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

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. 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Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 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 213 Index 227 Acknowledgements THIS STUDY WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE 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 dis- sertation, 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 Now- man 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 HIS BOOK WILL EXAMINE the representation of problematic identities in women’s fiction of the Sri Lankan diaspora. Women of the Sri T Lankan diaspora have, in the last few decades, made a significant contribution to the field of postcolonial writing, studies, and politics. As in- dicated 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 Plea- sures 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. Ganesha- nanthan’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 Ganesha- nanthan, 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 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). 2 P ROBLEMATIC IDENTITIES v 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 con- text 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 resi- dents, 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. 4 Minoli Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (London: Routledge, 2007): 3. v Introduction 3 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 indepen- dent 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 selec- ted 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 con- sciousness. The problems of character

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