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Her "Small Wedding"

Sita KULATUNGA

This is not something strange, but giving it some careful consideration, I have come to think that in Sri Lanka - and for many years too - we have a proud band of those I can well call the "Mothers of the Novel." Certainly, when it comes to fiction, women now march in the van and there's no denying it. They have made of their works a strong relationship to the novel. This is no new genre, obviously, but there is a reason for my concentration on the women writers of today. I do not wish to prepare an astounding litany of names, for each of these women have walked their own paths to perfection.

Instead, I have before me a significant piece of this great women-writers' heritage that I'd like to tell of. Raise a proud head, Sita Kulatunga. Yours is no "received wisdom" of any literary establishment. That is the beauty of it. You tell us now of a "Small Wedding" and gift your book to your children. That's the mother, plain and true, and in the creating, telling, writing, there is another thing we must accept. So many of our women writers are self taught. How many of them have actually been "trained to write?"

This is why Sita, who has plunged into novels, short story collections, poetry and translations, may allow her readers to tell of her school, and University training, but don't you see, whether in the lower or higher echelons of education, you need to train yourself to write, do your own thing, tell of life as it spreads before you.

In Sita Kulatunga I have found what I would call "buried treasure" and the writing is so to-the-point, so illuminating, that both discovery and burial move in what Virginia Woolf called the "stream of consciousness" - enormously satisfying, laced with ethical questions, the human predicament, coming to grips with human nature and of issues whether right or wrong. Of the many women's novels I have read, I have found both a questing and a questioning.

In her new novel "Small Wedding" there is no stultifying of form or texture. That is the true soul of the woman, for there is no assertion of the present as being of value only because it is of real existence. This is something that is positively "maternal". Sita does not take away from the present the chiming hours of what has gone by, nor does she neglect the hours yet to come.

What we have is a solid basis of sense and reality - the reality of "Knife Bappa", uncomfortable in his three-piece suit and a bride who wishes to giggle over the past days and tries to be decorous.

This is an utterly homespun story that will have readers eager to piece together the scene-shifts that are so well orchestrated. And no, I'm not going to fill up this review with chunks of it, however tempting. I recall the time one of Sita's poems called her a "gode person". Oh yes, there will always be a sprinkling of the countryside, the village, the rural, the poor hanger-on relations, and they all have their parts to play, but you need to settle for "feeling" for in Sita's case, all art, taste, speech, life springs from feeling - and to Hades with reason!

Long ago, Sir Joshua Reynolds said that there is a fundamental ground common to all the arts that require only two faculties of the mind - imagination and sensibility.

We may say that in "Small Wedding" there is no real call for imagination; that the story sweeps around in Sita's mind like a over-long piece out of Facebook, but to rework the hotchpotch image into something tell-able, sensibility is the need of the hour. So okay, some may call "Small Wedding" a beautiful, imaginative work, but if so, that imagination is securely held in the residence of Sensibility.

Sita Kulatunga may not be a prolific writer. Some I know are, but I know that they cannot leave what they have written to simmer gently in those first warm juices. They will pop in a ladle and carry some of the broth into yet another book.

This needs to be corrected, don't you think? Sita carried away the State Literary Award for "Dari, the Third Wife" and has been twice short-listed for the Gratiaen. I urge readers to take her originality as the strong quality of a woman's mind. Our booksellers and the publisher must be as the shakers and stirrers and not let such productions lie around the shelf....but you tell me: at what bookshop today do you find an enthusiastic staff to tell them of the good reads that await them?

With my best wishes to Sita, let me remind you that there is no woman writer, no "Mother of the Novel" in Sri Lanka who will write with just one idea in mind. Sita is special in this respect. Too many, and the men especially, are held fast with one idea only. Take our so-called "big men". Today they can talk or discourse on nothing else but "ranaviru". No, I'm not mocking them. Had I the opportunity, I would have been up north as well but nobody wanted a 74-year-old perisher!

Sita has a vast train of ideas and great thoughts. All she does is reduce them to practice and the book becomes a great art. Read "Small Wedding" and ask how so many causes and consequences, so much activity, humanity, so much of the speculative faculty, can make it "small".