Of literature and ‘frotezts’

 

Lakdasa Wikkramasinha saw people with words as rebels or rather advocated a rebellious role for them. He wrote:

The poet is the bomb in the city,
Unable to bear the circle of the
Seconds in his heart,
Waiting to burst.

In this poem, titled ‘The Poet,’ he describes the poet (and by extension any writer/artist) as one who, ‘tossing a bomb into the crowd, takes notes.’ He adds, ‘the one who, from an unseen distance, levels on the tripod that black rifle with sights that see as far as his soul.’

There are poets like that. Writers and other artists too. It is not ours to pass judgment on ideal subject matter for such people, but it is true nevertheless that there are poets and other artists who do exactly what Wikkramasinha advocated. They disrupt status-quo one way or another and seek to awaken people from, say, political slumber and hopefully drive them to collective and transformative political action.

I remembered this poem last Sunday at the Galle Literary Festival (GLF). Now, it’s been quite a while since I went to the GLF. I’ve dropped by briefly a couple of times either to meet someone or deliver something, but the last real GLF in my case was in 2011.

I wrote down various observations/criticisms of the GLF back then for the Sunday Observer and not much has happened to change my views on the event, essentially, ‘better to have it than not, but nevertheless an elitist gathering that largely ignores local literatures and writers.’  No need to re-write that stuff.

This time I went to Galle because my younger daughter wanted to see what it was all about. I spent some time in the Fort with my friend Janaka De Silva. There’s a story there.

 

I had interviewed and written about him years ago when I was at the 'Sunday Island.' He had told me that he was planning to open a gallery in the Fort. It was to be called ‘Sithuvili (Thoughts).’ Then I lost touch. At the 2011 event, I happened to be walking down Leyn Baan Street, Galle Fort, to a place called Serendipity Café.  I had been invited to an event that was taking place outside of the Galle Literary Festival (GLF); ‘outside’ in that it was not included in the GLF Programme.  A book launch: ‘Froteztology’ by Marlon Ariyasinghe.

And then I saw this sign: Sithuvili. Triggered a memory. I went in and found a laminated copy of that Sunday Island article (Janaka’s “Sithuvili” gives a sexy twist to the traditional). Janaka wasn’t there, but I got his number, called and re-connected and we’ve remained close friends.

‘Sithuvili’ has been upstaged by a new gallery which Janaka has named ‘Galle Fort Art Gallery.’ We talked as he showed and explained to me what was new (I have visited this gallery a couple of times over the past few years). Then I came across Marlon’s ‘Froteztology.’

 

I flipped through the pages and there were at least a couple of poems related to the GLF.

One was titled ‘Kolambata kiri, apita thaamath kekiri’ referring of course to the popular slogan that gained currency way back in the early eighties when Ranil Wickremesinghe, a cabinet minister of the then government, tabled a ‘White Paper on Education.’ Here are some excerpts.

We are not to be welcomed
Dirty, dusty, uncultured barbarians
The vulgar unassociables from the hills
(Except for Trinitians)
To their dinner dances
To their Gratiaens
To their GLFs or CFFs.

We are but sand beneath their patrician feet
We are here to provide comic relief
Material for their fiction their poetry
Pawns for their sick demented plays.

There’s more of course, but here’s the ‘bomb’ a la Lakdasa, who by the way thought writing in English was a kind of cultural treason. Debatable, but just jotting that down. The poem. It’s titled ‘To Amateur poets.’

Write you bastards
Write till your ink runs dry
Write till ‘They’ lock you up
Write till your fingers are severed
When your ink runs dry,
Write with blood.

That’s the positive side of GLFs. Inspires people like Marlon to assemble and explode poetic bombs. The GLF has survived and is proving to be quite resilient even if oblivious to criticism — people do what they do, what they do best and what they believe is best. Let’s leave it at that.

The title of the collection, according to Marlon, was drawn from a certain politically and ideologically laden straight-jacketing pertaining to ‘proper English’ which is entwined with notions of cultural superiority that is written all over the GLF, by omission and commission. Consider, finally, the poetic explanation Marlon offers. It is hilarious as it is potent. Another bomb. This one titled ‘I is wanting to Frotezt.’
 

