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Book review
The Heart of Silence
Author: Elmo Fernando
The Heart of Silence is a collection of poems written by Elmo
Fernando some two decades ago, and published this year in memory of his
wife, Hylda.
Suffused with the spirit of modernism and recalling the poetry of T.S.
Eliot, W.B. Yeats and Tambimuttu, Fernando's collection is elegiac,
describing not simply individual grief, but also the suffering of a
country and its people.
The sweep of the work is a landscape of destruction and desolation,
the mood one of pathos. There is a merging of the documentary and the
visionary - the visceral and the transcendental.
Fernando's imagery is pervaded by mist, fog and smoke; heavy clouds
hang over the human horizon and the natural terrain.
The opening lines of 'Wheeling the Cancer Patient':
'The translucent rays tore-up the thick
fog, hovering above the sanatorium;'
encapsulate Fernando's vision, in which beauty and suffering travel
together.
'He heard it again inside
where perfume - charged snowy angels
wend their way pushing trolleys,
be-decked with vials of ether.
Fernando writes with a beautiful clarity - the heightened perception
in the face of death, charges the lines with a kind of radiance:
'Summer swept her into oblivion
spawned in inertia
of the night's hangover,
The smell of antiseptics
pervaded the ward.
Our simple walking happiness
o'er the years snapped-up
the preserved pretence
of a nuptial three
decades gone by.'
(The Heart of Silence)
This play of darkness and light seems typical of the work as a whole.
The sadness, which is expressed, is almost always shot through with the
idea of a memory of happiness. As in 'The Mist'.
'.......Man has nothing
to wear, but shame and
inhumanity.
He needs the sunlight's unhurried loving
that pauses for laughter, or for breath
but takes no oath.'
The complexity of the human condition, its contradictions of joy and
sorrow are given a spiritual dimension in 'The Buddha.'
In it we are reminded that desire is suffering, and reminded as well
that beyond human action and passion there is peace. This enigma (that
the energy that reminds us that we are alive may be the problem) is
expressed in the final stanza:
'Desire, you taught us to shun,
permeates our deeds in the autumn
of life, and
our boundless bound passion must run.
Each into each like
rivers that break
the imprisoning banks
the buildings are hurled.
Low in the night
but when sleepers awake
there is a great peace
in the fallen world.
The simile that Fernando uses, 'like rivers that break the
imprisoning banks...' is characteristic. Water, and the threat of water
is a recurring motif throughout the work. Obvious from the two poems
early on in the collection, 'A Dam Built for a Sinhala King' and 'Waters
Meet', but also glimpsed as a dangerous element in 'Duke et Decorum Est'.
"Her elder-boy had a watery grave
he muttered"
In 'The Wait', a woman imagines her husband drowning at sea:
..... the capsized boat - Janis' corpse
hauled-up, the weeping children
the poignant scene.
was then, nature's ordeal
The scream of an owl, this hour
resounded the knell.'
Water's destructive power alluded to heros and again in 'A Dam Built
by a Sinhala King' is eerily prescient. The intense anxiety expressed in
the first person is uncanny, but brilliantly evoked:
'I feel uneasy living
beneath this dam
The walls reach up to
hold the infinite sky
the hidden weight of waters,
the poised hills and all the unguessed future;' (My underlining)
The 'unguessed future' is the mystery that hovers above many of the
poems, particularly those that concern war. Reflecting on the uprising
of 1971 as well as the subsequent civil war, Fernando laments the cost
of violent combat on human kind and on nature. In the war poems, people
come to life - the swashbuckling Cyril in 'The Upstart', the soldiers
daughter in 'Angel Face,' the old veteran, now a senile beggar, in
'Lament 2021', these show that Fernando is able to draw character, as
well as deal with big philosophical themes.
Ultimately, it is the humanity that shines through this wonderful
collection, issues of life and death are over arching concerns - but it
is the individual portraits, that Fernando conjures up, that live in the
memory.
The final poem 'Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori' contains all
the elements that make this work as a whole, memorable and moving. It is
a brilliant denouncement:
"Puran Appu's two sons
able-bodied, as they are,
left the university with
two scrolls of paper"
the consequent penury of the family - a thumb-nail sketch of the
plight of so many - leads to a terrible unravelling:
'paddy fields lie bare, brown and parched
crops failed - the god's embittered, children
died of the plague; and animals
ate their off-spring. The drought portends
death: wriggled - in and recoiled itself to spout forth its venom.'
The title of the poem, a quotation taken from Cicero - 'It is sweet
and glorious to die for one's country' is repeated in the final,
hollowly ironic, line, the final statement of the work.
Because of the fine focus of Fernando's poetry, its preoccupation
with time passing and its strong sense of place, I struggled sometimes
with the more culturally specific references. This is not a criticism;
who can make sense of the Waste Land' without notes? But it is clear for
all who read this poetry that at the heart of 'The Heart of Silence' is
Sri Lanka - a land of great beauty, but also of enormous sorrow. The
verses, tender and bitter by turns, mourn the loss of a loved one.
Bev Zalcock (aka Beverley Alcock)
S.L.M.A Guidelines and Information on Vaccines
New vaccines continue to be made available. The National Immunisation
Schedule of Sri Lanka is being changed from time to time. Some parents
demand vaccines outside this schedule.
The revised edition of 'Guidelines and Information on Vaccines'
provides the health professionals involved in immunisation procedures
with vital, valuable, updated information.
The answers given by health professionals to questions frequently
asked by the parents have sometimes been contradictory and confusing.
The chapter on "Frequently asked questions" is therefore very welcome.
This publication will certainly make a significant contribution
towards our vision of achieving the maximum possible immunisation of our
people, if two important conditions are fulfilled.
a) Sinhala and Tamil translations of this document will enable the
grass root medical staff who are more close to the clients who seek
immunization, to be adequately informed on this vital subject.
b) A very professional distribution system must be set in place to
ensure that, all personnel in the public and private sector involved in
immunisation receive this document. Every medical, nursing and midwifery
student should also be given a copy of this book.
All those patriotic people involved in the production of this book
must feel very happy and proud that they have made a very valuable
contribution towards the promotion of health and through that the wealth
and total welfare of Sri Lanka. May God and the Triple Gem bless them in
a very special way.
- Dr. W. A. Ferdinand
President Independent Medical Practitioners Association, President
Association of Private Hospitals and Nursing Homes of Sri Lanka, Past
President of College of General Practitioners of Sri Lanka
Mural paintings
Raja Waidyasekera Tissamaharama special corr. The mural paintings of
Mulkirigala Raja Maha Viharaya that were faded were repainted and
conserved on the instructions of the Director General Archaeology Dr.
Senarath Dissanayaka.
This is the first time these mural paintings were repainted ever
since they were repainted and conserved by an Italian Painter Luciyanu
Marazi in 1972. Director General Central Cultural Fund (CCF) Dr.
Sudarsana Seneviratna, Dr. Mohan Abeyratna Mural Painting Conservator
Dias Wagachchi and a host of officials of the Department of Archaeology
were involved in the repainting and conservation of mural paintings. |
