I found inspiration in this quote from the introduction to Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers by Shyam Selvadurai
“What kind of writer do you consider yourself to be? Are you a Canadian writer or a Sri Lankan writer?”
It is perplexing, this matter of cultural identity, and I am tempted, like some other writers of multiple identites, to reply grumpily, “I’m just a bloody writer. Period.”
Yet this response would be disingenuous. I suppose I could answer, “Sri Lankan-Canadian writer,” or “Canadian-Sri-Lankan writer.” But this also does not get to the heart of what i consider my identity to be as a writer (and we are talking of my writing identity here). For in terms of being a writer, my creativity comes not from “Sri Lankan” or “Canadian” but precisely from the space between, that marvellous open space represented by the hypen, in which the two parts of my idenitity joustle and rub up against each other like tectonic plates, pushing upwards the eruption that is my work. It is from this space between that the novels come.