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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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