5 Questions with Janaka Malwatta
Janaka Malwatta was born in Kandy, the hill capital of Sri Lanka, grew up in London, and moved to Brisbane in 2010. He writes poems about his experiences as an immigrant in two continents. He also writes narrative poetry, often exploring Sri Lankan stories.
He has performed poetry in Brisbane, including at the Queensland Poetry Festival, and has been published in Cordite Poetry Review, Rabbit Poetry and Peril magazine. He was the Sri Lankan voice on the ESPNCricinfo.com blog The Cordon. He is one half of the poetry and tabla collective Dubla. blackbirds don’t mate with starlings is his first full-length collection of poetry.
(Credit: Claudia Baxter)
No.1
What drew you to poetry in the first instance? Why poetry and not something else?
My first real engagement with poetry came at school. We studied All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, a novel written from the viewpoint of a German soldier in World War I. To present the British view, we studied the War Poets—Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon made a huge impact. They were decorated soldiers, but they wrote anti-war poetry. I had grown up listening to Bob Marley, [who is] in my view the ultimate message musician. I think these two forms of artistic protest connected somewhere in my mind.
Later on, I found spoken word in London. I used to seek out performers like Inua Ellams, Shane Solanki, Kat Francois and Charlie Dark. They were young, contemporary, and were exploring themes of identity and racism. They were saying what I was thinking. I kept going to spoken word gigs, and eventually started writing.
My writing is not limited to poetry, but I do particularly enjoy poetry for a number of reasons. Poems allow the writer to present stories in digestible and easily accessible chunks. Poetry is an oral and a written discipline. Those two elements give you two bites of the apple, in terms of reaching an audience. The demographic that attends a poetry slam may be very different from the demographic that browses the shelves at the State Library. The two forms complement each other. An audience can enjoy a reading, then take the poem away to inwardly digest it at its leisure. I love listening to poetry being performed by the writer. Nothing quite replicates a live performance.
No.2
How did the poems in blackbirds don’t mate with starlings come together?
The genesis of the collection was the terrible murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the backlash against BLM. The opening lines of triptych came to me whilst watching protestors tearing down statues in the UK. That poem opened the floodgates to a lot of sentiments I had obviously been carrying around for a long time. The poems just poured out of me. I then started to explore other issues around race and colonialism I had been pondering for a long time.
The Jack Johnson story has fascinated me from the moment I came to know a Black man had become the world heavyweight champion in the early twentieth century. At the time, white supremacy was openly entrenched in the western world. Contemporaneous newspaper articles overtly stated that a Jack Johnson victory would threaten the very existence of ‘civilisation’, which depended for its prosperity on the continued belief in their own inferiority of the ‘dark races’, and the entitlement of ‘the white man to rule the black’. Johnson triumphed but, like Muhammad Ali, the only other sportsman whose influence outside the sporting arena rivalled Johnson’s, he paid a price.
The segue from Jack Johnson to Boris Johnson allowed me to explore more contemporary events. Boris Johnson has made scathing remarks about Barack Obama, and [we know he] venerates Winston Churchill. It was instructive to examine what Churchill said, and what was said about Obama.
No.3
blackbirds don’t mate with starlings opens with a statement that says that it ‘draws from a collection of nineteenth and twentieth century accounts’ and ‘contains profoundly racist sentiments and language’. I wonder if you will speak more to this—how do you think making this decision (as opposed to eliding the racist language) makes the collection what it is?
One of the purposes of the book is to try to open people’s eyes to issues of racism and discrimination, current and historical, which they may not be aware of. To achieve that aim, one needs to present those issues as they are: raw, horrifying, and undiluted. The language is ugly because the sentiments that language expresses are ugly. To water down the language would be to water down those experiences, which would be fundamentally dishonest and would be disrespectful to the suffering I am trying to witness.
I hope the book does make people uncomfortable in places. People should be uncomfortable with those sentiments and language. People should also be aware that both the sentiments and the language linger to this day. If people are not aware of these injustices, how can they address them?
