Rhapsody of blueness

There is water and there are water songs.  All kinds of water songs.  All kinds of water bodies in words and musical arrangement.  That’s not unusual, considering that no poet looking for a metaphor or moved by what his or her eyes chances upon can escape water; water after all covers most of the earth’s surface.  In fact we are mostly water-made.  It runs in us and through us.  Just like air, but unlike air we see water, we feel it and we feel its absence acutely.  Air, on the other hand, even polluted air, is there (for now). 

Water cleans.  Water heals.  Gives and gives.  We know it is scarce for all its apparent abundance, and so we price it and we steal it.  It is our first elemental touch and for some it is water that receives the post-death remains.

Some songs are about waters, some just descriptions and some have but a water-trace, a metaphorical dash to straighten out a crooked line or untidy thought.  Each song has its merits and demerits of course, but certain water songs are unforgettable when I think of social, cultural and economic dimensions.  Among them is Karunaratne Divulgane’s ‘Kala wawe nil diyawara’ (The blue waters of the Kala Wewa).  

Gamata kalin hiru muluthengeta vadinaa

E hitu eliye nena mal podi pipuna
E mal suwande ada lowthuru suwa vindinaa
Kala wewe nil diyawara ape amma

It’s about the worth of a mother.  She is the sun, the lyrics explain, that rises first in the kitchen long before that other sun casts its first rays on the village.  It is that sunlight which gives life to little blossoms of wisdom.  This mother is likened to the waters of the Kala Wewa, arguably one of the finest irrigation works in the country and in the world. 

Mothers are priceless and therefore the assessment of a mother’s worth is necessarily an exercise of approximation.  The sun cannot be priced and to a Sri Lankan with even the remotest sensitivity to root and genealogy the Kala Wewa too is priceless. 

The sentiments are echoed in other songs, perhaps few as eloquent as one from a different time, sung by Nanda Malini:

Kala weven gath diya dothak se

Vatee vatee oba matame vatee
 
It is not about ‘mother’.  It is about love, nevertheless; the romantic kind, another of those ‘priceless’ things that human beings encounter.  Again the reference is to the Kala Wewa.  The ‘love’ or rather the worth of love, is likened to a handful of water taken from the Kala Wewa.

If Sri Lanka is a corporeal entity of a kind its blood is blue in color.  And that’s not because a map showing the rivers of the country looks like a host of blue threads from a geographically central mountainous heart and draws along all directions to the surrounding seas.   It is also dotted by innumerable blues, from tiny ponds (polkatu wevas) to kulu weva, gam wewa, wewa, maha wewa and the biggest body of them all, the sea.   If blue is one color, green is the other.  We are and have been an agricultural people dating back to several centuries before that ace rascal Vijaya set foot in Thammannar.  When we are done with our industrial adventure, when the oceans have risen, and the rain that was once transparent, but now red, turns into other colors, when the finger-pointing over carbon emissions has run its course, we will once again look to the earth for the answers we erased from our handbooks of life and which our ancestors didn’t write down but knew and lived. 

We will look for water. 

A friend told me a few days ago about his childhood.  He had been born with a diyasuliya or one of those peculiar twirls atop the head read by the credulous as death-by-water.  As a child he would be perched on a tree, watching the waters of the Gin Ganga.  He would watch the rafts coming downstream from Baddegama.  He saw red flowers floating along not knowing where the currents would take them.  Years later Bandula Nanayakkarawasam, one of our foremost Sinhala lyricists, found many ways of working all these things into his songs.  Years later he would write a column which was part biographical where he described all these things.  And he would suffer the ignominy of having his nieces and nephews reading them, calling him a barefaced liar.  The Gin Ganga at that point was a mere trickle. Time and development had done all that. 

We are losing are water and what we haven’t lost is being purchased directly or indirectly by multinationals peopled by and serving  faraway lands and communities who wouldn’t care one bit if we lived or died. 

The world will one day finish fighting over oil.  Then the world will fight over water. 

I remember a dry time in one of the driest pocket in the Dry Zone, a cluster of villages off the Ella-Anuradhapura road, about 3 kilometers north of Galgamuwa.  Each village had a wewa.  I spent a couple of months on a project to rehabilitate these wewas.  It was basically an exercise in repairing the bunds and the sluices.  One day it rained.  Hard.  The rain swallowed up the radiating cracks on the dust bowls these wewas had been turned into.  That ‘dry’ was nothing like the ‘dry’ of other parts of the world.  Our ‘Dry Zone’ is quite ‘wet’, in comparison to places labeled ‘dry’ by climatologists.  There was enough green in the shrub jungles and home gardens.  The rain re-painted it all in a deeper green all the more enhanced by a fresh bursting of light green leaves. 

Water changes the faces of people who understand it.  It rains and they break into smiles that are beyond description.  Asoka Handagama has captured it all, i.e. both the physical and social agency, transformation and determinant that is water in his teledrama ‘Diyaketapahana’, telecast about fifteen years ago.

