New life rolls out from old mountain tale

Book review

He's seventy-five. He went to Canada in 1965; and his voice has been ringing ever since. To Canada, he is the "incomer" and, as The New Quarterly said it all too well, "Canadian Literature... has never articulated and transcended the experience of the incomer so wonderfully."

He is Rienzi Crusz. "Arguably the best living Sri Lankan poet in English", is what World Literature Today said of him, "prepared to appropriate the colonial legacy of Shakespeare and English without anguished breast-beating 'as a tongue to speak with'."

My first Millennium gift, actually. On the flyleaf, Rienzi's own benediction: "All the best. Take care and God bless", and I was holding his latest book, Lord of the Mountain : The Saradiel Poems - a montage of prose and poetry in which the legend dies and is reborn - a folk hero sold to the gallows tree, a Robin unhooded and made to dance on a rope and sealed in cement, sealed forever with him the secrets of the mountain. To the British he was fear. Fear incarnate. In his epilogue, Rienzi makes the very flesh of history crawl. History becomes "the Bloddy stain of truth", History is when -

".... a hanging tree begins to grow
in Kandy's red earth."
Yes, to the British, the night had passed, the powers of darkness had been beaten back; and yet, it was the British, it was lop-sided society, the sneering rich, the suddha, mudalali, headman, rate mahatmaya who bred the bandit.
".... the boutique keeper
standing at the front door demanding
his pound of flesh...
"How the temple-school monk
seats Saradiel at the back of the class
like a pariah, he
with his dirty face and frayed sarong
as the sneering rich boys
stew in their silks, havadiyas
and gold teeth...
"...in the end, the Englishman takes it all,
exiles a king
and breeds a bandit."

Rienzi has given us a provocation that will invest the Lord of Utuwankanda with the aura of another John - the John of James Baldwin's Go, Tell It on the Mountain, where, just as Saradiel, "something moved in John's body which was not John. He was invaded, set at nought, possessed."

Why did Saradiel have to dance so in his circle of blood? Forget our romanticised, quite cock-eyed perspectives that have simply hover-crafted us over the stony mountain paths of truth. Did we need a Robin Hood anyway? Does a man have to explode through the skin of society's bloated misshapen carcass, swell like a goitre in the backside of the suddha and kris the Malay, all khakied and boot-webbed, to be the hero we are told he was? Rienzi does not analyse. Rather, he provokes and suddenly it is this provocation that becomes the delirium, the sounding hatred, the bud that turns into a blood-flower. How else does childhood's end become hate's beginning? Somewhere, between the gudu games and mora fruit raids come the sons of the rich, the sons of the aratchi and the headman -

"showing off
gold havadiyas round
their fat waists,
silk sarongs catching
the mercury of the sun...

"Their fathers
sucking up to the suddhas
and growing fat
on the poor of the land...

"One little vaysige putha,
Two little vaysige puthas,
Three little vaysige puthas...

"Some day, some day
I'll..."

That's when the cruelty began, spurred by a force that dashed the Karmic vessel to pieces at his feet and he found there the shattered bits of his own reason too. But, behind the swelling hate, Rienzi paints the anguish - an anguish that Saradiel surely could not endure. This is why, lying at the very bottom of darkness, he marinated his heart in blood. There was no God, Karma was a fake. The mountain was his most approachable God. How, then was Saradiel so different? Given almost God-like' powers today, hasn't civilized man killed over 60 million of his fellowmen and now primes to destroy all life on earth? Yet, it took one Saradiel to shake the mountain, make the villages quake, make the hills tremble in a crescendo of excitement, then fall inert.

Rienzi creates out of the old, old story that rolls out of the belly of its mythic barrel organ. That first clenched-fist exultation on the topmost cairns of Utuwankanda; that ola-leaf book of magic; the purloined henarajathaila-ya........ and no laughter. Oh no. Laughter is not powerful enough an emotion for a young bandit with so much anger, aggression, so much of the raven, as Menaka tells him, here now, and gone... he is the wind.

So he did rob Katu Bawa, barbered the man, gave what he stole to the poor. And he treated the planter Silva to a sumptuous meal. Why not? Silva had compassion. Katu Bawa had none. What did Silva see in this man?

"It was the eyes. The obsidian eyes
darting like lightning as if to pick up
every scent, every motion of danger.
And the cat in him. The way the limbs
moved liquid through the night air,
the language of animal prowl, "
the cautious idiom of the hunter."

Somehow, and I'm sure Rienzi felt it too, the legend began to coarsen when one mountain lord made of his friends his band. The Z of the Zorro grew arms and the arms were but air roots of the magic tree. Mamale Maricar, Samat, Goduwille Sirimala. More joined the ranks: Hawadiya, Baya, Mohamadoo Marcan, Vederala, Malhamy, Korale of Metnawella, Ukkinda, Nassudeen, Moderatenna Henda. In the villages, the gossip flared and the silence also thickened when the law demanded answers. Fear and pride. Moonshine and morphine.

Rienzi has welded together the historical and the imaginative to give us a work of sheer lyrical power. Weaving through the brilliant imagery are extracts from The Examiner, Colombo of 1864, the report to the government from Beminuwatte Rate Mahatmaya; the proclamation from the Colonial Secretary's Office; extracts from Colombo Overland Observer; diary entries of the AGA Kegalla; sergeant Mahat's account of Saradiel's capture; testimony of Raman Pakier and William Nicholas Appu at Saradiel's trial. Also excerpts from Father Adriel Duffo's report to Rome which included an account of Saradiel's last hours and execution.

It's the poetry that holds it all together. Surely, then, was Saradiel the bandit, the robbing Robin, but also a conditioned reflex to Saradiel the boy. He found the shock treatment, he needed on his mountain and from there did the shock waves spread. Remember how Pavlov told of the transmarginal stimulation of aggression? It ruptures into a higher nervous activity. To Saradiel, the mountain was his stimulus, and yet, on the mountain he could also reverie:

"Damn, what demons inhabit my body, me soul?
I hear the hammers shape my scaffold..."

And he asks Mammale:

"What makes love and hate hold hands
in the corners of my mind?"

Born to be Saradiel. Born to fan a dark hatred for class, power, "the cruel pansala priests", born to wield his own Karma of violence, to nourish the fires in his belly; born to be betrayed, born to hang.

Even today, in the villages around Kandy no one wishes to tell of how Saradiel embraced the Catholic faith. He was baptised on the day before his execution and accepted the name of Joseph. When the scaffold plank gave way the words of the "Our Father" died, garroting his tongue.

Rienzi breathes a new life into it all, sees a new vision in this age-old story. In uncorking this old wine he has allowed his poetic image to even cause the cork to feel the pain. We see the intentness, the relentlessness of this life, where the quest was for the sanctuary of the mountain - the mountain that made of a carter's son a lord.

It is so simple, really, that it needed the genius of such as Rienzi to be wholly aware of its utter simplicity. Saradiel stands, to saint and sinner alike a religious experience. His was a life that clasped heaven and trod on hell. One long overbelief in the primordial chaos that tussles within us all.

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