D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke has claimed that Arasanayagam is biased in favor of her husband’s ethnic group, the Tamils: “She identifies herself with her husband’s community to the point of being partisan on their behalf in her presentation of the ‘ethnic’ conflict” (“Sri Lanka’s ‘Ethnic’ Conflict” 452). Goonetilleke’s comment emerges from the fact that Arasanayagam, in her earliest response to the ethnic violence of the 1980s, highlights the violence that she and her family had to face, particularly in such poems as “At the Gate Stands a Mob… July 1983” and “Man at the Gate,” and that violence came from Sinhalese mob aggression. Anders Sjobohm makes the more valid point that Arasanayagam avoids laying blame for the violence on any particular or named group: “In these [poems] hardly a word is said about either Sinhalese or Tamils or about aggression or racism on the part of either” (14). He goes on to say that the fact that Arasanayagam has avoided naming particular groups as agents of violence makes her work stronger because the subject matter becomes limitless and universal. 11 I would add that Arasanayagam’s most pressing concern is to highlight the carnage that occurs whenever people—no matter whether they are Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, representatives of the state, or militants—forget their humanity and take up arms for whatever cause they support by delineating the impact of the violence on the victims. Her focus is more on the victims, with whom she identifies herself, than the perpetrators of violence.
Arasanayagam, like Wijeratne, is particularly interested in portraying how life went on in Sri Lanka despite the war zone that it became following the riots of July 1983. 12 In her collection Reddened Water Flows Clear, 13 Arasanayagam reflects on the changes that happened to the lives of ordinary people in Sri Lanka and the realities that they had to deal with every day. In “Numerals,” for example, the focus is on how Sri Lankans, in order just to be able to go on with their own quotidian lives, had to try not to dwell constantly on the numbers of people being killed, tortured, or “disappeared”: “Today a hundred and fifty shot / Yesterday seventy blasted / Even the poet becomes numerate” (14-16). At the same time, Sri Lankans had to avoid letting themselves get accustomed to news of daily massacres by “keep[ing] secret diaries” (3) in their minds of all the killings and other violent acts in order to retain their humanity during a prolonged period of terror that threatened to make them numb to such horrors—as Wijeratne described in her poem “Lest We Forget.”
In “Murals,” Arasanayagam focuses on the graffiti and threatening posters put up on city walls by the subversives during the JVP insurrection of the late 1980s and early 1990s and sees a terrible power in these “talking / Walls reaching out to us, the great new Jackson / Pollocks muralling our city, we walk through barriers / Seeing our new identities at checkpoints” (1-4). The posters—which take up entire walls and are haphazardly put up under cover of night on top of posters from previous nights—seem as random at first as Pollock’s abstract expressionism. While Pollock’s action painting points towards the very struggle and physicality of his creation, the posters on the walls provide an intimidating reminder that the unseen subversives are watching and will punish those who do not obey their dictates. The ordinary people are caught between the outlaw creators of these “bold / Calligraphies jutting out to strike the eyeballs / With swords of paint” (29-31) and the menacing scrutiny of the soldiers at the check points. The people’s “new identities” are wrought out of fear, suspicion, and submission and their prime goal is survival. They do not want to stand out or be conspicuous in a crowd; instead, they retreat as fast as possible into their homes, like snails retracting fearfully into their shells. Like Wijeratne, Arasanayagam, through the verbal artistry of her poems, conveys the emotional trauma and coping strategies of people living their daily lives in the midst of constant violence and unrelenting loss.
Other Voices: A Mosaic of Grief
If Wijeratne and Arasanayagam provide memorials for the respective losses of Sinhalese and Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka’s major urban centers, the writings of their less prolific contemporaries provide insight into a wider range of Sri Lankan identities and the transnational connections that these identities sometimes have. For one of Wijeratne and Arasanayagam’s contemporaries, Anne Ranasinghe, a German Jewish Holocaust survivor and naturalized Sri Lankan citizen, mourning for the violence in Sri Lanka is interwoven with her memories of her youth in Europe and her continued mourning for all her family and friends who perished in Nazi death camps. Ranasinghe, born Anneliese Katz in Essen, Germany, was sent away to England at the age of thirteen, just before the start of World War II. It was there, years later, that she met the Sinhalese surgeon who became her husband; she moved with him to Sri Lanka, where she has lived ever since. While a major portion of her literary output has focused on the Holocaust, in which her entire family was killed, since 1983 Ranasinghe has also turned to writing poems about the violence in Sri Lanka. Ranasinghe is a particularly interesting case in Sri Lankan Anglophone literature since she does not fit comfortably into any of the conventional categories of Sri Lankan identity.
