria: R. Ferdinands, 1995): 53. 18 Ferdinands, Proud & Prejudiced, 53. 19 Proud & Prejudiced, 53. 20 Ferdinands, Proud & Prejudiced, 53.

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Postcolonial Portrait: ‘Mimic Men’ and Malady The term ‘mimic men’ is generally associated with V.S. Naipaul’s novel The Mimic Men, which suggested that colonial men are little more than mimics of the British, inauthentic beings whose substance is generated on “the taint of fantasy”:21 the fantasy of imperialism and its discourses. Ralph Singh, the protagonist of Naipaul’s novel, begins his life believing in this fantasy. He is born as a colonial subject and as an adult works as a politician in his homeland, Isabella, a Caribbean island that is based on Trinidad (the homeland of Naipaul). As time passes, however, he develops feelings of political insufficiency, partly because he is denounced as a politician and partly because of his distance from the imperial centre. He consequently decides that he and his countrymen are “play-acting” (184) an imperial reality. As he declares in the throes of apostasy, We pretend to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new. ( 146)

To remedy this pretence, Singh moves to London in the belief that he will flourish in the stark reality, originality, and authenticity of the imperial centre. He soon decides, however, that the great “order” upon which he has modelled his identity is in fact a “great disorder” (8), a place of inauthenticity. This renders his imagined substance, his identity as a colonial subject, a pathetic farce. In London he writes his memoir: the novel by Naipaul. Frantz Fanon is another Caribbean writer who has had a great influence on postcolonial thought. And he shares certain similarities with Naipaul. As Michael Neill explains, They belong […] roughly [to] the same generation of West Indian Intellectuals who grew up in a period immediately prior to that breakup of European Empires of which each was to be a chronicler. Each retracing the middle-passage of his ancestors, came to maturity in the metropolitan country which helped to shape his vision of the world – Naipaul, the Trinidad East Indian, reading English at Oxford; Fanon, the Martiniquan negro, studying medicine and psychiatry at Lyons. Each in his different way, turned to writing as a method of exorcising the complex hurt and dislocation imposed by the double exile which was his colonial inheritance; and each, inevitably, in coming to terms with this alienation, was influenced by the dominant intellectual 21

V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (1967; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987): 118.

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P R O B L E M A T I C I D E N T I T I E S v currents of the fifties [the work of existentialists, such as Sartre and Camus].22

Fanon’s approach to politics, however, was markedly different from that of Naipaul. He was a political figurehead, a writer and activist, whose theories were adopted by numerous political groups. Fanon’s homily “rapidly became part of the common intellectual currency of those Third-World ‘free states,’ whereas Naipaul was always suspicious of ‘propagandist political rhetoric’,””23 which he denounced as “the pamphleteering of churls.”24 In spite of this political difference, however, Fanon and Naipaul have shared a common interest in the problematic of colonial mimicry. Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks, illustrates this particularly well. This text, first published in 1952, in French, was not released in English until 1967, the same year as The Mimic Men. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon explores the social and psychological effect of French colonialism. He argues that colonialism induces neurosis in its subjects, a pathology that concerns the doubling and/or combining of white and black cultures. He contends that many black men (his main subject is male, not female) wear the mask of a white, Western identity, a mask that hides and devalues their black identity. This mask, he argues, is developed through one’s grasp of the French language: “to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”25 This is proven, he claims, by the attitudes and dispositions of middle-class, French-educated colonial men, who, once they are familiar with the French language, appear to identify with white culture and hence demarcate themselves off from black culture. Fanon accuses “Antilles Negroes” (such as himself) of being key offenders in this regard, as they are, he says, “proportionally whiter” (being the most obsessed with the French language and therefore the most critical of the creole linguistic varieties) (20). The Antilles man who lives in France for a “length of time,” however, is Fanon’s pièce de résistance of francophiliation. This man cannot but return home “radically changed”; as a result of his immersion in the French language, his mind is permanently altered (19). Fanon contends that the “white mask” of the colonized black man is influenced by Western models. “The negro knows,” he says, “that over there in 22

Michael Neill, “Guerrillas and Gangs: Frantz Fanon and V.S. Naipaul,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 13.4 (October 1982): 23. 23 Neill, “Guerrillas and Gangs: Frantz Fanon and V.S. Naipaul,” 23. 24 Naipaul, The Mimic Men, 32. 25 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 38. Further page references are in the main text.

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France there is a stereotype of him” ( 20). The antithesis of the rational Frenchman, he is childlike and irrational, this being symbolized by his creole dialect, which is also stereotyped by the French as something inferior and uncivilized. According to Fanon, this man is so fearful of validating racist stereotypes of himself that he hyper-focuses on the French language, “not only rolling his R but embroidering it” ( 21). He is desperate to prove his intelligence to the French and sees diction as a way to establish this. Of course, the danger is that such anxious mimicry, while defying stereotypes, can also support them, by perpetuating caricatures of the silly colonial, who falls short of the mark when he attempts to imitate the ways of his colonizer. Another problem that Fanon sees is the tendency of the colonized man to esteem French culture (the French projection of themselves) all too well and thus to accept all French behaviour as de rigueur universel. As Fanon argues, colonial men who have lived in France often put on the airs, prejudices, and fascinations of the French, and bring these to their homelands. This man, he explains, “No longer understands the dialect, he talks about the Opera, which he may never have seen except from a distance, but above all he adopts a critical attitude to his compatriots” (24). He is “a joke”: nowhere is he taken seriously. He is a tragicomic figure of linguistic alienation, a paradigm which Fanon, through his discussion, aims to break down. The goal, he states, is the “disalienation” of the “negro” who has imbibed “European culture as a means of stripping himself of his race” (95–96). Homi Bhabha (Indian-born and Oxford-educated) has been the leading voice on cultural mimicry since 1994, when he first published The Location of Culture. In this work, he argues that colonial mimicry is in fact a subversive matter that challenges the authority of imperialism. He sees mimicry as an action that alters what it imitates, producing a substance that is, at best, quite similar to the original, something that is, “almost the same, but not quite.” 26 This result unsettles the power of an original action or concept; it debunks its significance through ambivalence. Bhabha’s focus is specifically on the production of British colonial mimicry; British imperialists wanted “reformed, [yet] recognisable Other[s]”: “authorised versions of otherness” who would support the development of their Empire (useful men like Macaulay’s “interpreter” or liaison). This, however, was not “quite” what they got, as what the generation of British mimics really achieved was a certain disavowal of the essence of Britishness (such as the necessary qualification of being born and 26

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. Further page references are in the main text.

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raised in Britain) (89). The effect, he argues, of the colonial mimic is inevitably a “flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicised is emphatically not to be English” (87). And this, he insists, is a menacing state for the colonizer. It “problematizes the signs of racial and cultural priority,” the foundations of imperialist authority (87). This mocks the “modality” of imperialism and, in so doing, illuminates the fine line between “mimicry and mockery” (87–88). Despite his references to the corruption of “essence,” Bhabha does not believe in essentialist notions of identity. In fact, he is adamant that “mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask” (88), as opposed to Fanon’s belief in the black face behind the mask. The “double vision” of mimicry discloses only “the ambivalence of colonial discourse,” which then “disrupts its authority” (88). This position is anchored in poststructuralist axioms of linguistic play, because it describes identity as an effect of discourse. Like Bhabha, the Palestinian critic Edward Said had a significant impact on the analysis of colonial discourse, which he believed affected the lives of Arabs, like himself. He achieved global recognition in 1978, with the publication of Orientalism, a book, which, since its release, has had a lasting impact on postcolonial analysis and criticism, Bhabha’s included. The premise of Orientalism is that Western colonial powers were constructed on and maintained by an academic tradition and discourse called “Orientalism,” which Said defines thus: A style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”… the basic distinction between the East and the West as a starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on.27

This argument is based on Michel Foucault’s theory that our knowledge of the world and way of knowing it are predicated on dominant “discourses.” Foucault discussed this position in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and Discipline and Punish (1975), both of which Said identifies as having an influence on his own discourse theory.28 In these seminal texts, Foucault developed the power–knowledge theorem: the theory that the various “discourses” of knowledge, and therein truth, are monitored and regulated by institutions of 27 28

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003): 2. Said, Orientalism, 3.

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power and government. This theory is explored by Said in Orientalism, where he describes the discourse of Orientalism as a discourse of power – a collective force that maintained and rationalized the power of the British (and, preeminently, the French) over their colonized territories. Said considers the importance of literary texts to a greater extent than did Foucault. He had a particular interest in the commodity of English literature, which, in his view, was one of the dominant vehicles of Orientalism. He discusses this extensively in the collection of essays titled The World, the Text, the Critic (1984), and in Culture and Imperialism (1993). In The World, the Text, the Critic, he outlines his stance on the “worldliness” of literature: My position is that texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.29

This belief in the need to expose the “worldliness” of texts, literary and other, was actually the inspiration for Orientalism.30 Said is often recognized as the father of “colonial discourse theory.”31 As Ashcroft and Ahluwalia explain, Colonial discourse theory is that theory which analyses the discourse of colonialism and of colonisation; which demonstrates the way such discourse obscures the underlying political and material aims of colonisation; and which points out the deep ambivalences of that discourse as well as the way in which it constructs both colonising and colonised subjects.32

This form of critique generally involves the rereading of canonical English texts; it involves analysis of the material’s “worldliness,” its affiliation with politics, society, and culture. Said’s preferred focus was nineteenth-century English literature, as he believed that the imperial sway of the British novel was second to none. In Culture and Imperialism (1993) he writes: British power was durable and continually reinforced. In relation to the often adjacent cultural sphere, that power was elaborated and articu-

29

Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 4. Bill Ashcroft & Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999): 32. 31 Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity, 32. 32 Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity, 22. 30

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As he contends, in this book, the strength of the British novel was its ability to project and elevate images of the British identity both in England and in the colonies. Part of this involved representations of “the relationship between ‘home’ and ‘abroad’,” which was increasingly relevant at that time, due to the economic stimulus of the colonies.34 More and more Britons, traders, bureaucrats, and missionaries, to name just a few, were becoming involved in the operations and governance of the Empire. And many were working, visiting, and/or settling in the colonies. The empire had fast become a critical aspect of British national identity; and this was reflected in fiction. Said’s examples of this trend include Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), for its reference to “Thomas Bertrand’s plantation in Antigua,” and E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1914), for its portrayal of “the Wilcox Nigerian rubber estate.”35 Both of these novels naturalize the economic authority of England in the colonies. The problematic of colonial mimicry/mimic men and the ‘worldliness’ of canonical English literature constitutes key themes that are presented in Michelle de Kretser in The Hamilton Case, which shall now be discussed.

The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser De Kretser’s The Hamilton Case explores colonial mimicry in a unique Sri Lankan context. She depicts it as a condition that affected the upper classes of colonial Ceylon, the social sets for whom the English language became the modus operandi. This involved mainly Sinhalese elites (such as the novel’s protagonist), and Burghers (those of Dutch descent, like de Kretser herself). The high status of these communities was one of the spoils of adaptation: when the British took over in 1796, the Sinhalese and Burgher elites actively collaborated, acting as “administrators,” “record-keepers,” “intermediaries and interpreters.”36 They embraced the English language and British culture, and, by so doing, achieved wealth and status. The Sinhalese elites or Mudali33

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993; New York: Vintage, 1994): 87. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 85. 35 Culture and Imperialism, 90. 36 Michelle de Kretser, The Hamilton Case (Milsons Point, N S W : Random House, 2003): 7. These were the functions of the protagonist’s family in de Kretser’s novel, reflecting the roles adopted by the large and influential low-country ‘clan’ into which the writer Yasmine Gooneratne was born. 34

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yar (native chieftain) families of low-country Ceylon were already acquainted with Western culture, exposed as they were, from the sixteenth century onwards, to colonization by the Portuguese, and later by the Dutch. They had also worked as interpreters for each of these former colonizers, as bothgroups relied extensively on the Mudaliyars’ experience in dealing with the Kingdom of Kandy (the area in the central and eastern portion of Ceylon that was governed by a native dynasty between the fifteenth and nineteenth century, until annexed by the British in 1815).37 The Mudaliyars’ powers were extensive by the time the British arrived, as the Dutch, by that stage, employed them in administrative roles that were paid for in korale (land). As discussed by Yasmine Gooneratne (née Dias Bandaranaike), in her family memoir, Mudaliyars and other officers received grants of tax-free land for their accommodation and enjoyment during their term in office, sometimes receiving whole villages in gift as in previous times. Grants of land honours and titles were given to Ceylonese who promoted the commercial interests of the Dutch East India Company by cultivating cinnamon, coffee, pepper and other cash-crops on the land provided.38

Religious flexibility facilitated the successes of these low-country Mudaliyars. They recognized the social and financial benefits of Christian conversion, and so changed from Buddhism to Catholicism under the Portuguese. They also became Protestant officials under the rule of the Dutch Reformists. Their conversion to Protestantism was especially advantageous, as it gave them genuine power and autonomy. It allowed them to “take an active part in the civil administration of the Maritime Provinces [to manage] a court of law with jurisdiction over natives of the country in all disputes concerning land and in matters of contracts and debt.”39 This service established the low-country Mudaliyars as a ruling class. They had recognized the advantage of cultural mimicry and assimilation and through it secured a tradition of power that was practically uninterrupted by the arrival of the British, who were willing to maintain their pre-existing authority at “a district level and below.”40 In fact, as K.M. de Silva contends, 37

Yasmine Gooneratne, Relative Merits: A Personal Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka (London: C. Hurst, 1986): 6–7. 38 Gooneratne, Relative Merits, 6–7. These offices were made hereditary in the eighteenth century. 39 Relative Merits, 6–7. 40 K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (1981; New Delhi: Penguin, 2005): 176.

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the British welcomed the standing structure of these offices, since “most of these positions carried no remuneration and were held on a loose hereditary basis.”41 The British were also taken by the readiness of Mudaliyar families to accept the English language and religion as their own. They soon spoke English, became Anglican officials, and were trusted in positions of power. 42 Ceylon’s first Governor, Frederick North, also supported the anglicization of Mudaliyar and Burgher elites. He was certain that local elites would be an invaluable asset to the British administration. Accordingly, he founded the Colombo Academy, an English school for Mudaliyars and Burghers, in 1799.43 In 1802, he also decided to refuse petitions that were written in any language other than English.44 This fast-tracked the adoption of English by many elite families, who quickly hired private tutors and/or enrolled their children in the English-speaking, fee-paying schools discussed earlier. The Burghers, of Dutch descent, were also renowned for their mimicry of British ways. This is likely what brought De Kretser, a diasporic Burgher, to the subject of Ceylonese mimicry. Like the Mudaliyar clans, the urban Burghers had a special advantage. They were preferred for their fair skin, European heritage, and Protestant bias, traits that gave them access to wealth and status in the British colonial regime.45 They also took on English as their own language, which promptly secured the trust of the British and eased Burgher participation in government by 1802, an employment that set their status as a ruling class throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.46 They dominated the administrative and skilled professions during this time, and by 1901, held a record thirty-two percent of such positions47 – a remarkable statistic, as they made up less than one percent of the population. 48 When the British departed, however, in 1948, their influence waned. Their alliance with the British was not appreciated by Sinhalese nationalists, who successfully ousted them from politics in 1956 with the ‘Sinhalese-Only’ policy. This policy changed the national language from English to Sinhala: a devastating 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

De Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 176. Gooneratne, Relative Merits, 6–7. Ferdinands, Proud & Prejudiced, 51. Proud & Prejudiced, 51. Proud & Prejudiced, 51. Proud & Prejudiced, 51. Proud & Prejudiced, 66. Proud & Prejudiced, 66.

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outcome for the English-speaking Burgher community; “the Sinhalese only policy […] resulted in the resignation of almost every Burgher from the bureaucracy.”49 Marginalized by a new social order, many families, like that of de Kretser herself, migrated to Australia between 1948 and 1972;50 “there were only two courses open to them [at this time], death or emigration.”51 The Hamilton Case, lampooning the lifestyle of Ceylonese elites, traces the life of a westernized protagonist, Sam Obeysekere, a Sinhalese lawyer and stalwart of the British system who thrives in colonial times. The highlight of his career is the ‘Hamilton Case’, a mystery involving the murder of an English tea planter. Sam solves the mystery through his understanding of “narrative patterning,” a skill that he has learnt by reading Orientalist texts, legal transcripts, and crime novels. Afterwards, he is celebrated in the newspapers as a Ceylonese Sherlock Holmes. His status changes, however, in the postcolonial era, where he is reduced to an antiquated relic of the past. At this stage, he considers his life retrospectively in the form of a memoir which forms the first chapter of de Kretser’s novel; the second chapter considers mainly the ‘Hamilton Case’, the third chapter focuses on the female characters in Sam’s life, and the fourth is a letter from Sam’s friend Shiva to his son Harry which functions as an epilogue. The following discussion considers de Kretser’s representation of Sam as a product of a British colonial education. It explores the novel’s depiction of mimicry in colonial Ceylon, analysing the genesis and evolution of the cultural mimic, and its ultimate meaning with reference to the theories of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Homi K. Bhabha. It then considers the novel as a parody of the detective genre and explores the significance of this in relation to (post)colonial identity.

‘Obey by name, Obey by nature’52 De Kretser’s protagonist Sam Obeysekere (‘Obey’ for short) is an accomplished mimic. He is (almost) the image of a pompous fin de siècle English gentleman. In writing the memoirs of his Victorian/Edwardian childhood and 49

Proud & Prejudiced, 55. “Of those Burghers that migrated after World War II about two thirds migrated to Australia and about 60% of them settled in Melbourne” (Ferdinands, Proud & Prejudiced, 4). 51 De Kretser, The Hamilton Case, 325. 52 De Kretser, The Hamilton Case, 37. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text. 50

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schooldays, he illuminates his profound acculturation by imperialism. He sees Englishness as a mark of achievement, and models himself as an Englishman. Fearing failure, he studies intently to have the right knowledge and to succeed in school, where “the gift of perfect mimicry” awards him “every prize on the classics side” (342). His school, Neddy’s (St Edward’s), is a single-sex, feepaying, boarding school, with all the usual airs and graces, and he is programmed by it. He embraces the collective school identity as an egalitarian order, and maintains this identity as an adult: “racial divisions were played down at Neddy’s,” he boasts, “we were Edwardians first and Ceylonese a long way second” (31).53 This statement, of course, is quite true. Sam, like his peers, is far more Edwardian (British) than he ever was, or is, Ceylonese. Sam’s aptitude for mimicry is clearly a result of the elite bourgeois culture that he has been born into, an environment in which Englishness is a measure of social and intellectual status. And his particular care for it is a comic illustration of his acculturation by the English language, as a structure of knowledge and way of seeing the world. In fact, his character has a symbolic function: he illustrates the various strands of postcolonial thought which consider the English language and literature as colonizing forces. Fanon’s dictum that “to speak a language is to take on a world” is relevant to Sam,54 as are Said’s views on the power of imperialist texts. Like many men of his era, Sam is fantastically inculcated by the “worldly” power of Western literature, 55 which, as Said argues, has played a major role in the shaping of Western and Oriental identities. As Said contends, there is a vast body of imperialist texts (fictional, political, philosophical), which uphold ‘Orientalist’ agendas (assumptions and stereotypes about the ‘Orient,” the East, and the Occident, the West). These texts, in their status as cultural referents, have taught both the dominant and dominated culture the ‘Orientalist’ distinction between ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, specifying for each their respective place in this binding social contract.56 These Orientalist texts have glorified the Western subject in the process of demeaning the non-Western subject. 53

The statement is startlingly similar to the first-hand accounts of Burgher schooldays included by Ferdinands, who states, of his own time at ‘Trinity’: “We though of ourselves as Trinitians first, Ceylonese second, and Burghers, Sinhalese, Christians, or whatever last” (Proud & Prejudiced, 135). 54 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 38. 55 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 4. 56 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii.

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The problem with Sam’s Western persona is that it is not really his to possess, at least not entirely. While he may be anglicized (and even lived in England while at Oxford), he is still, in the eyes of ‘authentic’ Englishmen, a ‘dark’ Oriental man, which makes him non-Western, hence an impostor. And it is this tension, this ambivalence, that is ultimately his undoing. This ‘almost, but not quite’ state generates an obsessive neurosis within him: an effect that cleverly illustrates Bhabha’s theory of the menace of mimicry57 – though, in this case, the menace is not for the colonizer, as in Bhabha’s representation of it in The Location of Culture. The menace is for the colonized man, the mimic, Sam, who is so anxious about being ‘discovered’ that he ‘embroiders’ the art of Englishness. Like Fanon’s Antilles man, embroidering his ‘R’s,58 Sam masters his master’s tongue as a way to avoid detection. The Hamilton Case, then, presents colonial mimicry as a neurosis caused by fear: the colonial subject’s fear of proving negative stereotypes of himself, of being primitive and inferior, and culturally deficient.59 Sam, the subject of the narrative, is so afraid of being exposed as ‘Oriental’ that he fears anyone who might crack his façade. An illustration of this is the recollection of Sam’s friend Shiva, who writes a letter to Sam’s son at the end of the novel, of an interaction that he had with Sam when at school, “an evening in halls,” when Sam became unsettled by the pronunciation of an area in central London: ‘Marylebone’ (344). His friend Shiva suggests that he “enquire of one of the masters,” but his words provoke despair: “Then they would know” [says Sam]. “Know what?” “That I’m not one of them.” (344)

As we see in this dialogue, Sam’s fear translates itself into a kind of lunacy, a mad desire for perfectionism that is not likely to be experienced by an ‘authentic’ English person, as it is a lunacy that is predicated on the insecurity of ambivalence: the anxiety of being almost, but not quite white. 60 This linguistic neurosis is also illustrated by Sam’s pride in his own mimetic achievement and intolerance of those who fail in this area, as highlighted in an episode during his Oxford days. Sam is strolling and conversing with his sister, Claudia, who is visiting for the week, when he starts assessing his own 57 58 59 60

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 91. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 21. Black Skin, White Masks, 20. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 89.

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skill and diligence as a mimic in contrast to her habit of botching British sayings: “He’s no oil lamp,” she [Claudia remarks, when “speaking of a lacklustre acquaintance’] [. .. ] It was amusing; even astute. [Yet] at the same time, I was faintly irritated. As a child I had memorised the proverbs that headed the pages of my copybook, committing each to heart, as my pencil traced its lines and loops. I was word perfect. No one noticed. That was the point, in a way: to have the fluency to pass unremarked. Nevertheless, it was galling when Claudia’s mistakes drew admiring laughter from our parents. I have always favoured the classical world, in which perfection is synonymous with flawless imitation. The ancients understood that there is no art to being original. It’s only a matter of getting it all wrong. (46)

While ironizing Sam’s radical neurosis, and his sibling rivalry, this account presents his acculturation as a form of domination that is predicated, as per Gramsci’s theory, on his willing consent. Sam idolizes the culture of the colonizer, constructing himself in their image. He thinks that mimicry (justified as an ancient artform) is wonderful, as it allows him to “pass unremarked,” in the elite Anglo culture, at home and in England. His fear of detection plagues him to the bitter end, however, for, even as an old man, he is distressed by unfamiliar English words. He is menaced, for instance, when he hears the word “sanforised” in a radio jingle: Sanforised embedded in his memory. Sanforised. Sanforised. He batted it away and it returned for the attack. What did it mean? He suspected that everyone else knew. Sanforised. Sanforised. How could he find out, without revealing ignorance? ( 306)61

As in the ‘Marylebone’ incident, Sam is disturbed by his fear of detection, a fear that is predicated on the ambiguity of his state as a British mimic, whose cover, he knows, could be blown. The difference in this scenario, however, is that it takes place after the British departure, thus illustrating the stranglehold of colonial mimicry among the English-speaking elites of Ceylon/Sri Lanka. Indeed, as the novel’s epilogue didactically states (in the aforementioned letter from Shiva, Sam’s friend, to Harry, Sam’s son), colonial mimicry permanently affected an entire generation of elites, even the less fanatical. As Shiva explains, 61

Sanforized: pre-shrunk by a controlled compressive process. Origin: America,

1930s: from the name of Sanford L. Cluett (1874–1968), inventor of the process.

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We were a generation that spoke always in quotation. Because at some point quotation had become our narrative mode. There was no original, no beneath, before, beyond. It was a question of rote thinking. Of the stock response and the preordained concept. I catch myself at it still, rolling out ready-made phrases like any well-drilled schoolboy. Not unproblematic. Did you hear it there? It works insidiously. In the place of an adverb. The choice of a cadence. ( 342)

The difference between the neurosis of Sam and his peers (less accentuated) is the character of his home life, which relates, it seems, to his pedigree. Like his education, his home life is remarkably British, which was common to elite Ceylonese families. In fact, it is worth noting that the description of Sam’s home life in The Hamilton Case has many similarities to the lifestyle described by Yasmine Gooneratne in Relative Merits. The Bandaranaikes, of course, are well known for their political progeny: S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, Prime Minister of Ceylon (1956–59), his wife Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the world’s first female Prime Minister (in 1960–65 and 1970–77), and Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, Sri Lanka’s first female president ( 1994– 2005). The lifestyle of the Bandaranaikes is relevant to Sam’s character, as this family is related to another important Sri Lankan family, the Obeyesekeres: a name so similar to ‘(Obey)sekere’ that it is seems quite likely that the significance of Sam’s name is more than just word-play. At the beginning of her memoir, Gooneratne explains the significance of these two families in the ‘Clan’ of Ceylonese elites at the start of the last century: Social and political life in Low country Sri Lanka was dominated by a large, wealthy, and influential clan whose members bore such surnames as Dias Bandaranaike, Obeyesekere, de Saram, Ilangakoon, de Livera, Pieris, Sirivardane and D’Alwis. For centuries they had been close to their colonial rulers, adopting their names, customs and religion: first the Portuguese and the Dutch, then the British. Under the last-named, Anglican churchmanship and the attitudes and tastes of the English upper classes were embraced, and the sons of the clan were sent to Britain’s ancient universities.62

The adaptability and character of the ‘Clan” and its various family networks has a startling resemblance to the fictional Obeysekere family in de Kretser’s novel:

62

Gooneratne, Relative Merits, dust jacket, front inner leaf.

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Buddhist under our [Sinhalese] kings, Catholic under the Portuguese, Reformists under the Dutch, [and] Anglican under the English… Obey by name, Obey by nature. (37)

The real Obeyesekere family (standing no doubt for the greater Clan) is alluded to, it seems, in the particular attention Sam pays to the significance of his own name, mentioned at the very start of The Hamilton Case. “A name,” states Sam, “is the first story that attaches itself to a life” and his, he says, “tells of geography, history, love and uncertainty,” which is exactly true, both for Sam and the real community upon which his identity has been modelled (3). In fact, by Sam’s own reckoning, his full name, ‘Stanley Alban Marriott Obeysekere’, is proof that he is actually the bastard son of an Englishman, his godfather, Sir Alban Marriot, who served a term as governor of Ceylon (4).63 This perhaps reflects the general miscegenation of the great Sinhalese ‘Clan,” who, as Gooneratne confirms, had blood ties to each of their successive colonizers. One may therefore say that Sam, like the Clan, has a genuine connection to ‘Englishness’; hence, that he is radically in-between, which is, to recall Bhabha, the ‘menace’ of the mimic. Certainly, reverting to Bhabha’s thoughts on mimic men and mimicry, one may argue that Sam, as a bona fide EnglishSinhalese hybrid, hides nothing behind the so-called ‘mask’ of mimicry: his hybrid state of being, biologically and psychologically, is, for all its ambiguity, complexity, resultant anxiety, and uncertainty, his sole identity.

Detection De Kretser’s novel engages with the detective genre as a way to further explore the menace of mimicry and Orientalism in literature. Her use of the genre involves a mixing of parody and satire, and, as with the role of Sam, her protagonist, it functions as a strategy of postcolonial critique. Her adaptation of the genre is shrewd, as detective fiction has often been situated in the canon of Orientalist literature. In fact, since the publication of Said’s Orientalism and the development of colonial discourse analysis, there have been a number of scholars who have pointed out the occurrence of Oriental stereotypes, imperialist agendas, and social debates in ‘golden age’ detective novels: the works of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century crime writers such as

63

S.A.M. is the acronym of ‘Stanley Alban Marriott’.

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Agatha Christie, W. Somerset Maugham, and Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, this is explored in several new studies of detective fiction.66 As Caroline Reitz contends in Detecting the Nation (2004), nineteenthcentury detective fiction was actually the by-product of a significant event in English history: the introduction of Britain’s domestic police force, which was established in 1829.67 This changed the English people’s perception of their national identity, since they had had previously scorned centralized state control, associating uniformed armies with their adversaries, France and Spain.68 They also regarded policing as a brute order involving “a level of aggression incompatible with national values of liberty and restraint.”69 However, the early 1800s witnessed an increase in domestic crime around London’s port areas, crime that was associated with the expansion of the British Empire. “Experts and intellectuals of various stripes” argued, in response, that the New World brought aliens and trouble to the city. 70 The possibility of a civil crisis was another contributing factor. In 1829, starving peasants, using the name ‘Captain Swing’ (an invented character), protested against the effects of what we now call the industrial revolution.71 The threat of anarchy loomed, and the state took preventive measures, changing the system of domestic control and replacing the existing parish constables and watchmen with a new centralized authority, the domestic police service. The English came to identify with the good neighbourhood ‘bobby’; they integrated his character into the national identity, and were mollified by the concept of an 66

Caroline Reitz, Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture, 1788–1927 (Columbus: Ohio State UP , 2004); Wendy Knepper, “Confessions, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” in Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective, ed. Christine Matzke & Susanne Mühleisen (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006): 35–57; Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World, ed. Nels Pearson & Marc Singer (Farnham & Burlington VT : Ashgate, 2009). 67 Reitz, Detecting the Nation, 37. 68 John Merriman, “Lecture Series: European Civilization 1648–1945, Lecture 10 – Popular Protest,” Open Yale Courses Podcast (6 October 2008) http://oyc.yale.edu /history/hist-202/lecture-10 (accessed 24 April 2011). 69 Reitz, Detecting the Nation, xiii. 70 Reitz, Detecting the Nation, xiv. 71 Merriman, “Lecture Series: European Civilization 1648–1945, Lecture 10 – Popular Protest.”

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enlightened modern detective, who was glamorized by writers of detective fiction.72 According to Reitz, the fictional detective played a major role in the transformation of social opinions about policing by re-imagining detection as a modern and distinctly English methodology [which] promised a solution to the problem of excessive violence plaguing British authority at home and abroad.73

It was, Reitz claims, this narrative of a protective power stemming from “knowledge rather than force” that reconciled the public to policing, centralized authority, and development.74 One novel that she uses to illustrate this point is The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) by John Buchan: “The Thirty-Nine Steps can be read as a mini-history of the detective, from his origins as a criminal, vaguely foreign outsider to his ultimate place as an embodiment of English law and order.”75 Suspected of murder, Richard Hannay, the novel’s protagonist, abandons his London dwelling and runs from the law. He is vaguely foreign because he is a Scotsman and because he has spent time in South Africa, one of the colonies. These faults are redeemed, however, when he catches the genuine criminal and thus becomes a hero for Greater Britain. Reitz’s theory of the relationship between detective fiction and social change reflects the argument of another scholar, the Italian Marxist Franco Moretti. Moretti’s Signs Taken for Wonders (1988) includes a chapter titled “Clues” which explores the sociology of detective fiction.76 Moretti argues that the purpose of the fictional, Victorian detective was to “resolve the deep anxieties of an expanding society: the fear that development might liberate centrifugal energies”; he would assure his audience “that society is still a great organism: a unitary and knowable body.”77 Moretti considers the function of science in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, arguing that “the science” of Sherlock Holmes was “none other than the ideology of this organism” (detection), the conjecture that the relationship between science and society is

72

Reitz, Detecting the Nation, xiv. Detecting the Nation, xiv. 74 Detecting the Nation, xiv. 75 Detecting the Nation, 81. 76 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1988): vi, xxv. 77 Franco, Signs Taken for Wonders, 143, 145. 73

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“ideological common sense” or “common sense systematised.”78 According to Reitz, the ideology of British ‘common sense’ was also used to rationalize “the precarious imperial project, which had to reconcile liberty with authority if the English public were to identify with the aims of imperial expansion.”79 As she suggests, “the rise of domestic police power and the expansion of the British Empire” are profoundly related in detective fiction. 80 Both involve the rationalization of the British government’s right to supremacy. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, discussing the phenomenon of Oriental stereotypes in British detective novels, contend that the occurrence of such stereotypes (such as ‘the inscrutable Asian’ or ‘noble savage’) was the result of a common public interest in the mysteries of other cultures: Many of the golden age detective novels (e.g. Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle) were drawn to colonial cultures. Especially the East – India and China – and to a considerable extent the Middle East held a particular fascination for the British reader at home.81

They find this trend to be particularly evident in the work of Christie, whose titles involve an assortment of Oriental intrigues, including Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), and Death on the Nile (1937).82 These themes, though “perfectly acceptable at the time,” were not unproblematic.83 They linked crime to the ‘Orient’ and thus affected “the European perception of the Orient” in negative and racist ways. Pearson and Singer have similar ideas about the racial problematic of the traditional detective novel: classical detective fiction of the Victorian era suggests that […] mitigating violence [in Oriental mysteries] is not a social aberration but a structural feature of empire.84 78

Signs Taken for Wonders, 145. Reitz, Detecting the Nation, xiv. 80 Detecting the Nation, xvi. 81 Christine Matzke & Susanne Mühleisen, “Postcolonial Postmortems: Issues and Perspectives,” in Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective, ed. Christine Matzke & Susanne Mühleisen (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft; Amsterdam & New York: Rudopi, 2006): 3. 82 Matzke & Mühleisen, “Postcolonial Postmortems: Issues and Perspectives,” 4. 83 “Postcolonial Postmortems: Issues and Perspectives,” 4. 84 Pearson & Singer, “Introduction: Open Cases,” 4. 79

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Their examples of this include a story by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” part of the famous Auguste Dupin series.85 Though set in Paris, this gory murder mystery involves a bizarre Oriental puzzle, involving a “racially-encoded, Burmese, Orang-Outang” who brutally murders two women, one of whom is found stuffed up a chimney.86 Although there are no eyewitnesses, there are plenty of aural witnesses: people who hear the incident. These witnesses agree that the assailant’s voice is that of a foreigner, yet cannot determine the nationality or gender from the voice. It is Dupin who locates the single hair of an ape at the crime scene, thus deducing that the culprit is an Oriental beast who turns out to be the property of a mean, money-grubbing, French-imperialist sailor, who has recently returned from Borneo.87 The literature discussed by these critics is further evidence of Said’s theory that English novels have naturalized and reflected the biases of Orientalism.88 The Dupin series is an intertext in The Hamilton Case. Sam is an admirer of Poe, and Sam has a double identity, which thus relates to ‘Inspector Dupin’. As Susan Sweeney explains, Poe refined the trope of doubled identities in the Dupin series with his various allusions to the “doubled identity” of the criminal/investigator, Dupin.89 In The Hamilton Case, Sam has a hybrid identity as an Oriental man and as a British mimic; he also has a doubled identity in his role as a “criminal investigator.” While he investigates a crime, ‘the Hamilton case’, concerning the murder of a British planter, he is at the same time guilty of crimes that affect his judgment of the case. First, he reads the case with the bias of a person who is indoctrinated by the prejudices of Orientalism, illustrated by his express belief that a low-class Tamil coolie, the character Velu, is incapable of any complex murder motives. As his brotherin-law Jaya explains after the event, 85

“Introduction: Open Cases,” 4. “Introduction: Open Cases,” 4. 87 See Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” ( 1841), in Poe, Poetry and Tales, sel. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984): 397–431. 88 While ‘golden age’ detective fiction was a popular source of Orientalism, it did not come under the radar of Said’s analysis. 89 Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, “ ‘Subject-Cases’ and ‘Book-Cases’: Impostures and Forgeries from Poe to Auster,” in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale & Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P , 1999): 249–50. 86

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A coolie was far too crude a suspect for him. No psychology, you see. In his view people like Velu [a possible suspect in the case] murdered brutishly from tedious motives. So [Sam] the great detective dreamed up his crackpot theory about [Gordon] Taylor [involving some footprint evidence]. (359)

Taylor is Hamilton’s British friend, who is ultimately accused of his murder and subsequently “delivered to the hangman” (141).90 Sam’s second crime is that he advances his case on the grounds of a personal insult, which again denotes his partiality. He decides prior to his accusation of Gordon Taylor that Yvette Taylor, his young wife, is somehow embroiled in the murder. He reaches this conclusion on the basis that her servant serves him tea in “thick Pettah china” during the investigations at her home, a “rudeness” which he attributes to her racial prejudice against the Ceylonese people (122–23): What she thought of Ceylonese on her veranda was plain. Which explained the china. There would be a good set in the lead-paned cabinet . . . fluted English bone in a shade between rose and apricot. He pictured the apu [her manservant] lifting out a translucent cup; and the expression on Mrs Taylor’s face as she caught him at it. (122–23)

He notes also, in this initial assessment of her character, that “Her accent was not quite right, the vowels skewed” (123), an Orientalist evaluation which seems to make her more suspect in his mind, by suggesting that she is not suitably English or that she is perhaps of an inferior class. He is ostensibly unaware of the contradiction that exists between these observations, his prejudice against her as compared to his umbrage toward her racial prejudice. He also desires her sexually and is resentful about this, knowing that he can never have her. Sam’s prejudices thus reveal his fears about his own ‘native’ inferiority, perceived and real, among the British. His contradictions also rearticulate the problematic of colonial mimicry: the “‘identity effects’ [of mimicry] are always crucially split,” thus yielding ambivalence and therein the paradoxes of double vision.91 Another allusive link between The Hamilton Case and the Dupin series relates to Jacques Lacan’s reading of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” Lacan’s poststructuralist and psychoanalytical reading of this story resonates with de 90

Although Taylor hangs himself in his cell before this can occur, he leaves a suicide note which re-states his plea of innocence. It is taken seriously, however, in the light of his suicide. 91 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 91.

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Kretser’s representation of Sam’s status as a mimic. In this story, a “letter,” of scandalous content, is purloined from a woman in “a very high quarter” of the “royal apartments”; although unnamed, this woman is assumedly the Queen of France.92 The “individual who purloined it,” a “Minister D – ,” is known to this lady, who employs “Monsieur G – ,” “the Prefect of the Parisian police,” to retrieve her letter.93 The search is to no avail, however, as the cunning “Minister D – ” hides the letter in a place that is in such clear view that it is not detected by “Monsieur G – ,” although it is obvious to Inspector Dupin (note his initial: D). As Lacan contends, Poe’s story involving the eponymous letter is essentially a fable about the “the displacement of a signifier” (the letter), the significance of language (the letter), and ultimately the “supremacy of the signifier” (the letter), within the psychology of men and women.94 As he argues, The displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their acts, in their destiny, in their refusals, in their blindness, in their end and in their fate, their innate gifts and social acquisitions.95

Sam’s relationship with the English language, its “letters” and discourses, is certainly of the nature described above, since there is, as previously discussed, this cultural “displacement” in the novel between Sam and his signifier (the English language with which he communicates and interprets the world). While Sam speaks the English language, which is his main spoken tongue, and is determined by it, he is also displaced by it because of his Oriental ethnicity, which is made ‘other’ by and through the grand narratives of British Orientalism. De Kretser’s use of the detective genre is subversive and multi-layered, alluding to the problematic of Orientalism and mimicry, as well as detection. It begins with the novel’s eponymous case, the masterwork of Sam’s career: ‘the Hamilton case’. As discussed earlier, Sam models his identity on Englishness in an obsessively neurotic manner. He concerns himself with the fine details of the language in a way that exceeds the norm. This manifests itself 92

Poe, “The Purloined Letter” ( 1844), in Poe, Poetry and Tales, sel. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984): 681.680–98. 93 “The Purloined Letter,” 680. 94 Jacques Lacan, “The Purloined Letter,” in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida & Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller & William J. Richardson (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins UP , 1988): 28. 95 Lacan, “The Purloined Letter,” 30.

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particularly in his analysis of ‘the Hamilton case’: a lawsuit involving the mysterious death of an English tea-planter. The suggestion, insinuated into the story, is that Sam’s assessment of the case, as a lawyer, is based on the rules of “narrative patterning” (352) which he learned at Oxford University. These rules, or patterns, are sourced from three significant textual bodies: the academic English books that he studies on criminal law, the records that he reads on “the famous murder trials of the day,” and the canon of detective fiction, English and American, which he consumes with passion (352). This group of texts illustrates some of the various outlets of Orientalism: discourses that have maintained the distinctions and hierarchies between ‘us’ (the West) and ‘them’ (the East). The joke is that Sam knows that his assessment of the case is a product of this collective discourse, as, in his view, it has taught him the psychology of Western as opposed to Eastern murder. He explains this clearly in relation to his case studies: I was most impressed [he says] by the cold brilliance with which the great English murderers planned their crimes, the slow maturation of the project in logic and cunning over weeks and months. It was quite the converse of the way things were done at home. There, lack of premeditation was the rule. ( 52)

He says of detective fiction: Modesty compels me to add that my unravelling of the Hamilton case […] probably owed more to a mind steeped in the stratagems of detective fiction than to the genius with which I was credited by so many. (52)

Sam approaches the ‘Hamilton case’ as one who has long since studied the patterns of detective fiction and so develops a theory which is based, naturally, on the precepts of Orientalism. His guiding logic, rationalized in the first of the above passages, is that English murderers are clever and sophisticated as opposed to Asian murderers or blunderers, who are not. He determines the case accordingly: he decides that the culprit is an Englishman with a complex motive, as opposed to the common coolie (the character Velu) whom the police suspect, the man to whom all the evidence points. The coolie, Sam argues, could not be guilty, as his supposed motive, theft, simply does not match the psychology of non-Westerners, as outlined in his reading materials. Sam’s total faith in Orientalism’s “narrative patterning” (352) again conveys the notion of the mimic man as the progeny of English textuality. Sam, the perfect colonial specimen, cannot imagine a reality outside of the grand narrative of England and the sum of its texts.

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For Sam, the psychology of fictitious murderers is as relevant to his scrutiny of the ‘Hamilton case’ as his formal education in criminal law, involving case studies and files. This attitude reinforces Said’s theory that nineteenth-century fiction was perhaps the most powerful medium of Orientalist acculturation. It is also symbolic that Sam’s preferred genre is detective fiction, given the arguments of Reitz and Moretti, suggesting that detective fiction has functioned to reconcile public uncertainties about British state control.96 Indeed, de Kretser suggests an awareness of such narrative theory. She has Sam recall (in his memoir) a recent occasion in which he “attended a lecture” by an Englishman, “a nitwit from Liverpool” who pontificates thus: By its strict adherence to formal conventions, the whodunit seeks to bring the socially disruptive act of murder under control […] by a representative of authority, who provides a rational and logical explanation of the crimes. (53)

Sam, predictably, dismisses the man and, while so doing, proffers his own theory on the genre. He argues that detective fiction is a “skirmish between author and reader,” which actually involves the “destabilising of convention” (53). These, too, are didactic words, which highlight the self-reflexivity of de Kretser, who is ‘destabilizing convention’ by critiquing the relationship between Orientalism and the detective genre.

Postmortems Wendy Knepper’s essay on postmortems has broad-spectrum significance for the analysis of postcolonial detective stories and so has relevance for The Hamilton Case:97 Considering the detective story as a kind of postmortem in the figurative sense of the word, the crime novel can be seen as performing a double act of retroactive analysis. In retelling the story of the investigation, a more comprehensive investigation into the meaning and causes of death, including philosophical, psychological, sociological or ethical concerns, can take place. For the postcolonial crime novel, the postmortem entails a metafictional, metaphorical, and analytical inves96

Reitz, Detecting the Nation, xiv. Knepper, “Confessions, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” 57; Knepper was also a contributor (on the Latina detective) to Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World, so clearly has a special interest in this genre. 97

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tigation into postcolonialism itself. This is to say that there are two bodies under examination on the autopsy table of the postcolonial postmortem: the body of the victim (plot of the crime novel) and the body of the (post)colonial society. 98

Unlike Anil’s Ghost, concerning forensic scientists and the corpses of war, there are no actual postmortems in The Hamilton Case. There are, however, several bodies laid on the figurative table of analysis that Knepper describes. The first body is that of Hamilton, the planter, the victim, surrounded by a crime, a plot, a theory, and re-tellings of narratives that possibly affected his death. Hamilton’s body, as that of an Englishman, has a metaphoric significance; it can be seen to represent the sudden demise of the British Imperial body after the Second World War. The implications of Hamilton’s death are thus doubled, both literal and metaphorical. Then, of course, there is another body: that of Sam, the lawyer–detective. Sam provides the evidence of his own life in the form of a memoir, which is supposedly intended “to set down the facts” of ‘the Hamilton Case’, though it says more about him than it does about the infamous lawsuit. Indeed, the memoir is really a portrait of his life as a mimic man: a philosophical, psychological, and ethnological representation of his character, his development, and his demise. The case of his life and identity is also analysed by the reader–detective, who, encouraged by the evidence, becomes aware of Sam’s own symbolic significance. He, his life, his body: they stand synecdochically for the state and identity of colonial Ceylon and the uncertainty that was left in its wake: “rumour, conjecture and misinformation” (6), the substance of postcolonial reflection. Sam’s family is beset with bodies. There is the body of Sam’s baby brother, Leo, who dies mysteriously from what seems to be either cot death or smothering. There is also the body of his sister, Claudia, who commits suicide, and the body of her own baby, whom she kills (each to be discussed further in Chapter 2 below). There are also a number of miscarried foetuses: Sam’s unborn babies, lost by Leela, his sad and unfortunate wife. The regular occurrence of death and dead bodies within the family emblematizes the subsequent death of the greater network of colonial Ceylon. Sam’s family represent the network of westernized Ceylon, whose slow cultural death occurs in synchronicity with their own. There is, moreover, much significance attached to the corpses of Sam and Leela’s unborn children. As the offspring of a British 98

Knepper, “Confessions, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” 39.

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mimic, they cannot belong to the future of Ceylon / Sri Lanka, where the British colonial identity is rejected. And so, what we find in this text is a tapestry of bodies, mysteries, and detection, a tapestry of ‘cases’ that mirror and mimic one another like Sam in his mimicking of the English. All of these function synechdochically. They represent the identity of British Ceylon, its ruling classes, and the reason for their passing. It is a figurative whodunit of the highest order. And the occurrences of self-reflexivity throughout are of great significance, as these accentuate the questions of ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ which are so germane to the great ‘case’ of colonial identity. In fact, The Hamilton Case should be assessed perhaps as a metaphysical detective novel or as what is sometimes called an ‘anti-detective story’ in the tradition of such modernists as Jorge Luis Borges.99 As Patricia Merivale and Susan Sweeney explain, this subgenre usually involves A text that parodies or subverts traditional detective story conventions – such as narrative closure and the detective’s role as a surrogate reader – with the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about mysteries of being and knowing which transcend the mere machinations of the mystery plot. […] Rather than definitively solving a crime […] the sleuth finds himself confronting the insoluble mysteries of his own interpretation and his own identity. 100

This definition is an almost perfect characterization of The Hamilton Case, especially when we consider the introspection and uncertainty that are generated in the final chapter/section of the novel. This is the aforementioned letter from Shiva (Sam’s closest friend) to Harry (Sam’s only son) following Sam’s sudden yet expected death. Shiva (the letter writer) just happens to be a diasporic Sri Lankan novelist, like de Kretser, and has also written a fictional version of ‘the Hamilton case’ called “Death of a Planter.” He is also a retired judge. The letter is, ostensibly, a response to Sam’s “manuscript.” Shiva appears in the story like “Inspector Poirot” in the last chapter of all of Christie’s Poirot mysteries, echoing the cadence of her genre. He, too, following her narrative formula, offers a number of alternative solutions to the case, one of which suggests that Sam was correct all along, which is undermined by these other alternative solutions. What he does not do, however, is to provide a final verdict. In fact, all he really says is that his retrospective analysis has streng99

Pearson & Singer, “Introduction: Open Cases,” 6. Sweeney, “ ‘Subject-Cases’ and ‘Book-Cases’,” 249.

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thened all his “old uncertainties.”101 This final account of the mystery is, of course, just another symbol for the uncertainty or, rather, ambiguity of the colonial identity and of identity more generally. De Kretser’s parody of the detective genre reflects a keen understanding of the Orientalist ideology that infiltrated nineteenth-century detective fiction, and reflects a morbid appreciation of the macabre conventions, and metaphysical intrigues, of writers such as Poe and Borges. De Kretser weaves these concepts into her work with the effect of deconstructing the phenomenon of the Ceylonese mimic. She presents the identity of this character as a linguistically constructed being by focusing on Sam’s obsession with the English language and narrative patterns in English literature. In part, this parodies a tradition that has long existed in metaphysical detective stories. As Merivale and Sweeney explain, Metaphysical detective stories [. .. ] explicitly speculate about the workings of language, the structure of narrative, the limitations of genre, the meanings of prior texts and the nature of reading.102

De Kretser’s self-reflexive attention to the phenomenon of textual construction is, however, involved in a serious postcolonial critique which differentiates it somewhat from the abstractions of a strictly metaphysical investigation. As this chapter has aimed to illustrate, de Kretser’s work is firmly entrenched in political dialogues about the power of language and its function in colonial Ceylon. It has also aimed to show that the theme of a ‘body politic’ has created a synecdochic link between the politics of individual and collective identities.

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De Kretser, The Hamilton Case, 351. Patricia Merivale & Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, “The Game’s Afoot: On the Trail of the Metaphysical Detective Story,” in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Merivale & Sweeney (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P , 1999): 7. 102





v 2 In Fear of Monsters Women’s Identities and the Cult of Domesticity in British Ceylon

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H E H A M I L T O N C A S E (200 3) B Y M I C H E L L E D E K R E T S E R and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006) by Yasmine Gooneratne are similar in their focus on the spectacle of colonial domesticity: the Victorian cult of femininity affecting women’s identities in British Ceylon. They satirize the Victorian literature that is esteemed by this culture, examining the literature’s construction and power as a force of imperialism. They parody the patriarchal tropes of femininity that dominated this genre, such as images of ‘angelic women’ and ‘female monsters’, which affected the identity of colonial women. De Kretser is particularly interested in the extremities of the angel /monster feminine dyad as developed in Romantic fiction, while Gooneratne is more concerned with the expression of Victorian domesticity and femininity in Ceylon. Gooneratne explores the attraction of this domestic ideal for elite Ceylonese girls and their families, while highlighting the problematic and limitations of this patriarchal and bourgeois ideology. She also critiques the culturally competing ideology of Buddhist domesticity, which is shown to be equally troublesome for girls and women. This chapter examines representations of problematic women’s identities in these novels.

Romanticism and Domesticity In Britons: Forging the Nation: 1707–1837, Linda Colley suggests that the Victorian cult of domesticity was directly influenced by the European Romantic movement, and that it was specifically connected to a Rousseauvian ideal of domesticity. Rousseau’s Émile ou de l’éducation (1762), as Colley notes, “appeared in at least five different English-language editions before

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1770.”1 Its popularity was maintained in the Victorian era, where it had a pro-

found influence on the gendering of education and domestic practice. Rousseau’s argument for ‘domesticity’ is that women have a duty of care, a duty to nurture and mother their children, which is vital for the well-being of a state. Rousseau contends that women of “society” have “despised their first responsibility,” that they have “refused to nurse their own children” and entrusted them to “hired nurses.”2 He accuses these women of acting as if they were the “mothers of a stranger’s children, without the ties of nature,” and insists that they are mostly interested in saving themselves “trouble.” 3 He rebukes their conduct further by suggesting that they are neglectful, that “there is no substitute for a mother’s love,” and that “hired nurses” are deficient. “How,” he asks, can a woman “who nurses another child in place of her own” be a “good nurse”? He also claims that “nursing” leads to “ingratitude,” by reasoning that a nursed child is taught to abandon its nurse when her function has expired, an act which leads the child to “despise at a later day the mother who bore him” in the same manner that “he” is taught by the mother to “despise his nurse.”4 Another subject discussed in Émile is the importance of educating women. Rousseau conjectures that women require moral improvement to make them better mothers who will thus produce better men for the state. He considers a formalized education to be the best way of achieving this, and recommends a curriculum of moral instruction, as opposed to academic learning, which he reserves for boys and men. He detests the rising culture of ‘bluestockings’ 5

1

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven C T : Yale U P ,

1992): 239. 2

Jean–Jacques Rousseau, Émile, tr. & ed. Barbara Foxley (Émile, 1762, tr. 1921; London: Everyman’s Library, 1974): 11. 3 Rousseau, Émile, 11. 4 Émile, 11. Rousseau clearly did not understood that a wet-nurse could feed and care for her charges while still feeding and caring for her own children. Nor did he comprehend that she had to work to support her own children. His knowledge of the practice was flawed. 5 The ‘bluestockings’ were men and women who attended the literary assemblies of the ‘Blue Stocking Society’ in London (c. 1750), or that of the French equivalent, the Bas Bleu. Society ladies hosted these assemblies. Their critics appropriated the term ‘bluestocking’ as a derogatory name for intellectual ladies. This, too, is Rousseau’s use of the term.

