The Great Flight
Page 9
Claiming asylum always results in the overreading of the proper noun.
This happens when it is enough to say that it is the body that claims asylum. The body by itself. The body as its body. Whatever state it is in, it is the body, the body in the flesh, that submits itself in front of other bodies, in order, first and foremost, to be declared present, made present, or to be seen as such by those with more mature flesh and finer cuts. In the flesh, the refugee arrives while bearing witness to his own body, while holding the narrative of the body: I am sacrificing my body for myself; nobody and nothing else, to edge back into the ladder of bodies and be a sign amidst signs. The body is by itself; bare, melancholic as the body in its first outing. Whatever state it is in, it is that that carries all states to the threshold. To the borderline whose remnant is a body and whose body is a remnant. In the flesh is what the refugee can see with or without the gaze.
Only those who have never seen a place can describe the place.
Those who flee their homes tend to have faces that are slightly clearer than the moon. In the above clarity, only the face can substitute its creator.
Claiming asylum is a claim that can only be proven posthumously.
With the same limbs, raptors and refugees hunt for place.
In asylum, we borrow our bodies for the last time.
Whenever my mother wanted to leave the house, it was to see God’s face. God’s face, according to her, was somewhere else.
Man, how is it that your body is intact?
The refugee is he who fears himself. When the self is deafeningly mauled, he will fear the place but never the animal.
There is nothing sacred about the sacred save the eyes.
To claim asylum is necessarily the claim that no being can prove or otherwise.
Damned is the place. Damned is the one.
On the threshold, they slaughtered us and time.
JUAN GELMAN
Translated by Keith Payne
On 14 January, having just returned from Mexico to Galicia’s wettest winter in seventeen years, I was sat in the library in Vigo’s old town when the news came down the wire that Juan Gelman had died. While the rain hammered the glass-domed roof of the Juan Compañel library, I read Bajo la lluvia ajena. These poems were part of Gelman’s return to poetry after a four-year silence: ‘I felt hatred for the military junta, I felt indignation, I felt powerless because I could do nothing in exile except denounce the military dictatorship, but nothing more. And that’s why I wrote nothing for four years.’ Under the barbaric rain are poems of the silenced exile, the exile whose jaw has been wrenched apart. The exile that you walk past on the Coal Quay in Cork City, the Rue Mouffetard in Paris or the Avenida de las Americas in Madrid. Exiles or migrants silenced by brutality and language. The literal translation of ‘Under a distant rain’ wasn’t sufficient shelter for Gelman’s migrant. ‘Barbaric’ suggested itself, with its brutality and inherent exclusivity of the safe native who can’t or won’t try to understand the migrant. There’s a word in poem VII of the sequence; asediaron, meaning to besiege and containing the word for thirst, sed, as in to drive someone out by thirst as opposed to the French sege, simply to ‘sit it out.’ My original reading of the poem, under that pummelling rain, reminded me of the exile’s last resort to the sup that often slakes his solitude. Yet here was Gelman ‘unashamed of nostalgia’ and forced to move through borders and languages. His poems migrated through the Lunfardo of his native Buenos Aires, then Spanish and Italian until he arrived at the Ladino of the Sephardim – that last great language of the migrant – that is, until today.
Under the Barbaric Rain
An Excerpt
I
It’s difficult to reconstruct what happened, the truth of the memory battles against the memory of the truth. Years have passed, the dead and the hatreds pile up, the exile is a cow that can give poisoned milk, some are nourished by this […]
The need to destroy yourself and the need to survive battle each other like a pair of crazed brothers. We hang up our clothes in the wardrobe, but we haven’t yet unpacked the baggage of the soul. […]
III
I won’t be ashamed of my sadness, my nostalgia. I miss the back street where they killed my dog and where I cried beside his body, where I’m stuck to the pavement with my dog’s blood as he died, I’m still alive since that day, it’s what keeps me alive, it’s what I am, and I’ll ask nobody’s permission to be nostalgic.
Maybe I’m different? There were military dictatorships, civil governments and more military dictatorships, they took away my books, bread, my son, they drove my mother to despair, they banished me, they assassinated my little brothers, they tortured my friends, they tore them to pieces, they broke them. No one removed me from the street where I am crying beside my dog. What dictatorship could do that? And what military bastard will remove my great love of the gloaming in May, where the soul’s flight is balanced on the night?
My country, it wasn’t perfect before the military coup. But it was mine, the times I trembled against love’s barricades, the times I was a boy, dog, man, the times I loved and was loved back. No general is going to strip my country of all that, the land I watered with love, with a little or a lot, land that I miss and that misses me, land where no military will muddy my mind or leave its grime.
It’s right that I miss her. We always loved each other like this: she asking more of me, me asking more of her, both hurting from the pain we inflict on the other, both strengthened by the love.
