✍️ Poetry
Big Match, 1983
★★★★★
AnalysisEssayContext
🏏 Historical context — essential before reading
July 1983, Sri Lanka — "Black July." On 23 July 1983, a Tamil Tiger ambush killed 13 Sri Lankan army soldiers near Jaffna. The next day, anti-Tamil pogroms erupted across Colombo and the south. Mobs attacked Tamil homes, businesses, and people. Estimates of Tamil deaths range from 400 (government) to 2,000–3,000+ (human rights organisations). Hundreds of thousands of Tamils were displaced. It is the darkest single event of Sri Lanka's civil war era — and it followed decades of escalating ethnic tension dating from Independence.
The "Big Match" is Sri Lanka's most prestigious annual school cricket fixture — the Royal-Thomian (Royal College vs S. Thomas' College) or the Battle of the Maroons — a day of intense spectator passion. Gooneratne takes this familiar social ritual and lays it over the catastrophe of July 1983: when the "match" became something else entirely.
Big Match, 1983 Yasmine Gooneratne
Glimpsing the headlines in the newspapers,
tourists scuttle for cover, cancel their options
on rooms with views of temple and holy mountain.
"Flash point in Paradise." "Racial pot boils over."
And even the gone away boy
who had hoped to find lost roots, lost lovers,
makes timely return giving thanks
that Toronto is quite romantic enough
for his purposes.
Powerless this time to shelter or to share
we strive to be objective, try to trace
the match that lit this sacrificial fire.
We talk of "Forty Eight" and "Fifty Six",
of freedom and the treacherous politics
of language: see the first sparks of this hate
fanned into flame in Nineteen Fifty Eight,
yet find no comfort in our neat solution,
no calm abstraction, and no absolution.
The game's in other hands in any case.
Big Match fever, flaring high and fast,
has both sides in its grip and promises
dizzier scores than any at the oval.
In a tall house dim with old books and pictures
calm hands reach for the clamouring telephone.
'It's a strange life we're leading here just now,
but there's room for some to go in, and today
as curfew ends and as curfew ends and begins again
I'm stepping up my intake quite a bit,
the general idea being that when those torches
come within fifty feet of this house don't you see
it won't be my books that go up first, but me.'
Who, me? — Oh I'm doing fine. I always was
a drinking man you know and nowadays
I'm stepping up my intake quite a bit,
the general idea being that when those torches
come within fifty feet of this house don't you see
it won't be my books that go up first, but me.
A pause. Then, steady and every bit as clear
as though we are neighbours still as we had been
In Fifty Eight. "Thanks, by the way for ringing.
There's nothing you can do to help us but
it's good to know some lines haven't yet been cut."
Out of the palmyrah fences of Jaffna
bristle a hundred guns.
Signposts in the Pettah, landmarks of our childhood
Curl like old photographs in the flames,
Blood on their khaki uniforms, three boys lie dying;
a crowd looks silently the other way.
Near the wheels of his smashed bicycle
at the corner of Duplication Road a child lies dead
and two policemen look the other way.
flung by his neighbour's hands.
The joys of childhood, friendships of our youth
ravaged by pieties and politics
screaming across our screens her agony
at last exposed, Sri Lanka burns alive.
