Journal of Historical Geography, 29, 4 (2003) 582±598

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0410

Unpicking Sri Lankan `island-ness' in

Romesh Gunesekera's Reef

Tariq Jazeel

Through a close reading of the Anglo±Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera's 1994novel Reef, this paper interrogates the misplaced concrete-ness regarding Sri Lanka'sstatus as archetypal `island-state'. I show howReefmaps an imaginative geographywhichboth naturalizes and problematizes Sri Lankan `island-ness'. Through the memory of thenovel's main protagonist the author's exploration of modernity ®xes geographicalknowledge of Sri Lanka. `Island-ness' emerges as a rationalization of modernity, one withits roots in Sri Lanka's colonial experience which the author then unpicks as he proceedsto explore the limits of modernity. I suggest that Reef demonstrates how island-nessis an inescapable yet problematic dimension of contemporary Sri Lankan geography.This is an ambivalent contradiction that fuels a civil war in Sri Lanka which relentlesslyand sanguinely contests the integrity of Sri Lankan island-ness. The paper emphasizeshow Romesh Gunesekera's hybrid position, as an author born in Sri Lanka and nowwriting from England, constitutes a post-colonial intervention which allows us to asknew questions about Sri Lanka's `natural' insularity.

# 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

To many the South Asian Democratic Republic of Sri Lanka represents one of thearchetypal `island-states' of the modern era. Modern Atlases and maps show its teardropshaped landmass delimited only by the Indian Ocean which surrounds it. They show itsmountainous heartlands where freshwater springs turn into streams, which tumblethrough falls eventually feeding the rivers which ¯ow to the coast. The maps reveal notrace of internal borders; they depict the island-state of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon. Yetmost observers will, to some degree, also be aware of the civil war that has raged violentlyand tragically in Sri Lanka of®cially since 1983.[1] It is a civil war which continually raisesquestions about the integrity of Sri Lanka's island-ness, threatening the `natural'insularity for which Sri Lanka stands. Against the backdrop of these con¯icting beliefs inthe geography of the nation-state, ®ercely contested between Sinhalese governmenttroops and Tamil separatist guerillas, this paper interrogates what wemight regard as the`misplaced concreteness' of assumptions regarding Sri Lankan island-ness. It does so notby considering the well rehearsed, and sometimes very convincing, arguments aboutof®cial discourses and counter discourses of Sri Lankan politics over the last halfcentury. Rather it does so by regarding what we might refer to as a `softer' cultural-politics involving the writing and reading of a piece of contemporary Anglo±Sri-Lankanliterature, namely Romesh Gunesekera's novel Reef.

5820305±7488/03/$ ± see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

UNPICKING SRI LANKAN `ISLAND-NESS' 583

Gunesekera is a Sri Lankan born author who lives and works in England.Reef, his ®rstnovel, was written in London and published in 1994. This paper regards Reef as animportant cultural form constitutive of a popular geography that problematizes SriLankan island-ness. Whereas writers such as K. M. de Silva,[2] and more recently NihalPerera,[3] have demonstrated the importance of the British colonial experience in bringinginto being and shaping the island-state of Ceylon in the eighteenth century, I show howin¯uence fromBritain, in particular here in the form of post-colonial literature, continuesto be instrumental in shaping Sri Lanka as an `island state'. The ®rst part of the paperimplicates the novel, as a form of popular culture, in a process of mapping island-nessonto Sri Lanka's contested and disputed territory. This is highlighted through thepeculiarities and complexities of immigrant memory in this piece of post-colonialliterature. Through a close reading of the novel the second part of the paper explores andinterprets Reef. It demonstrates how an imaginative geographyÐa spatialityÐof island-ness is implied and alluded to throughout the book. The analysis demonstrates howisland-ness is mapped problematically, initially as it emerges through abstract forms ofrational and modern knowledge, and eventually as an inescapable dimension of SriLanka's geography, as it turns from utopia to spoiled paradise in the immigrant'smemory.

Post-colonial hybridity and imaginative geographies

The ®rst two thirds of the twentieth century saw a plethora of good quality English,Sinhala and Tamil literature emerging from Sri Lanka. Literary offerings from SriLankan based authors have been diverse, from colonial writers aiming to convey Britishinsights into traditional `Ceylonese' life,[4] to literature of Sinhala origin aiming to re-interpret classical Sinhala history and legend,[5] through to explorations of the fate ofSouth Indian Tamil immigrants in Sri Lanka.[6] Wilfred Jayasuriya has identi®ed thebody of English language literature emerging from Ceylon from 1890 through to the1990s (but especially the post-independence periodÐ1948 onwards) as the modernperiod in Sri Lankan literature.[7] If this is so then the last ten or ®fteen years has seen theemergence of a new type of `Sri Lankan' literature which could be described, at least inthe chronological sense, as `post-modern'. Authors such as Romesh Gunesekera,Michael Ondaatjie, Shyama Perera and Shyam Selvadurai, who were either born in SriLanka and now live elsewhere, or who were born of Sri Lankan parentage, have beenregularly producing enthralling ®ction of a high quality. We might describe their workmore concretely as `post-colonial'. `Post-colonial' because of the authors' hybriditiesÐtheir attachment to multiple places, a condition increasingly representative of theglobalization of contemporary life.[8] Each having been born in Sri Lanka and nowresiding elsewhere, these authors produce novels written from boundary sites. Accordingto Joanne Sharp boundary sites constitute an unwillingness to accept either possiblenational identity.[9] Although I am reticent to accept such a clear cut dichotomousmodel of hybridity for these Sri Lankan born authors I do agree that `̀ the legacy ofcolonialism negates the possibility of a unitary, stable English identity''.[10] Likewise, itnegates the possibility of a stable Sri Lankan, Sinhalese or Tamil identity of anydescription. Consider Salman Rushdie's ideas regarding the experience of the immigrant:

All migrants leave their past behind, although some try to pack it into bundles andboxesÐbut on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and oldphotographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of themigrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon

584 TARIQ JAZEEL

whom they see the rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows ofbelonging.[11]

Rushdie implies that the translocated subject's memory changes and fades as his or hercultures or histories collide in the practicability and negotiation of everyday life.[12]

Hybridity constitutes the metamorphosis of history; the shifting and transformation ofthe shadows and ghosts of memory and imagination. Romesh Gunesekera's novel Reefis an exploration of memory, but we have to consider that memory, for Gunesekera,is constituted and remoulded through the post-colonial experience of immigration.[13]

