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SouthPaw Two: “Realism” in the South
-- Pradeep Jeganathan
Prasanna Vithanage’s subtle and accomplished new film, Ira Madiyama, has already been widely reviewed. To outline it briefly, again, it juxtaposes three different narratives of loss, longing and pain, to produce the effect of the fractured, uncertainly unstable whole, that is our country.
One narrative stays with a Sinhala Air Force ‘wife’ who partners with a expatriate Sinhala journalist to locate her missing pilot ‘husband,’ who may be an LTTE prisoner. Another narrative follows the travails of a Muslim family, that’s evicted, with hundreds of others from Mannar, by the LTTE, one fateful and infamous day. In the third, a Sinhala soldier, while on a R&R from the front lines, sees his sister working in a brothel he visits.
That much is already quite well known, I think – What I’d like to comment on in this column concerns the texture of Vithanage’s genre. He works with what might be called a ‘realist’ genre which means on the face of it, that there is a reflection or invocation of the ‘real’ or the ‘lived’ world in his cinematic narrative. But of course, that’s just on the ‘face of it.’ Invoking reality is quite complicated, because as Nivedita Menon shows us in her sparkling yet tense short story, At the Edge of Fiction, in this isses of Lines, it’s a slippery idea. And if you consider Vithanage’s film more closely, you realize he is well up to that complicated slipperiness.
Each narrative of his film, operates ‘reality’ in a different way, each invoking a realist genre that a located Sri Lankan viewer recognizes. The Air force Pilots common-law wife’s story, evokes the videography of the contemporary Sinhala teledrama, with its deliberate, almost underlined dialogue, and tight, close up face shots. The cinematic technique that frames the tale of the Muslims of Mannar, is a contrast to this. Those sequences are shot in a documentary style that records, quietly — the characters themselves (despite the heart rending pathos of the abandoned dog, Rexi) remain in the background of the narrative. The soldier’s story has yet a different visual feel; incredibly subtle, understated, with minimalist dialogue, it harks back it seems, to the very beginings of Sinhala cinema; and has scenes that can be well compared with those of Peiris’ celebrated Gamperaliya.
The juxtaposition of three modes of ‘realism’ in one aesthetic work simply emphasizes the complex, layered way that ‘reality’ can be invoked in a ‘realist’ genre, and further the ‘contrast effect’ between them generating for the viewer a regulated, structured unmaking of the nation. Looked at from the point of view of cinematic genre then, Ira Madiyama, should be seen as a celebration of the complexcity of the realist genre, and its multi-faceted possibilities.
Hence, it was incredibly surprising to read the column of an older film maker, Tissa Abeysekera, in the Daily Mirror some weeks ago, on Ira Madiyama, and Vithanage’s work, in general. Abeysekera, who took a curiously hierarchical tone with Vithanage, seemed to be arguing that realism was passé, and that he, certainly, had moved on to other more sophisticated representational forms. Even more startlingly, I heard a talented young writer and literary critic, suggest, at a literary evening recently that ‘magic realism’ was somehow, new, innovative, and marked the beginnings of an authentic literature in Sri Lankan English.
Why would ‘magic realism’ be better than ‘realism’? First of all, it isn’t new. In art critisim, ‘magic realism’ appears as an analytic term in the 1920s; in literary critiscim it comes to prominence with analysis of the work Marquez, and then Rushdie many decades ago. It’s true that it comes ‘after’ realism, but then it is blind progressivism to think that any thing ‘after’ is better that the ‘before.’
But there is more reason for caution. To cut a long story short, simply consider the ‘magic’ in ‘magic realism.’ That’s the same ‘magic,’ that colonial anthropology consigned to colonies, to tradition, to the animist, enchanted world of shamans, mystics, and snake charmers, while reveling in the secular modernity of its own privilege. To argue that it’s the only appropriate aesthetic mode for a Southern artist, seems to work within that logic, and I for one, inspired by the sheer thoughtfulness, and intelligence of a Vithanage, reject it as the prefered representational mode for my own, very modest, fiction.
Pradeep Jeganathan (www.pjeganathan.org) is a Senior Fellow at International Center for Ethnic Studies, Colombo.
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