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Jean Arasanayagam was born into one of Sri Lanka's
minority communities, and married into another. By birth
she is a "Dutch Burgher" – offspring of intermarriages
between Dutchmen and women of the indigenous communities
– a split inheritance. She herself married a Tamil, and
this marriage proved to be totally unacceptable to her
husband's family. In July 1983, the antagonism between
Sri Lanka's Tamil minority and its Sinhalese majority
culminated in bloody riots. Her family became refugees.
Jean Arasanayagam bore a writer's testimony of these
events.
Jean is an eminent short story writer. Her volumes of
short stories are The Cry of the Kite (1984), Fragments
of a Journey (1992), All Is Burning (1995), and Peacocks
and Dreams (1996), which won her a prize for non-fiction
in 1984 but was not published until twelve years later.
The Dividing Line
War. Excruciating pain. Identity crisis. 12
short-stories – The Dividing Line. Jean Arasanayagam's
expiation of the testing times that Sri Lanka has been
thrown into, torn apart by a long civil war. The stories
are all woven in a world of the somber and radiate an
uneasy calm. The stories sketch an unnerving world where
things fall apart-places, relationships, identities.
These are stories written in troubled times and hence
the voices reflect the uneasy world that the characters
inhabit. The first story in the collection "The Garden
Party" does not have the carnage of war but orbits
around the problem of identity for a half-caste
Sinhalese – the burden of being a colored woman yet
sharing a western surname. On the other hand, the title
story "The Dividing Line" encapsulates the warring
country and the tensions within families – where lines
are drawn to mark territories. A brilliant rendering of
tired and tattered strings of familial bonding unable to
cope up with the uncertainty of the modern world.
Arasanayagam's stories emanate from within a distinctly
perturbed mind over issues universal. A brilliant
collection which the delineates the atrophied world –
its decrepitude, its apparent state of aporia. |
