Violence, devastation and pain in the poetics of rudhramoorthy cheran

Sri Lankan Tamil poet Rudhramoorthy Cheran has written profoundly about the tragedy of the Sri Lankan Civil War in his poems. His poems are a documentation of the historical events which took place during the 26-year-long civil war fought between Sri Lankan government and Tamil rebels, blended with heart-wrenching and soul-stirring accounts of voices lost in the blare of the war. His first poetry collection, The Second Sunrise, published in 1982, a year after the aftermath of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library by Sinhalese mob, manifests the horror and trauma of a wounded land. Loss and anguish finds powerful expressions in Cheran’s discourse through the employment of concrete, vivid and brutal imagery. These emotions are tempered by a calm, deep stillness- that is reflected most fully in his awareness of the sea, a recurring image in many of his poems. Violence, brutality and suffering transcend time, space, geographical and racial structures, thus transforming the aesthetic of pain into a subversive praxis. Through Cheran’s poetics, the marginalised voices of a distorted Sri Lankan landscape, carve its way out and make space for itself in the literary canon of White Supremacist War Poetry. Thus this paper attempts to delineate on how Cheran deters from the Eurocentric portrayal of the war sentiments in his partly autobiographical poetics based on ethnic conflicts of his homeland Sri Lanka.