History is new(s)

The late Jayalath Manoratne was arguably one of the finest actors this country has seen, on stage and on screen. He made each character he portrayed utterly memorable. Among all of them, perhaps the strangest character he had to play was ‘history.’ Let me explain.

‘History’ was one of a trio of characters featured in Udayasiri Wickramaratne’s ‘Suddek Oba Amathai (A white man — or ‘whitey’ — addresses you.’ So we had ‘History,’ a white man and a woman addressing us. In the initial performances, there was a fourth, ‘baya vuna minihek oba amathai (a terrified man addresses you),’ but that fourth soliloquy, so to speak, was dropped later.

History, in script and portrayal, was quite a character. Udayasiri is a clever dramatist. His scripts are fluid and are amenable to the interjection of ‘the political moment.’ They make people laugh. They also constitute serious commentary on politics and ideology. It’s the same with ‘History addresses you.’

There’s a line or a passage, rather, that I remember well.  ‘History is news.’

Things historic come into the ‘news’ frame if someone who is ‘in the news’ mentions something from the past but it would, at best, warrant just passing mention. History can be ‘news’ if there’s some kind of archeological discovery.

For example, not too long ago someone chanced upon a ‘mass grave.’ That was news. Immediately, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachalet inserted this story into the section on Sri Lanka in a report presented at one of the UNHRC sessions. Evidence of mass killings and mass burials during the last stages of the war (against terrorism), she implied. News. Entertaining as news has to be these days. Tendentious and absolutely irresponsible. [see 'When you have a bone to pick']

Now after it was revealed that the skeletal remains in this grave were hundreds of years old, these euphoric news-spinners who got undies twisted went silent. The media didn’t bother to delve into the real story. Happens.

But that’s not what Mano’s character was referring to. It’s about relevant histories that are newsworthy, not only because they are interesting (entertaining?) but they interrupt happy and wooly-headed narratives.

The vilification of King Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe was quite effectively subverted in theatre. Mano’s character, History, made the point. There’s a story ABOUT Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe and then there’s Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe’s story. Not the same. It’s about representation and misrepresentation, both open to celebration and dismissal depending on the structure of communicative power. Those who craft ‘news’ (and even theses that are said to be ‘academic’ and therefore dispassionate) don’t necessarily represent truthfully.

Then something happens, an old text, an inscription or some other artefact that cannot be pooh-poohed away pops up. I can be newsworthy and too hard to ignore. The name that the marauder Raja Raja Chola I used to identify this island that is now called Sri Lanka, for example: ‘The Land of the Warlike Sinhalas.’

Raja Raja Chola I had nothing to gain by, say, laying the foundation for some Sinhala chauvinistic historical narrative. He was merely listing the lands he plundered while mentioning the sources of the wealth used to build various temples in his Kingdom. This was more than 800 years before the time that certain historians claim that ‘Sinhala’ came to be used as a name for a collective.

That little piece of information and other such little pieces of information constitute news. Indeed, considering the fact that it has come to a point where news and fake news are hard to differentiate and the latter even having the inside track on representing ‘reality’ (ref Bachelet again), this kind of stuff is certainly newsworthy.

History speaks. In different tongues. Different tongues in different talking heads. Different talking heads framed by different ideologies and outcome preferences.

And so the history of the world turns and, in turning, turns heads this way and that. We choke on too much history. We starve because it is non-existent or we are made to believe it is non-existent or simply because it is not palatable.  

And so someone announces, ‘history is dead.’  Some rejoice, some wonder what there is to celebrate if indeed such a death had taken place.

The problem: the dead are buried and what is buried is unearthed or re-surfaces. Narratives get wrecked.

It’s news, then. 

malindadocs@gmail.com

 

['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: 

Journalism inadvertently learned

Reflections on the young poetic heart

Wordaholic, trynasty and other portmanteaus

The 'Loku Aiya' of all 'Paththara Mallis'

Subverting the indecency of the mind

Character theft and the perennial question 'who am I?'

