A must for counsellors

Psychological Management of Sexual Trauma Victims
Written and compiled by Dr. Ruwan M. Jayatunge MD
Godage International Publishers, Colombo 10
216 pages, Price Rs. 475

Dr. Ruwan M. Jayatunge who pioneered the publication of books on different and complex aspects of psychological counselling both in Sinhala and English has compiled this volume on Psychological Management of Sexual Trauma Victims which fills the lacuna in dealing with gender based violence victims.

According to police and media reports the numbers of gender based sexual violence victims are on the increase. Serious sexual crimes of rape and incest had recorded a marked increase with majority of victims being young children.

While the enforcement officials are focused on punishing the perpetrators, the psychological damage which affects lifelong behaviourial patterns are left mostly unattended.

The police who are expected to provide immediate protection and advice are not trained in fundamentals of counselling to traumatized victims. Dr. Ruwan M. Jayatunge's manual gives basic training to law enforcement officials in counselling.

S.S. Wijeratne

LLB, Attorney-at-Law

Convener

National Centre for Victims of Crime

Former Legal Counsel

UNHCR, Geneva.

Principles of advertising explained

Denveem Karanaya(Advertising)
Author: Manoj Prasan Ratnayake
Sadeepa Publishers, Colombo 8
87 pages. Price: Rs. 120

"Information has become a talisman, a symbol of political potency and economic prosperity." (William J. Martin, 1988)

The key component of the information society is communication. Advertising is the non-personal communication of information usually paid for, and usually persuasive in nature, about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media. (Bovee, 1992).

Advertisements are ubiquitous in urban settings. Even the rural population is exposed to advertising through the print and the electronic media.

There is a dearth of publications on advertising and Manoj Prasaan Ratnayake's Denveemkaranaya is an enabling welcome book on this subject. Within the scope of 87 pages Manoj examines the essential principles, features and aspects of advertising.

What is advertising, advertising and marketing, advertising agencies, persuading the consumer, allegorical aspects of advertisements, and summary are the specific chapters. While reading this book a student following a course in Mass Communications would recollect the ideas expressed by Agee, Auit and Emery on criticising advertisements.

These are: Advertisements persuade us to buy goods and services we cannot afford; advertising appeals primarily to our emotions, rather than our intellect; advertising is biased; advertising involves conflicting competitive claims; advertising is unduly repetitious and much advertising is vulgar, obtrusive and irritating. Manoj has identified and screened some advertisements which depict all the above charges. Seveal advertisements carry images that reflect sexuality, beauty, youth, fashion, luxury, vigour, happiness and strength and we purchase these images instead of the product! In advertising too, the concept of linguistic sign emerges. Each linguistic sign is a combination of a concept (signified) and sound-image (signifier).

The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary (Saussure, 1916). The problem with several advertisements is, that the signifiers depicted hardly relate to the signified. The lion or the pretty cinema actress does not convincingly relate to a brand of alcohol and a brand of soap respectively.

Unless someone recognises such a relationship, these do not become signs (relation between the signifier and the signified). Very often the images employed are obtrusive, erotic and mischievous, masking and distorting the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic relationships.

Although Manoj has not specifically devoted much on the theories and behavioural aspects of advertising, the reader is stimulated in knowing about the A-T-R model and the D-P-V-N (descriptive, prescriptive, valuation and normative) components of advertising.

A brief section on the roles of the preconscious, conscious and unconscious components of the human mind, that processes advertising information; should have been extremely useful and interesting. Symbols in particular, are stimulative to the unconscious mind.

The other area of interest is the extensive modelling undertaken by the media advertising. This modelling is effected through associations, imagery, recapitulation, symbolisation and condensation. However, these models are largely mythical in configuration.

Our mothers shown in the electronic and print media advertisements are pretty, young and always feeding artificial milk to their children! What insightful information is in-built into media advertising?

Dr. Senarath Tennakoon

The Search long-listed for IMPAC Dublin Award

'The Search' written by Ms. Premini Amerasinghe and published by Vijitha Yapa Publications has been long-listed for the world's most prestigious and highest-value literary award, The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, for the year 2006.

Ms. Amerasinghe is amongst many other well-known authors whose works have been long-listed for the prize of Euro 100,000. They are Peter Ackroyd, Isabelle Allende, Roddy Doyle, Ken Follett, Amitav Ghosh, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, V. S. Naipal, Ruth Rendall, Alexander McCall Smith and Tom Wolfe. The winner will be announced in June 2006.

