In November 2005, I completed a three month writer’s residency with the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. At one of the translation workshops held there, I was approached by some students who wanted to translate my writing. However, when they asked me what language I wrote in and I replied English, their perplexed faces and subsequent question why? gave rise to some thoughts.

Why indeed do I write in English?

During the years 1796 to 1818, Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, gradually became a British colony, finally gaining independence in 1948. They left us an inheritance of tea, roads, railways and the English language.

Language seems to be the most apparent and the most enduring of the colonial legacies, especially in countries over which the British Empire held sway. This becomes evident when one considers the fact that a great amount of post-colonial literature has been written in English.

Ngugi Wa Thiongo, the Kenyan writer said in his article The Language of African Literature, “Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world.”

Could he have meant that because language provides the conditions by which reality may be composed, and that because language provides the names by which the world may be known, the effects of language in a colonised country go beyond the basic function of speech as communication and acquire a more cultural significance? This importance placed on language raises the debate of what should become of the English language in the former colonies of the British Empire. Should we reject, embrace or possibly even subvert it? And so it brings me to the question of what is my language?

As a Colombo Muslim, my grandmother spoke only Tamil, my mother spoke Tamil and English and I speak only English. Between my grandmother and me there was barely any communication. She represented the past (traditional, uneducated, powerless) while I was supposed to be the symbol of the future (modern, educated and having agency). But in-between, something happened. It was called Sinhala Only!

In July 1956, the Official Language Act came into being making Sinhala the one official language of Sri Lanka. Language became a tool of national identity. It became the basis of nationalism where ‘Sinhala nationalism’ equated with ‘Sri Lankan nationalism.’

This decision to make Sinhala the official language could be interpreted as a measure that aided in marginalising the minorities, rather than working towards creating a cohesive Sri Lankan identity.

If it was meant to divide, the strategy backfired.

Today, many Muslims speak English, Tamil and Sinhala for in reality Muslims have no ethnic language to call their own. Language, for them, is a means of communication; it’s not a part of their identity.

Similarly, the Tamils learned Sinhalese in order to survive.

Paradoxically, it is the Sinhalese for whom language is now a problem. Today, the language of the world, both commercial and diplomatic, is English. The Sinhala majority, who previously had no need to learn any other language, now struggle to master English in order to compete in this environment.

I was lucky. Belonging to the generation that barely avoided Sinhala Only, English is the language I was schooled in, the language I speak at home, the language I work in. It is in effect my mother tongue. Therefore, I am a Sri Lankan Muslim writing in English. But sometimes I wonder at what cost. For there is no doubt in my mind that there is always a cost.

Much of my writing deals with questions of identity in a multicultural country. In Sri Lanka we have four religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity), three languages (Sinhala, Tamil and English), four clearly defined ethnicities (Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and Burgher), and a number of sub ethnicities (Moor, Malay, Colombo-Chetty, Borah, Indian Tamil etc).

Having lived out of Sri Lanka intermittently for 17 years, I returned to my motherland in 2003 to begin a new life. I opened a fresh chapter of my life as a writer and publisher. Based in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital, amidst a changing political and geographical landscape, I put together my second collection of short stories. Entitled Zillij after the Moroccan art of creating intricate design using hand-cut mosaic tiles, this collection addresses issues of identity from a variety of perspectives – religion, class, language, ethnicity and nationality. In this collection there is a strong opinion piece entitled Muslim on the Periphery which critiques the Sri Lankan Muslim community from an insider’s point of view. As the title suggests, it is the deliberations of a Muslim man who doesn’t quite fit into the Muslim community and wonders if he is more Muslim or more Sri Lankan, for in his mind he believes that he has to choose one over the other. He finds out he is neither.

For me, writing is a means of exploring the many faces that we have, be it individual or collective. It is a mesh that we construct to give meaning to the world we know.

Through the years I have realised that my writing has two enduring themes – love and politics. Behind the most intimate relations as well as the most public, there is the same search for an identity, a self-confirmation and a wish to belong and exist. For me, the novel and the short story are instruments to penetrate a society that often defends itself against scrutiny, sometimes hides in censorship and hypocrisy and refuses to recognize its history and thus has the capability of producing an entire literature of lies. It is only now that we as a country are able to write about our 24 year old civil war in the north of the country; it is only now that we are able to discuss the bloody Marxist uprising of the south. It is only now that we refuse to retreat and hide behind safe words at the cost of our integrity.

As writers we have a tremendous responsibility in modern times. We are voices of memory, the conscience of a people. We are the witnesses to our time and place. Sometimes the role of the writer is to give life to voices that will ward off the threat of silence. Today I realise that all writers have a conscience and yet, sometimes their vision may not be one that society will support or understand. Still, we write.

What is my identity? How do I want to be remembered? As a Muslim writer, or a woman writer or a Sri Lankan writing in English? There is no easy answer to the question for I am all of them and none of them. It is an undeniable fact that like a burden these labels travel on the back of my stories. And yet at points they are my treasures to be unveiled one by one to reveal a glorious composite. A mosaic of personhood, an interwoven tapestry of self. It is enough for me that I have the luxury of multiple identities that are meshed tight enough to present a whole and yet loose enough for me to breathe and to be one and all that I want to be.