I is wanting to frotezt,
Againzt theeze mad men
Who appear radically
But think and live ideally 
And strain us linguistically
I is very worry
“To think that thinking men
Should think so wrongly”

Imagination is stunted
Creativity: not allowed!
We are brainwashed out of our
Vulgar un-linguistic ways
And reformed or forced to reform
To be radicals with no faze

Say special with a IS
And face with a Z
Protest with a F
And F*** with a P
Say it proudly.

So puck opp n let we be.


[Note: the asterisks were inserted by me and have nothing to do with any issue I may have with the content of the poem. As I mentioned in an earlier piece on ‘Froteztology,’ it’s just editorial necessity that is far less pernicious than the straight-jacketing the poet refers to].

Bombs. Literary bombs. GLF. Galle Fort. Sithuvili. Janaka. Marlon. Lakdasa. What a swirl! I didn’t want to write about the GLF. In fact when I thought of ‘unswirling’ the tentative title was ‘The Goal Literary Pestival,’ with the obvious nod to my highly talented and accomplished friend Marlon Ariyasinghe, but I do see some value in events such as the GLF. And yet, I felt a need not so much to throw a bomb and take notes but to capture in some way the (necessary) disruptions of a poet who threw a bomb and took his own notes.  It was a frotezt. A literary one. 

[This article was published in the Daily News under the weekly column title 'The Recurrent Thursday']

 

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Words, their potency, appropriation and abuse

 Marlon Ariyasinghe, poet, dramatist and friend, understands words. He understands that words are political or can be so. A few days ago he offered some observations on the words ‘resilient’ and ‘resilience’ through an Instagram post:

‘The words ‘resilient’ and ‘resilience’ should be banned in Sri Lanka (I’ve used them too). Politicians have been using this word for decades to show how much of a threshold we have for suffering and how quickly we normalise [the] horrific.’

Yes. Politicians have done that. They still do.  In fact it is almost second nature for politicians to do such things. It’s one of the many strategies used to appropriate that which rightfully belongs to other people. Tyrants toss around the word ‘democracy.’ Brutes have talked about a ‘Dharmista Samajaya’ or, as they translated, ‘a just and free society.’ The world has known prisons and torture chambers named ‘Peace’ and ‘Freedom.’ People have been convinced or coerced to abandon practices that are sustainable and have thereafter been forced to adopt others that are not but nevertheless named ‘sustainable.’

Language is political and Marlon is right — the words ‘resilient’ and ‘resilience’ have been used to sweeten unbearable condition; people have been pushed to thresholds of suffering and the associated horrors have been normalised by celebrating resistance and fortitude simply through the (over) use of such terms.

There are other words which, through overuse and abuse, have been robbed of meaning and indeed even rendered unusable simply on account of association with the horrific, laughable and absolutely deceitful.

Peace is a word that had a 'good' run not too long ago. It was used, overused and abused by those who were determined to sanitise terrorists, terrorism and attempted land-theft. The track records of politicians touting a particular brand of ‘peace’ as well as their approvers sullied the word to the point that it was divested of meaning apart from the fact that it came to be associated with all kinds of racketeers.  

‘Sahodaraya’ which literally means brother but was used as the Sinhala equivalent of ‘comrade.’ The track record of the sahodarayo and the outcome of sahodarakama, so to speak, made it a term associated with all manner of atrocities.

Aragalaya or rebellion used to be a respectable word. What the ‘Aragalaya’ produced, the ways and means preferred by prominent ‘aragalists,’ the identity of their principal backers and the simple fact that its champions were essentially fighting for a right to beg and therefore celebrated mendicancy and turned a population into beggars, has now inscribed elements of villainy on that word.

Democracy. Good governance. Nation. Nationalism. Patriot. Patriotism. Motherland. System-change. All overused, abused and therefore made less usable. "Resilience' and 'resilient' are comparatively benign. What this means is that language is also a site of struggle. Words have meaning and if meaning is robbed, words lose their potency.  

The thing with words is that you can’t really ban their usage. You can, at best, stop using them and hope they go away and become politically irrelevant. What can be done is to wrest the word from the powerful, call out their villainy and make it hard for the usurper of words to misuse them.

Terrorist sympathisers can and will sanitise pernicious endgames by using words such as peace and reconciliation. Does this mean that we should not use those words? Will not such refusal make way for the continued ill-use of such words?

Put another way, is resilience a bad thing? Should we cease to be resilient? Should we look for synonyms and try to popularise them? Should we take the struggle over words, language and meaning underground? Perhaps. The cockroach is said to be one of the most resilient creatures on the planet. Does not utter a word though.

