Mahagama Sekera, alive after all these years

It is not always that one reads forewords and introductions.  We tend to skip what we sometimes take to be necessary frill for author/publisher but eminently skippable for reader.  There is a risk.  A small one, of course.  I have skipped such preambles often for the main text beckoned more urgent perusal.  There’s one I didn’t miss and I am glad: the literary and philosophical gem that is the introduction to Mahagama Sekera’s defining poetic narrative, ‘Prabuddha’.  That essay was commissioned by the poet himself and is a piece of writing that Sekera never got to see, just as he didn’t see the book in print. 

Sekera died on January 14, 1976 at the age of 46.  Eight years ago I asked myself, ‘Would Mahagama Sekera be still alive had he not left us at forty six?’  He did not die in 1976, for he was alive when he first came to me, again in the form of a book that my father brought home later that year, ‘Mahagama Sekarage Geetha (Mahagama Sekarara’s Lyrics)’.  He has been alive since, in all the lyrics to which melody, music and voice were added to give us memorable songs.  He was alive a month ago at the Nelum Pokuna when Pundit Amaradeva sang what is widely held as the people’s national anthem, ‘Ratna Deepa Janma Bhoomi’.  And these days, I see him often as I try my hand at translating ‘Prabuddha’ into English. 

Death was, naturally, the last visitor he entertained on that day.  But before that moment when he breathed his last, we are told that the director of ‘Yasho Geethaya’ had come to his Gampaha residence to discuss a documentary film on ‘Ratna Deepa’.  The shoot had been scheduled for the following day.  Between that visit and death, Sekera is said to have attended to the final edits of his doctoral dissertation.  It was earlier in the day that Sekara had met the man he commissioned to write the foreword to Prabuddha, the late Ven. Dhammavihari, then Prof Jothiya Dheerasekera. 

He had called the professor and asked for a meeting before the arranged day.  The professor had expressed surprise that Sekera, given his vast knowledge on a wide range of subjects and proven excellence across many literary genres was nevertheless not holding a teaching post in a university.  He had pointed out in particular the depth of meaning in Prabuddha and the fine deployment of critical faculties in unlayering a social, political, cultural and philosophical milieu.  Sekera, according to Prof Dheerasekera, displayed innumerable and happy elements of a writer endowed with a poetic disposition filled with generosity, humility and honesty.  Sekera had merely stated, ‘In that case, it would be best that you write the introduction’. 

Dheerasekera’s introduction refers to Sekera’s previous work, including Maknisada Yath (The reason being…), Nomiyemi (I am immortal) and specific lyrics for stage plays.  The way he describes the man mirrors the nature of the main character of the epic poem, Prabuddha.  The story is a veritable exposition of the cultural, literary and musical tastes of the time, the changes therein, the dangers ahead and the possible ways of recovering the humanity that was clearly under threat.  Dheerasekera elevates Prabuddha to an importance of a nature that calls for a replication of the work in all art forms.  Indeed, such an exercise is the responsibility of youth with discerning taste and exceptional creative ability.  

Prabuddha was his last poetic exercise, although his doctoral dissertation, Sinhala Gadya Padya Nirmana Kerehi Ridmaya Balapa Athi Akaraya (Influence of Rhythm on the Sinhala Prose and Poetry)’ can theoretically be read as a similar unfolding.  Sekera may not have anticipated the ‘end’ that Prabuddha clearly marked, but Prabuddha, on account of his passing, marks his, philosophically, politically and literally, in a manner more pronounced than his other work. This is why it is the most frequently quoted and referred to of all his work, none of which can be called ‘lesser’. 

Sekera, in Prabuddha, brings a nation and a collective back to something that was and encourages a journey to a something that can still be (better).  It is a call for a softer engagement drawing from Buddhism but not exclusive from that doctrine.  There is a world he envisaged and which he promised to design, before leaving (dying).  He could not, but he did sketch a blueprint, or rather gathered blueprint from the civilizational ethos which made him who he was and which can be the foundation of a cultural, social and moral edifice that we could all inhabit.

