Zillij - A Review
-- Farzana Haniffa
Ameena Hussain, 2003, Zillij,
Colombo: Perera- Hussein Publishing House, pp.192, Price Rs 450.00.
Ameena Hussein’s second collection of
short stories, Zillij spans themes of love, longing, loss
loneliness and longevity with the specter of a conflicted Muslimness
hovering over the whole. Ameena is one of the newest, and undoubtedly
amongst the more skilled voices to articulate the well traveled
cosmopolitan, English speaking Colombo elite experience and is
a refreshing foil to the witless new Adoh! and Hi! magazines that
attempt to do the same. This is her second set of short stories
and they show a maturity and an emerging voice that augurs much
for the future of Sri Lankan writing in English as well as for
Ameena as a short story writer and future novelist.
The stories in Zillij
( Zillij is an Islamic traditional art of creating intricate mosaic
design using hand cut tiles.) traverse a wide spectrum of themes
dealing with germinal contemporary Sri Lankan issues such as Muslimness,
migration, and the conflict, with a few forays into the realm
of the imaginary with allegorical tales of a conflicted self.
The stories are all lively, timely and for the most part enjoyable.
The story White Girl
traces the issue of being “here” and “there”, of east and west,
and of global travel, through the friendship between a fumbling
foreigner and a self confessed local misfit. It traces their
life in Colombo and their encounters with its closed-off and set-in-its-ways
peculiarities. In the story the friends, Muslim Girl and White
Girl-- one struggling to fit in and the other reveling in not
fitting in--each carve out their destinies in keeping with their
own predilections. It is a drawn out tale of a year in the life
of a funny but fitting friendship, with the local human rights
community, a Cinnamon Gardens burger joint, a gym, and a string
of now defunct night clubs as backdrop. I also appreciated the
manner in which the story ends with a score of questions regarding
the peculiarities of place without any pretense at resolution.
In Comfort Food,
Ameena combines a story about cooking Middle-Eastern with a commentary
on misery and Muslimness. Set in the middle of Geneva the story
speaks of a Sri Lankan couple and their Lebanese-Egyptian neighbor
and her funny urbane European boyfriend. The Egyptian wants her
European boy friend to convert to Islam; he wants to wait until
he is moved by the faith. The story traces the pain and passion
that this impasse causes in the lives of both couples. It invokes
the “clash of cultures” that any of us who straddle multiple ways
of being, who are comfortable in and who want to be wanted in
more than one world, inevitably experience in our lives.
The other story that I liked,
and in which the writing is probably at its cleanest and sharpest
is Images of a Short Lived Love Affair. It is a compilation
of literary snapshots that traces the story of two lovers from
the beginning of the affair to its end and its aftermath. In stages
the language is brilliant and one particular “image” worth quoting.
Neither of us wants children. Why? I
can’t speak for you and I doubt that I can speak for myself. I
just know that it is a feeling. A feeling that has stayed with
me for as long as I have felt. My first love never understood
that. If you had such a blissful childhood why don’t you want
to have any children? And I never had any answers. I still don’t.
That first love of mine is still around. No longer a love but
still a remnant of an emotion. There are days when I wish him
away. Forever. Never to be seen. Not to be spoken about. Today
is one of those days. There are days when I wish you were with
me. Always around. Never gone. Today is one of those days.
Ameena speaks of love with sophistication
and a surety of touch.
The other theme that runs through the
book and is dealt with directly in at least three stories is that
of the conflict. The violence of that time – hopefully now past—is
difficult to articulate. And Ameena’s three stories are a testament
to this difficulty. At least two of her attempts are fitting.
