Bad citizens

Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

‘Is this art or bullshit?’ begins Asgar Hussein’s short story collection, The Mirror of Paradise, in ‘A Tale of Two Artists’, a satire on the pretensions of the Colombo art scene. The reader may well ask the same question of Asgar’s writing – is this art or bullshit? While there are elements of both in these thirteen stories, the truth is ultimately neither.

Asgar doesn’t demand of his readers the sort of lofty, sophisticated appraisal, feigned or otherwise, that the abstract painter Shantha from the opening story does from his viewers, with his portentously titled abstract canvases (‘Finite Evolution’, ‘Angst of the soul’). Despite the book’s title, from which you might expect a grim, social-realist dirge on Sri Lankan underclass life – a ‘mirror’ to the sandy beach, swaying palm tree ‘paradise’ promised by tourist brochures (get it?) – Asgar offers up a series of comic fables that gently satirise the anxieties and absurdities of Sri Lankan, largely middle class, life.

A dull accountant frets over the noise of cricket-playing boys, which threatens the calm of his respectable neighbourhood; a man who has spent his working life in England returns to Colombo to relive his carefree schooldays, only to have his nostalgia checked by the presence of an old nemesis; two students play at being prospective husbands and assume false, worthier identities in order to fool rich Kandyan families into lavishly entertaining them for their daughters.

But they aren’t all tales of well-to-do urbanites: tucked in among them are rustic, ‘village’ pieces, where the petty worries of their city counterparts are mirrored in the superstitions of the simple country folk that populate stories like ‘Grease Yaka’, where the fishing community of Makaragoda make increasingly farcical attempts to slay a black furry demon they believe keeps groping their women.

However, set against the ‘city’ stories, these tales of simple, credulous peasants, which take the form of traditional folk tales, can’t help but look condescending. They perhaps betray the writer’s own decidedly urban upbringing in Kandy, and his view of the countryside as someplace ‘other’ – a view no doubt shared by the city-dwelling characters he mocks so expertly elsewhere. Although charming and inventive as individual stories, the ‘village’ pieces together appear as contrived attempts to balance the affluent urban scenario that marks the rest of the book – something Asgar needn’t do.

The blurb on the back cover describes the stories as ‘a satire on human nature […] linked by a comic view of human existence […] intriguing and often outrageously funny.’ Although the better comic set-pieces will make any reader smile, especially those familiar with the insularity and aspirational fervour of Sri Lankan middle class life, it is at no point ‘outrageously funny’.

Asgar is often brutal to his protagonists – who, remaining largely likeable despite their comic foibles, are alternately beaten up, cheated out of millions, wrongly imprisoned and even driven to death. But their fates read more like cautionary tales, with all the cosiness and moral certainty that this implies, than black comedies – a genre which requires a certain trampling over taboos and a consequent discomfort in the reader. Indeed this could be just the sort of cheery, inoffensive poolside reading that tourists indulge in on their two-week visits to ‘paradise’.

Assuming the classical Greek comedy formula, each of the stories’ tragic-comic heroes has a blind spot that hampers their relations with others; in the case of Bandula in ‘A Man of Strong Opinions’, an overly zealous objection to both mosquitoes and politicians, which causes him to offend and alienate others at parties. This ultimately leads them, despite obvious warnings and omens to change their ways, to whatever calamity Asgar has in store for them – and so lessons are learnt and the greater cohesion of the community is validated.

Sometimes Asgar eschews these comeuppances and ends his stories with punchline gags – often scatological, and in one case involving urine – in a last ditch attempt to be ‘outrageously funny’. If they were bolder and wittier, the reader might excuse the shamelessly contrived and arbitrary manner in which these gags are brought about, and their failure to properly conclude the narratives. As such they come off as botched writerly tricks.

Yet, despite the breezy tone of Asgar’s prose – itself a model of good, plain writing that makes the whole thing wonderfully readable – the dark portents of the book’s title aren’t completely unwarranted. Although his characters for the most part enjoy great material comfort – spacious bungalows with fish tanks in smart districts of Colombo predominate – the bourgeois world that Asgar portrays is one crumbling under the heaped-up weight of envy, suspicion and avarice, and whose barricades against the uncertainty and chaos of the ‘real’ Sri Lanka prove thin. A wedding between a Sri Lankan Muslim man and a Dutch ‘Burgher’ woman is ruined due to their respective families’ fussy insistence on differing notions of ‘correct’ wedding conduct, and a drinking session among male friends descends from an exchange of work-related woes into insults and violence.

This is the true achievement of The Mirror of Paradise. What it lacks in belly laughs and black comic shudders, it makes up with a well-observed, subtle, yet fond parody of a society that fails to live up to its own prudish morals – and which constantly needs saving from itself.