From the silent sky

where the half-moon becomes pronounced
by and by
there drips the milk
for a child’s heart;
the infant son smiles
dreaming of the new world
that will come up tomorrow.
 
In this motherland
where a nation of giants
who built the thousand reservoirs
are now reborn
new freedoms emerge
in a myriad of color
elegantly polished
by his smile;
I wipe my tears
and see
the little boy reigning
in a debt-free fear-free tomorrow
 
Little sons all,
who conjure the spring
that wipe weariness
from tired limb,
know this:
when I see you
that labor is pleasure
nothing else;
I cannot leave,
before I craft
that world
I’ve made and shaped
over twenty five hundred years.
 
And therefore, Siddhartha!
And therefore grant me permission of finality
bless me in the manner of the Buddhas who came before
blessed the Buddhas to be,
now, this moment.
 
At this very table,
upon this very chair
among these papers,
in a paddy field that knows
tilling, sowing and reaping,
among slogans, strikes and
the teeth of a factory wheel,
in a crowded train
carrying men and women
in their thousands
to work and back,
to secure the ultimate truth
Enlightenment,
not alone, no
but with those millions
to know together
to reach collectively
the truth
Enlightenment!

We have as individuals come far.  And we have travelled ‘back’ too.  We cannot really celebrate the former due to the latter.  The ‘why’ of this, perhaps, is contained in the above lines from Prabuddha.  This is why, thirty six years after he died, Mahagama Sekera is still very much with us, as friend, companion on necessary journey, teacher and delighter. 

[Published in the FINE Section of 'The Nation', January 13, 2013.  See also, 'Mahagama Sekera: a vision open to residency'] 

Read more

‘With the Dawn’: A love-note penned in the Sri Lankan wilds

BOOK REVIEW

‘With the Dawn’, by Nihal Fernando and Herbert Keuneman, published by Studio Times Ltd., reviewed by Malinda Seneviratne.

There are countless melodies that can be composed with the 12 pitches of the Chromatic scale.  There are more than 12 words in the English dictionary and this alone gives sense of dimension pertaining to possible word configuration.  One might say that we have enough and more tools to describe the world to ourselves and one another.  There are times however when we all feel poor, not for lack of word but perhaps for its suffusion.  We cannot pick the correct words to describe to perfection, dimension and detail all.   Then we go silent. 

 

It is the same with painters. Color and line make for innumerable configuration but rendering is always incomplete.  Artists give us new eyes and perhaps inevitably new lies as ways, new ways of self-deception.  One would think, then, that the photographer is a more humble archivist, except that this is also an exercise that involves choices such as time of day, light-shade mix, the ‘settings’ pertaining to camera and of course post-shot play on a computer where a wide range of tools are available to re-render that which was captured. 

When a photographer has travelled a territory more extensively than an archaeologist or surveyor it is clear that he or she can make countless albums for there are innumerable ways to organize material.  It is hard to think of anyone who has traveled the length and breadth of this island as much as Nihal Fernando has done.  Neville Weeraratne in an essay titled ‘Nihal Fernando and Herbert Keuneman: a tale of two kindred souls’ says that the former ‘has seen, heard, experienced and above all understood the land, its people and their life’.  It holds for the latter too, going by that same essay and by the authoritative travel guide ‘The Handbook for the Ceylon Traveller’ which carries the signature of his life, vision, knowledge and the love he shared with Fernando for this country.   Weeraratne describes him this way: ‘His lifelong residence led to a passionate love for the island.  There is (nor was) anyone with his encyclopedic knowledge of the country in whatever the detail and in whichever the discipline.’

