Letters from Sri Lanka #2 (New Voices) | Sophia Naz

Photo : Sophia Naz

 “We are all guilty of gouging out two eyes for a third”

   - Imaad Majeed, from Thambi Vamsa

I have been invited to attend a monthly gathering of poets at the Hansa Cafe in Colombo. The gathering is called Poetry Pilau, Pilau referring to the dish that a Hindi or Urdu speaking person would pronounce as Pulao. I found it apt that the way it was pronounced in Sri Lanka could also mean ‘ give me a drink of poetry. ’ Indeed, I was about to be immersed in verse from some of this Island nation’s up-and-coming poetic talents.

The young man in his twenties who has introduced me to this gathering is  Imaad Majeed. Imaad is a force of nature; poet, rapper, singer-songwriter and  digital artist, as well as sub-editor/writer at YAMU, a review based site about restaurants in Colombo, director at Kacha Kacha,  a crowdfunded, independent platform that features performances by poets, rappers and singer-songwriters in English, Sinhala and Tamil, at bars frequented by the working class. Imaad’s innovative work ranges from the epic and in-depth examination of his country’s fractured history and politics to experimental, ephemeral poetry videos including one in which he combines Muslim prayer with Buddhist ritual and writes a poem on the water so that it may evaporate and fall as a fine mist upon a mosque that is due to be demolished. In another video he is performing nude, albeit discreetly covered by his guitar.

This  video  below is from a larger work called Thambi Vamsa, which was inspired by music from the Beat Generation and by the rap-poet Krisantha Shri Bhagyadatta, who is also the originator of Poetry Pilau. Thambi Vamsa is a twist on the word Mahavamasa, and explores the origin of Muslims in Sri Lanka, how they are perceived and the clashes they have experienced.

Of particular note is Imaad’s long-term project '1956'. Imaad explains that it is "a recognition that there are many language games and it will not satisfy us to legitimize one over the other. That would be a politics of terror. That is a politics of forcing others out of the conversation. But for ourselves we will want to rearrange the conversation so that we continue to have a voice.”

 1956 is a work in progress. Excerpts are featured here.

Mishal Mazin,  one of the poets present at Poetry Pilau, is also the co-founder of Colombo Poets, a community of poets that aims to encourage budding talent by bringing their spoken word and contemporary poetry to an appreciative audience. Mazin’s work is rooted in and richly evocative of Colombo  as is evinced in this poem, set in the bustling downtown known as Pettah.

On Pettah

Concrete maze, compact
Commercial conduit, with
Sporting Times pitstops
Running along the tarmac.
As far as there's people,
Who want money and peace.
The air smelt of half an illusion,
Of sea salt, and side-alley piss
A wall raised for the zombies,
Divides the horizon from
the ships, and their riches,
The sea is for the
sophisticated, and for us,
There are corner stores,
at every corner, a drunken,
4 PM no-good doer, slapped
Twice, for sparking a fray along
With his cheap tobacco
Beetle juice munching,
Loose shotgun mouth,
One's telling him to fuck off
The other's still trying to
Mumble a tale, political,
No points to his self esteem,
On his eyes, brown sugar,
Still mumbling, mumbling.
Jesus, Ganesh and Buddha,
Having a little chat over it,
Orange bearded and thasbi,
Buying jasmine flowers,
for a wife, or mistress might-be
At the corner of a temple.
Coppers here, coppers there
Coppers roaming everywhere,
Main Street was covered, even for
The biggest drug smuggle, yet
The thugs were on the billboards,
Smiling, and the coppers didn't notice.
Port-side bars, and beer stops,
wine stores at a six-to-one
Ratio to kadés, open on overtime,
And everyone's thirsty, so
The coppers are going home,
The sun can't bear to watch,
So it goes down too, ashamed,
lifting with it, first padlocks
Then all the roller gates,
Click open, the crows flock in
To sell, compel and threaten,
An air of tension, like a fight,
Waiting to happen, stare downs
By lost pedestrians, tuk tuk
Tough guy with tattoos and
Bread winning women,
Children, so many children,
Barefeet and hopeless,
Watching men in big cars,
Go shopping, tend to slots,
men on billboards, and the
Gold stores gleaming with
smiles, genuine laughter
And not a care was given,
To the children, of the sun,
As they played cricket,
Today, tomorrow, and
The day after, until their
Dreams had slipped
Through all the cracks,
In the pavements, and
They will not ask
Why?

