A forgotten dawn song from Embilipitiya

Pic by Tharindu Amunugama

I’ve read many Russian short stories that end with a short description of the landscapes in which the storied lives intersect. To me the authors are just taking the sentiments that torment the reader, elevating them to a plane soft enough for sober reflection.

‘The rain fell faster and the wind sang a sad and solemn dirge to the proud pair - Loyko Zobar and Radda, the daughter of old Daniel. And the two shadows whirled silently around each other in the darkness of the night, yet never was the singer, Look, able to overtake his proud, beloved Radda…’

That’s Maxim Gorky’s ‘Makar Chudra,’ a short story of a brief and tragic encounter. Of love expressed. Of being loved in return but sentiments expressed in the language of scorn and spurn. Of love unrecognised and therefore fuelling an insanity that could only be buried at knife point. Of an incomparable response; a smile that said what ought to have been heard and words that cut a heart to pieces.

There are sorrows that are not alleviated with words, these stories taught me. The dimensions are approximated through elemental description. The tenor of the wind blowing across the Steppes, the rain and its music, the dance of grass and such.

Consider this, though:

‘That township, enveloped in the disquiet of dust throughout the afternoon, by eventide found itself sneezing as it readied to settle down. The wind that swept across the Chandrika Wewa had become increasingly moist. A young moon resting now on one branch and now upon another of a Kumbuk tree on the far shores of the reservoir seemed to be searching for its more handsome form. Since darkness was close at hand, we set off to the place we were to spend the night. Night, spreading its long, dark wings, was preparing to take up residence in the town.’

A moment, a location, an environment. A feeling.

It could be any village or town close to or identified with a reservoir, large or small, irrigated or rain fed. Ratna Sri Wijesinghe, though, was describing a specific town and remembering a specific historical moment. The title of the essay (one of many written for the Silumina almost two decades ago and collected in a book titled ‘Aeth Pasura’): ‘Mee pup ladim - daru noladim.’ It’s a verse, a song and a story. The place: Embilipitiya.

The next line says it all: ran kaeti putha ko ko?  

And Ratna Sri takes us to Sooriyakanda and the avanaduva associated with that name. And to Ajith Kalyana Amarasinghe’s note:

Even though truth

was unearthed one day

from hidden recesses

at the foot of tall mountains

did it like snow on cold mountaintops

congeal thereafter,

when will the sun

rise over Sooriyakanda

for a resolute heart

its work to complete

someday?

There are places that uplift the heart. There are moments that are memorable. There are places and histories that break the heart. A poet can and will describe the truth of a place. A poet can succumb and often submits to the call of the pathetic fallacy, projecting upon flower, stem, root, mountain and dew the tremblings of the poetic heart. A poet can and sometimes does call forth a sun to direct its rays to bring to light earthed histories.

And so Ratna Sri reminds us of a tragedy that was planned, executed and covered up. It was made possible by the monumentality of the larger tragedy of which ‘Sooriyakanda’ was but one albeit singular manifestation. He cuts the heart to pieces, but not in the way that Radda shredded Loyko Zobar’s life.

The sunrise at Sooriyakanda is something to behold. The earth protects grave and brutality through its diurnal revolution. The sun does point to histories hastily unearthed, misread, mis-articulated and re-abused. For a while. Embilipitiya is beautiful. Sooriyakanda is spectacular. Somewhere at the foot of a mountain, there’s earth and heart patiently awaiting resolve and integrity.

 

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

Other articles in this series:

The soft rain of neighbourliness 

The Gold Medals of being

Jaya Sri Ratna Sri

All those we've loved before

Reflections on waves and markings

A chorus of National Anthems

Saying what and how

'Say when'

Respond to insults in line with the Akkosa Sutra

The loves of our lives

The right time, the right person

The silent equivalent of a thousand words

Crazy cousins are besties for life

Unities, free and endearing

Free verse and the return key

"Sorry, Earth!"

The lost lyrics of Premakeerthi de Alwis

The revolution is the song

Consolation prizes in competitions no one ever wins

The day I won a Pulitzer

Ko?

