Ashok Ferry on writing Sri Lanka and his younger selves
“This society is fragmented – it’s a product of colonialism, but it’s also just a fact of paradise island.”
Ashok Ferry is a Sri Lankan author of seven novels, including The Unmarriageable Man, which won the Gratiaen Prize in 2021, one of the highest literary awards in Sri Lanka. He is based in Colombo, and spent his earlier years in Sri Lanka, throughout East Africa, and the United Kingdom.
A central theme in your writing is grief – but it really seems to take different faces. In The Unmarriageable Man, Sanjay is grieving his dad, his relationship, but also his life in Sri Lanka with his family. He seems to be plotting his return to Sri Lanka almost immediately after arriving in London which subverts the common idea of an ‘American dream’ (or in this case ‘British dream’). What was your thinking behind this?
You hit the nail on the head. For many people, they want to get to the West at any price. I grew up in Sri Lanka until the age of eight, and then in East Africa until eleven, and then England. So, I had been out of my home country from a young age, and I was itching to get back, but I also knew that to have a life in Sri Lanka, you need money. I could see that the government in Sri Lanka was tumbling, and I knew I had to work in England and make money. But I also thought that I would move back by thirty – whether or not I had any money. What really happened, is that thirty came and went, the money came, and I stayed a bit longer before returning. And all of my books are autobiographical – for me, writing is like vomiting after drinking too much. I never sat down to be a writer; it just came out of me.
Sanjay discovers he’s half British, but his ‘Britishness’ seems to really only go so far as passport – when he gets to London, his camaraderie is mostly with undocumented Sri Lankans, and he’s largely seen as an outsider.
Exactly, the ‘Britishness’ is irrelevant. I wanted to make Sanjay a bit more British than I am – I’m not a British citizen. But Sanjay is also so diametrically opposed to many Sri Lankans who go to the West and all too happily ditch their belonging to the home country – and their home country only creeps back later in their life. We’ve just had elections here and Colombo is crawling with elderly Sri Lankans who have sold their soul to go to the West and they’re back here not knowing what to do. I feel like tapping them on the shoulder and saying, ‘you did it wrong, you should have come back when you had your wits about you!’ But it’s so easy to be wise after the event – and it says a lot about the Western countries that they’re able to sell you this dream. But I wanted to show the other side of the picture – to show a Sri Lankan that only went there out of sufferance.
This is a great segue to the character of Janak – a Sri Lankan man who embodies so much of Sri Lanka, but who can’t necessarily come back because of his queerness. What is your thinking there?
Exactly, there are many Sri Lankans that can’t come back because of so many things, including ‘unsuitable marriages,’ – even a young man with a much older woman! Sri Lanka is still a very traditional country. There are many Sri Lankans in the West who can’t come back, but that Sri Lankanness will never leave them. I’ve seen grandchildren come back and say,+ ‘oh my God, this is where I belong.’ However, the sad truth is that in many ways, living in the West can spoil you from living here. You can no longer deal with the heat, mosquitoes, the ‘mañana mañana’ life. You go to the West and do very well – I always say that all it takes for a Sri Lankan to do well in the West is to get on a plane! – you make money, you come back, but in many ways, you can’t survive here for more than a few months at a time. When I came back to Sri Lanka, it was pretty much a foreigner. It took me seventeen years to start thinking like a Sri Lankan. My decision to come back was an intellectual one, not an emotional one – I decided this was the place for me. When I came back, we were in two wars at that time. In that first year back in Sri Lanka, people asked me why I came back, like I was a lunatic! I wanted to be part of this country, but foreigners are often viewed with suspicion here. Society in Sri Lanka doesn’t really want you – the thinking is ‘who are you, as a foreigner, to tell me how to do things!’ There’s a sense of poetic justice there.
Sri Lanka is a post-British colonial state. There’s a sense of injustice around this severing of communities with their homeland, isn’t there?
We have bought into this dream after 450 years of colonialism. Many of my friends, for example, are Irish. And the Irish, good on them, loathe the British! We would sit at worker’s teas and damn the British, but we were both making our money in Britain. And no one was forcing us to go to London, that’s one of the horrible byproducts of colonialism – it teaches us to revere the colonial master, and that life is better in the Imperial Capital than in the slave state. But life here, in many ways, is far better! But try telling that to some Sri Lankans living in London, they think I’m mad. If you live in the West, you can buy wholesale into the idea of the ‘Third World Country’ with shooters on rooftops – which is more likely to happen at a Trump election than here!
Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask about language – which can be very incendiary in Sri Lanka. There’s been so much language-based persecution, and I wanted to ask how that’s impacted your writing and how this has impacted the literary landscape in English?
I believe Sri Lanka – and I could be wrong – is the most colonized country in the world. 450 years between the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British. We went through many colonial ideologies, largely European, and for those reasons, it’s hard for us to think of us having an identity. We’ve gone through regimes that have invented identities, like the Sinhala Buddhist nationalism – what happens if you’re a Sinhala Catholic, or Tamil Hindu, or a Burgur Christian? What about us? It was a shorthand to say Sri Lanka is Sinhala Buddhist, but that’s wrong. In India even, there’s a homogeneous quality that we don’t have. We pride ourselves on the mosaic quality of us, but it’s only when you stand back that this makes sense – not up close.
So yes, language is explosive here. If you write in English, you can be perceived somewhat as an enemy. Between the three languages of Sri Lanka, very rarely do Sri Lankans read in the other language. My first book, Colpetty People, written in English, is a bestseller in Sri Lanka, still hasn’t found a translator. It’s crazy, a best-selling book hasn’t been translated into its home languages. This is because it’s a comedy and hard to translate, but also because there’s very few people that are truly bilingual here. People turned their backs on the colonial language, but we need English, and we’re too ashamed to admit that we don’t speak it well. It’s a comedy of errors, but it also gets worse – Sinhala and Tamil are diglossic, which means that it’s spoken differently than it’s written. Written Sinhala is courtly, Sanskritic – beautiful, and no bloody use to anyone. Everyone in Colombo speaks ‘kitchen Sinhala,’ which is frowned upon. My friends who write in ‘street Sinhala,’ boy do they get criticized for it. The intelligentsia feel they’re disrespecting the language. But when you write in ‘proper’ Sinhala, it’s not accessible. We’re just caught here. It’s changing, but it’s very slow.
In many ways, I’m glad my books aren’t translated. I wonder how Sri Lankans would react to my satirical work, for example – English humour is crueller than Sinhala or Tamil humour. It’s a mine field, and you can play it safe, but no one will read it. This society is fragmented – it’s a product of colonialism, but it’s also just a fact of paradise island. Therein, though, lies beauty. Making sense of it is a Herculean task, but always an interesting one.