Innocence

A degree in people

Faces dripping with time

Saji Coomaraswamy and rewards that matter

Revolutionary unburdening

Seeing, unseeing and seeing again

Alex Carey and the (small) matter of legacy

The Edelweiss of Mirissa 

The insomnial dreams of Kapila Kumara Kalinga 

The clothes we wear and the clothes that wear us (down) 

Every mountain, every rock, is sacred 

Manufacturing passivity and obedience 

Precept and practice 

Sanjeew Lonliyes: rawness unplugged, unlimited 

In praise of courage, determination and insanity 

The relative values of life and death 

Feet that walk 

Sarinda's eyes 

Poetry and poets will not be buried 

Sunny Dayananda 

Reunion Peradeniya (1980-1990) 

What makes Oxygen breathable?  

Sorrowing and delighting the world 

The greatest fallacy  

Encounters with Liyanage Amarakeerthi 

Beyond praise and blame 

Letters that cut and heal the heart 

Vanished and vanishing trails 

Blue-blueness 

A forgotten dawn song from Embilipitiya 

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  

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If all Brown Sahibs unite would they finally lose their skin-tone?

A man called William married a woman called Kate recently. I was at Phoenix Advertising around that time. The TV was on. My daughters were with me. Some were watching the ceremony and my girls wanted to watch it too. The older girl explained, ‘tomorrow, all my friends will be talking about it, so I want to see it’. The younger was worried that this might be the last ‘Royal Wedding’ and didn’t want to miss it. I told them that we had to pay for many centuries so they could marry as they did. 

‘You are indoctrinating them!’ Irvin Weerakkody, who was passing, accused with a grin. I am pretty sure that these two girls, 10 and 7, will learn what ‘royalty’ is all about when they are old enough. I just planted a seed of doubt. Life will water it I am sure. I was not worried. I was, however, amused by the fact that this was spectacle enough for people to blow off work. So I thought that I might as well get a laugh out of it. I made an announcement (in Sinhala):

‘Listen everyone! The world’s first wedding is taking place, and it’s being shown live on TV. Don’t miss it. Most importantly, it is a white man who is getting married.’

Now there are many writers, poets and lyricists who work at Phoenix. In fact Irvin Weerakkody laments often that they can write songs, poems and novels but they can’t write decent copy for an ad. Among them is Udayasiri Wickramaratne, who actually does write brilliant advertising copy. Udayasiri is, to my mind, the voice of Sinhala literature as far as my generation is concerned.

His accomplishments include several novels, short story collections and volumes of poetry. In addition, he is one of the foremost columnists of our time. 

‘Aadaraye Shabdhakoshaya’ (Dictionary of Love) and ‘Arthika Vihilu’ (Economic Jokes, written under the pseudonym ‘Andare Smith, Adam Smith’s Grandson’) were two of the most read and looked forward to columns in the Irida Divaina. He used to translate into Sinhala the late Jayantha Kelegama’s column for the Sunday Island (Dr. Kelegama wrote as ‘Kanes’) and right now he translates pieces from Dostoyevsky’s ‘Diary of a Writer’ for the Irida Divaina even as he contributes a weekly column under the name ‘International Reporter’. Earlier he had translated all of ‘Confessions of Tolstoy’ to the same paper.

All this while running around organizing rehearsals and performances of his latest play ‘Suddek Oba Amathai’ (A White Man Addresses You) and attending to responsibilities related to his regular 9-5 job as copywriter at Phoenix.

I had seen Udayasiri somewhere a few minutes earlier, so I shouted (in Sinhala): ‘A White Man is getting married!’

The next moment, Udayasiri sends me a text message (obviously copied to a lot of people; he takes the Ogilvy slogan ‘360 degree brand stewardship’ seriously): ‘Ada suddek kasaada bandiy; 11venida suddek oba amathai’ (Today a white man is getting married; on the 11th a white man will address you’). Yes, he knows how to write advertising copy and has a keen sense of ‘moment’, that crucial element in establishing relationship between brand and potential consumer.

