Indranee Kandiah & Thiru Kandiah, whose review article** analyses A Tapestry of Verse, by Premini Amerasinghe {Nugegoda: Sarasavi Publishers. 2019. pp. 103]
Premini Amerasinghe’s A Tapestry of Verse, which was released last year, is a collection largely of her recent poems, but includes too a reprint of an earlier collection that, it might not be irrelevant to note, had been shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize as long ago as 1998. The present collection is a far cry from the ‘welcome diversion (into) creative writing by a medical specialist’ as the blurb on the back cover of this slim publication over-modestly proclaims. True, there may perhaps be some who would be inclined to think that a renowned Consultant Radiologist who had worked for several years as Head of her Department at the General Hospital, Kandy, might not quite have what it takes, imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, mastery of language, whatever, to extend and enrich our literature. But a glance at the poems will straightaway dispel this stereotypical misconception and demonstrate beyond a doubt that she has not just the skills but also the inborn talent, as well as certain other important credentials, to do so. In fact, we suspect that her own specialised academic and professional training might even have helped release her to seek her way to her own distinctive creative voice with all that more spontaneity and integrity than a purely literary training might have done.
Premini Amerasinghe
The decades commencing around or just before the time of Independence, and continuing even up to now, have seen a whole wide-ranging series of large changes of an unprecedently scale and kind sweeping the country as, coming out of centuries of empire, it strove to find itself again and remake itself as a brave new nation of free and equal and happy people. Irrevocably altering almost beyond recognition its landscape and, indeed, the very nature of being and existence in it, these changes raised issues and challenges for its diverse peoples of an immensely demanding sort. Demanding, because even as they entirely fittingly, and also excitingly, re-awakened these peoples to, among other important things, the glories of a shared past from which they could derive insight and inspiration for addressing those issues and challenges, the changes carried within them a potential too to grievously subvert the best hopes and expectations of considerable numbers of them – as too sadly confirmed by the many terrible happenings of the years since. This put on all alike of those who were involved in those changes the duty, as inescapable as it was
[1] This collaborative Review Article presents what its joint authors hope will read as a coherent, unified account of the collection of poetry under review, arrived at on the basis of a complete accommodation of all alike of the numerous differences that arose between them on whole ranges of matters all along the way. They remain, though, “forever the best of friends”, as Dickens’ Joe Gargery might have put it.
sacrosanct, to call as strenuously as they could upon all of their resources of mind, heart and imagination to fashion responses to the issues and challenges that would make their hopes and expectations attainable, precisely by thwarting the negative potential the changes carried and freeing the good things in them to fully realize themselves.
Amerasinghe was very much a member of the generations who lived through those most exciting, if disconcertingly demanding, times, participating closely in many of the changes that were going on, sometimes even, by virtue of her professional standing, in a leadership role. Drawing on a vast array of resulting experiences and on her insider knowledge of and insight into what was going on, she creates in her ‘tapestry of verse’ a vivid panorama of the times in which she also unshrinkingly takes on some of the most demanding of the issues and challenges they threw up. The panorama, it is useful for us to remind ourselves before we go on, not only extends in time from past to present and even beyond, but also takes in all sorts of people(s), scenarios, happenings and experiences, spread out across widely different tracts of the country, and in fact even venturing every now and then beyond its shores – the inescapable interconnectedness of our world’s shared modern mode of existence does not allow even these seemingly ‘foreign’ matters to be in any way excluded from our search for ourselves on the parochial grounds that they belong outside the walls of our own ‘purely’ local wells.
And, looking at all this, Amerasinghe provides us not just fleeting vignettes of scenes and events that she, along with many others of us, had already safely made her way through; nor, most emphatically, a mere nostalgic throwback to a time that has been left behind. Rather, an exhilaratingly spontaneous, vibrant and truthful evocation of thoughts and feelings and doings and things that she immediately knew/knows for herself at first hand, and that still throb as vibrantly in our own pulses today as we ourselves search out, in the immensely challenging circumstances of our own present day lives in these times of constant change, conflict, fear, doubt and hope, who we were and are and might be. And so her poems take on large significance for us in our here-and-now, as they impel us, as we would expect all good art to do, to pay attention to and radically re-think what is going on around us in our own seemingly different time and place, search out new and different ways of wholesome appraisal that, discriminatingly separating good and bad, right and wrong, lead us afresh to deeper and more perceptive understandings of it all that will help us arrive at what in human terms might be the best for our country and for all alike of its peoples; not in a remotely abstract cerebral manner but in immediately felt and known ways that are as appealingly attractive as they are powerfully compelling.
To search out how specifically the poems do this, which is largely what the rest of this essay attempts to do, is, we need to be forewarned, not entirely a simple matter. For, Amerasinghe’s is a most intriguing poetic personality, whose work of its nature defies any attempt to straightforwardly assemble from it any neat, conventional packages of stereotyped overarching ‘messages’ or ‘lessons’ or stylistic instructions or whatever that they might be considered to collectively offer us. Both the wide range of situations the poems (seventy-eight in all, slim though the volume is) cover as well as the poet’s responses to them, always strikingly spontaneous, again and again catch us by surprise in their refreshing unexpectedness, never allowing us to settle down too complacently. All of which defines a singular independence of spirit, which, though, however resistant it is, by virtue of its most engaging irrepressibility, to conformity, is firmly secured against the irresponsibility of the near-institutionalised hyper-individualism of our times by a strong sense of personal integrity and a remarkable capacity for self-reflexivity. Therefore, we are never left floundering by her writing in some unproductive state of meaningless uncertainty where nothing makes sense any longer. From the beginning, we get a strong sense that, in their very unpredictability, the poems fall together with each other in ways that enrichingly extend our understanding of things. To find out how they do so of itself promises exciting rewards that further sharpen our incentive to read the volume. And that is partly what the rest of our essay will try to do, though clearly, considerations of space oblige us to confine our exploration to just a selected set of matters, leaving readers to search out for themselves the other riches it offers them.
Much of Amerasinghe’s success derives, demonstrably, from her skilful control of her primary medium, language, that critically important matter that too often tends to get pushed out of sight in critical commentary in our times. On a first reading, it might appear that she has composed her poems with effortless ease. But that ease is exactly the best index of her prowess as a conscious artist. “A New Poem” explicitly addresses the struggle the act of composition often entails; the consuming excitement –
A new poem
Is like a new romance,
Irresistible
The center of my thought –
assailed as it seeks its rightful expression in words by demoralizing frustrations that exact heavy costs:
Too soon the flaws surface
Do I discard it?
Or, recrafted
Acquiesce to dull acceptance,
All fervor gone?
And yet we meet little of that very real quandary in the actual writing, its easy poise itself pointing us to the mastery with which she has applied her resources of language to overcoming it as she seeks out her own distinct individual voice.
No doubt there also other important things of a similar kind that lend power and conviction to the writing. Not least among these are the poet’s acute powers of observation, an instinctive openness and sensitivity to even the littlest of sensory details (visual, auditory, tactile and so on) of objects, creatures, situations, happenings, whatever, that are often what most vividly lend them those unique textures of colour, shape, movement, sound, rhythm and suchlike that cause them to impact so unforgettably (or, to use a word she herself suggests, magically) on us.
Ordinarily, such details tend to elude our often less than perceptive eyes, ears, and other organs of sense, causing us to
Regret… the myriads of moments
That slip by unnoticed
Like drops of elusive mercury
Achingly bright
Always out of reach.
