Sundress Reads: Review of Becoming Sam

The Sri Lankan Civil War, beginning in 1983 and ending in 2009, was fought between the Sri Lankan Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), a Tamil group that rose up in an attempt to establish their own independent state experiencing discrimination and frequent violent persecution. Ultimately, the LTTE were unsuccessful, and the Sri Lankan government has since faced numerous accusations of genocide, war crimes, and other atrocities. Against mounting evidence, the Sri Lankan government maintains they did nothing wrong.

This is the backdrop of Samodh Porawagamage’s Becoming Sam (Burnside Review, 2024) which is sweet, devastating, and always insightful. This poetry collection is split into three parts: “Malli Playing by a Mossy Stone” recounts scenes from Porawagamage’s childhood in Sri Lanka; “Peeling the Mango” grapples with his life as an immigrant in the United States; “The Monsoons” contains reflections on post-colonialism.

Porawagamage remarkably embodies the situation that inspired his book. Take, for example, the short, searing poem, “A Killing.” Porawagamage writes recalling the immediate aftermath of a theft:

 On the surface, the poem recounts what would be, to a child’s mind, a thrilling, almost adventurous memory. But taken in the political context of Porawagamage’s childhood, it is darkly suggestive, and an excellent exercise in metaphor. The police dog, rather than capturing the one responsible, kills a being that had nothing to do with the real crime. It perfectly symbolizes how government authorities we are taught to trust from a young age eventually reveal themselves as needlessly—one could even say extrajudicially—violent.

Elsewhere in the first part of the book, poems like “The Afterlife of Cut Hair” play into the casual absurdism of a child’s mind. “On the last day of middle school,” a presumably young Porawagamage watches a barber’s “delicate hands cut a girl’s hair like he is / preparing salad for dinner” (23). Porawagamage confesses, “Once I thought / the barbers sold cut hair to make / Bombay Muttai,” a Sri Lankan type of cotton candy (23). In the last lines of the poem, when his family flies to the Indian city of Chennai—the largest city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which is a massive cultural center for Tamils—he receives “a special / kids’ meal for free. It tasted like uprooted hair / poorly fried in a barber’s soothing gel” (23). The image of hair being turned into a dessert, and then finally eaten, reminds me of the way little kids fixate on seemingly ridiculous, almost psychedelic, ideas. But, as with “A Killing,” there are subtleties here that give the poem a profound emotional resonance. Porawagamage’s choice of the word “uprooted” suggests that maybe his family was fleeing increasing violence in Sri Lanka. The juxtaposition between the hair being “poorly fried” in “soothing gel” turns a whimsical description of mediocre tasting food into a solemn moment when a sweet treat isn’t enough to distract a child from the troubling reality they are stuck in.

My favorite poem in the collection, “Everywhere Love Songs,” comes in the “Peeling the Mango” section and is split into two parts. The first, “The Kid and the Beetle,” features a grown Porawagamage on his “way to teach love poetry” (48). Ahead of him, a little boy walks holding his mother’s hand, but then stops and points at the ground between him and Porawagamage. There’s a black beetle on the ground. Porawagamge writes:

Honestly, I just found the presence of this scene, so simple, so sweet, in a book that deals with prejudice and violence to be nothing less than life-affirming. The real coup de grâce, though, comes in the second part, “Later That Night at the Bar.” “A middle-aged ‘Jim’” pours his heart out to Porawagamage about how the woman he loves is married to another man and has given birth to his children (49). He asks, guilt ridden, if Porawagamage things “he’s an obsessed voyeur” (49). After buying him some chips, Porawagamage tells him:

We have these two men sharing a beautiful scene, only to have one of them act in a racist, ignorant way towards Porawagamage. Rather than explicating on it, Porawagamage wisely just leaves the dilemma in the air: Jim was obviously kind, at least in some capacity, and even acted generously towards Porawagamage. How does that square with his other behavior? How is Porawagamage supposed to feel? How is the reader supposed to feel? It’s the type of emotional ambiguity that gets under your skin and stays there.

The third and final section of the book sees Porawagamage excavate aspects of Sri Lanka that have stayed under his skin, to glorious results. The poem “In a Democratic Socialist Republic” is, frankly, the best piece of recent protest art I’ve encountered in quite a long time. While “the Police…ever so kind, / massage our rebellious heads / with cushioned batons” the speaker sees “in a ditch  / the goddess of law— / that good-for-nothing whore / pleading for her life” (80). The poem ends as the speaker climbs “a rusty ladder / one rung at a time / to another Democratic / Socialist planet / only visible / in the dark / at night” (81). It’s the kind of poem that contains all the living energy of an ongoing struggle, and though it may have been written with Sri Lanka specifically in mind, anyone angry at their government is sure to find it invigorating.

These are just some of the many jewels to be found in this relentlessly vivid and incisive collection of poetry. Throughout, there are intense, personal poems about survivor’s guilt, longing, and love. And in the end, it is author’s honest reflections on his own encounters with violence and colonialism that should make Becoming Sam a cherished classic. It displays the talents and fragments of the life a poet who is a master of his art without ever coming across as artificial. Poems like that are, at least for me, why I read poetry in the first place.

Becoming Sam is available from Burnside Review

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Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in May of 2025. He has had short stories and poems published in Gauge Magazine, Emerson Green Mag, and won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend, Macie, and their cat, Dory, and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.