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and is adamant that academic interests when cultivated by women are an aberration of nature, an abhorrence that a husband should not endure: It is not fitting that a man of education should choose a wife who has none, or take her from a class in which she cannot be expected to have any education. But I would a thousand times have a homely girl, simply brought up, than a learned lady and a wit who would make a literary circle of my house and install herself as its president. A female wit is a scourge to her husband, her children, her friends, her servants, to everybody. From the lofty height of her genius she scorns every womanly duty and she is always trying to make a man of herself. [. .. ] She always makes herself ridiculous and she is very rightly a butt for criticism. [. .. ] If she really had talents, her pretentiousness would degrade them. Her honour is to be unknown; her glory is the respect of her husband, her joys the happiness of her family. 6

British women of the Enlightenment era had mixed reactions to Rousseau. Some, like the conservative playwright Hannah More, were avid supporters of his work.7 More popularized his politics in Britain by valorizing his ideas in her moral tracts for the poor (1790s).8 In spite of her own career, her tracts suggested that women are subordinate to men and thus intended for domesticity.9 Others, like the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, challenged Rousseau’s views. In Vindications of the Rights of Woman (1792), she denounced his prejudice and appealed for sexual equality and equal opportunities for women in education.10 Her influence diminished, however, after her death, when her husband, William Godwin, damaged her name. He published her biography Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), which revealed her love affairs, illegitimate children, and suicide attempts: aspects of her character that were unacceptable to the public.11 Thereafter Rousseau’s influence was strengthened, and although it waned, temporarily, during the Napoleonic wars (1800–15), his gender-based politics was the platform for 6

Rousseau, Émile, 27. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 277. 8 Britons: Forging the Nation, 277. 9 Britons: Forging the Nation, 277. 10 Mary Wollstonecraft & John Stuart Mill, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman & The Subjection of Women (1792; New York: Gryphon, 1993). 11 Mary L. Spongberg, “The ‘Abelard Complex’: William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Gender of Romantic Biography,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 13.2 (2008): 19. 7

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the Victorian ‘cult of domesticity’: a culture of mother-worship and romantic sensibility, excluding most women from the public sphere, that took hold in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. It glorified maternity, while limiting opportunities for women. The effect of this culture was paradoxical. It slowed the progress of egalitarian politics for women while, at the same time, setting in motion progressive social changes. It led to the establishment of new institutions from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, such as maternity hospitals, which benefitted the poor, and also to the development of rescue organizations for foundlings and orphaned children.12 The Foundling Hospital in London is an example of this. The philanthropist Thomas Coram established this “hospital” in 1741, for “education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children.”13 The ethos of domesticity is also said to have strengthened the political influence of women in unexpected ways; women were able to use the “ideal of domesticity” to achieve a political presence; by connecting “civic virtue and the family,” as Rousseau had done, they found “a rationale for intervening in political affairs.”14 It is also suggested that women liked the “ideal of domesticity” for its coalescence of the different social classes. As Elizabeth Fox–Genovese insists, women of all classes found a sense of dignity and empowerment in Rousseau’s ‘ideal’ that was not offered by hitherto prevailing political theories: Conjugal domesticity and motherhood were gradually seen to offer the perfect moulds within which to reconcile female sexuality and female authority. They also had the advantage of offering women a new and flattering image of themselves, control of their own sphere – however marginalised – and a model with which women of different social and economic backgrounds could identify. 15

Fox–Genovese speaks primarily of the situation in France, though it is fair to say that the lure of this domestic ‘ideal’ was similar for women in England and the colonies.

12

Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 240. Rhian Harris, “The Foundling Hospital,” B B C (2011), http://www.bbc.co.uk /history/british/victorians/foundling_01.shtml (accessed 15 February 2011). 14 Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 274. 15 Elizabeth Fox–Genovese, “Introduction” to French Women and the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Samia I. Spencer (Bloomington: Indiana UP , 1984): 16. 13

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The Colonial Family In Imperial Leather (1995), Anne McClintock explores the imperialist politics of motherhood and domesticity, which, she suggests, peaked in the late-nineteenth century, due to the social anxieties of the elite Victorian classes. They were threatened by class insurgency, feminist politics, and the sudden escalation of poverty and disease.16 And they imagined that they could curb all of these trends by avoiding biological ‘degeneration’ in their own classes. This idea rapidly evolved into a “poetics of contagion,” which was used to justify a politics of social and racial exclusion in England and the colonies. 17 It was channelled through a poetics of maternity.18 Controlling women’s sexuality, exulting maternity and breeding a virile race of empire-builders were widely perceived as the paramount means for controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial body politic, so that, by the turn of the century sexual purity emerged as a controlling metaphor for racial, economic and political power. 19

The elite classes of Ceylon adopted this British ideology, which was easily affiliated with native caste prejudices. In spite of being second in rank to the British (with whom there was minimal sexual contagion, due to British race theory), they felt that they had a genuine imperial identity, an identity that needed maintaining and protecting from the “dangerous” (lower) classes/ castes.20 McClintock also argues that the British naturalized their own authority with the “trope of the family” by affiliating the patriarchal hierarchy of the Victorian household to the implicit racial hierarchies of empire: The family offered an indispensable figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a punitive organic unity of interests. Because the subordination of woman to man and child to adult were deemed natural facts, other forms of social hierarchy could be depicted in familial terms to guarantee social difference as a category of nature. The family 16

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995): 46. 17 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 47. 18 Imperial Leather, 47. 19 Imperial Leather, 47. 20 Michael Roberts, Percy Colin–Thomé & Ismeth Raheem, People Inbetween: The Burghers and the Middle Class in the Transformations Within Sri Lanka 1790s–1960s (Ratmalana: Sarvodaya, 1989): 119.

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image came to figure hierarchy within unity as an organic element of historical progress, and thus became indispensible for legitimizing exclusion and hierarchy within non-familial social forms such as nationalism, liberal individualism, and imperialism.21

McClintock believes that the naturalization of the patriarchal family in Victorian England was essential for the management of the British Empire, which relied heavily on the principles of the Enlightenment and liberalism.

Domesticity in Literature In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar consider representations of Victorian domesticity in fiction, and its connection to women’s identities in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. As they observe, there are two distinct images of femininity which consistently appear in Romantic literature, that of the good ‘angel in the house’ (the iconic Victorian woman) and that of her ‘evil other’, the untamed female ‘monster’.22 The Victorian ‘angel in the house’ is characterized, in a Rousseauvian way, as a creature of domesticity: contrived by men, she is a mother, a wife, or a daughter who is pure, noble, and selfless. Gilbert and Gubar trace her origins back to the middle ages, when “mankind’s great teacher of purity was the Virgin Mary, a mother goddess [and] ‘merciful dispenser of salvation’.”23 They argue that there is “a clear line of literary descent from divine virgin to domestic angel passing through (among many others) Dante, Milton, and Goethe.”24 As they explain, each of these men characterized women as virtuous mothers and/or angelic virgins who function as intermediaries between man and God. This liminal role has characterized the ‘angel’ enigmatically, as both a fine and a deathly creature. Indeed, as Gilbert and Gubar observe, the iconic ‘living angel’ is often portrayed as an “Angel of Death,” a heroine who “simultaneously inhabits both this world and the next.”25 Their examples include 21

McClintock, Imperial Leather, 45. Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven C T : Yale UP , 1979): 17. 23 Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 20. 24 The Madwoman in the Attic, 20. 25 The Madwoman in the Attic, 24; Bram Dijkstra makes similar observations about the liminality of domestic angels, though painting is his key focus: Dijkstra, Idols of 22

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Florence Dombey, from Dickens’s Dombey and Son, a neglected daughter who becomes a moral guardian of men, as well as the noble Beth March of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the maiden who bravely waits to die as her sisters play around her. These characters, and others like them, reflect what Gilbert and Gubar call the “aesthetic cult of ladylike fragility and delicate beauty,” a Victorian fashion involving the “domestication of death”: [This cult] obliged “genteel women” to kill themselves [.. . ] into art objects: slim, pale, passive beings whose “charms” eerily recalled the snowy, porcelain immobility of the dead. Tight-lacing, fasting, vinegardrinking, and similar cosmetic or dietary excesses were all parts of a physical regimen that helped women to either feign morbid weakness or actually to decline into real illness.26

The subjectivity of ‘angel-women’ was complicated, as, in meeting the requirements of fashion, they would have to submit to a “life of death, a deathin-life.”27 This liminality was also dangerous, as it could, if imbalanced, increase the woman’s chance of becoming ‘monstrous’. While her in-betweenness might connect her to god, angels, and heaven (in the tradition of ‘angelology,”28 writing about angel-women), it also conjures up allusions to a darker side of supernatural narratives: of ethereal characters that take life from the living, deceive, and bewitch. These dark potentials are “subtly acknowledged, even in the most glowing texts of male ‘angelographers’.”29 A chief example of this is Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel in the House,” a popular nineteenth-century poem celebrating feminine domesticity. It involves two books “The Betrothal” and “The Espousals,” which were published sequentially in 1854 and 1856. The ballad is a bildungsroman tracing the literal and psychological journey of its poet–protagonist, Felix (Patmore, thinly disguised), from the experience of choosing his one true love, Honoria (based on Patmore’s first wife), to an ultimate state of fulfilment, contentment, and understanding of women in marriage. From the poem’s early stages, the poet expresses a certain ideal of femininity that is derived from Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford U P , 1986): 26–31. 26 Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 25. 27 The Madwoman in the Attic, 25. 28 Gilbert & Gubar attribute the term ‘angelology’ to the Dickens critic Alexander Welsh (The Madwoman in the Attic, 25). 29 The Madwoman in the Attic, 26.

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biblical and classical narratives. Initially, Honoria, his love, is regarded as a wholesome goddess: she is selfless, walks in the “airs of Paradise,” and brings him, by her very existence, to a higher realm.30 Canto IV , “The Rose of The World,” involves a description of her character: Her countenance angelical; The best things that the best believe Are in her face so kindly writ The faithless, seeing her, conceive Not only heaven, but hope of it; No idle thought her instinct shrouds, But fancy chequers settled sense, Like alteration of the clouds On noonday’s azure permanence; Pure dignity, composure, ease Declare affections nobly fix’d, And impulse sprung from due degrees.31

However, the poet discovers, once married, that Honoria has a vice: a penchant for deception and manipulation, which, if pressed, she will employ to sustain the serenity of her chosen lifestyle. This is declared in canto VIII , “The Koh-I-Noor’: And, evermore, for either’s sake, To the sweet folly of the dove, She joins the cunning of the snake, To rivet and exalt his love; Her mode of candour is deceit; And what she thinks from what she’ll say (Although I’ll never call her cheat), Lies far as Scotland from Cathay.32

In this canto, Patmore recognizes his Angel’s potential for autonomy: an aspect of femininity which man cannot control, at least never entirely. 33 This aspect of femininity disturbs and threatens the patriarchal ideal of a constant, guileless, and altruistic woman.

30

Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House,” in Patmore, The Poems of Coventry Patmore, ed. Frederick Page (London: Oxford UP , 1949): 77. 31 Patmore, “The Angel in the House,” 83–84. 32 “The Angel in the House,” 83–84. 33 Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 27.

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According to Gilbert and Gubar, the masculine apprehension of women’s autonomy, apparent in Patmore’s poem, is the psychic origin of the female monster in patriarchal texts.34 They also insist that this anxiety is the source of the angel /monster dyad, the conflicting relationship in which an evil feminine other torments a pure and innocent angel: Patriarchal texts have traditionally suggested that every angelically selfless Snow White must be hunted, if not haunted, by a wickedly assertive stepmother: for every glowing portrait of a submissive woman enshrined in domesticity, there exists an equally important negative image that embodies the sacrilegious fiendishness of what William Blake called “Female Will.”35

Gilbert and Gubar argue that feminists should “examine, assimilate, and [somehow] transcend” this dichotomy with the aim to establish a “feminist poetics,” a mode of writing that denies the “killing” of women into art. 36 Their plan involves a scheme that was developed by the feminist icon Virginia Woolf. In a speech titled “Professions for Women” (a paper read to the British Women’s Service League in 1931), Woolf discusses a challenge that was faced by professional women writers of the Victorian era, a challenge which she herself battled with for many years: namely, the ‘killing’ of the ‘angel in the house’, and specifically the killing of Patmore’s ‘angel’: I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. [. . . ] The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that I killed her. [.. . ] I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. [. .. ]Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions according to the Angel in the House, cannot be dealt with by women.37

34

Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 27. The Madwoman in the Attic, 28. 36 The Madwoman in the Attic, 17. 37 Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (1942; Mitcham, Victoria: Penguin, 1961): 204. 35

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While plainly satirical, Woolf’s dialogue involves a serious critique of the idealization and objectification of femininity in Victorian literature and culture. It illustrates that the stereotype of the ‘angel in the house’ celebrated by Patmore, the myth of a woman who is eternally charming, sympathetic, selfless, self-sacrificing, pure, and gracious, is the substance of comedy. And yet, it also suggests, this ideal of femininity was a force to be reckoned with, a formidable notion that shaped the identity of Victorian women. It generated cultural benchmarks for women, specifying what they could do, think, and say. According to Woolf, killing the angel in the house was the standard “experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time” (during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century).38 Gilbert and Gubar extend Woolf’s plan by proposing a double assault: the killing of ‘the angel in the house’ together with the killing of the female monster, who, they argue, is an equal threat to the creativity of literary women. Their warning, however, is that this task is extensive: the images of “angel” and “monster” have been so ubiquitous throughout literature by men’ that there are ‘few women’ who have ever ‘definitively “killed”’ either figure.39

The Madwoman in the Attic is also acknowledged as having generated discussion about racial stereotyping in Victorian literature. Although Gilbert and Gubar were not especially concerned with this issue, they have been credited for its naissance because of limited yet salient observations made in a chapter titled “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress.”40 This chapter involves a psychoanalytic reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which the authors identify the figure of Bertha Mason, the iconic “madwoman in the attic,” as a licentious Creole and therefore a monstrous ‘Other’. They argue that Bertha, Rochester’s first wife, who was brought back from the West Indies before being locked in the attic for her apparent insanity and violent outbursts, is used by Brontë as a symbolic representation of her angelic protagonist’s psychological repressions – Jane’s “hunger, rebellion, and rage” toward the institution of domesticity, to which she is bound as a Victorian governess.41 They also contend that Bertha’s character is representative of the 38

Woolf, “Professions for Women,” 204. Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 17. 40 Deirdre David, “Imperial Chintz: Domesticity and Empire,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27.2 (September 1999): 571. 41 Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 360. 39

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frightening alternative to Jane’s angelic domestic identity: a dark and licentious femininity restrained by her chaste Victorian manners.42 Bertha, they argue, is Jane’s alter ego, her “truest and darkest double.”43 They emphasize the connection between Bertha’s Creole blood and sexual licence, though they do not examine the racism inherent in this association. Instead of considering these imperialist axioms, they depict Jane’s battle with Bertha as one between “self and soul,” involving nascent feminist themes, which characterize Jane as a “female individualist” and thus a heroine of Victorian fiction.44 Gayatri Spivak takes the postcolonial analyses of Brontë’s Jane/ Bertha dyad further to suggest that the symbolic significance of the dyad is profoundly imperialist. She interprets Jane’s “feminist individualism” as something that is predicated on her “shifting relationship to what is at stake, the ‘native female’ [Bertha],” whose humanity is rendered “indeterminate” by the axioms of imperialism.45 Spivak claims that Jane’s access to “individualism” is achieved by her rank as an English woman who is, in spite of her lowly status (as a governess), portrayed as being morally superior to Bertha, the Creole heiress. In this analysis, it is Bertha’s miscegenation and Jane’s racial purity that allow Jane a new and modern role in the social hierarchy of England, which was being reconfigured at this time by imperialism. In addition to her analysis of Jane Eyre, Spivak explores the subversive objectives of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys. This novel is a prequel to Jane Eyre, the untold story of Brontë’s Bertha: her childhood in Jamaica, her marriage to Mr Rochester (as a dowry bride), and her incarceration at Thornfield Hall. It thus merges with Brontë’s narrative. Rhys re-casts Bertha as a victim of imperialism. She suggests that Bertha’s madness is provoked by the cruelty of Mr Rochester, who alters her identity by changing her name from Antoinette to Bertha, and who treats her with contempt on discovering “madness” in her family. While Bertha / Antoinette is unstable, it is Rochester who sends her to the brink of madness, which is manifested at Thornfield Hall. In her analysis of this counter-narrative, Spivak focuses on the violent ‘othering’ of this native woman, her metamorphosis from Antoinette to 42

Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 360. The Madwoman in the Attic, 360. 44 The Madwoman in the Attic, 244–45. 45 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985), in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Reina Lewis & Sara Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003): 307. 43

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Bertha, the iconic female Other. Spivak suggests that Rhys’s Antoinette is turned into the Other, the lunatic Bertha, by the world-view of Rochester, who forces her to “see her self” through an imperialist looking-glass.46 After seeing herself in this way, she is compelled to become the female monster, who must, when at Thornfield, pursue the fierce vision of Brontë’s imagining: In this fictive England, she [Antoinette] must play out her role, act out the transformation of her “self” into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist of British fiction.47

Spivak describes Rhys’s story as an “allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism,” though her focus is entirely gendered.48 It presents the native woman as a victim par excellence of the imperial imagination, a human pawn, made monstrous, so as to justify the authority of the angelic Western “female individualist.” Spivak’s analysis of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea highlights the racialization of the Victorian angel–monster dichotomy.

Domesticity: A Ceylonese Policy The British administrators of colonial Ceylon actively promoted the education of girls to affect social change during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.49 As was the case for boys, the girls of elite Ceylonese families were sent to private, fee-paying, boarding schools. Like the single-sex boys’ schools, discussed in the previous chapter, these schools were run by European clergy and missionaries and were modelled on the British public-school system. They were also English-speaking establishments, which valued European learning and languages, over and above indigenous knowledge, tradition, religions, and literature. The aim of these schools was to produce proper Victorian ladies, wives, and mothers, who would, with the power of academic intelligence and domestic sensibility, suit the men of their class. Swarna Jayaweera studies the development of these private girls’ schools in “European educators under the British Colonial Administration in Sri Lanka,” suggesting that these schools were profoundly influenced by the 46

Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” 313. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” 313. 48 “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” 313. 49 Swarna Jayaweera, “European Women Educators Under the British Colonial Administration in Sri Lanka,” Women’s Studies International Forum 13.4 (1990): 324. Further page references are in the main text. 47

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“Christian evangelical revival,” which began in England in the late-eighteenth century (324). This ‘revival’ inclined colonial administrators to embark upon civilizing missions, involving the formal education of colonial subjects, in which they imagined “Western culture and Christianity” as a twinned curriculum (324). These administrators were also heavily dependent on the support of missionaries who, almost singlehandedly, financed and organized the education sector between the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century (324). This affected the perspectives of every person involved in the sector: All colonial educators, lay or religious, male or female, were imbued with the same ideologies. The evangelical zeal of colonial administrators and the religious fervour of the missionaries were focused on the salvation of the “backwards” and “heathen” races through the spread of Christian values and norms of behaviour. ( 324)

The education of girls was essential in these civilizing missions, as social reformists philosophized that girls, if taught the “loveliness of domestic virtue,” would, as future wives and mothers, most affect social change (326). This was the verdict of the first Educational Commission of Ceylon, the Morgan Committee, established in 1865. The committee published a notable report in 1867, which “underscored the centrality of the role of the mother in the family and the importance of educating her to raise the moral tone of colonial society” (325). Reformist support for girls’ education was also a response to the “strange” attitudes of the indigenous culture with regard to gender. Jayaweera explains: The traditional laws of Sri Lanka were liberal with regard to marriage and divorce, women’s rights were supported by relatively egalitarian laws pertaining to inheritance, and women had independent access to assets such as land [.. . ]. Missionaries and other westerners deplored this informal attitude to marriage and what they perceived to be sexual laxity, and they worked single-mindedly to enforce Christian principles of morality, the concept of a monogamous family and male head of household and the domestic virtues of a Christian wife. ( 325)

There was some irony, however, in the result of this plan, as the special emphasis on girls’ education meant that the girls of elite families received an education that was on par with that of their male counterparts. In fact, by 1881 it was the norm for these girls to sit for the external Cambridge Certificate exam, which gave social prestige to boys and girls alike. This exam was soon regarded as the point of an elite English education, and parents, teachers, and students became equally fixated on it (327).

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By the late-nineteenth century, however, there was a national backlash against this tradition of gender equality in the elite Ceylonese schools, which served less than ten percent of the population (328).50 Public opinion sided with the traditionalist politics of Buddhist and Hindu nationalists, with parties and lobby groups campaigning against the westernization of their people. These collectives wanted local languages to be included in the curriculum of English-language schools; they also demanded different curricula for boys and girls (328). The value of a Western education now under fire, a government committee (the Macleod Committee, 1911–12) was formed to determine the future of curricula at Ceylonese schools (328). Twenty-four principals from the private girls’ schools, all European women, plus two female school inspectors (also European), presented to the committee ( 328). Most were there to defend their curriculum, from an imperialist, patriarchal, and classinflected standpoint. The statement by Rev. Mother Mary of Jesus, principal of the Holy Family Convent, is a good example of the general consensus: The education of girls in higher classes of English schools is to fit them to occupy worthily and becomingly their situation in the higher sphere of life they are expected to follow hereafter. Imbued as we are in Ceylon with western ideas of civilization, men wish their wives to have had the same educational advantages as themselves.51

The view of most female speakers was that, while the future of most of their students was domesticity, they still required an education similar to that of men.52 Most were also adamant that local languages be excluded from the curriculum. These languages and their literatures were supposed to be unsuitable for elite girls. A statement by Mother St. Francis Borgia, head of St. Bridget’s Convent,53 Colombo, certainly conveys this: 50

On developments from this period to the mid-twentieth century, see, for example, Lakshmi Kiran Daniel, “Privilege and Policy: The Indigenous Elite and the Colonial Education System in Ceylon, 1912–1948” (doctoral dissertation, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, 1992). 51 Rev. Mother Mary of Jesus, Principal, Holy Family Convent, Colombo, in Ceylon Legislature, Sessional Paper X X of 1911, Evidence: Education Committee (Colombo: Government Press, 1911–12): 68. 52 Jayaweera, “European Women Educators Under the British Colonial Administration in Sri Lanka,” 329. 53 Sirimavo Bandaranaike (the first female Prime Minister of Sri Lanka and the world’s first female Head of State) was a student of St. Bridget’s Convent, as was her

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We have no place for the vernacular. [. . . ] I do not see that teaching the vernacular would benefit the children who attend the school. [. .. ] From what I have heard of the character of that portion of vernacular literature which would have to be taught in higher classes of secondary schools, I have no hesitation in replying that it could never be taught in a convent school.54

Only Ms. Lena Chapman, the principal of Hillwood College, an Anglican school for “daughters of the traditional elite,” voiced concern. She feared that “if local languages were not taught at least in the earlier stages of education, girls would tend to be ashamed of their language and despise those who had no knowledge of English.”55 Eventually, local languages were included in the curriculum of the elite private girls’ schools in Ceylon, though this did not occur in the primary sector until 1945, when the government started the transition to Sinhalese (or in some cases Tamil) as the key mode of instruction, which was completed by 1950.56 The transition in secondary schools came later, between 1953 and 1959.57 The Ceylonese government also launched the Free Education Act in 1945. This affected the primary, secondary, and university sectors; it included the state-‘assisted’ English-medium schools and all but fifteen of the elite private schools.58 It was supposed to alter the cultural divide between rich and poor, although the success of this project was debatable for some time. The English-speaking elite continued to send their sons and daughters to the elite private schools, which they dominated, as was the status quo, while the poor sent their children to the public schools they had also usually attended.59 daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga (the former president and Prime Minister of Sri Lanka). 54 Mother St. Francis Borgia, in Ceylon Legislature, Sessional Paper X X of 1911, Evidence: Education Committee (Colombo: Government Press, 1911–12): 68. 55 Lena Chapman, in Ceylon Legislature, Sessional Paper X X of 1911, Evidence: Education Committee (Colombo: Government Press, 1911–12): 80–81. 56 Hemamala Ratwatte, “Reversing Language in Education Policy: Is It the Way Forward for Sri Lanka in the 21st Century?,” in English for Progress: 1st Policy Dialogue (Chennai: Open University of Sri Lanka, 2007): 9. 57 Ratwatte, “Reversing Language in Education Policy,” 9. 58 Swarna Jayaweera, “Religious Organizations and the State in Ceylonese Education,” Comparative Education Review 12.2 (June 1968): 166. 59 Angela Little, “Discussion Paper” ( M S , University of London, 2008): 3.

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Ceylon’s exclusive English-language schools had a profound effect on the identity of elite women in British Ceylon, from the late-nineteenth to the midtwentieth century. These schools supported the Victorian culture of domesticity among the privileged classes and thus promoted Romantic stereotypes in their world. The myth of the good and accomplished Victorian wife – the ‘angel in the house’ – was critical to this educational system and also to the arguments for women’s higher education needs.

The Hamilton Case The preceding chapter explored the phenomenon of colonial mimicry: its imperial and literary foundation; its place in the history of Ceylon; and, specifically, its representation in Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case. It investigated the identity of her protagonist, Sam, a British-Ceylonese mimic. The following discussion will explore the various identities of the women in his life: Maud (his mother), Leela (his wife), and Claudia (his sister). De Kretser uses these characters to parody and deconstruct the angel /monster dichotomy as depicted in Victorian fiction. She offers a range of feminine stereotypes and tropes that were used in representations of this dichotomy. In the character of Maud she satirizes the stereotype of the licentious woman and her resistance to domestic ideology; in Claudia she lampoons the stereotype of the unstable murderess; while, in Leela, she complicates the aspirations of ‘domestic angels’. She establishes connections between Orientalism and the angel /monster dichotomy, and links the identity of each of these characters to the elite culture of colonial Ceylon. Sam’s mother, Maud, is the first woman to appear in the novel. Sam describes her as an eccentric socialite and a distant mother. She participates in the hunting scene of Ceylon and, exuding sexuality and with a reputation for lurid behaviour, is a far cry from a respectable lady in the Victorian sense. As Sam explains, “It was alleged that she once swam in a jungle pool wearing only her bloomers, even though there were gentlemen and snakes present.”60 She is also, according to Sam, promiscuous. She has affairs with high-ranking men, including the Prince of Wales, and the Governor of Ceylon, who Sam believes is his biological father. Her conduct defies the customs of the Victorian sensibility, which she actively rejects. Her back-story is woven into the second half of the novel, which explains the influence of her father, a doctor “with a taste for women and morphine.” He teaches his daughter “to bowl and 60

De Kretser, The Hamilton Case, 4. Further page references are in the main text.

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shoot [. .. to] dock a pointer’s tail, [and] the correct way to skin a leopard” (214). He exposes her to misogynistic diatribes and also to his conquests, among whom is Miss Thornton, Maud’s governess. She is bizarrely obsessed with the doctor, to the point of sniffing his dirty shirts. Maud, upon witnessing the act, is disgusted. This event shapes her rejection of Victorian sensibilities, the ideal of romantic love and fidelity. She decides never to be governed by a man, and thus embraces the sexual freedoms offered by the short-lived Edwardian era, 1901–11. This resistance to the codes of feminine purity, subservience, and goodness makes her a monster by Victorian standards. Maud’s world-view is characteristic of the elite Edwardian culture, considered by Julia Bush in Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (2000). As this book reveals, the elite Edwardians were famous for their parties and excess, which was exemplified by the ‘London season’, a time of year when members of ‘society’ would hold debutante balls, dinner parties, and charity events.61 Elite girls would be sent to London to ‘come out’ in this ‘season’, as Maud does in de Kretser’s novel. They would attend balls, be introduced to the King and Queen, and meet potential suitors.62 Marriage was desirable: it improved one’s freedom, status, and access to authoritative social roles. 63 The taking of lovers in marriage was also an attractive custom; it appealed to many from royalty downwards and was generally condoned if one had supplied heirs.64 This custom was launched by the ‘fast set’ of Marlborough House, the inner circle of the Prince of Wales (Edward VII ). This group established clandestine etiquettes that became de rigueur at elite house parties. As Christopher Hibbert explains, Once intending lovers had come to an understanding [often from a note on a breakfast tray], it would usually be agreed that something would be left outside the lady’s bedroom to signify that she was alone and that the coast was clear.65

61

Julia Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (London: Leicester UP ,

2000): 24. 62

Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power, 24. Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power, 24. 64 Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power, 24. 65 Christopher Hibbert, Edward VI I : The Last Victorian King (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 169. 63

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Prince Edward, a known player, accepted this practice, “provided there was no scandal or even open discussion of what was going on.”66 Maud in The Hamilton Case is said to have had an affair with this particular prince. The calling card that she leaves for the Governor of Ceylon (along with a leopard skin) also conveys her Marlborough style: “I shall call on you between five and six. The skin is for the small blue reception room, which is ideally suited to fornication and whatnot” (3). It is an obvious parody of the types of notes that were exchanged at Marlborough parties where hunting was also a popular sport. Maud’s distant style of mothering is another aspect of her identity that connects her to the upper realms of Edwardian culture, which often outsourced the practicalities of child-rearing. As Julia Bush explains, There was a universal dependence upon nurses and governesses for daily childcare [among Edwardian ladies], and a near universal willingness among married ladies to put the interests of their husbands above those of their children.67

This is Maud’s approach too. She relishes her husband and society much more than parenting. She attends the odd school function when required, though it bores her. Indeed, she feels massive indifference to the idea of parenting and towards her son in particular. As the narrator explains: She had tried to concentrate on her son, to see him whole. It was useless. In her mind, she was always inspecting him from a height. The air between them was at once clear and impenetrable. Diamond bright, diamond hard: it characterised her manner with the boy. Among a set that valued astringency in human relations, her style passed as good form. (186)

Maud employs the Edwardian style of parenting strategically, to disguise her emotional indifference as a mother, which is arguably more deplorable than her manner by Victorian standards. Her indifference challenges the conception of motherhood as the natural and hallowed domain of women, which was, if traced to Rousseau, the basis of the Victorian ideal of domesticity. Maud despises what Rousseau called the “ties of nature,”68 the “maternal instinct,” without which a woman was rendered “unnatural” and even danger-

66 67 68

Hibbert, Edward VI I : The Last Victorian King, 169. Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power, 32. Rousseau, Émile, 11.

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ous in Victorian discourse.69 Women who lacked this ‘maternal instinct’ were typecast as deviants by the Victorian medical establishment, which regarded the rejection of one’s own child as a symptom of insanity.70 Psychosis and death are the fate of female literary monsters, and it is also the destiny of Maud. Her final years at Lokugama (the family’s country estate) are used to parody the model of Victorian fiction, wherein bad mothers and lascivious women are forced into exile. Like Brontë’s Bertha, who is rehoused in the attic, Maud is exiled in a country mansion, albeit located in a jungle. Her exile occurs after the suicide of her daughter, Claudia, and the sudden death of her husband, Ritzy. Sam, her eldest child, is made the sole heir and executor of Ritzy’s (her husband’s) estate, a patriarchal licence that is used against her. He sends her away as a punishment for her “sluttish” and careless lifestyle (173). In exile, Maud descends into a state of decorous madness, involving letter-writing, delirium, and costumes, all of which further satirize the literary tradition of madwomen and female monster types. As Gilbert and Gubar observe, the dramatization of imprisonment and escape were pervasive themes in nineteenth-century literature by women, who were particularly interested in these themes owing to their own personal anxieties about the problems of patriarchal confinement and the options for women in the patriarchal culture (as the ‘angel in the house’ or the monstrous Other who rebels). Female writers would use “houses as primary symbols of female imprisonment [.. .] to enact their central symbolic drama of enclosure” and the fantasy of escape.71 De Kretser draws upon this tradition in her representation of Maud’s exile, by depicting Lokugama, the ancestral home to which Maud is banished, as a place of suffocating confinement: The house was dwarfed by its backdrop of trees, so that it appeared to crouch low on its haunches. In fact it had ceilings eighteen feet high designed for coolness. Its walls were inset with lattice, its verandas screened with rattan tats that could be lowered against the sun and sprayed with water. These were stratagems that presupposed certain currents of air.. .. But the breeze that ruffled the coast was strangled by leafy ropes as soon as it ventured into the hinterland. The air was

69

Jill L. Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester: Manchester UP , 1995): 157. 70 Matus, Unstable Bodies, 157–89. 71 Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 85.

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Maud, yearning for deliverance from this purgatory, starts writing. She writes letters to her old acquaintances to alleviate her boredom and to maintain her social identity, though this is not successful, as her writing estranges her even further from reality. She becomes a parody of the gothic female writer, a creative yet alienated woman who is freed by her pen yet still confined. The Orientalist style of Maud’s penmanship is a key aspect of de Kretser’s deconstructive representation of the female-monster stereotype. This literary style connects her female instability to the problems of colonial discourse and literary fantasies, romanticizing the Orient while at the same time demonizing Oriental women as models of female depravity, hysteria, and chaos (such as Brontë’s Bertha). Maud’s letters (which she often loses) describe the environment with a gaudy and Orientalist flair: Colourful detail was her forte. She described a troop of monkeys with sorrowful faces, speeding through tree tops. She called up manes of saffron-hued lantana… the jungle teemed with life. [. .. ] A visitor to Lokugama would have seen plaster that peeled like diseased skin, sagging rattan, the mildewy bloom of wood unpolished for decades. A horn at the gate would send Maud scuttling from the veranda, hissing for the bungalow keeper. That same evening she could sit at the dining table, its scratched varnish sticky along her bare arms, and evoke the intoxicating scent of jasmine or the emerald flash of a parrot’s wing. [. . . ] Rats thundered in the rafters. Did you know, she found herself writing, that according to legend this was the Garden of Eden. (186– 88; italics in original)

Maud’s Orientalist imagination increases her estrangement from reality, thus illustrating the alienating effect of Orientalism. It suggests that her developing madness (mental instability/ derangement) is a product of this discourse, and moreover, that she is being consumed by the genre, by becoming the madwoman of the Orientalist imagination. Delirium is another theme that de Kretser uses to link the Victorian female monster to Orientalism, for Maud’s jungle deliriums exacerbate her descent into the female monster /madwoman character type. Maud has fugal states of delirium, caused by the “alchemy of change” (200) (or menopause, another

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Victorian explanation for female insanity72). These delirium states are reminiscent of the opiate and/or malaria-induced deliriums of Orientalist fiction (such as, in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1821). In The Hamilton Case we read: The place itself eroded the distinction between perception and hallucination. It hung a devil mask in a flamboyant tree, a bold grey langur monkey whose mocking face presided over the drive. It impaled a turquoise rag on a twig and then, when Maud reached for it, bewitched by the brilliance, slipped a rotting wing into her fingers. Nothing was as it seemed. (199)

Following these hallucinations, Maud’s attitude to isolation is altered. She unpacks her evening gowns, thereafter parading about like Dickens’s monstrous Miss Havisham in her crumbling manor: glittery-eyed in a carapace of bronze beading, [with] greasy playing cards fanned out before her [.. . and] a clove in each ear-lobe in lieu of a jewel. (215)

She is emboldened by this imperial costume, which (aptly) gives her the confidence to go outside for walks in the jungle: Her progress through tunnels of leaves.. .marked by scraps of taffeta or organdie spiked on twigs, a scattering of diamanté like starfall. Skirts that had belled over parquet snagged on thorns and were tugged free with little hisses of protest. Hems came undone and trailed behind her gathering earth and leaves. (232)

The incongruous nature of her attire destabilizes the binaries separating the social world from the natural world, and yet she is completely at ease. She embraces the monstrous condition of ambiguity as the jungle divests her of her colonial mimicry. She realizes freedoms in this fugue state, as the “madwoman in the jungle,” who is, as the text keeps reminding us, the product of Orientalist stereotypes and the angel /monster dichotomy. De Kretser’s parody of this dichotomy and its relationship to the colonies is most apparent, however, in the episode in which the soldiers (stationed nearby in the Second World War) see Maud in the jungle. The soldiers perceive Maud as a ghostly and ambiguous figure, which is obviously significant with regard to the angel /monster tradition, given that there is, as explained, a fine balance between representations of angel women and monster women in 72

See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987): 59.

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fiction. An angel woman may have deathly or ghostly qualities, including frailty and liminality, while the monster woman may dress herself as an angel. The latter is the case with Maud, who appears to the soldiers “in the torn light of the trees” with “the aspect of a young girl” or a “debutante” “dressed for a ball,” before revealing the countenance of “a grinning crone” ( 256–57). This spectacle turns Maud into the substance of gothic angel /monster legends, which travel to faraway cities and towns, including Nairobi in Kenya, Poona in India, and Dubbo in Australia. This comic revelation allegorizes the pervasiveness of the angel /monster dichotomy in the colonies, while underscoring de Kretser’s attention to this paradigm in her construction of Maud. De Kretser connects the ambiguity of the angel /monster dichotomy to the problematic of femininity in language. It occurs when Harry, Maud’s grandson, spends time in her company, an episode in which Maud is suddenly grounded by the requirement of guardianship. Harry struggles with the complexity of his grandmother’s odd identity: He had absorbed at an early age the distinction between a woman and a lady. In his grandmother’s presence these terms slid towards that disturbing category of words he could not fasten to a thing: teapot and kettle caused the same queasiness to stir in him, or orange and yellow, ideas that slipped in his mind like a soapy plate gliding through Soma’s fingers on its way to disaster. (283)

It is significant that Harry instinctively sees Maud’s problem as one of language – Maud’s identity is a product of a slippery, gendered, and withal colonial, discourse, prone to ambiguity in fiction and reality. De Kretser ultimately reveals that Maud’s instability is the outcome of a specific linguistic confusion, the distinction between a cushion and a pillow, which relates to the mysterious cot death of her second son, Leo. De Kretser attributes Maud’s linguistic confusion to a sedative medication that she is given by a Victorian doctor following this child’s death, which thus connects it to the patriarchal Victorian establishment. The truth is revealed, albeit obscurely, with the assistance of Harry, Maud’s grandson, who tells her of a dream that he has while staying at Lokugama, about being in a room with “a cushion on the floor and a thing in a net. [.. .] A hand like mine” ( 286). This makes Maud realize that Leo’s room had “contained a cushion, rather than a pillow” (287) in the night following his death, and that she has thus mistakenly if subconsciously blamed Sam, Harry’s father, for Leo’s murder because of this. Maud explains this in her last diary entry:

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God knows what that old fool of a doctor gave to knock me out. It settled like fog on my brain, obscuring everything that happened that night. Hours after I had fallen into bed, I found myself on the back veranda. Every step I took was weighty and effortful. [.. . ] Dr van Dort had taken Leo away with him, but I had either forgotten or didn’t care. Instinct propelled me towards the room where he had last drawn breath. The door was open. And on the threshold I walked into a child. That was the vision that sank into my mind and lay buried there all those years. It governed me from that moment, I realise that now. But I had understood everything the wrong way round. [. .. ] I should have seen what Harry’s dream meant straight away. A cushion that replaced a pillow: that was the crucial detail. It held the key to what happened to Leo. (291)

We know from an earlier episode that it was Claudia, Maud’s daughter, who insisted on dragging a “bruise blue” cushion “everywhere as a small girl,” while keeping its tatty remnants, “a short length of corded blue silk” (46), as an adult. Maud’s recollection thus intimates that Claudia was more likely the murderess, a suggestion which is also implied by her other strange behaviou (to be discussed shortly). Upon recognizing her mistake, Maud visualizes herself pushing open Leo’s bedroom door to find Sam as a child with his arms folded over his chest. Then he let the pillow [the sign of his innocence] fall and ran forward to meet her [. . . ] a tremendous sense of wellbeing wrapped itself around her. (292)

Maud thus finds contentment and dies. This bizarre resolution is significant insofar as it connects the problematic of Maud’s feminine identity (as a mother) to the Victorian medical establishment and also to language. In this way, de Kretser reminds us of the significance of the medical establishment in relation to the development of the angel /monster dichotomy (in Britain and the colonies), as a result of its theories on female hysteria, particularly childrelated hysteria in mothers, and the treatments that were developed for these problems.73 This denouement, furthermore, reminds us of the slippery nature of language, which we, as language beings, must rely on to construct meaning and to find truth. This thus relates to the metaphysical detective element of the novel, discussed in Chapter 1. Like Maud, Claudia, her daughter, is no ‘angel’. Claudia mutilates herself and from childhood on is prone to hysteria. She personifies the ‘monstrous 73

See Showalter, The Female Malady.

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feminine’, more so than any other female character in the text, as she is a murderess. It is suggested, by Sam, that she was the killer of Leo, their baby brother, who she allegedly smothered with a cushion. This scenario is also supported by the final epiphany of Maud. Claudia’s second crime is the killing of her own baby son. It takes place when he is just twenty hours old. She enters the nursery at this time, kills her child in his cot, and then commits suicide by jumping out of the window. She is found soon after in “the damp weeds [. .. ] by the back wall, the bottle of Lysol empty beside her” ( 154). It is agreed that she was smiling as she fell. Maud thinks that her daughter was destroyed by the knowledge of one of her husband’s affairs. Lysol as a solution for marital problems is darkly comic, as this hygiene product was advertised around this time, during the 1930s, as the perfect solution for “married life.”74 Lysol was a multipurpose antiseptic, a substance like carbolic acid, which was marketed to married women in the 1930s as a ‘feminine hygiene’ solution and a contraceptive douche; it was also commonly imbibed for the purpose of suicide.75 De Kretser’s implication is that Claudia has been using the Lysol for its contraceptive purposes, prior to her pregnancy, which is conspicuously long-awaited, and later as a poison; since, as the narrator remarks, there was no doubt about “the agony of her end” (154). This end is fitting if macabre: by drinking the Lysol, Claudia finds the permanent solution to fertility, which is probably why she smiles as she plummets to her death, being newly freed of motherhood. Claudia’s psychotic, infanticidal hatred of babies reflects an aspect of the female monster/madwoman stereotype that was popularized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of the recognition of infanticide in Britain by doctors, lawyers, the public, the literati, and the media: broadsheets and ballads told tales of those accused of child murder, mostly women conjuring the deed itself, and often the accused’s dying words, sometimes with illustrations.76

This horrific act is also famously depicted in George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede (1859), a story in which the character Hetty Sorrel is sentenced to death for the murder of her illegitimate baby and then reprieved to deportation. In the 74

Andrea Tone, “Contraceptive Consumers: Gender and the Political Economy of Birth Control in the 1930s,” Journal of Social History 29.3 (Spring 1996): 485. 75 Elizabeth Reis, American Sexual Histories (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 273. 76 Jennifer Thorn, Writing British Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722–1859 (Newark: U of Delaware P , 2003): 13.

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mid-nineteenth century, Victorian doctors and lawyers were developing theories relating to the appropriate legal means of dealing with women who killed their newborn children.78 They formulated an ‘insanity plea’ which linked the act of infanticide to the female reproductive system, while underplaying the socio-economic factors, which were more likely to be the cause of this sad phenomenon. These theories of ‘reproductive insanity’ soon developed into a broad philosophy of female psychosis. Sally Shuttleworth observes: All stages of a woman’s reproductive life were marked by potential violence: the cannibal longings of pregnancy might be succeeded by the onset of puerperal insanity when murderous acts were frequently committed, usually against husbands and children. [.. . ] Even the operations of a woman’s menstrual cycle could evoke equivocal violence – whether the blood flowed, or failed to appear. [... ] Motherhood, and all processes leading up to it, were firmly associated in Victorian eyes with murderous lust. 79

The most extreme expression of this madness was always, however, the ‘act of infanticide’. Infanticide was and still is explained as a manifestation of postpartum madness, the idea that a woman is more inclined to temporary insanity in the year that follows the birth of a child, and that she is thus less responsible for her actions within this time-frame. While this idea spread in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the laws and provisions surrounding the misdemeanour were not decided until the twentieth century: 1922 in Britain, and then, with amendments, in 1938.80 The Act of 1938, which is still in effect, classifies infanticide as a lesser crime than murder, a felony with a lighter penalty, which is akin to manslaughter.81 Claudia’s killer instincts reflect the sensational representation of the female murderess in popular Victorian culture, informed by the popular78

Law Reform Commission New South Wales. “Report 83 (1997) – Partial Defences to Murder: Provocation and Infanticide,” in Law Reform Commission New South Wales (Sydney: Law Reform Commission New South Wales, 1997): section 3.2. 79 Sally Shuttleworth, “Demonic Mothers: Ideologies of Bourgeois Motherhood in the Mid-Victorian Era,” in Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the Politics of Gender, ed. Linda M. Shires (London: Routledge, 1992): 37. 80 M.E. Rodgers, “Gendered Assumptions – Madness, Pregnancy and Childbirth,” in Behaving Badly: Social Panic and Moral Outrage – Victorian and Modern Parallels, ed. Judith Rowbotham & Kim Stevenson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003): 214. 81 Rodgers, “Gendered Assumptions,” 214.

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medical/legal psychology of infanticide which was ultimately attached to this. This issue and the associated theories of feminine hysteria were still current in the 1930s, as indicated by the 1938 amendment of the Infanticide Act in Britain. This is germane, for it is during this period that Claudia kills her own baby. In this connection, it is also worth mentioning the mission of nineteenth-century colonial reformists with regard to infanticide. While this was not a concern in Sri Lanka per se (presumably because it was not a problem there), it was a major issue in the neighbouring colony of British India. Indeed, colonial reformists of the nineteenth century were very concerned about the policing of female infanticide in India and the prosecution of women who were guilty of this crime, which was still a major issue in Britain at the time.82 While this reformist movement did not affect Sri Lanka, it did link the horrors of infanticide to the Indian subcontinent (of which they were and are a part), hence to Western stereotypes of Oriental horror. This is perhaps another reason why de Kretser has chosen the motif of infanticide in her Ceylon-based parody of the angel /monster dichotomy, given her critique of Orientalist stereotypes and their relationship to this dichotomy. Claudia plays a relatively small yet significant role in The Hamilton Case. She creates chaos in the colonial family unit and she represents the female monster in her most violent, albeit darkly comic form: as a hysteric, a psychotic, a baby-killer, and a suicide. She also functions as part of an angel / monster dyad, with Claudia as the female monster and Leela, Sam’s ill-fated wife, as the domestic angel. This dyad is significant in upsetting the usual rubrics that demarcate angel women from female monsters, for, despite Leela’s wholesome yearning for motherhood, which makes her angelic, especially in contrast to Claudia, who loathes and murders babies, Leela ‘kills’ babies, too, since, in her efforts to bear a child, she is thwarted by a series of miscarriages. These make her monstrous by the patriarchal standards which she and Sam support, in spite of her otherwise perfect portrayal of the colonial culture’s feminine ideal, as a virtuous and westernized woman and a wife who wants a baby. Leela’s ironic condition exposes the nuisance of ‘maternal ideology’, supported by the medical establishment, which blamed average women directly and exclusively for all kinds of maternal failures, including miscarriages and stillbirths, despite the ubiquity of these problems in the nineteenth

82

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, Renu Dube & Reena Dube, Female Infanticide in India: A Feminist Cultural History (Albany: State U of New York P , 2005): 101.

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and early-twentieth centuries.83 As Shuttleworth observes, a woman’s reproductive failure could easily “lead to ideological reclassification: angel no longer, but a source of corruption and poison.”84 While Leela is a good and ordinary woman, her body revolts against her in cruel and prolific ways, involving multiple miscarriages and stillbirths that are gruesome, traumatic, and haunting. It is an ordeal that lasts for five years, and it is depicted in horrific terms: Anniversaries were marked by the packages of matted blood that slid between her legs at intervals. These objects were borne away from her in covered bedpans; occasionally she flushed one down the lavatory herself. She could not have said what they were exactly. But they were not children. They had no faces [… the] first time the midwife, a kind woman who suffered from varicose veins, told her that the baby was a girl, her skull covered in soft black curls. In Leela’s dreams this child was not dead, but beat uselessly on the rocks and earth piled above her. [. .. ] Once, entering the dining room she became convinced that something was trapped in the sideboard. ( 178)

Leela sees the “progression” of life itself as “monstrous” and otherworldly at this time. Her mindset is made worse by the patriarchal tyranny of Sam, who is oblivious to her trauma (180). In her crisis he sees only ineptitude: a wife who cannot fulfil her duty of producing healthy offspring. A prime example of his apathy is his behaviour soon after the stillbirth of their first baby (the girl with soft black curls), when Leela comes down for dinner, for the first time, following the tragedy: “Halfway through the meal” Sam remarks that he is “looking forward to an early night. It was his usual sign to her” (171). He regards this as a reasonable time to try again. Leela is depicted as the victim of maternal and patriarchal ideology, cultural anxiety, and bigotry about motherhood. Her misfortune critiques the approved role of imperial women as reproductive machines; procreation is a monstrous task destabilizing the glorification of maternity. De Kretser uses the insensitivity of Sam correspondingly, to reflect on the perception of infant mortality at this time, in the late 1930s, when stillbirths and miscarriages were rarely recognized as serious traumas for women.85 83

See Shuttleworth, “Demonic Mothers,” 37–38. “Demonic Mothers,” 37. 85 According to the findings of Susannah Thompson, neonatal death was not commonly recognized as a major trauma by the medical establishment until the 1970s; 84

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The books that Leela reads say much about her characterization as an angel woman, her identification with the Victorian culture and the tradition of Romanticism. She is a huge admirer of Sir Walter Scott. She has a full collection of his work, which she reads annually in a sequence, “returning to Waverley as soon as she has closed Castle Dangerous” (151). When having sex, she distracts herself with the names of Scott’s heroines: “Flora. Augusta, Rowena. Amy. Flora. Augusta. Rowena. Amy” (162). It is a mantra that clearly parodies the advice that was given to brides in the Victorian era, the instruction to ‘Lie back and think of England’, as a means of enduring one’s patriotic duty of child-making.86 Her reading cycle is interrupted in the years in which she miscarries – “the terrible years” when “even Scott failed her” (180) – as the shock of this triggers her withdrawal from the imperial culture, though she returns to it instantly when she is pregnant with Harry, her first and only healthy child. She imagines, while in “confinement,” that Harry will have grand adventures just like Scott’s highland heroes, Quentin and Nigel; she imagines that he will fight “injustice under a crimson banner [. .. and be] hailed as a hero in banqueting halls” (225). As the mother of a strong child, she is, by her own Victorian yardstick, licensed to rejoin the cult of Romantic sensibility that Scott represents for her. Scott allows her to confidently reassume her place as a Victorian ‘angel woman’ who may celebrate motherhood, while carrying out wifely activities such as embroidery, dressmaking, and having tea with other mothers. The downside of this grand and happy Victorian routine is that she is killed off quickly; she falls terminally ill while still in her twenties and of an unspecified disease, as was the common fate of angel women, thus standing as a satirized exemplar of the genre to which she is devoted. The plot of Scott’s Waverley (1814) has a special significance as an intertext. The alternative name of this book, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, illuminates the retrospective position of Scott’s narrator, who chronicles a comparatively recent era of social and political upheaval: the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, an uprising that was led by the Scottish highlanders who were disaffected by the British crown. This scenario is, in part, an allegory for the history of Sri Lanka, its highland clans, and their conflicts with the British in the early nineThompson, “Birth Pains: Changing Understandings of Miscarriage, Stillbirth and Neonatal Death in Australia in the Twentieth Century” (doctoral dissertation, University of Western Australia, 2008): 4. 86 Peter Vardy, The Puzzle of Sex (London: S C M Press, 2009): 139.