But, as the poem “Nature’s Magic”, from which these lines are taken, itself shows, not in Amerasinghe’s writing, as attested in many varying ways, by poem after poem in the volume, always lifting us to outcomes that are quite elevating. In the poem just cited, for instance, our eyes are literally led to see a magpie, ‘On a low-hung bough’, not just as the beloved common bird of our childhood ditty ‘one for sorrow…’, but in an arrestingly new way:
Blue-black sheen
Glistening white in front
Perpetually clad in a dress suit
– sheer distinguished elegance.
Striking enough in its own visual right no doubt, but it is the song that most entrances:
A ripple of the throat
An effortless haunting note
Rising sharp and sweet
…..
Piercing the still air
Ear drums vibrate,
Transmit those liquid notes
To the centre of my being.
Then a repeat performance, followed by ‘A worried turn of head’, an anxious moment of waiting for the anticipated ‘response/From a missing mate, a straying fledgling’; before, from
Afar off,
A rising crescendo reply
releases us, all tension of expectation dissolved, into
The music of exaltation.
But it is not only we who have been led to share in that exaltation. ‘Hidden ‘neath the leaves’, a hitherto unnoticed ‘flower pecker’, as caught up in the wonder of the moment as we are, can now, in homage, no longer continue to conceal his place of hiding, revealing himself through the barest, if still very memorable, glimpse of that ‘glint… in the light’ of his ‘metallic blue’, as ‘Head tilted in admiration/He applauds with a tuneless “crk” “crk” ‘. The auditory note of comical incongruity deftly slipped in here heightens the contrast between the two performances, allowing them to be put to work in creative counterpoint with each other to concretely realise that ‘moment of pure bliss’ the poet, ‘Alone in the verandah’, ‘savour(s)’, so very concretely that we too come to share immediately in it.
As we do, too, in the very different experience offered us in the poem “Niagara Falls”, which so stunningly puts colours and sounds, and movement too, to very different effect. Quickly building up from the hint of a promise in its opening line of a quiet calm, as ‘Translucent green, the water flows’, without at the same time allowing us, as it ‘edd(ies) nervously towards the precipitous fall’, to quite get lulled into an illusory tranquillity, it carries us to the moment when, ‘with all its strength descend(ing)’, it spectacularly bursts upon our senses, as
A mighty cascade
With thunderous roar
On impact exploding
Into a cauldron of mist;
leaving us, ‘teetering above’ (note the exciting contrasts of sight and sound this phrase of movement so tellingly picks up against what has gone before),
… humbled and entranced
By nature’s awesome power.
The next poem, “Autumn Leaves”, also like this one located in a scene outside the island, again uses sense impressions, this time predominantly of colour, brilliantly, to capture the ‘mesmerizing’ impact on ‘us tropical creatures’ of ‘the flaming orange/And the molten gold’ of the leaves, rendered even more memorable by their contrast with their
… backdrop of a brilliant blue cloudless sky.
The full stress that each of the adjectives qualifying ‘sky’ obliges us to place on it slows the line down pronouncedly even while making it considerably longer than the ones that had preceded it, allowing it to work with maximal dramatic force in helping bring the scene gloriously alive to our senses. Whereas, however, in the two preceding poems such pleasures that nature afforded were of a very uplifting kind, in this poem they lead the poet to more somber reflections:
But I
In the Autumn of my life
Have no such sparkle
And try to forget
The sagging skin,
The aging face and wrinkled hands…
The realisation forced upon her by the scene is that that same passage of time that in nature had led to its ‘mesmerizing’ beauty had wrought changes in her of a very different, more dispiriting sort; while at the same time triggering a defiant hope that she might still recover some sense of the verve and zest, as well as satisfactions, of the life that she had once known, even as, in yet a further twist that reveals how firm her grip on reality is, she remains alert to the inevitability of the end of it all. And that hope is
… that there still flickers
A vitalizing force, a force
With its bubble-bursts
Of excitement and contentment
Before the final bubble burst!
The alliterative compound expression ‘bubble-bursts’ helps concretely capture the vitality and force of what she is seeking to recover for herself. But the word ‘flickers’ has already prepared us for the moment of truth, through its overt contrasts, in sense, sound and texture with those of that expression, which then, in a very fascinating move, is itself cleverly turned around virtually unchanged to signal the final end of exactly what it had earlier helped evoke.
Clearly, Amerasinghe’s responses to nature are not of a predictably uniform kind. ‘Nature’ does indeed figure quite prominently in several of her poems. But not in the ways that come all too easily to members of the privileged urbanised classes to which she herself belongs, that is, as a self-conscious demonstration of a superior artistic sensibility, or a conscience-salving retreat to a romanticised idyllic setting occupied by the rural people out there cut off from them by the social and material realities. Rather, as the three poems just discussed suggest, in ways that reflect a more spontaneous sense of the organic mutual involvement of nature and the human being in and with each other, an involvement that might show itself in all kinds of unexpectedly different ways. In “The Wave that Brought Death”, for instance, which deals with the effects of the horrendous tsunami that numbed the entire nation a few years ago, it shows itself in one of its cruellest forms.
The poem starts quietly enough:
The incessant murmuring of the sea
Lulls my senses
The waves, their energy spent
Spread foam ribbons
A molten sun
Plunges below the horizon,
with only the word ‘plunges’ hinting at the falseness of the tranquillity and at the ferocity of what was going to happen, when the waves ‘arose with murderous intent/Black with fury’ and ‘Hurled’ ‘Humanity’ ‘into a vortex of death/Spewed out, broken and battered’, causing in addition ‘a confusion of sea and land’ in which ‘A twisted train/With a thousand dead/Floundered in the sea (and)/Shattered boats on treetops lay’. The masterful changes and contrasts of sound, sensation, sense, atmosphere, texture, tempo, and so on, work to stunningly shock us into experiencing for ourselves ‘that suspended moment/When time seemed to hold it breath’; that moment when, under the stunning force of the wave, the terrible destruction it wrought and the anguish it left behind, ‘The stunned survivors/ Became the living dead’.
Overpowering distress there, utterly beyond sentimentalizing. But reminding us at the same time, as in all of the several other poems in which Amerasinghe instinctively invokes nature, of that unbreakable reciprocal link between nature and humankind that is increasingly getting lost to sight under the advance, seemingly, of a limitlessly advancing technology in our times. And, in doing so, calling attention, too, to the pressing need to seek our way towards a more sanely rounded and responsible understanding of the full complexity of that link and its calls on us, something that our growing environmental crises are increasingly urging us to do.
The preceding discussion has, it would have been noticed, directed a fair amount of attention to the ‘devices of art’ (if you will) that Amerasinghe has brought to bear on her writing, the substantive tools or mechanisms or skills of a more technical sort that define its craft, playing a critical role in enabling each of the artefacts that result from their application to emerge as the distinctive things they are. But, as would have been evident from the discussion, such ‘devices of art’ are never sufficient unto themselves. For, if the artefacts do attain the kind of reach, depth and significance that assign them true value, the value that all art is ordinarily expected to carry, that is because these more ‘formal’ components of her art work in close and intimate integration with hosts of other essential things (not least the nature and quality of the thoughts, feelings and sensations involved, the instinctive sense of timing displayed all along, and, very much, the powers of imagination exercised) to project well beyond just themselves to matters that truly make a difference to our lives.
