Longing and belonging in diasporic poetry
The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable upsurge of interest
in diasporic writing. Migration has become a conspicuous and inescapable
fact of modern life. We are living at a moment in history when the
forces of globalism and localism are embroiled in each other's
activities in unanticipated ways. This state of affairs is vitally
connected with the increase in the volume of migration and the rise and
spread of diasporic writings. It is against this backdrop that I wish to
examine Sunil Govinnage's poetry, both in English and Sinhala. Govinnage
is a Sri Lankan born writer who currently lives in Perth, Australia. He
has published fiction and poetry in English, and three volumes of poetry
in Sinhala, one of which won the Godage Prize this year.
The word diaspora is derived from a Greek word meaning dispersion. It
was originally used to signify the dispersion of Jews. However, in
recent times, the term has been broadened to include diverse peoples who
leave their homeland for a variety of reasons and relocate in other
cultural geographies. The Indian-born social scientist Arjun Appadurai
has coined the term ethnoscape to denote the movements of these peoples
who cross national boundaries and find their way to alien societies.
This phenomenon has led to the emergence of diasporic writers.
In the case of Sri Lankan diasporic writers, the names that spring
immediately to mind are those of Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunasekera,
Shyam Selvadurai, Michelle de Kretser etc. Many of these writers left
the island as children or early adolescents. Hence their literary
sensibilities were formed elsewhere. On the other hand, there are
diasporic writers who left the island in full maturity, and hence,
important distinctions need to be made among these diverse groups that
are covered by the umbrella term disporics.
Writing an introduction to his book, Black Swans and Other Stories, I
made the following observation. 'The protagonists of Sunil Govinnage's
stories encode the anxieties and desires of the diasporics, caught as
they are between the two chimeras of home and exile. The dialectic
between localism and globalism only serves to intensify the pains of
this phenomenon.'
Cultural identity
The notion of cultural identity is pivotal to Sunil Govinnage’s
writings as it is indeed for all works by diasporic writers. Commenting
on his stories, I made the following observation. The idea of cultural
identity is central to the thematics of many of the stories gathered in
this volume. It is becoming increasingly clear that ideas are by no
means integrated and unified and fixed. On the contrary, they are
fragmented, fissured, volatile, constantly making and re-making
themselves.
They are constituted by varying regimes of discourse and cultural
practices. Identities are produced in specific historical conjunctures,
cultural geographies, institutional sites and special formations.’ These
observations, it seems to me, are equal applicable to Govinnage’s poetry
– both in Sinhala and English – with their stenos grappling with the
protean nature of identity. Many of Govinnage’s English poems deal with
the sense of dislocation, anxiety, disenchantment generated by the
problematics of cultural identity. For example, the short poem titled,
the city of light captures this mood well.
Perth; the city of light
Home away from home
Floating at the edge of the sawn river
Like a picture postcard,
Where people ask me
Every day
Where I come from.
The laconic and matter of fact tone of the poem serves to underline
both the commonality and the trauma of the interaction.
A second theme that is revealed to that of identity that figures
prominently in Sunil Govinnage’s English poetry is the issue of
language. He approaches this, quite appropriately in my judgment, not
directly but by certain circuitous routes. For example in the poem
titled White Masks (invoking Frantz Fanon) he presents this dilemma
through a simple situation without any editorial intrusions.
Under
A sixty year old gum tree
A plaque remembers
An unknown soldier
In King’s Park.
He sits and scribbles poetry
In English.
Burying
Two thousand and five hundred years
Of metaphors, images
Meter and rhyme now
Heard only at night
In dreams of Sinhala verse
Most diasporic writers choose to write in the language of their
adopted country; few continue to write in their mother tongue. What is
interesting about Govinnage is that he has opted to write in both
languages – Sinhala and English. Sri Lankan born diasporic writers have
written in English for many decades; however, it is becoming evident now
that more and more are writing in Sinhala and Tamil. The internet and
websites have facilitated this phenomenon. As I travel in countries such
as England, mainland U.S.A. Canada, Australia, Kuwait, Hong Kong etc. I
meet communities of Sri Lankan-born disporics who have selected Sinhala
as their language of choice of creative writing.
What is interesting abut diasporic writings in English and Sinhala is
the respective addresses of the two are different. This is clearly
evident in Govinnage’s poetry. His English poems are addressed largely
to an Australian audience, and hence issues of selfhood, cultural
identity, alienation play a dominant role in the poems. On the other
hand, his Sinhala poetry focuses on themes of memory, nostalgia and
home. Interestingly, his three volumes of poetry, Mathaka Divayina
,Mathaka Pilirav, Mathaka Mavatha have as their guiding trope memory
(mathaka).
