Introduction to postcolonial Sri Lankan Tamil poetry

Mirrored Images Author: Rajiva Wijesinha

Reviewed by Prof. Chelva Kanaganayakam

The general consensus among critics has been, quite rightly, that in postcolonial Sri Lanka, poetry has been the dominant genre in Tamil literature. This is not to say that fiction has been marginal. On the contrary, it has been prolific. But for the most part, it has not been profound, although there have been some notable exceptions. Poetry, however, appears to have flourished, serving as a powerful tool in reaching out to people, in promoting cultural and political awareness, in chronicling the narrative of the time.

Although Tamil literary histories indicate that poetry was in existence in Sri Lanka for several centuries, the poetry of previous centuries was either imitative or largely didactic in that it was written to champion a particular religious cause. In the past 60 years, however, poetry began to respond to the pressures of modernity and create a distinctive identity of its own. It is possible to assert that the renaissance initiated by Bharati in Tamil Nadu at the turn of the twentieth century remained dormant for 50 years and then emerged in the work of Tamil poets in Sri Lanka.

Tradition

During the past 60 years - from the time of independence to the present - poetry in Tamil has adapted itself to changing conditions, always mindful of tradition, and always willing to find new ways to express change and multiplicity. As decolonisation gave way to forms of neocolonialism and nationalism, poetry took on the role of both reflecting and refracting social and political conditions. Each region - the North, the East, the Hill Country etc. - had its own story to tell, and each region produced a plethora of important writers. Taken as a whole, the last sixty years represent a major watershed in Tamil literary history, and the poetry produced during this time is second to none in the postcolonial world.

To understand the complexity and richness of life among Tamils in Sri Lanka, one instinctively turns to poetry. It is here that one sees the struggles, the aspirations, the strengths and fault lines of a people who needed to define their social and political identities. Although the major watershed in social and political life might be the turmoil of 1983, each generation had its particular focus, and poetry captures the nuances of change. For various reasons, the Tamil experience in each region was inevitably shaded by difference, and writers self-consciously resisted homogeneity. In some senses, these differences have contributed to the overall range and depth of Tamil poetry.

In 1951, three years after Sri Lanka gained independence, Mahakavi, a poet who probably has the claim to be the elder statesman of post independence Tamil poetry, published his first volume of poems, an event that signalled both a departure from an established literary tradition and the beginning of a new tradition. What exactly this break meant is not easy to define, mainly because this poet too was conservative in his choice of subject matter and traditional metrical forms; significantly enough, the break did not mean an attempt at decolonisation. If anything, it marked a desire to break free of South Indian literary dominance which until then had been the mainstay of literary production. Mahakavi was a traditionalist in that he had little use for free verse forms that had no discernible metrical pattern. At the same time, he was the voice of modernity, in whose work worn out poetic formulations were replaced with a modern consciousness and idiom, though his vision remained distinctively conservative.

If Mahakavi and his contemporaries, namely Neelaavanan and Murugaiyan, have sometimes been thought of as espousing a decadent aestheticism, it must be remembered that in their work they set the parameters that shaped the work of younger poets. Naturally, there are significant differences among these poets of the 1950s and 1960s, but all of them were conscious of the need to adapt traditional modes to new forms of experience.

This was a period when poems were read aloud to appreciative audiences, and the 'public' quality of this poetry allowed for both orality and immediacy. These early poets were not unaware of the political changes taking place in a newly independent nation, but their main thrust was to shape the language of poetry to express contemporary concerns.

The poets who followed them were decidedly Marxist in their thinking and they often addressed what seemed to be the problematic aspects of Tamil society, namely, its class and caste structure. Poets such as Ponnambalam, Nuhman, Sivalingam, and many others were more conscious of social and political context, and their response was to champion the cause of the downtrodden and exploited people. To them one owes the widespread use of free verse and of a poetic form that imitated the rhythms of ordinary speech.

