Title: Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas
Editors: Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett.
Publisher: Penguin India (Vintage)
AAZHIYAAL
(b. 1968)
Aazhiyaal (the pen name of Mathubashini Ragupathy) was born in Trincomalee in Eastern Sri Lanka. She taught English at the Vavuniya Campus, Jaffna University, before moving to Australia in 1997 where she worked for two decades in the IT sector and commercial management in Canberra. Aazhiyaal has published four collections of poetry in Tamil: Uraththup Pesa (2000), Thuvitham (2006), Karunaavu (2013) and Nedumarangalaai Vazhthal (2020), the last honoured by Canada’s Tamil Literary Garden. Her poems have appeared in anthologies and have been translated into several languages. She in turn has translated Australian Aboriginal poetry into Tamil (Poovulagaik Kattralum Kettalum, 2017). Aazhiyaal writes about women’s place within patriarchy and uses her work to make sense of the war in Sri Lanka: ‘I believe that poetry is the antidote to the present rat-race. It is needed, it is necessary.’
Unheeded Sights
After the rains
the tiled roofs shone
sparklingly clean.
The sky was not yet minded
to become a deeper blue.
The tar roads reminded me
intermittently of rainbows.
From the entire surface of the earth
a fine smoke arose
like the smoke of frankincense, or akil wood,
the earth’s scent stroking the nostrils,
fragrant as a melody.
As the army truck coming towards me
drives away,
a little girl transfers her candy-floss
from one hand to the other
raises her right hand up high
and waves her tiny fingers.
And like the sweet surprise
of an answering air-letter
all the soldiers standing in the truck
wave their hands, exactly like her.
The blood that froze in my veins
for an instant, in amazement,
flows again rapidly, asking aloud,
‘War? In this land?
Who told you?’
[tr. from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström]
BASHANA ABEYWARDANE
(b. 1972)
Rohitha Bāshana Abeywardane was a member of the founding editorial board and later editor in chief of the Sinhala alternative weekly newspaper Hiru. In 2003, he was one of the activists who organised the Sinhala-Tamil Art Festival. His journalistic commitments brought on threats to his life, and he had to leave Sri Lanka. He continues to publish and coordinates Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, an organisation founded by journalists in exile. Following a stay in the Heinrich Böll House, Langenbroich, Abeywardane took part in the PEN Writers in Exile Program from September 2007 to August 2010. Today, he lives in Germany with his wife.
The Window of the Present
Nightmares, long dead,
peer through the shattered panes
of the window of the present.
The dead of the south, killed on the streets,
with bullet-riddled skulls,
walk once again, through an endless night,
and those of the north drowned in deluges of fire
when rains of steel drench their unforgiving earth,
gaze through the shards of glass empty eyed;
as slaughtering armies, prowl under starless skies,
upholding sovereignty
with blood-soaked hands.
PACKIYANATHAN AHILAN
(b. 1970)
Born in Jaffna in the north of Sri Lanka, Packiyanathan Ahilan has lived through the thirty-year civil war. An academic as well as a poet, he has published three collections of poetry and is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Jaffna. As well as writing about the visual arts, poetry, theatre and heritage, he curates art exhibitions and is co-editor of Reading Sri Lankan Society and Culture (Volumes 1 & 2). Ahilan’s poetry is sparse and staccato, like a heartbeat: he is one of the most influential poets writing in Tamil in Sri Lanka today.
Days in the Bunker III
Good Friday.
The day they nailed you
to the cross.
A scorching wind
blew across the land and the sea.
One or two seagulls
sailed in an immaculate sky.
The wind
howling in the palm trees
spoke of unfathomable terror.
That was the last day of our village.
We fishermen came ashore,
only the waves
returned to the sea.
When the sun fell into the ocean,
we too fell
on our knees
and wept.
And our lament
turned slowly into night.
In the distance
our village was burning
like a body being cremated.
Good Friday.
The day they nailed you
to the cross.
[tr. from Tamil by Sascha Ebeling]
A Poem about Your Village and My Village
1
I do not know.
I do not know if your village
is near the ocean with its wailing waves
or near a forest.
I do not know your roads
made from red earth and
lined with tall jute palms.
I do not know
the birds of your village
that come and sing in springtime.
I do not know
the tiny flowers along the roadsides
that open their eyelids when the rains pour down.
I do not know the stories
you tell during long nights
to the sound of drumbeats
or the ponds in your village
where the moon goes to sleep.
2
Tonight,
when even the wind is full of grief,
you and I know one thing:
Our villages have become
small
or perhaps large
cemeteries.
The sea with its dancing waves
is covered with blood.
All forests with their
trees reaching up to the sky
are filled with scattered flesh
and with the voices of lost souls.
During nights of war
dogs howl, left to themselves,
and all roads and the thousands
of footprints our ancestors left behind
are grown over with grass.
We know all this,
you and I.
We now know about
the flowers that died,
the abandoned lines of poetry,
the moments no one wants to remember.
3
But
do you know
if the burnt grass
still has roots,
or if the abandoned poems
can still be rooted in words?
If, like them, you do not know
whether our ancient flames
are still silently smouldering
deep down in that ocean
covered with blood,
know this today:
They say that
after he had lain in hiding
for a thousand years
one day
the sun rose again.
[tr. from Tamil by Sascha Ebeling]
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Out of Sri Lanka shines light upon a long-neglected national literature by bringing together, for the first time, Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry written in and after Independence. Featuring over a hundred poets writing in English, or translated from Tamil and Sinhala reshapes our understanding of migrational poetics and the poetics of atrocity. Poets long out of print appear beside exciting new talents; works written in the country converse with poetry from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Poems in traditional and in open forms, concrete poems, spoken word poems, and experimental post-lyric hybrids of poetry and prose, appear with an introduction explaining Sri Lanka’s history.
There are poems here about love, art, nature – and others exploring critical events: the Marxist JVP insurrections of the 1970s and 80s, the 2004 tsunami and its aftermath, recent bombings linked with the demonisation of Muslim communities. The civil war between the government and the separatist Tamil Tigers is a haunting and continual presence. A poetry of witness challenges those who would erase, rather than enquire into, the country’s troubled past. This anthology affirms the imperative to remember, whether this relates to folk practices suppressed by colonisers, or more recent events erased from the record by Sinhalese nationalists.
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe, 2019) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T.S. Eliot Prize and Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. After posts at Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham, he now teaches at Harvard.
Seni Seneviratne, a writer of English and Sri Lankan heritage published by Peepal Tree Press, with books including Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin (2007), The Heart of It (2012), and Unknown Soldier (2019), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a National Poetry Day Choice and highly commended in the Forward Poetry Prizes 2020.
She is currently working on an LGBTQ project with Sheffield Museums entitled Queering the Archive and her latest collection, The Go-Away Bird, was released in October 2023. She lives in Derbyshire.
Shash Trevett is a Tamil from Sri Lanka who came to the UK to escape the civil war. She is a poet and a translator of Tamil poetry into English. Her pamphlet From a Borrowed Land was published in 2021 by Smith|Doorstop.
Shash has been on judging panels for the PEN Translates awards and the London Book Fair, and was a Visible Communities Translator in Residence at the National Centre for Writing. Shash is a Ledbury Critic, reviewing for PN Review and the Poetry Book Society and is a Board Member of Modern Poetry in Translation. She lives in York.
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