English verse and eastern lullabies

By Alfreda de Silva

Although she found her early convent education very anglicised and distant from her heritage of Urdu and Punjabi literature, it was her privilege to be steeped in the Mushairahs. These were gatherings of poets who exchanged verses and banter in her grandfather's ancestral home.

Her father was a physician and intellectual with artistic sensibilitis. They lived in the Old Walled City of Lahore, memories of which she cherishes!

There she was exposed to various kinds of music, art and poetry, all of which motivated her to acquire a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Punjab University.

Farida's mother, who had no formal education and grew up in Purdah, taught herself languages and the work of classical poets.

She began writing poetry herself and read the rough drafts to her daughter when she was still very young.

Farida remembers the songs her mother sang to her when she was three years old, to put her to sleep. Their cadences fell in a soft sing-song rhythm on her ears as she drifted off to sleepon snatches of Persian, Arabic and Urdu lullabies.

Then there was the exciting dichotomy of the school where Shakespeare, Words-worth, Browning and Masefield, among others, woke her to the lilting music of English poetry. She started experimenting with it herself.

Her first attempt was a dirge she wrote to a red-crested songbird killed by her brother with his sling-shot. She was seven at the time.

Farida, who has enjoyed reading a lot of Punjabi and Urdu poetry - the work of such poets as Mirza Ghalib, Allama Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, regrets that she cannot write in these languages.

She has discovered that Punjabi and Sinhalese have startling similarities evolving as they do from the same roots, Pali and Sanskrit. She regrets that much of "the finely tuned play of words and images, the alchemy that gives symphonic life" to Urdu poetry loses a great deal of its quality when translated into English.

Her favourite writers are the Latin-American ones like Neruda, Paz, Marquez and Allende and the Spanish Garcia Lorca.

Her own inspiration comes from people and nature. "What else is there?" she asks, and asserts that "sometimes a jolt to the system, emotional pain, is necessary to catalyse the creative process".

She agrees that environment influences what one produces. She has travelled to exotic destinations but some big Western cities provide little or no sustenance to her as a writer and painter, apart from the stunning changes in the seasons. In this excerpt from Raga we have her credo: 

"Words become pictures
Pictures words
If you ask me
Which comes first
I'll be between a rock and a hard place....
Like the hand of Michelangelo
Coaxing puffs of roccoco clouds
Into dimpled cherubs
Straddling all creation.
Lyrical breathing like piano notes
Rising staying falling melting
Words pictures
Pictures words."

She declares, "I can hear a smile, touch a sunset, see the heady scent of cinnamon." She has lost her heart to Sri Lanka. The trees talk to her. Here are lines from her pen - portrait - City of Umbrellas.

"For a month every day
I sat on a rock
Looking for omens, away from you
Above a chameleon ocean.....
Sometimes when you look at one 
With half-closed eyes full of sea-light
.... City of umbrellas and deities
How distant grows recollections of armistice
How hotly courses gun-smoke air
Through children's bodies
Now strangers to trustful touch.
Sometimes I lose you to those
Who use you again and again
Dark mistress of immeasurable generosity
Colombo, my city, my love,
Custodian of wounds that hide sunsets
Care-giver to wombs like lotuses
Flush with day breaks."

Says Farida, "I feel regenerated in the Pettah, and also the silence that resonates in hills and forests. The oceans for me held untold terrors till I came here."

This poet's work is imbued with passion and sensuality, the apt rhythm and the well chosen cadence to make her spontaneously crafted poems move like dancers.

She claims that one of the best things that happened to her is meeting up with the Writers, Workshop, now known as the Wadiya Group, because the Beach Wadiya is the location of their weekly meetings.

Among the Sri Lankan writers whose work she admires are Punyakanta, Wijenaike, Anne Ranasinghe, Christine Wilson, Carl Muller and Neil Fernandopulle, whose writing radiates a timeless universality.

That's what she would like her writing and painting do - to transcend all religious, cultural and social barriers.

More often than not, Farida's poems are long. Her journeys into the mind's interior take her along winding streets of introspection, on many levels.

Love Song is one of the exceptions, a short poem encapsulating a world within a world:

"When we embrace
It's as though we grieve
Locked together like dark ivy"
We're two turtle doves mourning in an alabaster cave,
And your phantom tears fall like uneasy questions into 
The pools of my wet eyes that look far away.
And rocking back and forth we try to break loose from the fear of doubts and suspicions that hold us fast, that cement our symbiosis".

Dreaming in her third-floor loft where she writes and paints, Farida is never far away from her many other roles, foremost of which are those of wife and mother in this their first overseas assignment.

