Terror and Reconciliation

by Maryse Jayasuriya

  Yet such poems, which seem to take the war in stride, are juxtaposed with others that show the psychological effects of having to face violence on such a regular basis. For example, the poem “Diary of Bombs: July 2008” begins “Today another / the third this week” (1-2)—the bombs seem tediously repetitive. There follows a nightmarish vision drawn in painterly strokes in which rain and blood comingle: “Blood forms pools / In pools formed by / Other floods / And the muddy brown / Turns into / Rust then glut / makes way for crimson / From steps of the bus / It drips thickly / on to files and books / and shoes without feet / of university students” (9-20). The references to rains churning up mud that transforms into gore gives the impression that the speaker, beset by violence on all sides, begins to see it as almost a natural phenomenon, just another kind of (inconveniently hued) rain. Vanderpoorten also addresses the shock and horror of specific instances of violence—“Explosion” deals with the bombing of the Central Bank while “Death at Noon: For Lasantha” depicts the reactions to the killing, in broad daylight, of Lasantha Wickrematunga, the fearless editor of The Sunday Leader, one of Sri Lanka’s few independent English-language newspapers and a critic of the government, in 2009. “We stand around the / Water filter / Discussing ‘heroism’” (23-25).

  Like Sumathy, Vanderpoorten includes elegies for unnamed people who have died violently. In “Balloon Man,” a poem based on news headlines, “in a time when paranoia and hate / tick dangerously in the mindscape / and innocence and guilt are merely a matter of opinion” (4-7), a case of mistaken identity leads to a man delivering balloons to school functions dying a brutal death at the hands of the police, becoming “expendable, / like the rest of us, / no soldier, no hero” (22-24). In “New Year 2008,” while people are celebrating the dawn of another year with firecrackers, “a man lay dead / from a bullet to the chest / at a kovil in Colombo / Where he was / praying for peace” (11-15). A beggar desperately searching for something to eat pokes at a package by the side of the road and unwittingly detonates a bomb in “Today: March 2008,” while a collection of random people who otherwise might never have met or interacted are united forever when a bomb directed at an army truck explodes on Galle Road, the main urban artery: (“a dozen camouflaged uniforms and caps / one container driver newly employed, / a pair of lovers not married to each other, / random office workers, three / nameless ladies of the night, / one annoying / private-bus conductor / in a grey check check shirt”) (8-15) in “Hibiscus on Galle Road: May 2007.” The seemingly callous way in which the dead individuals are itemized emphasizes the ubiquity of such killings at the time.

  Vanderpoorten’s emphasis on a society saturated by violence for a prolonged period even informs poems that do not at first seem to be about war at all. For example, in “Disappearance,” the focus seems to be on a “crow-couple” building a nest outside the study hall of the speaker’s hostel and the way in which the baby bird is later snatched away by two pole-cats while the mother bird is away. The speaker says, “I remember that night well; / there was a power cut / in the capital / and a curfew in force” (20-23). As Neloufer de Mel points out in a review, these lines bring to mind the various periods in Sri Lanka’s recent history when such disappearances were common, happening even during curfews (“Poetic Economies” n.p.). The guilt of the (not-so-innocent) bystander is palpable as the speaker describes the mother bird’s reproach in the poem’s final lines: “did you not did you not did you not did you not / try to / stop them?” (35-37). In “For Mr. K with Love,” the speaker asks what right she has “to mourn a tiny chipmunk / parted from its mother / Caught in the crossfire / During an ambush by birds / And the chipmunks’ retaliation / In their quest for food?” (25-30). After all, she is surrounded by war as delineated in an earlier section of the poem: “In jungles booming with mortar fire / In IDP camps. / In accident wards full of / Young men hoping the pain would end. / Death immortalized in / the news, / the moving image, / broadcasts and / telecasts and podcasts” (15-23). It is significant that the speaker uses war-related terms so often used in news reports about the conflict (“caught in the crossfire” and “ambush”) in relation to the interactions of the birds and chipmunks. 17

