In 2015, I went to a reading by the great Malawian poet Jack Mapanje. I was writing poems at this time but hadn’t begun sending them out to journals for publication (although I had had a poem published back in 2004). I listened to Jack read and charm the audience. It felt like a gift to hear him and, at the end of the session, I hung back wanting to thank him. A few years previously, when I had been receiving EMDR treatment for war trauma, I would arrive early for my appointments, sit in the gardens of Bootham Park Hospital in York (U.K.) and read from his collection Skipping Without Ropes (Bloodaxe Books, 1998).
An outspoken critic of Hastings Banda, Jack had been a political prisoner in Malawi for 3 years, and his release was orchestrated by Amnesty International, spearheaded by the Department of English and Related Literatures at the University of York. On his release, Jack and his family settled in York and Skipping Without Ropes contains poignant, often heartbreaking poems about both his incarceration and introduction to Britain: ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa’ Mapanji wrote on the occasion of his house being targeted yet again by racists in York. Jack’s poetry was such a source of comfort to me during those years of vulnerability and recovery.
So, when I went to Jack’s reading in 2015, I held back at the end as I wanted him to sign my copy of Skipping Without Ropes while I thanked him for the lifeline his poetry had offered me. He smiled at me, exclaimed at seeing his book (“I didn’t realize they still sold this”) and said, “You write, don’t you? Send me your poems”. This kind and generous man met me in the weeks following, read through some drafts of my early poems and gave me an important piece of advice: “You need to reconnect with Tamil. It is part of you and it is what makes you a writer. Until you do, you will struggle to become the poet you are meant to be”.
I escaped Sri Lanka in the late 1980s after the brutal intervention of the Indian Peace Keeping Force in the civil war. Under them, I learned to fear the Tamil language itself. My family, and those around me, stopped speaking Tamil on the streets, switching to English as a way of protecting ourselves from the accusation of being Tamil Tigers. My mother, when negotiating with the Indian soldiers for food or safe passage, or when pleading with them as they lined us up to be shot, spoke to them in Hindi. This was the language of the conqueror, the language of solidarity with the oppressor, the language demanding submission. Tamil, on the other hand, was the feared marker of aggression, of difference, signifying a strength which the Indian soldiers feared, and which they caused me to fear in turn.
When I arrived in the U.K. as a deeply traumatised refugee, I refused to speak in Tamil. I became mute for around 6 months, only communicating with my parents (who were happy to encourage my silence) when strictly necessary. When I eventually began speaking again, I spoke in English. It is now 40 years later, and I still do not speak in Tamil: I stutter, stammer and the words get stuck in my throat. I am a fluent reader and listener but opening my mouth to speak in Tamil transports me back to being a teenager: I feel the need to hide, to burrow away in darkness so that I will never become a target again.
When Jack Mapanje asked me to open myself to Tamil again, he had no idea what he was asking of me. But I listened to his advice and soon began writing in English while thinking in Tamil. The lines flowed like waves: rolling forward in Tamil and ebbing back in English. It was transformative. The feel of my poetry changed, seeming more organic and assured. Although I don’t write in Tamil (my creative language is still English) I am now a successful translator of Tamil poetry into English and mentor emerging translators as they grapple between the poetics of these two wonderful languages. It took me another ten years to become comfortable with my inability to speak Tamil: the shame I feel when my mouth cannot utter the Tamil words that my heart and mind formulate; that my silence is a betrayal of the suffering of my people who fought for 26 years for their right to be.
In my poem ‘New words, new clothes’ I revisit the time when I abandoned the Tamil language, choosing first silence and then English as replacements. This is a poem about the transformative capacity of words; the power they contain to both illuminate and camouflage in equal measure. There is a sense of defiance in this poem, the short-sighted defiance of youth maybe, which nevertheless ensured that I survived in order to write this poem decades later. I remember silently listening to the flow of English around me, modulating my Tamil self to become something new in my ‘borrowed’ land. The verse about F, Z and X is from Edward Lear’s ‘Nonsense Alphabet’: these sounds being especially pertinent as they don’t exist in Tamil.
The ancient Pallavan and Cholan dynasties in Tamil Nadu, India, were both great patrons of Tamil arts and culture and their rule protected and furthered Tamil language and literature. Every Tamil child was brought up with stories of the legendary exploits of the various Pallavan, Pandyan and Cholan kings: by rejecting them I was rejecting my heritage, turning my back on the core of my being. In a way this poem is a study in self-harm: its sense of purpose hides the desperation of a child taking a knife to the cord rooting her to her heritage. The new words and new clothes being but a veneer with which to hide the scars she was healing from then, and which I carry still.
