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As a
Muslim writer, I often find myself in weird and wonderful situations, writing
in English, living in a predominantly Sinhala Buddhist nation with Sinhala as
the national language. For example, representing Sri Lanka at the International
Writers Programme at the University of Iowa in 2005, I spoke about being a
Muslim writer in the global context at one session and being a Sri Lankan
writer at the very next. Within Sri Lanka if I am asked to speak it is often as
a Muslim writer or as one who writes in English. Both fall into the minority
categories.
This paper will be about
being a Muslim writer as I realize that many of the stories I tell deal with
the Sri Lankan Muslim community. Similar to Rohinton Mistry using fiction to
illustrate the position and culture of the Parsees in India, I find myself
using fiction to portray my own community to my fellow citizens, for, despite
us claiming to be a multicultural society, in reality we are quite separate and
ignorant of the other cultures that live beside us. I also use fiction as a
vehicle to highlight issues within the Sri Lankan Muslim community that may
provoke discussion or in an ideal situation even change. I have been trained as
a sociologist, and an early critic of my stories once wrote that there is too
much sociology in my writing. Hopefully with each book I will be more writer
and story-teller than sociologist but I confess that hard as I try, it’s difficult
to remove the sociologist within me.
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