FICTION WRITING FOR CHEERLEADERS, or Oh What A Lovely War!

So, just what we needed, another patronizing novel on the atrocities of war in Sri Lanka! There I was at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, when Island of a Thousand Mirrors was soft launched, or soft sold along with a reading by the rearing to go author, Nayomi Munaweera who had got off a plane as fresh as a daisy, one that came all the way from Los Angeles, I heard!

When she had finished hectoring a Sri Lankan audience largely, about how Sri Lankans suffered during the war, and how she was detached enough to write from a distance, I couldn’t help but think that she was so full of herself – maybe with half that hot air she could have taken a shot at dropping by from Los Angeles and air-brushing or blow-drying the war to a finish at that time, but never mind …

As far back as 2011, if this writer is not mistaken, Colombo had already written the epitaph for this. Meaning that there was a seminar in Galle, titled post-war fiction in Sri Lanka, which essentially looked towards turning the page on the war as a theme in Sri Lankan creative writing which had been so hackneyed that it had become of considerable nuisance value, even to those who made a living, variously, out of the war.

Sri Lanka’s image

Everybody his girlfriend and his mother-in-law had been there, and done that, which was to write a novel about Sri Lanka’s multi-dimensional chronic misadventure, the so called ethnic conflict.

But that didn’t stop the pom-pom girl from Los Angeles from trying her hand at something that would make her unique among impresarios, somebody who tried to eke out something out of yesteryears passing fad -- ugh -- a fate worse than being a creative writing Ph.D with no sense of what it takes to write a novel with some passing appeal.

What is galling is not the for all intents and purposes foreigner’s attempt to cynically exploit a war that is behind us -- yet again -- for purposes of salesmanship, but the fact that when the epitaph was written for war-fiction long ago, there are still the attempts to create the false narrative that would blacken Sri Lanka’s image in the eyes of the foreigners whom as Munaweera herself says often ask, “Ah Sri Lanka, is that in Africa?’’.

Barely into her second chapter, Munaweera lets her imagination run riot and creates the little must-include vignette about how Sri Lankan troops molest a Tamil girl with a rifle butt in a train compartment asking the victim all the time, “Demala neda?’’.

Ah, Tamils were harassed by Sri Lankan Forces in the south of the country, and traumatized in front of the Sinhalese passengers!

Only a pom-pom girl from Los Angeles would have been able to conjure up fiction as far removed from the reality, as that. No doubt that when there were Tamil suicide bombers who blew themselves up all over the place, there was an element of suspicion that led to some discomfiture for Tamil women at checkpoints etc., one of those necessary inconveniences of war.

But even at the worst of times, the people of this country know, the forces were by and large civil and disciplined, which would make it safe to say that some of the soldiers that may have had sadistic tendencies either, never were so brazen as to harass Tamil civilians in the open as it were, in front of other passengers. Now, anybody can contest this opinion from an academic standpoint, but we who lived in Colombo during the war, and our Tamil friends and neighbours, do vouch for it, though a wannabe from Los Angeles may say, until the cows come home, that this is after all, fiction.

Horror story

That is the classic argument of the pom-pom set that think nothing of blackening a country’s image, putting its citizens in jeopardy -- they that have to live here, and travel abroad for instance, in an atmosphere that has been thoroughly prejudiced on their behalf by the Nayomi Munaweeras of the world. Imagine a Sinhalese meeting a Nayomi Munaweera reader in Los Angeles - - one of those Sri Lanka is in Africa types – to be confronted by the question, “Ah, its your soldiers that routinely rifle-butted Tamil girls on trains reminding them of their ethnicity, no?”.

See? Pom-pom creative writers are so utterly selfish, that they are inured to the consequences of their actions. They will shroud their self-serving intent of making up a concocted horror story out of what is a dated subject anyway in the hope that it will end up a blockbuster, with theories about uninhibited imaginations, and a creative writer’s right to create the milieu, even one that does not reflect reality.

But Munaweera should try those theories on the marines. Sri Lankans are tired of pom-pom girls, who drop in on the old country, to sell their cringe-making versions of war and racism, all invented, so that they could go from being creative writing academic to blockbuster novelist.

Hilariously, Munaweera is a big writer’s fail. Her attempt is to copy Michelle de Kretser, and at the beginning, she tries so hard that it is embarrassing, though to some extent she is able to carry it off. As the novel progresses however, she imitates badly too, which on the whole makes the book a dated effort at duplication, a dual-fiasco, the embarrassment of which is only compounded by the embarrassment of the so full of it promotional tour that followed in pom-pom fashion in the chic district of Colombo.