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teenth century. It is also a counterpoint for the changing social and political climate at the end of the colonial era in Ceylon in the twentieth century, the period in which most of The Hamilton Case is set. When de Kretser first published The Hamilton Case (2003), it was also about “sixty years since” the end of the colonial era, which is revealing on an intertextual scale. It reminds us, as readers, of the closeness of this bygone history, and the similarities between the attitudes of de Kretser’s characters to social change and the equivocal attitudes that are depicted in Waverley. Waverley ends with the consolidation of British identity throughout the United Kingdom, whereas The Hamilton Case examines the conclusion of British authority in Ceylon. However, both novels depict resistance by characters who belong to the old-world order. In Waverley, this resistance is the rebellion and patriotism of the highlanders who battle with the English; in The Hamilton Case, the stand is the unwavering imperial perspective of the main characters, wholly westernized despite the fast-approaching new world order of postcolonialism. In Leela’s case, this ‘last stand’ is the romancing of the Victorian feminine ideal. Jennifer Camden provides interesting observations about Scott’s use of ‘racially othered’ women in the narrative resolutions of Waverley and Ivanhoe (another of his popular works, concerning a medieval conflict between the Saxons and the Normans): Both novels [Waverley and Ivanhoe] narrate a sort of last stand against an already changed world order, and in each novel the secondary heroine [who is in both cases ‘racially othered’] registers the cost of that shift.87

In Waverley, the “secondary heroine” is Flora, who is racially othered by her Scottish heritage. According to Camden, Flora is written out of the story as a means to return the “hero [Waverley] and [rightful] heroine [the English Rose] to the imperial domestic space,” which thus consolidates English identity in this novel.88 Considering this with relation to Leela, the “racially othered” lover of Sir Walter Scott, one might suppose that her early demise is a parody of the treatment of ‘racially othered’ women in Scott’s work, although Leela’s ‘racial otherness’ is obviously ambiguous, given her Western

87

Jennifer Camden, Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels (Farnham & Burlington VT : Ashgate, 2010): 60. 88 Camden, Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels, 87.

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identity and Sinhalese heritage. It might thus be supposed that her ‘racial otherness’ is her ‘Victorian domestic identity’, which has become outdated. Another significant point with respect to Waverley as an intertext is that it is paradoxical, being both indubitably romantic and critical of Romanticism. As Andrew Hook argues, Waverley is precisely a book about the romantic temperament, and even more precisely about the dangers and responsibilities all too likely to develop of such a temperament.89

The same may be said of The Hamilton Case. Each of de Kretser’s female characters is damaged by this romantic temperament and the conditioning of women by this culture. It is also worth mentioning that Scott, at least according to Hook, did not approve of Jacobite politics, despite his sympathy for Waverley, his hero, who becomes entangled in these politics.90 De Kretser displays a similar ambivalence in her novel. She does not approve of her character’s affiliations with the British, the politics of domesticity, and romanticism, though she frames their ethos sympathetically as a product of cultural conditioning. De Kretser’s appreciation of the connection between romantic ideology, narrative convention, and stereotypes is striking. She plays with the conventions of nineteenth-century literary fiction as a means to deconstruct the ideologies embedded in them, particularly in relation to her stereotypical female characters, codified and corrupted by the angel /monster dyad. Maud and Claudia are typecast as monsters: Maud as the ‘mad woman in the jungle’ and Claudia as a crazed murderess. Leela, a domestic angel, is killed off in her twenties, as befits the tradition of her species. De Kretser deconstructs the angel/monster dichotomy in such a way as to illustrate its absurdity, and its detriment to women affected by the discourse. She specifically considers the effect of this dyad for elite Sinhalese women of the British colonial era, who, like their male relations, were conditioned to embrace and appreciate the ideological traditions of the British bourgeoisie. Using parody and mimicry, de Kretser critiques the problems of this sensational tradition for colonial women.

89

Andrew Hook, “Introduction” to Walter Scott, Waverley (1841; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972): 21. 90 Andrew Hook, “Introduction” to Scott, Waverley, 21.

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The Sweet and Simple Kind The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne is another novel that considers the domestic culture of colonial Ceylon, and the implications of this culture for women. It is also a story about a family, the Wijesinhas, who, like the Obeysekeres, maintain a high social and political status. The following discussion will consider the first section of The Sweet and Simple Kind, which is set in 1945. It will consider Gooneratne’s representation of the British domestic culture in Ceylon, the problematic of this culture for women, and the competing domestic culture of Sinhala Buddhists. It will also consider Gooneratne’s representation of the elite private education system, which influenced upper-class women’s identities in Ceylon by promoting Western models of domesticity and the devaluation of local languages.91 The discussion examines the problematic of elite women’s identities in this novel. Gooneratne explores the domestic politics of women’s identities by juxtaposing the cultural politics of two branches of the same family: one that is very Western and wealthy, and the other, also Western, but inclined toward Buddhism. Latha, the novel’s protagonist, negotiates the politics of the two families. She is the favourite cousin of the wealthier westernized family, with whom she spends the summer, and the only daughter of the other. Prior to departing on her holiday, Latha believes that Western ideologies are more progressive and liberating for girls and women than Buddhist ones, although she discovers that this is not necessarily the case. She becomes aware of challenges for women in both cultures, both relating to the gendering of identities. As in The Hamilton Case, there is a synecdochic relationship between the problems of the family and the problems of the state. Gooneratne satirizes the old-fashioned domestic expectations of SinhaleseBuddhist women in the late colonial era: the expectations of “sweetness” and “simplicity” in young ladies, which are referred to in the novel’s title. This type of demand is lampooned in the novel’s second chapter, entitled “Names,” which explains the significance of naming in the Sinhalese culture: the reason for Latha’s name and its ethnological difference to the name of her westernized cousin, Tsunami (whose name has significance with regard to future events). Her mother, Soma, explains: Latha is not a Japanese name. It is a true Sinhala name, and I chose it for her myself. .. A girl named Latha will grow up like a clinging vine. 91

Other sections from this novel will be discussed in the next chapter of this book, concerning identity, linguistic nationalism, and the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict.

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Not just because she will be graceful and lovely, but because she will be a perfect wife. She will cling to her husband as a creeper clings to a tree. His strength will support her and her beauty will decorate his sturdy branches. Tsunami: I understand Auntie. A kind of parasite.92

Latha’s mother and aunties (on her mother’s side) are characterized as silly and obnoxious women with out-dated views about womanhood, as symbolized by the tradition of naming. They romanticize a foolish model of femininity, depicting women as “sweet and simple” things. In this branch of the family, “silence, sweetness, and simplicity were the virtues that were most highly valued in women and girls” (69). As in her previous novel, A Change of Skies (1991) (which will be discussed in Chapter 5), Gooneratne underscores the contradictions of the domestic Sinhala culture by making the advocate of this gender-based culture a determined and self-righteous woman. This advocate is Soma (Latha’s mother), who chooses Latha’s name, who orders and instructs, and who makes nearly all the decisions in her household. Herbert, Latha’s father, is a great deal more flexible with regard to the future of his daughter, as he believes in her ability to make decisions. The scenario is a parody of the mother–father–daughter dynamic in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, wherein, just like Herbert, the long-suffering Mr Bennet hides in his study to avoid the stupidity of his wife. Gooneratne invites parallels to be drawn between Western and Buddhist modes of femininity with and through this allusion. Gooneratne juxtaposes the domestic ideals of Latha’s mother and aunties with those in the more westernized branch of her family, on her father’s side, who are ostensibly more modern. At Lucas Falls, the stately home of these wealthier cousins, Latha finds a very different kind of domesticity, which seems to her to be sophisticated, egalitarian, and less concerned with gender stereotypes. She first perceives it in the children: All the children, even Colin and Tsunami, addressed their father by the curious name of “Pater”, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to do. (They also called their mother “Mummy”, but Latha did not find that so curious: several of her class mates did the same.) She asked her parents what “Pater” meant. Herbert explained 92

Yasmine Gooneratne, The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006; Colombo: Perera Hussein, 2008): 14. Further page references are in the main text.

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that the word was a Latin one which meant “Father”, and added that the boys had probably learned it at Kings College, where the study of Latin and Greek was part of the curriculum. ( 37)

There is something more ‘British than the British’ about this household: involving custom, style, and courtesy ( 12). They attend their Anglican Church service “every Sunday,” regularly recite lines from Gilbert and Sullivan together, and watch “an American movie at least once a week” ( 34). The children also have open access to their father’s magnificent library, which is filled with all sorts of English literature – here no subject is forbidden; the only rule is that what is borrowed must be returned in good order. It is all immensely appealing for Latha, the eight-year-old, who is precociously obsessed with English literature, her favourite poets including “Pope, Keats, Spenser, Tennyson, Scott, Macaulay and Christina Rossetti” (29). She sees the house as a literary wonderland, and imagines that she is living in a novel written by her literary idol, Jane Austen.93 Gooneratne focuses on the “performance” of this Western household: the playacting, by both children and adults, who all participate in the recitation of English plays and musicals, dialogues and songs that exemplify the Romantic temperament. It is a performance of British domesticity, involving the ideal of “family time” and “family entertainment,” a bourgeois design which appeared in the nineteenth century.94 It projects a bourgeois notion of identity, framed by liberal ideals of recreation and self-expression. By homing in on the performance that maintains this domestic identity, Gooneratne suggests that it is to some extent contrived and that it glosses over another kind of reality, involving the patriarchal structure of domesticity. The revelation of this structure, evidenced by the relationship of the adult characters, exposes a discord between Western liberalism and patriarchy. 93

Gooneratne is also a fan of Jane Austen, on whom she wrote her doctoral dissertation. She has also published a book on Austen’s work, is the head of the Australian Jane Austen Society, and runs a writer’s retreat, in Sri Lanka, in an old plantation house called Pemberley. According to an interview that she gave on The Book Show, Lucas Falls is modelled on Pemberley (the writer’s retreat). AB C Radio, “Yasmine Gooneratne: Sweet and Simple,” radio broadcast, A B C Radio National (7 May 2009), http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/ 2009-05-07/ 3130668 (accessed 10 June 2010). 94 John Merriman, “Lecture Series: European Civilization 1648–1945, Lecture 9 – Middle Classes,” Open Yale Courses Podcast (1 October 2008), oyc.yale.edu/history /hist-202/lecture-9 (accessed 24 April 2011).

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Gooneratne examines the problematic of Western domesticity when she defines the relationship of Aunt Helen and Uncle Rowland; these characters offer a very unhappy portrait of domesticity, a vision of patriarchal control and Romantic artifice, which is said to have never been otherwise. Herbert, Latha’s father, recalls: Rowland had acquired Helen Ratnam rather as he might have purchased an exquisite ivory figurine for the drawing room in his house at Lucas Falls. He [Herbert] was convinced of it once, during a visit he paid to the newly married couple, Helen (then eighteen) came running into the drawing room and flung herself into a chair, breathless and glowing from a walk with the dogs. Herbert gazed at her in admiration, Rowland with silent disapproval. She met her husband’s eyes, recollected herself quickly, and immediately sat up straight, her eyes lowered, and her delicate hands folded demurely in her lap. It was an attitude that Rowland obviously favoured since he had her portrait painted (by Mudaliyar A.C.G.S. Amarasekere, doyen of Ceylon’s artists at the time) in that identical pose. (23–24)95

Roland chooses Helen because she is exotic, as an artist and as an Indian. Yet when they are married he expects her to change, to quit painting, to hide her ethnic difference. She is required to “look [and act] just like his own people,” elitist and westernized (114). He expects her to be the perfect wife and mother: a westernized ‘angel in the house’ who lives only for her husband and family. She is already westernized, having been raised in an elite British-Indian environment, but not sufficiently for Rowland. He would have her be more demure and Victorian than her “foreign” upbringing has taught her to be. Rowland’s view of Helen underscores the discrepancies between liberalism and patriarchy, as Latha astutely observes, when she hears an argument take place between them. It happens after a visit to the “aunties” (old friends of her aunt and uncle, expelled from society for having illegitimate children) and at the time when Rowland has decided to become a colonial politician. Latha is reading in the study when she hears the couple arguing outside the door. Roland: Now, you just listen to me, Helen.. . I cannot afford to have my name and yours linked to women of easy virtue, women who have kicked over the traces, disreputable women whose very presence in the neighbourhood is a disgrace to the district I hope to represent. ( 110) 95

Amarasekere was an actual artist of the colonial era, he lived until the impressive age of 100 (1883–1983).

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Helen challenges Rowland by asking how his political career relates to her, and to this he responds: Everyone cares what you do and think, Helen, and everyone makes it a point to inform themselves on the subject because you are my wife.. . And if you still don’t know why, it’s because I will not have it. . . And another thing.. . I have been informed that you are in the habit of taking Tsunami [their youngest daughter and Latha’s cousin] on these clandestine exhibitions of yours.. . – listen to me carefully – if I find out that this ever happens again, it is Tsunami who will suffer for it. She will get a whipping that you and she will never forget. ( 111)

It suddenly occurs to Latha that, although Roland claims to be a “modern man” with an enlightened “modern outlook” (113), he is actually capricious and authoritarian. She sees the balance of power tipped in his favour in a way that contradicts her romantic perception of his and his family’s Western liberal persona. She realizes that the marriage of her own parents, her more traditionalist mother and father, is more even-handed than that of her very westernized aunt and uncle. By exposing the patriarchal structure of this relationship, Gooneratne comments on the significance of patriarchy in the Western liberal ideology, as manifested in this era, and on the paradox of this ideology, which presented itself as being chivalric and respectful towards women while limiting their identity with domestic ideology and patriarchal agendas. Gooneratne explores the limitations of Victorian domestic identity further in her representations of Helen’s hobbies, tapestry and gardening. These were approved activities for a Victorian lady, as they related to the decoration of the home, which was a feminine duty. Ornamental needlework was a formal part of an elite woman’s education in England and in the colonies, where it served the purpose of acculturating elite women.96 By imitating and reproducing the style of this decorative art (in the Victorian style), elite colonial women were taught to appreciate British flora, fauna, and landscape. They were taught to revere these things over and above the natural wonders of their own native land, which is an issue that Gooneratne examines through her portrayal of Helen’s instruction in botany, tapestry, and colour: Helen told Latha she had felt instinctively [as a girl in India] that the centre of a forget-me-not.. . should be crimson. .. ‘You see, Latha,’ said Helen, ‘I actually preferred the crimson.’ She sounded guilty, 96

See Jayaweera, “European Women Educators Under the British Colonial Administration in Sri Lanka,” 26.

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P R O B L E M A T I C I D E N T I T I E S v almost as if she were admitting to stealing a sugar cube from the Lucas Falls sugar bowl. For it was not in the nature of things that Helen should ever have been allowed as a girl to make her own choice, even of a skein of embroidery silk. And though the blending of blue and crimson made a pleasing contrast that was, besides, easier to work with without eye-strain, Miss Whitecliff [her Anglo-Indian teacher] had rejected her choice outright. ‘No, Helen, that won’t do, my dear.’ Miss Whitecliff had said when she saw the first crimson drops forming under Helen’s needle. ‘It won’t do at all. English flowers have soft, delicate colours – try this pale yellow.’ [. .. ] And so Helen, whose earliest paintings had displayed a love of vivid colour and free flowing line [. .. ] had learned to suppress her fondness for what her teacher called the ugly, brutal, wild colours of the local Indian flora in favour of the soft pinks and muted violets of refined good taste. ( 88)

Throughout this mildly comic dialogue, Gooneratne reflects upon the Orientalist character of Victorian tapestry lessons, a seemingly harmless activity that glorified the natural inhabitants of England at the expense and diminishment of colonial places. This scenario highlights the acculturating and racist value of this and other similar arts, as taught in this era to elite colonial women. It also reveals the limitation of Victorian domestic ideology, which muted and restricted women’s self-expression in England and the colonies, as indicated by the rules with regard to colour and subject-matter, where even a “colonial flower” might cause offence. Since flowers had a gendered connotation in the Victorian era (as with the English Rose – the English girl/woman, homely and fair ), they also have significance here. It is implied that the “local flora” or, rather, local women are coarse, particularly if they fail to appreciate the British botanical genre that is approved in the British domestic arts. The marginalization of non-colonial women’s identities is also symbolized by the garden at Lucas Falls, which is maintained by Helen as the lady of the house and therefore its trustee. This garden is extensive and indubitably British: Not merely for the roses, the lilies, the pansies and hollyhocks associated with country gardens of Britain, and which had flourished in the cool, moist climate of Ceylon’s hill-country but, taking advantage of the broad acres afforded by her husband’s magnificent property, Mrs Lucas [the original owner and designer of this garden] had created avenues and walks in the style of the English eighteenth century, varied by such features as a quincunx, a bower, a stream, and even a maze. (89)

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The garden is a space in which Helen may express herself and occupy herself with a task that she enjoys, gardening, but it is also, despite its extensiveness, a controlled environment. It has a preset British formula, from which she is not allowed to deviate, at least not in the public eye. While she is allowed to develop a small section of the garden that represents her preferences, one devoted to Indian plants, this section must be screened from general view. The sequestering of Helen’s “Indian section” is symbolic of the marginalization of Helen’s Indian identity and creative licence in colonial Ceylon. Gooneratne plays with the conventions of Romanticism by allowing Helen an ostensibly romantic exit from her stifling marriage to Rowland. It involves the abandonment of her role as the ‘angel in the house’ at Lucas Falls and also of her children, a monstrous act according to the angel /monster dichotomy, as traditionally projected in Victorian fiction. Her escape, however, is a comical affair, however. It involves the drama of Romanticism that is celebrated in the poetry and plays that are performed during “family time” at Lucas Falls, up until the occasion when Helen elopes with Mr Goldman, the “Visiting Agent” of the family’s tea plantation. Helen and Mr Goldman are surrounded by the children in living room when the plan is hatched, with the recitation of verses from the English version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859): Mr Goldman, while playing monopoly: Ah love! could thou and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of things entire Would we not shatter it to bits – and then Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

Aunt Helen, while embroidering: Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close! The Nightingale that in the Branches sang, Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows! ( 118)

The dialogue is wry, as the children are completely unaware of the adulterous plans; they assume that it is just another little game, without any deeper meaning. Aside from the stanzas that Helen and Goldman recite, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám has significance as an intertext. On the one hand, this popular nineteenth-century poem relates to the mixed cultural identities of the characters, since it is an English translation of a Persian text. On the other hand, it relates to the adult characters’ rejection of domesticity. For, as Ian Ousby ex-

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plains, the Rubáiyyát “suggests withdrawal from ‘this sorry scheme of things,” from the dreary responsibilities of a mundane middle class existence.”97 By eloping, this is exactly what Helen and Goldman achieve; they employ the hedonistic philosophies of Romanticism to escape the “sorry scheme” of British domesticity, the same domesticity that is usually celebrated in mainstream Romantic texts. Another way in which Gooneratne explores the problematic of the British acculturation of women in Ceylon is through her depiction of the characters Tara and Tsunami, Helen’s daughters. Both girls attend Ashcombe School, an elite Anglican girl’s school that is modelled on the colonial schools described earlier in this chapter, the type of schools which provided a first-class education for girls to prepare them for their elite domestic futures. Tara, Helen’s eldest daughter, is a caricature of the model student who would have attended this kind of school, for, although she is extremely accomplished in each and every curriculum, she studies only to enter society: Tara at fifteen was a well-grown, good-looking girl who has slipped naturally into the roles of prefect and house captain at Ashcombe [. ..]. Athletic and sports minded, she was an excellent tennis player, swam like a fish, and although a University education was not one of her ambitions, her family’s knowledge of books and their interest in reading were reflected in her determination to be well up in what was fashionable in Britain. Books were her means to an end: they would help her become a leader of Colombo’s social set, well read, and culturally aware. To tour ‘the Continent’ as soon as she was old enough to do so was one of Tara’s main aims in life. She knew that somewhere – though temporarily out of sight – was a husband who would make all of this possible. She had complete faith in her father’s ability to find such a husband and until he did, she devoted herself to developing the skills which would equip her to manage a household at least as opulent as the one she had grown up in. ( 58)

Through this section, Gooneratne critiques the attitudes to learning that were taught in this type of private girls’ school during the late-colonial era. She suggests that girls of Tara’s ilk were shallow despite their elite education, that they were comfortable with patriarchy and with the prospect of having an elite domestic future. She is highly critical of Tara’s outlook, despite the accultura-

97

Ian Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 1993): 818.

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tion that would have brought her to this view. She presents such thinking as monstrous. Tsunami, Helen’s youngest daughter, is also negatively affected by her elite colonial education, although in a different way from Tara. Tsunami values a wide range of English literature, simply for the enjoyment it brings her. This interest is still problematical, however, as her absorption in the English language, at home, at school, and in fiction, teaches her to despise the local Sinhalese language and its literature, despite the inclusion of Sinhalese subjects in the secondary-school curriculum in the lead-up to independence. Gooneratne critiques the bigotry, arrogance, and resentment of Tsunami, which, like the domestic aspirations of her sister, was typical of women educated in the elite colonial schools, particularly during this transitional period. In 1945, as the narrator points out, “the Sinhala language was established throughout the island as the medium of education in all classes below standard V” (54). This was not the case in the elite upper schools at this time, although students were expected to attend one subject per day in the Sinhalese medium. Tsunami reacts very badly to this imposition, despite her timely graduation into the upper sector, which thus saves her from the full impact of the change. She says dreadful things to her private Sinhalese tutor, Mr. Gamalath, who is employed by her father. She tells him that his language is “okay,” if you want ‘to communicate with the servants [.. . ] but studying it is a complete waste of time,” and she frequently avoids his lessons (55). She also tells a poetry teacher at school that “Sinhala is a dead language. It’s deader than Latin, and isn’t half so interesting,” which causes this poor idealistic young teacher to burst into tears (55). In this sense, Tsunami is an imperialist girlmonster, who is spoilt, “unrepentant,” and who shows “no sign of contrition” (55). Through Tsunami, Gooneratne parodies and critiques the prejudices that many Sinhalese elites expressed in this era toward the non-colonial culture and to the Sinhalese language. Tsunami’s attitude is horrendous yet unsurprising, given the elite schools’ position with regard to local languages that existed before this time, as illustrated by the arguments of the European female educators, reviewed earlier in this chapter. Gooneratne’s representation of Tara and Tsunami is revealing. She presents their indoctrination by the imperialist culture as a monstrous flaw in their personalities, which thus challenges the authority of the elite Victorian identities that existed in the colonial era in Ceylon. This also challenges the accepted codes of highbrow femininity and education traditions that were favoured in this era. It questions the glorification of domestic aspiration in

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women, particularly with regard to Tara, whose domestic ambition is trivialized. To some extent, this inverts the angel /monster dichotomy as represented in Victorian fiction, where the ‘angel’ type is unchallenging, westernized, and ultimately contented by domesticity, as opposed to the ‘female monster’ type, who rejects or challenges Victorian codes of feminine comportment. Gooneratne’s depictions of women’s identities are clearly problematic.

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v 3 Combatting Myths Racial and Cultural Identity in Postcolonial Sri Lanka

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H I S C H A P T E R A I M S T O E X P L O R E the way in which The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006) by Yasmine Gooneratne, Mosquito (2007) by Roma Tearne, and July (2001) by Karen Roberts confront issues of civil and racial strife in Sri Lanka during the period of Tamil–Sinhalese conflict. It investigates themes of racial discrimination between the Tamil and Sinhalese people, and also identity, diaspora, and trauma. Each of these texts has a postcolonial agenda insofar as they set out to critique the politics of nationalism in postcolonial Sri Lanka, and to link the politics of nationalism and the crisis in racial relations to Sri Lanka’s colonial history.

Mythology and History Gananath Obeyesekere and K.M. de Silva are among commentators who suggest that the trouble between the Tamil and Sinhalese people existed prior to colonial times: before the arrival of the British in the late eighteenth-century, the Dutch in the seventeenth century, and the Portuguese in the sixteenth century.1 Their theory is based on two of the ancient Buddhist chronicles, the Mahavamsa, transcribed in the sixth century, and its sequel, the Culavamsa. The Culavamsa was first published in the twelfth century, though it was continually extended upon until 1815,2 the year in which the British annexed 1

See Gananath Obeyesekere, “The Vicissitudes of the Sinhala-Buddhist Identity Through Time and Change,” in Sri Lanka: Collective Identities Revisited, ed. Michael Roberts (Colombo: Marga Institute, 1997): 357–61; K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (1981; New Delhi: Penguin, 2005): 78. 2 Christopher Ondaatje, Woolf in Ceylon: An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf 1904–1911 (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2005): 68.

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Kandy, the last-standing indigenous kingdom.3 The first of the chronicles involves the origin myth of the Sinhala people, the tale in which the Buddha makes Vijaya, a Sinhala prince, and his seven hundred followers the protectors of Buddhism and of ‘Lanka’. The chronicle also recounts tales of feudal warfare, battles between Tamil kings (of southern India) and Sinhalese kings (of north-west Indian ancestry). The most famous of these battles is that of the Sinhalese king Duttagamini (161–137 BC ), and his Chola/Tamil adversary, King Elara (205–161 BC ). Elara was a respected monarch who reigned for forty-four years. He fought off challengers for the last fifteen years of his reign, until Duttagamini killed him in a final battle.4 Duttagamini is said to have reclaimed power for the Sinhalese. The tale involves a fundamentalist doctrine, as seen in the dialogue that follows the battle. Duttagamini asks his advisors: “How shall there be any comfort for me, O venerable sirs, since by me was caused the slaughter of a great host numbering millions?” They reply: “From this deed arises no hindrance in thy way to heaven. Only one and a half human beings were slain here by thee, O lord of men. The one had come unto refuges, the other had taken on himself the five precepts. Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts. But as for thee, thou wilt bring glory to the doctrine of the Buddha in manifold ways; therefore cast away care from thy heart, O ruler of men.” 5

Gananath Obeyesekere considers the significance of this discourse. 6 While admitting that it “is the only instance in the Sinhalese chronicles where there is an explicit justification for war,” he is convinced that it reflects a greater theme of racial hostility, which is evident throughout the ancient texts.7 He states: The general message that emerges is everywhere the same: ‘The Sinhalese kings are the defenders of the secular realm and the sâsana [their religion], their opponents are the Tamils.’8 3

De Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 300. Ondaatje, Woolf in Ceylon, 68. 5 Wilhelm Geiger, tr. The Great Chronicle of Ceylon, tr. & ed. Wilhelm Geiger (Mahāvaṃsa and Sinhala, 543 B C E ; tr. 1912; London: Oxford UP , 1934): 55. 6 Obeyesekere, “The Vicissitudes of the Sinhala-Buddhist Identity,” 361. 7 “The Vicissitudes of the Sinhala-Buddhist Identity,” 361. 8 “The Vicissitudes of the Sinhala-Buddhist Identity,” 361. 4

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Obeyesekere does not consider the message of the Duttagamini–Elara story as a minor issue.9 He believes that it has tremendous significance, due to the mythic positioning of Duttagamini as a “saviour of the Sinhalese race and of Buddhism.”10 Obeyesekere reads this story as an early expression of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, which is, in spite of his criticism, the same way in which the Duttagamini victory has been characterized since the nineteenth century by the nationalist Sinhalese elites.11 In A History of Sri Lanka, K.M. de Silva discusses the Culavamsa, the sequel to the Mahavamsa.12 He follows its depictions of medieval conflict between the Tamil and Sinhalese kings, and explores the significance of this for the Sinhalese people and culture. As he explains, Sinhalese hegemony was unsettled throughout this era, due to invasions by southern Indian (Tamil) kings, who colonized the northern dry zone.13 King Magha of Kalingi was the most renowned of these Tamil kings, and also the most despotic. He ruled for twenty-one years (1215–36), and split the island into two dominions: a Tamil Kingdom in the north and a Sinhalese kingdom in the south-west (which was habitually divided).14 De Silva suggests that Magha’s reign was a particularly dark phase in Sri Lanka’s history, and he uses excerpts from the Culavamsa as evidence of this. He considers the following passage, involving a violent assault by Magha and his men: His great warriors oppressed the people, boasting cruelly everywhere, ‘We are Kerala warriors,’ they tore from the people their garments, their ornaments and the like, corrupted the morals of the family which had been observed for ages, cut off hands and feet and the like (of the people), destroyed many houses and tied up cows, oxen, and other (cattle) which they made their own property. After they had put their fetters on the wealthy and the rich people and had tortured them and 9

Obeyesekere, “The Vicissitudes of the Sinhala-Buddhist Identity,” 361. “The Vicissitudes of the Sinhala-Buddhist Identity,” 361. 11 As Neil DeVotta states, “Sinhalese ethnic entrepreneurs [have, since the nineteenth century] appealed to the accounts divisive emotions to portray themselves as defenders of Buddhism and the Sinhalese race”; DeVotta, “Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” in Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia, ed. Michael Edward Brown & Sumit Ganguly (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 2003): 112. 12 De Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 81–85. 13 A History of Sri Lanka, 109. 14 A History of Sri Lanka, 85. 10

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P R O B L E M A T I C I D E N T I T I E S v taken away their possessions, they made poor people of them. They wrecked the image houses, destroyed the cetiyas [monuments of worship], ravaged the viharas [the monasteries] and maltreated the lay brethren. They flogged the children, tormented the five burdens and forced them to do heavy labour. Many books known and famous they tore from their cord and strewed them hither and thither. The beauty, vast, proud cetiyas like the Ratanavali (cetiya) and others which embodied as it were, the glory of the former pious kings, they destroyed by overthrowing them and alas! Many of their bodily relics, their souls as it were, disappear.15

Like the scribe of this tale, de Silva regards “Magha’s rule and its aftermath” as a “watershed in the history of the island.”16 He laments the treatment of the Sinhalese, and the suppression of their culture, which, according to the chronicle, was marginalized until the late-fifteenth century.17 Like Obeyesekere, de Silva uses the ancient Buddhist chronicles to reinforce the popular Sinhalese theory that is based upon this literature: that the modern conflict between Tamil and Sinhalese people is an extension of earlier conflicts and ancient grievances.18 There are writers who contest this idea, however, as revealed in the collection of essays Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict (1990), edited by Jonathan Spencer. These essays question the legitimacy of ancient continuation theories associated with the conflict. They suggest that the twentiethcentury Sri Lankan conflict is based on concepts of ethnic identity that were first introduced in colonial times. The most incisive essay in this collection is “The People of the Lion: Sinhala Identity and Ideology in History and Historiography” by R.A.L.H. Gunawardana. In this comprehensive study, Gunawardana analyses the development of Sinhalese identity and consciousness from the fourth century onwards. His arguments debunk the notion of an ancient and unified Sinhalese community that was in conflict with an ancient and unified Tamil community, as suggested by the story of Duttagamini and Elara.

15

Culavamsa: Being the More Recent Part of the Mahavamsa, ed. & tr. Wilhelm Geiger & C.M. Rickmers (London: Pali Text Society, 1929): 132 (versus 54–59). 16 De Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 85. 17 A History of Sri Lanka, 81–134. 18 See Jonathan Spencer, “Introduction: The Power of the Past,” in Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict, ed. Spencer (London: Routledge, 1990): 3.

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According to Gunawardana, the Mahavamsa chronicles portray elitist identities attached to members of royalty and high birth. They do not project concepts of mass identity, and thus do not relate to our modern understanding of the Tamil and Sinhalese communities in Sri Lanka. He notes: The ideology basic to these myths was not a mass ideology which reflected consciousness at a popular level, but an ideology of the leading elements of society which emphasized their identity, distinguishing their position from the lower orders of society, especially the service castes. At this stage, those brought together by the Sinhala identity did not include all the residents of the island, or all the members of a linguistic group: they were primarily the most influential and powerful families in the kingdom.19

He also finds evidence that complicates the notion that there exists a distinct Sinhalese identity for the elite classes. He points out interrelationships between members of the ancient ruling families, Tamil and Sinhalese. For instance, the character of “Nandhimitta, a general in Dutthagamani’s army, is said to have had an uncle who was a general serving Elara.”20 This and other similar scenarios problematize the theory of an ancient ethnic division. Gunawardana insists that a clear demarcation of Tamil and Sinhalese identities did not occur until the nineteenth century; he argues that it was a product of imperialism, and that it relates directly to the European study of Asian languages. The leader of this study was Max Müller, a German-born British philologist who specialized in Sanskrit. Müller found structural similarities between the Indian and European languages, which were classified as ‘Aryan’, a word derived from the Sanskrit arya, meaning ‘noble’. He outlined this theory in a series of lectures (1861–64) delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London.21 His ideas were popularized by the intelligentsia of Ceylon, who were drawn to the European vanguard. They were most interested in his reference to their homeland in a section of the lectures in which he

19

R.A.L.H. Gunawardana, “The People of the Lion: Sinhala Identity and Ideology in History and Historiography,” in Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict, ed. Jonathan Spencer (London: Routledge, 1990): 55. 20 Gunawardana, “The People of the Lion,” 55. 21 F. Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (1861; London: Longmans, 1871): titlepage.

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classifies some of the “idioms spoken in Iceland and Ceylon as cognate dialects of the Aryan family of languages.”22 Müller’s theory was seen to complement other theories that were circulating in Ceylon at the time, such as Robert Caldwell’s A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856).23 Caldwell claimed that the languages of southern India were distinct from the IndoEuropean languages (located in parts of northern India and Ceylon).24 The southern Indian idioms, he said, belonged to another “family of languages,” which he called “Dravidian,” taken from the Sanskrit dravida, meaning ‘relating to the Tamils’.25 He also said that there was no direct relationship “between the Singhalese language [. .. ] and the language of the Tamilians [the Sri Lankan Tamils],” which thus suggested a distinction between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities.26 Caldwell’s theory was used together with Müller’s to support a new ethnographic Aryan theory, which was promoted in Ceylon by the scholar James D’Alwis, in an essay titled “On the Origin of the Sinhalese language” (1866). He suggested that the Aryan–Dravidian distinction was racial, as related to the collective origins and biology of the people. He drew upon the physical characteristics of the Sinhalese people as evidence of this. They are, he said, “a copper colour [.. .] the colour of the Arya race.’27 He insisted that the “colour and the features” of the Tamils were “distinguishable from those of the Sinhalese.”28 This combination of linguistic and racial theory was well received by his Sinhalese contemporaries, who were attracted to the notion of having an Indo-Aryan pedigree, which connected them to their ancient rulers. This race-based theory was also promoted by the Indian anthropologist M.M. Kunte, who insisted in his Lecture on Ceylon (1879) that there are “only two races in Ceylon – Aryans and Tamilians, the former being divided into the

22

Quoted in Gunawardana, “The People of the Lion,” 72. Robert Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (London: Harrison, 1856). 24 Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar, 42. 25 A Comparative Grammar, 1. 26 A Comparative Grammar, 73. 27 James D’Alwis, “On the Origin of the Sinhalese Language,” Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 4/13 (1866): 50. 28 D’Alwis, “On the Origin of the Sinhalese Language,” 50. 23

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descendents of Indian and Western Aryans.”29 He also made reference to the physical characteristics of the Ceylonese “races.” He insisted that the “forehead, the cheek-bones, the chin, and the lips of the Tamilians are distinctly different from those of the Ceylonese Aryans.”30 By the early twentieth century, the concept of the Sinhalese-Aryan race had permeated the politics of the Sinhalese nationalist movement, which was advocating its religious authority, as a Buddhist party, and supporting an antiTamil discourse.31 The Sinhalese-Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) influenced this movement. He used the term ‘Sinhala-Buddhist’ to distinguish the Sinhala majority and suggested that this group were underprivileged by the colonial regime, which openly favoured Protestant elites. In a scheme to bolster the authority of Buddhists, he employed the “phraseology of anti-Semitism,”32 speaking of “the glorious inheritance of [his] Aryan ancestors, uncontaminated by Semitic and savage ideas.”33 This strange allusion to Semitic ideals discloses the racist face of the Aryan ideology, which had also become prevalent in Europe in the early twentieth century. 34 Dharmapala’s framing of the Aryan race is significant, as he played a major role in the development of modern Sinhala-Buddhist and/or nationalist Ceylonese identity, involving the politics of race, language, and religion. 35 The subject of race gained heightened significance in 1931, when the British government introduced ‘universal franchise’ to Ceylon. This system raised community concerns about methods of ethnic representation in government. The Sinhalese majority preferred the new ‘one person, one vote’ system, whereas the Tamils and other minority groups wanted a system of ‘communal

29

Quoted in Gunawardana, “The People of the Lion: Sinhala Identity and Ideology in History and Historiography,” 73. 30 “The People of the Lion,” 73. 31 “The People of the Lion,” 76. 32 “The People of the Lion,” 76. 33 Anagarika Dharmapala & Ananda W.P. Guruge, Return to Righteousness: A Collection of Speeches, Essays, and Letters of the Anagarika Dharmapala (Colombo: Government of Sri Lanka Department of Cultural Affairs, 1965): 517. 34 Gunawardana, “The People of the Lion,” 76. 35 Gunawardana, “The People of the Lion,” 77; His comment is not connected to the Tamils per se, as they were usually Hindu or Protestant.

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representation,” which would better protect their interests.36 This augmented ethnic tensions between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities in the 1930s and 1940s, which culminated in 1948, the year in which Ceylon gained independence from Britain. Shortly following the inauguration of the Commonwealth government, the newly elected Sinhalese leaders passed the Citizenship Act of 1948, which disqualified most ‘estate’ Tamils from citizenship. The estate Tamils were the Tamil population from southern India who had been employed by the English as plantation workers in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.37 This act was succeeded by the Parliamentary Elections Act of 1949, which excluded the majority of this group (making up twelve percent of the population) from their previously held right to vote. 38 At this time, many of the ‘Ceylonese Tamils’ were unopposed to the decision. They, like the Sinhalese, regarded the ‘Estate Tamils’ as foreigners and/or an unwanted relic of the colonial era.39 The majority of Ceylonese Tamils did not foresee their own marginalization in the new wave of Buddhist politics and linguistic nationalism. Buddhist and linguistic nationalism was prominent in the election campaign of 1956 and in the aftermath of the victory of Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (S LF P ). Bandaranaike had a platform of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism and language reform, which he tied to the politics of anti-colonialism. The election year was the same year as the Buddhist Jayanti (the 2500th anniversary of the Buddha’s death, and the arrival of Prince Vijaya, the mythologized forefather of the Sinhalese people).40 This increased the religious and nationalist fervour of the Sinhalese community, who celebrated their mythologized ownership of the island. The event was hosted by the state; it wedded Buddhism to nationalism, and nationalism 36

Elizabeth Nissan & R.L. Stirrat, “The Generation of Communal Identities,” in Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict, ed. Jonathan Spencer (London: Routledge, 1990): 33. 37 Amita Shastri, “Estate Tamils, the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 and Sri Lankan Politics,” Contemporary South Asia 8.1 (1999): 65–66. 38 Amita Shastri, “Government Policy and the Ethnic Crisis in Sri Lanka,” in Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Michael Edward Brown & Sumit Ganguly (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1997): 138. 39 Nissan & Stirrat, “The Generation of Communal Identities,” 32. 40 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1992): 42.

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to the Sinhalese language, to such an extent that it fashioned national identity as a Sinhalese-Buddhist identity.41 This identity was represented as the authentic character of the nation. As Neil DeVotta recalls in Blowback (2004), Bandaranaike promoted a ‘Sinhala-Only’ policy, with which he pledged to free his nation from the wake of imperialism within just “twenty-four hours” of election.42 The policy would change the official language from English to Sinhalese, the main language of the Sinhalese majority, who made up 70 percent of the population, and who widely supported the plan. While English was the medium of government and higher education, only ten percent of the nation had proficiency in it, meaning that government jobs and tertiary qualifications were limited to an elite minority who had received the privilege of an English education.43 Despite belonging to this class of English-speaking elites, Bandaranaike admonished the social injustices and inequities that the English language had created. He promised social reforms, which he delivered on. The first motion of his government was to pass the ‘Sinhala-Only bill’ of 1956, making Sinhalese the “one official language of Ceylon.”44 Tamil politicians and their constituents were understandably concerned about this bill, which would marginalize their language and a community who were, until this time, dominant in government and the tertiary-education sector.45 This was because of their proficiency in English, which, in spite of their minority status, allowed them privileges in the colonial regime.46 They therefore organized a peaceful protest outside Parliament during the debate on the bill. This protest was interrupted by a group of Sinhala-Only extremists who attacked several protesters. These extremists unleashed the first anti-Tamil riots in Colombo, which soon spread throughout the country. Nearly 150 Tamils were murdered.47

41

Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?, 42. Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (Stanford C A : Stanford UP , 2004): 78. 43 Victor Ivan, Sri Lanka in Crisis: Road to Conflict (Ratmalana: Sarvodaya, 1989): 11. 44 DeVotta, “Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” 123. 45 DeVotta, Blowback, 29. 46 The Tamils’ status, as a privileged minority, is another reason for the Sinhalese majority’s resentment their community. 47 DeVotta, “Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” 124. 42

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The Sinhala-Only policy led to a subsequent outbreak of riots in 1958, which started in northern Ceylon. Elizabeth Nissan and R.L. Stirrat describe the trajectory of this conflict as follows: Tamil activists in the north refused to incorporate the Sinhala “Sri” character on to vehicle number plates and began to paint it out on both private vehicles and vehicles of the Ceylon Transport Board. Sinhala activists retaliated, painting out Tamil language signs in Sinhala dominated areas. A train carrying Tamils who were thought to be on their way to a conference to discuss a further satyagraha,48 was ambushed and the passengers beaten up. Sinhala villagers in the vicinity of the ambush attacked local Tamil shopkeepers and the rioting spread to Colombo and to other urban areas where Tamils were in the minority. In all, up to 400 people were killed and 12,000 made homeless, almost all of them Tamils.49

Several days later, Prime Minister Bandaranaike asked the Governor General to call a State of Emergency, after which new legislation was passed regarding the “reasonable use of Tamil.”50 This legislation allowed the Tamil community to use their own language “in corresponding with the government and in government affairs,” and to “compete for government service examinations,” with the proviso that they learn Sinhalese.51 The requisite regulations to fully implement the bill were not passed, however, due to political upheavals in 1959–60.52 Bandaranaike was assassinated by a disaffected Buddhist monk who was angered by a business dispute. A Mr Wijeyananda Dahanayake replaced him until 1960, when Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Mr Bandaranaike’s widow, was elected to office. She was the first female Prime Minister in history, and a Sinhala-Only advocate. As Neil DeVotta explains, “Mrs. Bandaranaike’s government sought to rigorously implement the Sinhala-Only policy, which was due to take effect on January 1, 1961.”53 This involved a three-year phasing-out of the Tamil 48

Satyagraha: a policy of passive political resistance. Nissan & Stirrat, “The Generation of Communal Identities,” 32. 50 Howard Wriggins, “Appendix 2: The Sinhalese–Tamil Riots of 1958,” in Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy, ed. Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah (London: Tauris, 1986): 145. 51 Wriggins, “Appendix 2: The Sinhalese–Tamil Riots of 1958,” 145. 52 De Votta, “Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” 129. 53 “Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” 129. 49

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language in all areas of government, which forced many Tamils, who had previously dominated the sector, into a state of unemployment.54 She also banned various forms of media and entertainment in Tamil, such as imported “films, magazines, and newspapers,” throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, when her nationalist ambition was raised by the establishment of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka (1972). 55 She, as its first President, was determined to create an independent nation-state, which, as explained in the 1972 constitution, was defined by the Sinhalese language and Buddhist religion.56 This made Tamils feel marginalized and persecuted, and led to the formation of a Tamil youth resistance group in 1972, the ‘Tamil New Tigers’.57 In 1976 the group were renamed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE ) or Tamil Tigers.58 The LTTE was a militant organization which sought the establishment of a separatist state for Tamils in the north-east of Sri Lanka, a “Free, Sovereign, Secular, Socialist State of Tamil Eelam.”59 The group launched its first major attack in 1983, ambushing a Sinhalese Army patrol and killing thirteen soldiers in Jaffna (a port city on the northernmost tip of Sri Lanka).60 This offensive triggered a vicious spate of anti-Tamil riots in the capital of Colombo, in a period now referred to as ‘Black July’. The outcome was horrific: “Tamil businesses were looted and burned, thousands became refugees, and between 400 and 2000 Tamils were murdered.”61 It was a turning point in the trajectory of the crisis, as it drove thousands of Tamil survivors, who feared for

54

According to DeVotta, “In 1956, 30 percent of the Ceylon administrative service, 50 percent of clerical service, 60 percent of engineers and doctors, and 40 percent of the armed forces were Tamil. By 1970 those numbers had plummeted to 5 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent, and 1 percent, respectively”; “Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” 129. 55

“Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” 129. “Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” 129. 57 Stuart Notholt, Fields of Fire: An Atlas of Ethnic Conflict (Leicester: Matador, 2008): 5. 58 Notholt, Fields of Fire: An Atlas of Ethnic Conflict, 5. 59 De Votta, “Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” 134. 60 Kledja Mulaj, Violent Non-State Actors in World Politics (New York: Columbia U P , 2010): 396. 61 De Votta, “Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” 135. 56

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their own lives, to support the fight for Tamil Eelam (a separatist Tamil state).62 This period marked the beginning of a civil war between the LTTE and the Sinhalese government. It ended in May of 2009 when the Sinhalese Army conquered an area that was annexed by the LTTE . To protect this land from the army’s assault, the LTTE forced Tamil civilians to create a ‘human shield’ around the perimeter of the conflict area. They also prevented people from leaving the land. This received wide coverage in the international news media, as did their ultimate defeat. According to the Media Centre for National Security, at least two hundred and fifty ‘Tigers’ were killed in the attack. This included all of their leaders, who were regarded as “top fighters and political cadres.”63 The government claims to have freed seventy-two thousand civilians from the war zone.64 It also accuses the LTTE of terrorist activities, kidnappings, hijackings, the use of suicide bombers, and child labour.65

Nationalism and Modernity Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee are leading voices in the study of nationalism, its origins, and its expression in modern nation-states. They focus on the significance of print capitalism and vernacular languages in the development of modern national consciousness. They also explore the relationship between colonialism and nationalism in the postcolonial era. However, while Anderson believes that all nationalism is a product of European modernity, Chatterjee believes that anti-colonial nationalisms are unique, and different from those that exist in Europe. In Imagined Communities (1983) Anderson defines the modern nationstate as an “imagined political community” 66 – “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow mem62

De Votta, “Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka,” 135. A B C /A F P /Reuters, “Sri Lanka Declares Final Victory Over Rebels,” A B C News Online (18 May 2009), http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/18/2574158.htm (accessed 18 January 2011). 64 A B C /A F P /Reuters, “Sri Lanka Declares Final Victory Over Rebels.” 65 Notholt, Fields of Fire: An Atlas of Ethnic Conflict, 5. 66 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991): 6. Further page references are in the main text. 63

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bers, meet them, or even hear of them,” and yet in their mind’s eye they imagine a “communion” (6). They imagine a community to which they belong: a community that exceeds real social networks. Anderson traces the development of this extended consciousness to the print revolution, which occurred in Europe in the seventeenth century. This new capitalist media embraced certain bourgeois vernaculars for their utility, such as High German, and the King’s English, which were soon recognized as unifying “fields of exchange and communication” (44). Latin, the language of old Christendom, was steadily usurped by the efficacy of print languages, which unified the bourgeois classes in the cities and regions of Europe. These classes came to “visualise in a general way the existence of thousands and thousands like themselves”: imagined communities, and neighbouring communities, of educated bourgeois elites (77). According to Anderson, the post-Enlightenment bourgeoisie were the first classes to experience an imagined community in this sense. The significance of linguistic identity was extended in the nineteenth century, a time in which the dynasties of Europe embraced linguistic nationalism. As Anderson explains, the “Romanovs discovered they were great Russians, Hanoverians that they were English, Hohenzollerns that they were Germans [. .. ] and so forth” (85; italics mine). They adopted print languages (which were not necessarily their first languages) as the official languages of their respective royal houses, in an effort to naturalize, secure, and extend their own authority (85). The British mission of ‘anglicization’ is a prime example of this phenomenon, and the most extensive of its type. As Anderson argues, the policy of anglicization “produced thousands of Pals [sic] all over the world,” imaginary communities and/or fraternities in Asia and Africa, and also in the “white colonies,” “Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa” (93). In each of these locations, Britain’s colonial subjects were united by the English language, acculturated by this language and turned into patriots by it. Anderson believes that the success of nineteenth-century linguistic nationalisms was built upon the “philological-lexicographic revolution,” which is to say, the study and classification of language, together with the compilation of dictionaries. This trend spread the conviction that languages (in Europe at least) were, so to speak, the personal property of quite specific groups – their daily speakers and readers – and moreover that these groups, imagined as

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This theory is clearly relevant to the Sri Lankan experience. As illustrated in the first two chapters of this book, the Ceylonese bourgeoisie were particularly loyal to the British, with whom they identified as a product of their elitist English-language education. The English language led many in this community to see themselves as part of a British fraternity, which was demarcated from the other non-English speaking communities of Ceylon. They were also, as suggested earlier in this chapter, particularly influenced by the philological classifications of the Ceylonese languages, which divided Sinhalese and Tamil into the Aryan and Dravidian families. This distinction allowed anti-colonial nationalists to segregate the identities of the Tamil and Sinhalese people in the late-nineteenth century. Anderson believes that postcolonial nationalisms are directly connected to the “official imperial nationalisms” that came before them ( 113). This is because they are founded within the anti-colonial politics of colonized “intelligentsias’: communities who were influenced and inspired by the models of European and American nationalism. Their bilingual standing allowed them this knowledge: Bilingualism meant access, through the European language-of-state, to modern Western culture in the broadest sense, and, in particular, to the models of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation-state produced elsewhere in the course of the nineteenth century. ( 116)

The colonial intelligentsias imagined the prospect of self-determination and self-government within these existing European models, which functioned as templates for anti-colonial policies and mechanisms of government in the postcolonial era. Partha Chatterjee begins The Nation and Its Fragments (1993) with a question: “Whose Imagined Community?” It challenges the crux of Anderson’s thesis, his theory that all nationalisms are products of European modernity. Chatterjee suggests that Anderson has adopted a limiting and neo-imperialist stand: If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial

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enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonised.67

Chatterjee rejects Anderson’s premise as imperialistic and overly simplified. In his view, it fails to recognize the complexity and difference of anti-colonial nationalisms, born in the colonial era, and persisting thereafter. Chatterjee believes that anti-colonial nationalisms are split into two distinct domains: “outer domains,” which imitate Western models of “statecraft,” “economical [sic] practice” and innovation; and “inner domains’/ “spiritual domains,” which “bear essential marks of cultural identity” (religion, language, and pre-colonial custom).68 He believes that the “spiritual domain” is the more critical of the two, for its firm assertion of difference. As he contends, it is from the spiritual domain that postcolonial “nationalism launches its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a modern nation that is [. .. ] not Western.”69 Chatterjee says that Anderson is “entirely correct” for his recognition of the significance of print capitalism in the development of “modern national languages” and linguistic identities. He also agrees with Anderson in regard to the significance of bilingual intelligentsias in the development of anti-colonial nationalism, though his reasoning for this is different. He attributes the political success of the bilingual intelligentsias to their control over their inner linguistic domain, through which they projected their own cultural identity: The bilingual intelligentsia came to think of its own language as belonging to that inner domain of cultural identity, from which the colonial intruder had to be kept out; language therefore became the zone over which the nation had to declare its sovereignty and then to transform in order to make it adequate in the modern world. 70

Chatterjee suggests that the expression of postcolonial linguistic nationalism is rooted in culture, the revival of traditional art, literature, and drama. His evidence for this is the Bengali culture of drama and fiction in India. This, he believes, is the substance that really affected the postcolonialist and nationalist imagination. 67

Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton N J : Princeton UP , 1993): 5. 68 Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 6. 69 The Nation and its Fragments, 6. 70 The Nation and its Fragments, 7.

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Chatterjee’s theory can obviously be applied to the nationalist politics of postcolonial Sri Lanka, as projected through culture. For example, Sinhalese intelligentsias used the Buddhist chronicles for political gain, to generate a new national consciousness combining language and religion.

