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R E A D I N G P O E T R Y
LESSON 26: ‘SWEET LIKE A CROW’ BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE
The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world. It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line or rhythm. - Paul Bowles Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed through a glass tube like someone has just trod on a peacock like wind howling in a coconut like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning, a vattacka being fried a bone shaking hands a frog singing at Carnegie Hall. Like a crow swimming in milk, like a nose being hit by a mango like the crowd at the Royal-Thomian match, a womb full of twins, a pariah dog with a magpie in its mouth like the midnight jet from Casablanca like Air Pakistan curry, a typewriter on fire, like a hundred pappadams being crunched, like someone trying to light matches in a dark room, the clicking sound of a reef when you put your head into the sea, a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience, the sound of a fan when someone throws brinjals at it, like pineapples being sliced in the Pettah market like betel juice hitting a butterfly in mid-air like a whole village running naked onto the street and tearing their sarongs, like an angry family pushing a jeep out of the mud, like dirt on the needle, like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle like 3 old ladies locked in the lavatory like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.
ANALYSIS
Did this poem make you smile? It presents a serious idea in a humorous way, a
technique sometimes used by poets to indicate the absurdity of the belief they are
satirizing.
Ondaatje starts the poem with an epigraph by a Western writer who describes the
people of Sri Lanka as the least musical in the world. The poet then proceeds to address
someone else and describe their voice in some of the most unflattering terms
imaginable. However, given the poet’s concerns in this poem, it is obvious that he is
undermining Bowles’ opinion that the Sinhalese are unmusical people.
Note that the imagery of the poem is distinctly South Asian: crows, pappadams, betel
juice, brinjals and so on. The title gives the reader the indication that the poet is going to
describe something that is usually not considered positive in flattering terms. Ondaatje
also refers to specific aspects of Sri Lanka such as the Pettah market, grounding his
poem in the physical reality of his country of origin. Only the last comparison in the
poem is one that conveys a ‘real’ sense of something musical: the sound of anklets.
By using the opposite of ‘musical’ sounds to describe the voice of the person he is
addressing, the speaker mocks the quoted opinion that the Sinhalese are unmusical
people. He suggests that such opinions are voiced by those who do not make the effort
to recognise the validity of cultures that are different from their own. Bowles asserts
that the people of Sri Lanka are not musical because the music of their language and
songs is entirely different from that of his own.
If you would like to read another poem that addresses a serious issue through the lens
of satirical humour, try Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’.