His very status in England as an `Anglo±Asian', or `Anglo±Sri-Lankan', author points tothis memory transformation. No longer is Gunesekera primarily a `Sinhalese' author ashe might have been referred to in Sri Lanka, neither is he even an `Anglo-Sinhalese'author. In the western book market he is situated in that rather vague category of`Anglo±Asian' literature, or sometimes but rarely `Anglo±Sri-Lankan' literature. Suchcategories still Orientalize `Asia' by linguistically forgetting the particularities, speci®-cities and nuances of being Asian or indeed `Sri Lankan'. I do not want to denote theexperience of forgetting as one that is necessarily negative. Indeed, it can be awholly positive experience. After all, this duality, the divided selves within suchauthors, is precisely the relationship that `̀ . . . forms the basis and the subject matter oftheir art.''[14]

Indeed, it is the beauty of Gunesekera's art-form that constitutes it as such a powerfulimaginative geography.Reef is a novel that is, strictly speaking, set in England. The storyis told through the eyes the main character, Triton, who owns a restaurant in the EarlsCourt area of London. He tells of his memories of working as a houseboy from the age ofeleven for Mr Salgado in Sri Lanka. Mr Salgado is a marine biologist observing SriLanka's sea movements and disappearing reef. It is worth emphasizing here that the titleof the novel, Reef, and the name of the main character, `Triton', suggest that RomeshGunesekera self consciously sets out to explore the imaginative and physical relation-ships between land and sea in Sri Lanka.[15] A suggestion that is lent further support byobservingGunesekera's inside cover quote in the 1994Granta publication, taken directlyfromWilliam Skakespeare's Tempest, ``Of his bones are coral made''. The story starts in1962 and spans a good twenty or so years, ¯itting between Mr Salgado's city residence inColombo and his beach house somewhere on the idyllic south coast of Sri Lanka. Thestory culminates with their emigration to England as misfortune befalls both Sri Lankaand Mr Salgado's personal life. Reef's exploration of memory takes the reader on anostalgic journey through Triton's memories of his own informal education and develop-ment in Mr Salgado's service. Of how he learnt the art of `keeping a house', and of hisobservations on the `privileged' and exotic modern lifestyles that Mr Salgado andhis companions keep. It also tells of his employer's love affair with the sophisticatedand alluring Miss Nili. Crucially these memories all emanate from Sri Lanka.

Following representational theories of landscape, novels can be seen as cultural imagesthat are not mimetic representations of reality, but instead images constitutive of themeaning of place and landscape.[16] However, written representations work in differentways to pictorial representations in determining themeaning of landscapes. For example,we might consider the dynamism of the images presented in novels. Unlike paintings andphotographs, novels must move through time, they depend on such a ¯ow. Novels workin a similar fashion to the poetic verse which ``always has a movement, [whereby] theimage ¯ows into the line of the verse, carrying the imagination along with it''.[17]

Although textual, novels represent important determinants of the meanings ofplace through time. Duncan and Gregory's recent collection of essays has effectively

UNPICKING SRI LANKAN `ISLAND-NESS' 585

demonstrated how travel writing has re-imagined the world through representation.[18]

One of themost extreme cases, but by the same token, one of the best examples of how thelanguage of ®ction constructs the meaning of places is Walter Abish's ®rst novel,Alphabetical Africa.[19] This bizarre project parodies the hardships of journey andexploration into Africa and their consequent literary representations. Abish's novel` . . . charts `a journey of literary hardship' through the alphabet'.[20] The ®rst chaptercontains only words beginning with the letter `A', the second chapter contains wordsbeginning only with the letters `A' and `B', and so on and so forth, until the twentyseventh chapter sees the process reversed. Abish's Africa is thus an obviously literary andlexical one, represented only through the tools that Abish's self-imposed system presentshim with; a particular type of imaginative geography emerges. Abish's Africa is ` . . . aninvitation to the imagination'.[21]

In this sense it becomes possible to think about how Reef facilitates the re-imaginingof Sri Lanka through literary representation. Reef is a representation of Sri Lanka thatinvokes a particular spatiality; a geography existent in the writer's imagination andconsequently transferred to the reader's. WithReef's historical backdrop and its capacityto move through time while enunciating a spatiality we might also consider thisimaginative geography as one that is distinctly historical. Gunesekera's hybriditysuggests that the memory, imagination and geographies that emerge through Reef arepeculiar to him. They are the result of Gunesekera's translocation, his experience ofmigration; the coming together of his two worlds as outlined above. His is the narrativeknowledge of the migrant who ``looks here to a past which is spatially as well astemporally distant [and is] re¯ected in his present in different way[s]''.[22] His imaginativegeographies thus are unique, they are hybrid; they are `post-colonial' geographical imagi-nations. They constitute what Tilley regards as each person's own particular `perceptualspace', the center of which is `̀ grounded in individual perceptions of distances anddirections, natural objects and cultural creations.''[23] As I shall show, Gunesekera'sgeographies of the imagination persistently allude to island-ness which at once naturalizesand problematizes such a spatiality through a period of history when in Sri Lanka'spolitical realm the integrity of island-ness was threatened.

I would emphasize that I do not want to suggest a comparison between Gunesekera'simaginative geographies and any real geography and politics of Sri Lanka. As Duncanand Gregory emphasize:

. . . all geographies are imaginitive geographiesÐfabrications in the literal sense of`something made'Ðand our access to the world is always made through particulartechnologies of representation.[24]

This is an important point to emphasize because in no way do I want to suggest thatGunesekera's spatialities lack any `authenticity' or anchor to reality. Vikram Chandrahas bemoaned the criticisms constantly leveled at Anglo-Indian authors that theysomehow fail to represent the `real India'; `the `real India' is always there, never here', thecritics will say.[25] Chandra has rightly warned against such charges of `inauthenticity',suggesting that in the wrong hands these could lead to dangerous `blood and soil'ideologies. Instead, the `real India' always comes from within, Chandra suggests.

However, there is an important dimension in which authority is important in thisnovel. The authority that Gunesekera possesses over his reading public is in¯uential innaturalizing the spatial imaginations of island-ness that are implied in the body of thetext. Reef was published in London by Granta books. Granta has a reputation ofproducing `good quality' travel and exotic literature and publicize themselves as such.Gunesekera's position as an author born in Sri Lanka, the country which he is writing

586 TARIQ JAZEEL

about, rightly presents him in the capacity of someone to be believed, to be trusted, asregards his representations of `home'. After all, his books are being marketed for theconsumer living in the West. Sleeve comments on the book come from The New YorkTimes Book Review, The Times (England), The Guardian (England), The Globe: Mail(Toronto), and Scotland on Sunday. The book is also now available in Sri Lanka, and thisraises interesting questions about the effect of the post-colonial immigrant in shaping theimaginative geographies of those in Sri Lanka. Gunesekera's credibility, to his westernbased readership, maps Sri Lankan island-ness with authority. It allows us, as readers, todream over his mappings, like readers of an Atlas imagining the far of places it depicts:

There is the example of Loti writing in the shade of a tree in Dakar, which was his homeport: ``Our eyes turned toward the interior of the country, we questioned the immensehorizon of sand.'' But this immense horizon of sand is a schoolboy's desert, the Sahara tobe found in every school atlas.[26]