Representations of Conflict and Identity in Literature Yasmine Gooneratne’s The Sweet and Simple Kind (2009), Karen Roberts’s July (2002), and Roma Tearne’s Mosquito (2007) belong to a group of novels by expatriate Sri Lankan writers that narrativize the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict. The best-known example of such books is undoubtedly Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000), which won the Governor-General’s Award in Canada. Other notable examples are Funny Boy (1994) and Cinnamon Gardens (1999) by Shyam Selvadurai, Monsoons and Potholes (2006) by Manuka Wijesingha, and Love Marriage (2008) by V.V. Ganeshananthan, a novel that will be discussed in Chapter 5. The Sweet and Simple Kind, July, and Mosquito have been selected here for their representation of the Tamil– Sinhalese conflict as a legacy of colonialism, and as a problem relating to the postcolonial conflict over language. The Sweet and Simple Kind and July are also similar inasmuch as they trope ‘star-crossed love’ and familial conflicts as metaphors for the national crisis in Sri Lanka. The discussion will follow the trajectory of the modern racial conflict in Sri Lanka.

The Sweet and Simple Kind Yasmine Gooneratne’s The Sweet and Simple Kind traces the trajectory of socio-political tensions in Ceylon in the 1950s. As explained in the last chapter, this novel follows the journey of two cousins, Latha and Tsunami Wijesinha, from their childhood in the late 1930s and 40s, to their coming of age (at university) in the late 1950s. The preceding chapter discussed Gooneratne’s representation of domestic identities in the colonial era. The following discussion will explore her representation of ethno-linguistic identities and racial politics in the lead-up to, and during, the postcolonial era: the first years of the modern Tamil–Sinhalese conflict. The cousins’ university experiences trace the rise of linguistic nationalism, along with aspects of the class, caste, and race prejudices that led to the riots of 1958. Indeed, there is a synecdochic relationship between the girls’ personal experiences and the political struggles occurring at the time. The text is also metonymic, since many of the characters involved are used to represent the views of their respective classes,

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castes or communities. These literary techniques are used to deconstruct the politics of Ceylonese prejudices. The politics of language is a heated issue at Latha and Tsunami’s university, so much so that the arts community is divided into two ‘hostile factions’: the O-Fac (the Faculty of Oriental Studies) and the Kultur (the faculty of Western Cultures).71 These are terms that were used by students of the University of Ceylon (upon which this university is based) in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.72 In Gooneratne’s story, the O-Fac students are aggressors; they use the term Kultur scornfully to insult the character of westernized elites, such as Tsunami and Latha, who is dubbed the “Queen of Kultur” (284). Latha, the more innocent of the two girls, is genuinely surprised and confronted by this criticism. It seems, to her, to be “petty” and strange in an institution that specializes in English, which is why she is there ( 284). When she starts to think about it more carefully, however, she realizes that the issue is bigger than herself, her friends, and their campus. She realizes that the factional hostility is a reflection of the social and political changes that are occurring outside of the university grounds. This is a formative moment in Latha’s development, a turning point in which she is awakened to the linguistic tensions that were developing in the mid-to-late 1950s.73 Gooneratne informs her readers about the politics of language throughout this scenario, portraying the university as a microcosm of the national polity. The university is a symbolic site for this reflection due to the exclusion of non-English speakers from the tertiary sector, which adversely affected employment opportunities for the nation’s Sinhalese-speaking majority, as well as the non-English-speaking Tamil and Muslim minorities. While the Faculty of Oriental Studies was a significant component of the university, there was also a university entrance exam, which was in English from 1942 (the year that the university was opened) until 1960, when lessons in Sinhala were extended because of the Sinhala-Only policy, implemented by Prime

71

Yasmine Gooneratne, The Sweet and Simple Kind, 285. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text. 72 Percy Colin-Thomé, Ismeth Raheem & Michael Roberts, People Inbetween: The Burghers and the Middle Class in the Transformations Within Sri Lanka 1790s–1960s (Ratmalana: Sarvodaya, 1989): 296. 73 Ivan, Sri Lanka in Crisis: Road to Conflict, 9.

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Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.74 As the University of Ceylon was the only university in Ceylon at the time, the entrance exam was widely criticized for its discrimination against non-English speakers, who could not afford a private education in English.75 Students in the Oriental Faculty would have resented the English-speaking elites because of their advantages in the university sector. Another reason for the O-Fac students’ factional hostility toward ‘the Kultur’ is the prejudice of the high-caste English-speaking Sinhalese elites, which exists in the university, and the nation, at this time. Gooneratne reveals the various prejudices of this group and critiques them extensively through the satirical inclusion of a monster-woman called ‘Mrs Raptor’. Mrs Raptor, the head warden of a women’s hall of residence, is renowned for her bigotry. She invites Latha and Tsunami to be her “special guests” for dinner when she hears of their family’s prestigious standing. During this meal, Mrs Raptor, believing that she is in the company of proper “high-casters,” raises her concerns about the “inferior castes,” suggesting that their presence on campus is threatening the future of “good high caste” students (298). “Caste counts,” she claims, though her argument is supported by little more than the derogatory assertion that “low caste people smell” (297–300). After critiquing the “inferior castes,” she moves to the issue of race. “Tamils,” she moans, “even high caste Tamils, smell of gingelly oil, it comes from the food they have been eating all their lives long, up there in Jaffna. And of course, they don’t keep themselves clean, which is not surprising when you consider that they are basically coolies used to living in mud huts.” (298)

Mrs Raptor is a caricature and parody of the conservative upper-caste Sinhalese racist that existed in the 1950s. As Gooneratne admits, she is “based on a real head warden” from a women’s hall of residence, whom she met when attending the University of Ceylon.76 Mrs Raptor inspires a didactic discussion between the cousins and their friend, Amali, which informs the reader about the extent of race and class prejudice among Sri Lankan elites. It also reflects the more egalitarian attitudes of the younger generation of elites to which the girls belong. Latha struggles 74

Ivan, Sri Lanka in Crisis: Road to Conflict, 9; Ratwatte, “Reversing Language in Education Policy: Is It the Way Forward for Sri Lanka in the 21st Century?,” 11. 75 Sri Lanka in Crisis: Road to Conflict, 10. 76 Yasmine Gooneratne, Email, 28 May 2007.

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to accept Mrs Raptor’s politics as being a cultural norm, as opposed to Tsunami, who claims to be well-informed about the problems of racism in their nation. As proof of this, she cites the Citizenship Act of 1948 (312), which discriminates against ‘Estate Tamils’ (the migrant Tamil workers who emigrated from southern India in the colonial era) in the story as it did in reality. Following the appointment of this act, many Tamils were deprived of their citizenship and franchise rights.77 It was decided that they could only have citizenship reinstated by proving that their paternal grandfather was born in Ceylon, a ruling that presented sexism and xenophobia in the guise of anticolonial reformism.78 “Just think about it,” laments Tsunami, “at one moment they were part of a society making a massive contribution to our major industry, the next moment they found themselves stateless!” ( 312). Tsunami also alerts her friends to the racial prejudice that existed in the proposal to make Sinhala the official language, which happened in 1956. She is disinclined to accept the primacy of chauvinism in her own family, however, which is where her friend Amali steps in. Amali speaks of the everyday prejudices of the Sinhalese majority who have climbed on the nationalist bandwagon – Buddhists, like Latha’s mother, who disapproves of “Western ways of behaving” (30), and politicians, like Tsunami’s father, Rowland, who changes his elite colonial image to secure a Cabinet position. He is modelled on the young S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. Amali’s opinion challenges the cousins’ naivety, while at the same time exposing political disjunctions between the older and younger generations. Gooneratne further explores the distinction between these generations of elites through an ill-fated romance scenario involving Tsunami and a young history lecturer, Dr Daniel Rajaratnam, who is from a high-caste Tamil family. Gooneratne uses this situation to illustrate the racial prejudices that are held by the older generations in the elite sectors of the Tamil and the Sinhalese cultures. She satirizes the bigotry of Daniel’s Tamil parents and of 77

De Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 605. Most applications were rejected outright, since to this day there are “ 85,000 Tamils of Indian origin living in Sri Lanka. They possess neither Indian citizenship nor Sri Lankan citizenship, have no access to basic services such as education, and do not enjoy their economic, social and cultural rights”; UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, “Concluding observations of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Sri Lanka,” in U N Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Geneva: United Nations, 1998): 2. 78

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Tsunami’s Sinhalese father, who each reject the young couple’s wish to marry because of their racial differences. Gooneratne suggests that this opposition is the product of the changing political climate, which has created tensions between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, rather than any long-held prejudice. The young adults in this story are both unprepared for their parents’ sudden and extreme resistance to the prospect of their marital union. They are unaware of how these political tensions have affected their parents’ perspectives. The reaction of Daniel’s father and mother accentuates the tense and volatile nature of racial sentiment at this time, which was quite different from the more accommodating intercultural feeling that existed in the colonial era. Daniel naively assumes that his educated father will be pleased by his decision to marry Tsunami, in spite of her Sinhalese family, a problem which, he thinks, is counterbalanced by her mother’s Indian Tamil background and class standing.79 He also thinks that his father will be won over by the fact that she is a Christian rather than a Buddhist, though he is wrong on both counts. His father explodes with rage upon hearing his case.80 The narrator states: Daniel encountered, for the first time what he had never before heard verbally expressed, his father’s deep-rooted distrust of Sinhalese Southerners [… and] nothing Daniel could say on the side of reason could change his mind. (405)

Attempts to reason with his mother are equally futile: As she says, “Christian or Hindu, what difference does it make? The father is a Sinhalese. What have your Appa and I done that such a misery should come upon us! What sin have we committed?” (406)

She closes her argument with the declaration that she could never survive the sorrow and the shame of having a Sinhalese daughter-in-law enter her house, she might as well drink poison or insecticide immediately and put an end to her life. Alter-

79

As explained in the previous chapter, Tsunami’s mother, Helen, is an upper-class Tamil who was born and bred in India. She moves to Ceylon after marrying Rowland, Tsunami’s father, though she returns to India and divorces him when he turns to politics. He joins a fundamentalist party that supports anti-Tamil policies. 80 As mentioned earlier, Sri Lanka has two distinct Tamil communities: the Indian Estate Tamils; and the Ceylonese (now Sri Lankan) Tamils, whose history goes back to ancient Lankan kings.

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natively, she said, she would follow the example of Mahatma and fast until death. (406)

The extreme reactions of both of Daniel’s parents parody and critique the senselessness of their racial prejudice. The reaction of Tsunami’s father, Rowland Wijesinha, also exposes the irrationality of the Sri Lankan racial conflict, but in a different way from the reaction of Daniel’s parents. Rowland instantly rejects the prospect of Tsunami’s marriage on the basis of a newly invented image (involving race and religion) which he has constructed for his own political gain. He was once more British than the British and particularly tolerant of other races (his first wife, Helen, was an Indian). After deciding to run for election, however, he re-invents himself as a Sinhalese-Buddhist and fundamentalist. He replaces his Western suits with traditional Buddhist outfits, which he wears for political advantage. In truth, he is the essence of what Daniel’s father despises: “Sinhalese chicanery and duplicity” (205). And, whether or not he believes in his own propaganda, he simply cannot condone his daughter’s involvement with a Tamil: to do so would be political suicide. Rowland’s intolerance of their romance highlights the postcolonial political dimension of the Sri Lankan conflict, suggesting that it was manufactured by members of postcolonial political elites, like Rowland, who is, as mentioned, a parody of Gooneratne’s relative, the Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. Like the latter, Rowland switches political allegiances in the 1950s. He also gains the popular vote with his party’s campaign promise to change the national language from English to Sinhalese. His antics critique the chauvinism of the elitist Sinhalese politicians who emerged in this period.81 Gooneratne explores the chauvinism of postcolonial politics further in another romance scenario, which involves Tsunami and her second suitor, Sujit Roy. Sujit is a young Indian entrepreneur, without Tamil connections. When he approaches Rowland to ask for Tsunami’s hand in marriage he is instantly rejected. Despite his wealth and Cambridge education, Rowland decides that Sujit is a gold digger hoping to “storm the citadel of class and caste privilege” (553). Through this episode, Gooneratne explores the multifarious nature of Rowland’s elitist Sinhalese bigotry, this particular aspect of which is a legacy of the colonial era, in which class and caste were important social determinants (553).

81

Rowland is not the Prime Minister in this story, but he is in his party.

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Gooneratne also comments on the patriarchal tyranny of his breed, through this and another scenario, which follows, wherein Rowland is shot and fatally wounded.82 Immediately following this incident, Ranil, Tsunami’s brother, replaces their father as the new head of the ‘clan’. He then calls a family meeting in which he informs Tsunami that she is to be written out of the will, for being involved “not just once but twice, with men who are not welcome in this family […] unwelcome because […] they are not socially acceptable persons” (594). The irony is that Ranil is regularly involved sexually with “unsuitable women” (Indian-Tamil workers from their family tea estate), which thus conveys an inconsistency between what is acceptable for men and what is acceptable for women. Gooneratne suggests that the wild chauvinism of this ruling clan was a male-dominated affair, which thus exposes an interrelationship between sexism and racism. This latter connection is particularly evident in the chapter titled “Plantation Hospitality,” which involves a house party, hosted by Ranil, the new patriarch. He invites only men to his traditional soirée and pampers them with the delights of his estate. On the final night, he plans a dinner in which twelve young Tamil women (workers from his tea-estate) provide his silver service in semi-nudity. This group includes a set of virginal twins who were not previously informed of the ‘dress code’ or of the requisite service. The arrangement spins rapidly out of control when a guest decides to maul and violate one of the twins. In desperation, the other twin stabs the attacker to save her sister, which thus results in a formal inquiry. The prologue of this chapter is particularly didactic. It summarizes the tradition of ‘plantation hospitality’. It explains, for instance, that landowners of the colonial era exercised manorial and seigneurial rights over the workers of their properties, especially in relation to sexual matters. (626)

This explains Ranil’s despotism, corruption, and misogyny as the continuation of colonial traditions in a postcolonial era. This again intimates hypocrisy among Sinhalese elites in the early postcolonial period. Another way in which Gooneratne critiques Sinhalese nationalism is through her account of the 1958 riots. Gooneratne offers a postcolonial “resistance telling” of the riots, which differs from the official storyline and is

82

This is another allusion to the life of Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.

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critical of the government.83 It rearranges the sequence of actual events, and includes incidents that are not mentioned elsewhere. In her story, these riots are caused by a government plan to relocate a group of Tamil labourers from Trincomalee in the island’s northeast to another town, East Padaviya. This plan, which conflates several state-planned colonization schemes which were hatched between 1954 and 1962,84 provokes a gang of Sinhalese extremists, who got it into their heads that they had to defend their motherland from a group of marauding Tamils [.. . by] looting Tamil homes, raping Tamil women, and beating up Tamil labourers and public officers. (565)

Following this aggression, their hysteria spreads to Colombo, where “murderous mobs calling themselves Sinhalese patriots […] patrol the streets […] slaughtering anyone suspected of harbouring fleeing Tamils” (575). The riots continue for five days, until 27 May, when the Prime Minister finally calls a State of Emergency. Like many critics, Gooneratne suggests that the delay in the official reaction to the crisis was a result of the Sinhalese government’s racial bias. She suggests that the government arrested non-violent Tamil protesters before approaching murderous Sinhalese mobs. She also presents the ‘Sinhala-Only’ policy as the cause of these riots, and suggests that it was Sinhalese extremists who were most responsible for the violence and genocide that took place at this time. She depicts the event as a great tragedy, which altered the national consciousness of Tamil and Sinhalese people alike, victims and bystanders who questioned the ethics of the state. One of the unofficial incidents that Gooneratne describes as having occurred at this time is a Sinhalese ‘language test’. This does not exist in official accounts of the 1958 riots. A similar trial is described in Karen Roberts’s July, a novel about the 1983 riots, which suggests that ‘language tests’ may have occurred at other stages of the conflict. In Gooneratne’s story, hooligans are

83

This is a variant of the term ‘resistance narrative’, which is the fragmentation of conventional narrative paradigms (as in magical realism) or other forms of resistance to official storylines. See Joshua Atkinson, “Analyzing Resistance Narratives at the North American Anarchist Gathering,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 30.3 (July 2006): 251. 84 These were known as ‘Gal Oya’ projects. Robert Muggah, Relocation Failures in Sri Lanka: A Short History of Internal Displacement and Resettlement (London: Zed, 2008): 176.

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stopping people in cars and on bikes, and ordering them to speak a Sinhala sentence, if anyone fails the test, or dares to refuse he gets beaten up, or stabbed. (565)

The importance of this incident for Gooneratne is its focus on the linguistic conflict, which she places at the centre of the crisis. Gooneratne uses this scenario to make a special point of the dangers that existed for anyone who was not fluent in Sinhalese at this time, which includes some of the protagonists’ elite friends who are Sinhalese yet who only speak English. Like the teen protagonists in Roberts’s July, which will now be discussed, these privileged characters become vulnerable because of their westernization, which had hitherto protected them from the racism in their culture, albeit by giving them superior social rank.

July July, by Karen Roberts, starts in 1963, just five years on from where The Sweet and Simple Kind concludes. Like The Sweet and Simple Kind, July looks at the growth of the internecine conflict from a long ranging viewpoint, tracing the lives of two families and their neighbours over a period of twenty years. Through this frame it explores the social and racial prejudices that led to ‘Black July,” the Sri Lankan race riots of 1983. Like Gooneratne, Roberts tropes the personal as political, using themes of star-crossed love and of familial conflict as metaphors for the national crisis. The setting is Araliya Gardens, a residential court in Colombo, which appears to embody the essence of suburban harmony, as imagined in the 1960s by proto-British landscapers. Its residents are made up of Sinhalese, Tamil, and Burgher families who all live in “pretty houses” and socialize frequently in their “nice middle class” cul-de-sac.85 It is described as a modernized “garden of Eden’: Unlike the Galle Road where only people and vendors and confusion grew, down the side roads there were bougainvillea, Araliya, mango and of course kottan trees, under which one always found a flat rock or stone for cracking kottans open. There were manicured hedges, flower beds ringed with upside down, half buried beer bottles and nightblooming jasmine blooming up people’s gates. (8)

85

Karen Roberts, July (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001): 7. Further page references are in the main text.

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This depiction of urban tranquillity is rapidly destabilized, however, by the imperialist prejudices of the characters in the community who are critical and suspicious of non-Western identities.86 People of various races, religions, and cultures are accepted in this community, but only if they meet certain standards of westernization, benchmarked by the characters of Deirdre and Ed Jobsz and Enid and Stanley Silva. Deirdre and Ed, the Dutch Burghers, are appropriate because of their Western heritage and complexion. They are the products of various intermarriages between the Ceylonese and the Dutch invaders, who had pale skin and blue eyes, unlike the Portuguese Burghers who were swarthy and therefore looked down upon. (12)

Enid and Stanley, the Sinhalese Buddhists, are similarly fitting, as they are of the educated class, which meant that they both spoke Sinhalese and perfect English [. .. ] Enid was fair skinned and pretty [. . . ] Stanley was not so fair but made up for it with his perfect manners and excellent job. (11)

These couples are suited to Araliya Gardens because of racist Western ideals, which are founded partly on the pseudo-science of racial supremacy (favouring white skin) and partly on the appreciation of Western knowledge, both legacies of the colonial experience. The colonial predilections of this community are explained further when Violet and Bala, a Tamil couple, enter the neighbourhood. 87 Deirdre and Ed have reservations about Tamils. However, when they discover that Bala is an English teacher at a prestigious school, and that his wife wears dresses, they deem them instantly “fit for friendship” (12). Stanley and Enid have similar prejudices. “Tamils!” they think. “Of all the neighbours they could have had!” (11). Their attitudes change, however, when Violet and Bala move in. the first thing they carried into the house was a statue of the Virgin Mary. Christian Tamils were not so bad as Hindu Tamils, they decided. (11) 86

Araliya Gardens is based on the neighbourhood where Roberts was raised. Roberts “was eighteen years old in ‘Black July’ 1983, when the race riots occurred in which Sinhalese mobs were incited by elements connected with the Government then in power to torture and kill Tamil residents of Colombo”; Yasmine Gooneratne, “Karen Roberts,” in Celebrating Sri Lankan Women’s English Writing, ed. Yasmine Gooneratne (Colombo: Women’s Education & Research Centre, 2002): 360. 87 For some reason this couple are not given a surname.

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The reactions of these couples are examples of colonially inspired snobberies, which allowed Tamils into society on the basis of Western education, comportment, and religion, qualities that were seen to supersede the problematic of their “swarthy” ancestry. Roberts suggests that the prejudices of her characters had certain benefits for elite race relations at this time; as she demonstrates, it is the legacy of imperialism that allows these couples (Burgher and Sinhalese) to become good friends with their Tamil neighbours. She even suggests that their attitudes about race are progressive for the time, by juxtaposing their multicultural friendships against the extensive intolerance of others who live outside of their community. Enid’s mother, for instance, who lives outside, disapproves of her daughter’s and son-in-law’s inter-racial friendships. She is a traditionalist Sinhalese bigot, who looks down upon anyone who is not like herself, a high-caste Sinhalese Buddhist. This includes both Deirdre and Ed (the Burghers) and Violet and Bala (the Tamils), the latter two especially. She thinks that Tamils will corrupt her grandchildren and bring bad luck. Stanley, Enid, and their friends dismiss the views of Enid’s mother as snobbish and out of place in their modern community, which makes them liberal by comparison. Roberts highlights the problems of this moral high ground, however, by suggesting that the community (with the exception of Bala, the Tamil teacher) lives in a fool’s paradise. In spite of the friendships that are accepted in this westernized neighbourhood, Roberts’s characters (particularly the Sinhalese characters, Enid and Stanley) never fully rid themselves of their previously learned prejudices against other ethnic groups. Roberts underlines this irony when Stanley praises his friend Bala: “Bala’s […] the nicest, most decent person we know,” he says, “and I don’t care if he happens to be a Tamil” (53), as if Bala’s Tamilness would be a problem if he weren’t such a great guy. Enid, his wife, is also satirized for inconsistencies. While she defends Bala, in conversations with her mother, it is revealed that she actually shares some of her mother’s fears about Tamils. She worries that Bala will bring bad luck to her annual New Year celebration, simply by attending. She hides this from Stanley, for fear of seeming “small-minded,” irrational, and unenlightened (53). Roberts focuses on the inconsistency of this couple as a way of exploring the problematic of westernization, which concealed racial prejudices in this era, between 1960 and 1970. Roberts juxtaposes her story about the community of Araliya Gardens with a critical review of Sri Lankan race relations in the postcolonial era, which

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works to contextualize the attitudes of her characters belonging to ethnic minorities: the Tamil couple, Bala and Violet, and the Burgher couple, Deirdre and Ed. She suggests that the 1970s were a challenging time for minorities, who were alienated by the politics of Sinhala nationalism. And, she identifies the move to republicanism in 1972 as a key agent of the modern ethnic crisis. As she explains, 1972 was the year that Ceylon officially became Sri Lanka. The Democratic Republic of. Not that that meant anything. It only made minorities feel even more like minorities. It was a – Sinhalese name. (37)

This criticism alludes to the exclusive politics of language and identity that was promoted at this time, chiefly by the new Sri Lankan constitution. This document reaffirmed the Official Language Act of 1956, and it promised the sovereignty of Sinhala Buddhists.88 It stated: The Republic of Sri Lanka shall give to Buddhism the foremost place and accordingly it shall be the duty of the state to foster and protect Buddhism.89

As K.M. de Silva argues, Tamils were disturbed by this rhetoric; feeling that it confirmed their exclusion from the new nationalist identity, they denounced it as an act of discrimination.90 De Silva, like many other critics, including Asoka Bandarage and Gāmini Samaranāyaka, identifies the shift to republicanism as a political junction, which ignited the politics of Tamil separatism.91 Another way in which Roberts engages with the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict is by exploring its relation to the history of colonialism. As her omniscient narrator states, Everyone knew that it [the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict] went further back than a few years, a few nationalist governments, and a few hurt feelings [.. . ]. Some people were of the view that it was the fault of the British. […] Most agreed that the first real concerns about ethnic groups living together harmoniously and being treated fairly were 88

Asoka Bandarage, The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka: Terrorism, Ethnicity, Political Economy (New York: iUniverse, 2009): 64. 89 Cited in Bandarage, The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka. 90 De Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 674. 91 A History of Sri Lanka; Bandarage, The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka, 64; Gāmiṇi Samaranāyaka, Political Violence in Sri Lanka, 1971–1987 (New Delhi: Gyan, 2008): 173.

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In this section, Roberts presents a number of ideas and criticisms. She implies that the problems between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities were related to the colonial experience, but that the British contained them. She suggests that the British acted as ‘mediators and moderators’ who constitutionalized ethnic harmony, which is accurate: the colonial constitutions had clauses, which protected the rights of minorities.92 She suggests that the minorities of Sri Lanka were entirely dependent on the partiality of their colonial arbitrators, without whom they were lost, displaced, and powerless. Roberts expresses an especial sympathy for the westernized Tamils, who were marginalized by the politics of language in the postcolonial era: Tamils had always been a diligent race . .. they worked hard, lived frugally and saved frantically so that their children could go to good schools and universities. The children came home armed with hard earned degrees [. . . ]. Far away from the tiny island nation [at prestigious universities], they had been told they could do anything, be anything. They felt lied to [now]. Cheated. .. Educated people like Bala felt like outsiders. (42)

Roberts suggests that the Tamil community were treated unfairly at this time through no fault of their own: they did all the right things in the colonial era, in order to succeed (studying hard in England, etc.), but that these things became outmoded in the postcolonial period, where the politics of linguistic nationalism took over, thus replacing English with Sinhala. She presents the linguistic policy as blatantly discriminatory, and, most particularly, anti-Tamil (42). Roberts, suggesting that the politics of nationalism led to a divided consciousness among Sri Lanka’s Tamil elites, projects this idea through the character of Bala. Bala becomes torn between his two identities: his ethnic identity as a Tamil; and his Western identity, which connects him to the community of Araliya Gardens. He is alerted to the problematic of this duality when discussing politics with his westernized Sinhalese friends: “It was the attitude that rankled, the we and the our that excluded them [Tamils like himself]. Sometimes deliberately. And sometimes not” (42). Upon sensing his ex92

Bandarage, The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka, 64.

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clusion from the group we, he starts to separate himself psychologically from his friends. He begins to identify more with his Tamil identity, and less with his local identity. He begins to regard his friends enviously as They, They [who] didn’t spend sleepless nights trying to foretell a shaky future and worrying about their children. They [who] didn’t feel insecure every time there was an inspection by the education authorities. (42)

Bala’s anxieties again highlight the significance of language in the demarcation of postcolonial Sri Lankan identities. Another way in which Roberts explores the competing allegiances of westernized Tamil elites in this period is by juxtaposing the views of Bala, in relation to his identity, with the attitudes of Violet, his wife. Violet does not feel excluded or even divided by the we in political conversations at Araliya Gardens; she feels that she is a part of this we-grouping as a member of the community and the nation, which suggest that she elevates her local identity, as a westernized elite, over and above her Tamil identity. She, like her neighbours, refers to the separatist Tamil movements as “they.” “Bala,” she says, “why are you getting so passionate about them? It’s not wise, you know. Just let’s go about our business and let them be” (323). She rejects the suggestion, made by Bala, that the Sinhalese Army is a hostile force, and does not identify, in any way, with the separatist movements in the north. “They are not our people,” she tells Bala, “They are thugs who are killing people when there’s no need to” (323). Violet is a pacifist, an optimist, and an idealist, who is committed to the colonial ideal of ethnic harmony. Bala’s concern about the issue of his family’s racial difference is confirmed when Niranjan, his son, becomes romantically involved with Priyanthi, the daughter of Stanley and Enid, his Sinhalese friends. Throughout this scenario, Roberts criticizes the duplicity of Stanley and Enid, who, despite their close relationship with Niranjan’s parents (Bala and Violet), do not accept the relationship of their respective children. “Ordinarily,” we are told, it would have been a match made in heaven. They were the right age […] they were both bright, and they both came from respectable middle-class families. However, Priyanthi was a Sinhalese girl and Niranjan was a Tamil boy and that difference was insurmountable. (218)

This kind of racial double standard is also found in The Sweet and Simple Kind, in the reaction of Daniel’s parents (Tamil) and Tsunami’s father (Sinhalese) to the proposition of their respective marriage. Priyanthi’s mother,

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Enid, does not threaten to commit suicide, as Daniel’s mother does in The Sweet and Simple Kind, but she does ask similar questions. “Why me? What have I done to deserve this?” (276), as if her daughter’s relationship were all about her. She also decides that Niranjan is the “enemy”; “Niranjan who she adored for his gentleness and respected for his devotion to his mother…” is instantly transformed into “that person” because he is Tamil (275). Enid’s caprice suggests that racial tolerance was particularly unstable at this time, even among those who projected masks of tolerance. The fact that she hides the situation from Violet, Niranjan’s mother (also her best friend) shows that she is perhaps ashamed by her intolerance, but not so much that she will overcome it. She interprets Priyanthi’s involvement with Niranjan as an insult to her high-caste Sinhalese identity, and imagines that their relationship would similarly disturb Violet, were she to know of it. She believes that Violet understands the distinction between interracial friendship and interracial romance, as understood by westernized elites. As it happens, she is right, for Violet soon develops her own fears that Niranjan is hiding an unsuitable partner, “a Muslim . . . or a Buddhist” (311). Violet has prejudices that are based on religion, whereas Enid’s prejudices are based on ethnicity and caste. In the light of previous discussions, it would seem that the prejudices of both these women are products of colonial ideologies. Violet’s views reflect the colonially inspired bigotry of westernized Christians, while Enid’s views reflect the ethnographic notion of Sinhalese superiority, which emerged in the latenineteenth century. By highlighting the bigotry and double standard of both these women, Roberts comments on the ubiquitous nature of prejudice in this westernized community. Enid’s husband Stanley is also disturbed by the relationship between Priyanthi and Niranjan, though his reasoning is quite different from that of his wife – as the narrator explains, he is deeply troubled by the prejudice involved: Stanley knew Niranjan would take care of Priyanthi, knew that he would never have to worry about his daughter’s happiness. But he also knew that Bala would never stand for it either, would never allow his son to marry a Sinhalese girl, even if it was the daughter of his best friend. He was too proud of his Tamil heritage, too protective of it, too hurt by the prejudices of an unfair judgemental society. ( 285)

Stanley’s reaction reflects a remorseful understanding of the problems and double standards that plague his society, as well as his sympathy for the predicament of his friend. However, he sees the problem as a national issue

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which it is beyond his power to change. Roberts uses Stanley’s state of mind to show the way in which people who oppose racial prejudices, in theory, might support or tolerate them in practice with submissive inaction. The trope of star-crossed romance is taken quite seriously in this novel. It is used as a metaphor for the senselessness of Sri Lanka’s internecine conflict: a motif that binds the public and private spheres of race relations most directly. Roberts models the fate of her lovers, Priyanthi and Niranjan, on a Western formula, that of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Priyanthi and Niranjan have a secret romance, which they hide from their families. They are urged to marry by a man of dubious wisdom (a “toddy-tapper,”93 whom they meet when on a combined family holiday). They marry in secret, and the union ends in death. Following their marriage, anti-Tamil riots break out in the streets of Colombo, resulting in the brutal murder of many Tamils, Niranjan included. Upon discovering the tragedy, the families of both lovers are devastated. Roberts’s allusion to this Western storyline is significant in the postcolonial context of Sri Lanka. It supports the conjecture that the Sri Lankan conflict is, at least in part, a legacy of British colonial culture and acquired Western prejudices.

Mosquito The final novel to be discussed in this chapter is Mosquito by Roma Tearne. Mosquito explores contemporary manifestations of ethnic violence in postcolonial Sri Lanka. It links these situations to the legacy of colonialism and to the postcolonial conflict over language. It suggests that Sri Lanka’s modern internecine conflict is indissociable from this history of linguistic debate and from the nationalist decision to disenfranchise and thus alienate the Estate Tamils, the Tamils who emigrated from India in the colonial era. This novel is particularly concerned with the significance of art and artistic idealism in times of war. Also, it has metafictional qualities. These are employed to express the maelstrom of Sri Lanka’s modern civil conflict. Tearne establishes connections between the colonial and postcolonial with the character of Theo Samarajeeva, the protagonist of this novel’s main storyline. Theo is an expatriate Sinhalese writer, who is raised and educated in Sri Lanka’s colonial era before moving to London as an adult. He leads a happy and successful life in London until Anna, his European wife of many 93

A ‘toddy tapper’ is a man who taps sap from the coconut trees on the beach. Niranjan and Priyanthi meet him while on a group family holiday.

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years, becomes the random victim of a murderer on a city street. The shock of her death prompts Theo to return to Sri Lanka in 1987, in the midst of the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict. Theo imagines that he will be comforted by the island’s scenery, but when he arrives in Colombo, which is where he plans to settle, he is too affected by the spectacle of violence and corruption to stay there. He moves hurriedly to a more isolated setting, a “backwater,” 94 which is more in keeping with his nostalgic imaginings. Theo is an odd character; while he has supposedly written extensively about this internecine conflict in fiction, he has little understanding of the many dangers that lie before him in this ostensibly secluded location. Theo develops two key relationships in this setting, which reflect aspects of the internecine Sri Lankan conflict. The first of these is with his servant and friend, Sugi; the second is with a teenage girl artist, Nulani, whom he befriends and mentors. Both are Sinhalese. Discussions between Theo and Sugi inform the reader about the Tamil– Sinhalese conflict in two distinct ways. Sugi has local knowledge about the daily realities of the conflict, the immediate hazards of the military and Tiger presence. He warns Theo that his friendship with Nulani is risky, because her father – a writer – was murdered for criticizing the government, and because her family is still being monitored. He tells Theo not to “walk on the beach when there is a curfew [. .. as] the army is watching” (19), and insists that he shouldn’t talk about his novels, as this, too, may upset the army. Sugi’s counsel depicts a contemporary scene of political corruption and imminent danger, whereas Theo frames this information in the history of British colonialism. This is illustrated in the following conversation: “Don’t mistake our friendliness, Sir. We are Buddhists but we have forgotten this,” said Sugi. “We are quite capable of killing. It isn’t like before when you were last here. These days we don’t know who we are”. Theo nodded in agreement. “They should have known it wouldn’t end simply”, he murmured. “Who? The Tamils?” “No, Sugi,” Theo said. He sounded sad. “I mean those who conquered us. I mean the British. Their presence casts its shadow on this island. Still.” “Cause and effect, Sir, Just like the Buddha said.” But Theo was following his own thoughts. 94

Roma Tearne, Mosquito (London: Harper, 2007): 4. Further page references are in the main text.

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“Why are we surprised by this war, Sugi? Has there ever been a country that, once colonised, avoided civil war?” (20–21)

The irony is that, while Theo informs the reader about the curse of imperialism, which complements Sugi’s dialogue, he also assumes a neo-imperialist persona. He has little regard for what Sugi has to say, as he usually assumes that he knows more than he does on the basis of being both accomplished and westernized. This is the pompous attitude of a foolish hypocrite, whose absorption in philosophy blinds him to the seriousness of immediate dangers. He has an indubitably blinkered vision, which parodies the attitudes of the British colonialist men who once travelled from England to Ceylon with assumptions of learned superiority; they were often, like Theo, oblivious to the consequence of their actions. This imperialist attitude of Theo’s is also characterized by his relationship with Nulani (the teenage girl artist). While Theo assumes that he is assisting Nulani (as a mentor) to escape the injustices of a patriarchal society, which provides opportunities for her brother but not for her, he fails to see the problematic nature of his own relationship with her. He first meets Nulani when he is at her school giving a talk about his books. After this she appears in his garden, where she is found drawing. He takes her under his wing, seeing her as the child that he never had; through the desire to be close to her, he commissions her to paint his portrait. He allows her to uses his home as a studio, obsesses about her when she is away, and ultimately, after making her a promise of marriage, enters a sexual relationship with her. He is forty-five, while she is just seventeen and thus a legal minor in Sri Lanka. He decides what is best for her, in a classically imperialist way, and he justifies his feelings for her on the grounds that he is in love. She submits to his advances, but hesitantly; for instance, she trembles when he first kisses her, a reaction which he attributes to the surprise of love. His proposal of marriage is also met with a timorous reception: “Yes,” she says faintly, “I want it too” ( 115). One doubts the strength of this acquiescence, because of her age, and because the ‘romance’ is focalized through Theo alone. It seems that she agrees to give herself to Theo (the rich westernized man) due to the authority of his position as opposed to her own desire. The union thus appears as a neo-imperialist arrangement, involving the sexual exploitation of a minor. Tearne explores the substance of neo-imperialist affect further with the motif of the scarred postcolonial person. She uses images of physical and psychic wounds as metonyms for the damaged ‘postcolonial body’ or ‘postcolonial body politic’. These are metaphors that inscribe the postcolonial con-

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flicts of individual nations on the bodies of characters or places. This type of metaphor re-interprets the classical concept of the nation or state as a political organism with symbiotic parts which are compared to the parts of a living being, an analogy that has been employed since ancient times: it developed as a “rhetorical device in advocating and in some ways enforcing the ways in which the social and political elements of a society should be defined and controlled.”95 This metaphor found particular favour in the Renaissance period, peaking during the Englsh Civil War (1638–52),96 a result of the religious and civil disputes between the ‘Kingdoms’ of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the English parliament, the Churches, and particularly the monarchy of King Charles I. Political and religious writers of this period developed the metaphor of the “wounded body politic,” involving the language of injury and brokenness, as a way to rally support for their respective groups and/or to lament the devastation that was caused in battles.97 Postcolonial novelists have adopted a comparable discourse to express the damage wrought by colonial experiences, personal and political. The concern of postcolonial authors with the ‘body-politic’ theme is also associated with the use and abuse of colonized bodies by Europeans, physical and psychological. As Sara Upstone explains, colonization was centred upon the manipulation and appropriation of bodies as both a territory and the key to maintaining successful control of land: equally classified through vision, recorded and defined to the extent of classifying particular racial mixes and types.98

This situation is, of course, illustrated by Sri Lanka’s colonial experience, where the Tamil and Sinhalese people were categorized and demarcated in the nineteenth century by the study of philology and chromaticism. Upton suggests that colonized bodies have also been controlled by “writing, education, and administrative practice[s],” reflecting Said’s theory of Orientalism and the tradition of demarcating and stereotyping Eastern and Western identities in imperialist discourses and texts. This tradition has engendered many negative stereotypes about colonized people and cultures, including that of the un95

Sarah Covington, “The Wounded Body Politic,” in Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 22. 96 “The Wounded Body Politic,” 22. 97 “The Wounded Body Politic,” 19. 98 Sara Upstone, Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel (Farnham & Burlington VT : Ashgate, 2009): 148.

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civilized or sexually available non-Westerner.99 According to Upton, the damage inflicted by colonial stereotypes on colonized bodies spills over into the postcolonial world to “enforce the view that the postcolonial body is not an autonomous entity, but one already marked by the colonial past.”100 The wounded-body metaphor can also be connected to the body of a postcolonial author or the collective body of postcolonial authors, since they themselves are usually the products of colonial and postcolonial experience. In fact, this is something that Edward Said observed: Many of the most interesting post-colonial writers bear their past within them – as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, as potentially revised versions of the past tending towards a new future, as urgently reinterpretable and redeployable experiences, in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory taken back from the empire.101

Said’s position is reflected in the self-reflexivity of postcolonial authors who often create characters who are themselves writers in colonial or postcolonial contexts, such as the character of Sam in The Hamilton Case, who writes a colonial memoir, involving his school days and leading on to his career as a lawyer. In the same novel there is Shiva, Sam’s friend, who is a retired judge and postcolonial novelist. Tearne’s protagonist, Theo, is another example of this tradition of self-reflexivity; in fact, he is an explicit representation of the wounded or scarred postcolonial author. Theo’s emotional scarring is commented on by Nulani, his protégé: “You have a scar, no?” she says. “While I have been drawing you I have felt it. It is all over you, no? … It is under your skin, between your backbones” (15). This scar may be read in a number of ways. It can be seen as a sign of his fractured identity as a postcolonial writer, and thus as a representation of the fractured identities of postcolonial writers more generally, as discussed by Said. It can also be seen as a symbol of his particular neocolonialist corruption, demonstrated in his inappropriate feeling and behaviour towards a minor, the artist Nulani, which is rationalized (in his mind) by his fantasy of a reciprocal love and by his assumed authority as an elite and westernized ‘man of letters’. His scar can also be connected to the murder of his wife in London, a damaging event, which is seen by Nulani as the root of his troubled perspective. 99 100 101

Upstone, Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel, 149–50. Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel, 149. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 34.

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Nulani, the postcolonial Sri Lankan artist, also has a scar. Her scar, she says, is a “traffic island” (15, 247), the place where her father (an outspoken political poet) was murdered, as if the pain that she experiences is tangible. The external location of this scar is especially symbolic, for, as an “island,” it is an obvious allusion to the island of Sri Lanka, injured by the effects of war in postcolonial times. It is significant that a “traffic island” is a man-made thing, and that it is normally located between at least two opposing streams of traffic, as this, too, extends the metaphor. It suggests that the Tamil–Sinhalese war is a recently manufactured conflict, as opposed to an ancient rivalry, and that the Tamil and Sinhalese people are like two streams of opposing and competing traffic. The image of this “traffic island” scar arguably reflects some of the complexity of the Tamil–Sinhalese crisis. The wounded-body metaphor is extended to the character of Vikram, a Tamil orphan, in the novel’s subplot. Vikram is a casualty of war and an exchild soldier. The Sinhalese Army rape and abduct his mother and sister when he is just seven years old and hiding under a bed. After this he is found on the side of the road by the LTTE , who train him as a “Tiger cub” (44). He is then ‘rescued’ by the Sinhalese Army, who send him to an orphanage, where he is eventually, by age twelve, adopted by a “nice” Sinhalese man, a Mr Gunadeen (44). Mr Gunadeen seeks to “counteract the work of those murderous Tamil bastards” by giving a Tamil child a chance (44). He picks “Vikram more or less randomly” from the orphanage, enrols him in a local boys’ school, then leaves him in the care of a housekeeper in a Dutch colonial home (44). Vikram projects the trauma of his difficult life onto the body of this colonial home where he lives in the early years of his adoption: he kick[s] the walls, treating the house as though it were a person, scuffing the furniture slyly, gouging holes in the doors when no one was looking, and cracking the fine coloured glass into as many lines as he could without breaking it completely. Torturing the house. (45)

It is significant that these acts of vengeance and hatred are committed against the body of a Dutch colonial house, as this links Vikram’s expression of trauma to Sri Lanka’s colonial history, which thus reinforces the message that the internecine crisis of the 1980s was connected to the colonial experience.102

102

Shastri, ‘Estate Tamils, the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 and Sri Lankan Politics,” 65–66.

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As suggested by the title of this novel, the ‘mosquito’ is another key motif in this story. Tearne uses the mosquito as a symbol for the LTTE , and for the child soldiers, such as Vikram, that they breed. She places three italicized passages at intervals throughout the text to develop this metaphor. In the first of these, she allegorizes the rise of child soldiers through the activity, breeding, and dwelling habits of the anopheles mosquito, the species which thrives in tropical climates: They swarmed so thickly that they might have been mistaken for smoke. Rising swiftly from the water filled holes dug by the gem miners in their search for sapphire, the mosquitoes seemed suspended in reflected light. For a moment the holes appeared as mirrored surfaces, blue as the sky. Further towards the coast the rainwater filled the upturned coconut shells, as they lay scattered across the groves. Here the beautiful female anopheles mosquitoes, graceful wings glinting in the sun, landed lightly and prepared to create a canoe of death for their cargo of eggs. (9; italics in original)

By representing the mosquitoes and their spawn in this way, Tearne suggests that the LTTE child soldiers are a natural phenomenon, like the mosquitoes, inasmuch as they are the product of a certain kind of breeding ground, a watery (emotionally laden) and (politically) heated environment: a breeding ground for agitated predators. The second passage about the mosquitoes describes a failed effort to organize a tropical-diseases conference, focusing specifically on malaria, a parasite that is carried by the female anopheles mosquito, which transmits it to humans. This conference becomes an allegory for the failed attempts to manage the internecine crisis with peaceful negotiation. The third and final passage in this mosquito sequence allegorizes the looming threat of malaria and therein the crisis. It suggests that both are cyclical, which, in the case of the political crisis, alludes to the recurring outbreaks of this modern conflict. This passage also relates contemporary hostilities to the problems of religion and language, which reminds us of the historical origins of the conflict in the postcolonial history of religio-linguistic nationalism. This is embodied in the image of Buddhist monks, who are said to kick over the water-filled “coconut shells that scattered the ground everywhere,” the nesting places of mosquitoes, “Language was on their minds, the importance of Singhalese [sic] as opposed to Tamil” (77; italics in original). Tearne explores the connection between language and the Tamil–Sinhalese crisis further when Theo becomes a prisoner of war. The Sinhalese Army imprisons him on the pretext that he has Tamil sympathies. The Army’s action is

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actually instigated by Nulani’s uncle, who uses his military connections to take revenge for Theo’s relationship with Nulani. Theo is sent to a squalid, overcrowded prison, where he remains for four months without legal representation and with the sound of people being tortured in rooms around him (a mark of the corruption of the Sinhalese Army). Initially, Theo is so shocked that he cannot talk. Eventually he finds his voice. He shares stories about his life, speaking in Sinhalese, as do his fellow prisoners, including two Tamil doctors. Theo also makes up stories, which he tells to pass the time. He also recites English poems from memory, such as “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.103 The Tamil doctors join in with poems that they have learnt at school, which are presumably in English, too. These poems bring them closer together. Theo and his cellmates, both Tamil and Sinhalese, are thus united through the Sinhalese language, though they bond through the English language, which is the lingua franca they share through their nation’s colonial experience. Tearne suggests that language is a positive medium, in spite of the difficulties that it has caused for Sri Lankans. She also suggests that English is a unifying medium, which has the potential to build bridges between the Tamil and Sinhalese people. She presents the English language as a glue that can hold these ethnic groups together, as it did in the colonial era. This reflects the politics of the English-speaking elite of the colonial era and of the Tamils who petitioned for the keeping of English as a national language to safeguard their minority interests in the late-colonial and early-postcolonial periods. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” has further significance as an intertext with regard to Tearne’s presentation of the Sri Lankan war. The “Rime” is a ballad about a sailor who kills an innocent albatross. Although the albatross seems, in some way, to save him from shipwreck at the South Pole, he kills it for lingering.104 His vessel continues safely to the tropics but then runs out of water, at which point the crew turn on the sailor. They hang the dead albatross around his neck as punishment for his misdeeds, and then a ghost ship arrives, containing two ghoulish characters, “Death” (a man) and “The night-mare life-in-death” (a woman). They are playing a game of dice to determine the Mariner’s ultimate fate. “Life-in-death” wins the life of the Mariner, while 103

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” ( 1798), in The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1994): 143. 104 Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 145.

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“Death” wins the souls of the crew.105 Tearne seems to use this story as an allegory for the theory that the modern Tamil–Sinhalese conflict was a product of colonialism, and, specifically, that it was related to the British policy of importing Tamil workers from southern India. This interpretation has undermined the civil rights of Tamils in the postcolonial period, by classifying all Tamils (Estate and Sri Lankan) as an unwanted relic of colonialism. Tearne likens this attitude to that of the Mariner, implying that the Sinhalese majority want to get rid of the Tamils in the same way that the Mariner wants rid of the albatross, heartlessly. The consequences of this also relate to the poem, as in the end all parties are condemned by the horrors of war, in which there are only two options, ‘death’ or ‘the nightmare’ of a ‘life in death’. The idea of living “the night-mare life-in-death” is also mirrored in the predicament of Theo, whose ordeal becomes more difficult following his recitation of the poem. He is released from the Sinhalese prison, but abducted immediately afterwards by the LTTE . They ambush the vehicle returning him to his home and take him prisoner-of-war. Struck with fear, he loses the ability to speak, and because of this they torture him physically, stringing him upside down with a sack on his head and placing electrodes on the palms of his hands. They torture him until he is unconscious. This exchange of fates between the Sinhalese prison and the LTTE prison is his own “night-mare lifein-death,” which keeps getting worse. When the Tigers stop torturing him, he is barely recognizable and has forgotten his identity. The last cruel and nightmarish twist of fate, before Theo’s escape, is that the man who rescues him, Gerard, wants to use him as a writer for the Tamil separatist movement, which has all but killed him. He has Theo nursed to health and gives him a copy of his own book, Tiger Lily, which is about the injustices of the Sri Lankan civil war. The book gradually restores his memories as he reads it, which is the ultimate nightmare, as here Theo’s life yet again mirrors a fictional nightmare, and this time the fiction that it mirrors is his own. Theo’s experience of being abused by both the Sinhalese Army and the LTTE represents the maelstrom in this conflict where both sides behave abominably, while this meta-drama augments the horror of it all.

105

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 148; With relation to the previous chapter, it is worth noting that it is ‘The night-mare life-in-death,” the female character, in this poem, who inhabits a liminal space. Since, as explained, liminality is a troped domain for angel women and monsters in Romantic texts.

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Tearne suggests that artistic idealism is the only means of survival in dangerous conditions like these, and she presents this argument on several occasions throughout the novel. The first of these involves a discussion that takes place, prior to Theo’s imprisonment, between Theo’s friend Rohan and the character Nulani: ‘Art is our highest form of hope,’ he said absently. ‘Perhaps it’s our only hope. Living has always been a desperate business [… and] Life is full of pointlessness. Not just now there’s a war, but always, before. It’s the nature of living and the wounding of beauty, that’s all part of it, no? First you possess it and then you lose it. Art represents that aesthetically’. (92)

Rohan’s attitude reflects the romantic ambition of classical art or Platonic idealism: the notion that beauty can depict an abstract and/or eternal truth, a bare reality, which transcends the here-and-now. This idea is allegorized, in the Sinhalese prison, when Theo uses narrative and poetry to cope with his trauma. It is also expressed by the conclusion of the novel, wherein Theo is rescued again by idealism, which is developed in his writing. His salvation process begins with nihilistic statements, which are written just before his escape from the LTTE : “There is no such thing as freedom,“ he writes, and “no sense” in having “an ideology” (217): Now that there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world. That is the only thing that interests me. (231)

He returns to his village shortly after, where he is encouraged to keep writing by a neighbourhood woman. He begins his fourth book, which becomes an elegiac story about the war. This book is described as being more hopeful than his previous works, “filled with optimism” because of his improved faith in the significance of art as some rarefied realm where one’s material realities are transcended (231). Tearne makes a problematic conjecture towards the end of her story, wherein Theo, by putting his faith in art, and literally in the artist (by writing about Nulani in his latest book), is finally granted happiness. This conclusion is problematic because this happiness is only attainable in Europe, which thus comments upon the hope, or lack thereof, for artists in war-torn Sri Lanka. Theo returns to Europe when Giulia, the wife of his friend Rohan, contacts him. She tells him that she and Rohan are living in Venice and that they have found Nulani in England. Nulani has spent the last ten years in London and is now of a more suitable age and maturity for Theo. She has also achieved suc-

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cess as an artist and has shared an exhibition with Rohan, called “Two Sri Lankan Painters” (282). Giulia encourages Theo to come to Venice, where he is reunited with Nulani in a happy-ending romance scenario. The reunion of these artists in Europe suggests that there is no place for their artistic idealism in Sri Lanka. It suggests that Sri Lankan artists must live in the diaspora (specifically, in Europe) if they are to fulfil their ideals. It is an arguably neoimperialist sentiment, which reflects the neo-imperialist attitudes of Theo seen earlier in the novel, as when Theo decides that Nulani must go to England (where he started his career) if she is to succeed as an artist. Alternatively, the diasporic ending can be read as realism, given that the conflict seems to preclude all else. Maryse Jayasuriya discusses the question of exile in two diasporic Sri Lankan novels. She makes the point that exile is not the only option for people in war-torn nations, despite the propensity of some diasporic literature to present it as such. She uses Gunesekera’s Reef (1994) as an example of this. Jayasuriya is very critical of Gunesekera’s depictions of violence in this novel as being “endemic to Sri Lanka.”106 She considers his rendering of violence as both nihilistic and “exoticist,” depicting Sri Lanka as “a spoilt paradise.”107 His novel, she suggests, implies that “the only possible and rational way to deal with the problems in Sri Lanka [.. .] is for its citizens to go into a self imposed exile.”108 She sees Ondaatje’s story Anil’s Ghost (2000) as providing a more realistic alternative to Gunesekera’s nihilism, Ondaatje shows that exile – even for those with the resources for mobility – is not the natural and obvious choice for people living in a war-torn country.109

Ondaatje illustrates this, she suggests, through the brothers Sarath and Gamini, who “spoke of how much they loved their country. In spite of everything”; they stay in Sri Lanka for the love of the place that “no Westerner would understand.”110 106

Maryse Jayasuriya, “Exotic Ruses?: Sri Lanka as Seen Through Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” in South Asia and its Others: Reading the “Exotic”, ed. V.G. Julie Rajan & Atreyee Phukan (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009): 111. 107 Jayasuriya, “Exotic Ruses?,” 106. 108 “Exotic Ruses?,” 111. 109 Jayasuriya, “Exotic Ruses?,” 119. 110 Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000): 285.