Kala Korner by Dee Cee

Satyajit 

Meanwhile, he is impatiently waiting for the green light from the State Film Corporation to start his maiden full-length feature film. He has submitted the script and is hopeful he will get the nod for funds from the Corporation's Film Development Fund. The Fund has been set up to encourage young filmmakers who possess talent but lack funding.

Satyajit's film is titled 'Boradiya Pokuna' (he calls it 'Centre of the Lotus Pond' in English) and has as its theme a very contemporary issue. The story revolves round a Free Trade Zone employee and an Air Force officer. "I treat them as the fish in the 'boradiya pokuna", he says. He is keen to have Kaushalya Fernando play the female lead and is on the lookout for a talented young actor for the male role. "She likes the script but hasn't yet given a word," he says.

Getting back to his tele film, I remember Satyajit once telling me that he was so affected by Richard's death and the events that followed, that he thought the best way to pay tribute to his friend would be through cinematic expression. And he did it well. He had the fullest support from his team with leading lady Iranganie Serasinghe, Peter de Almeida, Chandani Seneviratne, Kaushalya Fernando, Sita Kumari and Chamila Ratnayake playing their roles extremely well. Pradeep Ratnayake's music, Palitha Perera's camerawork and Ravindra Guruge's editing added that much more to make 'Smarana Samapti' a memorable creation.

Indian Cultural Lentre newsletter

Apart from summaries of past programmes months, the newsletter gives a calendar of events and a list of new additions to the library. for the current month. It carries an interesting feature every month on some aspect of Indian culture either a dance form or a festival. This month's feature is on Thai Pongal.

It's high time our Cultural Department officials takes a fromthe Indian Cultural Centre.

Images of spiritual tranquility 

The works on display narrate the epic voyage of Semage's disciplined and determined effort to come to terms with his professional challenges.

As a sensitive child growing up in a coastal town in the South, he imbibed the variegated cultural strands that make up the way of life in that kind of human settlement.

A staple in his art has always been the echoes and ripples of Buddhist rites and rituals, which add distinction to the character of those who grow up in Sri Lankan villages.

The rich cultural and artistic heritage of his native Ambalangoda, nourished and nurtured young Jayasiri Semage, enabling him to dream his childhood dreams in artistic motifs. Unlike most practitioners of art in today's context, who inhabit a mere surface level, Jayasiri Semage built his vision and practice on a firm footing provided by the traditional art of Sri Lanka. He developed his skills through a mastery of such indigenous forms and patterns like palapeti. With such a solid foundation, evolution into creative maturity was just a matter of course.

Beginning with a keen attention to the murals in village temples, he focused upon such high creative expressions as depicted by the frescoes of Sigiriya in our own Sri Lanka and also those in Ajantha caves in India.

Most critics, who consider Semage's intriguing creations, tend to observe the sensuous female figures that adorn some of his canvases. Some of these symbolising the perfection of the female form, could very well be mistaken as merely 'sexy' by those uninformed of the ways of art in India and Sri Lanka. They exude not a sexiness but a wholesome eroticism.

Semage's creative works on themes derived from Buddhism are not exactly religious art. They could be defined as portrayals of the spiritual. Those works communicate a sense of tranquillity and deep serenity. The contemplation of these spiritual works of art, engender within the viewer a state of inner calm, even if the viewer does not belong to the oriental spiritual tradition. 

Jayasiri Semage's latest exhibition titled "Miracle on Canvas" will on from February 10 to 12 at the Lionel Wendt Gallery - opening ceremony on February 9, 2001 at 6.00 p.m.

Edwin Ariyadasa

Come sing with us

This choir which is over 55 years old has presented some wonderful concerts in the past under conductors like Dr. Gerald Cooray (founder), Ronald Walcot, Jeyarajan Paul, Raymond Adlam and Lylie Godridge. Mary Anne David, the first female conductor of this choir is also full time Director of the Merry An Singers. 

She has had many years of conducting the full genre of music from grand Opera through Musicals to contemporary and sacred music.

The choir is made up of professionals, housewives, students and retirees from various strata of society. Not everyone needs know how to sight read music. 

They meet every Wednesday from 6.30 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Dutch Reformed Church abutting the Galle Road, Wella-watte for rehearsals. 

The bon homie among the group will be a tonic to new comers. So drop by next Wednesday.
Book Review

Blissful rhythms of perception and recollection

It was John Clare who wrote of the poet "kindling fancies into poesy" in his beatiful poem "To the Rural Muse". Thank God Eva Ranaweera did not have to wait 150 years to have these, her newest collection, published. Poor John Clare had to do just that. Blissfully, too, Eva has again shown a positively youthful delight in poetry, much like what Masefield admitted to when he said that delight in poetry is strongest in youth. 