A few days ago, I saw a poster. A red poster with three photographs neatly boxed in the centre. It was, at first glance, a May Day poster and I expected the figures to be Marx, Lenin and perhaps Wijeweera. The line at the top was not ‘sakala desha vaasi nirdhanayani ekvau’ (The Proletariat of All Countries Unite!). It was a play on those well-known words: ‘sakala desha vaasi kalu suddani ekvau’ (translatable as ‘Brown Sahibs of the World Unite’).

I expected a twist on the follow up line from the Communist Manifesto, ‘you have nothing to lose but your chains’. Something like, ‘you have nothing to lose but your skin tone’. It would have been over-kill, I later concluded.

Udayasiri had followed up his text-ad based on the Kate-William wedding fixation. Priceless. Made me want to see the play again.

The figures on the poster were the incomparable Jayalath Manoratne, the award-winning Madhani Malwattage and Nuwan Pradeep Uduwela, who deliver three brilliant soliloquys, Ithihaasaya Oba Amathai (History addresses you), Sthriyak Oba Amathai (A woman addresses you) and Suddek Oba Amathai (A white man addresses you) respectively. Adding the fourth, Bhayavunu minisek oba amathai (A terrified man addresses you) would have messed up the layout of the poster perhaps.

We live in interesting and confused times. We don’t easily recognize that the people we vilify are actually resident within us one way or another. It is good to have a mirror held in front of us now and then. Udayasiri does this in the kindest manner possible.

He makes us think about who we are. He makes us laugh. He silences us.

And he even provokes us to raise voice at the appropriate moment. That’s a necessary precondition for exploring who we can be.

Important, in these times, I think. I realized this the first time I saw the play, April 1, 2010 (Udayasiri’s poster for the maiden performance was ‘A white man addresses you on April Fool’s Day’).

My daughters like drama. They like song. They like history. They might miss the political nuances, but I am sure they’ll enjoy the show and have hundreds of questions to ask, many of which will no doubt floor me.

Small price to pay. I am going to the Elphinstone on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 3.30 or at 6.30, depending on what their after-school programme for that day is like.

I am not sure if I’ll come across any Brown Sahibs at the 50th performance of the play, but if such a creature still lurks inside me, I am sure I will be able to get hold of the dude and do something to it.
Like patting it on the head and sending it along its way to its true traditional homeland, wherever the hell that may be. 

This article was first published on May 10, 2011 in the 'Daily News'.  
 

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Irangani Serasinghe: the mother of our collective imagination

The Sinhala translation by Udayasiri Wickramaratne of the story of Irangani Serasinghe as told to Kumar De Silva was launched a few days ago.   It took me back to an interview with this gracious lady more than 14 years ago.  The following write-up was carried in the Sunday Island (April 29, 2001). Television regularly fires the potent artillery of naked consumerism and crass materialism at the heart of the viewer. It does other things too. Some good, some bad. For me, the single redeeming feature of the "idiot box" is that it has given birth to the culture of tele-dramas. Of course, a lot of these tele-dramas are unadulterated trash, but sometimes we are treated to something special, a well-crafted story, things to ponder about and excellent portrayals. The mortar fire of ideologies that are essentially damaging to our way of life and the core of who we are, sadly, is something we as a people are often forced to suffer in order to gain access to these small mercies. Still, it was thanks to TV that people like Irangani Serasinghe came to reside in our homes and hearts as the perennial mother of our collective imagination.

Long before the arrival of TV, Irangani touched another generation in the same way when she played the mother of the adorable little boy in Lester James Peiris’ path breaking film, Rekawa. Since then she has generously spread her exceptional talents in acting in innumerable plays, films and teledramas and in return has won the love and admiration of thousands of people. More than half a century has passed since she first went before the public. She has been interviewed, critically acclaimed and honoured with numerous awards. I asked myself, when I went to see her last week if there was anything new I could say about this enigmatic woman. As I write, I am still not sure if this is merely a repetitive exercise, a recycling of that which is already known.

