Historiographical/Nationalist Perspectives
Each side in this conflict has its own perspectives on why the situation in Sri Lanka has come to this tragic and violent pass, as Sri Lankan scholar Qadri Ismail has delineated in his 2005 study Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality. As Ismail asserts, the Sinhalese historian K.M. de Silva, in Reaping the Whirlwind: Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Politics in Sri Lanka (1998), gives a good example of the Sinhalese nationalist viewpoint. According to de Silva, the Sinhalese have lived in Sri Lanka for over twenty-five hundred years, while the Tamils have been in the country only for about fifteen hundred years. Though the Sinhalese originally came from India, they have developed their own unique culture and speak a language that is not spoken anywhere else in the world. Since the Sri Lankan Tamils have an ethnic affinity with the millions of Tamils in South India, the Sinhalese feel that they are a minority in the region, despite their majority status in Sri Lanka. They also remember the Indian invasions of Sri Lanka over the centuries and thus look upon the Tamils as their “traditional enemies.” In addition, the Sinhalese—the majority of whom are Buddhists—consider themselves historically destined to protect and safeguard Theravada Buddhism, which has been obliterated by Hinduism in India. The Buddhists feel that their faith—which was eroded during three consecutive colonial regimes (the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British)—is threatened by the Tamils, who are predominantly Hindus. The Sinhalese also feel that minorities such as the Tamils and the Burghers were given unfair privileges by the British during colonial times. Following the country’s independence from Britain, the Sinhalese exercised their democratic rights as the majority to regain their rightful place in Sri Lanka. The measures they took to protect their unique culture were indeed discriminatory, but the Sinhalese gradually rectified these mistakes and tried to make reparations. Despite this, the Tamils still want to carve out a separate state for themselves based on dubious claims about a traditional Tamil kingdom and homeland.
The Tamil nationalist position, as Ismail points out, is articulated by the Tamil historian A. Jeyaratnam Wilson in his books The Break-up of Sri Lanka (1988) and Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism (2000). According to Wilson, the Tamils of Sri Lanka were always a distinctive race with their own traditional homeland and kingdom in the north and northeast of the country. Far from being latecomers or interlopers, the Tamils may well have arrived and settled in Sri Lanka before the Sinhalese. The Tamils are not a minority in Sri Lanka but a nation in their own right. Colonial powers such as the Portuguese and the Dutch recognized this fact and always ruled the Tamils separately. It was only the British who centralized their government in the southwestern city of Colombo and ruled the Tamils and the Sinhalese together. Once Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain, the Tamils were willing to live peacefully with the Sinhalese, but the latter consistently discriminated against the Tamils. The Sinhalese, due to their chauvinistic nationalism, broke every promise that they made to the Tamils and disregarded all the pacts that were made between leaders of the two ethnic groups as well. Only as a reaction to these broken promises and in defense of their culture and their very lives did the Tamils finally decide to take up arms for the sake of a separate state for themselves, which they call “Eelam.”
In Abiding by Sri Lanka, Qadri Ismail convincingly argues against authoritative histories such as those written by de Silva and Wilson. By juxtaposing an analysis of the above-mentioned works by de Silva and Wilson against historical works written previously by the same two writers, Ismail shows that due to their political agendas, the two historians have changed the past based on the political reality of the present—thus, instead of the past affecting the present, the opposite can become true within the discipline of history because of the authority that is given to the historian. Writing during the ceasefire that preceded the final phase of the war, Ismail, who prefers not to refer to the situation in the country as “the ethnic conflict” and instead emphasizes that the problem in Sri Lanka is “a question of peace,” posits that literature can do more than history or anthropology (the latter of which he dismisses as being completely Eurocentric) to effect peace in Sri Lanka because it does not claim to be true or verifiable (unlike history and anthropology) and therefore allows the reader to imagine possibilities. Ismail values writers and works that abide by Sri Lanka. In Ismail’s terms, “to abide by” is to actually take sides and make interventions in situations, instead of merely acting as native informants trying to appear objective and interpret situations to the West. For Ismail, abiding by Sri Lanka does not necessitate living in Sri Lanka since it is the text that shows whether a writer is abiding by Sri Lanka or not. Finally, Ismail argues against representational democracy, which always privileges majority rule, and calls for attention to be given to a minority perspective that is not based simply on numbers.
