‘Once Upon a Time in the Land of Grave-Holes’: Cheran’s Poetry in Sri Lanka

Abstract

My essay looks at the Sri Lankan-born Tamil poet Cheran Rudhramoorthy’s recent poetry collections, Ajnar (‘Trauma’, 2018) and Tinai Mayakkam allathu Nenjodu Killarthal (‘Binary Overlapping or Struggles with the Heart’, 2019). Published almost a decade after the final war—the massacre of Sri Lankan Tamils by the state’s armed forces at Mullivaikal on 18 May 2009—these poems provide a searing counter-narrative to the official justifications. The finality of what took place at Mullivaikal, when what seemed like all the powers of the world had conspired to draw the 30-year Tamil militancy to an end, has provided Sri Lankan Tamils with a historical moment tied to a specific locus.2 The Ajnar and Tinai Mayakkam poems present Cheran as a poet for the dispossessed. These poems with their split movements between the homeland and new snowscapes erase the borders between the refuges of the diaspora and a lost island. Cheran’s poems and other writings—on grief, love, land and exile—are made amid unimaginable state-sponsored violence against minority bodies. In this essay, I provide a historico-cultural background in terms of the various discourses that were coming into prominence in the 1960s and 1970s as Cheran came of age—for instance, the remnants of colonial racism that provided the impetus to a post-independence nationalism, a thriving literary caste-driven Saivism, and the manifestation of an authoritarian state apparatus and its militant opposition.