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Tearne’s Mosquito is the least hopeful of the three novels that have been discussed here in regard to the future of peace in Sri Lanka and the hope for those who remain there. This is possibly because of Tearne’s own personal experience of having witnessed atrocities during the riots of 1958,111 and maybe because of the timing of the book’s release, in 2007, when the civil war was still raging. Tearne wrote this novel during a particularly awful period of Sri Lanka’s history, after more than twenty years of conflict between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan Army, and the failure of “four separate peace efforts” by the Norwegian government that took place between 1997 and 2009 (1997–99, 1999–2002, 2002–2006, and 2006–2009).112 Fighting escalated in 2006, and as a result of this, the government launched a largescale military offensive, which continued until 2009, when the LTTE were dramatically defeated.113 Tearne was interviewed following the announcement of this event by Claire Armistead of the British Guardian newspaper: Armistead: Last month the Sri Lankan president announced the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, didn’t he? Do you believe that? Tearne: No. No, absolutely not. Memory does not die easily. There has to be a truth and reconciliation. There has to be a uniting of the Tamils and the Sinhalese who live outside of the country. There has to be some unity between them. And, there has to be investigations into the war crimes, otherwise there will never be peace. Armistead: Actually, there are probably more Tamils outside than there are inside? Tearne: Yes there are. But there are a significant amount of Sinhalese. And, the war is continuing abroad because the Tamil and Sinhalese, and espe111

Claire Armistead, “Roma Tearne on Brixton Beach,” The Guardian Books Podcast (10 July 2009) http://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2009/jul/10/romatearne-brixton-beach (accessed 3 June 2011). 112 Shamindra Ferdinando, “Peace Process and Accountability Issues: UN Report Out, Await Norwegian Evaluation,” The Island Online (25 April 2011), http: //www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title =23919 (accessed 18 June 2011). 113 Reuters, “Timeline: 25 Years of Conflict in Sri Lanka,” Thomson Reuters (17 May 2009), http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/05/17/us-srilanka-war-timeline-sbidUSTRE54F16620090517 (accessed 3 June 2011).

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cially the Sinhalese abroad, are embarrassed about what’s going on in their country. So they’re in denial. And actually there has to be an openness and a willingness to discuss what is going on there, because with one hundred thousand dead, people are not going to forget. Women are not going to forget that their babies have died. Something has to be done with this emotion before there can be peace.114

Tearne’s wish for reconciliation between Tamils and the Sinhalese is ambitious. While the United Nations has published a report (released on 25 April 2011) which has found “credible allegations of war crimes by both government and Tamil Tiger forces”; both parties deny this.115 The United Nations cannot investigate further without the Sri Lankan government’s approval, and this is not forthcoming.116

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Claire Armistead, “Roma Tearne on Brixton Beach.” It should be noted that Tearne’s is a subjective point of view. The number of Tamils living outside Sri Lanka is contested and debated by critics, particularly in Canada, as will be discussed in the final chapter of this book. 115 Peter Lloyd, “UN Report Alleges War Crimes in Sri Lanka,” Lateline (26 April 2011) http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2011/s3200829.htm (accessed 30 April 2011). 116 Lloyd, “UN Report Alleges War Crimes in Sri Lanka.”





v 4 Chandani Lokugé and Yasmine Gooneratne Deconstructing Postcolonial Tourism, Exoticism, and Colonial Simulacra

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H E N A T U R A L B E A U T Y O F S R I L A N K A makes the island an attractive destination for wealthy Western tourists seeking relaxation in an Asian setting. And, as a developing nation, it makes good economic sense for Sri Lankans to build their tourist economy. However, international tourism has its downside. It creates massive social problems stemming from exoticism and neocolonial dynamics. This chapter will consider the representation of tourism in Turtle Nest (2003) by Chandani Lokugé and The Pleasures of Conquest (1996) by Yasmine Gooneratne: both are set in the coastal resort district of Sri Lanka. Each of these novels examines the problems of sex tourism, exoticism, and neocolonialism in Sri Lanka, though their approaches are dissimilar. Turtle Nest is a serious and tragic story about the damage of child-sex tourism in a poor fishing community, whereas The Pleasures of Conquest is a postmodern comedy, focusing on the neocolonialist and exoticist simulacra of Sri Lanka’s traditional hotel sector. This chapter examines the problematic of neocolonial identities in these novels.

Tourism and the Neocolonial Phenomenon As Reiner Jaakson explains, mass tourism “emerged in the decades following the Second World War,” due to new social and economic factors that had developed in the Western world, such as the introduction of “mandatory vacations for all, faith in a continuously growing [Western] economy, and rising

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disposable personal income.”1 This Western phenomenon coincided directly with the rise of commercial air travel and with the end of British and French colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. In this period, the colonized nations of South Asia were making their transition to political independence, re-inventing their identities and their economies, which were supposed to be different from those of the previously existing colonial regimes. They were refashioning themselves as modern independent nations and they were attracted to the potential of tourism as a modern economic driver, as promoted by the World Bank and the United Nations.2 By the 1960s, the World Bank and the United Nations were openly and collectively impressed by the progress of modern tourism. 3 It seemed to require a minimal investment to establish, and thus to provide great opportunities for developing nations. As Malcolm Crick states, it was represented as an easy option for development [.. . ] because it relied largely on natural resources already in place – e.g. sun, sand, and friendly people and therefore required no vast capital outlays for infrastructure.4

Product differentiation was readily available in the exotic environment, culture, and people. It was imagined that developing countries would be able to increase their foreign exchange earnings from exoticist tourism, which would create jobs: directly, in hotels, restaurants, and tour companies, and indirectly, in the businesses selling goods and services to the sector.5 Tourism was promoted as the ultimate cure-all: an antidote to poverty, unemployment, and 1

Reiner Jaakson, “Globalisation and Neocolonialist Tourism,” in Tourism and Postcolonialism: Contested Discourses, Identities and Representations, ed. C. Michael Hall & Hazel Tucker (London: Routledge, 2004): 171. 2 Malcolm Crick, “Representations of International Tourism in the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights, Savings, and Servility,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 315. 3 Crick, “Representations of International Tourism in the Social Sciences,” 315. 4 “Representations of International Tourism in the Social Sciences,” 315. 5 See E.D.L. Mendis, The Economic, Social, and Cultural Impact of Tourism on Sri Lanka, (Colombo: Christian Workers’ Fellowship, 1981): 9; recent publications by the Sri Lankan Tourism Development Authority indicate that this is still the prevailing opinion. See Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority, Annual Statistical Report of Sri Lankan Tourism 2010 (Colombo: Sri Lankan Tourism Development Authority, 2010): 11.

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unequal distributions of wealth as a result of the spending of rich tourists in poor nations.6 It was also depicted as a conduit for international tolerance and understanding, and even as a solution for civil unrest.7 These ideas were advertised in an international campaign for tourism coordinated by the United Nations,8 which declared 1967 the International Year of the Tourist, and developed the catch-phrase ‘Tourism: Passport to Peace’. 9 In 1974, they created the World Tourism Organisation, UNWTO : a specialized UN agency that was, and still is, dedicated to world tourism, while “paying particular attention to the interests of developing countries.”10 The World Bank was similarly involved in tourism development projects at this time, opening a Tourism Projects Department in 1970, which financed “24 such tourism projects in 18 developing countries” and loaning around 450 million 11 US dollars before being phased-out in the early 1980s. Truong believes that this department’s closure was “due to mounting criticism” about “social, cultural, and economic impacts of tourism” on the nations assisted by the bank.12 Louis Turner and John Ash were among the first writers in the social sciences to critically review the modern phenomenon of mass tourism. The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery, published in 1975, provides a chronicle of tourism, starting with the European tradition of the Grand Tour, taken by aristocrats from the 1660s to the 1840s. Turner and Ash discuss the first packaged tours, organized by the evangelist Thomas Cook from 1845 onward, and the refashioned and often sexualized singles vacation cultures advanced by Club Méditerranée and other similar companies in the aftermath of the Second World War.13 The authors suggest that mass tourism has followed the same trajectory as colonialism, both involving the search for exotic difference and/or antiquity in Other places by members 6

Thanh-Dam Truong, Sex, Money, and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in South-East Asia (London: Zed, 1990): 117. 7 Truong, Sex, Money, and Morality, 117. 8 Sex, Money, and Morality, 117. 9 World Tourism Organization ( UN W T O ), “World Tourism Organisation” (2011) http://unwto.org/en/about/unwto% 3E (accessed 2 September 2011). 10 World Tourism Organization ( UN W T O ), “World Tourism Organisation.” 11 Truong, Sex, Money, and Morality, 122. 12 Sex, Money, and Morality, 122. 13 Louis Turner & John Ash, The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (London: Constable, 1975): 29–96.

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of wealthy nations, and thereafter the commercial appropriation of land and resources in these ‘discovered’ locations. They describe ‘Third-World’ tourism, especially, as “a new form of colonialism [.. .] which is in no way different from the world wide scramble for gold, uranium, oil or any other precious resource,”14 and equally problematic for the nations concerned: If past generations created oil-producing, mining, or rubber-growing enclaves, ours has produced tourist resorts which are, in many cases, just as irrelevant to the long-term development of the countries concerned. [.. . ] Many of these countries are still struggling to overcome the class and racial problems left them by previous generations of imperialists, who swamped the original inhabitants with successive layers of African slaves, and then Indian and Chinese indentured labourers. Tourism will exacerbate this damage by adding another ethnic (and privileged) layer to these deeply divided societies. [. .. ] Tourism may seem like an innocent activity, but its impact is divisive, far-reaching and long-term.15

Turner and Ash seek to dispel “illusions about the economics of tourism” in the ‘Third World’ by illustrating the dominance of Western influence in the tourist sector: First, just because a tourist spends a dollar in a country there is no guarantee that it is going to stay there. In large parts of the tourist world, many of the hotels and restaurants are foreign owned, so part of the tourist dollar flows out inevitably in the form of profits or dividends; many of the top managers are expatriates who, as well as being paid more than local employees, will tend to bank a good part of their salary out of the country; much of the food and drink may have to be imported to meet the conservative tourist palate, thus eating further into the precious foreign exchange; likewise the tourists demand expensive machinery like air conditioning, lifts, speed-boats, and cars, all of which have to be imported by all but the most sophisticated host countries [. .. ]. [Second,] a goodly proportion of total money spent by tourists on a holiday will never reach the host country in the first place. It goes on transport to and from the destination, and the former part of the holiday is firmly controlled by airlines, car-hire and bus companies which are overwhelmingly controlled by the tourist generating nations.16 14 15 16

Turner & Ash, The Golden Hordes, 249. The Golden Hordes, 249–51. The Golden Hordes, 116.

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They also critique the ‘cheap and easy’ set-up mythology, which is easily undermined by the high cost of airports, landing strips, and other infrastructure necessary for the development of mass tourism. Infrastructure is usually funded, at least in part, by local governments who may be reliant on international loan schemes. These investments are risky because they can potentially cause financial loss if economic calculations are wrong,17 such as less tourism being generated than originally anticipated because of a global financial downturn or unexpected overruns in the cost of new infrastructure that increases government debt. Sri Lanka is a key example of a developing economy that has experienced the negative effects of mass tourism. Malcolm Crick explores the dominance of Western influence in the Sri Lankan tourist economy, which he describes as neocolonialist.18 Sri Lankan tourism imitates, he suggests, the economic pattern of colonialism. As in colonial times, the West is the dominant economic power, while Sri Lanka is the dominated economy, dependent because of its reliance on Western revenue in the tourism sector, and dominated by Western stakeholders in this sector. Western companies direct the industry, because of the economic power of their airlines and their tourist agents, and they exert control through the packaging of holidays, which guarantees that tourists will reside in the luxury hotels that have high rates of foreign investment.19 Crick considers data from the 1967–76 period, a boom time for the development of Sri Lankan tourism, prior to the nation’s lengthy war-time stagnation (from 1983 to 2009), and highlights how “foreign ownership in tourism and ancillary services (such as tourist vehicles)” in Sri Lanka reached an estimated 31 percent by the end of this period.20 He accepts that the Sri Lankan situation is better than the situation in some Third-World nations, where “tourist facilities are substantially owned by foreigners,” such as in the Bahamas, yet insists that the power of foreign investment is a problem in Sri Lanka.21 One should remember, he says, “that the tourist industry is part of a

17

Turner & Ash, The Golden Hordes, 117. Malcolm Crick, Resplendent Sites, Discordant Voices: Sri Lankans and International Tourism (Chur: Harwood Academic, 1994): 64. 19 Resplendent Sites, Discordant Voices, 52. 20 Resplendent Sites, Discordant Voices, 52. 21 Resplendent Sites, Discordant Voices, 52. 18

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complex international system, in which the different players have very unequal allocations of power.”22 The percentage of foreign ownership that Crick is concerned about would have risen significantly since the 2004 tsunami disaster and since the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009. The tsunami destroyed much of the tourist infrastructure in the southern coastal belt, leading the government to seek increased levels of foreign tourism investment, in order to quickly redevelop this sector. The cessation of civil war also produced a new emphasis on foreign investments schemes.23 It was correctly predicted that tourist arrivals would improve immediately in the aftermath of the war. Postwar tourism has grown rapidly and is now, according to Sri Lanka’s Tourism Development Authority (S LTD A ) “one of the fastest growing sectors in the economy.”24 This tourist development, positively for the Sri Lankan economy, increases foreign exchange returns. It is also problematic, however, as this new reliance on foreign investment perpetuates the system of neocolonial relations, which affects all aspects of the tourist sector including the workers. It influences the structure of race relations in foreign companies, particularly in settings where foreigners have more money and power than the locals. This tourist-based economy also supports a culture of servility, which has encouraged Sri Lankans to revive the exoticist identities that emerged in the colonial era. 25

Tourism, Servitude, and the Exotic As Crick suggests, tourism causes unequal distributions of power among workers in the industry, which can have negative effects on society. “The overwhelming proportion of tourism jobs are menial,” are often “seasonal,” and are not necessarily offered to the residents in the tourist districts who are most in need of the work. 26 He believes that the service industry also perpetuates images of servility and subjugation. As evidence of this, he looks at the elitist tourist resorts, offering luxury accommodation, which can be seen as providing some of the better jobs in the industry. The resorts maintain 22

Malcolm Crick, Resplendent Sites, Discordant Voices, 53. Inshita Wij, “Sri Lanka Tourism: Poised for Growth,” H S V Online (15 July 2011), http://www.hvs.com/article/5329/sri-lanka-tourism-poised-for-growth/ (accessed 5 September 2011): 2. 24 Wij, “Sri Lanka Tourism: Poised for Growth,” 2. 25 Mendis, The Economic, Social, and Cultural Impact of Tourism on Sri Lanka, 22. 26 Crick, Resplendent Sites, Discordant Voices, 50. 23

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“stereotypes of the Third World” through, for instance, the custom of colonially inspired uniforms. Foreigners arrive to find waiters [who are] barefoot and wearing sarongs, even if they are from good homes and have been well educated. All this creates an overwhelming atmosphere of subservience and privilege. 27

E.D.L. Mendis similarly criticizes the fantasy uniforms worn by the service staff in some of the Sri Lankan tourist resorts: sarongs and bare feet for the men and the equivalent but with a jacket for the women; “Such uniform plays a dual role [...] it helps to reinforce the servant mentality and also project the image of something exotic and native”; service staff are conditioned by their costumes, preferring Western tourists to locals; “local visitors to tourist hotels often complain of poor service, of discrimination based on skin colour.” 28 Mendis sees “the so-called cultural exchange brought about by tourism” promoted by the Tourist Board as a farce; what is actually exchanged “is the worst aspect of culture on both sides,” with Sri Lankans embracing servility and Westerners exploitative: a system encouraging master/ servant relationships between tourists and locals, which mimics the scheme of colonial race relations.29 He explains: A close look at the tourist industry reveals strong parallels with the colonial structures of the past. A predominant feature of the colonial era was the glaring disparity that existed between the ruling class of whites and the rest of the people. The former lived in palatial city mansions and estate bungalows located in the most picturesque spots, they had exclusive clubs for recreation and entertainment, and they separated themselves from the “natives” by erecting invisible barriers of class. Similarly, the tourist hotels are located in the most scenic areas and are separated from the country by high tariffs, and in the resort areas by real, high walls. These walled-off enclaves make one reminiscent of the forts and fortresses of old.30

For Mendis, this demarcation of tourists and locals is necessary for the success of the industry, which cannot use poverty as a selling point:31 27

Crick, Resplendent Sites, Discordant Voices, 65. Mendis, The Economic, Social, and Cultural Impact of Tourism on Sri Lanka, 23. 29 The Economic, Social, and Cultural Impact of Tourism on Sri Lanka, 21. 30 The Economic, Social, and Cultural Impact of Tourism on Sri Lanka, 22–23. 31 Although, some countries do use poverty as a selling point, as in South Africa, where there are tours of impoverished townships. 28

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P R O B L E M A T I C I D E N T I T I E S v In a sense, we are compelled to create these tourist enclaves since we are obliged to fulfil the expectations of our visitors who come here to sample a taste of paradise. We must make it possible for them to enjoy the sun and sea and relax in peaceful tranquil surroundings, oblivious of the poverty around them. [. .. ] Hence the strenuous efforts at window dressing, camouflaging the hell-holes of squalor that blot the landscape, and sweeping the dirt under the carpet. [. .. ] We cover-up the festering sores with bright raiment and present our visitors a cheerful, smiling Lanka who is really nothing but a sick and anaemic lady with a painted face.32

Touristic window-dressing was the accepted practice of the Sri Lankan government up until 2002, at a time when the civil war was temporarily stopped. The government and the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) signed a “permanent ceasefire agreement.” mediated by Norway, 33 which changed the nation’s economic policies instantly. It generated renewed interest in the development of Sri Lanka’s tourism sector, encouraged by “ US AID , the World Bank and its offshoot the Asian Development Bank.”34 consensus emerged that Sri Lanka’s most significant competitive advantage lay in the fact that it was one of the last places left uncolonized by go-go globalisation, a by-product of its long war. ( 391)

A plan was devised in cooperation with the Sri Lankan government, which was called ‘Regaining Sri Lanka’ (2003): Under the plan Sri Lanka’s jungles, which provided such effective cover for guerrilla fighters, would be opened up to ecotourists, who would ride the elephants and swing like Tarzan through the canopies the way they do in Costa Rica. Its religions, accomplices in so much bloodshed, would be retrofitted to nourish the spiritual needs of Western visitors – Buddhist monks could run meditation centres, Hindu women could perform colourful dances at hotels, Ayurvedic medical clinics could sooth aches and pains. ( 391)

This project required the relocation of “millions of people” in “traditional villages to free up the beaches for tourists and the land for resorts and highways” (393). It promised to eliminate the stench of the peasantry, including 32

Mendis, The Economic, Social, and Cultural Impact of Tourism on Sri Lanka, 23. Bandarage, The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka, 279. 34 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2007): 391. Further page references are in the main text. 33

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the smell of fish drying on the beach, which some tourists and hoteliers were objecting to (393). The fishing that “remained would be dominated by large industrial trawlers operating out of deep ports – not wooden boats that launched from the beaches,” as was the local custom (393). Outraged locals protested against this scheme. They won, but then the 2004 tsunami hit, which changed the situation again. There was no longer a need to move the locals, as the tsunami had “cleared the beach. [.. .] Every single fragile structure was washed away – every boat, every fishing hut, as well as every tourist cabana and bungalow” (387). And, Klein adds, “small boat fishing people [.. .] made up 80 percent of the victims” (388). The government then prevented the remaining fishing families from returning to the coast. It designed a “buffer zone,” which outlawed any building on the beach “along the entire East coast” (387). Klein believes that most would have accepted building farther back from the water, but [that] there was no land available there [.. . which thus left] the fishing people with nowhere to go. (387)

Klein implies that this was an economic ruling and that ‘Regaining Sri Lanka’ is thus to go ahead (387), although the name is no longer in use. ‘Regaining Sri Lanka’ was intended to offer tourists the exoticist vision of South Asian authenticity at the ironic expense of real Sri Lankan fishing people living on the eastern coastline. These people have since been forced to relocate and thus to give up their traditional way of life. This situation highlights the negative social and cultural effects of tourism in developing economies. It also draws attention to the problem of touristic ‘authenticity’ itself, as defined by the West and developing nations who are encouraged to compete for the exoticist tourist market.

Tourism and the Signs of Postmodernity Jonathan Culler, discussing “The Semiotics of Tourism” and reviewing the problem of touristic authenticity, 35 begins with the combative theory of Daniel Boorstin, who argues in The Image (1961) that “the tourist” desires “caricature [... and] seldom likes the authentic.”36 “He prefers his own pro35

Jonathan D. Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988): 153. 36 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, or, What Happened to the American Dream (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961): 106.

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vincial expectations,”37 Boorstin insists. As he states, “The American tourist in Japan looks less for what is Japanese than what is Japanesey.”38 Culler is more forgiving. He suggests that Boorstin’s findings are evidence of a “semiotic code” or “process” as opposed to the mere “stupidity” or “moral turpitude” of the tourist.39 This code involves the pursuit of signs by tourists: “The tourist is interested in everything as a sign of itself”: A Frenchman is an example of a Frenchman, a restaurant in the Quartier Latin is an example of a Latin Quarter restaurant, signifying “Latin Quarter Restaurantness”. All over the world the unsung armies of semiotics, the tourists, are fanning out in search of signs of Frenchness, typical Italian behaviour, exemplary Oriental scenes, typical American thruways, traditional English pubs; and deft to the natives’ explanations that thruways are the most efficient way to get from one place to another or that pubs are simply a convenient place to meet your friends and have a drink, or that gondolas are a natural way to get around in a city full of canals, tourists persist in regarding these objects and practices as cultural signs. They put into practice Jean Baudrillard’s claim that an accurate theory of social objects must be based on signification rather than needs or use-value.40

Culler rejects Boorstin’s claim that “the tourist seldom likes the production of a foreign culture,”41 insisting, instead, “that tourists do set out in quest of the authentic,”42 even as he acknowledges that “the distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic” is evasive.43 “The semiotic process at work has a curious effect,” he argues, as “the proliferation of markers or reproductions [souvenirs, postcards, statues, etcetera] confers an authenticity upon what may at first seem egregiously inauthentic.”44 Culler suggests that tourists, of all classes, are limited by the presence of markers which are “any kind of information or representation that constitutes

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Boorstin, The Image, 106. The Image, 106. Culler, Framing the Sign, 154–60. Framing the Sign, 155. Boorstin, The Image, 106. Culler, Framing the Sign, 158. Framing the Sign, 159. Framing the Sign, 160.

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a sight as a sight.”45 “The authentic is not something unmarked or undifferentiated,” he says; “authenticity is a sign relation”: Even the sights in which the most snobbish tourists take pleasure are not unmarked; they have become for these tourists the “real” Japan [for instance] by a process of semiotic articulation, only their markers are more recondite and less tacky than the plastic reproductions or souvenirs of the most famous sites.46

For Culler, this reveals the “paradox” of authenticity, which is that for anything “to be experienced as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated, [as] a sign of itself, and hence lacks authenticity.”47 Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist (1976) is another study that explores the problematic of touristic authenticity. In a chapter called “Staged Authenticity,” MacCannell adapts the back/front theory of Erving Goffman, who discussed the significance of “front and back regions” in social establishments. For Goffman, “front regions” are “meeting place[s] of hosts and guests or customers and service persons,” the sites of audience-based performances, as opposed to “back regions,” which are “the place[s] where members of the home team retire between performances.”48 Goffman’s examples of back regions are “kitchens, boiler rooms, [and] executive washrooms”; his “examples of front regions are reception offices and parlors” (92). Like Goffman, MacCannell intimates that “back regions” have “some mystification” in social settings, which is the product of their structural concealment (93). This concealment inclines the public to perceive them as embodying a special kind of authenticity or truth that is missing in “front regions.” MacCannell believes that tourists go in search of this “back region” authenticity when negotiating touristic zones and that this is evidenced by the touristic custom of guided tours. “Tours,” as he states, “provide easy access to areas of the establishment ordinarily closed to outsiders” (98); they feed a tourist’s appetite for authen-

45

Culler, Framing the Sign, 159. Framing the Sign, 161. 47 Framing the Sign, 164. 48 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1959): 114, paraphrased in Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; New York: Schocken, 1989): 92. Further page references are in the main text. 46

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ticity. And yet, as he observes, “there is a staged quality” to such planned “proceedings that lends them to an aura of superficiality” (98). MacCannell suggests that back/front socio-structural dichotomies are manipulated in touristic zones and particularly in guided tours, which can fake the supposed authenticity of back regions: “it is always possible,” he argues, that a place which is presented as “entry into a back region is really entry into a front region that has been totally set up in advance for touristic visitation” (101). A tourist may believe that they are moving towards authenticity, when it is really a staged illusion (101). He suggests that the back/front dichotomy is complicated further by the popular practice of openly manipulating these dichotomies for tourists, as in restaurants with visible kitchens. This practice of spatial manipulation is so prolific in “some areas of the world that it appears as an infinite regression of stage sets” (105). MacCannell believes that the tourist’s “quest for authenticity” is problematized by the appearance of touristic space everywhere and outside of traditional tourist settings ( 105), such as museums, monuments, and landscapes. Jean Baudrillard takes this concept of distorted social experiences well beyond the realms of tourism. In the “The Precession of Simulacrum” (1981), he suggests that our postmodern reality is in fact a “hyperreality,” wherein the distinction between “the real” and “the simulated” has collapsed.49 Everything in existence is now, according to Baudrillard, engaged in a “procession of simulacra.”50 Disneyland is the “perfect model” of simulacra for Baudrillard, since he believes that it presents itself disingenuously; it pretends to be an “imaginary world,” he states, involving “the miniaturized pleasure of real America,” when in fact it is the “real” America: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as an imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.51

Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra reflects the extremities of postmodernist thought in which meaning and/or substance is inevitably lost and/or inter49 50 51

Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 1. “The Precession of Simulacra,” 1. “The Precession of Simulacra,” 12.

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minably corrupted. Still, it can be quite readily applied to the modern touristic world in which the proliferation of “staged authenticity” overwhelms, infects, and/or distorts realities. Tourists and locals are often mutually entangled in touristic role-play, as is seen in the exotic master / servant fantasy played out in contemporary tourist establishments.

Exoticism and Touristic Corruption Exoticism is entrenched in colonial history and it relates specifically to the colonial and/or neocolonial practice of ‘othering’, as Graham Huggan explains in The Post-Colonial Exotic (2001). Huggan defines “exoticism” thus: a particular mode of aesthetic perception – one which renders people, objects and places strange even as it domesticates them, and which effectively manufactures otherness.52

Exoticism is used by international tourists and tourist providers to manage ‘the exotic’. It is synonymous with colonial fetishism and with the related fantasy of sensual experience that is offered by various tourist providers, both the approved and the illegal. There is an approved fetish product, as seen in colonial nostalgia hotels, which offer a master / servant dynamic for their customers.53 And there is an illegal fetish product, which is sold by black market providers, including sex workers and procurers. The worst aspect of this black market is undoubtedly child-sex tourism, which is a major problem in Sri Lanka. This type of touristic demand relates to the Orientalist attitudes of Western tourists and/or travellers, who think that they are less accountable in exotic locations because of their assumed cultural superiority. 54 War and natural disasters also exacerbate the problem of child-sex-tourism, which is another explanation for its prevalence in Sri Lanka.55 According to UN ICEF ’s most recent estimates (1998), there are approximately 36,000 52

Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001): 13. 53 Mendis, The Economic, Social, and Cultural Impact of Tourism on Sri Lanka, 22. 54 Christine Beddoe, “Beachboys and Tourists: Links in the Chain of Child Prostitution in Sri Lanka,” in Sex Tourism and Prostitution: Aspects of Leisure, Recreation and Work, ed. Martin Oppermann (Elmsford N Y : Cognizant Communication, 1998): 44; Said, Orientalism, 3. 55 International, S A P , A Situational Analysis of Child Sex Tourism in Sri Lanka (Negombo, Colombo, Mt. Lavinia, Hikkaduwa, Galle, Anuradhapura and Trincomalee) (Colombo: E C P AT , 2003): 12.

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children working as prostitutes in Sri Lanka, between seven and eighteen years of age and most of them boys. 56 Sri Lanka has been a popular destination for Western paedophiles since the rise of tourism in the 1970s. It was even advertised as such in some German magazines in the 1980s, which were “openly speaking of the cheapness and allure of small Sri Lankan boys.”57 Huda suggests that this is still a problem: “one can find names and addresses of agents and children in publications [unnamed], particularly in some gay magazines.”58 The child-protection group ECPACT contends that the problem of child prostitution is most prevalent in Sri Lanka’s coastal areas, accusing tourism providers of allowing this practice, particularly in private guesthouses, and claiming that sex-tourism is directly related to tourism growth, which indicates that this social problem may have worsened in the last few years in line with the sector’s development.59 ‘Third-World’ sex-tourism may be seen as a legacy of colonial ideologies, as argued by Joseph Boone, who explores the history of child-sex-tourism in the Near East (North Africa).60 He believes that “Eastern boys” were victimized by Western travellers throughout the colonial era and posits a modern continuance theory, in a position extrapolating from Said’s finding in Orientalism (1978) that the Near East was a popular destination for white male artists, writers, and travellers in the colonial era, seeking “a different type of sexuality […] experience unattainable in Europe.”61 Boone insists that this “different type of sexuality” is homosexuality. He considers the experiences of writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Lawrence Durrell, André Gide, and Oscar Wilde who were drawn to the Arab world because of its reputation for homoerotic freedom. He says that this freedom involved the acceptance of pederasty among male travellers and a “tourist trade in boys,” which was openly and sardonically discussed in literary circles. As in the tradition of

56

International, S A P , A Situational Analysis of Child Sex Tourism in Sri Lanka, 10. Crick, Resplendent Sites, Discordant Voices, 60. 58 S. Huda, “Sex Trafficking in South Asia,” International Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics 94 (2006): 379. 59 E C P AT U K , Child Sex Tourism in Sri Lanka (London: E C P AT U K , 2002): 2. 60 Joseph Boone, “Vacation Cruises; or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism,” in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Sara Mills (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP , 2003): 474. 61 Said, Orientalism, 190. 57

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Orientalism, Arabic boys were characterized as being effeminate and sexually available for Western men: for over a century, numerous gay men have journeyed to North Africa to discover what they already suspected was there: a colonized Third World in which the availability of casual sex is based on an economics of boys.62

One can surmise that the Orientalist attitudes informing child-sex-tourists in the Near East are the same attitudes that have informed various child-sextourists in Asia. The problem of child-sex tourism in Sri Lanka can also be seen as a manifestation of neocolonialism, envy, and consumerism among youth, as argued by Christine Beddoe. Beddoe questions the usual stance of child-protection groups, who define a child as being a person under eighteen years of age and who argue that children are incapable of making informed choices about prostitution.63 For Beddoe, the beach boy “is not a boy at all, but rather a young man,” “usually 14 to 26 years of age,” an average which is founded on her own interview-based findings, which suggest that the ‘beach boys’ of Sri Lanka are generally drawn into the industry for aspirational reasons, as opposed to any “pure economic necessity,” and that they are entrepreneurial: 64 Central to the ideology of beach boys is the desire to emulate tourist behaviour and consumption patterns. In a survey conducted in Hikkaduwa in 1986 and 1987 it was found that what lures boys at very tender ages into participation in sex acts and drug taking was the lure of “good money” they earned. The income of these boys was very high by local standards and they ate in tourist resorts even when the tourist did not pay. [. ..later] interviews conducted with beachboys by the author in 1993 and 1994 clearly indicated that their desire was to be with tourists in tourist space.65

Beddoe regards the aspiration “to be with [white] tourists in tourist space” as evidence of a neocolonialist culture in Sri Lanka, wherein “color is still regarded in terms of interassociated [sic] variables of class and socio-economic status.”66 “In the tourist setting,” she states, “access to the white tourist repre62 63 64 65 66

Boone, “Vacation Cruises; or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism,” 474. E C P AT U K , Child Sex Tourism in Sri Lanka, 13. Beddoe, “Beachboys and Tourists,” 45, 47, 48. “Beachboys and Tourists,” 48. “Beachboys and Tourists,” 45.

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sents a breakthrough to the world” with which the tourist is associated. 67 She believes, moreover, that the term ‘boy’ is a reflection of “the subservient relationship between host and guest.”68 This theory recalls the derogatory colonial use of the term ‘boy’ for any non-Western male servant, which is thus associable with exoticist fetishism. This study shall now move on to the analysis of Lokugé’s Turtle Nest and Gooneratne’s The Pleasures of Conquest in terms of the neocolonialist and exoticist problems that have been articulated here in connection with Sri Lanka’s tourist economy. It will begin with Turtle Nest, a novel which confronts the issue of child-sex tourism in a very direct way. It involves a serious representation of neocolonial problems and touristic corruption affecting the lives of the poor fishing folk in Sri Lanka’s coastal districts. It is set prior to the 2004 tsunami, which changed the traditional lifestyle of Sri Lankan fishers by forcing them to live away from the coastline.

Turtle Nest Lokugé’s Turtle Nest begins with the tale of Aruni, the novel’s eighteen-yearold protagonist, who was adopted at birth. She has travelled from Australia to Sri Lanka to learn about her “real” mother, an ill-fated “beach girl” called Mala who became pregnant twice as a teenager. Aruni is the second child. Although she is informed that Mala is dead, Aruni wants to learn about her life by meeting her estranged uncle, Priya, Mala’s brother. She traces Priya to the beach where her family lived but finds him semi-functional and uncommunicative. He is ostensibly a shell of a person because of his troubled life experience. So it is Simon, a friend of the family living on the beach, who speaks on behalf of Priya. He tells Aruni the sad tale of her family: her mother, Mala, and Priya, her fractured uncle, who listens in at times but never contributes.69 Simon’s story explains Mala’s and Priya’s shared history of sexual abuse by tourists. It presents their vulnerability as children, and subsequent molestation, as the result of poverty, local hierarchies, touristic exoticism, and neocolonialism. The ideas that this story about child sex workers 67

Beddoe, “Beachboys and Tourists,” 45. “Beachboys and Tourists,” 45. 69 Priya only makes one brief statement in this novel – “I’ll do that” – in reference to the collection of a chair from the beach; his curt tone suggests irritation at Aruni’s invasive enquiry (Chandani Lokugé, Turtle Nest [Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 2003]: 120; further page references are in the main text). 68

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conveys are consistent with those presented by Beddoe, Boone, and childprotection groups: sex workers are at once predatory teenage delinquents (albeit caught within a capitalist dynamic) and unambiguous victims. Through these characterizations, Lokugé reveals some of the very real and tragic ramifications of the ‘exoticist’ fantasy that Sri Lanka provides to white tourists. Mala and Priya are damned from the start. They are born into a poor and vulnerable fishing family, whose trade is upset by the war. Their father, Jamis, is prevented from working during the monsoon seasons because of incursions in the East by the Tamil Tiger militias, who have started “attacking the Sinhalese fishing colonies” (47). This has a devastating effect on their annual fishing routines and on the family, who, like others in the fishing community, go hungry during these times. The war also results in a reduction of tourists in the south of the island where they live, further reducing the income of the family and their community. Lokugé portrays the vulnerabilities of the children, Mala and Priya, that begin with this economic predicament. Their plight is exacerbated when Jamis, their father, becomes increasingly disaffected by his situation. He drinks, gambles, and is violent. With the breakdown of the family, Mala and Priya become vulnerable to the predators in their district, which in time leads to their being sexually abused by Western tourists. This outcome reflects the theory of child-protection groups, such as ECP AT , who identify poverty, “economic insecurity,” “weakening in the family structure,” and “intra family violence,” as factors that influence childsex tourism.70 Lokugé’s preference for the term “fishing colonies” also encourages the reader to see the organization of the fishing community as a legacy of colonialism. Lokugé frames the situation of her characters within local hierarchies by having the Mudalali (the local fish-trader) exploit the protagonist’s family and their community. The Mudalali is a predatory male figure who abuses his power. He pays his fishermen the lowest possible prices for their catches and charges “heavy interest from them when [loaning them] money to lease his boats” (50). It is said that “men like Jamis were bound to him for life in a cycle of poverty,” and that Aslin, Mala’s mother, felt it necessary to keep her children “out of his way”: He was a shark, Aslin said often enough, and lived not only off his fishermen but off their wives and daughters as well, when he got the chance. (64) 70

E C P AT U K , “Child Sex Tourism in Sri Lanka,” 2.

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The Mudalali’s impact on the fishing community suggests that their difficulties are predicated on these local patriarchal hierarchies, which support their status as an underclass. Despite these obvious local hierarchies, which subjugate the fishermen and their families, Lokugé presents the sexual exploitation of the children in the novel as a particularly neocolonial phenomenon. While the children’s vulnerability starts at a local level, with poverty, it is mainly the tourists in the story who take advantage of their weaknesses. The wealth of Western tourists overwhelms the children in the novel because they are so poor. They see sex tourism as a viable solution to their hardship because of their exposure to the sex-tourism culture on the beach where they live. This culture is promoted by the ‘beach boys,” a collection of teenage characters who are modelled on the real ‘beach boys’ (the male child prostitutes) of Sri Lanka. In Lokugé’s story, the ‘beach boys’ operate in packs, selling their services as tour guides, drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, and “god knows what else” (88). They “wear nylon shirts and shiny watches,” smoke “foreign cigarettes,” and trade “foreign chocolates and chewing gum,” all of which distinguishes them in the local community (110). They also make jokes about their sexual exploits with white men, which is how they acquire these “goodies” (110). This focus on material gain and commodities suggests that the beach boys are influenced by a neocolonial politics of envy, which is manifested as a kind of reversed exoticism. They regard westernization as an exotic accomplishment and covet Western things. They collect the signs or, rather, the ‘markers’ of westernization in much the same way that Culler’s ‘tourist’ collects vacation souvenirs. Their bravado implies that they are in control of the tourist culture, and that they are exploiting Western men, when in reality they are victims of the corrupt touristic imaginary. Lokugé uses the story of Mala, Aruni’s mother, to deconstruct the phenomenon of touristic envy, which draws beach boys (and girls) to prostitution in real-life scenarios. She grounds Mala’s envy in her poverty, a move that challenges the theories about envy (such as Beddoe’s) that play down the significance of poverty in the neocolonial context. She suggests that Mala is transported into an envious state – and thereafter led astray – by her very reasonable desire for a less punishing life. This is illustrated in a bathing scene where Mala is seduced by shampoo: Someone on the beach had given her a sachet of shampoo and she lathered her hair with it, relishing its fragrance. She wished she had never used the horrible carbolic soap. She could see what it had done

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to her mother’s hair that now cringed, scanty and dull against her neck. [. . . Afterwards, in the house,] she brought her face up against the mirror, and smiled for it, sultry and heavy lidded. She longed to be in some other, scented place. (61)

Shampoo is a non-essential product, and yet it has a powerful significance for Mala because she has so little to begin with, as indicated by the carbolic soap, which she would normally use to wash her hair. The “scented” place that she imagines at this moment is, it seems, the tourist space, the place where her shampoo has come from. Mala is seduced by its fragrance, because it stands for an ‘Other’ exotic and less harrowing form of existence. She also associates this longing with sex, because of her semi-exposed state while showering, which provokes an adolescent fantasy of sexual initiation (of being kissed and desired). Her subsequent prostitution is depicted as a natural development of her desire to become a part of the exoticist tourist world. Here, too, we see the pervasive workings of the exoticist Western imaginary, as Mala thus begins to desire herself in line with the fantasy of the Asian woman: as an exotic, sexualized, and perfumed creature. She keenly imbibes this fantasy because of envy and desire for an alternative life. Mala’s story also explores the problem of neocolonial consumerism and commodity fetishism, as manifested in the teen prostitution culture. It presents the trap of consumerism for Mala, who, after falling into the white man’s net, feels empowered by the things that she buys with her income – “butterfly hair slides” and “slinky dresses” (89), frivolous and exotic things which give her confidence. The tragedy of this commodity-based empowerment is that she must prostitute herself to have these things, which makes her a human commodity. It is an unfair deal in which she, the local, is actually disempowered by her trade in spite of her earnings. The pathos of her commodity status is mocked by the locals, who call her “a free-for-all – a basketball that could be shoved from hand to hand” (90). The “basketball” enriches the metaphor with respect to this neocolonial commodity culture, because it is a traditionally Western (and, specifically, American) plaything. Mala’s disastrous commodification is developed further when she becomes pregnant by a Western tourist. She gives birth to a “half caste” who is sold by her father to a colony of beggars, thus creating another human commodity, and a particularly unfortunate one (107), for, as Simon, the family friend/ narrator, knows,

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This narrative adjunct is also, perhaps, an allusion to the illegal selling of babies in Sri Lanka, an issue that has concerned child-protection groups since the early 1980s.71 Lokugé represents the tragedy of child-sex tourism most unambiguously through the character of Priya, Mala’s brother, who is lured into the white man’s net at age eleven. She highlights his vulnerability in the lead-up to his fall, by explaining that he is starving: that he has had “nothing but plain tea since [the] morning” (111), and that he will have nothing more until the evening. She says that he has dropped out of school because of his family’s poverty, and that he has been left unsupervised on a dangerous beach, albeit close to his house. Lokugé makes it quite clear that this character’s ‘decision’ to submit to a paedophile is based on economic necessity, not informed choice. Although he has a “vague idea” of what is expected, from his contact with the older ‘beach boys,” he cannot understand the pain and suffering that prostitution will cause him (110). Priya’s story highlights the vulnerability, naivety, and innocence of prepubescent children who are targeted by paedophile tourists. Lokugé presents his experience as relating to a particularly vicious variety of Western cultural imperialism in which non-Western children are perceived as an unproblematic exotic commodity. Lokugé describes her unnamed paedophile Western tourist character as a violent neo-imperialist predator. He approaches Priya on the beach because of his vulnerability, which he gauges through a quick assessment of his “skinny body,” “narrow hips,” and oversized shorts (112). They illustrate poverty and susceptibility for the paedophile, who confidently exploits the situation with the knowledge that Priya’s circumstance will be his undoing. As the narrator states, “He knew the boy had little choice, and that he must succumb. If not today, then tomorrow or the next day” (113). He uses chocolate as a bait to lure the starving child away from the beach and into a cabana where he sexually assaults him: The man was knowing and crafty. He held out a chocolate from the bedroom. Priya moved towards it. The man closed the door behind 71

Crick, Resplendent Sites, Discordant Voices, 60; see also Alexis A. Aronowitz, Human Trafficking, Human Misery: The Global Trade in Human Beings (Westport C T : Praeger, 2009): 85.

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him and dropped the chocolate back into the bowl. He sat on the bed and drew Priya to him. Priya squirmed but tried to smile to please, his attention was still focused on the bedside table. He was also excited that he had been employed at last to do the work of the big boys. The man was gentle at first but suddenly he turned Priya around violently, and pushed him down on the bed. He yanked Priya’s head back and clamped one hand over his mouth. [.. . ] As the man impaled him the pain swelled and surged, thrusting relentlessly through his body. And then cessation. .. Priya lay released at last, his face buried in a sheet. It was the excruciating pain, now, nothing else. He could barely move. The man pulled him to his feet with some impatience. [.. . ] “Take the chocolate or the cigarettes”, he said. Priya did not realise that he was dismissed. [. . . ] “Get out,” the man ordered, wanting to be alone. He lay back on the bed and wiped his face as if with a sudden distaste for this brown thin child and for the sweat and fish smells that emanated from him. He kicked Priya’s shorts from the bed to the floor. Suddenly activated, Priya picked them up and drew them on. He picked up a chocolate. His actions were hesitant. He opened the door and crept out. [. . . ] Simon waited for Priya some distance way from the cabana. (113–14)

This rape scene highlights the horrific, violent, and damaging nature of this crime. Lokugé depicts Priya as the victim of a cruel and exploitative neocolonial world, in which the tourist has power and the local Sri Lankan child has none. The tourist exploits his power by taking advantage of Priya’s hunger and vulnerability, and he does this in full view of the locals, including Simon, the family friend/narrator, who observes the situation from a distance. It seems that even the compassionate adult Simon is resigned to this outcome because of Priya’s poverty and the prevalence of child-sex tourism in the area. Simon’s resignation suggests that the neocolonial tourist culture subjugates him, too, despite his advantaged position as an adult and valued member of the local beach community. This subjugation illustrates the wide reach of the neocolonial culture, which affects the entire community. It also suggests some degree of hegemony – in the Gramscian sense, ‘domination by consent’ – as the community seems to tolerate this state of affairs, at least where boys are concerned. Since, outside of the narrator’s portrayal of Simon’s silent concern, and an earlier threat made by Priya’s mother, that “she would burn his legs or beat him until he could never walk again if she found him in a

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Suddha’s [white man’s] net” (110), no moral outrage at this matter is felt by characters in the local beach community.73 The moral argument of the novel, with regard to the prostitution of young boys, is thus mostly limited to the narrator’s graphic account of Priya’s rape and its interpretation by the implied Western or English-speaking reader. This is entirely different from the handling of Mala, who is admonished by characters in the beach community for her involvement with white men. In addition to the older beach boy’s aforementioned “basketball” slur, it is said, following some transgressions, that “the village gossiped about Mala all the time” (89). This communal tension escalates one day as Mala is walking home. The butik men (shop vendors, and those hanging about in the front of shops) hurl “a stream of insults [upon her …] from either side of the road”: “Go back to your white men, vesi [they say], you won’t find what you want among the likes of us anymore.” They flashed their torches at parts of her body. [… Then] a few nights later, neighbours slung buckets of excrement on the front door of [… her father’s] house. ( 98– 100)

This treatment of Mala in contrast to Priya suggests a difference in morals and local attitudes toward the problem of prostitution for boys and girls. Mala’s prostitution is clearly more threatening to the community than Priya’s, despite his tender age. In the context of Sinhala culture, this relates perhaps to the significance of female purity in Sri Lanka. This is founded in Buddhist doctrines, which underlie Sinhala nationalist identity and is manifested in the moral expectations that are placed upon women, including the preservation of premarital virginity.74 As Caitrin Lynch explains, Sinhala Buddhists consider women to be the agents who hold the nation together [.. . guardians] at the core of Sri Lanka’s moral identity.75

73

Priya’s parents are killed shortly thereafter in a suicide bombing, which means that his mother cannot intervene. He is taken in by Simon, whose subsequent efforts to protect him are in vain. The damage is apparently done. 74 Alexandra Watkins, “Problematic Identities in Women’s Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora” (doctoral dissertation, Deakin University, 2012): 220. 75 Caitrin Lynch, Juki Girls Good Girls: Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka (Ithaca N Y : Cornell UP , 2007): 9.

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In applying this theory to the novel, one could argue that because Mala, as a result of her gender, is supposed to be a moral representative of the beach community, her offences are communal and unforgivable. Lokugé’s levelling of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives is worth noting in relation to Mala’s exclusion. While the community’s reaction to Mala is challenged by the westernized character, Aruni’s horrified reaction to this story of her mother’s harassment, Aruni’s outsider criticism is immediately balanced by the insider Simon’s response in the related discourse: Aruni: ‘Did you do anything… The people respected you, surely you could have stopped them?’ (99) Simon: ‘No Missy, I did not do anything. Who can say how we react in a crisis? We all had a hand in the way things turned out’. ( 100)

Simon’s words remind the implied reader that the drama of Mala’s fall – and Priya’s, which precedes it – occurs in a moment of crisis defined by the aforementioned displacement and subjugation of this traditional fishing community by the coalescing factors of tourism and the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. Simon’s statement implies ambiguity with respect to the local community’s ‘duty of care,” or lack thereof, thus acknowledging at least some local responsibility for the foreign exploitation of the protagonist’s children. The failure in ‘duty of care’ to vulnerable children is a significant theme in Turtle Nest, since failure by the local community and by the tourists results in the victimization of and predation on children. This state of affairs is expounded through the novel’s eponymous “turtle nest,” a metaphor for the situation of the children who live on the beach, who, like the turtles, are exposed to predators. These predators are often, although not always, tourists: white paedophiles who target vulnerable children. Like the baby turtles who make their perilous journey from their nests to the sea, the beach children are exposed to airborne predators as soon as their lives have begun. And, just like the turtle’s natural predator, the eagle, with its aerial view, these predominantly white predators have an advantaged position. It is intimated, by the fate of the turtle, that the life of the beach child is hopeless. Asilin (Priya and Mala’s mother) suggests as much early on, when Mala wants to rescue a baby turtle that has fallen from the sky after an eagle has dropped it: “Child, that miserable creature is better dead.. .. Or else when it is as big as a house, it will be cut up for raw meat” (18). Aslin would know, as “in her spare time” she sells “turtle meat to rich people” (18), which reminds us also that it is the rich

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who are consuming the poor in this tale. Her words remind us that survival is tough for the vulnerable in this area. The turtle–human victim analogy is also apparent in a scene where the beach boys round up an old turtle and turn it into a spectacle for the amusement of Western tourists: The turtle is forced upside down. It keeps flapping its short stumps against its inner sides. It’s one massive turtle. The locals haven’t seen anything so big for months. Everyone is fascinated by its size, its ugliness. […] It struggles to turn right side up, beating its fins frantically. The beach boys hold it down […]. they will not free the turtle. They will force it to another hotel, and when it is exhausted and starved they’ll dismember it for its meat. (128–29)

Like the small children who join the beach boys, the turtle is victimized, tortured, and consumed by this brutal commodity culture. The horror of childsex tourism is allegorized by this scenario and by the description, which follows, explaining the butchering of the creature. A woman’s hand is inserted “into the jagged wound” so as to scoop “out its thickly clotting blood” before the cutting of fin and tail and organs. They say the turtle lives through it all, mourning and writhing in agony, until the carapace is almost empty, until at last the heart has been cut out. They know it is alive because it keeps snapping its mouth and opening and closing its eyelids. ( 129)

This slow and painful death represents the permanent damage of child prostitution upon the grown beach boys, which we see in Priya later in the storyline: he is represented as a semi-functioning but mostly empty shell of a person. He still walks away with the white men. As previously stated, he listens to the conversation between Simon, his friend, and Aruni, Mala’s daughter, though he never contributes. His most communicative moment comes toward the end of the novel, when Simon has finally explained the details of Mala’s disappearance: Simon gets up and walks away into his house, closing the door behind him. When Aruni looks up at last, she finds Priya in Simon’s chair. She raises her eyes to his. He moves his hand finally, across the years, and touches the wetness on her cheek. (195–96)

It is a poignant gesture of affection for his estranged relative, and one that reminds the reader of the far-reaching extent of Priya’s otherwise benumbed condition.