Calling imperative attention to itself among these other essential things, for the way it runs so pervasively and instinctively through so much of Amerasinghe’s work, is something that has so far escaped explicit mention, namely, her profound social consciousness. It is a consciousness that leaveningly informs her treatment of virtually all of the extraordinarily wide range of subjects/topics she covers. The sheer wholesomeness of Amerasinghe’s responses to these topics/subjects, their compelling persuasiveness, manifestly indicate that her social consciousness rests solidly upon a clear, reasoned recognition, worked out within herself with acute perceptiveness and unflinching honesty, of the material realities that define the context within which the search for self cannot but be pursued and of their precise nature. That recognition, it needs to be observed, extends fully to the inherent political-ideological dimensions of those realities, cutting incisively through the sanctimonious cant, evasive prevarications, dubious rationalizations and so on with which the controlling political class/tribe too characteristically seek to clothe them, to the fundamental human issues involved and, inseparable from them, the ethical issues of conscience that lie at the core of it all.
As importantly, none of this is ground into our consciousness with the opinionated assertiveness of the single-minded propagandist/preacher, or even in some kind of disembodied abstractly cerebral manner. Amerasinghe never allows us to forget that she is a poet. Bringing the ‘devices of art’ available to her to bear on her poems with unaffected assurance and ease, she enables them to bring her subject matter alive for us with such refreshingly instinctive spontaneity that we come to know and feel for ourselves what it is all about and its human meanings, so that our own experiences and understandings of things get deepened and extended in ways that make a difference.
It would be expedient perhaps to start with Amerasinghe’s treatment of a socio-political issue that is arguably the most notorious Achilles Heel of our creative writing (and criticism), unsurprisingly so in a sense because most of their producers come from privileged, often educated, backgrounds. This is their disabling lack of self-reflexivity when it comes to matters of class and the critically pernicious role it plays, no less in literature and criticism than in the ‘real’ world out there, in confirming and perpetuating the social disparities and inequalities that deface the context in which we are searching ourselves out (MacIntyre, Sarachchandra, Sivanandan and Somachandre Wijesuriya are among the distinguished exceptions).
Amerasinghe is different. In “A Fine Dining Experience”, she shows nothing of the widespread incapacity to see through to the failings of her class, fiercely and with telling (if in this poem with somewhat too obvious and unsubtle) circumstantial directness, denouncing one of its members for his/her ‘eagerness’ for ‘the ultimate steak experience’ (of ‘wagyu beef and Angus’), transported in ‘(a) show of vulgar consumerism’ from ‘its natural habitat’ in London and New York to their own context, utterly unconcerned about the ‘Cattle in distant climes/Force-fed for their unique flavor’ and, even more devastatingly, completely blind to the ‘burgeoning poverty’ around,
Where Podi-Menike makes do
With two handfuls of rice
Thrown into a pot of boiling water
Barely adequate for three young children
Their bright eyes dulled by hunger
Where Kalu-Banda, in desperation
Rummages in dustbins
Grabbing the edible scraps.
‘Podi-Menike’, ‘Kalu-Banda’ – names stereotypically associated in the minds of the privileged urbanized middle class with the dispossessed people down there from among whom, particularly if they came from the rural areas, these classes tended to draw their household servants who made their lives so comfortable to live. ‘Imprisoned in domestic routine/Hands in perpetual motion’, these menials were often at one time doomed to remain in drab, lifelong servitude to them until ‘It was (their) time for dying’. ‘They were young once’, Amerasinghe reminds us in “A Servant’s Tale”,
Before
The countries of their minds
The maps of their bodies
The consonants of their names
Were colonized
by their generally bilingual English-speaking proprietors and changed.
Deriving pleasure
From muttered imprecations and satisfying threats
A litany of sound
Unravelling the night,
and
Resolutely hoarding “Merit”
To be bartered for a better life
Next time round,
our ‘Janes’ or ‘Alices’ (as the ‘Podi-Menikes’ are now called) still cannot put off their arrival at the final, excruciatingly painful, moment of truth:
A home for Elders
Their final destination
Welcomed by a smiling Matron
Another prison
Crouched in bed
They await their next meal
Their last breath.
The contrast between the utter finality of that last line and the smiling welcome of that line leading up to it bitterly accentuates the futility of the plight of those trapped in this system we so take for granted. In the process, it also sharply hits off our complacent acquiescence in it, while at the same time reminding us of the need for acceptance of and compassion for these our disentitled fellow beings.
It comes as absolutely no surprise, therefore, that this sense of compassionate identification with the under-person out there flows over with such natural ease and complete rightness into Amerasinghe’s poems of the Insurgencies and the youth unrest incited by the discontents of, particularly, such dispossessed rural people.
“A Villager’s Tale” presents itself as a matter-of-fact bit of reportage, dead-pan in its nature and, seemingly completely innocuous. It begins with as utterly ‘ordinary’ a statement as you could get:
“We don’t eat fish anymore” she said.
But that very ordinariness works to stunningly heighten the force of the horror of the explanation of that statement in the lines that follow:
“Their bellies are bloated with putrefying flesh
daily we see bodies floating on the river
headless young men, with twisted limbs
floating down to the sea”,
a familiar enough sight from the bridges of some of our rivers during that time when the State put down the uprising with a ferocity never before witnessed in those times. The report continues, as matter-of-factly, and, therefore, as unsettlingly,
“Putha does not stay with us any longer,” she said
“He fears the strangers who come by night
only yesterday, his friend was dragged out
we heard shots, then silence”
‘Normality’ thus restored, we are next most unexpectedly startled into a brief moment of uplifting relief,
“One good thing, we have more money to spend on food these days
The children’s father is looking much better now”,
before the illusoriness of that moment is shattered by the concluding lines, with their so casual, yet so grim, throwback to the “headless bodies” mentioned earlier:
It is useless saving up for Podi Dhu’s dowry
She will soon forget what a young man looks like.
This too, seemingly, in that same deadpan manner, but now heavy with an unbearable sense of hopelessness.
“A Rustic Scene” works through similar unexpected contrasts that shock us into recognitions of other realities that are belied by the seeming normality of what we see, while at the same time opening out to other subtle variations in Amerasinghe’s response to the plight of the rural people caught up in the situation. A typical rural countryside scene, attractive, soothing and benign, as the title has already led us to expect.
The fields spread out
Brash green softened by the morning mist
Pegged down by knots of trees
Blue water hyacinths
Clamour for attention
Somnolent Buffaloes
Blink placidly.
And it continues in the same vein as our sight is shifted to the people around:
A cluster of people
Impatient children, astride their mothers’ hips,
quite normal and expected. But the ominous hint in the spectators’
Eyes which say nothing,
hardly prepares us for the numbing shock of finding out that they are standing round
… a smoking body
Black as granite
Contorted limbs
Stick out like branches,
again a familiar enough sight in some rural areas during those distressing times of unrest.
But the concluding lines,
Wisps of idle conversation
Float above the smoke,
still do not allow us any respite. Seemingly entirely detached, mere objective record of the facts that are there to be observed, yet at the same time, almost achingly delicate in the gentleness and softness of their touch, these lines. Yet, precisely by leaving us inconclusively suspended on that paradox, they superbly thrust us into a challenging predicament: what possibly might the situation be saying to us, what truths are submerged in it that we just feel impelled to draw out from it? Pure Amerasinghe! In the villagers, resentment? anger? fear? hopeless resignation in the face of the power of their oppressor or of their predetermined destiny/karma? And in us the readers (and writers), unperturbed indifference, like that of those ‘somnolent Buffaloes/ blink(ing) placidly’ in the fields? Or instead, …??
In “Mea Culpa”, Amerasinghe makes more explicit a response to that challenge that we have already seen was in any case implicit in her other poems on the youth unrest that we have looked at. It is a response that in its self-reflexiveness and human empathy strongly distinguishes her work from that of most other writers of her class who engaged with the topic, with just a handful of exceptions, including Sarachchandra, already mentioned above, and, also, Ashley Halpé.
