Godfrey Gunatilleke’s ‘memory markers’

Saturday, 21 June 2014 00:01 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

First volume of poetry places soliloquies of 60 years in the public domain

A reading of selected poems from Deshamanya Godfrey Gunatilleke’s book ‘Time’s Confluence and other poems’ was held at the Marga Institute auditorium recently. The book features poems written over a span of 60 years and is Gunatilleke’s first published volume of poetry. A civil servant par excellence and a man of great learning, Gunatilleke is one of Sri Lanka’s topmost intellectuals. He has contributed immensely via the written word over the years and is responsible for a great body of work. In this interview with the Weekend FT, Gunatilleke traces his journey in poetry and literature:

At your poetry reading on Tuesday, you said the poems were soliloquies and literature was a refuge. Could you expand on this?

I would say that the writing of a poem, at least for me, has had the quality of a soliloquy. In writing a poem, one needs to find some inner space where one is alone with oneself to reflect on an experience that has caused some disturbance in one’s inner life. It was Shakespeare

who gave supreme expression to the soliloquy; the character withdraws from the presence of others, is alone, shorn of all pretence, examining what lies within him. He lays bare to himself his hidden feelings and motives and he does this without any thought of an audience. His first task is to find the words that will give full expression and meaning to his experience. In this process, communication to an audience becomes secondary. But I am not saying that literature is a refuge in the sense of an escape from reality; it is a refuge in the sense that it is anew discovery of reality. Poetry – all art for that matter – has a redemptive quality, an element of atonement; it enables you in the words of Eliot to “re-enact all what you have been and done,” all the mess and imprecision of thought and feeling in which you had lived and to reach out to a new state of meaning and order. These poems were written over the course of 60 years, from 1945 to 2013. Why were you so reluctant to publish, what made you finally decide to publish and what are your thoughts on them finally being out in the public arena?

My reluctance was a somewhat simple reaction. First, the poems were born out of a world of experience which was personal to me, and I was not sure that it would have meaning for others. Second, the body of writing itself was slim; I felt it was not substantial enough to merit publication. And third, I had not devoted myself to poetry as poets do who make poetry one of their major occupations. But I now think, as in the case of the soliloquy, there is always the audience in the background and I have been very happy with the interaction I have had with those who took time to read the poems and comment seriously on them. If the writing of poetry has a redemptive quality for the poet, the sharing of the experience is equally redemptive.

At the reading, you described your poems as an attempt to penetrate beneath daily relationships and also as ‘memory markers’. What were your influences in writing these considerably diverse poems interlaced with underlying themes of love and spirituality?

If I interpret your question as what influenced the content and existential substance of my poetry and the subjects I selected, I must say the influences varied with every phase of my life. I think in the first phase it was the relationship of personal love that was the centre. But again I think the somewhat unusual circumstances of that relationship, the context in which mortality, pain, grief was a constant attendant on the joy of love, imparted the knowledge which enabled me to absorb and adjust to the experience. The span of time in which I wrote the poems inevitably gives it great diversity. The poems tried to capture moments lived intensely at different periods ofmy life and they touch on contemporary events. Beyond this I think the mix of faith and culture in which I lived, the mix which sought to give different patterns of meaning to my life – Christian, Hellenic, Hindu, Buddhist, Darwinian – they all contributed to the inner life of the poetry. They provided a kind of spiritual underpinning. You said you wrote because you wanted to use your acquired skills and also felt the need to sit down and respond to particular experiences, compelled to write to bring some order into disorderly situations and disorganised feelings. Why did you choose poetry as your medium and how did the poetry help?

As I mentioned in my foreword to my anthology, I found that the short poem was the literary art form which was best suited to my needs and my circumstances. Its capacity to give concentrated expression to a whole range of human experience in a few lines is unmatched by any other form. One can compose and carry a poem in one’s mind, keep on working on it at different times and in different places. I found that the poem is particularly suited for unravelling and re-ordering a specific personal experience which had troubled me. If I go back to the poems ‘Grief’ or ‘Pain,’ I would say the poetic medium enabled me to express the tension of being drawn apart by pain and grief and at the same time the intense desire to be together and of seeking a way out of self, to give of oneself to the other. In the midst of it all, it brought me to the overarching acceptance of pain and grief. Without any doubt, given my full-time engagement in my professional life, the poem was the most appropriate and congenial form.

