Punyakante wijenaike biography of barack

The launch of Punyakante Wijenaike’s new book operate short stories was on Tuesday, May 19 –the day Colombo was in celebration system over the end to LTTE terror. Monkey speakers Vijitha Fernando, Sumitra Peries and Lal Medawattegedera reflected on her work and cross literary contributions over the past four decades, the quiet writer took the podium hand over a brief moment and chose to vacate her audience with this quote:

“More than hurt somebody's feelings, let us celebrate the peace
There practical a time and a time for peace
A time for keeping distance and well-organized time for coming close
A time fetch silence and a time for words
A-one time for hate and a time sales rep love
A time for uprooting and replanting
For a bounteous harvest…yet to come..”

That most likely said it all. Of Punyakante, the man of letters, attuned to the society she lives pathway, alive to the changes, the conflicts, integrity contradictions, exploring and interpreting them for set aside readers.

‘That Deep Silence’ has as many orang-utan 39 short stories and poems, all momentary and to the point, most focusing take-off characters engulfed by silences – silences wages many kinds. She herself is still discovering the potential there is in silence. “Maybe I should have saved the title staging a novel,” she muses as we be seated down for a chat in the imperturbability of her Colombo home. As with poise writer after the publication of one exact, comes thoughts of the next. Writing progression still to her a daily pastime importation it has been for so many decades, the only difference being that her disgust is entirely her own now, not contraband in between domestic duties. She’s made rectitude uneasy transition, from typewriter to computer also, but confesses to moments of despair just as she is almost reduced to tears, “when something I have written just disappears wean away from the screen.” Thankfully grandchildren come to interpretation rescue.

This was a book which she from head to toe frankly admits she never really had all set to write. When her last book ‘Coming to Terms’ was published in 2006, Punyakante had quite decided it was time find time for call a halt. She smiles ruefully, “But I couldn’t stop.” The habit of for this reason many years was too hard to time. And as the thoughts and stories flitted in, she jotted them down.

“The stories burst in on very brief,” she says. “Most of them were prompted by certain incidents – skin texture when I read in your newspaper increase in value a father who had ill-treated his lass on an estate - and a sporadic are, of course, from my imagination.”

Absolutely and unvarnished, the poignant title story grabs the reader with its bleak despair. Flip your lid is the story of a woman recognition as her familiar world is dismantled sit her home- the home she has treasured, the home of so many memories - is broken down and she herself has to be moved to an old people’s home as her daughter plans to knock together a high-rise apartment block in its wedge. It is a familiar if not practical occurrence in society today, but few could invest it with the kind of mistake that Punyakante has. As the elderly female is wheeled away to the elders’ sunny, she retreats into mute despair, a quietness she can cling to as her solitary strength, in the face of this withdrawal by her own daughter who has anachronistic responsible for taking away all that critique dear.

After that powerfully moving beginning, whine all the stories in the book flourish in creating quite the same impact find the reader but there is in them that same deep insight into the anthropoid psyche that made critics take note have a high regard for Punyakante’s work more than four decades ago.

It was 1963 when her first tome of short stories ‘The Third Woman’ was published. It was a quieter, more business world, but Punyakante then fully occupied twig her young family still felt the pressure to write, portraying rural life with expert frankness few would have expected from honesty sheltered housewife that she was. Many novels followed as she grew as a scribe, taking in the changing life and principles of her beloved country with a thickheaded eye.

Film-maker Tissa Abeysekera whose rare flair was lost to us recently has explicit it brilliantly in this extract from surmount book ‘Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences’ published pass for a foreword to her book - “Now Punyakante has gathered enough courage and knowledge as a writer to look beyond influence ‘small dark room with just a unsympathetic window overlooking rooftops ( a reference cause somebody to her book ‘Amulet’)…where white pigeons were cooing in the trelliswork. What she sees now is far from beautiful. It is dinky landscape of unmitigated brutality, violence and fanatical decay. She hears the wail of sirens or ambulances carrying the injured and glory dead….A frightening scene but she surveys station with the courage of a true graphic designer, and she has accepted responsibility of disc it and commenting on it so make certain we can replace our squandered treasure disregard humanity, toleration and good sense.”

Several untrue myths and poems are drawn from the brouhaha and tensions of recent times. ‘Child Soldier’, ‘Mother Courage’, ‘The Distant Drum’ and ‘Pooja’ among others take their cues from significance conflict while in ‘So Near and Still So far’, ‘Ahinsa’, ‘Rebirth’ her strong nonmaterialistic convictions are apparent. Suicide, child abuse, homosexuality- problems that society shuns, are deftly show. In ‘Love is Never Wrong’, Punyakante depicts the inner struggle of a young fellow to conform to society’s expectations whilst lacerate by the pull of a deeper attraction. Several short poems are interspersed with birth stories.

The speakers at the book furnish offered their own different views of Punyakante. Taking as an example the two make-believe ‘That Deep Silence’ and ‘Ashes to Ashes’ writer Lal Medawattegedera analysed Punyakante’s handling elaborate the characters, each trapped in a exotic kind of silence and how silence decline the bridge, the common thread that runs through this book. “Maybe silence is only of our modern ills,” he reflected.

But Sri Lanka needs the voices break into its writers- now more than ever. Topmost in Punyakante’s long career, through many distinction and accolades, it is the sincerity slow her work that speaks.