Far above the ‘Form’!

Ruwini JAYAWARDANA

Dr Sumathy Sivamohan

She believes in art as a desire of mediating change rather than a direct tool of social reformation. Growing up in a fairly sheltered conservative middle class background in Jaffna books were the doorway to a wider world for her. The solitary of reading motivated her to think differently that is now evident in her literary works.

Be it poetry, prose or the screen, her take is on the road less traveled to life. She has ventured beyond convention to mould her writing and productions.

Her research and academic involvement includes publications and conference presentations on postcolonial literature and theory, women’s movements in Sri Lanka, Performing Arts (theatre and film). She has won the Gratiaen in 2001 for her play Thin Veils . A Washington State University doctorate holder, she was a member of the Drama Panel of the Arts Council of Sri Lanka and the member of Performing Arts Society in Sri Lanka.

Ingirunthu (Here and Now), the latest addition to her collection of artistic works, will be screened this year. Our ‘Encounter of the Week’ is the Head of English Department, University of Peradeniya, poet and filmmaker Dr Sumathy Sivamohan.

Q: You are known as a poet, author, filmmaker or a lecture of literature, critical theory, theatre and film theory. What comes for you first?

A: They are like dreams: autobiographical, political and philosophical. They appear like flashes of truth in a dream and I snatch at what whizzes by in whatever colour in whatever form. If that is film, then it might be poetry too. Who cares and who knows what it is all about anyway? I need to tell and I tell how I can.

Q: Isn’t Ingirunthu more of a documentary than a film?

A: I can answer this at many levels. Let me try.

Firstly, the question you ask is about form.

What is the form of a documentary and what is that of feature? Could you tell me what the formal features of a fiction feature are? This cannot be defined at all, and should not be defined.

I think in Sri Lanka there is no audience for documentaries and there is no culture of watching and viewing documentaries. Individuals might watch documentaries from around the world, but there is not much of a documentary viewing/making culture here.

Ingirunthu is not a documentary if you apply the conventional understanding of documentary; it does not attempt a ‘truth’ about a situation. It does not demonstrate a truth. To the contrary, in my view, it questions that understanding of truth. That’s how I would see your question. When I was about to make Ingirunthu , I thought a lot about its form, for I knew form would be crucial to this film. Form is crucial to any film, but in a non linear film, form has to be thought over and over.

In a linear film, form is shaped by the time line of the story. You may get flashbacks and you may even have multiple narratives, but the contents would still be shaped by the story, the narrative.

In linearity, form dominates and shapes the progression of the film in such a way, it becomes naturalized; you do not raise questions about form.

In the making of Ingirunthu I had to think deeply about form, not for its own sake, but to develop a narrative, that is meaningful to the people it is about, to myself, and to the audience. I had to then raise questions about form and hence your question. I thought of Ingirunthu as epic narration to draw upon Brechtian conception.

When a colleague of mine told me that Ingirunthu exemplified Brecht’s concept of alienation, I was mighty pleased. But I was not thinking of Brecht or any one else when I made the film. In fact I had Toni Morrison’s Beloved , Moby Dick by Herman Melville and Ritwik Ghatak’s trilogy, particularly Meghe Dhaka Tara , in mind when I thought of the film.

I also had at the back of the mind, The Tree of the Wooden Clogs by Olmi, a wonderful and deceptively simple narrative film. is not like any of the above.

It is not like Moby Dick or Meghe Dhaka Tara . Neloufer de Mel did see Esther Valli in Ingirunthu as the character ‘Beloved’ in Morrison’s novel Beloved without any prompting from me.

But formally speaking, Ingirunthu is very different from any of the above.

To come back to documentary/fiction-feature dichotomy: I follow my own train of thought and I developed a form that would capture the urgency of the “Here and Now” of the people of the Malaiyaham, the people of the tea plantation.

It is a film of “conversation” and I use the word conversation metaphorically. It is about the conversations I had and continue to have with my friends who are located in and outside of the ‘Malaiyaha’ community.

As I told you, I did not develop anything too consciously; but I knew I was taking some risks. I wanted something that was immediate, urgent and unplanned. I sought a documentary effect that would make a comment on the idea of documentary as well. I used a free camera that would capture things ‘as they are’, though they might have been more planned than you would think. As you know I come from a theatre background and I like to see what the actors bring to the stage or the situation here.

Oranges and even Piryalayam were heavily scripted documents. With Ingirunthu , I tried not to control the actors too much and looked to see how best the film could bring them out as people and not as actors. I had the main idea which I gave the actors, and they improvised; after which I delineated the situation and circumscribed the action, working out until I got what I thought was the desired effect.

The actors were up to this. They were game. Even during shooting, I sometimes let the situation develop to see how far I could go. Once you think about form in this active sense, form becomes unimportant. You would be free to play with it and with your material. You will take control of the form and not let it dominate you. I like that play; the crafting; the deep intellectuality; the fascination of seeing the risks one takes pay off; the collaboration; the very semiotics of it.

