Seamus Heaney and modern Sri Lankan poetry - 5

The idea of community as articulated in Seamus Heaney's poetry is a topic that, in my judgment, has yet to receive the deep and sustained attention that it richly deserves. I wish to explore this topic in my column today. This is doubly significant for my discussion in that some of our most perceptive literary critics like Gunadasa Amarasekera have been focusing on the need for Sri Lankan writers to establish a closer and more life--giving relationship with the community of which they are a vital part. If one reads Amarasekera's work very carefully, one would realize that during the past half a century or so, he has been drawing attention to the importance of tradition, of social consciousness and their complex interactions in the formation of a vibrant community.

Over the years, he has underlined the need to generate a meaningful and informed conversation among literary intellectuals and concerned readers.; his phrase 'uttara sanvadaya' highlights one very important aspect of this endeavor of community-making. Therefore, the way that Seamus Heaney sought to construct a community though his poetry is one that merits our closest attention. Here, I plan to present my own distinctive take on the relationship between poetry and community as manifested in the writings of Heaney.

The word community first made its presence in the English language in the fourteenth century. It is derived from a Latin word and in English it has been used to signify the common people as opposed to elites, a form of organized society, often small, the people belonging to an area, the quality of possessing something in common and a sense of common identity.

Raymond Williams says that community can be the warmly persuasive word to characterize a set of prevalent relations or an alternate set of relationships. According to him, unlike other terms such as state, nation, society, the word community never seems to have been deployed unfavorably or with negative connotations.

However, Jacques Derrida, the architect of deconstructionism, adopts a very different view .He says, 'I don't much like the word community. I am not even sure I like the thing.' He goes on to state that, 'if by community one implies, as is often the case, a harmonious group, consensus, and fundamental agreement beneath the phenomena of discord, or war, then I don't believe in it very much and I sense in it as much threat as promise.' What Derrida sees in community is a tendency towards self-protective closure and indifference to otherness; this goes counter to the spirit and norms of validation of deconstruction.

In recent times, the concept of community has become the site of diverse debates among both humanists and social scientists. Two of the most influential ideas related to community have been advanced by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the French thinker Jean- Luc Nancy. They represent the leading edge of thinking on this topic, Agamben talks of the 'coming community'; what he means by this is the emergence of a community on the ashes of the inclusive/exclusive logic that grounds all our discussions of identity.

Normally, the concept of community indexes a form of belonging; it refers to a group of people with shared attributes and values who converge to constitute a loose collective. Agamben sees things differently. According to his proposed model, the community is without belonging except for belonging to itself.

To tease out the full implications of this view, I need more space than is available at present. The second important theorist is Jean - Luc Nancy. For him, community does not comprise a group of individuals and their specific proclivities; community is not aggregation of individuals, but more akin to a sense of feeling that is generated by the moments of sharing of irreducibly singular beings. It is apparent, then, that both Agamben and Nancy repudiate the generally accepted notions of community.

In my analysis, I wish to locate this concept at a mid-point between Raymond Williams and Nancy. For a community to function properly there need not be total unanimity of opinion; in fact that would be a recipe for the death of a community. There should be vigorous debates, space for disagreements, within a community. After all the 'uttara sanvadaya' that Amarasekera talks about gestures precisely towards this dynamic. People belonging to a community are united by a need for rational discussion and in the case of literary communities that is of the essence. As we shall presently see in the work of Heaney, the construction of a community involves a complex process of recognitions. It is vitally connected to the foundations of one's being as they gain life in and through social collectivities. Anyone familiar with Heaney's prose writings gathered in such book as 'Preoccupations' 'The Government of the Tongue; 'The Redress of Poetry', would realize that he has, along the way, made numerous comments on the idea of community. For example, commenting on the place occupied by Yeats in his community, Heaney makes the following observation. 'Within a culture the most important thing for the poet is to establish authority, and Yeats had the gift of establishing authority; first of all by achievement, but secondly by a conduct which was 'majestic' in some kind of way and overbearing to some extent but based upon a belief in the culture. He could rebuke the culture because he was its most intense representative to some extent. And I think that the poet has to not get caught in a position where he is answerable to the politician but where in some way the politician is under his spiritual gaze. Now that is what is exemplary about Yeats, but also what is very difficult to achieve for a writer in contemporary Ireland.'

This statement needs careful unpacking. Embedded in it are comments on the relation of a poet and his community, a poet and politics, the integrity of the poetic process. In 'The Government of the Tongue', Heaney reinforces the conviction that 'poetry is its own reality and no matter how much a poet may concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and historical reality, the ultimate fidelity must be to the demands and promise of the artistic event.'

What is interesting about Heaney's approach to community is that while recognizing its supreme importance he is also quick to underline the fact that a poet ultimately stands or falls by the quality of his poetry.

When discussing the relationship between Seamus Heaney and his notion of community as exemplified in his poetry, we have to posit three growing circles of community.