  In particular, Vanderpoorten focuses in certain narrative poems on the long-term effects of the conflict on specific named and unnamed individuals as she looks back on more than two decades of war. In “Vadani in our Hostel,” the speaker describes the plight of a young (Tamil) girl: “Vadani used to / do anything to / get attention / and / they used to / say Vadani was a slut” (7-12). Yet, in the very next lines, the sense that one is merely eavesdropping on distasteful gossip at a lodging house is undercut suddenly and wrenchingly by the truth: “although some of us knew that / Vadani was gang-raped in Jaffna by / the peacekeepers” (13-15). The horrific irony of a young girl being brutalized by “peacekeepers” is made even worse by the fact that Vadani is penalized for her subsequent actions, the results of trauma; instead of help or counseling or understanding, she is “sent away” because “we have young / women in this / place and she is a shame / to us / a shame to them” (39-43). The shame of the action of the so-called “peacekeepers” as well as the shame of a society that allowed such things to happen is now all displaced onto the victim, who has to bear the burden of this shame and be hidden away so that she does not cause any pain or embarrassment to others. In “Unsound,” the focus is on a young man who led an ordinary life and once dreamt of being a teacher. After a presumably brutal interrogation by the authorities, “Now, he sits / in a ward for the mentally ill / and stares endlessly at a bulb shaped like a / teardrop” (17-21). The teardrop signifies sorrow but also reminds us of Sri Lanka itself—the country is frequently referred to as “the teardrop-shaped isle.” While “people in human rights, / wrote / about men like him / in important journals” (22-25), he is now forgotten and is simply known as the schoolteacher’s mad son (“Iskole mahattayage pissu kolla”) (29). In the final poem in her second collection, “Madness,” Vanderpoorten takes as her subject a person in a news item—“a mentally challenged man, who jumped into the Indian ocean to escape arrest, drowned after being badly beaten up by Sri Lankan Police in the water in front of a large crowd, police said,” according to the headnote. The theme here is the mental, emotional, and ethical state of a society that has experienced so much violence—“we who had watched worse / and said nothing / gazed in silence” (10-12). Is there any healing possible for a people so inured—and perhaps so immune—to violence? “Hideous history / prevailed / to bear witness / to a country whose / war was just over / to a people / now at peace” (17-23). The “people / now at peace” is obvious irony since the violence seems to continue, albeit in different ways: “but the boy we call mad / is retreating into the ocean” (28-29). There is sharp castigation of the way the speaker and her society stand passively by and let such things happen even now, after the war: “and our humanity / strangles itself / on the shore” (34-36). The emphasis on “the boy we call mad” interrogates the opposition of sanity and insanity, emphasizing the way in which things and people that make us uncomfortable, that remind us of what we would like to put behind us and simply forget, are labeled “mad.” The poet seems to challenge this rhetoric of madness—are Vadani, the schoolteacher’s son, or the abused youth less sane than we are merely because their pain is more apparent?

  Even now that the military conflict in Sri Lanka has come to an end, the legacy of the conflict continues, as Vanderpoorten suggests in her poem “Love, Displaced: Northern Sri Lanka, July 2009.” The date obviously indicates that the war is over, but attention is firmly on internally displaced people in Jaffna. The speaker is a displaced person in a camp addressing a missing loved one. “If I only knew / you were all right / or even just okay / or less than all right / but alive / I could survive / in this— / this place / where now there are shops / clinics / even makeshift toilets / and tampons distributed / by companies with / corporate social responsibility” (1-14). The speaker can hardly
bring herself to name the camp in its semi-permanence even as she bargains down her desperate desire for her loved one’s health and well-being—from “all right” to “okay” to “less than all right but alive.” The contrast is stark between the love she has been accustomed to and the well-meaning but paltry substitutes she receives in the camp “here / where / kindness is injected in small doses / and love / is a warm cup / of nestomalt” (32-37). The speaker’s love can only be described in violent images: “a bullet / lodged deep in the belly” (40-41) and “barbed wire / slicing the lips” (48-49). Vanderpoorten thus offers a kind of anatomy of the various ways of responding to and mourning the ethnic conflict in her poetry: casual stoicism, irony, indignant protest, guilt, shock, and enduring and ongoing sadness and loss.