She starts by asking herself a question:
Where was I
When you lay crouched in the dark
Your eyes burning holes
In the fabric of the night
Awaiting a knock on the door
…..
A shirt around your son’s eyes
A rough jeep ride
The final rifle burst.
Disconcertingly strong writing there, making impossible the familiar retreat of the class to the usual self-protective responses designed to safeguard their own privileged positions within the system that spawned the discontent that underlay it all in the first place: the evasive prevarications, feeble rationalizations, diversionary sophistry, even the indignantly self-righteous condemnations of the destruction and atrocities undeniably perpetrated by many of the youth, and so on. None of that for Amerasinghe, whose answer to that most unsettling question is:
I lay cocooned
in a separate world
grateful that the knock
was not on my door
Relieved it was not my son
The surface of my life unruffled.
Unflinchingly honest, that, in its self-awareness. But still not sufficient. ‘Ashamed/That I have no tears/to shed’, she goes on, relentlessly. No, no restful solace in that guilt either, the guilt that, safely separated in her cocoon from that mother out there, she feels, quite understandably actually, over her own personal relief that she has been spared the terror that that woman has so cruelly known. There is just too much more that simply cries out to be looked at, cared about, acted on, things that make her all too
Aware
That indignation
Falls short of constructive anger
And acceptance
Implies apathy.
Yes, Amerasinghe sees and talks too clear and straight for complacent conscience-salving responses. And it is exactly that utterly honest, self-aware approach that she brings to bear on her treatment in her poems of the most traumatic and urgent moral and civilizational crisis of our times in the country, namely the ethno-religious-linguistic conflict that has torn our peoples asunder, the conflict that the country at large seems to want to deny, leaving it with the yet unfinished, if unfortunately barely recognized, project of working out proper, sufficient, redemptive responses to it.
“Aftermath – July 1983” again works, characteristically, by contrast.
I am lulled to contentment,
the poet says, as she looks upon the scene in front of her, where
a blue haze of distant mountains
filters through,
on the one hand,
A cool wind (that) surges around me
Ripping the bright banners
of a plantain tree
into delicate fingers
which flutter impatiently
and, on the other,
the dark gloss of breadfruit leaves
(that) move… ponderously.
Already, the words ‘surges’, ‘ripping’, ‘impatiently’, ‘ponderously’ have hinted that the seemingly restful scene that is slowly being created by the other words in the lines with their very different textures and associations is not quite what it might appear to be, and that impression is quickly confirmed by our realization that what that sense of contentment has done is to push ‘far behind me’
The smoke haze of a burning city
The acrid smell of exploding tyres.
Which then suddenly brings us starkly face to face with the ‘you’ of the poem,
whose home was a black hole in a wall of flame,
and for whom
there is no healing breeze
…
The holy ash on your forehead
Has turned to frost
…
Your black pottu
Is the stigma of your suffering
and my shame
(are there echoes here of Christ’s suffering on the Cross?). Again, characteristically, no comforting flight back into that balmy state of ‘contentment’, but instead, an almost unforgiving self-awareness that allows no escape from our own responsibilities in such situations.
Quite naturally, Amerasinghe’s gaze shifts to the battles zones of the war stoked by such occurrences. In “Palmyrah Trees”, she calls our attention to
the distant events
Within another sphere,
Another space,
to which we remain ‘insensible’, and to
The whining shells
Exploding bombs
The bodies, limp and still,
which, too, remain ‘Invisible’ to us. That other space of Jaffna, where
charred and headless
palmyrah trunks
Guillotined
may be seen
Still proudly standing tall
…
Symbolic
Of the indestructible spirit
Of a proud people.
How generously sensitive in its ability to wear the shoe of the persecuted ‘Other’! And, then too, that other space, ‘A hundred miles to the East’, to which also that other poem “Survival” takes us, where, surrounded by
Charred walls, twisted timber
Blackened shells, gaping at the sky,
Humanity lies
in huddled heaps.
Again that theme of
Our blinkered vision (that) encompasses
Only the familiar land-marks
Of a reassuring landscape,
even as we hear or smell again
A muffled scream
The pervading odour of roasting flesh,
leading the poem to those most perishing of concluding lines:
“We never knew” they said
Unseeing they sauntered by.
Against this background, it seems entirely natural to read that other, very different poem, “Casuarina Beach – Jaffna”, written after the end of the Civil War and under very different circumstances, as, among things, hinting, if implicitly, at a variation of this same theme that is so powerfully presented in the poems we have just looked at. This poem throws the focus on the Casuarina trees that give the beach its name, originally planted alongside it by the former British rulers, trees that
have endured the full circle
Of peace, war, now peace again
that, since those times, the beach has seen. During the civil war,
dew tears dripped from drooping fronds,
as the beach played
reluctant host
To weapons, landmines, shells
Scattered limbs, and shattered bodies.
But now, with peace restored and
The beach returns to life
The Casuarinas flutter joyously.
Seemingly, an entirely welcome change, saluted even by nature. But something seems not quite as it ought to be, for now the ‘silence’ of the beach is
…shattered
By busloads of excited holiday “trippers”.
Do the inverted commas that enclose that last word, combined with the normal, even auditorily-reinforced, associations of the words ‘busloads’ and ‘shattered’, imply some sort of strong ironic comment on the large numbers who, after the war, went sightseeing on triumphalistic tours of the war zones to celebrate victory and the spoils of war?
That theme of our unseeing responses to the human and other costs of the realities of the war, in fact goes integrally together with another encompassing theme that runs through these and related poems, namely, the theme of the utter futility of war and its violence, which destructively, and beyond even the possibility of ‘expia(tion)’ gather up absolutely all of those around without exception in their ever-spinning ‘roulette wheel’ (surely, a terribly sardonic variation of “tapestry”?) of
Blood, Bullets, Blood
Human bonfires –
Yet more blood
And Time is leeched by Death
(“The Roulette Wheel”).
Among such casualties, and so unutterably tragically, the ‘young minds and lithe bodies’ of the poem “A Thought”, who, ‘in the name of Peace’
Dare not hear
The anguished screams
Dare not see
the nightmare scene,
only as a consequence to be ‘devour(ed)’ by these failures of ordinary, human response, failures that they have been ‘Honed to’ cultivating to ‘perfection’.
And then there are those ‘beautiful children’ (in the poem “Beautiful Children”) who now lie,
…lifeless beneath
piles of anonymous rubble
…
Destroyed by mindless fanatics
And heartless saviours;
or, alternatively, with
Their bodies drift(ing) towards the beach
They left a while ago
as ‘Battered by savage seas’, they sought to ‘Desperately flee…’ those fanatics and saviours;
or, no less dispiritingly,
Surviv(ing) in impersonal cities
Where resentment simmers,
(their) beautiful eyes
Dulled by resignation
Los(ing) that sparkle of hope.
Variously included in the lines cite above among the different sorts of casualties of the war are the fighters on all sides, their dead victims, those fleeing abroad from the violence, often to end up drowned at sea or reduced to complete hopeless apathy in some alien place. Further included among such casualties are ‘The perpetrators of terror/L(ying) spread-eagled’ ‘By the unruffled waters of a blue lagoon’ (“The Final Battle”). Levellingly, not sparing either, on the other side of the battle, even the high-ranking Brigadier lying in splendour, ‘The polished surface of a coffin-lid/reflect(ing) the insignia of his rank’ (“The Death of a Brigadier”).
Not long ago
He must have passed this way
marveling at the unreal tranquility
his mind absorbing it.
But not even he cannot escape the irretrievable, meaningless finality of it all, as,
In just such a rural setting
not too far from here
Where the herons have taken flight
from a devastated land-scape
That mind
was blown to nothingness.
