The Copper Tumbler & Donkeys in Mannar: A Work of Mourning – II
By Laleen Jayamanne
(First part of this article appeared in The Island Midweek Review on 12 July 2023)
‘it is not narrative that we should abandon but chronology’’ Kumar Shahani
Matter and Memory: Copper and Fire
The image of the copper tumbler on fire in the microwave oven is shocking and dangerous because of the proximity to electricity. But beyond that visceral shock, the image itself feels like the burning heart of this quiet film. This image on fire, in the hum-drum space of the kitchen, is an accident. The film doesn’t tell us who put it in there but we can guess. The tumbler itself is also emotionally supercharged. We learn that lots of stuff has happened to that copper tumbler, it has a mini-history.
The old mother, Daisy Teacher, was entrusted with a set of special copper tumblers and other personal items for safekeeping by her friend and colleague, Fatima Teacher, before the latter was evicted from her home in Mannar, along with a host of other Muslims. Clearly, she expected to return soon. Daisy Teacher’s son Jude who questioned the LTTE about this expulsion disappears at the same time and in her grief his mother collapses the two events, blaming her friend. She gets rid of the set of tumblers and all of the valuables left with her in trust. She has gone past understanding that like her son, Fatima Teacher is also a victim of LTTE violence, not the cause of it.
Quite by chance a single tumbler survives Daisy Teacher’s effort to get rid of the set. The surviving tumbler opens up a wound barely healed and also potential. Several Lankan and other critics have appreciated that the violence of the war is not represented in the film, but instead emerges in recollections. The single tumbler is a special copper cup, invested with the values of friendship between two professional women, the Tamil Daisy Teacher who taught English and the Muslim Fatima Teacher who taught Biology. Daisy Teacher flings the tumbler on the floor yelling at the maid for having served her tea in it when she had been ordered never to do so. Soon after as a result, the repressed past (at once personal and historical in scale), erupts irresistibly into the present.
Potentiality as an idea can be treated in two ways. As an Aristotelian scientific category, it is about strict cause and effect. It’s a latent possibility in an actuality – for example, a seed is a potential tree. The seed can only become that species of tree and no other. Change here is predictable and rationally understandable by science.
Now, the image of the tumbler on fire does not have a potential in this sense, its outcomes are indeterminate. It creates a breach within the hum-drum everyday normality. It opens up an old wound and raw pain manifests as shock and anger. But the sound and image of a copper tumbler of hot tea, first flung on the floor by Daisy Teacher, then catching fire in a microwave oven, and then subject to discussion, harbours historical memory.
If we allow the sense of utter urgency of the ‘mad’ old mother to rattle us, and we linger there, the sparks will fire our imagination. Then we might recall that there are similarly singular, disturbing fire-powered images in Sumathy’s two previous films also. I am thinking of the white car set ablaze by a Sinhala racist nationalist mob, with the film director K. Venkat trapped within it and his muffled mournful cries as he is burned to death, in Sons and Fathers. Then there is the burning tea bush in Ingirunthu, with Peter seated beside it playing his accordion in the dead of night, for example. But in their repetition, these fiery images do very different things, never the same.
So, the copper tumbler on fire in the microwave, in the kitchen, is not a Symbol, nor a Metaphor, or an Allegory. A symbol, like for example the blindfolded figure holding the scales of justice signifies that The Law is unbiased, objective, and rationally balanced. A metaphor, according to the very etymology of the word, converts one thing into something else without residue, unlike a simile, as in ‘Juliet is the sun,’ pure radiance. As for allegory, it has a bad name because it is arbitrary, unlike symbol and metaphor.
So, there can be ‘a tea bush on fire’ in Sumathy’s Ingirunthu which does not turn to ashes. The relationship between the tea bush and fire is ‘arbitrary’ which is what allegory does, it stops time, so we can read the image. You can’t say for example, that the tea bush is fire, there is no intelligible connection between the two. Their relationship is arbitrary but an imaginative director may help us perceive a sensuous abstraction, creating an allegorical connection, rather than a dry abstract juxtaposition.
What critical move can we then make (having eliminated the main rhetorical figures we critics reach for, filed neatly in our brains), when we are lost for words in the face of such a singular image as a copper tumbler ablaze? There is, I think, a challenge, a critical imperative and an intellectual impulse too, to keep going back to it to see and hear it and think of its materiality and its immaterial powers of connectivity (sparks) with the rest of the film – its filmic provenance, so to speak.
We can register its unusual materiality; it’s a copper cup, not a base metal like tin of which most tumblers (belek coppa) are made. Who makes tumblers in copper one wonders and learn from Daisy Teacher’s rambling, crazy but partly lucid monologue that, ‘it’s of very good quality (using English), they don’t make them like that anymore’. It is believed that the ancient Mantai port, the main one for Anuradhapura, once even exported Seruwila copper to India. So, it’s very likely that a tradition of making those copper cups was alive in the country, alluded to by Daisy Teacher.