Interpreting Reef: modernity and the allusion to `island-ness'

Gunesekera seems entirely aware that his narrative is just one among the multitude ofdifferent narratives and experiences of Sri Lankan immigrants in London. He is awarethat his exploration and experience of memory and imagination is uniquely constructedthrough his own hybridity. This becomes obvious from the brief, but very important, twopage introductory prologueÐThe Breach. It is set in London in the present day andprovides the key to themain protagonist's nostalgic memorializations of Sri Lanka whichgo on to form the body of the novel. It is an encounter, a meeting, a moment, betweenTriton and another Sri Lankan immigrant working in the London petrol station whereTriton has just re-fuelled his car. It provides the breach in time that allows the novel toproceed in its exploration of memory. The other immigrant is a Tamil who speaks neitherEnglish nor Sinhala, but only Tamil. Tamils comprise the largest minority group in SriLanka (around 15% of the population) and the vast majority of them are Hindu byreligion. The Sinhalese comprise the vast majority of the population in Sri Lanka today,around 75%, and the vast majority of the Sinhalese are Buddhists. Sri Lanka is a non-secular state, religiously aligning itself to Buddhism. The 1972 constitution declares thatit shall be the duty of the state to protect and foster Buddhism, and accord it the foremostplace in the cultural development of the nation.[27] Tamil separatists believe in theestablishment of a separate Tamil State, `Ealam', in the north and eastern part of theisland. Their militant guerilla activist faction, the `Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam'(LTTE), ®ght for this cause. Triton attempts to speak to the attendant in Sinhala; Tritonis Sinhalese. It is the wrong choice of language. The petrol pump attendant explains toTriton in broken English that there is a very badwar back in Sri Lanka now.We aremadeaware that he is in exile, one of the many Tamil refugees tragically forced out of theirhome by the war; ``. . . their home'', the island state, Sri Lanka, that seems unable to holdall who claim it as their home. Thus we are led to think about Sri Lanka in terms similarto the metaphorical `wooden clay mould' that Jayadeva Uyangoda compares it to:

When a craftsperson places a wooden mould on a pile of clay, only that amount of claycan ®ll the mould that would ultimately make a brick. The modern form of politicalassociation is moulded as the nation-state, and communities are the clay utilized inmaking the brick of the nation-state. The excess clay, as a matter of practice, is thrownaway.[28]

The Breach is important because although I have already asserted Gunesekera'scredibility as a narrator, I think it demonstrates that he is not making any claims to

UNPICKING SRI LANKAN `ISLAND-NESS' 587

represent Sri Lankan memory. The Breach subtly, yet boldly, states that Gunesekera'sexploration of memory is personal. Triton's initial inability to communicate with his newacquaintance is a stark reminder that every immigrant has a different narrative, adifferent memory.

Yet as this brief encounter proceeds, the petrol pump attendant tries to befriendTriton. The young refugee, as Gunesekera describes him, asks Triton to help himwith thecomputerized machinery that he is having trouble with. He identi®es with him, askinghim into the cubicle to help:

``Sir, come inside, please.'' He hurried to the door and unlocked it. `̀ Please.Please.''I went in.He lead the way to his cubicle. Lifting the hinged counter top, he sat me next to the till.``My ®rst night,'' he said. He picked up the telephone again. `̀ You speak, please.''``Who to?''``Boss. Won't understand. You speak, please. You know, please.'' He pointed to the tilland shrugged. He switched off the lights outside.[29]

In this carefully engineered encounter, Gunesekera sows the seeds of a diasporaconsciousness. James Clifford claims that diaspora consciousness is `̀ constitutednegatively by experiences of discrimination and exclusion''. That `̀ a negative experienceof racial and economic marginalization can also lead to new coalitions.''[30] Here there isa new coalition between Triton, the Sinhalese immigrant and the young Tamil refugee inexile who is ®nding life in England, and at his new job, dif®cult to come to terms with. It isa coalition that perhaps would not have been given the chance to blossom in Sri Lanka atthe height of the ethno-sectarian riots in the mid-eighties. Triton seems aware of this. Heis aware of the peculiarity in this encounter and coalition:

My every breath seemed imbued with petrol. I wanted to close my eyes and imagine awarm sea and our salt in the air. I did not knowwhat I was doing in there. I andmy youngrefugee with his ¯ickering cash register. He ¯icked another switch and the cubicle lightwent out.[31]

Here, at the very outset of the novel, Triton seems explicitly to acknowledge thecomplexity of Sri Lankan `island-ness'. Although his references to Sri Lanka are non-spatial here, he contemplates the arbitrariness of `island-ness' by asking himself what he`̀ was doing in there [with his] young refugee''. It is as though his translocation to Englandhas brought into sharp focus Sri Lankan insularity and all the questions it raises aboutthe legitimacy and integrity of Sri Lanka as an `island-state', that `pre-eminent powercontainer of the modern era', which alludes to an idealized organic concreteness.[32] It isonly here in London, 6000 miles away from Sri Lanka, that Triton and the young Tamilrefugee can sit together and talk or think unfettered about an island `home' common toboth, yet whose very insularity would most probably prohibit such a meeting on itsshores. It is an insularity which has even exiled one of them. Triton closes his eyes andimagines a house on the beach 6000 miles away to lead us into the memories thatconstitute the body of the novel, and at once this perspective, this clarity, perhaps eventhis ¯icker of hope, is gone. Never again in the novel do we have such an authoritativepiece of writing on the arbitrariness of the insularity of Sri Lanka, as viewed from here inthe petrol station in London.

In the pages that follow, Gunesekera proceeds to explore two of the main themes inReef, memory and modernity. Perceived through Triton's eyes these are central to aprocess of mapping which consistently problematizes a spatiality of `island-ness' byalluding to different expressions of insularity. Gunesekera's references to the trips that

588 TARIQ JAZEEL

MrSalgadowould takewith Triton, down to the south-west and south coast of Sri Lanka,away from the house in Colombo, visually map this part of the countries island-ness. Thedescriptions depict the shape of a coastline in a graphic way. We are told of the placewhere Mr Salgado would disappear for days; his observatory ``where the deep southbottoms out and begins to curve up again.''[33] Describing any coast is problematicbecause of its continual change, its eternal impulse to both hide and reveal itself afresheach day with the tides. The coast resists capture in the `map' as it re-invents itself eachhour of each day with the perpetual and relentless movement of the Ocean. Paul Cartersuggests, however, that knowing the coast was essential to ful®lling the intellectualambitions of eighteenth century explorers.[34] Thus ``the coast itself had to be linearized,reconceptualized as a coastline.''[35] Knowing the coast was essential to knowing lands ofexploration. Reducing coasts, and by the same token extending coasts, to a moregeneralized and abstracted notion of `coastline', represented the urge to ®x rationalgeographical knowledge; to know space and be able to map it on the tabula rasa of thecartographer's page. In a similar way, Gunesekeras' words allude to the curved line todescribe the coast. The line charts the bottoming out of Sri Lanka's coast and traces itscurvature up again. However, the words do more than just describe coast in terms ofa linear trace. They also suggest a continuation of the coastline implying and alluding toan island-ness which as I shall show, is at once contained and de-stabilized.