Aesthetic value

Despite the transformation that altered poetic utterance, from the 1950s to the 1980s poetry was seen predominantly as literature. Its worth and strength were often measured in terms of aesthetic value. Whether the poetry adopted traditional metrical patterns or chose free verse, the lines of judgment were determined by aesthetic considerations. Since form was still seen as a constitutive element, at this time it was still relatively easy to make claims about the strength of certain poets and not others.

At the risk of generalisation, one could claim that the various stances espoused by the poets were, at some level, subservient to the consciousness of poetic form. To say this is not to dispute the fact that many of these poems were in their own way tendentious, but the poets positioned themselves in a manner that allowed them to see themselves first and foremost as poets. It is also important to remember that for the poets who wrote in the 1960s ethnic identity was largely subservient to national belonging.

In the poets of the 1970s changes were becoming increasingly visible, but it is really with the disturbances of 1983 that poetry took on a completely new dimension. Put simply, poetry became entirely politicised. New forms of expression, new metrical variations, changes in forms of narrative, experiments with form and language - all these were now essential elements of poetry.

Beginning with poets such as Cheran, Jayapalan, Ratnathurai, Solaikkili and several others, poetry now became the vehicle of political expression and a distinctive ethnic identity.

Thus in the 1980s, particularly with the publication of Maranathul Valvom in 1985, poetry became an integral part of the political scene. As the political conflict grew, poetry too gathered momentum. Certain poets were themselves part of various political movements. Others chose not to align themselves with any particular position, but insisted on their political content and their activism. Poetry was performed in public gatherings, thereby establishing its relevance at a time of political and social upheaval.

In 1984 when Pathinoru Eelathu Kavignarkal was published, the so-called canon appears to have included 11 poets.

One year later, when Maranathul Valvom (We Live Amidst Death) was published, the collection becomes much more inclusive and eclectic. This collection includes 31 poets. To say this is not to express a preference for one or the other. What it means is that, given the political context of the time, many more felt the need to write poetry.

The current scene, as exemplified in the present anthology, is even more complex and multi-faceted. One dominant aspect of this body of poetry is its commitment to forms of political realism. Experience rather than form now becomes the major concern of poetry.

Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil poetry is complex in that the deep fracturing of human lives lends an urgency to narrating them in ways that are truthful. During the three decades from the 80s to the present, circulation of information was either restricted or shaped by different forms of ideology and power. At different times, there has been both official and unofficial censorship.

Affiliation

Or else, forms of communication were circumscribed by affiliation. With such filtering of information, poetry, either in the form of published material or in the form of performance, took on the role of telling the so-called truth. Paradoxically, it was the imaginative representation of literature that seemed to get close to the truth. Poets, then, were seen as chroniclers of the time.

To be a poet was not always easy. In turn they were praised or castigated, depending on what they said. Several major poets were, at one time or another, subject to careful scrutiny. Poetry was seen as an art form that had the power to change and transform the perspectives and opinions of people. It was not an elite form that distanced itself from the world around. Recent Tamil poetry from Sri Lanka thus needs to be seen as an artistic expression of political and social upheaval.

There is clearly no easy way of establishing a typology that would enable us to make distinctions among the broad spectrum of poets who are writing today. Even among the poets represented in this anthology, the range is such that it is difficult to establish a classificatory grid.

And it is equally difficult to advance a poetics that would facilitate crucial distinctions. It is possible to establish a fundamental binary between poets who choose to use traditional metrical patterns or variations within traditional forms, and poets who choose to ignore all such conventions.

Adopting this duality one can demonstrate that in the best of contemporary poets, the rhythms and conventions of the past are still present. In short, free verse in not entirely free in this body of poetry. It is equally possible to make distinctions on the basis of geographical areas and claim that poets from Batticaloa write very differently from those who live in Jaffna or in the hill country. Since many poets were at one time or another supporters of various political stances, it is possible to organise one's material on the basis of political affiliations or the absence of any political involvement.