Weeraratne’s piece is found towards the end of an album of photographs which is also an essay and a journey, ‘With the dawn’ published by Studio Times.  From dawn to dusk is a long time.  For people like Fernando and Keuneman it’s a set of hours that can theoretically make for countless albums on countless subjects.  This collection is based on the Studio Times exhibition called ‘Wild Life ’73’’ held almost forty years ago at the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery, Colombo.  The photographs displayed were picked by Keuneman just two weeks prior to exhibition date.  That process has been described beautifully thus:

‘Fernando and Keuneman flung open the doors of the studio (Studio Times, that is, located then in the Times Building, Colombo Fort), letting the unsullied air of a quiet morning find its way into the dark corners, as they laid out the photographs on the floor.  Beggars who lived in the foyer of the building, occasionally peered in to look at the whirling images of deer and elephants, monkeys and crocodiles, jungle trees and jungle pools, birds and more birds in flight.  Herbert Keuneman walked among these black-and-white prints, picking up one, peering at the next, tossing photographs here, there, everywhere.  He cast a few aside, sorte4d others, grouped some and started writing the story of a day in the jungle…with the dawn…the birds…awake…and take off…and so it went on until the last bird flew home.’

This was long before digital cameras and ‘photoshop’ those advances that turned point-click amateurs into art photographers if they knew how to photo-edit or could obtain the services of a photo-editor.  We can flip through the pages and be mesmerized by the images.  It would take a traveler however to look at each photograph and imagine the work involved.  Nihal Fernando is well known for his patience.  He did not (and admittedly could not) depend on the insurance of post-click technology to work out the glitches that human frailty (of mind, eye and finger) spawns.

It is a black and white collection.  For this reason the photographer obviously had to work within narrower margins of error.  Color blinds at times and even makes for a lot of fudging.  Perhaps this is why even in today’s digitized world of fascination with color palettes the black and white photographer is still held in awe. 

We cannot tell if the collection was gathered, photographically, over a single day.  But this was a different age of photography and a different society working towards different objectives at a different pace and in less glittered economy.   Nihal Fernando was inspired by love.  So too, Herbert Keuneman.  Such people don’t rush.  They take their time.  It is evident in the collection, both in image and in descriptive line.

They take us from moment to moment, hour to hour, dawn to dusk as though leading us by hand, drawing attention to all that the untrained and less-used-to-loving eye would miss.  Keuneman’s economy of words is ideal complement to Fernando’s photographic poetry.  He says only what is necessary and thereby teaching that silence is an excellent travel companion and even travel guide.  There is silence, silently captured and described in whisper.  There is music here too, for Fernando makes us hear the ripple of water, the movement of wind, the call of bird, flapping of wings and thereby teaches us the language of the civilized, our ancestors who had eyes and did not babble incessantly just because they had mouths and tongues. 

‘With the Dawn’ ends ‘when the last bird flies home’.  It is a limited edition of just 1000 copies.  A different generation of photographers might think that armed with technology they could as much or better with a fraction of the effort.  They would be wrong.  Technology does not have a ‘love-function’.  It is not obtained by point-and-click on a computer screen or inserted as device in a sophisticated camera.  It comes with walking.  It comes with deep reflection.  It comes in conversations with hundreds and hundreds of ordinary people.  It comes with the dawn and takes flight in the wings of the last bird flying home.

 

[Published in the FINE Section of The Nation of January 6, 2013]

Read more

So you want anarchy, do you?

The 1978 Constitution is not made for dictators, contrary to an oft-articulated view.  It is rather made to make dictators in that it confers on the executive near dictatorial power.  The objections however have focused more on incumbent than position or constitutional provision. 

The constitutional document is of course referred to but mostly to acquire the ‘objective’ tag or as make-up to disguise political preference.  In the main it has been about likes and dislikes.  Virtues of democracy and the need to have it affirmed in word and spirit are trotted out.  It’s part of the political game to appear neutral but political preferences are hard to hide in this day and age. 

A good rule of thumb when assessing the democratic worth of constitutions and articles therein is to imagine a beneficiary whose ability and integrity one questions, someone whose ideological bent and politics one abhors.  This is the device I suggested that MPs voting on the 18^th Amendment should use. 

If we assume for argument’s sake that democracy is the best system of governance, the 1978 Constitution is a body blow to the idea.  If one wants Sri Lanka to be a better democracy, then a complete overhauling of the constitution is called for.  Easier said than done of course for it requires a two-thirds majority which is what is enjoyed by the current set of beneficiaries.  It would be myopic to expect them to vote against their interest. On the other hand those who aspire to obtain the same sweeping executive powers would hardly be interested in voting to prune these very same powers they hope to someday enjoy.  This is perhaps why the focus is on person and not post and why the rhetoric seems hollow. 