Gunesekera's allusions to Sri Lankan island-ness work in tandemwith his explorationsof modernity and scienti®c rationality. From the outset of the story we are informed thatMr Salgado is a `gentleman', and his modernity is steadily reinforced throughout thebook. The class distinction between Mr Salgado and Triton is equated to modernity andcapitalist relations:

To him, [Triton's Uncle] Mister Salgado was probably not much more than a boy, but aboy whom history had favouredÐa product of modern feudalismÐwhereas my unclewas a road-runner, a driver for an oil company.[36]

Mr Salgado is explicitly posited as a bene®ciary and product of the newmodernity andcapitalism sweeping Sri Lanka, whereas Triton's Uncle is the ``road runner'', caught inthe proletarian web of this modernity and capitalism. Mr Salgado's modernity andscienti®c rationality impinge on his everyday practice, so much so that together with hiscompanions and lifestyle he becomes the epitome and embodiment of liberatedmodern ideals to Triton. His everyday practices exhibit the qualities of a new hybridityin Sri Lanka; a hybridity displaying the intellectual and scienti®c `bene®ts' of a westerneducation on an emerging class of wealthy, fortunate Sri Lankans. Gunesekera'sdescriptions of Salgado's actions constitute observations on that ``open sea of commonexperience that surrounds, penetrates and ®nally carries away every discourse.''[37]

His mundane, everyday actions are the practice or common experience that surrounds,penetrates and ®nally carries away the discourses of modernity which infuse MrSalgado's life:

Mister Salgado liked to do the actual arranging of the inside of the vehicle himself. Heopened the back and started to put the boxes in. I helped him. `̀ No, put that over in thecorner . . .Good. Now this one here.'' It was masterly. He knew exactly what shapes ®ttedtogether to make the best use of space. My mountain of goods disappeared into ageometry of storage that was smaller than a camp-bed, all planned in his head.[38]

His modernity is a quality that Triton aspires to attain. Mr Salgado becomes a mentorto Triton. A mentor whom Triton has an unabashed admiration for. The house becomesa school where Triton believes he can learn everything he needs to know from watching

UNPICKING SRI LANKAN `ISLAND-NESS' 589

Mr Salgado. Gunesekera makes allusions to the educative dimension of Mr Salgado'shouse. We learn that the house has an almost Bachelardian `̀ intimate immensity'' toTriton. Forms of reason, modern knowledge and scienti®c rationality lurk within itswalls:

I always felt the place was bigger than its form, that each room extended beyond what Icould see, that the house itself extended beyond what I could know, as if each room had ashadow room which only shadows could enter and where secret rituals of peculiarsciencesÐoceanography, sexologyÐwere practised.[39]

De Certeau suggests that systems and structures of culture are certi®ed by education(from universities to elementary schools).[40] In this way Mr Salgado's house is theunof®cial certi®cation of a modernist, rational culture to Triton. It is much moreappealing than a `̀ bewildering'' school which offers him nothing he could not ®nd in that`̀ gracious house''. Gunesekera subjects the reader to Triton's strong desire to hybridizeand modernize his own knowledge. A Cartesian desire articulating positivist approachesto knowledge:

My old school teacher abandoned science to nature . . .Language, he used to say, waswhat made us different from the apes, and that was what he wanted to teach. But fromMister Salgado I learned the reverse: language is what you pick up naturallyÐeveryonespeaks, no problemÐbut science has to be learnedmethodically, by study, if one is ever toemerge out of the swamp of our psychotic superstitions. It is what transforms our lives.The electri®cation of the village or the illumination of the mind, which comes ®rst?[41]

Triton wishes to modernize by acquiring scienti®c knowledge. He shows disregard forthe traditional values that his sacred village upbringing emphasized, describing them as`̀ the swamp of [their] psychotic superstitions''. He takes a delight in registering that®shermen near Mr Salgado's beach house perceive him as a `̀ City Mahathaya.''[42]

Triton's education in modernity inevitably effects his imaginary con®guration of theworld as well. He learns of a big, wide, `modern' world somewhere out there, from thescraps of newspaper that Mr Salgado writes his various lists on. These same newspaperscraps also inform him of many of the discontents in the `modern world'Ðdrugtraf®cking, courtroom dramas and political scandals, for example.

Mr Salgado's position as a scientist, a marine biologist, is important in the novel. He iscontinually in pursuit of the reason and logic which can scienti®cally explain to him thephenomena he observes on Sri Lanka's coasts:

To him [Mr Salgado] there were no boundaries to knowledge. He studied mosquitoes,swamps, sea corals and the whole bloated universe, and right from the early days wrotelong articles about them. He wrote about the legions under the sea, the transformation ofwater into rockÐthe cycle of light, plankton, coral and limestoneÐthe yield of beach toocean. I sometimes burst in on him in his study when, pen in hand, he was poised on thebrink of some miraculous calculation.[43]

His quest to know the coast, to ®x and rationalize scienti®c knowledge of this dynamicand shifting zone which continually eludes the ®xity of the cartographer's map, isimportant. It is Mr Salgado's impulse to rationalize the coast that works on the island-ness of Tritons' geographical imaginations. It is an implication which is never explicitlyenunciated, and neither are its associated problems addressed, as they are in The Breachat the beginning of the novel:

We drove for hours; whistling over a ribbon of tarmac measuring the perpetual embraceof the shore and the sea, bounded by a fretwork of undulating coconut trees, pureunadorned forms framing the seascape into a kaleidoscope of bluish jewels. Above us atracery of green and yellow leaves arrowed to a vanishing point we could never reach. Attimes the road curved as though it were the edge of a wave itself rushing in and then

590 TARIQ JAZEEL

retreating to the ocean. We skittered over these moving surfaces at a speed I had neverexperienced before. Through the back window I watched the road pour out from under usand settle into a silvery picture of serene timelessness.[44]

