The Naming of Names

Shash Trevett’s The Naming of Names begins with a note to the reader: “This book is filled with names. They will be strange and unfamiliar to you. As you turn these pages you will be tempted to gloss over, skim, even ignore them. Please don’t.” Every name in the book belongs to a Tamil person killed by the Sri Lankan state. These names, writes Trevett, are “[t]he hiss of incense on a funeral pyre.” Though the book is introduced as a kind of a textual memorial, the sibilance of “hiss” and the endurance of the incense sounds a note beyond mere remembrance—it hints at rage, and the dream of a free Tamil Eelam.

The book is a record of the civil war beginning with Black July, a week-long pogrom against the Tamils in July 1983, through to the last three months of the war in 2009, with UN estimates putting the death toll at 40,000–70,000. From “Night Bombings”:

When they began, artificial suns
tore open the sky in flashes
of such power, we waited
for the universe to explode.

Trevett’s tone is at times sober, testimonial. The details are so devastating that poetic embellishment risks disbelief: “The mob gouged out their eyes first / that day in Welikade Prison. / They drank their blood and shouted:/ Look, we have drunk the blood / of blinded Damila Demons.”

Refusing to succumb to the numbing effect of generalities, Trevett insists on specifics—each act of barbarity and each name counts. From “At Jaffna Teaching Hospital, 21st October 1987”:

They found them in the X-Ray Block.
Dr Sivapathasundaram, Consultant Paediatrician; 
Dr Ganesharatnam, Surgical Registrar;
along with nurses Mankayarkkarasi, 
Paramananthan, Leelawathy,
Sivapakiam and Ramanathan.

Trevett’s book is as much about state violence as it is about the problem of recounting that violence as survivor, witness, and poet. For Trevett, one way of grappling with the difficulty of tackling the “self” while relating unmediated brutality is by including her translations of work by other Eelam poets alongside her own poems. From “Grave Song,” by the Tamil poet and scholar Cheran: “His distress, the horrors he felt, / were trapped within his final words // which congealed in the air / above that grave.”