Creativity

“Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.”
Beatrix Potter

I think this quote explains the creativity best. Creativity is, in other words, originality – when you create something, it’s original. Creativity and education are poles apart. Helen Beatrix Potter is known as an English children’s writer, who was taught at home. Her quote, however, does not mean she is uneducated; only that she did not get a proper school education.

Then why education is a barrier for creativity? This is something hard to go into details. It’s easier when we start from the language and literature. Think of two categories: first category thinks creatively but doesn’t have a good command of written language (so to say, written language is what you inherit by education), and the second category is excelled in the written language but not creative enough. Who attracts more audience? In my opinion, it’s the first category.

William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe belong to these two categories respectively. The history of literature maintains that Marlowe is much more learned than Shakespeare. Shakespeare was just an actor who later turned out to be a writer almost by chance. Still, who got the plum audience? Marlowe isn’t even in the A/Ls English Literature syllabus, though every Tom, Dick and Harry knows who Shakespeare is - at least heard of him.

Way back in 1960s, Jacque Derrida, a French philosopher, popularised a particular term - Deconstruction. It’s so hard to locate a simple definition for this term. However deconstruction is simply rewriting a source – that can be history or some contemporary incident – creatively. Shakespeare used to take a source, which is raw in material, and rewrote it creatively. He was largely criticised for anachronism, but it was also a part of his creativity. He cut and chopped wherever necessary, and made it audience-friendly. If you say creativity is inborn, Shakespeare needs no further introduction.

Some opine Shakespeare plays were actually written – or rather rewritten - by Marlowe. It’s something you should see when you study their works; interesting . Anyway just leave both Marlowe and Shakespeare alone. Let’s talk about the latest Sinhala epic work – Jackson Anthony’s Aba. Anthony must have studied many sources too, but our official chronicle is Mahawamsa. If you read King Pandukabhaya’s chapter in Mahawamsa, you will realise the power of creativity. The two Yakshas are killed by the prince’s father to protect them. This is quite absurd in modern sense. So Anthony makes the royal command take the responsibility of their death. You need creativity to deconstruct the actual event. I don’t think this change has damaged the actual history. After all ‘Aba’ is a movie, which needs creativity in first place.

Now don’t get me wrong that education is not needed at all. It’s needed at all. But it’s needed only to sharpen your originality. If you have no creativity, however much you get education, you can’t get it.

They say poetry is best written in simple creative language. Say, you are so excelled in the language, and you use a heavy language as much as possible. What happens? You loose the audience.
I have mentioned that education and creativity are poles apart. But you come across exceptions too. Sarachchandra is the best example, who did the same thing Shakespeare did: rewriting a raw source creatively. On the other hand, G B Senanayaka did not have a proper education, and yet pioneered free verse in Sinhalese poetry. His poetry was full of creativity.

Martin Wickramainghe is a also a good example for the creativity sans proper education. I have heard one saying Mahesh Rathsara Maddumaarachchi, scripts love more passionately than Wickramasinghe. And now puritans will certainly chase me for breaking this news.

Need I write more on creativity, if only space permits!

Does reading make a perfect man?

One batch mate has dropped a short to-the-point mail asking me to confine the facts into one topic. With hats off to her request, I still got to have my say: I just can’t help treading on side alleys. One is connected to the other. Or near enough, anyway.

This time I am trying to edge my subject: reading with the Book Fair season. A fat subject area. I do not want to go into details why a book fair is important on encouraging reading. Sorry for putting it this way: these are nothing but empty talk for me. Especially when you have so many things to think of sideways.

Why read in the first place? Well they say reading makes a perfect man. A funny inbox mail reads: reading makes a man perfect. Nobody’s perfect. So why read?

Professor James Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes fiction is a well-read professor. But all his knowledge was powered to harm the living. Osama Bin Laden is also said to be a well-read scientist. What could he do with his exceptional brain? Reading makes you either a professional or a professor. And some professors are just ivory towers. Is it what we interpret as, or, mean by, ‘perfect’?

The intellectual Dr. E W Adikaram dropped reading towards the last stages of his life. The biography has details on how the philosopher had felt enough of reading and needed time to reflect his readings. This biographical episode cast a spell in my childhood thinking path, and elders got scared that I would drop reading too. You should not get the wrong end of the stick. The Adikaram theory does not prompt dropping reading, as it might be to a lazy reader. His matured decision has a meaning: you shall know what you will read.

Reading whatever falls on your hand is good for language development, but not for the perfection, I think. I bought Adolf Hitler’s biography in a previous book fair, but could not complete the voluminous book. First because of the boring language, and I felt like reading a biography of a notorious politician. You have hair-splitting answers against my stand here. There are political elements in the biography. You can get to know the making of a fixer. You can analyse modern politics with the contents. With many other reasons to justify reading the ‘great work’. May be good for political and social scientists, but not for a simple folk like I. I gain nothing by reading a voluminous biography of a notorious politician written in an archaic language.

So come to think about categories such as religion, literature and medicine. You will get ‘something’. Analysis of such reading may lead us towards a particular type of perfection. Religion brings you the feel of some sort of salvation. Literature makes you forget the real-life drama. Medicine will lengthen the beloved life. And there are many categories that might bring you to the brink of perfection. I have doubts on categories like ‘crime’. Just give this a thought. You are the Jury to choose a category between ‘religion’ and ‘crime’.

Today we live with heaps to read. Internet and Mobiles are worse. Some read papers on the mobile. Now that you have many things to read, even on the go, you got to learn how to read fast. They teach you that faster reading means faster learning. It’s like learning English in 8 days as guaranteed by ‘qualified English teachers’.

