In an insightful interview by Rashmika Madawala for the Youth Observer, award-winning author Romesh Gunasekera reflects on the enduring impact of his acclaimed novel ‘Reef’, which celebrates its 30th anniversary since being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. With the release of new translations, including the first-ever Sinhala version, Gunasekera shares his thoughts on the journey of his literary career, the role of ecological themes in his work and the socio-political landscape of Sri Lanka during the turbulent decades he explores.
Q: Reef celebrates its 30th year since being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1994. A new French translation and the very first Sinhala translation of ‘Reef’ came out this year. Looking at the journey of three decades, how do you feel about it now?
A: I feel lucky to have been able to write the books that I have written and for appreciative readers who read these books. I have been waiting for a Sinhala Translation from the beginning and to have it happen now with ‘Reef’ is a great joy.
Q: When I first read this book a few years ago, I found ‘Reef’ still having validity in many ways. You had chosen the ‘60’s sixties to the ‘90’s- three decades as your setting for the novel. Those three decades were the most challenging times for Sri Lanka. It shapes the country in which we are living today. You wrote this thirty years ago. What were your thoughts at that time? What are the changes you see now?
A: I started writing ‘Reef’ the day my first book ‘Monkfish Moon’ was sent to the printers. I had not planned to write a novel set in that particular time frame. My original intention was more to do with creating a new voice. One that I hadn’t heard before. But in the course of writing for just two years, the period and place that I had started exploring in my first collection of stories took over the novel.
The voice grew and the place grew around it. I felt this was a world that I had not experienced in imaginative writing in English before and therefore I wanted to create it. The years that Triton, the narrator, grows up and finds his voice became the main focus. But I had also learned from my stories in ‘Monkfish Moon’ that fiction has to contend with the political realities of the world. And so it had to make sense in the world that I was writing in as well as the world my characters lived in. The story of ‘Reef’ had to have meaning in the London of the early ‘90’s that I experienced.
At that time, the fuel stations close to where I lived were all manned by Sri Lankans who had come as refugees. Some spoke in Sinhala and some spoke in Tamil. The opening scene of the book is not made up – it was a gift!
Q: Eco-criticism has become popular in recent years around the globe.
Concerns about the environment are being dramatised in Literature. But in 1994, ecocriticism was not as familiar as it is today. On page 33 of the book you wrote a sentence like this – “The tank was a sea, made safe by human imagination.” Prior to that sentence, you described the tank beautifully.
I found this interesting. Where do these thoughts come from? And what are your views on ecocriticism?
A: I take pleasure in seeing myself ahead of the curve on this, as with my book on Cricket. For me ecological concerns in ‘Reef’ are natural. It grew organically from the story and the art of telling it. The world I was exploring was the world I knew growing up in the ‘60’s.
Although I grew up in Colombo, the world I inhabited was very close to nature. I was lucky. That closeness to nature and the bond it creates is less easy to find in today’s world, even if you live in a rural environment. There is a lot more of the rest of the world impinging on it. What was special about the time and place of the novel was the natural world around it and its vulnerability. By writing I wanted to protect and recreate that world.
Eco-criticism is an academic approach which I guess allows for an appreciation of the ecological dimension in a text. Hopefully it increases that appreciation and understanding for some.
Q: Ranjan Salgado represents the elite class of that era. The tense illegal coup against the Sirimavo Bandaranaike and its after-effects were never captured in our books. As an expat writer, how do you face the challenge of understanding the real situation at that time? What made you write about these things?
A: I wrote about them and that period because I knew it first-hand as a child. I was there. I can remember the conversations about the coup. I had even seen some of those now historical figures and heard them speak. I knew individuals such as
Ranjan Salgado and Triton. I was not an expat then! I was a Sri Lankan before Sri Lanka became a Republic, I was a Ceylonese child growing up in Colombo.
I was very lucky because my parents knew an unusually wide range of people, from actors to activists, politicians of the Left and the Right, Marxists and entrepreneurs, the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural. I had a lot of models to draw on when I eventually started to write fiction.
