World War 2 poetry a Ceylon connection

U. Karunatilake

Robert Kilian Brady was the head of the British Council in Colombo in the early sixties of the century just past.

We do not know whether the literary circles either in Colombo or Peradeniya were aware at the time that Brady was a poet who had been published by the Fortune Press which had published, among other poets, the poetry of Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Roy Fuller, John Bayliss, and our own Thambimuttu. Did they all fall in as poets of World War II?

Brady had been stationed in Malta from 1939 to 1945, the entire period of the War. Maybe in Malta, an air and naval base covering the North African, as well as the Italian campaign, Brady did not see much of the stark horror of war, but his poetry carries the quiet reminder of death in the background.

"The long white finger"

OF searchlights points the way where danger lies:

"And still they linger-

The sea, the foe, the skies!"

(St. Paul's Bay, 1940)

These lines carry flashes of action, of the RAF fighter squadrons defending Malta or perhaps providing fighter escort for bombing missions over enemy territory.

"My dry skin is the aeroplane,

I wear my coat and the Hurricane."

(Night Fighter)

As we read on however we see that Brady is not enamoured of war.

"They're clever men that work down there,

So clever they forget to fear-

They study skies on a paper plan

And photos bought with the life of a man."

His doubts go down to the roots of human hostility

"I'm sure I've heard that word somewhere,

And it had a sense and a meaning there,

In some telluric mess, I know,

We talked of men and called them, Foe."

(Night Fighter)

Then, inexorably, the urgent breath of war.

"Up there are the bombing planes!

Can I believe the engines' purring breath

Contains

The earnest whispering of death?"

On to religion in war and the role of faith.

"Only when pass these faith-dealt pains,

The earth will no more be oppressed.

The aeroplanes,

Will in their hangers rot then, and we rest!"

Apart from the poems on Malta and the War, the concern with the pain, the impermanence, and the unreality of individual being, surfaces in much of his poetry:

"Follows commonly delusion

When enchanted youth is gone."

(Carina)

"When the tree was hung with rime

I took my stick on the ways of Time...

Yellow grew the leaves and fell,

Bowed on my stick, crave I farewell."

(The Tree)

In a few of the poems he flits to his village and home far away from Malta and war.

"..... and win so me Marjorie,

My sister, seeks the ripely uddered kine

Along the burnie where the eglantine

Lives her pale life in company of birds"

(Nostalgia)

Back to Malta at the height of the war.

"Remain only the night and the metallic tread of my feet

Striking a hard-cored pity from the ground,

While house bends to house across the straitened street,

And the stars in their weary pastures mope around."

The Mediterranean theatre of war kept Brady for the entire period from 1939 to 1945.

Back in England he was caught up in the post-war literary ferment in which people from all social classes returning from the services confronted the conservative smugness of Europe and America and the ivory towers of those who had reigned secure in the period between the wars.

New writers and poets were taken up by many literary journals including poetry London edited by our own Thambimuttu, and mass publications like Penguin New Writing edited by John and Rosamund Lehmann and New World Writing on the other side of the Atlantic, both giving new writers worldwide circulation.

A poet who takes you beyond your shores

Flowers of Passion - prose poems, Author: Rohini Gooneratne Cooray, Godage International Publishers, Colombo, 2005 - pp 58, Price Rs. 300

Review: Carl Muller

Meet Rohini Nedra Gooneratne Cooray - born in her home in 43rd Lane, Wellawatte; daughter of proprietary planter W. Don Robert Gooneratne and Irene H.P. Samarasekera. There, that's personal enough!

Now meet Rohini - member of the Pittsburg Poetry Society, USA, that had, as its parent, The Poetry Society Inc., of Great Britain and America.

All in all, it is the largest international association of men and women gathered for the promotion, recognition and appreciation of poetry.

Meet Rohini - Honorary D. Litt conferred on her by the World Academy of Arts and Culture and Diploma given her at the 17th World Congress of poets held in Seoul, Korea in August, 1997.

She is also a member of the National League of American Pen Women; the Pennsylvania Poetry Society; member of the World Congress of Poets, California; and a life member of the World Academy of Arts and Culture, USA.

Meet Rohini - artist and painter. In 1990, an exhibition of her oil paintings was declared open at Gallery Z, Pittsburg, by Sri Lanka's Ambassador to the US, Dr. Ananda W.P. Guruge.

Complete painter-poet that she is, she portrayed a fascinating spread of the seasons and accompanies it with her book, "Thoughts are Wings III" that conveyed her dreams on each season's splendour she depicted.

