Recently we have been informed about the granting of land title deeds as well as houses to some of the most disenfranchised people in this land. Our current Sri Lankan political leaders, as recently as late April this year, have decided to grant each of the 200,000 families of Indian Origin Tamil workers in the estate and plantation areas 7 perches of land, with documents which legally authorise & prove their right to ownership of the land and the houses they build on it.
Prior to this new legislation, the plantation workers and their families had experienced 200 years of existence and occupation in the regional areas of Sri Lanka such as Nuwara Eliya and Hatton, without the entitlement and security of the right to own the land on which they lived.
These workers were employed by successive generations of British, and then Sri Lankan, owners of plantation estates, and lived in 'line houses' near the plantations where they worked, in conditions which many urban Sri Lankan people have often never witnessed or been aware of.
Their daily actual experiences, and their acute awareness of their own compromised status, have been in striking contrast to those conveyed by the iconic tourism portraits of 'smiling tea plantation workers in their colourful clothes' which are used to sell Sri Lankan tea to tea-drinkers all over the world.
The new recognition of their right to own land is a historic decision, which brings into focus some of the most marginalised communities in Sri Lanka. While the land title deeds and documents were being finalised and presented to the first groups of families concerned, in regional areas such as Badulla, I attended the recent launch in Colombo of a book of poetry, which contained several 'portraits' in poetry, of members of these communities.
'Sedahamy, Selvakumari & Others' is the poet Sakuntala Sachithanandan's most recent collection of poems. There are in this volume poems written on a diverse range of subjects, but the ones that stood out most starkly to me are those that dealt with the dispossessed citizens of the plantation and estate sector.
'Selvakumari of Hatton' is a portrait of a woman, who had been 'A street-sweeper by day and a street-walker by night', now seen in later life 'destitute, homeless' and in abject distress, as she 'crouches on the pavement,
her face crumpled, shivering,
by the wall of The Happy Food Corner'.
We can see that the poet uses both conceptual and visually symbolic juxtaposition very effectively in this poem to contrast not only this lady's present debased condition with that of her 'former,/ comely, loud-mouthed self', but to show the socio-political ironic significance of her physical positioning, 'right next to the Happy Food Corner':
In her 'grimy, thread-bare rags, /her hair in stiff unwashed grey skeins', she observes with interest and excitement (but remarkably without envy) the other town dwellers emerging with their groceries from the stores: 'Swinging bulging bags in their happy hands!/ Maybe rice - dried fish - coconuts - or bread?/ Or - her heart leaps up - a lovely shiny bottle/ To warm them through the rainy night ahead?'
Sachithanandan's acute and sensitive eye for detail exists concurrently with exceptional socio-economic and legal awareness, and her poetic portraits therefore enable us to clearly perceive the political and sociological issues underlying the situations she describes. The lexical sets of images of brokenness and decrepitude in the poem 'The Half-Built House Of Dreams' create an unforgettable and cumulatively structured image of the despair and exhaustion experienced by the poorest people in the land:
'The half-built house of dreams stands/
on the wind-blown hill
under a blinding bell of hot blue sky./ From a corner beam hangs
a lantern from last Wesak,
or maybe the one before,
its paper torn, mildewed, struts askew.
Planked up on many sides where
the cement blocks ran out,
wads of newspaper replace
its broken window-panes.
Above, a slab now long-abandoned, moss-adorned,
Sprouts bouquets of bent steel wires, rusted, forlorn.
A soiled, dusty curtain flaps across the door - it sports/
faded beauteous damsels from Sigiriya, row on row,/
bejeweled, heavy-bosomed, lotus-eyed, -
and, from within, one hears the "krus-krus"/ of the brisk scraping of a coconut -
then a slap -
and a little child bursts forth,
sobbing loud'.
The sudden emergence of the sobbing child, accentuated by poetic use of plosives, is startling evidence of the existence of young and energetic life, even amidst these bleak conditions, as noted by Vivimarie Van Der Pooten in her speech at the launch of this collection of poems. The serried insights into real life contemporary poverty in this scene are ironically contrasted with the faded images of iconic Sigiriya fresco ladies, privileged beauties of an ancient royal court. Sachithanandan's descriptions of these 'faded beauteous damsels', with their bounteousness described in long, luscious rounded vowels, sharply and significantly counterpoints these pinup girls of ancient days with the lone dog in the last stanza of the poem, 'a bitch of many litters' who 'slowly crawls...
through listless weeds, / and rests its weary head upon its paws'.
There is unyielding irony in the portrayal of the hope expressed in the enduring religious beliefs which lead the house's inhabitants to inscribe on 'one bare, dejected wall', the 'devout legend, / Hopeful of protection from all harm:
"Budu saranai - Devi pihitai" (May one receive the blessings of the gods)
in a giant, shaky scrawl.'
These scenes, with their deliberate amassment of bleak realistic detail, are distressing, but I suggest that the poems which show Sachithanandan's awareness of the humiliations and experience of everyday ethnic and linguistic exclusion experienced by the more prosperous members of this community, affect us in a more complex and disturbing way:
'Language Issue - 1994' and 'Language Issue - 2011' are printed adjacent to each other in the book, and likewise counterpoint each other in both title and theme. Both are in a sense like mini-documentary films, portraying scenes in which citizens speaking the minority language come up against the linguistic barriers which block them from equal status in everyday life.