We curse the drought.  We curse the end of drought when it is followed by unceasing rains. We don’t curse ourselves.  Even if we didn’t curse ourselves we still don’t do the can-do things, the little-drops  of the ditty that talks about how the mighty oceans are made.  We just leave the tap running while we brush our teeth, we leave un-fixed the faucet that leaks, we water gardens to add a shade of green when the dew would look after that ‘fixing’.  And we cut down trees.  And we say nothing when they are cut in the name of city-beautification or development for we can’t wait to go from A to B in half the time we used to.  We are too lazy to plant a tree.

Mothers carry us not just for the length of womb-time but all our lives. They give.  There comes a time when they are too frail and we are powerless to give them back the strength they lost.  The earth is like that.  The Kala Wewa is our mother.  Dunhina is our mother.  The Mahaweli is our mother.  The drop of water that was not noticed…that too is our mother.

Our mother is blue in color. She is beautiful.  She is not immortal. 

There is a thing called matricide.  There is a word called matricidal.  These refer to the murder of one’s mother.  We cannot have enough of ‘Mother’.  We can look at her forever. We can take pictures. We can write poetry about her.  We take refuge in her.  She takes care of us.  Not forever.  All things are born, they decay and they perish.  These waters too and so too the air we breathe.  That inevitability does not necessarily mean that our life’s goal is to hasten it. 

We are a young planet that might also die young.  At the rate we are polluting our fresh water that young-death might be sooner than we believe.  ‘Sooner’ here means within the lifetime of our children. 

The happiest days of my life are those spent watching water.   All the wewas I’ve been to and bathed in have cooled and healed.  Rivers and rivulets too. Irrigation canals and drains around the house have been ready carriers of paper boats and tossed leaves.  The rain, whatever the size of drop or rate of fall, has always blue-blooded my streams of consciousness.  The sea has dwarfed me many times, thankfully. 

Water is a song.  Water is for singing.  Dirge, though, is also a song.  We should not get to that kind of singing, but we might. 

 

[Pics by Hiranya Malwatta]

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Fred D’Aguaiar undresses death and rebirth

‘Continental Shelf’ by Fred D’Aguiar, published by Carcanet Press Limited, 2009, reviewed by Malinda Seneviratne

Death disturbs and therefore when we have to confront it we want to get over it as soon as we can. And move on/away.  But death arrives.  It arrives in the news.  It visits us from war and massacre, genocide and capital punishment, from here and there, as names and numbers and as of late graphic visuals.  The more horrific the pictures and larger the numbers, the more difficult it is to turn away. Partly because of the fascination, partly the fear; for there’s love and hate about death. 

When we’ve seen enough death in horror and quantity, we become happily numb.  Until the next massacre, provided there is a long time between horrors.  The Virginia Tech massacre was not the first campus shooting.  Still, it shocked, for ‘record’ reasons.  It was the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in US history, some said.  Seung-Hui Cho, said to have been suffering from a severe anxiety disorder, a final year English major, shot and killed 33 people and wounded 15 others. 

It happened on April 16, 2007.  I don’t remember the date.  I remembered the place.  And duly forgot it as other tragedies, other words and images obliterated horror-memory.  I remembered, though, when I was invited for a symposium on ‘Writing and Reconciliation,’ early this month, organized by that university and in particular by The Creative Writing Program in the Department of English, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program in Sociology, and the Center for 21^st Century S’tudies in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.  It played on my mind for a while and went away.  The good people and the stimulating program are to blame. 

It came back on the last morning of the event.  And I realized that death and tragedy are ‘ ‘backburnered’ by event but stays with the witnesses, the near and dear, and those who are averse to ‘backburnering’.   It was something that had happened five years before.  Fred D’Aguiar knew the date.  It was also something that stayed. 

Fred read from his acclaimed poetry collection ‘Continental Shelf’.  He spoke by way of introduction of that day, the student who would never sit in his class again and how when he called his mother she said she’ll come over and cook Caribbean food for his students.  He read from here and there, but the poetry related to that day made the book for me. 

‘Continental Shelf’ is in three parts.  In its entirety the collection traces Fred’s journey from place to place and his growing up in that larger moving.  Fred traces social, geographical, political and ideological maps (with all the fault lines, disasters and sporadic reasons for cheer therein) by talking about people, describing event, unraveling and laying out all the contradictions and complexities of his mind-engagement. 

Fred begins with a question in the first part, ‘Local Color’.  He speaks of ‘bringing back’, laying out the past-idyllic and asking that it all be re-enacted, ‘as would sprinters to a start line after a false start where one bolts and the rest follow’.  Someone fouled.  Others followed suit.  We need to return to that all-things-even place, he suggests even though that happy location would have had its own contradictions, own disparities. 

He describes that childhood world in detail.  It is in a way an exercise of  ‘I/we did this’ or ‘I/we did that’, but what takes us there and makes us belong to that world is the delicate weaving of human commonality or rather childhood commonality into narrative. 

‘Playing House’, for example, is not about Fred and some Guyanese context; it is everyone’s memory of a time that has been gently taken to ‘starting line’.  ‘Bullroarer’ is an ancient ritual of sharing among friends.  Or siblings.  It is as Sri Lankan as it is Caribbean. 

