Poverty, Pride, and Memory: On the Writings of Basil Fernando
Journal article by Anders Sjöbohm; World Literature Today, Vol. 73, 1999
Journal Article Excerpt
Poverty, Pride, and Memory: On the Writings of Basil Fernando
By ANDERS SJÖBOHM
On the west coast of
Sri Lanka, just north
of the capital Colombo, there is a small village where the majority of the
inhabitants are poor people belonging to the fisher
and the washer castes. The name of the village, Palliyawatte, indicates that it is Christian, for in Sinhala
palliya means "church" and watta means "property." It became Christian -- Catholic -- after the Portuguese conquest of the coastal provinces of Sri
Lanka in the early sixteenth century.
Even today the west coast as a whole makes up a
Catholic core area in otherwise Buddhist Sri Lanka,
Catholicism having struck deeper roots than might
be explained by the violence of the conquerors. It
even stood the test when Catholics themselves were
persecuted, after the Portuguese (following one
hundred years of rule) were chased out by the Reform Dutch. When their time had come to its end,
and when after another 150 years the more tolerant
English took over, the Catholic Church again
emerged as the strongest of the Sri Lankan Christian churches, while the Reformed Church collapsed
like a house of cards.
But back to Palliyawatte. In this village, fifty-one
years ago, the writer Basil Fernando was born. In
those days the village certainly lived up to its name:
the village church was a natural center, the priest
the foremost authority, the bishops more well
known than politicians. People went to church regularly, and on Good Friday the women dressed in
black. Especially in the drama of Passion Week, the
villagers lived through their own exposed position
and agony, their poverty and the threat of illness
and death.
The church statues of Jesus Christ on the cross
were especially easy for the fishermen and washers
to identify with: a suffering and lonesome human
being, clothed in a simple loincloth like themselves,
but also a Christ who, according to Fernando, radiated helplessness -- and submissiveness. Submissiveness was exactly what the church, the offspring of
ANDERS SJÖBOHM has published literary criticism in various
newspapers and magazines since 1969 and has written longer articles on popular literature for critical anthologies as well as essays for popular use on such figures as Virgil, Georg Trakl, and a
number of Swedish authors. Since 1983 he has been introducing
(mainly anglophone) Sri Lankan writers and their works into
Swedish, among them Jean Arasanayagam. He works in a public
library near Gothenburg and is currently writing a history of this
library.
foreign conquerors, preached. Neither did it ever seriously try to resist the caste system; it even stirred
up bad blood when a new priest, a Frenchman, allowed low-caste boys to participate in the altar ser
vice.
The priest never let the villagers get to know him
intimately, and he considered himself their benefactor, not their liberator. "He helped the poor, / But
disliked / A tailor's son becoming a doctor," to
quote from Evelyn My First Friend and Other Poems
( 1985 , 28). When Basil Fernando was a child, however, poverty in Palliyawatte was not as deep as it is
today. Perhaps this helped make it easier for the
church to play the role of benefactor. People could
dress better and had more to eat than either before
or after; there was even meat every day of the week,
except Fridays, when Catholics traditionally do not
eat meat.
Poverty, humiliation, and the agony of self-contempt, however, were always present, as were the
screams of those who where beaten up in the police
station. They too have remained present in the writings of Basil Fernando. Even his first published
short story, from 1968 and in Sinhala, deals with
the sense of relief felt by a low-caste boy: the monsoon rain forces him to stay at home, and he does
not have to go outside into a world where his value
is always questioned. In another short story, from
the 1990 collection Six Short Stories of Sri Lanka,
the writer lets a disillusioned revolutionary, a former
priest, observe: "Poverty is no abstraction. It is
something which eats into you, into your nerves,
eyes, ears, anything that may be called the soul and
body" (150).
Moreover, times grew worse. With the fifties
came rising prices and massive protests, a Buddhist
renaissance with nationalist overtones, ever more severe antagonism between the Sinhalese and the
Tamil minority. ...
A short note on published poems
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 Leave a Comment
By Basil Fernando
(October 22, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka Guardian) My first poem was published in New Ceylon Writings while I was a student of law at the Faculty of Law, Colombo, edited by Dr. Yasmin Gunaratne, who was then teaching at Peradiniya University. I published my first collection of poems, The New Era to Emerge, in 1972. Several of the poems published in that short collection were reproduced in several anthologies. Two of the anthologies that I do remember are the ones produced by Dr. DCRA Gunatilake and Dr. Rajiva Wijesinghe. Several of these poems are also translated into other languages and reproduced outside Sri Lanka. I published my first Sinhala collection around 1974 under the title Koluwa Malaya, and most of the poems are around the massacre of young people in the 1971 insurrection. One of the poems was translated under the title ‘The Wreath with No Name’ and has been reproduced constantly. It is also engraved into the stone before the Disappearances Monument in Seeduwa, Katunayake. The poem reads as follows:
The Wreath with No Name
This wreath of flowers
with no name attached
is for you
who has no grave
It is placed
besides a road
as the earth which touched
you cannot be found
Forgive me
for making a memorial
by the wayside.
Forgive me.
I shared the award for best poem with Richard de Soysa from New Ceylon Writings for my poem ‘Yet another Incident in July 1983’. This poem has been reproduced over and over again and translated into many languages. It has been included in anthologies and also in other books. It has also been used as part of the syllabus in some universities outside Sri Lanka.
I published my third collection of poems, second in English, sometime in the 1980s under the title Evelyn, My First Friend. Poems from this collection, too, have been included in anthologies.
My fourth collection of poems, third in English, was Kalyana Mitra (Beautiful Friendship), which has about 60 poems, and several of these poems also have been published separately in publications in Sri Lanka and abroad. My fifth collection of poems is The Sea was Calm behind your House, published in English. My sixth collection of poems, second in Sinhala, is China Gedara Kirilige Geethe (Bird of the Chinese House).
A collection of my poems was translated into Malayalam under the title Sundaramaithry, which is a translation of the poems in Kalyana Mitra by Dr. Dhanya Menon. To my knowledge, this is the first collection of a Sri Lankan poetry collection of a single author into any Indian language.
Several of these collections can be viewed at www.basilfernando.net
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