FOR PUBLICATION
AHRC-ART-003-2008
April 25, 2008

An Article Series on Human Rights and Culture by the Asian Human Rights Commission.

This is the 3rd issue of Human Rights and Culture. This issue contains an appreciation of Aime Cesaire by K.G. Sankarapillai, Activism is art applied in future tense, by Aditya Shankar, two poems by Basil Fernando, Sambuka- the low caste Tapasa and Mahaweli, Kalani, Walawe, Kalu Gangas and a translation of a children’s poem, Separation of a father by Buddhika Gayani Ranaweera, a Grade 12 student.

You may view the previous issues at:  http://www.ahrchk.net/pub/mainfile.php/hrculture/.

Your contributions and comments for future issues can be sent to ahrc@ahrc.asia.

Aime Cesaire – An appreciation by K.G. Sankarapillai

The sad news of the demise of Aime Cesaire, the great Caribbean poet, at the age of 94 was not a shocking piece of information. But when it came to me last week, just the day following my return from the Asian Human Rights Commission and Hong Kong it aroused in me a series of cultural, political issues, responses, and the battle for the cause of social justice, freedom, human rights and dignity in the twentieth century world of the Blacks.

I remember that winter evening in 1974 in the Monday market street of Karol Bagh in New Delhi where I saw for the first time in the long spread of second hand books ‘A return to my native land’, Aime Cesaire’s epic poem with a yellow line sketch of a Negro’s head by Picasso on a deep black cover. I remember my sleepless Delhi nights with Aime Cesaire’s poetry. It was far different from what I experienced as modern poetry from the west. Cesaire’s lines were like charged high power electric lines; multi-potential lines, lines which can evoke memories, history, wrath and protest lines which can carry resonances of dark crying jungles on its lyre, lines which could predict the freedom, pride, and cultural identity of the Negroes and the downtrodden masses. They were lines which can play the violent symphony of the upsurge of the undefeatable spirit of negritude. They were lines which can portray with love, joy, and music the resurrection of the oppressed, the victorious green vastness, and the beauty of triumphant and free human souls.

A Disquiet and profound creative energy was my first experience of that long poem. It was a great poetic document of the new turbulent Negro times. It had a multitude of resistance-centres within; centres of consciousness and culture, fighting against colonialism, fighting against prisons and chains and gallows for a celebration of freedom, fighting against despotism for democracy. Centres that were in deep disagreement with the yielding savage attitudes of the traditional negro mind set, accommodating silently the torturous everyday happenings and inhuman bondage and sufferings in the brutal order of the white hell of colonialism.

Aime Cesaire’s high power words relentlessly urged for resistance, freedom and justice. It was clear that the poem was written by a rare brand of poet fascinated by surrealism and its rebellious style and spirit dancing in tunes with liberty and equality of the inner universe of humanity. Naturally this poem was easily accounted in the registry of ‘modern poetry’; poetry of the bewildered individual surrounded by a hostile and bitter world; as poetry of memory and of dream. Later as the sense of black resistance resulted in the readings of the creative contributions of the Negroes and started redefining the black culture,‘a  return to my native land’ by Aime Cesaire received  great poetic acclaim as one of the masterpieces of the third world political modernity, a work that raises serious questions against the value system of the ideology of the Euro centric ‘modern’ of the west. The new mix of tenderness and thunder in this poem became one of the major hallmarks of modern black aesthetics.  This poem became gradually identified as a great call for the freedom and the justice due to the wretched of the earth. Here the word RETURN means Discovery; discovery of the self, reclaiming the cultural identity; regaining the locations of justice, dreams, freedom, love and happiness. Return is in no sense a going back to the primitive darkness .

Clearer the new world could now hear in this poem the untamable lions roaring in the subconscious jungle of the Negro minds. Images in Aime Cesaire’s poetry were wild and aggressive with a bright vision of liberation from all forms of oppression. Its rhythm is the violent rhythm of the storm.

The life of this great Caribbean poet Aime Fernand David Cesaire, playwright, thinker, politician, cultural analyst, is closely knitted to the renaissance movements and freedom struggles of the Negro race. He was a great inspirer, advocate, teacher, leader, and fighter for the cause of justice to the so-called slave race, the Negroes. Redefining the great negro spirit he used the word ‘negritude’ to convey the essence and force of the blacks’ cultural identity.  He is credited with coining the word negritude to spread the message of radical black humanism all over the world. He has his own unique contributions in shaping the new sensibility and fighting spirit in our modern heritage to shred down all forms hegemony from the social consciousness of all societies in the colonial and post colonial worlds.