We don’t and cannot take issue with the word; we can and should contest usage by confronting the user. This, I believe, is what Marlon calls for. It might require the abandonment of a word or term or else recovering the power to define and use it. Resistance is called for. Contestation is called for. It’s a battle and in this battle, in the fact of often superior forces, resilience is a virtue. Whether or not we call it that.  

Words. They are not innocent. Language. It’s not apolitical. It is a battlefield, yes,  even a single word is a site of struggle. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once observed that things that go without saying often come without saying. Applicable to words and the mischief they are part of. The user is not innocent and those who resist cannot afford to be naive. 

 

['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 a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below] 

 

Other articles in this series:

Street corner stories

Who did not listen, who's not listening still?

The book of layering

If you remember Kobe, visit GOAT Mountain

The world is made for re-colouring

The gift and yoke of bastardy

The 'English Smile'

No 27, Dickman's Road, Colombo 5

Visual cartographers and cartography

Ithaca from a long ago and right now

Lessons written in invisible ink

The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness'

A tea-maker story seldom told

On academic activism

The interchangeability of light and darkness

Back to TRADITIONAL rice

Sisterhood: moments, just moments

Chess is my life and perhaps your too

Reflections on ownership and belonging

The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha

Signatures in the seasons of love

To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows

Sirith, like pirith, persist

Fragrances that will not be bottled 

Colours and textures of living heritage

Countries of the past, present and future

A degree in creative excuses

Books launched and not-yet-launched

The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains

The ways of the lotus

Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace

The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville

Live and tell the tale as you will

Between struggle and cooperation

Of love and other intangibles

Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions

The universe of smallness

Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers

Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills

Serendipitous amber rules the world

Continents of the heart The allegory of the slow road

 

 

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A conversation with Marlon Ariyasinghe about gates and gatekeepers

There was a rare literary event at the University of Peradeniya about four years ago. Dubbed ‘SLAM 2010’, it consisted of writers reading from published, to-be-published and perhaps ‘unpublishable’ work and a couple of panel discussions, one on ‘post-war literature’ and one on the publishing industry.  Vihanga Perera, poet, novelist, academic and event-organizer, quipped that the proceedings would have given me enough material for 30 articles.  A few, I responded. 

There are a lot of things to say but I shall leave event-review for another day.  I will limit comment here to a thought-provoking poem read by Marlon Ariyasinghe, who was classed as a ‘budding poet’ in what was possibly a careless moment when titling the programme.  Among the six ‘budding’ poets featured were 3 who have published collections and three whose work was by no means inferior to the ‘non-budding’ or ‘budded and flowered/flowering’ writers.  

Marlon read from a collection that’s going to be published in January, titled ‘froteztology’.  The ‘word’ comes from the poem so here goes:

I is wanting to Frotezt

I is wanting to frotezt,

Againzt theeze mad men

Who appear radically

But think and live ideally 

And strain us linguistically

I is very worry

“To think that thinking men

Should think so wrongly”

Imagination is stunted

Creativity: not allowed!

We are brainwashed out of our

Vulgar un-linguistic ways

And reformed or forced to reform

To be radicals with no faze

Say special with a IS

And face with a Z

Protest with a F

And F*** with a P

Say it proudly.

So puck opp n let we be.

Ok, the asterisks were inserted by me and that has nothing to do with any issue I may have with the content of the poem; just editorial necessity that is far less pernicious than the straight-jacketing the poet refers to, especially given the fact that the restrictions come, according to him, from self-appointed authorities on language-liberation. 

This is a poem that need to be read out loud to capture the play on the politics of language standard, for example those surrounding the ‘o’ sound, i.e. the ‘Yakko-O’ (as opposed to the ‘Snooty-O’).  Print doesn’t do it and apologies on this account.  I had a question, which I asked then: ‘Isn’t it because you can say ‘f*** off’ that you can say ‘puck opp’?  Marlon conceded that there was some logic in my proposition. 

We had a conversation over email subsequently which might illustrate some of the issues pertaining to language standards and I believe reproducing the gist would be better (and perhaps more entertaining) than commentary.  I just asked him to send me the poem and he said, ‘This poem is aimed at those at the university who promote academic writing but at the same time say that we need to broaden linguistic barriers.’  Marlon is not a big fan of ‘English Our Way’, by the way. 

