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Jean Ara
 

S as a y a C an

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Cover design: Muhanned Cader

Apocalypse '83

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Apocalypse '83
Poems
Jean Arasanayagam

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International Centre for Ethnic Studies 2, Kynsey Terrace, Colombo 8, Sri Lanka
Copyright G 2003 by ICES
ISBN: 955-580-084-7
Printed by Unie Arts (Pvt) Ltd No.48B, Bloemendhal Road Colombo 13

First Published in 1984

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Contents
Excerpt from Some Aspects of Recent Sri Lankan Literature in English
Ashley Halpé
Jean Arasanayagam: in Search of identity
Regi Siriwardena
Taken from Breaking Bounds: Essays on Sri Lankan Writing in English
Rajiva Wijesinha
Comments on Trial By Terror
Norman Sinns
"Someone smashed in the door and gave me my freedom': The Writings of Jean Arasanayagam
Anders Sjöbohm
Poems
Naur 1982 Ahimsa Sutra
Fear 1958....7 .....'77...... 81.....'83 Personae
Innocent Victim - Trincomalee Eye Witness- Nawalapitiya In the Month of July The Holocaust Death of the Prisoners Prisons
Political Prisoner A Set of Photographs Now we are Strangers
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20 22 24 25 27 29 31 32 33 34 36 37 39 42

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At the Gate Stands a Mob. July 83
Man at the Gate
Gutted
Molotov Cocktail
It's Got to End
Refugee - Part I
Refugee Camp
Poems from a Refugee Camp Refugee - Old Man
Old Woman - Part II .
Refugee - Old Man - Part II
Night - Refugee Camp
Halt
Sentry
Refugee Camp 1983
Refugees - As We Move On, As We Move On
I Watch My Own Death
Apocalypse - July 83
In Hiding
The Silent Enemy - July 1983
When Can We Live Again?
If the Gun Speaks
Exile II
EXile II
Flamboyants in July (From a refugee camp) 1983
Defeat
Letting Go
Vision of the World
Refugee
Aftermath
44 46 48 51 52 53 55
57 59 60 62 64 65 66 : 67 69 71 72 73 74 75 77 78 79 80 81 83 86

Excerpt from Some Aspects of Recent Sri Lankan Literature in English
Ashley Halpé
Apocalypse '83, to borrow Jean Arasanayagam's title, appears to have focused the eyes, the hearts and the imaginations of our writers on the present, with its chiaroscuro of conflict and disaster, suspicion and suffering, hypocrisy and protest. Contemplating the countryside or rural characters had been as Prof. Goonetilleke reminds us in his introduction to Modern Sri Lankan Stories, typical of writing in English in this country as authors conscious that they were alienated from the mass of the people and local traditions sought to capture truly national authentically Sri Lankan experiences.
The result was usually a sentimental ruralism, a tendency almost entirely absent from the very substantial output of creative writing in English during the last two years. This writing is deeply aware of crisis, and even where the present situation is not its subject matter it contributes to an understanding of it; one might add that it certainly does not say the same things in the same old way. h
Central to a reading of this period is Jean Arasanayagam's book. Flamboyants seen flaming all over the city from a refugee camp remind of blood, and "a skeletal branch left" bears "a crown of thorns;” in the valley she sees that solitary fires still burn and "the men and women of the village' had, during the destruction "stood their faces blank impassive waiting for the blood sport to begin.”
The deep involvement with the landscape, the lushness and visual splendour of fruit and foliage which came through in Kindu ri and Poems of a Season now only intensify the shock of disposition -
"I didn't know this country was not mine', it seemed I knew this earth too well to feel its heave and its revulsion
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expel my half ingested being from its twisted guts.
The trauma of becoming a stranger in her own land finds expression in nervous tortured language and in images of violence and pain that are deeply scored into a reader's consciousness.
Not herself a Tamil but married to one, Jean Arasanayagam had once "watched from afar' having her "own identity safe from marauders.' Poems of a Segson... her prose work Bhairavi and many of her short stories (The Cry of the Kite) showed her gradual giving of herself to it. In July 1983, she arrives at a grimly ironic possession.
Now I'm in it It's happened to me At last history has meaning.
The poems convey the gathering of the storm (Nallur, and 1958... '71... '77... '81... '83...) the immediate violence both as she saw it and through various personae, the forced contemplation of what had happened in the period in the refugee camps, the thought of exile - "can I rent a country / as I rent out a room? The recognition "I didn't know this country.'
The poetry is courageous sparing the reader nothing, yet not mesmerised by horror for there is room for meditation, compassion for more hapless victims, and even the awareness so conspicuously lacking in the attacker's: the human reality of "the others.'
The author probes her own identity, a theme developed further in her most recent book of poems A Colonial Inheritance which also explores the complexities of this country's modern history.
Excerpt from BRIEF CHRONICLE.
"Some Aspects of Recent Sri Lankan Literature in English', by Ashley Halpé, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.
The critique is from "An Anthology of Contemporary Sri Lankan Poetry in English", edited by Rajiva Wijesinha.
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Jean Arasanayagam: In Search of Identity
Regi Siriwardena
Jean Arasanayagam's first love was painting, and when she wrote her early poems, she brought a painter's eye to them:
A man's shadow walks along the river, the water moves away from his reflection. The eye forms a pattern out of isolated segments of landscape interposing its design.
In Navasilu 2 there is a note on Jean Arasanayagam's poetry - this was in 1979 - by Ellen Dissanayake. The critic (she was American by birth) found in Jean's poetry a voice that was noticeably non-western because of its pervasive sense-awareness,' its voluptuous language, and imagery.' For my part, I am inclined to relate these characteristics more to her painterly imagination than to any distinctively Eastern sensibility. Of course, the images in her early poems are markedly, and sometimes self-consciously Sri Lankan.
The sun ripens like a sapodilla Glowing warm red-orange.
But these youthful poems of hers affect me rather like the poetry of the Anglo-American Imagists of six or seven decades ago: I'm not suggesting an influence, necessarily, but rather an affinity in the poet's conception of what she wanted to do. There's a strong dominance of the visual imagination, there are sometimes brilliant flashes of sensuous perception, but ultimately the poetry seems tenuous,
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impressionistic, incomplete. About two years ago, I wrote to Jean asking for a copy of her first collection of poems for the purpose of a programme. I was presenting, and she sent me one inscribed with the words: "All this existed, had life and meaning, once.' That precisely phrased comment suggests to me that without wanting to disown her early work, she recognises that it belonged to a self she has outgrown. Certainly, one could hardly have anticipated from it the astonishing explosion of creative power in her work since 1983. It is only rarely in her first volumes that the poetry goes beyond the shimmering surface of sense-impressions to a fuller vision. Perhaps the most interesting poem of that period is "The Inner Courtyard', where the visual imagination is at the service of a larger meaning. Images of emptiness and desolation build up a sense of a tradition disintegrating, a way of life falling to pieces.
But it was in the crucible of July 1983 that Jean Arasanayagam's poetry was completely transmuted. Like many other women of her class, she found herself undergoing the hitherto inconceivable as violence overwhelmed her and her family, and she was compelled to share the terror and anguish of a community to whose fate she was bound not by birth but by marriage. For many of us, her poems in Apocalypse '83 - some of them written in refugee camps - came as the voice of our collective sense of horror and tragedy. In some of the poems in this volume, for instance in "Flamboyants in July', the visual imagination is as vivid as it ever was in Jean's poetry, but no longer indulging in the luxury of sensation, scarred instead by the searing images of blood and death:
All over the city
over the roofs the great branches arch with flame how bright the colour of blood scarlet pools of fallen flowers lying beneath the trees

