Running in the Family (11 page)

At St. Thomas’ College Boy School I had written “lines” as punishment. A hundred and fifty times.
. I must not throw coconuts off the roof of Copplestone House.
. We must not urinate again on Father Barnabus’ tires. A communal protest this time, the first of my socialist tendencies. The idiot phrases moved east across the page as if searching for longitude and story, some meaning or grace that would occur
blazing
after so much writing. For years I thought literature was punishment, simply a parade ground. The only freedom writing brought was as the author of rude expressions on walls and desks.

In the 5th Century
B.C.
graffiti poems were scratched onto the rock face of Sigiriya—the rock fortress of a despot king. Short verses to the painted women in the frescoes which spoke of love in all its confusions and brokenness. Poems to mythological women who consumed and overcame mundane lives. The phrases saw breasts as perfect swans; eyes were long and clean as horizons. The anonymous poets returned again and again to the same metaphors. Beautiful
false compare
. These were the first folk poems of the country.

When the government rounded up thousands of suspects during the Insurgency of 1971, the Vidyalankara campus of the University of Ceylon was turned into a prison camp. The police weeded out the guilty, trying to break their spirit. When the university opened again the returning students found hundreds of poems written on walls, ceilings, and in hidden corners of the campus. Quatrains and free verse about the struggle, tortures, the unbroken spirit, love of friends who had died for the cause. The students went around
for days transcribing them into their notebooks before they were covered with whitewash and lye.

* * *

I spend hours talking with Ian Goonetileke, who runs the library at Peradeniya, about writers in Ceylon. He shows me a book he put together on the Insurgency. Because of censorship it had to be published in Switzerland. At the back of the book are ten photographs of charcoal drawings done by an insurgent on the walls of one of the houses he hid in. The average age of the insurgents was seventeen and thousands were killed by police and army. While the Kelani and Mahaveli rivers moved to the sea, heavy with bodies, these drawings were destroyed so that the book is now the only record of them. The artist is anonymous. The works seem as great as the Sigiriya frescoes. They too need to be eternal.

He also shows me the poetry of Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, one of his close friends who drowned recently at Mount Lavinia. A powerful and angry poet. Lakdasa was two years ahead of me at St. Thomas’ College and though I never knew him we had studied in the same classrooms and with the same teachers.

As I leave his house, Ian returns to the beautiful George Keyt drawings which fill his study and the books he has to publish in other countries in order to keep the facts straight, the legends uncovered. He is a man who knows history is always present, is the last hour of his friend Lakdasa blacking out in the blue sea at Mount Lavinia where the tourists go to sunbathe, is the burned down wall that held those charcoal drawings whose passionate conscience should have been cut into rock. The voices I didn’t know. The visions which are anonymous. And secret.

This morning in the house on Buller’s Road I read the poetry of Lakdasa Wikkramasinha.

The slow moving of her cotton
in the heat.
        Hard shell of foot.
She chops the yellow coconut
the colour of Anuradhapura stone.

The woman my ancestors ignored
sits at the doorway chopping coconut
cleaning rice.

Her husband moves
in the air between trees.
The curved knife at his hip.
In high shadows
of coconut palms
he grasps a path of rope above his head
and another below him with his naked foot.
He drinks the first sweet mouthful
from the cut flower, then drains it
into a narrow-necked pot
and steps out to the next tree.

Above the small roads of Wattala,
Kalutara, the toddy tapper walks
collecting the white liquid for tavern vats.
Down here the light
storms through branches
and boils the street.
Villagers stand in the shadow and drink
the fluid from a coned leaf.
He works fast to reach his quota
before the maniac monsoon.
The shape of knife and pot
do not vary from 18th Century museum prints.

In the village,
a woman shuffles rice
in a cane mat.
Grit and husk separate
are thrown to the sun.

From his darkness among high flowers
to this room contained by mud walls
everything that is important occurs in shadow —
her discreet slow moving his dreams of walking
from tree to tree without ropes.
It is not vanity which allows him this freedom
but skill and habit, the curved knife
his father gave him, it is the coolness up there
— for the ground’s heat has not yet risen —
which makes him forget necessity.

Kings. Fortresses. Traffic in open sun.

Within a doorway the woman
turns in the old pleasure of darkness.

In the high trees above her
shadows eliminate
the path he moves along.

Returning from Sigiriya hills
in their high green the grey
animal fortress rock claws of stone
rumours of wild boar

pass

paddy terraces
bullocks brown men
who rise knee deep like the earth
out of the earth

Sunlight Sunlight

stop for the cool
kurumba
scoop the half formed white
into our mouths

remove

tarpaulin walls of the jeep
to receive lowland air

on a bench behind sunlight
the woman the coconuts the knife