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| Wednesday, 10 March 2004 |
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On being exiled and alienated A felicitation ceremony for Anne Ranasinghe to celebrate 50 years of her contribution to the literary life of Sri Lanka and to the launching of the book "I Want to Speak of Tenderness: 50 Writers for Anne Ranasinghe", edited by Gerard Robuchon took place at the ICES premises recently. A large gathering of writers, academics, playwrights and critics were present. Following is the text of Anne Ranasinghe's speech at the ceremony.
This felicitation is a very special honour for me. Because although I have now lived here for over 50 years I know that I am basically an outsider, moreover, an exile. My mother tongue was German which I had to abandon to face an uphill struggle with the English language, and my unmistakably Germanic accent bears witness to this. Although they say that you have as many existences as languages you speak, the truth is that transplanting yourself into the soil of a new language makes you, as, a rule, rather than flourish, feel deprived rather than enriched. While I was very lucky in being young and well-taught I have to confess a constant nagging feeling of incompleteness. This surfaces particularly when trying to write a poem, because one's own experiences are the seismographs of poetic interpretation, and one reacts to the same words and texts in two different languages in a different way. It is a problem of an incomplete semantic adjustment in what is inevitably lost in translation from one culture to another. Only when you become fairly competent in your new language, and are still reasonably conversant with the old, that you realise the complexity of the problem. What I am trying to say is that because of the dual problem of not being born in Sri Lanka and not writing in my mother tongue (because I can't) that I so greatly appreciate this fantastic gesture today. But then the human being, according to Heidegger, is precipitated into life, and there is no reason or explanation. Being born is a gamble, no one can demand to be born and where and into what circumstances you emerge is a matter of pure chance. Life is an arbitrary gift, and should never be taken for granted. Like Regi Siriwardena in his wonderful poem on his 80th birthday titled '80 iambic pentameters for my 80 years'. I (also) "must confess/I am rather surprised to be still here". Until a few days ago this whole enterprise was kept totally secret - certainly from me. And not even the faintest indication that something was afoot percolated down to me. I don't know how Gerard Robuchon managed this, especially when no less than 50 authors are involved. After all, normally nothing can be hidden for long in Sri Lanka, there is a grapevine with an incredible capacity for ferreting out secrets, be they personal, political, military or literary. However, while I am quite overwhelmed by this enormous gesture I am not at all sure that I deserve it. My writing began as that of a dilettante, grew out of the circumstances in which I found myself. When I came to Sri Lanka - then Ceylon - the war was over but what had been happening in Europe began only very slowly to reach public awareness. As a child in Germany my knowledge of what was going on was minimal, not only the historical background of the events that were unfolding, but the events themselves appeared blurred and somehow mysterious. Mainly I think because our parents - I refer to children of my age and milieu - screened the escalating disasters from us as far as possible and also because no one could have anticipated the magnitude of the calamity to come. The ability to remember is not a particular virtue, we remember whether we want to or not, and Jews especially have always believed in both the necessity and importance of remembrance. Not only because of the contingencies of the holocaust but also because the Jewish religion is tied very closely to historical awareness, and it is in fact this collective memory which identifies Jews. On the whole, remembering is not a very comfortable experience, just as we cannot control the events that happened so also we cannot control our memories. Moreover, memory is unreliable for we tend to suppress anything we do not wish to remember, and in search of the truth we discover different aspects of it. Also the years change us, the child grows into mature woman, and with time attitudes and understanding also change. So that if the past is incomprehensible to us as we are today, then we reinvent it out of our present understanding. It was the return of a time of anxiety and tension, here in Colombo, in the late sixties, that brought back early memories. That is how process of remembering began for me. And then of writing. |
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