My study, like Abiding by Sri Lanka, recognizes the value of literature in seeking reconciliation in Sri Lanka but goes beyond the two literary works 6 that are considered by Ismail. I examine literary works about the ethnic conflict ranging from novels by Shyam Selvadurai (1994), Romesh Gunesekera (1994), Ambavalanar Sivanandan (1998), Michael Ondaatje (2000), Nihal de Silva (2003), Channa Wickremesekera (2005) and V.V. Ganeshananthan (2008) to collections of poems and short stories by Kamala Wijeratne (1984-2002), Jean Arasanayagam (1984-2002), Neil Fernandopulle (1999), Pradeep Jeganathan (2004), and Vivimarie Vanderpoorten (2007-2010). These works deal with factors that contributed to the building up of tensions that led to the conflict, the variety of situations that ordinary people dealt with since the conflict began, the coping strategies that they used in a war situation, and the responses of locals, diasporics, and the international community to events in the country.
In Sri Lanka: Voices from a War Zone (2005), the Indian journalist Nirupama Subramanian writes about the stories of ordinary people—including farmers, fisherfolk, housewives, maids, teachers, schoolchildren, and retirees—who were affected by the war. Subramanian, in the introduction to her commendable work, writes:
In years to come, historians will doubtless deal with the period in their own way. But orthodox histories usually look at events from above, painting broad brush strokes that do not take into account the lives of ordinary people who are affected by those events, and how, in turn, they influence the march of history. (xvi)
Literary works about the ethnic conflict not only give us narratives similar to those in Subramanian’s work, they also often create spaces for people, places, and situations to which such a reporter might not have access. After all, Subramanian herself admits that the government or the militant groups frequently prevented her from going to places she wanted to visit and meeting people with whom she wanted to talk. 7 A literary work does not have to deal with such constraints; it can be a way of bridging the gap between verifiable accounts of events and sanctioned ignorance, to use Gayatri Spivak’s term, of such happenings. Through an act of imagination, the writer and reader can both experience—albeit to a very small extent—what otherwise might be foreclosed to them.
In addition to imagining events and incidents that happened during the different stages of the ethnic conflict but were not covered by the media due to a variety of factors and circumstances, literary works about the conflict also make possible counter-moments/spaces. These counter-moments/spaces, which call for great imaginative work, can act as a key coping device in times of trauma and dislocation. The writers of works examined in this study do this counter-imagining in different ways; some remind us of times and spaces from the past (for instance, Arasanayagam and Sivanandan take us back to places and times in which members of different ethnic groups in Sri Lanka co-existed in relative harmony and co-operation). This strategy of retrieval is not necessarily the same as nostalgia, which usually involves yearning and/or mourning for what is lost and cannot be recovered. Imagining other times and spaces in this case is both a reminder that problematizes narratives of long-standing and implacable enmity bet
ween groups that are currently at odds with each other, and a motivating force to seek ways and means of recuperating and re-creating such spaces and times. Other writers imagine the potential of imagined events (for example, de Silva explores what would happen if representatives of opposing sides were thrown together and could interact directly with each other as human beings instead of as quintessential enemies). Spivak, in a talk on terrorism, has emphasized the necessity of this type of (radical) imaginative work, which considers the opponent—even if it is a suicide bomber—as a human being and attempts to understand the significance of his/her act:
I am… not suggesting that political analyses and resistances and, on another level, aid and human rights, are unnecessary. I am suggesting that if in the imagination we do not make the attempt to figure the other as imaginative actant, political (and military) solutions will not remove the binary which led to the problem in the first place. … It is an imaginative exercise in experiencing the impossible—stepping into the space of the other—without which political solutions come drearily undone in the continuation of violence. (“Terror” 94)
To Spivak, and to the writers whose works will be discussed in the following chapters, the imagination is not “mere unreason” (“Terror” 101) but a powerful force that enables both the writers and the readers to think creatively and move towards solutions by wrestling with what might otherwise be quickly dismissed as impossibilities.
