How Sport is Set against Communal Violence in Yasmine Gooneratne's Big Match, 1983

The phenomenon poet, Yasmine Gooneratne, in Big Match, 1983, writes from inside one of the darkest weeks in Sri Lankan history, the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983, while addressing herself to an English-language reader for whom "the big match" means the annual schoolboy cricket encounter at Colombo. The poem holds that innocent sporting phrase against the burning of houses, the killing of Tamils, and the dismantling of a multi-ethnic society. By doing so it transforms a comfortable English metaphor into an indictment of those who treated communal violence as a spectator sport. This essay argues that Gooneratne stages sport against communal violence through an opening of remembered childhood cricket, through a deliberate slippage from the playing field to the burning street, through the borrowing of cricket's vocabulary to describe atrocity, and through an ending that refuses to let the metaphor return to its earlier innocence.

Point — Gooneratne first opens the poem with the warm familiarity of the schoolboy cricket match, in order to make the later violence sharper by contrast. Evidence — She recalls the Royal-Thomian "Big Match," the crowds and the schoolboy chants, evoking a Colombo where the season "filled the streets" with banners and laughter. Technique — The poet uses nostalgic imagery and a register of civic memory. Explanation — By beginning in fondness, Gooneratne enlists the English-reading reader's own affection for the colonial-school ritual; the poem invites the reader into a shared, sunny Colombo so that what follows will hit a familiar wall. The cricket she sketches is not condemned; it is simply asked to bear the weight of a date it cannot carry. Link — The opening therefore prepares the indictment by establishing the ordinary world that the violence is about to disfigure.

Point — The poem then performs a deliberate slippage from the playing field to the burning street, allowing one phrase to migrate violently across two realities. Evidence — The "match" of the title is the cricket encounter and also "the match / that lit the fires" in Tamil houses and shops across Colombo. Technique — Gooneratne employs punning and an extended metaphor that turns sporting language into political language. Explanation — The pun is not playful but accusatory; the same word that, days earlier, summoned schoolboys to a stadium has been retooled by the mob to mean arson. The slippage exposes the moral carelessness of a national vocabulary in which scoring and burning could share a noun. Link — Through this slippage, the poem advances the thesis: sport is not a refuge from communal violence but, in 1983, the very language in which it was conducted.

Point — Gooneratne deepens the indictment by borrowing the technical vocabulary of cricket to describe the pogrom, making the reader hear the strangeness of the analogy. Evidence — The poem speaks of "innings," "umpires," and a "scoreboard" in the same breath as the burning of Tamil shops along the streets of Colombo. Technique — The poet uses extended metaphor and satirical irony. Explanation — By forcing cricket's lexicon onto atrocity, Gooneratne makes the obscenity of treating violence as competition unbearable to read; an innings counted in lives is not a metaphor anyone can accept, and the discomfort produced by the line is the poem's political point. The cricket vocabulary is not retired but contaminated. Link — The borrowing therefore proves the thesis from inside the language itself: sport is set against communal violence not as an opposite but as a stolen vehicle.

Point — The poem ends without returning the metaphor to safety, refusing to let cricket recover the innocence it began with. Evidence — The closing lines insist on the smoke and the silence rather than on any subsequent match, leaving the reader inside the burnt afternoon of July 1983. Technique — Gooneratne uses an open close and a final sustained image of smoke. Explanation — The poet refuses the consolation of resumption; the season cannot simply continue once its vocabulary has been used in this way, and the reader is not allowed the relief of pretending otherwise. The closing image insists that history must change before language can. Link — The ending therefore seals the indictment, denying any reading in which the poem ends as it began.

This study probes to analyse how Gooneratne, through nostalgic opening, deliberate slippage, borrowed vocabulary and a refusal to resolve, sets the language of cricket against the realities of communal violence and finds the language guilty. The remembered season, the punning match, the obscene scoreboard and the final smoke together build a poem in which English, Colombo and cricket are forced to face what they were used to disguise. The deeper insight is that Sri Lankan poetry of 1983 could not afford the metaphors that earlier Sri Lankan poetry had taken for granted; some words had to be retired or restitched, and Gooneratne's work belongs to that retirement. Big Match, 1983 endures, therefore, both as elegy and as a small lesson in the politics of language.