You can hear Mishal Mazin perform “On Pettah” at the Pettah Poetry Fringe Festival

Also hailing from Colombo, Nawya Ponnamperuma is a 20 year old Spoken Word poet. Her writing is airily minimal but no less evocative of the city:

I don't belong to the night.

Nor day.

I don't belong, I am flimsy.

Like 4pm to 6pm.

I am the rushed hours.

The happiness of a foot out of a shoe.

The pastel skies.

The baked bread waiting for a home.

Aanisha Cuttilan is a 21-year-old student of Business Management who writes in her spare time and tends to draw inspiration from personal experiences. She is  an editor on the site icommas.com that showcases poetry, prose and spoken word written by the youth of Sri Lanka. The themes of her writing include love, culture and women's rights. Her poem “Hands” is about the agony of rape but it is ultimately a poem of survival, grace and transmission of strength and self-worth to other victims of sexual abuse.

 “Though scars run too deep
You must not forget, beauty flows endlessly”

Benny Lau is  the nom-de-plume  of a young Muslim poet  who comes from a conservative family that would not approve of his “writhings.”  Speaking about his influences, he says, “ I really only got into experimenting with writing 'poetry' after attending a seminar on Burroughs with one of my teachers Richard Doyle. We were working on a zine to send to the 50th anniversary celebration of Naked Lunch in Paris. I used to dig through the Naropa lectures on archive.com often and those were way more inspiring than any intro to creative writing class I took.. After listening to Allen Ginsberg's lectures on expansive poetics / reading Charles Olson's essay on projective verse, in 2009/10 I started writing 'poetry' and have been writing since.”

Benny’s lines are dense, with wonderful conjugations like “anthropouring” jostling with the ubiquitous digital flotsam of our smartphone-infested lives. One can almost feel the beaded sweat on a packed train conjured here:

Coastin ta ta yay bay!

Thick turmeric gasp bloodied evening, smoking a gold leaf, clutching rosary
wrapped around wrist. Trains rattle past, anthropouring, every pore scene, sweat, dust,
sea breeze, easing cramped quarters ever so slightly.
Harking back, train rides to Galle, legs dangling, foot board,
delighted, get the fat out of Colombo, trace coast all the way to Arugambay,
Train-bus-Pilates, pissing plain tea, smoking joints, under cover, parked buses, random
stations, eating peanuts, salty skin chilli crusted flaking finger tips, swinging banyan roots,
breeze up sarong.

Taste of milk toffee lurking on tongue, stuck in Procrustean seat, head leaning grimy
steel tube railing window. Dozing, drooling, body odor of mustachioed, early thirties,
collared ‘Reborn’ t-shirt, navy blue pants, gentleman. His face dignified, a kind of
realness, rarely found in city folk, oozing out of Buddhist temperament, unassuming,
compassionate, eyes avuncular, lanky legs tipping into his territory.
<’tag location’> <popup-spam-‘lose weight fast’> bookaroomnow in
Monaragala> <message failed to send. Click to resend>


Water buffalo-egret trance, paddy field motion blur, odd dog
almost hit by more than one passing car. Not too far now,
arid, thickets, thorns, thickets, wood apples, tamarinds, cactus blooms, elephant dung,
<2 new notifications>  white sand, cerulean wash, frothing cusp.
Hour long smooth road spat out speed bump, hold on,
roadside rapture, spurt of forest, a shade of satisfaction
Here now quite soon, too many peacocks to not notice,
too many notifications to not peacock,
Kataragama, Dionysus birthplace, wincing
in dry zone twilight dusty afterglow
Spot a leopard, focus, naked camera-novelty,
spit out story #nofilter for lent ears, sharing quirked
in filtered #remembrance, grey matters.

It was my distinct impression that there was a renewed interest in poetry happening all around me. In addition to the publication of the anthology New Ceylon Voices after a gap of 32 years, there are a number of Fringe poetry festivals exploding all over Sri Lanka;  in  2017 the Cockrell Fringe Festival took place in Galle, around the same time as the Galle Literary Festival. The director of the Cockrell Fringe Festival is the irrepressible Grace Wickramsinghe, whose debut book of poetry, titled Closure, was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize, which was instituted by Michael Ondaatje in 1992 with the money he received as joint-winner of the Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient. The Prize is awarded annually to the best work of literary writing in English by a resident Sri Lankan. In the video below, Grace reads the poem “Che Sera”  from Closure.