I responded, ‘Those who rubbish language standards don't say puck-orp  and don't use such 'language' when they themselves write. They only use it in the dialogues they insert, though, and this only affirms language hierarchies.’  

 

Marlon agreed: ‘Exactly.  They only criticize it in theory and they themselves speak in an RP accent (RP, he told me later, was ‘Queen’s English’ or ‘Received Pronunciation’). They may as you say bend language boundaries in speech, but this is also a "made-up" effort.’  He pointed out that it is fashionable to say there’s nothing wrong in bending, but that in reality such bending-advocates do not dream of doing it, especially in writing.

I tossed my two-cents’ worth.

‘I think that language standards don't have any defensible theoretical foundation.  Having said that I am acutely aware, as you are, that it is a class instrument that is mercilessly employed.  We can take one of two approaches. We can say 'f*** it, it is not ours' or we can learn it so that we can meet sword with sword and not butter-knife.  It's a simple mechanism taken from the realities of combat.’

I think there are 4 categories of people who talk about this issue.  There are the puritans, who think there’s only one family of Englishes, the RP Family. There are the sour-grapers, who dismiss English as para bhashawa (foreign language), tag it to the colonial enterprise and all kinds of discriminations and marginalizations consequent to it and advocate a ‘Mother Tongue Only’ approach to language.  That’s a dying breed these days as more and more people realize the disservice that S.W.R.D. Bandaranyaike did to those who were not RP-privileged.  Then there are those who Marlon takes issue with, that is, the class of academics/writers who promote anything-goes English as a progressive and even anti-colonial or anti-establishment instrument but are suspiciously reluctant to put those words where there mouths are, literally and metaphorically.  Then there are those who take cognizance of the politics pertaining to language, language standards as well as the relevant hierarchies, especially the hands-off aspect of promoting Yakkho-English in order to keep the riff-raff off their ‘traditional homeland’ called Snooty-English.  

It is not clear in the poem where Marlon stands, the third or the fourth of the above categories or in a fifth, perhaps, i.e. located somewhere between the two.  I told him I was of the view that I feel the third category considers people like Vihanga Perera a threat because they (those like Vihanga) know this standard business is crap but are not lacking in weapons of any ‘standard’-class, from the supiri-snooty to the yakma-yakkho.   

Marlon located himself: ‘The only way to criticize or even break the standard is to know the standard (you have to know your enemy). Mispronunciation and bad grammar are "radical" only when we know the correct standard.’  He still had a question, and one which I had too: ‘But don't you think that once we learn and use the standard we have already lost the battle. Since knowing it means that we are a part of it; that we ourselves become one of those "gate keepers". This is my dilemma. What do you think?  Is there any way out of this predicament?  To say fuck the standard and not learn it will only be a disadvantage because we will not be taken seriously. The second approach makes us a part of the system. 

‘Mispronunciation and bad grammar are “radical” only when we know the standard’.  A great line, I thought.  Here’s my response: ‘We can choose to be gatekeepers or we can be gate-openers; make sure we do everything possible to erase the gate, i.e irrelevance the gate.  It has to be conscious.  We got to pick and choose method and hope like hell we get it right, given that our ignorance is infinite.’ 

I think there’s a radical politics in English ‘Standarding’ and that what passes off as ‘radical’ right now is complicit in the elite project, i.e. the entrenching of Snooty-English.  I think those who organized ‘SLAM 2010’ have got it right.  The poetry that was read, Marlon’s ‘I is wanting to Frotezt’ was not the only poem that consciously articulated this radicalism, bodes well for an informed intervention in this regard.  Something good to look forwards to in the little dingy backroom of the literature archives of Sri Lanka where Englishes languish, I felt. 

And since Marlon brought up the terms ‘gate-keeper’, the following would be a good puck-opp flourish to end this comment.  Eric Alterman a professor of English and journalism at the City University of New York, writing about Wikileaks disclosures (‘Do you want to know a (top) secret?’) and claiming that mainstream editors and reporters may be forgiven for wondering just how long they can remain central (in dramas such as the one generated by the revelations), asks, ‘when the gate’s been toppled, how long does the keeper keep a job?’

It is not about the gatekeeper. It is about the gate.  Maybe.  Let’s meditate on this.

*This was published in the Sunday Observer on December 2010

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