The language of Amerasinghe’s poems on the war (and also the Insurgencies) is often powerfully visceral, even at times near-unbearably so. But, she is no mere prophet of doom and despair, her characteristic irrepressibility of spirit just will not allow her to be that. “Schooldays”, with telling effect positioned in the volume next to “Aftermath – July 1983”, allows us to know for ourselves something of the irreplaceably rich beauty of what we so readily have available to us but could well lose as a result of such violations. With the most refreshingly lightest of touches, we are introduced to four young girls and their joyously carefree and innocent friendship, a friendship on which it would be impossible to set a value.
Pigtails a-flying, I bounced o’er the hills
With Zarina, Neliya and Letchimie
That trek back from school
Always ended too soon.
The girls are as different from each other as we might imagine, with their names already overtly indicating something of their different ethnic(-religious) identities, except, of course, in the case of the ‘I’ of the poem, presumably the poet who, as suggested by her name and, in fact explicitly indicated later in the poem, is ‘of another race’ ( I shall return to this matter in my discussion below of another poem). But, the differences extend, quite taken-for-grantedly, to all kinds of other things too, economic and domestic circumstances, personal dispositions and expectations, even appearance.
Zarina had not a care in the world
Her father owned a store
Her one ambition was marriage
And nothing more
Neliya never knew her Irish Dad
Glossy black hair, cheeks pomegranate-hued
A gorgeous girl
Whom all the boys pursued
Letchimie wore the thickest lenses I have ever seen
Her home, a gloomy tenement
Her light, a sickly beam
From a flickering bottle- lamp
Her father was determined that some day she’d be
A doctor or a lawyer
Or at the very least
Go to University.
Importantly, it is exactly such varied, all-too-ordinarily-familiar differences that made them the real, live individuals that each of the four of them distinctly, and separately, was (though, of course, as already noted, in the case of the poet/speaker, the details are not mentioned but taken for granted). But, what it is even more critically important to recognize is that it is out of exactly these very same defining differences they carry with them into their relationship that, in such a spontaneous, carefree, mutually accepting manner they make for themselves that lovely, blessed togetherness that brings them such marvelous joy and satisfaction. Truly a stirring reminder of what our divided land could at its best be if only it wanted to – or tried to.
I never for a moment felt
That I was of another race
Life was good when we were young
And hatred had not shown its face.
And then we are taken to the next generation.
My daughter now walks home from school
Jabbering along the way
Five-abreast across the road
They discuss the topics of the day.
Still, thankfully, as spontaneously carefree and innocent as ever, so it appears. Until
“A Tamil boutique was burnt,” says one
“Serves them right,” says another.
The shock of that let down is strongly intensified not just by its stunning unexpectedness, but even more, perhaps, by the utter casualness of the exchange – just part of a perfectly ordinary, normal conversation. And the poet’s response to it, a quiet, kindly ‘explanation’ of that behavior, rueful, yes, yet with not the slightest hint of either reproach or extenuation; rather, instead, compassionate, if regretful, understanding – they just did not know what she had so gloriously known,
For they never shared the company
Of Zarina, Neliya and Letchimie.
The deft, measured gentleness of that touch helps bring across to us all the more overpoweringly the sense of the irretrievable loss of something utterly beyond valuation, but which could still be there for us to bring back, if we but make the effort.
The sheer, wondrous innocence of that something as it expresses itself in the poem makes it impossible to resist a reference to that other, most delightfully childlike, poem “Santa Claus”, (‘[Written by the child in me]’, as the poet warns us), with its simultaneously joyful/rueful take on that ‘universally loved’ figure whom ‘I’m really grateful for’, even though she is all too well aware that he has been left behind for us by the ‘Colonisation we all deplore’. The description, not devoid of a touch of impish humour, of the growing excitement of the little girl as she awaits the arrival of this much-looked forward-to visitor on the night of Christmas Eve as ‘He encircles the globe in his magical sleigh/Undeterred by the absence of snow’, is most captivating:
My eyes, prised open, and ears attuned
Pretending sleep, I lie awake……
Is that a tinkle of bells at the gate? ;
right up to even that mildly deflationary let down:
Alas! His entry I’d always miss
Which often is through the smallest of chinks,
‘mildly’ because enlivened by the humour of the explanation the little girl so solemnly gives for it so that she can some or the other hold on to her beloved friend
But that disappointment is more than compensated for when she wakes up the next morning to the ‘goodies’ that are ‘sure’ to be there, whose ‘magic’, ‘whatever’ those gifts might have been (even, ‘When times are hard’, just ‘soap and sandals’), ‘persists’; and in fact even more so, for, in addition,
There’s always that letter
The proof of his visit
No matter the writing looks a trifle familiar!
Inevitably, though, if regretfully, adulthood brings that magic to an end, quite callously in fact.
Alas! One day, I lost my dear friend
“There’s no such person” the voices yelled
And that, of course, was childhood’s end!
The diversion of our argument here from comparatively grave to somewhat more lighthearted might well have been welcome to readers. But it should in no way cause us to miss out on recognizing again that refreshingly unpretentious spontaneity and integrity of spirit that, as remarked earlier, are a hallmark of Amerasinghe’s writing. It is in fact just such qualities that allow her to speak uninhibitedly in this poem out of the mind of the child she once was, without fear that this would cause her to be seen as someone ‘lesser’ than what adults of consequence might wish to be seen as. Her characteristic unconcern for such trivia is partly what allows her to venture unhesitatingly into those many quite unexpected observations and remarks and shifts that open insights out to us precisely by the way in which they so catch us by surprise, making her artistic personality as intriguing as, we noted above, it was.
Which brings us back to Amerasinghe’s own distinctive identity and her treatment of it, a matter we promised above to take up. Again, that characteristic deft, light, admirably non-intrusive touch, on perfect display in, for instance, that opening question she asks herself in “Kaleidoscope”:
Who am I
To deny
The murmurings of my ancestors
Coursing through my veins…
On one side of her ancestry, by no means evident from the surname she had acquired from her Sinhala(-Buddhist) husband,
The German from Weimar
Who inexplicably
Ended up here,
And proceeded to produce
A clutch of respected citizens
And the shadowy Hollanders
Of whom I knew nothing;
and on the other,
…the little boy
From the deep south
Who chose to shred
The tangled weave of his ancestry
In the mills
Of suburban respectability,
eventually leading, “closer up in time”, to
Two grandmothers
One dark, one fair
Encased in skirts and armchairs
….
The gentle waves of their reminiscences
Lapping over me,
even as
A Grandfather looks down
From a faded photograph
Fiercely Teutonic
To the tip of his goatee.
No showy, self-promoting display there, designed to wrest especial recognition. Throughout, rather, totally unostentatious observation, basically, despite its somewhat self-effacingly modest nature, quite detached, even to the extent of recognizing that the ‘suburban respectability’ that that ‘little boy’ had earned might well have come at the cost of what his own ancestry, ‘tangled’ though it was, might have brought him. At the same time, as
Memory bites
On a juicy centre
And History contracts
To an intimate thought,
all of this comes resonantly together at the core of her being to define her own personal identity, who distinctively she is as a unique individual person. And this is a person who, clearly, carries her (‘westernized’) Burgher heritage within herself integrally alongside her Sinhala heritage (to use the official classificatory labels) and much else too, not in any parasitic or predatory manner, as current parochializing nationalistic fashions would narrowly and exclusionarily have it, but in inseparable, mutually sustaining and enhancing interaction with it.
