All Is Burning

Jean Arasanayagam

Description

Nineteen stories of rare power from the heart of war-ravaged Sri Lanka. In these stories Jean Arasanayagam brings us voices that are not normally heard: those of anonymous men and women searching for order and reason in the midst of a ruthless civil war. While many succumb to the horror of their times, there are others who discover in themselves unexpected reserves that will help them survive. Thus a young Sinhala man turns his back on an aimless upper-class existence and joins a group of Tamil refugees smuggling themselves into Germany; a woman goes out alone to see the scene of a carnage to try and find her daughter's lover among the dead and dying; a maid returns from the rich desert city of Doha to the green half-jungle of her village in northern Sri Lanka and rediscovers happiness despite the uncertain future... In addition to stories about the effects of war and violence, this collection also explores aspects of ethnicity and individual choice in a multicultural society. All is Burning is truth-telling at its poignant best.

Sujets

• Short story
• Science fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351180876
• Langue: English

Extrait

JEAN ARASANAYAGAM
All is Burning
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
The Journey
I Am an Innocent Man
Elysium
Time the Destroyer
The Mutants
Man Without a Mask
From Distant Ophir
The Golden Apples of the Hesperides
All is Burning
The Sand Serpents
The Innocents of the World
Prayers to Ka li
Fragments from a Journey
A Fistful of Wind
Bali
A Husband Like Shiva
I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes
Two Women and an Apple
Fear: Meditations in a Camp
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
ALL IS BURNING
Jean Arasanayagam is a Sri Lankan writer of Dutch Burgher origin. She attended a private Methodist Missionary School, is a graduate of the University of Ceylon and obtained an M.Litt in Literary Linguistics from the University of Stratchlyde, Glasgow. She was an Hon. Fellow in the Creative Activities of the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa in 1990. In 1994 she was International Writer-in-Residence in the South West (U.K.) and was Visiting Fellow at Exeter University in the Faculty of Arts. Her work has been published widely in Sri Lanka and abroad.
She is married to Thiagarajah Arasanayagam, writer, painter and playwright, and has two daughters who are themselves writers. She lives in Kandy but has travelled extensively in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe and India.
To my daughters Parvathi and Dewasundari Continuing sources of inspiration and support
Thus have I heard, The Blessed One was once living at Gayastsa in Gaya with a thousand bhikkus. There he addressed the bhikkhus.
Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?
Bhikkhus, the eye is burning, visible forms are burning, visual consciousness is burning, visual impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the visual impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion; I say it is burning with birth, ageing and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.
The Fire Sermon of the Buddha (Adittapariyaya-sutta)
Here too, the night is dark, thunder-black, as the fire In the village spreads, it s best to escape while you can, Take to the forest, mats rolled up on the head, Children tucked under the arms, no time to cook The evening meal, just milk in the breast, the morning s Rice wrapped up in a plantain leaf, to lie awake Watching alert for the sound of gunshot and wailing Cries, the moon wounded, the clouds bleeding
Excerpt from Fire in the Village
The Journey
Oneself is one s own protector (refuge); what other protector (refuge) can there be? With oneself fully controlled, one obtains a protection (refuge) which is hard to gain
-The Dhammapada
T WO THREE FIVE eight twelve sixteen . Always the counting. Numbers. Under the breath. In soft, sibilant whispers. There must be no slip in their precise numbering. But we had names. Must we forget them now? Names that were known among friends. Parents. Loved ones. In which country? One that seems so distant now. The one we have left behind. Home: hills, fields, valleys; rivers, jungles, habitations; trees, flowers and fruit. They pass through my mind like those Jataka tales unfolding in the temple murals of my country. Tales of the several lives of the Bodhisattvas. The striving of The One to reach Enlightenment, become a Buddha. But first to reach the highest state of perfection. Until then he is on the road to Enlightenment and on that road which he travels through successive births, he will live and speak with all beings-animals, birds, humans. That journey of his, that Road to Perfection . And ours? We are travelling on many unknown roads. Taking unfamiliar routes through alien terrain, crossing frontiers and borders. On and on we travel. To reach what destination and why?
The guide knows where we are being taken. We must trust him absolutely. We are walking through a forest. There are no tracks. The trees are silent and watchful sentinels. Yet they offer us protection too. Oak. Birch. Beech. Pines. The snow piles up silently. Our boots sink deep as we step cautiously through it. We cannot afford to flounder. Or delay. In the darkness we have to keep together. By instinct. Animal instinct. If we veer off the track we will be lost. Losing our way will mean that we can never make it to our destination. There s a woman among us, with her young son. That makes sixteen of us altogether (asylum seekers, refugees-call us what you like). Seventeen with the guide. The guides change from time to time and place to place. No names. Just gestures to follow them. Trust. Absolute trust.
