Seamus Heaney and modern Sri Lankan poetry - 4

In my last three columns, I focused on the way Seamus Heaney deployed the pastoral mode, how he found his poetic voice very early and his encounters with the issues of post-coloniality respectively; all three of these topics have a direct bearing on the ambitions and preoccupations of Sri Lankan poets writing in English In today's column, I wish to explore the topic of Heaney's handling of the political issues arising out of the conflict in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics. We in Sri Lanka have just emerged from an unfortunate and brutal civil war that lasted for over thirty years. The experiences of citizens in Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka have much in common; there are, no doubt, significant differences as well. How Heaney transformed these political tensions, acts of violence that he observed and experienced in Ireland into memorable poetry merits our closest attention.

The conflict in Northern Ireland in its brutally violent form lasted for about thirty years from 1960- 1998; in 1998, the Belfast Good Friday Agreement was signed; even after that conciliatory event, sporadic violence continued. The central point of disagreement between the two contending groups, Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists, was the constitutional state of Northern Ireland and the deeply held antagonism between the two rival groups. This had both a political and paramilitary dimension. Paramilitary groups associated with both sides escalated the violence leading to a period of turmoil and unrest.

Ideas of cultural identity, place, history, imperialism, economic opportunities were entangled in a complex mosaic. How writers and artists in Ireland sought to give creative expression to the complexities and ambiguities associated with this conflict deserves careful study.

This conflict in Northern Ireland is generally referred to as the Troubles, and how writers and artists represented its manifold nature has been a topic of intense discussion.

The politics of communal proximity, the long shadow of imperialism, the perils of atavistic sectarianism, the intersections of aesthetics and politics figure very prominently in these discussions. It is in this context that we have to locate Seamus Heaney's attempt to represent the complexities of Troubles in his poetry.

Seamus Heaney's poems that bring to life the Troubles have to be examined as alternate modes of cultural and historical inscription. Like most writers, artists and filmmakers, Heaney, for the most part, sought to adopt a mature and conciliatory and forward-looking attitude to the Troubles. The film 'Dance Lexie Dance (1997) by Dave Duggan represents this mode of thinking. This film recounts the experience of a protestant parent coming round to appreciate her daughter's ambition to learn Irish step dance.

In the earlier part of the narrative, the father points out the insurmountable gap between Protestant and Catholic culture in relation to dance. However, as the film ends, the father participates proudly in her performance of Irish step dance by her daughter. Many of Heaney's poems display this generous outlook. However, there are a few, mostly in his collection 'North' that adopt a more partisan interpretation.

Heaney has made numerous references to his intentions as a poet, and these allow us to understand better his approach to politics and poetry. Once he remarked, 'to be a source of truth and at the same time a vehicle of harmony; this expresses what we would like poetry to be and it takes me back to the kinds of pressure which poets from northern Ireland are subject to. These poets feel with a special force a need to be true to the negative nature of the evidence and at the same time to show an affirming flame, the need to be both socially responsible and creatively free.'

On another occasion Heaney made the following observation. 'Poetry, let us say, whether it belongs to an old political dispensation or aspires to express a new, has to be a working model of inclusive consciousness. It should not simplify. Its projections and inventions should be a match for the complex reality which surrounds it and out of which it is generated...as long as the coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world that we live in and endure, poetry is fulfilling its counter-weighting function.' Heaney's approach to poetry and politics can be gauged from statements like the following.

' I think writers of my generation saw themselves as part of the leaven. The fact that a literary action was afoot was itself a new political condition, and the poets did not feel the need to address themselves to the specifics of politics because they assumed that the tolerance and subtleties of their art were precisely what they had to set against the repetitive intolerance of public life.' This statement has a great relevance for us in Sri Lanka as well.

Seamus Heaney, by and large, sought to avoid endorsements of extreme positions and was able to display the deeper powers of poetry in carving out newer courses for thinking and imagining. He was a superb cartographer of the forbidding lands of memory and consciousness; he was able, in his poetry dealing with memory and consciousness, as they intersect with poetry, to demonstrate his analytical and humane strengths as a poet. There are, of course, critics of Heaney.

On the one hand, there are those who accuse him of not adequately representing the plight of the Catholic minority, and his decision in 1972 to leave Belfast and settle near Dublin was seen as an act of betrayal. On the other hand, critics such as Edna Longley, Blake Morrison, have levied the charge that he tends to legitimize violence and give historical respectability to sectarian killing. However, the majority of literary critics seem to think that he made a good faith to understand the Irish troubles in their full complexity and represent through the medium of conscious literary art.

