26.august2015
Halal as a metaphor for the search for understanding
by Sivamohan Sumathy
HALAL
The season’s come to a close
and we are about to go.
In this half way resting place
you looked after us well.
Thank you, Kaaka.
The watch tower’s taken down,
and the sticks are in the cart.
Your field lies by the spine of my own,
and when you seeded, a few
might have crossed the common line,
and scattered into my side too.
They would have sprouted
into so many ears of pearly grain.
Say Halal! and bless them.
The cart’s about to go,
We take our leave. Assalamu alaikkum!
Fazeel Kariyappar. 1988.
trans. by sumathy. 2013
Fazeel Kariyappar lived most of his life in Sammanthurai. He was a teacher. In wanting to find a way out of the political morass of extremism that is hemming us in today, from different quarters, socially, politically and economically, I turned to the poem he wrote in 1988, a poem I would describe as agriculturalist in subject matter, thematically of co-existence and modern/ist in idiom and sentiment.
In his life time, Kariyappar did not achieve the fame that similar poets in Tamil, Sinhala or English achieved. In this poem he speaks of neighbourliness, co-existence, matters that underpinned an agriculturalist life style. The poem is located within an idiomatic understanding of an agriculturalist economy, but not necessarily exclusively. Reading the poem today after several years I am stuck by its significance for our times, its modern/ist idiom and consciousness.
I want to talk about the salience of this poem to our times within this framework of the modern. Could we use it to prise open one of the self perpetuating discourses of modernity—clannism, nationalism, ethnicisation—and their extremist variant, fascism? Could we use it as a counter point to the rampaging discourse surrounding the certification of Halal, a monster unleashed by Bodhu Bala Sena and other extremist factions? What struck me about Kariyappar’s use of halal is the multiplicity of meanings it generates which the singled mindedness of extremism will be hard put to understand or grapple with.
The poem is about place. Place in the poem is not a given; it has to be requested and permitted, granted. It has to be articulated in terms of an appeal, a request, what is allowed, permitted and as a blessing: "your fields and mine, they are adjacent. I will take my leave. But you will stay. I ask for your permission, to grant me my prosperity, gain." Kariyappar speaks not of a life style, but of economics, class, mobility and even gender.
Finally, the poem for me is not just about extremism, Bodhu Bala Sena or the LTTE. It calls for a rethinking of the modes of articulating the self as autonomous and self governing. The poem’s ‘we,’ the ‘self,’ is mobile and understood only in terms of its negotiation with the ‘you’ and its act of appeal touching upon apology. The binary of self and other is undermined through the assertion, the proclamation of ‘halal,’ not as an authorization, but as a transaction, a dialogue, a giving. Such an articulation as place eludes our ethnicised nationalist consciousnesses, which envisions it as territory, conquest, as exclusive and self imposing. In offering this poem in translation to ‘you’, I invite you to join me in discussion, to rethink what is offered by ‘halal’, to look beyond the binaries of self/other, and to look beyond authority and authorization. I request us here, in this discussion, to forge a consciousness of the ‘we’ in the multiple ways called for by the poem.
Sivamohan Sumathy is attached to the Department of English, University of Peradeniya