Stefhan Sebastian is the consummate spoken word poet  reciting a poem from memory at the Pettah Fringe Poetry Festival; he speaks of his hands “ Like a blind god reading braille”

This is a poem Stefhan read in reaction to a man who had just performed an offensive anti-Muslim song:

Search me and see;
There are nothing but words holding this man together.
I stitched them into the seams,
I stitched them into my being,
and in-between the spaces between the places in-between creases indivisible and unseen.
Between the street light and the shadow.
Between the horizon and the sun.
Between the tea cup and the monsoon.
Between the left and right side of your spine.
Between the stone and the wave.
Between the wolf and the sky.
Between the dream and the page.
Between our tongues and the tangle.
Between my eyes and my hands.
Between my thoughts and my thoughts of thoughts.
Between the sheets and the smell of you.
and in every dialogue between me and me.
These words are all I have,
so tonight, I am taking these words back.
…. And we…
We are the living breathing custodians
of a living breathing language.
Born twice,
of flesh and blood,
and purely articulated thoughts.
Made of mostly empty space and solid intentions,
wielding heavy words in light voices,
in the face of those hard and hollow,
that would loudly wield empty words against us.
And we demand these words be returned to our custody;
The youngest sons of the first man who said ambition was like dreaming.
The youngest daughters of the first woman who said loving was like falling.
Who know that home is a fireless warmth
and the chill of more deaths than winters.
That they being returned to our care
will allow us to return to:
killing our sleep to craft them,
sleeping to dream them,
and waking to share them,
as we walk down a lifetime of pages
lined with these words.

I was delighted to encounter these young and fearless Sri Lankan poets who are informed by their culture yet incisive in their criticism of it. They are constantly  challenging State narratives, gender, race and class stereotypes, their language is by turns, taut and tender, expletive ridden yet suffused with a distinctly South Asian lyric quality.  They are navigating the many streams that make up their linguistic heritage with grace and finesse and leaving some fine poetry in their fierce wake, as Nawya Ponnamperuma so eloquently states:

I am part brown heritage and part white influence.
It came through the sterling and seduced architecture, lifestyle and my ancestors.
I am part-tea, dancing my way to palates overseas through seven regions.
I am the middle of the earth.
I am curvy letters that have tickled rocks,
My ethereal roots fall from branches downward
I am drumbeats drumbeats drumbeats and a thousand dance forms
Serendib, a teardrop, a  pearl.
My story began with liberated naked women and men who wore pounds of gold.
We built ships for Egyptians.
Never reeked of greed but smelt of cinnamon,
We knew love...before the son of God.
We drank with cupped palms,
And fought with fists. We didn't hide behind a rifle.
We engineered. Mastered. Flourished.
We were taught to acknowledge the clergy
Hold a sheaf of Betel the right way.
We are made of folklore
And a grassroot of colourful celebration.
You were white skin and everything beautiful.
But we were glorious and this!
Is our
Common wealth.

~

Read : Letters from Sri Lanka #1 (Sophia Naz)

Letters from Sri Lanka #1 | Sophia Naz

   "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  

Read : Letters from Sri Lanka #2 (Sophia Naz)

Letters from California #1 | Sophia Naz

Photo : Divya Adusumilli

I've seen the future, baby: 
it is murder 

Leonard Cohen, Sept 21, 1934 - Nov 7, 2016

In the early hours of November 9, 2016 the unthinkable happened. A man who had built his political career on a racist lie disparaging the first African American President of America was himself elected to the highest office in the land. In his run for the White House Trump broke every rule in the Presidential campaign playbook, he insulted minorities, women,  the Muslim immigrant family of a decorated war hero, a disabled reporter, the list goes on and on. Even the leaked video in which he boasted  about sexually assaulting any woman he chose with impunity did little to dent his momentum. Since the election much ink has been spilled on how this travesty could possibly happen, and yes, a large part was played by Russian hacking of the election , the growth of “alt-right” aka white supremacist media, along with the progressive vote being siphoned off to third party candidates post Bernie Sanders’ unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination but the bald fact remains that Donald Trump won by blaming the economic troubles of blue collar white voters on non-white immigrants successfully stirring up a toxic brew of racism and xenophobia. For me, this outcome was particularly disturbing  because like countless others, when I received political asylum in America it came with the promise of a country that  would not discriminate  on the basis of ethnicity religion or any of the markers that plagued the country of my birth. I come from lands that know all too well the  horrors that are unleashed by demonising an imagined “other”.

