Written by Devika Brendon
Published in Ceylon Today
'If I had a black box instead of a heart
Where the heart should be,
wherever it is, /
That faithfully recorded my life,
That, I believe, would take the joy,
The sheer wicked thrill,
Out of the telling of all those tall tales I tell'...
('The Black Box')
This collection of poetry, published earlier this year, has a clear and persistent discernible pulse. As the title implies, there is a portrayal of struggle, episodic and cyclic flights from frustration, a dialogue or altercation between binary oppositions and dualities, and eventual emergence, stark or muted, in every poem.
The poet herself identifies her recurrent theme in her Preface:
Her focus is on 'serendipitous moments of honesty' which cause her to 'meet [her]self face to face naked of all subterfuge'. This brings into focus the idea of a dulled and mundane, at times chaotic, reality, interspersed and riven with aspirations and fierce strivings. The struggles are internal: longings for access to an alternate, exalted sphere, triggered by external events. The reader sees, across the range of poems, that the longed for portal opens for the poet only in intermittent moments of awareness and clarity.
Godakanda says of herself that in those moments 'something in me dies and in its place something finer, I would like to think, emerges from the ashes of the perverted thing that has died. In between these unceasing moments of life and death my time is mostly spent on waging a constant battle against those forces within me - which are not really of me, but smuggled in by those forces from without and grafted against my wishes to my very being - that try to keep me from that enriching cycle of death and rebirth'.
Here the poet introduces her persona as a combatant, experiencing her psychological and socio-emotional life as a form of constant warfare, with her essential self drawn into unremitting skirmishes, but yearning for unencumberment, full personal franchisement, and peace.
Many of these skirmishes are dialogues (or partial dialogues) with lovers, and deal with the failure of physical love, with its often egotistical misapprehensions and
limitations, and inevitable and messy sharing of the partially discovered self, and its continual failure to provide the access to
the personal peace that the persona longs for. Some are evocations of friendships which have become unsustainable, with life's remorseless individuation process drummed into their unravelling, in cycles that seem inevitable.
These personal conflicts take place in a wider and more fractured and destabilised societal sphere, in which injustice, condemnation, shallow judgment, misapprehension and cruelty distort the communication that could provide release and solace for people. The strength of these poems is that, although they are often clearly responses to personal experiences, they are not all merely personal accounts, but are of interest and relevance to the reader.
Central to their effectiveness is the poet's own frank admission of her impatience with the falseness of the norms and expectations levied on us. She invokes the social forces she is often warring with in prose in her Preface, in the form of the third person reported strictures of those who seek to scold her into conformity with acceptable contemporary models of conservative female behaviour:
'It is better to go on as it is, they say. Toe the line, less trouble, they say. But I choose not to. A declaration of war... And rarely does myself emerge victorious from these many skirmishes. However, these defeats, instead of crushing myself down, are often the very stuff that set me on fire so that I could turn to ashes once again and emerge from my pyre a little closer to myself'.
I find this powerful claiming of this 'pyre', as a form of wholly personal redemption and renewal, liberating. In my mind's eye, in response to these words, and as I read the poems, I think of the fire of purification, of Rama and Sita, circling the sacred flame, the ordeals of social sanctification endured by women, and the fire of suttee in which faithful wives were expected to immolate themselves for their husbands' greater spiritual ascension. The woman's identity often seemed subsumed in the relationships women had with men.
So this poet's embracing of a life created by internal self-immolations is subversive. Even in its often perceived overall or individual 'failure', tracked in each poem, I find the tracing of the poet's challenges to the dominant paradigm of female compliance very effective as a portrayal of an alternative to mainstream behavioural conformity.
Images of fire, of comets, and transcendence, operate to integrate the poems thematically across their diverse forms. Martial imagery and astronomical references are invoked, appropriate for a celestial appreciation of life's required combats.
It is evident that these personal wars and battles are clearly more important to the poet than the political struggles of the country around her. These are invoked but she does not allow them to extinguish the flames of her personal anguish, or douse her personal rebellions and uprisings with a collective mass of depersonalised sorrow. There is a capacity for objectivity, detachment and broad perspective manifest in her work, which makes her direct treatment of everyday and personal disappointments very interesting.
Godakanda uses references to Classical mythology and archetypes to expansively broaden the framework of several of the interchanges showcased in her poetry: and allusions to Indian as well as Greek and Roman mythology, and Christian doctrine.
