Terror and Reconciliation
Terror and Reconciliation
Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature,
1983-2009
Maryse Jayasuriya
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jayasuriya, Maryse.
Terror and reconciliation : Sri Lankan Anglophone literature, 1983-2009 / Maryse Jayasuriya.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-6578-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-6579-9 (electronic)
1. Sri Lankan literature (English)—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Sri Lankan literature (English)—21st century—History and criticism. 3. Sri Lanka—In literature. 4. War in literature. 5. Ethnic relations in literature. 6. Reconciliation in literature. I. Title.
PR9440.05. J39 2012
820.9'95493—dc23 2012004482
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For my parents, Leslie (1927-2010) and Yvonne Jayasuriya,
with love and gratitude
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of many years of hard work and could not have been completed without the help of many people. This project took shape under the guidance of Aparajita Sagar, and I would like to thank her, Shaun Hughes, Emily Allen, and Margaret Rowe for their advice throughout the project’s early stages.
As Chairs of the English Department at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), Evelyn Posey and David Ruiter have encouraged my pursuit of this project. My colleagues in the UTEP English Department have each in his or her own way contributed to creating an environment in which I was able to finish this project. Special thanks to the literature faculty: Meredith Abarca, Shelley Armitage, Ezra Cappell, John Dick, Ruben Espinosa, Mimi Gladstein, Robert Gunn, Lawrence Johnson, Deane Mansfield-Kelley, Lois Marchino, Marion Rohrleitner, Thomas Schmid, and Tony Stafford.
The Purdue Research Foundation supplied funding through two summer grants that enabled me to travel to Sri Lanka for research purposes and two year-long grants that made my labors lighter at a crucial stage in the writing of this book.
At Lexington, Justin Race has been a very supportive and helpful editor, and he, Sabah Ghulamali, and Megan Barnett have been a pleasure to work with. I thank the anonymous readers for Lexington who spent so much time and effort responding to and commenting on my work.
I am grateful to Jean Arasanayagam, Suresh Canagarajah, Arjuna Parakrama, Anne Ranasinghe, Amirthanjali Sivapalan, Sivamohan Sumathy, Vivimarie Vanderpoorten, and Kamala Wijeratne for permission to quote from their work, and to Amal Siriwardena for permission to quote from the work of Regi Siriwardena and Rajiva Wijesinghe for permission to quote from the work of Richard de Zoysa. I would also like to thank Gary Pulsifer of Arcadia Publishers for permission to quote from When Memory Dies, by A. Sivanandan. Portions of chapter 5 appeared in South Asia and Its Others: Reading the “Exotic,” edited by Atreyee Phukan and V.G. Julie Rajan, and portions of chapter 2 appeared in a different form in a special edition of South Asian Review, edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Deborah Weagel. I’m grateful for permission to reprint from both of these essays.
My circles of friends from various stages and places of my life in Sri Lanka and at Mount Holyoke College, Purdue University, and UTEP have always been there for me. Special thanks to Sonali Pathirana (who even helped me track down authors for permissions purposes), Sharnila Henry, Mishthi Senewiratne, Sharmila Wijesuriya, Fazlah Bahaudeen, Rehana Dawood, Amali Fernando, Katie Patrick Lokmaci, Shanthi Divakaran, Kathleen Maloney, Tracy Collins, Celeste Heinze, Shamala Kumar, Danesh Karunanayake, James and Carrie Palmer, Roy Mathew, Vinny Kaur, Yoshie Hagiwara, Andre Ellis, James and Patti Lyons, and Bill and CJ Moore, whose friendship has sustained me.
My parents, Leslie and Yvonne Jayasuriya, have always encouraged me in my academic endeavors, even when it meant that I would have to move half a world away. I have always been able to count on them for everything, and my debt to them is too great to be measured. I thank my sisters Carmeline Jayasuriya and Rosanne Weerackoon, my brother-in-law Roshan Weerackoon, my nephew Ranil and my nieces Rochelle and Rushika for their love, support, and prayers.
I can honestly say that this book would not have been written if not for my husband, Brian Yothers. His intellectual curiosity and sheer hard work have both amazed and inspired me. Only he can know how much his love, support, advice, and patience have meant to me in this, and in everything else.