In the aftermath of the election, I was reminded of Brecht. In his Svendborg Poems, written in exile in Denmark in the 1930s, Brecht wrote: ‘In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times.’ His life was shaped by these dark times, as ours will no doubt be, in these years to come. It is in times of trauma that poetry becomes indispensable to our lives because nothing else can gauge the barometer of our horror, or distill the stubbornness of our resistance:

Diane Di Prima,  Revolutionary Letter  #7

what will win
is mantras, the sustenance we give each other,
the energy we plug into
(the fact that we touch
share food)
the buddha nature
of everyone, friend and foe, like a million earthworms
tunneling under this structure
till it falls

Here in California, the election  results could not have been more starkly different. Californians not only voted for Clinton by a record margin, but they also approved a raft of progressive measures, that included the legalization of recreational marijuana, easing parole for nonviolent criminals, raising taxes on cigarettes, extending income-tax increases on the wealthiest few, increase in school spending, restoring bilingual education and banning single-use plastic bags. Californians made Kamala Harris the first Indian-American (and second African-American woman) to be elected a United States senator, and reaffirmed overwhelming Democratic majorities in state politics. With Clinton’s popular vote lead surpassing 2 million, there are secessionist  rumblings that could gather steam if Trump’s threats to withdraw federal funds for so-called “sanctuary cities” such as San Francisco and Los Angeles which do not  expel undocumented immigrants. In general the mood here is one of anger and disbelief, summed up perfectly in Michael McClure’s poem from his compilation Huge Dreams, San Francisco and Beat Poems written in 1961 but eerily prophetic in its tone:

HELL, PAIN, BEWILDERED EMPTINESS
The part left smolders.

Indeed  San Francisco and the “Left Coast” is no stranger to poetry that stands against the status quo. In fact one could argue that it is its very crucible, that the Beats came here because there was already a movement, both poetic and political already underway with the help of older poets like Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Spicer.  Spicer was one of the founders of the Six Gallery, site of the 1955 reading with Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen. This was the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation, as McClure recalls in the documentary, Rebel Roar:

“The East Coast Beats really reached a watershed moment when the Six Gallery reading took place, in particular Kerouac. ( who was in the audience)  It was after the Six Gallery reading that he was able to write Dharma Bums and Big Sur. In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return--and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void--to the land without poetry--to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.”

I lift my voice aloud,
    make Mantra of American language now,
            I here declare the end of the War!
                Ancient days’ Illusion!—
        and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
    let the nation weep,
        let Congress legislate its own delight,
            let the President execute his own desire—
this Act done by my own voice,
                nameless Mystery—
published to my own senses,
        blissfully received by my own form
    approved with pleasure by my sensations
        manifestation of my very thought
        accomplished in my own imagination
            all realms within my consciousness fulfilled

Allen Ginsberg, Wichita Vortex Sutra #3

Post this apocalyptic election the hunger for voice and vision has grown fierce once more. Poetry has taken on an urgency not seen in recent years. Reactions to the election that resists Donald Trump and his ideology dominate Calls For Submissions at journals. The most poignant of these  calls was from DarkHouse Books: “If you are so inclined, maybe send us a Descanso ( roadside memorial marking a fatal accident )for America, and place it, like a pushpin on a calendar, on Election Day 2016”  An array of  poetry protests all across the state are ongoing. Typical  is this notice:  “Open mike at Union Square, San Francisco, Open to all genres, all arts, all people. If not in SF--send work, will read! NOT MY PRESIDENT!”

So, sweet seeker, just what America sought you anyway? Know
that today there are millions of Americans
seeking America. . .

Gregory Corso, Elegiac Feelings American

There is some consolation in the fact that in many ways the counter culture of the Beats has become the culture in California. It now remains to be seen whether the rest of America will catch up or go another way. The fate of our planet may well hang in the balance.

- Sophia Naz

Glen Ellen, California,
November 2016