by Indran Amirthanayagam
Hanging Loose Press 2008
Reviewed by J. Mae Barizo

Pictures of Grief

“I find it hard to write even today about this tremendous beast,” Indran Amirthanayagam writes in the preface to The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems, referring to the 2004 natural disaster that took the lives of over 225,000 victims in southeast Asia. On December 26^, 2004, the day that his country of birth, Sri Lanka, “lost half its face,” he was consumed by a desire to “write that face back.”

He is not the first writer faced with the urge to bear witness to calamity. Nelly Sachs survived the concentration camps of World War II, going on to write literature that would win her a Nobel prize in 1966; Gottfried Benn worked as an army physician for prostitutes during World War I, his poems from that period marked by their preoccupation with decay and the human body. More recently, there is Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy. There is also D. Nurkse’s Burnt Island, which contains a series of poems that are a homage to post 9/11 New York. Tragedy is difficult to chronicle for the same reason that it is difficult for a trauma patient to revamp his or her damaged psyche: the mind possesses an aggressive anathema towards healing.

Amirthanayagam displays that he is no stranger to the backdrop of the disaster. There is an inherent ease in the way that he describes the allure and the ferocity of the sea; one can almost smell the salt and feel the stickiness of the tropical fruit on the fingertips while reading his well-crafted verse. It is the emotional map of the poem that is less developed, but he does his best to transport the reader to the scenes of wreckage: fisherman’s shanties, village churches, holiday hotels along the gutted coast. In “Commandment,” he does a praiseworthy job of conjuring up the injured landscape:

…the sea drew back
exposing rocks
huge like elephants,

then catapulted,
bludgeoning beaches,
bodies roused out
of seething, headless water,

The five-hundred-mile-an-hour
funeral march;”

The writing is vivid; the lines are fluid; the narrative is propelled incessantly by loss. It is this omnipresent saturation with death and devastation, however, which tends to wear heavily on the reader. What is it that happens in the mind as it attempts to simultaneously delve into and skirt around catastrophe? Maurice Blachot, in his book, L’Ecriture du Desastre, writes: “it is not knowledge of the disaster, but knowledge as disaster and knowledge disastrously — carries us…deports us (whom it smites and nonetheless leaves untouched), straight to ignorance, and puts us face to face with ignorance of the unknown so that we forget, endlessly.” The reader of The Splintered Face is constantly reminded of this endless cycle of remembering and forgetting as we become aware of Amirthanayagam’s writing processes. Again and again, we are given a glimpse of the Tsunami and its aftermath, while the author projects heartbreak, anger and futility onto the speechless victims in his poems. This transference suggests to me that the author has not fully internalized death, and in order to minimize his own vulnerability, transposes loss onto the various narrators of the poems.

Throughout the collection, Amirthanayagam often writes from the first-person viewpoints of survivors. In “Words and Orchids,” the narrator is a wife whose husband was washed away as “he sucked mangos with his hands.” “Faith” is told in the voice of a minister or priest of a congregation that “lost eighteen nuns that day.” “Wrecked: Coconuts” is a poem that tells the story of a fisherman who ate coconuts for twenty-five days until a ship found him, his wife and children swept away. The list goes on. This movable “I” of the collection, speaking from its numerous narrators, removes the author from the landscape of the poem, letting the victims speak for themselves.

This method is one that has been used before, notably by authors such as C.D. Wright and Bei Dao, and is successful when utilized tastefully. In The Splintered Face however, it contributed to my longing for a more unified continuum between thought and emotion, life and death. This use of multiple narrators, all infused with similar mournful inflections, prevented me from becoming vested in their stories, no matter how affecting they were. The well-crafted poems in this book are the ones that are committed to description, a type of lyrical yet informed journalistic cataloguing of events and characters which make sense of catastrophe from an appropriate emotional distance. Take for instance this terrific employment of description in “Order”:

:the past where we danced ballroom
while the children played carom, and mangos

stained our lapels, and today, hobbling,
scavenging in ash heaps, how easy

the arithmetic, day and night, two by two.
Bring on the mind workers.

Let a thousand doctors bloom.
I lived right here on the x, my name

is blue: sea green blue blue green…

The strongest poems in the collection, “Birds”, “Intruder:Mullaitivu”, “Teaching Noah”, and the stunning “Order” speak to the reader on a level which outstrips grief, approaching the disaster from a even-tempered place, rather than articulating from the seat of suffering. Writing from the experience, instead of about the actual event, allows the author to reject sensationalist methods of description, letting the poem transcend above disaster and all that the word demands.

*