It was late evening when I walked into her garden in Nawala. She was in the veranda, listening to the birds who were probably anticipating the thunderstorm that was to hit the city a few minutes later. Before I could ask anything, she commented on the beauty of the Ehala tree in her garden and how one day she was walking home and was struck by the spectacle of the tree covered with flowers and standing against the backdrop of a splendidly coloured evening sky.

Nature is clearly associated with healing for Irangani. During the next two hours or so, she came back to this several times, expressing the longing she had for silence, and to be alone, enjoying the wonder of the natural world as she had long ago as a child.

That "long ago" was located in Mudugamuwa, near Ruwanwella, where she lived near a tributary of the Kelani. She described softly and recreated images in a way that made the present and the place irrelevant. "I still remember vividly the silence that came with the sunset...the going down of the sun...the last bird call was that of the magpie. Then the kirivawlas would come out, followed by the mavawlas. There was only the sound of the river...the koravakka. It was perfectly peaceful. And from a distance the deliberate ringing sound of a blacksmith at work would be heard. It was not a disturbance. Among all this, the voice of someone reading from a bana potha."

Against this history, it is easy to see why she despairs about the "here and now". "I used to think that at least we have our hills, but no, on every hill now there is a tower to facilitate the use of cellular phones!" Having founded an environmental organisation Ruk Rekaganno, which is now 25 years old and seen the violence done to our ecosystems over the years, and being acutely sensitive to political and social processes in general, it is not surprising that she says "at my age it is easier; if I had to think of the next 40-50 years, it would only bring despair!" She riled against "progress". "Developing what for whom? Just consider GMOs (genetically modified organisms). We are nothing but guinea pigs for the West!"

She agreed that cynicism is not a good thing, but couldn’t help remarking that today "we are in much greater trouble than we ever were". She was of the view that earlier it was a ‘seen invader’ but now the enemy comes without a name and a form.

Irangani Serasinghe off-stage is certainly someone whose persona spills out of the frame of "mother" that we have got used to. I asked her to give me a brief biographical sketch, but she waved me off saying "that’s boring, it has been written so many times." So I asked her about how she took up acting.

"I have been told that I was acting from the time I was born!" she said. Apparently she had been taken for a concert nearby when she was small and had been enthralled by what she saw, so much so that she had come home and played out the parts that had caught her fancy. And her parents had got her to "perform" for friends and relatives who visited their home. During her tenure at Bishop’s College, Irangani had taken part in end-of-term plays, and later, when she went to Kandy High School to do her "HSC" she had played Professor Higgins in Bernard Shaw’s "Pygmalion".

She had qualified to enter the University, but her father, a Rate Mahattaya, who had been educated at Oxford, had objected strongly, saying "You are not going to that den of inequality!" Irangani’s cousin who was already in campus had pleaded her case and the old man had relented. "The things I did in campus! I was a Marxist, having been influenced by relations who was Left-wing such as Esmond Wickremesinghe and my cousins even before I entered university. My father died in good time....when I was in my first year!"

Needless to say, she was in the thick of the theatre scene in Colombo, coming under the guidance of Professor Ludowyk. In addition she had taken dancing classes under the tutelage of Chitrasena. After graduating with an Arts degree, Irangani had got married and had gone to London. Ludowyk had given letters of introduction which allowed her to meet Flora Robson and Sybil Thorndyke, two great actresses. Through them she had spent a year at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and two years at the London School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art.

When she returned home, the Ludowyks had got down director Neuman Jubal, an Austrian Jew who had fled from the Nazis to Australia. Irangani claims that she learnt a lot from Jubal. "He gave a whole flavour to the stage. It was a romantic period for the theatre. No one ever thought of making money. There was tremendous discipline. We learned to revere the stage. I still have that discipline."