The answer begins in art

Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

For four days only – 28th till 31st August (10am-7pm) – the Lionel Wendt Gallery and the Harold Pieris Gallery are hosting an exhibition that aims to distil the artistic response to 26 years of civil war from across Sri Lanka’s social spectrum. The plainly titled Visual Responses During the War: Selected Works of Artists features painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and video from 22 artists who together represent the island in miniature. Tamil artists Kiko, T. Shanathanan, G. R. Constantine, Vaidehi Rajasingam and Kamala Vasuki are exhibited alongside Sinhalese artists such as Jagath Weerasinghe and Muslims such as Muhanned Cader. Together they conjure a shared experience of conflict and suffering, and warn against the toxins of ethnic and religious chauvinism.

Chandradguptha Thenuwara, the curator of the exhibition, and a painter whose work also features on its walls, described to the Sunday Times the process of introspection and re-evaluation that the war forced upon Sri Lankan artists – something like a call to artistic responsibility, he recounted. Conventional notions of beauty and traditional methods of representation, such as the flat painted rectangle, were no longer felt to be sufficient in communicating the contradictions and cruelties of a society in perpetual war. A new artistic language had to emerge, with new formats and mediums of expression, to surprise viewers and shock them into a full consciousness of their present condition, and – most importantly – of how the division and mutual hatred had come to pass. ‘We were seeing things,’ Thenuwara said, ‘but we were not looking.’

Thenuwara went on to describe the delayed response of Sri Lankan artists to the transformed realities of war. Although the civil war is commonly said to have begun in 1983, with the Tamil pogroms, it was not until the early nineties that the ‘new’ art began to appear, grappling with the conflict head-on. Indeed, there is nothing in the exhibition that predates the nineties. New formats took precedence, such as multi-media installations, sculpture-painting hybrids, and video and digital art. Traditional Sri Lankan motifs were reworked; for instance, the exhibition contains a painting by Kiko of what at first appears to be a conventional image of Ganesh – only, on closer inspection, the elephant god is revealed to have striped tiger skin and to be wielding axes from multiple arms, expressing Kiko’s disquiet that her Tamil Hindu identity was being hijacked and distorted by Tamil militant groups for their own violent cause.

Of course, despite the growing conflict, the early nineties was also the era that conceptual, installation art became a big seller on the international art market – something that gained particular fame and notoriety with the Brit Art movement characterized by Damien Hurst and Tracey Emin – and its flowering in Sri Lanka at the time can perhaps be attributed as much to this as to the changed social realities of ethnic conflict. Yet there can be no doubt that it captured the shared suffering of civil war in a unique and often haunting way.

The exhibition contains an innovative piece of ‘book art’ from Kingsley Gunatillake: on an existing book that surveys the ‘culture’ of Sri Lanka, Kingsley has scrawled in pen the wording of the 1972 constitution, a resonate legal gesture that embodied the hope at the time for an end to Tamil grievances with an equitable settlement of rights – only, on either side of the open book, the respective armies of the government and the LTTE have burst through the pages in toy soldier form, firing at each other across the book’s spine. The violence committed against the cultural fabric of Sri Lanka is hinted at in the book’s ruptured pages, but the position of the two miniature sculptural armies on either side of the same book affirms the essential unity of the island, and the absurdity of the war itself.

The exhibition also sees the return of Anoma Rajakaruna’s multi-media installation, Quest, first exhibited in Colombo’s National Art Gallery in 2006 and exhibited here in a paired-down format. Anoma, who confesses to beginning her projects with no clear idea of their outcome, travelled with a collection of white paper doves from Jaffna to Matara to Colombo in the immediate aftermath of the 2002 ceasefire agreement, which at the time signalled a pause for rehabilitation and, crucially, reflection on the harm and suffering committed and felt on both sides. Shocked by the devastation she saw, she begun taking photographs which she later manipulated on a computer. The project evolved, however, when she began documenting, in a similar fashion, the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami, which in a single day killed 30,000, half the number of those killed in two whole decades of civil war. This added dimension underlined, she felt, the message of her work: the common experience of suffering as a universal evil, which begs nothing less than a universal response to alleviate.

Quest took the eventual form of a series of digital images set alongside a selection of quotations from authors, philosophers, politicians and ordinary Sri Lankans, with a dialogue to be drawn between them. The images and quotations were also synthesised in a 36 minute film projected on three different screens in one room of the gallery, each in one of the three principal languages of Sri Lanka: Sinhala, Tamil and English. Visual Responses to the War will display only the English version, which, as the Sunday Times can enthusiastically attest to, retains the original work’s hypnotic visual spell and urgent message of peace and moral regeneration. ‘How do we build up from these ashes of devastation…how do we get to peace from here?’ the artists asks. ‘For me, the answer begins in art.’