I’ve uploaded most of my old poems to the “poems and other peelings” page, although there are still a fair number floating around my harddrive. I’ll get around to uploading the new stuff as soon as I have a decent archive going.
Just finished the first part of my novella, which is set in Sri Lanka between 1980 and 1989, when a failed communist uprising killed more than 40,000 people, mostly young students. My father was in the thick of it then, and he has told me stories about how the army, to quell and frighten the JVP (the communist party) into submission, would cut off the heads of suspected leaders and local union members and dump them into the sea. The headless bodies would then wash up on the shore of some of the private hotel beaches in the south. This is not to say the JVP was innocent – oh no. They too had their mass killings: students were killed and dropped into ditches, voters were shot through the eyes in the polling booths. It is unfortunate that most of the left here align themselves so strongly and with so little reservation to communism/socialism. For those of us who have come from countries where practical communism devolved into sadistic violence, mass murder and propoganda, things don’t seem all that clear cut. Of course I understand the difference between communism as practiced and Marxism in theory, and there is such a thing as democratic socialism, but nevertheless I approach the subject with a weary eye.
Here’s a long poem I wrote some months ago about playing cricket in Sri Lanka (and other things). There is much I want to say about the recent and ongoing crises there, but that will have to wait. I want to be very careful with my words, because more than anything I have learned that the best intentioned ideas often unravel and deflate themselves with poorly chosen language. To articulate feeling as accurately as possible – this is my intent. And right now my feeling is so much at odds with my fellow diaspora Tamils almost as much as it is at odds with the government. Anyways, that’ll all come to a head soon…
Cricket and Mrs. Manikam
I.
No umpire, so the next batsman must replant
the splayed wicket, use the heavy flat of a sweat
worn bat to hammer the three stumps back
into the dry, scuffed ground.
There is blood on one of the bails, a rusty
splotch bedded in the oak pores –
that time Ajmal was blindsided by a left leg
spinner, the solid clutch of violent leather
glancing off the edge of the old blade at
ninety-six kilometers per hour, that mad
devil Chatura black and beaming behind his
throw – the glance and swift nick upwards
to the brow, gashing to lily bone.
But blood and slash are seasoned myths, and
we are not playing with a leather ball today.
I step up confident to the crease, heft the
careful weight of willow in my spindly grip,
feel in the palmed rubber handle all the small
local glories, the fielder cry of
HOWZAT! HOWZAT! HOWZAT! –
rarely ever a question, more a deafened rage
to cull all possible critics in a shower of
rank spittle.
I step up and lift the treated linseed edge
newly polished to the sky – for effect –
watch sluggish noon gleam its cruel grin
over the pitch: our small private road barely
eighty meters, closed in on three sides by
neighbors long weary of our antics.
‘The fucker’s grandstanding,’ Ajmal says at
center-right, a proud white scar
he’s shown off to all the girls
scrawled like a hasty comma
above his left eye – ‘Throw the bloody ball!’
And then the measured trot of bowl, Chatura
tense and coiled in his meticulous gallop,
a professional that one, two fingers on the seam,
the spin the throw the arc of arm, bright green
tennis ball with a life of its own after the first
bounce, as if his professional sweat had bewitched
it’s warm hollow, made it twitch and writhe like
air possessed,
waiting for the exorcism of impact.
I do not calculate, swing the weighted history of our
small tribe with pudding muscle, close my eyes at the
vital point, a crack a shudder that runs up my arm like
a stream of fiery ants, nibbling elbow and neck with
tiny jaws,
wait for the call.
None comes. Eyes open to the dirty light, the fallen faces
and angry scowl – Ajmal shaking his head like a dry
disappointed leaf:
The ball has landed in Mrs. Manikam’s yard.
II.
After they have smacked their brows and thrown a few
small stones my way – for effect –
we deliberate:
for we know the measure of Manikam, her forked
tongue and wattiyamma speech that like a burst dam
would somehow always flood the shores of parents’
ears,
and then surely the belt-buckle loosening, the
oiled cane retrieved from its place of pride, the
slap!slap!slap! administered without passion, as
perfunctory as snipping weeds, clearing deadwood –
for all this
I scurry to make amends, return the ball my blind eye
has scattered.
Skinny frame straddling the edge
of wall she has not yet studded
with broken glass,
I sit above two worlds,
sweat and dust and silt of light
enclosed in one;
and this other I am about to enter,
this small square of tile and house
which seems far older, far vaster
than the world I leave behind.
