- Author | 1954 -
Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.
Romesh Gunesekera
PoetryPlaceKindIslandLandLevel
Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.
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In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.
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A passenger on a road journey is in the hands of a driver; a reader embarking on a book is in the hands of a narrator.
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Whether we live in Sri Lanka or Malaysia or India, the U.K. or the U.S., we face similar issues of understanding, remembering the past that has made us and seeing the future we want.
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The old idea that you grow wiser as you get older, and you learn from your elders, is actually completely wrong.
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The nationalist movement supported Sinhala by suppressing Tamil; there were competing nationalisms. It was a fundamental mistake to make parallel streams in education - or a calculated political gamble. Politicians were playing with it.
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At 16, I started reading trashy stuff, anything slightly naughty and risque.
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In writing, I try to find the right balance between momentum and infinity, truth and beauty.
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Imaginative writing, to me, is a way of discovering who we are and what we have to contend with; discovering what is out there and also what is not there. It enables me to think and explore and make something new with language while trying to make sense of our lives.
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Sri Lanka is a part of my background: it's not where I live, but it's what I want to explore. And I find it works very well to explore through fiction.
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Who controls the present controls the past. There's a power structure, if you like, between the present and the past and the future, and that's what I'm interested in.
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