An Intimate Affair

WHEN PEOPLE ASK, ‘when is a poem political’, one is always tempted to answer with ‘when is it ever not?’ Such a response, however, would be beside the point. The spirit of the original query isn’t an attempt to bifurcate poems into two camps. It’s more along the lines of ‘when does introspection, commentary or criti­cal observation become representative of something bigger than the poet?’ Two recent collections provide increasingly interest­ing answers. Meena Kandasamy’s Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You features hard-hitting, almost oracular poems that place an individual’s deeply held political convictions against reigning orthodoxies. The repressive state becomes the all-seeing enemy, and being punished for dissent feels like a self-fulfilling proph­ecy. The recently published anthology Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas, on the other hand, collects expressions from across the region’s politico-religious spectrum and seeks to construct a poetry-of-record, if you will.

Out of Sri Lanka’s editors signal their ambi­tions in the introductory essay, calling the book “a human rights intervention” — surely a significant burden for any literary project to bear. But this anthology isn’t weighed down by the daunting nature of the task, cor­rectly viewing the diversity of voices at their disposal as a blessing. Sri Lanka has numerous languages, religions and ethnic groups living in “an island smaller than Scotland”. Add the Lankan diaspora to this mix and you have a compelling mixture of voices across 400-odd pages: old and young, Tamil and Sinhala, Buddhist and Muslim and so on.

Nowhere is this hybrid-identity factor more compelling than with Anne Ranasinghe’s (1925-2016) poems. She was born Anneliese Katz, into a German Jewish family. After surviving the Kristallnacht (“the night of the crystal”), a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Gestapo in 1938, she married a Sri Lankan Tamil man. In the poem ‘At What Dark Point’ Ranasinghe compares the smashing of stained-glass synagogues during Kristallnacht to the events of Black July in 1983 when Tamil houses and families were targeted, and hundreds killed. The poem begins with the image of a man twisting knots in a jute rope, like Madame Defarge knit­ting her patterns of death in A Tale of Two Cities.

“And seeing him sit day after day, / Sinister, silent, twisting his rope / To a future purpose of evilness / I sense the charred-wood smell again, / Stained glass exploding in the flames / (A fireworks of fractured glass / Against the black November sky) / The streets deserted, all doors shut / At twelve o’clock at night, / And running with animal fear.”

Some of the most potent poems in this collection take the form of self-conscious allegories, Aesop’s Fables-style. Take, for example, Illavalai Wijayendran’s short, hard-hitting poem ‘To Those Who Bear Sticks’, a reminder of the absurdity of well-meaning truisms like “negotiation is always the right an­swer”. “My strength lies in my words / not in my body. / To ter­rify the people, you pile on words / borrowed from the night. / But my words remain upright. / They beat and subdue yours. / Having lost to my words / you return bearing sticks. / What words can I use to answer / this display of your power?”

The editors have been careful not to over­sell the political allegory aspect, emphasising the self-sufficiency of these poems as stand­alone works of art. They also express their frustration with the fact that when it comes to political art from the Global South, Western commentators focus too much on the politics and not enough on the art itself; the craft, the process, the technical distinctions. Of course, there’s also a school of thought which rejects this ‘burden of aesthetics’ altogether—why, they ask, should Indian or Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan art be assessed using aesthetic pa­rameters borrowed wholesale from the West? In other words, one man’s art is another’s pretentiousness. Indran Amirthanayagam’s poem ‘Not Much Art’ is remarkable work in this context. It opens with these stunning lines: “I hear there isn’t much art / in the bomb­ing of Jaffna. / Planes fly overhead / and crews pick up / bombs and fling / them down on houses.” Later in the poem he doubles down on this point, writing, “How shall the night end, / drummed? Our eyes punched we sleep / Versed? Blindfolded / we sleep / Brush stroked? / Eyes wide open, / we sleep.”

History books will tell you the socio-political underpin­nings of a crisis, poetry always offers more than facts—it gives you the texture of lived reality, the warp and weft that keep communities together, and gives them the resilience to docu­ment their culture. Out of Sri Lanka is a particularly valuable addition to the South Asian canon because of this reason.

In a poem called ‘In Lieu of an Artist Statement, In Lieu of a Poem, In Lieu of a Diary’ from Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You, Kandasamy confronts the question of the book being her first poetry collection since 2010’s Ms. Militancy. “In these intervening years, I wrote a lot. Not poetry. Not / poetry unless I was driven to it by rage or love. Poetry / didn’t serve the practi­cal purpose of essays/op-eds; it could/ not argue with razor-sharp precision, it did not intervene / in urgent discourse.” The poem, significantly, ends with a young student thank­ing Kandasamy for “making my coming out so easy”—the student’s mother realises the fact after watching them read Kandasamy’s online writings. This is a great example of the in­terplay between the politics-of-the-individual and the politics of an identity group, how one feeds into the other, nourishing, enriching, making connections across space and time.

Ms. Militancy, famously, had feminist reworkings of Hindu and Tamil myths, and there are a couple of poems in that vein here as well, most notably ‘Fire Walk With Me’, about Ravanan and Sita. The title is a reference to the ‘agni pariksha’ (trial by fire), and it’s also the name of a typically harrowing, hallucina­tory David Lynch movie from the early 1990s. In the poem ‘The Discreet Charm of Neoliberalism’, Kandasamy reflects on the way those in power hijack language, hollowing out meaning from emancipatory words. “Neoliberalism knows how to spin, I say: / When workers flock to sweatshops: / the working condi­tions have improved / and, when workers leave in droves: / the community has been sensitised. / How to spin about a spin master? — / a question I want to ask, but do not.”

A particularly impressive poem, ‘Your Absence Is a Presence’, sees the poet (and Kandasamy, even when she is clearly writing about herself, often deploys the third person, in line with the conventions of ‘auto-fiction’) thinking about an ex-lover while she is going through the rhythms of a routine day (“feed, teach, feed, play, wash, feed …”). Here we see Kandasamy tapping into a voice that’s at once vulnerable and pro-active about its excava­tions of memory. The following lines are especially impressive in their imagery; “Watching my children is like tending a fire: / There is all the warmth in the world, but, / I cannot blink, I can­not turn away. / I’ve grown a hundred hands, / I’ve flaming feet.”

The book’s titular poem captures the Kafkaesque nightmare of being arrested under the wide-ranging UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act); it is dedicated to Jaison Cooper and Thushar Nirmal Sarathi, two friends of the poet who were ar­rested over eight years ago, under the Act. Released on bail, they still haven’t received a chargesheet, but the ordeal has affected their lives in several ways—‘Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You’ is a grim reminder of the unfairness of process-as-punish­ment (a separate poem here called ‘Process=Punishment’ offers an even more pointed commentary).

In Exquisite Cadavers, Kandasamy’s 2019 work of ‘auto-fic­tion’, the first chapter itself introduces us to a politically charged novel-within-the-novel, featuring a couple called Maya and Karim. On every page, meanwhile, the margins feature Kandasamy’s record of writing the novel, offering brief glimps­es into her domestic life. The chapter ends with a great joke in this context, as Kandasamy’s partner asks her if the book she’s writing is going to be political. She replies with, “No, love. It’s very domestic.” This is an excellent, playful way of collapsing the largely artificial distinction between the ‘intimate’ and the overtly ‘political’. Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You is a further triumph in the same vein, a collection of poetry that challenges preconceived notions about these modes of writing.

Anne RanasinghebooksMeena KandasamypoetryVidyan Ravinthiran