A careful swing of leg and I am sprawled a lazy cat on
the polished flagstones, the red clay split and scaled by
the sun. Our ball, nowhere, but I remember well the
slow turn back, Mrs. Manikam huge and looming
before the black gate, a musty almirah draped with
flimsy curtain, faded petunia and crinkled vine crawling
over her bloated bulb like cartographer’s markings,
the sinuous shift of rivers curling around her twin
mountains, a large dry basin yellowed by old sweat,
her quench of rain; and the face, wind-hardened dough
thrown in a lump against a wall and left for time to sag.
And then she opens, brings the tennis ball out from
behind her back,
a silent offering from within the darkened cave, and
the ball, I see, is neatly sliced in two, an empty bowl
each in one hand, that bewitched air long gone,
two vestibules now for the sly stretched sky.
‘Take this and run you pariah,’ she rasps, before
dropping the halved green spheres to the frying
ground and unlocking the gate. I perspire I stoop
I grab and I run, her voice a sting in my back,
leaking its ancient poison into my silly young veins.
Later, my sister swinging in grandmother’s sari,
I am initiated to the past – how on a hot day in
July, 1983, the year I was still content inside the
womb,
the smell of burning flesh tendril-snaked
across the city, warping faces like a bath of sudden
acid.
How the ear curls at the sound of the mob, that
preaching frenzy of metal limb and wooden tongue,
that grain that seeks to crack the plank in one way only,
a critical mass of mad bite that roiled and scourged
a people
who refused to split at the seam.
This is not history, this is time folding time,
this, they say, is the harrowed ground that
nourished my disease.
Even the bus-conductors have fallen silent,
their incessant
Kollupitiya Bambalapitiya Wellawatte Dehiwala
Wellawatte
Dehiwala Dehiwala Dehiwala
killed
along with the engine, boarded along
the smoking roads by the
Sinhala kathakaranda puluwang-de? questions,
where the difference between word and word
syllable and syllable
is stretched between life
and the final closing of the lung.
Poor Mrs. Manikam, still cauled in a widow’s grief,
huddled alone on her terracotta floor:
the hungry limbs have entered her house.
They scaled the walls like I did, broke the latch of the gate
I had bounded archly from.
She shields her face with a crucifix, as if the bloody
maw could distinguish kin from kin,
the people of the temple from the people of the church.
But even here, at the base of this culling drive,
there is the farce of protocol, there is the mocking
semblance of law: a list is read and re-read, heads
are counted and tallied, half the names crossed out,
the other half still drawing inky breath, still
waiting for the raze.
Mrs. Manikam is not on the list.
So left to huddle in her pooling fear they flay
the house instead, find out she is a musician of
some known merit, break the case of her Sitar, that
swan-necked clutch of teak and string, gourd and horn,
drag it out by its beak to the hot clay yard, a growing
pile of rug and chair and board,
a splash of pungent flame and all consumed before
the manic eye, the warp of chorded stem before
the sweet strings snap each one in tuneless heat,
carry that black music crashing to the brain.
Ah Mrs. Manikam, now I fear I wrote you wrong.
III.
It is possible to go even deeper,
to mole my way through the brined past
and say
here,
look,
this is the jaw they dislocated in Jaffna,
this is the limb they hacked off in Killinochi,
this is hole in Vavuniya they plunged a nailed board
through,
these are the fingers they broke each day
with a hammer
in the closed dark of a prison in Colombo.
How much time can weigh in the swing of a bat?
How many people can crowd the twin hollows
of a split tennis ball?
I am afraid now to even get out of bed,
shift and turn like an invalid in sweated sheets.
I am afraid to lift my arm, to speak, to breathe
lest all that past blood gorge and sink
and siege my life,
if in brushing my teeth or cutting my nails I am
suddenly bloated by a scream so long and so deep
I am left without air and suffocate,
Or if in conversation with friends
my words in a single instant
are flooded with memories that were never mine,
dribble raw and useless from my mouth.
I am afraid of becoming this vessel,
of finding myself empty and suddenly filled
by other lives that seek escape from my pores,
that pinwheel my arms and jerk my wooden legs
to the end of the stage.
I am afraid of the justice that walks in my body,
I am afraid of what it will do and what I cannot
do for it.
I have woken up and found myself a skin over
a stranger’s bones,
pulled tight and fastened on all ends
like the skein of a drum,
humming softly in the morning air,
waiting patiently for the right hand to
release its coiled voice.
I am terrified of this.
Of walking to work one day
and arrested finally in mid-step,
feel the surge of a million souls
drop like a coin in my heart
and fix me forever to a foreign ground.
tipos de casas