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Migrant Prince Yasmine Gooneratne Yasmine Gooneratne is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Macquarie University, New South Wales, where she has held a Personal Chair in English Literature since 1991. Born in Sri Lanka, educated at Bishop's College, Colombo, she graduated from the University of Ceylon in 1959, received a PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University in 1962, and in 1981 received the first higher doctoral degree of Doctor of Letters (DLitt) ever awarded by Macquarie University. From 1989 to 1993 she was Foundation Director of her University's Postcolonial Literatures & Languages Research Centre. In 1990 she was created an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to literature and education. Her 17 published books include critical studies of Jane Austen, Alexander Pope, and the contemporary novelist and screen writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. She is also the author of volumes of literary essays and poems, short stories, a family memoir (Relative Merits: A Personal Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka) and two novels, one of which (A Change of Skies) was awarded the Marjorie Barnard Literary Award for Fiction in 1991. Both her novels have been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. In July 2001 she was presented by Samvad India with the 2001 Raja Rao Award for `an outstanding contribution to the literature of the South Asian diaspora'.

This poem was written in 1973, a year after Yasmine had arrived in Australia. It was published in Colombo in 1981 in a collection titled "6,000 Ft Death Dive".

"Migrant Prince" is about the loss of the creative imagination which often accompanies the experiences of exile and expatriation. `Vijaya' in the poem refers to the legendary Indian prince who, exiled from his homeland in ancient times, made landfall in Sri Lanka and founded the community that was to become the Sri Lankan nation. The poem draws on the legend of Vijaya and Kuveni. the enchantress he encountered in the forest, and married. I had just begun writing poetry seriously, and had published a first volume of poems when circumstances took me out of my homeland. I had at that time a very real fear that I would never write creatively again. The poet in the poem, however, recovers his `lost Muse', here symbolized by the Circe-like figure of `Kuveni', a woman spinning in a forest.

MIGRANT PRINCE (1972) Behind him a Kingdom sliding to decay dragging with it lost childhood, sheltered youth Before him alien shores, an unknown bay, another Vijaya he ventures south. A strange bird dreams on a dry bough; marsupials lift liquid eyes in silence, questioning a stranger's footfall. Here no leopards snarl - do beasts turn also from the pain of living? And is this pleasant landscape, then, to be the chosen setting for his spirit's death, the hammering media's brash mythology to breathe on him immobilizing breath? Somewhere in this enchanted woodland brims the secret well; and there her golden thread his lost Muse sits and spins, and as she spins the fallen blossoms listen for his tread. False step to east or west, and desert grows between these two. Look, landward from the sea light footprints lead, through glades alive with shadows: Others have passed this way ahead of me. Perhaps in a lost age another kindled here, in this glade, from that bird's dip and flight or from the shape the moon took as it dwindled, bright myth to lie beside on a cold night or built a legend he could crawl into and warm his blood to health and fruitfulness. Lost myths, turned rubble now beneath the new towering chainstore, rammed under the express- way. I a wanderer in this land, turned by necessity to new material strange to my eyes, uncertain in my hand, shall I be fortunate enough to call into forms unimagined in my youth new life? Create in joy, here, on Death's lip? Another Vijaya, I venture south here to reshape my art, refit my ship. (Yasmine Gooneratne: 1973)

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