Fred returns to the Guyana of his childhood or rather draws from it in the third (and final) section, ‘Continental Shelf’ and the poem of that title, calling not for a return to starting line but for a wake-up: ‘This country needs to wake up faster, for my body could use another couple hours rest’.  That ‘country’ is both Guyana and the USA, it is every country that is made for idyllic rendering and ready for lament.  It is each and their connectivity, for Fred is acutely conscious of the political economy of trade, the commerce of resource and surplus extraction:

Give me back my slippers, my robe
And my favourite cup  purchased at Whatley
Diner from another life and laced with two
Per cent milk and beans from Central
America.

The world has whirred around him and his eyes need rest.  He returns again and again to his Guyana on a ‘same-moon’ ship which seeks him out wherever he goes, especially Blacksburg, Virginia where he lives and teachers, and is witness to things that disturb but cannot rob him of hope. 

Fred’s poetry is musical, as poetry ought to be (I think) and not because he can easily pick the words and sounds that make for the kind of rhythm he wishes his lines to dance with.  It is not strained or artificial.  The rhythm comes from both word choice and thought strand, the poetry of life that he lays out in word configuration and line-break.

There’s a narrator here who made me think ‘he would write great short stories or novels if he puts his mind to it’.  No, there’s nothing ‘grand’ about his narration.  He reports stories that we’ve heard, events we’ve seen many times, people we have met and things that have caught our eye.  It’s only the outer cover that is different. 

And ideas too.  They are not ‘Guyanese’, they are not foreign. 

Never a book opened for anything

But reprimand and nothing but rules
In any book worth opening or so it seemed
Waist-high with things that gripped me
As a wave grips the sea and sea grips sand
As a current runs through the sky’s open hand. 

That’s how ‘The Never-Never’ ends.  We are all rule driven and rule made.  We are all doubters and rebels.  We are complicit in the processes that trick, suppress and overwhelm us.   We read books, but not as authors want us to read them.  We know rules and what they do, and when necessary we ignore them, go around them or even break them. 

There are moments when his words take out to a never-never world of dreams which come and go, which allow for visitation but not permanent residency.

I hand my life over to you

Embrace this gift for what it is
A raft of night afloat in days.  [Succession]
 
‘Elegies’ is sandwiched between ‘Local Color’ and ‘Continental Shelf’.  That’s his word-memorial to those students who died.  It is a twenty one part turning-inside-out of all that came to him and all that went out on that day and thereafter. 

Erin will not come back. 

I see her desk three desks back in that first row where she dived

For Cover, like the rest of the class she always sat in one spot.

She won’t come back, for she has never left:

‘But Erin’s desk will be empty? I see her loping way

Of crossing a room.  An athlete, she moves off the basketball
Court with so much economy for her strong body, as if space
In which she did not compete, hardly merited movement,
Like a coiled sprint, off duty, or a loved government.’

The absurdity of it all is apparent to all and said often enough, but Fred says it nevertheless because it must be said again and again:

‘Not twenty but thirty-two innocents killed, just think,

Thirty-two mown down in classrooms by weapons
You can buy legally before you can legally drink.’ 
 
Life returns, as it will.  Fred speaks of the return to routine, the back-to-groove of ‘Blacksburg back on its feet, Blacksburg undefeated’.   Not to him, and perhaps not to anyone of that moment, that incident:

‘How stunned April 16^th left me

So that now is exactly like then till kingdom come’
 
April 16^th is a day I remember.  Not 2007, but 2000.  Massive protests against the IMF and the World Bank in Washington DC.  Not anymore though, not after reading Fred’s narrative of all that took refuge in the underside of the mind’s many leaves of coping. 

They say aggregates (human ones, say) are greater than the sum of their constituent parts.  Perhaps it is the reverse that’s true.  The sum is less than the aggregate of parts because human beings are false-start bullies and followers of such cheats.  Some poets, sometimes, make things more even.  Fred D’Aguiar.   Just by saying the as-is and more importantly the un-ease that gets buried for convenient and eye-relief.  He is an outlier, if you will. And that’s what his life is all about, I felt, as he laughed, clapped, cheered, was silent and recited.   And shared. 

I won’t forget April 16 or Virgina Tech or Erin.  Each death will come running, from now on.  I could curse Fred D’Aguiar, but I think I will say ‘thank you’.   

 

[First published in the FINE Section of 'The Nation', November 18, 2012]

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Tilak Samarawickreme's 'Voyage in Sri Lanka Design'

BOOK REVIEW

Tilak Samarawickreme can talk about art.  He can talk about design.  He can talk about handicraft or with a broader brush fill the mind’s canvass with opinion on culture, heritage, history and politics, both of the mundane diurnal and of the more abiding ideological.  He can also talk of exploration, the search for and encounter with all manner of things, with different shapes, lines, colors and meaning. 