Chapter 1
Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature and the Problem of Publication
The events of September 11, 2001, erased the memory of what might otherwise have been the most spectacular and traumatic suicide terrorist attack of the year worldwide. On July 24, 2001, armed men entered the Bandaranaike International Airport in Katunayake, Sri Lanka, and sprayed bullets through the departure lounge. Several of their confederates, wearing the suicide vests that their organization had perfected, ran toward the six new Sri Lankan Airlines jets and detonated their bombs. The attack was sudden, unexpected, and profoundly unsettling to both Sri Lankans and visitors to the country. Moreover, the attack had been preceded by a long series of highly visible suicide bombings from the late 1980s on, which included the assassinations of Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa, Indian ex-prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and numerous Sri Lankan political figures; the attempted assassination of Sri Lankan president Chandrika Kumaratunga; and the bombings of highly visible public sites like the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth in Kandy and the Central Bank in Colombo. Sri Lanka’s woes, however, became overshadowed by more visibly global concerns following September 11, 2001. For Sri Lankans, however, the war that raged from July 1983 until May 2009 was anything but peripheral, and the current shape of Sri Lankan literature in English reflects the centrality of war, terrorism, and attempts at reconciliation to the Sri Lankan experience of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with ethnic violence and global terrorism on the rise, Sri Lanka had the dubious distinction of being one of the few countries to have dealt with these phenomena continuously for over two decades. From the ethnic riots of July 1983 until the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009, Sri Lanka consistently dealt with the issues of terrorism, human rights, ethnic violence, and political uncertainty that have engrossed the wider world over the last decade. Sri Lanka’s small size and the fact that the conflict there does not mesh readily with the narratives about terrorism and human rights that are widespread through much of the rest of the world have meant that much of the trauma of the island’s Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher inhabitants has been invisible to the rest of the world. This invisi
bility has not, however, prevented Sri Lankans from seeking to represent and understand their collective tragedy in fiction, poetry, and film. The body of Anglophone literature that has sprung from the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka both reveals the impact of terrorism and ethnic violence on a particular society and seeks to understand how and why the conflict took root. Although the war in Sri Lanka has ended, the search for interethnic amity and reconciliation embodied by many of these works remains crucial for the future peace and well-being of Sri Lanka and vital as well for the pursuit of peace and reconciliation around the planet.
The pursuit of peace and reconciliation and the obstacles in its path as displayed in contemporary Sri Lankan literature provide the framework for my study of Sri Lankan Anglophone literature. This book is a study of the range of literature that Sri Lankan writers, both those resident in Sri Lanka and those dispersed around the globe, have produced in response to the ethnic conflict. Although my approach throughout this book is largely inductive—seeking patterns in the works of Sri Lankan literature that I discuss rather than attempting to impose an interpretive framework from above—there are three strands that emerge consistently in the chapters that follow. It is worth identifying these strands here, as they constitute the essence both of my argument for why Sri Lankan Anglophone literature should be studied as well as how it can be studied. First, because of the specific form that the interaction of language and politics has taken in Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan English language literature is crucial as a medium for dialogue and reconciliation. Second, because of the importance of the diaspora within the Sri Lankan nation, it is essential to consider both works by diasporic writers and works by local writers in order to have a full picture of the literature that surrounds the ethnic conflict. Third, the importance of considering these groups together must not obscure the fact that location and material conditions matter deeply, and an attempt to deal with Sri Lankan literature that does not make considerable room for writers who are resident in Sri Lanka and thus often excluded from wider publishing networks is fundamentally flawed. Throughout my study, these three points emerge repeatedly, and they operate as fundamental axioms for the understanding of Sri Lankan literature that emerges in this book.
The following pages will discuss, in very broad strokes, the origins of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, followed by the narratives presented by Sinhalese and Tamil nationalists to justify each side’s claims—claims that have been questioned by critics such as Qadri Ismail, Valentine Daniel, and Neluka Silva. A brief consideration of the history of the English language in Sri Lanka and the development of Anglophone writing will lead to a discussion of the goals of this study and its contribution to literary scholarship.
The Evolution of the Conflict
In order to appreciate the challenges faced by the writers whose works I examine, it is necessary to understand the evolution of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, which continued for more than twenty-five years, ever since the riots that erupted in Colombo in July 1983. But the riots were the culmination, not the starting point, of tensions that had been brewing for a long time between the Sinhalese, who are the majority ethnic group in Sri Lanka comprising about 74 percent of the population, and the Tamils, who are the largest minority group comprising about 18 percent of the population. 1
At the beginning of colonial rule in Sri Lanka, there were no clear ways of classifying and categorizing the peoples of the country. 2 Religion, caste, kinship, and region were as important identity markers as language and ethnicity. The British experimented with categorizations such as race and nationality for purposes of administration, and Sri Lankan politicians used these categories to form or solidify group identities. At the end of the nineteenth century, racial theories developed by philologists and orientalists were introduced into the country by the British. When the elite from various ethnic groups formed the Ceylon National Congress and began agitating for political reform in the early years of the twentieth century, the then (British) governor ensured a balance of power by urging more groups to demand communal representation. This contributed to the polarizing of ethnic and regional groups. In the last years of British rule, communal representation was abolished in favor of majority rule, based on the recommendations of the Donoughmore Commission. According to Nira Wickramasinghe:
Policy makers decreed that the one man-one vote principle should be instituted in order to create a sense of belonging to the state which would override particularistic identities. But the Commissioners did not foresee that democratic politics without adequate safeguards signified dominance of the majority group. (257)
Thus, socio-political changes that took place in Sri Lanka under the British set the stage and contributed significantly to violence in the post-independence era.
