BOOK REVIEW: ‘Requisites,’ by Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe, Mica Press & Campanula Books, United Kingdom, 2025, reviewed by Malinda Seneviratne
The white American poet and writer Allen Ginsberg once said, ‘The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.’
The world is too misnamed and misrepresented for people to make head or tail of it and obtaining awareness, perforce, is quite a challenge. We are caught in the swollen waters of consumerism, acquisition, competition and self image as individuals and collectively; and if rivers in spate toss us into unfamiliar banks, we dive right in, believing that we just cannot drown (how could we?)! We drown because we can’t swim, neither downstream (with the flow) or upstream (against the flow).
Poetry, if we go with Ginsberg, can offer pause. Good poetry, that is. Poets, even poor ones, offer insights, but if the narrative is uneven and lacking in cohesion (as most poetry collectives are), puffs of mediocrity quickly obliterate those rare illuminations. We learn very little.
Ramya Jirasinghe’s ‘Requisites’ is like a companion to someone on a quest, a journey out of ignorance and towards awareness of the eternal verities. It is fluid but is neither a trickle nor of monsoonal volume. Enough to quench thirst, enough to float a just-enough-room-for-one vessel. If it were the former, the reader would flounder, and if the latter, risk wreck and drowning.
It must take a lot of poetic skill to achieve such a delicate balance. Indeed, one might even wonder if such is possible. But we have in ‘Requisites’ the cover-to-cover elegance, insight and economy that are the defining attributes of good poetry.
Ramya is no novice though. Her ‘There is an island in the bone,’ published in 2010, was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize of 2007. ‘Love poems from a frangipani garden’ came out in 2018. Both are highly readable and re-readable, each containing more than a few poems that deserve a permanent place in any anthology of modern Sri Lankan poetry. And of course, she won the Gratiaen for her debut novel, ‘Father Cabraal’s recipe for love cake.’
Requisites: the word obtains from the ‘ata pirikara,’ the eight essential items the Buddha recommended for seekers: outer robe, inner robe, winter cloak, bowl, needle and thread, belt and water strainer. Ramya uses these to structure her reading (or reclaiming of meaning) of the world.
It reads like a companion volume to ‘The light of Asia.’ Whereas Edwin Arnold details the life and times of Prince Siddhartha and his subsequent Buddha persona, Ramya’s focus is the dhamma or doctrine of the Enlightened One. Arnold uses blank verse and therefore his text has definite structure that makes for musical rendition. Ramya uses free verse, which one might say is a better communicative enabler. Importantly, less structured, stylistically, than Arnold’s celebrated narrative poem, ‘Requisites,’ is not lacking in any way when it comes to rhythm. And of course reason.
It is a carefully crafted explication of key elements in the journey that she considers necessary. A book for seekers, then, But is it only that? I think not.
Ramya does not veer from the path, she merely obtains from the everyday, the ‘here’ that is close to home and the ‘there’ that is distanced by time and space. She alludes to the ‘worldly’ world that Ginsberg speak of and therefore comments on an overarching political economy that contains among other things capitalism, colonialism and empire. She get specific at times, for example in referring to Donald Trump and the current tensions over rare earth minerals, but none of it is frill. Rather, she uses them as apt windows that open to the larger or rather deeper philosophical quest that is her journey, her book.
The book is chaptered by each element of the ‘ata pirikara,’ with each unraveling key principles of the doctrine. In the ‘Outer Robe,’ for example, Ramya comments on things seen, the outer (and even pretty and alluring) skin of our lives, that which is carefully groomed for other eyes. Self-image. She interjects, ‘all around is the world in a shop window / sold to us through slogans.;
Gone, she says, are the days of
‘…[recycling] vestiary: stripping
the funeral shroud before vultures swooped in
unwrapping stained rags restitching them into a life
chosen when the map had no other place to take the wanderer.
these could be vestments for the journey upstream.
these were.’
But no more, for, she says, ‘this is another millennium.’ And yet, ‘the shunning must begin.’ Obviously it is not only the disavowal of things material, and Ramya reminds us that in fact there’s an inner robe which needs deconstruction:
‘…the most difficult task:
looking oneself, where?
in the eye.’
Because, she continues…
‘the eyes will understand what it sees
only after it has seen itself’
Then she elaborates. As she does in the other sections.
‘Requisites,’ is a smooth and yet disturbing ride. Perhaps ‘disturbing’ is the wrong word or one that needs to be broken down. Agitates (in a good or rather wholesome way) might be better, for Ramya’s effort at seeking (with words but perhaps without them, in her personal life) is at once an exercise of reclamation; she draws meaning from the seemingly meaningless, true dimensions of things exaggerated or truncated as the case may be, and awareness of the world: that which exists outside her but inevitably within her.
Perhaps because I am not necessarily a seeker of the kind that Ramya addresses, I found much delight in the little and almost peripheral pieces of ‘rock’ in the gallery of poetic gems that is ‘Requisites.’ Nothing here is peripheral of course, but there are stand-alone lines that can distract and lead the reader to destinations Ramya has not recommended.
‘…there is no cure for a hangover — it sticks in the throat
the smoked haddock de-boned from a colonial trail
sitting next to chicken tikka and butter naan’
Pithy. So much said with so few words. Such economy! David Kalupahana, in a rare public lecture at Peradeniya University in the early nineties observed that the Buddha was an eminent linguist. Not a word out of place. He did explicate at length but then he was also able to encapsulate with such precision without compromising lyrical quality — at least in the transcriptions that have come down to us, with or without amendment. Doctrinal fidelity can be debated, obviously, but not the ‘nutshelling.’ Ramya nearly understands the worth and use of finesse in the art of poetry.
‘Requisites,’ is heavy. It is a slow read. It calls for several, slow, reads. Line by line. Words by word, even.
‘…we keep our ear to the smooth shell of loneliness.’
Such lines abound. They are like koans which gently nudge us to reconsider the lives we live and the worlds we inhabit and are inhabited by.
In the end, we are forced to confront ourselves (the Ascetic Siddhartha’s final challenge [and ‘crossing’] came in the form of Mara, the Tempter who manifests in the form of the ascetic himself, whereupon the following is said to have been uttered, ‘architect, thou shalt not build thy house again’. — the kleshas had been exhausted).
‘…we may hang on to these eight requisites but
the practice is circular we must discard
the requisites before we carry them’
That circularity and the necessary, even inevitable, return to self or self-reflection is a recurrent feature in ‘Requisites’:
‘…it did not work, we know, we who fled to
our country homes looking for cool springs.
It could not work we realised: the tail meets
the tea, sooner or later’
It is a layered narrative then. There’s the everyday for those who find moments fascinating. There’s political economy for, say, the politically inclined, revolutionaries included. And philosophy for those who contend with ‘the smooth shell of loneliness.’ Well, we are all of all of the above, more or less, and therefore this is a treatise that can be read differently at different moments. That alone speaks of the richness of that narrative and literary deftness of the poetess.
And perhaps, at the end of the reading or during it, we might obtain the meaning, in all subtlety of nuance, of the following:
‘…our journey up stead was a faceting
of this still point of not wanting
not thing nor word nor metaphor.’
And we may, then, reclaim some semblance of awareness (of the world) as per the work of poetry. Or not; depending on our individual karmic accounts.
And now, I must return to ‘Requisites,’ by Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe, for substance, lyricism and this-worldly delight, for re-visitation is both invitation and necessity in the reclamation of awareness.
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