In 'Language Issue - 1994', an extremely well-dressed and dignified gentleman enters the Land Reform Commission Office:
'on his lips a genial smile.
A white jasmine perched upon his ear
He wore spotless verti and shawl,
And with holy ash upon his brow
He walked tall'.
This gentleman, coming to transact a property claim, is initially confident, and on solid ground. He views the three young ladies seated there to assist him as 'fresh and pretty, untroubled, / Like his own grand-daughters,/ He fondly thought'.
The gentleman at first feels calm, at ease, and respected, as a fellow- citizen. But he suffers a rapid and dizzying fall in self-esteem, as he speaks to the young ladies 'all in his own language, Tamil:
"I am Sivagnanam Muthiah
From Bogowantalawa, thangatchi (little sister).
I was given a land in Bogowantalawa,
What should be done to obtain the deed?
I heard there is a delay here.
Please look into it and tell me -
Much merit will be yours"'.
It is a tragic experience to even witness this courteous and well-spoken man's unwarranted humiliation at the hands of the trio of damsels who shockingly transform, via their insensitivity and cruelty towards him, into harpies:
'The pretty smiles vanished - they drew together - Their delicate ears having been assaulted by the language of the Other - they questioned him in Sinhala, over and over/ Which they implied he ought to know,
And he went plodding on, pleading in Tamil, / his sweat began to pour.'
The poet is a witness to this act of cultural and generational disrespect, and observes herself as partially complicit, for not intervening:
'No one else was called in to help.
I now regret I had not gone to his aid
It was a pity I only watched, fascinated,
And finally the man, lost and dejected,
gave in, gave up, and left'.
The abbreviated monosyllabic utterance of the last line draws our attention to the irrevocable undermining of the Mr. Muthiah's identity and self respect, as a consequence of this incident.
More than a decade and a half later, however, the poet intervenes to help a lady who is humiliated by being at the receiving end of what is clearly differential treatment at the Bank. Confronted by legal paperwork in two languages she did not understand, this lady was bewildered:
'I saw the woman hesitate,
look askance at the forms in her hands -
I could see she was a Tamil and poor,
Didn't know any English, for sure...
In broken Sinhala she tried to inquire
But my good lady brushed her a side,
she was too busy, she just turned away,
I looked on unbelieving in shock and dismay
And I then filled the forms, myself,
For the woman seated
by my side'.
Here, the physical positioning of the two women underlines the humane, co-operative collaborations that are made possible through awareness of and sympathy for another's distress.
Sachithanandan's use of structured and positioned contrasts in her poetic portraits clearly reveal inherent sociopolitical injustice in Sri Lankan society, and the suffering and paradoxical hardening of hearts it causes. The poems give us vivid and dramatic insights into the lives of people who inhabit experiences and conditions which are largely unknown to us. Yet compassion is not the only perspective generated in the poet by sustained awareness of these prevailing social inequities.
Sachithanandan scathingly satirises the callousness and insensitivity of some of the more privileged Colombo citizens towards the relatively unentitled, in what I think of as 'the comedy of manners poem': 'Land Reform 1975'. This poem depicts the 'keening lament' of 'distraught ladies (who) sipped from dainty tea-cups... In certain mansions of Colombo' when faced with the 'ramifications' of the 1975 Land Reform legislation:
'They discussed the news, heavy with
portent of loss and doom
as they sniffed into embroidered handkerchiefs
beneath a cloud of stifling gloom'.
As they commiserate with each other, it becomes clear that their calculating callousness has become a way of life:
'Our men were awf'lly clever:
Where our lands are to be acquired,
They stopped paying the wages/ of the workers as required!"...
"I hear some workers have left
the estates where we do not pay!"
"Really? Oh well - " a shrug, a sip -
"Let's be pious, let us pray!" '
The second half of the poem is a devastating portrayal of the condition of the destitute and dispossessed workers, a contrast which highlights the heartlessness of those to whom these poor people actually seem to be less than human, after being treated as such for so long:
'Zombies, - / what a sight!
Ragged humans huddled
Round a fire, cooking a meal -
To ward off the bitter cold, they'd thought to
Smear themselves with grease!
A desperate, dreary broth they brewed
In an old empty can of paint,
Of some weevilly rice and dhal and salt
They'd begged off the shops that day:
some half-rotten discarded vegetables too,
from the Municipal market stalls:
And they fell like starving wolves
upon their meals - hardly sufficient for all!'
'Otherisation in action', could be the alternative title of this poem. And the poet rightly calls the subject matter 'a grim drama':
'I will not forget the shock I felt, to see a woman die
There, by the road,/
A bag of bones,
eyes rolled up to the sky'.
Law is based on the principles of causality, of cause and effect, of actions and consequences. So Sachithanandan's combination of legal training and humanitarian insight makes these poems a valuable counterpart to the new legislation which is designed to remedy the dispossession and its human impact, which this poet memorably portrays in her work.
I was interested to find, when I interviewed this writer, that her close and sympathetic observation of the people, in situations of various forms of distress, who appear in these poems, derives from long professional and personal acquaintance with them.