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The turtle metaphor can also be seen as an allegory of the nation, as Anthony Carrigan argues.76 Carrigan sees the dismembering of baby turtles by “shell-crushing” eagle talons as representing the Sri Lankan body politic, fractured by war and “global power interests”: [The novel] invites a correlative reading that extends to the level of national allegory as the turtles’ dismemberment [sic] bears strong political parallels. Meaning both “to divide and partition (a country or empire)” (O E D 2) and “to cut off, separate, sever, from the main body: chiefly in reference to country or region” ( O E D 3.b), the dismemberment of baby turtles is redolent of ethnic division in Sri Lanka (a divided or “dismembered” state). The analogy situates the postcolonial island as subject to larger forces, manipulated by global power interests and scarred by internal brutalities.77

These internal brutalities are also, he suggests, related to the sex-tourism industry. Carrigan’s focus on the turtle–eagle/ victim–predator dyad is interesting in relation to the aforementioned “global power interests,” particularly if we consider the significance of a flying predator, which makes one think of human predators arriving on aeroplanes. This enriches Carrigan’s theory of there being an implied neocolonial political critique in the turtle metaphor. Another issue explored by Lokugé in this novel is the problematic of diasporic nostalgia and its relationship to touristic gullibility as experienced by Aruni, Mala’s daughter. Aruni’s impressions of the beach-world are complicated because of her adoption by Sinhalese elites as a newborn baby, and because of her life in Australia since the age of eight. The beach boys “surreptitiously call her kalu suddhi […]. It means black-white woman” ( 72–73). She has heard them say this, but discounts it because she is determined to stake her claim in their culture. Aruni’s need to belong blinds her to the sordid realities of their world. It leads her to romanticize their existence in an exoticist way and subsequently to behave naively on the beach and among the beach people. Her naivety is shown to be the result of her diasporic nostalgia, her privileged Australian upbringing, and her resultant status as a tourist. 76

Anthony Carrigan, Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment (New York: Routledge, 2010): 150. 77 Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment, 158; see also Carrigan, “ ‘ Out of This Great Tragedy Will Come a World Class Tourism Destination’: Disaster, Ecology, and Post-Tsunami Tourism Development in Sri Lanka,” in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey & George B. Handley (New York: Oxford UP , 2011): 277.

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In Australia, the beach is typically seen as a restorative environment, a site in which to relax, unwind, a place for families and camping holidays, beautiful bodies and good times.78 There are hazards on the surf coasts, of course, though Australia’s iconic lifesavers protect citizens from most of these perils. In Turtle Nest, the ideology is quite different. Despite the raw beauty of the novel’s setting, the beach is depicted as a dangerous place for locals and tourists alike, an ambiguous and slippery place where beauty and violence collide: Aslin [Mala’s mother] remembered how Mala loved the changing shades of the sunrise – red-gold flowers in the sky. She remembered also, as in an unending nightmare the bloodied cloth in which Mala had left her infant. The way it wrapped round the tiny body, the way it had left patches of faded red on the translucent baby skin. And she remembered her husband’s knife raised against her and the infant. The blood that oozed from it, fish blood, her blood, his, all mixed in confusion – the reds of hearts breaking. ( 52–53)

Blood is a destabilizing motif. It is regularly compared in the novel to the warmth and colour of the tropical sun and with the fierce cycles of life and death on the coast. Images such as this undercut the touristic fantasy of the pristine island paradise, as promoted by the Sri Lankan tourist board or travel writers/ photographers, such as the Australian character Paul, a professional travel photographer who befriends Aruni at the hotel where they are both staying, quite early in the novel. Paul’s impressions of “catamarans against brilliant twilight skies, the delicate footprints of a bird on wet sand” ( 15), convey quite a different world to that which is described elsewhere in the story. These impressions belong to the touristic imaginary fed to the Western traveller; they negate the problematic aspects of beach tourism in Sri Lanka.79 78

See Allan Edwards, James Skinner & Keith Gilbert, Some Like it Hot: The Beach as a Cultural Dimension (Oxford: Meyer & Meyer Sport, 2003); John Fiske, Bob Hodge & Graeme Turner, Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Susan Hosking, Rick Hosking, Rebecca Pannell & Nena Bierbaum, Something Rich & Strange: Sea Changes, Beaches and the Littoral in the Antipodes (Adelaide, S A : Wakefield, 2009). 79 It should be noted that Paul is a somewhat ambiguous character because he is older (in his forties) and married, and because he starts an affair with the young, eighteen-year-old Aruni, which might be interpreted as his taking advantage of a young local person, in spite of Aruni’s diasporic status. This action may be regarded as another illustration of his exoticist touristic imaginary, which romanticises corruption. It is interesting to note, however, that he looks at local women with some Orientalist

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Lokugé’s dramatic finale emblematizes the concept of the beach as a savage Janus-faced territory. It begins when the beach boys wake Aruni at night by throwing shells at her window. They tell her that there is “a turtle laying eggs on the beach, very close,” and that her friend “Paul sir is already there” (236). Deciding that there is no time “to dress properly,” she hurries down to the sand wearing only a “beach cloth” (237). It is not until she reaches the men that she reconsiders her actions. She sees that there is “hardly any moon,” which is odd, as the turtles “by habit laid [their] eggs on fullmoon nights” (236). And she realizes that Paul is not there. “I think I’ll go back, I’ll come another night” (237), she tells them. “There is no moon. The turtle will not lay eggs on a moonless night like this.” “But you will missy. You’ll lay” (237), she hears one of them say. She wakes the following morning battered and bruised, lying on the wet sand. She has been gang-raped by “her people” (241); and yet, when she finally looks around, she sees only the sunrise “A marigold sky: warm and orange” (240). This juxtaposition of violence and beauty once again articulates the ambiguous reality of beach life and of beach-tourism culture more generally in developing nations. In this place and others like it, “the sea is everywhere, spreading and spreading and roaring and heaving, flooding their lives” (27), it is a world of despair despite the warmth of the sun. This ending problematizes the concept of the local victim/ tourist predator dyad, as here it is the tourist Aruni, albeit Sri Lankan born, who is the victim, and the beach boys who are the predators. They are victims turned predators. This also problematizes the turtle metaphor, as Carrigan astutely notes. Until this moment in the novel, the beach boys are likened to turtles; now it is Aruni who enters the abused turtle metaphor, when they tell her that she will “lay” like a turtle laying its eggs. There is also a description of her garment, the inadequate beach cloth, which is torn by the wind “out and away from her like violent flapping wings” (238). “The term ‘flapping’,” as Carrigan states, “establishes a direct connection” with the earlier scene, described before, in which the ‘massive turtle [. . .] is forced upside down” by beach boys: 80 “It keeps flapping its short stumps against its inner sides [… as] it struggles to disdain. He is, on a couple of occasions, disturbed by the thought that Aruni is one of them, a beach person, as opposed to a middle-class Sri Lankan-Australian tourist. 80 Carrigan, “Sex Tourism, Beach Ecology, and Compound Disaster,” in Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment (New York: Routledge, 2010): 159.

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turn right side up, beating its fins frantically” (128–29). Carrigan reads this allusion as emblematizing negative cycles of exploitation in beach space, with turtles representing no more than profoundly negative mediations with the natural world, local culture turning “feral”, and all ecological actors involved in a pseudo-Darwinian “survival of the fittest.”81

This denouement of the sexually exploited teenagers becoming aggressors also reflects a real phenomenon. In fact, there are a number of studies which show that boys who have been victims of sexual abuse have a greater tendency to develop problematic forms of sexual behaviour in adolescence. As Kahn Jahan explains, it is not uncommon for abused children to “merge sexual behaviour and aggression and become the victimizers of other children.” 82 There is also, as Carrigan observes, a high incidence of rape by young men in war-torn countries. They rape and torture as a means of reclaiming their masculine identity.83 This ending also reflects the error of Aruni’s touristic, romantic, and exoticist vision of Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans. Her fate elucidates the problematic of this type of exoticist and touristic thinking, which has the tendency to “mask” social problems and disguise “brutal circumstances,” as Graham Huggan explains of exoticist culture.84 As Huggan suggests, tourism, far from protecting its paying customers, makes them vulnerable; it creates an environment of misunderstanding that can easily transform into conflict.85

Huggan’s observation is made with regard to two Australian “tourist novels” set in Bali: Gerard Lee’s Troppo Man (1990) and Inez Baranay’s The Edge of Bali (1992).86 These stories are “self-aware,” like Turtle Nest, challenging and confront the popular exoticist culture of tourism and writing about tourism in South Asia, and, albeit in very a different way from Turtle Nest, transmuting “touristic conflict into the stuff of pastiche and self-conscious aestheticism.”87 81

Carrigan, “Sex Tourism, Beach Ecology, and Compound Disaster,” 160. Kahn Nasrin Jahan, “Sexual abuse problems among adolescents and major remedial actions,” International Journal of Biomolecules and Biomedicine 1.1 (2011): 10. 83 Carrigan, ‘Sex Tourism, Beach Ecology, and Compound Disaster,” 160. 84 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 14. 85 The Postcolonial Exotic, 203. 86 The Postcolonial Exotic, 195. 87 The Postcolonial Exotic, 199. 82

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They are postmodern, like Gooneratne’s The Pleasures of Conquest (1996), which will be examined next. Turtle Nest is self-aware, though it is also serious. It contests the touristic and exoticist fantasies of the Third-World beach setting as a paradise. It critiques the seedy underbelly of sex tourism in Sri Lanka and the neocolonial character of this touristic corruption. Lokugé’s representation of the beach resists the trafficking of exoticism. It rejects the fashion of romancing people and places in developing nations, which inevitably diminishes the severity of their social and political problems.

The Pleasures of Conquest The Pleasures of Conquest by Yasmine Gooneratne looks at many of the issues that are addressed in Turtle Nest, but in a radically different way. While Lokugé explores the socio-economic problems that affect the poor in Sri Lanka’s beach districts, Gooneratne examines the neocolonialist, exoticist, and/or Orientalist simulacra provided in Sri Lanka’s elite tourist hotels, such as the world-famous Galle Face Hotel in Colombo, which still markets “colonial grandeur,” “Victorian architecture,” English “high-teas,” and royal patronage.88 Gooneratne uses pastiche and irony to satirize this type of nostalgic tourism and to deconstruct the neocolonialist attitudes and persuasions of Western tourists. The dominant narrative in this story is set in the island republic of Amnesia (an allegory for Sri Lanka) and it starts in 1981.89 It involves the creative exploits of Stella Mallinson, a popular American novelist who has a background in “the Academy,” having previously taught creative writing at an American university. Stella is in Amnesia for a working holiday to compile authentic Amnesian stories by local writers for a book that will be sold in America. She 88

The Galle Face Hotel, “The Galle Face Hotel,” The Galle Face Hotel (2011), http: //www.gallefacehotel.com/html_classic/home_classic.htm (accessed 17 November 2011). 89 The book is divided into four sections, which regularly overlap. Stella’s story is the first of these. It focuses on her literary project, The New Imperial Hotel, and her relationship with a local boy called Rohan. The second section is about Stella’s exlover Phillip Destry, who laments his treatment of various women, while reflecting on his Amnesian related research. The third is about a local woman called Angela, her Australian husband, Peter, and their son, Julian. The fourth section is about Mallika, an illiterate local woman who has an exceptional memory and who works as a housekeeper. She is the aunty of Rohan, from the first story.

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is a guest at the New Imperial Hotel, where she and her team of writers are working. In addition to her literary assignment, Stella is on a mercy mission. She has joined the celebrity-cause bandwagon, and is planning to save the Amnesian elephants to heighten her celebrity status. As the narrator explains, “Stella had to consider several Third World locations before the final decision was made.”90 She had thought of going somewhere else to raise support for “starving Third World kids,” but in the end her publicist decided that, thanks to her shapely physique and the need for photo opportunities, she would “look a lot better kissing killer whales or cuddling elephants than hugging emaciated children” (19). This satirical detail shows that her interest in Amnesian culture is quite self-serving. Gooneratne’s novel is a complex and comic critique of Third World tourism, exotic commodity fetishism, and neocolonialism. The formula of Stella’s literary project, the aforementioned collection of stories by authentic Amnesian writers, satirizes the manufacturing of exoticist commodity discourses, as situated under the rubric of postcolonial literature, in a number of ways. To begin with, there is the issue of mise en scène: the ‘settings’. Stella organizes the setting of “each of the novel’s twelve chapters” around “twelve specially selected ancient Amnesian sites,” which have been chosen for “their historical importance and their picturesque attributes” ( 27). They have been carefully nominated to “showcase” Amnesia to the world and, thereafter, “to open [it] up to tourist[ic] development” (27). This plan illustrates the secondary significance of the ‘authentic’ Amnesian tales within this supposedly literary project. It also highlights the close relationship between exoticist literature and exoticist tourism, which are commonly informed commodities.91 This relationship is further implied by the presence of the Minister for Tourism and Immigration in Gooneratne’s novel. He is a key contributor at the conference about Stella’s book, which is hosted by the Amnesian Ministries of Education and Culture, who have decided to make this project a “Government-sponsored” affair ( 29). They have, as the narrator explains, “strong links with the Department of Tourism” (24). The Minister for Tourism and Immigration appoints himself Stella’s official “escort’: he makes “himself available whenever affairs of the state are not on his mind” and 90

Yasmine Gooneratne, The Pleasures of Conquest (Milsons Point, N S W : Vintage Australia, 1996): 19. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text. 91 Exoticist literature has stimulated exoticist tourism for centuries, as for instance Sir Richard Burton’s translation of the Kama Sutra, first published in 1883.

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places “one of the Ministries fleet of cars, a Cadillac with a personalised numberplate and liveried Chauffeur [.. .] at her disposal” ( 46). Gooneratne also uses Stella’s book project to critique the neocolonialist and/or Orientalist fantasy of Asian authenticity, which is often projected in postcolonial literature. Stella wants “real” stories and humorous anecdotes about “authentic” Amnesian experience, stories that describe the nation’s exotic qualities with cheer and sentimentality. But she cannot find them, as the stories that her writers offer are about suicide, political exploitation, disability, and poverty. And, while the writers themselves find elements of humour and/or irony in their tales, Stella “could discern no humour in any of them. One or two, indeed, make her feel quite ill” (63). She sees their stories as “unreal inventions,” which are, “almost surreal” (63). The only story that she can really appreciate is one that is set in the nineteenth century about a British civil servant who “had spent his entire life working for the welfare of the province he ruled” (61). The local authors find this story amazingly funny and utterly fictitious. Stella asks, “What’s improbable about a colonial officer working his guts out for his district? They did it all the time, didn’t they?” (61). She is informed that this happened “only in novels and on the cinema screen. In real life they lived it up here, lined their pockets and went home” (61). This dialogue encourages the reader to consider the disparity between the reality of life in the Third World and the exoticist fantasy about that life that is sold to the West in books. Gooneratne suggests that Western consumers prefer the fantasy to the reality of the Orient, a fantasy that is alive and kicking at the New Imperial Hotel. Amnesia’s New Imperial Hotel is a fantasy of colonial simulacra, a carnivalesque celebration of “olde worlde” (6) decadence catering specifically to the Western tourist: Grossed staves and armorial emblems […] hung above the lobby’s entrance doors, and portraits of Amnesia’s long-dead British governors and their ladies in antiquated frames of carved mahogany and calamander wood embellished the walls. (5)

Stella Mallinson, while aware of the hotel’s clichés, is still seduced by the New Imperial’s décor. On seeing it again, she “couldn’t help exclaiming with pleasure. She was so charmed that she very nearly clapped her hands” (5). In this scene, Gooneratne satirizes the Orientalist hotel culture and the touristic reaction to this kind of culture. By calling this hotel ‘The New Imperial,” she also reminds us of the neo-imperialist character of tourism in places like Amnesia/ Sri Lanka.

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The link between the imperialist trajectory of the ‘olde worlde’ and that of the new is signified by the placement of the mosaic in the lobby’s entrance hall. Its cartographical form is a shapely reminder of the foundation of colonialism in Amnesia/ Sri Lanka. When Stella enters the hotel, the sight of the mosaic overwhelms her. As if by magic, it re-creates the arrival of the Portuguese in the island and the birth of the colony. It has all the clichéd trimmings, such as “graceful galleons […] masts decked with pennants and streamers, [and] white sails billowing in a non-existent breeze” (3). The majesty of the ‘olde worlde’ is neatly subverted, though, by the arrival of Stella’s luggage trolleys, which glide fantastically across the lobby, stacked with her “colour-coded designer bags” (3). The designer bags remind us of the real reason that Spanish galleons were sent to Amnesia: commerce. It is telling that Gooneratne places this great colonial map at the entrance of the hotel, for it also reminds us of the relationship between tourists and imperialism in the modern world. Tourism can be described as a final outpost in the colonial enterprise because it continues to divide the world. Generally speaking, only wealthy elites and/or people from developed countries can afford its luxuries. As Anne McClintock suggests, the map was a great symbol in the history of colonialism. As she explains, the imperialist cartographer would use symbols when creating a map that would gender the landscape as feminine, making it symbolically penetrable, and therefore controllable by Westerners:92 Map-making became the servant of colonial plunder, for the knowledge constituted by the map both preceded and legitimised the conquest of territory.93

Jean Baudrillard makes a similar comment on territory: the territory no longer precedes the map nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – procession of simulacra – that engenders the journey. 94 92

As she observes, “Female figures were planted like fetishes at the ambiguous points of contact, at the borders and the orifices of the contest zone. Sailors bound wooden female figures to their ships’ prows and baptised their ships – as exemplary threshold objects – with female names. Cartographers filled the blank seas of their maps with mermaids and sirens. Explorers called unknown lands ‘virgin’ territory”; McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London & New York: Routledge, 1995): 24. 93 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 28.

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In its postcolonial context, the map in the New Imperial Hotel is testament to the “procession of simulacra’; it precedes and legitimizes the commodification of imperialism. Another issue that Gooneratne considers, in relation to tourist culture, is the insulation of the patrons in luxury establishments. This aspect is satirized in the attitudes of Stella and the local media who interview her at the New Imperial Hotel. The narrator intimates that “Stella’s sponsors had a certain distaste for the extras that seemed an indispensable part of outdoor settings in Amnesia these days” (18). And, that “rumours of terrorism in the north of the island and bomb scares in the south had been causing nervous tourists to cancel their reservations” (22). However, Stella is indifferent: she is too preoccupied with the plan of developing her celebrity persona, and with getting a tan on the side, to worry about this civil strife. The media is also uninterested in the conflict, which is less newsworthy to them than the presence of Stella and the wintry conditions of her home base, Manhattan. These perspectives illustrate the critical position adopted by Mendis, as noted earlier, with regard to the deliberate isolation of tourists in Sri Lankan hotels and the glorification of tourists in Sri Lanka, which overshadows the seriousness of social issues. 95 There is a touristic theory that the happenings outside of hotel precincts are of little consequence or interest for tourists in Third World locations. This touristic indifference to local problems is illustrated by an article which suggests that hundreds of American college students, staying in the Mexican Pacific beach resort of Acapulco in 2007, were “unfazed by a violent drug war that [. .. ] killed police and left body parts strewn about [the] town.”96 While this may well be construed as media hype, it is indeed supported by the response of one young American woman who explained the position of her fellow ‘spring-breakers’: “We don’t necessarily think about any of that,” she stated, “it’s more just coming down here and having a good time.”97 The cadence of this article is strikingly similar to that of the characters in The Pleasures of Conquest. 94

Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 1. Mendis, The Economic, Social, and Cultural Impact of Tourism on Sri Lanka, 22–23. 96 Gunther Hamm, “Spring-Breakers Party on Amid Acapulco Drug War,” Thomson Reuters (3 March 2007), http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/03/03/us-mexicodrugs-acapulco-idUSN0346665020070303 (accessed 17 November 2011). 97 Hamm, “Spring-Breakers Party on Amid Acapulco Drug War.” 95

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It seems that the tourist hotel can, in isolation, embody the ‘authentic’ and or complete touristic experience. All that is required is that the establishment provide the appropriate signs of ‘authenticity,” as Culler demonstrates in “The Semiotics of Tourism,”98 and as MacCannell similarly illustrates when discussing the phenomenon of “staged authenticity.”99 Tourism providers develop ‘authenticity’ for their tourists. With street signs and information stands, they create tourist-friendly environments. They also sell trinkets and souvenirs, pieces of ‘culture’ that the tourist can take home with them. Although these ‘signs’ are intended to be helpful and/or complimentary, they tend to diminish and trivialize the local culture. They also have a tendency to flood the market to such a degree that they overwhelm the sites of interest that they are meant to support. Towns become meccas of touristic signs, stages, and simulacra, as described by Baudrillard: they become grotesque “hyperrealities” in which the simulation is the attraction.100 This is certainly the case at the New Imperial Hotel, where the fanfare of ‘authentic’ simulacra is so impressive that its patrons needn’t leave their hotel at all. Even the ‘authenticity’ of nature is brought to their doorstep: When the capital’s working elephants pass by in twos and threes on their way to the fields in the early mornings, they pause of their own accord before the New Imperial Hotel’s great balcony. Turning to face it, and requiring no command from the mahouts on their backs, they strike the tips of their trunks to their foreheads in a protracted and thunderous salute. ( 13)

As Stella learns, this great procession, once an annual event, “can be viewed quite regularly these days […] in the tourist season as often as once a week” (15). In the true Baudrillardian sense, the simulation here is as alluring as the original artefact, if not more so. Indeed, this is what the tourists are coming to see – this “enhancement” of reality. Still, while this predicament may be the product of the tourist culture,101 Gooneratne warns that simulations of the past, such as those at the New Imperial Hotel, can be problematic. This is particularly so when they involve the simulation of outdated conventions such as

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Culler, Framing the Sign, 154. MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 91. 100 Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 13. 101 Where there is no original, since everything is a sign of itself (a simulation of a simulation). 99

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the Oriental servant / Western master dichotomy, a prevailing concept in Sri Lankan tourism, which has been critiqued by both Mendis and Crick.102 The performance of the master / servant relationship is both satirized and critiqued in The Pleasures of Conquest. The first occurrence of this is a scene in which a native waiter admires Stella in the hotel lobby where she is seated like a queen. He observes: The chair on which Stella was sitting was so cunningly positioned on the floor that she appeared from a distance to be floating on air, very much like the queen. (9)103

The joke is on Stella, as the waiter is well aware of the staged arrangement of the furniture: The arrangement was a conceit deliberately designed to flatter. It was calculated to make the Western visitor, especially if that visitor were under sixty and female, look like a pampered beauty in a Cecil B. de Mille film. (If she caught sight of her reflection in the huge mirror on the opposite wall, she was likely to feel like it, too.) (9)

And yet, by entering this theatre, and “taking pleasure in the illusion” of a “queenly” Western beauty (9), Gooneratne shows how this waiter is at the same time subordinated by Stella, his Western mistress. “Not Berenice’s locks first rose so bright, The heavens bespangling with dishevelled light,”104 says “this young man to himself, [so deeply] fascinated by the picture of Stella” (10). In Literary Formations, Anne Brewster, in the tradition of Homi Bhabha, argues that cultural identities in postcolonial writing can be “highly performative and participative.”105 She suggests that this is a positive because it produces “ambiguities that result in polysemousness, or multiple meanings.”106 In The Pleasures of Conquest, Stella’s performance with the staff at the New 102

As discussed in this chapter, pp. 128–30 above. This passage appears to be a parody of the beginning of ‘A Game of Chess,” Part Two of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which is a parody of lines from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra. It is thus a parody of a parody. 104 This is a quotation from Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock” ( 1712), Canto V, ll. 129–30. 105 She says this when talking about writing by Ania Walwicz. Anne Brewster, Literary Formations: Post-Colonialism, Nationalism, Globalism (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne UP , 1995): 88. 106 Brewster, Literary Formations, 88. 103

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Imperial Hotel is replete with multiple meanings. However, this “polysemousness,” while playful, is not presented in an entirely positive light, for, on the one hand Stella’s performance as a Western queen is just a game, yet, on the other, she takes the game far too seriously, to the point of becoming an actual conquistador. She starts an affair with Rohan, her young masseur, which illustrates Paul Fussell’s idea that “the resemblance between the tourist and the client of a massage parlour is closer than it would be polite to emphasize.”107 Initially, the relationship between Stella and Rohan is depicted as a game: a play between lovers. We are told that “With Rohan,” Stella, “felt like a queen and, in the best sense of that misused word, a mistress” ( 53). They both embrace the theatrics of sexual role-play, which seems to denote a fair balance of power between them: Rohan brought home to Stella the joyous naughtiness of nurseries: lambs grazing in forbidden meadows, cows rioting in ripening corn, a gander pushing its curious beak into a fine lady’s chamber… “Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,” she would say softly, sometimes, a signal that would be immediately and intimately understood. ( 53)

The disclosure of Rohan’s age, however, which occurs later in the story, illuminates the problematic of this English nursery-inspired game, which not only transpires between an adult and a minor (Rohan is just seventeen years of age), but also between a Westerner and a local. These English rhymes call attention to the previously mentioned literary construction of imperialist power, as argued by Said.108 Stella’s literary personality also reminds us of the work of Boone, who discusses the imperialist tradition of pederasty and corruption among Western literary travellers.109 The games between Rohan and Stella are supposed to end when Stella’s projects are completed, though Stella is too distraught by the prospect of this happening to let it occur. Before leaving, she makes a proposal to his family for what seems to be an offer of marriage. They accept her, on monetary grounds, which allows her to take Rohan back to America. At the airport, however, her sincerity is destabilized: although the reader is reminded at several points in the chapter that Rohan is much younger than the middleaged Stella, it is only at this point that we learn that Rohan is just seventeen. 107

Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York: Oxford UP , 1980): 42, quoted in Culler, Framing the Sign, 155. 108 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 87. 109 Boone, “Vacation Cruises; or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism,” 474.

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Furthermore, we learn that her offering to the family has not been one of marriage but, rather, that of adoption. Thus, it eventuates that Stella is really no better than her male colonial predecessors. She has, like the paedophiles in Turtle Nest, bought a child for the “pleasures of conquest’; she has bought into the Orientalist tradition of paedophilic tourism. Indeed, on the plane she brazenly reflects that what she is providing him with is a “new, wonderful life,” [. . . in which] nothing would be allowed to get in the way of her plans for his comfort, his happiness, nothing would be too good for this beloved child. (108; italics mine)

Rohan, like the children in Turtle Nest, is the victim of a predatory Western tourist, though his situation is depicted more as an indecency than as a tragedy. Stella’s quasi-abduction of Rohan is used as a crude allusion to the short-sighted, culturally imperialist attitudes of Westerners who have, over the years, ‘assisted’ Oriental people by introducing them to the marvels of the Western world. Furthermore, despite the comic overtones of the narrative, it would appear that Rohan is used by Gooneratne to express the appalling reduction of the Sri Lankan people to a literal product and/or service in the mind of the Western tourist. We see this when they arrive in America and Stella presents Rohan to her friends as her latest Oriental souvenir, a commodity that is put on display for guests, just like her “ivory jewel box,” “her incense burners and her meditating Buddhas” (154). As her ex-lover Phillip Destry observes, Rohan is “like all [of] Stella’s purchases, extremely beautiful” (154). Rohan’s status as a human being is further reduced by the information that Stella has re-named him Benjy. This baptism has several dismal connotations. At a base level, his new American name signifies his rebirth as a Western subject. However, it also alludes to the pet name that he has himself invented for his penis, thus denoting his status as Stella’s sex pet.110 Indeed, popular culture prompts most Western readers to associate the name with the eponymous dog star Benjy from the television series. Hence, it is suggested that Benjy (formerly Rohan) has become a domestic pet, who must heed the command of his exploitative mistress. This pathetic state is exacerbated by a recollection of Philip Destry, the ex-lover:

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It also reflects the imperialist tradition of renaming servants with more ‘acceptable’ anglicized names.

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As discussed above, postcolonial literature often uses the journey or condition of individual characters to represent the state of the postcolonial nation. Here, in The Pleasures of Conquest, Gooneratne has employed the woeful condition of ‘Benjy’ and the bizarre antics of Stella to reflect upon the aggressive commodification of Sri Lanka by Western consumers. Gooneratne’s critique of the postcolonial condition does not end with Rohan’s ruin, however. Despite his inauspicious departure, he eventually emerges victorious. He regains his stolen autonomy in 1986, five years after his exodus, when Stella dies unexpectedly from a “massive overdose of sleeping tablets” (387). Then, ten years later, in 1996, he returns to Amnesia. He is financially independent as a result of inheriting Stella’s fortune as her adoptive heir, and is re-stylized as “the Guru of New York”: “His Grace and Supreme Holiness Guru Sri Rohan Mahadev D’Esterey” (386). Rohan claims to be a direct descendant of the “White Raja,” a British colonial officer called Sir John D’Esterey who went ‘native’ in the nineteenth-century and who was mythologized as a protector of the Amnesian people. Rohan (in his guise as the Guru D’Esterey) buys the New Imperial Hotel for himself and refashions it as his own ashram, thereby turning the tables on an institution that had once oppressed him; whereas once he was its servant, now he is its master. It is a personal win for Rohan, and yet it is doubtful whether his own reincarnation and re-fashioning of the hotel, as the D’Esterey Ashram, does anything to empower his fellow Amnesians. Despite the sweet myth of the original D’Esterey’s being a protector of the Amnesians, he was also involved in the demolition of their traditional monarchy. According to Gooneratne’s novel, Sir John D’Esterey, before becoming a local hero, convinced the court of Amnesia’s ‘Inner Kingdom’ that he was on their side just prior to his aiding and abetting the capturing of their king. This parodies the real story of the capturing of the last reigning Sri Lankan monarch by the British in 1815, with the assistance of an officer called Sir John Doyle: an historical personality with whom Gooneratne is quite familiar.111 In 111

She co-wrote a book about his life, in fact; see Brendon Gooneratne & Yasmine Gooneratne, This Inscrutable Englishman: Sir John D’Oyly (London: Cassell, 1999).

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The Pleasures of Conquest, the character Philip Destry, Stella’s ex-lover, who is not related to the original D’Esterey, discusses the corruption of Rohan’s claimed ‘ancestor’, “It was D’Esterey himself who created the propaganda about a homicidal and paranoid king to justify the British takeover,” he explains, and “it was he, following the king’s capture, who ruled the inner kingdom as representative of the crown” (195). The appropriation of D’Esterey’s title by Rohan is ironic insofar as it places the balance of power back in Rohan’s Amnesian hands, while using a British name to do so. But it is also problematic, since, by posing as the “Guru D’Esterey” and by conning his people into believing that he is their reincarnated spiritual leader, Rohan is really just modernizing D’Esterey’s imperialist persona. In fact, it is almost as if he were conjuring the real D’Esterey into being, as he shares various characteristics with him. D’Esterey was a skilled actor and a performer who swindled the people of the Inner Kingdom. Equally, Rohan is a skilled actor and performer who uses his talents to brainwash his followers. Both men seem to reject the imperialist status quo: D’Esterey, by training to become a monk in his later years; Rohan, by remodelling the New Imperial Hotel as “his principal ashram” (388). The only real difference between these two characters, apart from the time in which they exist, is the detail that, while D’Esterey worked for the British Crown, Rohan works for himself. He is backed by American money, which makes him a neo-imperialist. This parodic connection between Rohan and D’Esterey illustrates the idea that colonial ideologies resonate in the postcolonial atmosphere. It also conveys the postmodern belief that originality is a non-reality: that, due to the “procession of simulacra,” everything is a copy of an earlier form, which suggests that postcolonial re-invention is untenable in the context of Gooneratne’s novel.112 This Baudrillardian idea is further suggested by the many other examples of repetition and parody that occur in this novel, each involving interracial courtship scenarios. These include the relationship between Rohan and Stella, discussed above; an affair between the American character Philip Destry and his Asian-Australian student protégé Leila Tan; and the marriage between another local character, Angela Van Langenberg, and her Australian husband (later-ex-husband), Peter Forbes, who was based in Amnesia during the Second World War. Each of these three relationships is a parody of the D’Esterey side story, which also involves a love affair: the 112

Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 1.

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courtship of the original D’Esterey and his love, a poet called Dona Isabella, which is also modelled on a real relationship: a courtship that took place in the nineteenth century between the real colonialist Sir John D’Oyly, on whom D’Esterey is based, and the Ceylonese poet Dona Isabella Cornelia Perumal (391). Gooneratne uses these various parodies of courtship – involving the shifting of power-relations between men and women – as a metaphor for the evolution of political power. For instance, in the story of Rohan and Stella, Stella, the foreigner, starts with power, which is later replaced by the power of the local Rohan, albeit when she dies. Similarly, in the story of Philip Destry and Leila Tan, Destry is initially Leila’s superior and then loses this status after their affair, when Leila becomes a more accomplished academic than he is. The shifting of power-relations ironizes the oscillating power dynamic that haunts formerly colonized nations. Gooneratne suggests that power is constantly in a state of flux, forever being replaced by new varieties, new imperialisms. This portrait of alternating sexual power can also be seen as illustrating Baudrillard’s theory of “seduction” as “a reversible game, which the object plays against the subject.”113 According to Baudrillard, “all signs are reversible” in the game of seduction,114 which foils “all systems of power and meaning.”115 Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of à l’envers, “the characteristic logic of the ‘inside out’,” can also be seen as relevant to this text. 116 According to Bakhtin, the medieval carnival would evoke à l’envers logic: the “turnabout”, of continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and decrownings.117

In Gooneratne’s text, Rohan is a reverse or ‘inside-out’ parody of D’Esterey. He is an Amnesian who, captivated by a white woman, leaves Amnesia to live in the West and later becomes known as the “Guru D’Esterey.” D’Esterey is a 113

Chris Horrocks & Zoran Jevtic, Introducing Baudrillard (1996, London: Totem,

2011): 95. 114

Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, tr. Brian Singer (De la séduction, 1979; Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1990): 10. 115 Baudrillard, Seduction, 8. 116 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Tvorschestvo Fransua Rable, 1965; tr. 1968; Bloomington: Indiana UP , 1984): 11. 117 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 11.

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Westerner who goes to Amnesia, falls in love with a native woman, and is later unofficially crowned the “White Raja.” It seems that in Amnesia history is in a perpetual cycle of à l’envers simulation. It is making endless copies of itself yet inverting them into mirror images. Critically, it involves Bakhtin’s “comic crowning and decrownings,” which comment on Sri Lanka’s tortuous political history, in which three successive imperialist powers crowned themselves sovereign, only to be later unthroned by their successors. These powergrabes and usurpations work to deconstruct the authority of power by illustrating the fact that ideologies are not stable concepts, that they change with time. There is, however, a constant residual, which is that one power always acts to control and marginalize another, in accordance with the processes of imperialism and/or neo-imperialism. It is, however, the final crowning in The Pleasures of Conquest that is the most potent, when Rohan becomes, as mentioned, the self-crowned reincarnated “White Raja.” This is the moment at which the “precession of simulacra” becomes most deranged – where “hyperreality” seems to take over because of the sudden spiralling of postmodern drama. In Baudrillard, hyperreality is the final outpost of modernity, the moment when the system “no longer needs to be rational [as] it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance.”118 Certainly, this is what occurs in Gooneratne’s narrative. Though Rohan’s crowning is clearly a fabulous media stunt, a con job, and a sham, the people of Amnesia fall for it. Their psychology as Amnesians, with amnesia, means that they fail to question his claims, they fail to remember the past or to judge his authority “against either an ideal or negative instance.”119 The “precession of simulacra,” of constant “crownings and decrownings,” has led them to this point, the hyperreal, which is their postcolonial state of being. This outcome can be seen to be reflecting the political condition of modern Sri Lanka, where neo-imperialism thrives because of the nation’s commercial and specifically touristic ambitions. It also reminds us of the proverbial consequences of forgetting history, hence having to repeat it. Both Turtle Nest and The Pleasures of Conquest suggest that the socioeconomic problems of tourism are bound to Sri Lanka’s colonial history, and that while the political structures of the colonial era have been dismantled, the economic and cultural relationship between Sri Lanka and the Western world prevails to this day. This creates a neocolonialist environment in which the 118 119

Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 2. “The Precession of Simulacra,” 2.

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poorest of people are still abused (both psychologically and physically) by the ideologies of imperialism, neo-imperialism, Orientalism, and exoticism. Lokugé takes a more serious approach than Gooneratne, who uses comedy, satire, and pastiche to critique the trajectory of Sri Lankan culture. Indeed, for this reason, Gooneratne’s novel is more playful and less disturbing than that of Lokugé.

v



v 5 Diasporic Identities Inscriptions of Celebration and Psychic Trauma in Western Locations

D

IASPOR A IS A SLIPPERY TE RM.

It is used to describe the experience of immigrants who have been forced to leave their homeland. It is also used more generally to describe the condition of being an immigrant: the act of negotiating old and new identities, in a practical sense and psychologically. As Crane and Radhika Mohanram contend, diaspora is the “oscillation between the strange and the familiar.”1 It must be acknowledged, however, that diaspora is “historically laden.”2 Its meaning changes according to the culture and period to which it is applied and also in relation to the gender of the diasporic person.3 The diasporic experience can also vary in accordance with the social standing of the subject; the diaspora of a wealthy professional is markedly different from that of a refugee who has little social mobility. The experience of diaspora is also affected by personality traits. Some people embrace the diasporic condition and make a success of it, whereas others fail. This chapter will consider the representation of the Sri Lankan diasporic experience in three novels: A Change of Skies (1991) by 1

Ralph J. Crane & Radhika Mohanram, “Introduction: Constructing the Diasporic Body,” in Shifting Continents / Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Crane & Mohanram (Cross /Cultures 42; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2000): x. This description of diaspora is intriguingly similar to literary definitions of the ‘uncanny’ in literature: which “is often associated with an experience of the threshold, liminality, margins, borders, [and] frontiers […] as something not only weird or mysterious, but also as strangely familiar.” Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003): vii. 2 Mohanram & Crane, “Introduction: Constructing the Diasporic Body,” xii. 3 “Introduction: Constructing the Diasporic Body,” xii.

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Yasmine Gooneratne; If the Moon Smiled (2000) by Chandani Lokugé; and Love Marriage (2008) by V.V. Ganeshananthan. Each renders the diasporic condition as a challenging state of being involving the problematic of ‘doubleconsciousness’, dual and/or multiple states of cultural awareness, and cultural liminality or in-betweenness. A Change of Skies and If the Moon Smiled are both set in Australia, though their representations of diaspora are very different. Gooneratne’s novel A Change of Skies involves a comic celebration of a migrant experience that demonstrates assimilation and accommodation to and with the Australian culture by its migrant characters. It uses parody to send up racial stereotypes of both ‘white’ and ‘oriental’ Australians, while evaluating the pros and cons of diasporic consciousness and multicultural identities. In contrast, Lokugé’s novel If the Moon Smiled depicts diasporic tragedy; the protagonist cannot cope with the condition of cultural displacement. This novel offers a vision of trauma, despair, and mental illness. It explores the psychological devastation that can manifest when people cannot let go of their imaginary homeland – the vision of what was and what could have been. Ganeshananthan’s novel Love Marriage has similarities in this respect, though its setting ranges between Sri Lanka, the U S A , and Canada. Its protagonist is an American of Sri Lankan parentage, a young woman who battles with a socio-political doubleconsciousness that is influenced by her politically divided Sri Lankan Tamil heritage. Ganeshananthan, like Lokugé, tropes the ‘double’ as a means to express the split and/or fractured consciousness of her protagonist. The following discussion will explore the ways in which these novels represent the Sri Lankan diasporic identity. It will compare the authors’ respective use of comedy and tragedy as strategies to explore this subject. It will also consider the way in which diaspora constructs, distorts, and changes the identity of the characters in each novel, the way in which their diasporic condition is negotiated in Australian and Canadian cities, as well as the difference between representations of masculine and feminine diasporas.

The Mimic in Diaspora The experience of diasporics in Western nations generally involves assimilation and accommodation, which can resemble the phenomenon of colonial mimicry as discussed in the first chapter of this book in relation to the theories of Fanon and Bhabha. Indeed, the stereotype of the new immigrant is often strikingly similar to the stereotype of the colonial mimic man as defined by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), as a culturally displaced person

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who becomes neurotically obsessed with Western etiquette and language in his desire to assimilate, and as a person who is fearful of racist stereotypes about non-Westerners, like themselves, which they know to exist.4 This fear plunges some diasporics into a state of anxious mimicry, which, ironically, supports the stereotypes about new immigrants that they are trying to reject, in much the same way as the colonial mimic will inadvertently support stereotypes about themselves. Bhabha, following Fanon, discusses the problem of colonial mimicry in The Location of Culture (1994). He agrees that colonialized subjects are disposed to a problematical “flawed colonial mimesis.” 5 This is, he suggests, the nature of mimicry, which inevitably alters what it imitates, producing a substance that is, at best, quite similar to the original, something that is, “almost the same, but not quite.”6 His outlook is much more positive, however, than that of Fanon, who argues that the mimic man is a joke. Bhabha, by contrast, suggests that the mimic man is in fact a powerful character who challenges racist stereotypes. Bhabha sees the mimic man’s ambivalent quality, his ‘almost the same, but not quite’ status, as unsettling the power of the dominant authority in the colonial context.7 This destabilizing power theorem seems equally applicable to mimicry in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, if one is willing to broaden Bhabha’s definition of the colonizer to see the postcolonial colonizer as the dominant will, image, and discourse of the Western nation, which diasporics must negotiate in various Western locations. The identity models that new immigrants respond to and mimic in the postcolonial Western context, such as Australia, are generally stereotypes based on touristic representations of national identity. It is the touristic identity that immigrants initially respond to for the purpose of social integration in the mainstream culture. In Australia, these touristic stereotypes include athletic and sports icons, such as the Aussie Rules football player, 8 the surfer, and the lifesaver;9 there is also the stereotype of the relaxed and ‘easy-going’ 4

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 21. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 87. 6 The Location of Culture, 86. 7 The Location of Culture, 86. 8 See John Fiske, Bob Hodge & Graeme Turner, Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987): 177. 9 Douglas Booth, Australian Beach Cultures: The History of Sun, Sand, and Surf (London: Frank Cass, 2001): 65. 5

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Australian, the tricksy, rebellious ‘larrikin’, and the ‘battler’ (the underdog who struggles with authority).10 Each of these stereotypes is predominantly masculine, ‘ocker’, and anglocentric. This chapter will explore the problematic of mimicry for Gooneratne’s diasporic characters in Australia, and, to use Bhabha’s idiom, the “menace of mimicry’11 for her Australian characters representing the dominant local culture.

Lacan, the Mirror, the Migrant, and the Symbolic Order Another way in which the immigrant experience will be examined here is through the psychoanalytic framework of Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ theory, which will be applied to representations of diasporic characters. These applications will illustrate the relevance of Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ in the analysis of diasporic characters, while also supporting the use of Lacanian theory in postcolonial and diasporic studies more generally. As Dylan Evans explains, “the mirror stage describes the formation of the ego via the process of identification.”12 Lacan originally conceived of the mirror stage as a phase that occurs during infancy, the moment when a child first sees itself in a ‘mirror’, be it an actual mirror or a metaphorical one (such as the image of another person with whom the child identifies, such as its mother). The infant subsequently develops a narcissistic identification with its own image. By seeing this image and identifying with it, the child imagines that it is a complete and autonomous being independent of its mother. It thinks that the image of this ‘Other’ in the mirror is a part of itself, and therein constructs its ego.13 This identification also issues in what Lacan called the ‘Ideal-Ego’, which “functions as a promise of future wholeness which sustains the ego in anticipation” of what is to come.14 Although Lacan stated, in 1937, that the ‘mirror stage’ occurs only in infancy, between six and eighteen months of age,15 he radically revised this theory in 1956, maintaining that the “mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the devel10

Sally O’Brien, Miriam Raphael, Paul Smitz, Rick Starey & Ryan Ver Berkmoes, New South Wales (Footscray, Victoria: Lonely Planet, 2004): 23. 11 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 88. 12 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996): 118. 13 Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 193. 14 An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 118. 15 An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 118.

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opment of the child. It illustrates [, rather,] the conflictual nature of the dual relationship” or, in other words, the ongoing relationship between the ego and the image from which the ideal-ego is derived.16 Evans describes Lacan’s extended theory thus: representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, the paradigm of the I M A G I N A R Y order; it is a stadium (stade) in which the subject is permanently caught and captivated by his own image.17

Lacan believed that the ‘mirror stage’ is succeeded by the subject’s entry into the ‘Symbolic Order’, otherwise known as the realm of language. Here the ego is governed by the ‘big Other’, with a capital ‘O’, as opposed to the little ‘other’ with whom it is related in the ‘imaginary’ dynamic of the ‘mirror stage’. This transition is marked, Lacan argues, by a child’s recognition of a third party, or law, that intervenes between itself and its mother: the Oedipus complex.18 Upon recognizing the ‘Other’ – which is the oedipal triad – the child is forced into an awareness of “the structure of social and sexual roles and relations which make up the family and society,”19 and thus becomes a part of this ‘Symbolic Order’, as determined by language. Lacan felt that this transition into language, though necessary, is inherently alienating, since it is here that the child is reduced, by the system of culture – the laws of language – to an empty signifier: an ‘I’. Indeed, from a structuralist standpoint, he argued that the ‘I’ of language is nothing but a signifier; it has meaning only in relation to other words.20 From this he concluded that the linguistic subject is inherently alienated from the centre of its being, the imagined substance that held it together, psychologically, in its pre-linguistic days. The imagined substance upon which the ego was founded is from this point on forever displaced by pronouns, names, and titles, which can only really symbolize a shifting concept of identity within the differential matrix of language.21 As Sean Homer explains, Alienation designates the process through which the subject first identifies with the signifier and is thereafter determined by the signifier 16

Lacan, in An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 118. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 118. 18 Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge, 2005): 57. 19 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983; Oxford: Blackwell, rev. ed. 1996): 145. 20 Homer, Jacques Lacan, 45. 21 Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 143. 17

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[…]. Alienation is the inevitable consequence of the formation of the ego and a necessary step towards subjectivity.22

Lacan’s adult mirror-stage theory and the subsequent yet also alienating symbolic order seem especially relevant to the psychosocial experience of immigrants, who must adjust their ego or self-image in diaspora. It seems reasonable that the proliferation of new images in diasporic conditions, so different from the original ‘other’ with whom the diasporic previously identified, might propel a migrant into an intensive adult mirror stage, a state of anxious and narcissistic identification.

The Diasporic Imaginary: Rushdie, Mishra, Lacan, and Freud This chapter positions the diasporic ‘imaginary’, mourning, and melancholia as the alternative to assimilation as a diasporic experience, as intimated in Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled and Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage. The concept of the ‘imaginary’ is in part Lacanian, concerning Lacan’s ‘imaginary order’, which is ‘the realm of the ego’. Sean Homer describes the Lacanian ‘imaginary’ thus: a pre-linguistic realm of sense perception, identification [. .. ] and mirror-reflection; a realm of distortion and illusion [. . . ] in which a futile struggles takes place on the part of the ego to once more attain an imaginary unity and coherence.23

The imaginary will also be considered as a diasporic memory space, as Salman Rushdie defines it in the introductory essay of Imaginary Homelands.24 In Imaginary Homelands Rushdie speaks of his own diaspora, his condition as an exiled Indian writer who lives in England, relying on memory to reconstitute his homeland in literature. Specifically, he discusses the challenge that he faced when writing his canonical text Midnight’s Children (1981): his realization that he could not produce an historical novel “in which the past reappeared as it actually had been, unaffected by the distortions of memory.”25 Seeing this early on, he decided to abandon his original ambition of reclaiming the past as it was and, instead, used his fragmented recollections to explore the unreliability of memory itself, speculating that by doing so he was 22 23 24 25

Homer, Jacques Lacan, 71. Homer, Jacques Lacan, 31. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 9. Imaginary Homelands, 10.

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touching upon the collective dilemma of immigrant writers who explore their homelands from afar. Physical dislocation, he argues, means that the immigrant writer can never retrieve “precisely the thing that was lost,” as this lost thing is inevitably mutated by memory;26 their work thus revives, “not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”27 In The Diasporic Imaginary (2005), Vijay Mishra examines the problematic of the diasporic ‘imaginary’ space. Mishra believes that immigrants’ desire to shroud themselves in an ‘imaginary’ state can inflict psychological damage. He coins the term ‘diasporic imaginary’ to classify any “ethnic enclave in a nation-state” that sees itself as living “in displacement.” 28 He defines the ‘imaginary’ in a Lacanian sense, as “linked to the mirror stage of the ego, and therefore characterized by a residual narcissism” and also in the sense described by Slavoj Žižek, as an “identification with the image in which we appear likable to ourselves.”29 The ‘diasporic imaginary’ refers to the fantasy that the diasporic person has developed of who they were before they moved away from the homeland and also of what that homeland was or still is. Mishra argues that this fantasy has the tendency to hinder a person’s ability to mourn for the loss of their homeland, a position that he bases on Freud’s analysis of grief, as put forth in “Mourning and Melancholia” ( 1917). Freud contended in this essay that mourning is a psychic process. He argued that it involves a subject’s ability to withdraw the libido (sexual desire and mental energy) from a lost “love-object” (be it a person, place, or idea), and thereafter to place it elsewhere.30 He believed that mourning becomes melancholia when this process fails, when, in following the loss of a ‘love-object’, the free ‘libido’ does not re-attach itself elsewhere but is, rather, drawn back into the subject’s ego (the mind as ordinarily conceived), which casts a shadow on the griever. Mishra claims that this is what occurs to people who are mourning the loss of their homeland. He argues that the nature of the ‘diasporic imaginary’ is so 26

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 10. Imaginary Homelands, 10. 28 Mishra, The Diasporic Imaginary and the Indian Diaspora, 14. 29 The Diasporic Imaginary and the Indian Diaspora, 14. 30 Sigmund Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, ed. Adam Phillips, tr. Shaun Whiteside (from texts collected in Gesammelte Werke, 1940–52; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005): 209. 27

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idealized that the lost ‘love-object’ is in fact withdrawn from consciousness, thus making it impossible for the subject to objectify what has been lost and thus to mourn it in a healthy manner.31 Maintaining Freud’s view, Mishra states that the subject’s “failure to objectify the loss means that the emptiness and impoverishment of the world (the condition of mourning) is transferred on to the ego,”32 thus bringing it to “the complex of melancholia” wherein the ego is, as Freud writes, drained like “an open wound […] to the point of complete impoverishment.”33 Mishra proposes that for the bearers of the ‘diasporic imaginary’ (the sufferers of diaspora) mourning and melancholia are often unrelenting. In fact, he goes so far as to say that the experience of diasporic mourning is an “impossible mourning,” a term borrowed from Jacques Derrida, who was adamant that all mourning is impossible, on the basis that the mourner’s object of desire exists only in their memory and thus only in a “trope of absence, a ghostly trope of prosopopoeia (the mode of personification that implies an absent speaker).”34 Mishra thus surmises that “all diasporas are unhappy.”35 This discussion does not fully endorse Mishra’s theory that “all diasporas are unhappy,”36 although it will suggest that some of them are. It will aim to illustrate that diaspora is a subject-specific experience, as intimated by the character representations in each of the three novels that shall now be discussed. It will start with the most optimistic of these, albeit one laced with challenges and finishing with the untimely death of its two chief protagonists.

31

This follows Freud’s position in “Mourning and Melancholia” ( 1917) in which he qualified ‘healthy’ mourning as being something that does not turn into melancholia. He revised this position in “The Ego and the Id” ( 1923), wherein he decided that Melancholia was in fact a normal and “inevitable part of ego-formation”; Patricia Rae, Modernism and Mourning (Lewisburg P A : Bucknell UP , 2007): 16. This occurred to him following the death of his daughter Sophie in 1920 and after the death of his favourite grandson, Sophie’s child, in 1923. His jaw was also operated on for cancer that year; it was the first of many operations. These events were no doubt an influence on his perspective in regards to melancholia. Richard Appignanesi & Oscar Zarate, Freud for Beginners (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992): 152–53. 32 Mishra, The Diasporic Imaginary and the Indian Diaspora, 9. 33 Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, 212. 34 Mishra, The Diasporic Imaginary and the Indian Diaspora, 8. 35 The Diasporic Imaginary and the Indian Diaspora, 1. 36 The Diasporic Imaginary and the Indian Diaspora, 1.

