Archive for the ‘Poetry’

Hate

Tell me, do you feel it every day? When you’re buying groceries, taking a train to somewhere; when you smoke, eat or dream? Does it take a toll? Make your feet drag, perhaps, or your head ache? * Tell me, Does it get away from you sometimes? Have people around you sensed something not quite right, caught that glint in your eye (there for just a second, and gone the next) and wondered what it was that made their skin crawl? Or have they wished you good morning every day, sat down to lunch with you, asked how your mother was, without ever having a clue? * Tell me, where does it hide? What shape does it take? I imagine a boiling lava, burning in the pit of your stomach, roaring with something other than hunger. Or a demon that sits on both your shoulders, having laid waste to the angel of good conscience, whispering secrets and schemes into your…

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Extra Time

The latest news from the family-run, once independent island, is the appointment of a presidential committee to decide upon which recommendations to adopt regarding the erstwhile ethnic question, which has been subsumed into the unitary enterprise of the war-fighting, now North and East-occupying, government dedicated to paying appropriate attention to the international human rights lobby and European and American states. Nothing like a committee to push the football away, like the many formed and dissolved in the past without achieving laws, but which gained time for the family to work and play.

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Defending the Country

They cry foul in that cauldron of a news room, saying these human rights defenders are traitors, publishing their names and photographs, inciting fears of death squads preparing to drive white vans to their residences. The warning by the UN Human Rights Commissioner to protect witnesses is welcome, quixotic. How will her office stop disappearances when government has rejected the resolution, said it will push back reconciliation, which I presume to mean more islanders vanished, bloodshed, people living in fear and loathing, keeping quiet or moving out, accompanied to the airport by diplomats from a friendly mission, leaving their homes to caretakers, a new life abroad for champions of human rights at home? And for those who stay, negotiating protections, waiting for a post- midnight call by an elite team of assassins, like the ones who shot prisoners at Nandikadal, stopping motorbikes in the intersection to beat Lasantha to death, dressed in black with black glasses, or as drivers of…

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Off the Field

In the end we have only ourselves to pick up from the grass, the bed, the gymnasium floor. The dead will have their say in dreams, and fond ones too, how the boy used to laugh when chasing the ball on Duplication Road, or the girl back in the village, shyly accept the glance of her neighbor’s son, by the well, over a garden wall, the victims, the left behind after the tsunami or the shelling without end, abroad, processed, rebuilding their lives in the company of Australians or Canadians, new people, while the distant war on its nightly visit to parents, single or a pair, does not curse the kid born away, who loves the latest fad on satellite radio and the girl in his class who sports an infectious laugh.

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We Are Resolved

Sri Lanka is small but the government thinks big, always has; since independence its growth rate in ministries and delegations the envy of Asia, and now defeat of the resolution the charge of 52 valiant diplomats whose arrack flows in hospitality suites at night, while mornings are spent chatting about contracts, coal-fired plants, fish meal, everything as long as the other party speaking does the needful, as we say in our language, to save the gentleman’s agreement, the brilliant and home-grown war on terror strategy and abstains, or much better for later tabling and closing of reports, votes against.

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The Island Abstains

The decision by the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka to abstain from the General Assembly vote calling for an end to violence in Syria, and stepping down of its president, cannot be accused of inconsistency, given the island republic’s wish to continue importing Iranian oil, serve tea at official Syrian garden parties, and its pummel- the- minority most successful bombing strategy, that just three years ago seemed to be the talk of Colombo town. Unfortunately, the government faces a resolution of its own, upcoming in Geneva, and perhaps the abstaining route indicates a not unsubtle wish that it may go unperceived in the noise of those who said yes or no. Some of us noticed, however, the way Lankan diplomats exercised the popular will and we present evidence here in the court of poetry.

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Killer Representative

I am assembling the scene, a local hood and his gang come to a Christmas Eve gathering at a beach hotel, want to dance with foreign women, see a bloke from town trotting high with a blonde, but when they ask for a spin, are spurned, although they are hot shots in the area, their chief an elected representative; they have guns and knives in their pockets, or placed discreetly on their reserved table, and they tear a woman from her boyfriend, cutting her up and him, then shooting. Government in a tither, keeping press at bay, we cannot have these stories displayed in the West where similar incidents take place in the most respected capitals, says another representative, and the perpetrators have been booked, are under investigation, although the head of the local governing council has been known to kill in the past but nobody is sure who can, or will, introduce historical evidence.

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Measuring (After Nandikadal)

An embarrassment, to forget over short eats, ignore the bundle on his back, that sloshed set of poetry he cannot avoid carrying, an appendix, reptilian brain, fascination with naming elements of the crime, breadth of carpet strafing of civilians in tents on banks of the lagoon, while tails for the ball are rented and we sit down to quail and goose, although elements of the meal have no political meaning. They are foods for festive or special occasions: here fundraising, so ordinary citizens can travel to see the miscreant dictatorship, dressed in civvies, mixed in with the crowd, not in a killing field, drawn up in advance, but the larger and harder-to-manage masses of the post-war streets, and report what they find before the police visit.