Ella Deloria's silences

Blackness, whiteness and black-whiteness

Inscriptions: stubborn and erasable 

Thursday!

Deveni: a priceless one-word koan

Enlightening geometries

Let's meet at 'The Commons'

It all begins with a dot

Recovering run-on lines and lost punctuation

'Wetness' is not the preserve of the Dry Zone

On sweeping close to one's feet

Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California

To be an island like the Roberts...

Debts that can never be repaid in full

An island which no flood can overwhelm

Who really wrote 'Mother'?

A melody faint and yet not beyond hearing

Heart dances that cannot be choreographed

Remembering to forget and forgetting to remember

On loving, always

Authors are assassinated, readers are immortal

When you turn 80...

It is good to be conscious of nudities 

Saturday slides in after Monday and Sunday somersaults into Friday 

There's a one in a million and a one in ten

Gunadasa Kapuge is calling

Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California

Hemantha Gunawardena's signature

Pathways missed

Architectures of the demolished

The exotic lunacy of parting gifts

Who the heck do you think I am?

Those fascinating 'Chitra Katha'

The Mangala Sabhava

So how are things in Sri Lanka?

The most beautiful father

Palmam qui meruit ferat

The sweetest three-letter poem

Buddhangala Kamatahan

An Irish and Sri Lankan Hello

Teams, team-thinking, team-spirit and leadership

The songs we could sing in lifeboats when we are shipwrecked

Pure-Rathna, a class act

Jekhan Aruliah set a ball rolling in Jaffna

Awaiting arrivals unlike any other

Teachers and students sometimes reverse roles

Matters of honor and dignity

Yet another Mother's Day

A cockroach named 'Don't'

Colombo, Colombo, Colombo and so forth

The slowest road to Kumarigama, Ampara

Sweeping the clutter away

Some play music, others listen

Completing unfinished texts

Mind and hearts, loquacious and taciturn

I am at Jaga Food, where are you?

On separating the missing from the disappeared

Moments without tenses

And intangible republics will save the day (as they always have)

The world is made of waves

'Sentinelity'

The circuitous logic of Tony Muller

Rohana Kalyanaratne, an unforgettable 'Loku Aiya'

Mowgli, the Greatest Archaeologist

Figures and disfigurement, rocks and roses

Sujith Rathnayake and incarcerations imposed and embraced

Some stories are written on the covers themselves

A poetic enclave in the Republic of Literature

Landcapes of gone-time and going-time 

The best insurance against the loud and repeated lie

So what if the best flutes will not go to the best flautists?

There's dust and words awaiting us at crossroads and crosswords

The books of disquiet

A song of terraced paddy fields

Of ants, bridges and possibilities

From A through Aardvark to Zyzzyva 

World's End

Words, their potency, appropriation and abuse

Street corner stories

Who did not listen, who's not listening still?

The book of layering

If you remember Kobe, visit GOAT Mountain

The world is made for re-colouring

The gift and yoke of bastardy

The 'English Smile'

No 27, Dickman's Road, Colombo 5

Visual cartographers and cartography

Ithaca from a long ago and right now

Lessons written in invisible ink

The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness'

A tea-maker story seldom told

On academic activism

The interchangeability of light and darkness

Back to TRADITIONAL rice

Sisterhood: moments, just moments

Chess is my life and perhaps your too

Reflections on ownership and belonging

The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha

Signatures in the seasons of love

To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows

Sirith, like pirith, persist

Fragrances that will not be bottled 

Colours and textures of living heritage

Countries of the past, present and future

A degree in creative excuses

Books launched and not-yet-launched

The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains

The ways of the lotus

Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace

The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville

Live and tell the tale as you will

Between struggle and cooperation

Of love and other intangibles

Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions

The universe of smallness

Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers

Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills

Serendipitous amber rules the world

Continents of the heart

  

The allegory of the slow road 

 

Read more

Jaya Sri Ratna Sri!

‘Sulang Kurullo (Windbirds)’ is possibly the most popular song by Harun Lanthra and Angeline Goonetileka. The melody has always appealed to me, but not being quite the connoisseur of music of any kind, I had never listened to the song with any degree of attention. A few years ago I did. And I told my wife it is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard.

