Like Myth & Mother
by Sumathy Sivamohan
Sirahununi, 2008
Like Myth & Mother is a collection of 25 poems, prose, graphics, dialogue and theatre lyrics by Sumathy Sivamohan, set in the context of Sri Lanka's tragic and protracted armed conflict. Subtitled 'a political autobiography in poetry and prose', it offers a provocative insight into the author's own journey through the dissonance of contemporary Sri Lanka, and a nation entangled in violence, betrayal and mythmaking histories.
Sivamohan, a professor at the University of Peredeniya, noted recently of her book, "It is the prose that brings out the devil in me." My curiosity aroused by this instruction, I began to read Like Myth and Mother primarily through its prose. It is multifaceted: protean in how it changes shape and mood, at times becoming prose poems, as in the accompaniment to the centrepiece poem of the book entitled "Love in the Time of the City". The prose places the poems in the volume within contexts of time, place and events. It carries political commentary, self-reflexive asides on Sivamohan's own experiences of exile, loss, colour, caste and gender, and satirical barbs that spare neither the politician nor the intellectual, the peace activist nor the assassin. The prose in Like Myth & Mother is also where Sivamohan contemplates the work of writing itself, through a series of questions and musings on glossing, citation and censorship; on writing as purgation; and writing as a force that both bridges and breaks bonds of friendship.
The devil in the prose should come as no surprise for those familiar with Sivamohan's past work, such as Thin Veils, which won the Gratiaen Award for the best Sri Lankan creative writing in English in 2001. Writing in both English and Tamil (though everything in this new volume is in English) she has, over the years, been robustly engaged with, and burdened by, the violence of the war around her. She is sibling to both Rajani Thiranagama, the human-rights activist assassinated by the LTTE in 1989, and Nirmala Nithyanandan, who once belonged to the LTTE but turned her back on its violence and now pays the price of exile. Sivamohan was close friends with the Tamil-language poets Selvi and Sivaramani, who both met untimely deaths during the course of the island's ethnic conflict, and with others who have been detained, tortured, 'disappeared' – many of whom are specifically named in Like Myth & Mother. Sivamohan writes, "from then on … I began to write poems, insistently and urgently, again for no reason whatsoever. all or most of these poems were about death – death not carefully prepared for by a process of painful ageing – but as sudden, violent, blood-gushing acts; death that is always, always about the nation. I wish I did not write about death."