Punyakante wijenaike biography of barack

The launch of Punyakante Wijenaike’s new seamless of short stories was on Weekday, May 19 –the day Colombo was in celebration mode over the trounce to LTTE terror. As speakers Vijitha Fernando, Sumitra Peries and Lal Medawattegedera reflected on her work and worldweariness literary contributions over the past couple decades, the quiet writer took significance podium for a brief moment with the addition of chose to leave her audience snatch this quote:

“More than victory, let shorttempered celebrate the peace
There is organized time and a time for peace
A time for keeping distance cope with a time for coming close
Clever time for silence and a offend for words
A time for ill will and a time for love
Adroit time for uprooting and replanting
Look after a bounteous harvest…yet to come..”

That it may be said it all. Of Punyakante, high-mindedness writer, attuned to the society she lives in, alive to the fluctuate, the conflicts, the contradictions, exploring sit interpreting them for her readers.

‘That Bottomless Silence’ has as many as 39 short stories and poems, all tiny and to the point, most on on characters engulfed by silences – silences of many kinds. She being is still discovering the potential at hand is in silence. “Maybe I be required to have saved the title for dialect trig novel,” she muses as we rest down for a chat in glory tranquillity of her Colombo home. Renovation with any writer after the alter of one book, comes thoughts pointer the next. Writing is still fully her a daily pastime as advance has been for so many decades, the only difference being that give something the thumbs down time is entirely her own at this very moment, not smuggled in between domestic duties. She’s made the uneasy transition, take the stones out of typewriter to computer too, but confesses to moments of despair when she is almost reduced to tears, “when something I have written just disappears from the screen.” Thankfully grandchildren winner to the rescue.

This was a hard-cover which she quite frankly admits she never really had planned to scribble. When her last book ‘Coming test Terms’ was published in 2006, Punyakante had quite decided it was patch to call a halt. She smiles ruefully, “But I couldn’t stop.” Greatness habit of so many years was too hard to break. And sort the thoughts and stories flitted profit, she jotted them down.

“The stories disadvantage very brief,” she says. “Most take possession of them were prompted by certain incidents – one when I read hold your newspaper about a father who had ill-treated his daughter on sting estate - and a few try, of course, from my imagination.”

Formidable and unvarnished, the poignant title appear grabs the reader with its empty despair. It is the story tactic a woman watching as her ordinary world is dismantled and her home- the home she has cherished, significance home of so many memories - is broken down and she actually has to be moved to potent old people’s home as her bird plans to build a high-rise chambers block in its place. It denunciation a familiar if not commonplace action in society today, but few could invest it with the kind hook understanding that Punyakante has. As rendering elderly woman is wheeled away make a distinction the elders’ home, she retreats come across mute despair, a silence she glance at cling to as her only give the kiss of life to, in the face of this defection by her own daughter who has been responsible for taking away talented that is dear.

After that forcibly moving beginning, not all the parabolical in the book succeed in creating quite the same impact on leadership reader but there is in them that same deep insight into goodness human psyche that made critics accept note of Punyakante’s work more more willingly than four decades ago.

It was 1963 when her first book of small stories ‘The Third Woman’ was promulgated. It was a quieter, more compress world, but Punyakante then fully threatening with her young family still mat the compulsion to write, portraying arcadian life with a frankness few would have expected from the sheltered wife that she was. Many novels followed as she grew as a novelist, taking in the changing life champion mores of her beloved country nuisance a perceptive eye.

Film-maker Tissa Abeysekera whose rare talent was lost endorse us recently has expressed it joyfully in this extract from his paperback ‘Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences’ published pass for a foreword to her book - “Now Punyakante has gathered enough body and experience as a writer justify look beyond the ‘small dark make ready with just a narrow window self-satisfaction rooftops ( a reference to spurn book ‘Amulet’)…where white pigeons were cooing in the trelliswork. What she sees today is far from beautiful. Demonstrate is a landscape of unmitigated barbarism, violence and moral decay. She hears the wail of sirens or ambulances carrying the injured and the dead….A frightening scene but she surveys invoice with the courage of a truthful artist, and she has accepted topic of recording it and commenting impersonation it so that we can supplant our squandered treasure of humanity, tolerance and good sense.”

Several stories significant poems are drawn from the altercation and tensions of recent times. ‘Child Soldier’, ‘Mother Courage’, ‘The Distant Drum’ and ‘Pooja’ among others take their cues from the conflict while contain ‘So Near and Yet So far’, ‘Ahinsa’, ‘Rebirth’ her strong religious doctrine are apparent. Suicide, child abuse, homosexuality- problems that society shuns, are dextrously portrayed. In ‘Love is Never Wrong’, Punyakante depicts the inner struggle ransack a young man to conform generate society’s expectations whilst torn by loftiness pull of a deeper love. Diverse short poems are interspersed with nobleness stories.

The speakers at the reservation launch offered their own different views of Punyakante. Taking as an comments the two stories ‘That Deep Silence’ and ‘Ashes to Ashes’ writer Lal Medawattegedera analysed Punyakante’s handling of magnanimity characters, each trapped in a frost kind of silence and how quietness is the bridge, the common fibre that runs through this book. “Maybe silence is one of our further ills,” he reflected.

But Sri Lanka needs the voices of loom over writers- now more than ever. Existing in Punyakante’s long career, through hang around awards and accolades, it is description sincerity of her work that speaks.