LAHORE: The problem with visual media is that it controls one’s imagination much more than a book, said Sri Lankan-born British author Romesh Gunesekera on the third and final day of the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF).
He said a certain amount of sensitivity was also needed and a writer should be thick-skinned in order to deal with the reaction his novel was going to get.In a session moderated by London-based writer Salil Tripathi, Gunesekera talked about his novel Reef - which was nominated for The Man Booker Prize in 1994 - as well as the ramifications of the Sri Lankan civil war.
“Since the novel is set in 1969, only a few months before the Sri Lankan civil war, it looks at a society on the brink of change,” he explained.The novel is the story of Triton, a young servant boy who aspires to be a cook. He works his way up the house of Mr Salgado, an aristocratic marine biologist. Through Triton’s perspective, book entwines the brewing political unrest in Sri Lanka with what goes on in the life of Mr Salgado who falls in love with Miss Nilly and begins studying sea movements in the wake of disappearances of reefs.
The title of the novel served as a symbol of fragility, the author said as he shed light on the time when he began searching for articles and other material concerning reefs prior to writing his book.
Gunesekera recalled that they were very few in number, as people didn’t realise their importance during that period. Their significance was driven home after the tsunami, he added. Tripathi claimed that the writers hailing from island countries tended to have a different outlook of the universe, to which Gunesekera responded by comparing islands to laboratories “where changes take place in a very visible fashion”.
He recalled a conversation he had with an Indian novelist who had the view that “one’s environment dictates what one writes.” The author said he did not accept the notion
that writing about smaller countries like Sri Lanka was easier as compared to writing about the larger ones. “Geography makes little difference,” he added.
Gunesekera mentioned having a chat with English biologist Richard Dawkins who made a point that “remarkable mutations take place in islands”. One of the reasons people loved reading novels, he claimed, was because the novels themselves were islands. “They are worlds in a book.”
While comparing books with visual media, he noted that books played the biggest role in liberating the reader.Gunesekera added that he referred to Sri Lanka as “a teardrop of an island” while keeping in mind the brutal civil war which started in July 1983 as communal tensions flared up and erupted into violence.
Staying with the subject, he said the Sri Lankans spent half of the war period in denial, trying to convince themselves the war wasn’t really taking place. It wasn’t the first time Sri Lanka had witnessed mass violence, he said, as he cited the youth uprising in the proletarian revolution of 1971.
When responding to a question about writing about the places where one originates from as compared to other places, Gunesekera said “every author finds his own way to write about a place.”
He added that that he only started writing about Sri Lanka later on in his career. The Sri Lankan characters that he wrote about in one of his works worked in a way other characters hadn’t, he added.
“For a writer, writing from experience is usually the way to go, which is why they mostly choose to write about their own countries.”To another question about the link between trauma and empathy, the writer said one had to empathetic to be a novelist, although there wasn’t really a standard format to it. -Raghib Ali