In 1995, her poetry collection "Ripples" was endorsed for Merit by the Pennsylvania Poetry Society. So was her follow-on collection, "Unicorn Whispers" and then her Haiku, "Firefly Crossing" published locally by S. Godage and Bros.

You see, she is very much part of this country too, and is the president of Business and Professional Women, Sri Lanka.

Ardent landscapes

What I now have before me is her latest collection of prose poems, "Flowers of Passion" dedicated to her grandfather W. Don A. Gooneratne and grandmother Cecilia. On her grandfather was bestowed the rank Vidane Mohandiram by A.M. Ashmore C.M.G., Lieutenant-Governor of Ceylon, 1905. We also have a Foreword by Professor Ashley Halpe, and an Introduction by Deshamanya Dr. Vernon Mendis.

I have approached this review, taking the long way, because I like my readers to picture for themselves the stuff our poet is made of "Flowers of Passion" like her other books carry her cover paintings. On this is her painting, "Copra Mawatagama" - and the split coconuts, drying in the sun, seem to lie spread, warm, like the ardent landscapes of Lanka she captures in this collection.

As Ashley Halpe says, "(there is) a variety of tropes and forms" and Dr. Mendis calls it "an exposition of philosophy relating to Sri Lanka".

This collection was also endorsed for Merit by the Pennsylvania Poetry Society in 1999.

The love Rohini holds for her island home cannot be better described than in "Desires, Delusions and Dust" (p.7) where she seeks a gentler solace in "a corner seat in this hall of thine", finding joy in the innermost shrine of her island destination:

Standing on the edge of centuries

I view tomorrow........ (p.7)

I am focusing on her Lankan landscapes because I want readers to listen to her flaring soul songs and be one with her - the fortunate of an island that must now be renavigated, reborn, when the blossom of the dharma spreads its fragrance over the sands "stained with lion and tiger blood".

This is her message in "Frivolous Shade of Frolicking Flower".

Honeysuckles full of clear bee-wine

nodding drowsy with fragrance

lazily climb bird trills.....

As the sun in zenith shoots

direct fervid rays

drawing abundance from our fertile fields.

Tea, Paddy, Coconut, gardens of

Cinnamon and other spices

cymbals crackle and crumble........ (p.12)

Syllables of horror

But dreams can also be sad, and there is that crepitating slug that drags the slime of its sins as it advances, "swiping through the blood-drenched villages" and numbing prayerful hands clasped in devotion.

Two poems on pages 20 and 21, "Dredging Eternal Essence of Apple Blossoms" and "The Sunbaked Soil Seeps" reminds us of the evil that impinges: of "factions shivering with greed" and children voicing "syllables of horror". Let me give you an excerpt from the first and the second in full:

...a human voice beckons

a silver stir of strings, calls for

love laws of Mercy and Justice.

destroy evil Karma

to perfect civilization..... (p.20)

There is a dirge, a parade of broken dismembered souls; a lament that is made more plaintive in the space slashes that make these lines like a litany of words too heavy to bear:

up blood, with piquant fumes

(like acrid juice of Styx)... (p.21)

Rohini is unsparing in "A Sixhundredmillionyearthing" (p.24) - six words in one rushing togetherness, as if she finds the centuries "tethered together by eternity" as she dredges the beds of history to make old sores erupt anew: She tells of India and Sri Lanka, the former a "weighty body" pressing "to this tiny tear drop".

In Sinha sunlight perspiring into oblivion

melting away from itself, a weighty body presses

to this tiny tear drop earth and its history

like lotus seeds into oil cakes.

Tethered together by eternity

two great ethnic groups grapple

in scorching grains of coal.'

Dante's screaming hell, bombs missiles spears

Lion and Tiger cauldron spurred on by ghosts

of former kings, senseless combat all injured

no victors just struggle defeat.

This ancient land a pastoral piece

of music performed for centuries by a

very worldly orchestra. Hiding souls

teeming tourists panting fear while climbing

the sunrise Peak. Wretchedly wheezing

like Napoleon in Egypt. Granite languishing rock

frightened by its own weight, why press each other so?

We who are all guests in the abyss. The Peak.

Adam

something from the very beginning

to make us something of the end.

Life's purpose

What then is this island life's purpose? That we sink into and "suffer cold oblivion", hands growling around each other's throats? Always there is the cry, "Peace, Peace, Peace..." and where does it uselessly echo? Take her poem. "Young Bones Dreaming" (p.26)

of shelter from such cunning cruelty

Sri Lanka mourns wicked vicious language of

bold brash bomb blasts' bloom.

