Poverty, Pride, and Memory: On the Writings of Basil Fernando.

SJOBOHM, ANDERS

On the west coast of Sri Lanka, just north of the capital Colombo, there is a small village where the majority of the inhabitants are poor people belonging to the fisher and the washer castes. The name of the village, Palliyawatte, indicates that it is Christian, for in Sinhala palliya means "church" and watta means "property." It became Christian-Catholic-after the Portuguese conquest of the coastal provinces of Sri Lanka in the early sixteenth century.

Even today the west coast as a whole makes up a Catholic core area in otherwise Buddhist Sri Lanka, Catholicism having struck deeper roots than might be explained by the violence of the conquerors. It even stood the test when Catholics themselves were persecuted, after the Portuguese (following one hundred years of rule) were chased out by the Reform Dutch. When their time had come to its end, and when after another 150 years the more tolerant English took over, the Catholic Church again emerged as the strongest of the Sri Lankan Christian churches, while the Reformed Church collapsed like a house of cards.

But back to Palliyawatte. In this village, fifty-one years ago, the writer Basil Fernando was born. In those days the village certainly lived up to its name: the village church was a natural center, the priest the foremost authority, the bishops more well known than politicians. People went to church regularly, and on Good Friday the women dressed in black. Especially in the drama of Passion Week, the villagers lived through their own exposed position and agony, their poverty and the threat of illness and death.

The church statues of Jesus Christ on the cross were especially easy for the fishermen and washers to identify with: a suffering and lonesome human being, clothed in a simple loincloth like themselves, but also a Christ who, according to Fernando, radiated helplessness-and submissiveness. Submissiveness was exactly what the church, the offspring of foreign conquerors, preached. Neither did it ever seriously try to resist the caste system; it even stirred up bad blood when a new priest, a Frenchman, allowed low-caste boys to participate in the altar service.

The priest never let the villagers get to know him intimately, and he considered himself their benefactor, not their liberator. "He helped the poor, / But disliked / A tailor's son becoming a doctor," to quote from Evelyn My First Friend and Other Poems (1985, 28). When Basil Fernando was a child, however, poverty in Palliyawatte was not as deep as it is today. Perhaps this helped make it easier for the church to play the role of benefactor. People could dress better and had more to eat than either before or after; there was even meat every day of the week, except Fridays, when Catholics traditionally do not eat meat.

Poverty, humiliation, and the agony of self-contempt, however, were always present, as were the screams of those who where beaten up in the police station. They too have remained present in the writings of Basil Fernando. Even his first published short story, from 1968 and in Sinhala, deals with the sense of relief felt by a low-caste boy: the monsoon rain forces him to stay at home, and he does not have to go outside into a world where his value is always questioned. In another short story, from the 1990 collection Six Short Stories of Sri Lanka, the writer lets a disillusioned revolutionary, a former priest, observe: "Poverty is no abstraction. It is something which eats into you, into your nerves, eyes, ears, anything that may be called the soul and body" (150).

Moreover, times grew worse. With the fifties came rising prices and massive protests, a Buddhist renaissance with nationalist overtones, ever more severe antagonism between the Sinhalese and the Tamil minority. The Catholic Church too was gradually given new signals. The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) emphasized the responsibility of all Christians "toward the poor and all the suffering" and opened the Catholic Church to non-Catholics as well as non-Christians. It also demanded an end to poverty and oppression. The Archbishop of Colombo could, for the very first time, put on a red cardinal's hat, but a theology with a stress on the liberation of the poor and oppressed was not welcomed by the leaders of the church. That at least is how Basil Fernando understood it. "Bishops of Asia, we appeal to you. . . . Dispossess yourselves of your wealth and possessions," was the demand formulated in the late sixties at a bishops' meeting in the Philippines-attended by Basil Fernando-but it was not received with sympathy.

