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| Saturday, 28 June 2003 |
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Valuable contribution to Lankan literature Chelva Kanaganayakam (Ed), "Lutesong and Lament. Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka", TSAR Publications, Toronto, 2002. ISBN: 0-920661-97-1. Pages: 170. This anthology consists of post-independence short stories and poems by over thirty authors, some living in Sri Lanka, others in the diaspora because of social insecurity and economic decline. The Editor has included brief biographical notes on the contributors, and a glossary to help those unaware of Tamil culture. The work is fittingly dedicated to one whose life is devoted to Tamil literature, R. Pathmanabha Iyer. Literature is heterogeneous, and this collection - ranging and varied in subject and mood - is not an exception. In the story, 'A Silver Anklet' (pp. 7-11), a farmer "who toiled ceaselessly against the barren soil of Jaffna" buys his newly-married wife an anklet. His spurt of anger at its accidental loss, and her hurt, causes estrangement but their love and essential goodness bring them quickly together again. It is a wonderful evocation of the shifts of human emotion; its unpredictable and abrupt, ana-logic, nature. In "Among the Hills, a tea plucker runs away to her lover's hut, but sacrifices private love for duty and love of another kind: her mother is sick, and her siblings are her responsibility. The family simply would not survive without her presence and help. One is reminded of james Joyces story, 'Eveling'. Literature brings to attention those thought to be ordinary and insignificant: the poor, the lonely, the old. In "The Chari-ot", a bewildered old man is confronted by, and ultimately acquiesces to, changed times and behaviour. The accusation made against Burke by Thomas Paine in his 'Rights of Man'. - "Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection. He is not affected by the reality of distress" cannot be levelled at these authors. Their heroes and heroines are not the great and the powerful, not the wooden horses colourfully painted and prancing at a festival, but the unnoticed, sweating bulls, "foaming at the mouth" that drag the spectacle along ('Toil, p.46). How long will people endure economic exploitation and the resulting degradation? The poem, 'Tea Baskets' (p.57) reminds one of Langston Hughes warning that dreams deferred again and again may eventually explode into violence. If literature entirely ignores the immediate and the important, it runs the risk of itself becoming unimportant, decorative and escapist. One cannot drive buzzing flies away from poetry (p. 134), but the spirit is resilient and, even in the worst of conditions, human beings are conscious of, and respond to, other aspects of life. For example, the urge to celebrate, the impatience, to participate in the festival (of live) is there in the poem, "Faster, Faster": (p.4). "Gently flows the river" (pp. 5.6) has a dual consciousness of change and permanence: the passing of time, and long past history are contracted with simple village women, talking and bathing by the river. One is reminded of Thomas Hardys affirmation in the midst of an entire world in conflict: " War's annals will cloud into dust/Ere their story die. "Summer" (pp. 148-9) is a delicate fabric of longing and restrained sensuality, all the more touching for its closeness to nature, for its indirection and understatement, for expressing by not saying. Sorrow has its own cadences. In these stories and poems, violence and sorrow are transmuted into art, into shapes of beauty that do not blur but, on the contrary, make violence, loss and grief all the more real: that is the paradox of art. The Editor admits that literature cannot be translated, and yet what this anthology has succeeded in 'transforming' into English makes a valuable contribution to Sri Lankan and to world, literature. To that earnest question, "Do you understand what I write?" (pp. 124-5), the answer, hopefully, will be in the affirmative. Charles Sarvan |
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