and a skeletal branch left bearing a crown of thorns
Yet, if the strength of the best poems in Apocalyse '83 comes out of the naked immediate response to catastrophe, the very spontaneity of the poetry carries with its own dangers. Poetry, even when written out of genuine passion, anger or lamentation, can acquire force and conviction only through the discipline of language, rhythm, form. Jean Arasanayagam shares the conception of poetry that D. H. Lawrence had: she seems to leave it to her emotion in the act of creation to find its own form rather than shape it by deliberate critical labour. It is a mode of poetic composition (Dionysian rather than Apollonian) that is alien to my own temperament, and the fact that I yet respond to the best of Jean's poems is evidence that in them the strength of the experience has in fact found its own appropriate form.
In any case, for Jean Arasanayagam to grow as a poet, she had to progress beyond the simple human reaction of shock and horror, of compassionate identification with the victims of 1983. To have articulated that at the time was a necessary emotional catharsis for her and for us, and in an act of atonement for our collective guilt. But her poetic development required a growth into a deeper insight into the events. That process is begun in the poem * 1958....71...81.....83. It not only sets 1983 in its place in the recurrent and intensifying violence of our society; it's also the expression of a striving towards self-understanding and self-criticism, in which the poet comes face to face with her own former incomprehension:
It's all happened before and will happen again and we the onlookers
but now I'm in it
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at last history has meaning when you're the victim when you're the defeated the bridges bombed and you can't cross over.
At last history has meaning'. That line could have served as an epigraph for her next collection: A Colonial Inheritance and Other Poems, which contains, to my mind, the most impressive body of work she has yet given us. The poet who began as a young woman with splintered fragments of sensation has here attained historical imagination and insight. The crisis of 1983 and after has clearly been for her also a personal crisis which has compelled her to examine anew herself, her identity and her place in relation to the past and present of Sri Lankan history. The result is that the poetry gains greatly in scope and depth. And, as often in poetry, a maturer vision is accompanied by the poet's greater control over her instrument. The language in this volume glows with warmth and vigour; the rhythms flow with compelling force; and the best poems have a charged economy of utterance.
In this volume, the poet explores her dual identities - the Jean Solomons she was and the Jean Arasanayagam she became. Recollections of her childhood upbringing take her back to the colonial past:
on the whatnot with its curlicues were portraits of uncles in cream tussore and Edwardian collars, aunts in Brussels lace, pin tucks, bouquets of arum lilies, trailing ferns of maidenhair.
And beyond her lifetime lies that of her ancestors - the conquerors who began that history. It's a history she cannot entirely slough off because she is bound to it indissolubly by birth and family, by the very texture of her skin, her face, the curve of lip or lid; yet the life of the poetry comes from the tension between the claims of lineage and the poet's
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consciousness of the violence and plunder on which that culture was built. The destruction and slaughter she has known in the present find their antecedents in the pillage and murderousness of the past:
What did they leave behind in peaceful parks and gardens statues of warring generals astride monstrous bronze horses rearing their brutal hooves high upon a pedestal
a gun upraised. In the garden of the museum a cannon rests. Within glass cases artefacts of time. Minted coins abraded silver larins, golden guilders, stuivers, ancient swords stained with rust and blood. Firearms antique, and in my face - a semblance.
The other face of the volume is in the poems in which Jean unravels the thread of her relationships with the family and the Tamil culture to which she linked herself by marriage. These poems maintain a complexity of judgement and a subtly poised ambivalence of feeling. She is able to use with the inwardness of sympathy the language of Hindu belief and ritual, while rebelling against the clannishness, the authoritarianism, the attachment to property, of a conservative society. It is striking that in these poems she speaks without reticence of intimate family conflicts, as if the larger crisis she has lived through has released her of any such inhibitions. And she can speak with the dignity and price of one who has passed through the fire and has therefore earned the right not to be regarded as alien. This rich and delicately fused amalgam of emotions has gone into the making of what is, for me, her finest poem, "Lines to a mother-in-law'. The poem is at one and the same time a self-assertion against exclusion and ostracism, and on the other hand a transcendence of
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bitterness and resentment through compassion achieved as the fruit of suffering. It deserves not to be mutilated in quotation:
Do we finally forgive each other? Time is passing and you're growing blind they tell me, dead cataracts fill your eyes, your memory is confused you summon ghosts from the past, it will be late, hurry you must remember my face, don't confuse it with that of any stranger who came knocking at your gate. I have become part of your life even as an impositor taken the family name and lived with it through my own passage as it passed through an alien heritage of changing climates changing seasons. You must remember before it's too late the colour of my eyes, the shape of my limbs time is passing it's growing darker my sight is failing too. Soon we will no longer recognize each other we're both walking in the same direction both with halting gait stepping towards a certain destination, death. You had your rituals and 1 mine fire was your natural element the fire of the sacred yaham the fire of the burning pyre I too have passed through fires for your son ’s sake, the absolution of Sati's flames.
Regi Siriwardena is an eminent writer, translator, literary Critic. He is also the editor of Nethra, a journal published by the ICES. This Paper first appeared in An Anthology of Contemporary Sri Lankan Poetry in English. Edited by Rajiva Wijesinha.
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Taken from Breaking Bounds: Essays on Sri Lankan MVriting in English
Rajiva Wijesinha
The suffering that the Tamils and their families experienced however, not only in the riots of July 1983 but also in the run-up to that event with its fostering of prejudice and resentment, changed things radically. An anguished awareness of the transformation of the national landscape was boldly and prophetically expressed from the beginning of 1983 in poems such as 'Nallur', which is a cry about death and destruction that is paradoxically full of pulsating life. This I would suggest springs from the intense selfidentification of the poet with the scene described; and underpinning this is the assured use of locations and images that belong specifically to this context.
the leeching sun has drunk its blood and bloated swells among the piling clouds. mingling with fragrance from the frothy toddy
pots swinging like lolling heads... Thirtham now no longer nectar of the gods brims over but is bitter, bitter. the gods are blinded
by the rain of bullets,
six faced Arumugam
all twelve eyes
close in darkness
(Emphasis added)
The immediacy with which Arasanayagam conveys her message, developed even more forcefully in "Remembering
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Nallur- 1984”, springs, I would suggest then, from her tota! immersion, through the compulsions of social and political reality, in the idiom of a particular time and place. At the same time, I would be very wary of describing her extravagantly unorthodox syntax as distinctively Sri Lankan, as opposed to the vocabulary and the cultural background. The piling on of images she employs does not seem to me to be necessarily alien from standard English and, as in the case of say Raja Rao, as indicated above, I would take issue with those who discern some sort of specifically oriental tendency in such sentence structures. Faulkner after all does the same sort of thing, and Joyce, and insofar as one can judge from translations, Marquez too.
For one must, I think, distinguish between the stretching of syntax to its limits and the deliberate adoption of fundamentally different forms, as, say, Tutuola uses or Naipaul in his presentation of dialect. In asserting the existence of different Englishes we should take care not to assert as a norm what writers themselves would describe as a distinctive specialized style they use to emphasize a personal vision. That I would suspect is Rao's purpose in his evocative meanderings; I can State with certainty that Arasanayagam is not through her strained syntax attempting to reproduce standard Sri Lankan speech patterns, but is on the contrary seeking to express heightened emotions, an intensity of emotion if you like, that is peculiarly hers.
Having said that, I should also mention that there is some significance in the desire and the confidence to experiment in such a fashion, which would not have occurred earlier except in the non-natural context of the bail a rhythms. Together with the willingness to use in easy admixture words and images that are specifically local this to my mind indicates that the language has at last come of age in Sri Lanka.
Albeit its superscription is taken from the Book of Isaiah, the first few stanzas of Remembering Nallur-1984 are replete with instances that clearly make the point.
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Discarded the threaded garlands of flowers streaming down the braids of young girls in their peacock silks, discarded too, the garlands of the gods, tarnished the brass trays with their camphor tulsi, flowers and fruit... the shrivelled mango leaves blow into ash the conch blast echoes over the veedhi of Nallur... where have they now vanished the Bakhthi singers in their trance bodies bent backwards leaning against wind, borne by its surge across the empty plain singing the thevarams
Such concerns, expressed vigorously without selfconsciousness, contrast clearly with the formalities of an earlier period and as such seem to me despite difficulties with regard to the vocabulary to communicate much more forcibly.
Rajiva Wijesinha is a Professor of Languages, Department of Languages, University of Sabaragamuwa, Sri Lanka.
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Comments on Trial By Terror
Norman Simms
To those of us in New Zealand who view Sri Lanka only through the lens of the television news cameras as they swept over scenes of violence and destruction during the last few years and whose awareness of the customs and people of that distant land is tinged by the romantic associations of exotic place-names such as Ceylon, Kandy, and Trincomalee-for us the poetry of Jean Arasanayagam comes with the kind of shock that only great poetry can give. This is the shock of insight and compassion. In a world where we tend to be dulled by the nightly electronic images of terrorism and war, whether these are factual reports of real lands and real people or only the refracted nightmares of video and film, the poems in Trial by Terror awaken dormant emotions and generate new paths of thought, connecting our own personal and cultural experiences with those of people, of whom we have only faint glimmerings. Hers are not polemical verses, however, shrill in the cacophony of ideological complaint, no matter how legitimate; neither are they mere satiric diatribes, casting blame and scratching out, with squeals of horror, paradigms of paradises lost. They are works of immense self-control and mastery of the poet's craft, with a surface that is clear, steady, and awesome, redolent with powers from deep inside their texture.
If Wordsworth wanted poetry to be emotions recollected in tranquility, the poet in a land where civil war prevails is denied this luxury. For where otherwise civilized communities find themselves lurching into acts of madness as the earthquake of modernization turns the firm basis of their beliefs into a seething mystery beneath them, only the outsider, though no less a potential victim, can find even a precarious ledge to crawl onto. Arasanayagam is such an outsider: a woman of Burgher origins who is married to a
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Tamil husband, hence at once historically and only superficially outside yet emotionally and physically within the space of danger. She has eyes and can see, ears and can hear, a heart and can feel and above all, she has the poet's imagination and can, (even as the madness impinges on her own life and that of those she loves most dearly), transform the suffering of Sri Lanka into a poetry which gives to her, homeland-to Tamil and Sinhalese, to Buddhist and Hindu alike-the very dignity that the violence denies.
The poems in Trial by Terror were begun in the dark days of 1983. They record, with seemingly objective detail, the scenes of terrorism, conflict. and degradation that began to tear apart the life of Sri Lanka. The poems view from within the minds of refugees, the fear and agony of confinement, displacement, loss of dignity and hope. The craft of the poet is to make of the suffering-the concrete sensory experience of the bereaved and the victims, the turmoil of hope and despair in their minds, the voices of their own attempts to articulate the pains-something more and other than mere pathos and complaint.
If the poems are an enraged cry of frustration in the face of the irrational and unwarranted violence Sri Lanka has brought on itself and suffered through the conscious and unconscious consequences of colonialists, if the cry is forced inward and emerges with the added power of understatement, the frustration is transformed into hope that is built into the very poetic enterprise itself, as it metamorphoses suffering into meaning.
That muting of the outraged, half-inarticulate cry, that transformation into hope, that metamorphosis of agony into significance occurs through the medium of poetry, its ability to speak in figurative language, to draw analogies beyond the normative range of logic, to perceive new sense in old mythologies. Hence, for example, a quiet, brief poem such as "If the Gun Speaks."
If the gun speaks There will always be silence
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The silence of fear if the gun speaks through blood and bullets
Scarlet hibiscus Like gouts of blood Stud the image of Ganesh
Here simple repetition of words and phrases and the inevitability of the conditional sentence lead the contrast between silence and speech to burst forth in a natural image; (the flower) that is at the same time and predominantly the image of divine life (the god Ganesh), yet the quietness of the texture is broken by the incongruity of the word gouts and the force of the verb stud; so that as we read the poem, we are forced to reevaluate words, images, concepts, and frames of reference again: in the suffering of the poet's subject, nothing is as it was before, nothing can be taken on trust, at face value, on the basis of traditional understanding. In many of her earlier poems Arasanay agam had explored the qualities of life as the wife in a mixed marriage, the woman who feels an outsider in her own country while nevertheless passionately committed to its culture and life. There, in poems known to readers of Sri Lankan poetry in general Commonwealth anthologies, her-measured voice gave insight into the private fate of a small segment of the population of the island nation. Here; like Ann Ranasinghe, a Jewish-German poet of Sri Lanka, who also writes out of the profundity of compassion and sympathy for the plight of all humanity represented by the suffering of Sri Lanka's strifetorn crimmunities, Arasanayagam reaches out from the pain of the involvement to the creativity of the poetic act, not only giving voice to the silences and the blind cries of the refugees and other victims but also discovering the essential humanity in the moments of supreme inhumanity, thus pointing toward hope, reconciliation, and renewal.
Norman Simms is a Professor of English, Writer, Critic. Department of English, Waikato University, Hamilton, N.Z.
This critique appeared in World Literature Today. A Literary Quarterly published by The University of Oklahoma, U.S.A
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'Someone Smashed in the door and gave me my freedom': The Writings of Jean Arasanayagam
Anders Sjöbohm
Perhaps Jean Arasanayagam would have remained a strictly disciplined word-painter and observer if external events had not interfered and disturbed the balance in her life and thus also her aesthetics. Being married to a Tamil grew increasingly dangerous in a society where the two major communities of her country, the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority, were becoming more and more antagonistic. In July 1983 this antagonism culminated in bloody riots. Among the more than ninety thousand Tamils who had to flee were Jean Arasanayagam, her husband and their two daughters. At that time they lived in Kandy in central Sri Lanka, and Jean Arasanayagam lectured in English in a teacher's college in the neighboring university town of Peradeniya.
These terrible experiences were a decisive turning-point for Jean Arasanayagam as a writer. She wrote a collection of poems, Apocalypse '83 (1984); a partially overlapping collection, Trial by Terror (1987), was published in New Zealand. In these, hardly a word is said about either Sinhalese or Tamils or about aggression or racism on the part of either. Neither, on the other hand, do they deal with religious conflicts or economic crisis. And far from being a weakness in the collection, this constitutes strength. The subject matter of the collections becomes unlimited and universal.
Jean Arasanayagam's poems concentrate on the essence of carnage hatred, on the impenetrability of pure evil to understanding. In the mob there is no room for mercy nor feelings of solidarity. With hard rhythms and hectic invocations, Jean Arasanayagam rivets on a depiction of pure hell. The fate of human beings, the suffering of the anonymous and innocent, is made sharp in a few lines:
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In the month of July
a man fled from his pursuers
he climbed a tree
the mob aimed stones at him until they got him down probably fell off, his grasp loosened slippery with blood, his body already battered and then they trampled him to death.
In one sense the reader still recognizes the problem complex from The Cry of the Kite and elsewhere. Time is a destroyer, human societies are fragile and unstable, nature regains that which it has lost. In spite of the fact that Jean Arasanayagam herself is a victim, she is also a watcher and a questioner, a painter with an eye for the details of landscape.
Changes, however, are portrayed as much more violent and brutal in Apocalypse '83 and Trial by Terror. Rather than temples slowly crumbling, there are plundered, burning houses. Rather than the sorrow and bitterness and estrangement and decay, there is the horror of those who have been packed together in school corridors and classrooms. The pyres, once on the shores of the Jaffna peninsula, are now burning in the middle of the streets and pavements in Kandy.
Chaos, humiliation, horror, loss of safety and a sense of home, loss of identity itself. . . But this naked, personal zero point also means a paradoxical sense of freedom: "Someone smashed in the door/ And gave me my freedom I To walk out into the world / Free, free from the prison of myself Jean Arasanayagam can no longer be just an observer, she has had to share the conditions of the pursued and defeated:
It's all happened before and will happen again And we the onlookers.
But now I'm in it
It's happened to me At last history has meaning
In an interview Jean Arasanayagam has said: "I was alien to my husband's family. I was alien in society because I was
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married to a Tamil. I was made to feel I didn't belong. I had to answer a lot of questions. I became my own interrogator.
In Apocalypse '83 one cannot help noticing that Jean Arasanayagam shapes death with overtones of a sacrifice, a rite with bludgeons and axes, a cult ceremony in a spirit of pure evil. In A Colonial Inheritance death is present on every page. The collection ends with a long and powerful poem, "Remembering Nallur 1984, the culmination of a series of poems and pieces of prose Jean Arasanayagam has dedicated to the greatest religious festival in Jaffna.
The Nallur festival is consecrated to the Hindu war god. Skanda, son of Shiva, one of the highest divinities. In Jean Arasanayagam's poem, the festival partly has a new significance. The giant wheeled chariot with idols, drawn on enormous ropes by innumerable men stripped to the waist, has become the chariot of a death cult. The devoted god seekers, the repentants who roll around in the sands, oblivious of the crowds, are no longer red-stained by the earth of Jaffna but by bullet wounds. The god seekers no longer threw themselves in front of the chariot in moments of ecstasy, but are run over as victims. Death represents the truth of the time: the brutal violence, our sacrifices, the piles of dead bodies; those who have been sacrificed:
They still come, in violent surge of waves in oceans of re-incarnate birth, insistent, pulled by the moon's fatal tides that draw them compulsive to the sands for their ritual sacrifice, prostrate themselves closer to the beating heart of earth now trod upon by tramp of soldier's marching boots.
others still come, drawing with their bodies' ropes the chariot that bears their own flower strewn bier
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as one by one they fall, one by one swept over by the waves of frothing blood. . .
In Jean Arasanayagam's writing, religious symbolism is a central theme. In her early books the supernatural is a burning question; in The Cry of the Kite, the writer tells how her experience of the landscape made her 'search through sea, through temple, the enigmatic smile of the stone goddess by the freshwater spring - to see through the flame which burnt in the little shrine by the sea, into the eye of Shiva. Shiva is the most terrifying of all the Hindu gods, the destroyer of that which is good as well as that which is evil, who allows new forms and creations to germinate. These are destructive forces, the presence of which Jean Arasanayagam must have felt all her life, both good and evil.
In Apocalypse '83 and Trial by Terror, Christian symbolism is also present. The victims share the agony of Christ, a Gethsemane and a Golgotha at the same time: 'And the hammering of nails echo through / The night-forests of trees cut down.' −
Sometimes it seems as if Jean Arasanayagam is trying to say that the old gods are gone and with them the peaceful god seekers. In Trial by Terror, a soldier takes the gods away, their hands bound, to prison camps in the South - "at last perhaps they know what it is to be human. There is new religion, with a temple gopuram built of "bones and skulls'. It is a dark conception of the world we meet through Jean Arasanayagam. Life budding from death - her own identity from the bloody birth of colonialism, trees from dead buried bodies, worms from the graves - is cold comfort. But the fact that Jean Arasanayagam keeps writing (rather than becoming silent) shows that she is all but resigned. For many of us, her poems in Apocalypse '83 came as the voice of our collective sense of horror and tragedy wrote Sri Lankan critic Reggie Siriwardene.
To conclude, it is worth quoting a section from "Narcissus’, an unusual poem printed on its own in 1986. In 'Narcissus' Jean Arasanayagam gives us the classical myth with her own interpretation. She does not let Narcissus drown
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after he falls in love with himself, seeking the image in the water. In her poem, all nature is Narcissus' glassy pool', a petrified picture. Until:
... now the mirror shows a myriad faces and through their eyes appear a thousand others to tantalise and set ablaze the frozen fire of a silver vein. Time reveals to a heart estranged friends that are ghosts and lovers strangers. Suddenly the pool grows black the eyes that watch, close blind in darkness and the mirror cracks. We see a mirror cracking, a world crowding in upon our minds with painful knowledge, blindness and darkness. “I stand and call an unknown dark / to wrap me in its densest shroud'; Jean Arasanayagam writes in a poem in Out of Our Prisons We Emerge. Life and creation have to be paid for by the proximity of pain and death.
This article by the Swedish critic Anders Sjöbohm was translated from the Swedish by Linda Schenck and Shelley Wright.
Anders Sjöbohm is a widely acclaimed Swedish Literary Critic and writer. He is also a Librarian.
This article first appeared in Wasafirino. 13, Spring 1991. This critique has also appeared in World Literature Today, a Literary Ouarterly published by the University of Oklahoma, USA and in War Losen, a Swedish Journal.
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NALLUR 1982
It's there,
Beneath the fallen fronds dry crackling Pile of broken twigs, abandoned wells of brackish Water lonely dunes
It's there The shadows of long bodies shrunk in death The leeching sun has drunk their blood and Bloated swells among the piling clouds
It's there
Death Smell it in the air Its odour rank with sun and thickening blood Mingling with fragrance from the frothy toddy Pots swinging like lolling heads from Blackened gibbets,
It's there,
Amid the clangour of The temple bells, the clapping hands, the Brassy clash of cymbals,
The zing of bullets Cries of death Drowned in the roar Of voices calling Skanda By his thousand names Muruga, Kartikkeya Arumuga.......... "We pray, we cry, we clamour. Oh Sri Kumaran, be not like the god Who does not hear deaf Sandesveran.
Thirtham now no longer nectar of the gods Brims over but is bitter, bitter, And at the entrance to Nallur The silent guns are trained Upon a faceless terror.
20