Basil Fernando lived his life, figuratively speaking, close to the church, in that he went to schools controlled by it. Eventually he felt he had lost his Christian faith: "I saw too much blood and hypocricy" (Death and Rebirth, 10). But it has come back, stronger than ever, although not accompanied by any confidence in the established church. Several poems from the collections of the eighties allude to the suffering and death of Christ, and they all deal with a Christ who belongs to the poor and afflicted. In one of them, the poet dreams of a mob that persists in roaring, "We have no king but Caesar," and votes to condemn Jesus to death (Sharing Betel, 35). In another poem a soldier hears his prisoner whisper, "I thirst," and has a sensation of the crucified behind him; however, he silences the prisoner as well as his own inner voice by shooting the man-and by crossing himself afterward (32). A third poem deals with Pontius Pilate, the shrewd lawyer who shifts his own responsibility onto the masses (33).

In a fourth poem we meet Peter, the apostle, warming himself by the fire in the courtyard of the high priest. Three times he denies all knowledge of Jesus; here, though, this does not happen "out of shame" but "out of necessity" (Evelyn, 17). Facing manipulated opinion, a poor man must protect himself with lies and accept being slandered by later popes and theologians. Above all, he must bide his time, "with patience of a fisherman / taught by the sea" (ibid.).

The Christian element is strongest in the later collection Death and Rebirth (1993), which opens with a sequence of poems in the form of a prayer to God. These are poems dealing with evil and violence, with bureaucrats and poverty, but also expressing the certainty that God is greater than his churches and has not only patience but also love and a sense of humor.

Basil Fernando was born in a time when the older generation was still in possession of the heritage of traditional poetry, a common phenomenon in the homes of poor Sinhalese people. Modern poetry flourished as well: "the Colombo poets" with their rhymed patriotic poems were read (and sung) by many, free verse was gaining ground, and all newspapers carried a poetry column. Basil Fernando was not the only child who dreamed of becoming a poet; so did most of his schoolmates.

Basil Fernando, a boy from the washers' caste, also had the opportunity to continue his studies. It was his mother's wish: she herself had wanted to become a teacher but had instead been forced (according to custom) to marry the husband of her deceased sister and submit to a life of poverty. She defied prejudice, worked her will, and inspired other villagers to do the same. In a long poem from the collection Sharing Betel, Basil Fernando pays homage to his mother for all she meant to him: "And I who carried / The cloth bundles with you / Am carrying your spirit within me / Your pride / And the determination / Never to bow down" (16-17). In fact, English schools offered low-caste children new opportunities. Here Basil Fernando was to conquer a new language, a language that was to help him break with poetic forms and their power over thought and to express experiences that traditional Sinhalese self-understanding could not contain.

In 1972, the year after the suppression of the armed insurrection of Sinhalese leftist youth, Basil Fernando passed his examination at the faculty of law. In the seventies he was a university teacher in English and intensely engaged in the work of revolutionary socialist groups. He had begun to write, and in 1973 his first book appeared: A New Era to Emerge, a collection of poetry. Three years later followed a collection in Sinhala, Koluwa Maleya (The Young Man Died). In 1982 he became a lawyer, in a situation where law and order were increasingly threatened by collapse. In 1984 he began to work with violations of human rights and also published two more volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories. The persecution of Tamils became more and more violent, and the Tamil Tiger guerrillas emerged. The police and the military grew increasingly powerful. People began to disappear and were later found murdered, among them priests with undesirable opinions. One lawyer was arrested by the police and died in hospital from his wounds and from maltreatment. The lawyers' association took the unique decision not to represent the police in any legal instance.

In 1989, within a short period of time, four of Basil Fernando's colleagues were murdered and he himself was warned by a police officer who was kindly disposed toward him that his safety could no longer be guaranteed. That same year, in connection with a legal conference abroad, Basil Fernando left Sri Lanka. In one of his prayer poems in Death and Rebirth he thanks God "For helping me to see danger / To flee in time / And for the strangers I met on the way / Who turned out to be / Such good friends / Theirs and your company" (6). Since then he has represented (among others) Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong and has monitored elections in Cambodia. He is a member of the editorial board of an Asian journal of creative writing, Asia: Culture Links (Hong Kong), and he has also continued to publish: in addition to poems and short stories, he has produced two books on refugee issues and human rights and one on Sri Lanka. In the latter he emphasizes the fatal legacy of colonial times, which has contributed to the development of a police and military state within the state, to the persecution of trade unions and minorities, and to continual violations of human rights.

