Photo courtesy of CSP
A prisoner goes to the jail’s library to borrow a book. The librarian says, “I am sorry, we don’t have this book, but we have its author.”
It’s a Turkish joke, much richer in the context of its old, decayed and brutal imperium. It was one that came to mind as I was going through translations of Ahnaf Jazeem’s poetry – the poet from Mannar currently living his 14th month in prison.
The idea of putting poets in prison has an eminent history. Plato wanted poets banned from his ideal city because poetry was “distant from the truth and engaged the lesser parts of the soul”. The less high minded explanation might also have been that he didn’t take too kindly to Aristophanes, a brilliant comic poet of the time, roasting his friend Socrates in public. And there is a long history of poets and writers in prison, a few for crime, others for debt and the vast majority for their politics from Wagner to Li Po and Dostoevsky to Ezra Pound, who all had politics and ideas out of favour with their times.
I wondered what it was about Ahnaf Jazeem’s poetry that was so rabid and incendiary that the Attorney General’s Department thought it best to put him away. The poetry is part of the muddled case against him.
For much of his poetry Jazeem is preoccupied with virtue and goodness; it is a virtue that is oddly Buddhist in outlook. I Must Create for instance reveals a yearning to remold oneself in virtue that the Buddha might have applauded.
“Control the senses of the body,
And the arrogance of the mind,
Do not take pride in yourself,
Take control of your tongue growing long,
And fold it in your overreaching hand”
Hereafter is grounded in a similar virtue and self-control but in tone is a strident polemic against the relentless impulse to gratify the senses and baser instincts. Its strident sentiments would slip effortlessly into some of the later Theravada Buddhist literature as Buddhism had to countenance its own institutional decay.
“Look for another woman
Satiate your lust
Thus you roam lifelong
Treachery, wrangle, women, drink
Listen to base music
Drunk, sing with the dame
Foster theft and dissension
Always yearn for good food
Having eaten rollick, sleep
and dream
The moon up in the sky.”
Other themes of charity and trust and honesty emerge as deep seated, if naïve, yearning for a better world. His attitude to women appears more problematic. There is undiluted love for his mother – the leitmotif of the Sri Lankan son – and the universal young man’s tongue in cheek lament about the stony heart of woman. But there is plenty of the standard South Asian misogyny too. Women get raped because of the way they dress and act.
“You my sister, your body hugging clothes,
and skin-tight attire, drives the stranger mad,
and he strips you bare, Then you cry…”
“…..Women’s liberation has no meaning, no benefit
to anyone, anywhere.”
Odious as these lines are, they are typically conservative Sri Lanka sentiments, held in common among respectable middle class folk and are culturally mainstream.
On the other hand, there is an almost religious joy in nature, in the wind and rain and lightning in the storm. These poems reveal a sensitive youth struggling to reconcile the world as it reveals itself. If there is wonder at the natural world there is also a growing despair at the nature of man and the affairs of the world. There is almost baffled despair at the plight of the Rohingya.
“The times when the Burmese Buddhists used to dance, sing, play and mingle with our people
are all gone. Now they insult them, demanding they leave, telling them there is no refuge for
them in Burma, only graves…”
“…Do not think you have broken their homes, dashed the tiles of the roof on the ground to
pieces. Or that you have broken open the cage where the pet parrot lived.”
The worst of his opprobrium is leveled at the ISIS and leaders of the Arab world and American imperialistic meddling. But here again his rhetoric is hardly provocative. On the contrary it would be the substance of any after dinner conversation in the drawing rooms of the Sinhala nationalist classes.
“Lives wither. Crops scream. The stench of corpses rises in circles. So many children are
crying. But the pig-headed idiot is blabbering that the religious way, religion, Islam, is
blooming. Which system of justice would call this just?”
Here is a rural and unsophisticated worldview made of simplistic binaries; one that feeds an impotent anger against injustice and a yearning for divine retribution. In translation it is impossible to judge the quality of Jazeem’s poetry but perhaps we should not be hasty in our judgment of poets. He would not be the first poet whose overflow of emotion passed off as poetry.
But what of the AG’s department? It has been one of those hallowed institutions whose daily task is to demark, defend and dispense an order based on law. Much like poetry is to the individual, its existence is a marker between civilization and barbarism. The AG’s department is supposed to attract the brightest and the best of our lawyers, able to parse legal minutiae while awake to the possibilities, nuance and the hidden subtleties of the written word. How then did they find Jazeem’s poetry so utterly dangerous as to deprive him of liberty? Do they read poetry in the AG’s department? If they did, it would take at an hour at best to conclude that Jazeem’s anger is not incitement, deep religiosity is not a joint conspiracy and a yearning for divine retribution is not a plan of violence.
At its heart Jazeem’s continued incarceration on the one hand shows a deep incapacity to think or evolve beyond the colonial template of the state controlling and coercing its populace instead of safeguarding and empowering the citizen.
On the other hand, 30 years of war and steady social degradation, years rationalizing state brutality, the constant compromise of principles, the galling subservience to increasingly stupid politicians and the lure of fat consultancies must take its toll on the institution’s integrity. A studied blindness to inconvenient truths has perhaps led to an endemic inability to see the distinction between government, state and public interest; a moral deficit and intellectual laziness of an enabler that refuses to see beyond the coarse daily traffic of judicature; and where Citizen is a watch and Liberty a cinema.
The police mostly deal out immediate, unthinking brutality but there is a measured and much worse malignancy at play when learned and reasoning men join together under law to deprive another of his liberty on flimsy prejudice.
(Translations by Professor Sumathy Sivamohan and Dr. Mahendran Thiruvarangan)
