A discussion on The Public Mirror by Dimuthu Samudra Liyanage

The Public Mirror, a collection of self-published poems by Dimuthu Samudra Liyanage presents a glimpse into the mind of an “unconventional” man who “weaves” his “sorrows and pains into …words” and shares them with the world.

 The first poem of the collection “Without You!” deals with the necessity of the monsoon rains to sustain life on earth. The poem contains several powerful visual images marking a transition from negativity to positivity. Like in many of the poems in the collection, Dimuthu uses repetition and parallelism as a major technique in this poem, too, in order to underscore the themes of hope and fear.

In “You and I and Love” the poet talks about the unbridgeable distance between him and his loved one which nevertheless is not an impediment to their love and death as the unavoidable end of all things mortal. He uses long vowel sounds, parallelism and repetition to highlight the pain of unrealized desire and love.

“Under the Rags”, on the other hand is about a beggar. The poetic persona comes across a dead beggar with a wad of rolled up cash in his hand. He reports the incident to the Police. In the meantime, the money disappears and the police question him about the disappearance of the money. At this point, he casually mentions another beggar moving into the area. Here too the poet uses a lot of powerful visual images. The poet also uses conversation in order to give a feeling of immediacy to the event. Similarly, “The Last 10-Rupee note” is an interaction between a beggar and a would-be-benefactor whose mind is not yet made up on whether to part with the last 10 rupee note he had. Here, underneath lay the tragedy of the middleclass – those of the middleclass have very little but they have to maintain appearances.

Both “My little ones world” and “Dear Educationist” voice a father’s worries over his son’s future. In the former, the father is afraid of the impact of TV, fast food and pollution have on his young son’s emotional, intellectual and physical health.  The father is plainly aware of a better way of life and he regrets his son is not enjoying such life. In “Dear Educationist” he asks his son’s teacher to give his son “some time to play/[h]opscotch, cart wheel or molds with clay”. He wants the educationist to “[u]ntie” his son’s trapped wings so that “he would fly high/ over the dales where daffodils would lie.” In “Black and White Rainbows”  the poetic persona is engaged in a struggle to bring colour to the world while the woman who loves him is projected as limited in her vision and mission: “In black and white/Her love she keeps.” Consequently, she fails to understand his mission. With the passage of time the would-be-bringer-of-colours too changes and both he and the woman become preoccupied with their parental duties. His sense of beauty narrows down to admiring the fringes of his daughter’s dress.

“The Public Mirror” the poem that Dimuthu chooses to name his collection after, is a reflection on our desire for the tangible or at least visual evidence of what we have lost. After wars statues are built to commemorate those who fall in action. On the pedestal of this particular statue the statue maker had embedded a “public mirror”. Anyone who stands in front of it sees what he wants to see the most. For the birds and dogs, the mirror is of no significance. However, the “aged mother” whose son had died in the war sees her child’s entire life from infancy in the mirror – “[a] pittering-pattering destiny.” The mirror is a “miracle heart/ [o]f empathy” for the mourning old mother. Similarly, “[t]he mirror’s heart mops up/ [t]he pain” of parting of the war widow who comes to the statue with “a bouquet,” “sobs” and “freshly dried tears.”

With the passage of time the mirror loses its sparkle. Young men yearning for adventure remember the statue, though, and visit the “framed memory”. So when fresh violence breaks out they take up arms and march on to battlefields where death awaited them. The mirror’s heart cracks. Once again, another mirror is embedded on the pedestal of the statue signaling a new cycle.

“In Dark Confession” the poet is praying to god for the ability to forgive the fanatic and a rubber to erase the tragic memories that haunt him. In “Tomorrow is Another Day” the poet is lamenting the existence angst/ utter meaningless of everything. He uses historical allusions both ancient and relatively modern to convey his theme. Ultimately, the poetic persona “just turn[s] back from all.”

“Mission of Peace” sets calls for war at odds with calls for peace. The forth stanza summarizes the aftermath of conflicts:

Dying hopes on tearless eyes

Anxious patience whispering cries

Many a gone a few arrives with

Smothering chests …breathless numbs.

