Seamus Heaney and modern Sri Lankan poetry - 3

My last two columns have been devoted to a discussion of the relevance of Seamus Heaney's work to Sri Lankan poets in terms of the possibilities of the deployment of the pastoral mode and finding one's poetic voice. In today's column, I wish to focus on the ideas of post-colonial writing and how the English language, the instrument of colonial domination and subjugation, could be used to write poetry that will facilitate the re-possession culture and history in the way that Heaney has sought to do. This is indeed a problematic that is germane to the ambitions of Sri Lankan poets who choose to write in English. The efforts, choices and rhetorical strategies of Heaney can be eye-openers in this regard.

The idea pf post-coloniality when applied to the case of Ireland can generate a spate of discrepancies and anomalies. Ireland was a colony of the English, but clearly it is different from other former British colonies such as India, Sri Lanka or Nigeria. For all intents and purposes, Ireland belongs to the first world and Europe and to apply theories and frameworks related to post-coloniality fashioned in third world countries might appear to be contradictory. The geographical proximity of Ireland to England and it being a successful member of the European Union do complicate matters. In addition, Irish missionaries played a not too insignificant role in the colonized countries of the British Empire. All these considerations clearly make it difficult to insert Ireland unproblematically into the category of colonized countries.

At the same time, it has also to be recognized that Ireland had a rich cultural heritage extending over centuries and a vibrant language; they were virtually destroyed by British colonizers. Here the Irish experience bears certain similarities with the tragedies countenanced by third world countries. It is in this context that Seamus Heaney's poetry can be instructive to Sri Lankan poets writing in English.

Whether Seamus Heaney can be regarded as a post-colonial writer is a matter of debate. A similar controversy surrounds the work of the other illustrious and Nobel Prize winning Irish poet William Butler Yeats. There are those who claim, because of his attitude to mainstream English poetry, his aristocratic proclivities, his being identified with the Anglo-Irish protestants who were marginalizing the Catholics, that he cannot in good faith be termed a post-colonial writer. On the other hand, there are those cultural critics like Edward Said, a highly influential post-colonial theorist, who claims that Yeats can be regarded as a post-colonial writer. For example, Said says, 'it is difficult to read most of Yeats and not feel that the devastating anger and genius of Swift were harnessed by him to lifting the burden of Ireland's afflictions.

True, Yeats stopped short of imagining the full political liberation he might have aspired toward, but we are left with a considerable achievement in decolonization nonetheless.' Said went on to accord him the status of 'that of the indisputably great national poet who articulates experiences, the aspirations, and the visions of a people suffering under the domination of an off-shore power.'

If Yeats can be considered a writer with post-colonial proclivities Seamus Heaney, who belonged to the oppressed Catholic minority in North Ireland certainly has a stronger claim. In examining the ways in which Heaney sought to challenge the British hegemony, we need to focus on his struggles to make the English language bend towards his Irish longings. Here indeed is an area in which Sri Lankan poets writing in English can learn some valuable lessons.

In order to understand Seamus Heaney's frame of mind and contextualize his efforts within a wide sphere of intellectual and poetic activity, it is useful I think to examine his approach to art and poetry in general. He valued highly the infrangible dignity of the poet and his or her inner freedom. He remarked that, 'I have learned to value this poetry of inner freedom very highly. It is an example of self-conquest, a style discovered to express the poet's unique response to his universal ordinariness.' He said that, the achievement of a poem, after all, is an experience of relief. In that liberated moment, when the lyric discovers its buoyant completion and the timeless formal pleasure comes to fullness and exhaustion, something occurs which is equidistant from self-justification and self-obliteration.'

Heaney believed with Yeats that what gives poetry its indomitable power is its ability to 'hold in a single thought reality and justice.' Heaney, as a poet, was deeply interested in re-possessing the Irish cultural heritage; and this meant the decolonization of memory and language. At the same time, he wanted to do this as literary artist and not a propagandist.

He once observed, 'we have been rightly instructed about the ways that native populations and indigenous cultures disappear in the course of these civilizing enterprises, and we have learnt how the values and language of the conqueror demolish and marginalize native values and institutions, rendering them barbarous, subhuman, and altogether beyond the pale of cultivated sympathy or regard. But even so, it seems an abdication of responsibility to be swayed by these desperately overdue correctives to a point where imaginative literature is read simply and solely as a function of an oppressive discourse.' This statement of Seamus Heaney is one which is well worth pondering. On the one hand, he fully recognizes the imperative need to de-colonize culture and language and re-possess history; on the other, he is fully alive to the danger of slipping into noisome sloganeering. Modern writers in Sri Lanka who write in English are confronted with this dilemma. And how they respond to it and overcome it is vitally connected with the growth of English literature in Sri Lanka.