Once Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1948, the country was left with a parliamentary democracy in which the majority Sinhalese played the dominant role and took measures to reassert their authority. The insecurity felt by the Tamils was heightened later that same year when the Ceylon Citizenship Act was implemented and a large section of Hill Country or Estate Tamils (who had been brought in from India by the British to work in the plantations and at this point comprised 10 percent of the population) were disenfranchised on the grounds that people whose parents were not born in Sri Lanka could not be Sri Lankan citizens themselves. As a result, the Tamils collectively lost some of their representatives in parliament. In 1949, the Federal Party led by S.J.V. Chelvanayagam was formed with the primary goal of creating a federal system of government in the country that could give some autonomy to the Tamils in the areas that they dominated.
Ethnic tensions were exacerbated in 1956 when an Oxford-educated Sinhalese politician, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, in an effort to gain votes by appealing to the Sinhalese majority in response to the impulse of decolonization, promised to make Sinhala the sole official language of the country. Once he became the prime minister, Bandaranaike and his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) government put the “Sinhala Only” language policy in place, a move that disenfranchised the Tamils. 3 When the Tamils protested the language reform, riots ensued against them. When Bandaranaike attempted to mollify the Tamils by means of the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact in 1958, which included a proposal to make Tamil an official language and give limited self-rule to Tamils in Tamil-dominated areas, riots occurred again and the proposal was dropped.
In 1972, a new constitution changed the name of the country from Ceylon to Sri Lanka, consolidated the status of Sinhala as the official language, and enshrined Buddhism as the state-sponsored religion. The government also instituted education reforms that put into place a system of standardization by language media at the University Entrance Exam, which made it more difficult for Tamil students to gain university admission and limited job opportunities for them as well. Subsequently, Tamils abandoned their requests for federalism in favor of separatism under the auspices of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). Tamil youths began to band together in militant groups, such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which was led by Velupillai Prabhakaran and formed in Jaffna in 1976.
Matters came to a head in 1983, when thirteen Sinhalese policemen were killed in Jaffna by Tamil militants. Anti-Tamil riots broke out in Colombo and spread to other areas. Tamils were killed 4 or displaced, while their houses, shops, and property were burned. It is now widely believed that the riots were not merely a spontaneous uprising of Sinhalese angered at the killings of the policemen but a pogrom with the connivance of President J.R. Jayawardena’s United National Party (UNP) government. In the next few years, war went on between the state forces and the Tamil militants, and the LTTE crushed rival militant groups. Thousands of Tamils left the country as political refugees.
The Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987 between Jayawardena and India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi brought the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka. Though all militant groups were to give up their arms under the agreement, the LTTE refuse
d to do so and launched attacks against the IPKF. The IPKF consequently took strong-arm measures against the LTTE. In the south, Sinhalese youth protested the presence of the Indian force in Sri Lanka as a threat against Sri Lanka’s sovereignty and attempted to overturn the status quo through violence. This led to the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection in 1988. The JVP carried out a reign of terror in the next few years, while the state carried out a vigorous campaign against the insurgents. Thousands of Sinhalese youth were tortured or simply “disappeared.”
In 1989, the LTTE proposed peace talks on the condition that the IPKF leave the country. When the IPKF left Sri Lanka the following year, the LTTE resumed war against the state. Peace talks began again in 1994, under Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge, the new president, but ended in 1995. The years that followed saw numerous battles between the state and the LTTE. Thousands of civilians in the north and the east were killed or displaced, while suicide bombings by the LTTE in and around Colombo, the commercial capital of Sri Lanka, killed Sinhalese politicians and civilians as well as Tamil dissidents. The conflict wreaked havoc on the country’s economy and infrastructure.
Norway brokered a ceasefire between the state and the LTTE in 2002. Following the election of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who had argued in the campaign that the ceasefire agreement undermined Sri Lanka’s security, the ceasefire ended at the beginning of 2008. The LTTE, which had been weakened during the ceasefire by a division in its ranks between the leadership, which was based in the north of Sri Lanka, and the eastern branches of the organization based in Batticaloa and Trincomalee, had become increasingly aggressive in its attacks on its enemies, including the assassination of Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar and the attempted assassination of government minister Douglas Devananda, both of whom were anti-LTTE Tamils. The new government, meanwhile, was confident that it could defeat the LTTE altogether. The final showdown, which ran from 2008 to 2009, ended with the military defeat of the LTTE, the death of most of its leadership, and the surrender of most of the LTTE leaders who were not killed. Since 2009, the government has maintained control throughout the country, but the question of whether lasting peace and reconciliation will emerge remains to be resolved. 5
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