by Jean Arasanayagam
Sadness fills me. It is oppressive.
Betrayal is corrosive. The violence that gapes
Wide-open its gargoyle mouth, the words that
Squirt their acid to wound the innocent skin.
What do I do? Open out a file in which I keep
Old recipes from the past, descriptions of tiffins,
Birthday parties, dinners, recipes allied to a genealogy.
It is soothing to read of what women did with their
Lives a century or two ago, perhaps.
What a vocabulary of lexicals with all their
Connotations, translated into tastes and flavours
Contrived out of those newly discovered indigenous
Ingredients, recipes that sound to our finely attuned
Ears, esoteric, the tongue exotic, forgotten now
Only to be resurrected as part of an inheritance
History looks askance at.
I retrieve those retrospective names,
Rose koekjes, that cake shaped like the heraldic
Flower; dendeng, strips of meat dried in the sun,
Fried in oil, sugar syrup soaked golden poffertjes,
Allerlei, those mixed pickles resembling our own
Historical breed and countless others, ‘toothsome
Delicacies’ conjured up by those ingenious women
Who lived in and loved the good life of the Tropics.
Words that now belong to the reminiscences of the
Past, material for the indefatigable identity researchers.
And there are the memories of emigrants
Who set out on their own voyages in this century,
Emigrants who started out from those early genealogies.
They have gone away, all of them, left me behind,
Still write to me of lamprais, love cake and breudhers,
Making merry in those distant antipodes even though
Says Romaine, “Aunty Yvonne had undergone major
Heart Surgery (triple by-pass) only three months ago,”
So, she continues, “Christmas was all eating, drinking and
Being perhaps a little too merry!”
I do not know when I last knew
The meaning of that word ‘merry’
Belonging as it does to all those lost annals
Including nativities, proselytization, ballads and lyrics.
No, the word has lost all meaning for me,
I do not make merry any longer
Not with thoughts of blood-sodden battlefields
With their unrecognizable dead, revolutions,
Torture or burning tyre-piles and the weight
Of fear my daughter still expresses of that
Terrifying past inscribed in the minutiae
Of her psyche.
For the moment, it is comforting to read of
The personal reminiscences of others and the
Painstaking process of those time-consuming
Preparations of meats, cakes, fritters,
Burgitter soup and milk ponce, all closely guarded
Family secrets handed down the generations by word
Of mouth, narrating the personal histories of their
Lives, through anecdotal recitals of their culinary
Skills, to enhance those inherited names for a
Fast vanishing, now almost effaced posterity.
Their hands, fingers heavy with gold bands engraved
With bonded initials, kneading pastry dough, beating up
Hundreds of eggs before the centuries cracked apart
In fragments. No more, the perfect shell remaining
To protect the embryos
No one then thought those people alien?
Not belonging. Were they not accepted just as
They were, for themselves and not as the stranger,
Or did they think their lives a private enclave
Inhabited by a different genus?
The questions are open-ended,
The answers, individual, helped occasionally
By turning over the pages of documented
Histories, while still writing one’s own.
What use to others then, are my own memories?
Memories that were and are, although now
Faded, part of the warp and weft of that
Tapestry of life, many hands wove together
I re-read the letters of my immigrant niece,
Piece together the scattered leaves of her
Own memoirs, her family wapenheraut,
Before those pages, in that distant country
Will have no place in any archives.
While she lives together with her people
Displaced from their historical heritages,
She survives on carefully preserved
Ancestral memories before the somnolent eyes
Of the past close in death, recreates, retrieves
Along with remembered childhoods, her past.
What do I possess? I am the lost cipher
Rediscovered, the pointer in that reading
Of a history that is now ruthlessly scrutinized,
Leaving no room for redress.
What is there left to retrieve?
In a room, antiquated artefacts locked away
While I still remain, groping with a rusted key
That reveals in a cobwebbed trunk,
The vital clues, in diaries, letters, time preserved,
Of a fragmented identity,
That has meaning not only to myself
But for our collective histories.
Anoli Perera - Sri Lanka
Absence
screen print on paper
“Meticulously wrapped Christmas cakes, freshly baked breudhers, and homemade wine…I conjure memories of a short haired woman in a linen frock… ……My most touching memory is of Annthia next door was her playing the Tennessee Waltz in my piano…and often she would play these vintage songs to me…I was 11 years and she was 7o years old …. She left and they all left. An end of an era….. Their absence burdens my memory with memorializing their presence for posterity.
Absense (2010)
