Lilac unveils a bold modern woman’s world
Yesha with her mother at the launch. Pic by Amila Gamage
Lilac- Yesha Fernando’s 96-paged mishmash of short poetry and prose in Sinhala- has the tang of a good translation (Russian? French? Italian? Galician?)- sparkling with references to black velvet whiskey and Morning Glories and Wild Irises. The young poet, who has never left the palm-fringed shores of her island, takes us to the heart of the lived experience in the West beautifully with her writing.
Surely there is a samsaric bond- how else can Yesha waft her way into that Mediterranean world of street cafes and Martinis- and the Slavic wooded horrors of Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Beautiful?
The title, Lilac, she says, is a tribute to the heavy Western element of the book. It is an apt title for a collection that takes you to a world of bluebells and summer mornings, silver ferns and snow drops, Ballerina Reds and hollyhocks.
It is uncanny how a language contoured by an ancient, arid, dry-zone hydraulic civilization- Sinhalese- can conjure European visions so poignantly.
The genesis of these ramblings on paper, says Yesha, were Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books. The Anne of Green Gables series, set against the pristine Canadian wilderness, sparked her imagination. Those books (translated into Sinhala by Manel Jayanthi Gunesekera) with their exploration of a rural childhood, made her discover the wings that good translations can often give a reader.
Yesha is not daunted by geographical boundaries. The whole world could be her province and all history her oyster, as in the story of ‘Kiya’ where she reconstructs in a lyrical narrative the mystery of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten’s young wife, a 14th Century BC princess who gets wiped off the Pharaonic chronicles suddenly- as if by a sandstorm. Yesha sculpts Kiya’s brief tale with imagination, weaving in- as villainess- the famed beauty Nefertiti who was Akhenaten’s chief wife and queen.
But it is a woman’s eternal quest to find love and its ultimate meaning that materializes in a motif of roses and wine even though in bold, short and often scathing verse.
Yesha smiles almost apologetically when she confesses that she is not far from being a traditional mother at home- looking after her nine-year-old daughter. But on paper her alter ego rebels. She writes with candour about the unique flavour a man’s skin possesses. Moving from the salt-and-dust tang on his neck to heavy nicotine of rough lips, she says that the flavour also changes ‘from summer to summer’.
Lilac was born down Green Path one drizzly evening in October. There were no speeches- only mingling- with lilac cupcakes, lilac chocolates and iced coffee under a lowering sky, where everyone lingered freely till late to acoustic music.
It was a bohemian baptism for a poet who had been blowing her dandelions sporadically on cyberspace. It will, hopefully, be the formal ushering in of a new, bold woman poet who hacks away at the elegant female to reveal a modern woman, candid about her own needs and desires.