‘The lyrics are exquisite,’ I said.

‘Really? I like the melody.’ That was her response.

Some people are attracted to the music, some to the words. This however is common to both types: you know the name of the singer, but not necessarily that of the lyricist or the compose. In this case Dharmasiri Gamage and Premasiri Khemadasa respectively.

And this is why I came to know of Ratna Sri Wijesinghe so much longer after I had heard the songs he had written.  That, and the fact that I had barely been a student of literature. It was in the early nineties that I encountered his collection of poems titled ‘Vassane.’ And it was around the same time that I found a copy of ‘Sudu Neluma.’ Indeed it was the blurb on the back cover of the latter that gave me insights into the mind and heart of this exceptionally gifted poet/lyricist, according to some, the most accomplished in his generation. 

On the back cover was a backstory of sorts about the song ‘Sudu Neluma.’ It was about a little girl who had drowned in the Sorabora Wewa. Apparently she would go there to pick sudu nelum which she would later sell to devotees who visited the Mahiyangana Chaityaya. I can’t remember who wrote that blurb but the following observation is etched in my heart:

‘Having suffered all manner of sorrows throughout their lives, her parents did not have tears to shed at her funeral, and yet when Pundit Amaradeva sang the song for the first time at the Elphinstone Theatre there wasn’t even one eye in that audience that was not washed in tears.’

So we know songs and singers. We know less about lyricists and even less about how they see the world.

A few days ago, I attended an event at the Sri Lanka Foundation, organised to celebrate the poet on the occasion of his 70th birthday, marked among other things by Kalpana Ambrose’s translations of some of Ratna Sri’s poems, ‘May the thorns bloom.’ Actually, I was detained by other matters and by the time I arrived, it was over. It was chit-chat time with friends over a cup fo plain tea. Consolation enough for me.  Kalpana promised to gift me a copy, so I bought two other books, Ratna Sri’s first collection of poems, ‘Biya novan ayyandi (Fear not, older brother)’ and ‘Ath Pasura,' a collection of essays Ratna Sri had written for the Silumina in 2005/2006 and first published in 2008.
 

The title essay itself is a revelation. Ratna Sri takes a simple word or rather term and in a few pages sheds light on vast swathes of literary history. He takes us to Sarachchandra’s Maname, Mahagama Sekera’s Kundala Keshi, and long before them Wettewe Thero’s Guttila Kavya, Kalidasa’s Raghuwamas and the Panchatantra. ‘Ath Pasura,’ in short, made me regret that I had not studied literature.

This Ratna Sri, i.e., the student of literature, is often seen at the launch of poetry collections. Few in this country can review poetry the way he does. It is like watching a documentary on a literary tradition. 

 

He dissects and puts together in ways that are tender and pleasing, even when he is critical of the work he’s assessing. Sunanda Karunaratne and Liyanage Amarakeerthi are two other poets/critics who share this ability.

What ‘Ath Pasura’ once again confirmed to me is the fact that Ratna Sri is one of the keenest living observers of the human condition. He could write Sudu Neluma because he has the eyes to see, the mind to reflect, the discipline to be patient and let the nuances of context speak to him and of course the mastery over the language. I didn’t read that column in the ‘Silumina,’ but the collection is eminently re-readable for he lends us his eyes and invites us to see and see again, now from this angle and now from that, not just on what he’s discussing but in general on all things around us over which our eyes carelessly pass.  

Coincidentally, I came across an Ernest Hemingway quote that seems to describe what Ratna Sri has done and does.

‘When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.’

He listens. He sees. He shares. That which birthed feelings in him he records truthfully and offers comments with the full weight of his long engagement with literature and the as lengthy consideration of life.

Sulang Kurullo has the following lines:

සිහින පොතේ පිටුවක් පෙරළී අද
මොනවද එහි ලියැවී ඇත්තේ
ආදරේ ආදරේ හ්ම් ආදරේ
ආදරේ ආදරේ ආදරේ

A page has turned in the book of dreams
what is it that has been written?
Love, love, love
Love, love, love.’

