Neruda returns to Ceylon after nine decades with the film “Alborada”

by Eda Cleary Panguipulli, Chile, January 2022

Pablo Neruda, considered by Gabriel García Márquez as “the greatest poet of the 20th century in all languages”, has returned to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in an extraordinary film entitled “Alborada”. It was written and directed by Asoka Handagama, one of Sri Lanka’s foremost filmmakers today. Asoka Handagama has a long and successful career as a filmmaker, painter and playwright.

“Alborada” was invited to participate in the 34th Tokyo International Film Festival in October 2021. The film has not yet been released in cinemas, but it is already giving a lot to talk about. The trailer can be seen on Youtube. The theme of the festival was “Crossing Borders”, which sought to showcase cross-cultural stories, and the story of Pablo Neruda in ancient Ceylon is certainly one of them.

The film is set in former colonial Ceylon during the years 1929-1930, a period in which 25-year-old Pablo Neruda, already the author of the famous book “20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair”, took over as Chile’s honorary consul on the island, after having carried out similar duties in Burma.

The script is a fiction that is structured from Neruda’s own memories in “I confess that I have lived” (1974) in the chapter “The Luminous Solitude”, where he describes in seven lines about how one day he sexually forces himself on a Tamil girl, who came from the lowest caste of the Sakkili, who were considered “untouchables”:

“One morning, I decided to go all the way, I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. Unsmiling she let herself be led away and was soon naked in my bed. Her waist, so very slim, her full hips, brimming cups of her breasts, made like one of thousand-year-old sculptures from the South India. It was the coming together of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive . She was right to despise me. The experience was never repeated”.

Asoka Handagama, an admirer of Neruda’s work, was stunned to read this paragraph of the memoir and for more than ten years entertained the idea of making a film about the incident. But it was not until 2021, in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic, that this dream would be realized with the filming of “Alborada”. The title was inspired by the name Neruda had given to his Ceylonese friend Lionel Wendt’s house built in the elegant Cinnamon Gardens neighborhood of Colombo. Wendt was a musician, photographer, filmmaker and promoter of the arts in his country.

The plot of the film is based on the following sequence: Neruda arrives without luggage in Ceylon because he had just come out of a supposedly “terrorist” love affair with his Burmese lover Josie Bliss, to whom he had not said goodbye. When he made his social debut in Ceylon, he met Patsy, a French girl, with whom he had free sex with no commitments. Just when he thought he was safe from Josie, she suddenly appears at his door. Neruda prevents her from entering, forcing her to spend the nights in the street, causing a public scandal. He hides and orders his servant Rathnaigh, not to let her in. Meanwhile Neruda continues intimate encounters with Patsy in secret from his Burmese ex-lover. Josie understands her disadvantageous situation and decides to leave him and go home for ever. Neruda is left devastated and now turns his attention to the Sakkili girl, whose job it was to empty and clean his buckets of excrement from the toilet every morning.

Neruda fantasizes poetically about this young woman, attributing to her goddess-like qualities because of her immense resemblance to a sculpture of the goddess Parvathi that he kept in his living room. His Tamil servant Rhatnaigh, a firm believer in the caste system, fears for Neruda and himself because he feels that any contact with this “untouchable” caste would necessarily “dirty” them. Neruda is alien to that cultural tradition. For him, the relationship between a man and a woman does not pass through caste. That is why he sees no obstacle to behave like a conquering “macho” when he feels like possessing a woman. The Sakkili girl, accustomed to her inferior position, does not accept Neruda’s attempts to approach her. But he insists and forces her in such a way that she is left with no alternative but to endure a sexual assault for Neruda’s carnal satisfaction alone.

This picture could have given rise to a number of different scenarios, starting with a mere voyeuristic version of what happened, a trivialization of the event, or perhaps simply its denial and/or justification. But that is obviously not Asoka Handagama’s style. Judging by the surprising interweaving of the subsequent scenes, and their unexpected ending, where a real explosion of pain, rage, despair and desire for salvation of each of the characters emerges, Handagama triggers a process of reflection that leads to a frontal humanizing approach. At no point does “Alborada” force the spectator to take sides with the good guys against the bad guys as if it were a battle, where passion could not give way to reason and understanding of what is happening.