Outside,
The landscape changes The temples by the shore are smoking Ruins charred stone blackened, On empty roads are strewn The debris of warfare, Stained discarded dressings Burnt out abandoned vehicles A trail of blood Soon mopped up by the thirsty sun.
Turned away from bloody skirmishes Of humankind, the gods are blinded By the rain of bullets, Six faced Arumugan
All twelve eyes
Closed in darkness.
The land is empty now The pitted limestone Invaded by the sea Drowns vanishes.
Waves of rust swell and billow Beating into hollow caves and burial urns Filled with the ash of bodies Cremated by the fire of bullets.
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AHIMSA SUTRA
Do not kill Practise ahimsa Do not kill Leave off hinsawa Learn loving kindness Do not kill Relinquish hatred Do not kill Practise not envy Jealousy, lust for murder Do not kill, do not burn Do not harm, do not destroy.
There was no time left for the Obsequies of death, no time left At all for the sacred rituals, no time For penance either, walking on The smouldering embers of the trench.
You expiate your sins In fire's absolution Your body now the pyre That burns in public streets Consumed in flames The gutters now your burial urn Scattered in wind your ashes.
Kovils went up in smoke The ther of sandalwood The cross, the churches all in flames Great fires raged But the conflagration of hatred was much greater. Close to a burnt out house A new house rises boulders And sand and brick pile up.
22