I love you, motherland, and you love me. That love smoulders imperfections, lives.
09-05-1980
V
Of the exile’s duties:
don’t forget the exile /
dispute the language that disputes the exile /
don’t forget the exile / that is the land /
that is the motherland the mother’s milk the blanket
where we shivered / where we played about /
don’t forget the reasons for the exile /
the military dictatorship / the errors
we commited for you / against you /
the land that made us and kneels
at our feet / like dawn outstretched /
and you / my precious heart that watches
at every morning as it fades /
don’t you forget to forget to forget it.
09-05-1980
VIII
We don’t queue at the dream factory. We queue in the front of the country. We are living in a dream factory, eating, sleeping, living, they’re all dreams, every day we make dreams and we come back for them the next day or dream.
I’m dreaming of the Via del Corso and Jorge is dreaming of the Rue Mouffetard. Dream streets, turned away from us, they’ll never know us. We walk down them night and day, we pass them by, we bleed to death on them, we even cry on them, stone dreams that hear other feet.
Our ghostly glare terrifies them. They dream we don’t exist, that we don’t walk down them.
Barbaric dream street: you have undreamed me entirely.
11-05-1980
SHASH TREVETT
In June 1956, the Sinhalese nationalist government of Sri Lanka, led by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, passed an Act of Parliament stating that the Tamil language would no longer be recognised as one of the national languages of the country. In doing so, the government sought both to impose a Sinhalese doctrinal hegemony over the Tamil people, and to disenfranchise a section of the population uneducated in the Sinhala language. Birth and death certificates, hospital records, job applications could no longer be filled in by the Tamil population, and this led to protests on Galle Face Green in the heart of Colombo. The law was repealed a few years later.
I have used both English and Tamil when writing about this case of glottophagy (or ‘linguicide’). It seems inconceivable when writing a
bout the threatened loss of my mother tongue, not to draw on the beauty of its cadences (in Tamil as well as in translation) within my poem. There are a couple of things to note. In the lines ‘And when we dreamed | our dreams erupted | in அs and இs and உs’, the அ, இ, உ (Aaa, Eee, Ooo) are the first three letters of the Tamil alphabet. Later I refer to the Tolkkaapiyam. This is the earliest written Tamil grammar, believed to have originated, in written form from oral sources, sometime between fifth and tenth centuries BC. This text is a fundamental cornerstone of Tamil Literature.
I left Sri Lanka in the late 1980s after the brutal intervention of the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Under them, I learnt to fear the Tamil language itself. My family, and those around me, stopped speaking Tamil on the streets, switching to English, as a way of protecting ourselves from the accusation of being Tamil Tigers. My mother, when negotiating with the Indian soldiers for food or safe passage, or when pleading with them as they lined us up to be shot, spoke to them in Hindi. This was the language of the conqueror, the language of solidarity with the oppressor, the language of submission. Tamil on the other hand was the feared marker of aggression, of difference, signifying a strength which the Indian soldiers feared, and which they caused us to fear in turn. When I arrived in the UK as a deeply traumatised refugee, I refused to speak in Tamil. And even now, 30 years later, I cannot speak it. I stutter, stammer and the words get stuck in my throat. Ironically, in my case, the wishes of the post-independence Sri Lankan government have been realised. I can think in Tamil, and write in it, but my mouth cannot utter the Tamil words that my heart and mind formulate. I commit linguicide every day that I choose not to speak Tamil to my children. I believe in a polyglot future, but I yearn to sing the lullabies of my Tamil past.
Glottophagy
Tamil words that lilt
soothing as a lullaby on a mother’s breath.
Their isaioli, their music
nourishing our uyir,
(life)
marked on a stave
imagined a few millennia ago.
In whispers of promises they show themselves
as paadal
(songs)
and kathai
(stories)
and kavithai:
(poetry)
the Goddess’s gifts from her river throne.
Our generations were formed by their fluid naatiyam
(dance)
our voices modulated by their scripted sangheetham.
(hymns)
And when we dreamed,
our dreams erupted
in அs and இs and உs:
building blocks of a nation
now without a homeland,
a people now without a place.
And when in ’56
with the Sinhala Only Act
they tried to silence your innisai –
the sweetness of your melody –
gag your uyiroli
(vowels)
and eradicate your meiyelluthal,
(consonants)
we took to the streets –
carrying your truth as our arms.
Warriors of the Tolkkaapiyam
on Galle Face Green,
paying with our blood for your right to be.
Oru naadillaathe aatkal
a people without a country,
in exile,
bearing the music of your beauty, still.
