It’s personal, but it’s something beyond too
Shades by Edmond Jayasinghe
Vijitha Yapa Publications
Price: Rs 1000
Reviewed by Sasanka Perera
I initially began reading ‘Shades’ – Edmond Jayasinghe’s collection of recent poems in English during a government-imposed quarantine in faraway Tissamaharama. In that unplanned solitude, other than wandering peacocks, loitering pigeons, and military personnel clad in personal protective equipment checking my temperature and that of my wife at regular intervals, I decided to keep my sanity intact by scribbling a few poetic lines in Sinhala online.
Jayasinghe’s collection reached me via email, adding some excitement into the otherwise event-less life in quarantine. I did not know of the poet’s background but as I began to read and continued to do so after reaching Colombo, what came to mind was Salvatore Quasimodo’s often quoted idea that “poetry … is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.”
The poet, in his collection essentially writes about what he has experienced during his eventful life spanning eight decades as well as his thoughts and anxieties over what he has seen and felt. There is no mistaking that these are his own experiences and feelings. But as in Quasimodo’s words, Jayasinghe’s thoughts in many senses could also be my own, and that of others because he is not writing in isolation, but as a member of the sociopolitical and cultural spaces in which we all live. But despite this sense of broader community, it is abundantly clear that the words he has penned comes from his own mind and his life.
What I want to do is not to review Jayasinghe’s poems but simply give a sense of the life I ‘see’ when reading them and through this, to understand how they might be located in a broader discursive domain beyond Jayasinghe’s reflections. In his poem, ‘Possessions’, he notes:
Material nonmaterial
Possessions over a long arduous journey
Happiness unhappiness alternated
Clung on to orderly
The words obviously resonate the poet’s personal take on the materiality in life, but also reflects Buddhist notions of attachment, greed, and their consequences which today people within the faith and beyond have forgotten and discarded, in preference for a world infused with materialism.
‘Love Infinite’ on the other hand, is very personal:
Infinite is your love like the universe
Infinite is your love like the oceans
Infinite you are in our life journey
What happiness and meaning you ushered in
To decorate our lives…
Here, obviously, the poet is placing on record his recognition of his partner’s shadow across all vistas and corners of his life. But this does not mean that Jayasinghe is a man devoid of a sense of politics beyond the personal and the philosophical. Take his poem,’Cry of the Voiceless’:
Pull us out of this rut
Have been buried for so long
Commissions and omissions of the old,
Had no role for us to play at all
Entrapped in a vicious spiral
No hint of an escape
Virtual prisoners
Can’t you hear the clear and loud cry?
Of a voiceless group of young
Prime precious asset of a nation
Consigned to virtual living prisons
Crowded congested beyond capacity
A grave injustice …
Here, there is no mincing of words, but a simple cathartic release of what conscience tells him is right, what is happening out there in our society, particularly among the youth utterly frustrated and steadily radicalized, simply because they cannot imagine a future for themselves. The importance of Jayasinghe’s lines here is that they represent the voice of a disturbed conscience at a time conscience as an essential condition of humanity seems to have been banished from most domains of public life in our country.
Jayasinghe’s poems are literally snapshots of his life: what he has seen, heard, felt, been exuberant about, despaired over and what he hopes for. This is not the poetry of a ‘cultural creature’ well versed in the language of literary adventures and post-structuralist jargon but the language of a retired and experienced Foreign Service Officer opting to share his ideas, thoughts, and experiences through poetic form. I have always been impressed by people who take retirement gracefully during which they would engage in things they could not do in their professional and work lives. Public Servants such as himself are virtual repositories of knowledge and wisdom. But in our country, very few opt to share the worlds they have had access to in verse or prose forms.
Jayasinghe is a living example of what Robert Graves meant when he noted in 1946, “to be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”
(The reviewer is Professor of Sociology and former Vice President, South Asian University, New Delhi, India)
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