Healing the present with the past

Oct 06, 2019 Book Review…, News

---

Book: Unknown Soldier
Author: Sensi Seneviratne
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD

Poet Sensi Seneviratne’s visionary work, Unknown Soldier, speaks to the transcultural virtue of filial piety. It is on the edifice of her father’s past – her memories – that Seneviratne finds wholeness. Her words are wistful, hagiographic, cathartic and therapeutic. She peers through the crevices of time in search of meaning. The past, ever nuanced and interpretative, challenges the most discerning among us. We must connect the dots sewing together every disjointed piece for clarity.
The poet journeys through the cycles of time, from her father’s military service, to fatherhood, to his waning health to his last breath. Aesthetically, she captures episodic tales through photos, letters and narratives. His experiences in the 1939-1945 desert war of North Africa, the banter and camaraderie, and the destiny that shadowed him.
Her words are weighty, swaying like a pendulum, each direction sparring with the other for emotional relevance. Her optimism and acceptance are at times overcome with guilt and fatalism. Such was the emotive bond they shared.
Notably, every selection resonates with palpable feeling.
‘Love of My Life,’ ‘Low Moments,’ ‘Troopship,’ ‘The Habit of Hope’ and ‘When Someone’s Got Your Back,’ speak to the vicissitudes and vagaries of the human experience.
In ‘Dear Dad,’ her father’s calm stoicism under weighty conditions evoke admiration. “It’s so typical of you to think of going up on the deck when tough seas made the mess unbearable,” she writes.
Tinged with guilt, she adds, “That reference to your trip on the Orama from Ceylon to England 12 years ago makes me so sorry I never asked you more about that crossing as well as this one.”
In “Photo Albums’ she regresses, her mind filled with images. A picture tells a thousand words, and from these images, she learns gratitude, understanding the sacrifices of parenthood and the ‘divinity’ of the bloodline. With nostalgia, she recounts – “I am on his knee, eight months old, my small face inside a fluffy bonnet. On one side my sister, his arm around her and one of his fingers reaching to touch her hand my brother nestled into the crook of his other arm. His looks intent on keeping us safe.”
History, we gather, can never be fully recaptured. Its nuances and subtleties run deep obfuscating our search for knowledge. It is a philosophy that weaves through ‘The Monument.’ “It’s merely the slabs of stone…they recall the granite of old graveyards, it’s the filling in the gaps, the acceptance of what’s missing in the spaces between,” she pens.
In ‘Remember,’ our imprints imbue nature for all eternity. Our thought forms, so charged with yearning that others relive them. Seneviratne explores this phenomenon, writing, “…the first walk in the woods […] before bending to see the face of a woman carved by the movement of rock against itself, her brow leaning against stone, her gaze fixed on an elephant dancing under a bright fern which had sprouted against all odds, from a cleft in the rock.”
Seneviratne produces her most memorial writing in ‘Last Visit to the Hospice, recounting her father’s last moments.
“He was on the edge of heaven, talking to the dead, I, the non-believer, stayed there with him and quenched his quiet thirst with sips of water,” she recalls. “In the end it seems that all I’d ever wanted was to hold his hand in comfort, so I held his hand; it was the only thing to do, and quenched his quiet thirst with sips of water.”
‘At the Co-op funeral directors,’ there is an organic quietude to dying, a stillness where she finds transcendence and oneness with her father. There is no “submitting to the formal requirements of dying.” There is rather an authenticity “to the business of grieving, “ as she honoured her mother’s words, “I want him buried in his pajamas.”
The Unknown Soldier redefines the meaning of ancestral veneration and its long-held religious carapace. The writer’s father is central, a figure that bridges all of time. There is a redemptive, almost salvific quality to the father-daughter bond, not in a spiritual sense. Seneviratne is an unbeliever; that much she conceded.
But in some profound way, her faith is far deeper than she cares to understand. To honour an ancestor so selflessly and yearningly, not with rituals, but with the heart, reaps a meed that spans many lifetimes. Surely, Seneviratne is blessed in ways unimaginable.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)
Feedback: glenvilleashby@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby

©2019 Sensi Seneviratne

Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd

ISBN 13: 9781845234515

Available: at Amazon

Ratings: Recommended

 

---

---