Ignite Your Mind
Vavuniya Refugee Camp
Aparna Eswaran in conversation with Eelam poet Cheran Rudhramoorthy
As an undergraduate student, Cheran Rudhramoorthy from atop his hostel room witnessed the burning of Jaffna city and the public library being set ablaze by the Sri Lankan military forces. He saw therein, a message the fire had written upon the clouds. It was a sunset, but he called it a second sunrise, knowing very well that the future was bleak, because “when you burn books, what follows next is inevitably a burning of people”. In a powerful prophetic vision, he saw the apocalypse approaching. Thirty years later when he comes out with his eighth collection of poems, Kaadaatru (The Healing of the forest), the unsettling images of his earlier poems; the wounded land mass, the dance of the dead, the blood of tears; had all come true. By May, 2009, genocide had been committed, people were burned.
R. Cheran
R. Cheran
Growing up among books and in company of poets that included the influence of his father ‘Mahakavi’, Cheran very early on discovered the oral potential of poetry. He memorized and recited huge chunks of his poetry in public and performed in plays. Cheran’s poetry is also a continuing story of Sri Lanka and Tamils, the poet and his craft journeys with it. The lyricism and aesthetic resonances of his earlier poetry gave way over time to a more economic writing which conveyed the parching of sensibilities at the onslaught of external violence, of living amidst the dead. In his early poems while we see a depiction of the pastoral beauties of his land, later on, the same landscape is evoked to convey the brutality committed on it by the war. Each poem of his became a testimony of a witness, a draft of the struggle at understanding, at reconciliation. It is also a human document pleading for clarity in the most difficult of times, when forgetting is a crime. He became the chronicler of specific events as well as a curator of universal human emotions.