The ``ribbon of tarmac'' is the modern road, a product of economic infrastructuraldevelopment in Sri Lanka. The tarmac is a material ®xing through modernity of theshifting liminality of the coast. It separates Triton's body from the landscape andsimultaneously its perpetual embrace of the shore and sea suggests an imaginary peri-circulation of the whole island; as if all routes meet up on this circumlittoral concreti-zation of modernity. The ``tracery of green and yellow leaves arrowed to a vanishingpoint'' suggest a modern geometric con®guration of space. This exquisite representationof Sri Lanka's south-western coastal road employs a language of linearity which isthoroughly modern, thoroughly rational. It represents the abstract form of modernknowledge thatMr Salgado is bringing to Sri Lanka's coast through his engagement withthe task of ordering and ®xing knowledge of the coast scienti®cally. It is a knowledgewhich in its linearity turns the unknowable coast into knowable coastline. Coastlinewhich is traversible, peripatetic, ®xed. The language of linearity suggests an extension ofcoastlineÐ``[a] perpetual embrace of the shore and the sea''. Island-ness is implicated,alluded to through the modern knowledge that Mr Salgado is bringing to his homecountry, and so in¯uentially in¯ecting upon Triton. The reader is encouraged to imagineMr Salgado and Triton ending up where they started from if they continue driving formuch longer at this speed. The line of the coast is extended in the imagination, which asCarter suggests, ``[e]ncourage[s] the eye to wander beyond, to pass from the visible intothe realms of the as yet invisible . . . present[ing] itself as a featureless continuity, the coastideally merge[s] into the plain''.[45] For Carter, this is the problem that the coastlinesigni®es. The coastline is a function of the knowledge system it emerges fromÐthat ofmodernity and scienti®c rationality. Linearization of phenomena refer to:

[t]heir continuation, their extension in any direction, [which] does not signify an attractiveforce acting on them locally but an innate propensity to self-reproduction. The result is ageometrical analogue of the doctrine of Progress, an irresistible forwardmovement whichposes as the unchanging repetition of an initial impulse.[46]

To imagine the perpetual, insular embrace of the `coastline' is to smooth over thegaps in Sri Lanka's coastal embrace so to speak. It is to forget about the challenges tothe integrity of Sri Lanka's insularity which permeate society in Sri Lanka. There arean in®nite amount of obstaclesÐ`gaps'Ðthus preventing Mr Salgado and Triton fromcontinuing their peri-circulation. For example, the road falls away in a number of places,sometimes forcing them to head inland at Yala National Park in the south-east orWilpattu National Park in the north-west for example, and sometimes forcing them ontopot-holed dirt-tracks where coastal roads do not exist. In the north-west, at the time ofthis journey, only a few years after the 1958 race riots, they may have had to watch forTamil separatist mobs, or the extreme left, Sinhala nationalist group (JVP) in the deepsouth. If this journey were to be taken today they would have a problem with landmineson some of the roads in the north.

Thus, the implication of island-ness is highly problematic, representing also the limitsof the abstracted, modern, reason, which attempts and struggles to know the coastscienti®cally.

The dif®culty of drawing a continuous, dimensionless line is not simply a ticklish problemfor the draughtsman: in a modest compass it describes the logical paradox inherent inEnlightenment epistemology. A science that claimed to be well founded had ipso facto toleave no gaps in its reasoning.[47]

UNPICKING SRI LANKAN `ISLAND-NESS' 591

The coast was, after all, in so many ways, `unknowable' and `unmappable' in all itsspeci®cities and complex particularities. The ability of the coastline to paper overthe cracks and gaps of the knowledge system from which it is promulgated is frail. Thescope of rational, modern knowledge was to eliminate the gap.[48] But the gaps remain inSri Lanka, and although island-ness is inferred, alluded to and implied by the linearlanguage of modernity in Reef, it is thus also severely problematized which at oncedestabilizes the discourses of modernity that privilege the primacy and organic unity ofthe island-state. We learn retrospectively from The Breach, at the beginning of the novel,that perhaps the only way to paper over the gaps is through the diaspora consciousnessthat Triton glimpses in the petrol station in London. And even then, island-ness is seen assomehow senseless by Triton.

As the story progresses and Triton grows from a young boy to young man, he becomesincreasingly despondent with modernity and scienti®c rationality. He begins to see the¯aws and downfalls of modern life and capitalist relations, observing what wemight referto as precisely these `gaps' in the modern doctrine of Progress, and its impulse towardsclassi®cation, order, control and puri®cation. He begins to rediscover the value ofBuddhism to his life. InReef the alienating effects of modernity and capitalism are felt onan observational level. When Palitha Aluthgoda, one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs inSri Lanka, is murdered, possibly by a member of the new wave of ultra-left Marxists thathas proliferated the educated working classes of Sri Lanka, Triton remarks that, `[t]hework of his assassinÐsome unknown guerrillaÐbecame the more enduring achieve-ment'.[49] It is a statement which seems to question the values of entrepreneurialcapitalism sweeping Sri Lanka. Similarly, Triton becomes despondent, and evenaggravated, with Mr Salgado's lifestyle and companions whose modern lifestyles heused to admire:

``That's what we need!'' he [TippyÐone of Mr. Salgado's companions] said to me in aloud voice. `̀ Pour the tea, kolla.'' He didn't even look at me when I served him his cup.[50]

And later after Triton goes to the garden to escape them:

I heard Tippy call me, `̀ Triton, kolla, beer!'' But I didn't go. If he wanted it so much hecould fetch it himself. In any case it was high time they all left. I waited in the shadows.Tippy called out for me again tapping a glass against a bottle.[51]

And then:

``Where the hell is that bugger, Triton?'' I shoved my arm in the air and swore at themunder my breath. `̀ Kiss the sky!'' Something in the night air infected me too. Too muchwas going on. Wijetunga on the beach had worked it all out.[52]

Wijetunga was one of Mr Salgado's research assistants from the research project nearhis beach house. Earlier on in the story Wijetunga reveals to Triton that he is one of thenew Marxists preaching against the social effects of the new form of capitalism andmodernity sweeping Sri Lanka. This follows a period in Sri Lanka's history when thegovernment had re-structured its development ideology from the `non-alignment' whichhad dominated through the 1960s. In the face of economic crisis they sought to relax therestrictions on imported goods thus embracing and integrating themselves into a globalcapitalist economy. At that early point in the story Triton disregards Wijetunga'sadmission considering him as somewhat `crazy'. Then, Triton is more interested in hisown personal quest to modernize. In his revelation, Wijetunga asks Triton if he knows`the ®ve lessons on the crisis of capitalism', thus revealing a link with Buddhist discourse.Martin Wickeramasinghe identi®es what he perceives to be a similarity between commu-nist Russian ideology and Sinhalese Buddhism, as re¯ected in Russian and Sinhalese

