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.