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The Sri Lankan critic Gamini Salgado may well have been this country's first non-white Professor ofEnglish-joining Exeter Univer- sity in 1977, after studying at Nottingham. He wrote on both Renaissance literature and D.H. Lawrence, a strong influence on the style of his sadly out-of-print memoir, The True Paradise. Constructed posthumously of gathered fragments by Salgado's widow, Fenella Copplesione, it was published by Carcanet in 1993 - an extract had previously appeared in this magazine - and includes as an appendix his inaugural lecture at Exeter on 'Shakespeare and Myself. Here Salgado argues for clear writing in academic criti- cism, a challenge to postcolonial norms which has all the personal authority one could wish for, and which should be taken seriously. He also defends the practice of learning poems off by heart - a term he prefers to any other, for 'if we remember what we love, we can also learn to love by the effort of remembering [... ] in our educa- tional activity we have lost any sense of the connection between memory and love'.
The reminiscences of The True Para- dise are unashamedly lyrical. It deserves to be reprinted, and to be widely read, for its historical importance - I'm thinking here of Salgado's unique academic achieve- ment, and his record of one middle-class boy's Buddhist-Sinhala upbringing prior to Independence, and the civil war. But it's also wonderfully written. Here Salgado describes, of the local temple, the reclining statue which occupied 'the entire back wall and reached, at the shoulders, right up to the ceiling':
The even, ochre-coloured stone folds of the sleeping Buddha's robe fell away towards the enormous feet like ribbed sea-sand. I could not cover the nail of the big toe with both my palms. The vermil- ion lips seemed strangely out of place in the gentle, candle-coloured face.
The lovely orchestration of this passage - which I'd quote, if I could, at greater length (though really...