I hope the language in the book makes people understand the brutality of racism. If that understanding gives people the confidence to intervene if they see injustice unfold in front of them, the book will have achieved something worthwhile.
No.4
As a poet, do you think it’s important to be politically engaged? What were the motivations that drove you to write and finish the poems in blackbirds don’t mate with starlings?
I am not quite as extreme as Bertolt Brecht and his diatribe against what he termed ‘political illiterates’, but I do think it is important for everyone to be politically engaged. Brecht’s point was that everything around us—from the cost of the food we consume, to the education our children receive, to the environment we live in—is politically determined. If we absent ourselves from those discussions, we leave that space in the hands of people who may not share our motivations or whose motivations might be up for sale. There seems to be a growing sense of political disenfranchisement. There is only one solution to that. In the UK, there are absurdly low turnouts for elections. Australia is the only country I’ve lived in which has compulsory voting. I have to say I’m in favour.
The motivation for writing the poems was to embark on a journey of exploration, both internal and external. I think one always writes in the first instance for oneself, whether that be to find something out, or just to tell oneself a story. The motivation for trying to have the poems published, and publicised, is the hope that the next generation does not have to contend with the same issues my generation had to contend with. When I wrote ‘triptych’, my son was almost the same age I was when I first arrived in London as an unwitting immigrant from Sri Lanka. If the book can make a few people open their eyes and empower people to intervene if they see the sort of situations I faced as a child, the discomfort of reliving those experiences, putting them down in print and pushing them out into the world will have been worth it.
No.5
You’re also one half of a tabla collective called Dubla. How do you think music speaks to poetry, and vice versa?
My favourite spoken word event is the long-running Tongue Fu in London, [where] a trio of musicians (usually keyboards, drums, and double bass) improvises behind a poet. The poet gives the musicians some guidance: a memorable request was, ‘Could you play something like the music in a 1950s B-movie when the heroine goes down to the haunted cemetery by herself in the middle of the night, but jazz it up a bit?’—then cracks on and hopes the musicians catch up. Something magical happens when these two artistic disciplines intersect on stage, live and unrehearsed.
Music and the spoken word are natural bedfellows. Rhythm is an integral part of poetry and can augment the emotional impact of a piece of writing. The musical techniques of speeding up, slowing down, the use of silence (which Prince said he learnt from Miles Davis) can equally be deployed in writing.
A skilfully-crafted piece of music can manipulate emotion as effectively as the written word. Bob Marley demonstrated this masterfully when he set Hailie Selassie’s 1963 ‘until the colour of a man’s skin’ speech to the UN to music in the song ‘War’. The repetition of the bass builds and builds to an irresistible climax. Hugh Masekela’s remarkable song ‘Stimela’, which tells the story of the coal train bringing immigrant workers to South Africa’s mines, truly is a marriage of music and poetry, so much so that I read the lyrics as a poem at a poetry event.
I love collaborating with musicians. Femi Akindole, a British Nigerian GP who raps under the name DrBigF MC, set my poem ‘triptych’ to music. Femi chose three different tunes to match the different moods within each section, and did so brilliantly. Cordite Poetry Review published the audio file on their website. It remains one of my favourite collaborations.
The poetry I performed with Dubla was narrative poetry set in Sri Lanka. The tabla was a natural fit. I thoroughly enjoyed performing with Ravikesh Singh. Ravi is a tabla genius. He makes me look good, no matter what I say or how I say it.
Find out more
blackbirds don’t mate with starlings is a work of activism, fury and hope. Its urgent and purposeful poems contribute to the dismantling of racism, raging against its machinery. It combines performance poetry with poetries of witness and memory, recounting personal experiences of racism as well as historic injustices.
The coherence of this collection comes from the incandescent rage that burns from the first poem to the last. Yet there is a measure of compassion here, a compassion that is able to register contradiction and complexity without passing judgement. Ultimately this superb collection directs its imagining towards a just future for the next generation.
Get it from UQP here, or at all good bookstores. Janaka will also be launching the collection at Avid Reader in Meanjin/Brisbane on Nov 4. More info here.