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A Fisherman Testifies

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I learned from Sri Lanka to go overboard, to flounder in the deep ocean while Navy sailors beat me with sticks, and cut my nets, and round me up as the country’s diplomats meet my Indian representatives with elaborate denials of mistreatment on the high and most domestic seas. I want to feed my wife and children, return to Tamil Nadu with my catch. I have not been re-schooled as a farmer or an errand boy. Will the United Nations take up my case? The International Criminal Court? My Chief Minister protests and protests but the Center is deaf and keeps speaking with the devil. How can we calm his temperature, cool the beast, teach the tyrant that he cannot stifle Tamils beyond the nautical limits of the Sri Lankan island?

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Prescient

When Lasantha wrote the editorial that predicted his imminent assassination he suggested the civil war would turn steadily uglier, then move inwards, as a lizard searching for its tail, insidious in the way each institution begins to lose its independence, the machinery of the ruling family greasing every Tom, Dick and Banda—forgive my allusion to white rulers of a more genteel if not innocent nursery school— this forsaken Ceylonese child has turned monstrous now in the eyes of Whitehall and Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, betters going wild about pressures in Canberra to present a bold brief on behalf of human rights and investigation of war crimes as Commonwealth heads prepare to meet, while on the island rival thugs, from within the all-powerful ruling group, battle over drug routes and a parliamentary seat.

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Cheran

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He is writing history, where he lives, when he travels, to Denmark, Singapore, Tamil Nadu, Toronto. Edward Said wrote about Palestinians, Rudramoorthy Cheran, Tamils. News that my friend has suffered a mild heart attack does not surprise me. His muscle has been strained for more than thirty years. From the Saturday Review where he reported the first days of rebellion in Jaffna to more recent sociological study and dramatic writing, the man, as scientist and poet, has let emotions hang on strings strummed to a tabla’s beat. Wordsmiths for Tamilians are as good as our instruments and words are always enhanced by music. I recall when we met in 1987 at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies on Kynsey Terrace in Colombo, where I moved as a kid when the house was home and not yet a center dedicated to resolving differences, the wounds of the1983 “Riots” were still very fresh, and enthusiasm for resolution of long-standing grievances strong, and…

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Climate-Induced

Plantain leaves, steaming yellow rice, katta sambol, seer fish, passion fruit, the island’s culinary pleasures I think of first, batting then for a day, stopping for lunch and tea, but this strain of poetry has been sidelined, a war won and lost, rewriting of history, yet the latter may not be necessary, building of monuments to the bullet near the sea, or the various stupas popping up by kovils, or replacing them quietly. The waters of the Bay of Bengal are rising steadily.

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  • 1 Jul, 2011
  • 0 Comment
  • Jaffna,
    Peace and Conflict,
    Poetry

For those who have missed out and want to know humanity

Belated, but worth it. I read through this collection of Sinhala poems by a Sinhala “creative activist” friend, who moves the reader across the large canvass of responsible humanity, very solemnly holding the reader, in a spell of “silent guilt”. She does not talk politics. But she does, in a different tone and spirit. She does not blame the reader straight and hard. Yes she does, in a piercing whisper, right into the conscience. She does not talk of an ethnic conflict. But she does talk of a human tragedy, that tells the reader, there is somewhere a ‘divide’ that stalks the fate of these people. This collection of poems, titled by her as “For Ears That Had Not Heard” (No-asu Kan Walata), by itself is a subtle, nuanced allegation against the Sinhala reader, for not being, if not sensitive enough, then observant of the tragedy that unfolded around us during the war. She thus picks up hardly noticed incidents…

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  • 26 Jun, 2011
  • 5 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Language,
    Poetry

The ‘coolest’ publisher of English books in Sri Lanka: In conversation with Sam Perera

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Sam Perera, along with Ameena Hussein (see interview here) began the Perera Hussein Publishing House, a niche publisher based in Sri Lanka known to publish some of the most compelling contemporary writing in English. Sam, who thinks of all things, he is a farmer at the beginning of the programme opens up the conversation with reforestation. The link to the world of publishing lies in that fact that, as a private initiative, PH Publishing House plants at least one tree per book they publish in Puttalam. Noting that PH Publishing House was established to publish stories by Sri Lankans for Sri Lankans, Sam’s rather interesting take on what he does is that the local consumer / reader doesn’t necessarily want literature, but stories that are written well – of course judged by none other than Sam himself. When pressed on what he considers good or great literature, Sam points to Randy Boyagoda’s writing, and says that even though he is…

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Overseeing the Farm

Planning a visit home is not easy for a Tamil returning to Jaffna. First, he needs to fly into the international airport at Katunayake and pass through customs like any traveler. He may be asked to step into a back room, to answer why he carries the Economist in hand luggage, or stickers from the World Wildlife campaign to save the tiger, given that such animals have not been spotted on the island in thousands of years, if indeed they ever sauntered through the wild grass or paddy fields. He may be grilled about family members in Wellawatte, and what career he pursues in the Scarborough, Ontario refuge where wild and liberal creatures found a home before conservatives took over in Ottawa; he may be whisked through secondary, and into a waiting vehicle for a fast ride to the upstairs room at CID headquarters where he will meet his guide, his helper, who will say, come friend, the campaign is…

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About Groundviews

Located at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Groundviews is a citizen journalism website that uses a range of genres and media to highlight critical perspectives on governance, reconciliation, human rights, the arts and literature, democracy and other issues. The site has won two international awards, including the prestigious Manthan Award South Asia in 2009. The grand jury's evaluation of the site noted, "What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes. It's a new age media for a new Sri Lanka... Free media at it's very best!"

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