Each crisis of identity, displacement, and belonging does not allay her it simply sets her apart in her liminality: In these ambivalent spaces that she occupied between colonised and coloniser in the sociocultural milieus of Sri Lanka, Arasanayagam’s poetry is exceptional for its vivid explorations of her personality. In a poem, she thus writes: “my eyes looking into yours tell me that I cannot belong…”.

However, Arasanayagam also had to adapt to their stringent social strictures and traditional norms as an outsider. The Tamils are a numerically significant and politically active minority in Sri Lanka. Her marriage to a Tamilian from Jaffna, another minority group in Sri Lanka, additionally positioned her to uniquely explore poetry from within her lifelong quest for meaning, belonging, and identity in postcolonial Sri Lanka. In her ‘lifetime’s search for an identity’, the origins of her ancestry in a distant space and time added great nuance.Īlso read: Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s Poems Anticipated the India of Today Acutely aware of this former inheritance of privilege, she was nevertheless fascinated by the non-indigenous culture that had shaped her upbringing. The Dutch Burghers enjoyed wealth and social privilege in colonial Sri Lanka. She was born Jean Solomons into a Dutch Burgher family, an ethnic minority of Dutch origin who had married Sri Lankan women. She was also a painter who exhibited her work at Commonwealth exhibitions in London, at the Paris Biennale and at the Lionel Wendt Art Centre in Colombo.Ī deeply sensitive investigator of identity, Arasanayagam straddled multiple heritages in her poetry and sought to chart a cartographic course that would transcend ethno-nationalist boundaries. She had an MLitt in literary linguistics from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and taught English at various institutions in Sri Lanka. She was also a recipient in 2017 of the Gratiaen prize, the most prestigious award for Sri Lankan writing in English, for her poetry collection The Life of the Poet. She was a uniquely political writer, whose poetic identities were forged in the volatile crucibles of the ethnic strife that marked Sri Lanka in the 1980s.Īrasanayagam was awarded the Sahityaratna by the Sri Lankan government in 2017 for her contributions to literature and the Premchand Fellowship from the Sahitya Akademi in India in 2014. Jean Arasanayagam (born 1931), a leading Sri Lankan poet, passed away on July 30 after a brief illness.

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