Encounters from the school of life

The speech delivered by Tissa Jayatilaka, Executive Director of the United States-Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission, at the launch of Dr. Tissa Abeysekara’s book Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences.

SPEECH: We are here to celebrate the release of Tissa Abeysekara’s latest literary offering which has a great deal to do with memory. And Tissa has placed on me the happy burden of providing an introduction to today’s proceedings.

When I sat down at my desk early this morning to bring my thoughts about Tissa, his life to-date and his work into some coherent whole, I was myself solely tempted to fall back on memory - a dominant strand in all of his writing. I have tried not to resist this temptation.

An introduction is a preliminary explanatory matter, something simple that is meant to pave the way to something more substantial and wholesome.

An appetiser to the delectable main course that my friend Jayantha Dhanapala will doubtless provide for us in a moment. I have chosen an unusually long title for my introductory comments this evening, which is: ‘A Book, Quotation from an unidentified German, A Red Jaguar and a Table with a Baize-lined Top’.

Tissa Abeysekara and one other in this audience will readily known why I have resorted to this seeming verbosity.

This is certainly not the occasion to elaborate on my reasons for inflicting this title on you but I do have very good reasons for this infliction. There might yet be world enough and time for elaboration.

For the present, however, I do beseech you, take me at my word. Tissa Abeysekara is a filmmaker who in mid-life wrote his first novella about a poignant moment from his childhood.

Let me quote a few memorable lines from that novella to give you a sample of his mellifluously limpid prose: The glass smelled vaguely of sardine and the water tasted like when it is taken from a galvanised bucket, but I drank it all in one breath and returned the glass to the woman with both hands.

This is exquisite language. Not all of us with moving experiences to share as Tissa Abeysekara has, can express them nearly so well. The essays in Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences are full of this kind of elegant writing.

As I pondered over the title of Tissa’s book of essays that is before us, the following impressions came to mind. We are familiar with the main root, that tap root and the adventitious roots, the latter are those that come from outside, accidentally, casually.

Reflections are ideas that arise in the mind, usually re-considerations of ideas that so arise. And reminiscences involve remembering, recovery of knowledge by mental effort; collection in literary form of incidents that a person remembers. Remembrance of things past, keepsakes, souvenirs, memorials.

When I read Tissa’s essays, I was reminded of that beautiful Christmas song that Jim Reeves sang which we are bound to hear again over our airwaves in a few months in the lead up to the season of hope and good cheer. And the apposite lines from this I recall are:

Pardon me if a tear

Falls upon my Christmas cheer,

It’s the memory of an old Christmas card

Tissa Abeysekara’s memory is not linked to any Christmas cheer or cards. They, in fact, are far removed from them. These essays in Tissa’s “Three Rs” written, for the most part, post-1996 after Tissa had brought ‘Tony Home’ to wide acclaim, are shot through with a mature sadness.

To adapt the words of our mutual friend, Michael Ondaatje, Tissa’s writing has, the delicious sad sense of being solitary in the world, with a thousand intricacies between you and your closest neighbour or relative.

In place of Christmas card cheer, Tissa’s outpourings in Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences have much to do with a book 900 + pages long, a quotation that used to hang in the Film Corporation Chairman’s room that I used to frequent when Tissa lent dignity and style to that office by holding it, the toot of the horn of a red Jaguar with a long bonnet and a table with a baize-lined top. (Now my title may make a little more sense to you). Recollection and retrospection, yes turbulent retrospection, are the touchstones of Tissa Abeysekara’s writing.

Please permit me to reminisce for a while now. I first met Tissa Abeysekara way back in 1978/79 at a seminar we both attended at The American Centre in Kandy on the theme ‘From Stage to Screen’ where we discussed the process by which good theatre is sometimes transformed to good cinema. Tissa, who I had only known by reputation at the time, was one of the specialists The American Centre had invited to address the subject.

Our acquaintance evolved into a rewarding friendship in the mid-80s when a good friend of ours, the late Bandula Jayawardhana, invited us to serve for some years on the Panel of Judges of the annual National Sinhala Drama Festival held under the auspices of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs of Sri Lanka.