In this context it is natural to think that knocking off the slightest shard off the executive armor is a necessary step in a ‘democratizing’ process.  The error is that what incumbent loses does not materialize as a corresponding loss in constitutional provision.  J.R. Jayewardene was declared a tyrant.  Few were sorry to see him go at the end of his two terms.  When he was replaced, Premadasa inherited the powers as did Wijetunga, Kumaratunga and Rajapaksa after him.  The losses that accrued to the individual on account of error, ignorance and arrogance, they took to grave and retirement. Successors started afresh. 

Attacking the President is easy.  Taking issue with position is also easy.  Arguing that the incumbent being ousted is ‘first step’ is hogwash.  Belief that a presidential back-off would amount to dent in constitutional provision is patently naïve.  

Today there’s a stand-off of sorts, some would like us to think: Supreme Court vs. Parliament, Judiciary vs. Legislative.   Two process: Impeachment against the Chief Justice and Court Ruling against Parliamentary Select Committee.  Some have called for a change of laws pertaining to impeaching judges of the higher courts.  Some have called for prorogation of Parliament ‘to cool things a bit’.  The ‘callers’ claim it is all about the independence of the judiciary. Some add that it is a democratizing move.  The objection raised by some ministers to moves against the Chief Justice (at least in terms of the impeachment process) have been cheered by the above ‘callers’, notwithstanding the fact that some of these ministers are not exactly ‘people’s representatives’ in that they are in Parliament courtesy the President’s largesse.  Bold of them, yes, but the fact that they don’t have a constituency to speak of should not be forgotten. 

More telling is the identity of the callers.  They are not political neutrals.  They are regime-haters and as such their democratizing credentials are suspect.   Whipping up notions of ‘confusion’ and ‘tension’ even as they call for an executive/legislative ‘back-off’ alone shows much humbuggery.     

It is not a matter of picking between Mahinda Rajapaksa and Mr/Ms Perfect President.  The choice is not between Rajapaksa and A Better Order in the Foreseeable Future.  The choice is not between Executive Presidency and Westminster System (with or without some adjustment). For such choices, there have to be objective conditions such as severe economic, social, political discontent across the board.  There are people who are not exactly cheering this regime, but neither are they inclined to cheer anarchy.  The courts are not people-friendly, in fact that are places where the masses feel utterly displaced and disoriented.  Lawyers are seen as evil necessities by those who for whatever reason are forced to be in court.  Shirani Bandaranayake is not a Sarath Fonseka in this sense.    Those who try to market her as the figurehead of moves at changing regime and democratizing probably assume she’s naïve, which is of course a possibility that cannot be ruled out.  Worse, they assume that their political records are unknown.  It’s a straw-clutching exercise of the politically dispossessed and displaced privileged class that we have seen before, with Sarath Fonseka and before him Sarath N Silva.  No surprises therefore.

Only those whose lives and lifestyles are insured can wave hand at anarchy.  Such situations are made for blood-letting, but the blood that could flow will not be theirs, but that of ordinary people.  If it is a matter of a Constitutional Dictatorship versus Anarchy where a result in the favor of the latter (unlikely as things stand) spawns yet another Constitutional Dictator, the intelligent and responsible choice would be the former. 

[Published in 'The Nation,' January 6, 2013]

Read more

It is time to un-‘develop’ our minds

We are a few hours away from the year 2013.  The world has not ended and the signs are it will not.  Strangely, the end of the world sometime in late December was the most looked forward to event of the entire year, beating by a fair margin the Olympics, the US Presidential Election and the T-20 World Cup.  Well, it looks like Doom’s Day prophets have called it a day. For now. 

A calendar year is ending and a new year beckons.  It’s naturally a moment to look back and look ahead, to think about the what-have-we-done and also the what-should-we-do.  If the whole world’s-end hoopla taught us anything, it must be that we are collectively ignorant.  We just don’t have the ability to predict.  And if anyone is to be blamed it is ourselves. 