Copper is a precious civilizational metal, one of the oldest materials to be crafted by humans, providing also the material for the iconic bronze sculpture of Lanka across Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as Modernist and Contemporary abstract sculpture. So, a pure copper tumbler is part of a formidable Lankan lineage (though humbly domestic).
It sanctifies the friendship, trust and professional loyalty shared by Daisy Teacher and Fatima Teacher. That copper tumbler, in what poets call its ‘thisness,’ in its facticity, in its material links to history, is a Bazinean ‘fact-image,’ in both its use value and iconic value. It stirs one’s faculty of memory, opening up Epic-Memory, connecting an intimate female friendship with historical civilizational memory of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious polity, which includes trade and migration too. Those, as I see and understand, are some of the potential of the burning copper tumbler.
* * * *
The penultimate sequence in The Single Tumbler is of Old Daisy Teacher, dressed in a lime green sari with a dark blue-green blouse, leaving her house, shuffling along the main road, alone, with a dazed and distressed expression (captured in a profile tracking mid-shot, framed against trees), carrying that dented burnt copper tumbler, hoping to return it to her friend.
Even in her madness her ethical sensibility has re-emerged in her futile quest. She passes two donkeys at a crossroad when the camera leaves them behind, gathering speed on one of Sumathy’s favourite tracking shots taken from Lalitha’s car taking her to the airport, leaving behind Mannar town with its large Christian cemetery and church, crossing the causeway with its water landscape vistas as music strikes up.
Instead of ending there, quite unexpectedly, we are taken back to the family home. We see the familiar back veranda with a pot, mortar and pestle and some firewood, where Daisy Teacher gave her monologue. A wide shot of the house front, at a mid-distance, appears as the last image, rather than as the establishing shot at the beginning of the film. In inverting the traditional chronological order, this home we have inhabited is soaked in memory and feeling, which would not have been the case had we seen it as just a house at the beginning.
The film in fact opens with a woman glancing at the camera and saying animatedly, ‘Amma!’ It’s an odd way to open a film in mid-sentence, with this disorienting mid-shot, to not be given a context (the master shot), but that is indeed its strength, one realises later. We enter the film in medias res (in the middle) of hearing an outburst. The context becomes clear soon after, learning that it is the older daughter from Canada, Lalitha who appears to address us. But we are not quite sure of the film’s mode of address, because the camera has made its presence felt through that repeated direct glance at us through the camera lens. The entire opening scene is filmed with a hand-held camera which adds a feeling of volatility, a slight sense of unease physically.
Suddenly the scene cuts to a public street of a row of closed shops but with a snatch of conversation among the siblings played over it for continuity. The cut away happens when Jesse mentions the bazaar of their childhood and alludes to the army’s rampage in Mannar town during the war, when they attacked innocent people and burned down shops in retaliation to an LTTE ambush of an army truck leading to deaths. Through these rhetorical moves, Sumathy breaks the traditional rules of scene construction. And in doing so she creates a narrative freedom to shift her mode of address in ways that are unexpected, disorienting and yet rhythmically persuasive.
I haven’t said much about the conversations and chit chat which really constitutes the film. There are the usual family conversations, catching up on this and that, then there is the long and disorienting monologue of Daisy Teacher, also recounting traumatic events. Anthony appears to be the sibling most damaged by the war years, having lost his youth to its terror. The two sisters remember a distant past that sounds idyllic. When Lalitha (who slips into English intermittently), asks about the disappearance of Jude, Anu, stuck at home, doing chores, caring for their mother and her own family, responds impatiently with, ‘that’s an old story, now we have other problems’! But anecdotal accounts of the history of the civil war, its horror at a personal and mass scale are woven in and out casually, including the circumstances of Jude’s disappearance. The question about what really happened to him keeps coming up. Amidst all this, a few lines of Daisy Teacher have stayed with me. When she hears that Fatima Teacher has died, she responds sharply:
“Why did she die! She’s my age. Why did she have to die!” This is in the same monologue where she irrationally says that Jude disappeared because Fatima Teacher cursed him.
Neo-Realist Acting?
The Post WWII Italian Neo-Realist cinema created a new kind of cinema and film acting, on the rubble of a war-ravaged Italy, even as the Nazis withdrew from the country’s North. Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945), Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1946), introduced a new kind of realism into acting which Bazin theorised in the course of celebrating the emergence of this movement of cinematic resistance to fascism from 1945 on. While Rossellini worked with celebrated actors like Anna Mangani, he also included non-actors, and people from the very milieux filmed. He elicited remarkable performances from them, especially from little children.
Sumathy also uses a mix of people, experienced actors like Sharmini Masilamani as Lalitha, and her own eldest sister Nirmala Rajasingham, as the mother. The actor playing the younger brother, Suman Loganathan appeared in Ingirunthu. Nirmala as a person, carries a complex political history. These personal connections with the realities presented are very important for Sumathy, in her choice of people to act in her films, along with their professional competence, which Is why I am invoking Italian Neo-Realism here, which continues to nourish world cinema, though the Italian movement ended after a few years with post-war modernisation. (To be continued)
