When you look at the picture accompanying this article, what do you see? I took the photo from a car window, struck by the contrast between the trumpeting words and the cracked and broken state of the wall on which they are blazoned.
I want to demonstrate the value of developing and applying multiple critical perspectives to the texts we read, the people we meet and the world around us. This is particularly vital in a complex society such as ours, in which people from so many diverse backgrounds, formed by a variety of contexts, attempt to co-exist.
Our opinions often indicate more about ourselves than they do about the subject matter we are describing. We show ourselves through our telling of a story, the selectivity and angle of our narrative description, and the poetic portrayal of a scene. What appear to be factual physical material details are replete with symbolism, and our interpretation of them indicate the state of our own evolution. We want to write our own name on the mirror wall of our culture. We want to rise above our enforced limitations! To go through the glass ceilings, to access and inhabit the spaces we perceive are denied to us.
I want to talk about walls. Because they are built to demarcate territorial space, to allocate and indicate ownership, to protect and defend, to exclude what threatens us.
I want to discuss Robert Frost's poem 'Mending Wall', and the walls and cultural lines both explicit and implicit in Anne Ranasinghe's poem 'At What Dark Point'. I will try to use insights gained from many years of studying Frost's poem to open Ranasinghe's poem to a broad critical perspective.
Both poems refer to specific events in the daily lives of a first person poetic narrator: one a New England farmer, the other a lady living in a home in one of Colombo's most expensive roads. The farmer is walking the length of his farm with his neighbour, in the early days of spring, when winter snows are melting, and causing the dry stone wall between their properties to break down in parts. They discuss whether they need to rebuild the wall in areas where they are using the land very obviously in different ways: the neighbour is growing pine trees, while the poet is growing apple trees. The wall is really not needed here; and the cost and labour and time of mending and rebuilding it is not worth it, the poet asserts.
His neighbour disagrees. He is a traditional man, and his father had told him 'Good fences make good neighbours', and so he wants to keep on following that received wisdom, even if times have changed, and circumstances have altered. No evidence to the contrary of his prefabricated views will change his mind. He sees what he wants to see.
Frost's persona (for modernist poets often write in first person voice) is astonished, at his neighbour's stubborn doggedness. But his description of the neighbour, who insists on rebuilding the wall right then and there, with a stone in each hand, shows that he is aware that their difference of perspective is more than a contrasting opinion: it is a profound clash of values.
'I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness, it seems to me,
Not of woods only, and the shades of trees'.
Robert Frost, 'Mending Wall'
The persona observes that his neighbour has made a choice: to fortify his own territory, to choose an adversarial position. It is a choice to act from fear/survivalism, and not from trust/love. It is a choice of self over other, which prevents their empathic connection.
Ranasinghe wrote her poem, which was first published in 1970, at a time when threats were being written on the walls of Colombo streets, lanes and roads, in the buildup to the 1971 insurgency.
In her poem, a lady in a house looks out at her garden and sees a man out on the road sitting in the shade provided by a tree she had planted years before. The man sits there every day, looking at her as she watches him, and weaving a strand of rope which increases as he weaves.
There is no verbal dialogue reported between the lady and the man. Ranasinghe seems to be describing factual details, of the man's skeletal frame, and his ceaseless creation of the rope. But the sense of menace her portrayal creates is visceral:
Every morning I see him
Sitting in the speckled shade
Of my blossom laden araliya tree
Which I planted many years ago
In my garden, and the branches now
Have spread into our lane.
Under my tree in a shadow of silence
He sits, and with long skeletal hands
Sorts strands from a tangle of juten fibres
And twisting twisting twisting makes a rope
That grows. And grows. Each day.
Every morning I pass him. He sits
In the golden-haze brightness under
The white-velvet fragrance of
My tree. Sits
On the edge of his silence twisting
His lengthening rope and
Watching
Me.
This section of the poem portrays the social tensions inherent between the lady in the house and the man on the road. The lady can be seen as a socially elevated person literally looking down on the man. The road can only be visible from a window in the upper floor of her house.
Yet it would not be fully just to dismiss this portrayal of the relational positioning between woman and man as
a promotion of elitism and the perpetuation of social inequity. The poet's choice of words actually shows her acute awareness of the man's social powerlessness in relation to her.