Which allows Amerasinghe to announce in “A Paradox”, if with unfussy matter-of-factness, ‘I am pleased to be multicultural’. Impressively quiet and non-assertive, this affirms her very real sense of integrally belonging, in precisely that distinctive, ‘mixed’ individual identity, along with the innumerable other such highly varied and distinctive individuals around her, within the country they all alike know as ‘home’, adding yet another strand to the many colourful ones they together contribute to the weaving of the rich and beauteous tapestry of its own more embracing identity.
The recognition here is the very well known one that Frantz Fanon led us to, one that came, or ought to have come, easily enough to the generation Amerasinghe belonged to. This is that what countries such as ours and their varied peoples have always ever-changingly been and, continued to be, have been determined by all of the many and varied elements that had entered historically into their formation. These elements derive not only from what was presumably within their shores in the earliest times, whatever they might have been, but also from outside of their shores (for instance, all of the major religions of the country seem to have entered it from outside of its shores), interacting in all kinds of ways with each other to fashion their constantly evolving experience, ways of seeing and understanding and feeling and doing things, and, in the final count, what might be taken as their ‘identity’. And what Amerasinghe is doing with that announcement is simply giving expression, in an exemplarily dispassionate and disinterested manner, to that truth – the ‘Burgher’ component of her heritage, far from detracting from the ‘Lankanness’ she shares with all those around her, contributes as decidedly, and as essentially, to it as the things they differently contribute.
What it is important to note is that none of this blinds Amerasinghe in any way to the reprehensible provenance of that part of her Lankan identity in the depredatory enterprise of empire. As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, among the most urgent of the challenges that faced her generation in its time was to help remake their country in terms that made sense at that time of emergence from empire to all of its peoples. This entailed looking unflinchingly at the country’s actual material and other realities as they have been constructed throughout all alike of the millenia of its history. Her poem “Genesis”, which pointedly reproduces the name of the first book of the Bible of the faith she herself inherited from the ‘western’ line of her heritage, begins:
It all began
When white sails billowed over the horizon
And the fragrance of sun-roasted cinnamon curls
Assailed Caucasian nostrils
…..
When strange boots left imprints on our shores
Pale shadows acquired substance
Stones transformed to bread
And wine, glowing red in goblets, to blood.
The notorious ‘Christians and spices’ drive of Empire, along with the initial gut-reactive responses of the populace to it when it first suddenly descended upon them in unimaginably unfamiliar form. Echoes of the Rajavaliya combine with those of the Bible in those last four lines to allow the workings of the enterprise along its religious front to be sharply bared.
The air was thick with incantations
The blood of Christ was forced
Down trembling throats
Menikes converted to Mary
And Dayas to Dias.
Which then again brings us to the language front of those workings, already mentioned in the poem on servants looked at above, and its implications beyond language as such.
The tongue twisted around strange consonants
Savoured the scarlet rambutans, the fiery chillies
Forgetting the red drip from their swords.
But that was only the beginning. For, as such episodes were repeated by two other sets of invading forces,
Our bondage continued
and
Juan changed to Jan
And Jan to John.
And the consequences?
Insidiously
A land was splintered, by the sword and the cross
Imperceptibly
The cracks widened
Into gaping chasms.
Unmistakably, no escape for Amerasinghe’s generation as they came out of Empire from the notorious divide and rule strategy that supported its designs on their country, in the process spawning so many of the challenges of recovery and reconstruction that they desperately needed to grapple with. But here again, as the socio-politically aware poems we have looked at above clearly demonstrate, the poet’s signature independence and integrity of mind (mentioned earlier), does not allow her to put that recognition to use in the way that has become all too conventional in the decades since. And that way has been to divert attention from our own refusal or incapacity to respond as required to the demands those challenges made on us, by glibly passing the entire blame onto that strategy, thus securing that culture of denial that is the main obstacle to a proper, enduring resolution to the country’s ethno-religious crisis. As the poems just mentioned show, Amerasinghe resists such evasions outright.
But, given her exposé in “Genesis” of the role of this faith she had herself inherited through her ‘western’ ancestry in the sorry episode that was Empire, this still leaves us with the very open question of her own relationship with that faith, which does, after all, continue to figure in a couple of her other poems, if differently from the way it does in this one; simply, in fact, as just another entirely natural and spontaneous way of giving expression to herself as anything else she engages with in her writing. And here again, her independence and integrity of spirit manifest themselves quite strikingly. For, it expresses itself in the form of highly personal experiences that, while they might or might not, in their characteristically unconventional even at times surprisingly idiosyncratic nature, quite accord with orthodox doctrine, come across with a sincerity that it is impossible to deny.
The poem “Barrabus” (sic), for instance, is based on the story in the Bible where, by popular will and against the judgement of the representative of the Roman Emperor who was presiding over his case, the innocent Jesus Christ was condemned to death in place of the notorious murderer who carried that name and whose life was ‘as empty as a hollow gourd’. Speaking in the voice of Barrabas, as he meets Jesus carrying his cross on his way to his crucifixion, she says:
Our eyes meet
I sink
In twin pools of Compassion
And Contentment
My chains drop
Clang and coil around my ankles
But I remain manacled
To realization
Remorse
even Love.
No particular concern here even with the facts of the story as set down in the original account, let alone the specific significance they are standardly assigned in their usual institutionalised readings. Instead a unique kind of appropriation of them for the moving expression, arising out of a certain immediate sense of personal identification with Barrabas, of a profoundly regenerative act of self-recognition. It is an act that releases her, along with him, into an almost transcendentally transformative peace of mind, a certain compelling sense of surpassing spirituality, even as at the same time the concluding lines,
Watching His frail shoulders
droop beneath its burden
Listening to the thud of wood
on cobble stones,
still ensure, in their very effective, if distressing, sensory detail, that we will not forget the painful source of that release.
It is just such a transcendental, even mystical, experience of utmost spirituality, defying mere cerebral dissection even more than this one, that we encounter in that most intriguing of poems, “Days End” (sic).
A solitary rose
Casts its petals down
An over-blown Jak fruit
Spatters the ground
In a bowlful of blood
I watch the day drown.
By now we are accustomed to the kinds of surprises, delivered in the familiar aesthetically arresting ways, that these lines spring on us – rose petals, jak fruits and blood, and drowning days, most unusually associated with each other in strongly sensory terms. But then, from nowhere and with even more astonishing unexpectedness, we find ourselves in the next stanza:
And Christ
Walks upon the waters.
The allusion to the miracle of the familiar Biblical story is obvious enough. But that miracle itself, its entire context, the circumstances surrounding it and the meanings standardly, if variously, extracted from it, are seemingly so completely remote from and unrelated to the scene that we have just had set in front of us, that to seek out any link between the two demands a gigantic leap of the mind, heart and, above all, imagination. And while we are yet struggling with that task, we are tossed, with yet another totally unexpected shift of view, into the next stanza:
Your face
In finest marble wrought
For Death has ironed
Those creases out
drained away
the tortured doubt.
We now find ourselves looking, and from out of nowhere as it were, upon a face, seemingly in fact a marble statue of a face, and we might be forgiven for presuming from the preceding stanza that that face is the face of Jesus Christ. The aesthetic perfection of the statue, then, captures the state of perfection Christ himself is proclaimed to have attained through his death, with all the unbearably painful traces of suffering associated with that death falling away from sight as he is seen coming through it all, transcendently transfigured in ways that put him utterly beyond defeat. Which then suddenly ushers us into the concluding stanza, which, again by no means unsurprisingly, brings back echoes of the biblical miracle that has earlier been alluded to; through, in fact, a repeat of the lines of the preceding stanza with just one single change in them, the replacement of the word ‘Christ’ by the pronoun ‘you’ –
And you
Walk upon the waters.