While relating to the English literary tradition, you said that every poet carves out his own language of the language he uses. Why did you choose to use English as your mode of expression and could you tell us about the linguistic and existential challenges you faced?

The simple answer is that I had no choice but to select the English language. English was the medium of instruction in school from the kindergarten upwards and I was learning to speak read and write English from the age of four. I think by the age of five or six I was thinking and feeling mostly in the English language. I began to immerse myself in English literature – mostly fiction and poetry and by the age of 14 I had read a great deal – a large volume of children’s literature – translations of Grimm brothers and Hans Anderson, and a wide range of fiction, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard, Scott, Dickens, Jane Austen and George Eliot to mention a few. I also read and memorised a considerable body of poetry selected from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Masefield, Shelley and Wordsworth for recital when needed. Then in the University I selected English for my degree. So it was natural for me to use English for any creative writing I wished to do. I had no hesitation whatsoever in writing in the English literary tradition. Every poet I think shapes and moulds his personal language from the common language he uses. There is a distinctive imagery, tone of voice a vocabulary in Yeats or Eliot or Shakespeare that you can recognise as the personal language they have forged to craft their poetry and express their vision of life. This protects the integrity of their experience. In my own small way I had to do this with my use of English language. This brings me to your two other questions. I have spoken of the constraints and the sense of isolation one had in writing in the English language. I have written my poetry in a language that was and is spoken by a small English educated community who live in a larger society in which the English language is not the language in which people think and feel, in which Sinhala and Tamil are spoken. The English language in which I felt and thought had been a transplant in Sri Lanka. It had grown in a different culture and a different physical environment from which its poetical language was drawn, its imagery and its metaphor nourished. Would therefore the English language of a Sri Lankan English educated poet or creative writer for that matter invariably lack the full body of the English language I have discussed some of these linguistic and existential issues in my essay on ‘Language without Metaphor’. I think we need to have a continuing discourse on those issues. For myself, I realise that my inner life, my thoughts and feelings were those of an English educated person and could be best expressed only in the English language. I also had the inner assurance of the value of my own experience as an English educated Sri Lankan, the value of the experience of the English educated community as a whole. Its fine, multicultural global reach I think had a universal value. I went to the English language and found that it was immensely resourceful for the purpose of expressing my experience and I had to try and reach out to those resources as best as I could. Conrad, who learnt the English language when he was over 20 years old, preferred the English language to French for his creative writing although he had grown up using French. Dr. F.R. Leavis says it was because Conrad discovered in English words multiple layers of meaning – a somewhat unique characteristic. I found that I had to write in the English literary tradition if I were to be true to my experience. I carefully avoided indigenising the language. It might have strained the language and given it artificiality. That kind of indigenisation was not needed to express my experience.

Can we look forward to more poetry publications in the future?

I am continuing to write poetry. My daughter Delaine collects these carefully and says that when there are a sufficient number, she will get them published. Your story, as your son said at the launch, is one of ‘coming home,’ where you left literature to enter the civil service and now you have returned to the fold. Could you tell us about this journey and the intervening years?

I enjoyed my career as a public servant. It gave me firsthand knowledge of the process of development. I moved from agriculture and land development to industry and then to national planning. My involvement in national planning when I worked with Dr. Gamani Corea was the most interesting part of my career as a public servant. But then the other decisive change in my life came when I left the public service and together with a few colleagues we established the Marga Institute – a centre for development studies. This took me on a different path, involving me in development issues from the village to the global level. It also gave me the opportunity to work with other civil society organisations on public issues. From then onwards I have continued to work at the Institute. The Institute is collecting my writings on Sri Lankan development issues and hopes to publish them soon.

To wrap up, could you tell us the story of how you met your wife while in university?

We met as students in what was then the University of Ceylon. We came to know each other in our first year. I recall the first occasion I spoke to her. We had James Joyce’s ‘The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ as a text for a first year English course. Many of the students wanted to read Joyce’s masterpiece ‘Ulysses’. I was quick to borrow the novel from the library and my wife who also wanted to read the book had learnt about it. One morning she came directly up to me and asked me when I was returning the book as she intended to borrow it. That was how our relationship began. You might say English literature brought us together.