As determined Destiny weeps a barren tear

for widows mangled mayhem men an life.

With ancient heat new terror strikes.

Corrosive white noises of anxiety

ethnic creeds create disconcerting quicksand

(sad ghost of Goya gazes from shadows deep)

as lions and tigers slowly sink with each thrust

futile debacles suffer cold oblivion.

Massacred Satyragraha Likes

Power! Freedom! A miracle!

to forgive? Swift sudden deadly deeds

unimpeded by withered old skeletons gaunt

Bosnia and around the entire world

Peace Peace Peace Peace Peace

I do not intend to lay more before you because what I have given should serve as an aperitif to the rich and rarer wine so beautifully bottled in this collection.

Rohini excels in both approach and mood in "Secret Threads of Destiny" (p.54), where she seeks an united nations; in the endurance of millennia of divine wisdom in "Glimpses of Sri Lanka" (p.52); of the Buddhas dreaming in transparent stillness in "Polonnaruwa - Ashes Echoing Lament" (p.42); and everywhere the symbols of resplendent Nature-"sun drunk humming birds", "lilies whiter than Leda's love"; the ambience of coffee blossoms; rosaries of jasmine scents, the pink-white drapes of drunken sailors' the cobra hood of the Venus fly trap; the flaming throats of honeysuckles; oleander blossoms; the fire-light flowers of the niangala; and the Mahaweli's meandering history.

There could be no better, no more fitting title than "Flowers of Passion", for every poem in this collection seems to lie within the open-petalled chalice of a flower that holds the themes with a passion that boils, simmers, boils again.

Rohini has given us a philosophy that ranges restlessly, ceaselessly within her.

There are new visions that startle, make us more aware of what is both home and heritage - and she takes us beyond our shores and brings those other shores to us.

Her "Flowers of Passion" becomes, as a garland to true humanity that first lay, feather-soft around this, our island home.

Narratives on Sri Lankan culture

The Rascal and Other Stories, Author: T.M.S. Nanayakkara, A Stamford Lake Publication, 248 pp Price Rs. 450

Review: Malini Govinnage

This is a collection of stories. There are nine; all but one, the story of Patachara are narratives which display many aspects of Sri Lankan culture.

The stories seem mere receptacles to hold long descriptions of various cultural practices, customs and ceremonies observed at several stages of a person's life, birth, attaining age, marriage and death are presented in detail. Going further, he delves into the caste system operating in society; the class divisions, conflicts between the poor and the rich are portrayed through narratives.

There are painstaking, long enumerations on certain characteristics of rich indigenous cultural heritage such as Ayurvedic medical system, astrology and many other rites and rituals. The only story in the book which can be identified as a short story is the Rascal. This is about a cat which stole the hearts of a whole household, in spite of the initial strong resentment the householders had for rearing a cat in the house.

The story is narrated in the first person. The unpleasant experiences in connection with felines the writer had while he was living abroad had developed a dislike in him towards them. Nevertheless things took a drastic change, since the day he chanced encounter two cats mating. After a few weeks a cat is seen in the kitchen with a kitten. Gradually, the kitten becomes the centre of attraction of everyone in the household.

At the death of the cat he is given a funeral befitting an intimate member of the human family. After the funeral of the cat, the whole household comes to a firm decision not to rear pets. An ordinary experience is tastefully presented. The reader is made to disregard and almost forget that the theme is nothing new.

The story is presented without deviating from the central theme unlike the other stories in the book.

"So near yet so far" is another interesting story, had the writer has focussed more on developing the main story without turning to many other detailed descriptions in the process.

In this story a high caste young man gets infatuated with a girl from Rodiya caste. When the girl conceives a child, men of the girl's clan make the boy come to their community and live with the girl among them. The boy is ostracized from his family.

As time passes by the young man learns to live with his near relations getting accustomed to their ways and manners. The story ends with a sad note reminding the reader of the words of the Buddha, thus: The young man is seated on the banks of the river which separates the Rodi village from the villages of the high castes.

It happens to be the day of his only sister's wedding. He hears a song wafting in the breeze coming from the house, which disowned him. The song says not by birth one becomes an outcaste or a Brahmin.

The story shows how the same caste system which was harnessed for the productivity and cultural development of the country has brought miseries and the most inhuman divisions among people.

The writer uses the medium of story telling to show many maladies in society in its transformation to the present consumerist society bent towards overindulgence and self-centredness.

His message would have been more powerful, had he focussed more on the craft of story telling, as he has done in the first story, The Rascal.