A post-colonial reading would highlight the words: sitting in the shade...under my tree/ In a shadow
of silence. This language establishes the man as occupying a marginalised position. The lady, protected by the wealth and safety of her home, occupies a central position in a locus of abundance, irradiated by the sun, characterised by 'golden-haze brightness' and 'white-velvet fragrance'. It is important to notice that the lady herself has planted the tree, which is blooming so abundantly, and giving shade to the man. She is not selfish! She creates beauty, and a peaceful space. In fact, he comes every day to sit under the tree because she has planted it. She does not question his right to sit there. Her marked use of personal pronouns 'my' 'our' certainly establishes her ownership of the land, and her possessiveness, in contrast to his dispossessed state, her articulacy highlights his silence, her centralised position shows his marginalisation. But it does not necessarily constitute elitism, unconcern or arrogance.
What makes the lady apprehensive is not the man's presence but his action, in making the rope. The rope-making triggers the lady's memory of violent events in the past. This is not evidence of a hysterical or fanciful oversensitivity or an over active imagination.
The insurgencies and civil unrest in Sri Lanka, as in other countries, incited many to enact actual violence against those they saw as unjust oppressors or as members of an unwelcome minority group, or as a threat to the status quo. Mobs and rioters behaved with extreme cruelty, sadism and savage barbarism and deliberately dehumanised their victims by perpetrating violence on their persons and their property. Threats to person & property were literally written on the walls of the cities and towns.
The lady in this poem sees in the scene in front of her something which triggers memories of the atrocities enacted against the victims of the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s in Europe. This is a form of lateral thinking: of association of ideas and symbols and feelings; it is an embodiment of the idea that traumas that occurred in the past can actually be felt in the present as continuous, and recurring: that the wounds caused by such terrible experiences may never heal, may trigger feelings of panic at any time.
It requires empathy to really try to comprehend another's experience, which is alien to us. It requires energy and it requires generosity. It requires the withholding of narrow judgmentalism and bigotry.
It is easier to be a savage, and throw stones, at glass houses and at palatial mansions. It is easy to censure our fellow human beings. It is easy to condemn them, for what they appear to have, and be.
'Stand high in honour, wealth or wit,
All others, who inferior sit,
Conceive themselves in conscience bound,
To join, and drag you to the ground.
Your altitude offends the eyes,
Of those who want the power to rise'.
Jonathan Swift, 'On Censure'
As we look, we construct meaning. And what we think reflects our own biases and prejudices very clearly. At that moment of confrontation, we have a choice: to seek to understand or wilfully misunderstand. To create or destroy.
A previous reviewer has read Ranasinghe's poem as showcasing 'elitism' and 'failure' to empathise with her fellow human beings. He seems to (rather unsettlingly) know exactly where the poet lives, and to assume that her poetry is autobiographical, not allowing her the complexity and nuance provided by the use of first person narrative voice and constructed persona.
In my own view, the poet's portrayal is of a lady who is acutely aware of the socially-based hatred directed at her. She understands that she is hated and objectified, because of her elevated position. Her empathy and generosity are diminished by the imposition of an exclusively classist perspective. The real apprehension she feels is caused by experience of human capacity for cruelty, and her understanding that this cruelty is fuelled by resentment of the kind generated by social and political inequity.
Her perceived privilege renders the man observing her inferior,and their disparity enrages him, even while he is protected from the sun by the shade of the tree she had planted in her garden. She is afraid, perhaps, that one day he may redress the imbalance between them by tearing her down from her position of safety, shade, seclusion: the privilege that so offends him.
Ropes were used in Nazi Germany, and in 1983 in the terrible riots in Colombo. Perhaps the lengthening rope measures the limits on the lady's occupation of her home. Maybe the rope will be used to hang her from the tree she herself has planted. Maybe the rope is the thread of her life, which she fears will be cut short by Fate. As has happened so often in the history of our collective humanity.
Do we tear down? Or do we build? Do we direct our judgment at others, or first at ourselves? Can we recognise in our own characters our own unique biases and limitations, and their destructive potential?
Hatred is a failure to love; judgment a failure to understand; and objectification a failure to connect.
Walls and abysses of race and class and gender and education divide us. What can connect us except increasing awareness of self in relation to other, and ways of refining and strengthening our capacity to understand the best ways of dealing with each other, and thus mutually bearing the burdens of our differences?
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