People walk past ruins of splintered glass And blackened shells
With averted faces Men bend and lift to build This new structure, carry the burden Of the brick and stone for shelter These hands build while those Of others broke so many walls Hurled bombs and wielded rods and axes.
All that we, now displaced, must learn Is to live again
And to every enemy Show forgiveness.
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FEAR
Fear chokes the throat Clogs the tongue Fear of the mob Fear of the night Fear of the sunlight Fear of the day Which reveals the foe, Fear makes the body Tremble shivering with ague And burn, burn, burn With fever, the stunned eyeballs Crowded with images of death Turn blind as stone, Fear in slumber fear in dream Fear as we talk Or walk along a street Fear of the watchers as they wait And stare in our direction, Fear in each look, each stance Fear of the moment to begin Fear as they come to kill us Fear as we flee, Can my ghost still have substance As we linger here When there's no longer flesh Left to cringe?
24

1958 ....... 71 ....... '77....... '81 ....... '83
it's been a long journey Still not over So many landmarks Each a tombstone History in each monument Of the slaughtered I can name the years, I travelled through them. Once, it was no concern of mine I had my own identity Safe from marauders I watched from afar The burning had not reached me.
The next time the guns sounded Their echoes came from cities, villages And jungles far away Men slept with guns by their side The wounded crawled Blinded and maimed, Bodies drifted down river As coconuts, driftwood and decomposing Corpses in the flood, borne like flotsam In the current
Or lay piled on streets And public market places Rotting spoiled vegetables.
It happened again and yet again The tedious repetition Of violence spilt blood smashed glass Walls crumbling like crushed origami Flames bursting
Smoke billowing
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Loot filched from the "enemy" All day the sirens screamed Fire engines racing through the burning Cities, gunfire popping over the hills.
History repeats itself Or so I'm told Is it only in deeds of violence? Battlefields strewn with The nameless dead Each grave a file Misplaced, of lost identities History repeats itself So the act has continuity.
Arson, murder, rape, looting, Battering clubbing hacking burning Count and recount the numerous ways On the blood splattered abacus Keep count although your fingers Touch death, reveal the w Statistics before we all forget.
It's all happened before and will happen again And we the onlookers
But now I'm in it
It's happened to me, At last history has meaning When you're the victim When you're the defeated The bridges bombed And you can't cross over.
26

PERSONAE
Have you ever killed, tell me? Or burnt or slashed? Does the bullet speed away from you Like a bird takes wing to nest Within a body warm with blood?
Have you ever killed, tell me? How sharp the blade must be How firm, how hard the impact of its Fall from your brute hand, Does it chop flesh and bone at once Slice through the throbbing organ Dismembered carcass Leaping on the block.
Have you ever killed, tell me? Or burnt or smashed or axed Hated a stranger one like you Turned his face into a searing mask And watched his eyeball Like a whirling comet Drowning in sockets of blood?
Have you ever been silent tell me? When words you must speak out Choke you and clog your throat To drink the bitter gall and vomit Till your guts twist and writhe With the poison of guilt and hate.
Have you ever turned away from those Tell me, who once were friends Avert your gaze from ruined homes And piled up bodies licked by flames
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Or have you gazed and gazed With eyes of lust upon the dead The dying and the burning.
Have you ever shut the door, tell me? On a man woman or child Not of your race or creed seeking asylum Fleeing from mobs and hordes Of murderous men Brandishing the out-thrust torches, axes, Or rods, clubs, knouts and chains?
Have you ever known, tell me? Once, walked with, spoken, rubbed shoulders With friends, wept over the respected dead Upon the biers borne by mourners, Now we meet and pass each other by How strange that we should Stare or look away Never even remembering that We were friends
Careful to keep on masks of disguise
Beneath which lies the naked Countenance of hate.
28

INNOCENT VICTIM - TRINCOMALEE
Yesterday the rice I ate Was cooked by my mother Today the food I eat Is that of strangers.
Tomorrow?
Pity is the salt that flavours my food The pity of strangers That now become my kin.
I sleep on a mat
Among others
All who are strangers
When I wake up,
I do not see Either my father, my mother or my sister.
We ran into the jungle In fear, even the wild elephant Or hooded reptile Did not make me so afraid
Until They came, strangers.
My parents had gone to the temple Why didn't the gods protect them?
My sister four years old Stood idly by the roadside Waiting for their return.
When they came, strangers.
I was afraid
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I ran into the forest God Kandaswamy protected me
My mouth, my throat were dry. My tongue parched. We had no food No water, no thought of sleep We walked. Through thorns, we walked. Hiding our shadows. Darkness hid our flesh We walked. And walked. No voices. An elephant Trumpeted. A peacock cried. Muruga Protect Me. I have entered your sanctuary but I Have not yet broken a coconut as offering This I will do
When I return.
When they came strangers, Our house went up in flames Thrown in like faggots, my parents
Blazed crackling, they burnt Like two lizards in the fire My sister too, she, tiny
Chameleon turned first green, then
Livid red Brands they bore
Swords. shining blades
Soon they will forget Me and all the others And the night My house went up in flames.
Together with My sister, father. mother. And will they come again?
Strangers?
30

EYE WITNESS - NAWAL.APITYA
A young boy speaks of carnage Eyewitness to death From three streets he says They converged upon this township They were without mercy in their Killings, hacked men as they ran From their burning buildings Flung into the fire gashed With knives, great axe blades Flashed, clubs, poles and iron rods Struck them down; Among the victims A young man three months married, Father and sons.
It began at noon And ended somewhere at midnight These are now the cities of the dead, How can men walk through bloodstained streets Breathing the smoke that choked Their dying breath and feel Strength in their loins Sunlight on their skins Flinging their weapons aside See, they now return to hold their Children, fond le them, embrace Their women, hold in their hands A plate of rice, bend their heads And offer flowers at the temple.
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IN THE MONTH OF JULY
Childhood is far away Beneath a tree Playing with pebbles Skilfully tossing them from Back of hand
To palm Requiring a certain skill and . Magical ritualistic incantations.
As one grows older The pebbles grow too Into great stones and Rocks hurled with violence Smashed skulls spilled brains Splattering the pavements.
In the month of July A man fled from his pursuers He climbed a tree The mob aimed stones at him Until they got him down Probably fell off his grasp loosene Slippery with blood, his body already battered And then they trampled him to death
32