As Ranasinghe writes in the poem “July 1983,” for forty years she has been attempting to understand what happened during the Holocaust and why people acted as they did—both those who carried out the atrocities and the bystanders who passively observed the horrors without stepping forward to intervene. She begins the poem by wondering whether former Nazis and those complicit in their crimes are haunted by guilt. Midway through the poem, her focus changes and now she is concerned with questions of memory and guilt in a Sri Lankan context. She writes:
Forty years later
once more there is burning
the night sky bloodied, violent and abused
and I—though related
only by marriage—
feel myself both victim and accused,
(black-gutted timber
splinters, shards and ashes
blowing in the wind; nothing remains)—
flinch at the thinnest curl of smoke
shrink from the merest thought of fire
while some warm their hands at the flames. (16-27)
While at one point she felt distant from the victims of the Holocaust as someone, after all, who both survived and is now “half a world away” from the scene of violence (as described in the poem “Auschwitz from Colombo”), now the blood and destruction she sees on the streets of Sri Lanka remind her of the earlier atrocities that occurred in the land of her birth. This link between the brutalities enacted by the Nazi regime and the 1983 riots in Sri Lanka is most evident in the lines within parentheses, deftly describing both the destruction in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and that of Essen, Germany, four decades earlier. The “black-gutted timber / splinters, shards and ashes” bring to mind both the ruins of Jewish homes, stores, and synagogues in Nazi Germany as well as the smoking remains of Tamil homes, shops, and Hindu temples after the 1983 riots in Sri Lanka. The speaker herself feels both a victim of the violence and a perpetrator, for she knows that there can be no such thing as an innocent bystander or witness. While she herself has not participated in the violence, neither has she been able to intervene between perpetrator and victim; therefore, even though she “shrinks from the merest thought of fire,” she feels that she is complicit. Moreover, as the spouse of a Sinhalese man, she now finds herself connected—through marriage—to the ethnicity of the perpetrators of the 1983 riots.
While binaries (in climate, topography, violent events of recent history) are emphasized between Germany and Sri Lanka in poems such as “Auschwitz from Colombo” written prior to July 1983, those differences are reversed in the poems written by Ranasinghe after the riots that heralded the ethnic conflict—now the horrors and atrocities are happening in her adopted land instead of in the homeland from which she is exiled. The reversal is all the more evident in the poem “Landscapes,” which addresses a “you” who has written “of a garden filled with blossoming lilac / And a cuckoo that calls joyfully” (1-2) from an ede
nic place where “everything is green and gentle” (3) to the speaker who lives in a very different location, one with a tropical climate and monsoonal storms: “Here the clouds are thick and threatening” (5) and even the trees seem to be “holding their breath” (8). Yet the expected storm turns out to be metaphoric—what transpires is a burst of man-made violence, which leaves the speaker trying to deal with the “Red flood of torment in the desecrated night / No earth can conceal such a torrent of blood / And the voices that cried out in agony” (17-19). The sudden shift from a literal natural landscape to a figurative one that has been spoiled, “desecrated” by humans, creates both shock and horror within the reader. The poem ends with the repeated lines of “And nothing remains / but to mourn” (25-26).
For Ranasinghe, it is essential to both remember and mourn the violence, the destruction, and the brutalities that have occurred through art in order to acknowledge the reality of what has happened and ensure that such atrocities do not recur. In “Vivere in Pace,” a poem written just before the 1983 riots, the speaker responds to comments by a Sri Lankan (at “a review of an exhibition of graphics from the German Democratic Republic,” according to the notation under the title of the poem): “Why this obsession with war / and its horrors?” (1-2). The interlocutor is apparently “disturbed and horrified / and cannot live with this kind of art” (25-26) and asks, “When will the Germans stop / saying mea culpa?” (36-37). The speaker responds to this last question by saying, “Never, I hope. / For under their mea culpa lie buried millions of dead / and would you for the sake of your comfort / that we forget?” (38-41). Here, the remembrance of violence and the mourning of its effects through art is not some kind of self-indulgence but a necessity. 14 As Norman Simms observes, Ranasinghe is “increasingly obsessed with the question of remembering—because she knows what it means for the Germans to forget” (148).