‘A Voyage in Sri Lanka Design,’ an elegant volume put out by Vijitha Yapa Publications is a life story.  It is an account of exploration along many pathways with astute acknowledgment of intersection and commonality, and sensitivity to connectivity across time and space of multiple spheres.  The text and illustrations are neatly organized in a by-subject manner, but within these chapters the signature of a man with multiple interests and one who has resolved to keep mind open to both the fresh and abiding is apparent. 

Tradition and the traditional are things he has clearly encountered and occupied himself with, in both gaze as well as creative work.  His, however, is not a hard-grip encounter but a caressing.  This is what probably allows him to see unevenness in what his gaze encounters.  It allows him, moreover, to slip under sheen and observe the delicate and violent mix of ideology, philosophy and political economy. 

Tilak is not a transcriber of things past and things on their way out.  He obtains inspiration from the traditional and adds social and economic shelf life by using idea, motif and material in what he produces for modern day consumption.  That’s not a surprise, given unabashed veneration of Ananda Coomaraswamy and in particular of his definitive (for many) work, ‘Mediaeval Sinhala Art’, which he says has framed this book and indeed, one could argue, his life.  Coomaraswamy saw art not as ornament but as something alive and which obtained value mostly from utility.  Tilak’s excursions have gifted him ample examples of live art and his urban encounters probably made him see enough of ‘art as ornament and nothing else’.  His own work appears to take direction from the Coomaraswamy definition.  His ‘journey’, therefore is vibrant, his work speaks, they engage and perhaps even transform. 

The world and in particular Sri Lanka has not picked up on Coomaraswamy, though.  ‘Tradition’ hangs from walls wherever we go, from hotels to the living rooms of the affluent and even the art loving Bobos (Bourgeois Bohemians), but utility value has for the most part been reduced to eye-candy and showcasing.  Tilak’s tapestries speak of a past as well as an abiding sense of ‘way of life’.  They have market value, yes.  They also speak. They teach. They preserve and nurture something more than a color-line mix that pleases eye.

Art connoisseurs would probably speak of Tilak’s aesthete and his contributions to create ‘a new aesthetic order’.  What the uninitiated realizes is how Tilak’s reinvention of the tradition has spilled over to real, lived, experienced life, for example in the world of fashion. 

The book contains the words and appreciations of experts.  Those essays illuminate. They also help us understand where Tilak stands in the global art firmament.  Bruno Munari’s piece on his drawings is a case in point.  He speaks of the amazing economy of Tilak’s hand.  He expresses so much with so little, which of course implies the ‘lot’ that is constituted of study, experimentation, reflection and imagination.  He must possess the most delicate fingers, that much can be concluded. 

Those line drawings manifested themselves in the now celebrated and oft-wowed  Munchee TV commercial aired during the recently concluded T-20 World Cup.  It demonstrated that ‘tradition’ to Tilak is not cast in stone and not buried in the past either.  It is up to those present to do what they will.  Tilak is firmly rooted in the moment, which is a high vantage point to those who sees it as such from which gaze can be cast on that which came before and that which is yet to unravel.  This is why there is a certain futurism in his work that is (interestingly) familiar as well.  He takes line and he makes it dance.  He gives a third dimension even in a two-dimensional activation.  That must take a lot of skill. 

He says his architecture ‘has a universal and cosmopolitan approach’.  Perhaps it is something intrinsic to ‘buildings’ but his designs are a stark contrast to his drawings. Curve is replaced with straight line.  There is less ‘dance’ and more ‘standing’ if you will.  Neat. Elegant. 

This book can be a flip-through and that would please much, let there be no doubt.  That, however, would be a disservice to the man, the work, the pathways he has travelled, the treasures he has picked up and the painstaking but seemingly effortless polishing and crafting he’s engaged in all his professional and artistic life.  Most importantly, one would miss the significance of the ‘social’ in all his undertakings.  Even as his craft carries his distinctive signature, Tilak’s work has always been contextualized by a deep appreciation of the collective, a strong respect for those who came before, appreciation and acknowledgment of the wells he has sipped inspiration from and an abiding sense of social responsibility.  It all adds up to many things, including a kind of patriotism that flag-waving and anthem-singing ‘nationalists’ have no clue about. 

It is a journey in itself, this reading.  It is a quick-read book that needs to be read slowly and many times over, one feels.  It puts reader in touch with something that is hard to describe but perhaps speaks to him in a familiar voice of things he or she is made of but probably unaware of.  A treasure, simply. 

[Review was carried in the UNDO Section of 'The Nation', November 18, 2012]

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And we must all walk the talk…

The Government could say that FUTA (Federation of University Teachers’ Associations) inflated the numbers.  They could say that NGO money frilled it.  They could say that lecturers and others were pawns or were complicit in a sinister political game. 

Analysts could say that the demands are unjust or else indicative of infantile analytical ability which itself subverts the agitation and robs it of moral authority.  Few, it could be said, would have understood what the ‘6%’ slogan signified, even if a cogent argument around that figure could be made. 

Some might say, on the lines of that old adage, ‘no taxation without representation’, that ‘rights without responsibility’ and ‘free education without moral obligation to return the favor to society’ just do not make sense. 