This book, as it seeks to explore works that heed Spivak’s call to “step into the space of the other,” is influenced by the work of the University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR) group, which has tried to document human rights violations by all sides involved in the conflict. In Hoole et al.’s The Broken Palmyra (1989), members of the UTHR give detailed accounts of ordinary individuals whose human rights have been violated, with the understanding that every single person’s life and rights matter. This focus on the individual and the particular is evident in many of the literary works that deal with the ethnic conflict and are included in this book.
Throughout this study, I will be considering works that have been written by Sri Lankans in English about the ethnic conflict. First, however, I will introduce the historical context of the English language in Sri Lanka and outline the ways in which this language is implicated in the country’s prevailing ethnic conflict.
The English Language in Sri Lanka
English, in Sri Lanka, is very often referred to colloquially by the Sinhala word “kaduwa”—literally, the sword, which divides the Westernized, culturally elite class fluent in this language from everyone else in the country and “cuts down” anyone from the lower classes who aspires to economic and social advancement. For one hundred and fifty years under British colonial rule, English was the only official language of administration, law, and business, and those who knew English benefited materially, socially, and politically. The elite from all ethnic groups were able to send their children to fee-levying English-medium schools (very often run by Christian missionaries) in urban areas, while the majority of people sent their children to non-fee-levying Sinhala or Tamil “swabasha” or vernacular schools (meaning the medium of instruction for a student was his/her mother tongue). Due to the plethora of missionary schools in Jaffna—which is located in the north of the country and is a Tamil-dominated area—and the dearth of the kinds of employment opportunities available in other areas, a disproportionate number of Tamils were educated in the English medium and were able to get much-sought-after jobs in the civil service and other prestigious professions. The Burghers (Eurasians) also were very well represented in bureaucracy since English was their mother tongue. The predominance of these minorities in the civil service, professions, and public life caused resentment among the Sinhalese. English remained the only official language in the early years after independence. As Kumari Jayawardena points out, “the anomaly of continuing to conduct the administration in English, which was understood only by a fraction of the population, led to campaigns for a more democratic language policy” (66). At first, political leaders were progressive and willing to make both Sinhala and Tamil the joint official languages in the country. Soon, however, politicians sought to gain mass appeal by pandering to the preferences of the Sinhalese majority, which ultimately resulted in the “Sinhala Only” policy of the Bandaranaike government. As discussed earlier, this language policy was a major factor in the events leading to the ethnic conflict.
Even though Sinhala and Tamil are now both official languages, English—which has now been designated a “link language”—still retains much of its socio-economic power due to the effects of both Sri Lanka’s colonial past and modern globalization. Consequently, those who are only proficient in the vernacular, even if they obtain a tertiary education, find it difficult to achieve the advancement they desire. This is why English is simultaneously attractive and repulsive to the masses, who are aware of the need for proficiency in English and desperately pursue this proficiency, even as they resent having to do so. 8
Sri Lankan Anglophone Writing
Sri Lankans who engage in creative writing in English for the most part come from the Westernized upper and upper-middle classes of Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher communities. They have grown up in English-speaking families and have attended private schools or elite state schools in which English language instruction is readily available. For these writers, English has never been a foreign language; rather, it is the language that they generally speak at home and the only one they seem to feel comfortable enough to use as their creative medium. They do not appear capable of choosing the option of returning to indigenous languages, which Ngugi wa Thiong’o advocates for African societies in Decolonizing the Mind. 9
The class element mentioned above remains, however, and Sri Lankans who write creatively in English are actually wielding the “kaduwa” by writing in a language in which the majority of people in Sri Lanka are not fluent. As Neloufer de Mel points out, Sri Lankans who write in English are now marginalized by a state that propagates Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism; at the same time, “the command of the English language… still carries with it social status, mobility of profession, access to travel and the potential for cosmopolitanness, unavailable to… citizens who are outside the privileges of class and the colonial tongue” ( Women and the Nation’s Narrative 162). They are, paradoxically, both insiders and outsiders within their society.