Women writers

In the past two decades women writers have emerged as a strong voice among Tamil poets. Their vision is often at a remove from that offered by men. The poetry of Selvi, Sivaramani Avvai, among others, articulates a particular vision. Equally important is the diaspora as a category, since a number of contemporary poets write with a distinctive diasporic consciousness. Aravinthan, Natchaththira Chevvindhiyan, Cheran, and Jayapalan, for instance, are all diasporic poets.

While it can be asserted that diasporic poets sometimes lack immediacy and veracity in their experiential grasp of conditions, with the consequence that they become essentialist or overtly nostalgic, it is also true that they have been able to imbibe a host of new experiences and use them to empower their own poetry.

That said, it is important to recognise that the notion of poetics has not been addressed in any consistent way. At a time when the presence of a large diasporic population has enabled publication on a large scale, there is a real need to rethink the notion of poetics in ways that embrace the past but also recognise that doffing one's hat to the past in itself does not ensure the quality of poetry.

At the same time, experiences of loss and tragedy, narrated without imaginative depth, does not constitute good poetry. Unfortunately, literary criticism has not kept pace with innovations in poetry, with the consequence that we do not have sophisticated analyses of either the poetics or aesthetics of Sri Lankan Tamil poetry.

Part of the problem is, of course, that much contemporary verse is written without any strict adherence to metrical patterns. Some poets have self-consciously written poems using traditional metrical patterns, but that is more the exception than the rule. When metrical patterns are seen as necessary, it is a lot easier to separate the poet for whom meter is a source of strength from one who finds it an impediment.

Once that requirement is no longer part of the reader's expectations, the standards become less clear. As a result, explication is often what has been done in the name of literary criticism.

It is easy enough to dismiss this concern with aesthetic value as irrelevant, counterproductive, or even elitist. But it isn't. Poetry is too important in a culture that has not only nurtured poetry painstakingly for over two thousand years but has made it an essential part of its daily life. Regardless of whether one lives in Toronto or in a remote village in Sri Lanka, some poems continue to be read and repeated. Hence the need to cultivate standards that would enable readers to make crucial distinctions among poets.

Original poets

Nonetheless, it is obvious that the recent past has produced some strikingly original poets. Often we distinguish them by the stances they adopt. Thus it is easy enough to distinguish the texture, of, say, Jayapalan from Solaikkili or Cheran. Cheran might invoke an intellectual, modernist, set of associations, and be far more self-conscious about his artifice than Jayapalan who tends to favour a more traditional lyricism. Some write with a kind of public performance in mind while others write for the individual reader. Some adopt a personal, confessional mode while others remain objective and removed from the experiences they write about.

A poet such as Sivasegaram writes with a careful fusion of the traditional and the modernist. These distinctions are both inevitable and necessary. What unites them is a consciousness about poetic language and its capacity to transform the familiar and the mundane into something transcendental.

The best of contemporary poems often draw on the past in obvious or carefully concealed ways. It is difficult, particularly in Tamil, to be unmindful of the ways in which poetry has adapted itself over 20 centuries. This tradition is important to the original poet in that it reminds him or her that great poetry is never bound by its time and space. But the past cannot be reproduced. If a contemporary poet wrote in the manner of a Sangam poet, the poem might well be unreadable.

The present poem must invoke the cadences of the present, but where the poem foregrounds the event or the experience at the expense of poetic vision, the poem itself takes on a journalistic quality. Its purpose, then, would be to impart information rather than transformation through an act of the imagination.

We have not paid adequate attention to the notion of poetics, of what constitutes a great poem, and what we look for in a poem that is firmly grounded in the present, but shapes its language and its vision in ways that are transcendental.

Subjectivity and sensationalism often command immediate attention, but they rarely have staying power. Fortunately, the majority of poems written during the past several decades, including the poems in this anthology, reiterate the sophistication, strength, and richness of recent Sri Lankan Tamil poetry.