A lot more indeed has been said about the long march organized by FUTA from Galle to Colombo last week.  For example, that just as it was about ‘state education’ and ‘saving’ of the same, it was also an avenue to express frustration, anger, fear and such regarding what the Government has been and has not being doing over the past several years. 

Times have changed since this country went through ‘1971’ and ‘1988-89’ and what those years signify.  A few decades ago an undergraduate who owned a push bicycle might have been called ‘privileged’.  Later, there were scooters and motorcycles. Today some come to campus by car.  Many have laptops.  They have sophisticated cameras too.  The FUTA campaign is all over Facebook.  Blogs dedicated to the struggle or else which have adopted it as something that warrants daily comment have mushroomed. 

Does all this mean that the general population has somehow been yanked out or has upped itself out of endemic poverty?  Does it mean that those who benefit from free education must always look poor? No.  The truth is that although things don’t trickle down the way some economics would like us to believe they would, things have got better at the bottom.  This does not mean that the ‘top’ has idled.  The truth is that gaps have widened.  Costs have soared.  Just because an undergraduate rides a motorcycle or wields a camcorder or hammers out status updates about an agitation campaign on Facebook, this does not mean that higher education costs have come down or that they have become affordable to the vast majority of the population somehow. 

It’s there in the faces of those who braved the weather and the real possibility of having their heads bashed in by thugs deployed by ruling party politicians or even by the Police.  It is there somewhere in the enthusiasm and festivity that somehow layer themselves over protests.  Just because protests have a ‘fun’ element, this does not mean that they are not serious. It does not mean that those who marched are dumb.  It does not mean that the fuel that made them place one foot in front of another, mile after mile, hour after hour, was not made of both fear and hope. 

While it is easy to dismiss FUTA and easier still to scoff at or refute slogan and statement, there can be no doubt at all that the Government does not have vision, strategy or even a set of skeletal slogans that can pass off for coherent procedure when it comes to education.  While overall allocation for education has gone up, this hasn’t been accompanied by or derived from a comprehensive policy on human resource development that is linked to overall economic policy.  Indeed, what passes for ‘development policy’ is unabashed gleanings from IMF policy directives, laced of course with a lot of nationalist rhetoric.  Those directives are patently anti-poor or at best designed to toss out just enough tidbits to keep insurrection at bay. 

Now it is hard to argue that increasing allocations will automatically translate into pushing education in the right direction unless the entire system is overhauled and infused with some kind of rationality with social justice framing the exercise.  However, it is the very absence of reason in policy formulation that buttresses the argument that more money is better than less (and less and less). 

This country’s human resource crisis can be traced back to the 150,000 to 200,000 young persons who died during the two insurrections mentioned above and the three decades long conflict.  That ‘loss’ manifests itself everywhere, but perhaps nowhere as naked as it is shown in the kinds of people who make it to Parliament.  If FUTA looks weak, that too is a part product of the above decimation.  Consistent refusal to address this fundamental issue in any meaningful manner by successive governments only tends to create conditions for other such showdowns and an exacerbation of the problem on account of the inevitable losses. 

People are falling out.  That’s obvious.  And politicians really don’t give a damn, not those in power and not those who aspire to hold office.  After all, what goes as ‘education’ policy today is the blue version of the green ‘White Paper’ on the subject that Ranil Wickremesinghe came up with thirty years ago.  It is slanted in favor of the privileged.  True, some from the villages will (as they always have) swing things their way, but that’s what’s called exception.

State education needs to be reformed.  Education needs to be reformed.  Neither should be done in a way that people get left behind.  The sad truth is that people have always got left behind and the current thinking of the regime doesn’t have a clue about getting them on board and worse doesn’t seem to care either! 

There is fear.  It is written in the faces of many who marched or came for the march-end rally.  This is because education still is the only (outside) chance of climbing out of poverty, dispossession and humiliation.  Perhaps those who benefit have not appreciated and have not paid their debts in full or part, but that does not mean that it should be scrapped or downsized. 

Speaking strictly for myself, I can say without hesitation that I owe free education a debt that I can only strive to repay.  I am acutely conscious of the fact that whatever I do there will not come a point when I can tell myself ‘I’ve paid in full’ and be able to sleep well. 

The Government might say that it does not intend to touch ‘free education’.  The signs however are ominous, even if one brushes off FUTA numbers as being incorrect and inflated for protest-efficacy.  Schools being closed are just one indication. Dropout rates increasing must say something.  There’s insanity in priority.  Hope is running out.  Fear is taking over. 

Let me repeat.  Knowledge is The Doorway that opens out to the avenue that takes a people out of poverty.  That was Lalith Aluthmudali.  It is being shut.  For many.  There is a moral obligation on the part of every individual who benefitted from state education to take a stand.  For this you need not stand with FUTA.  You need to stand on the conscious acknowledgment of what made you and who made you what you are.  If money was not invested with circumspection, that’s a different matter.  The answer is not to withdraw the funds or systematically cut the allocation in terms of percentage distribution. 

