Personal Perspectives – Richard’s Mother

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Evelyn Waugh, Kadirana, Manorani de Zoysa, Ranjan Wijeratne, Ravaya, Richard de Zoysa, The Terrorist Trilogy, Victor Ivan, Wilpattu

Over a decade ago I wrote the following in a series that appeared in over a couple of years in the Island Newspaper. I had forgotten it until it was sent me by those seeking to revive the memory of Manorani Saravanamuttu, Richard de Zoysa’s mother. At a time when ‘Ceylon Today’ is reproducing ‘The Terrorist Trilogy’ which was written with Richard and about him, I thought it fitting to republish this piece

…

Chanted loudly, chanted lowly
Till her blood was frozen slowly

(Tennyson)

I was out of the country when Manorani died, just as I had been when her son Richard de Zoysa was abducted and killed, 11 years previously. And it was before I came back that Victor Ivan published in the ‘Ravaya’ an article that led to a very forceful critique of Richard in the ‘Island’. Those raise issues that I suspect will have to be addressed shortly. However, for the moment it is time, as Evelyn Waugh put it about another woman of extraordinary beauty, to speak of Manorani.
The last time I saw her was in the intensive care unit in January, which was a terrible experience. She was unconscious, and under heavy medication. Yet there had also been reason for regret on previous occasions I saw her, for her memory had faded. On the last of those, her 71st birthday I think it was, one tried to take comfort in the fact that she was no longer tormented by thoughts of Richard and his death. But her contentment was that of a child, so that, that too was upsetting, for the two qualities one remembered most strongly in her were both lacking – her tremendous dignity and her passion. These are qualities one does not often associate, but Manorani had them both in abundance.

I had got to know her well, as all Richard’s friends did, for their lives were shared in a very deep sense. This was inevitable in that, after she and her husband parted, she embarked on a new life and career in Africa, but gave them up to come back to Richard. He in turn recognized what she had given up for him and felt equally committed. They both, only half jokingly, felt they had been together in previous lives – I still have a copy of a poem he sent her shortly before his death, a poem about commitment in various incarnations. His comment was that they were not the only two in a time warp.

The colours will still revolve in the sky

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Ajith Samaranayake, Ceylon Today, Giraya, James Goonewardene, Punyakante Wijenaike, Servants, Terrorist Trilogy, The Awakening of Dr Kirthi, The Terrorist’s Daughter, This Waiting Earth, Thisuri Wanniarachchi

Speech of Prof Rajiva Wijesinha

At the launch of The Terrorist’s Daughter

By Thisuri Wanniarachchi

At the Taj Samudra Hotel, August 14th 2014

It is a pleasure to speak at the launch of Thisuri Wanniarachchi’s second novel, The Terrorist’s Daughter. But I must confess that I wondered initially what had prompted a young lady I did not know to ask me to do this. Though I spent many years promoting Sri Lankan writing in English, at a time when the academic establishments of the day tended to look down on this, that was a very long time ago.

Yet having read through the novel, I began to understand. One of my criticisms of the literary establishment at the time was its celebration of what I termed the ‘village well’ syndrome. So Punyakante Wijenaike’s brilliant and very sophisticated novel Giraya was torn to pieces, but there was adulation by a Colombo academic of the wife in This Waiting Earth, as representing the real village woman. The sharp social criticism of a village elite in the later novel was not highlighted, nor was James Goonewardene’s The Awakening of Dr Kirthi, still perhaps the best analysis of what had destroyed the administration of this country.

I have long felt that works dealing with these higher levels of society are also important, because after  this is where decisions that affect larger groups of humanity are made. My own writings, uniquely at the time, dealt with the very highest echelons of power, in that my first novel was based on the ethnic violence of 1983 and I indicated there that that violence had received the blessings of the highest level of decision making. So the entire Terrorist Trilogy dealt direct as it were with the events of 1983 and 1987 and 1989-90. My next novel, Servants, was in a different vein, but its subject matter was similar, since it too, if more obliquely, addressed social and political developments during that long drawn out period of crisis.

Poets and their visions 30 – W H Auden

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1939, Christopher Isherwood, poems, Poetry, September 1, Stephen Spender, The Night Mail, The Platonic Blow, The Unknown Citizen, W H Auden, Wilfred Owen

The last, chronologically speaking, of the poets I shall discuss – and the only one I actually met – is W H Auden. His was the generation that grew up just after the First World War, so they were without the intensity of subject matter that Wilfred Owen and his contemporaries displayed. But they had to deal with a new world order, and their poetry is replete with efforts to develop a system of values to help face the changing political and social circumstances.

In the end this involved, in the case of Auden and one of the contemporaries closely associated with him, the novelist Christopher Isherwood, a rejection of the world they grew up in, and both escaped to America during the Second World War. The third of the group, Stephen Spender, stayed on in England, though as a conscientious objector.

Auden’s attitude to the different world that was emerging can be seen in one of his more light-hearted poems, the letter to Lord Byron that he wrote from Iceland. The objects of his satire and the preposterous juxtapositions he engages in are multifarious: Carnegie one of the first rags to riches millionaires who devoted the latter part of his life to philanthropy; the highly conservative Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, listening to jazz; Oswald Mosley, who led the Black Shirts, the British political grouping that supported Hitler (the Teutonic Fuhrer-Prinzip), persuading Lord Byron to lead his storm troopers; the Pope joining the Moral Rearmament group; and what he thinks incredible, Lord Nuffield who built up the Morris motor business being poor, or anyone thinking British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to be honest.

Poets and their visions 29 – John Betjeman

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A Shropshire Lad, A Subaltern’s Love Song, An Edwardian Sunday, John Betjeman, OXFORD: SUDDEN ILLNESS AT THE BUS-STOP, P G Wodehouse, Song of a Nightclub Proprietess

Almost the last poet of the 20th century whom I shall discuss may seem a most unusual choice. He certainly would not qualify as a genius, but he was not only a most entertaining writer, he also had a delightful sense of nostalgia. This I think serves to make his vision of the process of age and change well worth recording.

His subject matter was essentially England, and he was easily the most popular Poet Laureate in that country since Tennyson. His evocation of long lost country pastimes, if not quite as preposterous as that of P G Wodehouse, is unreal but compelling. There is no way, having read of her, that one can forget Joan Hunter Dunn of A Subaltern’s Love Song –