'The Search' is the story of an adopted boy's search for his real mother. It shuttles between England, Sri Lanka and Australia. Interwoven into the main theme is the concept of rebirth - as David, the boy, is conceived at the very moment that his uncle dies under tragic circumstances.

A radiologist by profession, Ms. Premini Amerasinghe shows creativity through her poetry collections and other literary works. She ventured into the field of novel writing only after retirement.

'The Search' is her first published novel. Her first publication was a volume of poetry, Kaleidoscope, which was short-listed for the Gratiaen Prize in 1998. She is a regular contributor to the literary magazine 'Channels'.

The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was established in 1995, as a joint initiative of Dublin Corporation, the Municipal Government of Dublin City, and IMPAC, a productivity improvement company. The award is given annually, for a novel published in English (either originally or in translation) in the year preceding the award's conferral.

The nomination process for this award is unique, as nominations are made by libraries throughout the world's capital and major cities. Each library may nominate up to three works of fiction. The award is determined by an international panel of judges, which changes each year.

Focus on four great intellectuals of Sri Lanka

Enabling Traditions
Author- Prof: Wimal Dissanayake
Publishers: Visidunu Prakasakayo (Pvt) Ltd

One of the most interesting and readable books that I read recently is Wimal Dissanayake's Enabling Traditions. His book is a thorough study on tradition and shows how powerful, a tradition shapes the thought process of a nation, a country, a social fabric.

It is a forceful exposition as to how traditions cement in different societies on their own varied characteristics in accordance with the needs and beliefs of each and every country.

Hence at the outset let me say that Enabling Traditions is a must that should be read by everybody, and a book that must be in everybody's bookshelf for its value, critical approach and intellectual outpouring besides its expository spirit.

Wimal Dissanayake who himself is a post generation intellectual subjects, in his scrutiny, four giant predecessor intellectuals in Munidasa Cumaratunga, Martin Wickramasinghe, Ediriweera Sarachchandra and Gunadasa Amarasekera to view as to how these four were involved as carriers of tradition with the changing social conditions and needs of our country.

They followed different paths as architectural renovators of the past in terms of history, memory ,rationality, ideology and modernity and advocated their own vision of tradition as they envisaged for the country's progress. Wimal begins in a chronological order of the four intellectuals in their age history, and the first with Munidasa Cumaratunga, then Martin Wickramasinghe, Ediriweera Sarachchandra and lastly Gunadasa Amarasekera. All four of them took different roots and applied different canonical methods to dig into the meaning of tradition and how it was a product of the societal needs and beliefs.

Cumaratunga based grammar and language, pushing the importance of both elements in the development of a cultural tradition, and applied them analytically in his works; Wickramasinghe Buddhist humanism through his literary works and philosophical interpretations; Sarachchandra by edifying research on folk and traditional drama and its inherent theatrics as well as by live successful experimentations on them, mainly linking with the Indian tradition injecting Buddhist philosophical nature of life; and Amarasekera mainly but sternly through his linkages to the classical idiomatic poetry, and its language instilling depth and simplicity of folk expression exhilarating its enchantment touching on the human quality it projected.

Cumaratunga was a distinguished scholar who excelled in the areas of grammar and the study of language, contributing significantly to the growth and systematization of these fields.

He did this very painstakingly and idealized that language and its grammar were the main stream of bondage that keeps a community intact in its thought progression. Wimal supports Cumaratunga's thesis from world authorities like that of Hans-Georg Gadamer quoting him, thus.

Language is not just one of man's possessions in the world, but on it depend the fact that man has a world at all. For man the world exists as a world in a way that no other being in the world experiences. This condition is inscribed into man through language.

Wimal looks at the various ways that Cumaratunga analyzed and systemised Sinhalese language identifying how his analysis and systemisation based the development of tradition in different societies. In this connection he also shows that Cumaratunga was not slavish to ideas and syntaxes of foreign language importations to build our own.

Cumaratunga implies that Sinhalese language developed on its own nuances of structure and it had its own identity on an innovative dialectical relationship or on a manner of speech.

In this regard Wimal quotes from Cumaratunga's Vyakarana Vivaranaya. There could be so many other great languages in the world. Their grammars could be blemishless. In uncovering the grammar of the Sinhala language, it isn't any of these languages that we should focus on.