592 TARIQ JAZEEL

literature of the time.[53] He identi®es Soviet Russia's hostility to capitalist civilizationwith a residual humanitarian and spiritual impulse. One aspect of this impulse is acapacity for suffering. These humanitarian impulses he associates strongly with Buddhistphilosophy and the capacity for suffering he identi®es as a heroic quality promulgated byBuddhist philosophy.[54] In Reef Gunesekera establishes communist ideology as a directcritique of the modernity that Mr Salgado and his lifestyle exhibit. The links here withBuddhism, although not explicitly enunciated by Gunesekera, can be traced by lookingat the recent social history of Sri Lanka. In the 1970s the extreme wing of this Marxistelement organized themselves into the notorious `JVP'.[55] They led a series of violentattacks targeting government, prominent entrepreneurs and businesses in response to thesurge of modern capitalism throughout the country. They were considered an extremistSinhalese Buddhist group, and although their extreme tactics were widely denounced andfeared throughout Sri Lanka, their quasi-religious political agendas gained signi®cantsupport.[56] Thus, Triton's admission that `̀ Wijetunga on the beach had it all workedout'', should not only be seen as a despondency with the new wave of modernity andcapitalism sweeping Sri Lanka, but also an indication that he had begun to embracetraditional and sacred Buddhist values.[57]

Here as the novel is progressing, the natural boundedness of Sri Lanka, by theocean, is becoming oppressive and is somehow hermetically sealing the pointlessness ofthe discontents of Mr Salgado's household and the island in general as the years go by.Island-ness has become problematic precisely because of its naturalization in the novel.The `coastline' and its ability to contain Sri Lanka's modern and rational `insularity' isnow imprisoning, restrictiveÐthe source of discontent for Triton. Wijetungarevealed his socialist manifesto for change to Triton on the beach. Again the beachis an important feature in Gunesekera's story telling. It is a paradoxical site, whoselandscapes are unstable, always shifting and always changing. The beach is aregenerative landscape, continually re-inventing itself and resisting the impulse to beknown, classi®ed, ®xed and mapped. Yet, I have already shown how it also maintainsa greater stability or topographical concreteness through its linear extension into`coastline'. It is the site which marks the transition from land to ocean. The site whereisland-ness both begins and ends, its perpetual and timeless embrace relentlessly de®nethe limits of insularity. While the beach continually changes it offers little hope ofescaping the island-ness which seals Sri Lanka's tragic fate. Thus according toWijetunga, change must come from withinÐby revolution, if it cannot be found in thenatural landscape.

Triton's despondence with modernity and consequent rediscovery of Buddhismmirror the fate of Sri Lanka in Reef. His early, fond, utopian recollections of his homecountry become tinged with distopic memories as the maladies of modernity arein¯ected on Sri Lanka. One sleeve comment on the book remarks that Sri Lanka is a`spoiled paradise' (The Times) for Triton. As the ethnic rioting and class basedinsurgencies in Sri Lanka suppurate, the language of space that describes Sri Lankabecomes more distopic:

The place where she [Lucy-amma, the cook] had been born turned from village to jungleand back to village, time and again, over her seventy-odd years. The whole country hadbeen turned from jungle to paradise to jungle again, as it had been even more barbaricallyin my own life.[58]

In her exploration of the spatial imaginations of the Malaysian rainforest, MaureenSioh equates the linguistic referent of `jungle' to landscapes of savagery, resistance andstruggle in many developing countries.[59] Sri Lanka is no exception to this phenomenon.

UNPICKING SRI LANKAN `ISLAND-NESS' 593

In times of insurgency the rainforests and national parks are frequently transformed inpublic imaginations from landscapes designed to encapsulate a Sinhalese `national'identity to the adopted hideaways of the LTTE guerilla soldiers. They thus becomelandscapes of fear in a similar fashion to the way Sioh talks about the authorization of theMalaysian rainforest:

As fears of political violence became displaced onto the forest, the sign of the `forest' wasreplaced by the sign of the `jungle' and all its accompanying references to savagery . . . Ibelieve that this fear is related to the signi®cation of the forest as an uncontrollable spaceproviding refuge to an uncontrollable population.[60]

It is in a similar vein that Triton refers to the `whole country' as once again becoming ajungle.

As Triton's memory trans®gures Sri Lanka into a spoiled paradise it appears that SriLanka's island-ness is an inescapable component of such distopic memorializations. Thesocial context is a period in Sri Lanka's recent history, from mid 1950s through to themid 1960s, when the pro-Sinhala SLFP (Sri Lanka Freedom Party) government, lead byMrs Srimavo Dias Bandaranaike, had implemented a series of policies that effectivelymarginalized the rights and opportunities of Tamils in Sri Lanka. For example,the implementation of the Sinhala only language bill in 1961, and the negotiation of therepatriation of over half a million Indian Tamils with India in 1965. Although in 1965the more liberal and plural UNP (United National Party) were re-elected and priori-tized the calming of racial tension, the seeds of divisive ethnic sentiments had been wellsown politically. Tamil separatists began to make themselves heard in the light ofincreasing sentiment against Tamils by a Sinhalese populace swayed by the primacyof Buddhism in a non-secular state.[61] This ethnic friction saw its bloody fruition in 1983following a series of horri®c attacks by the militant Tamil separatist group, the LTTE, ongovernment troops, government workers (from police of®cers to village post-of®ceworkers), Buddhist monks and on various public buildings. These acts can be interpretedas explicit and violent articulations on the inappropriateness of a plural island-staterepublic system for Sri Lanka. A belief certainly held by the LTTE and those moremoderate Tamil separatists of the time. Responses to these terrorist attacks were just asviolent and horri®c in the shape of the nationwide 1983 riots. In Colombo these riots sawunof®cial Sinhalese `lynch-mobs' exacting revenge on innocent Tamils residing in thecity. Known Tamil houses were looted and burned and in some cases Tamil occupantswere executed. It has also been suggested that `lynch-mobs' were furnished with`con®dential' electoral lists by Sinhalese government of®cials. These lists con®rmedthe locations of Tamil families in Colombo.[62] The sequence of events exposedthe inability of the island-state to effectively contain a democratic plural Republicwhich was coming apart at the seams. Cross cutting these racial insurgencies are anearlier series of class based insurgencies by the ultra-left, Sinhala, youth group the JVP, asoutlined earlier.

Importantly though, this is a social context of which the reader of Reef is unaware. Asreaders we are made aware of the decaying image of Sri Lanka as remembered by Triton.We know that he andMr Salgado actually move to England in 1971, a good twelve yearsbefore the 1983 riots. However, we are aware that Tritons' distopian memories of SriLanka are retrospectively in¯uenced by both the ethnic and class based problems thatbefell the country, and we are also aware of some equation of Triton's increasinglysaddened memories to his own explorations of modernity. Never, however, are weallowed into the particularities of the country's sanguinary misfortunes. The intricacies

594 TARIQ JAZEEL

and complexities of Sri Lanka's blood-stained contemporary social history are not madeclear in Reef.