Now it is not the case that the world has been spared natural disasters.  Earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis, droughts, floods, famine, epidemics and such are not unknown to the world.  Our ancestors saw and suffered.   They also knew war.  .  And the wars they fought, won and lost, were nothing like the conflagrations the world has known in the past century.  What they didn’t have then was ‘development’.

There was a time when we had seasons: when we knew when it would rain, for how long, in what quantity and where.  We knew about inter-monsoonal rains.  Again, our ancestors knew enough about rainfall and where the rain would fall and where it would not.  So they planned for drought.  They built sophisticated irrigation systems.  They knew enough about ecology to be circumspect in how they engaged with the natural world, especially since they were equipped with technological know-how capable of causing much destruction to ecosystems. 

‘Development’ changed all that.  ‘Modernity’ changed all that.  ‘Modernism’ and ‘Develomentalism’ changed all that.  Capitalism and Communism in their various articulations changed all that.  These things spawned hordes of profit collectors and do-gooders (some naïve, some now) who wanted to modernize and develop societies that were deemed to be archaic and underdeveloped. 

Things that worked were called ‘traditional’ or ‘crude’.  Values and customs that built civilizations and sustained societies were tagged ‘heathen’.  Those who did not require salvation were sought to be ‘saved’.   And when it became clear that ‘the good life’ comes at a cost (environmental degradation to the point of ecosystem collapse and frenzied competition for resources resulting in wars), the do-gooders, so-called, said ‘people need to have choices’.  They should, in other words, be able to choose between 10 brands of footwear, each brand offering a range of choices for the ‘sophisticated’ consumer.  The consumer, at the end of the day, is much like his or her less needy ancestors, endowed with just two feet. 

But everything we see, hear, taste, touch and smell come with three tags: loba (greed), dosha (envy/hatred) and moha (delusion/ignorance).  They come with an invite: ‘Come, embrace and embrace tight!’  Delusion is a pernicious operative for it persuades us to destroy all that we have in the belief that this is a necessary condition for obtaining what we don’t have and didn’t need but have come to believe we must have in order to secure meaning in our lives.  We throw away what we have (traditional knowledge, climate-specific seeds, ethics of giving and sharing etc) to obtain membership in a throw-away society; so that we can be called ‘developed’ and ‘modern’, where the tag-giver deliberately leaves out the obvious suffix, ‘fools’. 

The world did not end as predicted, but there are many worlds that are ending or rather are being ‘ended’.  That process should be stopped.  We have ‘developed’ for quite some time now and have very little to brag about.  Perhaps it is time to undo certain things.  Perhaps it is time to un-develop.

Read more

Tragedy has rhythm, recovery too

BOOK REVIEW

‘Rhythm of the Sea’ by Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe, published in 2007, Reviewed by Malinda Seneviratne.

How can one look at the sea, the waves and spray, the ships on the horizon, sunsets and sunrises, beach and shell when sea and wave have destroyed all or almost all?  That is a question I asked myself immediately after the Tsunami of 2004.  Then I remembered an anecdote about seafaring folk. 

A man asks a fisherman how his father, grandfather and great grandfather died and the answer on each occasion was ‘drowned at sea’.  ‘Aren’t you scared to go to sea?’ he asks again. The fisherman asks a question by way of response: ‘Where did your father die?’ The man says ‘In bed’.  ‘And where,’ the fisherman asks ‘did his father and his father before him, die?’ ‘In bed,’ he man answers.  ‘Aren’t you scared to sleep?’ Silence. 

One year after the Tsunami I went to Kalametiya, Hambantota, where the Green Movement of Sri Lanka built some 30 plus houses for families affected by the tragedy with funds collected by my sister who is domiciled in the USA.  There was a small ceremony, remembrance, planting of trees in memory of those who died, the shedding of tears.  I remember well a comment by a resident: ‘The sea took it all away, but it is the sea, again, that will yield a tomorrow’. 