Q: Your past films Oranges and Piralayam too include autobiographical and real life details. Why do you prefer to make productions based on true incidents rather than fiction?

A: Oranges uses archival material rather self consciously. The archival material in Oranges disrupts the fiction part. Oranges is autobiographical only in outline. The film itself is not autobiographical. Piralayam situates the story within the tsunami. I admire documentary films and documentary filmmakers; documentaries is something I feel I cannot do. I feel I am not courageous enough to do documentaries. There is something so unpredictable about documentaries. I think I like to bring that fascination I have for documentaries into my filmmaking.

Scenes from Ingirunthu

Also, I use documentaries to disrupt the linearity of fictionalizing. In Oranges I have both a naturalized bomb blast, a reconstruction and archival material of bomb blasts. They give meaning to each other. But Oranges is really a highly fictionalized work. The use of documentary material is like a punctuating act; to create episodes and to create another layer of meaning. One could say, that in Ingirunthu too, the documentary effect produces different levels of meaning. But here, I am speaking as a viewer, not as a filmmaker.

Q: What interested you about the plantation sector?

A: This necessitates a long answer. I will be slightly enigmatic here. I live and work in Peradeniya and Kandy. It is important for me to make sense of the histories that surround me; to make conversation; understand the reality of being Sri Lankan.

Q: What was the biggest challenge you faced in making Ingirunthu ?

A: Battling it out with the big plantation companies who operate with a feudal-colonial understanding of territory.

Q: Do you believe that a work of art can change the mindset of the society?

A: No. It can create spaces for discussion, a momentum, and a desire. Maybe desire is the best word here, the desire to be an agent of change. I expect little more from art. If it becomes a mass movement then it can generate and shape desire, articulation, aspirations. But individual works would not just by themselves change the mindset of society.

Q: What is your view on Sri Lankan writing in English when compared with English writing across the world?

A: When I read I do not compare. I read Sri Lankan writing, of any language, only when I want to, when somebody tells me that a particular work is exciting or worth reading; or when I know the writer. So, I do not feel that somehow Sri Lankan literature needs to be propped up, encouraged or anything like that.

For this reason, I must say, I am not an authority on Sri Lankan literature in English.

However, if I could hazard an answer I’d say, today you find emerging forms of writing in English that are far more exciting than those long ago. The reasons for these are that there are more people writing in English today than before.

And secondly, more and more writers are emerging from a bilingual and who knows even trilingual environments, bringing in a more dynamic idiom. Though in terms of quantity there might not be much to speak of, there are flashes of brilliance in Sri Lankan writing in English.

Q: Do you see holding events such as the Gratiaen Award and the Galle Literary Festival as an encouragement to budding young English writers?

A: I hope not. I hope these elite formations do not become defining moments for literary engagement. I hope literary engagement in English is driven by a deep seated need to communicate, tell a story, to write graffiti, etc. I am not somebody who thinks it is important for a Sri Lankan English corpus. Why do we even speak of English literature in Sri Lanka as an exclusive form? Why aren’t we speaking of it as something that has to do with writing itself in any language?

Q: Are you satisfied with

the work done by university English departments and is there any room for improvement?

A: If I may speak about Peradeniya English Department, which is the only one I know best: there is something we do well. That is a broad literary canon. Our students are given a good grounding in the canonical, in critical thinking, in teaching language, and language acquisition. What I’d like to see happen is more collaboration between these three sections; Literature, language and critical theory- maybe more of an engagement with other disciplines and research that goes outside of analyzing texts. After you asked this question, I thought of asking the students about it; it’d be interesting to find out what they think.

Q:How has winning the

Premchand Fellowship 2011 helped you in your work?

A: I was of course thrilled to be awarded the fellowship about which I knew little until I was called by the Indian Cultural Centre Director Mr Ramachandran, who broke the news.

I was on my way to Norway for a performance. I was completely taken aback. In India I was among some of the giants of literature and I felt embarrassed and honoured at the same time about the award.

The writers I met were very sincere and dedicated people. What really enchanted me was the interaction with writers from so many different languages and all of them demanding attention in their own right.

I was at the Sahithya Akademi award ceremony and it was in the small group interactions, one on one discussion that I found a lot of understanding about what the writers were writing about.

I attended a conference on Dalit literature in Delhi which I found very moving and thought provoking. Coming back to multilinguality: I was asked again and again about the language I wrote in and when I said English, I felt a certain sense of resistance. The unasked question: ‘why do you write in English?” I always felt obliged to add rather hastily: “but my theatre and films are in Tamil,” I felt obliged to justify my choice. I did not want to say, like many other writers writing in English, “I have no choice, this is the language I know best.” Could one really say, writing in English today, it is not a choice? It is a choice, a choice of privilege. To say I write in English because I have no choice, philosophically speaking, is not accurate. I have a choice over not writing at all. I have a choice about wanting to be a writer.

And that choice makes me a writer in English. I thought a lot about my own location as a writer.