"The life of the poet
is it different to the life of the ordinary
Anonymous person whom we encounter on the
street,
Sometimes a flash of recognition illumines
the face
as if encountered on some reincarnatory
journey
through aeons and aeons of rebirth
that transient image startles you out of a
dream and leaves
you like a passing thought never to be
recaptured."
- Jean Arasanayagam
 |
| Photo : Sophia Naz |
I am writing
these lines from Samakanda, a 60 acre eco retreat in south Sri Lanka where time
seems to have stopped, or more aptly never come into existence. Samakanda is
part of the Kottawa Forest Preserve; a forty five minute drive from the
picturesque southern coastal town of Galle. Galle fort, with its largely intact
colonial era Dutch influenced architecture is a Unesco World Heritage site
which combines the European flavor of its cobblestone streets and lively cafes
with a laid back local vibe.
An abandoned
colonial era tea estate, Samakanda was rediscovered and developed by BBC
journalist and environmentalist Rory Spowers, who wrote about his experiences
in a book called "My Year in Green Tea and Tuktuks". As morning's
softly steaming mist dissipates, the forest greets me with symphonies of
birdsong. An ever changing kaleidoscope of tweets, warbles and calls caress the
ears. Every day this composition of birdsong changes, as if the three hundred
avian species endemic to Sri Lanka were in animated conversation with each other.
Perhaps
Fariduddin Attar was inspired by such exchanges when he composed his epic poem,
The Conference Of The Birds. Pure untrammeled nature serves to remind us that
at its most elemental, language is just made of sound. The birds remind me of
Kerouac's attempts at an unfiltered vocal verse, especially his poem at Big Sur
by the Pacific Ocean, my adopted home 8000 miles away from these serendipitous
shores. Enveloped by the sensory overload of this numinous rain-forest,
confronted by its overwhelming primal force, I feel as Kerouac must have felt,
a need for a liminal tongue, poetry as word-birds, going with the babble flow.
Language lies at
the root of the dark underbelly, the scarred fault-lines of this paradise. In
1956 Tamil was made a minority
language, a secondary tongue. Sinhalese became the official language: the
speech of bureaucracy, of many, many jobs. And in 1956, leading politicians
preached race hatred in order to win office. They said, the Tamils are taking
your jobs. Sri Lanka's history bears a chilling resemblance to current events
in America and Europe today. History teaches that history teaches. Massacres,
suicide bombings, disappearances, abductions, arbitrary arrests and
imprisonment, marred desolate bombed landscapes, refugee camps, camps for the
internally displaced, landmine explosions, a society divided and consumed by
antipathy and suspicion.
Writing is a
tool to document, a tool of memory against forgetting. Many of Sri Lanka's best
known writers on
the island and in the diaspora Jean Arangasayam, Yasmine Gooneratne, Romesh Gunsekera, V.V.
Ganeshananthan, D'Lo, Yalini Dream, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Pireeni Sunderlingam,
and Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta, to name just a few–have used poetics and literature to document
the realities of living within a civil war resulting in massive amounts of
violence, death, forced diaspora, and repression.
The havoc
wreaked upon the land and its people by Sri Lanka's 26 year long ethnically fueled brutal civil
war is poignantly conjured up by Jean Arangasayam' s poem, Nallur:
it’s there
the shadows of
long bodies shrunk in death
the leeching sun
has drunk their blood and
bloated swells
among the piling clouds
it’s there,
death,
smell it in the air
its odour rank
with sun and thickening blood
mingling with
fragrance from the frothy toddy
pots mingling
like lolling heads from
blackened gibbets,
it’s there
amid the clangour of
the temple
bells, the clapping hands, the
brassy clash of
cymbals,
the zing of bullets
cries of
death
drowned in the roar
of voices
calling Skanda
by his thousand names
Murugan,
Kartikkeya
Arumugam . .
. .
Thirtham now no
longer nectar of the gods
brims over but
is bitter, bitter,
and at the
entrance to Nallur
the silent guns
are trained
upon a faceless
terror
The persona of the poet inevitably and indelibly
absorbs this legacy of violence in
Lakdasa Wikkramasinha's The Poet:
The poet is the
bomb in the city,
Unable to bear
the circle of the
Seconds in his
heart,
Waiting to
burst.
Violence
permeates even this poem describing a computerized chess opponent in
Reggie Siriwardena's poem, To White Knight ( MK 11):
Loss and gain
are sensed as
abstractly by your blind circuits
as by the remote
airman his deadly rain
on the town
below, or by the absent terrorist
his bomb’s explosion of blood and pain.
Yasmine Gooneratne's poem, Big Match, brings home the irony of
what unfolds under the tree that is the symbol of the enlightened Buddha:
Beneath a Botree
in a shower of
sticks and stones
flung by his
neighbour’s hands.
The joys of
childhood, friendships of our youth
ravaged by
pieties and politics
screaming across
our screens her agony
at last exposed,
Sri Lanka burns alive.
The civil war
led to the exodus of many Tamils to the west. Expatriate Tamil poet Indran
Amirthanayagam migrated to
America in 1988. In conversation with
his Pakistani counterpart Adam Zameenzad he eloquently talks about poetic
influences and the constant makings of newness:
"Pound
wrote a poem for Whitman saying, “it was you who broke the new wood/now is the time for carving.” We have been carving since the dog
dug up Eliot’s garden,
and Auden doused himself in bitters on 52nd Street, and Dylan beseeched his
father to not go gently into that good night. We have been carving since Guy
Amirthanayagam wrote “the
road is dark and stained with damp gray leaves” and later wondered if his son Revantha would
ever reveal his awesome secret, “that there is in life an undertow of sadness/which rocks what fleeting
gladness there is today or may once have been.” We have been carving since Yeats slouched to
Bethlehem and admonished himself and his friends: “We who seven years ago/ talked of honor and of
truth/now shriek with pleasure/ at the weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.” We have been carving since Bob Lax wondered
aloud about being 108 years old: “and not/ one per-/ fect/ hai-/ ku /writ-/ ten.” We have been carving since Cummings became
puddle-delicious and Jaime Manrique saw golden bees of light strike Gotham’s sparkling towers. We have been
carving, Adam, with Maria, your heroine, wandering through Latin America in
search of Heaven. We have been carving since Allen jumped off the hydrogen
toadstool and puffed a nicotine-free cloud, and long before then, when he sat
with Jack Kerouac on the tin-can banana dock."
A rich, complex
hybrid poetry has been carved by these prolific poets. Like the mangroves they
are equally at ease with the rooted land and the fluid, global currents of the
encircling sea. This liminal foundation has given rise to a vibrant
contemporary poetry scene, which I shall explore in my next letter.
-Sophia Naz,
Samakanda, Sri Lanka
01.01. 2017
01.01. 2017
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