Sri Lankans are resilient.  They take the blows, fall at times, but if they have life they stand up again.  And smile too.  Today, eight years later, there are still signs of the surging waves, the occasional sight of a house that’s lost its roof, doors, walls, furniture and occupants, but for the most part someone who did not know of the tragedy would be hard pressed to imagine the magnitude of what transpired on December 26, 2004.  Sri Lankans would know, though, for minutes after the tragedy the entire population, almost, was galvanized into a monumental rescue and relief operation, not by command but volition.  To those who know that the country turns into a dansala twice a year and are aware of a cultural norm to set aside difference to celebrate joy and offer strength and presence in times of sorrow, this would not come as a surprise. 

Everyone who lost someone or something has a story to tell about the Tsunami.  Everyone who knows someone who lost someone or something has a story to tell too.  When tragedy is of such proportion as was seen in the last days of that December it is next to impossible to gather all the stories or even read them all should such an exercise be completed.  What can be done is to collate a set of stories that capture that overwhelming and word-robbing time.  This was the modest task that Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe set herself a few years after the Tsunami.  ‘Rhythm of the Sea’ is the result of that exercise, a project sponsorted by the Hambantota District Chamber of Commerce.  It is, naturally, a work which required the support of various individuals, all of whom are mentioned.  It is a book of text and image, Ramya handling the first while Denise Militzer (a WUSC University volunteer with the Ruhuna Rural Womens Organization in Hambantota) providing the latter, excellent pictures which contain an epic story of human endeavor.

Hambantota, Ramya says, is the backdrop against which ‘the lives of people and the progress of events following the tsunami’.  The book covers the moment and the aftermath, the grief and reconciliation with the fact of tragedy, the determination and tenderness of the citizenry who gathered themselves to shoulder the greater part of the relief and recovery effort and the largesse of the world that poured into Sri Lanka.  She mentions the institutional arrangement that managed relief operations, treating in passing the weaknesses therein and the opportunities squandered, applauding however the early work of the Centre for National Operations for averting in the first 72 hours what could have developed into a humanitarian disaster. 

She has missed, however, the ‘relief-hordes’ that arrived in numbers that India and other countries did not entertain, riding on tragedy to engage in proselytization of a kind that their own countries would never allow had the ‘gifters’ been, for example, of the Islamic faith.  Money poured in, but it had to be channeled either through the Government or I/NGOs.  The dollar/Euro hungry NGO operators were quick-footed enough to re-invent themselves as disaster-management experts.  There were bucks made in the process. Big bucks. 

But the focus of Ramya’s task was different.  Hambantota was the location and what happened there is what this book is mainly about.  A lot of painstaking research has been done in picking up the main strands of the tragedy and the post-tragedy recovery process.  It is the little things that cause most vexation.  Like the fact that it all happened on a public holiday.  Like the fact that the Tsunami didn’t differentiate between house and administrative building.  Ramya details how these were made negligible and how selfless courage and human generosity rose above ethnic and religious affiliation, and how the worst elements of human nature were overcome by the human spirit, which she demonstrates ‘tipped the balance’. 

There was loss.  Indescribable.  And yet, Ramya traces with splendid sensitivity the nuances of that fundamental aspect of tragedy.  There is enough basic information in this book to give the reader a sense of the numbers and the magnitude of the disaster as well as the resources available and secured and how they were deployed.  The narratives of key officials, community leaders and ordinary people are deftly woven into the text not as embellishment but as necessary complement.  Indeed, these narratives can be read (as they should and are) as the core of the overall human effort to stand up after taking a terrible blow from natural processes that was beyond their power to stop.    

Post-disaster work is not about providing food and water, medicines and medical attention, or providing shelter.  The magnitude of the disaster necessitated a rebuilding of a kind that one expects after the end of a war.  All of it happened from scratch. Literally.  The work moved from immediate humanitarian relief to comprehensive rebuilding of lives and livelihoods, the recovery of economic activity and re-building of institutions.  ‘Rhythm of the Sea’ shows how Hambantota did it, how life was infused back into desolate landscapes, how hope emerged from a coastline that had turned into a cemetery.   

