Malinda Words: In the land of insomnial poets

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 233rd article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

‘So, poets, do you sleep well at night?’ Is the intriguing title of Saumya Sandaruwan’s latest collection of poetry (ඉතින් කවියනි හොඳට නින්ද යනවද රෑට?). Having read his first two collections (හැටේ වත්තේ මග්දලේනා — ‘Magdalena of Haete Watta’ — and නුඹ නො ඒ නම් කියන්න — ‘Let me know if you aren’t coming’), I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of this collection; Saumya is one of my favourite poets and he’s one of the best in his generation.

The collection may contain Saumya’s response, for he himself is a poet. Maybe he sleeps well at night, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe the collection is an investigation of the reasons for poetic insomnia if such exist.

There’s one situation that comes to mind, though, and it was best articulated by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: ‘I can’t sleep, there’s a woman stuck between my eyelids; I would tell her to leave but there’s a woman stuck in my throat.’

Such things keep people awake at night. Awake at all times. Fixations. Obsessions even. The tragedy of a poet who is in such a plight is that despite having words at hand they can’t be deployed to say what needs to be said. They can’t dislodge that which is stuck in the throat and forbids articulation of any kind. And so ‘the woman’ taken at face value (‘beloved’) or as metaphor (conundrums of any kind, romantic or otherwise, political perhaps but not necessarily).

It’s something that Rabindranath Tagore, in the Gitanjali, hints at: ‘When I sit by the roadside, tired and panting, when I spread my bed low in the dust, let me ever feel that the long journey is still before me. Let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.’

‘Sorrow’ here could have any number of sources. Maybe what Saumya refers to is something that troubles, not necessarily sorrowful. Tagore urges, ‘don’t forget it,’ not in wakeful hours or in dreams. So if it intrudes upon sleep, then one cannot sleep in peace or enjoy restful sleep.

People on this planet sleep. Poets sleep too. Not all sleep is troubled. It’s the wakeful hours that trouble people, poets included. I wonder if Saumya believes that poets can never sleep because there are always things that trouble them, make them sorrowful, make them want to find the right words to dissolve impediments to resolution of conundrums.

So I flip around the question. If poets do sleep well at night, what does it imply? Does it mean they have resolved to accept the world as it is? Does sleeping well at night indicate that those who do so are at peace with the world and themselves?

Saumya asks this question from all poets. He asks it from all those who read poetry. He challenges everyone, with this very simple question, to consider their lives, their wakeful hours and conduct, the choices made, the words and silences and all the complicity therein.

It can never end though. We are, in this existentialist realm, forced to contemplate, forced to act and question ourselves at every turn. There’s always something left unsaid and undone. James Baldwin put it well:

‘Throw everything out of your mind. Read a little, sleep. The world will still be here when you wake up, and there’ll still be everything left to do.’

Years ago, thinking of Galeano’s quote and about obstacles to sleep and voice, I wrote,

I walk endlessly in the delirium of my insomnia,
I can't forget, for my eyes are a barred gate
that refuses amnesia.
She's stuck in my throat, Eduardo,
and it is not that I want to ask her to leave,
need I even say?

The poet’s dilemma is different though. The poet has to come to terms through writing, one could argue, the delirium of that which denies sleep. The poet has to find bearings when lost in orbits of choice and circumstances.

The poetic eye bars the gates that could open out to the plains of forgetting. Even if such suspension were possible, a good night’s rest is necessarily followed by the immediate and inescapable Baldwinian truth: there’s still everything left to do.

I have a question for Saumya. If a poet is defined by the terrible affliction of insomnia (as I assume he believes), are all insomnial poets? Put another way, is insomnia an ailment that is not the preserve of poets or other creative people but the occupational hazard of those who had resolved to devote their lives to understanding things and processes and acting upon the knowledge thus obtained?

04 October 2023

In the land of insomnial poets

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