Consequently, I examine the complex issues that are brought up in and by the recent works in English by Sri Lankan writers—both those who live in Sri Lanka and those who do not—when they write about the ethnic conflict. On the one hand, these writers are located in different material cultures that affect how they produce their texts, including the genres in which they write. For example, due to the dearth of publishing and other opportunities, most writers resident in Sri Lanka tend to write short stories, novellas, and poems, as opposed to the diasporics, who more frequently produce novels, which leads to the question as to whether some genres are more suitable than others in terms of dealing with a subject like the ethnic conflict. On the other hand, both groups of writers are engaged in mapping out a range of subject positions within their work as they attempt to respond to the turmoil in Sri Lanka, and those who have to wrestle with the claims of their multiple identities are engaged in delineating the contours of their own subjectivity.
Liberation Struggle, Terrorist Problem,
Civil War, or Ethnic Conflict?
Language also affects how we talk about the violence in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009, whether in English, Sinhala, or Tamil. Anyone who discusses this conflict has to face the problem of deciding what to call it. Proponents of the LTTE would like to describe this as a war of liberation (and would describe its conclusion as the tragic defeat of a liberation struggle), while Sinhalese nationalists among others would describe it as a war against terrorism (and celebrate its ending as a final victory over a terrorist menace). News reports have used these terms interchangeably and have also referred to the situation in Sri Lanka as a civil war or an ethnic conflict. I use the term “the ethnic conflict” despite the fact that it is not entirely unproblematic.
Attempts to define the Sri Lankan conflict as a liberation struggle show the influence of Frantz Fanon, who justified violence as a way of nationalist resistance against colonial oppression because colonialism makes violence systematic. In The Wretched of the Earth, he asserts that the first encounter between the colonizer and the colonized was “colored by violence” and “their cohabitation” is similarly carried on by violent means (2). As a result, “the colonized masses intuitively believe that their liberation must be achieved and can only be achieved by force” (33). Spontaneous acts of anti-colonial violence ultimately lead to a war of liberation. According to Fanon, the violence is redemptive in that it “unifies the people,” restores their self-respect, and leads to political independence (51). 10 This was a common mindset among Tamils at the beginning of the conflict: the Sinhalese majority was seen as the oppressors, and militancy was considered the means through which Tamils could obtain a separate state and ensure that they would no longer be subjected to discrimination or violence by the Sinhalese. 11 As the University Teachers for Human Rights group emphasizes in Hoole et al.’s The Broken Palmyra, however, the popular base of the militants became eroded over the years, and it certainly cannot be said that all Tamils consider or support the LTTE—which decimated rival militant groups and killed Tamil dissidents such as Dr. Rajani Thiranagama—as their sole representatives.
Other participants in the conflict would argue that the war in Sri Lanka was primarily a terrorist problem. They would point to suicide bombings such as the ones that killed Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993 and to explosions such as the Central Bank bombing at the World Trade Centre in Colombo in 1996 and the Temple of the Tooth (a major Buddhist sacred site) in Kandy in 1998. Because of its attacks on civilian targets, frequently by means of suicide bombings, the LTTE was proscribed as a terrorist organization by the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Canada, and, most recently, the European Union. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the LTTE justified acts of violence in Fanonist terms by referring to their struggle as a war of national liberation.