Neruda never managed to forget the contempt the Sakkili girl felt for him. His ego was so wounded that shortly before his death in his memoirs he decided to make a crude public confession about the incident and thereby unveil a fact that is generally hidden.

Handagama’s great contribution is to have brought this story told in just seven lines to the screen with overwhelming complexity without falling into the temptation to light judgment.

The formidable outcome of the plot leaves many questions open, not only about the story that took place in 1929, but also about the relevance of these same conflicts in the present. Neruda is therefore only part of the chess game of the story, because Asoka Handagama, a connoisseur of his culture, has no qualms about revealing the world of brutal prejudices and superstitions that hung like a sword of Damocles over the “untouchable” Tamils. Especially on women, within their own caste they were the most discriminated against, and then doubly so by the society around them.

The occasion for the film could not have been more controversial. Almost five decades had passed since the publication of Neruda’s memoirs, which had been a resounding success. But time changes, social movements change, and so do readers’ perceptions. A few years ago, global feminism branded the story told by Neruda about the Sakkili girl as a big patriarchal lie. Overnight, social media was filled with angry statements against Neruda and the tone was to “cancel” Neruda. Now the most widely read poet of the 20th century was nothing more than a sexual predator. On the other front, Neruda’s unconditional followers went on the offensive and their strategy essentially focused on downplaying the fact. Both positions have contributed to the trivialization and caricaturing of the intricate origins of macho violence and toxicity, where the world is seen in black and white, divided between the good and the bad, the superior and the inferior. But life itself is more than that, and it is necessary to delve deeper into this history. In this sense, “Alborada” succeeds.

Confronted with the radical fundamentalist positions on this incident, Asoka Handagama approaches with creative audacity the dramatic subject of sexual violence, the caste dilemma and the racism underlying “machismo”.

Neruda’s confused life situation in Wellawatte is masterfully illustrated. The poet appears as a labyrinthine, multifaceted and contradictory personality. He is both victim and victimizer. He hides from Josie, is simultaneously cowardly, playful and adventurous, loses patience, smokes opium, takes his chances with Patsy, but does not hesitate to protect a woman beaten by her fisherman husband in Wellawatte. Crucial to the story, however, is that this confusion is not enough to understand the violent incident with the Sakkili girl. Asoka Handagama rudely but wisely lays bare the crushing destructive force of the patriarchal view of existence. From this incident, everyone is hurt, and the most damaged, of course, is the Sakkili girl.

The director of “Alborada” manages to bring the mature Neruda down from his poet-god pedestal without denying his immense talent and poetic genius. He humanizes him by pointing out his impotence to free himself from the macho ballast of male domination and shows him in his own masculine labyrinth.

This film is irreplaceable when it comes to an unbiased discussion of the real poisoning that patriarchal ideology creates in human beings in every age, in every occasion and in every culture. From a specific story, it universalizes the discussion on the difficult approach to the gender question, which is currently essentially caught in the grip of fundamentalist feminist positions that oscillate between the “culture of cancellation” and the traditional positions of the culture of denial and silencing of patriarchal violence.

Finally, “Alborada” is also a moving film with an excellent cast. The period setting gracefully opens the door to the past and makes us empathize with its protagonists. The handling of the camera to capture the characters’ states of mind with precision is outstanding. The colors, the scenes, the lighting and the music will be a real aesthetic delight for the viewers.

Eda Cleary is a sociologist with a PhD in political science from Germany. She lived for six years in Myanmar (the former Burma) between 2015-2021. She is the author of two essays on Neruda published online in the literary platform Letralia, Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish and in the Chilean online newspaper El Mostrador. The first appeared in 2015: “Josie Bliss, Pablo Neruda’s Burmese lover 88 years later” and the second in 2018: “Ceylon in Neruda’s heart. Deconstructing Neruda’s life and work in Ceylon”. For this work, the magazine “Chile somos todos” of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared her a “world-class Chilean” in 2016.

Editor’s note:

The author sent us this review after the publication of a feature on Handagama’s new film in this paper attracted her interest. She felt it deserved attention by the Spanish speaking world, did a review for Le Monde Diplomatique and sent us this translation of it in English.