Shash Trevett’s debut pamphlet, From a Borrowed Land (Smith|Doorstop) begins with what feels like a cleansing, or perhaps a renewal. As a recent arrival to the UK as a refugee from the Sri Lankan civil war, in the first line of the opening poem, ‘New Words, New Clothes’, the speaker declares: “I discarded the words first”, immediately evoking not so much a sense of loss as one of self-will . The verb discard is surprising here, it is a deliberate action, not a passive one; we do not get the sense, even in a strange new country, that the “mute silence” she finds herself in is something happening to her, but rather it is being done by her; and I think there is a manifesto of strength in this short opening line. The speaker then begins observing – “I watched and learned like a mynah bird” – and building, as she replaces one language with another, transmogrifies one into another would be closer, as Trevett uses Tamil script (“அ became A”) to emphasise the physical transformation entailed in the process of language learning.
After a while through whispers and croaks
new words emerged
in the borrowed tongue of a borrowed land.
This first poem gives an authentic sense of a new-language user’s building confidence, from the symbol-changes, to the child-like simplicity of Edward Lear’s nonsense alphabet lines, to the “single, stuttering, borrowed syllables”, to the final graceful torrent implicit in “and the new words began to flow”. The new words, like a new set of clothes, have transformed the speaker, made her new again as she has escaped the painful history contained in her own language.
I abandoned two millenia
of poetry, mythology and history.
No Pallavan or Cholan could claim sovereignty
over my tongue, my mouth, my mind.
There may be guilt here; there is certainly irony in the fact that the speaker finds this sense of escape from Imperial repression in the UK, but the succeeding poems show that Trevett, though she may have abandoned her mother tongue, has far from abandoned her mother land or people. English and England remain, after all, a “borrowed tongue” and a “borrowed land” and there remains in that word borrow the suggestion that the day will come when what has been borrowed will have to be returned. Touchingly, at the very end of the pamphlet in the Acknowledgements, she juxtaposes this sense of impermanence with something more abiding when she expresses love to her family, who, she says “have made this borrowed land my home”. But still, there remains the sense, as in much diaspora poetry, that her new home is not entirely hers. The poet’s life in the UK is not the subject of the pamphlet though, which on a basic level is twofold I think: the memory of violence and the role of language in that memory.
The “mute silence” of the first poem stands in comparison to the “fug of silence” which wraps the speaker’s father in the second (‘In Your Old Age’) which “clots” and “strangles”, not only trapping the old man, who is perhaps a victim of aphasia or silent simply from having witnessed too much, as though in a windowless room (“so thick it will not let the light in”) but also severing his memories from his voice, and so from his child, the speaker.
Appa, in your muted world
what do you remember now?
And the sensation of a collapsed, decaying internal world returns at the end of the collection, in ‘My Grandfather’s House’, where the crumbling words of ‘In Your Old Age’ are replaced with the physical, and of course metaphorical, crumbling of a family home back in Sri Lanka.
There is moss growing in the bedrooms
of my grandfather’s house and raindrops
sing a lament on deserted floors.
This neglected, decaying house also sits in silence, apart from the “music” making mosquitos, who are the “inheritors of (its) rooms” and “the sum total / of our dreams”, all sound reduced to a buzz, all traces of everyday human activity to an empty and slowly disappearing space. The poem is a potent symbol of lost language and a lost time – the falling away of memory.
But between these two bookends, Trevett’s pamphlet is an excerise in measured rage. Rage at the supression of the Tamil language, for example, in ‘The Sinhala OnlyAct, 1956’, the second half of which is addressed, wonderfully, to the language itself: “Oru naadillaathe aatkal, in exile, / bearing the beauty of your music, still.” – the ‘people without a country’ and the music, of course, returning at the end of the pamphlet tragically decimated as insects and absence. Rage at international indifference to the juggernaut of endless war, in ‘Things Happen’:
When they shoot blindfolded men in the back
and take souvenirs of mutilated lives
and hopes. When they rape girls and grandmothers
and celebrate the hecatomb of their success –
things happen
and the world moves on.
And rage at the betrayal of vulnerable refugees by politicians in ‘Psalm’, which condemns the British MPs who voted against the 2016 Dub Amendment to the Brexit Bill by incorporating their names into an enormous (almost page-sized!) single word: ‘NO’.
But From a Borrowed Land is more than just rage, it is a celebration of the beauty of the Tamil language, and of the culture it represents. Trevett presents two poems by other Tamil writers (Cheran and Vinothini) in their original script, followed by her own translation and then, enlighteningly, a third poem, a response to the original. This tripartate approach to translation is stunning in both concept and execution. The original versions, to a non-Tamil speaker reading from the page, appear like a garden of strange and beautiful flowers, presented as though Trevett is challenging the reader – if you want this, she seems to be saying, you’re going to have to come closer, read more, listen more carefully – and the translation then provides shape and shade, with the response expanding that into a different context and country. ‘Psalm’, mentioned above, is the reponse to the Vinothini poem translated by Trevett as ‘My Songs’, which celebrates a child’s creativity, tenacity and most importantly her future, which is then taken away from her in the most leaden and symbolically violent manner with that single negation of the final response. This is from Trevett’s translation:
Those unwritten songs rest
in the hands of that little girl
who won’t release them, easily.
I could dwell for a long time on a number of other lovely poems, such as ‘Blue Lotus Flowers’ which is written using the classical Tamil Akam form and which contains such a brilliant description of a young lover, that I can’t resist adding it here:
As beautiful as a peacock on the hillside.
As strong as a bull elephant
swaying among the young grass.
Bright as a green parrot
skimming the mango tree
he called to me.
Or ‘The Last Mango Tree’, which stands as a requiem to, and in soldiarity with, “a lost people”.
But I will finish on my personal favourite poem of the pamphlet, ‘I was Na’amah’, in which ‘the wife of Noah’, who “was known by many names and now by none”, wrestles an identity away from the patriarchy using the many alternative names by which she has been known across the world and throughout the ages. This poem seems to me to encapsulate much that is exciting about this pamphlet: the various names for Na’amah burst onto the page like the flowers of Tamil in other poems; the strength is that of the ‘mute’ refugee arrived in the UK in ‘New Words, New Clothes’; the celebration is for those who are repressed yet stay strong nonetheless; and the rage is aimed at the deadening blindness of a subjugating force which is unable to see the beauty and profundity of the lost meanings this character’s old names represent:
I was Emzara, Noyemza. Norea to the Gnostics.
The Babylonians called me Tytea.
I was the sunrise of creation
the moon glow of eternity.
This poem (like the responses to other poets’ work) brings to mind Carol Ann Duffy, and I don’t see any reason why Shash Trevett should not be mentioned in the same breath as poets of that calibre. From a Borrowed Land is a terrific debut pamphlet, and I would fully recommend buying a copy.
You can buy From a Borrowed Land from The Poetry Business, here.
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