Terror and Reconciliation

by Maryse Jayasuriya

  The speaker is castigating Sinhalese Buddhists for ignoring one of the most important tenets of the Buddhist faith—to revere life in any form—even as they claim to be the defenders of the faith. The stress on “you” and “your” marks a clear division between the speaker’s beliefs and practices and those presumably of coreligionists who are involved in violent acts. Again, mourning becomes a resistance to violence.

  It is significant that even for a writer such as Wijeratne, who deplores violence in general, the war against the LTTE is a necessity. There is a tension here between the universalistic ethic within Buddhism that Wijeratne celebrates and a tendency towards particularism in her occasional embrace of Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalism. There are many poems in which Wijeratne clearly feels sympathy primarily for one of the warring factions—the Sinhalese. It is difficult to see a distinction between the poet and the persona she assumes in the different poems since many of the poems involve some sort of witnessing and seem autobiographical and/or confessional. In “To a Student” (from Millennium Poems), the speaker says, “I tremble for men of kindred blood” (18). The poem “Not the Sphinx but the Sybil” (also from Millennium Poems) begins with a description of the effects of a bomb blast. The speaker proceeds to say, “Our lives are arranged by war / A war we never made” (35-36). Perhaps the speaker is an ordinary person who feels that he or she has nothing to do with the turbulent situation in the country. There is no acknowledgment in the poem that even such an ordinary citizen might have some responsibility in the discrimination against the Tamils that caused the conflict or in the election of particular administrations. There is much bitterness as the speaker talks of how “the world turns away from us / And lauds those who inflict death” (39-40). The reference is perhaps to the years during which militant groups such as the LTTE were not categorized by foreign governments or international organizations as terrorists and were therefore able to raise funds freely for their activities as “freedom fighters.” Perhaps it is this sense of abandonment by the international community and having to fend for themselves that led some Sinhalese groups to become (even) more chauvinistic as a means of defense.

  In “We” (from Millennium Poems), the speaker sees the Sinhalese as the rightful heirs of the country—Sri Lanka is depicted as a Buddhist country set aside for the Sinhalese, who are symbolized by the lion. “There was no doubt at all / About status / We were the children / Of the lion / Basking in the sun; / Singled out to inhabit / The golden isle / And rule it too / For five thousand years” (1-9). The speaker poses a question: “Has the decline come then? / The tide turned, the tail twisted? / The tiger growls in the jungle terrain” (22-24). The threatening growl of the tiger is a very obvious reference to the activities of the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, commonly known as “the Tigers.” The speaker admits that in more recent centuries, there have been additions to the land from India, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Arab nations—obviously referring to the Tamil, Burgher, and Muslim minorities in Sri Lanka. There is a definite sense that these newcomers should not attempt to usurp the power of the dominant lion. “May the genetic mixing make / The lion stronger” (49-50). The lion here could represent Sri Lankans as a whole since it is the main symbol on the Sri Lankan flag. The lion symbol has too often, however, been associated only with the Sinhalese; this is the reason why green and orange strips were added to the Sri Lankan flag to represent the minorities who felt that they were excluded by the image of the lion at the center. 3 What is missing here is a new way of imagining an inclusive Sri Lankan nationalism.

  Wijeratne notes particularly the destruction caused by suicide terrorism in Sri Lanka. Bombings of public places such as the “Dalada Maligawa”—the Temple of the Tooth Relic, one of the holiest shrines for Sri Lankan Buddhists—the Central Bank in the World Trade Centre building and the Colombo airport were among the most tangible ways in which urban Sinhalese like Wijeratne experienced the war, and Wijeratne’s poems register powerfully the rage, loss, and confusion created by suicide bombings. There is great anger in the speaker’s tone in “To a Suicide Bomber” (from Millennium Poems). The speaker likens suicide bombers to Hitler’s agents and other “forces of Darkness” (41). She sees suicide bombers as those who want to destroy only because they are “robots of hatred” (20) driven perhaps by “lust for gold” (32).

