Mirrored Images – 3

Tags

Dirge for Your Village and Mine, Jean Arasanayagam, LIYANAGE AMARAKEERTHI, Mr. Amirthalingam, Nallur, Once upon a Foreign Country, P. AHILAN, Poetry

Once upon a Foreign Country

LIYANAGE AMARAKEERTHI

‘Broken, beautifully broken,’
I thought
on the day Karuna broke away from the Tigers
and I read it on the Net

I wanted to call my friends
and enjoy the news with them
all the Sinhalese who gather to eat rice together
and brag about building the nation

My defeated, guilty
arrogant Sinhala heart.

Broken
My two year old son’s sleep
was broken
by the clatter of the computer
on the day Karuna broke away

Piggy-backed as usual
while I read the Net
looking over my head
at Karuna’s face on the monitor
my son said ‘Thatha’

In fact Karuna does look like me
no need of more proof
my wife thinks so too

Another day
when having risen early
I read in the BBC
about the assassination of Kaushalyan
an Eastern tiger leader
my son was in my lap
still a bit sleepy

‘Thatha,’ he said
leaning against my heart
looking at Kaushalyan
on the page I was reading

I had to agree with my son
at least to an extent
I looked like Kaushalyan too

To my son’s eyes
still not blinded by culture
still not bound by ideology
all three of us look alike
with no mark of ethnicity
carved on our foreheads

At the instant my son gifted me
with the third eye of insight
I saw Karuna, Kaushalyan and myself as one

If I was born in the North or East
if I had to run in that bitter black July
barely evading torches, knives, swords
and the clubs of Sinhala thugs
in ragged clothes, bleeding all over
carrying little brothers and sisters

screaming
but still not awakening the peacefully sleeping
Sinhala political conscience

in Colombo, Galle, Kurunegala,
and sacred Anuradhapura
if I had to grow up
under the world-destroying Ishwara gaze of the Sun God
tied in the chains of ideology
which polish fear with blood
into public opinion
I may well have been copied into Karuna
and tamed into Kaushalyan

Auden said of Yeats
‘Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry’
and this mad island
has hurt us all into the heart of madness

Which idiot says
‘There is no problem for Tamils
just because they are Tamils’
in this great lie that is Dharmadeepa?

But when I read how Kadirgamar’s heart
the heart of a man left alone between Sinhala and Tamil
was pierced by a bullet
when he was cleansing himself of the filth
that got to him hanging around with politicians all day
my heart was defeated

I was alone
without my son over my head
or in my lap by my heart

He doesn’t like it anymore
to look at the computer which shows him
other forms of his father

perhaps knowing by instinct
that it hurts the heart he leans against

I am afraid again
that my conscience might fall asleep
that I hurt reading the Internet
when living in a foreign country

Should I tell my son of the death of Uncle Kadir?
Why should I give him my Lankan sorrow?
No. I will tell him something good
about Lanka, Sinhala and Tamil

Let him sleep happily
in a foreign country

Mirrored Images – Introduction

Tags

Amarakeerthi Liyanage, Chelva Kanaganayakam, Days in the Trenches, Eric Illayaparacchi, Human Bomb, Indian Cultural Centre, Indian High Commissioner, Jean Arasanayagam, Lakshmi Holmstrom, Ministry of National Languages and Social Integration, National Book Trust of India, P. AHILAN, Peradeniya University, Poetry, Refugees – Old Man Old Woman, Sunday Observer

‘Mirrored Images’, a collection of English and Sinhala and Tamil poetry from Sri Lanka, was launched in Colombo on September 20th, and subsequently in Kandy on the 27th and in Jaffna on the 30th. The Colombo event was chaired by the Indian High Commissioner in Colombo, HE Yashwant Singh, with Vasudeva Nanayakkara, Minister of National Languages and Social Integration as Chief Guest. The even was arranged by the Indian Cultural Centre, in collaboration with the Alliance Francaise.

Both these institutions have collaborated on the launches in Kandy and in Jaffna. The former event was held at Peradeniya University and the latter at the Indian consulate. Poets featured in the book read at all the events, attendance in Colombo by readers from Jaffna, and vice versa, being sponsored by the Ministry of National Languages and Social Integration.

The volume was launched earlier in Canada by the Sri Lankan Mission in Toronto, with a keynote address by Prof Chelva Kanaganayakam, who has furnishe an introduction to the Tamil section of the book. Prof Chelvanayakam taught English previously at the University of Jaffna, while his father was Professor of Tamil at the University of Peradeniya. The introduction to the Sinhala section of the book was written by Prof Amarakeerthi Liyanage who teaches currently at the University of Peradeniya.

The book, which was edited by Prof Rajiva Wijesinha and published by the National Book Trust of India, is a sequel to ‘Bridging Connections’, a collection of English and Sinhala and Tamil short stories from Sri Lanka which was published in 2007 and has now been translated into Oriya and Marathi and Tamil.

Poems from each language on similar themes were brought together by Prof Wijesinha for a weekly column in the ‘Sunday Observer’, which was then features on this site. Over the next few months poems from each language, in alphabetical order of the names of the writers, as they appear in each section of the book, will be brought together here, to enhance understanding of the different styles and perspectives, and of the common humanity of all the writers.