Young poet Ranudi Gunawardena explores the wombscape, childhood in rural landscapes and the uncanny in nature, her work already published in literary magazines such as Action, Spectacle, Chestnut Review, Magma and Sho. She studies at Williams College, Massachusetts, USA.

Of her collection of poetry shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize titled Wombful of Weeds, she says:

“It is a girl-child’s opening into the gendered world of adulthood and its everyday violence(s) in rural Sri Lanka. It contains poems in which the child first comes to encounter the other –within and without –in the forms of femininity, masculinity, (hetero/homo) sexuality, nature and natural disasters, and the uncanny. Wombful of Weeds aims to capture the danger lurking at the edge of girlhood as desire, period rituals, domestic violence, and fathers. It wants to retell patriarchy from the female gaze, to point at the (phallic) violence of the pastoral image. It wants, most of all, to remember that the landscape of the womb was never void, was, is, and always will be creating, desiring.”

Usual Erasures

(Originally published in Magma Issue 91: “In the Flesh”)After school in the bus hurrying homewards, I feel its difficult floweringin my stomach: the mangled hibiscus, flesh-petaled and tearing, the nectar seeping a thickening red from its split and singular ovary. In the aisle, pressed against unknown bodies writhing in the afternoon-heat, the nauseating thought: in between the skirt-pleats, attached on the back of my white school uniform, the detached petal, a hibiscus-saturated stain. Rising through the public intimacy of mingled sweat, I smell the frightening rawness of myself, then, search the numerous and dismembered faces for a gesture for the erasure of shame. Suddenly under my skirt-pleats, against my disbelieving upper thigh, the cold crawl of an ownerless hand. In my grandmother’s garden, a hibiscus of fire blazing behind my ear, I had frozen still one blameless morning at the sight of an indigo rat-snake— how it wrapped its reptilian flesh elastic around the tree -trunk, stretched its fangless mouth open, and thrust inside the tree-hollow its festive head. How the skin at its throat swelled transparent and revealed the bird-egg snatched from the nest.

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