Palmyrah
11-23-2009, 05:48 AM
Greetings from the war-torn (but slowly recovering) island formerly known as Paradise. Not many of us natives speak English and few of us speak it well, but there are some notable exceptions. I'm one such, the scion of a westernized, deracinated, soi-disant elite that has been blamed, unfairly, for most of Sri Lanka's post-colonial troubles. The Communists called us compradors, the blind nationalists and historical revisionists use much nastier words. The bulk of us have long since succumbed to the mild version of ethnic cleansing by being driven abroad by nativist language policies in the decades since Independence, but a few, myself included, still cleave to the country of our birth and are proud of the bridge we form between East and West. In my particular case, I build the bridge by writing, which is my profession as well as my cross. I write in English, my native language, which is also the language in which I (mostly) read.