Many of his poems were translated in to Malayalam and some other Indian Languages .

Aime Cesaire’s life, contacts, works, and commitments:

Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique in 1913 . In 1931, he traveled to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand on an educational scholarship. In Paris, Césaire, who, in 1935 passed an entrance exam for the École Normale Supérior, created with Léopold Sédar Senghor, the great Sinegalese poet , and Léon Damas, the literary review, The Black Student which was a forerunner of the Négritude movement. In 1936, Césaire began work on his book-length poem a return to my native land. The Notebook of a Return to My Native Land - (1939), was a vivid and powerful depiction of the ambiguities of Caribbean life and culture in the New World, and this upon returning home to Martinique.

Césaire married fellow Martinican student, Suzanne Roussi, in 1937. Together they moved back to Martinique in 1939 with their young son. Césaire became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where he taught Frantz Fanon and served as an inspiration for, but did not teach, Édouard Glissant. He would become a heavy influence for Fanon as both a mentor and a contemporary throughout Fanon's short life.

The years of World War II were ones of great intellectual activity for the Césaires. In 1941, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Roussi founded the literary review Tropiques, with the help of other Martinican intellectuals like René Ménil and Aristide Maugée, in order to challenge the cultural status quo and alienation that then characterized the Martinican identity. Many run-ins with censorship did not deter Césaire from being an outspoken defendant of Martinican identity. He also became close to French surrealist poet André Breton, who spent time in Martinique during the war. Breton contributed a laudatory introduction to the 1947 edition of a return to my native land, saying that "this poem is nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times." 

In 1945, with the support of the French Communist Party, Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and député to the French National Assembly for Martinique. He was one of the principal drafters of the 1946 law on departmentalizing former colonies, a role for which independentist politicians have often criticized him.

Like many leftist intellectuals in France, Césaire in the 1930s and 1940s looked toward the Soviet Union as a source of human progress, virtue, and human rights, but Césaire later grew disillusioned with Communism. In 1956, after the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, Aimé Césaire announced his resignation from the French Communist Party in a text entitled Lettre à Maurice Thorez. In 1958 he founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais. In 1960, he published Toussaint Louverture, based upon the life of the Haitian revolutionary. He served as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. He retired from politics in 2001.

In 2006, he refused to meet the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Nicolas Sarkozy, then a probable contender for the 2007 presidential election, because the UMP had voted for the February 23, 2005 law asking teachers and textbooks to "acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa", a law considered by many as a eulogy to colonialism and French actions during the Algerian War. President Jacques Chirac finally had the controversial law repealed .

His writings reflect his passion for civic and social engagement. He is the author of Discourse on Colonialism (1953), a denunciation of European colonial racism which was published in the French review Présence Africaine. In 1968, he published the first version of Une Tempête, a radical adaptation of Shakespeare's play The Tempest for a black audience.

Martinique's airport at Le Lamentin was renamed Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport on January 15, 2007.

On April 9, 2008, he suffered serious heart troubles and was admitted to Pierre Zobda Quitman hospital in Fort-de-France. He died on April 17, 2008.

 Courtesy:  wikipedia , the free encyclopedia .

K.G. Sankarapillai, is a contemporary Indian poet writing in Malayalam. He has won the National Award for Poetry in India on two occasions. More about this author may be found at http://india.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=8636

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Activism is art applied in future tense

Aditya Shankar

I love the concept of ghosts. There is nothing quite like it, as a creative manifestation that influences my mind as an experience of the uncertain.  Sitting alone in my hostel room, I have felt the pinch of fear on some nights when you switch off the lights immediately after watching a horror movie. Looking at it in another way, fear is a terrifying dream (or nightmare) about the future. It is an uncertain futuristic experience where you are unable to predict the impending future, though you know it is bound to be distasteful either immediately or somewhere within a longer span of time.