Let me repeat.  If this country came from nowhere to somewhere, free education had a lot to do with it.  IF this country is to go from here to a more robust and wholesome ‘there’, then education is key.  It cannot be turned into a luxury in any way.  Not by denying access to better institutions and not be restricting popular courses to a privileged few.  Tidbits will help tide over crisis, but they won’t stop insurrection. 

There were feet that made that march.  They were not soft.  The faces were lined with the hard lessons of a harsh struggle to get by.  They have a point. They have a grievance.  They have fear.  They are the sons and daughters of our soil.  They gave their all to making this country what it is.  It is their villages that are dotted with the graves of those who gave their lives to eradicate terrorism, for example.  They have already paid for the education their children are not receiving and may not receive.  That’s humiliation and ingratitude.  Of the entire nation and especially the privileged. 

Stand with FUTA if you must, stand along if you will.  Stand.  I believe it is a moral obligation.

 

 [Published in 'The Nation' of October 7, 2012]

DISCLAIMER:  The photographs are by Kalpa Rajapaksha, who, while agreeing with some of the points in the article, does not necessarily agree with everything I've written.  Kalpa, very kindly allowed me to use the photographs 

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Afghanistan: unvanquished, untamed and beyond description

There are countries we are resident in and countries we like to live in or at least visit.  No two countries are alike.  And no country is read the same way by two different people.  Close-eyes or the eyes of residents, especially longtime ones, see and read landscapes, physical and social, differently from far-away eyes or the eyes of foreigners.  And then there are eyes that are even further removed, those that have never visited, but are visited by countries in the form of stories, news reports and features, photographs and videotapes.  

All of them, without exception, are narratives that are structured by all the flaws that are wrought by familiarity (and ignorance), cultural specificities (and preferences), the preferred outcomes of political processes (local and global and their intersections), love (and hate) and other factors too numerous to lay out here.

So we have many stories for and of each and every place on earth, some more flawed than others, but all pertinent one way or another to a greater or lesser degree, and each incomplete for nothing is ever fully describable and we are trumped as much by ignorance as by knowledge, as much by lack of vocabulary as by the words at our disposal.

So how can I write of Afghanistan when I’ve never been there?  How could anyone write about anything, though?  My Afghanistan is not yours, and it may be further removed from the Afghanistan of Afghans (today, tomorrow and yesterday) than the Afghanistan of Reuters, BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, etc., but it is nevertheless mine, a ‘my story’ of a place that has descended on me through the media. 

Let me recall.

The first time I head of Afghanistan was in May 1978.  Back then, at the age of 12, my grandfather, who was shortsighted, got me to read the headlines of the ‘Daily News’ and also the stories that interested him.  ‘Foreign News’ was a must. That’s how I got to know that in a country called Afghanistan, a man called Daud Khan, the President of that country no less, had been assassinated, along with his family.  The word ‘coup’ would have been mentioned, but I didn’t know what that meant.

I heard of course that the Communists had taken over. That I understood.  When Nur Muhammad Taraki, Daud’s successor was assassinated under the orders of Hafizulla Amin and Amin himself was killed and the Soviets moved in, I was older, slightly, and knew enough to get a sense of what international politics was all about.  I remember Babrak Karmal’s name. It came up in General Knowledge Competitions.  Mohammad Najibullah lasted long enough and in a pre-internet world where Washington posted news, his name came with a tag, ‘Soviet Puppet’.  It didn’t take long to figure out that the USA had its own puppets. 

And so we went through the tired script of the USA and the Soviet union’s proxy wars, how the CIA sponsored the Mujahideen, how the Red Army had to retreat, how the fall of the Soviet Union left Najibullah vulnerable, how the idea of ‘Jihad’ shifted, fratricidal wars, the rise of the Taliban, the support from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the opium and heroin trade, the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud just two days before 9/11, the US-led invasion of that country, the struggle to secure resources, the resistance, the endless drone attacks the election of Hameed Karzai, his re-selection subsequently and so on.

Afghanistan memories include the Bamiyan Buddha Statues, which I had never heard of and might have continued to be ignorant of had the Taliban not blown them up.  And there was also Vida Samadzai, Miss Afghanistan 2003, the first Afghan woman to participate in an international beauty pageant since 1974 and the ire she raised with her red bikini. My most recent ‘Afghan Moment’ was in Geneva in May 2012, on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Council Sessions.

A panel discussion on human rights violations in Afghanistan, which privileged Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, included a documentary.  Afghans from all walks of life and who had suffered all kinds of losses were given voice and airtime.  They all said they were sick of war. They all said they were sick of having foreigners dictating terms.  The organizers neatly left out the horrendous crimes against humanity perpetrated by the USA and its allies and painted the Taliban as Monster No 1.

Afghanistan, for all this, is still caricature, a creature painted according to ideological bent and outcome-preference, both accompanied by structured silences and silencing, absences and absenting.  It is a country and a political space that is moment-bound.  As such, the narratives tend to footnote the long histories of that region, traceable back to 500 BCE, described by some as ‘A Gateway to India’ and by others as ‘The Central Asian Roundabout’ given its strategic location, the commerce of cultures and the intersections of roads blazed for territory-capture and plunder, as much as for commerce.  Absent from narrative tapestry are also the philosophical and cultural strains left by its Zoroastrian, Macedonian and Buddhist past.