This seems to holds out to us some suggestive clue, as we struggle to make reasoned sense not just of the miracles mentioned but of the entire set of seemingly unrelated situations the poem has presented to us, along with the far-from-evident links it is inviting us to make among its hugely different and seemingly unrelated components. But just as we seem to be finding our way along these lines to some reasonably satisfying resolution of our predicament, a further quintessentially Amerasinghe-type of spanner gets thrown into the works by her personal communication to the authors of this review that that face we are looking upon is not a statue but an actual face, the face of her father as he lay in his coffin at his own ‘day’s end’, in what unforgettably struck her as a blessed state of palpably attained peace and perfection, with all of the worries and troubles that might have beset his life put finally and irrevocably behind him.
So, there does indeed remain a very strong sense of the miraculous that the reference to the biblical story seemed to have been designed to invoke. But we now see that story working very differently, not in any literal or orthodox theological terms, but in terms that are preeminently aesthetic, as, in fact, a profound metaphor that helps establish a powerfully felt, indissoluble organic link among the various scenes the poem has placed us in – the natural phenomena in the opening stanza, her father lying in his coffin, Christ walking upon the waters. It is a link that gets established imaginatively, initially on the basis of that transcendent sense of the miraculous that the sensory perfection of each of the scenes organically inspires in us; and next, on the basis of the deeply spiritual connection that no less organically gets established among these very different forms of perfection.
But, as characteristic of Amerasinghe as ever, she still leaves us with a further very intriguing issue to tease out. Does the pronoun ‘you’ work in that last stanza in its usual anaphoric way to pick out as its referent a person mentioned earlier in the text, most obviously in this case, her father lying there in front of us? Quite likely, but might it not also possibly refer instead to Christ himself, whose attainment of a transcendently perfect peace her father has himself in his own way succeeded in emulating? Or does the pronoun work in that other familiar, generalizing way that catches absolutely anybody and everybody up? As, for instance, when you say something like what we’ve just said, where the ‘you’ last mentioned in this sentence of ours refers to anyone at all really, including, among all others, the speaker/writer and the addressee. In this use, the ‘you’ would necessarily include the poet herself, or even any of us who are reading, or for that matter, not reading the poem. Interestingly, all such uses of the pronoun allow themselves to be drawn upon here, generating an extraordinarily fascinating ambiguity that greatly enhances the impact the poem has on us. So, whatever the orthodox theological readings the miracles invite, the way the aesthetics of the poem works, everybody gets caught up in them and their spirituality, so that, as she puts it in that other poem of hers, “Cathedrals”, ‘a cloak of awe and reverence/Falls on believer and nonbeliever alike’.
We have left to the end the poem “Realisation”, which, while revealing yet another such facet of Amerasinghe’s ‘social consciousness’ as we have called it, allows us to more fully round off our assessment of Amerasinghe’s accomplishment in the volume, in the process throwing into relief what might well come to be recognised as perhaps one of the most distinctive of her contributions to the country’s writing . (We might in fairness to readers warn them before we go on that it is in this section of the essay that the interventions of its second author are the most pronounced.) The poem deals with ‘a brief encounter’ the poet has with
a pleasant young man
With whom I spent the day
Discovering London,
not handsome, (but with)
A certain degree of charm, perhaps;
the ‘naked admiration in his eyes’ ‘miraculously transform(ing)’ her ‘Into a desirable woman’, from the ‘sexless automaton’ she had been reduced to by that daily routine of
…juggling the spheres of profession, wife, mother
Not daring to let them drop
Walking the tightrope between career and caring.
As the first author of this article can readily confirm from her own instinctive initial response to the poem, it has the potential to strike an especial chord with women for the way in which the encounter presents the kind of cherished moment of joy that holds out to them the tantalizing prospect of a release, however momentary, from the insufferable boredom of the everyday routines that can lay waste to so much of their lives. And that chord will be struck with all the greater strength for a very good reason. The point is that in the more usual treatments of such encounters woman tends to be presented simply as a kind of object, the passive object of man’s attention and, therefore, vulnerable to his decisions and actions. In this poem, however, the poet, speaking in her own distinctive individual voice as woman, takes charge of how the situation and the issues it raises might call to be seen from the viewpoint of woman as independent agent in her own right; which, clearly, makes a very important difference.
That situation is, if anything, a situation of temptation. It is characteristic of the way Amerasinghe works that, even at the possible cost of opening herself out to mere common-or-garden gossip, always utterly profitless, let alone destructive, she never in the poem lets us into what the actual outcome of the encounter might have been. Instead, she chooses the far more courageous path of using the poem, in close conjunction with two other poems in the volume, its first and its last, to lead us into a head-on engagement with the issue of gender relations and sexuality (which is perilously close to such relations) that is calling insistent attention to itself across the world in our times. And, which is even more important, in terms that can irrevocably secure for women full recognition of their inviolably equal and legitimate right to address and resolve such situations in the ways that most matter to them at the deepest levels of their being.
As already pointed out, the encounter in the poem “Realisation” presents a situation of temptation. The poem that opens the volume, “Another Eve”, puts the predicament unavoidably up front, through the image of the ‘solitary passion-fruit… Of an indescribable shade of purple’, that, ‘Dropped from a vine/Atop a tangle of trees/The size of a small apple’ , ‘lay/On a bed of dry leaves’.
For a brief moment
I am Eve
Tantalized by the perfection
Of a mysterious fruit
Stroking its smooth surface ….
And who can blame her? With a candour rarely seen in our writing, the concluding poem at the other end of the volume, “When the Magic Ends”, makes it impossible for us not to know for ourselves something of the powerful allure of the situation at hand. The scene that, standing by the seashore Amerasinghe presents to us, putting brilliantly together a varied range of marvelously observed sensory details,
A pucker on the sea-skin
Transforms to
A magical curve of water
Crested, riding high
Thrusting forward
To pound a submissive shore
Collapsing
In a last gasp of froth
And spread of spin-drift
Bearing wreaths of sea-weed,
does indeed comes vividly alive for us. But, part of that brilliance is that the scene works at the same time at another very different level, transporting us beyond even the extraordinary vibrancy of the scene that literally lies in front of us as registered by our physical senses, to recognitions of other rousing things of a very different sort that are also already built integrally into it:
Sight sound and touch
Guide life
Through mundane alleys
Of indifferent days and nights
Until transformed
To a heightened sensibility
A sunburst of awareness
Which pounds the blood
And melts two bodies into one.
The sensation of the gentle softness of the scene we started with, its delicate beauty, even tenderness persists, if in a quietly latent manner. But, the ecstasy and the power of the sheer physical passion they transform into are also palpably felt. Little wonder that Eve in the opening poem cited above, the tantalizing fruit in her hand and ‘Determined to know more’ cannot hold back from ‘rais(ing) it to my lips’. But then, after an interminable moment during which we are kept suspended on that line, the concluding stanza:
The crisp brown leaves rustle
A suspicion of a slither … .
Barely perceptible, but still jolting us wide awake to the other, more dangerous possibilities lurking in the situation.
We recognize here the familiar Biblical allegory of the Fall of ‘Man’, the lapse, caused by the fatal error of choice made at that moment of decision that, according to that story, ushered humankind into the distressingly troubled world of imperfections and sorrows within which they have since struggled to make their lives. We recall, particularly, the infamous twist in that story, when the man, in what surely must be as pathetically cowardly and blatantly false an act of denial and blame-shifting evasion as any we might encounter, passes the culpability for the lapse entirely onto the woman, thus supplying significant legitimacy to the reprehensible treatment woman has throughout the ages had had to endure at the hands of man across most climes and cultures.
