Towards a Sri Lankan Feminism: Intersections in Feminism, Buddhism and Poststructuralist Thought Through Sunethra Rajakarunanayake’s Metta

Abstract

This paper aims to stimulate a cross-cultural conversation between western poststructuralist feminist thought and eastern Buddhist thought as their resonancnes emerge through Sunethra Rajakarunanayake's novel, Metta. The novel, which essentially narrates the growth and development of a female character, radically complicates the central assumption of the female bildungsroman genre as a narrative of a woman’s self-creation/self-assertion because the heroine’s growth and development culminates not in the achievement of a sense of selfhood but in the realization of a self-lessness - the idea that there is no essential, core organizing principle behind experience. A knowledge that stems from Buddhist epistemology, Rajakarunanayake presents the attainment of this knowledge as profoundly empowering. Epistemologically, the novel thus resonates with western feminist poststructuralist thought which evinces a similar suspicion of identity categories. The novel thus provokes a meditation on the intersections between radically different cross-cultural epistemologies and illustrates how these epistemologies could be mutually-enriching.