Don’t get me wrong in the bottom line. I do not want to spoil your reading habit. Just carry on. But be selective. I am going to stick to my words too this time keeping tabs on my bony wallet.

So happy reading to you all, and keep away from credit cards at the book fair!

On ‘Bringing Tony Home’

Of all the literary contributions by Tissa Abeysekara I think ‘Bringing Tony Home and other stories’ is the best – even surpassing his other works in English such as ‘In My Kingdom of the Sun and the Holy Peak’ and ‘Bringing Tony Home – a story in three movements’.

Those who haven’t read his two books with the titles bearing Tony’s name, will now have a question: what is the difference between ‘Bringing Tony Home and other stories’ and ‘Bringing Tony Home – a story in three movements’? The latter was a novella – on a dog called Tony - which won the Gratiaen whereas the former title, the last one, has three more stories added to the original novella on Tony.

Abeysekara uses inverted commas sparingly in the last one. That was to indicate his stream of consciousness. His sentence patterns have three lengths: very long, middle and short lengths.

He makes use of situation unlike his other English works to evoke his nostalgia. He has four stories with strong melancholic plots. The first story on Tony is an offshoot version of his previous novella. It’s about a dog who was abandoned by a family because of economic circumstances. The second story ‘Elsewhere: Something Like a Love Story’ is about ‘bittersweet’ memories of a ‘forbidden’ love between a young couple. ‘Poor Young Man: A Requiem’ has a young many trying to inject sense into his relationship with his father. The last of the collection is called ’Hark, The Moaning Pond: A Grandmother’s Tale’, where a much older man revisits the loss of his grandmother and experiences a profound revelation of her place in the history and mythology of her people. Count on me all these four stories are equally interesting, since each of them has a gripping story to tell you.

His language is not that simple and seems old world. It doesn’t have the modern Ken Follett touch, but is adorned with the olden day Charles Dickens style; the sentences of rich complexity evoking a plethora of meanings. More particularly he didn’t seem to be familiar with the common language used by many Sri Lankan writers in English. His language is alien in that sense.

He spoke high of bilinguals because he was one himself. Speaking of bilinguals, he was all over India’s R K Narayan. Abeysekara did not live in such close quarters to Narayan in language though they tended to use complicated sentences at times. Narayan was more a story teller while Abeysekara had the knack to touch his own heart without making the reading bored.

All the stories that come in the last book are his memories. He does not hide it; in fact he brings out his personal information like his full name too in some instances.

Sri Lankan English?

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.

Once upon a time!

A review even before the movie release is unethical – cards on the table, I agree. Well this is not a review exactly, because I am not going to analyse anything deep on cast or filming – that part can be handled later on when the movie is released. I just need to say that this is one of the few Sinhala movies that struck my heart.

Sanath Gunathilaka’s Ekamath Eka Rataka<$> - dubbed as ‘Once Upon a Time’ in English based on Emile Zola’s ‘For a night of love’ - is not an intelligent movie. Nor is it a standard movie. It doesn’t have a specific story line (so don’t worry I have nothing to lose your appetite on the film). It has neither start nor end. It just flows out.

An ageing man with a crooked back totters down to his office everyday. A cheesy looking young lawyer walks down the streets attracting girls. An aphrodisiac girl lives in a deluxe mansion getting dressed every evening for her suitor. Rest of the characters float along propping up this ‘threesome’. Ageing man plays the lead role whose routine pervades the movie. He has a soft companion at home to hear everything he has to say. Goodgirl is an understanding Labrador Retriever.

Not only that, it is adorned with a few you-know-what scenes. Wow, you can’t wait to watch the movie, eh? For me those scenes are well woven and nicely matched, a rare feature in Sinhala movies. Believe me it is not porn, as some would definitely jump the gun to label; they are very aesthetic and eye-pleasing scenes.

I naturally went back to Sanath Gunathilaka’s performance in Viragaya. I was at a loss. He performed an unrivalled role in Viragaya, but ‘Once upon a time’ man beats Viragaya’s Aravinda at times. In Viragaya he had to work mainly on his body and movement. But here he has to breathe in a complete oddball who can never beckon love but only sympathy. Speech, body movements and facial expressions have to keep on playing out that. And above all Sanath has to do the job of director as well as this lead role. No cakewalk in spades.

Zola’s creativity on the other hand is not so easy to handle on reel; it easily makes the audience yawn. Sanath somehow surprisingly handles that. He makes every scene tell us something. It doesn’t have a specific story, I repeat, but you have to read every scene, for they have untold stories.

The way the girl enters the scene is really impressive. The man was fast asleep with Goodgirl, and suddenly a light is flashed on both of them. They locate the source of the light to the mansion where the girl lives. They spot a girl with stunning beauty who closes the window at length leaving them again in usual darkness.

It also talks about feminine craving for strength and power. Their ability to win over men. Their influence over men. It is about two men and a girl, and how the fair sex has influence over them. Apparently girl falls in love with the younger one. She continues mocking the ageing man, but starts caring for him when she needs his assistance for a matter of life and death. But I don’t like to think the girl chose to care for him because she needed his help badly. I like to think it, their love, is complicated, rather.

The girl is constantly obsessed with her strength and influence over the boy she falls in love with. Her pride is often hurt and the boy even has to sacrifice his most precious thing just for the sake of girl’s pique.

These three are interlinked to each other, and so to say they are afraid of each other. The boy persuades girls in street to mock the man, but he doesn’t face him straight away. The girl doesn’t like the man’s face but loves listening to his flute for hours.

So this is about a love among three. Does the love triumph? What will happen at the end? Watch it. It is really funny! When I say really, count on me for that!