What we have are stories of blood and blood-letting. Deserts and barrenness.  What we see is insanity’s spawn injecting humanity with the poison of hatred, arrogance and vengeance.  It is almost as though Afghanistan has a population of gun-toting thugs fighting each other to prove which gun is most potent.

There are no farmers in this story.  There are no children. There is no tenderness.  No one loves in this Afghanistan.  There is no poetry or pottery, no marveling at the infinite variety of cloud formation, no movement to meditation by the night’s silence.  No one mistakes fireflies for stars or, even if the two are recognized as different, portrays as two versions of a singular reality in the manner of the Sufis.

Jalal ad-din Rumi was not from this land that is now called Afghanistan.  It was not a center of learning.  It is made of two kinds of people, the Taliban and those who happily or otherwise support the USA.  There are no Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Aimak, Baloch and others.  In this Afghanistan there is an undifferentiated population of madmen and veiled women.

There are Afghanistans though that I have never heard of and the world is not bothering to discover or be introduced to in the world’s insane fixation with black-white logic.  These mountains know, however.  The snow melts and flows, but the Hindu Kush is 800 km long.  The rivers that run through this land have watered the tired earth and much else.  There is scholarship in memory and the telling and re-telling of legend.  There are grandparents who have not lost tongue nor been divested of memory.

And there’s living.  People die, yes, but death is something that can visit only the living.  There are traditions and like all traditions both empower and restrict.  There is resistance and not just to the tyranny of the Taliban or to the terrorism of the United States of America.  There must be tenderness.  Flavors and fragrances are inevitable makers of people and communities. I cannot convince myself that the people in Afghanistan never dream.

There are many Afghanistans and I’ve not visited even one of them.  I’ve seen snapshots and I suspect that snapshots are what most of the world has seen of this beautiful country of ancient ways and modern warfare.  Afghanistan is not a country that’s ‘mappable’ easily, and I suspect that its many mappings have tested and cost numerous cartographers in ways that other countries have not.  Not just because of the violence of course.  It is, after all, a resisting country that is at the same time asserting itself.

Many Sri Lankans backed Afghanistan when its cricket team took on India. Perhaps it’s some anti-Indian sentiment or else a general tendency to root for underdog.  It could be a fascination with the exotic. Lakshman Kadirgamar watching an Afghanistan team in action a few years before he was assassinated famously said ‘they play cricket as though they are fighting a war’.  That’s caricature too.

Afghanistan is a country I would like to visit.  And in the same breath I say ‘I know as much about Afghanistan as I know about Sri Lanka’.  And that, ladies and gentleman is my two-cents on Afghanistan, a country endowed with riches beyond imagination even while it is poor beyond belief. 

Just like ours.

[Published in the 'UNDO' Section of 'The Nation', September 23, 2012]

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RIDI VIHARE: THE FLOWERING OF KANDYAN ART

‘Ridi Vihare, or ‘The Silver Vihare’, has its origin during the early days of Buddhism in Sri Lanka,   Heir to a tradition which dates back to the early Anuradhapura period, its beginnings are shrouded in myth and legend.  Over the centuries the vihare has become a veritable treasure trove of Sinhala art: oainting, architecture, sculpture, ivory carving and metalwork.  This work traces the art and history of the temple from the 2^nd Century BCE to 1815 CE.’ 

The above is part of a general description on the inside of the dust cover of ‘Ridi Vihare: the flowering of Kandyan Art’ by SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda, a narrative decorated by photographs from Studio Times, illustrations by Saroja Dharmadasa, and plans and drawings by Ineke Pitts and Kapila Ariyanada.

It is apt, considering the moment of narration, the first years of the 21^st Century, that the author has framed this history with an observation by Ananda Coomaraswamy:

In the words of Blake,

When nations grow old,

The Arts grow cold,

And commerce settles on every tree.

In such a grim fashion has commerce settled in the East.

Indeed, we live in times when commerce has captured tradition and much else besides, what with organ-trade and the trading of polluting-rights.  It has come to a point where all nations, old and new, have commerce-laden trees.  It took time with us, but we’ve learned fast, it seems.  The intrinsic worth of anything, be it artifact of pageant, exorcism or ritual, giving (dana) or devotion, has given way to commercial potential.  King Market rules, decides and dispenses. 

And so, we name and attach price-tag, forgetting often that certain things resist valuation and categorization.  Therefore we find that value-attachment is reduced to the quantifiable and the play of demand and supply.   It is in this context that one has is stopped-in-track by the amazing disclaimer: ‘No one who has worked on this book has asked for or received payment of any kind; all royalties have been donated by the author to the Ridi Vihara’.  That’s giving. Truly.