'Narcissus! Narcissus!', addressed to a younger lover, shows the persona strongly inhabiting an imaginative space of cultural strength not usually accorded to women who cross age lines in their romantic relations with men in traditional societies, and using classical archetypes for her personal self-empowerment:
'You beautiful boy-man
Looks fade and you grow old, sweet boy-man/
I, Echo, have seen so many like you
Preening and posing
On the surface of my lake...
Men come, sweet Narcissus,
To my life-giving pool,
And then they go,
When it is time to go -
But I, Echo, the keeper of life
Stay.'
The self-esteem and self-respect in the poet's tone here are further explored in 'Lucifer, I See You In Me', where the persona's identification as a woman with the socially condemned pride of Lucifer is portrayed as a necessary strength, in a world where she is often called into action, to affirm as well as defend herself:
'Pride goes before a fall
I have heard many mutter
As they pick themselves up
Dust and put the pieces of their broken lives
Back together -
Little pieces missing
Lines not exactly meeting
Humbled beyond words
Looking for meaning
In dusty volumes
Until the next fall.
I march towards my end,
No heaven or hell,
Until I too fall down -
Yet, no Book would I turn to
In despair for hope.
Instead, reach deep within my being
And gather
That slow-burning Promethean Gift
Between my sheltering palms.
With that to guide and light the way,
Once again
I walk head high,
Battered and bruised,
But not broken.
Lucifer, I see you in me.'
The relatively cliched final phrases 'battered...bruised/But not broken' are not threadbare but original in their placement in this cumulative sequence, as the evocation of the image of the 'slow-burning Promethean Gift' of fire held by the persona in her 'sheltering palms' suggests an invocation of the sacred which enables her to transcend the struggles and frequent indignities she encounters in the path of her life. Images of the vulnerability and fragmentation of the self cited during the passage of the poem are thus denied by the alliterated end focused phrase 'But not broken'.
Godakanda in her most effective work does not clutter or freight her poetic syntax with overwrought description, and her images are free of self-referential and self-conscious posturing. In 'A Closer Fit', she directly addresses us, the reader, with an abruptness that is endearing, and revelatory in its indication of her awareness of our shared human condition:
'My skin does not fit right;
An imposter in clothes
Borrowed, begged, or stolen,
That is how I feel, day in and day out;
In places it pinches sorely,
Too young to be me;
In others, hangs loose
In wrinkled, flabby folds
That looked not even remotely like me,
From afar, at least.
Slink I into shadows cracks and nooks,
In shame when among those
With tailor-made skins, just right,
The way they hang, chameleon-like,
In vain, I know, do I stretch and shrink,
A caterpillar gone mad in its chrysalis,
Nip, tuck, and suck, endlessly,
Looking for a closer fit.'
The frustration of the process of emergence from felt constraint is powerfully expressed in the climactic metaphor 'A caterpillar gone mad in its chrysalis', and the diction derived from dressmaking is particularly appropriate as a description of a woman rejecting the ill-fitting and unsuitable measurements made of her by her society. Here in Sri Lanka we are particularly aware of the many 'fittings' required for the dresses and garments that are tailored for us, and the various efforts required for us to feel as if we are physically appealing, and approved of. Even the most liberated of us wonder at times if we fit, or fail to fit, the models held up to us of female beauty and desirability.
The poet's evocation of youth and age here, as equally uncomfortable extremes, shows her prevalent desire to find the unique 'fit' that expresses her sense of her true self, rather than the 'imposter' that she rejects, who is constructed often inadvertently in response to the dictates of society.
In 'The Cup Of Life', she describes herself as 'waiting for my cup to fill,
With memories bittersweet,
Dissolved in sweat and tears.
One final drop,
And then I will drink it
And fade in a euphoric mist
Into an eternity beyond everything.'
In this first stanza, the phrases 'bittersweet' and 'sweat and tears' seem slightly tired, but the syntax and enjambement ensures overall clarity of meaning. The flow of the second half of this poem, however, is disrupted by unrendered words, which cluster claustrophically and do not allow Godakanda's own voice to free itself from the trappings and implications of well-known phrases:
'Yet, I have lost count
Of those drops,
Seeping through the very cracks of life,
Trapped in a hazy, labyrinthine mist
Of life-choking mind-numbing memories
And am still awaiting
Breathlessly, hesitantly,
For that final drop,
That magical catalyst,
To fall.'