Eva Ranaweera is a woman of deep emotions. To truly know her work is to read her with eyes purged by the euphrasy of understanding. I feel, personally, that there is no form of authorship in which the pains are so great. Admittedly, it is hard to sell verse, but Eva, with her mansions full of inspiration and her rooms full of a signal art of verse structure, has always earned praise, recognition and careful attention.

In "Blissfully" I find I can hardly keep pace with her stride. She certainly knows how to beat out her music, whether it is Singho's soldier sons standing in line, tin plate in hand, for his ration of army food, or standing in line to be a bloody gulp of terrorist food too. This is the sort of appropriate expression that Eva excels in. There is always that perfect felicity of phrase.

wounded rotting in the desert
awaiting hospital trip
fed on rice and sand 
sand and rice
and dhal dhal dhal 
Singho's rural son

There is none of that distate fulness of slovenly, unacceptable verse. Lately, and sadly, we have had a surfeit of miserable poetasters who, as was once said: "..... sacrifice the sentiment to sound/And cut truth short to make a perfect round."

After all, let the old rhyming structure go hang. The expression of imaginative truth in any form is poetry, and we feel the hot fervency as Singho's son, "enemy surrounded sing song mosquito in ear.... buried his face as bullets whisked from gun...."Are we not ransacking our villages to feed the Tigers? 

In "Blissfully", Eva has not only weighed the meanings and qualities of the words she chose, but has also combined them in so realistic, yet so uncommon a manner, that even the thought of being "given away" screams the question: Does my father really love me? Who gives away someone he loves? Are all the diamond earrings, bangles, necklaces, saree pins, cottage and bungalows given to demonstrate love? Who really cares what darling daughter thinks... what can she think? Why, her father has even taken her name away from her. Suddenly, we see the harshness of the world's common voice but cleverly softened by the list - the detailed dowry; the price of sacrifice. This poem, "My Listing," shows strength of a rare order. And yet, how ordinary it all could be. Give-away parents, given-away daughters. Is this so extraordinary? Millions give away, millions are given away.... even the priest at the altar asks: "Who gives away this woman?" and the father says that first, "I do." But Eva has trod this field and made of this thought a flower. Here lies true sensitivity - as if suddenly she has sung the one true song millions did not care to sing.

There are many I know who tell me they do not care for poetry. It's a sort of unexplored country to them. They think poetry too "sentimental" - no appeal to the practical. Well, there is sentiment, surely. Take Eva's "Remembering You". Where, she asks, does remembrance hide? Ah, deja vu, what jogs memory? Is it that our world moves jet-fast today and we have neither time nor patience for that "buried niche of time"?

Somewhere, love lies buried too and there are those starless sea-nights and the wind that canters up the steep Sigiri rock. Love is a great diarist. Old, yellowed pages, maybe, but memory embraces the essence of all the arts and the aureole of each. This is why Eva's lines glow so: 

remembering you, just remembering 
fragrantly and life running contentedly
murmuring like a purring cat
up and down within the same format

What I find in this slim book is life's great fact of periodicity. It's like the swing of the Earth through space - as complex as the suicide brother in "The Rebel", regular and rhythmic as "Sri Dalada Sri". 

Long ago, philosophers called the manifestations of poetry the pulse of the universe. Maybe this also contains that spirit of periodic recurrence - a spirit that Eva has found and joyfully bomber to the fore. We find this in "Travelling with a Picked-Up Girl" - the rain, raining as only the rain will, raising the puddles of life's frustrations, of human bewilderment, so tiresome when even talk becomes a drizzle, damp, clammy, joyless.

It is the vision that takes precedence. No easy thing, this, to perceive a poet's vision. "The Mute" is not complex but it underscores realities that shock, realities created by passion, character and action. Here is poverty power interpreted at first hand - a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" as Wordsworth put it. True, the emotions could be recollected in a later, quieter time, but as the saga of Leela and Joseph is played out, the quietude disappears and the emotion begins to exert again.... and again:

Joseph who sent Leela into a 
noisewilderness
to rattle tin cans hears grief words
bashed her nightly 
and kept the nut smile hidden within

This collection of poems perceives, then recollects. Every one holds an individual point of view, true, but each is a sort of stir-fry of the heart, not really generalised from personal experience but a true embodiment of abstractions.

It is sometimes difficult to review a book of poems. One needs to acquire the poet's standpoint and even forfeit one's own individuality. But Eva Ranaweera has, most blissfully, gone her way, done it again her way and with the strength to stand proud and say, "this is my way."

Blissfully, I accept, for I am quite content -
keeping faith with Maya on a gentle bridge
between self and self rocking happily
blissfully

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