The first is the rural Catholic community that he grew up in Northern Ireland. His early poems display a close attachment, but one of criticality, to this community. The community that he evokes through images of frogs, cattle, wells, buckets, fishermen and so on is one that Sri Lankan readers can readily identify with. His early poems dealing with this rural Catholic community display vividly the fact that a poet has to identify himself with a community, while giving definition to that community; the self of the poet too as a consequence attains a more legible profile.

When describing the community associated with his childhood, he took care not to invest it with a false romantic halo and try to represent its rhythms in their true complexity. He sought to capture the cadences, locutions, imagery that marked his community while not ignoring the divisions, violence and turmoil that were endemic to it. They are presented to us from the point of a view of a mature man who experienced the long political tensions and anxieties of his community. Consequently tropes of combat and delusion pulsate through his poetry dealing with rural living.

In describing his community Heaney paid close attention to the landscape, animals, activities such as digging, farming, thatching that characterized it. At the same time, wherever possible, he attempted to invest it with symbolic valences and allegorical significances. There is a valuable lesson for Sri Lankan poets here. For example the poem, 'Gifts of Rain' collected in his book 'Wintering Out' illustrates this fact. This poem commences with the description of the flooding of the local river (Moyola), and as the poem unfolds, goes onto find symbolic and allegorical meanings in the interdependence of human beings and nature. It concludes with allegorical thrusts that relate to a better future for Ireland.

Heaney's comments on his relationship to his community provoke important lines of inquiry. He once remarked that, 'The community to which I belong is Catholic and nationalist. I believe that the poet's force now, and hopefully in the future, is to maintain the efficacy of his own 'mythos', his own cultural and political colorings, rather than to serve any particular momentary strategy that his leaders, his paramilitary organizations, or his own liberal self might want to serve.' These observations, to be sure, carry the force of ethical imagination; they also encourage one to dream forward. It all starts with the idea that identity comes to life as a first person pronoun.

The second circle of community that I have in mind is that of Ireland as a whole. As an undergraduate at Queens University in Belfast, Heaney felt the contradictory pulls of his rural community and the wider world of sophistication. Given the vast distance that separated the two spaces, the movement from one to the other proved to be a demanding journey. Given the nature of British imperialism, and the deep seated animosities between Catholics and Protestants, clearly this was not an easy journey to make. However, Heaney also realized the unavoidable need to make that journey and become a part of the larger Irish community. As a commentator remarked, 'to cross back and forth required the skill of a chameleon. His poems registered the perils of playing the camouflaged 'double agent', as he calls himself in 'Station Island' as well as the kind of shuttle diplomacy needed to tear down old barricades and live peacefully with factions.'

Many of his poems bear testimony to the arduousness as well as the compelling need to move into that second and wider circle. The trope of healing is central to this endeavor. He once remarked, 'I was symbolically placed between the marks of English influence and the lure of the native experience.' hence, the idea of being situated between two cultural worlds animates his poetry. Therefore he regarded his writing as a form of healing. It was evident to him that the contentiousness between Catholics and Protestants were perpetuated through the deployment of language, myth and symbols. He felt that it was incumbent upon him to heal that rift, cross that insurmountable gap, by providing newer openings of language and novel understandings that would lead to a process of healing.

Heaney once said that, 'I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading. I think of the personal and Irish pieties as vowels, and the literary awareness nourished on English as consonants. My hope is that the poems will be vocables adequate to my whole experience. 'The notion of poems as objects that reconcile and harmonize rival forces is evident in the formal aspects of his as poetry well. He fashioned his poetic structures in a way that would facilitate this fusion of opposing forces.

The third expanding circle that I have in mind is that of the English literary tradition. Heaney is a Catholic from Northern Ireland, but his chosen medium of literary communication is English. What this means is that he also heir to the rich poetic tradition that passes through the work of Milton, Wordsworth, Clare, Hopkins Yeats, Eliot, Hughes. His widening interests did not stop here; he was also attracted to American poets such as Robert Lowell, and Russian poets like Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, polish poets like Zbigniew Herbert Czeslaw Milosz. He saw himself as belonging to that wider literary community as well. The membership in these three distinct communities entailed the shuttling between three spaces, and constant border-crossing. In the case of Heaney this means the crossing back ad forth between the divisive fortifications of Catholic and Protestant, rural and urban, Irish and English, British and American, romantic and classical. In this trafficking, Heaney is constantly mindful of the two polarities - that 'poetry makes nothing happen' as Auden said, and the compelling need for poetry to be politically consequential. Heaney always believed that one should not convey the impression that poetry has abdicated the engagement with collective life.

The way Seamus Heaney navigates between the three communities that I have outlined has great implications for poets in Sri Lanka. The arc of energy that flows from one community to the other has to be carefully mapped. How we continue to be loyal to our immediate communities without worshipfully endorsing them, how we can be constructive members of a unified and multi-racial society and how we can become writers and critics and readers who are also a part of the global community deserves careful pondering and strategizing. Heaney has shown us some strategies that we might consider. Clearly, there are others that we can fashion for ourselves in relation to our own distinctive cultural formations.

It is important to bear in mind the fact that our entry into history is contingent on our ability to negotiate productively the triple membership of these three communities. How Heaney has constructed linguistic bridges to move freely between the three communities is a topic that invites deep reflection.