13. Kenneth Harrow discusses similar kinds of myths of purity in relation to the Hutu and Tutsi and the genocide in Rwanda in his “‘Ancient Tribal Warfare’: Foundational Fantasies of Ethnicity and History” (2005).
14. For information on the complexities of planning the English literature curriculum in Sri Lankan schools, see Rajiva Wijesinha’s “Teaching Post-colonial Literature in Sri Lanka” (1997).
15. For more information on the constraints that Sri Lankan Anglophone writers have to face in terms of publishing, see Walter Perera’s “Recent Developments in Sri Lankan (English Language) Literature” (2006) and Ameena Hussein’s “The Joys of a Small Print Run” (2011).
16. Channels is a journal of creative writing published annually by the English Writers Cooperative, with a different editor each year. The rotating editorship means that writers are gradually able to gain experience in editing, designing, printing, and publishing the work of their peers. According to Sita Kulatunge, one of the editors of the journal, “The intention was to bring out four issues per volume each year, but this proved to be far too ambitious a target: firstly, and mainly for financial reasons (we have to manage entirely on Members’ yearly subscriptions). … Putting together a journal such as CHANNELS needs time and labour, and we have no office or staff to deal with the day to day tasks” (qtd. in Ranasinghe, “Editorial”). Channels is the successor of earlier independent literary magazines such as New Ceylon Writing and New Lankan Review, both of which have been defunct for some time.
17. New media sites such as blogs and WriteClique.net (an online community of writers sponsored by the British Council), as well as the Galle Literary Festival (held annually since 2006), have been helpful to Anglophone Sri Lankan writers in getting their work a wider audience, publicity, and feedback.
18. Wijesinha’s hypothesis seems to be validated by Kamala Wijeratne, who says that local critics did not write about her work until a friend of hers in England wrote a favorable review of a collection of her poems. When Wijeratne sent a clipping of the review to a local critic, it was immediately published in an English-language newspaper; soon afterwards, she was awarded a state prize that enabled her to publish her next collection without bearing the expense of the venture herself as she had done until then (personal communication).
Part One
Island Dialogues
Chapter 2
Mourning Terror: Memorials to the Conflict in Poetry and Film
The problem of how to mourn victims of terror and the importance of doing so is a recurring theme in Sri Lankan Anglophone literature. Because the writers of Anglophone literature in Sri Lanka span a variety of ethnic and religious communities, their work provides the opportunity to memorialize loss across the communal spectrum. 1 Readers of Anglophone literature are thus exposed to the pain of other groups as well as their own.
The issue of mourning has been highlighted recently in Sri Lanka in the collection Matters of Violence, edited by Jayadeva Uyangoda. In the lead essay in the collection, Sasanka Perera argues that in situations characterized by insurgent terrorism, state terror, or both, the absence of a body to be mourned constitutes a portion of the injury to both bereaved individuals and the entire society. Perera writes: “Experiences of unnatural and violent death (particularly those involving the absence of a body), and the narratives of such experiences have to be understood in the context of a language of incompleteness, suddenness, darkness, and endless unfulfilled continuity” (8). How to mourn and acknowledge loss in a society wounded by terror becomes a pressing question for Sri Lankans, and much of the Anglophone Sri Lankan literature of the last two decades has been devoted to mourning precisely such losses.
The victims are memorialized in different ways—one of which is an emphasis on the more prominent or well-known people who have been killed and come to be mourned as representatives of countless others who have died and as celebrated figures of immense and now unrealized potential. Another way of mourning and memorializing is to name and list the apparently nameless and faceless hundreds and even thousands of people who have been “disappeared” or killed and become mere numbers in news reports—and sometimes not even that if there is censorship with regard to extra-legal violence. It also becomes important to mourn other losses—the loss of innocence, unity, and perhaps even humanity and decency—that have been effected by the war. The mourning and memorializing can also include expressions of anger against those responsible for the losses, sometimes sharp indictments of the perpetrators.