 In the last stanza, the poet intensifies the pathos generated by the entire poem by using a series of potent visual images:

A silent thrush, a parched bush

Half-scorched, two wings …smokes

A wailing shell, a thunderous drill

Half-hatched, two eggs …cracks.

Once again in “The Solitary Hustle” the poet deals with the repetitive nature of day-to-day life, our myopic preoccupation with our routine, our desire to reach our goals in life and the ultimate realization of the futility of all human endevours. In “The Lost Path” the poetic persona is engaged in a spiritual quest. He is grappling with the question whom he should turn to for guidance “when every human link” is broken and when our “deprived soul” is “desperately poisoned” – should it be “Jesus” or “Gauthama”? He rejects Jesus on the ground that he could not even help himself and Guthama because he is surrounded by “slaves” but just looks on. The poem ends with the voice not having made a decision. In “Buddha’s Icon” the poet laments commercialization of the image of the Buddha:

Behold!

I saw him

At the pavement store

On a fabric glow …!

Casting

The everlasting compassion

Over the straying masses …!

In “Emancipation,” once again the poet is dealing with the meaninglessness of performing rituals that comes in popular Buddhism which aim at finding solace for earthly trials and tribulations. The poetic persona is the Buddha statue in front of which these rituals are performed which declares frankly its inability to be of any assistance to the devotees.  

Poem 18, “The socialized Pest,” offers a completely different point of view. In that the poet deals with the human tendency to tame and anthropomorphize other living beings resulting in identity crisis for them. The tamed chimpanzee and its bride have two children, “a chimp/ [a]nd a man!” in “The Hound,” we hear the voice of a dog describing the services it provides his master and the rewards it gets in return for those services. The dog betrays its fellow beings in the service of man for “a [p]at on the head,” and a “bone at the end” or a “praise.” The conditioning of the dog in order to continue such behavior through reinforcement is pointed out by the poet by using repetition. Of course the dog could be read as the agent of repression under powerful entities. They harass their own kind for petty rewards thrown their way by whose use them to maintain their socioeconomic power.

In both “the Opportunity Cost” and “the Scarlet Woman” the poet deals with the sex trade. In “The Opportunity Cost’ the reward for selling sex was a “crust bread/ [s]ome lentils / Four bellies to grow.”

“Two Distance,” “the Soul Collector,” “Rent a Mourner,” “On the Zebra Crossing,” “The Earthly Life,” “At 60” and “The Facebook Account” deal with various aspects of death. In “Two Distance,” “you” and “I” are at the two ends of and age spectrum: one is 5 years old while the other is 50. In the “Soul Collector,” death is personified as a benevolent power who “shares a woe/ [a]tear or two/ [t]hough you are not there” for you. In “Rent a Mourner,” the poet looked on the ritualization and commercialization of an extremely private moment as well as disintegration of the society. “On the zebra crossing” tells us how sudden death can be while “the Earthly Life” is about the cyclical of birth and death and the Grand Design. Life is represented by: “jasmine, marigold, [and] land primroses” that attempts to move “upwards/ [w]orshipping the light only for the [[d]ark death” to beckon “beneath.” “At 60” is a short poem of 3 stanzas teeming with autumnal images implying the end of life which brings to mind “[i]solated fears.” In “The Facebook Account,” the poet deals with sensationalizing death for public consumption. Instead of helping the victims, everyone is busy taking a photograph that would go viral.

In “Fire-fly Love” a firefly trapped by the emerging daylight falls in love with a moth that he felt that was “luminous” like him. In the end, the moth dies leaving the firefly heartbroken. In the last poem “Divided by Two” Dimuthu deals with mother’s love for a child. The mother in the poem nourishes her child at the expense of her own health as an act of conscious selflessness as opposed to the child’s unconscious selfishness:

A little to be divided futher

Which she started feeding me bit by bit

Her hand trembling and eyes flooding; face smiling.                                  

 All in all, The Public Mirror is an interesting collection of poems that touches a wide variety of human interests. The imagery used is quite refreshing yet approachable to even to someone quite new to poetry. Dimuthu’s collection could have, like those of alomost all writers who use a language not his own, benefitted by the friendly intervention of an experienced editor; still even the occastional mishaps cannot hide the innate beauty of Dimuthu Liyanage’s writing.       .