ESSAYS & REVIEWS
Those Destined to Bear Witness
Lost Evenings, Lost Lives, translated and edited by Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling, Arc Publications, 2015
Lost Evenings, Lost Lives, is a bilingual anthology of Tamil poetry. The poems, arranged in broadly chronological order, trace the events of the civil war in Sri Lanka, as witnessed and absorbed by the Tamil poets in question. Beginning in 1977 and ending in 2015, the 32 anthologised poets have been elegantly and sensitively translated, capturing in English the lyrical sparsity of the Tamil originals, bringing to a new audience the beauty of a language which has poetry at its core. From the first to the last, the poems presented are a map guiding the reader through the suffering of the Tamil people over the last thirty-five years; signposts to the bloody history of the people in the North and East of Sri Lanka.
The detached, unobtrusive editorial stance makes this volume of poetry a pleasure to read. Tamil is a hard language to translate into English. As Lakshmi Holmström has written elsewhere, the syntax works very differently in Tamil and English sentences. In Tamil, the principal verb appears at the end of the sentence leading to inversions and the problems associated with them during translation. Yet the poems presented here read effortlessly. At a quick glance the topography of source and object appear to correspond to each other. A closer examination reveals the skills of both translators: with precision of intent and thought, each difficult Tamil idiom or cadence has been found its English partner. There are no fillers or additions. The poets’ own words are presented to the English reader with the integrity and strength of their Tamil originals. What appears in this anthology are poignant and beautiful Tamil poems, translated sympathetically into cleverly crafted and lyrical English counterparts.
Many poems in this volume are worthy of mention and it is hard to single out any for particular attention. Needless to say, the following poems have been picked as they serve the purposes of this review. The volume opens with the elegant ‘Last Evening, This Morning’ by M. A. Nuhman, from whose final couplet the title of the anthology is taken. He describes lazy days in Jaffna before the war, browsing among bookshops, smoking and chatting by tea stalls, watching busy people living their lives in unrestricted freedom. The land was theirs, the streets, the days, their lives were theirs. That was yesterday. But in the second part of the poem, the today, there is a dramatic, apocalyptic shift. Now the streets are owned by ‘khaki-clad men’ and
bullets rain
piercing bodies
drinking up lives.
The market place is a smouldering ruin, shops lie desecrated, burning tyres mark the burning of bodies and dreams. The poem was written in 1977 in response to the anti-Tamil riots following the presidential elections of that year. The bewilderment of the poem mirrors that felt by the Tamil people themselves, as they woke to a new reality, bereft of days and nights they could call their own.
The anthology then moves through the years, with poems marking the burning of the Jaffna Public Library (M. A. Nuhman ‘Buddha Lay Dead’) and the corresponding loss of priceless classical Tamil writings, through to the violence of 1983. Cheran’s well-known poem ‘I Could Forget All This’ speaks graphically and brutally about the events of Black July, when a state-sponsored mob ravaged the streets of Colombo, armed with census forms which enabled them to target Tamil homes and business. An estimated 3,000 Tamil people lost their lives, and a further 150,000 were rendered homeless. Cheran writes of ‘thigh bones protruding’, a face ‘empty of its eye | a socket caked in blood’. The plaintive image of
A Sinhala woman, pregnant,
bearing, unbearably,
a cradle from a burning house
has been poignantly translated by Lakshmi Holmström. Not only does the reader mourn the death of the original occupant of that cradle, but Cheran mourns too the death of a future, of the generations that were lost in those dark days of 1983. From there the anthology moves through the brutal intervention by the Indian Peace Keeping Force, to Mullaivaikkal in 2009, where more than 40,000 Tamil civilians were massacred in the No Fire Zone. The tragedy of the war in Sri Lanka, the mindset that enabled a government to turn its guns on its own people, the peace that is still being denied Tamil people on that island, is best summed up by Dushyanthan in ‘They Do Not Know’:
They do not know
that you and I are human.
All they know is
that you and I
are not
human.
A wide variety of poets are featured in this volume, encompassing many positions and viewpoints. There are poems by LTTE combatants with their rhetoric of martyrdom and the glorification of the heroic dead, which sit alongside poems more condemnatory of the violence of the liberation struggle. Poems by Muslim Tamils, who suffered greatly under the hands of the LTTE in 1990, make a welcome inclusion. There are various poems about exile and dislocation, about identity and a loss of community, poems about hope for a future peace. What makes this anthology all the more laudable is that many of the poets featured still live and work in the North and East of Sri Lanka. Through these translations we are able to hear their voices and see their words reaching out through time and space, bringing with it a special kind of responsibility to the reader.
Women poets feature strongly in this anthology. Of the 32 poets present, 14 are women. Rape and the consequences of it are a common thread between the women, but they also write eloquently about hope and of loss. S. Sivaramani in her ‘Oppressed By Nights Of War’ writes starkly about the loss of innocence amongst the children born amidst gunfire and destruction.