The idea of memory is central to Givinnage’s Sinhala poetry; it gives
them shape and definition. He sees memory as occupying the space of
intersection of personal, social and cultural dynamics. In other words,
he sees memory as the product of a diversity of discourses. In recent
times, memory has been subject to various re-imaginings by outstanding
thinkers. Govinnage is fully aware of them, and makes use of these
concepts to give shape and profile to his lived experiences. Sigmund
Freud pointed out the complex ways in which personal memory operates. He
paid special attention to childhood memories and the resurgence of
repressed bitter memories. The eminent French sociologist Maurice
Halbwachs opened up a newer line of inquiry by demonstrating the social
basis of memory. In the meantime the idea of cultural memory was
promoted by other thinkers. All these have had an impact on the creative
intelligence of Govinnage.
In addition, Sunil Govinnage, in some of his poems, has dramatised
the ways in which memory can challenge officially sanctioned histories
and historical narratives. This is indeed a pathway of inquiry that was
stressed by the celebrated German cultural critic Walter Benjamin. He
said that, ’to articulate the past historically does not mean to
recognize it the way it really was. It means to seize hold of memory as
it flashes up at a moment of danger.’ In recent years, Pierre Nora has
done as much as anyone else, to explore the complex ramifications of
memory. He remarked that, ‘memory is life. It is always carried by
groups of living people, and therefore it is in a permanent evolution.
It is subject to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, unaware
of its successive deformations, open to all kinds of use and
manipulation…..history is always the incomplete and problematic
reconstruction of what is no longer there. Memory is always belongs to
our time and forms a lived bond with the eternal present; history is a
representation of the past.’
The idea of nostalgic animates many of Govinnage’s Sinhala poems. To
be sure, his is a critical nostalgia that leaves little room for bathos
and sentimentality – twin perils that lie in wait for the poet who
chooses to traverse that path. One reason why Govinnage is able to
infuse his poems with a sense of critical nostalgia is because he senses
the dialectical relation between nostalgia and globalization.
Svetlana Boym, who in many ways, has written the best book on
nostalgia, tiled The Future of Nostalgia says that, ‘globalization
encouraged stronger local attachments. In counterpoint to our
fascination with cyberspace, and the virtual global village, there is no
less global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community
with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented
world. Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in time if
accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.’ It is this
feeling that nostalgia is a product of globalization and hence has to be
addressed in all its complexity that gives Govinnage’s poetry its
vigour.
Another theme that Govinnage has sought to explore in his poetry is
the idea of home. This theme is vitally connected with nostalgia; after
all, nostalgia means home sickness. Interestingly philosopher Novalis
asserted that philosophy is really homesickness; it is the urge to be at
home everywhere. The trope of home radiates diverse trajectories of
meaning. Home is where we flee to and flee from. As Govinnage makes
clear in his poems, the trope of home appears in a plurality of
registers, topographical, material, psychological, linguistic, symbolic
and so on. The power if the trope of home is fed by another trope –
roots. As the eminent thinker Simone Weil once observed, ‘to be rooted
is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human
soul.
Not everyone feels the same way. For example, Salman Rushdie,
somewhat sardonically dismisses the whole notion of roots. ‘we pretend
that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not
find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles.’ Govinnage, in his
writings, has placed a great deal of emphasis on the ambiguities of
meaning and understanding that the tropes of home and root generate. In
some of his poems, there is a direct reference to home, while in others
like Vada Arambannata Pera, Urumaya Saha Kavi Sisila, Mituruvu Tisara
Nadiya the allusions are more oblique.
plaintive note
A plaintive note pervades many of Sunil Govinnage’s poems written in
Sinhala. This is primarily because the idea of suffering that arises as
a result of cultural dislocation, language becoming its own stranger,
uncertain identity, repossession of the past that inform his writing
anxiety-producing ways.. In addition, a sense of suffering emerges from
his struggles to dislodge emotions domiciled in his thought-structures.
His conviction that his consciousness has failed him exacerbates this
suffering and this adds to the troubling feeling that he has failed to
achieve his own mind.
What this discussion of Govinnage’s poetry points to is an
interesting conjunction, antagonistic and complementary, between
geography and history. He lives in Australia, his adopted country, a new
geography. At the same time what guides and informs his deepest
structures of feelings is a history not emanating from this new
geography, but from the geography that he chose to leave behind. The
tension between history and geography enframes his poetry in interesting
and complex ways as evidenced in poems such as Ataramaga and Palaema.
This tension manifests itself in his poetic craft as well; although he
writes about an alien geography, he writes it in a language medium that
has evolved since the sixteenth century through the Sanedhha kavyas.