Approaching it from a parallel perspective, I would like to analyze my experience of listening to news. It is an experience that all of us (at least in theory), believe to be an act of reaching out to what is new and relatively realistic. Though, news often is a new deviation into myth from what you thought was the real, those that are believed to have an influence on your life either in the macro or micro level. ‘This is a bad, bad world’ is a common summary of experience for most of us; especially when you view something as horrendous as the repeated visuals that are aired on the TV channel about how adivasis were dragged into the city centre, circled and then beaten up brutally in Guwahati. This I feel, is somewhat related to my dream of ghosts; the common connecting point being my worry of the future. This experience though very apolitical and selfish, probably applies to the cross section of the masses today.
 
The viewpoint to be discussed here is that future is probably experienced mostly through reality itself, not through plain imagination. The fact that no one is absolutely impartial/unbiased/objective in their experience probably extends the scope of reality into imagination. This extension, either as an imagined continuation of news that you hear or a piece of art/literature that you experience, is what makes you feel that you are thinking of the future or even ever so slightly touching it. This is not entirely a false experience either. In fact, it is vital to the way the whole world plans itself and moves forward.

 This becomes more important when a group of people plot their extended realities/imaginations together to see the dreadful reality that they think is the future. An environmental protection initiative, for example, provides a striking example of how important it is to see your terrifying dream. They constantly see a nightmare where the world is a place too hot and polluted, stripped off rivers and lakes; a place where all the surviving species live underground. Rather, they extend the possibilities of the currently existing rude reality and showcase them in front of the world so that it corrects itself.

Any form of activism then, is not just reality but art applied in the future tense. Also, of all the collective dreams that a society can see, imagine or recollect, the dream that an activist sees thus becomes the most vital dream. Probably, it is also the ugliest due to its striking depiction of a possible continuation of the ugly real. If the world is imagined to be a series of infinite, ever dynamic canvases, theirs is the most brilliant canvas and probably the most worrying depiction of the possibilities of experience.

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I need a pencil, a drawing board, probably a geometry box; I need a white chart that is pinned against a board; probably I need to imagine that there is sea ahead of me when looking out through the window. Because, I am trying to make an interesting drawing here to prove that I am quite incapable of plotting any futuristic event/moment. I am calling the drawing ‘Ahead-a behavior experiment’; probably meaning a realistic depiction of what lies ahead of me. I am going to plot the points within the axis of a chart on this page. On one hand I have the actions that I might perform in the future. They have to be derived from an inner chart that has the history of my thought and its interaction with my physiological evolution that may lead into my possible actions. Within that inner chart lies the evolution of the behavioral traits of my ancestors against their own time. So my inner chart to derive my actions goes back until time and action existed. Then this time and action has to be relatively compared at each instant with all those actions in the rest of the universe that were happening parallel to the particular chain of action that formed my behavior. This would mean I would need to plot the entire history of time against the history of all the actions that has ever been performed. This left alone, I would also need to trace back my physiological evolution to arrive at my physical status to perform an action and this has to be derived beforehand by comparing it to all the possible elements that might have shaped the physique.

Let me get back to the back seat of my taxi in this bustling city. It is much more definite here than anywhere else. I am on a by-road now. It is like a minor vein of a leaf and I could say with surety that we move forward not knowing what is happening in the other road, forget future.

Because I plotted all this while just to reach my present. It is better enjoyed this way; from the back seat of the taxi where you know just the chaos outside. I experience this chaos as noise. Every space has its own sound/noise. I experience and probably recognize my space through sound; my space is dynamic and moving forward like the taxi; my future is an ever increasing noise that I fail to quantify.   

I am in one of those moments. I am thinking about future. This is when you dispel your doubts and start to reassure yourself that poetry as a way of thinking and as an attempt of expression is an active element in the minds of the people; though unknowingly.  The noise will increase and I am willing to listen.

Aditya Shankar is a young Malayali poet and a writer. One of his poems was published in the first issue of this publication.

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TWO POEMS by Basil Fernando

Sambuka- the low caste Tapasa

A grieving Brahmin
Carrying the corpse of his young son
Cursed Rama
And threatened a hunger strike
Unto death if the sin
That caused his son's death
was not found and expiated.