Ratna Sri offers us reality, the space for dreams and the inhibiting structures as well. All love. All love. Love, love, love and love.

Long life, sir!   

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

Other articles in this series:

All those we've loved before

Reflections on waves and markings

A chorus of National Anthems

Saying what and how

'Say when'

Respond to insults in line with the Akkosa Sutra

The loves of our lives

The right time, the right person

The silent equivalent of a thousand words

Crazy cousins are besties for life

Unities, free and endearing

Free verse and the return key

"Sorry, Earth!"

The lost lyrics of Premakeerthi de Alwis

The revolution is the song

Consolation prizes in competitions no one ever wins

The day I won a Pulitzer

Ko?

Ella Deloria's silences

Blackness, whiteness and black-whiteness

Inscriptions: stubborn and erasable 

Thursday!

Deveni: a priceless one-word koan

Enlightening geometries

Let's meet at 'The Commons'

It all begins with a dot

Recovering run-on lines and lost punctuation

'Wetness' is not the preserve of the Dry Zone

On sweeping close to one's feet

Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California

To be an island like the Roberts...

Debts that can never be repaid in full

An island which no flood can overwhelm

Who really wrote 'Mother'?

A melody faint and yet not beyond hearing

Heart dances that cannot be choreographed

Remembering to forget and forgetting to remember

On loving, always

Authors are assassinated, readers are immortal

When you turn 80...

It is good to be conscious of nudities 

Saturday slides in after Monday and Sunday somersaults into Friday 

There's a one in a million and a one in ten

Gunadasa Kapuge is calling

Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California

Hemantha Gunawardena's signature

Pathways missed

Architectures of the demolished

The exotic lunacy of parting gifts

Who the heck do you think I am?

Those fascinating 'Chitra Katha'

The Mangala Sabhava

So how are things in Sri Lanka?

The most beautiful father

Palmam qui meruit ferat

The sweetest three-letter poem

Buddhangala Kamatahan

An Irish and Sri Lankan Hello

Teams, team-thinking, team-spirit and leadership

The songs we could sing in lifeboats when we are shipwrecked

Pure-Rathna, a class act

Jekhan Aruliah set a ball rolling in Jaffna

Awaiting arrivals unlike any other

Teachers and students sometimes reverse roles

Matters of honor and dignity

Yet another Mother's Day

A cockroach named 'Don't'

Colombo, Colombo, Colombo and so forth

The slowest road to Kumarigama, Ampara

Sweeping the clutter away

Some play music, others listen

Completing unfinished texts

Mind and hearts, loquacious and taciturn

I am at Jaga Food, where are you?

On separating the missing from the disappeared

Moments without tenses

And intangible republics will save the day (as they always have)

The world is made of waves

'Sentinelity'

The circuitous logic of Tony Muller

Rohana Kalyanaratne, an unforgettable 'Loku Aiya'

Mowgli, the Greatest Archaeologist

Figures and disfigurement, rocks and roses

Sujith Rathnayake and incarcerations imposed and embraced

Some stories are written on the covers themselves

A poetic enclave in the Republic of Literature

Landcapes of gone-time and going-time 

The best insurance against the loud and repeated lie

So what if the best flutes will not go to the best flautists?

There's dust and words awaiting us at crossroads and crosswords

The books of disquiet

A song of terraced paddy fields

Of ants, bridges and possibilities

From A through Aardvark to Zyzzyva 

World's End

Words, their potency, appropriation and abuse

Street corner stories

Who did not listen, who's not listening still?

The book of layering

If you remember Kobe, visit GOAT Mountain

The world is made for re-colouring

The gift and yoke of bastardy

The 'English Smile'

No 27, Dickman's Road, Colombo 5

Visual cartographers and cartography

Ithaca from a long ago and right now

Lessons written in invisible ink

The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness'