In the three poems mentioned, Amerasinghe provides us with an impressively distinctive response to that violation of justice and humanity that feels compellingly right. As already mentioned, the poem “Realisation” never explicitly tells us what the actual outcome of the encounter mentioned was. But, to require it to do so, whichever way the encounter went, would be to completely miss the point, precisely by diverting us into the realm of worthless gossip, whether that evokes mere titillation, self-righteously virtuous condemnation, feeble self-justification, mindless celebration of an unbridled entitlement to do anything one wants never mind the consequences, whatever. But those, the poems seem to be telling us, can hardly be the ways in which we need to find our way to the response to the predicament of woman in our world that can indeed overcome it and restore to her the fully equal recognition and the respect that are her inviolable right by virtue, simply, of her being human.
Thus it is that the poems do not indulge fruitlessly in any of the other possible ways of seeking out that response that might familiarly have been available to her: denial or evasion, based on virtuous protestations of innocence or on carefully formulated blame-shifting strategies; relentless battles for supremacy in an unending war of attrition waged primarily to reverse the situation not to irrevocably end it – bitter, vengeful battles, too often fought, with unrecognized irony, on terms laid down in the first place by man himself, where the concern is largely with demonstrating that woman is as good as, if not better than, man in doing what man has determined ought to be done.
None of that for Amerasinghe, whose response in the three poems mentioned, raising itself well above such preoccupations, strives, more difficultly, towards a deeper and more fully rounded and far-reaching understanding of the situation at hand, a much more wholesome and encompassing understanding that would open out the way for woman to bring to its resolution what only she might, both as woman in her own distinctive nature and right, and as an inviolably equal partner in a common human endeavor she shares in equal measure with man. It is a response that is firmly and manifestly grounded in a self-empowering retrieval and affirmation of agency for woman, seen not in terms of a desperate effort to wrest power out of hand man’s hands into her own, but in the eminently just and reasonable terms of how it would free her to take full, confident control of her situation in her own right, making, with care and responsibility, her own choices and decisions on the basis of a proper, self-reflexive awareness of all of its varied facets, however uncomfortable some of them might well be. The need of the moment, an unflinchingly honest and courageous look at the situation in all its fullness and depth, seeing all around it and through to its impossibly contradictory pulls and their irresistible force in full recognition and acknowledgement of all alike of their implications for the choices and decisions it inescapably puts on her to make and of the possible consequences and costs of those choices and decisions in human terms that exclude nobody.
So, in all three poems, woman is more than acutely aware, in the best self-reflexive way, of the extremely challenging nature of the situation in which she finds herself, all the more so for her openness to the sheer ecstasy of what it offers, the seductive beauty and irresistible power of its tantalizing appeal, so headily captured in that last poem. For all this, Eve in the first poem does not pretend not to notice that ‘slither’, despite its near-imperceptibility; she has too much integrity for that. And to notice it is to awaken, too, as in “Realisation”, to the other conflicting demands that the realities of the situation make on her, demands that simply cannot, in all conscience, be denied or disavowed; demands circling around inviolable human matters of devotion and commitment and duty and caring and concern and, perhaps even more importantly, responsibility. All this presented by reference to that ‘miraculous’ transformation of the poet from sober matron into ‘Desirable Woman’, the designedly wry irony of which prevents the occasion from being converted into a solemn, preachy proclamation and celebration of her own ‘virtue’. Indeed, the entire way in which she has handled this immensely challengingly situation allows that ‘virtue’, whatever its specific nature might be, to come across in the writing with all the greater conviction, for the way in which, in her concluding poem, she leaves us with a powerful reminder of what could well happen if/when the steep plunge from the heights of the ecstasy that is on offer takes place as it comes to an end, and its magic
fades away
Midst recriminations and regrets.
Not just soberingly rueful, but terribly despondent and bleakly pessimistic, those lines that conclude that final poem of the volume and, therefore, the volume itself, striking a note that has sounded in varying ways in several of the other poems in it too. And yet, these are by no means the final sentiments we carry away from the collection, and the lines that give expression to them are certainly not the ones that speak the last word on what it has to offer us, hers is too irrepressible a spirit for that to happen. But, what Amerasinghe does seem to be telling us is that, demoralizing though such sentiments might be, they too are as undeniably and inescapably a part of the world we all live in as all of those other good things the poems preceding this one have reminded us of, entering alongside them into the richly varied weave of its tapestry. And that, it is only by fully recognizing this and looking squarely at all of these matters alike and the circumstances surrounding them as well as the people, including ourselves, involved in them, with courage and complete honesty, and, too, with sympathetic and caring openness, that we might arrive at that wise and generous understanding of life in all of its rich diversity, good, bad, beautiful, frustrating, disappointing, satisfying, wondrous, exhilarating, challenging, whatever, the life within which we need to search ourselves and our meanings out. And, for leading us through her artistry to participate in the weaving of the tapestry that is that life, thereby allowing us too to glimpse for ourselves something of all of that, we need to be grateful to Amerasinghe.
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** About the AUTHORS
Indranee Kandiah started her life-long teaching career in the secondary schooling system in Sri Lanka (1962-1965). She subsequently went on to teach in the primary school system under the Inner London Education Authority (1965-1967); at the English Language Teaching Unit of the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, with the focus now shifting to “English for Specific (Academic) Purposes” (1975-1985); in the “Survival” English Language courses for Refugees as Volunteer Teacher (UNHCR Singapore, 1988-1992); at (EAP again) the Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore (1996-1997) and the National Institute of Education of the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore(1998); and at the Open University of Sri Lanka, as Visiting Tutor on its Certificate and Diploma in English Courses (1999-2002). She was also IELTS Examiner for the British Council, Colombo (2003-2005).
Throughout she has participated in conferences, seminars and training/study courses designed to enhance language teaching expertise and skills.
She has shown a lifelong interest in Drama, and has acted in both English and Sinhala plays.
What she most celebrates is that she has throughout the years juggled all this with being, first and foremost, a full-time mother.
Thiru Kandiah, past Professor of English at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka (2000-2003). Has taught and published in several specialised areas of language/linguistic study as well as in the field of literature/drama (primarily post-colonial), within the overarching discipline of English Studies, though Tamil and Sinhala too get a look-in. Adopting a trans-disciplinary approach and using the specialized modes of reasoning and argumentation appropriate to the particular disciplinary areas involved, he has sought to integrate his work (literary and linguistic) under a steadfastly post-colonial perspective.
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This review article was first published in June 2020 in the Arts and Culture section of Commonwealth Business News Online. Link: https://www.cwbnlive.com/2020/06/a-refreshingly-different-sri-lankan-poetic-voice.
END NOTE
[1] This collaborative Review Article presents what its joint authors hope will read as a coherent, unified account of the collection of poetry under review, arrived at on the basis of a complete accommodation of all alike of the numerous differences that arose between them on whole ranges of matters all along the way. They remain, though, “forever the best of friends”, as Dickens’ Joe Gargery might have put it.
About the Poet: Premini Amerasinghe ….
……. Consultant Radiologist from Sri Lanka, started writing poetry seriously in the 1980s. Her love for literature was inculcated in her by her mother, Beatrice Spittel.
Her first book of poems (Kaleidoscope) was shortlisted in 1998 for the Gratiaen Literary Award in Sri Lanka. She has also published several novels: The Search (long listed for the Dublin Impact Award in 2002); Sophie’s Story; Tangled Threads (shortlisted for the Gratiaen Award in 2010); and The Golden Deer (2014). A Tapestry of Verse, published in 2019, includes a collection of new poems and a reprint of her old poems.
