“And in my face – a semblance”: The Poetry of Jean Arasanayagam
This week in Daak:
Mirabilia is a collection of things that evoke wonder and marvel. It’s the perfect word to describe the pieces we’ll be featuring over the next few weeks — an enlightening and thought-provoking set of articles by our returning intern, Fiza Mishra.
Also, Daak is getting cheeky. Explore our new postcards to learn more!
And as always, check out this week’s Daak Recommends for some rare delights.
1. “And in my face – a semblance”: The Poetry of Jean Arasanayagam
For survivors of war, writing is an act of bearing witness. Those who have outlived the atrocities of war have long documented how telling their stories, and providing a testimony for their grief allowed them to unfreeze — to unravel their suffering while also putting it in the past. Jean Arasanayagam, a celebrated Sri Lankan writer found herself returning over and over again to the ethnic riots of July 1983 (better known as Black July), and the hair-raising memory of her family being forced to flee to a refugee camp:
“You can pick up the fragments and leave the camp, but those fragments will remain embedded within you like shrapnel…Everything I have described to you has found its way into my work, I have had to excise it out of my system. It is alchemy – the conversion of base metal through literature into something precious.”
Black July transformed her writing. Already an established author, her subsequent works further rooted themselves in themes of displacement, identity and territory. The burden of identity, however, was far from unknown to her— born into a Dutch Burgher family (an ethnic minority of Dutch origin who married Sri Lankan women), she was uncomfortably aware of the legacy of privilege and oppression she had inherited. Her poem “Epics” explores this conflict in her head:
In the garden of the museum A cannon rests. Within glass cases Artefacts of time. Minted coins abraded Silver larins, golden guilders, stuivers, Ancient swords stained with rust And blood. Firearms antique, And in my face – a semblance.
Through artefacts in a museum, Arasanayagam gives shape and form to colonial violence. She conjures an image of herself staring at them through a glass case and catching sight of her own face mirrored back at her — a cross that is hers to bear.
It was her connection to Tamil culture, however, that defined her experience of the violence of ‘83. Married to a Tamil from Jaffna, Arasanayagam faced the dual challenge of being marked Tamil in public while also being snubbed by her husband’s family; despite the violence they are subjected to, the Tamils are numerically, politically and culturally more significant than the Burgher minority in Sri Lanka. Her poem, “Women Goddesses and Their Mythologies” recounts an experience of the time she was allowed to enter her mother-in-law’s jealously guarded shrine:
She allowed me once, but barely once to enter the sacred Room, gaze upon her shrine with saints and gurus And fold my hands in worship to those unknown gods On whom she showered love, those goddesses of wealth And learning, those powerful deities whose towering lingams, Curling trunks, lotus and veenas inhabited the world Of her sacred legends and mythologies, where I, with Human limbs and eyes, whose sacrifice of blood fell On those empty stone altars where not one single god Would turn its eyes, belonged not to a single of her rituals, Yet I entered, treading uncertain and wavering with Naked sole, my feet, now unpolluted, washed and bathed In turmeric, first having shaken off the dust of many Journeys on roads and streets I trod...
With a sense of both awe and vulnerability, she illustrates her nervousness of being in a forbidden space that she doesn’t understand, but one that she knows is sacred. In a manner that is intimately familiar, the poem evokes the barely suppressed joy of someone who was yearning to be seen and maybe, just maybe, has finally received a nod of acknowledgement.
What is especially wonderful about her work is that it is never monolithic — raw and unsparing, her stories occupy a uniquely ambiguous space between the coloniser and the colonised, of being Tamil and not-Tamil-enough, of both bearing witness and being witnessed.
You can find more of her poems here.
By Fiza Mishra
2. We’re getting cheeky
Check out our new line of postcards which offer a fun and cheeky take on classic artworks — perfect for your quirky friends who love South Asian art.
3. Daak Recommends
Watch this lively interview with Jean Arasanayagam to immerse yourself in her life, childhood, art, pain, and sundry sources of inspiration.
Also, did you know that the famous Bengali filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, designed his own movie posters and fonts? Read this article to learn more about his affinity with typography.