A tea-maker story seldom told

On academic activism

The interchangeability of light and darkness

Back to TRADITIONAL rice

Sisterhood: moments, just moments

Chess is my life and perhaps your too

Reflections on ownership and belonging

The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha

Signatures in the seasons of love

To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows

Sirith, like pirith, persist

Fragrances that will not be bottled 

Colours and textures of living heritage

Countries of the past, present and future

A degree in creative excuses

Books launched and not-yet-launched

The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains

The ways of the lotus

Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace

The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville

Live and tell the tale as you will

Between struggle and cooperation

Of love and other intangibles

Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions

The universe of smallness

Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers

Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills

Serendipitous amber rules the world

Continents of the heart

  

The allegory of the slow road 

 

Read more

The barbed-wire that divides and impoverishes

Gunadasa Kapuge comes to me in strange ways and times.  He died in early April 2003 and I did not realize that this is why the Sinhala radio stations were all playing his songs one crazy afternoon.  I remember thinking that if he were to die I would be asked by Manik De Silva, editor of the newspaper I worked for at the time, to write something about the man and that I would not have the words.  That’s what happened.  I was asked to write and I struggled and came up with a line: ‘With you, Kapuge, “goodbye” is a ridiculous word’ (http://www.island.lk/2003/04/06//leisur04.html). 

I still remember listening to a description of the funeral proceedings. I think it was Kingsley from Sirasa FM, but I may be wrong. I was on my way back to Colombo from Matugama after attending a wedding.  The time had come to light the pyre. The commentator ended the programme thus: samu gena yanna apen thava mohothai…nododa inne ai (the moment of departure is upon us; why are you so silent?).   The car was full of wedding guests.  I’ve never experienced such silence.  I just cried. 

He comes, in strange ways, as I said, and I realized that I was right when I wrote 7 years before that ‘goodbye is a ridiculous word’.  This was Aluth Avurudda, 2010. April 14. Taking off from Kottawa, going to Kegalle.  Switched the radio on.  Siyatha FM, I believe.  Kapuge, Gunadasa.  A song written by Ratna Sri Wijesinghe, which was first aired in 1990 I believe.  The song: ‘Bimbarak Senaga’.

It speaks of a land of plenty. A land that gave birth to people who were like the sun and the moon, powerful and benign, a land that was subsequently ravaged, its tanks breached, waters stolen and territories divided. 

The song was written in the late eighties or at least of that time.  A time, let us never forget, was marked by the massacre of innocence, the unnecessary deaths of over 60,000 people, the vast majority of whom were unarmed and had committed no crime other than being born in the wrong decade.

Minee mal pipunu seethala nimna bhoomiye ata katu sathara riyan kada ahimiva vilaapaya nagai.

On the cool plain now decked with ‘funeral flowers’ there are skeletal remains wailing on account of being denied the minimum dimensions of space that the dead are usually guaranteed.  True.  We saw all that.  No one talks about it now, not one asks for ‘Truth Commissions’, or punishment for the guilty.  There is selectivity in these things, one observes. 

Vaekanda kapaa bim katu kambiyen bedaa me rana bime hisa gasaa damana kaduwa bima helau…

It is a directive: drop immediately the sword that seeks to behead this proud and heroic land by breaching dam and dividing the land with barbed wire!

 

That’s the line that struck me most.  Ratna Sri Wijesinghe points out that the invaders came from land, sea and air: yuddekata avith rupu sen sath muhudu mathin guvanin.  And what did they do?  They tried to parcel out with barbed wire this splendid land (kambi wata kale manaram maaligava do?). Well he uses ‘manaram maaligawa’ (beauteous palace) as a metaphor clearly.  The key word/term is the katu kambiya and the reference to parceling, the undermining of commonalities and other things that can be categories as ‘common’ or podu, common property included.

It struck me that the song is as relevant today as it was in 1990, in 2003, ever since the divide-and-rule doctrine was put in place and ever since the seeds of separatism were sown on the seethala nimna bhoomiya. 

Today, after a regime that vanquished a terrorist organization and defeated the ideology of separatism that spawned the monster called the LTTE, we have all kinds of anti-Sri Lanka forces demanding that the Government be ‘magnanimous’. The Government is required, in essence, to kick in the butt the aspirations articulated by those who voted it to power and defer in favour of the politics, ideologies of the defeated.  The vote was an endorsement of a policy of reconciliation in which separatism did not have a place. No, not even the step-by-step separatism couched in the devolution (to imagined ethnic enclaves) discourse.  The people rejected all that.  That was what was buried in Nandikadal, symbolically in May 2009. 

