I would write something but never go back to it and try to make it better. But writing has always been a way of comfort for me, a form of therapy and also one of affection. I loved it since I was young.
BH: You wrote your first novel, Song of the Sun God, on a Sri Lankan Tamil family’s history and lineage. Could I ask an additional question about why you returned to Sri Lanka and not to Sydney for your first novel? Were you returning further back into your roots from the disappointment of Sydney? Were you reaching back to ancestral roots—a diaspora tendency of course, as evidenced in several of the interviews in this book of Creative Lives—springing from lack of roots in the process of your (three-continent) routes?
SC: In Song of the Sun God, I returned to Sri Lanka and eventually settled in Australia. This narrative follows the course of my family’s life and mine—geographically but also spiritually I suppose. At university, I read T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”. The following lines have stayed with me:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
I sound so tragic, but these lines still move me and I often find myself thinking about them. As a member of a diasporic generation born outside of our ancestral homeland, I have often felt without roots. I have often felt untethered and have longed for that deeper sense of belonging that my parents take so deeply for granted that they do not even know they have it.
Growing up in Australia, I did not feel I “fitted”, nor did I have a relationship with or lived connection to Sri Lanka. Song of the Sun God was a way for me to explore, find or even create, a connection to Sri Lanka—the actual Sri Lanka, the historic one and the Sri Lanka that I had received through my family’s memories. The family in the book, like me, loses home (in the different ways we define home) and must create a new one. Writing the book was developmental and cathartic for me in that it helped me understand and accept so much: where I have come from (ancestrally); what I cannot have, reclaim or be; and who I am now. All of that is evolving, dynamic and imperfect but it’s mine.
BH: It is interesting that you are using words like “comfort” and “therapy”. I wonder whether it was the very act of writing that helped you navigate all these shifts in your life at that time?
SC: Absolutely.
BH: So, writing is an escape, a comfort and an energising force; you write from the nest of the family. But are you also escaping the wider diaspora of Sydney in which you live, into a Sri Lanka that might have been more positive and inclusive of you, perhaps? An original homeland—even if you were not born there?
SC: No, because it is very hard to see Sri Lanka, given its recent history, as a place that could be more inclusive of the Tamil people. For that, I would need to re-write history, and I wanted to create a novel that was as historically accurate as I could.
BH: The process of writing and sharing your story with a wider audience can be unsettling. Does the act of writing—developing a story, its characters, a setting—still serve as something settling or comforting for you?
SC: I think, 100 percent, yes, it does. Overall, I am, as a person, far more grounded and at peace with myself when I am writing. It comforts me, it uplifts me, and it connects me to myself. I feel my most authentic self and very present when I am in the middle of writing. It might seem contradictory that I feel very present when I have deliberately taken myself to another world. When I am writing, I am 100 percent in that world to the point where my husband is concerned that if there was a house fire, I wouldn’t be aware of it. So, I don’t write and don’t even edit on screen when my children are home. I will research when the children are in the house, and I will edit on paper. I can sit with them and do a bit of editing, but I would never work on the first draft of a manuscript or an idea when they are around because I am too deeply absorbed into that world. It’s not fair for them, and it’s not safe for them. I owe them as their mother the mindfulness and the presence. I need to give that to them when they are with me.
The other part of that answer though is that I often write about very traumatic things and that is unsettling for me. It is traumatic for me. When you write, you really are inside your mind, the picture is very clear, and you are with those people. You are as close to them as you could possibly be, without being them, and that is traumatic. At the end of the day, depending on what I have been writing about, I find that I really need to take some time to pull myself out of that world and re-set my mind for reality and my children. On those days, I need to just hold them for a while to be reassured that reality is safe and secure, and that my children are OK.
BH: You write about the Sri Lankan civil war in both your first and (I gather) third novel-in-progress. What is your angle? How do you see it, as someone in some senses outside—a diasporic—returning to the land of her ancestors, one that is not immediately “yours”? Also, did you feel welcome in Sri Lanka? How did Sri Lanka receive you?
SC: For both Song of the Sun God and The Phantom Limb (my third novel), I spent a lot of time researching and interviewing insiders—Sri Lankans with lived experience of the events and places I write about. However, my writing will always be from the outsider’s perspective. I am a diasporic outsider, someone with an ancestral connection and love for the place, but still an outsider. At times, this gives me an ability to see things that are best seen from the outside. And at other times, it means that I am not seeing as much as I should. My lens is obscured and distorted.
My angle is Tamil and I can’t apologise for that—I can only tell the reader who I am. I can declare my conflict of interest as it were, whilst also reiterating that I tried to write as historically accurately as I could, interrogating the motivations, actions and failures of all of the stakeholders in both the micro (family) and macro (political) story I told. I felt that bias and inaccuracies would undermine the veracity and credibility of the whole piece, and I wanted people to read this perspective of Sri Lanka rather than dismiss it. The lawyer in me also wants detail, facts and testimony—in a sense, the truth.
I felt so welcome in Sri Lanka—all people welcomed me and supported my research. People wanted to talk and share their stories, even the ugly, hard ones. All people are storytellers, not just writers. We are unburdened by telling stories. We bind ourselves to each other by telling stories. I felt truly welcomed. The response to Song of the Sun God in Sri Lanka has been really humbling. People read it and reach out to me. It has been an honour to write something that seems to resonate with Tamils and Sinhalese people.
BH: In fact, I was wondering how you would manage to switch between the often-violent worlds of your writing and the all-encompassing world of motherhood. I can imagine that moving from writing a war scene onto making dinner or helping with homework can be quite exhausting. And even if the process of writing is mostly comforting for you, the task of traversing both worlds—the real and the imagined, the one around you and the one inside of you—might drain energy from you as well.
SC: I think one of the contradictions of writing is that it is really energizing and exhilarating to write. I am very uplifted when I write and if I don’t write, I can feel a heaviness within myself. If I don’t write, I am difficult to be with. I am uncomfortable with myself, and I am slightly agitated and unsettled. At the same time, though it is energising and exhilarating, it is also meditative and prayerful. And it is traumatic and draining. It is all of those things.
BH: But fulfilling in that way?
SC: Yes, ultimately, it is incredibly fulfilling. I feel extremely fortunate that I had a job in the law that I loved. I would wake up every morning with a rush of adrenaline and march into the office determined to do something useful today. And I feel so fortunate to have had that for more than ten years, and I loved it. I thought I would never love a job as much as I loved that. But when I began to write, I realized I had found something that