PORTRAYALS OF THE “COMMON” POOR AS [UN]COMMON WEALTH IN THE SRI LANKAN NOVEL OF EXPATRIATION

Abstract

In her paper, “ Can the Indigent Speak? Poverty Studies, the Postcolonial and Global Appeal of Q &A and The White Tiger,” Barbara Korte responds in the negative to her rhetorical question, “are the non-poor disentitled to write about poverty?” before proceeding to critique some novelistic renderings of the indigent by writers who are obviously not impoverished (294). One could ask a similar question in relation to Sri Lanka and frame it thus: “Are Sri Lankan expatriate writers, who are separated from the land of their birth by time and space, entitled to write about the poor in the island, especially domestics”? To this, and the possible follow up question, “Dosome of these depictions of the poor and their interrelations with the moneyed class challenge the postcolonial critic?”one could respond with an emphatic “yes.” In posing and responding to these questions, I am to some extent influenced by a plenary paper presented by Meena Pillai which was subsequently published in the SLACLALS journal Phoenix. She posited that “One needs to look at the representation of the subaltern not as a simple act of representation but as a translation act contaminated by differential language power and mediated and constructed by institutional power”(3). Pillai’s subject was the translation of the writings or oral submissions of sex workers, beggars, and other marginalized individuals into English. But if she feared the accuracy of representations in which the subjects are clearly involved, the “translation” of the Sri Lankan poor in the