As great a gift is the book itself.  It is a scholarly study of a kind one does not associate with the dust, foreboding, pedantic and exclusive typical of history books.  Sure, throw in a lot of pictures and you get enough color to drive out the dismal and turn out a page-turner.  These are often better ‘histories’ than some texts which do not reach scholarly benchmarks in terms of standards and sweep  but still see mediocrity getting doctorate and professorship, one must acknowledge.  They also tend to be less ideology-burdened than much of the ‘history’ that is churned out by quacks masquerading as historians.  Even if all this weren’t true, as far as the ordinary (i.e. non-academic) reader is concerned, they are far more readable narratives. 

‘Ridi Vihare’ is not a collection of pictures with captions empowered by exceptional talent at turning a phrase, though.  Here the illustrations and photographs enhance rather than gloss over text, excuse poor scholarship or boost marketability, which is common in picture-history books.  It is not just because the subject is both history in general as well as the appreciation of art-evolution, which naturally make illustration-insertion sensible.  Tammita-Delgoda’s exercise is more wholesome and appreciative of a range of influencing strands that saw the Ridi Vihare move from what it was to what it is. 

It is the historian in him that locates Ridi Vihare in historical context, across the centuries, as well as in the fascinating narrative of temple art, in particular the rock and cave wall painting that our ancients have so generously endowed over the centuries.  It is the embeddedness of an author in his society and as part product of transformations over time that gives body to the narrative.  Such conscious ‘affinity’ would scar objective gaze over the subject, one might argue, but then again it is also true that the neutral gazer is inescapably bound by his/her own locations and histories.  There is always indulgence even though the indulgent might protest innocence.  What is perhaps the more sensible and all things considered, the more scientific, approach would be to resist both grip and discard, and seek ‘caress’ in the appreciation of what is before the scholar’s gaze.  That would be a kind of Buddhist Historiography or let’s say ‘Buddhistic’ historiography.  ‘Ridi Vihare’ has that tender, touching-but-not-touching touch in narrative. 

Tammita-Delgoda offers a careful and exhaustive study of the ‘Ridi Vihare’ complex, i.e. the several caves as well as the structures built on two rocky hills, in the village of Ridigama in the Kurunegala District.    The work introduces to us a comparatively poorly studied temple (of the hundreds of temples that warrant study, one might add) with an excellent foreword about Kandyan art and scholarship related to it. 

The archival research has clearly been exhaustive.  The author must have spent countless hours pouring over all chronicles to seek out references and use these to trace the relevant history.  He tells us multiple stories, some of the folk tradition included by the Mahawamsa chronicler (who appears to have understood the legitimacy of folk narratives long before Gayatri Spivak and others coined the term ‘Subaltern Studies’) as well as the hard-evidence stories.  He gives name and date, details that are so important to those who believe history is a pure science and for others who, even though they are not as fixated, nevertheless like to know who did what and where. 

So we are taken from the 2^nd Century through the many upheavals after the European invaders set foot here to the time of the Kandyan kings.  Woven in is the long and complex conflict between the Theravada and Mahayana traditions of Buddhism, which although portrayed as a bitter political duel, nevertheless demonstrated contestations framed by an agreement to coexist and focus on ideological push and pull.  The tenuous relations between king and Buddhist Order, or Sangha, is similarly referenced to give a fuller picture on the historical canvass. 

The political ups and down naturally left traces on all things, culture included.  Temple renovation is then a part of that story. Patronage too inscribed signature.  Tammita-Delgoda takes us along these sub-plots, interjecting tastefully and appropriately the relevant ideological and philosophical underpinnings.  

‘Ridi Vihare’ then, is not just a description of some monastic or religious complex, but a window on the political changes that took place, changes which are one way or another marked on the narrative of the site. 

From here he proceeds to dissect.  The chapter, appropriately titled ‘Anatomy of a Temple’, is largely descriptive.  The attention to detail is noteworthy.  Each key element of the complex has been subject to a thorough examination and full documentation.  It show not just an enumerators fascination but an art students natural tendency for comparison and contrast.  

Paintings have warranted separate explication, and fittingly too, considering their historical and artistic worth.  Tammita-Delgoda, in delving into this element, tells us about that time and how the politics of that time impacted the fascinating and yet simple paintings which reflected both period as well as general philosophy-driven ways of the Sinhala people.  He has brought in his deep understanding of Buddhist art as well as Buddhist philosophical tenets to enrich the narration of history. 

‘Ridi Vihare’ is unique.  It is not unrelated to the other examples of exceptional Buddhist art.  This book points to the work that needs to be done to document the undocumented, mis-documented and the semi-documented.  Tammita-Delgoda’s pains also indicate a new way of writing history, a manner that makes it accessible to the common reader.  There are, after all so many more ‘vihares’ some made of silver, metaphorically speaking, and some not, but all replete with countless lines, curves and textures that help us rediscover who we are, where we came from and perhaps show us where we ought to go and how we can get there.  That ‘pointing’, so to speak, deserves applause.  But then again, the exercise and the excavator here, by proclamation, have said ‘thank you, no’.  That’s in line with belief system embedded in the artifacts that were examined.  Makes sense.  

[Published in the 'UNDO' Section of 'The Nation', September 9, 2012]

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