Ranasinghe does not equate the six million lives lost in the Holocaust with the deaths resulting from the 1983 riots and the events that followed in Sri Lanka. She does, however, insist on the need for remembrance, as exemplified in the poem “Memory is Our Shield, Our Only Shield.” The poem begins with a consideration of what should be remembered and what forgotten. The speaker wonders whether memorials are a too-easy way of attaining comfort and peace of mind: “To exorcize the guilt / And to create acceptance, / Erase fearful remembrance / And both idealize and trivialize the circumstance?” (18-21). The speaker immediately refutes her own speculations: “A memorial is the final seal / Upon the grief / It is a link / Between past and future / It hallows and dignifies / All those who died this most horrendous death. / It is evil to forget / It is necessary to remember. / For memory is our shield, our only shield. / The memorial warns: / Six million Jews” (22-32). Over and over again, Ranasinghe emphasizes that to remember, to mourn, and to memorialize is not to find an easy way out of guilt but to ensure by means of a full awareness and cognizance of reality that history does not repeat itself.
Wijeratne, Arasanayagam, and Ranasinghe are all writing from various perpectives about Sinhalese and Tamil suffering in the south. Sivamohan Sumathy, a Tamil poet and academic, also writes the experience of loss, focusing on those individuals who have been killed or disappeared at various stages of the conflict, particularly the Tamils and the Muslims in the north who suffered at the hands of both the government and the separatists. All too frequently, the experience of war in northern Sri Lanka, where the effects of the war were most intense, can be eclipsed by the more commonly circulated narratives associated with riots and terrorism in the south of Sri Lanka. Sumathy helps to ensure that the north is not forgotten. In “Unfinished Poem,” Sumathy lists those who have been assassinated by the LTTE as traitors, ranging from a foreign minister to a diverse group of journalists, academics, and activists that she has known and lost. The months have become “indistinguishable” since each brings death: “we / can mourn today, let tears flow / let your feelings slip / through when the flat screen / in my life’s room / turns red in its daily ritual telling” (92-97). In “To Kugamoorthy” Sumathy writes of how a journalist friend with whom she once mourned the loss of mutual friends and acquaintances has now in his turn joined the list of “the disappeared” for whom she must mourn: “we did not know then that loss would touch us all / again and again, that i would / mourn you too, when / i am not others” (33-36). Sumathy also ponders the plight of all the anonymous, seemingly expendable people who have perished in the conflict in a poem the title of which itself provides the context: “to the memory of the three-wheeler driver purportedly shot dead by the ltte for being familiar with the police.” She apostrophizes the dead man who has been killed by the LTTE during what was supposed to be a ceasefire, telling him that “we will not mourn you” (1) because to acknowledge his murder would derail the ceasefire of 2002 and any possibility of the longed-for peace: “i will not mourn you, three legged guide / for i too have caught the germ; / i have sealed my body against your truth; i pack / my thoughts tight / in six yards of lack / wave flags at peace vigils” (45-52). Sumathy’s poems angrily denounce not only the state and the LTTE but also the general public—particularly people in the south—and the fear and/or apathy which prevent them from speaking out against the perpetrators of violence and destruction, and she includes herself in her condemnation.