The woman doesn t ask to be treated in any special way. Bears everything silently. But she is always watchful and alert where the boy is concerned. She s prepared for any hardship. Tough woman. Only tender towards the child, but doesn t cosset him too much. I m the only Sinhala male in this group. The others are Tamils, from the North of the country which we have left. And the guides? Who knows? They change. German? Russian? Swiss? Jewish? No one questions. No one asks with easy and casual familiarity, Hey, what s your name? Where are you from? A family? Children? Have you ever travelled before? Visited my country? No, no. No time for questions, for entry through the slightest aperture into any life other than one s own. Danger lies in too much knowledge. We do not share information about each others lives. We have learned to store away all facts that are useful to us. When the time comes we will unearth that store. Moreover, identity isn t important here, at this juncture. Identity is still the burning question of the day in our part of the world; identity that separates and divides. But here we are one, because we share this journey and all its travails. We eat the same food. Bread, cheese, apples. We quench our thirst from the same flask of water. No one makes me feel that I am not one of them. It would have been easy for them to have done so.
We maintain silence most of the time. I have no one to talk to in my own language at any rate. Nor can we speak in each other s language. We use signs to communicate with each other when the necessity arises. What keeps us together, keeps us going in a landscape that has no recognizable signpost or landmark is just one purpose and that is to reach Berlin. To disappear there or to seek, through legal means, political asylum. The question of maintaining an individual identity will come later.
Two routes lead to Berlin. One through France, the other through Russia. We have taken the route through Russia.
We continue to move stealthily. Fear. It is perpetually with us. We need physical and mental stamina too. We must be strong in body, mind and will. No sign of weakness must be shown, or we might be left behind. We must not impede the rest of the group. We must move together. I am reminded of the stories about the plantation workers who were brought to our island two hundred years or more ago. Brought from south India in their hundreds in ships. Disembarking at Talaimannar, they made the long trek from the north, through thick, animal-infested jungles, to the central highlands to work on the tea estates. So many died on the way of cholera, dysentery, malaria. Many were left behind to be attacked by wild bear and leopards or to grow weaker and weaker and die, leaving their skeletons as new landmarks on that terrifying journey. And of those who reached the central highlands, many hundreds died of fever, chills, pneumonia in those mist-veiled mountains. Always the weak have had to succumb . No, we must keep up our strength. There is no letting go even for a moment. And always to remember that we are a group. Numbers. Each of us is a number. The numerals reverberate in our minds: sixteen of us, seventeen with the guide. No one should go missing.
Our dependence on the guide is total. This is unknown country to us. We are not human beings to them. With names. Personal lives. Habits. Feelings or emotions. When we are handed over at the border for the next stage of the journey to the next guide or agent, we are dollars . We bear with the irony. We re not people, we re money to them. We provide employment to them. They take risks too. We understand that. Dollars. Money. What do they care about the politics of our individual countries? About war and violence. Conflict. Ethnicity. Massacres and assassinations. Revolutions. Human rights violations. Disappearances, torture, death. Though it s nothing new to anyone, really. The soldier justifies his rape of women in war. He asserts the triumph of the victor. He has to let off the tensions and the horrors of the battlefield, has to have his booty. The map of Europe has been changed often enough and is still changing. People are reclaiming the territory that once belonged to them before the invasions and conquests of historical eras and epochs. The changing of borders and frontiers leads to extensions of power. And now, ethnic cleansing, so that the reclaimed territory rests on a foundation of skeletal remains: bones that branch out like a subterranean forest, the flesh nourishing the soil yet its poisons creeping through the still veins to create a monstrous foliage. We know the histories of all these worlds. They haven t had time to learn ours. Our wars, our revolutions, our conflicts, our displacements, are important only to ourselves. We become refugees, asylum seekers. Their laws restrict our entry into their countries. Yet there are people who help us to bend these laws. They ve got to eat too, haven t they? We serve their purpose. They serve ours. When we reach a destination, the desired one, we can t expect a friendly welcome. Although looking back on our own history, didn t we open our doors to the invader? Didn t we even adopt the colonizers way of life? Change ou