Lakdhas Wikkramasinha
Poems from an restless, enigmatic Sri Lankan writer
By Lakdhas Wikkramasinha, edited by Michael Ondaatje and Aparna Halpé
160 Pages. New York Review Books. $18.00.
Lakdhas Wikkramasinha, a Sri Lankan poet who wrote in both English and Sinhalese, was no doubt almost completely unknown to even the most dedicated American readers of poetry until NYRB Poets put out a collection of his work late last year. And even with this publication before us, Wikkramasinha’s obscurity has only half-ended; without more of his writing, and perhaps more commentary about the man and the era he lived in, we cannot make a definitive statement on his work. With that in mind, I have decided not to make much of an effort to assess the quality of Wikkramasinha’s poetry in this review. I cannot determine whether it ranks among the very best of its time; that being said, it is clear to me that if you have any interest in 20th century poetry, you will read and reread Lakdhas Wikkramasinha. He is clearly an epochal poet.
If there is one definite claim I can make as to Wikkramasinha’s stature, it is that it is only a portion of what he could have been: he drowned while out for a routine swim aged 36, and what we get of the poet in this collection indicates that he was in the early stages of a career that would have spanned many decades and gone through many styles and poetic personas, a career in the path of other 20th century luminaries such as Octavio Paz, Czeslaw Milos, and W. H. Auden.
But those three poets were all born in the early 20th century, lived on multiple continents, and began their mature work as Europe was being ripped apart by competing empires and ideologies. In contrast, Wikkramasinha was born in 1941 and spent all his life in Sri Lanka. Yet the global and historical import of his poetry is clear. His was a poetry defined by the passionate struggles of his age: not just the end of colonialism, but the burdens of history that came with colonialism’s end, and the rapid globalization of world systems (both capitalist and communist) that was thrusting ever remoter parts of the planet into the rowdy, messy present.
This NYRB Poets volume is not arranged chronologically, but in three thematic sections. The first section is titled “Camoes: A History,” and it is history these poems are concerned with: Sri Lankan history, both during and before the colonial period. Among the most representative of these poems is “Dandhabanavaka” – the end notes to this collection give no explanation of what this word means, and an online search brings up nothing, but Wikkramasinha tells us in his sub-heading that it is “a tenth-century bas-relief.”
What does the Dandhabanavaka look like? In this short poem, Wikkramasinha gives us only a select few details: “Enclosed world: in its duplicity/It is drawn with long red female hair” are his first two lines. This mixing of concrete details with abstract surmises about the artwork continues throughout the poem: “Its carved wings flutter in disused time–”
“Dandhabanavaka” is a representative 20th century lyrical ekphrasis, similar in mood to Larkin’s Arundel or Rilke’s archaic torso. But whereas those two poems both conclude with declarations of universal truth (“What will survive of us is love” and "You must change your life."), Wikkramasinha’s ekphrasis ends in uncertainty: he cannot tell whether the figure he is describing is “caught” in “a ruched spiral, or a/Monstrous climbing eye.” The very obscurity of the two options suggests Wikkramasinha’s distance from the deep past of Sri Lanka. The earlier description of the relief inhabiting “disused time” – suggesting a period in time that no longer is felt in the present – means it will likely only ever be an enigmatic symbol, deprived of the spiritual meaning it once possessed.
One reason why Dandhabanavaka lies in an “enclosed world” cut off from Wikkramasinha’s understanding is suggested in the book’s next section, titled “Hand Bomb Et Cetera.” It begins with his most famous poem “Don’t talk to me about Matisse.” Unlike the poems from the first section, this poem is in-your-face; Wikkramasinha’s voice shouts out urgently:
Don’t talk to me about Matisse, don’t talk to me
about Guaguin, or even,
the earless painter van Gogh,
& the woman reclining on a blood-spread…
the aboriginal shot by the great white hunter Matisse
with a gun with two nostrils, the aboriginal
crucified by Gauguin–the syphilis spreader, the yellowed obesity.
[...]
Talk to me instead of the culture generally–
How the murderers were sustained
By the beauty robbed of savages
Strangely enough, I find myself reading this poem in conversation with “Dandhabanavaka.” Both poems speak to an alienation from individual works of art that are shorn from the context of their broader culture. We get no indication of why Wikkramasinha cannot enter into the “disused time” of the bas-relief in “Dandhabanavaka,” but upon reading “Don’t talk to me about Matisse,” where the historically memory of colonialism overtakes an aesthetic appreciation of western art, I have come to believe they speak to the double pain of the artist from a colonized land: he is an outsider, almost a colonialist himself, when looking at the art of his ancestral land, but he cannot help thinking about colonial violence when approaching the classic artworks of Europe. He is at home nowhere.
The final section of this collection, “Stones of Akuretiya Walauva,” is the hardest to clearly define; if the first section dealt with the deep history of Sri Lanka and the second with its recent political history, then “Stones of Akuretiya Walauva” could be said to deal with the social and folkloric history of Sri Lanka, along with Wikkramasinha’s own personal history. Several of them reference his grandparents and ancestors, and others seem taken from events he witnessed in his lifetime. But these poems, as the most personal, are also the most surprising and most dramatic, the most introspective and self-critical.
His poem “Disciple” channels this final aspect of the book very potently. Its first two lines seem to belong with the images of political violence we saw in “Hand Bomb Et Cetera:” “That body that you and five policemen/Pull out of the Beira–” (the Beira is a large lake in central Colombo). The night before, Wikkramasinha tells us, this body had a “mind thinking: my loyal disciple follows me,/He is at my footsteps, at my back.” That is, until “his mind was not too quick to know, the knife I buried in his back.”
Who is the disciple, why does he betray the one he follows, and why again does he confess his betrayal in the form of a poem? The idea that a poet had to follow closely their poetic forebearers before destroying them was a popular one in Wikkramasinha’s time (think of Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence or Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” to say nothing of post-colonial writers wrestling with a literary canon imposed on them by empire), but this poem ends with a particularly bitter conclusion: “Only the knife I buried in his back/Knew I follow no one/Knew, and was not too late to feel.”
What kind of poet would feel closer to a knife than a human being? Consider the strangest formal feature of this poem, its peculiar use of punctuation, which, instead of bringing lines and clauses together, seems to break them apart, and make the poem more fragmentary (indeed, it is even ambiguous enough that you could argue that the disciple of the title is not the murderer-narrator, but the one who is murdered and thrown in the Beira). Wikkramasinha follows no one, which at the same time means no one can quite understand him. The political and historical burden of the previous sections of the book seem elided, even transcended here, but at the cost of slicing away the bond between person and person.
I have focused on quite bitter, alienated poems for this review, but these ones do not represent all, or even most, of what Wikkramasinha wrote. Still, I find it very telling that we get this kind of unsettled, bitter energy from a poet who wrote both in English and Sinhalese. Most of the poems in this collection are in English, and the ones in Sinhalese tend to be shorter and more imagistic (though of course it's hard to tell what I’m missing in the translations). Is what makes Wikkramsinha’s poetry so unusual a result of him trying to make English like Sinhalese? And did he try to make Sinhalese poetry like English (or more generally European) poetry?
The middle of the night
Was built for two people:
For myself, and for myself.
Once again, my remarks here are very preliminary. Part of the pleasure of this newsletter is that I get to take part in the first reactions to authors who have died many decades ago; I expect that in a few years, I will have the further pleasure of taking parting in subsequent reactions to poetry of Wikkramsinha, as more of his work is published.