Throughout these allusions to the mis-fortune of Sri Lanka, island-ness appearsinescapable. It is mapped through the contours of Sri Lanka's unstable social terrain, andmore speci®cally through the contested claims on the integrity of Sri Lankan island-ness.It is depicted as a fate that pre-dates and contains the country's tensions; an inescapablegeopolitical reality, almost organic by nature. AsMr Salgado explains to one of his guestsin an after dinner conversation:

`You could say Africa, the whole of the rest of the world, was part of us. It was all oneplace: Gondwanaland. The great land-mass in the age of innocence. But then the earthwas corrupted and the sea ¯ooded in. The land was divided. Bits broke of and driftedaway and we were left with this spoiled paradise of yakkhasÐdemonsÐand the history ofmankind spoken on stone.[63]

Throughout Reef's rather vague descriptions of the competing claims and counter-claims in the Sri Lankan ethnic and political arena at the time, the organicism ofSri Lanka as one distinct land-mass, an island, remains constant. In the above extractMr Salgado, in typically rational tones, authoritatively decrees that the piece of land, theisland called Sri Lanka which was left after the split of Gondwanaland, was a `spoiledparadise' as soon as it was createdÐfull of demons. In an instant he has naturalizedclaims on the integrity of Sri Lankan island-ness; claims which are not in fact natural butentirely cultural and social.

Fairly late on in the story as Mr Salgado and Miss Nili are on the verge of a break upwhich eventually seesMr Salgado and Tritonmove to England, we sense that Triton feelsalmost claustrophobic in his spoilt paradise:

I didn't want to clear up. I didn't want to intrude on Miss Nili and Mr Salgado. After awhile I walked down to the main road. I watched the traf®c go from nowhere to nowhere.I could feel the ocean pressing around us.[64]

Island-ness is engul®ng Triton. It is now con®ning him. His memory imagines ageography that seemed inescapable. Towards the end of the story, as memories of theethnic war and class struggles become more pronounced, Triton's spatial imagination ofSri Lanka is even more distopic and tinged with the blood shed by `Sri Lankans'. Notspeci®cally Sinhalese or Tamils in this story, just `Sri Lankan' all from the same island.Their `̀ bodies would roll again and again in the surf, they would be washed in by the tideand be beached by the dozen.''[65]

Sri Lanka's insularity has been mapped through Triton's memory in such a way that itis also severely problematized. Gunesekera's constant allusions to island-ness, in a waywhich implies insularity without ever explicitly tackling the issue, explores the gaps in theimpermeable `coastline' which de®nes Sri Lanka's insularity. The very natural andconcrete assumptions about Sri Lankan island-ness emerging initially through Triton'sapplication of modern and scienti®c knowledge and reason to his spatial conception ofhis world, become fraught with dif®culty and contradiction. It is an island-nessimplicated eventually as somehow inescapable and as much imprisoning as it isserendipitous. But Triton has escaped. Here then it is appropriate perhaps to verybrie¯y re-visit The Breach, for it is only in London that Triton can directly address thesenselessness of Sri Lanka's fate. Island-ness and its senselessness are brought into sharpfocus only 6000 miles away from Sri Lanka itself. Triton and the young refugee'scommon idiom of English is a reminder that British colonization of Ceylon in fact createdCeylon as island state. This raises interesting questions about the condition oftranslocation as expressed in post-colonial literature. In particular about the type

UNPICKING SRI LANKAN `ISLAND-NESS' 595

of vision this facilitates and the types of questions that post-colonial authors such asRomesh Gunesekera can raise regarding Sri Lankan island-ness. Gunesekera's explor-ation of modernity, memory and island-ness in Reef lend weight and clarity to HomiBhabba's suggestion that post-colonial perspectives `̀ formulate their critical revisionsaround issues of cultural difference, social authority and political discrimination in orderto reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the `rationalizations' ofmodernity.''[66] If island-ness is a rationalization of modernity with its roots in Ceylon'scolonial history then Gunesekera's post-coloniality in Reef is a form of counter-modernity, or `̀ a disavowed colonialismmade present, in the present, through the gap (or`fracture') in the enunciation of modern culture.''[67] He raises essential questionsnecessary to stutter the rationalisations of modernity.

Conclusion

Jayadeva Uyangoda suggests that the nation-state is in a dying phase in South Asia.[68]

He stresses that it may now be easy to rid ourselves of nation-state totemism. While Iwould like to share his optimism about new visions and political imaginations which areparticular to a South Asian problem, I would also suggest that we broaden our ideas ofwhat the political encompasses by paying attention to the politics involved in culturalforms such as popular literature. If, then, nations are construed as inventions, artefacts,and not necessarily the most appropriate inventions in particular cases, then we shouldrecognize that their existence is predicated upon `̀ an apparatus of cultural ®ctions inwhich imaginative literature plays a decisive role.''[69] Thus, the political interpretation ofliterary texts becomes an interpretation not auxiliary to other interpretive methods, butrather, as Frederick Jameson suggests, the absolute horizon of all reading andinterpretation.[70] This does not mean I wish to denigrate the imaginative geographiesportrayed inReef. After all this is one narrative among many, one particular articulationof memory. Triton's memory that makes no claims to represent, but also in the last fewpages of the book seems to recognize its role in constructing an imagined geography:

I was learning that human history is always a story of somebody's diaspora: a strugglebetween those who expel, repel or curtailÐpossess, divide and ruleÐand those who keepthe ¯ame alive from night to night, mouth tomouth, enlarging the world with each ¯ick ofa tongue.[71]

Moreover, I would suggest that we have to listen carefully to the peculiarities andhybridities of immigrant memory in post-colonial literature, and its articulation ofimaginative geographies and identity. These speak of important instabilities in spatial-ities and also ask important questions of these spatialities. They tell of the often troublingconditions of translocation, airing painful pasts which once better understood allow are-orientation with the present. However, I would also tentatively suggest that we lookat the way the popular novel has the potential to map discourses of the island-state. Thispaper has shown howReef is involved in a process of mapping island-ness onto Sri Lankawhich at once helps to naturalize and problematize such an insularity. As Cosgrovesuggests:

An implicit claim of mapping has conventionally been to represent spatial stability; attimes to act as a tool in achieving it. In a world of radically unstable spaces and structures,it is unsurprising that the idea of mapping should require rethinking.[72]

Perhaps the challenge is now for both readers and writers of ®ction to consider theprocess they are mutually involved in as political and geographical; not just recreational,but a dynamic and evolving process of mapping.Meeting this challenge might allow us to

596 TARIQ JAZEEL

`̀ ask new questions of old and new sources,'' and ``®ction may give us the necessary tools,the construction of new myths may be part of our work.''[73]

Department of GeographyFaculty of Social SciencesOpen UniversityWalton HallMilton Keynes MK7 6AAUK

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Romesh Gunesekera, Denis Cosgrove, Catherine Nash and the members of`Landscape Surgery' in the social and cultural geography group at Royal Holloway, University ofLondon, for comments on previous drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank two anonymousreferees for comments and Klaus Dodds for invaluable encouragement. I am also grateful to theEconomic and Social Research Council for a postgraduate training award, which has enabled thisresearch.