Q: I found it interesting how you retold the story of Angulimala in the end, Saying it may have been penises rather than fingers. I am curious to know what made you think this way.
A: One of the recurring questions for me is, where does violence originate?
Why does it erupt? In my stories I try to explore it. When I was writing ‘Reef’ and remembering the conversations around me as a child, I remembered the variations of the Angulimala story that I heard. I remembered imagining and visualising the story and how disturbing I found it. I can’t now remember whether someone told me this variation, or whether I figured it out so that it had the same visceral impact on an adult reader as it had on me as a child. It seemed to me a way of showing the roots of violence in the human spectrum and the horror of it.
Q: The uniqueness of your writing style in ‘Reef’ was the challenging part I faced as a translator. I tried to keep the original text as far as I could. When you describe tanks, the sea, and other environments, language comes up like a snake that reacts to the flute. How did you build this language style?
A: To be a fiction writer, In my view one must try to be a magician. You want these marks on paper. The sounds we make and to create images. From these images, the reader’s imagination will create the characters and the story flow. So, you do your best to create a dream. In this book, one of the concerns is how we use language to make our world special. Triton becomes a kitchen artist and he also becomes the artist who creates his story. And for that he gains control over the use of language. In the English text you see him take control of the English Language. At first the English is simple but as the books progress, he gains confidence to own the language and change it by introducing his own vocabulary (including Sinhala words) and syntax. He mirrors my journey with language. I think this must be very difficult to convey in translation given that the subject is the language and his use of it. The language style in the book developed from my turning into the character of Triton in the book.
Q: Your title for the book ‘Reef’ and the main character Mr. Salgado was very concerned about the corals and the ecosystem. At one point in the book, Salgado says that corals can be destroyed even by urine. Corals and human life are both fragile. We could see how fragile Mr. Salgado was when Nili left him. Now after 30 years what do you think about your writing?
A: The metaphor of the reef is one of the most enduring elements of the book.
Luck plays a part in all our ideas. I think only as I write, not before. So while writing the book, the idea developed (much as a reef, or a pearl does). And only after I finished the first draft of the book did I see the importance of the metaphor. A reef is one of the strongest structures in the world. But this structure is made mostly of dead matter-skeletons to be precise. What gives it strength is the living coral layer on top of the skeleton. Somehow that living tissue, which is very delicate and can be easily destroyed, gives the dead matter tremendous strength. If the living coral die, then the whole reef disintegrates. This is what Salgado (and marine biologists of that time) were discovering. It struck me that this scenario is true of many things in our lives. Our bodies, though made of muscle and bone, are sustained by our most delicate tissue: the brain. We remain alive while that tissue is alive. Our minds are a combination of memory (the skeletons) and the imagination (the delicate coral). Our relationships are the times we have shared but kept alive by the delicate balance we achieve in the present.
Our societies are made up of the old and the experienced but survive on the health of the younger generation. The planet itself is a bit like a reef with us as the living vulnerable coral that can nurture it or destroy it.
Q: At the end you wrote, “Another country running out of money.” At the time when I read that line, we were already declared a bankrupt country. Even the UK faced many issues. If we revisit that sentence today, someone can tell you have seen the future of these two countries.
A: Disastrous futures are easy to see, because these things recur. Hope is much more difficult. In my most recent novel, ‘Suncatcher’, also set in the ‘60’s, the description of the context was entirely applicable to the time of writing – 2019:where there were strikes, censorship, political shenanigans and shutdowns.
Q: You have written many novels and short story collections about Sri Lanka. I hope these books will be translated in the future. Do you have any message for the Sinhala reader?
A: Readers who come to these books in translation will become tomorrow’s writers, tomorrow’s translators. And despite the rapid advance of AI, I think translators who are imaginative creators (like writers), will still have a vital role in our world. It is books that will help the world become a better and more translated place. Please read the world and transform it for the better.
Keep our imagination alive!