Judith Butler, in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, has theorized about the “possibility of community on the basis of violence and loss” (20). Butler notes that the loss of a loved one is something that people, no matter how different in other respects, have all experienced; when people mourn the loss of a loved one, it is also an acknowledgment of the ways in which they are connected to others and the vulnerability exposed by the loss of such ties (20). According to Butler, “Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility” (22). Thus, grief and mourning can make people all the more conscious of their own ties to and dependence on others and result in their turning towards community and perhaps accepting responsibility for how that community functions—a mobilization towards political action and change.
The following pages look at the mourning process in the works of two very prolific Sri Lankan poets resident in the country throughout the various phases of the conflict, one Sinhalese and the other Burgher, along with several less-well-known poets. I conclude the chapter with an analysis of the very public poetic and filmic memorials to two exceptionally well-known victims of violence.
“The grim saga of our war-torn races”: The Poems of Kamala Wijeratne
Kamala Wijeratne is not a writer by profession—she is Sinhalese, a teacher of English, who self-published her first collection of poems in 1984, in the aftermath of the 1983 riots. She has self-published several other collections since then and deals frequently with the political situation in Sri Lanka in her poems. Wijeratne’s work is especially important to consider in this context because many of her poems mourn the physical and psychological damage caused to Sri Lanka by war, insurgency and counterinsurgency, and suicide terrorism. Wijeratne’s work also reveals the limitations of mourning; at times, she emphasizes the losses experienced by the Sinhalese almost to the exclusion of the losses experienced by other communities. Wijeratne’s work serves a crucial function in that she makes the side of Sinhalese experience that might otherwise be invisible outside the Sinhala-speaking (and what is more, reading) community available, not only to the outside world, but also to members of other linguistic groups in Sri Lanka. I discuss poems from four of Wijeratne’s collections, in particular, those poems that focus on the war and violence in Sri Lanka. Wijeratne emphasizes a Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalist view in her work, thus bringing to the fore concerns that will need to be addressed in any political solution to continuing ethnic tensions following the end of the military conflict.
Wijeratne can be deeply sympathetic to victims of ethnic violence on both sides of the conflict. One of her most well-known poems is “Dear Mabs,” from the 1985 collection A House Divided. Wijeratne indicates in this poem that the Sinhalese and the Tamils did live together in peace at an earlier time, and she mourns the loss of inter-ethnic amity following the 1983 riots. The poem is in the form of a letter written by the Sinhalese speaker to her erstwhile neighbor, a Tamil woman who is now living abroad. Mabs has lost her family home, her source of income, and her ability to live in her native country as a result of the riots, a situation that makes her broadly representative of the experience of Sri Lankan Tamils. The speaker addresses Mabs directly, talking of the last tim
e they met, after Mabs’s house was burned by Sinhalese mobs in July 1983. The sense of closeness that existed between the speaker and Mabs at the time is evident. The speaker knows of Mab’s concerns—her life as a widow, as a single parent to her daughter, and as a caregiver to her aging mother, and her attempts to earn an income by renting her home to tenants. These two women, despite their ethnic differences, were friends, familiar with each other’s homes and concerns, and capable of communicating even without words while “sitting companionably side by side” (47). Yet the riots have divided them and forced Mabs and her family into exile. The speaker remembers her sorrow about Mabs’s plight at the time of the riots and her attempts to offer consolation: “Your hand felt clammy to my touch / your brow when I kissed it was stone-cold / but the tears that sprang to my eyes / brought no answering wetness to your own” (15-18). The speaker feels responsible for what has happened: “I hung down my head / in misery and shame; / the weight of history sagged down my shoulders / its pages heavy with the grim saga of our war-torn races” (20-23). The speaker is able to recognize that she shares responsibility for what has happened to her friend and neighbor. The speaker subscribes, however, to the myth that there has always been enmity between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in Sri Lanka. Many people on both sides adhere to this belief, which has been challenged by anthropologists such as Arjun Guneratne, who points out that “the opposition between the concepts Sinhala/Tamil is a modern one, arising out of a modern situation beginning in the economic and social transformation of the colonial period, and unlikely to have been meaningful to our ancestors” (26). Rajan Hoole has asserted that until relatively recently, caste was the principal mark of identity in Sri Lanka, as it was throughout South Asia, not language or religion (122), while Nira Wickramasinghe in Ethnic Politics in Colonial Sri Lanka and Kumari Jayawardena, in Ethnic and Class Conflicts in Sri Lanka, have both shown that ethnic consciousness came to the fore in Sri Lanka only in the last century or so, encouraged by the British colonial regime and its “divide and rule” policy. By mentioning the long-standing enmity between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, the speaker in Wijeratne’s poem seems to imply that a solution is impossible. Wijeratne herself seems to subscribe to the speaker’s attitude and reinforces it, as we shall see, elsewhere in her poetry.