Ramya brings all her well-established literary skills to turn a compelling story into one which inspires readers to recognize the vast stores of human energy, creativity and determination, and transform inspiration into something tangible and lasting. 

She collects the uncollected, i.e. things that the untrained and less-sensitive eye passes over.  ‘The conch shell collection’ is a case in point, the details of which I hold back for Ramya describes it best.  These are all real people with real names and real lives. And real losses of course.  Magnitude tends to obliterate name and turn it into number.  That’s necessary too because we are talking of vast amounts of money, provisions and personnel involved in helping vast numbers of displaced and distraught people.  And yet, it is the focus on the ‘real’ that makes this book different from other Tsunami accounts. 

Eight years have passed.  Ramya’s account was published in 2007, just three years after the Tsunami.  Even then, the transformation achieved was remarkable, especially (as Ramya observes) considering the strange incapacities demonstrated by the USA in dealing with what ‘Katrina’ left behind (or took away).  Hambantota is a different town, a different district now, clearly not only because of the post-tsunami work.  But the Hambantota recovery story is not uncommon to other coastal towns and districts. 

‘Rhythm of the Sea’ calls out for other narratives and narration, not just because it is good to remember things but for all the lessons learnt, not least of all the inhumanity that tragedy spawns but more than that the immense reserves of human goodness and the dignity that no wave, however tall, can crush. 

[Published in the FINE Section of 'The Nation', December 23, 2012]

Read more

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]

Read more

Aney Haamuduruwane!

There is a school of opinion which holds that the clergy should not be involved in politics.  In fact UNP MP Wijedasa Rajapaksha has called for constitutional measures prohibiting clergy from entering Parliament, which would of course see his party man Eran Wickramaratne being barred as well, a fact which neither individual has dared comment upon.  The merits and demerits of such a move notwithstanding there is no escaping the fact that every single citizen has a right to opinion and the expression of the same, subject to the caveats pertaining to character assassination, libel and so on.   Everyone makes choices and very few choices are apolitical.

 

As such, no one can complain about the Maha Nayaka Theros expressing opinions on matters of national import, including that of the present tensions between the legislature and judiciary.  They can write to newspapers, make speeches and even express views privately.  Whether or not such privately expressed views are thereafter published for purposes unintended is a matter they may or may not know about or care about, but that’s not the point.  They have the freedom to express. 

The word of the Prelates needs to be listened to by all, of this there is no argument.  They may not get it right, but that’s a different matter.  They have on many occasions made political choices, some of which have been detrimental to the country and the people, which too one can dismiss as decisions prompted by notions of the wellbeing of all albeit based on incomplete information and inadequacies pertaining to reading the political.  Opinion is opinion, however, and as citizens they have the right to express views. 

So there is nothing wrong about the Maha Nayaka  of the Asgiriya Chapter the Most Venerable Udugama Sri Buddharakkita Thero chit-chatting with anyone, even with the US Ambassador Michele J Sison.  The Venerable Thero has every right to talk about anything with anyone; even the US Ambassador and even about the current tensions between Parliament and Supreme Court.  The Thero can pass judgment too.  By the same token the Thero will also be judged, with all due respect. 

Sison asked about the impeachment motion against the Chief Justice, as she is entitled to, and the Venerable Thero responded, as is his right.  It was then, not just a courtesy call, but a visit to play agent provocateur as has been the not so side-role of US diplomats all over the world. 

Now it would be childish to say that the Maha Nayaka Thero is part of an international conspiracy led by the USA against the Government.  The question is, why even bother to discuss the subject with someone whose government cares next to nothing about justice, fair play, decency, propriety and such in domestic or international affairs.    It is certainly not something one expects from those who are often referred to as the Mura Devatavo (Guardian Deities) of the nation. 

The Venerable Thero perhaps out of courtesy is reported to have referred to acts of friendship.  Perhaps, again out of courtesy, the Venerable Thero kept silent on unarguable acts of aggression and enmity.  Perhaps out of ignorance, we could add, but let’s err on the side of compassion here.  Either way, circumspect ought to have been demonstrated.  It was not.  Pity.  

 

 

Read more

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]

Read more