Poem structure
| Form | Free verse. No rhyme scheme or fixed metre — appropriate for a poem about chaos and breakdown. The irregular length of stanzas mirrors the fragmented experience of the pogrom: some stanzas are brief shocks, others are long unravelling narratives. |
|---|---|
| Voices | The poem uses multiple shifting voices: the journalists (quoted headlines); the diaspora observer ("the gone away boy"); the intellectual collective "we"; the trapped Colombo intellectual (direct speech, two stanzas); the remote external caller; and the panoramic narrator surveying Jaffna and Colombo. No single speaker — the poem is fragmented like the country itself. |
| Movement | The poem moves from outside → inward → outward: tourists fleeing → the intellectual class trying to analyse → a trapped person in a burning city → the actual bodies in the street. The private telephone conversation at the centre is surrounded by public violence. |
Historical dates in the poem
| "Forty Eight" (1948) | Ceylon's independence from Britain. The Ceylon Citizenship Act simultaneously disenfranchised many Indian Tamils. The seeds of ethnic inequality were planted at the moment of national birth. |
|---|---|
| "Fifty Six" (1956) | The Official Language Act — the "Sinhala Only" Act. Overnight, Tamil became marginal in government, the courts, and education. Tamil protests were met with violence. The Act created a permanent sense of exclusion. |
| "Nineteen Fifty Eight" (1958) | The first major anti-Tamil pogrom — 200–300 Tamil deaths, mass displacement. The poem identifies this as when hate was "fanned into flame." 1983 is the culmination, not the beginning. |
| "Fifty Eight" (re-used) | "as though we are neighbours still as we had been / In Fifty Eight" — the last moment before neighbours became enemies. 1958 is the dividing line: before it, the communities were neighbours; after it, they were not. |
Key lines and devices
| "Flash point in Paradise." "Racial pot boils over." | Quoted media headlines. The quotation marks signal that this is how foreign journalists wrote about Sri Lanka — sensational, detached, the country reduced to a headline. "Paradise" is the tourist's word; the violence is their story, not their reality. Gooneratne's irony is sharp: the headlines reduce catastrophe to clickbait. |
|---|---|
| "the match that lit this sacrificial fire" | Double meaning (pun / extended metaphor): "match" = the cricket fixture AND a match struck to light a fire. "Sacrificial fire" = the burning of Tamil homes and bodies. The Big Match title extends through the poem as a dark metaphor: a cricket score vs a death toll. |
| "dizzier scores than any at the oval" | Extended metaphor (cricket): "scores" = cricket runs AND body counts. "The oval" = a cricket ground. The violence is producing "scores" that outstrip any sporting achievement. This is Gooneratne's most compressed and devastating image — sport and slaughter on the same scoreboard. |
| "as curfew ends and as curfew ends and begins again" | Repetition / stream of consciousness: the repeated phrase mimics confusion and disorientation — the speaker is losing track of time under curfew. It also conveys the relentless, cycling nature of the violence: it keeps starting again. |
| "it won't be my books that go up first, but me" | Dark humour / gallows humour: the intellectual trapped in his library knows the mob will burn him before his books. The joke is about priorities — in an ordinary fire, you save the books; in a pogrom, your ethnicity determines what burns. The repetition of this line across two stanzas deepens the horror: the speaker says it twice, as if convincing himself. |
| "it's good to know some lines haven't yet been cut" | Double meaning: telephone lines AND the lines between communities, between friends, between human connection. In the middle of Black July, the fact that a phone call can still be made is a small, fragile sign that not everything has been destroyed. |
| "a crowd looks silently the other way" / "two policemen look the other way" | Repetition: the same phrase applied to the crowd and the police. Both groups watch and do nothing. The poem indicts not just the killers but the bystanders and the state — those who looked away. This is the poem's moral centre: silence and inaction are forms of complicity. |
| "Sri Lanka burns alive" | Final image — personification: the country itself is on fire. The last line uses "alive" — Sri Lanka burns as a living thing. This could mean "the country is burning" but also that the burning is happening to a living entity — Sri Lanka itself is being killed. |
Themes
- Ethnic violence and its deep historical roots. The poem refuses the idea that 1983 was sudden or inexplicable. It traces the fire back through 1958, 1956, 1948 — showing that each political decision about language and citizenship added fuel. The violence of July 1983 is the result of 35 years of exclusion and suppression.
- Complicity and silence. The crowd that looks the other way; the policemen who look the other way; the intellectual who drinks and waits. The poem is not only about the killers — it is about everyone who did not stop it. Silence is a form of participation.
- The failure of the intellectual class. The educated Colombo voice ("tall house dim with old books") is trapped, drinking, making dark jokes, unable to act. He can trace history, find no absolution, and in the end can only wait. The poem is partly Gooneratne's self-examination: what do the educated do in a crisis?
- The diaspora's ambivalence. The "gone away boy" returns to Toronto with relief — glad, guiltily, that he is not there. His distance makes him safe. His inability to help makes him irrelevant. The Toronto stanza opens the poem with irony: even the man who came "to find lost roots" discovers his roots are in a country he should flee.
- Sport as false community. The Big Match is a day when all of Sri Lanka comes together around cricket — a unifying ritual. 1983 turns the same energy into ethnic hatred. The poem asks what "big match fever" really does: does it unite or does it teach sides to hate and score against each other?
⭐ Exam facts — remember these
- Author: Yasmine Gooneratne (born 1935). Sri Lankan poet and academic. Emigrated to Australia; Professor of English at Macquarie University. Writes from the position of a Sri Lankan intellectual in the diaspora watching her country tear itself apart.
- The "Big Match" = Sri Lanka's most prestigious annual school cricket match. Extended metaphor for ethnic conflict throughout the poem.
- Key historical dates in the poem: 1948 (independence/citizenship), 1956 (Sinhala Only Act), 1958 (first pogrom), 1983 (Black July).
- Central device: extended metaphor — cricket scoring / body counting; "the match that lit this sacrificial fire" (match = both cricket and matchstick).
- "looking the other way" — repetition applied to crowd AND police = complicity of the state and society. Examiners specifically test this.
- "it won't be my books that go up first, but me" — dark humour / gallows humour from a person facing death. The humour makes it more disturbing, not less.
- The poem ends with "Sri Lanka burns alive" — not just a literal description but a metaphor for a nation being destroyed from within.
- Essay angle: "How does the poet use the 'Big Match' metaphor to comment on ethnic violence?" — cover the match/fire pun, the scoring imagery, the "game's in other hands", the "fever" language.
⚠ Common student mistakes
- Treating the poem as only about cricket — the Big Match is the metaphor; the subject is the 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom. Without this context, the poem makes no sense.
- Not explaining the double meaning of "match" — cricket match AND a match struck to start a fire. Both meanings must be stated in any analysis of "the match that lit this sacrificial fire."
- Missing the multiple voices — students often write about "the speaker" as if there is one. The poem shifts between the journalist voice, the diaspora voice, the intellectual "we", and the trapped Colombo voice.
- Calling the dark humour inappropriate — it is the coping mechanism of a person facing death. The humour makes the situation more terrifying, not less serious. Always explain the function of gallows humour.
- Missing "looking the other way" as a repeated device — the crowd and the police both look away. This parallel is the poem's indictment of complicity. Students must comment on why the poet uses the same phrase twice.
- Ignoring the significance of specific place-names — "palmyrah fences of Jaffna" (Tamil north), "Pettah" (Colombo market, heavily Tamil), "Duplication Road" (Colombo). These are not decorative — they locate the violence in specific real places to make it undeniable.
📝 Exam Practice
Real Section A format — write your answer first, then reveal the model answer.
"Powerless this time to shelter or to share
we strive to be objective, try to trace
the match that lit this sacrificial fire.
We talk of 'Forty Eight' and 'Fifty Six',
of freedom and the treacherous politics
of language: see the first sparks of this hate
fanned into flame in Nineteen Fifty Eight,
yet find no comfort in our neat solution,
no calm abstraction, and no absolution."
we strive to be objective, try to trace
the match that lit this sacrificial fire.
We talk of 'Forty Eight' and 'Fifty Six',
of freedom and the treacherous politics
of language: see the first sparks of this hate
fanned into flame in Nineteen Fifty Eight,
yet find no comfort in our neat solution,
no calm abstraction, and no absolution."
✎ Practice drill
Practice question
-
(a) Name the poem and the poet. (01 mark)"Big Match, 1983" by Yasmine Gooneratne.
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(b) What does "the match that lit this sacrificial fire" mean? Explain the double meaning. (01 mark)"Match" has two meanings: (1) the Big Match — the annual school cricket fixture used as a metaphor throughout the poem; (2) a matchstick used to start a fire. "Sacrificial fire" refers to the burning of Tamil homes and lives during the 1983 pogrom. The double meaning connects the sporting event to the actual violence.
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(c) What are "Forty Eight", "Fifty Six", and "Nineteen Fifty Eight"? Why does the poet refer to them? (01 mark)These are historical dates: 1948 = Ceylon's independence (when Tamil citizenship rights were curtailed); 1956 = the Sinhala Only Act (making Sinhala the sole official language, marginalising Tamils); 1958 = the first major anti-Tamil pogrom. The poet refers to them to show that the violence of 1983 was not sudden — it was the result of 35 years of escalating ethnic tension.
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(d) What does this stanza reveal about the speaker's position, and what is the effect of the words "no calm abstraction, and no absolution"? (02 marks)The stanza reveals that the speaker is an educated intellectual ("we strive to be objective") who can trace the historical causes of the violence — but this intellectual analysis offers no comfort and no escape from guilt. "No calm abstraction" means history cannot be discussed at a safe distance; "no absolution" means understanding the causes does not release the speaker from responsibility. The educated class has watched the escalation for decades without preventing it. The ending acknowledges that intellectual analysis is inadequate in the face of mass violence — and that the speaker's community shares some guilt for not having acted.
"it won't be my books that go up first, but me."
Who, me? — Oh I'm doing fine. I always was
a drinking man you know and nowadays
I'm stepping up my intake quite a bit,
the general idea being that when those torches
come within fifty feet of this house don't you see
it won't be my books that go up first, but me.
Who, me? — Oh I'm doing fine. I always was
a drinking man you know and nowadays
I'm stepping up my intake quite a bit,
the general idea being that when those torches
come within fifty feet of this house don't you see
it won't be my books that go up first, but me.
✎ Practice drill
Practice question
-
(a) Name the poem and the poet. (01 mark)"Big Match, 1983" by Yasmine Gooneratne.
-
(b) Who is speaking in this stanza, and what is his situation? (01 mark)The speaker is a Colombo intellectual — a Tamil (or Burgher/mixed-ethnicity) person — trapped inside a "tall house dim with old books" during the 1983 curfew, speaking on the telephone to someone calling to check on him. He faces the threat of a mob coming with torches to burn his house.
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(c) What type of humour is used in these lines, and what is its effect? (01 mark)Dark humour / gallows humour. The speaker makes a bitter joke about the fact that in an ordinary fire you might save your books, but in a pogrom targeting him personally, his body will burn before his library. The effect is to make the situation more disturbing rather than less — the humour signals both the speaker's courage and his awareness that he is in real danger of death.
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(d) Why does the poet repeat this line in two separate stanzas? What does the repetition achieve? (02 marks)The line "it won't be my books that go up first, but me" is spoken once within the telephone conversation and then echoed as if the speaker has said it again, or as if the caller remembers it. The repetition achieves several effects: it embeds the phrase in the reader's memory, making it impossible to ignore; it suggests the speaker returns to this thought obsessively, the gallows joke becoming a genuine statement of reality the more he says it; and it deepens the horror by confirming that this is not a one-off dark quip but the defining thought of a person who believes he may be killed. The repetition transforms dark humour into something approaching a death sentence spoken aloud.
"Out of the palmyrah fences of Jaffna
bristle a hundred guns.
Signposts in the Pettah, landmarks of our childhood
Curl like old photographs in the flames,
Blood on their khaki uniforms, three boys lie dying;
a crowd looks silently the other way.
Near the wheels of his smashed bicycle
at the corner of Duplication Road a child lies dead
and two policemen look the other way."
bristle a hundred guns.
Signposts in the Pettah, landmarks of our childhood
Curl like old photographs in the flames,
Blood on their khaki uniforms, three boys lie dying;
a crowd looks silently the other way.
Near the wheels of his smashed bicycle
at the corner of Duplication Road a child lies dead
and two policemen look the other way."
✎ Practice drill
Practice question
-
(a) Name the poem and the poet. (01 mark)"Big Match, 1983" by Yasmine Gooneratne.
-
(b) What is the effect of naming specific places — "Jaffna", "the Pettah", "Duplication Road"? (01 mark)The specific place names root the violence in identifiable real locations in Sri Lanka, making it impossible to dismiss as abstract or distant. Jaffna = the Tamil north; the Pettah = Colombo's market district, heavily Tamil; Duplication Road = a specific Colombo street. The naming insists: this happened here, in places we know, not somewhere safely remote.
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(c) The phrase "looks the other way" is used twice — for "a crowd" and for "two policemen". What is the poet suggesting? (01 mark)The repetition deliberately places the crowd and the police in the same moral position: both witness the killing and do nothing. The poet indicts not only the killers but the bystanders and the state. The police's inaction is particularly damning — it suggests official complicity or at least official failure to protect Tamil lives.
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(d) How does this stanza function as a climax to the poem's argument about the 1983 violence? (02 marks)After three earlier stanzas dealing with intellectuals, analyses, and private telephone calls, this stanza delivers the unfiltered physical reality: guns, flames, blood, a dying child. The poem has been building through metaphor, historical dates, and dark humour — all ways of approaching the violence indirectly. Here the indirection ends. Three boys in khaki lie dying; a child is dead by a bicycle. The specificity ("corner of Duplication Road") and the blunt syntax ("a child lies dead") strip away all literary distance. The repetition of "the other way" is the poem's final moral verdict: the violence was witnessed by everyone and stopped by no one. "Sri Lanka burns alive" in the final lines is both literal description and the culmination of this argument — a nation that looked the other way while burning itself.