The Middle -class, guilt - ridden character in the Dark Night of the Soul is portrayed as a left activist in his youth. He was among the protesters who stormed the US embassy building in Colombo in the 60s, during the Vietnam war, and burned the 'Stars and Stripes'. However during the JVP insurgency he is unable to confront and deal with the issues. My own dilemmas were reflected in this character.

I was only nine years old when the first JVP insurgency took place in April 1971. But I later became good friends with some of those who took part in that struggle. I admired them and looked up to them. I sympathized with this first JVP struggle, not the second. I felt the youth had a legitimate right to challenge an unjust system. When I was about fourteen years old I became involved in active politics. I was born in Panadura, a few miles south of Colombo. This was and still is a bastion of the left. I started reading all the socialist classics and soon found myself on the Trotskyist side. I joined and campaigned for the Revolutionary Labour Party (RLP). They had broken away from the mainstream Stalinist left. In the 1982 Referendum to extend the life of J R Jayawardene Presidency and parliament, I campaigned with the RLP to oppose this extension.

By this time I had some major problems with the re-emerging JVP. The first was their simplistic division of art and artists into those who 'created' for the cause - artists for the people - and those who had 'petit bourgeois concerns'. This was the general belief that emancipation could only be sought through their kind of socialism. This was repeated in my second problem with them. I felt they were developing an attitude of Sinhala chauvinism towards the Tamil question in Sri Lanka. It was again the dogma of 'socialism first' - this was being to solve all the problems. For me this was being untruthful. I believed strongly in what Trotsky said that if art is truthful then it is revolutionary. He also said something to the effect that there are artists who swim on the surface and there are artists who dive deeper. I wanted to be one of those deep divers because I had and still have passion for humanism, truth and justice.
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