Even in his first collection of poems there are scenes from Basil Fernando's adolescence, and such scenes have become a permanent feature of his work. In fact, Palliyawatte, the village of his childhood, emerges as the life-giving center of his writings: "I am left / To tell the stories" (Evelyn, 15). His recollections have grown to almost symbolic dimensions. The fortunes of Palliyawatte's people and the questions of poverty, pride, and faith are still waiting for an answer.

Basil Fernando's style is unobtrusive and restrained. His strong feelings are disciplined by a terse, austere, and sometimes ironic matter-of-factness. His abruptness may sometimes seem excessive, making his poems look more like drafts than finished products, but his sense of rhythm seldom fails. His verse is almost always free, with but a few sudden, singing rhymes inserted here and there. He comes straight to the point, his choice of words is simple, and strikingly often he uses a direct form of address to the person about whom he is writing.

A lot of what he writes revolves around friendship, one of the finest words he seems to know (along with others like sharing). The titles of both of his collections of poems from the eighties are significant: Evelyn My First Friend and Sharing Betel. The long memorial poem dedicated to his mother (mentioned and quoted above) speaks of the relationship between mother and child as a form of friendship (Sharing, 8). His parents' involuntary marriage meant "a permanent state of suffering and shock" (10), but nevertheless, "what friends, you two later became" (9). A city may be a friend, as may the shade under the trees; Catholic priests develop strong ties of friendship, and the writer wishes to think of God not as his Lord but as his friend. Perhaps we find the most moving expression of friendship in the title poem of Evelyn My First Friend, a memorial poem to the poet's little sister, who died at the age of six from wrongly treated pneumonia.

They brought you back,

Dressed like a little angel.

I did understand

The meaning.

That day is more

Vivid to me

Than any other,

Before or after.

You were my first friend

And the best.

Even decades after

You are so much about the place.

That'll be so

Till into silence

I too would go.(7)

The struggle to ease the sense of loneliness and anonymity, to overcome the distance in time and space, is constant. The process of memory itself is a decisive sign of life, a sign of solidarity with the world to which the writer once naturally belonged. Fragments of memory and of faces in his dreams stand out as revelations, and, as if it were an invocation, he continually repeats his refusal to forget them. Even a poem seemingly registering everyday impressions, including sounds from neighboring apartments, seems in a concentrated way to deal with that which is too easily lost. In several of Basil Fernando's best texts it is as if human destiny itself had received an aura of anonymity-an ambiguous anonymity, in certain respects universal but also the result of poverty and of enforced modesty. One of the nameless dead by the roadside, perhaps fallen in the insurrection of 1971, arouses feelings of guilt. The unknown young man of whom the poet catches a glimpse during the curfew also affects him: "Stop, and tell me at least tomorrow" (Evelyn, 22). His agony and despair are also great in a poem dedicated to the memory of his murdered neighbor, a poem wherein the dead man visits the poet and laughs at him: "Every night, I feel / I should pass away too / And be reborn, again and again / Till I prove capable / Of winning your friendship / Once more" (quoted in The Village at the Mouth of the River, part 5, March 1993).

Compared with the former longing for friendship and solidarity, there is now a "savage indifference" (Evelyn, 31) leaving its mark on life in Sri Lanka today. "I'm deeply interested in the destructive role the Sri Lankan middle class has played and still is playing against the best interests of the mass of people here," Basil Fernando stated in a recent interview. Calculation and greed stand out as virtues acquired by long practice in his society, together with envy and submission. Violence is smoldering, and from time to time it breaches the surface and bursts into flame.

