Every now and then, a reader comes across a real discovery. A few rupees to spare at Colombo International Airport in Sri Lanka prompted the purchase of some books by local authors. Traveling, if done with an interest in the world rather than in oneself, requires cultural immersion and experience. Food, art, history, religions, cultures, and music are on the list, but literature and writing must also be on the list. What a reader would not predict from a cover that featured bananas and little else would be the fact that this set of stories would prove to be nothing less than a sufficient revelation to merit the description of “masterpiece.”
The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku is the book in question. It has seven short stories with a total of around fifty thousand words, making it short enough for the traveler to consume before the plane heading west from Colombo reaches Doha. But don’t think that this implies anything slight. Rather, the theme of these stories goes straight to the heart of Sri Lanka’s social fabric, its political and religious conflicts, its war, its highly unequal society, even its often conflictual relationship with Britain, its former colonial master.
These stories cover many topics and illustrate many arguments, but don’t think for a moment that they are didactic or burdensome in any way. The reality is quite the opposite, as the writing style is sophisticatedly simple and transparent, the plots deceptively simple in their ability to convey complications with superb empathy. There is the Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim triangle, the Sinhalese-Tamil war, the relations between the sexes and the generations, the devastation by a tsunami, the effects, intended and not, of foreign aid and even cricket. Anyone who has visited Sri Lanka will marvel at the brilliance with which these contexts are skillfully woven into the tales of ordinary people. A reader who has never been to this beautiful, troubled, welcoming and often hectic island might even feel that these stories were the same as a visit, so vivid are the descriptions and so seemingly real are the settings. We even have a government minister being pushed through a crowd by the driver of his four-wheeler. Anyone who has visited Sri Lanka will recognize the requirement to get off the road. By the way, the reason the convoys of ministers behave so rudely in traffic is that they assume the bombs are never far away.
If this set of stories, Insankya Kodithuwakku’s The Banana Tree Crisis, contained only The House in Jaffna, it would still be worth buying, just for those twenty pages. In just a few thousand words, Insankya Kodithuwakku addresses intergenerational and cross-cultural differences, the empty consumerism of captialism that sees personality as simply the sum of consumption, the nature of nostalgia, the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict, the fate of Jaffna, and , in general, the appreciation of life as a process of change. It is nothing less than a masterpiece of the genre.
And Insankya Kodithuwakku’s writing style is always wonderfully transparent, always engaging, and regularly surprising throughout this set of stories. Insankya Kodithuwakku certainly shows great talent. If you know Sri Lanka, you will love these stories. If you’ve never been, you will be taken there for an authentic, enlightening, and thoroughly entertaining tour. Please read The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku.