Juxtaposition as the Central Technique of Big Match, 1983

The phenomenon poet, Yasmine Gooneratne, in her elegy Big Match, 1983, organises the entire poem around a single technique — juxtaposition — and lets the device perform almost all of the poem's argument. The title points to the annual Colombo schoolboy cricket encounter; the date points to the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983; and the poem places those two facts beside one another and refuses to choose between them. By doing so it forces the reader to feel, in the space between the title and the date, the moral fracture that those days opened in Sri Lanka. This essay argues that Gooneratne uses juxtaposition through the title and the date, through the lexicon of sport set beside the lexicon of arson, through the playing field placed against the burning street, and through a closing image that refuses to allow the two halves of the juxtaposition to be reconciled.

Point — Gooneratne first uses juxtaposition in the title and the date themselves, before any line of the poem has been read. Evidence — The phrase "Big Match" denotes the Royal-Thomian cricket encounter, and the year "1983" denotes the July pogrom; the poem sets the two side by side as its name. Technique — The poet uses titular juxtaposition. Explanation — A title that places sport against communal violence does the poem's first work without spending a word; readers familiar with both contexts feel the dissonance immediately, and readers unfamiliar are alerted to look for it. The technique is announced even before the body begins. Link — The title therefore establishes juxtaposition as the poem's organising principle: every later contrast will refer back to the one already made on the cover.

Point — The juxtaposition is sharpened in the body of the poem through the lexicon of sport placed beside the lexicon of arson. Evidence — The poem speaks of "innings," "umpires," "scoreboard," "match," and at the same time of "fires," "ash," "smoke," and the burning of Tamil shops. Technique — Gooneratne uses an extended verbal juxtaposition and punning. Explanation — The two vocabularies belong to entirely different worlds, and Gooneratne forces them to share a sentence; the "match" that lights the cricket season is also the "match" that lights a Tamil shop, and the reader hears in real time how a comfortable English noun can be conscripted by violence. The juxtaposition exposes a national vocabulary that had not noticed how much its sporting talk could resemble its political conduct. Link — The lexical juxtaposition therefore extends the technique into language itself: words are made to bear the weight of the dissonance the title only named.

Point — The technique deepens further through the placement of the playing field against the burning street, two settings the poem refuses to keep apart. Evidence — The crowds that should have lined the streets for cricket fixtures are replaced by mobs along those streets, and the boundary the schoolboys drew with their bats is shadowed by another boundary drawn around Tamil neighbourhoods. Technique — The poet uses spatial juxtaposition and a cinematic cut between settings. Explanation — Gooneratne treats the Colombo street as two pictures in the same frame; the cricket season pinned the street to one meaning, and the pogrom pinned it to another, and the poem refuses to allow either picture to be retired. The reader is asked to hold both streets in mind at once, and the discomfort of holding them is the poem's moral education. Link — Spatial juxtaposition therefore proves the thesis from another angle: the place is a single place, and the poem uses that single place as evidence of an indivisible national failure.

Point — Gooneratne finally seals the technique by refusing to close the juxtaposition, leaving the reader inside the unreconciled dissonance. Evidence — The poem ends on smoke, ash and absence, rather than on any subsequent fixture or on a return to play. Technique — The poet uses an open close and a final juxtaposed silence. Explanation — A poem that resolved the contrast would suggest that the cricket and the pogrom could be brought back into the same Sri Lankan calendar, and Gooneratne refuses; the juxtaposition is left open because the historical wound that produced it is not yet closed. The technique therefore ceases to be a literary device and becomes a political fact. Link — The unresolved close completes the thesis: juxtaposition is the poem's technique because juxtaposition is, painfully, the poem's subject.

This study probes to analyse how Gooneratne, through titular pairing, lexical collision, spatial overlap and an unresolved close, makes juxtaposition the central technique of Big Match, 1983 and the very form of its argument. The title and the date, the cricket lexicon and the arson lexicon, the playing field and the burning street together build a poem whose moral and whose method cannot be separated. The deeper insight is that for Gooneratne, the events of July 1983 had already done the juxtaposing; her task was to refuse the social habit of unjuxtaposing them, of pretending that sport and pogrom could occupy adjacent newspaper columns without speaking to each other. Big Match, 1983 endures, therefore, as a poem in which technique is not a decoration of argument but its conscience.