THE HOLOCAUST
Every word must be wrung out of The throat of the poet Strand by strand each vocal chord Must sound strong their timbre To denounce this monstrous evil They're razing the cities to the ground And, digging trenches for the dead The pits of hell yawn wide open And the conflagration mounts higher Higher for the daemonic feast Of barbequed flesh. Screams are stifled in the shootin Flames crackling With burning bodies Writhing in the marvellous Excitation of death
They're human
Our avengers,
We're not.
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DEATH OF THE PRISONERS
It is not all over yet
Still not blunted
With so many deaths The sharpened knives and axes Crowbars rods
Recent bloodstains fresh From necklaces of blood Studded with disc of ivory bone To which adhere flesh hair and skin. Barred doors and locks and iron bars Fall apart like paper walls Before the onslaught of the ravening mob There remain, three or four survivors Three priests and certain sundry ordinary men Eyewitness to the horror of their murder Four hundred or so prisoners and their gaolers Assailed each cell Each man alone defenceless Clubbed to death pierced with Sharpened crowbars Hacked and chopped their flesh
The eyes of that prisoner Stabbed with pointed steel As he knelt before his murderers Taunted with a dream What was his wish When as a common criminal Condemned to death? That his eyes be given to a child To see the freedom of his race The way he chose--for him there was No other path but terror, murder, violence His vision now screams to the world
34

That has to see What he no longer lives to see Being both blind and dead Now within each cell The flesh of guilt Transubstantiates to innocence Our hands must hold the cup Eat of the bread--Christ's broken body Drink of the wine--Christ's shed blood To purge and cleanse us of our sin
How many others too Must make the sacrifice'? Repentance never comes The charred Cross falls and crumbles Into ash The soldiers fling their dice and gamble Bartering Christ's garments at its foot The thunder that we hear heralds a storm The murderous thunder of the rabble Mounting on the roadways of the world, Their cries rising in the raucous revelry of death.
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PRISONS
We are now in prisons In the open streets of the world Prisons Locked within our fears And dangers V The warders range freely Among us
We are surrounded The keys to our cells Are swords and iron rods And more than that The steel of hatred and suspicion In the eyes of the crowd Transfix us as we press Against invisible walls Peer through bars.
We can only survive If we show we don't exist Neither word nor look Must reveal our identity We must forget all that we know Or learned of love Either of men or country In our personal histories.
A man lifts both hands And in obeisance bows his head Before the temple of the Dalada But a while ago He uttered words Of hatred against his neighbour But then he is another man And of another race
36

POLITICAL PRISONER For Steve Bikko and others
In a prison cell
He lies dead When did it happen We were all asleep. It was somewhere towards dawn We did not hear His silent scream Or grating whimper He died alone
Who mourned Was it a person or a nation? In a prison cell he died His breath twisting round the bars No one sat by him Although a multitude stood outside. In a prison cell He died we read it The next morning
In the papers
In cold dead print. Perhaps you passed it by. He died alone, quite alone In his prison cell Four walls a roof Locked doors and little else.
You'd be in there too But you wear masks you're clever At disguise you'd rather not In order to be safe, speak out your Thoughts aloud, You don't want bullets passing Through your ribs to burst your lungs,
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Let others spill their blood and wound their flesh Your lips in silence clamp down tight.
Guns continue to sputter Bombs go off. If you step from the forest Onto the road in pools of blood You’ll slither But look the hangman's noose Drops lower it's a ring of rope That slowly tightens round your neck Snaps the bone
Watch it come
Swinging close Do you recognize the face? Cry out in recognition? He is one of yours Is he the friend And you the foe?
38

A SET OF PHOTOGRAPHS
Among others shown to me Of Birthday parties, enormous cakes Heart-shaped iced with green and white and rose, Red candles. illumination for the living Not for the dead And balloons floating, ethereal fruit Streamers and orchid blooms, little girls In frills and flounces, shoes and socks and Happy faces hugging Teddy bears and dolls,
But she must blow the candles out And in the darkness of those years So quickly lost we hear new echoes Pounce behind their laughter.
Turn over the page,
A wedding in Paris, The banquet went on for hours and hours So many covers lifted from those silver platters Toasts and speeches, Champagne corks plopped. Vin rouge vin blanc flowed sparkling in cut Glass decanters, on the white-spread table Platters of roast duck, terrines of pork and ham Pate-de-fois gras, truffles, bon-bons, gateaux, Cheeses, coloured fondant, fruits and shimmering ices Turn over another page, A room in a house in London Mother and daughter wrapped in furs Among the glittering candelabras Living in a sugar-coated city Domes and streets drenched
In falls of snow
And somewhere else Flowers, flowers, flowers red and white And pink and purple, walking among the cobbles
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Of the quartier Latin in the tranquil shadows Of Sacre Coeur, At Notre Dame did you see the grimace of death On the faces of the caryatids and gargoyles Sculpted on columned pilasters? Walking in the sunlight on white pavements The abbatoirs are hidden.
Another set of photographs Unframed, a whispered secret, Massacre in a prison, Sheet after sheet Sliding into my hands, I touch each print My hands are thick with blood I look into a morgue A slaughter house Extermination chamber, Picture after picture Of murdered men in prison cells Some caught unaware. Asleep on bunks and pallets.
Who were the guilty? The murderers or the murdered? They're all silent. Who? The dead or the guardians of the law The jailors or the jailed? No one's left to protest Their innocence, They're silenced once and for all. Who? The so called criminals?
No questions. No one questions. No one's left to answer. Only the rattle of keys,
40

Scrunch of bone and cries of death No one heard the pleas for mercy Stifled in one breath.
We're all waiting on the streets outside While the slaughter still continues, Will they wipe the stains inside The cells, scrape off the flesh and bone And scalps, lower the coffins Into secret graves.
The cells are empty now All those whose hands dealt death Have found reprieve, the innocent Too have found their peace, The floors, cleaned out, the walls white washed, Concealed the deadly haemorrhage of death.
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NOW WE ARE STRANGERS
It's final now the parting It's over, this obsessive wandering In a landscape rank with foliage The earth repels the root, the bitter soil Rejects the seed, canopies of leaf Lift parting their branches in a snarl To bare the mud and slime coiling With reek and stench of corpses Hacked or raped or burned
Why love that which can only Wound, the heart festering Bleeds and suppurates. Monolith stone Hidden cave Ancient murals Despoiled with blood Displaced our histories Our necks festooned with Tattered documents Of raped identities Our public shame.
We have no country now no Land, nowhere to be what Once we were, you made us turn Away with hate and fear Placed between us walls Edged with jagged glass splintered And sharp, erected barriers.
Now we are strangers Either we stay awake dark nights sleepless Throbbing with fugitive dreams Locked within a cell
42

Wait for the release of death Or embark upon a ship That takes us routeless Without maps
To fare forth On a voyage without end.
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AT THE GATE STANDS A MOB ...... JULY 1983
At the gate stands a mob Wielding swords like Samurai Waiting to give battle to a Single man defenceless Great stones and bricks Rods and poles They carry in their hands To wound and bash his head Axes to hack his limbs And bombs to burn his house.
With folded arms men and women Of the village stood Their faces blank, impassive Waiting for the blood sport to begin.
The house next door
Goes up in flames
Through the garden
The throngs surge in To watch the pyrotechnics On display, violence thrills, It's not their house but that of aliens, Mothers lift babies high Over the flowering shoe-flower hedge Others rush in leading children by the hand The old men watch, silence their only comment, The young stand in the mob "What do you say"? One man laughing asks "Shall we throw a bucket of water. Put out the flames?" There's no answer, they turn away The roof crackles sharply and caves in The people have all fled
44

The wind blows smoke in my direction too I am in the thick of the mobs It is time for me to flee.
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MAN AT THE GATE
Man at the gate There's no time to introduce Ourselves before we start Our dialogue. You hold onto bars And call the others, why the crowd? Why don't you face me alone I'm unarmed, you're not, You've got beside your poles and axes Hatred burning through your eyes, Your words scorch me searing The edges of my life, why do you hate Us? We've never met before, Seen each other on the road, In the market place or in a bus perhaps But never once exchanged a word Do you think it's easy to snuff out a life With just one blow'? You're not killing Vermin, stamping on a crawling squirming worm, It's me. Look, eyes, limbs, mind, heart Bearing the same habiliments as you. However, for this moment You're my tribunal I must plead my cause Before you, my hands are empty Though we are at daggers drawn What do I think of when I face You, the others don't exist They're a murderous crowd with masks But it's yourself that I contend with It's face I won't forget You'll continue to haunt me As I flee through nights of hell As you compel me to walk out Of my home and flee seeking refuge
46

In some hole among others who like me Are fugitives, You'll be the assailant in all my nightmares Blocking the exits to escape Lurching towards me with great Stones in your hands, poles, axes upraised Blind hatred in your face.
You're the man of the moment Leader of the mob The hero -- this is your only chance To prove so many things to the world And to yourself - you're given all The freedom to burn and murder Threaten, fling burning brands, hurl bombs Why don't you stop to think That for you there'll never Be a monument This is your only, the only Glorious moment To be acknowledged As the greatest, strongest, bravest Spokesman of the cowards who live Behind their walls and screens"?
Watch me, licking my wounds Cringing in the dust While behind their doors and windows Shuttered, locked, the neighbours Stand and stare quaking in fear and terror Pretending I'm not there.
Man at my gate You've still a long, long way to go.
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GUTTED
Gutted houses
Gutted lives
Charred wood
Charred flesh
Shattered brick
Shattered glass Hammer blows of fists
Iron rods
Breaking walls
Breaking doors
Clubs, poles Pulped flesh smoke choked breath Slashed limbs, stab wounds, human Torches blazing in the streets Eyes wild frenzied of the mob brutal Cries blood curdling screams human Bloodhounds scenting alien blood Marauding gangs stalking the innocent,
Blood wells up, flows disgorged From gashed fountains and springs In charred gardens Wine dark blood streams In sunlit air crimson buds Newly open swiftly crumple Pervasive odour of Scorched Flesh charred and blackened Stumps like broken statuary Strewn on burnt out lawns.
Flames soar licking hot with pulsing tongue Each edifice consumed by fires of hate Lust for death makes rapid panthers Springing from dark lairs
48