Wijeratne also focuses on individual loss in her poetry. For example, in “A Soldier’s Wife Weeps”—also from A House Divided—the speaker is a young woman who is confounded by the fact that even though “there were no malefics” (8) in the horoscope of her soldier husband, he is brought home dead. There is an overwhelming sense of both sorrow and confusion as the speaker tries to come to terms with her grief. She reflects on the “bare, barren years / stretching like a road swaying through a desert” (29-30) before her. The last line, “how wrong the horoscope readers were” (37), points to the apparent inadequacy of traditional beliefs and practices in times of conflict.
Rajiva Wijesinha has asserted that Wijeratne is a writer “whose work appears to have changed quite substantially for the better” ( Breaking Bounds 12) due to the ethnic conflict. Wijesinha goes on to say that “it was the actual explosion of the ethnic crisis around her that enabled her talent to develop in a more meaningful fashion instead of meandering through well-meaning but vague hankerings after ethnic unity that were at the same time combined with excessive exaltation of a defiant Sinhala spirit” (13). While it is true that Wijeratne’s work has developed significantly due to the conflict and she draws attention to the agonies of war, there is also a Sinhalese nationalistic strain in her work. Wijeratne embraces a Sinhalese-Buddhist identity and asserts the rights of the Sinhalese; she rarely strays far from her own ethnicity or creed.
In “I Will Not Forget Dutugemunu,” 2 from her 1984 collection The Smell of Araliya Flowers, for example, the Sinhalese speaker is directly addressing a “dear brother from the North” (2)—a Tamil. The speaker offers to the Tamil interlocutor her hands “stained with two decades of blood-letting,” which must be wiped clean “’ere you touch them” (16-17). This is a hopeful beginning—a Sinhalese speaker who is cordial to a Tamil and appears willing to take responsibility for the misdeeds of the ethnic group that she represents. The speaker quickly adds, however, that the guilt is not hers alone: “But yours too are clotted I see / With centuries of blood” (18-19). These lines appear at first to be focusing on the mutual guilt of Sinhalese and Tamils with regard to the ethnic violence since Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain; however, the Sinhalese, according to the speaker, have caused blood to be shed for only “two decades” while the Tamils have done so for “centuries.” The speaker continues to place blame on the Tamils with references to “Macbeth’s gory glass in your hands” (21) and “Elara’s marauding bands” (22). Since Macbeth and Elara both sought thrones that were not rightfully theirs, the speaker’s emphasis is on Tamils as invaders of Sri Lanka, who have long attempted to usurp the rightful position of the Sinhalese in the land, very much in keeping with the Sinhalese nationalist viewpoint discussed in the previous chapter. The speaker assumes a tone of superiority as she says, “But killing is not our creed, loving is” (31), as if to imply that one community’s religion is more non-violent than that of the other. The speaker goes on to say that the responsibility for ending the conflict lies solely on the Tamils: “It is up to you whether we be friends / Equal” (42-43). The speaker seems to suggest that if the Tamil militants stop their activities, there would be no more problems, ignoring issues such as the discrimination against Tamils by the Sinhalese majority. Yet the poem ends on a more conciliatory note, with a recognition that there is commonality between the Sinhalese and the Tamils: “Because we are of one stream / Of one source” (47-48). These final lines, when juxtaposed with what has been said earlier, reveal a tension in the poem between Sinhalese nationalism and a more inclusive Sri Lankan nationalism.
