Indran Amirthanayagam

The poetry of migration

Q: How do you maintain a connection to your Sri Lankan heritage while living in the US?

A: Ceylon is in my blood, heart, dreams and memory. It walks with me as I walk about the world; it is paradise, Eden, “where only Man is vile”; it is my family, my roots; it is beautiful; it is ocean and jungle; it is civil war, and an invitation to eat and drink to all and sundry.

And Ceylon has been the subject of some of my most treasured books – The Elephants of Reckoning; The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems; and Uncivil War.

Q: Do you find yourself expressing different emotions or perspectives depending on the language you’re using?

A: The language of love is universal. I love in all my languages – French, Spanish, English, Portuguese and Haitian Creole.

But I’ve forgotten the languages of my childhood – namely, Tamil and Sinhala. So I feel great regret and a great debt at the same time to those forgotten languages, and the cultures they express.

The truth is that I wiped them away in a traumatic effort to adjust to the new world as an eight-year-old boy in London, facing an evil figure dressed in black on a bicycle who flung racial epithets at me along with her cane.

Q: You grew up in different places – from London to Hawaii. Have these diverse environments influenced your writing style and themes?

A: A. K. Ramanujan called my first book “a welcome addition to the poetry of migration.” That phrase informs all my work.

I’m a migrant poet. I’ve crossed borders of all sorts – geographic, linguistic and cultural. I do not believe in borders. And I believe that we are diverse, owing to our diverse cultures.

But we’re one people before God and nature. And we’re failing to conserve and let thrive this gift, ecosystem and Earth. We’re failing our fellow beings, and other animals, birds, insects and fish.

We must do better to celebrate life and live sustainably to pass on the gift to future generations. Poetry is my way of raising the alarm.

Q: Can you describe your typical writing process?

A: I begin my day by listening to news in different languages from various parts of the world. I also read newspapers online… but don’t read enough – there is such a wealth of source material.

This consumption is important to my writing process. I am a lyric poet of love and religious poet. I’m interested in the human relationship with love, God, and the Earth and planets, and stars.

I’ve been called a news poet, poet of migration, poet of the limonada (a reference to the sweetness of my Spanish verse). I rail against the idea that poetry makes nothing happen.

I believe that poems are necessary for commemorations and funerals. But they also need to be read in the boardroom and cabinet room, and should be published in newspapers and on news sites.

Poems offer news of the heart. We need to connect to its beat.