Michael Sonnleitner has pointed out that for Fanon, the ends justified the means. Since Fanon has suggested that a new humanity for the colonized can only be created by absolute violence, Sonnleitner insists that “absolute violence clearly includes terrorism” (288). Sonnleitner goes on to define terrorism as “political violence involving an intentional willingness to injure civilian noncombatants” (288). Yet it is difficult to pin down what terrorism actually is. With reference to the violence in Northern Ireland, Richard Kirkland writes,
Terrorism has consistently been perceived as an act that defies the realm of civic discourse. Indeed, it has been the traditional role of language in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist atrocity to present itself as unable to capture the overwhelming materiality of the event itself. What, so the argument runs, can words offer in the face of such violence? Understood as such, every terrorist outrage becomes unspeakable. (77)
The sense that terrorist acts are irrational and unknowable is evident in more recent discussions of terrorism, which have been influenced by the terrorist attacks of September 11th. As Oliver Marchart points out in “The Other Side of Order: Towards a Political Theory of Terror and Dislocation,” Hans Magnus Enzensberger has made a useful differentiation between “terror” and “terrorism.” According to Enzensberger, acts of terror—terror for its own sake—are empty acts with no apparent goals or signification and lead to a sense of dislocation; acts of terrorism, on the other hand, come with conventional rituals such as phone calls claiming responsibility or setting out specific goals—and lead to disorder (Marchart 97-100). From these attempts at understanding terrorism, we can see that the assassinations and bombings described above are examples of the LTTE using terrorism as a tactic to advance what they claimed was a war of national liberation for the Tamils. Just as it is problematic to define the LTTE’s military campaigns as a war of liberation, it is also problematic to regard the Sri Lankan government’s campaigns against the LTTE solely as a struggle against terrorism because it would elide the fact that the government itself (under various administrations) is responsible for atrocities before and after the terrorist acts by the militants began. In addition, the campaign of fear psychosis carried out by the JVP in the late 1980s and early 1990s—referred to in Sinhala as “bheeshana yugaya” (literally, “reign of terror”)—might then also be ignored.
The term “civil war”—which has been frequently used by the international media—suggests that there is a bifurcation of all Sinhalese and Tamils, which is too simplistic and also ignores other actants such as the Muslims, who have been victims of mass expulsions in LTTE-controlled territories in the north and northeast. I choose to refer to the crisis in Sri Lanka as the ethnic conflict since the term can encompass all the different phases and participants even as it refers to precipitating issues such as ethnic identity and language. This is not to say that the term is unproblematic; the term “ethnic conflict” makes it seem as if Sri Lankans are only marked by ethnicity, despite the fact that Muslims, for example, are marked by their religion even though the majority of them consider Tamil as their first language. Also, whatever their practice, the Sri Lankan government claims to represent all ethnic groups, not just the Sinhalese. Despite these problems, however, “ethnic conflict” still seems to be a more suitable term than “war of national liberation,” “terrorist problem,” or “civil war.”
Keeping in mind the assertions of critics such as Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik regarding the ways in which practitioners of postcolonial theory are complicit in neocolonialism due to their institutional location, 12 and heeding Spivak’s warning that postcolonial intellectuals should be vigilant in positioning themselves and making “a productive acknowledgment of complicity” ( Critique xii), it is necessary for me to position myself at this point. I am of Sri Lankan origin and a Sinhalese, and I live and work in the United States. Since I have gathered much of the material for my study in Sri Lanka, I may appear to be open to the charge of mining information from my native country. I believe, however, that my work is not one merely of information retrieval but one that will allow me t
o make an intervention, or, as Ismail might put it, abide by Sri Lanka. My aim is not merely to bring the body of English writing by Sri Lankans to the attention of the Western academy but also to the attention of a Sri Lankan audience. Indeed, Sri Lankan writing in English has not received much critical attention in Sri Lanka and this is a lack—a lack that is detrimental to both writers and the prospective audience in the country—that my work seeks to address.
Why Anglophone Writers and Literature?
