Sachithanandan deserves appreciation
If one is not a racist one would appreciate the simple poems meant
for simple audiences that would appreciate the slices of life of a few
people whose plight has not been widely known. We refer to the
collection of verses titled On the Streets and Other Revelations
published by Godage International Publishers (Pvt) Ltd. The writer is
Sakuntala, an attorney, belonging to the Sinhala community and married
to another attorney Sachithanandan who belongs to the Tamil community.
The couple lives in the Hilly town, Hatton. This information is
essential to know why the 28 poems in this collection are so revealing
and which some of us refuse to see or prejudiced.
It's decades now since the late C V Velupillai's contribution to
Lankan English Literature was born - his collection of poems Born to
Labour was published. Sakuntala Sachithanandan's collection is in a way
a sequel to that.
Her book is truly a reflection of Lankan writing that has its
uniqueness. It's a revelation of people, places and events that is
strikingly Lankan and therefore not a pretentious creative writing. The
outside world comes to know that there is another side of life lived in
regions that are seldom noticed. The literati in other parts of the
world do not want to read pretentious and exotic fiction aping the
imaginative unrealistic potboilers that have a market in regions where
crank materialism pervades.
Writing done in Sinhala and Thamil particularly in Lanka are
realistic portrayals of life as opposed to writing of mere fantasy and
thrill using excessive imagination. Most Lankan writers in English
Fiction stick to realistic and imaginative writing of Lankans. That it
is, it should be.
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Sakuntala Sachitanandan.
Picture by Rukmal Gamage |
One interesting feature of the verses in this collection is that it
has Sinhala and Tamil names and idioms. Such inclusion has an immediate
identification of 'Lankanness'.
Another feature is that the collection would help young readers of
English who may not be familiar with the language to understand some
aspects of our own lives through the medium of verses that are in most
part narrative in old style of writing that connects with the reader
instantaneously.
Let's take a few lines from some of her verses that are appreciable
from my sensibility.
Before I do that our readers must consider the considered views of a
dramatist, actor, singer and critic that belong to the golden age of
English learning at the portals of the University of Peradeniya - Haig
Karunaratne.
"Sakuntala writes about what she knows and loves best with a
passionate intensity. Her poems reflect a close and perceptive
familiarity with their context. They convey the tastes of fruits like
karutha-columban, the sounds of birds, the colours and smells of trees,
instead of abstract statements about the beauty of nature and contrived
pictures of paradisical settings."
"Sakuntala's style is simple yet well crafted and flexible enough to
register more complex emotions cause d by encounters between power
figures and their victims and the separations of friends and family
members and by sudden death."
I wish to quote more from Haig Krunaratne's analysis the foreword of
the book because my mind is also attuned in the same direction. But I
resist doing so because of space restraints.
I like Sakuntala's subtle exposure of politics that play a part in
the lives of some section of the estate population in the country-
Frantz Fenon's famous title Wretched of the Earth and C V Velupillai's
titles Born to Labour and Human Cargo came to my mind inevitably.
Just look at only the first stanza of a poem that speaks for itself
by the compressed images giving a satirical interpretation of a typical
Lankan setting.
Thalaivar at a Labour Conference
The thalaivar looks 'round, wary,
Noting the dorais at the desk-
The peria dorais, the Union dorais,
And who is this, he seems to ask,
Seeing me, in my no war-zone,
Presiding, cautious, stiff,
Weighing his interests against our own.
As Haig Karunartne has pointed out "Social barriers like caste and
ethnicity are scorned by this first person technique being further
extended to conversation pieces'
Only racists would object the use of Tamil and Sinhala usages in a
truly Lankan English Literature. I am particularly happy that Sakuntala
S has introduced a few Tamil names and usages for the enlightenment of
readers that are not familiar with the lifestyle of a community long
ignored and should have been drawn into mainstream Lankan thought, word
and deed.
The poet has done a service in giving as footnotes some of the terms
used for better understanding of the language.
If 'Varieties of English' are accepted such works are good examples
of Lankan English Writing.
It is sad and deplorable that some who use the English language for
their vituperative so -called 'criticism' are harping on 'universal
standards' that do not exist as everything changes rapidly.
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