Today there are both external and internal forces wanting to play the katu-kambi politics of dividing communities, separating peoples and thereby keeping alive the threat of communal politics. 

There is need for vigilance.  Those who talk a lot about democracy must understand that there cannot be any kind of democracy without representation. It must be understood that representation today, by the ruling coalition, is about preserving the unitary character of the state (among other things of course).  There cannot be any room for breaching dams, and parceling out territory to every Tom, Dick and Harry who touts myth as fact and posits aspiration as right.  All those who talk of ethnic-based devolution and thereby pander to Eelamism have to explain the logic of such an exercise given histories, archaeological tract, geographical factors and demographic realities.  Factoring out the sentiments of those who are against such division is not democracy, simply because those who are for the unitary state constitute the vast majority. 

If their sentiments go unheeded, then it will come at a huge cost.  Remember 1988/89.  Quite apart from the fact that the JVP and UNP leadership at the time were bloodthirsty brutes, we have to understand that the former fed on seething resentment at having an absolutely ridiculous proposition thrust down their throats (the 13^th Amendment) and the latter had to defend a horrendous accord signed by the previous regime. 

Gunadasa Kapuge gave voice to some words penned by Ratna Sri Wijesinghe.  If we want our nation to be the manaram maaligawa that it has all the potentials to be, then we have to get rid of the katu-kambi, especially those rusted instruments of division that have been written into our constitution without our permission. 

It’s 7 years after he died, but Gunadasa Kapuge keeps singing and as long as we have his voice and of course Ratna Sri Wijesinghe’s words, we will have heart and mind necessary to call ‘rubbish’ that which cannot be described by any other word.  We are indeed a blessed nation, I feel.

Malinda Seneviratne is the Editor-in-Chief of 'The Nation' and an be reached at msenevira@gmail.com.  The above article was first published in the 'Daily News' (April 2010), for which newspaper he wrote a daily column titled 'The Morning Inspection'.

Read more

Framing the child in art

A film with children is not necessarily a 'Children's Film'

Some years ago, when I was working in a Sunday newspaper, I was asked to do a story about children’s literature.  I as asked to interview some prominent writers about the status of children’s status. I remember what Ratna Sri Wijesinha said.

‘What is sold as children’s literature is basically adult narratives which child characters.’  He is right.  There are children, in text and illustration, a dash of the magical and a splash of baby words (well, the tone and language style can vary depending on the age of the ‘intended’ audience of course) in children’s books, so-called, but this doesn’t make them suitable to be read by children or even useful for them.  Ratna Sri Wijesinha explained the reason for this state of affairs thus:

“Those who write children’s books forget that in order to write a story that makes sense to children they have to first get inside the mind and heart of a child.  Instead of doing this, they focus on ‘message’. This makes them preachy. It takes away something from the story, the narrative, the whole unfolding which is what enchants the child. ”

I agreed back then.  What we get are authors who use the genre ‘children’s story’ to make a point, say, about morality, about good and bad, right and wrong.  What ought to happen is the opposite; a story that is written and is loved for its narrative worth. The telling is not framed by objective, rather the moral issues in an unobtrusive way which is the better way of persuading reader to reflect and embrace.

It reminded me of the difference between children’s literature that came from the former Soviet Union and that from Mao’s Culturally Revolutionized China in the seventies.  The stories from Russia, Ukrain and other Soviet Republics were not injected with socialist propaganda. There was no perceptible push to make the reader absorb ethic and values associated with the socialist ideal.  Folk tales.  Princes. Princesses.  Witches. Wicked people. Good people. Strange animals.  Magic. The simple triumph of good over evil.  All it did was to tell the child which side it is better to take given circumstances. Sure, there was the unabashed and life-misrepresenting lie: the good always emerges victorious.  Still, that is a ‘truth’ whose learning can be postponed without harming a child too much. 

