"The Way It Is" by Shirani Rajapakse

 

Readers of Shirani Rajapakse’s poetry will be familiar with her anger and impatience in the face of the violent, bloodthirsty politics practiced in so many areas of the world. Children displaced or murdered, families ripped apart, men disappearing without a trace, beautiful, verdant valleys laid waste, legitimate democracies overthrown. Her righteous and justified anger, her outrage, burns the pages of this collection.

Readers of her poetry will also be familiar with her startling observations where she anthropomorphizes natural occurrences, like leaves dancing with each other in a breeze, or a tree waving to a neighbor. This collection doesn’t have quite the range of these charming offerings, thrust as it is in the service of the poet’s magisterial anger.

These accusing verses veer from anger to despair to resignation to hope; Rajapakse dwells on all these at some length and from a variety of vantages. She touches on class conflict in a way that I don’t recall her doing before. A woman’s homeland is invaded by privileged young people who tell her she’s not doing enough to decry the dictator. They tell her she must reduce consumption for the health of the planet. Reduce consumption?:

“…but of what? She wonders as she
looks around meagre belongings, someone’s
hand-me-downs old slippers with holes that can’t
keep the dirt out,
a pot in the middle of the only room
she shares with her sisters and parents
to collect the water dripping from the roof…” (from “Whose World Is It Really?”)

Rajapakse’s imagination ranges on: she waits for rain to bring water that a T-Rex may once have drunk. She remembers the age-old natural remedies, prepared from plants now plowed under in deference to Big Pharma profits. She suffers through dark nights of the soul, without sleep, without contact, and temporarily without hope.

At length, however, Rajapakse does see fit to finish on a hopeful note. In a poem called “I Will Rise,” she reviews more than a thousand years of being cut down and yet getting to her feet again; she cites monks with stakes driven through them; she recalls Nazis locking her “inside cauldrons of hate”; her tongue cut out so she could not accuse those who didn’t like what she says. After her house is set aflame by an incendiary device:

“…My words
crumpled and turned to cinders and they think
they have won. Yet I will rise.
I will rise. For I am truth
and I will rise.”

As we review this poet’s oeuvre, it becomes blatantly clear that she has the clarity, magisterial judgment, and comprehensive outlook to earn the title “Conscience for our Age.” Would that many many more would read her words, and be chastised into less destructive, and less murderous, lives.