| Abstrakt: |
The Cubist painter George Keyt became, in the three books of verse he wrote while unable to paint, Sri Lanka's first Anglophone Modernist poet. His enquiry into the limits of representation, cognized through an alignment of literary with visual art, became central to Sri Lankan lyric. Although poems in this line take up the argument that Western art is an aesthetic branch of colonialism, their indebtedness to Modernist painting (and Modernist poetry) makes for self-questioning, intertextual and cross-generic encounters. As Sri Lankan poets wonder how, in a borrowed, contaminated language, to depict, analyse and memorialize complex and traumatic experiences, they turn repeatedly to visual art (invoked as a metaphor, but also as a model). Comparing works by Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, Indran Amirthanayagam, Parvati Solomons Arasanayagam and her mother Jean Arasanayagam, we see how the appearance of visual art in a Sri Lankan poem makes possible transactions between identity and otherness, experience and aesthetics. This essay extends the "dialogic poetics" of Jahan Ramazani to argue that these Anglophone lyrics of the Global South engage painting as a means of achieving a poetic reflexivity that is also a historical situatedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
