Jean Arasanayagam

Jean Lynette Christine Solomons, born on 2 December 1931 in Kandy, Sri Lanka, was the youngest of three children born to Harry Daniel Solomons and Charlotte Camille (née Jansz). Arasanayagam was considered a Dutch Burgher, a person born out of a marriage between a Dutch person and an Indigenous person. She spent the majority of her life residing in Kandy.

Arasanayagam attended the Girls' High School, Kandy, graduated from the University of Peradeniya, and received a Master of Arts in Linguistics from the University of Strathclyde.

Regarded as an affectionate and dedicated educator by numerous students across multiple educational institutions in Sri Lanka, Arasanayagam additionally served as a visiting Fellow at University of Exeter's Faculty of Arts. While primarily recognized as a poet, Arasanayagam was also a talented painter who showcased her artwork at Commonwealth exhibitions in London and Paris, as well as at the Lionel Wendt Art Centre in Colombo.[2]

Her husband, Thiyagarajah Arasanayagam, her a Jaffna Tamil individual, which exposed her to diverse cultures and traditions. This exposure likely played a role in shaping her ethnic consciousness and personal identity.

Her husband along with their daughters, Devasundari and Parvathi, all possess a deep love for writing. Thiyagarajah achieved recognition by winning the Gratiaen Prize in 2016, while Parvathi has established herself as a published writer in the genres of fiction, short stories, and poetry.

She died on 30 July 2019, aged 88, after a brief illness.[1]

Throughout Arasanayagam's diverse body of work–which encompasses poetry, short fiction, fiction, and memoirs–she consistently explores several prominent themes, including identity, heritage, displacement, and ethnic violence.

One prevalent theme in Arasanayagam's writing is her profound sense of identity displacement as a Dutch Burgher in a post-colonial country. The Burgher community in Sri Lanka, although once possessing high social status during the colonial era, dwindled in numbers after Independence. As a result, they experienced a deep cultural and linguistic marginalization. Arasanayagam delves into her own Burgher ancestry within this context of marginalization, even when it requires confronting the exploitative nature of the Dutch colonial period. In A Colonial Inheritance and Other Poems (1984), she vividly portrays the brutality inflicted upon the locals by the Dutch upon their arrival and highlights the ways in which the indigenous population was exploited. Arasanayagam's exploration of identity reflects her personal experiences and sheds light on the complexities of identity, cultural alienation, and historical injustices within the Sri Lankan context.

Arasanayagam's marriage into a traditional Jaffna Tamil family further intensified her sense of displacement and grappling with her identity. The Tamil community, already "very sensitized" about their cultural and political aspirations, viewed her as an outsider due to her Burgher background.[3] In turn, she found herself becoming a member of a community that was already marginalized by dominant nationalist discourses. This duality of being perceived as "other" by both the Tamil community and the hegemonic nationalistic narratives added to her complex experience.

As an outsider, Arasanayagam had to navigate the exacting and uncompromising social customs and traditions of the Tamil community she married into. This negotiation between her Burgher identity and the expectations of the Tamil community became a central theme in her early collections of poems such as Kindura (1973) and Poems of Season Beginning and a Season Over (1977). This exploration of dual identities, cultural clashes, and the challenges of assimilation continued to be prominent in her later works, including "Reddened Water Flows Clear and Shooting the Floricans. These writings delve into the complex process of reconciling different aspects of her identity and the tensions that arise from navigating between multiple cultural and social contexts.

Critics widely acknowledge that the year 1983 had a profound impact on Arasanayagam's literary career, leading to a noticeable sense of urgency and heightened political awareness in her writing after that period.[3] Her collection Apocalypse 83 (1984) specifically addresses the riots that took place in July 1983, serving as a strong protest against the anti-Tamil violence that unfolded in the aftermath of Sri Lanka's independence.[4]

Being married to a person of Tamil-Hindu ancesty, she became a target of Sinhala nationalist forces during the events of Black July in 1983. Living in Kandy, Sri Lanka, at the time and working as a lecturer in a teachers' college in the nearby town of Peradeniya, she and her family faced direct threats. A mob set fire to a neighbor's house and posed a danger to the Arasanayagam family themselves. As a result, they were forced to flee their home, seeking refuge in the houses of sympathetic neighbors before being ultimately taken to a refugee camp by the army.[5] This traumatic experience profoundly influenced her personal identity and subsequently became a recurring theme in her writing, as she explored the events of Black July and other acts of violence witnessed in the country following its independence.

Arasanayagam also wrote about the suffering of women during the colonial period, highlighting the period's prevalent patriarchal practices. An example of this can be seen in "Maardenhuis - The House of the Virgins Amsterdam/Kalpitiya," where she narrates the experiences of Dutch female orphans who were brought to Sri Lanka to serve as sexual companions for Dutch colonizers. Through her writing, she exposes the exploitative nature of colonial relationships and highlights the suffering endured by women subjected to such circumstances.[3]

Katrina M. Powell said Arasanayagam's poetry ‘uniquely links identity, documentation and alienation’.[2] Reggie Siriwardene, the Sri Lankan poet and critic, described her work as being the voice of ‘our collective sense of horror and tragedy” [2] after her first-hand experience of the violence of the ethnic riots translated into her writing. Furthermore, Alka Nigam stated that her poetry "in ‘mournful melodies’ struggles with both the inner and outer turmoil,” agreeing with Arasanayagams's own admission that "the crux of her poems is a life time's search for an identity".[6] Similarly, Melanie Murray sees Arasanayagam's poems as ‘engaging with issues of identity and territory by exploring her (colonial) past to come to grips with the present’.[6][7]

Arasanayagam's poetry was integrated into a convocation at Bowdoin College, where the college's then-president, Barry Mills expressed admiration for her significant contributions, describing her as a "voice of conscience, of experience, of wisdom, and of hope."[8] He commended her for generously supporting and encouraging young writers and recognized her profound impact on the literary community and her commitment to fostering the growth and development of aspiring writers.[8]

Arasanayagam's several noteworthy achievements during her career.

In 1990, she was honored as an Honorary Fellow in the Creative Activities of the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa. She also served as a visiting fellow at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Exeter and held the position of international writer-in-residence for the University of Exeter and Southwest Arts in the United Kingdom in 1994.

In recognition of her literary prowess, Arasanayagam received the Premchand Fellowship from India's Sahitya Akademi in 2014. [2] In 1984, she was the recipient of the National Award for Literature, a testament to her outstanding literary contributions. In 2017, The Life of the Poet won the Gratiaen Prize.[8] The same year, she was also honored with the Sahityarathana, which acknowledged her lifetime achievements and immense contributions to literature in Sri Lanka.

• Literary Encyclopedia page
• SAWNET: Bookshelf: Jean Arasanayagam