In Their Own Words

Rather than just hear my accounts of the festival I thought you might like to hear some of our writers in their own voices. Below is a ten minute excerpt from Friday afternoon’s session on ‘Longing and Belonging’. There was a lot more in the session – and interesting accounts from all the panellists, Shyam Selvadurai, Karen Roberts, Channa Wickremesekera and Randy Boygoda – but here is just a ten minute out-take:

RANDY BOYAGODA (imagine the accents as you read this one)

‘My most recent experience with the diasporic community in Toronto was this past spring – I was asked to be something like the Chief Guest of Honour at the Sri Lankan New Year celebration in the east end of Toronto. And I was asked to do this because I’d written a novel that making fun of official multiculturalism and of ethnic parading. And then there I was on stage parading around with everyone else and I sort of brought this up through my remarks and – dead silence in the crowd – everybody was too busy playing with their video cameras getting ready for their kids to dance on stage. I don’t think anybody was listening.

But there was another experience – this Omni [have I got this wrong?] television channel – which is the ethnic station in Toronto. And at some point someone called me wanting to know if I’d come on to their Sri Lankan Sunday morning News-Hour show to talk about my book. So I said,

“ok I will get my publisher to send you a copy and some advance material”

“No no no no, just come on and talk it’s ok!”

…I said “look I’m not going to come on your show and basically talk about how my book makes fun of shows like yours unless you read this”. So he was very upset with me and said, “ah, right!” hung up the phone. And Penguin sent him a copy of the material and I never heard back from him (I don’t think the stuff was ever opened) and then my mother, who watches the show, called me up very excited and said

‘Son, son, they mentioned your show on Sri Lankan News-Hour today’

‘What did they say?’

She said “They said this: [And here Randy does a voice of great alarm and ponderous amazement]

‘One of our own has published a book with the Penguin’”

[…]

SHYAM SELVADURAI

‘Randy I was going to say that’s one of the differences between you and me – I’ve sat through enough Royal College prizegivings. I know to say “no, I’m not going! I know how long those things go for.”

How has it shaped my relationship with the community here? I don’t know. The thing about literature is it doesn’t really do that oddly. You write the book in private and then people read it in private. It’s not a communal activity reading a book – so it’s very hard to say that it’s changed my relationship with the community. The relationship just continues on as it is.

[Rama Mani asks Shyam about arriving in Sri Lanka now 25 years after the 1983 riots and how in his mind that relates to the place he left after the riots, “how have you been conscious and not conscious of being as you say a Sinhalese speaking Tamil as you’ve come in this time?’]

‘Ok, I see what you mean. Well to be honest I had actually forgotten it was 25 years – I’m ashamed to say that because considering FUNNY BOY everybody probably thinks I should remember that. I think one of the things is, Rama, I’ve been coming back so often now that there are layers upon layers of experience. So I wasn’t feeling greatly nostalgic for my childhood or the post-1983 period. I was more thinking of being in my 20s and coming here to do research and then coming with my partner to spend a year here. Those are stronger memories and things that draw me back than my childhood anymore. I’m not really interested in going back to my childhood house. The only place I really want to go and visit is the place where my partner and I lived for a year and spend time with the landlady and talk and have a meal and stuff.

I think what you want me to talk about is the fact that I have a Tamil name but I’m actually more Sinhalese in many ways because I speak Sinhalese and I don’t speak Tamil and I eat Sinhalese food and I don’t eat Tamil food… And that thing that happens between two people in the course of one minute where you can read each other – you can read an amazing amount of stuff about somebody in a minute: I can read a Sinhalese person but I can’t read a Tamil person from Jaffna, for example; I don’t know what the social markers are. So it’s always very strange for me that I have this Tamil name that then puts me in this oddly vulnerable position with checkpoints and the military and all that. I don’t know how to describe it: it’s just an odd disjunction for me. It’s not that I’m not proud of being Tamil. I’m very proud of being Tamil but I’m also very proud of the Sinhalese part of me but that’s always kind of cut out. The war forces me to cut it out of myself. It forces me into this one little box into which I don’t feel I quite belong.’