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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