Ariyawansa Ranaweera, Jayasumana Dissanayake, Y.R. de Silva, Kusuma Karunaratne, Lakshmie de Silva, Punyakante Wijenaike, Sita Kulatunga are some of the other congenial companions who joined us as I remember. Happily some of them are here with us today at this event.

From that time on, Tissa and I have conspired together on several politico-cultural affairs and have shared an intimate friendship. We’ve seen some of our dreams for Sri Lanka take shape, hold promise and then sadly, wither away.

Despite the ever-encircling doom and gloom, we’ve struggled over the years to do our best to focus on worthy causes and contribute our mite to national re-construction and resuscitation.

Needless to say, Tissa Abeysekara’s contribution in this respect far surpasses anything I have done. I am grateful to have had the pleasure and opportunity to collaborate with him on certain projects that impinge on shared interests.

Tissa has been enormously generous in allowing me to bask in some of the glory he frequently reflects. So this introduction is a simple act of trying to give something back to him in celebration of a valued friendship.

Tissa’s writings are at times funny and tender. He manages very well indeed to keep dangerous and explosive emotions under wraps. I did not know Tissa’s parents. They had departed before Tissa and I became pals. But, he has shared with me his impressions of them. As he himself reveals, Tissa comes from ‘a split social background’.

His father was from the anglicised upper middle class while his mother hailed from the exclusively Sinhala-speaking lower middle class with roots in the rural hinterland of our country.

Tissa is a fusion - on occasion an uncomfortable and uneasy fusion - of these two strands. But, Tissa has, like any gifted human being, turned these disparate and, at times, confusion social circumstances into a career of a film-maker and write of rare distinction.

He is one of the giants of that vanishing, if not vanished, bi-lingual intelligentsia of our country.

In his inimitable style, Tissa refers to his wonderful prowess in both Sinhala and English as his ‘double-tonguedness’! In pithy Sinhala he once told a hostile interviewer who took exception to Tissa’s preference for writing in English:

‘Mame diva dekey minihek. Eh hindai mung Ingrisiyen saha Sinhalen liyanne’

The more challenging fusion in Tissa is to do with his personality and temperament. He is a mix of his father’s ‘frightening calm’ as he has put it and his mother’s initial fun-loving, mischievous disposition which later slipped into an ill-tempered one under the onslaught of life’s reversals.

Despite the straitened circumstances of his family life during the late 1940s that Tissa shares with us in his Bringing Tony Home, his father displayed stoical calm under intense pressure - a calm Tissa found disconcerting in his youth.

It is this ‘bi-polarity’ if you will that we encounter in Tissa Abeysekara, the adult creative artist. Someone once observed that:

Sweet are the uses of adversity;

Adverse are the uses of sweet today.

We could profitably use this observation to describe Tissa’s career to-date. His versatility and his depth, I believe, spring from his encounter in his life’s journey with profound adversity.

This brilliant, mostly-self taught man who did not get to attend school until about 11+ and whom circumstances prevented from going to university has learnt much from the school of life, ever the best teacher.

Those of you who know me know of my fondness of the well-written word. Hence my desire to end with two quotations will not come as a surprise. Here is the first that I referred to in the title of my talk that, as I said, used to hang in Tissa’s office whereby hangs a significant tale:

Be and continue poor young man, whilst others around you grow rich by fraud and disloyalty. Be without power or position, whilst others achieve theirs by flattery.

Forego the gracious pressure of the hand for which others cringe and crawl. Wrap yourself in your own virtue and seek a friend and thy daily bread. If in your cause, you have gone grey with unbleached honour, bless God and die.

If anyone here knows who the writer of these lines is, please let Tissa know. I know he will be more than grateful to you! The second quotation from Leslie Weatherhead is, I think, a very apt one to end these introductory comments of mine:

Like all men, I prefer the sunny upland of experience, when health, happiness and success abound, but I have learned far more about God, life and myself in the darkness of fear and failure than I have ever learned in the sunshine.

There are such things as treasures of the darkness. The darkness, thank God, passes. But what one learns in the darkness, one possesses for eternity.