Description
Threshold of Rebellion
At two o’clock in the morning, the bus returning with the cast arrived at the university.
Suddenly the headlights flashed onto a barricade of old barrels across the lane, and three guards stopped the bus.
“Sir, didn’t you hear?”
“No, what happened?”
“Yesterday evening…. Mr. Henry, ….shot dead .”
“No!”
They remained in stunned silence.
”We were in Colombo with the play…we didn’t hear”
Then one of the guards turned around slowly and pointed towards the Senate House, which glowed as if a great fire was beyond it.
“…and then this happened …. at about midnight.”
“What…. happened?”
“Sir,….ten boys and a girl,…..they have been beheaded,… and they are burning on a pyre of tyres.”
Upul Abeyrathne –
As Sri Lanka rebuilds its shattered society, a gripping novel revisits a seminal moment of crisis
On an idyllically beautiful university campus set among the hills of Sri Lanka, a student theatre company is rehearsing a production of Blood Wedding, Frederico Garcia Lorca’s gripping exploration of love, hate and divided loyalty.
Their director, a visiting scholar from England, watches, first with dismay and then with horror, as the growing social and political unrest among Lanka’s people begins to infect and overwhelm the students, his young cast among them.
Soon the Edenic life on campus is transformed into a deadly real-world drama of rebellion and reprisal.
Shocked by what he has seen, the Englishman departs. But the cast have no such easy escape. As the flames of violence mount higher, they decide that, somehow, the show must go on…
Those uneasy years led to undergraduates leading an ethnic Sinhala uprising which culminated in 1988/89, with the state extra judicially executing over sixty thousand young men and women. The revolt was against Indian troops in Sri Lanka at the invitation of the government. The rebels claimed the government naively believed Indian troops would quell ethnic Tamil separatism. They were convinced it would eventually lead to the creation of another Bangladesh from East Pakistan, in the form of a separate ethnic Tamil state.
The Vague Poetess revisits and illumines the Sinhalese youth rebellion of 1988/89, which further convulsed a nation already embroiled in ethnic conflict and economic upheaval, and traces its enduring effects, which culminated in 2022 in a popular uprising that toppled the established government, and led to a Marxist led coalition which in 2024 buried the remnants of the old colonial elite and brought a younger generation of national leaders to power in Sri Lanka.
Praise for The Vague Poetess
‘What is timely about this novel is its insistence upon an interiority that betrays an overlapping crux of ignorance, fear, and desire. [But] Fernando’s depiction of horrific violence is no fiction.’
‘By turns beautiful, comic, close, perceptive, and painfully aware, Fernando’s story makes its point: ‘You can’t be playing the fool in the middle of a revolution.’
– Professor of English: James Methven, University of Oxford
‘The novel depicts how political freedom infringed on the aesthetic pursuit of others. The theme of violence explored by students attempting to produce Lorca’s Blood Wedding, becomes symbolic of the inherent violence of the political process around them.’
– Emeritus Professor of Sinhala: K.N.O.Dharmadasa, University of Peradeniya
‘The continuing tale of unrest in the unhealed universities of Sri Lanka. Marxist revolutionary politics and the search for modern universal expression through the theatre. Fernando encapsulated the events of the eighties to a few years, to gain dramatic intensity.’
– Professor of Political Science: Upul Abeyratne, University of Peradeniya