At a time when much that passes for modern Sinhala poetry is nothing
more than chopped up prose, it is encouraging to see a poet paying
sustained attention to questions of metaphoricity in poetic statement,
the importance of form and the auditory registers.. His poetic idiom is
one that is tightly woven from colloquial speech, classical literature
as well as folk poetry. Consequently, in his more successful poems, the
traditional past leaps to the eye and activates interesting
thought-paths. The voice that Govinnage seeks to project in his verse is
one that is both at home and not at home in the vanished spaces of the
past and the turbulence of the present. In a curious way, the past
performs the important work of illuminating the present moment.
The strength of Govinnage’s poetry lies in the way that he allows
this complex and tensioned historical consciousness to shape his
sensibility. In his more memorable pieces, the past and the present face
down each other in the anxiety-driven spaces of metaphor.
I suggested earlier that Govinnage’s English and Sinhala poetry have
two different addresses. This fact is closely related to the
subject-position of the poet. The way a poet positions himself as a
subject, an agent, tells us a great deal about his or her predilections
and investments. This is also connected to the self-awareness of the
poet. In the case of Govinnage, his self-awareness foregrounds the
disjunctions between the self and culture he inhabits.
In his English poetry, he positions himself in relation to issues of
multi-culturalism debated in Australia while in his Sinhala poetry, he
positions himself as an expatriate attached by bonds of cultural memory
to the poetic traditions that he grew up with in Sri Lanka and that
continue to nourish him.
This self-position is also vitally connected to the poetic authority
that poets seek. By poetic authority I refer to the intellectual
cogency, aesthetic valuations, visionary explorations, that invest power
in a poet and his or her texts. This poetic authority has to be earned
from a community of readers that the poet is addressing. It is indeed
they who have the power to confer that poetic authority. Govinnage, it
seems to me, is fully conscious of this desideratum.
Bilingual poet
As a bilingual poet, Govinnage has addressed his mind to the problems
of cross writing – how he could put into play an invigorating
interaction between the Sinhala and English languages. This desire of
his is clearly evident in some of his English poems. For example, in his
poem titled ‘Fading Memories’ we observe his attempt to draw on the
locutions and tropes of Sinhala poetry, both classical and modern, and
even Sanskrit poetry.
I cannot see your blue eyes
Pained with manel tint
Blue lotus
I can’t feel your thin lips
Like na-dalu
I cannot feel your breasts \
Which sway like a pair of swans
In my mind’s lake.
The conjunction of swans and mind’s lake is reminiscent of Sanskrit-
inspired poetic locutions – manasa vila.( In fact, this locution finds
expression in the Sanskrit play Ratnavali).
In some other poems like 'Night Watchman', one sees the
interpenetration of two sensibilities fed by the Sri Lankan and
Australian cultural texts and contexts.
The dark deep night
As thick as kalu dodol
Stands still.
I gaze at an empty sheet
Where I could write a poem.
Images slip away like my life
As I look at the candlelight.
My pale window is the only gate
To the outside world.
Bats are busy in their night prowl
Nightingales sleep
Street lamps meditate.
The deep dark night
Thick as kalu dodol
Stands still like an enemy.
It is only a reader familiar with Sinhala who will enter fully into
the experience re-created in the poem. The term kalu dodol in this
context might appear to be incongruous, even comical. Indeed, it would
appear somewhat comical in a Sinhala poem too. That is precisely the
point. Sunil Givinnage is seeking to call attention to what he perceives
as the unbridgeable gaps that exist between Sinhala and English modes of
enunciation with their divergent cultural archives. Govinnage’s most
successful poems are those in which compactness and economy of
expression become the predominant feature. In these poems what is left
unsaid reverberates questioningly in the minds of the reader as in the
following poem titled 'After Two Winters'.
I browse through a magazine
And see your name,
Two winters have passed
Like our frozen conversations
The sky still carries rainbows
Like your affection.
No beginning or end.
Just a sign in the sky
And our unfinished conversations,
As with most collections of poetry, Govinnage’s work too displays
certain weaknesses. Some of the experiences are too sketchy to carry
complete emotional conviction; others cry out for more rhetorical and
conceptual density; there is also a tendency towards repetition both
experiential and tropological..
Taken as a whole, Sunil Govinnage’s disporic poetry manifests what I
think are three important inclinations. First, he dramatises the nature
of the impossible space called home. This is closely connected to his
insight that distances as well as proximity breeds desire. Second, as
any good poet should, he seeks to redeem the world with words. This is,
to be sure, a laudable ambition that calls for strenuous discipline.
Third, many of his poems can be praised as defences against anxiety,
principally the anxiety generated by the compulsion two operate between
to cultural worlds with inescapable and antithetical demands.
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