Sri Lankan English set off a firestorm between an editor of an English national weekly and a literary panel at a previous Galle Literary Festival. The editor had side props from a Kelaniya English Honours student. GLF 2009 had the same environment, and I was looking forward to seeing the courageous duo once again, in vain.
GLF is ‘famous’ to have confined their forum mostly for foreign ‘elitist writers’. So did this local panel who wanted to sing hymns for Sri Lankan English fictionists over Sinhala writers. For them, Sri Lankan English writers have more depth and they reach a wider audience, than the Sinhala writers. Editor and undergraduate – I am proud of you - braved it claiming it was an elite snobbish faux pas<$> to pass such comments.
Now we are at the heart of the subject. Is Sri Lankan English fiction better than Sinhala? Do they have a wider audience? Just because they handle English, does that mean they are a privileged lot? Or whether they write with more in-depth? My faith – be it fair – is that it is not.
There is a reason. I observe three common negative features in Sri Lankan English:
1. Winding sentences with obscure words and less idioms, phrasal verbs and expressions.
2. Ubiquitous basic errors in spellings, punctuation and subject-verb order
3. Lack of proof reading and sentence reconstruction.
I do not need to generalize this, but still with these features, we have doubts about an international audience, let alone ‘in-depth’ nonsense. Even when it reaches international market, we have doubts about their quality. We should take the Sinhala fiction in this backdrop. Sri Lanka’s Sinhala fiction evolves – apparently – faster than its English fiction. For that matter, most of the Sinhala fiction are readable, with short sentences and good editing, hence is well polished and well positioned.
There is another fact above all. The Sinhala fiction has more in-depth outlook of the society it speaks of. Most of the Sinhala writers are village-born, and the language they use goes alongside. As for Sri Lankan English writers, most of them are settled beyond our shores, and does not have a very good view of the very society they were born in. If Sinhala writers could write their originals in English – not translated by others – the international market would have loved to accept them. But it does not happen. Most of the Sinhala master storytellers with an excellent command of their own society cannot handle English the way they handle Sinhala. And writers for whom English is cakewalk cannot claim for an excellent command of the society they speak of. This is the hybridization they speak up in literary circles. Ediriweera Sarachchandra was a bilingual and yet he could not get the effect he built up in Sinhala when he wrote in English. Ashley Halpe could not make the same effect in English when he translated Wickramasinghe’s works. Sri Lanka’s English writers, such as Sarachchandra and Halpe are very proficient in English, and all the same they do not live up to the same grade translating pathos and nuances of the culture into an alien language. Because Sinhala and English are two different languages. You can translate Shakespeare or Sarachchandra, and you don’t see the Englishman in Shakespeare and the traditional villager in Sarachchandra.
SLE writers are so fond of banking on obscure words, must be thinking it would show up their scholarship. The complexity or the beauty of the writing, for most of the Sri Lankan English writers, lies on words not on the sentence patterns. We can see this clearly when we compare SLE with non SLE (British and European suburbs) novels:
“The second group which consisted of ancient, secret remedies for all the ailments under the sun, he studied.” (from an SLE novel)
“She would be lively, he felt sure: she would wriggle and scratch. All the better.” (from a non SLE novel)
Non SLE writers work the language with simple words; their aesthetic complexity lies on the sentence patterns. Where most of the SLE writers use obscure words, non SLE writers use idioms and phrasal verbs. They are rich with many kinds of expressions.
The memory of the editor and the undergraduate now gladdens my heart. They called the kettle black cannoning into that GLF panel. The panel had to eat humble pie: Sinhala writers are far better than Sri Lankan English writers – not to worry about exceptions.