Grammar is the law of language. The grammar of each language is determined by the usages of each language. This shows how independent and innovative his thinking is. He applied this phenomenon as the basis in the birth of a culture and thereby the development of its nuances as the body of traditions.

Same process took in the mind of Martin Wickramasinghe too but in a wider scale applying the Buddhist and humane quality in his understanding as to what tradition meant to him with a permanent imprint of his thoughts on it in the community through his literary and critical works, and philosophical interpretations.

Wimal focuses this aspect because he takes the view that Wickramasinghe was shaped by Buddhist humanism, and the way he tried to demonstrate the importance of Buddhist humanism as a discourse that should guide our life and literature. This is more clear and becomes universal when we read Wickramasinghe's literary and critical works and deep understanding of jataka stories and Sinhala classics.

More over his references to jataka stories and the comparisons that he makes with the French novelist Marcel Proust's novels, and Russian literature, particularly Dostoevsky's great works makes it still clearer.

In his examinations he not only found humanism in them in terms of Buddhist philosophy but also applied it in his own creative outpourings as evident in his literary works and philosophical treatises.

In short as Wimal puts it very succinctly humanism to Wickramasinghe was precisely the notions of human dignity, integrity, impartiality that served to reinforce appreciation of human difference and otherness.

And to him tradition is an aspect of culture which as most anthropologists demonstrate as socially inherited habits, prejudices, and superstitions, religions, language, ceremonies, arts and crafts of a people.

In the same manner Wimal distinguishes Ediriweera Sarachchandra as an intellectual who valued the creative forces embedded in tradition and one who thought that the best way of understanding Sinhala cultural tradition was through its linkage to the Indian tradition.

He further states that Sarachchandra's thinking on tradition had a closer link with Ananda Coomaraswamy's wisdom that Sri Lankan tradition was highly influenced by the Indian tradition, and it was a setting for its growth. Sarachchandra was more modern in his approach.

Actually it can be said that he advanced, and placed the growth of intellectual horizons of tradition, bridging the old with modernism through his criticisms. He became in this sense a tradition creator as an Inventionist as well as a creative assimilationist because he set a progressive criticism approach which over time grew to be traditional within the framework of customisation of criticism.

This he mainly did not do only through his critical aura but also through innovative dramas and literary creations. He championed in all the spheres he was involved, including in the field of philosophy. He was thorough in whatever he did and applied humanism through its source - Buddhism to the hilt and thereby enriched all his creative works to be permanent.

Wimal in his evaluation of Sarachchandra as one who enabled tradition to suit the then changing social environment emphasizes his importance as a commentator on literature, on drama, on music, and on criticism. He further says that Sarachchandra realized and felt very strongly emphasizing the need to identify our cultural tradition with the classical Indian tradition perceiving Sri Lanka as a part of the greater cultural India.

Wimal summarizes the entirety of his creative acumen like this - Sarachchandra's approach to tradition was to move out of the parochialism of confining culture to Sri Lankan geographical boundaries, and to encourage identifying with the Indian culture as it has evolved over the centuries.

Sarachchandra had a mind that was sensuous and mobile, passionate and rigorous, it served to infuse his writings with an unusually persuasive power.

His essays were marked by crisp wit that was quick to detect the synthetic and counterfeit, and the gap between appearance and reality. It energized his writings while subtly invoking standards both moral and aesthetic as it played off facile self indulgence against reflective self knowledge.

His human sympathy flows out of a clear recognition of the essential incompleteness of human beings. Connecting Sarachchandra in the tradition development process, Wimal shifts from him on to Gunadasa Amarasekera.

In Wimal's eyes Amarasekera is one who enabled tradition growth through a process of poetry. Those who are familiar with Amarasekara's bulk of writing know him well as one who entered the field of literature in the 1950s as a short story writer, then a novelist plus a critic, a socio-politico reformer, and more importantly a poet of repute who has excelled more in the latter enabling him to become a tradition setter as Wimal establishes.

But I see Amarasekera as one who also excelled in all the fields he set his foot on. He was in fact a revolutionary and a free thinker unafraid of criticism and progressed on his mission as a daring literati.

It is with this background Wimal launches on Amarasekera to evaluate his works giving priority to his poetry. This is because it is evident though he excelled in other disciplines, viz, short story writing, novels and criticisms his deep interest lies in the sensibilities of poetry as a follower of tradition in the development of poetry and modernizing it.

