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Fare thee well . . .
Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here . . .
I'll shape my old course in a country new.
- Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.2.179-86
Carl Muller's trilogy consists of The Jam Fruit Tree (1993; hereafter JFT), Yakada Yaka (1994; YY), and Once Upon a Tender Time (1995; OUTT). These three novels, based on the von Bloss family, give us insights into the Burghers of Sri Lanka. The works are description and defense, a celebration and a valediction. Muller, like Toni Morrison (see 1993), is conscious of re-presenting his people in fiction. The intention here is to read the novels as cultural texts in the light of New Historicism's awareness that history is not merely some stable and passive background against which "sublime" literary texts are foregrounded and, second, with a consciousness that there is no whale, that we live in a world without hiding places, irradiated by history (Rushdie, 99-100).
Edward Said has ironically wondered whether the Palestinians, not having uncontested territory, living in refugee camps or dispersed around the planet, can claim to be known as a people. Similarly, Muller wonders who are these "Burghers"? The simple answer he provides is that they are the "descendants of the Dutch and Portuguese and other Western types" (YY, 11), today comprising less than .07 percent of the population. The Portuguese made contact with Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known) in 1505 and gradually began to take control of the island, beginning with the more easily conquered coastal areas. Most of the early Portuguese settlers were either exiles or criminals whose prison sentence had been commuted to military service in the East (McGilvray, 237). "After 150 years of Portuguese domination the Dutch moved in for another 150-year spell [1656-1802], after which the British took over around 1815" (JFT, 26) and ruled until independence in 1948: "And in the wake of the militia came the settlers-a new race of people who worked their way into the country's canvas.... The brew was further spiced by other foreign types [French, Germans, Scandinavians, and others] who drifted in" (JFT, 26-27). Under the British, the majority of Burghers served in the clerical services, the transport and communication services, and in various technical departments (McGilvray,...