  It is significant that Wijeratne is unable to imagine any collective or individual ideological reason for the actions of suicide bombers, unlike Punyakante Wijenaike, who, in her novella An Enemy Within, attempts to comprehend what would drive a person to destroy both him- or herself and others and poses the possibility that the suicide bomber who blew up the Central Bank in the World Trade Centre in Colombo in 1996—by ramming a truck filled with explosives into the building—did so to avenge the death of his young son at the hands of government forces. Wijeratne’s depiction of suicide bombers is also very different from that of another Sinhalese writer, Amila Weerasinghe. The speaker in Weerasinghe’s poem “Suicide Bomber” is a Sinhalese, who speculates that rape and torture might be what drives a young Tamil woman to become a suicide bomber: “The blood of your innocence / On the prison walls. / Your body bears the scars / Of the collective sin of my people / The lion race” (4-8). The speaker in Weerasinghe’s poem makes an admission of guilt, recognizing that she and fellow Sinhalese—the reference to the “lion race” is pejorative in this case—are to blame for making people like this Tamil woman “a foreigner forever / In the land of [her] birth” (17-18), which in turn has taken away her capacity to pity the people she has to kill in order to complete her mission. Moreover, Weerasinghe’s speaker is engaged in mourning the crimes of members of her own ethnic group as well as their sufferings. 4

  Wijeratne is forthright about her Sinhalese nationalist views. She reflects the feelings of sections of the Sinhalese population that sincerely sympathize with those who have undergone the atrocities of war and violence but still fear the loss of their own Sinhalese identity. Sinhalese nationalists, for example, fear that concessions to Tamil nationalists will threaten the Sinhalese or jeopardize Sri Lankan sovereignty. This fear contributed to certain political developments in Sri Lanka in the early 2000s, when hard-line Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalist groups such as the third and latest incarnation of the JVP—which combines leftist populism with Sinhalese nationalism—and the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU)—a hard-line Sinhalese political party organized by Buddhist monks—did well in elections. 5 Understanding their viewpoint is necessary because attempts to solve the long-term problems which caused the ethnic conflict without assuaging the fears and addressing the concerns of the nationalists would ultimately fail due to the lack of necessary popular support.

  Wijeratne’s poems both reflect Sinhalese nationalistic sentiments and influence a new generation. It is noteworthy that her works sell most among university students. According to Wijeratne, she has support from a grassroots readership. While her collections of poetry are not given prominence in the bookstores, 6 they have been promoted by word of mouth among her students, as she herself has said: “My market is not in the shops; it’s among my students [at the Teacher Training College in Penideniya and at the National Institute of Education]. When my books come out, they take it over. They sell it among themselves” (personal communication). 7 The fact that Wijeratne’s books sell so well to this demographic indicates that the sentiments in her poems resonate with young people.

  Wijeratne’s poetic laments, which mourn the violence of the ethnic conflict and the second JVP insurrection, but which also betray nostalgia for an imagined golden age of Sinhalese nationhood, thus have the potential to influence the next generation—either toward a principled rejection of violence or intensified Sinhalese nationalism, both of which are present throughout her work. Her poems also serve to illuminate the affective sources of Sinhalese nationalism, meaning that they have important resonances for anyone seeking reconciliation among Sri Lanka’s ethnic and linguistic communities. For healing
and reconciliation to be possible, the wounds of all sides in the conflict must be acknowledged.

  “It’s happened to me”: The Poems of Jean Arasanayagam

  Jean Arasanayagam has been a prolific writer for more than thirty years and her body of work exemplifies the way in which Anglophone literature in Sri Lanka has developed and become more socially engaged and relevant since the beginning of the ethnic conflict. Like Wijeratne, Arasanayagam—who is also a teacher by profession—has been writing for several decades, but she is more well known and has been published by Penguin India, the Calcutta Writers’ Workshop, and other foreign publishers. Arasanayagam, a Burgher (Eurasian) of Dutch descent and a Christian who is married to a Tamil Hindu, draws heavily on incidents from her own life and mourns her personal losses along with the large-scale public losses effected by communalism. Arasanayagam thus provides a complementary view of the losses mourned by Wijeratne: because of her marriage, she is in a position to explore the losses experienced by urban Tamils in the 1983 riots and beyond, and as a Burgher, she is able to give voice to the uncertainties of one of Sri Lanka’s smallest minorities.