The blurred abstractness of this idea, its unconnectedness to any specific image, obscures its meaning. Godakanda expresses a similar idea more effectively in a more physically concrete form in 'To Be Joyful Of Little Things':
'A drop of nothingness
Hanging pendulously,
Swinging, quivering
In the morning chill
On a blade of the sidewalk's crushed grass;
A little no-name plant
Pushing itself staunchly
Through a crack
On the pavement,
Despite being smashed,
To pulp, day after day,
By the pounding feet
Hurrying along to nowhere;
The one true note
In the repertoire of screeches
Of the fake-blind man
With the cracked violin
At the corner by the lights;
One perfect ray
That cuts across the choking smog
And falls at my feet
And follows me, and then guides me
On my way
To yet another yesterday, today, and tomorrow;
Little things, they surely are,
And they are all I have,
Yet to find joy in them, I have learnt, finally.'
The inverted syntax used here in the end focus of the last line very effectively positions the persona's unexpected realisation of joy inherent in the diurnal progress in which we pursue our various sacred grails.
The most powerful overtly political statement in the collection is the long poem 'Let Me Cast The Last Stone', a portrayal of the state-sanctioned ritual murders of women which take place in countries adopting punitive and manifestly unequal measures to publicly condemn adultery and sexual 'impropriety'.
'Let me cast the last stone
At that Brown-bodied Woman
Buried waist-high
Runnels of sweat and blood
Streaming down...
Straining, as she braced herself
For me to let go of that sharp-edged flint
Whizzing through the air
And hit her bloodied, ravaged body
Once more.'
The poem, with its topical subject matter, runs the risk of being usurped by the 'incident reportage' style in which real events are responded to with emotiveness and often gratuitously violent faux profundity, and simulated outrage. Godakanda prevents this by her positioning of the textures and physical details, and judicious use of sequential plosive and sibilance to portray the perpetrators in relation to the victim of the unfolding events.
The woman being stoned here fragments from within. Initially, she is:
'Confident, still...
That those sons and daughters
Of her ancient line
Would shield her from more stones,
Chase the infidels out
And let her breathe once more
A lungful of liberty.'
The scene of her dissolution is simultaneously shown in 'real time' and placed in a historical contextual framework, in which the first stone is 'Cast by the White Sahib', and the last metaphorically by the persona herself. The persecutors are disturbing versions of the victim's own 'darling child,/ Savouring the often regurgitated cud
Of post-imperial anti-capitalist cant'.
The sado-masochistic and self-justified cruelty of the perpetrators of the killing is as accurate as a televised replay in its close-up poetic, measured detail, evoking and summoning the covert voyeur in the reader:
'Picking up a jagged piece
Running a testing finger
Over the sharp edge, sensuously
Weighing the thing
Turning it this way and that
To get a better grip
Before letting it fly
Whizzing through the hot noon air.'
The persona expresses the wish to cast the last stone to 'free her/ So we could bury her
Under the cloak of the approaching night'. But this action is not merely motivated by mercy, or compassion. It is an incitement to finish it off, to get it over with:
'So we could get on with our lives
Wading our way through
A quagmire of the post colonial slush
Sucking it up to the White Sahib
In absentia.'
The deliberate use of the inclusive plural pronoun 'we' in this implicates us all in the event, and indicates the eroded problematic situation of anyone in a moral void, where indeterminacy prevails, and post colonial issues create a 'quagmire of...slush', trying in vain to locate ground on which to stand. Any certainty here dangerously devolves into judgment or condemnation of an 'Other'.
Human connection eroded, other people's suffering is seen as a vacuous spectacle, an enactment in which the figures' claim to life, through relationship, constitutes the reason for their death, and their existence, judged, and castigated, is mindlessly and heartlessly absorbed by the machinery of the state.
'Phoenix' is a guided tour through the thoughts and impressions of a person of interest to us. The sentimental caterwauling we are, regrettably, as readers subjected to, in various forms, by writers of contemporary poetry, is refreshingly absent here, where the 'black box' of the awareness which has been substituted for the 'heart', often clearly registers the re-calibrations which generate and renew the poet's equanimity.
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