Two different writers: Punyakante Wijenaike and Shashikala Assella

by Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

I was saddened a month or two back to read of the death of Punyakante Wijenaike, a pioneer in the field of English Language writing by Sri Lankans. I thought back then to our long association, when I worked at the British Council, and began promoting Sri Lankan writers who had previously been scorned by our academic establishment.

I should note that D C R A Goonetilleke was an exception, but even he did not promote study of these writers. Indeed he had an even more conservative approach than the rest in that he removed Sri Lankan writing from school curricula when he was in charge – unlike his former colleague at Kelaniya, Regi Siriwardena, who was removed when a more conservative disposition prevailed, in the country too.

By the early nineties Sri Lankan writing had come into its own, and Michael Ondaatje decided to spend some of the money he won for the Booker to promote it further, and set up the Gratiaen Trust in which he expected me to make the running initially. And I continue proud of the winners in the first two years, when I was primarily responsible for selecting the judges. The two books that won in that period are still seen as important, Carl Muller’s Jam Fruit Tree and Punyakante Wijenaike’s Amulet.

When I heard that Punyakante had died, I was reminded of the excitement when she won, for she had strong competition, including Anne Ranasinghe and Jean Arasanayagam. And over the next few years we continued close, for she sent me whatever she produced, a great range of interesting material. And she continued a pillar of the English Writers Cooperative, of which she had been a founder member in the days when the British Council helped to set it up, in the late eighties.

But around the turn of the century we had less contact, and it was some years back when I last saw her. It was at a dinner, after which I dropped her at home, and I was saddened at how old she seemed, and forlorn, for when I dropped her home she had had to enter her house in virtual darkness for there had been no one up to receive her.

She was a gracious person, whose achievement was remarkable, given both what seemed a restricted background, and the animosity towards Sri Lankan writers in English on the part of academics when she started writing. I still find it difficult to understand how the leading lights of Colombo University could have scorned Giraya and contrasted it with the formulaic Waiting Earth and exulted over the passive wife in that novel.

Times have changed since then, and there are many more writers in English and they are more widely accepted, though sometimes I feel there has been little development in quality. We are light years away from the world in which Punyakante wrote, beginning with The Third Woman with its brilliant delineation of a wide range of life. Interestingly, that world has been recreated in Kamala Wijeratne’s latest novel, Anithiyagame: the end of an ere which she sent me recently.

That needs to be savoured and written about later. What I thought to juxtapose with the evocative prose of Punyakante is a very different book by a much younger writer, Shashikala Assella, who is now Head of the Department of English at the University of Kelaniya.

The concerns of (In)Consequential Musings, which has been published by Godage & Bros, are emphatically modern. The book deservedly appeared on the Gratiaen Prize long list last year, though to my surprise it did not make the short list. But then I have never thought the Gratiaen Prize the acme of achievement, although there have been a couple of splendid books that have won it in the last quarter of a century, among them Shehan Karunatilleke’s Chinaman and some years earlier Tissa Abeysekera’s Bringing Tony Home.

Shashikala writes on a smaller canvas than all the prose writers I have mentioned, understandably so for few poets in Sri Lanka have moved to a larger canvas, Vasantha Senanayake’s Transcending Sita being a notable exception. But her work also has interesting depths, as with the first poem in the collection, misleadingly entitled ‘Gossip’ about ‘That Kassapa boy’. Moving from Colombo gossip to her subject she startles the reader into enhanced perceptions with the assertion that, while he ‘Paints nude girls’ his brother Mugalan ‘can never measure up to Kassapa’ but ‘wants the palace that Kassapa built’.

There are other marvellous insights, about how Adam might have seen the apple first, ‘Plucked it, ate it first Being him, blamed her’ to which another perspective too is added,

Maybe, they found it

Together, in the afterglow

Of finding each other.

Easy to blame the apple

For the passions unchecked.

There are other thought-provoking takes, on Meenakshi the Rakshasha who set the rivalry rolling between Rama and Ravana, on Sita asserting her individuality, on a woman painted at Sigiriya when serene, not ‘ravaged’ which it is suggested was also her fate. There are poems about pressure to marry, about nature mirroring life, a tree in autumn ‘for you are me my soul bared, lonely once upon an autumn day’, flowers ‘just You. Pretty for a while All dried up Now’.

Perhaps because I live these days with living creatures whose joys and sorrows cannot be expressed for us to understand easily, I was most moved by ‘One Less to Love till she Hurts’ –

I saw her screaming, flying into a rage

When he came your way

Spitting rage, snarling her anger

She chased strangers, gave you life

Maybe not the best, but enough

To keep you living, playing and loving.

To see you stretched rigid

Swollen a little, with no mischief

I wonder what she thought

Maybe, one less to fight for,

One less to care for, one less to love till she hurts.

Maybe, good riddance????

She came, saw you, cried her stone heart out

In silent unseen tears

And spent the time

Now stretched till eternity

To feed the others.

Shashikala studied at Sabaragamuwa, and taught there after I had left, but then went to England for a doctorate for which she secured funding, and is now ensconced at Kelaniya with innovators such as Dinali Fernando, who also has a refreshing approach to both texts and students. And they encourage students too to write, which makes me regret that there no longer seems to be an outlet for new writers that promotes merit as New Ceylon Writing and The New Lankan Review did in those distant days.