Papers by Maryse Jayasuriya
Routledge eBooks, Nov 16, 2022
South Asian Review, 2013
'She has grown up' they said with love And pride, relatives made gifts encircling My fingers with... more 'She has grown up' they said with love And pride, relatives made gifts encircling My fingers with family heirlooms ... Telling me that I was now ready For love and procreation (59-64
Transcultural Humanities in South Asia, 2022
South Asian Review, 2012
In this interview with Maryse Jayasuriya, Vivimarie VanderPoorten discusses the lack of publishin... more In this interview with Maryse Jayasuriya, Vivimarie VanderPoorten discusses the lack of publishing infrastructure, particularly with regard to Anglophone writers in Sri Lanka, and the significance of the Gratiaen Prize in such a context. She also analyzes how her own hybridity reflects the colonial past of Sri Lanka. She mentions her ambivalence regarding writing creatively in English and the need for, as well as the difficulties of, translating poetry from English to Sinhala and Tamil and vice versa. She also discusses the influence of the internet and social media sites on her own writing, especially in terms of interacting and receiving feedback from readers.] V ivimarie VanderPoorten is relatively new to the Sri Lankan literary scene but has made a significant mark on Sri Lankan Anglophone literature. She is the author of two collections of poetry, nothing prepares you (2007), for which she won the Gratiaen Prize, and Stitch your eyelids shut (20 I 0). After graduating from Sri Lanka's Kelaniya University, with a degree in English Literature and Economics, she completed her M.
An International Journal of Asian Literatures, Cultures and Englishes, 2016
Since the end of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, Sri Lankan writers have sought to come to terms ... more Since the end of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, Sri Lankan writers have sought to come to terms with the long-running war and its violent conclusion. This essay considers three recent novels by Sri Lankan diasporic women: Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012), Chandani Lokuge’ s Softly , As I Leave You ( 2012) and Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014). Each of these novels focuses on the trauma of the war and the way that the war has affected and continues to affect those in the diaspora as well as in the homeland. Moreover, the novels provide a comparative view of the diaspora’s relation to the war, as Munaweera is resident in North America, Salgado in the United Kingdom, and Lokuge in Australia. In keeping with this issue’s theme – “from compressed worlds to open spaces” – my essay explores how South Asian women writers address the Sri Lankan war in the open spaces of the transnational Sri Lankan diaspora. As all three novels suggest, the end of the m...
South Asian Review, 2008
W omen writing in English in Sri Lanka face two substantial challenges: the inhospitable publishi... more W omen writing in English in Sri Lanka face two substantial challenges: the inhospitable publishing environment and the task ofrepresenting the country's long-running and mutating war situation. 1 This essay will begin by briefly delineating the difficulties of publishing in English in Sri Lanka and then proceed to an overview of the works of two writers, Jean Arasanayagam and Kamala Wijeratne, who address Sri Lanka's ongoing conflict from perspectives that engage questions of ethnicity, hybridity, language, and identity. Their poems and short stories reflect, with much immediacy and power, the experiences and ideologies of certain groups of Sri Lankans who live in the midst of violence. Through their fiction and poetry, Arasanayagam and Wijeratne point to beliefs and ideas that may sustain the conflict as well as possibilities for effecting change. Writers who live in Sri Lanka and write in English face a daunting struggle when it comes to getting their work published. There is no significant support system or infrastructure to help Sri Lankan writers in English edit, publish, or distribute their work, perhaps because local publishers and booksellers find it more profitable to cater to the majority of Sri Lankan readers who prefer their reading material in Sinhala or Tamil. There are only a few local presses-such as Vijitha Yapa, S. Godage, Sarasavi, and, most recently, Perera-Hussein-that publish works in English. There are no literary agents or editors, and it is up to individual writers to make sure that their work gets into print. 2 One option that is open to Anglophone writers is to publish short pieces in English-language newspapers such as The Daily News and The
Journeys, 2009
... focus on travel among non-privileged classes is evident in the recent literary works of two S... more ... focus on travel among non-privileged classes is evident in the recent literary works of two South Asians, Indian diasporic writer Kiran Desai in ... to know this diverse group of people who work beside him and gratefully accepts the generosity of peo-ple like Saeed Saeed, a Muslim ...
South Asian Review, 2016
Following the end of the military conflict in Sri Lanka in 2009, there was a concerted effort by ... more Following the end of the military conflict in Sri Lanka in 2009, there was a concerted effort by the (then) Sri Lankan government to build, reconstruct, renovate, and eliminate marks of destruction and devastation in public spaces. 1 While many would applaud this as a positive change, some have pointed to the dangers of a seeming obliteration of history, a rewriting of history, or an emphasis on selective histories as a result of this reconstruction. On the way to the northern city of Jaffna, on a bombed out, collapsed, and truly enormous water tower is the slogan, "Say no to destruction"-a kind of echo of the words "Never again" associated with the European Holocaust-an attempt to remember the destruction in order to prevent its recurrence. This essay analyzes literary attempts to memorialize public buildings and structures-specifically the Jaffna Public Library, the Central Bank building in Colombo, and the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy-that were damaged or destroyed during the ethnic conflict. Because the Sri Lankan conflict ran for more than a quarter century, the damage to major public sites is spread across many years and literary attempts to memorialize those sites have appeared both during and after the conflict. Drawing examples from the poetry of Rudramurthy Cheran, M.A. Nuhman, Kamala Wijeratne, Anne Ranasinghe, and Vivimarie VanderPoorten, and the fiction of V.V. Ganeshananthan and Punyakante Wijenaike, I show how and why structures that are damaged or razed to the ground are remembered in literary works. This type of public memorialization of destroyed and desecrated public
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Papers by Maryse Jayasuriya