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A Change of Skies Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies is a tapestry of two stories: the migratory journey of the married couple Bharat and Navaranjini, which is set in contemporary times; and the journey of Bharat’s great-grandfather Edward, who travelled to Australia one hundred years earlier. Both storylines explore issues of racism in Australia and its effect upon immigrant identities. This discussion will focus primarily on the contemporary storyline about Bharat and Navaranjini, a privileged couple who decide to abandon their lives in Colombo when Bharat is offered a visiting professorship in linguistics at Sydney’s Southern Cross University. The narrative concerns their struggle to locate and understand their new identities as Asians in Australia, as diasporic personalities, and, later, their success as multiculturally situated Asian-Australians. Through this adventure, Bharat and Navaranjini negotiate the challenges of racism, diasporic mimicry, the menace of stereotypes and gender roles in diaspora, and the problematic of Asian class-consciousness in Australia. Like Gooneratne’s other novels, A Change of Skies is densely layered with irony, parody, and satire. Gooneratne uses these literary devices as a means to deconstruct aspects of the Sri Lankan-Australian identity and the subject of Asian-Australian relations more generally. Much of the following discussion will investigate the identity of Gooneratne’s characters from an anti-essentialist point of view. Baker and GalasiÕski define identity as something that is “continually being produced within the vectors of resemblance and distinction […] not an essence but a continually shifting description of ourselves.”37 This way of viewing identity follows the work of structuralist and poststructuralist critics such as Ferdinand de Saussure, who claimed that all meaning is relational,38 and Derrida, who refused to believe in the stability of meaning; Derrida claimed that meaning is a sign- (or word-) based substance, which is always being deferred through time and space, because of its required contact with other signs (words) in the relational matrix of language: he called this problematic the state of différance,39 37

Chris Barker & Dariusz GalasiÕski, Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis: A Dialogue on Language and Identity (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 2001): 30. 38 Ferdinand de Saussure, “Course in General Linguistics” ( 1916/31), tr. (1959) Wade Baskin, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 83. 39 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” tr. David Allison, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): 385–91.

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a term he invented to connote ambiguity, since in French it means both ‘difference’ and ‘deferral’. Derrida was notorious for his statement “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’: ‘there is nothing outside of the text.”40 Gooneratne is particularly interested in the role that language plays in the formation of diasporic identities. Her writing reflects a keen understanding of poststructuralist linguistic theory in this respect. It is no accident that her character Bharat is a professor of linguistics. Gooneratne is also, it would seem, attracted to Lacan’s work on ego-formation. Her fiction appears to play with his theory of the ‘mirror stage’, regarding images and the ‘imaginary’, and also with the subsequent ‘Symbolic Order’, the realm of language. These theories will be related to the immigrant experience of her protagonists, Bharat and Navaranjini. Both are deeply affected by the words and images that construct their immigrant identities and influence their sense of belonging in mainstream Australian culture. Racist signs, posters, and graffiti can seriously affect a migrant’s sense of self-worth, as monitory reminders that they are, to use the words of Gayatri Spivak, “resident aliens,” strangers in an unpredictable terrain.41 And indeed, as Lokugé argues, Gooneratne shows us that such signs are significant and that “racism hurts.”42 One of the first impressions that her protagonists have of Australia is that it is a racist environment, which is clearly marked as such with signs. Looking out of the window of a taxi that has collected them from Sydney airport, Navaranjini is shocked to observe anti-Asian graffiti, slogans such as ‘AS IANS OUT ’ and ‘BASH A P AK D AY ’.43 On viewing these signs she suddenly realizes that the rosy, welcoming image that she previously had of Australia (derived from another sign, a poster that she had once seen as a child of “a fair-haired, pink-cheeked little girl” inviting her audience to “Sunny Australia,” 18) hadn’t really been intended for her as an Asian. Despite having listened to her friends’ warnings in Colombo about the White Australia policy, she does not realize until this moment that it might actually affect her. The year is 1964, which is significant, since it was at this time that

40

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (De la Grammatologie, 1967; Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins UP , 1976): 163. 41 Gayatri Spivak, “Resident Alien,” in Relocating Postcolonialism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg & Ato Quayson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 47. 42 Lokugé, “‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 31. 43 Gooneratne, A Change of Skies, 69. Further page references are in the main text.

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members of the Ceylonese English-speaking elite44 – who were not fluent in Sinhalese – made their exodus to places such as the UK , the U S A , Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. They were motivated by the Sinhala-Only language policy, their concerns about Sinhala nationalism, and the race riots of 1958 (discussed in the preceding chapters). Australia was less popular, because of its policy of denying right of entry to most non-Europeans, at least until 1973, when the policy was finally ‘abolished’ by the Whitlam government.45 In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon suggested that the mastery of European languages gives educated non-Europeans the gift of ‘honorary citizenship’ in white societies.46 When Bharat announces his decision to move to Australia, his friends and family joke that he and his wife will be granted the status of ‘honorary whites,” which relates to Fanon’s observation. Since, despite the joke of the friends, this is precisely what happens to Gooneratne’s characters in Australia, for the educated Bharat and his wife Navaranjini are, to use the words of Sir Alexander Downer, the Australian Minister for Immigration (1958–63), recognized as “distinguished and highly qualified Asians’47 the type who were accepted at this time in the 1960s, prior to the official ‘abolition’ of the White Australia policy. They are afforded a level of respect and social mobility in Australia that many Asian immigrants did not experience during this time – a direct consequence of Bharat’s academic standing as a professor of linguistics. It is never in question that Bharat and Navaranjini may not live in Australia because of the colour of their skin. Nor, as in If the Moon Smiled, are this couple’s social interactions restricted to the Sri Lankan 44

Note: Ceylon did not become Sri Lanka until 1972. The ‘abolition’ of the ‘White Australia’ policy involved a promise by the Whitlam government to forever “remove race as a factor in Australia’s immigration policies,” and, later, the passing of the “Racial Discrimination Act 1975,” which prohibits discrimination “based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin” by law. National Communications Branch: Department of Communications and Citizenship, Fact Sheet 8: Abolition of the ‘White Australia’ Policy (Canberra: Australian Government Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2009). However, nothing is written in stone; the current treatment of Asian immigrants and refugees by the deeply conservative government of Tony Abbott constitutes a significantly recidivist negation of this legislation. 46 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 25. 47 National Communications Branch: Department of Communications and Citizenship, Fact Sheet 8: Abolition of the ‘White Australia’ Policy, 1. 45

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community. And while it is often the case that Asian migrants are forced to accept low-paid employment beneath the status that they have had in their ‘homelands,”48 this is not the case with Gooneratne’s couple. In fact, the Australian university system opens avenues for Bharat to become an academic celebrity. It also gives Navaranjini, his wife, the opportunity to become a successful author and restauranteur. Yet, despite their privileges, Bharat and Navaranjini struggle for some time to negotiate their status as migrants, an experience which is exacerbated by racism. The chapter entitled “Bharat Changes His Image” deals quite directly with this issue of racism and its effect on migrants. It involves a microcosmic presentation of the novel’s major themes, which is perhaps no surprise, as it was originally the short story from which the novel developed.49 In this chapter, Navaranjini tells the reader, in cadences reminiscent of a traditional Aussie yarn, of the troubles that her husband, Bharat, is experiencing concerning his image in Australia: Before we came to Australia I had no idea that he had an image. But now it seemed he’d acquired one, and with it he’d acquired problems: problems connected, as far as I could make out, with the various aspects in which, he felt, he appeared to the Australians around us. […] ’Look’ he told me ‘We’re Asian’s. They’re Australians. When Australians see us that’s what they notice first. Difference’. ( 118)

“Difference,” of course, is the key word here, for this is what Bharat attempts to correct: his difference. He feels the need to change his Asian image because of the hurtful remarks that are made by the character Ronald Blackstone. Professor Blackstone, a prominent academic, has recently announced on talk-back radio that Asians “pollute the air with the fumes of roasting meat” (123), an assertion that is somehow intended to support his argument that Asian immigrants pose a threat to the Australian people, as they do not assimilate to the mainstream Australian culture. Blackstone appears to be a 48

As discussed in Adam Jamrozik, Cathy Boland & Robert Urquhart, Social Change and Cultural Transformation in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 1995): 85. 49 Vera Alexander, “Cross-Cultural Encounters in Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag and Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies,” in The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, ed. Christian Mair (Cross /Cultures 65, A S N E L Papers 7; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2003): 380.

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parody of the historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey, who argued against the progress of Asian immigration in 1984 in a speech he delivered to a group of Rotarians in Warrnambool, in Victoria.50 Blainey suggested that the increased intake of Asian immigrants, since the demolition of the White Australia policy, was to the disadvantage of “Old Australia,” by which he meant ‘white Australia’.51 Like the fictional Blackstone, he argued that Asian immigrants congregate in ghettos such as Sydney’s Cabramatta, and that they disturb Australia’s “social harmony” by doing so.52 Blackstone’s racist character can also be read in the context of the subsequent outbreaks of xenophobia that occurred in the late 1980s, as suggested by Alison Broinowski; Broinowski claims that Blackstone is a satire of the “anti-Asian feeling” that appeared in 1988 – the bicentennial year – espoused in the “statements of RS L leaders, conservative politicians, European migrants, and slogan writers.”53 Lokugé’s essay on Gooneratne’s novel also supports this analysis.54 In the novel, Bharat is so disturbed by the stigma of being Asian that he remodels his identity. He knows, like Fanon’s colonial mimic, that there is a racist stereotype of him out there and so he tries, like the mimic, to negate this problem with a comprehensive assimilation plan involving mimicry. It begins with his name; he wants him and his wife to be seen by the white community as “true blue, fair dinkum Aussies” (124) and so he gives themselves proper Australian names: Bharat and Navaranjini Mangala–Davasinha are reborn as Barry and Jean Mundy. Naming, as revealed in other chapters and works, plays a significant role in all of Gooneratne’s work. She often satirizes the Sinhalese tradition of assigning auspicious names to newborns, as when she discusses the naming of her protagonist, Latha, in The Sweet and Simple Kind.55 In A Change of Skies, she plays with both the Sri Lankan and the Australian systems of nomenclature (327). As she explains in the “Author’s Note” at the end of the novel, the names of her Western characters have been selected according to a Western tradition, observed in Mary Durack’s Kings in 50

Frank Lewins, “‘ The Blainey Debate’ in Hindsight,” Journal of Sociology 23.2 (1987): 261. 51 Lewins, “‘ The Blainey Debate’ in Hindsight,” 261. 52 “ ‘ The Blainey Debate’ in Hindsight,” 261. 53 Alison Broinowski, The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia (Melbourne: Oxford UP , 1996): 13. 54 Lokugé, “‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 23. 55 See Chapter 2 above, p. 70.

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Grass Castles, “of naming natives of a colonized country after animals, vegetables, or food articles” (327). At Barry’s university, the Western characters are nearly all given ‘fishy’ names, such as Professor Kingley Fysshe, Angel Fysshe, John Dory, Ann Chovey, Maude Crabbe, Red Kodd, and, last but not least, Barry Mundy, the honorary Westerner. This academic pool of characters inverts, satirizes, and critiques the Western naming tradition discussed by Durack. It is common in Australia for Asian immigrants to adopt a Western name as a means to simplify their interactions with the white community. As Jean (formerly Navaranjini) reflects in A Change of Skies, It’s certainly much easier to say ‘Mrs Mundy here’ when I ring someone to fix things […]. Nobody asks me now to spell my name for them, or says ‘Hey, come again?’ (124)

As Gooneratne warns, however, name-swapping should not be taken too lightly; indeed, historically, the tendency of migrants to anglicize their names has often been linked to fears of persecution. There is much irony in the following remark by Jean: The Australian custom of name swapping […] dates back to convict days [… though] it had a new vogue after the war was declared in 1939 and hundreds of German immigrants anglicised their names practically overnight in Australia. ( 122)

As Lokugé observes, this biting statement is “resonating with the terrible underlying truth of what might have happened to the German migrants had they not changed their names and assimilated to the majority identity.”56 Certainly, for Barry, the name-swap is a result of fear – the fear of seeming too Asian, too different, to white Australians. By discarding his Asian name, he allows Blackstone’s prejudice to affect him, though this is not the only problem that he incurs through this decision. ‘Bharat’, meaning ‘India’, had referred to his great-grandfather’s scholarship in the Indian languages, while his former surname, ‘Mangala-Davasinha’, meant ‘wedding-day’, and had signified that he was the descendant of an important general in Sri Lankan history. His new name, however, ‘Barry Mundy’, apart from being a fish (barramundi, Lates calcarifer), has a meaning that is even less attractive when translated into Sinhala. As Jean informs Blackstone, “[in Sinhala] the word bari means ‘incapable’. It means impotent” (128), while, as Lokugé notes, “mundi 56

Lokugé, “‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 24.

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[means] ‘dregs’ or ‘residue’.”57 Thus, it seems that, by engaging with the “time-honoured Australian custom of name swapping” ( 122), Barry has allowed himself to be leached by the fear of difference, and in the process has become an impotent residue of his former self. From a Lacanian perspective it can be argued that Barry’s imagination has been captivated by the image and language of the ‘other’ (Australians), which has thus shattered his original sense of self. Indeed, it seems that he has figuratively re-entered the ‘mirror stage’, where he must assume “the armour of an alienating identity.”58 Barry is clearly captivated by the image of white Australia and thus adjusts his ‘Ideal-ego’ accordingly; this “functions as promise of future wholeness which sustains” his “ego in anticipation” of what is to come.59 Since this reimagining of the self involves his decision to change his name, to align himself with the dominant discourse, Lacan’s ‘Symbolic Order’ is also relevant. Indeed, Gooneratne’s novel also appears to allegorize the integral alienation of the ‘Symbolic Order’. For, as we see, her protagonists, both Barry and Jean, though fluent language beings, must, by living in Australia, enter a new symbolic order in which they are categorized as outsiders. Like the figurative infant from Lacan’s seminars, they have no choice but to redefine themselves within this new dynamic, despite forsaking a part of their former identities in the process, as is signified by the change in their names. It is, again, no accident that Barry is a linguistics professor, a person who would be particularly well acquainted with the Lacanian significance of naming. Moreover, it seems likely that he (or, rather, his creator Gooneratne) has selected the name ‘Mundy’ as an esoteric joke, alluding to the discussed reductionism of subjectivity in language, for, while mundi does mean ‘a residue’ in Sinhala, it also means ‘of the world’ in Latin, thus suggesting that Barry Mundy’s multi-cultural identity is but a worldly (or wordy) residue. The importance of language in the construction of identity is also explored through the character of Jean, Barry’s wife, who recognizes the significance of language in the making of Australian identities. She wants to become familiar with the Australian vernacular, so she heads to the “School of Languages at the Southern Cross University” to enrol “as a student of Australian” (120). To her dismay, however, there are no classes for studying “Australian,” and thus she is forced to return home to develop her own research pro57 58 59

Lokugé, “‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 25. Quoted in Homer, Jacques Lacan, 25. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 118.

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gramme: listening to talk-back radio she takes notes on interesting Australian idioms such the use of the “ancient Australian word that begins with ‘b’ and rhymes with ‘custard’” (120). Her antics lampoon the plight of new Australians, who try to simulate the Australian character in a passionate effort to fit in and be accepted by other Australians. In this respect she can, like Barry, be seen to parody the colonial stereotype of the ‘mimic man’. This said, however, Jean’s desire to ‘speak Australian’ is particularly astute, for “the Australian accent is one of the clearest markers of Australian-ness.”60 According to these critics, the word ‘accent’ is important, as it denotes ‘emphasis’, not just on language, but more generally on an Australian way of being: Just as there’s an Australian way of producing the sounds of English, there’s an Australian way of doing many other things such as working and playing, eating and dressing. We call all these part of the Australian accent, in a broader sense of the word. They all work in the same way, through relative shifts against a common standard, not an absolute difference. They all have a common function, to define an Australian identity.61

This concept of the Australian ‘accent’ having a synecdochic relationship with Australian identity is something that is given much attention in A Change of Skies. Jean understands that by mastering the Australian dialect, the ‘Symbolic Order’ of all other things Australian, she can somehow penetrate the Australian identity. Despite her husband’s being a professor of linguistics, it is Jean who sees in her everyday life as a housewife that discourse is power, as in the work of Said and Foucault.62 She proves this when she accosts Professor Blackstone, who has upset her husband. She berates Blackstone in “Australian.” “You are a yahoo and a wrinkly [. . .] a shithead and a stinker,” she tells him. Then, to bid him farewell, “May all your chooks turn into emus […] and kick your flaming dunny down” ( 129). Though she may not be aware of it herself, her appropriation of Australian idiom deconstructs Blackstone’s power as an intellectual authority. It demonstrates the ‘menace of mimicry,” as in Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry, by destabilizing the dominant ‘Australian’ discourse. The novel’s criticism of racism in Australia is not limited to the discourse of white Australians. As Sneja Gunew observes, Gooneratne’s “satirical force 60 61 62

Fiske, Hodge & Turner, Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, 163. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, 163. Said, Orientalism, 3.

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is as trenchantly directed toward the prejudices she encounters within the diasporic community itself.”63 While she satirizes the commentary of Blackstone she also acknowledges the racist prejudices that are held by her Sri Lankan characters, Jean and Edward (the protagonist in the parallel storyline). In some ways, Jean is shown to be as ridiculous as Blackstone, as she is personally indifferent to his charges on the basis that she simply cannot see how they relate to her as a member of the Sri Lankan elite and of the AsianAustralian intelligentsia (an honorary white person).64 She also disputes Bharat’s fear that ‘Australians’ see them in a discriminatory light as Asians. “We’re not Asians here,” she says. “When Australians say ‘Asians’ they don’t mean real Asians, like us. They’re talking about –” (118). And from here on the dialogue shifts into a racist soliloquy that satirizes the prejudices of certain Sri Lankan elites: You see, at home in Sri Lanka, [she says] and I suppose in India too, which is the centre, after all, of the real Asian world, we always call far Eastern people “Ching-Chongs”. My husband says it’s a racist way of speaking, that we learned racism from the British in our colonial days, and must discard it totally now that we are free. But coming from such a Westernised family as his, he just doesn’t understand. There’s nothing racist about saying… that word; racism’s unknown in India and Sri Lanka. Race and caste and colour just have their appointed places there in the divine scheme of things, in which everyone moves in a beautifully regulated order. Everyone knows that. (119)

Her speech reminds us that racial prejudices, like ideologies, have a covert design. Certainly, it seems evident that Jean, in this part of the novel, is far more disturbed by the fact that Blackstone has upset her husband than by anything else. She is so proud of the way in which the ‘regulated orders’ of her own culture make her special that she has no intention of rejecting them. Edward’s reaction to racism in the parallel storyline is similarly ironic. Edward, a gentleman who travels to Queensland in 1882 disguised as a labourer, deplores the hateful treatment that he and his company receive from white Australians. Yet, like Jean, and perhaps Barry, too, to a lesser extent, his Sri Lankan class-consciousness leads him to look down on Australia, Australians, 63

Sneja Gunew, “Resident Aliens: Diasporic Women’s Writing,” Contemporary Women’s Writing 3.1 (June 2009): 41. 64 Indeed, Professor Blainey suggested that there was an “absence of threat in relations between Middle-Class Asians and Old Australians”; Lewins, “‘ The Blainey Debate’ in Hindsight,” 270.

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and even his fellow Sinhalese. Indeed, he goes so far as to equate himself with “Ovid among the Goths” (163). This layering of irony and interweaving of criticism between the two storylines seems to deny the moral high ground to either the Australian or the ‘Oriental’ characters. Gooneratne’s irony is strikingly postmodern, inasmuch as it ‘value-problematizes’ and, for the most part, denies resolution of contradictory beliefs.65 Another important issue considered in this novel is the diasporic valency of gendered identities. Gooneratne is particularly interested in the way in which these identities operate in Australia as opposed to Sri Lanka. She is also interested in the way in which the diasporic condition disturbs essentialist notions of gendered identities. Her approach to this subject mirrors her approach to the issue of racism, and of cultural identity in a more general sense, inasmuch as she considers the issue from various perspectives. Beginning with what seems to be a liberal feminist critique of the Hindu notion of a wife’s place, Gooneratne satirizes Jean’s mother’s counsel that “a wife must look up to her husband” as the embodiment of “creative energy in marriage” (183). This critique is particularly strong in the chapter titled “Barry marvels at the power of the native imagination.” In this episode, Jean and Barry are faced with the dilemma of how to organize a rather unusual wedding gift: exotic four-poster twin beds, one of which is three inches higher, a problem caused by the fact that the beds were not originally intended to be a set (182). Jean manages the issue by ordering Barry to take the higher bed so that their sleeping arrangements can reflect the ‘symbolic significance’ of the marital hierarchy. And though Barry sees that her command is “contradicting the spirit of her mother’s teachings” (184), he submits to please her. As Barry observes the irony, so does the reader; thus Jean’s beliefs are ridiculed as much as the logic of her practical application of them. Yet it is not just Jean and her Hindu ideals that are lampooned. When one of Barry’s Australian colleagues brings his wife over for dinner at their house, the wife concludes that their curious bedding arrangement, observed on a tour of the house, must relate to some sort of superior Oriental sexual practice or knowledge. Consequently, this couple, who had been on the lookout for a way to spice up their own sex life, decide to have their own set made. This transmutation of Jean’s mother’s teachings provides a comic illustration of the way in which Asian ideals about gender roles can become distorted when they are 65

Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (1989, London: Routledge, rev. ed. 1999): 99.

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re-interpreted in Western sites. On the one hand, South Asian migrants in Australia may want desperately to hold on to their culture; on the other, certain ideas such as the ‘rule of the husband’ often collide with contemporary Australian views about marriage. As previously stated, A Change of Skies is particularly concerned with the way in which migrants negotiate conflicting cultural ideals. For Barry and Jean this means living with contradictions – between what they have been raised to believe and the new dynamic of life in Australia. The disparity of the beds might be seen to symbolize the strange fit of a new migrant and gendered identity in Australia. It brings to mind a metaphor used by Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands, of the Indian migrant writer who must straddle ‘two stools’ of culture – sometimes falling between them. 66 The disjunction between Jean’s understanding of gendered identities and the opinions of white Australian women is critiqued further in the chapter titled “Jean advances native education” (itself an ironic echo of the debate on education in pre-independence Ceylon). In this episode, Jean is invited to speak at a women’s meeting held at Barry’s university to discuss her family’s involvement in the Sri Lankan women’s-rights movement. To the mortification of her host, Dr Maude Crabbe, however, Jean informs the audience that her mother brought up six daughters to be good wives and mothers, and that her family’s “long-established connections with women’s rights” relate to her father, a professor who had “always encouraged the ambitions of women” and never complained, “not even when sometimes he had to get his own cup of tea” (134). Maud laments: far from regarding men as the tyrants they are, and the rapists they would be (given half a chance) [Jean] seems to see them – even Blackstone for heaven’s sake – as knights in shining armour. ( 133)67

Her ideas are so dissimilar to the views of her audience that the latter can only assume that she is being ironic – a save that allows her to come out on top. This episode, however, rather than belittling Jean, satirizes the culturally imperialist views that many Western feminists have of women living in Third-World countries. The audience wants to hear about the suffering, subjugation, and victimization of their South-Asian ‘Others’ and not about the contentment of happy Sri Lankan housewives. Maud, their leader, is a feminist-imperialist par excellence. She deems Jean “unliberated,” “unenlightened,”

66 67

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 15. Jean thus tactically revises her opinion of Blackstone.

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and beyond reprieve – thus alluding to the stereotype of the “politically immature” Third-World woman.68 Maud’s imperialist attitude does not stop here. In a one-on-one discussion following the speech, she is startled when Jean tells her that “she sees her marriage to Barry as a personal reward for good deeds performed in a previous existence” (134). From Maud’s perspective, Jean’s reference to reincarnation, a principle of Hinduism and Buddhism, is a practical admission of lunacy. Again, however, her reaction does more to illuminate her own shortcomings than to discredit Jean. Maud’s views show her to be intolerant of non-Western beliefs, and thereby to have Orientalist tendencies. Certainly, Jean demonstrates innocence in regard to her understanding of what is expected of her at the women’s meeting, but she does not, like Maud, discredit the intelligence of any other attendee because of prejudices that she has based on stereotypes about Western women. In the light of this, Maud’s later complaints – bemoaning the tendency of “foreigners,” like Barry, to accept stereotypes about “Oz and the Aussie, i.e., that we are a nation of uncouth drunks with the intellectual standards of a soap opera and the social standards of the football scrum” (134) – are particularly ironic. Gooneratne’s text challenges Western feminists who may be tempted to typecast Asian women. Jean espouses a belief system that appears to place her in a subservient position to her husband. However, she acts in a way that allows her to fulfil her own needs and that in a way supports her adoptive community. She is, in the Australian vernacular, a ‘doer’, not a ‘talker’. Though Jean is no academic, she is keenly aware of the Western fascination with Oriental stereotypes, particularly in regard to the perceived mystique of Asian sexuality. As Lokugé observes, it seems that Jean “takes ‘oriental’ in her stride.”69 Far from being discouraged by the prejudices of Western feminists such as Maud, Jean proves that she can stand her ground, on her own terms, as an Asian woman. Indeed, when she becomes involved in the English department’s Open Day Exhibit she proves that she can use Asian stereotypes to her own advantage. Trained by her society mother, Jean sees an opportunity for the school to profit from their exhibitions (that had hitherto been free of

68

Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1998): 83. 69 Lokugé, “‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 29.

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charge).70 She transforms the school’s book display into a sexy “Antiquarian section” of “Collectors’ Items” – the star attraction being her own “limited edition, illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra” (140). The work attracts such extraordinary attention that she has, on the day, “the brilliant idea of cancelling the flat rate, and charging by the minute,” and by so doing nets an incredible $8,500 from the book display alone. Her ability to exploit Oriental stereotypes proves that these can be double-coded: though they can be used to objectify, otherize, and marginalize, they can also be appropriated and/or parodied by the traditionally ‘othered’ (in the postcolonial sense) to manipulate those who uphold them. Stereotypes can be a protean commodity. Jean infiltrates and empowers the university women’s group by writing and successfully marketing a cookery book that funds the group’s campaign for “better conditions for working wives and mothers on the university staff” (207), thus defusing Maude Crabbe’s distrust and apprehension of Jean’s lack of feminist ideological purity. Despite Maud’s feeling that her overt domesticity is a character flaw, Jean proves that her domestic talents are actually of benefit to the group. She shows them that that while her approach to a fundraising may be different from theirs (they apply for government grants), it is nonetheless effective. Her book, which becomes a bestseller, provides an outlet for the celebratation of her own cultural diversity. Titled “Something Rich and Strange,”71 it “combines Oriental and Western ingredients and methods of preparation” (207). Like her own diasporic personality, it is a fusion of East and West. In fact, its success may be seen to symbolize her own personal success in negotiating her Sri Lankan, Hindu, and Western identities. It might also to be seen to reflect the progress that Australia has made, by this point in the narrative, in regard to Asian relations. At the very least, Jean’s success allegorizes the joke that food is the most successful, acceptable, and digestible form of multiculturalism. As Sneja Gunew suggests, one of the few unthreatening ways to speak of multiculturalism [in Australia] is in relation to food, in other words, to say that all these immigrants have improved the diversity of the national cuisine. 72

70

It should perhaps be noted that, while she does not work, Jean is a qualified librarian. 71 “Something rich and strange” is also a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest I.ii. It is from Ariel’s song “Full fathom five thy father lies”; it, too, considers the changing of identity in a foreign land. 72 Sneja Gunew, “Feminism and the Politics of Irreducible Differences: Multicul-

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This situation, however, is not unique to Australia; in fact, it is common to all Anglo nations with complex immigration histories.73 Lokugé suggests that Jean’s culinary successes (the cookbook and later the twin roadside restaurants that she opens, “BAB A-G and BAB A - Q ,” thematic continuances of her cookbook) are problem-laden, however. These successes are problematic because they are located in the ‘domestic space’ traditionally allocated to women, and also in the ‘foodie’ space, the approved and stereotypical area of Australian multiculturalism. She therefore suggests that Jean’s triumph is contained in the area pre-sanctioned for the immigrant woman. In concluding her analysis of Jean’s multicultural persona, Lokugé recommends a “modification” of Spivak’s most renowned theory that “there is no space from where the [sexed] subaltern can speak.’74 Lokugé contends “that there is space where the subaltern can speak – and that is only domestic space.”75

turalism/Ethnicity/Race,” in Feminism and the Politics of Difference, ed. Sneja Gunew & Anna Yeatman (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993): 16. 73 As the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver boasts in Jamie’s Great Britain, a ‘foodies’ documentary series about multiculturalism and ethnicity in British food: “You know your fish and chips? Down the seafront – newspaper and a nice bit of cod? Well, you’ve got the Portuguese to thank for that. The chips come from the French. And the apple pie? That’s down to the Egyptians. Aren’t we lucky? They’re ours now.” Oliver suggests that this eclecticism is a uniquely British phenomenon: “Go to Italy, France or Spain, and you won’t see a Greek restaurant next to a Turkish restaurant next to a Chinese, an Indian, a Japanese and a Moroccan. You won’t see waves of new immigrants doing their thing, like the banh mi [Vietnamese] sandwich people on London’s Whitecross Street. Never, never.” Oliver celebrates this diversity, suggesting that it is the underpinning of Britain’s multicultural harmony. Richard Johnson, “Jamie Oliver Celebrates British Cuisine,” Radio Times (25 October 2011), http://www.radiotimes.com /news/2011-10-25/jamie-oliver-celebrates-british-cuisine (accessed 6 February 2012). Apart from this, however, it is interesting to note that the celebrity food journalist Charmaine Solomon has been perhaps the most recognized Sri Lankan-Australian woman since the late 1960s, when she began working for Woman’s Day magazine. There is no doubt some allusion to Charmaine in Jean’s character. 74 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988): 307, quoted in Lokugé, “ ‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 33. 75 Lokugé, “‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 33.

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While Jean faces challenges to her gendered identity, so, too, does Barry. As mentioned, Barry’s character development can be read in Lacanian terms. Through the process of locating his migrant identity in Australia, Barry enters a figurative ‘mirror stage’ in which he reconfigures his sense of self by identifying with the image of the alienating ‘Other’/Australia and Australians. Part of this process involves a reinterpretation of his psychosexual self. Initially this involves donning the garb of an egocentric americanized Australian, swapping his glasses for contacts and flaunting his exotic sexual allure.76 This new look turns him into a TV celebrity, an expert on Asian affairs. And, mesmerized by this new look and status, he ceases to care about his students. After a time, however, he has an epiphany: he meets a Vietnamese refugee in his writing-skills course whose story of suffering and trauma so moves him that he decides to give up his academic post and research ambitions to become an E S L teacher for migrants and Aboriginal students, who have been neglected by the system. Here he finally abandons the narcissistic fantasies of his “academic armchair” and by doing so realizes a new kind of ‘Symbolic Order’, a place where meaningful relationships can occur. Indeed, only here, in this moment of the narrative, does Barry finally grasp the importance of actually bonding with other Australians. As is the case with his great-grandfather Edward in the parallel storyline, the moment at which Barry can truly empathize with his fellow man “with eyes unclouded by prejudice” ( 285) is the moment in which he can finally exit the ‘mirror stage’ of psycho-social development. His newly acquired altruism allows him to distinguish his own personality unfettered by “the gaze of the ‘Other’.” 77 It should be noted here that Barry’s career-change challenges Sri Lankan ideas about masculinity that equate higher-paying professions with success. As Lokugé states, a shift in status from “a professor at a university to that of a free-lance E S L teacher […] would be considered [by many Sri Lankan’s] as a severe career demotion.”78 But Barry no longer cares; his overwhelming need to connect with other minority communities has driven him to renounce the competitiveness of his psychosexual ego, which was a reflection of both Sri Lankan and mainstream Australian culture. In fact, it is suggested that he has no option but to do this, as he has finally recognized the ‘truth’ that his diasporic identity is an ever-changing entity that must be “perpetually remade” by 76 77 78

Lokugé, “‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 25. “ ‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 21. “ ‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 28.

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the vectors of “human relationships” (285–86). His new philosophy reflects the poststructuralist maxim that meaning is in a constant state of evolution, that it is always being changed through the processes of différance. It also reflects the Buddhist philosophy of reincarnation, of moving up the karmic scale through good works and selflessness. It is worth noting that after Barry’s great-grandfather discovers the ‘truth’, he, too, reconnects with his Buddhist heritage. The obstacle of Asian class consciousness is a significant theme in A Change of Skies. The protagonists in this novel have been brought up as members of the Sri Lankan educated elite, as were most Sri Lankans who emigrated in the 1960s and 1970s. They have been brought up in a culture of strict social stratification in terms of caste and class hierarchy. While class orders do exist in Australia, they are far more subtle there than in Sri Lanka, where the working class usually would not interact with the educated class on equal terms, such as by shaking hands. Gooneratne uses satire to illustrate the way in which seemingly small cultural differences, such as a handshake, or sitting in the front seat of a taxi, have challenged Sri Lankan migrants of this generation. Indeed, the problem of negotiating and interpreting Australian customs is made so significant in this text that one of the minor characters, Mr Kyoto (a Sri Lankan community leader), commissions Barry to write an instruction manual titled “A Guide for Asian Migrants.” While this guide seems a little inane, it makes the point that quotidian events such as shaking hands with tradesmen, or putting one’s own bins out (about which another character, a Tamil called Viswa, has a phobia, fearing that his mother will hear about it), sometimes assumes overwhelming significance for South Asian migrants. Such minor issues form a synecdochic relationship with the greater issues of the migrant’s struggle to belong and to come to terms with the diasporic condition, in which they must often negotiate conflicting values. Barry never completes the commissioned “Guide for Asian Migrants,” however, because the longer he stays in Australia the more he changes, and as he changes so does his understanding of what it is to be an Asian migrant in Australia. As Paul Gilroy argues in The Black Atlantic (1993), the spirit of racial identity lies in the “cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse and avoid capture by its agents.”79 The finale of A Change of Skies, like that in The Pleasures of Conquest discussed in Chapter 79

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard UP , 1993): 2.

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4, is especially postmodern in its outlook. Indeed, while the totality of the

work may be read as a celebration of hybridity and the postcolonial condition, the ending embraces the notion that meaning is constantly being repeated and changed through the process of différance. Indeed, in the final chapter we find Edwina, Barry and Jean’s daughter, who has been named after Edward, Barry’s great-grandfather, boarding a plane that is headed for Sri Lanka: she is holding an empty journal. We learn from Edwina that Barry and Jean both died in a plane crash some years before.

If The Moon Smiled If The Moon Smiled (2000) by Chandani Lokugé is another novel that considers the Sri Lankan-Australian diaspora, though in very different way from A Change of Skies. In this novel, Lokugé deals with an unhappy diaspora: one of alienation, dislocation, and mourning. The narrative revolves primarily around Manthri, a young woman who emigrates to Australia with her husband and two small children in the 1960s. She has not gone by choice but out of duty, as it is her husband who has decided upon the move. Lokugé explores the psychological consequence of this enforced diaspora. As the critics Martin Kilduff and Kevin Corley argue, people who are compelled to leave their homelands “often feel a profound sense of personal loss similar to the death of a loved one.”80 This is the case with Manthri. The abandonment of her homeland thrusts her into a degenerative state of mourning and melancholia. Lokugé uses her character’s memories to describe the conditions that lead to this neurosis. Indeed, to this end, she pays great heed to the significance of memory for diasporic people. Though narratives about memory are common to postcolonial literature, they usually relate to the ‘collective memories’ of a nation-state, as in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; the shared memories of a displaced community, as in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef (1994); or the shared memories of a diasporic family, as in Roma Tearne’s Bone China (2006). Lokugé’s approach is different. She renders diasporic memory as a space of private reflection: a place to nurture the individual, the ego that is cast into shadow through displacement. This approach stresses the personal alienation of the diasporic condition. It considers memory as a safe house from trauma and also as a site of residual narcissism. The following discussion will explore the function of memory in this novel from a psychoanalytic 80

Martin Kilduff & Kevin G. Corley, “The Diaspora Effect: The Influence of Exiles on Their Cultures of Origin,” Management 2.1 (1999): 4.

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perspective, as ‘imaginary homelands’, sanctuaries of comfort, fantasy, and narcissism. It will involve Lacan’s theory of ‘the imaginary’, Freud’s theories of mourning and melancholia, Vijay Mishra’s work on the ‘diasporic imaginary’, as well as Julia Kristeva’s post-Freudian theories of mourning and melancholia. The discussion will then advance to the issue of ‘doubles’ and ‘alter egos’ in diasporic writing, exploring the trope of mental illness as a representation of diasporic double-consciousness. A discussion of the significance of doubles in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage will follow this. The term ‘imaginary homelands’ has become a master-trope for postcolonial fiction. It is used to refer to the space of diasporic novels (as unreliable or mythic locations) and also as a metaphor for the memory-space of diasporic people who are forever separated from their homeland by spatial and temporal distance; their homeland, as it was when they left, lives only in the space of their imagining, a space that is often romanticized by their longing for return. At least, this is what is suggested in diasporic literature, so often depicting characters such as Manthri in If the Moon Smiled who idealize their homeland as a place of innocence and purity, as an Eden, which has not been corrupted by the trauma of their diasporic experience. For Manthri, ‘home’ is not her alienating physical locality; it is not where she is with her husband and children in Australia. Manthri’s most distinct sense of home is absolutely the site of memory. By recalling her memories of Sri Lanka, she can summon up a sense of home and belonging that she cannot locate in Australia, and this is immensely comforting for her: “May it go on [she wishes], life after life, birth after birth. This moment, this dream: this memory.”81 Manthri believes that her true identity is missing in Australia and thus feels nurtured by the imagining of a true self, suspended in memory. From a Lacanian perspective, it could be said that her memories allow her to sustain an “illusion of unity” with her homeland, and thereby to ignore the truth of her “fragmentation and alienation” in Australia.82 For, as previously noted, Lacan believed that the formation of identity is predicated on a subject’s realization that he or she is alienated and fragmented from the original sense of wholeness experienced in the ‘imaginary order’ in which the ego was formed. It is evident in this novel that, although Manthri admires the ability of her children to adapt to and integrate with the Australian culture, she cannot do so herself. She is so traumatized by the reality of it that she shies inwards, 81 82

Lokugé, “‘ We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’,” 7. Homer, Jacques Lacan, 71.

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to what Lacan would call the “protective function of fantasy,” 83 which, ironically, only deepens her depression. Mishra’s theory of melancholia and the ‘diasporic imaginary’ can also be applied to Lokugé’s novel. Manthri as protagonist is ensnared in her memories of the past, fantasies of her identity in Sri Lanka, ideas that prevent her from moving forward in Australia. Forced by circumstance to leave her homeland (her love-object), she has (following Mishra’s theory of diasporic melancholia) been put into a situation where she must mourn its loss. Yet, rather than forsake her love for it, she has (following Freud’s theory on melancholia) drawn the memory of it back into her own ego, as a way to deny the totality of the loss. This distorts the normal pattern of object-relations that Freud prescribed, as it leads her ego to erroneously identify the lost loveobject as a part of itself. This can be seen in the way in which her imaginings of the lost homeland are so inextricably tied to her sense of self. Also, it is said in the text that she feels a lack in her day-to-day reality, as if a dream that was once promised to her has lain unfulfilled, a dream of happiness. This sense of impoverishment is, of course, a well-known symptom of melancholia84 – though, indeed, this is not the only symptom that suggests such a verdict. There is also her introversion in social situations, and her inability to form new love-attachments in Australia. Memory is the burden that arrests her. Memory or, as Mishra would have it, the ‘diasporic imaginary’, is the source of her melancholia. She cannot relinquish her diasporic imagining of what was, therefore cannot move on with her life. Though these trysts in memory are intended for comfort, meaning, or as a station in which to locate her loss, they are ultimately complicit in her downfall. They estrange her from her children and eventually lead to her intermittent incarceration for melancholia and psychosis. Though she does not realize it, her memories create what Derrida has called “the tomb or vault of some narcissism.”85 They represent a beauty that she cannot forsake. Another aspect of this novel that reveals the dynamics of this character’s diasporic melancholia is the intervention of traumatic moments in her memories, which alter the reader’s perception of her homeland. Such episodes suggest that Manthri has been greatly dissatisfied by her community’s attitude 83

Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 61. Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, 205. 85 Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale–Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2001): 12. 84

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toward her gendered identity, and that this has often made her feel sad and alienated. We see this, for instance, in the scene in which, as a small child, she overhears field workers lamenting her parents’ misfortune of only having a girl child. It is seen also in the episode of her puberty ceremony. In this memory she is literally locked away in a dark room for the duration of her period, a Buddhist tradition that is intended to protect the men in the village from the threat of her first killa (pollution).86 She is estranged by this ordeal, a feeling that is only intensified when, after being allowed out, she is forced to recognize that, as a woman, she must disengage from a close relationship with her father, her favourite person in the world. However, the main trauma that haunts her adult life occurs on the night of her wedding, when her husband accuses her of being impure. These traumas may well be considered in terms of Freud’s theory of melancholic ambivalence, as what is particularly striking about these moments is the way in which they come into conflict with Manthri’s otherwise idealized vision of the past. As Freud argued, ambivalence is often generated by the threat of loss, a threat that can lead the melancholic mourner to regard a lost love-object with disdain:87 In melancholia a series of individual battles for the object begins, in which love and hatred struggle with one another, one to free the libido, the other to maintain the existing libido position against the onslaught.88

The post-Freudian critic Julia Kristeva makes a similar point in Black Sun. Appropriating Freud’s idea that the melancholic libido enters a kind of “cannibalistic phase,”89 she contends: Depression, like mourning, conceals an aggressiveness towards the lost object, thus revealing the ambivalence of the depressed person with respect to the object of mourning. “I love that object,” is what the person seems to say about the lost object, “but even more so I hate it; because I love it, and in order not to lose it, I imbibe it in myself”.90

86

Deborah Winslow, “Rituals of First Menstruation in Sri Lanka,” Man 15.4 (1980): 607. 87 Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, 216. 88 On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, 216. 89 On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, 210. 90 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, tr. Leon Roudiez (Soleil Noir: Dépression et mélancolie, 1987; New York: Columbia UP , 1989): 11.

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If the Moon Smiled effectively illustrates this love-hate dichotomy upon which these analysts see melancholia, or in this case, diasporic melancholia to be sustained. This enriches the psychological significance of memory in the text, for it implies that Manthri’s obsession with memory is less a product of her love for the lost homeland than it is a product of her resentments towards it: for having hurt her, alienated her, and finally for shadowing her ego, which has prevented her from reconfiguring her identity in diaspora. As discussed, Lokugé makes it clear that her protagonist’s resentments are each inextricably bound to the way in which her homeland has alienated her as a girl and woman. This is significant as it centres the textual critique of imaginary homelands or the ‘diasporic imaginary’ on the issue of gendered identities. Lokugé seems determined to prove, however, that subtle cultural influences can also affect diasporic trauma. Indeed, she communicates this expressly by focusing her reader’s attention on the social construction of her protagonist’s gendered identity, a technique that is not uncommon in feminist writing. As one can see, Manthri’s memories have been organized in such a way as to encourage the reader to view the events, rituals, and teachings of her traditionalist Buddhist upbringing as the building blocks of her feeble mental state. Manthri’s first memory relates to the Buddhist precepts of feminine purity. “You must try to be like that nelum flower,” says her father, as they kneel at the foot of the Buddha, “Blossom free of the mud in which it is born, unsoiled by it.”91 The Nelum, or lotus lily, is a traditional symbol of purity in Sri Lanka, “purity of the body, speech, and mind.”92 As M. Mani Meitei states, this flower signifies “the aspirations of the culture – the patriarchal assumption in culture that all women should be universally chaste and virtuous.”93 Manthri the child is taught to accept this; and though there is an irony here in the presence of the old women at the temple who “sit around in white cloth and bodice […] look[ing] weary and resigned,”94 Manthri is too young to appreciate the discrepancy. She mimics the actions of the devotees, a game that becomes serious when, as a weary middle-aged woman, she returns to the temple with a real longing for worldly detachment. This retrospective 91

Chandani Lokugé, If the Moon Smiled (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 2000): 3. Kapruka, “Native Flowers of Sri Lanka,” Kapruka (2012), http://www.lanka .info/Sri_Lanka/cms/kapruka_t1.jsp?docid=1239063101546 (accessed 2 February 2012). 93 M. Mani Meitei, “Post-Colonial Location of Culture and Feminist Agenda in Chandani Lokugé’s If The Moon Smiled” (M S , nd): 2. 94 Lokugé, If the Moon Smiled, 4. 92

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link brings to mind Judith Butler’s theory that gender is constructed by a “performance,” “a stylized repetition of acts,” which function to naturalize gender-specific forms of behaviour.95 Manthri’s childhood indoctrination as an obedient daughter and, later, submissive wife is clearly outlined in the text. It is evidenced in her acquiescence to her husband Mahendra’s demand that she emigrate to Australia despite her wish to stay in Sri Lanka, and then, once in Australia, by the gradual whittling down of her defences. She regularly gives in to Mahendra: by not wearing the bright coloured saris that she loves, by not working outside the home, by allowing him to bully their son, and by not defending Nelum, their daughter, when he decides to force her into an arranged marriage. Although she is silently tormented by his controlling demeanour, she accepts it as a fate or destiny that she can only negotiate within the limits of her role as the good Buddhist wife. Lokugé suggests that her protagonist is so indoctrinated by these precepts of feminine purity that even when she realizes they have hurt her and longs to escape them, she cannot. This is made evident when her daughter Nelum, having decided to become a surgeon, refuses to accept an arranged marriage in Sri Lanka just before the ceremony. The shock of this disobedience leads Manthri, it seems, to question the necessity of her own marriage, as she subsequently abandons the responsibilities of her life in Australia by staying on with her parents in Sri Lanka. She tells the family that she is waiting for Nelum to return, but it is evident from the way she has cropped her hair, like a Buddhist nun, and joined the temple that she is pursuing enlightenment (which, following the Buddhist religion, is an acceptable way to leave a marriage).96 What is significant here is that, despite finding that her beliefs about marriage, masculine authority, and female duty are destabilized, she clings with more ardour than ever before to the system that has taught her these ideals. In fact, it seems that she is actually acting out the story of Yasodara, the heroine from her favourite childhood scripture, the ‘romance’ of Yasodara and Siddhartha. In this tale (narrated earlier in the text) Siddhartha (the Buddha) abandons his wife Yasodara in a quest for enlightenment in Sri

95

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993): 140. 96 However, it is usually only men who exit their marriage in pursuit of enlightenment.

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Lanka. Though he does not return, Yasodara is so faithful and virtuous that she never re-marries and eventually resolves to become a nun.97 Manthri’s rendition of this fate is especially intriguing if considered in terms of melancholia, for, though it appears that her faith is strengthened by doubt, it is not her faith in her real marriage that is strengthened but, rather, her faith in a higher ideal. This higher ideal relates to her original conception of romance, derived from the story of Yasodara and Siddhartha, which is inherently detached from the traumas of real human emotion. This relates back to Mishra’s theory of diasporic melancholia: his belief that the object of diasporic mourning is a kind of high ideal that eludes representation. Though Manthri does attempt to represent this lost ideal, by pursuing enlightenment at the monastery, it is a fantasy that cannot really be achieved, which is why this pursuit serves only to worsen her melancholic state. In fact, it draws her so far into her self that she becomes almost mute: she thinks of all the things that she would like to tell her daughter but cannot. She exhibits what Kristeva has called ‘asymbolia’, a symptom of melancholia involving “a subject’s inability to use language to compensate for the lost object.”98 The result of this for Kristeva is the virtual death of Lacan’s symbolic subject (although Lacan would not concede this fate, as it was his view that we cannot escape language).99 This scenario hones the suggestion that the object that the diasporic person mourns most is a high ideal; for Manthri it is a perceived promise of a lifestyle that can never be recaptured, not even by her return to the homeland. There is a nihilistic message here, suggesting that there is no salvation for a character like Manthri, so bound to her formative teachings that she cannot release her ‘imagined’ lost love-object. To summarize arguments thus far, it is evident that Manthri denies her Lacanian “alienation and separation” from her imaginary homeland (her ideal of who she is and of what her life should have been) by withdrawing into an ‘imaginary’ state (of narcissism). This is achieved by her recoil into memory and, as just discussed, through the performance of a high ideal, which estranges her from reality. Alienation is her double bind; it is the experience from which she shies, yet it is the experience that she exacerbates by her own 97

Lokugé, If the Moon Smiled, 6. Janice L Doane & Devon L. Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the “Good Enough” Mother (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1992): 55. 99 Homer, Jacques Lacan, 71. 98

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state of mind, which continually draws her into an ‘imaginary’ zone (in the Lacanian sense). Lokugé depicts her protagonist’s diaspora as an indubitably melancholic state from which she cannot escape, a deep psychic trauma predicated on an ambivalence that has partly been issued by the trauma of her gendered conditioning. There is a tradition in diasporic literature of using doubles (the doubling of characters and/or plots) as a means to allegorize the notion of a divided and/or fractured diasporic identity. We see this in Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled and Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage, to be examined later. Each of these novels uses doubles as tropes through which to convey the idea that diasporic identity involves psychic trauma. They use character doubles to allegorize the cultural, spatial, and psychological crises that affect their protagonists. Lokugé, for instance, provides her protagonist with a ghostly doppelgänger. She creates the character of Vana Mohini, her heroine’s ethereal, otherworldly ‘other’, as a means by which to allegorize the psychodynamics of diaspora. Manthri first sights this apparition on the eve of her wedding. She sees her from afar, wandering in the wilderness by a river with an infant clutched to her breast. This vision, which, the narrator says, could be a dream, is the first of several encounters that she has with this spectre, encounters that become increasingly terrifying and destabilizing. Mohini (meaning ‘maiden who steals the heart of the onlooker’) 100 appears to Manthri when she is particularly troubled, sometimes in dreams and at other times when she seems to be awake. These supernatural occurrences are examples of what Jeanne Delbaere–Garant calls ‘psychic realism’: a variant of magical realism in which a “physical manifestation” is used to symbolize “what takes place inside the psyche.”101 Mohini allegorizes Manthri’s psychic reality: her fractured mental condition, and especially her self-appointed purgatory. This phantom woman is the ultimate personification of madness, instability, and chaos. She is also the epitome of liminality, loneliness, marginality, exile, and social alienation.102 She reflects the many qualities of Manthri’s psychological

100

Kala Menon, “Classical Dance Art Forms of Kerala,” Sruti Ranjani 14.1 (2004):

12. 101

Jeanne Delbaere–Garant, “Variations on Magical Realism,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora & Wendy B. Faris (Durham N C : Duke UP , 1995): 255. 102 As Lois Parkinson Zamora states, “Ghosts are liminal, metamorphic, intermediary: they exist in/between/on modernity’s boundaries”; Zamora, “Magical

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diaspora. Manthri speaks tellingly of this connection towards the end of the novel when she says: “Disconnected from all. Wandering spirit seeking some other husk in some other existence. That’s what I am.”103 This also illustrates her understanding of Mohini as a kind of doppelgänger or frenzied alter ego. It is interesting to note that critics such as Mishra talk about diasporic people as being “haunted by spectres, by ghosts.”104 Manthri’s phantom woman is indeed a poignant representation of this metaphor. According to Freud, the doppelgänger can be traced to the workings of “primitive narcissism.”105 As he explains in The Uncanny (1919), “the double was originally an insurance against the extinction of the self” – for instance, in the portraiture on sarcophagi that was intended to immortalize the dead kings of Egypt.106 This concept of the double securing life soon changed, however, as the double was almost immediately transformed into an “uncanny harbinger of death.” 107 Freud argued that this evil double is a reflection of an internal force, the part of our mind that checks our modes of behaviour through “self-observation and self-criticism” (our ‘conscience’). 108 This internal force can translate itself, he said: [into the manifestation of] possibilities which, had they been realised, might have shaped our destiny […] all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of violation that fostered the illusion of free will.109

This idea is illustrated in If The Moon Smiled, for, while Manthri and Mohini share many of the same characteristics, the Mohini ghost embodies a freedom that Manthri feels has been denied to her. This involves a wild sexual desire, a “monstrous feminine”110 that Manthri has been forced by her social and Romance /Magical Realism,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora & Wendy B. Faris (Durham N C : Duke UP , 1995): 498. 103 Lokugé, If the Moon Smiled, 201. 104 Mishra, The Diasporic Imaginary and the Indian Diaspora, 1. 105 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, ed. Adam Phillips, tr. David McLintock (Das Unheimliche, 1919; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003): 142. 106 Freud, The Uncanny, 142. 107 The Uncanny, 142. 108 The Uncanny, 142. 109 Freud, The Uncanny, 143. 110 The ‘monstrous feminine’ is another term for the ‘female monster’, coined by Barbara Creed in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993): 1.

