Romesh Gunesekera—Yemisi Blake

Romesh Gunesekera, born 1954, left Sri Lanka at the age of 12 for the Philippines. He moved to England in 1972, and has stayed there since. His first book Monkfish Moon, a collection of short stories around ethnic and political tensions that have plagued Sri Lanka since independence, was published by Granta in 1992. In 1994, he published Reef which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He has written seven books since, short stories, novels and non-fiction, much of this either on, or influenced by, Sri Lanka. His last book on the country was Noontide Toll.

In this interview with Books&Authors he talks about the past that influences so much of his work, the country which he keeps revisiting, what makes for authentic writing and questions of form. Following are excerpts:

How much time do you spend in Sri Lanka?

I haven’t lived there since I left in the 60s. I didn’t go very often when I was much younger. But for the last 20 years, ever since I’ve been writing my books I’ve been going pretty regularly. In the last 10 years I’ve been going every year. I was there just before the tsunami, before the war came to an end … I’m fairly connected.

Does distance shape your writing on it as much as proximity?

Distance is important, but it’s really imaginative distance that’s important — whether you’re living there or not. If you are writing something you automatically create a certain distance. It can be very little. Even within the same city you imaginatively have a certain distance from your subject and at the same time you have to have a connection. Those things are not essentially physical, though they can be. Sometimes I feel that if I’m writing something about a place it might be nice to be there. But I’m a pragmatist and it doesn’t always work that way. If you think of writing in the past, the classic example is [James] Joyce. There’s no closer parallel between the imaginative and the real than Ulysses. And he wrote it at a distance. He himself said distance is one of the key essentials of writing. But I think that’s imaginative distance. You don’t have to leave a place to write about it.

There is more of the past and the future, than the present, in your writing about Sri Lanka. Is this a consequence, partly, of your not living there? I’m thinking particularly of Reef and Noontide Toll.

That’s an interesting one. Noontide Toll is about the time it was written, which was 2012-2013 — that’s when the stories are set. But it’s dealing with the repercussions of what happened three years earlier. That’s about as contemporary as you can get, but because the contemporary was moving very fast, so what a character like Vasantha could see in 2012, was no longer visible in 2014. So you’re looking at history almost as if it were yesterday’s history. Reef is different because it is looking much more at a period in the past, but that’s partly because I wanted that book to deal with the issue of memory. But again when it was written, in ’93, the opening would be contemporary, but from there it goes back to the 1960s. That was deliberate because I felt that period, the late 60s, were an invisible period. In terms of imaginative writing, I wasn’t aware of any other novels describing that period in Sri Lanka.

Going back to your earlier question, 1969, ’70, ’71, which is when a lot of what happens in the novel happens, are years when I wasn’t in Sri Lanka, or even visiting Sri Lanka. So distance was there, and imagination was there, and I was very much interested in how the past and present work. There’s a quote from George Orwell which says that who controls the past controls the future. 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.

An ongoing debate is one on the authenticity of fiction. Back in Sri Lanka have you had to deal with that?

I haven’t had to deal with that but I’m sure the charge has been levelled. That writers like me or Ondaatje or Sivanandan, or any of the writers who don’t live there, are inauthentic, which I take as a compliment in a way. It means someone’s noticed. And I go back to Joyce. Is he inauthentic? Well, if he is, I’m happy to join the club.

A review of Noontide Toll mentioned the protagonist Vasantha’s thoughts didn’t seem like a Sri Lankan taxi driver’s, that he was merely a device. What do you think? Also, where should one draw a line when it comes to using a narrative device that departs from reality?

Taking the second one first, a device has to be either invisible or very unobtrusive. It goes back to a very simple idea of writing and fiction — that you and your reader have been taken to this island. And anything that suggests you’re not on such an island, just reading a book, a device which stops you from accepting the story, would be wrong.

In the case of Vasantha, I don’t want to defend him, but it’s an issue I did think about quite hard and what I’m hoping for is that Vasantha is a real enough character. You may ask how come he’s so articulate, or how come he thinks about these things as a taxi driver. That’s okay with me because you really need to think about your own thoughts and what you expect a taxi driver to be thinking about. I do know people who drive tourist vans for hire in Sri Lanka, very much like Vasantha. I had several van drivers a bit like Vasantha — who had an office job, retired, they know English, and they enjoy talking to tourists. Quite interestingly I had a conversation in Pakistan as well with a posh lady who said, “My brother is a taxi driver in New York.” The other day I got into a taxi here and the guy turned out to be a microbiologist with a PhD.

It’s not the taxi driver that’s the issue. The issue is, given his actual life, could he have got on in life and learnt as much as he actually has. And I guess the way I built the character is that he has standard formal education, but he’s intelligent. You know, in Reef, Triton is only a cook, he’s a servant boy, but he’s much more articulate than a servant is often expected to be, because in effect he’s written a book, practically. I remember when that came out there were middle-class ladies in Delhi who were very upset at the idea that a servant could be articulate or intelligent. I think the reactions tell us more about the prejudices of those who react.

How did the form of Noontide Toll come about?

My original intention was to write something to counterbalance Monkfish Moon. A special kind of collection of stories. Then, when the war came to an end, I went to Jaffna. I thought I’d write write non-fiction and I did write one piece. But I also thought there was more important writing to do about the changes happening in Sri Lanka which non-fiction couldn’t do justice to. That sounds extremely arrogant to say because there’s been some really good non-fiction but it’s always a certain kind of news and I felt that there were things happening here that … with fiction you could make something that would have a meaning now and a different meaning in the future. I thought the only way I could do this was with a book that I could finish soon, a collection of short stories. So I wrote the first couple of stories on the basis that it would be a collection of short stories. But then I looked at Monkfish Moon and thought: What makes this book work? And I remember that when I wrote that, I wanted it to be a collection of stories, but a unified book, not a rag-bag collection. And I remember trying to work out the sequence of stories, and the kind of journey it would go through … and I remember thinking that there would be a shape to this book that will be satisfying in its own way and that it had to do with the north and the south, and the balance between the two and the past and the present. And then I realised that I could make this not just a bunch of stories, but that it would be Vasantha’s stories, linked short stories.

I wanted to try and get at what the issue was if you were living in Sri Lanka in 2009, ’10, ’11 and ’12. When the war is over, you’re glad the war is over, you’re not very happy about how it was, you’re balancing things and it’s a very confusing time. And I knew that the younger writers weren’t writing about it. And there was also a lot of fear about the regime, about saying anything. And I thought, actually, I can write this book. For me, if there’s anything important about the book, it is to show a way of dealing with a reality, a politically problematic reality. And how one can confront it with a kind of black humour.

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

But along the way I discovered I really enjoyed this form. It can be relatively quick therefore it can be very contemporary. But in fiction, if it’s just contemporary it’s dead. So I really wanted a book that would come out when it did, when it would have a special resonance, because already our points of reference have changed. But it has to work now as well, with evolving resonances. So at different times you could read it differently and concentrate on other things, start thinking about the different characters rather than politics of the time.

But the form hasn’t always worked to my advantage, because people look at it and are not interested because it’s not a novel, or because it’s not short stories.

In the past, linked short stories have been linked for other reasons, by place or by looking at relationships between characters, whereas this is linked by the political aspect as well as the main character — Vasantha. The other link is really that of form itself. To play with the idea of what is a short story and what is a novel and what can you do with a novel. It’s a little disappointing that some people haven’t come to grips with that. Someone said, “But it isn’t really a novel”. But a novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, Clarissa — that’s not a novel it’s just a bunch of letters. But it isn’t! Because it’s organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.