Irangani has been so much a theatre person that it is quite likely that many people don’t know that she has lived other lives as well. She taught briefly at Musaeus College, worked at the Times of Ceylon after returning from London, married again, did a stint at the SLBC and finally took to the tourist trade, working as a junior executive at Mackwood’s. "I never worked in one place for more than 4 years. I know that some people value a lifetime’s work in one institution or at one job, but I think that jumping from job to job allows you to obtain a more comprehensive view of the world, meet different people in different fields etc. It is enriching."

It goes without saying that theatre is Irangani Serasinghe’s greatest love, although she says that she never thought of it as a career. "I wanted to have a home and a family," she said. It was all English plays until Henry Jayasena got her involved in "Apata Puthe Magak Nethe". This was followed by Damma Jagoda’s Sinhala version of Street Car Named Desire, "Ves Muhunu," and then "Porisadaya".
Her first role on film was a short piece by Lester James Peiris for the Traffic Police. This was followed by Rekawa. "Rekawa was a landmark in Sinhala cinema. It was the first film that was shot on location. Even the sound was recorded outside!" She also remembered Sandeshaya and Delovak Athara, both by Lester, and Bakmaha Deege by Dayananda. Unfortunately, according to Irangani, it is no longer possible to do only good films. "We just can’t afford it!"

Still, she was particularly happy about her role as a teacher and mother of a soldier in the award winning tele-film, "Samapthaya" directed by Satyajit Maitipe. The story is set in a time of rebellion similar to the Bheeshanaya period in the late eighties. A short film, "Samapthaya" according to Irangani captures a wide range of issues that ordinary people have to deal with in such periods of social upheaval such as loss, grief, anger, and other things that are hard to come to terms with. I put it to her that such a time is going to come again, and she said slowly, "yes...yes...yes".

Those who are cricket fans would have seen shorts of "Kinihiriya Mal" in a commercial that was played in between overs during the recently concluded tournament in Sharjah. Irangani plays the role of what she calls "a brothel keeper of the worst order". "I am bound to get a lot of criticism and people will be dismayed, especially since I smoke in the film. I am only worried that I might come off as someone advocating smoking, because I am against it. Still, I am fed up with the amma role. People have come to think that I can’t do anything else."

She also mentioned a new film by Sunil Ariyaratne, "Sudu Sevanella" where she is once again a rural character. "This is the first time I am playing such a role since Rekawa and I felt very much at home, much more comfortable than the middle-class ladies I have been portraying all this time."

In the back and forth between work and world view, the things she slipped in her frustration at being a woman. I would love to take a tent and camp, but a woman cannot do that. And wherever I go, there are people who recognise me. It is either that or it is impossible to find a place where one can have some peace. When I was in school my favourite pastime was dreaming. In fact, my end of term reports were full of complaints regarding this, where my parents were informed that I would do much better if I don’t dream and write poetry."

Dreaming is something that she still indulges in apparently. I asked her if she still considers herself a Marxist and she said that although she identifies with the values and vision, human nature is too steeped in "thanha" for such a vision to become a reality. She used the word "thanha" so many times, that I told her "I knew a Malaysian who said that his father was a Maoist who had become a Taoist," and asked her "Are you a Marxist who has become a Buddhist?"

She laughed and said that she doesn’t like to put a label to what she believes because then you have to accept under that name. "Take for instance the matter of offering flowers. I can understand the charm of offering a single flower at the temple. But people seem to think that the more flowers you offer the greater the merit or the quicker the journey to enlightenment. So they steal flowers, not considering for a moment all the organisms that are killed in the process. And for what? If you want to venerate the Buddha, follow what he says!"

She is probably one of the busiest women of her age, but the couple of hours spent in her company were infused with the soothing aura that one can expect only from those who are near and dear. Irangani Serasinghe, history has so decreed, possibly against her wishes, will always be "amma" to those who have come to enjoy her soft intrusions into their lives. And like any mother, she is both life-giving and nurturing. We are not worthy, I am tempted to say.

Read also 'The Bodhisattva of Godawaya', for an encounter that took place about 4-5 years ago, where Irangani was also present.

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