Notes

[1] Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948, as the Dominion of Ceylon. Its name was changedto Sri Lanka in 1972 by constitutional reform. The ®rst of®cially recognized race riots werein 1958.

[2] K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Delhi 1981).[3] Nihal Perera, Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism and Post-colonial Identities in

Sri Lanka (Boulder Colorado 1998).[4] For example, Leonard Woolf's, The Village in the Jungle (London 1913).[5] For example, Colin de Silva's, The Winds of Sinhala (New York 1982).[6] For example, Raja Proctor's, The Illicit Immigrant (Colombo 1977). There is much academic

writing on the complex debates regarding literatures originating from Sri Lanka tacklingissues such as the place of Tamil literature in the nation-state, and the issue of Englishlanguage in Sri Lankan literature. It is not my intention to engage with these here. Thesediscussions have been well rehearsed elsewhere. See Wilfred Jayasuriya, Sri Lanka's ModernEnglish Literature: a Case Study in Literary Theory (New Delhi 1994); and D. C. R. A.Goonetileke (Ed.), Modern Sri Lankan Stories: an Anthology (Colombo 1986), for example.

[7] Wilfred Jayasuriya, op. cit.[8] Joanne P. Sharp, A Topology of `Post' Nationality: (Re)mapping Identity in The Satanic

Verses, 65, Ecumene 1, 1 (1994) 65±76.[9] Ibid.[10] Ibid., 67. Joanne Sharp is concerned with Salman Rushdie's predicament in The Satanic

Verses, thus while her arguments about hybridity are extremely valuable for this work, hermodel does not represent a theory that can be transplanted directly into this research. Thecomplexities and messiness of post-colonial theory require that each case be worked throughindividually.

[11] Rushdie quoted on p.189 in Stefano Manferlotti, Writers From Elsewhere, in Chambersand Curti (Eds), The Post-colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London andNew York, 1996)

[12] Ibid.[13] In personal e-mail correspondence on 6/5/1999, Romesh Gunesekera, stated that these were

his two main themes in Reef.[14] Manferlotti, Writers From Elsewhere, 189.[15] The name `Triton' of course has many associations with the maritime in western symbolism.

In Greek mythology Triton was the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, each of a race of minorsea gods usually represented as men with ®shes tails. Triton is also the principal naturalsatellite of the planet Neptune, is Mr Salgado Triton's Neptune? A Triton is also a largemarine gastropod, whose shells when blown produce a booming sound.

UNPICKING SRI LANKAN `ISLAND-NESS' 597

[16] For examples of representational theories of landscape within geography, see StephenDaniels and Denis Cosgrove (Eds), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the SymbolicRepresentation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge 1988) 1±8; StephenDaniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the UnitedStates (Cambridge 1994); Denis Cosgrove, Cultural Landscapes, in Tim Unwin (Ed.),A European Geography (Essex 1998), 65±81.

[17] Gaston Bachelard (trans. by Maria Jolas), The Poetics of Space (Boston 1994) xxviii.[18] James Duncan and David Gregory (Eds), Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing

(London and New York 1999).[19] Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (New York 1974).[20] Kasia Boddy, The European journey in post-war American ®ction and ®lm, in Elsner

and Rubies (Eds), Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London1999).

[21] John Updike, Through a continent darkly, in Picked up Pieces (New York 1975) 343±351.[22] Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London and New York

1996) 87.[23] Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford

1994) 16.[24] Duncan and Gregory, op. cit., 5.[25] Vikram Chandra, `The Indian Gaze', talk delivered at the Continental Drift: Asian Writing in

Transit conference, Royal Festival Hall, London, 1999.[26] Bachelard, op. cit., 204.[27] de Silva, op. cit., 550.[28] Jayadeva Uyangoda, Biographies of a decaying nation-state, 174±175, in N. Tiruchelvam

and P. Dattathreya (Eds), Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka (Colombo 1998).[29] Romesh Gunesekera, Reef (London 1994) 2.[30] James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Massachesetts

1997), 256.[31] Gunesekera, Reef, 3.[32] Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge 1985) 120.[33] Guneskera, Reef, 51.[34] Paul Carter, Dark With excess of bright: mapping the coastlines of knowledge, in Cosgrove

(Ed.), Mappings (London 1999) 125±147.[35] Ibid.[36] Gunesekera, Reef, 6.[37] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (California 1984) 15. The reference to

`common experience' refers to the ordinary or quotidian experience, not the social or sharedexperience.

[38] Gunesekera, Reef, 53±54.[39] Ibid., 28.[40] Michel de Certeau, op. cit., 24.[41] Gunesekera, Reef, 58.[42] Mahathaya literally translated means `Sir'.[43] Ibid., 24.[44] Ibid., 59.[45] Paul Carter, 1999, op. cit., 136.[46] Ibid., 127.[47] Ibid., 128.[48] Ibid.[49] Gunesekera, Reef, 137.[50] Ibid., 152.[51] Ibid., l53.[52] Ibid.[53] Martin Wickeramasinghe, Buddhism and Culture (Sri Lanka 1981) 96.[54] Ibid.[55] JVP stands for `Janata Vimukti Peramuna'.[56] A. J. Wilson, Politics in Sri Lanka, 1947±1979 (London 1979) 161.[57] Gunesekera, Reef, 153.[58] Ibid., 15.

598 TARIQ JAZEEL

[59] Maureen Sioh, 1998, Authorizing the Malaysian rainforest: con®guring space, contestingclaims and conquering imaginaries, Ecumene 5 (1998) 144±154.

[60] Ibid., 160.[61] K. M. de Silva, 1981, op. cit., 531.[62] See Stanley Jeyerajah Tambiah, Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fracticide and the Dismantling of

Democracy (Chicago 1986); and also Idem., Buddhism Betrayed: Religion, Politics andViolence in Sri Lanka (Chicago 1992).

[63] Gunesekera, Reef, 84.[64] Ibid., 154.[65] Ibid., 173.[66] Homi K. Bhabba, The Location of Culture (London and New York 1994) 171.[67] John Kraniauskis, Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: Latin Americanist and Postcolonial

Perspectives on Cultural Studies, 121, Nepantla: Views From South 1 (2000) 111±137.[68] Uyangoda, Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State, 179.[69] T. Brennan quoted on p. 167 in Robert Shannan Peckham, Between East and West: the

border writing of Yeorvios Vizyinos, Ecumene 5 (1996) 145±166.[70] Frederick Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 17,

(Cornell University Press, 1983) 17. Also see Homi Bhabba (Ed.), Nation and Narration(London 1990).

[71] Gunesekera, Reef 174.[72] Cosgrove, Mappings, 5.[73] Catherine Hall, Histories, empires and the post-colonial moment, in Chambers and Curti

(Eds), The Post-Colonial Question (London 1996), 65±77.