  In her earliest poetry and prose, Arasanayagam—who is also a painter—concentrated on sense impressions, pastoral poems romanticizing Sri Lankan village life and emphasizing the poet’s own feelings of alienation as a Burgher living in postcolonial Sri Lanka, and reflections on the problems which resulted from her interracial marriage, specifically about her tenuous relationship with her husband’s family. 8 As Yasmine Gooneratne has noted, Arasanayagam’s focus on sense impressions is evident in her poem “The Sanctuary—Kumana” from Kindura, her 1973 collection 9: “Honeysuckers puncture green-bronze berries, / Parakeets’ red beaks split globules / of golden juice clustering on branches / Butterflies’ pollened wings / Shafting in flight among crimson / Canna lilies, green chameleons” (qtd. in Gooneratne 26). 10 The poem is visually very appealing, with its emphasis on the colors and movements that are seen in nature, perhaps even indicating what the poet finds noteworthy in her society: its vibrant color, movement, and sense of plenty. Even the first JVP insurrection in 1971 did not sway Arasanayagam from her primary interest in conveying word pictures, though she was obviously moved by the events of 1971 and made it the subject of some of her poetry. This is evident in the poem “April 1971”: “On the other side of the mountain / thick blood flows from the jungle, / On the trampled grasses lie / Scattered bodies like fallen trees, / Fear and death stalk among / Laced branches and foetid caves” (qtd. in Gooneratne 28-29). There is no sense of urgency or outrage at the blood that has been shed during this abortive attempt at revolution by rural youth and the brutal squashing of that revolution by government forces, merely an almost-placid contemplation of violence that seems devoid of any human agency or meaning. The speaker is distant from what is happening “on the other side of the mountain,” gazing at what is very nearly a tableau or a still-life scene. The only movements come from what is inanimate, already-spilt “blood,” and from abstractions such as “fear” and “death.” Arasanayagam does not attempt to provide possible reasons for the insurrection, though the perceptive reader may see “the other side” as an indication of the socio-economic divide that led to the uprising. As Gooneratne observes, “Social comment was not within Jean Arasanayagam’s field of interest during the 1970s… even in a poem that engages with the pity and terror of that period, her characteristic interests emerge in the way the debris left by the insurrection is made a part of a painter’s composition” (28). Since the eruption of the ethnic conflict in 1983, however, Arasanayagam has gone beyond her initial themes in order to explore pressing socio-political issues from a very personal perspective.

  The period of terror that would become infamous as “Black July” became the turning point for Arasanayagam because she witnessed ethnic violence firsthand, and much of Arasanayagam’s work mourns and commemorates Black July and the events that followed. As mentioned in the first chapter, when the LTTE ambushed and murdered thirteen Sinhalese soldiers in Jaffna, Sinhalese gangs went on the rampage against Tamils in Colombo and other parts of the country in retaliation. It is now widely believed that the government of that time instigated these riots because the mobs had election lists that enabled them to target and destroy the houses and property of Tamils. Since Arasanayagam’s husband was a Tamil, she and her husband and two daughters were compelled to flee from their home and temporarily seek shelter in a refugee camp. Arasanayagam makes it clear that since that crucial and traumatic year, she could no longer only be a bystander feigning innocence or ignorance, or—as conveyed in the poem “April 1971” discussed above—experiencing merely a tranquil and uncomplicated sadness. Everything that happens to the country, she begins to realize, affects her.