Of these, More Than Rain is a symbolic exploration that
combined the flow of blood and the lack of water that marked so
many of the conflict years in a metaphoric reflection on the apathy
brought about by the country’s past politics. It is only two pages
long but powerful. So is Now And Then. In this story she
combines an ominous 500.A.D foretelling of the country’s troubles
in fifty ola leaves with the tale of Colombo during the conflict
– screaming ambulances, suicide bombers and check point filled
evenings of dancing at the Blue Elephant. But An Ordinary
Death the one about the fruiterer dying in a bomb blast did
not work as well. I could not help but wonder, why the laboured
word “fruiterer”? Why not fruit man, a much more familiar Colombo
colloquialism? This story had little of the metaphoric power of
More than Rain, or the honest confronting of the issue
as in Now and Then. The material was surely that
which merited a short story; however it just did not seem to work
too well.
There were three stories
that I thought did not have much of the lyricism or the imaginative
breadth evident in most of the rest. And these too seemed to hold
promise that could have done with a little more tweaking of the
material. One of these is An Ordinary Death. Another is
The Immigrant, the story of Anura and Jayantha who struggle
and steal to reach the great land of plenty- America. Porn sheets
and peep shows in New York, just-off-the-boat clothing, the shock
of the first winter all feature in the story and are powerful
images conveying much about the terrible rootlessness of working
class immigrant life. But the story is too insistent in its telling
of being down-and-out-in-Manhattan and thereby defused the possible
power of these images.
The same could be said of
The Glass Block. While the immigration themes that are
touched on, local visa officers mimicking the foreign bosses without
seeming in the least conflicted over their assigned roles, the
irony of an inherited racism masquerading as efficiency, the
humiliating effects that distant stereotypes could have on local
lives are all well worthy of a short story. However The Glass
Block does not seem quite finished. For instance, the symbolism
of the “Glass Block” the title and the story’s principle metaphor
was not sufficiently fleshed out. It did not play enough of a
role in this story to merit the title.
As already mentioned, Muslimness
hovers around all of Ameena’s writing—at least half the stories
in the book featured being Muslim as a theme, as a metaphor or
informed the story’s background in some way. It is a welcome
infusion and long overdue. There is no writer that I know of who
has written in English about being Muslim in Sri Lanka critically
or at least honestly in recent years. There are profound historical
and sociological reasons for this and Ameena’s voice is welcome.
Ameena also provides a much needed globally pertinent critique
of stereotypical Muslimness through her portrayal of such Muslim
characters as the degenerate club hopping “Muslim Girl” in White
Girl or the well traveled couple in Noombi Story.
Ameena also represents the
discomfort that many local Muslims feel with the peculiar insularity
of a great majority of Sri Lankan Muslims who have recently begun
to take very vocal pride in their isolation. Ameena struggles
to articulate her dissatisfaction with the options that are offered
by the community. However, at this point, her discomfort is still
too present and she is not yet capable of infusing her view on
this world with any degree of sympathy. For instance, Ameena’s
stories do not ask why such an isolationist position is sought
by Muslims. In Muslim on the Periphery Ameena masterfully
scoffs at the compulsory sociality of Muslim community without
an equal appreciation of the feeling of togetherness and belonging
and of taking care of ones own that is also a part of the enforced
brotherhood. Then the hijab and its infusion into Sri Lankan
Muslim life, a phenomenon that many middle class Muslim women
are embracing with aplomb is dealt with in the story Beauty.
It is seen only through the frame of a socialite mother’s disappointment
at not being able to show off/live off her beautiful daughter.
The countless middle class young women who embrace this garb as
rebellion, as finding a greater truth that an older generation
were incapable of grasping, is also a part of this story but one
that Ameena is not yet interested in commenting on.
By and large the stories
in the volume are enjoyable. Other than those briefly described
here there is the fanciful Night Journey, there is Those
Days about changing times and changing worlds, Noombi
Story about travel and Pain of Imagination that
defies description. Zillij is the first publication
of the Perera Hussain publishing house and is an important contribution
to Sri Lankan writing in English. Ameena Hussain’s is a welcome,
necessary, competent, sometimes lyrical and always wonderful voice
that promises much for the future.
Farzana Haniffa is a senior research fellow
at the Social Scientist Association and Phd candidate Dept of
Anthropology at Columbia University.
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