|
|
 |
 |
| Sunday, 16 February 2003 |
 |
|
 |
Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
|
The poet, Perseus and Medusa's head Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake Two new books, one of poetry and the other of short fiction, offer a window on contemporary Sinhala literature. The book of short stories titled "Katuwa Ennemi' is by Buddhadasa Galappaththi, himself a poet, while the book of poetry is by Lal Hegoda who has practised entirely in the genre of poetry although he is also a photographer and a teacher of photography of some repute.
The latter book carries a preface of a polemical nature which looks like some kind of manifesto on the part of the poet and which raises some sharp questions about the nature of poetry written today. Hegoda is dissatisfied with the aesthetic outlook which permeates much of the poetry today. In fact he puts it brutally by saying that most poets including himself are akin to hawkers of ganja cigars. These cigar sellers both sell their wares as well as partake of it themselves. In fact he extends this criticism to the whole of society and includes in his criticism party politicians of all complexions, some media magnates, the prattling television and radio presenters employed by these magnates and the cohorts of the advertising agencies. The question he poses is twofold. One is the function of the poet in this situation and the other is what chance serious poetry stands in the midst of such a trivialised popular culture. individual aestheticism The kind of individual aestheticism championed in its heyday by the likes of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater is of course long dead but it can be contended to some extent that it is surely the function of the poet to offer an aesthetic experience to the reader. Poetry after all is a pattern of words cast in the best possible form and order and the awakening of the sensibility is part of the poet's function. But Hegoda's point is that this sensibility today has to be awakened to the gross and coarse realities of life and society rather than what is beautiful. For example, a poet might exult in the beauty of a waterfall but what if the waterfall is reduced to a trickle as a result of it being dammed to provide hydro electricity? of course, says he, there are the intellectuals who will explain away all this as the inevitable result of globalisation but as poets he contends one must be driven to a sense of moral anger by this vulgarisation of society and the trivialisation of the culture. He concludes by saying that what we need is a poetry which will be a shield which will reflect the Medusa's face of contemporary reality and a poet who like Perseus will be able to chop off Medusa's head. Of course this is not really new since there has always been a strong social element in Sinhala poetry but what is new is Hegoda's call for a revolt against the shibboleths and cliches of a trivial popular and political culture. His point about the whole gamut of those who operate as corrupting influences on society (the politicians, media magnates and their cohorts and the hordes of the advertising industry) must surely find some resonance among the more sensitive souls of a society bombarded by cheap political slogans and catchy advertising spots? Hegoda's contention is that in such a context the poet's function is not to retreat into aestheticism but to be in the vanguard of the revolt. imagery of romantic poetry However, what Hegoda demonstrates in this anthology is both his capacity for aestheticism as well as revolt. In fact the first segment of his anthology titled 'Lo Soba' which roughly translated means the ways of the world is full of resonant poetry. But even here he touches on society even in an oblique way, as in 'Ran Ruva' where he invokes memories of the golden statue in the Kusa Jatakaya only to describe a sick young woman at the gates of a hospital. But his is a conscious revolt against aestheticism as when he invokes the best imagery of romantic poetry to finish about a piece of flesh on a surgeon's pan which he tells us incidentally was a woman's breast. Gruesome you might say but such is the nature of the poet. But the point is that aestheticism can be combined with revolt. Nice words can be used to talk about not so nice things. However the poet comes into his own in his conscious protest poetry such as 'Siriyawathiwa Nidahas Karanne' or 'Kageda Me Maskella'. The first is about the pollution of a lake in the Anuradhapura district as the result of the induction of a factory and the resultant human tragedy which involves not merely the rural society but also questions of justice. In the second poem, the poet brings into question the whole problem of killings in recent times involving not only the role of the passive onlookers but also the apparently vocal Parliamentary Opposition awakened only by such incidents and leading to its mordant climax when after all the indignant oppositionists have departed, a beggar approaches the piece of flesh which had been the object of all this inquiry and muses whether this was the tongue of a newspaperman! Hegoda also very rarely for a contemporary poet packs a mordant polemical wit such as in 'PL 480' which is an ironic ballad sung to the American Ambassador and composed by a lowly member of the governing party who had been denied other lucrative jobs because he had been in hospital soon after the elections for reasons unspecified but which can be easily guessed in today's political context. In the same category is the poem about the drought-stricken peasantry of the Giruwa Pattuwa which is a trenchant criticism of the exploitation of the so-called low castes by the political establishment. In most of these poems Hegoda uses the dialect of the region to telling effect. rat race of life With Buddhadasa Galappaththi we are in less contentious terrain. None of these stories are autobiographical (in fact all of them are written in the third person) but here we see a mirror held up to the upwardly mobile middle class life in the metropolis which the writer knows at first hand as a middle-aged senior executive in the corporate sector. In 'Kurulu Adare' for example Karunajeeva seeks to surmount the barrenness of his daily existence by focusing on the birds who have built a nest on top of his lamp shade. However to his daughter who is preparing for an examination the birds antics (which so intrigue her father) are an ordinary thing and she takes the death of the fledgling bird with the matter-of-factness of the new generation. In 'Katuwa Ennemi' Palika is a bored housewife saddled with a workaholic husband and seeks diversion in the arms of a creative director of an advertising agency. There is no overt social commentary here but underlying these stories is the nullity of middle and upper middle class life in Colombo. These people are neither intentionally cruel nor insensitive as in the case of the mother and daughter in 'Kusumalatha' but caught up in the rat race of life they have no time to think of the feelings of others. Valentine's Day Perhaps the most powerful story here is 'Wassata Themunu Gehaniya' with its theme of male domination and the exploitation of women in work places. Sumali is trapped in an unhappy marriage but she cannot but see her acholic and unemployed husband Piyatilleke except through the romantic haze of their courting days, a useful reminder of how love can sour to those who have been busy touting Valentine's Day this past week. Her boss Jayaratne who finally manages to seduce her too professes to be trapped in a loveless marriage himself but being Sumali's superior he has more opportunity for satisfaction. Unlike most recent fiction writers Galappaththi makes no attempt to pursue the techniques of post-modernism and will no doubt be faulted on that score in some quarters. But that surely is the writer's choice although there are some critics who would like to ram their own tastes down the throats of writers. However what these two works of short fiction and poetry demonstrate is that serious Sinhala literature is alive and well although the problems, dilemmas and challenges which Hegoda poses will increasingly become relevant to serious writing in this age of popular culture. |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