Flanks freshly steaming with the heat Of hunt the unarmed defeated Skulk in jungles fleeing from The orgiastic love for death Hiding among the mana grasses, thorn Thickets tea bushes or seeking Cover in homes that grant temporary Asylum to those who crossed A borderline to this brief safety We are prisoners of fear Crouching in dark locked rooms Drawing each breath in blood Heart leaping at each Closer murderous cry,
Some fall at doorsteps as they flee Stabbed to the heart, axed down
And poled frail birds whose wings Foiled in their flight were crushed, Melted like wax in mounting fires.
Yet whom do they destroy? Those who to each other are unknown Who know not nor will ever know Each others histories or personal Loves and hates, no longer to equate A child's toy with a human life As cradles burn As beds of lovers go up in flames The only ecstasy is death Bathed in the blood of murderer Even the guilty now absolved Of every sin, become saints. Whom do we destroy'? Wrenching apart like broken fingers Fractured bones unclasped from palm,
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They go back to their lairs and dens Piled with loot clothe themselves in Other skins.
They have destroyed themselves Yet do not know it Waiting for the next call To stream into the streets with burning Brands and bombs and clubs and poles They make their gleeful beds on carnage.
In each man who is alien To their tongue and speech They see both enemy and prey.
Within the flames of burning cities Writhe and twist their purgatorial souls Within the fire great monsters rise Hulks of dark brutal giants bruited Against the fearful midget-kind diminished By fear, who make no stand, no gesture of defence.
What chance, what hope
When all is wrecked.
A dead body floats
In the calm waters of the lake,
Beaten and mutilated,
Beggars still hold out their empty palms To all who pass, they alone in poverty can see No difference.
Perished on pyres with rituals of hate Or immolated within the walls of burning rooms A few survivors hold in their hands Corpses of husbands, wives and children Pieces of charred and broken brick. Here there is no longer any home For those of alien breed.
50

MOLOTOV COCKTAL
Heady, bursting out of the glass Cache fire gushes into the Amphitheatre of this world Swirling around and Falls into the arms Of the ambushed crowd Smithereen glass and flesh Scatters Mosaic embedded with red Rubies, ivory bone. There's a wonderful ballet Out there. Look! The rhythmic Movement of the upswung arm The graceful pas-de-deux Pirouettes of violence. The ballet of the madmen,
In their hands they hold Flame birds, release them Into skies Flight explodes Wings ignite The smell of death and burning Clings within my garden Reminding me That with our departure All the pigeons Have flown away, and The fallen mangoes Rot upon the soil Buzzing with bluebottles.
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IT'S GOT TO END
It's got to end
Now that it's happened. It's got to end, you've got to clear The streets of rubble, sweep up the charred bone And the ashes, you've got to make the roadways Clear, help the traffic move again Rebuild the damaged bridges. The boats sail the waterways,
You've got to take away our tears Help us to freely move through The world's corridors and passageways,
We've got to speak our thoughts aloud Not utter them in furtive whispers Behind locked doors. The bombs, the guns the grenades and the swords Must all be put away, the bitter words The tears, the violence, the killings
And the murder All must stop. Weren't we all one In diverse ways Before the slaughter and the burnings Had begun Now why must we stand opposed With barriers of steel and flames Waiting to ford rivers of blood?
52

REFUGEE - PART
I am fleeing from my home I look around my house What do I take with me as I leave It's easier to leave it all behind Nothing's important but the poems I have written, the lives I have lived In each one of them Which once destroyed Can never be remembered.
I rush to a friend Thrust them in her hands All, all of them Except the new ones to be written Lurking in each cell, Gestating in the mind "Look after them for me", I say And walk out. It's curfew and I'm on the road A jeep speeds towards me “What are you doing ? Don't you know it's curfew We can shoot on sight".
The house next door burns Spluttering, the roof caves in Crackling, a great hole appears gaping on A blazing room
Black clouds of smoke Billow, breaking glass shatters, the Silence, smell of scorched wood Creeps into my garden The crowds rush in through the open gate To watch the circus of destruction
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A man returns to his burnt out house Our neighbour. He weeps.
All he can salvage Is a fan, a flask, a pair of shoes Just one pair left to continue an Unfinished journey. He walks out through a broken Door leaving behind the charred And smashed remains of his life
And five bags of paddy still Burning.
54

REFUGEE CAMP
And is this refuge here within these walls We are brought here for a kind of temporary safety Flung into a van escorted by uniformed men With guns for our protection or is it
Theirs?
Their faces blank turned away From our weeping, We are brought here among others Who seek asylum spreading mats Sheets bundles and baskets on the floor Set aside from others of our kind Somehow different.
Have I all these years been blind Do we now in exile share only the Territory of our fears? All around us people sit or sleep Children cry, news comes to us This one's house is burned that One's raped or murdered.
In sleep the stench of death assails
Our dreams
Acrid smoke creeps in through open windows Pervasive, wafting through classrooms, halls and corridors.
A uniformed officer wanders in, “Why do you shut all the windows? Open them, everyone, You're crowded here, Don't you want to breathe The freshness of the air outside"? And then another comes "Close the windows
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Close them all Don't make targets of yourself For the mobs outside Can't you see the fires"?
The city still is burning The flames mount up When will they subside Whom do we obey So fearfully We are truly liberated From our fears inside.
56

POEMS FROMA REFUGEE CAMP REFUGEES - OLD MAN, OLD WOMAN PART
They sit where you ask them to sit They sit against the wall they sleep against the wall They curl up on mats embryos in sleep Some curse and grumble others silence keep There's a baby four days old It sleeps beside its mother father's lost somewhere Dead or just deserted, no one knows or cares She groans, so soon after labour, asks for rags, Old clothes, there's a young boy sick and fevered Stretched upon the ground Buses come in, disgorge their loads Empty their entrails of humans, bundles,
Old men, women, children With bowls and plates they stand Lining the stairways and the passages In queues for food, rice, sambara, A man awake night after night, Upon his head unsutured wounds Stuck together with plaster paces endlessly The crowded corridors.
An old woman stands in the centre Of the courtyard, white saree wrapped About her, earlobes empty of thodu She does not move She doesn't stand on familiar ground Round her neck there is no thali She sees nothing, no-one round her That she knows or recognizes The silent throngs move on Coiling snakes, empty, their poison sacs and venom
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We face each other, "Have you eaten'?" I ask She does not answer A young woman comes up leads her away But gently, its not important to her In what direction she must go Out or in there's no guarantee there's safety The town is burning, burning The streets are filled with marauders New fires start out Before the old ones die down Or are put out.
58

REFUGEE - OLD MAN - PART
On a blackboard resting on the floor An old man sits we place within his Hands, knotted, trembling with ages palsy Starched white garments, some one else's skin. He cannot understand, "These are not mine.' He says? "Not mine', he whispers, "But take them they are for you, Wear them, you have nothing else.” Leaving your burning house just as you were, He prays, hands clasped, bowed head.
Thanks us, accepts them. I forget him when we move on To the next camp in our crowded Buses, herded in like cattle, Still we're lucky, we've escaped the slaughter.
Old man, white haired, spectacled Drinking a bowl of hot milk Is he still there Moving on to another camp II wonder Sitting in a corner back to the wall Or is he, still in darkness Groping somewhere for a familiar wall?
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NGHT - REFUGEE CAMP
Lying on a thin sheet The ground is icy cold We sleep shoulder to shoulder Head to head swathed in winding sheets We are the dead Waiting to be pushed into incinerators Someone turns, sighs, breathes, From what infernos has he or she escaped?
The great bulk of some old unknown Fugitive woman bunched up on a mat Gulps of snores through her volcanic Mouth and nostrils growl The hot lava of her nightmare dreams Engulfs us in their molten stream In her twisting guts the subterranean Thunder of her fear pulses and gushes.
Within this school room bats of flame Wing wheeling through the night.
I cannot sleep. The searchlights on the trees never dim Smoke from the burning city rises Red flames through shuttered windows Glow from a nearing distance I too am consumed within my own infernos The flesh takes long to burn The bones to brittle charcoal turn Flames in windblown gusts light up The skyline, Scattering sparks, In the night sky a few stars glitter I toss besides my husband and my children Stretched out within the territory of our doom Where nothing's private neither sleep nor dream
60