For a long time after independence, Sri Lankan writing in English was not politically engaged. Many of the writers produced what Rajiva Wijesinha calls “village-well stories,” writing not about what they knew, the urban milieus with which they were familiar, but focusing on life in rural areas, as if they “accepted that genuine Sri Lankan experiences could only be those of the village and villagers, not those of the urban upper class society from which they themselves invariably sprung” ( Breaking Bounds 67). According to Wijesinha, the problem was not that these writers were focusing on what was mainly outside their experience, but that they repeated a limited number of themes, settings, and situations, which restricted the possibility of exploring the interplay of issues such as class and race, making the texts seem ahistorical and apolitical. For example, in many of James Goonewardene’s novels (like A Quiet Place from 1968) and Punyakante Wijenaike’s early work (such as The Waiting Earth from 1966), villagers and village situations are idealized, and rural people, for the most part, are presented as being simple and pure in contrast to the debauched and sophisticated city folk.
Most critics agree that what first spurred these “writers to become more sensitive to the political, social and cultural realities of the land” (Sugunasiri 69) and engage with their own identities and roles in society was primarily the 1971 JVP insurrection, the failed attempt by educated but unemployed rural Sinhalese Marxist youth to overthrow the government and create a new social order. At this crucial period, when young people from the villages were willing to sacrifice their lives in order to make a drastic change in a s
ocial structure which kept the majority of Sri Lankans in dire poverty, writers such as Ediriwira Sarachchandra, Wijenaike, Goonewardene, M. Chandrasoma, and Raja Proctor began to make an effort to analyze these socio-political developments and understand their own roles in society through their writing. They seem to have begun to gain an awareness that it was not possible to continue subscribing to the notion of an “urban-rural dichotomy” (Goonetilleke “Beyond Alienation” 32), that their lifestyles perhaps contributed to the oppression of others, and that it was necessary to “acknowledg[e] complicity” (Spivak Critique 309) for what was wrong in the social structure. Nonetheless, the 1971 insurrection was only the starting point for Sri Lankan writers in English to move beyond their disengagement and feelings of alienation; as the Sri Lankan dramatist Ernest MacIntyre has said of that period: “We hover just over it [the indigenous society] in varying degrees of unease or at least concern, but can’t or won’t make a landing. There is no final commitment” (“Creativity” 380).
The push for Sri Lankan writers in English to make the “final commitment” of which MacIntyre writes came with the beginning of the violence that erupted in the early 1980s and continued unabated for more than twenty-five years. These armed struggles affected every aspect of life in Sri Lanka, making writers engage with the socio-political developments in the country to an even greater extent than before. Some Sri Lankans who write in English, such as Yasmine Gooneratne, Gunesekera, Ondaatje, Chandani Lokuge, Selvadurai, Sivanandan, and Channa Wickremesekera, have, over the years, either chosen to or been forced to go into exile in the West as a result of the violence and political instability in Sri Lanka, while others, such as Arasanayagam, de Silva, Fernandopulle, Sita Kulatunge, Carl Muller, Anne Ranasinghe, Eva Ranaweera, Ayathurai Santhan, Sivamohan Sumathy, Vanderpoorten, Wijenaike, and Wijeratne, continue to live in Sri Lanka. Many of these writers have had to grapple with how and why the violence erupted in Sri Lanka and attempt to work out the issues it has raised.
Terror and Reconciliation Page 2