As my reference to Ngugi suggests, one response to the project of writing about Anglophone literature in a nation which, like Sri Lanka, has a non-Anglophone majority, is to dismiss this body of work as the production of an elite without a serious connection to the concerns of the population. Indeed, this is what some critics—including at times the prominent Sri Lankan critic D.C.R.A Goonetilleke, but more frequently critics within the broader field of postcolonial studies who encounter Sri Lankan literature—have done. This is a plausible objection, but it overlooks the ways in which the conflict has victimized speakers of all languages on the island, and it overestimates the degree of privilege conferred by English fluency. Lasantha Wickrematunge, an outspoken editor of the Sri Lankan English-language newspaper The Sunday Leader who was assassinated in broad daylight during the final months of the war; Richard de Zoysa, a poet and journalist assassinated by death squads associated with the Sri Lankan government of the time; and Rajani Thiranagama, a courageous Tamil physician, medical professor, and human rights activist gunned down by the LTTE all serve as examples of victims of interethnic violence drawn from the English-speaking population. Likewise, numerous Sinhalese and Tamil political figures assassinated or wounded by suicide bombers or snipers shared an English-speaking background: Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, Tamil United Liberation Front leader Neelan Thiruchelvan, former president Chandrika Kumaratunga (who survived a suicide bombing but lost the use of an eye), and many others. This is not to mention all the nameless victims and perpetrators who spoke, wrote, or read English: middle-class Tamils in Colombo or Jaffna expelled from their homes by the riots of 1983 in the first case or the years of war that followed in the second; middle-class Muslims and Sinhalese expelled from their homes in Jaffna by the LTTE; English-speaking Tamils who were members of the LTTE or one of the rival militant groups that ultimately fought against the LTTE; Sinhalese, Burgher, Muslim, and Tamil members of the Sri Lankan armed forces, government, and business community who were drawn into the violence; and the list could go on. English is a Sri Lankan language, and although it would be a mistake to think of Anglophone literature as exhausting the Sri Lankan response to the conflict, it is also a mistake to omit this literature from the discussion.
It is worth noting that the question of whether English language writing from non-Anglophone majority countries should be valued has resonances around the world, and has been addressed elsewhere by such figures as Salman Rushdie and Chinua Achebe. In response to Ngugi wa Thiongo’s call for African writers to write in indigenous languages, Achebe contended in his essay “The Song of Ourselves” (1990):
And talking of dispossession, what about language itself? Does my writing in the language of my colonizer not mean acquiescing in the greatest dispossession? … Let me simply say that when at age thirteen I went to that school modeled after British public schools, it was not only English literature that I encountered there. I came into contact also for the first time in my life with many boys who did not speak my Igbo language. And they were not foreigners, but fellow Nigerians. … [To live together] we had to put away our different mother tongues and communicate in the language of our colonizers. (319)
Salman Rushdie affirmed much the same point in his now classic essay “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist” (1983), in which he proclaimed that “the English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English a long time ago” (70). In the spirit of Rushdie and Achebe, we can justifiably conclude that English is in part a Sri Lankan possession and that what Sri Lankans do with this possession is of interest to anyone concerned with the English language itself.
Indeed, in seeking to understand the country’s ethnic conflict, it is especially important to examine the work of Sri Lankan writers who use English as their medium. These writers, just as much as Sri Lankans who write in Sinhala and Tamil, represent the country through their writing; furthermore, they tend to call into question myths of cultural purity. It is important to note, of course, that there is no such thing as cultural purity and “cultural impurity” is not limited to the Sri Lankans who write creatively in English. As Anthony Appiah points out, “We are all already contaminated by one another” (439) and as Spivak asserts, “All identities are irreducibly hybrid” ( Critique 155). However, the Sri Lankans who write in English are particularly visible as being culturally hybrid since their writing in English precludes them from being marked simply as “Sinhalese” or “Tamil” or “Muslim.” They may identify with one of these segments of Sri Lankan society more than others, but they are so heavily influenced by the cultural complications of history that they even write creatively in a language that would otherwise not have been considered their mother tongue.