Amarasekera says in his Sinhala Kavya Sampradaya as Wimal cites that perceiving a tradition is to understand the nature of a constantly flowing stream that is both changing and unchanging. To situate oneself in tradition is to stand in this stream. It is not standing on a dead past.

For him as Wimal places, poetry represents the essence of a nation's emotional life. That is why Amarasekera reverberates that poetry constitutes the language of the national heart.

It is also the conscience of the nation. Amarasekera showed signs of being a promising poet through his Bhava Geeta in 1955 and was already reacting against the Colombo school with its ill-defined emotions, vague and sentimental poetry dealing with shallow experiences and the other against the newly introduced Free Verse modeled on the works of Eliot and Pound and Lawrence, Wimal quotes again.

He further goes on to say that in both these schools Amarasekera found the mode of language employed insufficient for the intended purpose. This was because the first category did not rise above the journalistic mode and the second indicated the invention of an artificial idiom based on English tropes.

Amarasekera avoided both these superficial modes and inclinations, but followed a path of maturity instilling depth and exquisiteness in his creations that drew on the vigour of folk poetry of which he was accustomed - the folk milieu as evidences in his works.

From Amarasekara's writings emerge not only a product of the folk culture but also an inborn creator who had gripped greedily the spirit of the Sinhala classical poetry.

This may be because he had mastered the insightful voracious reading habit of the classics. It is also evident equally well of his grasp of the wealth and depth of the eastern tradition and its Buddhist humanism. This I am sure has resulted in the origin of his inborn intellectualism and the embodiment of folk spirit in his poetry rather than the influence of post modernism. Asak Da Kava demonstrates this spirit.

As Wimal puts it correctly and Amarasekera himself confesses, a successful poem recreates not only a world of emotion but also a world of thought, and there are considerable overlaps and intersections between the two .The greater the depth of the world of thought in the poem, the greater the emotional resonance unleashed by the poem.

In other words it is the beauties of thought of images of a poem that evoke imagination and provide reverberation of deep emotions. It is interesting to note that there are a number of common denominators of all these intellectuals whom Wimal dwells on, which were discussed throughout in his book.

All of them claim that Sri Lankan tradition is closely linked to the Indian tradition, and that our culture and tradition were enriched and progressed because of its linkage to it.

They also believed and worked on the basis that language is the primary source that keeps a community intact as a social fabric and on it an identifiable tradition is shaped over time; it subjects itself to change within the intact systematization.

The other feature that everybody professedly hovered was Buddhist humanism. There is a common consensus among all of them that religion formed the cultural milieu, and both culture and tradition are interconnected, and on it the spiritual and aesthetic fortitude of a people survives.

It may be wrong for us to assume that all these four intellectuals were just appliers of the Western thought on our tradition, and interpreted it accordingly. If such a thought enters into the mind of any reader of Wimal Dissanayake's Enabling Traditions it will be totally a misconceived perception.

Some of the Western thoughts that Wimal discusses in his book were post thoughts of the four intellectuals, and they may perhaps have not at all influenced them.

I believe that what he does is to impress that in Sri Lanka too similar thought processes emerged because of their undying engagements in the pursuits of depth, value and greatness of the Eastern tradition in contrast to that of the Western tradition. Certainly no doubt their ways of thinking may have compounded with the advent of advanced knowledge of the Western disciplines as well.

Namel Weeramuni

Essays on Administrative Law in Sri Lanka reappears

Author: Prof. G.L. Peiris
A Stamford Lake Publication, Lake House Bookshop, Colombo
372 Pages, Price Rs. 1,500

Prof. G.L. Peiris's Essays on Administrative Law in Sri Lanka was first published in 1980. It was a useful book for Law students and the general readers even at that time. Then the book was not available in bookshops for a long time.

Therefore the reappearance of the book as a Stamford Lake Publication is a welcome sign.

The author deals with many areas of administrative law in Sri Lanka including the writ of certiorari, requisites for its availability, grounds for the issue of certiorari, contravention of the rules of natural justice, exclusion of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to grant writs and the doctrine of ultra vires.

Prof. Peiris' interpretation of the law relating to administration and the inclusion of case law are praiseworthy. The book comes with a useful table of cases and a general index.