Jean Arasanayagam

She is remembered first for the words: some fifty books of poetry and fiction, translated into German, French, Danish, Swedish and Japanese, that made Jean Arasanayagam one of the most widely read English-language writers Sri Lanka has produced. Before and alongside that reputation, though, she painted, she worked in batik, and she cut lino prints, and it is the visual side of her that the record has kept most thinly. To place her honestly is to name the writer first and then to recover the artist inside her.

She was born Jean Lynette Christine Solomons in Kandy on 2 December 1931, into the island’s Burgher community, of Dutch descent, and she married Thiyagarajah Arasanayagam, a Tamil Hindu, so that her own household gathered up several of the inheritances that would tear at the country in her lifetime. The ethnic and religious turmoil of Sri Lanka became the central subject of her writing, together with the layered identities of her marriage and her ancestry; the civil war, gender and the aftermath of empire ran through the poems and stories that carried her name abroad. She read at the University of Peradeniya and later took a Master of Arts in linguistics at the University of Strathclyde.

The visual practice sat within that same restless, several-sided sensibility. She wrote poems and short stories, she painted, she cut lino prints and she worked in batik, and she taught, moving between media as the material asked. Her paintings and prints were shown at a Commonwealth exhibition in London and at the Paris Biennale, and at home at the Lionel Wendt Art Centre in Colombo, the modern movement’s own gathering place, which set her visual work in the company of the island’s painters rather than only its poets.

She died on 30 July 2019, aged eighty-seven, chiefly mourned as a writer and rightly so. The visual art is the quieter room in a large house, under-recorded precisely because the poetry filled the doorway, and it is worth entering for that reason: the same eye that found the country’s fractures in language also worked them in dye and ink and paint, and left, in batik and lino and on canvas, another record of the identities she spent a life setting down.