‘Avidya’: Vidyan Ravinthiran’s poems are a compelling chronicler of Sri Lanka’s political history

Why do we read poetry? And what does it awaken in us? Perhaps we turn to poems the way we turn to a prayer or a strand of light. Perhaps we evoke our roots at the foot of a poem that grows into our mind. Perhaps we turn to poetry by the same impulse by which man gave birth to god. Standing on this side of the Arabian Sea by the Coast of Malabar, as a child, I stubbornly believed that the hazy grey line I saw far away on the horizon was the island country of Sri Lanka.

The winds blowing in from the sea, be it the Arabian Sea or the Indian Ocean, have a peculiar effect on the sensibilities of the natives, and it is with this sense of ennui that Vidyan Ravinthiran’s first poem in the collection Avidya marks its presence. “As a/ Sri/ Lankan/ Tamil/ I feel strongly /about /three o’clock in the afternoon”. On a first reading, the poem appears to echo the imagist technique of Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro”, but this impression is quickly undone. Unravelling the frame of imagery, Ravinthiran summons the sharp and indelible memory of the Tamil pogrom that engulfed...

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