The Chinese stories were different; at least the ones that my mother brought home from exhibitions of Chinese books.  There were no princes and princesses that I can remember. No unheard of creatures. Nothing magical.  There was however heroism, the triumph of good over bad, the putting down of the wicked and the consecration of righteousness   All this, however, was made insufferable by frequent references to Chairman Mao and the Great Communist Party.  I didn’t know Mao was or what this Great Communist Party was. I only remember my mother saying that she should have been more careful when she picked those books. 

It doesn’t ‘work’ for children whether it is political propaganda or morality lecture.  They are interested in storied, not messages.  That’s the bottom line.  Ratna Sri mentioned, I remember, Sybil Wettasinghe. He said that today we have so many who author children’s stories and none even close to the heights of creativity and charm reached by the Grand Young Lady of Children’s Fiction in Sinhala. 

Today literature is not just about giving into creative urge or the product of such engagement. It is business.  There’s something production-line about it.  You get one thing right and then its ‘replication, baby’ as far as author is concerned.  Most, I should say, since not everyone is that commercial-minded. 

We are just a couple of days since the world celebrated Children’s Day. Today, when there’s so much of children’s literature, it is ironical that there’s very little for the child.  We get tons of DVDs for children.  There are hundreds of cartoons. Almost every TV channel has a children’s programme made of cartoons. What are these about? In a word, violence!  Someone tricking someone, someone bashing someone over his/her head and a lot of little children being taught that this is good stuff, this is RIGHT stuff, this is ought-to-do stuff. 

Then we have children’s theatre and film.  Happily theatre appears to have more than a ‘fair’ share of decent and sensitive individuals.  Children’s plays are children’s plays.  They can’t really be described as the playing out of adult themes using children as actors and props.  Film however is a mixed bag.

We have had excellent films such as Udayakantha Warnasuriya’s ‘Ran Kevita’ and Somaratne Dissanayake’s ‘Siri Raja Siri’.  They were truly ‘family’ films.  There is drama, fantasy, a story line that was clear and entertaining.  There were ‘dark’ elements but nothing overdone to the point of terrorizing the younger child in the audience. Indeed those elements that are usually taken as ‘bad/wicked/fearful’ are in the end turned into funny, human and even lovable creatures. This was particularly evident in ‘Ran Kevita’. 

Somaratne Dissanayake proved in ‘Siri Raja Siri’ that he can do a decent children’s film. This came after the award-winning ‘Suriya Arana’ which was a violent film that was totally unsuited for the younger child. It was an adult-themed film that had a couple of children doing their child-thing, but ought to have been tagged PG-13 (Parental Guidance recommended for children under 13 years of age).  It was followed by several other ‘children’s films’ including ‘Bindu’, again touted as a ‘family film’ and therefore for ‘children’.  This too was unsuited for younger children. 

Right now we have ‘Ira Handa Yata’ (Under the sun and moon) by Bennet Ratnayake, again a film made for the entire family.  It is certainly unsuited for small children.  There is a lot of violence in the film.  The producers have carefully left out those colours in the advertising. It appears, if you went purely by hoarding and poster, like a love story in a stressful time with not a hint of the violence embedded in the film.  That’s trickery.  Cheap. 

These films clearly indicate how parents are being duped and children being abused for commercial gain.  The business enterprises camouflaged as art-productions needs to be taken to task and so too the ‘artists’ who are complicit in these ‘projects’.  We are not talking about people who are engaged in the business of providing entertainment for children and getting the wrong end of the stick (like those children’s authors mentioned earlier), but operators who may even be quite aware of what’s what in all this. 

Here’s the status report then.  We have more child-material in all art forms than we’ve ever had in our history. We got the volume sorted out. We just don’t have the quality.  For this reason alone, volume is a curse.  It is an obliterating curse for nothing is more pernicious and destructive than the trap that comes coloured as gift. 

Our children are poor indeed in this regard.  Some of them are lucky to have grandparents, yes, but that’s still only a consolation. 

Malinda Seneviratne is the Editor-in-Chief of 'The Nation' and can be reached at msenevira@gmail.com.  This article was first published in the 'Sunday Observer' in October 2010 at a time when I wrote a weekly column for that paper titled 'From the Sidelines'. 

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