In “Dirge for Corporal Premaratne” by another Tamil poet, Suresh Canagarajah, the speaker reads of the death of a group of soldiers—including the one named in the title of the poem—in a landmine explosion and feels gleeful: “I gloated over the destruction / Not yours but of your uniform / Not yours but of Oppression / of Tyranny, of Militarism” (4-7). The speaker does not see the individual, only the abstract qualities—emphasized in uppercase letters—he himself associates with the dead corporal and his ilk. The speaker’s glee dissipates when he reads an obituary for Premaratne in the daily newspaper: “I suddenly visualize / the husband behind the Uniform / the father behind our slogans” (18-20). The speaker is well aware, however, that the dead soldier would probably not have seen him as anything but “a demala balla 15 a sworn Enemy / a Terrorist destructive and deadly” (26-27). The speaker speculates that the subject of his dirge would, given the chance, have pursued and killed him, destroyed his home, and even raped his wife because “in your enraged eyes can be seen / many prejudiced schoolday lessons / daily slanted media messages / weekly chauvinist religious sermons” (30-33). What Canagarajah is primarily mourning in this poem is the lost opportunity to foster and maintain ethnic amity, the road not taken by teachers, the media, and religious and political leaders. The speaker in the poem realizes that both he and the dead soldier have learned the lessons of chauvinism so well that they are almost unable to see the humanity in a person of a different ethnic group.
Another Tamil poet, Amirthanjali Sivapalan, in a poem titled “And We Lost the Morning Sun” lists all the small, ordinary items of diurnal life that have been lost by displaced people who once lived in predominantly Tamil areas in the north, along with the bigger aspects of life with which the items are associated:
Lost the shores, the boats and the nets that
Brought in the fish with the morning sun
The morning sun we lost
Our homes, our wells, our temples we lost
Our refugee camps too; the plastic sheets
That held out the rains,
Even those plastic sheets we lost. (9-15)
The pathos of losing something as humble as plastic sheets to keep out the rain from temporary shelters in refugee camps is juxtaposed with the tragedy of massive losses that include even “the right to bury our dead.” The ability to mourn thus becomes itself a casualty of violence. The opening lines “We walked many years / Lost many days, lost many nights / Many roads we lost” (1-3) become “We walked many years, we lost many roads / We lost many years, / We walked many roads” (20-22) by the end of the poem. At first glance the final lines of the poem seem to be an echoing of the first, but then one
realizes that the lines are not mere repetition—the phrases have become jumbled, but the changes still make sense within the context of violence, destruction, and loss conveyed by the poem. These lines have a nightmarish quality of despair since they emphasize the ways in which erstwhile villagers who have been transformed into refugees/displaced persons have lost what should not be lost: not only meager but tangible possessions but even time, opportunities, and hope itself.
The Persistence of Loss: The Poems of Vivimarie Vanderpoorten
The work of a poet who is relatively new to the literary scene in Sri Lanka demonstrates that this sense of loss and anguish is ongoing during the final stages of the military conflict and even after its conclusion. Vivimarie Vanderpoorten is a poet of Belgian-Jewish and Sinhalese descent, 16 a teacher of literature who won the Gratiaen Prize for her first collection of poems, Nothing Prepares You (2007). Thus, like Ranasinghe, Vanderpoorten troubles conventional taxonomies of identity in Sri Lanka, and her Anglophone poetry emphasizes the complexities of Sri Lankan identities. Her second collection of poems, Stitch Your Eyelids Shut, was published in 2010, after the end of the military conflict in Sri Lanka. In both collections she includes poems that deal with the various phases of the Sri Lankan conflict. Like Wijeratne and Arasanayagam, Vanderpoorten writes about what it means to deal with aspects of the war as part of daily life. In “Haiku: Protecting Faith, September 2006,” the speaker muses on the irony of having to be searched when one is merely engaged in carrying out Buddhist religious rituals: “New custodians / in this temple of the Tooth / Soldiers wielding guns” (1-3) and “public body-checked / before going inside / to purify the mind” (7-9). The newly imposed security measures impinge on the sanctity of the temple and violate the devotional acts. Violence and war have become commonplace in “Suddenly, in a Public Place”: “You ask me to promise you / that should war break out / I will leave this country. / But the war is already here / I have lived here all my life / and this is my home” (1-7). The speaker goes on to say that “war is not new to me, it is as familiar as / the sound of firecrackers during Avurudhu / and often my dreams during naps /…. / are of corpses floating / in rivers / burnt out shells of car bombs / distant voices of long-dead friends / and the smell of fear” (10-18). The speaker laughingly responds to the lover’s concern that the speaker will die, according to a horoscope prediction, suddenly in a public place—saying that (s)he should have known better than to fall in love with someone who has been given such a prediction.
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