Songs of the Vanquished

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In our own time we have seen the Apocalypse… We have all gone away/ there is no one to tell our story./ Now there is left/ only a great land/ wounded/ No bird may fly over it/ until our return.” So wrote Cheran after the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Rudramoorthy Cheran’s name as a poet has become synonymous with the vicissitudes of the Eelam liberation movement in Sri Lanka though he himself has never been a member of the LTTE or a votary of violence. In fact,he had to leave his country having spoken against the violence of the Sri Lankan army as also against the violence of the Tamil Tigers when it turned against Sinhalese civilians.

Caught between the two extremes,he was forced to move out to Canada where he is now teaching at the University of Windsor. In between,he survived a helicopter crash (1986) and a tsunami (2004),on both of which he has composed poems.

Cheran’s poetry grew with the conflicts in Sri Lanka which were not necessarily always ethnic; they had to do as much with economic inequalities,cultural identities,different ideas about the nation,and questions of class and caste and region. Cheran’s poems and plays tried to address all these dimensions. The disturbances had begun far back,with the conflict in 1958; the brutally suppressed insurgency of the People’s Liberation Front in 1971; and the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981: all these shaped the aesthetics of Cheran’s poetry. Having matured in the 1970s and the ’80s,his consciousness,imagination and idiom came to be moulded to a great extent by politics and violence,though his style did undergo changes especially after the genocide when he found he could no more employ old forms for the new poetry of the vanquished,the poetry of erasure rather than of witnessing. Cheran had been influenced in his early poetry by his father “Mahakavi”,known for his synthesis of tradition and modernity,for creating a people’s idiom as different from the esoteric modern Indian Tamil poetry.

Cheran has authored eight collections of poetry in Tamil,from Irandavadu suuriya udayam (The Second Sunrise,1983) and Yaman (The Lord of Death,1984) to Miindum kadalukku (To the Sea Again,2004) and Kaadaatru (Appeasing the Forest,2011) besides five plays in Tamil and three in English.

A Second Sunrise,the book under review,carries,in English translation,a representative selection from Cheran’s poetry in Tamil. It is difficult to categorise Cheran’s poetry as revolutionary,modern or postmodern; it is deeply human,direct and moving without being sentimental; it is political without being loud and hoarse. The poet is not dogmatic,making his range wide,his idiom flexible. The trauma of loss,exile and defeat has not turned his poetry cynical; it has retained to this day its tenderness and concern for the suffering. Cheran uses everyday language; his rhythms come from the spoken idiom. Lyricism and irony have been his hallmarks. The translators have been able to capture the mood and the tone and help us imagine the idiom of the original.

The sea is a major presence in Cheran’s poetry. He says the sea that surrounded his village defined his imagination. His first poem was “Kadal” (The Sea). The sea symbolises vastness and security while it can also turn into their opposites: isolation and vulnerability. Water is the primary element here: his poems abound in references to wells,rivers,rain and tears. His images are mostly taken from nature,a quality he must have inherited from the tradition of ancient Tamil poetry. The heron practising austerities,the flowering ironwood,the many blues of the Lankan sky,the fire breaking out in the bamboo grove: simple things assume symbolic significance.

Cheran has been a chronicler of the terror and violence in Sri Lankan life that he often presents in matter-of-fact tones. An example from “Body”: “A body by the sea,/ head split open./ In the straight glance of the eyes/ that refuse to close even in death/ there float: resistance,surprise,/ distress,struggle,agony,despair/ and an endless dream.” He sees the bridge burdened by a thousand tales collapse within a single tear (“Chemmani”). A coffin moves by itself to the cremation ground followed by a multitude of legs without faces or bodies (“The Trace of a Dream”). He can be epigrammatic at times: “The sea is without water/ Tamil is without land/ Kinship is without name” in “Untitled”. His final advice is: “Fling away the footprints,the voice./ Only sow words.”

The reviewer is a Malayalam poet and former editor of “Indian Literature”