Waking, breathing, eating, defecating, Spectres and wraiths writhe through the brain Which now becomes one enormous tragic eye That reflects the crouching beasts Marauding through the dark Leaping on tender breast of fawn To tear its living heart Trapped in the tenuous tissue of shed blood.
Towards dawn Blisters and weals appear upon the sky Red streaks slashing The billowing grey smoke clouds.
At each sound or cry The stomach heaves in dread The pierced entrails disgorge The cry of fear.
A child cries, a mother comforts, Croons holding close to nestle, bending Makes her body into the hammock Of the womb........
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HALT
Guns waver towards us The car stops On the centre of the road We're anxious to move on To reach our temporary home A camp for refugees Darkness, silence is sharp Roads deserted. Checkpoint. Hand clicks the trigger Spotlights turn on us Hands clutch guns Nervous eyes dilated stare in our direction.
So it is in the forest With the hunter and the hunted But we cannot turn away and leap Into the fastness of the shadowy trees. You sit before us Your head unmoving turned to stone Your cap some kind of official symbol Ablaze with bands and badges Rests on a windscreen's ledge The driver speaks one word
"Police". Fear chills us Each one of us isolated 1 remember we reached home safely I mean the camp for transients Curfew on; stretched on a mattress on the floor A sleeping guard, the others stand Guns against the wall or in their hands Someone's huddled over a phone I'm silent I've no message for the outside world No one to ring me back
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If I turn the numbers on a dial, No one hears it ringing in an empty house.
"Did you notice? He held the gun the wrong way,' you said, "Pointing towards us not away, The gun could have gone off At any moment”.
"He was young, hervous Probably just out of school Still in training', I said. "Careless, they haven't learnt To hold guns correctly", he replied.
Danger is the new climate
lin which we live And learn to breathe.
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SENTRY
There's a man at the door allert With a gun -a sentry - he smiles And stands alone - for him there is no fear For me, unarmed, there's no defence, It doesn't matter anymore There's nothing left to protect, The body's tomb is broken into, Desecrate, the precious phial of the Heart turns into poison seeping into Veins with lovely death.
My ghost stares at me through glass My body in its fleshly tomb Already immolated. Beyond my wraith stand multitudes of shades New risen from Hades to conduct safe passage To another land, another crossing
In the valley solitary fires still burn Smoke billows acrid burning fills the air We are all consumed , In this inferno struggle A few survivors huddle in their ruins, The rest have perished.
64

REFUGEE CAMP 1983
This single garment that I wear The sweat and grime it bears Gives me now some status Some identity, I know who Now I am with others Whom I sit and talk And sometimes weep with We're all the same Each branded
With a name
-Refugee
This plate I hold Stretching out both hands For rice from the great cauldron In the courtyard of a school Stills my hunger as well as yours But it's a hunger of a certain kind Soon appeased Unlike the hunger to be Free of fear and danger.
A few folded clothes For a pillow, lying on A cement floor, childrens' Desks and chairs mark my boundaries I am at last in the safety zone Neutral territory Displaced together with A hundred thousand Or more human beings
- All refugees -
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REFUGEES- AS WE MOVE ON AS WE MOVE ON
If it's for food or clothes, They stretch out their hands, hold out their Children but always standing in those long Endless queues; what do we put in their hands? A biscuit, a slice of bread, a plate of rice, Old clothes, a cup of milk, plain tea, sugar Dropped onto the palm Bottles, mugs, bowls fill, replenish, Empty, replenish sometimes twice, thrice The residue lines the bottom or the rim Buckets of milk, wood fires burning Old blackboard frames thrown in Waiting for the cauldrons of water to Boil, clothes wrung out lying on the grass.
Stench from excreta and urine Disinfectant sprinkled everywhere is to Destroy bacteria, vermin, yet we like Human insects emerge creeping out of Corners there's still a spark of life in us Although our spines are broken Clipped our wings.
A blue bottle buzzes over a mound Of faecal matter, it zooms Settling on another pile travelling Perhaps to some other camp We'll meet it sooner or later As we move on, as we move on.
66

"I WATOH MY OWN DEATH." REFUGEE CAMP 1983
I watch my own death here It's happening all the time Bit by bit the slow torture Of dying and yet not completely Dying, each part grows numb Sets in the stasis of the limbs and brains Death of each cell yet each part clings Onto the remaining pain of life.
There are those who try to summon Me to live by words or fond embrace But this can only be brief tarrying Before the final entry to an unmarked grave.
Who's left to mourn all that I was or hoped To be, anonymous through hate and enmity Cold glance, silence, averted face Splinters the already frozen heart.
The aftermath of holocaust Places me within a different territory. Between the frontiers lie A no-mans land of barbed wire, watch towers Guns and sentries.
It is easier now to die than live, One waits for the burning to be over One waits for the final conflagration To end, seeing death and murder face to face In the eyes of enemies, strangers, predators, The degradation of the fugitive, the hunted Fleeing from the burning mazes, threats and death. I watch my own death Happening as I look over the city
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From a window's ledge in a school Stepping over the welter of bodies Sitting or lying in the long halls and corridors In the bowels of hell.
68

APOCALYPSE JULY 1983
Never again will words say the same things In the same old way nor lips that touch Seeking to know love as once we did Learn secrets through the whispered Breath to search each other out.
Now we no longer lovers are Nor friends but find ourselves Hostile and strange armed with suspicion Each to the other somehow
Suspect.
Always now is the remembrance Of death, that of ours so near And those of others who never willed it At that moment in the sun While gardens flowered and trees fruited
Squirrels scurrying on the branches The sky blackened with smoke The moon turned red Men leaped and danced Heaving from wombs of turmoil Never the rains came to put off Burning fires, scorched flesh Turned livid, the bloom Rubbed off, singed hair In tendrils curled, vanished In whiffs, blowing a breath of ash into your eyes.
Pile up, pile up the brands Lay them athwart each other Build up pyres and stakes The iron strikes against the innocent flesh Flames hiss,
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Caught in the burning The all consumate kiss of death.
Have you and all the rest So soon forgotten? Your eyes Stare in my direction In this stark light The aftermath of ruin Blinding your vision of the holocaust, Fires, smoke and sulphur Brimming the earth and rivers, Of horses breathing fire and locusts Settling on new harvests of corpses.
Are these the revelations Of the Apocalypse?
70

N HIDING
“Where have you been?" "In transit". “When did you return?" "I haven't yet, I'm still there
In hiding
It's my persona That you see Just a shadow on a screen Moving and acting out a scene Not epics of heroic deeds But the drama of defeat.
We slide across the street Phantoms of fear
The anonymous people Waiting for the fires to die And the "All Clear" that never Sounds I've got to grow a new skin But the camouflage is from within It's a two faced mask I wear Meet my new persona
The heat of rage That kindled thought The fires of life Are all put out And all we do Is tread and tread the ashes As they spread From the burning stake The smouldering flesh The memory of the dead.
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THE SLENT ENEMY- JULY 1983
Now all silence must cease Heads that are bent, faces averted Lift up and look the enemy Straight in the eye, you find Yourself gazing into the eyes of innocent Men who smile as children do Laugh, make love Men who banter and pass the Time of the day under the
Same sun.
You pass each other in the street Do you remember the flaming petrol Bombs searing the quick and Burning flesh, the skin once so Cool and fresh now white bone Curling into ash, They who that morning woke From slumber and ventured as you did Onto the roadways of the world Breathing the same air Panic seized them, fear roughly Slung them from the hammocks Of their lives, Pushed into the flames Or forced to flee climbing over Walls, set on fire, sometimes Refused asylum or running Wildly on those endless Streets leading into Nowhere, out of their minds, Watching before their eyes The sharp knives cut and slash Peeling the skin off like a rinded fruit The juice of blood spurt out.
72

WHEN CAN WE LIVE AGAIN?
When can we live again The corridors of a school
Lined with tired men Beaten and cut chased from burning homes Lying without pillow, without mat, Their eyes are wide awake watchful in the night We are caught within the thrall of fear Dragnets of fife enclose us Cowering behind walls of flame. Men curse and grumble women weep Hold close in their embrace other weeping Strangers now grown close as kin, Children scream and play they do not understand.
The smell of burning hangs about the street Pervasive breezes drift about the charring walls Searchlights trained from the tops of trees Make a false daylight, A police officer walks among the refugees We knew each other somewhere else In some other age, some other time Students on a campus in the years gone by Silent then voluble in the shock of recognition Each talking a different language I fumble for words that say nothing Of my plight, lose his name Stare back into the past, amnesic, all Landmarks obliterated
My hair a tangled knot Sweat streams down my face Now we meet, suddenly discovered friends At crossroads, veer off, taking different tracks.
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F THE GUN SPEAKS
If the gun speaks There will always be silence The silence of fear If the gun speaks through blood and bullets.
Scarlet hibiscus Like gouts of blood Stud the image of Ganesh.
Splayed out on every limb Every flower An open wound.
In the temple veedhi at Nallur The glittering ther Moves slowly on the sand Drawn by ropes of humans.
Crack
A thousand coconuts Break, their sweet milk Bleeding from the fleshy kernel Streams over bared bodies Naked heads.
After the guns go off There is only silence And crackling flames Spread like a sea of fire.
Already ash
A mutilate land Burned on a thousand pyres.
74