Basil Fernando's first collection of short fiction, Four Short Stories of Sri Lanka (1986), deals with the gangster system in politics, with graft and corruption. Politicians and police officers, ultimately responsible for much of the murdering and plundering that goes on, are constantly trying to shunt their own guilt onto ordinary people. In one of his most powerful protest poems, written after the massacre of Tamils in July 1983, the writer refuses to take this guilt upon himself. In the prizewinning poem "Just Society" from Evelyn My First Friend he speaks in the name of all Sinhalese people:

You burned the buildings

And put me in prison

You threw their infants into fire

And called me inhuman

You murdered in open daylight

And blamed me for wanting blood

You turned my neighbour into a refugee

And said I am responsible

You looted his hard-earned property

And called me a thief

You imprisoned him and killed him

And named me a brute.

You befriended thugs and I the victims

But you made me the accused.(10)

In other poems, sometimes in a deceptively good-humored tone of voice, he gives us almost unbearable pictures of the ravages of the murderous mob in Colombo. However, Basil Fernando also seems to feel a need to give oppression new proportions, to bring it down to earth, so to speak. In a kind of playful fable, the career politician is reduced to a conceited little ant, the government to a pig ready for slaughter and hanging on a spit or to a fish on the hook. There is a clear connection between animal and imagination; in one poem the writer depicts himself as breaking out of his isolation and being transformed into a bird.

In the abovementioned "Just Society" Basil Fernando also writes, "Wounds of defeat / Will live with me long / And the memory / Of this insult" (Evelyn, 11). In another poem he compares his countrymen to cattle with the brand of submission burned in them early, by the European conquerors, or possibly even earlier. Already in his first collection of poetry he speaks of "ages of suffering" connecting the lives of the anonymous poor with the past. Individual memory is fused into a collective one. To remember is to expose oneself to something difficult and painful, but memories also pave the way to pride and resistance. A fight against a ruthless local landowner, one short story tells us, lived on in legend. In an interview the author quotes a priest who once found that the memory of the rebellion of 1818 still survives in the minds of people in a distant part of Sri Lanka!

In his latest and best collection of short fiction, Six Short Stories of Sri Lanka, the long-term perspective stands out clearly. In some of his stories Basil Fernando depicts proud men of his native village causing bitter envy; it required persecution and violence to break them. His prose has now changed. In spite of the spare and foreshadowing style and in spite of the anonymous contours of the human lot, these recent short stories are more full-length portraits than were the tales of his earlier, more satiric collection. The climax comes in a noteworthy, concentrated story about an old man who seems to have a great deal in common with the author's own father. Throughout his life, this man has lived in the very same village. Every day, after work, he walks down to the canal for a short rest. Half of his eighty-year life he has lived under British rule, the other half under independence. He never speaks about colonial times. He has buried them somewhere along with his deepest pain and sense of humiliation, far down in the lower recesses of his mind and the collective subconscious. He is like a tortoise, pulling his head into his shell; he sees nothing but cannot help registering impressions.

It is in this unconscious way, over unimaginable distances of time, that the experiences and outlook of generations are passed on. The independence of 1948 brought no significant change; the police and the military continued to protect the powerful and the rich. In the short story, dead bodies suddenly appear floating along the canal, in increasing numbers-bodies of murdered people no one dares to bury, victims of unknown massacres in unknown places. Eventually the old man is no longer capable of walking down to the canal. He starts to have nightmares. He sees himself and his son lying dead in the water on either side of the big church statue of Christ, like the two thieves depicted in the Gospels. All the people he has ever known and loved appear in his dreams, also dead in the water. He is frightened and retreats into himself. In a final dream, he reaches the very core of memory, a core of shock and shame; men of a foreign race with swords and guns are running amok in his village.

This short story may be compared with another text dealing expressly with Basil Fernando's own father. In a poem from Sharing Betel the long-term perspective of the father stands out as a foothold the son feels he is lacking.