Rama called his council
Eight learned Rishis and Narada
Who advised  him
Of a Sudra
Aspiring to be a Tapasa
Transgressing Dharma
Doing only what Brahmins should do

Great Rama's duty
It was to find and punish
The evil doer and reassert  Dharma
End the premature deaths
Among the twice born.
So promptly he set out
On his aerial car for the hunt.

At last, in a wild region
Rama espied
a man practising austerities
Inquiring his genealogy
Found the Tapasa was a Sudra
A practicing Yogi aiming mocsha
Named Sumbuka

Great Rama cut off Tapasa's head
Instantly without a warning
Expostulation
Or any address
For a Sudra deserved
no explanation,no pity
Had no rights

Even before the severed head
Fell to ground
The dead youth regained his breathing
And Deva's descended from heaven
Singing Rama's praises
Sages commended his action
And gifted a devine bracelet.
 
Such is the greatness
Of caste preserving Dharma
The divine justice or wrath
Against the Sudras seeking holiness
Crossing of the boundaries laid by Vedas
Misconstruing as good what was evil
Sadu, Sadu to Rama the righteous avenger.

Tapasa- An ascetic
This poem initially appeared in Channels, published by the English Writers Cooperative of Sri Lanka.

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Mahaweli, Kalani, Walawe, Kalu Gangas

I used to sing
Kavi from Padyawaliya
Mahaweli, Kalani, Walawe, Kalu gangas
Flowing from the butterfly hill
Heard songs also of ratharan puthun
And charming girls growing in the villages

Then I saw,
Bodies floating in rivers
Rain water flowing from mountains
Mixed with blood
Bloated bodies
Eaten by Kabaragoyas

Now I do not like to hear
Walawe, Kalani and Kalu gangas
Mountains have lost
Mystery or attraction
In the eyes of mothers
I see not tears but distrust

What Am I, I ask myself
What is my motherland?
I want to sing those same poems
To that I can't bring myself.

(Padyawaliya—A school anthology; ratharan puthun- Golden sons)

Basil Fernando is a Sri Lankan poet and has published several collections of poems. An anthology of his poems entitled, Sundramaithry, has been translated into Malayalam by Dr. Dhanya Menon, and published in 2008. This is the first anthology of Sri Lankan poetry translated into any India language. His writings may be seen at www.basilfernando.net under literature.

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A Children’s Poem

Separation of a Father

Though the Asela moon had risen that night,
Though the Amawaka moon peeped through at times,
On a night little stars felt fear,
The world was consumed in a dark sin
Though the moon did not visit my house,
The joy did fill the house
Placing a fire barrel on my chest,
A hangman took that joy in his hand
The only comfort I had in the world
Why did you enemies take my heavenly joy?
The service done to the country is not little
Why such raw sorrow given to a family with children?
You shot and killed me before my time
Why did you destroy my bird’s nest?
The services I had done were not considered
I was sent out of the world abruptly
I now live sadly in heaven
Why was I not allowed to live?
I cannot understand why people are so cruel
When will I meet you again, my son?
Though I am separated from my son’s world,
I see my golden little son in dreams
If peace descend on a future date,
I will willingly be born in my country again
If reborn one day, let us unite
And spread peace with kind feelings in the mind
Let us not separate again
The tragedy that fell on us should not fall on others

Buddhika Gayani Ranaweera is a Grade 12 student.

Separation of a father is one of the poems from a collection of 83 Sinhalese poems by children of grade 3 – 12 from the anthology Kadulu Mathakayen Obbata (Beyong the memory of tears) published by a organisation called Kalapeya Api (We of the free trade zone) based in Negombo, Sri Lanka. This poem has been published in several publications in different countries. Translation by Basil Fernando

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The Asian Human Rights Commission is regularly issuing this article series on Human Rights and Culture in which various cultural expressions, poems, stories, pictures and other forms of cultural expression that are based on the theme of justice, will be published. A pivotal issue in modern literature is justice, particularly the enormous unleashing of injustice under fascist, communist and other authoritarian regime including those that pursue an unbridled market economy have generated responses from created writers. This search for justice is at the very essence of being human. Human beings are part of nature and part of each other. Perhaps the lines of John Donne are most relevant: “…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;”

Contemporary mass culture promotes violence and destruction. There are those who are opposed to mass culture and want to reclaim the best traditions of human culture within which justice remains a core issue. This column will provide space for those who wish to share their creative initiatives.

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About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984.