An Interview with Romesh Gunesekara

[Romesh Gunesekara was born in Sri Lanka and was brought up there and in the Philippines. He moved to Britain in the early 1970s and now lives in London. His widely acclaimed first novel Reef (Granta Books, 1994) became a publishing sensation by being short-listed for the Booker Prize as well as for the Guardian Fiction Prize. His first collection of stories Monkfish Moon (Granta Books, 1992) was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the David Higham prize and was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1993. Widely anthologized and broadcast, his work has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, German, Dutch and Hebrew amongst others. Besides fiction, his poetry also has won several awards. The Sandglass (1998) is his most recent novel. All three books are also available in Penguin India.

T Vijay Kumar spoke to Gunesekara during the 15th Oxford Conference at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Excerpts.]

What I was suggesting, but what I didn’t amplify very much in the session, was that Sri Lankan English writing goes back a very long time, to about 1800s, obviously—newspaper writing and also literary writing. But I was trying to explain that since Independence, the English language and the way the English language has been regarded in Sri Lanka has changed over the years. In the early decades after Independence—50s, 60s, and 70s particularly—the English language was not highly regarded. It was really seen as a language of imperialism and so on, as in many parts of the world. But it meant, of course, that it had no popular appeal at all, and even among, I suppose, literary circles of that time, it was to some extent under siege. Then, partly because of the educational policies (?) of successive governments and the way things have gone, there was a huge deterioration, I think, in the English language. It didn’t have quite the support it has had. And it is really in the 90s that you get the feeling that the use of the English language has become value-free, less problematic, and in recent years you do see much more writing in English. Of course, there has been a group of writers who managed to continue to write, and put in interesting work right through out the period.

What I mean is that the English language now is a very peculiar language, and one of its great peculiarities, and one of its attractions to me, is the fact that it is no longer ‘owned’ by any single group. It is a language that any one can use and any one can own. It is do with the peculiarities of the language, it is to do with, perhaps, the flexibility of the language, the ease with which it can be learnt, and the fact that it is very difficult to go wrong with it. Any use you put it to is valid. So that’s what I mean, obviously it has its history (?) and everything else. It is to do with ownership of the language, and if you think of the writers in the decades past, there used to be a lot of anxiety, a lot of angst, about the use of a colonial language, an imperialistic language. In Sri Lanka it has been seen as a weapon, language as a sword that has been used (?). I don’t think that applies any more.

Yes. Languages are always tools, and this one has become more evidently a tool because it doesn’t have that ownership issue.

I think it can be anybody’s language. Language is a hugely emotive issue. As one famous Sri Lankan politician very famously said, there is nothing like the language issue to excite people, its one that you can fan a lot of flames with. There are obviously links between language and culture, and they are very important. So there are different reasons why people have different relationships with different languages, with one’s own language, or whatever. But I think, the English language, simply because of the nature of the beast, as it were, has, because of the nature of the modern world, a slightly different existence. It’s a bit like cyberspace, it has that kind of existence. It does have its roots, but what has changed over time, and now recognized by every body simply out of the numbers involved, is that while its roots in England and Wales are important, its roots in India, Sri Lanka, Australia and wherever, are equally important.

[For the complete interview see The Book Review, ‘South Asia Special’. 24. 10 (Oct 2000), 69-71]