You, Father, are eternity

And I am impermanence

You are quietness, the strength

Of silence. I am only noise

The weakness of urgency.

You tend the garden, look after

Little ones, reflecting backward

To eight decades or so.

I, just stare blank into nothingness.(37)

In many texts it is precisely the absence of a foothold-a state of emptiness, apathy, and discouragement-that stands out as the great threat, as the death of spirit. In a poem from Death and Rebirth the writer asks God if it is He who has left people in a void or if the people have left Him. It is probably no coincidence that, in the poem above, we see the image of the father, bearing the weight of eight decades, joining with the image of God.*

Frolunda, Sweden

* This essay is based on information supplied by the writer himself and on the rich material LeRoy Robinson has published in various university magazines in Nagasaki, Japan. These include primarily the journal Keiei to Keizai, an interview in three parts (1985-88), and a biography in six parts, The Village at the Mouth of the River (1992-93). Robinson has also edited and, in the same magazine, published the two collections of short stories by Basil Fernando. My essay is dedicated to LeRoy Robinson, as an expression of appreciation and gratitude for all his unselfish work and for his friendship over the years.

Works consulted

Fernando, Basil. A New Era to Emerge. Nugegoda. 1973.

---. Koluwa Maleya. 1976.

---. Evelyn My First Friend and Other Poems. Wattala. 1985.

---. "Four Short Stories of Sri Lanka." LeRoy Robinson, ed. Keiei to Keizai (Nagasaki University), 65:4 (March 1986).

---. Sharing Betel. Colombo. 1987.

---. "Six Short Stories of Sri Lanka." LeRoy Robinson, ed. Keiei to Keizai, 70:3 (December 1990).

---. Sri Lanka-Modernization Vs Militarization: Ethnic Conflict and Labour. Hong Kong. Asia Monitor Resource Center. 1991.

---. Asian Refugees: A Search for Solutions. Hong Kong. International Affairs / Christian Conference of Asia. 1991.

---. The Inability to Prosecute: Courts and Human Rights in Cambodia and Sri Lanka. Hong Kong. Future Asia Link. 1993.

---. Death and Rebirth. Hong Kong. 1993.

---. The Cynics and the Owls. Hong Kong. 1994.

Robinson, LeRoy. "An Interview with Basil Fernando on Aspects of Culture in Sri Lanka." 3 parts: Tonan Ajia Kenkyu Nenpo (Nagasaki University), 27 (20 December 1985), pp. 127-41; Keiei to Keizai (Nagasaki University), 66:1 (June 1986), pp. 123-42; Keiei to Keizai, 68:2 (September 1988), pp. 141-62.

---. "The Village at the Mouth of the River: A Biography of Basil Fernando." Published in six installments in Keiei to Keizai and Tonan Ajia Kenkyu Nenpo from March 1992 to September 1993.

Basil Fernando

Just Society

You burned the buildings

And put me in prison

You threw their infants into fire

And called me inhuman

You murdered in open daylight

And blamed me for wanting blood

You turned my neighbour into a regugee

And said I am responsible

You looted his hard-earned property

And called me a thief

You imprisoned him and killed him

And named me a brute.

You befriended thugs and I the victims

But you made me the accused.

I who was grieved

At my school mate,

My neighbour, my friend,

My guru and fellow worker,

When he died, when he went into hiding,

When he fled to escape the mob,

Suddenly departed to other lands

Empty handed - I who cried holding his hand

At the Harbour bidding him farewell,

Am now to bear this insult.

You say it's peace

When you put the blame on the innocent

You say it's stability

When you protect culprits

You say it's honesty

When you hide the reports

And hush the inquiries,

Spread falsehood among the nations

Having a laugh at a restless nation,

Divided and wounded.

You sleep well

But I cannot sleep

You eat well

I have lost all appetite

You think you are successful

I know, wounds of defeat

Will live with me long

And the memory

Of this insult.

Colombo, July 1983

(From Evelyn My First Friend and Other Poems, 1985)