EXILE
I am already there In another country Not of my birth Clinging to my soles The loose soil the clinging Earth, pebbles and stone Detached, the root Perishes withering in the sun Fruits I will never taste again Ripen in my garden And falling rot, So many hands pushed out This craft to sea Those hands were wrapped In blood, feet cut in fallen masonry Crushed debris, On the horizon vanishing fast Cities ablaze, Curling into sky grey whorls of smoke Erupted thick as pluming scum.
Where can I find asylum For myself and foundling family, Can I rent a country As I rent out a room, Lodging for the night Or for several moons? Will they greet me as I step Ashore with waving flags Bouquets, beribboned, speeches, songs? I know it will be different, this welcome We're only here on sufferance I'm always going to be a stranger I'm going to knock on doors That will not always open.
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I'm here within the casket Of my exile, drive in another nail
Then shut it tight, the lid falls into place
Now that the execution's done The solemn pallbearers step into place.
76 :

EXILE 11
You tell me to pack up my bags and go But where? I turn my face towards Country after country Silently I lip read their refusal What do I call myself Exile, émigré, refugee? The sunlight is a web That silent weaves through Light, caught within its spokes The delicate seeming threads Strengthen, draw tight. Noosing what's left of life.
If I remain There's no escape My dreams slide through My brain like silent knives' Sharp blades
As I live through So many nights So many deaths.
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FLAMBOYANTS IN JULY (FROM A REFU GEE CAMP) JULY 1983
The flamboyants flame All over the city clusters of Scarlet as if the clouds Were pricked with blood The blue air shimmering Rent with contusions and Weals, a welter of wounds, White clouds suddenly Bursting out with plumes Of flame a gush
Of blood
Why do I think of you Compulsively in your cell Your body crisscrossed And covered with raised Welts, those bruises too darkened Like thunder clouds And the scarlet stripes That went deep beneath the skin.
All over the city Over the roofs The great branches Arch with flame How bright the colour of blood Scarlet pools of fallen flowers Lying beneath the trees And a skeletal branch Left, bearing A crown of thorns.
78

DEFEAT
Caught in the crossfire Where do I turn? Who is the enemy? They point a finger at me. Whose hostility do I face? What do they see me as?
Not one of them. That is enough. To neither side do I belong But the insistent crowd Tars me with the same brush.
I don't want refuge With either side Nor safe asylum Where none can exist. This is where I stand Feeling the firm earth give, Sinking into the treacherous Hollows of shifting Sands,
This was my territory
Once My roots were here
But plucked with bloodied hands Flung aside and scattered
Only the soil disturbed And wounded shows
The emptiness.
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ETTING GO
Letting go, It's time, the time has come From your hands grasp Slips away the past the present The imagined future Which perhaps will never be, Letting go from your hands clutch The precious things that mattered And that you now have lost letting go, Letting go the documents of your identity Scrawled defaced tattered torn In shreds and rags Tossed in the wind,
Time there was
When it had its value But now it's time to loosen your grip Unclench your hand Letting go your hold On love and fame
And name,
Letting go of hands that try To hold you back
As you plunge
Into a chasm
Where there's only
Dark, Letting go falling into the well of death Where at last the splintered bone The shattered body
Rests.
80

VISION OF THE WORLD
Suddenly woke up to find That the world had changed Someone smashed the windowpane And the view was not the same Someone Smashed in the door And gave me my freedom To walk out into the world Free, free from the prison of myself Free from the passion for possessions That all these years had hemmed me in And cluttered my mind and life, Rooms were empty where dust had gathered
Cleared their litter of books and clothes and furniture Suddenly woke up to find The world had changed No one spoke about the weather Although the climate's different And cold winds blow icy From North and South and East and West
Suddenly woke up to find The world had changed Someone smashed the windowpane And the view was not the same We spoke of death As if he were a next - door neighbour Felt his icy touch through burning flames And blazing torches and explosions The news was not of welcome or arrival But of exile, migration and survival Each day on the calendar Was a Red Letter Day Red because it's the colour of blood Spilt and splashed and flowing Each day was important Not because a child was born
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But because a nation's people were decimated. A plane crashed, a dying man made prisoner
A child's corpse carried High above the bomb blast Shattered glass and wreckage
Suddenly woke up to find The world had changed Someone smashed in the windowpane And the view was not the same
So what's to do, we're changed too Mankind, survivors of the holocausts The mass graves, burnings, hangings and the rape Assassins and death squads
Suddenly woke up to find The world had changed Someone smashed the windowpane And the view was not the same.
82

REFUGEE
I've no country I've got no name I've no bag And I've no claim I'm a refugee
I've no home No kith and kin If I want a country I must plead and cringe I'm a refugee
A visa and passport To safety I'll need But my voice is a whisper That cries I'm not free I'm a refugee
They say you'll help me On humanitarian grounds But I've first got to prove That everything's gone
Nobody wants me I don't belong Society shuns me But who's done the wrong?
The climate's icy We're chilled to the bone We're all waiting For the new winds to blow
Give me a tent I'm under the sky If it rains we'll be wet
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And scorched if it's dry I've no roof the tiles are awry The walls are shattered There are corpses in the rubble I'm now a refugee
I'm a misfit and outlaw
But I didn't burn men
Or beat them to death I didn't destroy and I didn't smash up But I'm a danger to my neighbours and friends So I'm a refugee
I've no identity I've nowhere to go I'm not a person Don't exist anymore I'm just a refugee
I've a face But I've got no name I talk in whispers And move in stealth Because I'm a refugee
My vessel's sinking And my boat is tilting I'm on the ocean without a map Fling me a lifebelt Before I'm sunk Because I'm a refugee
You send me out with a begging bowl The world will fill it somehow I know It may be with crumbs or it may be with bombs Either way it's the dice of the gods Because I'm a refugee
84

Where was my country
I no longer know May be Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Laos Vietnam, Chad, Afghanistan, Does it matter? I'm on the run We're all fleeing from, the burning and the bombs We're all refugees
And if there's someone Who still cares To know where I'm going But can't follow me there Have the envelope ready With the stamp stuck on There'll be an address someday If I reach somewhere When I'm no longer Just a refugee.
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AFTERMATH
It seemed I knew this country Once belonged waiting for my journey to End here, the ground grown familiar to My tread, the earth fecund with plant And sun and rain, bud spilling nectar On the drought parched earth, the coupling Reptiles on a stubble field and lizards Pouring out of ant-hills like molten brass Among the stalking birds,
It seemed I knew this earth too well to feel It's heave and it's revulsion Expel my half ingested being From its twisted guts,
My birth is now my death The country is my grave My days in exile spent waiting for The end where my beginning was Where once I had belonged I stopped Finding the hills crested with smoke The river a burning barrier whose flames Spread into cities and fields Where the white crane fed Roosting on trees,
Turning and turning on the winds Spit roasted then charred to a cinder White ruffled wings fanning Out from branches Then pleated and scattered Falling in lakes of blood My image floats upon its surface Turning into a crazed
86

Fish flipped over belly upwards Black shapes of crabs scuttle Reptiles twist among the grasses Flames rear like golden egrets Stretching their necks towering over Far and above and over with Wings of fire, spreading, lifting Into flight falling into the inferno In which burns all human kind.
The offering of pity Placed me outside the pale Already condemned to walk Forever lonely on the earth A leopard aged Stalking its languid prey My shadow pressed upon the earth Shrinks and vanished footpads Dwindling with the end of day.
I didn't know this country was not mine Never could belong to me never could be Shared, I never knew I could no longer Belong, never, never ask For any corner of this earth To be a part of me Even the grave would be in alien soil.
Reading books on history I was the man who rolled down boulders Cut down trees, laid trunks across a pathway In ambush for those alien invaders Toiling through the leech-infested ferns and Rocks and swollen rivers,
I was one of you
Because I thought This is my land and this my people
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l was misguided like all the rest, our area cordoned Off we became the condemned Left at the thorn gates The knives out-thrust towards us The powder casques were damp with Rain the shots all failed, We were completely routed,
I was the new invader My long folk memory belonged somewhere Else beyond an ocean choked with fish And sodden gulls, drowned ships and Men weighed down with rusting armour.
I cry to my ancestors, I cry Blood frothing at my mouth The wound deep within its rib cage The head bludgeoned and bruised Now vultures soar with talons and claws
That cut and pierce the throats of innocent men And burn, burn, burn Crackling and crisp the bone Sundered from scorched flesh.
Hills that I knew with dreaming temples Which as bone are stained with hideous fungus As from the grave green with mould,
I didn't know this country, I didn't know That I didn't belong until I was surrounded Hunted out forced to disclose my identity To spell out danger.
My face contorted with fear My eyes flew out of my head My tongue lolled out as if the dangling
88

Noose had already tightened its threads. A few offered pity A sip from the water pot In a famished land Leaving my thirst unduenched My throat rasping, spewing blood,
A few offered pity Was it what I wanted Would it give me what I had lost forever Waiting for the fires to go down The smoke to diminish So that I could see those eyes That meet mine and those of others With hate and death, the sight gouged out, Eyeballs pricked and sightless Go hurtling through the dark like Shiny red-veined marbles Tossed in games Lost toys soon buried And forgotten,
I probe, touching now a nerve A vein Or touch the bone letting the new Blood flow to heal old wounds.
Upon the hill the gibbet swings Where slowly vultures gather.
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Page 52
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DCOLOMBO 13, TEL 233095