As Homi Bhabha writes, the “interstitial passage between fixed identification opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (4). The value of hybridity, therefore, is that it opens up differences without hierarchy—something that is necessary at this crucial period of Sri Lanka’s history. Neluka Silva points out in her introduction to the collection The Hybrid Island that in a time of ethnic conflict, the prevailing discourses emphasize notions of racial and cultural purity (i-ii). Each side invokes originary myths in order to validate its own particular claims. 13 In their respective articles in the same collection, anthropologists Arjun Guneratne and Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake delineate how the close connections and mixings among the Sinhalese, Tamils, and other groups over the centuries have been increasingly denied during the ethnic conflict as each group attempts to show its exclusivity and purity as a means of emphasizing its territorial rights.
Guneratne draws attention to one way in which the Sinhalese differentiate themselves from the Tamils—by wholeheartedly embracing the concepts of “Aryan” and “Dravidian” that were introduced by British intellectuals into Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century. Guneratne asserts, however, that both the Sinhalese and the Tamils are from the same stock and came to Sri Lanka from India in successive migrations. He points out that although the Sinhalese have been classified as Aryan because they speak an Indo-European language—like the peoples of North India—while the Tamils have been classified due to their language as Dravidian—like the peoples of South India—both the Sinhalese and the Tamils share a common kinship structure based on cross-cousin marriages. Guneratne argues that since language is more liable to change than kinship structures, a divisive factor such as language should not be privileged over a uniting factor such as kinship structures (20-38).
Rajasingham-Senanayake, meanwhile, looks at the cosmopolitanism and diversity of Sri Lanka as described in a plethora of older narratives by visitors to the island. She says, “Sinhala and Tamil nationalist historical narratives share a common plot that presumes that the two groups were and are mutually exclusive. These nationalist histories elide ‘other’ histories of mixed settlement, intermarriage, and bilingual and bicultural communities in many parts of the island” (44). At such a time, the concept of hybridity enables the possibility of exposing the constructedness of discourses of purity.
Just as Spivak has suggested the value of strategic essentialism, Rajasingham-Senanayake argues for a strategic use of the concept of hybridity despite the fact that it is “a product of the very same discursive structure that prioritizes ‘pure,’ (or mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) identities” (63). Rajasingham-Senanayake suggests that hybridity is most effectively used as “a ruse to denaturalize and historicize the settled ident
ity categories that we take for granted, and to highlight the contingent, contextual and political nature of apparently ancient cultural identities” (63). Sri Lankans who write in English, through the very act of writing, conspicuously problematize dangerous and false claims about national purity as they attempt to come to grips with the fact that they are part of the nation even though they have been greatly influenced by mixings and borrowings from other cultures. For this reason it is important to examine the influence of the ethnic conflict and Anglophone Sri Lankan literature on each other.
There have been no book-length studies specifically about Anglophone Sri Lankan literature on the ethnic conflict. Scholarship on Sri Lankan literature in English, for the most part, concentrates on the texts that appeared in the period before the beginning of the ethnic conflict. In his Sri Lanka’s Modern English Literature (1994), Wilfrid Jayasuriya focuses on early Anglophone literature in Sri Lanka and gives useful background and analysis on texts written before or shortly after independence. The ethnic conflict and its significance on Sri Lankan literature, however, is discussed only briefly in the final chapter. D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke’s book, ambitiously titled Sri Lankan English Literature and the Sri Lankan People 1917-2003, is an excellent resource that provides the most extensive listing of works written by Sri Lankans in English both before and during the ethnic conflict. Since he is more concerned with breadth than depth, Goonetilleke does not provide much analysis for the more recent works about the ethnic conflict. Minoli Salgado’s Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance, and the Politics of Place (2007) deals with some of the diasporic writers that I consider, but with few of their local counterparts. As important and path-breaking as Salgado’s book is, I would suggest that our comprehension of Sri Lankan Anglophone literature is incomplete, particularly when the focus is on writings about the ethnic conflict, so long as we do not consider the work of those Anglophone writers not generally known in the West, and that even our understanding of diasporics like Michael Ondaatje and Shyam Selvadurai is enriched when we consider them alongside their counterparts who are resident in Sri Lanka.
Terror and Reconciliation Page 3