Heaney fully endorses Wallace Stevens’ statement that the nobility of poetry ‘is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without.’

Seamus Heaney repeatedly stressed the importance of appreciating the complex and many-sided totality that is a poem. He commented that, ‘it is obvious that poetry’s answer to the world is not given only in terms of the content of its statements. It is given perhaps even more emphatically in terms of meter, and syntax, of tone and musical tunes; .When one examines Heaney’s poems very carefully, one realizes how much thought has gone into the realization of this multi-faceted unity that is the poem. Aspiring poets have much to learn from Heaney.

There are a number of important ways in which Heaney, an Irish writer using the English language, sought to invest it with certain facets of his cultural inheritance and identity. In this regard, I wish to focus on five important areas of concern.

The first is his use of Irish myths, legends, traditional narratives as a way of imparting an Irish tincture to his writings in English. This is indeed a strategy that was employed by other distinguished Irish writers like William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. He second is the way he turned to linguistics as a way of challenging the hegemony if English from within.

When we read poems gathered in a volume like ‘Wintering Out, we have to consult often the Oxford English Dictionary or English dialect dictionary to understand and attain a clearer meaning of certain words; words such as ‘stour’ in the poem ’Intimidation’ carries diverse literary connotations, and they unleash various currents of meaning. Consequently, a certain tension begins to emerge between the way that words are situated in a line and heir historical associations. As Derek Attridge aptly remarks, ‘the use of etymology fissures the synchronic surface of the text, introducing diachronic shadows and echoes, opening the language to shifts of meaning that can never be closed off.’

This is one strategy, then, that Seamus Heaney has deployed to unsettle the power of English. As another critic commented, ‘Heaney’s poems serve as a textual space in which competing discourses, conflicting experiences, discontinuous thoughts, interrupted action, questions without answers, and contradictory cultural messages cohabit.’

Third, along with etymologies, Heaney focuses on the sounds of words, the pronunciation of words, as a way of shocking the reader to a new linguistic awareness. For example in the poem ‘Broagh’ this is exemplified vividly. This is a poem in which the focus is on the way the word id pronounced, and on the people who use it; .the poem opens with the spoken word broagh in the title. In turn, the first word in the text operates as a translation of the title

Broagh

Riverbank, the long rigs

Ending the broken docken

And a canopied pad

Down to the ford.

As a commentator observes, ‘since the word broagh means riverbank, a reading of the poem involves not only the articulation of the dialect word, but its translation and pronunciation as well for those ‘strangers’ who find the word ‘difficult to mange,’’

Fourth, the way Heaney makes use of metre and sound effects to draw attention to the hegemony of English merits study. He believed that phonetics and feelings are intimately connected in the human make-up. In this poem, the poet says

The last word

gh the strangers found

difficult to manage.

In this example, Heaney focuses on pronunciation as a way of unsettling the dominance of English. Commenting on poems such as these, Heaney says that they convinced him that a poet can be ‘faithful to the nature of the English language….and, at the same time, be faithful to one’s own non-English origin.’

Fifth, Heaney made use of Gaelic metrical and rhyming conventions as a way of de-stabilizing the flow of English thought patterns.

For example, in the following stanza taken from the poem ‘Follower’, foregrounds how monosyllables rhyme with unstressed syllable of a two-syllable word, reminding one of Gaelic representational strategies.

An expert. He would set wing

And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

The sod rolled over without breaking

At the headrig, with a single pluck.

Seamus Heaney wrote in English, but he knew Irish well enough to translate from Irish into English. One of his translated poem commands

Unshackle your mind

Of its civil tackling,

Shelley, Keats, and Shakespeare.

Get back to what is your own.

This discussion of Seamus Heaney’s attempts to de-colonize English and subvert its power, even as he enriched the language in the process, invites close attention.

To write in English while maintaining one’s cultural identity and imprinting that identity on the English language is one ambition of Heaney.

It stands to reason to think that it also should be an objective of poets writing in English in Sri Lanka.