A personal tapestry of racial prejudice

Drawn from his experiences growing up in London, Janaka Malwatta’s recent debut poetry collection, ‘blackbirds don’t mate with starlings’, that won the 2021 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, will be launched in Colombo

For Janaka Malwatta, poetry is a sensory celebration – a rich buth curry feast for a returnee. His debut collection, ‘blackbirds don’t mate with starlings’, as the title so vividly remonstrates, is a diatribe against racism but this GP from Brisbane, ‘not afraid to call a racist a racist’ as one reviewer said, is far from being an embittered émigré.

Take his early poetry, which appears on his website http:// janakamalwatta.com. Harking back to an island where his ancestry is in the emerald hills of Kandy, it is colourful and pungent and savoury like our island cuisine:

‘Leaf through the Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book,/ price six hundred rupees, first published in 1929,/ negotiate the joys of Sri Lankan English/ and the injunctions laid upon housewives/ to ‘achieve domestic felicity by feeding the brute’/ you’ll find recipes for curried Jak fruit/ snakegourd and wattalapam,/ vadai, idly and rasam,/ easter eggs and frikkadels,/ gotukola, Chinese rolls,/ Yorkshire pudding,/ kathuramurunga,/ mango chutney and, my favourite,/ invalid blancmange.’

‘The way the cookbook’s recipes jump/ from lunu miris to Victoria sponge,/ from poffertjes to malu pan,/ from the cobblestones of old Amsterdam/ to white villas snoozing in the Algarve sun,/ from Chinese sailors, Malay soldiers,/Arab merchants, and tall Afghans….’

However, his new collection, winner of the 2021 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, to be launched at the Barefoot Garden Café on March 30, is of a different order and tunnels back to the mid 1970s, when the Malwattas moved from Kandy to London. Experiences of racial prejudice, personal and vicarious, of fifty years are woven into this tapestry. He does not hesitate to use the ‘toxic language’ of the aggressors, uncensored, in order to ‘render a faithful depiction of these events, precisely to portray their ugliness’.

Growing up in Dulwich with his doctor parents, Janaka got hooked on poetry when his O’ Level class read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, a work that looked at the First World War through German eyes, followed by the work of the British war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to ‘balance’ the perspective.

At medical school he used to slip away to performance poetry events. Inua Ellams, Shane Solanki, Kat Francois and Charlie Dark, all were poets who gave angry outspoken voice to the racism they had grown up with.

The genesis of the current collection, says Janaka, was at the height of the uproar over the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) and the backlash at BLM. Watching on TV the statues of slave owners – also of Winston Churchill – being pulled down, he felt a rush of empathy for the vandals and a quatrain swam up to his consciousness, the beginning of the poem Triptych:

“Middle aged, overweight Tyres around my waist When I see them pull down statues Their rage is my rage”

The whole collection sprang from these hastily scribbled lines.

The book comes in four sections. The first, Unburdenings, deals with racial slurs he experienced in the UK as a child; Examinings, with overheard conversations revealing the unconscious racism of interlocutors; Imaginings – fictional poetry of experiences of immigrants in UK and Australia; Foundlings with found poetry from text by Jack Johnson and others; and an Epilogue.

For Janaka, Jack Johnson is a heroic figure in that, in a world of white supremacy, he became the world heavyweight champion, and despite being the son of a slave wrote his memoirs in beautiful English and wrote to French newspapers in immaculate French.

Despite having spent most of his life in London Janaka considers himself a Sri Lankan writer and it is of the island that he writes. Some of this he imbibed through ‘uncles and aunties’ and evokes deep nostalgia for rambling houses and gardens in his poetry. In Portello for instance he writes:

‘Portello is the taste of sunshine/ Portello is the taste of/ long afternoons/ in an open air pool/ during summer holidays which didn’t seem to end

‘Portello is the taste of/ freshly fried patties, / pastry crisp and crumbly, / devoured with the smell of chlorine still in your hair

‘Portello is my aunt, / round arms and round face, / who has a bottle of Portello in her fridge/ within an hour of me landing at Katunayake Airport/ remembering my craving from the last time, / and the time before that, / going back thirty years’

Inspiration, Janaka gathers from many fields. He reads Persian poetry and Japanese from Omar Khayyam to Li Bo.

Janaka says he is planning to move to Sri Lanka with his young family – wife and son, soon. He finally adds a word in advice to young writers. “Join a writing group; you learn a lot of what works… the group can give you critiques and feedback and develop each other’s work.”

‘blackbirds don’t mate with starlings’ will be launched at the Barefoot Garden Café on March 30.