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cultural conditioning to repress from her consciousness. Mohini is an unconscious manifestation of this desire, which could have altered Manthri’s identity, though, in contrast to this, one can also argue that Mohini’s violent sexual identity is at least partially symbolic of Manthri’s conscious fear of sex in marriage, as instilled by her husband, Mahendra. Mahendra treats their sexual relations with a scorn and hostility that traumatize Manthri, so much so, that she regards his advances as a monstrous violation: “I will not allow Mahendra to touch me [she thinks]. I will not let him lay his hand on me. Because what will he do next but torture and torment.”111 This fear of his advances is, moreover, directly connected to her diasporic state, as this fear exacerbates her sense of psychological alienation. The symbolic ambiguity of Mohini, as a reflection of both Manthri’s fears and her desires, reinforces the theme of a divided diasporic identity. It also draws attention to the nature of the double more generally, as an enigmatic figure, an uncanny entity that can stand for contrast, opposition, and likeness as well.112 Another way to interpret the Mohini double, however, is simply as the delusion of a schizophrenic. Although Lokugé does not use the term schizophrenia per se, Manthri’s symptoms (her interaction with the Mohini character, hearing voices, and general disconnection from reality) allude to this condition. Reading the situation in this way opens an exciting and provocative metaphor for the concept of diasporic double-consciousness, as in its simplest sense schizophrenia is a psychic division, a disturbing state of double or multiple consciousness. It is derived from the Greek schizo (meaning ‘split’) and phrene (meaning ‘mind’ or ‘discourse’).113 It should be noted here that the motif of immigrant schizophrenia is quite common in Asian diaspora literature. As the critic Sheng-Mei Ma states, this peculiar bent of literary imagination is shared not only by Chinese, Japanese, and Indian diasporic writers but also by their Asian American counterparts.114 111

Lokugé, If the Moon Smiled, 201; this fear of his advances is, moreover, directly connected to her diasporic state, as fear exacerbates her sense of psychological alienation. 112 Milica Živković, “The Double as the ‘Unseen’ of Culture: Toward a Definition of Dopplegänger,” Facta Universitatis: Linguistics and Literature 2.7 (2000): 122. 113 O.L. Zangwill, “Neuropsychology,” in The Oxford Companion to the Mind, ed. Richard L. Gregory (Oxford: Oxford UP , 1987): 657. 114 Sheng-Mei Ma, Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (Albany: State U of New York P , 1998): 39.

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Lokugé appears to draw on this tradition, as does V.V. Ganeshananthan in her novel Love Marriage, which we shall now move on to.

Love Marriage: The Canadian-Sri Lankan Diaspora and the Terrorist Context According to Jennifer Hyndman, “Canada’s Tamil population is thought to constitute the largest Sri Lankan diaspora in the world,” while “Toronto is the city with the largest number of Sri Lankan Tamils in the world.”115 This immigrant community grew from 1983 onwards, during the Sri Lankan war.116 Canada’s 2006 census records 103,625 Sri Lankan-born immigrants, with the majority of 85,935 located in the state of Ontario117 and concentrated in Toronto: 80,610 Sri Lankan-born immigrants live in this greater metropolitan area.118 Other sources suggest that official reports are misleading, particularly with regard to the Canadian Tamil population. As Hyndman explains, most “estimates of the Tamil diaspora in Canada range from between 110 000 and 200 000,” while the high end estimates are up “to 400 000.”119 Hyndman suggests that this diaspora has maintained “strong ties with Sri Lanka” and that they sustained strong “economic and political connections” with the now defeated LTTE , connections that have been documented by Canada’s High Commission, “news media and intelligence sources.”120 As she states,

115

Jennifer Hyndman, “Aid Conflict and Migration: The Canada–Sri Lanka Connection,” The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 47.3 (2003): 259. 116 Carly Foster, “Group Backgrounds: Tamils,” Diversity Watch (2011), http: //www.diversitywatch.ryerson.ca/backgrounds/tamils.htm (accessed 3 February 2012). 117 Statistics Canada, “Ethnic Origins 2006 Counts for Canada, Provinces and Territories 20% Sample Data,” Statistics Canada (2007), http://www12.statcan.ca /census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/hlt/97-562/pages/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo=PR&Code =01&Data=Count&Table=2&StartRec=1&Sort=3&Display=All&CSDFilter=5000%3E (accessed 2 February 2012). 118 Statistics Canada, “Ethnic Origins 2006 Counts for Census Metropolitan Areas and Census Agglomerations – 20% Sample Data,” Statistics Canada (2007), http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/hlt/97-562/pages/page.cfm ?Lang=E&Geo=CMA&Code=535&Data=Count&Table=2&StartRec=1&Sort=3&Displ ay=All&CSDFilter=5000%3E (accessed 2 February 2012). 119 Hyndman, “Aid Conflict and Migration,” 259. 120 “Aid Conflict and Migration,” 259.

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In The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka (2009), Asoka Bandarage makes similar allegations.122 While careful to note that “the vast majority of Tamil emigrants are law abiding citizens,” she suggests that others “have funded the war in Sri Lanka.”123 She states that “from the beginning, many wealthy Tamils, especially doctors [.. .] were galvanized to support separatism in Sri Lanka.”124 The novel Love Marriage (2008) by V.V. Ganeshananthan involves representations of this alleged underground movement. Ostensibly a family saga, this novel is centred on a young adult protagonist, Yalini. Though born and raised in New York, Yalini regards herself a foreigner who is forever branded by her Sri Lankan appearance. Her sense of racial consciousness is intensified when she and her parents move to Toronto in 2005, a shift that is instigated by the arrival of her estranged uncle Kumaran, who is dying, and his daughter, Janani. She withdraws from university to be with them. These relatives have been working in Sri Lanka as militants in the LTTE , which troubles Yalini. It forces her to realize that her Sri Lankan identity, upon which she has established her most fixed, albeit troubled, sense of self, is actually more divisive than she had ever understood. The novel depicts Yalini’s diasporic identity as involving a psychic crisis. This is exacerbated by her problematic heritage, which she tries to make sense of by writing a history of her family during their stay in Toronto. The following will consider Ganeshananthan’s use of character doubles and dualistic conjectures, which develop her themes of diasporic double-consciousness and psychic crisis. It will also explore her representation of “the terrorist” relatives as uncanny ‘doubles’ par excellence, who further portray the extremities of diasporic double-consciousness. Ganeshananthan presents the protagonist’s Tamil family as a network of dualistic conjectures, of unions, pairs, mirror images, and repetitions that function synecdochically to advance the theme of diasporic double-conscious121 122 123 124

Hyndman, “Aid Conflict and Migration,” 259. Bandarage, The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka, 116. The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka, 116. The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka, 116.

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ness and its significance for the protagonist Yalini. Consideration of duality is given at the beginning of the novel when Yalini discusses the non-traditional ‘love marriage’ of her immigrant parents in New York. Her mother’s family, in Sri Lanka, had initially opposed the marriage because it had not been properly ‘arranged’ by them in accordance with Sri Lankan tradition, though this attitude eventually changes when they meet her father, an expatriate Tamil doctor. He now fits into her mother’s family “as well – if not better – than he fits into his own family.”125 The preceding conflict precipitates a tension within their union, however, which is a difficulty that persists throughout their lives. This tension relates directly to the Sri Lankan civil war, because it was Yalini’s mother’s brother, Kumaran, the LTTE militant, who was most violently opposed to the marriage at the start. He had threatened to use his connections in the separatist movement to find her father’s family and “hurt them” in Sri Lanka (50). Although this does not occur, it deposits a residue of unease within their home, a trace of the conflict between the pacifists and the militants in the Tamil community. The parents try to separate themselves from this tension by making their home in America, but their daughter, Yalini, feels the resonance of their concern. She describes their home as a “war-torn house” in a “peaceful country” ( 21). She tries to avoid the problem by escaping to a university that is “far away from them,” in the same way as they try to avoid the tensions in their homeland by living in New York (21). But none of them can evade the issues that plague them when Kumaran arrives from Sri Lanka as a dying man with his daughter Janani by his side. Kumaran meets his estranged relatives in Toronto, where he is accepted as an asylum-seeking ‘Tiger’, and only then because of his terminal condition. They settle in Scarborough, a suburb that is densely populated with Tamil refugees and which contains its own ‘Little Jaffna’. Yalini’s father becomes his private doctor and in the lead-up to his death they have LTTE supporters call in on their home to pay their respects to Kumaran and to leave donations for the separatist cause. Despite their shared objection to his militant politics, they become embroiled in helping him, which thus problematizes their opposition to his politics. It leads them to focus on the divisions and similarities that they share as a family, which is especially disturbing for Yalini, who is just starting to understand her divisive heritage. It leads her to study her family’s history and to locate therein a plethora of dyads, parallels, and char125

V.V. Ganeshananthan, Love Marriage (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008):

4. Further page refeerences are in the main text.

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acter doubles from the past and in the present. These ‘doubles’ allegorize the intense diasporic double-consciousness that she experiences, and they ultimately destabilize her. Ganeshananthan develops a synecdoche between her protagonist’s double-consciousness and that of the Tamil diaspora more generally. Karl Miller’s theory of doubles has relevance for this text, particularly in relation to Yalini’s terrorist relatives. As Miller states, the “component parts [of duality] may completely resemble or repel one another. Such parts are partners or enemies.”126 He suggests, further, that “in most circumstances, whether of conflict or accord, part and counterpart are both perceived to be true,”127 which is to say that character doubles (such as Manthri and Mohini in If the Moon Smiled) are often partners and enemies at the same time. Love Marriage provides an excellent illustration of this theory, since, for the most part, distinctions between partners and enemies are blurred. The most striking characters blurring this distinction are the terrorist relatives, uncle Kumaran and cousin Janani. These characters are especially unsettling for the way in which they destabilize the distinction between a beloved family member and a feared enemy. They provide examples of duality within themselves and also in their relations with other characters. The protagonist Yalini and her cousin Janani are a major dyad involving both similarity and difference. On the surface they are alike; they mirror one another in terms of their positioning within the family network: Yalini’s mother is Janani’s aunt, as Janani’s father is Yalini’s uncle. They look “almost identical” (219), are close in age, and are both only children. However, they have been born and raised in different worlds, Yalini in America, Janani in Sri Lanka. As a result of this, and of the politics of their upbringing, they clash politically. Yalini is a pacifist who opposes the war in Sri Lanka; Janani is a militant, a proud member of the LTTE . In the simplest sense, the relationship of these cousins reflects the two main opposing attitudes that Sri Lankans (both in Sri Lanka and abroad) have had over the years concerning the Sri Lankan war: pacifism and a desire for peaceful negotiation, versus fundamentalism, be it Tamil or Sinhalese, and thus a belief in contestation through violence. They act also to illustrate two of the common psychological reactions that people have to conflict: fight and flight. Yalini (along with her parents) stands metonymically for the people who chose a diasporic existence 126 127

Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987): 21. Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History, 21.

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over violence, while Janani stands for those who stay and fight for their ideals regardless of the consequences. The philosophical conflict of the two cousins represents a question that has been at the core of the Tamil consciousness in Sri Lanka and abroad: what is the right way to respond to racial persecution? And: can one defend a “justwar ideology”?128 Clearly, both the LTTE and the Sinhalese Army believed that they could, as this conflict continued for many years. It ended in 2009, when the LTTE was forced by the government to surrender in a furious finale that was followed closely by the international media. As discussed in Chapter 3, the LTTE had been using Tamil civilians as a human shield to protect an area of jungle in the north of the country that they claimed as their ‘Eelam’ (their own separatist nation-state). The Sinhalese Army defeated them in a specialist combat operation: they rescued the civilians (though hundreds died); reclaimed the land; and killed Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the 129 LTTE . This military offensive has had massive humanitarian consequences, however. As previously noted, the United Nations suggests that Tamil Tiger forces and the Sri Lankan government are each guilty of war crimes.130 The Janani character also functions as a representation of a critical conscience in the mind of diasporic Sri Lankans, which thus illustrates Freud’s theory about literary doubles being connected to the ‘conscience’ of protagonists, as mentioned in the discussion of If the Moon Smiled.131 Ganeshananthan has clearly constructed Janani as a critical voice in the novel. Janani berates Yalini personally as a Tamil who has not experienced the conflict in her homeland, yet who still challenges the ethics of the LTT E . She belittles Yalini’s existence as a diasporic Tamil: living in the West while other Tamils ‘back home’ are suffering. She also suggests that Yalini is not a real Tamil, because she cannot speak Tamil: How could you know about the war? [She says] You grew up without speaking Tamil? The war is like Tamil for you. Something you would 128

Tessa J. Bartholomeusz & Chandra Richard De Silva, Buddhist Fundamentalism and Minority Identities in Sri Lanka (Albany: State U of New York P , 1998): 32. 129 A B C /A F P /Reuters, Sri Lanka Declares Final Victory Over Rebels. 130 Peter Lloyd, “UN Report Alleges War Crimes in Sri Lanka,” Lateline (26 April 2011), http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2011/s3200829.htm (accessed 30 April 2011). 131 Freud, The Uncanny, 142.

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This is a pointed criticism in view of the significance of language in the history of Sri Lanka’s civil conflict. As discussed above, the nation’s changeover from English to Sinhala was a catalyst of the civil strife. Janani’s cutting words allude to this fact and, by so doing, are intended to remind Yalini that she is an outsider with a limited understanding of the crisis. As these are concerns that Yalini has about herself, they can be regarded, at least in part, as a reflection of her own conscience. Although she cannot condone the tactics of the LTTE , she is troubled by her own family’s involvement in this conflict and perplexed about how she can resolve their history as part of her own heritage. This concern forces a psychic crisis within her that is compounded by her already developed sense of being, and not being, an American because of her Sri Lankan heritage. This anxiety is exacerbated in the Tamil enclave where they settle in Toronto. It muddles her ‘Sri Lankan-American’ consciousness further. Who is ‘the host’ and who is ‘the guest”?, she wonders, when taking tea with Janani, who asserts her Tamil identity (40). As stated, Janani and Kumaran, her father, oscillate between conflicting modes of subjectivity. To Yalini they are family, a cousin and an uncle, a cousin who looks more like her mother than she does and an uncle who has witnessed persecution in his family, just as her father did. However, they are also terrorists, which is understandably worrisome for Yalini. In reflecting on their function in the novel, it is necessary to consider the significance of the ‘terrorist’ as a trope. As David Punter observes, “a terrorist is not always or only simply a terrorist, he or she is other things as well, not assimilable to a simple, single, quasi eternal category.’132 Like the fictional Janani and Kumaran, the ‘terrorist’ that we see on television or read about in the paper is usually a member of a family and a community. And this is what makes them frightening: they dwell among us. They are both ‘heimlich’ (homely) and ‘unheimlich’ (unhomely), which is the definition of ‘the uncanny’ according to Freud.133 They are also both liminal and alienated subjects, which, as Punter astutely observes, is also often the lot of ‘the immigrant’:

132

David Punter, “Terrorism and the Uncanny, or, the Caves of Tora-Bora,” in Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, ed. Jo Collins & John Jervis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 201. 133 Freud, The Uncanny, 148.

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In encountering the terrorist we are taken to the limit of understanding, to the end of inscription: nothing but death is written on this body, and death is not interpretable […]. In the fate of the immigrant, we see [also] the limitations of understanding, or of being understood; the inescapability of stereotyping and prejudice; the impossibility of ever being fully ‘at home’.134

This insight is something that Love Marriage seeks to illustrate by Yalini’s identification with her uncle Kumaran. He, ‘the terrorist,” is on the brink between life and death (albeit by natural causes), while she, his niece and the child of immigrants, teeters on the brink of a psychic crisis: a crisis that is caused by her developed sense of double-consciousness. Following Kumaran’s death, she says that “governments call men terrorists to erase their reason, to make them crazy. Some of them are, and some are not” ( 272). To a certain extent this suggests that she has started to sympathize with his actions and to rationalize his behaviour. But the significance here is more the parallel between the erasure of Kumaran’s reason, as a terrorist, and her own, as a person experiencing a psychic crisis, the consequence of her diasporic trauma, which thus relates Kumaran’s uncanny condition as a terrorist and a dying man to Yalini’s condition as a diasporic person. There is a striking parallel between Manthri’s schizophrenia in If the Moon Smiled and Yalini’s psychic trauma in Love Marriage. Like Manthri’s illness, Yalini’s condition is exacerbated by a fixation on the past. Throughout the narrative, she documents the history of her family as a way of understanding her present situation as the American-born daughter of Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants who is now living in Canada. Though she aims to write objectively, as would a researcher, she is drawn into the narrative of her deeply divided family. Indeed, by her own admission, she is unable to write about her relatives without writing about herself in the form of the first person. The consequence is that the stories of her relatives permeate her own identity to such an extent that she is unable to see herself as a distinct and separate individual. The past, as in Lokugé’s novel, works as an ‘imaginary homeland’ that prevents her from moving forward and functioning in the present. She feels that she is inextricably bound to their trauma as if it were her own. Yalini’s over-identification with others can, moreover, be conceptualized in Lacanian terms; as in earlier discussions, the ‘mirror stage’ theory can well be applied here. It is evident that Yalini is captivated by the image of the 134

Punter, “Terrorism and the Uncanny, or, the Caves of Tora-Bora,” 202.

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‘Other’ (her relatives). Soon after this she imagines that her identity is synonymous with theirs, and thus reconstructs her ‘ego’ in accordance with their image (which, problematically, involves traumas and doubles who contradict unity). As she says melodramatically, “I am composed of all the women and men who came before me. I am the result of many marriages” ( 239). In saying this, she highlights the synecdochic relationship that exists between her and the other characters in the novel. This reflection is double-coded. On the one hand, it is metafictional, revealing the symbolic intent of the author. On the other, it reflects a schizophrenic state of mind, which, as in Lokugé’s novel, is a metaphor for the discussed divisions of the diasporic Sri Lankan identity. As in Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies and Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled, Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage suggests that diaspora leads to states of narcissistic self-reflection. This self-reflection is illustrated by the protagonist’s obsession with researching her own family history. The novel intimates that diaspora involves a state of double vision that is especially disturbing for vulnerable characters like Yalini who must confront personal histories of violence. It is interesting to note here that Ganeshananthan also frames Yalini’s sensitivity as a genetic trait, the bequest of her mad aunt Uma with “those otherworld eyes” (222).135 This again suggests that the double vision of diasporic Sri Lankans is an inheritance of their homeland, a legacy of violence, as was the case with Uma. The implication is that histories of violence and trauma, such as Sri Lanka’s, have a psychological aftermath that seeps through generations and into diasporic landscapes. This discussion has aimed at establishing that Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage depicts the identity of diasporic Sri Lankans as a psychic trauma predicated on division. As has been illustrated, Ganeshananthan has depicted the family of the protagonist as a series of dualistic conjectures that work synecdochically to develop the theme of a doubled diasporic identity. These conjectures suggest that the double-consciousness of diasporic Sri Lankans is predicated mainly on racial conflicts that have existed in Sri Lanka, and that this legacy complicates the sense of cultural in-betweeness that is experienced 135

Krishna Manavalli suggests that Uma is a schizophrenic: “Uma’s schizophrenia translates into the divided consciousness of Yalini’s diasporic experience”; Manavalli, “The Place of Love and War: Recovering History and Genealogy in the Sri Lankan Diaspora in Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage,” Journal of Contemporary Thought 33 (2011): 113.

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by the diasporic Sri Lankan living in the West. In consideration of the protagonist’s uncle and cousin, the discussion has also explored the concept of the ‘terrorist’ as the ultimate embodiment of uncanny duality and thereby a metaphor for the diasporic person. Ganeshananthan’s representation of the kindly terrorist sets the novel off from the other diasporic novels that have been discussed in this chapter; it humanizes this feared ‘Other’, which is certainly unusual. Ganeshananthan’s depiction of her protagonist’s psychic breakdown was also discussed in terms of providing a representation of diasporic crisis.

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‘Pretty Little Tales’1 of Substance A Conclusion

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omen’s fiction of the Sri Lankan diaspora is not unique from a marketing point of view, since, like most other fictions of the ‘South Asian’ diaspora, it is marketed as an exoticist literary commodity. This has the ironic effect of “domesticating the foreign.”2 From publishers to booksellers, the aim is the same: to convince potential readers that books by South Asian writers are bursting with rich Asian themes that are both recognizable and ‘different’, while also being recognizably ‘political’. This marketing strategy requires the romancing of the Orient as an exotic location and the romancing of Asian identity as a seductive character, despite the problems of these exoticist stereotypes in the postcolonial age. Fiction of the Sri Lankan diaspora has demonstrated self-consciousness about the Orientalist dynamics which are used to sell books. In fact, as noted in the third chapter of this book, the male writer Romesh Gunesekera has been rebuked for his production of nihilistic exoticism, as perceived in his extreme and graphic representations of the Sri Lankan civil conflict in Reef (1994).3 Ondaatje has similarly been accused of exoticist excess, particularly for his representations of Ceylon in Running in the Family (1982),4 in which, to be fair, there is a vast array of exotic novelties, including the scorpion, the peacock, the elephant, the leopard, the cobra, the jungle, and the rural village. Women’s fiction of the Sri Lankan diaspora similarly embroiders the exoticist appeal of South Asian writing, though it often does so in a subversive manner.

1

De Kretser, The Hamilton Case, 367. Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, 13. 3 Jayasuriya, “Exotic Ruses?: Sri Lanka as Seen Through Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” 111. 4 See Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka, 147. 2

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This is candidly illustrated in de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case in the character of Shiva, who is Sam’s only friend. Shiva becomes a successful diasporic novelist who writes “pretty little tales, trickled out with guavas and temple bells.”5 His books are well received by Western readers: “your work is exotic,” they tell him, and “marvellously authentic.”6 The Orientalist literary project led by Stella Mallinson in Gooneratne’s The Pleasures of Conquest – her collection of authentic “Amnesian tales’ – is another instance of self-referential parody of literary exoticism in women’s fiction of the Sri Lankan diaspora. The above examples illustrate how women’s fiction of the diaspora transcends and explodes exoticist discourse, particularly with regard to Sri Lankan forms of identity. This book has, it is hoped, demonstrated the complexity and depth of this diasporic work: from the deconstruction of the colonial mimic and Orientalism discussed in Chapter 1 and the parodies of the Victorian domestic tradition, colonial angel women, and female monsters, considered in Chapter 2; through the caricatures of colonial prejudices, nationalism, and representations of the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict explored in Chapter 3 and the portraits of tourism, its horrors, and its neocolonial faces reviewed in Chapter 4; to the depictions of diasporic divisions and crises that were studied in Chapter 5. Women’s fiction of the Sri Lankan diaspora has, as illustrated here, much to offer the fields of postcolonial and diasporic studies. It is significant and unique in spite of the exoticist strategies that are used to market it. This body of work is, moreover, valuable for its sophisticated rendering of problematic Sri Lankan identities in the colonial era, the postcolonial period, and into diasporic contexts. Each of the writers discussed in this book throws light on anxieties about identity. The analysis of the mimic man demonstrates their fiction’s anxious probing of colonial identities, and, for men, doubts about authenticity in colonial contexts. In its study of domestic angel women and female monsters, the book likewise demonstrates how women’s fiction reflects on anxiety about elite women’s identities, especially with regard to the problematic of women’s construction by colonial powers. The parodies of nationalist identities explored convey the authors’ concern about the prejudices that have influenced the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict. The authors’ collective focus on linguistic identities reflects the problematic of these issues in 5 6

De Kretser, The Hamilton Case, 367. The Hamilton Case, 367.

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postcolonial Sri Lanka. The division and crisis of diasporic identities reveals the difficulties of these identities for their diasporic characters, male and female. This range of analysis has indicated this group’s particular concerns about the production of gendered identities, which, as seen throughout this book, are manifested by mourning and psychic disturbance.

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Works Cited

A B C /A F P /Reuters. “Sri Lanka Declares Final Victory Over Rebels,” A B C News

Online (18 May 2009), http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/18/2574158 .htm (accessed 18 January 2011). A B C Radio. “Yasmine Gooneratne: Sweet and Simple,” radio broadcast, A B C Radio National (7 May 2009), http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow /2009-05-07/3130668 (accessed 10 June 2010). Alexander, Vera. “Cross-Cultural Encounters in Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag and Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies,” in The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, ed. Christian Mair (Cross /Cultures 65, AS N E L Papers 7; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2003): 375–83. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). Appignanesi, Richard, & Oscar Zarate. Freud for Beginners (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992). Armistead, Claire. “Roma Tearne on Brixton Beach,” The Guardian Books Podcast (10 July 2009) http://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/ 2009/jul/10/roma-tearnebrixton-beach (accessed 3 June 2011). Aronowitz, Alexis A. Human Trafficking, Human Misery: The Global Trade in Human Beings (Westport C T : Praeger, 2009). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. “Introduction” to “Part XI I I : Education” of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin (1995; Oxford: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2005): 425. Ashcroft, Bill, & Pal Ahluwalia. Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999). Atkinson, Joshua. “Analyzing Resistance Narratives at the North American Anarchist Gathering,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 30.3 (July 2006): 251–72. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Tvorschestvo Fransua Rable, 1965; tr. 1968; Bloomington: Indiana UP , 1984).

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v





Index

acculturation 3, 9, 22, 24, 34, 73, 74, 76, 77

Adam Bede (George Eliot) 62 Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women 45 Alexander, Vera 176 alienation 13, 15, 169, 170, 179, 189, 190, 195, 196, 198 Amarasekere, A.C.G.S. 72 Anderson, Benedict 90, 91, 92, 93 “The Angel in the House” (Patmore) 5, 45, 46 ‘angel in the house’ trope 5, 44, 47, 48, 54, 57, 72, 75 Angel of Death 44 ‘angel women’ 5, 59, 64, 66, 117, 210 angel–monster dichotomy 5, 39, 50, 54 —See also: monster, female ‘angelology’ 45 Anglicanism 12, 20, 25, 26, 53, 71, 76 Anil’s Ghost (Ondaatje) 35, 94, 119, 209 anti-Tamil prejudice 106, 109 Appignanesi, Richard, & Oscar Zarate 172

Aronowitz, Alexis A. 142 Aryanism, linguistic 6, 83, 84, 85, 92 Ashcroft, Bill, & Pal Ahluwalia 17 Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin 11 Asian Development Bank 130

assimilation, cultural 19, 166, 170, 177 asymbolia (Kristeva) 195 Atkinson, Joshua 101 Austen, Jane 18, 70, 71; Mansfield Park 18; Pride and Prejudice 70 Australia, and immigration policy 177; as host land for Sri Lankan immigrants 4, 6, 21, 60, 138, 147, 166, 167, 168, 173–88, 189–97; Asian immigrants in 178, 183, 185; beach culture of 148; class distinctions in 188; cultural stereotypes of 167; immigration policy 175; stereotypes of 177; tourist novels in 150 —See also: White Australia policy Australian characters in fiction 149, 151 Bakhtin, Mikhail 162, 163 Bandarage, Asoka 105, 106, 130, 200 Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, Chandrika (President of Sri Lanka) 25 Bandaranaike, S. (Sirimavo) W.R.D. (P M of Ceylon) 25, 52, 86, 88, 96, 97, 99, 100 Baranay, Inez, The Edge of Bali 150 Barker, Chris, & Dariusz GalasiÕski 173 Bartholomeusz, Tessa J., & Chandra Richard De Silva 203 Baudrillard, Jean 6, 132, 134, 154, 155, 156, 161, 162, 163

228 beach community 143, 144, 145; in Australia 148; in Turtle Nest 138–49 Beddoe, Christine 135, 137, 138, 139, 140

Bhabha, Homi K. 5, 10, 15, 16, 21, 23, 26, 31, 157, 166, 167, 168, 180 Bhatnagar, Rashmi Dube, Renu Dube & Reena Dube 64 Black July (Colombo riots) 89, 102, 103 Blainey, Geoffrey 177, 181 Blake, William 47 bluestocking culture 40 body, postcolonial 111 body, the, as motif 35 body-politic theme 112 Bone China (Tearne) 189 Boone, Joseph 136, 137, 139, 158 Boorstin, Daniel J. 131, 132 Booth, Douglas 167 Borges, Jorge Luis 36, 37 Brewster, Anne 157 Broinowski, Alison 177 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre 48, 57, 58 Buchan, John, The Thirty-Nine Steps 28 Buddhism 19, 26, 39, 52, 69, 70, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94, 97, 98, 99, 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 115, 130, 144, 184, 188, 192, 193, 194 Burgher presence in Ceylon/Sri Lanka 4, 12, 18, 20, 21, 22, 102, 103, 104, 104 Bush, Julia 55, 56 Butler, Judith 194 “Caesura” (Castro) 4 Caldwell, Robert 84 Camden, Jennifer 67 Canada, as host land for Sri Lankan immigrants 4, 6, 94, 121, 166, 175, 199– 207

Carrigan, Anthony 147, 149, 150 Castro, Brian, “Caesura” 4

P R O B L E M A T I C I D E N T I T I E S v Catholicism 19 Celebrating Sri Lankan Women’s English Writing (ed. Yasmine Gooneratne) 2, 103

Ceylon, mythic history of 79–85 A Change of Skies (Gooneratne) 1, 4, 6, 70, 165, 166, 173–88, 189, 206; Australian language satirized in 177–80 Charter Act (1813) 9 Chatterjee, Partha 90, 92, 93, 94 child sex (paedophilia) 6, 123, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146 Christianity 9, 10, 12, 19, 51, 98, 103, 124

Christie, Agatha 27, 29, 36 Cinnamon Gardens (Selvadurai) 94 Citizenship Act (1948) 86, 97, 114 Civil War, English 112 civil war, Sri Lankan 2, 68, 90, 111, 117, 120, 128, 130, 201 —See also: conflict, Tamil–Sinhalese civilizing mission, colonialism seen as 9 Club Méditerranée 125 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 116 Colley, Linda 39, 40, 41, 42 Colombo Academy 20 Colombo, riots in 87, 89, 101 comedy 5, 6, 47, 123, 164, 166 commodification 17, 141, 142, 146, 152, 155, 159, 160, 185, 209 —See also: fetishism Commonwealth Writers Prize 1 Confessions of an English Opium Eater (De Quincey) 59 conflict, Tamil–Sinhalese 3, 4, 6, 67, 79, 82, 88, 90, 94, 99, 101, 102, 105, 109, 110, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 139, 145, 150, 155, 192, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 209, 210 —See also: civil war, Sri Lankan

229

v Index Coram, Thomas 42 Covington, Sarah 112 Crane, Ralph J., & Radhika Mohanram 165

Creed, Barbara 197 Crick, Malcolm 124, 127, 128, 129, 136, 142, 157 Culavamsa (Buddhist chronicle) 79 Culler, Jonathan D. 6, 131, 132, 133, 140, 156, 158 D’Alwis, James 25, 84 Daniel, Lakshmi Kiran 52 David, Deirdre 48 De Kretser, Michelle 1, 5, 9, 18–26, 30– 37, 38, 54–68, 209, 210; The Hamilton Case 1, 5, 9, 18–26, 30–37, 53– 67, 68, 113, 209, 210 De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of an English Opium Eater 59 De Silva, K.M. 2, 19, 20, 79, 80, 81, 82, 97, 105 death, domestication of 45 Delbaere–Garant, Jeanne 196 Derrida, Jacques 172, 173, 174, 191 detection as trope 9, 23, 24, 28, 32, 36 detective genre 5, 9, 21, 26, 27–37, 60 DeVotta, Neil 81, 87, 88, 89 Dharmapala, Anagarika, & Ananda W.P. Guruge 85 diaspora 167, 168, 170, 172, 190, 195, 196; concept of 165, 166; Sri Lankan 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 20, 36, 79, 119, 147, 148, 165, 166, 168, 170, 173, 174, 181, 182, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 211 diasporic imaginary (Mishra) 171, 172, 190, 191, 193

Dickens, Charles, Dombey and Son 45; Great Expectations 59 différance (Derrida) 173, 188, 189 Dijkstra, Bram 44 Doane, Janice L., & Devon L. Hodges 195

Dombey and Son (Dickens) 45 domesticity, ideal of 5, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 52, 54, 56, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 78, 185 double-consciousness 7, 16, 31, 166, 190, 198, 200, 201, 202, 205, 206 doubles /doubling 13, 14, 190, 196, 197, 198, 200, 202, 203, 206 Doyle, Arthur Conan 27, 28 Dravidian languages 84, 92 Durack, Mary, Kings in Grass Castles 177

Durrell, Lawrence 136 Dutch Reformed Church 19 Dutch, presence in Ceylon 2, 79 Eagleton, Terry 169 East India Company 9, 19 The Edge of Bali (Baranay) 150 education, in Ceylon 4, 5, 9, 10, 21, 25, 34, 40, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 69, 76, 77, 87, 92, 96, 97, 104, 107, 112, 183 education, of children 42 education, of women 40, 41, 51, 73, 76 Educational Commission of Ceylon 51 Edwardianism 21, 22, 55, 56 Edwards, Allan, James Skinner & Keith Gilbert 148 Eliot, George, Adam Bede 62 Eliot, T.S., The Waste Land 157 elites, in Ceylon 5, 6, 9, 20, 22, 24, 25, 39, 43, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 68, 69, 73, 74, 76, 77, 83, 87, 92, 97, 102,

230 [elites, in Ceylon] 104, 107, 113, 116, 151, 175, 210; elites, in Sri Lanka 4, 5, 9, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 77, 81, 85, 87, 91, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 106, 107, 108, 147, 154, 181, 188; Victorian 43 Émile (Rousseau) 39, 40, 41, 56 Empire, British 15, 18, 27, 29, 44 English Education Act (1835) 11 English language 18, 20, 22, 32, 37, 77, 87, 91, 92, 116 English Rose stereotype 67, 74 Enlightenment 10, 40, 41, 44, 91 essentialism 16, 173, 182 Estate Tamils 86, 97, 98, 109, 114, 117 ethnicity 12, 32, 108, 186 Evans, Dylan 168, 169, 179, 191 exoticism 6, 72, 119, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 164, 182, 187, 209, 210 extremism, political, in Sri Lanka 87, 101

Fanon, Frantz 5, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 166, 167, 175, 177 femininity 5, 39, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 60, 70, 77 Ferdinando, Shamindra 120 Ferdinands, Rodney 12, 20, 21, 22 fetishism 135, 138, 141, 152 —See also: commodification Fiske, John, Bob Hodge & Graeme Turner 148, 167, 180 Flaubert, Gustave 136 Forster, E.M., Howards End 18 Foster, Carly 199 Foucault, Michel 16, 17 Foundling Hospital (London) 41 Fox–Genovese, Elizabeth 42

P R O B L E M A T I C I D E N T I T I E S v Free Education Act (1945) 53 Freud, Sigmund 7, 170, 171, 172, 190, 191, 192, 197, 203, 204 Funny Boy (Selvadurai) 94 Fussell, Paul 158 Galle Face Hotel 151 Gandhi, Leela 184 Ganeshananthan, V.V. 1, 6, 94, 166, 170, 190, 196, 199–207; Love Marriage 1, 6, 94, 166, 170, 190, 196, 199–207 gender 2, 3, 7, 30, 41, 50, 51, 52, 60, 70, 74, 145, 154, 165, 173, 182, 183, 187, 192, 193, 196, 211 Gide, André 136 Gilbert and Sullivan 71 Gilbert, Sandra, & Susan Gubar 5, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 57 Gilroy, Paul 188 Godwin, William 41 Goffman, Erving 133 Gooneratne, Brendon, & Yasmine Gooneratne 160 Gooneratne, Yasmine 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, 39, 69–78, 79, 94–102, 103, 123, 138, 151–64, 166, 168, 173– 89, 206, 210; A Change of Skies 1, 4, 6, 69, 165, 166, 173–88, 189, 206; Relative Merits 19, 20, 25; The Sweet and Simple Kind 1, 5, 6, 38, 68–77, 79, 94–102, 107. 177; ed. Celebrating Sri Lankan Women’s English Writing 2, 103 Gramsci, Antonio 11, 24, 143 Grant, Charles 10 Great Expectations (Dickens) 59 Gunawardana, R.A.L.H. 82, 83, 84, 85 Gunesekera, Romesh 2, 3, 119, 189, 209; Reef 119, 189, 209 Gunew, Sneja 180, 181, 185

231

v Index The Hamilton Case (de Kretser) 1, 5, 9, 18–26, 30–37, 53–68, 113, 209, 210 Hamm, Gunther 155 Harris, Rhian 42 Hibbert, Christopher 55, 56 Hinduism 52, 85, 98, 103, 130, 182, 185 homeland 3, 4, 7, 13, 15, 83, 165, 166, 170, 171, 176, 189, 190, 191, 193, 195, 201, 203, 206 Homer, Sean 169, 170, 179, 190, 195 Hook, Andrew 68 Horrocks, Chris, & Zoran Jevtic 162 Hosking, Susan et al. 148 host nation 4, 80, 126, 138, 204 hotel settings and culture 6, 124, 126, 127, 129, 135, 153, 155; in The Pleasures of Conquest 151–58 Howards End (Forster) 18 Huda, S. 136 Huggan, Graham 135, 150, 209 Hutcheon, Linda 182 Hyndman, Jennifer 199, 200 If the Moon Smiled (Lokugé) 1, 6, 166, 170, 175, 189–99, 202, 203, 205, 206 imaginary, the (Lacan) 7, 169, 170, 174, 190, 195, 196 imaginary homelands (Rushdie) 190, 205

imaginary order (Lacan) 169, 190 imagined communities (Anderson) 92 immigrants, Sri Lankan 4, 165, 176, 185, 199, 205 imperialism 16, 22, 26, 30, 49, 50, 52, 77, 92, 103, 111, 112, 119, 126, 153, 154, 158, 159, 161, 163, 183, 184; and motherhood 43; British 13, 15, 16, 39, 44, 49, 50, 83, 87, 104, 111, 142, 154, 155, 163, 164 India, Aryans in 85; as centre of Asian world 181; British colonization of 9,

10, 12, 63, 98; education in 11, 12; in detective fiction 29; indentured labour from 126; Sinhalese presence in 80 India, southern, history of 80; languages in 84; Tamils in 80, 86, 97, 98, 109, 117 Indian characters in fiction 73, 75, 99 Indian diaspora 7; languages 178; literature 2, 10, 93; migrants 183, 198 Indian–English relations 72 infanticide 61, 62, 63; in India 64 Infanticide Act 64 intelligentsia 92, 93, 94; AsianAustralian 181 International Year of the Tourist 125 interracial relations 108, 161 Ivan, Victor 87, 95, 96

Jaakson, Reiner 123, 124 Jacobite Rebellion 66 Jahan, Kahn Nasrin 150 Jamrozik, Adam 176 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 48, 49, 50, 57, 58 Jayasuriya, Maryse 119, 209 Jayaweera, Swarna 50, 51, 52, 53, 73 Johnson, Richard 186 July (Roberts) 1, 6, 79, 94, 101–109 Kama Sutra 152, 185 Kandy, kingdom of 19, 80 Kilduff, Martin, & Kevin G. Corley 189 Kings in Grass Castles (Durack) 178 Klein, Naomi 130, 131, 195 Knepper, Wendy 27, 34, 35 Kristeva, Julia 190, 192, 195 Kumaratunga Bandaranaike, Chandrika 53

Lacan, Jacques 7, 31, 32, 168–70, 174, 179, 187, 190, 191, 195; “The Purloined Letter” 32

P R O B L E M A T I C I D E N T I T I E S v

232 language, Australian, satirized in A Change of Skies 177–80 language conflicts 3 Law Reform Commission New South Wales 63 Lee, Gerard, Troppo Man 150 Lewins, Frank 177, 181 liminality, cultural 44, 45, 60, 117, 165, 166, 196 linguistic nationalism 6 Little Women (Alcott) 45 Little, Angela 53 ‘living angel’ 44 Lloyd, Peter 121, 203 Lokugé, Chandani 1, 4, 6, 123, 138–51, 164, 166, 170, 174, 177, 178, 179, 184, 186, 187, 189–99, 205, 206; If the Moon Smiled 1, 6, 166, 170, 175, 189– 99, 202, 203, 205, 206; Turtle Nest 1, 6, 123, 138–51, 159, 163; beach community in 138–49; predation as topos in 139, 142, 145, 147, 149 Love Marriage (Ganeshananthan) 1, 6, 94, 166, 170, 190, 196, 199–207 Lynch, Caitrin 144 Ma, Sheng-Mei 198 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 10, 11, 12, 15, 71; Minute on Education 10 MacCannell, Dean 6, 133, 134, 156 Macleod Committee 52 magical realism 101 Mahavamsa (Buddhist chronicle) 79 Manavalli, Krishna 206 Mansfield Park (Austen) 18 Marlborough House 55 marriage 45, 49, 51, 55, 73, 75, 99, 107, 109, 111, 158, 159, 161, 182, 183, 184, 194, 195, 198, 201 Matus, Jill L. 57

Matzke, Christine, & Susanne Mühleisen 29

Maugham, William Somerset 27 McClintock, Anne 43, 44, 154 Meitei, M. Mani 193 melancholia 3, 7, 170, 171, 172, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195 Mendis, E.D.L. 124, 128, 129, 130, 135, 155, 157 Menon, Kala 196 Merivale, Patricia, & Susan Elizabeth Sweeney 36, 37 Merriman, John 27, 71 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 170, 189 Miller, Karl 202 mimic men 5, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 26, 33, 35, 37, 53, 129, 166, 180, 193, 210 The Mimic Men (Naipaul) 13 mimicry, cultural 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 31, 32, 36, 54, 59, 68, 166, 168, 173, 177, 180 Minute on Education (Macaulay) 10 mirror stage (Lacan) 168, 169, 170, 171, 174, 179, 187, 205 miscarriage 64, 65, 66 Mishra, Vijay 7, 170, 171, 172, 190, 191, 195, 197 missionaries 10, 18, 50, 51 Monsoons and Potholes (Wijesingha) 94 monster, female 5, 39, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 75, 77, 78, 96, 197, 198, 210 —See also: angel–monster dichotomy More, Hannah 41 Moretti, Franco 28, 29, 34 Morgan Committee 51 Mosquito (Tearne) 1, 6, 79, 94, 109–21 mosquito, as trope 115 motherhood 35, 42, 43, 44, 56, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66

233

v Index mourning 3, 7, 146, 170, 171, 172, 189, 190, 192, 195, 211 Mudaliyars (Singhalese ruling class) 19, 20, 72 Muggah, Robert 101 Mulaj, Kledja 89 Müller, F. Max 83, 84 multiculturalism 104, 166, 185, 186 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Poe)

Ondaatje, Michael 2, 3, 34, 94, 119, 209; Anil’s Ghost 35, 94, 119, 209; Running in the Family 209 Orientalism 6, 10, 11, 17, 21, 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 54, 58, 59, 64, 74, 95, 112, 132, 135, 137, 148, 151, 153, 157, 159, 164, 182, 184, 185, 209, 210 Ousby, Ian 74, 76

30

Naipaul, V.S. 5, 13, 14; The Mimic Men 13

narcissism 168, 170, 171, 187, 189, 191, 195, 197, 206 national identity 4, 18, 27, 87, 167 nationalism 2, 3, 4, 6, 20, 44, 52, 69, 79, 81, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 100, 105, 106, 115, 144, 175, 210 nation-state 89, 90, 92, 171, 189, 203 Neill, Michael 13, 14 neocolonialism 3, 6, 113, 123, 127, 128, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 147, 151, 152, 153, 163, 210 neo-imperialism 111, 142, 164 neurosis, colonial 14, 23, 24, 25, 189 New Zealand, as host land for Sri Lankan immigrants 175 Nissan, Elizabeth, & R.L. Stirrat 86, 88 North, Frederick 20 nostalgia tourism 6 Notholt, Stuart 89, 90 Obeyesekere, Gananath 25, 26, 79, 80, 81, 82 Oedipus complex 169 Official Language Act (1956) 105 Oliver, Jamie 186 Ondaatje, Christopher 1, 79, 80

paedophilia 136, 142, 145, 159 Page, Kezia 4 Parliamentary Elections Act (1949) 86 parody 5, 9, 21, 26, 36, 37, 39, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 77, 96, 99, 111, 157, 160, 161, 162, 166, 173, 177, 180, 210 pastiche 150, 151, 164 Patmore, Coventry, “The Angel in the House” 5, 45, 46, 47, 48 patriarchy 5, 39, 43, 44, 46, 47, 52, 57, 60, 64, 65, 71, 72, 73, 100, 111, 140, 193

Pearson, Nels, & Marc Singer 27, 29, 36 The Pleasures of Conquest (Gooneratne) 1, 6, 123, 138, 188, 151–63, 210 Poe, Edgar Allan 30, 31, 32, 37; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” 30; “The Purloined Letter” 31–32 Poirot, Hercule 36 Portuguese, presence in Ceylon 2, 19, 25, 26, 79, 103, 154 Prabhakaran, Velupillai 203 predation, as topos in Turtle Nest 139, 142, 145, 147, 149 prejudice, class 3, 31, 96, 98, 99, 108, 205

prejudice, racial —See: racism

234 prejudice, sexist 40 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 70 Prince of Wales 54, 55 prosopopoeia 172 prostitution 136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 144, 146

Protestantism 19, 20, 85 psychic disturbance 3, 7, 46, 111, 171, 196, 198, 200, 204, 205, 206, 207, 211

psychic realism (Delbaere–Garant) 196 psychosis, female 61, 62, 63, 191 Punter, David 204, 205 “The Purloined Letter” (Lacan) 32 “The Purloined Letter” (Poe) 31–32 race 3, 16, 22, 29, 31, 43, 48, 49, 67, 68, 79, 80, 84, 94, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 112, 126, 166, 181, 188, 200, 203, 206 racism 15, 29, 48, 74, 85, 96, 97, 100, 102, 103, 167, 173, 174, 176, 177, 181, 182, 187 Rae, Patricia 172 rape 114, 143, 144, 150 Ratwatte, Hemamala 53, 96 realism, literary 5, 119, 196 Reef (Gunesekera) 119, 189, 209 Reis, Elizabeth 62 Reitz, Caroline 27, 28, 29, 34 Relative Merits (Gooneratne) 19, 20, 25 religion 9, 12, 20, 25, 80, 85, 89, 93, 94, 99, 104, 108, 115, 194 Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea 49–50 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The” (Coleridge) 116–17 riots, in Sri Lanka 87, 88, 89, 94, 100, 101, 102, 103, 109, 120, 175 Roberts, Karen 1, 6, 79, 94, 101–109; July 1, 6, 79, 94, 101–109

P R O B L E M A T I C I D E N T I T I E S v Roberts, Michael, Percy Colin–Thomé & Ismeth Raheem 43, 95 Rodgers, M.E. 63 Romanticism 39, 41, 44, 54, 66, 68, 71, 72, 75, 76, 117 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 109 Rossetti, Christina 71 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 56; Émile 39, 40, 41, 56 Royle, Nicholas 165 The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (FitzGerald) 75 Running in the Family (Ondaatje) 209 Rushdie, Salman 7, 170, 171, 183, 189; Midnight’s Children 170, 189 Said, Edward W. 5, 9, 16, 17, 18, 22, 26, 30, 32, 34, 58, 112, 113, 135, 136, 137, 158, 180 —See also: Orientalism Salgado, Minoli 2, 3, 209 Samaranāyaka, Gamini 105 satire 6, 26, 48, 54, 68, 96, 97, 152, 153, 164, 173, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 188

satyagraha 88 Saussure, Ferdinand de 173 schizophrenia 3, 198, 205, 206 schools, in colonial Ceylon 10, 12, 20, 50, 52, 53, 54, 76, 77, 106 Scott, Walter, Waverley 66, 67, 68, 71 self-reflexivity 34, 36, 113 Selvadurai, Shyam 2, 3, 94; Cinnamon Gardens 94; Funny Boy 94 servant/master dichotomy 31, 110, 129, 135, 138, 153, 154, 157, 160 sex tourism 6, 123, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 146, 151 sexuality 41, 43, 49, 51, 55, 100, 111, 138, 140, 141, 150, 158, 162, 169, 171, 182, 187, 197, 198

235

v Index Shakespeare, William 109, 157, 185; The Tempest 185; Romeo and Juliet 109 Shastri, Amita 86, 114 Sherlock Holmes 21, 28 Showalter, Elaine 59, 61 Shuttleworth, Sally 63, 65 simulacrum (Baudrillard) 6, 123, 134, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 161, 163 Sinhala culture 69, 70 Sinhala language 4, 6, 20, 53, 69, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 95, 97, 102, 105, 106, 116, 144, 175, 178, 179, 204

Sinhala-Only language policy 4, 87, 88, 95, 101, 175 Sinhalese Army 89, 90, 107, 110, 114, 115, 117, 120, 203 Sinhalese presence in Sri Lanka 3, 4, 6, 12, 18, 20, 21, 22, 26, 68, 69, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 114, 116, 117, 120, 121, 139, 175, 177, 182 Sivanandan, A. 2, 3 Solomon, Charmaine 186 Spencer, Jonathan 82, 83, 86 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 5, 49, 50, 174, 186 Spongberg, Mary L. 41 Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority 124 Sri Lanka, foundation of Republic of 89, 105

star-crossed lovers, as trope 6, 94, 102, 109

Statistics Canada 199 stillbirth 64, 65 suicide 31, 35, 41, 57, 62, 64, 90, 99, 108, 144, 153 Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth 30, 36

The Sweet and Simple Kind (Gooneratne) 1, 5, 6, 39, 69–78, 79, 94–102, 107, 177

Symbolic Order (Lacan) 168, 169, 174, 179, 180, 187 synecdoche 36, 37, 69, 94, 180, 188, 206

Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja 86, 87 Tamil language 52, 203 Tamil presence in Canada 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205 Tamil presence in Sri Lanka 3, 4, 6, 12, 30, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 139, 166, 199, 200, 201, 203 —See also: Estate Tamils Tamil Tigers (L T T E ) 89, 90, 110, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 130, 139, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204 Tearne, Roma 1, 6, 79, 94, 109–21, 189; Bone China 189; Mosquito 1, 6, 79, 94, 109–21 The Tempest (Shakespeare) 185 terrorism, as trope 90, 200, 202, 204, 205, 207 The Thirty-Nine Steps (Buchan) 28 Thompson, Susannah Ruth 65 Thorn, Jennifer 62 Tone, Andrea 62 tourism 6, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 163, 167, 210

Tourism Development Authority (Sri Lanka) 128 traffic as metaphor 114

236 tragedy 5, 65, 101, 141, 142, 159, 166 trauma, migrant 6, 165; postcolonial 6, 65, 79, 114, 118, 166, 187, 189, 190, 193, 196, 205, 206 Trevelyan, Charles 12 Troppo Man (Lee) 150 Truong, Thanh-Dam 125 tsunami, effect on Sri Lanka 128, 138 Turner, Louis, & John Ash 125, 126, 127 Turtle Nest (Lokugé) 1, 6, 123, 138–51, 159, 163; beach community in 138– 49; predation as topos in 139, 142, 145, 147, 149 turtle nest, as metaphor 145, 146, 147 U K , as host land for Sri Lankan

immigrants 4, 136, 137, 139, 175 uncanny, the (Freud) 165, 197, 198, 200, 204, 205, 207 United Nations 97, 121, 124, 125, 203 Upstone, Sara 112, 113 U S A , as host land for Sri Lankan immigrants 4, 6, 166, 175 Vardy, Peter 66 Victorian domesticity 5, 28, 29, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 151, 210 virginity 144, 192

P R O B L E M A T I C I D E N T I T I E S v Viswanathan, Gauri 10, 11, 12 The Waste Land (Eliot) 157 Watkins, Alexandra 144 Waverley (Scott) 66, 67, 68 Welsh, Alexander 45 westernization 3, 21, 23, 35, 52, 64, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 78, 95, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 111, 113, 140, 145 White Australia policy 175, 177 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys) 49–50 Wij, Inshita 128 Wijesingha, Manuka, Monsoons and Potholes 94 Wilde, Oscar 136 Winslow, Deborah 192 Wollstonecraft, Mary 41; & John Stuart Mill 41 Woolf, Virginia 47, 48 World Bank 124, 125, 130 World Tourism Organization 125 ‘worldliness’ (Said) 5, 9, 17, 18 wounded body metaphor 6, 112, 113, 114 Wriggins, Howard 88 Zamora, Lois Parkinson 197 Zangwill, O.L. 198 ¦ivkoviº, Milica 198 ¦iûek, Slavoj 171