Explosion

On the day the truckload      

of explosives

drove into the central bank,

for a long second

time staggered

All sounds of a workday morning

in the city

even the cawing of the crows

merged into a solitary

Boom

Prism of fire and fury

Lives ended

eyes were blinded

retired wage earners

collecting provident funds

were crushed

under brick and glass

the nearby vegetable seller’s

hands were severed

like cucumbers,

Women in sari

held their eyeballs in their palms

and blood spattered

the streets,

erasing memory.

Out of the broken window

of a damaged car -

dead driver -

the radio blared, unscathed

on a commercial break

a man’s pleasant voice

announced

that big or small, insurance

protects them all

 (From 'nothing prepares you' - 2007) Posting this on the request of many teachers and students who need poems from the new syllabus of the GCE Advanced Level English examination

Untitled

Today you are all day
On my mind.
I hear your sighs
In the wind
I see your lips
In the leaves of
The Na tree.
The silver finger nail moon
In the sky
Is your smile.

Both now are beyond my touch.

I miss you.
Not the cursing, swearing
you, now filled with the rage of a hurricane
not the you with the stone heart
But the you who dried my tears
And said you will never forget me
The you whose hands
sculpted for me a penguin
out of yellow soap.
This is not a poem.
It is not a plea.

It is just a note
my tears wrote.

Gecko

 

when love releases you

from its warm embrace

your first impulse is to hug yourself

to keep away the chill

Odd, that need for self preservation

even in the moment

you’re  tottering at the edge

of the world.

The body goes on

even when the soul has

been torn out

the limbs move, the eyes blink, the nails grow

stubborn in their slow routine

and the heart keeps running

its steady and futile race

like the tail

that wriggles

long after the gecko has gone

Stitch your Eyelids Shut 2010  (Akna: Colombo)

Crossings: a memory map

(For my sister, 2007)

In a few weeks

you will

cross several oceans

and two continents

in search of new beginnings

and fulfillment of old needs

my mind hovers around

the days we sailed paper boats

on rivers made by

monsoon rain on a coconut estate

streams afloat

with pol mal and tamarind shells

and halts near the talk

of leaving

the concept of home

and crossing oceans.

With you I have confronted

the intricate twists of

growing up

negotiated the algorithms

of loving and losing

divided grief

into manageable chunks

With you I have constructed a history.

So geography shall remain

only a syllable

as you leave,

a small twig in the river

that flows inexorably

to the sea

Cadaver

They say that holding on to the past

is like tying a corpse

to your back and taking it along

with you

wherever you go,

the stench horrible,

people around you hold their noses

and avoid you like

the proverbial plague.

(A radio DJ spouts such

words of wisdom

between Beyonce’s song

about replacing her lover

and a commercial for detergents)

Driving in rush hour traffic

with a knot of grief

in my throat

I believe he’s speaking

just to me.

So I’m thinking

I should let memory die

let loving you go

imagine the maggots surface

white and thick and sticky

from the depths of  your eyes

I drowned in once

and try to hold in my hands

the crumbling flesh

of your once-loved body

as it falls

bit

by

bit

from

the skeleton of

your devotion

I should untie you

from the back of my heart

dig a hole in the dark deep

night of my past

and bury you,

kisses and all.

My new book is now available, published by Sarasavi

Traditional

I was seven when

I first saw my uncle

kick his pregnant wife, hard.

In the stomach.

It was Avurudu and

festive  times were upon us

Dropping him at his house

because he couldn't drive  on his own

Waiting in the car

until he made it through the door which

opened

and his wife came

outside

expressing disappointment

at his inebriation

My father swore

slipped out of the driver's seat

and pulled him off

my screaming aunt

and punched him in the face. He went flat

out.

Bleeding from the nose.

He had been named

for  a notorious Italian dictator

and much was always blamed on that.

Inside the house,

the milk heated at the auspicious hour

had boiled over signifying abundance

and was still warm

in the pot.

Long Distance

Tilted mornings

Upside down nights

The Sun trying its best

to balance their yearning to

touch
to
talk
to
pretend

there are no oceans in the way.

Technology, cynical

hyper aware of  cleverness

masquerades

as go between

 

yet remains

heartless.

Options No 47 Editorial

Language as Oppression, Language as Resistance
Robin Lakoff, a pioneering scholar in the field of Language and Gender reminds us of the fact that folklore and fables, those earliest instruction manuals at our disposal, construct the relationship between women, men and the idea of verbal expression in ways which are oppressive to women. For example in the fairy tale “Seven at a Blow,” the brave little tailor, having killed seven flies with one swat, embroiders himself a belt to that effect and wears it out into the world. He gets into trouble but eventually triumphs. The lesson: verbal assertion brings a man success. On the other hand, in the story ‘The Seven Swans,” a girl’s seven brothers are changed into swans. She can transform them back into men only by sitting in a tree for seven years sewing them shirts out of daisies. If she utters one word during this period, she will fail. She succeeds, despite terrible obstacles. The moral: silence and obedience are the path to success for a woman. Or if not success, the path to not getting destroyed. The way to stay safe and unharmed.
From the lack of language (i.e. silence) that is required from a wife who gets raped and beaten daily, in order to protect the good name of the family, to the way a woman should dress (or not dress) in order to not get raped, throughout the ages, women’s expression of themselves, their ‘language’ – be it verbal or non-verbal has been curtailed, ridiculed as being trivial and represented as being confined to the realms of gossip and small talk. The sexist language used to describe women is too familiar to be repeated here.
For this issue we invited contributors to interpret the theme of language and gender for themselves, and were happy to receive a varied and interesting range of interpretations which analyse, question and celebrate the language of women and women’s language. We were delighted to receive pieces from first time writers to Options, and also welcomed the interpretations of women and expression articulated by a few male contributors.
From an impassioned analysis of why the word ‘feminist’ is so abhorrent to young women today, to a powerful collection of photographs bearing messages from women (and men) for women in the form of placards and posters at a public rally, from a discussion of resistance as symbolized by a form of dress and the language of the saree to the way women use the act of cooking of a curry to express solidarity, from the language of women on a dance floor, to how female voices are affected in the act of translating and from an insightful analysis of dominant and competing discourses about violence in the home to thoughts on words and translations in religious texts, we offer you in this issue a mix of prose and poetry, the verbal and the visual, the pithy and the profound.  We hope the pieces in this issue of OPTIONS will provoke our readers to pay more attention to language, a phenomenon which is seemingly neutral and taken for granted because it is so fundamental and blended into our construction of the world. And of course, we hope you will be entertained as well.
I’d like to end with a quote from Amy Cunningham’s brilliant 2004 essay “Why Women Smile”, since smiling is also so much part of the ‘language’ expected of women, and so much part of remaining silent.
“To limit a woman to one expression is like editing down an orchestra to one instrument. And the search for more authentic means of expression isn’t easy in a culture in which women are still expected to be magnanimous smilers, helpmates in crisis, and curators of everybody else’s morale. But change is already floating in the high winds…”
Vivimarie VanderPoorten

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