  As a victim of violence, Arasanayagam became a witness to war. Arasanayagam conveys what she experienced through her mainly autobiographical poetry and prose with a great sense of immediacy, becoming, according to Regi Siriwardena, “the voice of our collective horror and tragedy” (4). In her collection Apocalypse ’83, written in the immediate aftermath of the July riots that had made her and her family homeless, again and again Arasanayagam revisits that time of terror and trauma when bloodthirsty mobs came to her gate, or when she and her family attempted to survive in the cutthroat environment of the refugee camp. In the poem “1958… ’71… ’77… ’81… ’83,” the speaker dwells on the fact that the riots of 1983 were not the first eruption of violence in Sri Lanka—it is merely “history repeat[ing] itself” (37). In the years mentioned in the title of the poem, interethnic riots erupted or university-educated youth from rural areas struggled to overthrow the socio-economic status quo. As the speaker reiterates, not so much with cynicism as with resignation to the inevitable, “It’s all happened before and will happen again” (27). As someone belonging to neither of the warring ethnic groups or rebelling classes, the speaker emphasizes that she was not affected by the violence prior to 1983: “Once, it was no concern of mine / I had my own identity / Safe from marauders / I watched from afar / The burning had not reached me” (9-13). Safe in her ethnicity, class, and culture, the speaker finds each successive cycle of murder and mayhem to be nothing more than an inconvenience, a “tedious repetition / of violence spilt blood smashed glass” (28-29), and the massive numbers of people tortured and/or killed in riots, pogroms, and insurrections are relatively easy for her to put out of her mind.

  But in 1983, when the mobs reached her own front door, the speaker can no longer be a mere observer gazing “from afar” at what is happening “on the other side of the mountain”—she herself has been forced into the role of victim in this violent drama: “But now I’m in it / It’s happened to me, / At last history has meaning / When you’re the victim / When you’re the defeated / The bridges bombed / And you can’t cross over” (53-61). The speaker’s shock and outrage at finding herself in the midst of violence—“But now I’m in it / It’s happened to me” (emphasis added)—are palpable and convey both a sense of violation and a realization that the political and/or the historical become real only when one’s own personal life has been directly affected by these events. The impact of the trauma is also evident in the metaphor of the bombed bridge that does not permit the speaker to get past what has happened and keeps her at a standstill, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally as well. Unlike in Arasanayagam’s earlier poems, there is no vibrancy or multiplicity of color or movement. Here, Arasanayagam mourns the loss of innocence that accompanies a fall into history.

  Arasanayagam is able to convey how much everything has changed for herself—the woman, the poet, the citizen—just as it has for the whole country. Everything—even things that would normally be considered sacred or beautiful—has been transformed so that it can only be a reminder of violence to the wounded psyche. For example, in “If the Gun Speaks,” the flowers that decorate a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh look like “Scarlet hibiscus / like gouts of blood” (5-7). In the poem “Flambo
yants in July—from a Refugee Camp,” the speaker gazes at the flamboyant trees in bloom: “The flamboyants flame / all over the city clusters of / scarlet as if the clouds / were pricked with blood” (1-4). The sight of the clouds framing the profusion of red blooms on the trees reminds the speaker of bruises and welts covering the body of a tortured, unnamed “you” that she is apostrophizing, while the “scarlet pools of fallen flowers” (25) only bring to mind the blood that has been spilt in such careless abundance in the streets. In “Vision of the World” the speaker says that she “suddenly woke up to find / That the world had changed / Someone smashed the windowpane / And the view was not the same” (1-4).

  An unknown hand has brought destruction into the speaker’s line of vision—the speaker mentions “the view” but avoids specific details, making no attempt to render the scene. Paradoxically, however, the speaker does not find this destruction wholly negative. Even though the smashed windowpane is obviously not something that the speaker desired, it has removed a barrier between the speaker and what she has been trying to see and to reach. Thus, the speaker is able to say, “Someone smashed in the door / And gave me my freedom / To walk out into the world / Free, free from the prison of myself” (5-8).

  In Arasanayagam’s case, the protective bubble around her has been punctured, but perhaps this violence has functioned as a rite of initiation which has begun to take away her feelings of alienation and enabled her to share in the trauma experienced by so many of her compatriots. The sense that the effects of the violence she endured are not unambiguously negative is evident in another of Arasanayagam’s poems, “Apocalypse July 1983”: “Never again will words say the same things / In the same old way” (1-5). The speaker suggests that violence and destruction have led to a revitalization of language—surely a positive thing for a poet.