Let us consider a poem that has been at the centre of a widespread controversy; it is the poem 'Punishment, included in the collection 'North'. The practice of punishing young Catholic girls who developed affairs with British soldiers is at the heart of the poem. His attitude to the killed girl is one of mixed emotions. On the one hand, he is moved by a sense of eroticism and sympathy as illustrated by some of the tropes he uses. On the other hand, he seems to sympathize with the punishers for what she did.

Catholic girls in northern Ireland who have had affairs with British soldiers have been punished in the same way

Your betraying sisters cauled in tar

wept by the railings Here he is alluding to the practice of tying young girls accused of these crimes to railings, their hair shaven and covering them in tar. The poem ends with the following stanza.

Who would connive

In civilized outrage

Yet understand the exact

And tribal intimate revenge

Critics like Cruise O’brien have found the poem offensive, he says, ‘it is the word exact that hurts most.’ To my mind, what the poem manifests is the divided consciousness of the poet. As a rational being, Heaney would surely articulate ‘civilized outrage’ at such unacceptable behaviour; at an emotional level, he comprehends the reason for his community approving such actions. It seems to me, the poem is also saying guiltily that Heaney, like others, is subject to the dictates of atavistic sectarianism. It is interesting to observe that the final word in the poem is ‘revenge’ and not ‘justice’; this also has the effect of undermining the legitimacy of the action.

In some other poems, like ‘On the Other Side’, included in his book ‘Wintering Out’ he develops the tensions between the two contending groups dexterously. Here, the poet attends a funeral mourning the death of a neighbour who is Protestant. He finds himself out of place, but decides to pay his respect. As a consequence of the deep-seated animosities between the two groups, he can only chat about the weather with one of the attendees.

Should I slip away I wonder

or go up and touch his shoulder

and talk about the weather e

Here the phrase ‘the other side’ is one used by both Protestants and Catholics to signify their opponents The poem deals movingly with the problems and respects of inter-communication between Protestant and Catholic neighbors. The taciturnity, the uncertainty that marks this interaction is worked into the disparities in religious lexicon to intensify the poet’s message.

Seamus Heaney’s poetry dealing with the Troubles in Ireland connects to the experiences that we have gone through with the ethnic conflict and the bitter memories that still linger. It was his intention to transform the turbulent period and the harsh experiences it generated into a mature and self-reflective poetry. He succeeded, in my judgment, for the most part. His consciousness was locked into implacable contradictions growing out of dual loyalties, double allegiances. He was caught between the contradictory pulls of his native Catholic community and their traumas, and his vocation as a poet writing in English. How he was able to navigate those troubled waters contains many lessons for poets in Sri Lanka.

In this regard, I wish to focus on one area that he fashioned for himself – an area of concern that has a direct relevance to those of writing poetry in Sinhala, Tamil and English. He was able to locate the present Irish Troubles in distant history and myth, and thereby open a newer perspective on them. Heaney deployed ancient myths reconfiguring violence and sacrifice as a way of enframing current turmoil in Ireland. What he sought to do was to juxtapose the past and the present in a way that would offer an ironic commentary on both. By the mapping of traditional European myths and legends on to the modern experience of violence and bloodshed in Northern Ireland, Heaney was seeking to illuminate both experiences in a novel and reflective way. Hart insightfully observes, ‘Heaney returns to myths and histories of primitive cultures that resemble his, stripping the old gods of their grandiose cloaks and implicating them in the world affairs from which they arose.’ Interestingly, in a passage like the following, Heaney could be commenting either ancient Icelanders or modern Irelanders.

Thor’s hammer swung

to geography and trade,

thick-witted couplings and revenges.

The hatreds and behindbacks of the althng, lies and women,

exhaustions nominated peace,

memory incubating spilled blood.

Similarly in the poem titled, ‘Funeral Rites’, Heaney juxtaposes memories culled from his childhood, the modern funerals in Northern Ireland resulting from sectarian violence and ancient legends. He says

Now as news come in of each neighbourly murder we pine for ceremony

customary rhythms

Here it is the phrase ‘neighborly murder’ that serves to focus on the continuities between the ancient and the modern – these neighbours could be protestants and Catholics killing one another in Ulster or the warring neighbours in the Icelandic sagas.

Locating modern Irish Troubles in the distant past, re-contextualizing them within ancient legends, then, is one distinctive way in which Heaney aimed to explore the conflict in Ireland through his poetry. His deft use of etymology, place-names, metrical patterns, Irish locutions, that I alluded to in my last column are some of his other rhetorical devices. It is evident that Heaney’s ethical imagination is vitally connected to the valorization of inner freedom and the recognition of the other. Interestingly, Derrida claims that the respect for otherness is the driving force of deconstruction.