Many of Wijeratne’s poems describe the devastating effects of violence. The sight of a truckful of young soldiers leaving for the battlefields of the north brings “the mist” (11) to the speaker’s eyes in “Musical,” from the 1994 collection The White Saree and Other Poems. In “Lest We Forget,” from the 2002 collection Millennium Poems, Wijeratne writes of how Sri Lankans have become impervious to the daily bulletins of war. As she listens in a crowded bus to a radio news report giving the numbers of soldiers and militants killed in the conflict, the speaker looks around at her fellow passengers: “For the reaction / That should have been; / For a face to pale / A hand to fold and unfold / For fingers to clench / At least for a muscle to twitch” (13-18). But there is nothing: no anger or shock or any type of reaction in her fellow passengers to the reports of these deaths. These acts of violence have happened too many times to disrupt the lives of those who are not directly affected by them. “We have got so accustomed / To this unending war / As we have got used / To the garbage dumps / In every sprawling street / To the reeking stench / Of rotting bones and skin / Of bulls and pigs / And feathers of chicken / Sodden deep in mud / By the thunder showers” (45-55). The imagery in the poem actually conveys the horrors of war through the sights, smells, and textures of the garbage dumps, bringing to mind descriptions of trench warfare in poetry from the First World War. Just as the garbage dumps contain the remains of animals that have been consumed, the speaker highlights the lives that have been consumed by the war and are quickly forgotten, relegated to the garbage dumps of history. Wijeratne also seems to suggest that both the war and the consumption of the flesh of animals (as hinted at in the poem) indicate that the nation is falling short in relation to Buddhist ideals.
Wijeratne has not been slow to criticize the violent acts of her own ethnic group during the second Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurgency. In the poem “White Saree,” Wijeratne deals with the spate of abductions and killings of young men in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, for which the insurgents and the then government were both responsible. The speaker has just returned from a funeral and is about to p
ut away her funeral attire—a saree that is white, the color of mourning for both the Tamils and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and a hint of the shared culture of these two ethnic groups—but decides not to do so because she does not know when mourning garb will be needed again. “First it was Jagath / Then Hiran / And today Ajith / I don’t know who will be next. / Jagath was killed at home / Getting ready for dinner, / Hiran was on his way to work, / And Ajith shot building the dam” (20-27). These men were not killed on the battlefield against Tamil militants but cut down as they went about their day-to-day activities by fellow Sinhalese—either JVP insurgents attempting to strike fear into the populace or paramilitary agents of the government trying to eradicate those whom they suspected to be in league with the insurgents. The act of mourning “Jagath,” “Hiran,” and “Ajith” is politically powerful because it indicts the senselessness of the violence in Sri Lanka. Wijeratne is leading her readers in an expression of collective grief that is also a rebuke to the state- and non-state-sponsored violence of the time.
Wijeratne’s critique is harsher in “Panati Pata Weramani Sikkapadam Samadiyami” (from The White Saree and Other Poems)—a line in Pali for which she provides the translation within the poem: “I will not deprive / Any living creature / Of its precious life / I will not take life / From ant or worm” (7-11). This is a teaching of the Buddha and a crucial precept for Buddhists, who chant it daily. The speaker reminds the interlocutors—presumably Sinhalese Buddhists—how they learned this precept from childhood and promised to abide by it: “Every morning at school / Every evening at home / before the watchful Buddha” (14-16). She goes on to condemn the hypocrisy of those who claim to be Buddhists but commit inhuman acts: “You seem to have forgotten / Your promises to your Buddha / Because now you stride around / With your finger on an automatic / And you aim at the head / And with your foot turn the body round” (22-27).
Terror and Reconciliation Page 5