  The poets discussed above have employed numerous strategies in order to express the grief and horror of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict—personal testimonial, large-scale reportage, and the use of imagined victims of violence to stand in for the thousands actually dead, disappeared, or maimed. Two victims of the violence in Sri Lanka who were assassinated by very different forces within months of each other have stood out repeatedly in memorials to the violence of the ethnic conflict and the JVP insurrection. Rajani Thiranagama and Richard de Zoysa, themselves writers among other vocations and avocations, have each functioned as a synecdoche for the most profound losses experienced by Sri Lankans of all ethnicities during the war.

  Remembering Rajani Thiranagama

  Rajani Rajasingham Thiranagama was a doctor, university lecturer, feminist, and founding member of University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna (UTHR-J). Born into a middle-class Tamil Christian family in Jaffna, Thiranagama bucked convention when she married outside of her ethnicity, religion, and class—her husband, Dayapala Thiranagama, whom she met while at university, was a Sinhalese Buddhist from the peasant class in the rural south and had been imprisoned following his involvement in the JVP insurrection of 1971. 18 She was at first a supporter of the LTTE and then a fierce critic of the LTTE’s human rights violations as well as its claim to be the sole representative of Sri Lankan Tamils. While she had the opportunity to remain in Britain, where she completed her doctorate, Thiranagama decided to return to Sri Lanka and become a professor of anatomy at the University of Jaffna. Thiranagama, in her capacity as a medical doctor, also acted as a counselor to victims of violence, particularly women who were suffering the physical and psychological effects of war, and also established a cooperative for such women.

  Along with three of her colleagues 19 she co-authored The Broken Palmyra, a detailed account and analysis of the troubles faced by the Tamil people in the north following the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord of 1987 between the Sri Lankan state and India and the war that ensued between the LTTE and the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF). In the section that she authored about the experiences of women within the context of war, Thiranagama writes, “I wanted to hear my sisters tell their own versions of their travails, tragedies and triumphs” (305). Based on many interviews that she conducted, Thiranagama compiled the testimonies of women who were molested, raped, detained, and whose loved ones were “disappeared” or whose children were recruited or abducted by the militants. Thiranagama also reported on women’s organizations and women’s participation in armed struggle. In the postscript to The Broken Palmyra, written shortly before her death, Thiranagama states, “Objectivity was not solely an academic exercise for us. Objectivity, the pursuit of truth and the propagation of critical and honest positions, was crucial for the community. But they could also cost many of us our lives. Any involvement with them was undertaken only as a survival task” (408). These proved to be prophetic words since she herself was ultimately assassinated at the age of thirty-five, on September 21, 1989, in Thirunelvely, Jaffna.

  There have been many tributes and memorials to Thiranagama, especially by the UTHR-J. Poets have paid special tribute to Thiranagama. Regi Siriwardena’s poem entitled “Garland for Rajani” is short but poignant, focusing on Rajani’s courageous decision to return to her homeland and act on her convictions:

  You refused to eat the bounteous and bitter bread

  of exile, returned to live with the hot breath

  of death pursuing you, yet held your head high.

  They shot you like a dog in the street, but that death

  will be remembered as their shame, your pride.

  I bring you no wreath, but flowers as for a bride. (1-6)

  The very brevity of this six-line poem calls attention to the brief lifespan of Rajani Thiranagama. The speaker emphasizes Thiranagama’s courage in her choice to return to Sri Lanka despite “the hot breath of death” pursuing her—while she was on what turned out to be her final trip to England, her home in Jaffna had been raided and her manuscripts confiscated and she had been warned by associates to stay away (Wilson 2363). The same defiance shown by Thiranagama—who held her “head high” despite threats and intimidation—is evident in the speaker’s tone. It is significant that the reference to Thiranagama’s assassination comes in the middle instead of at the end of the poem. The last lines are a refusal to see Thiranagama’s death as an ending or as a defeat and an insistence on presenting an image of Thiranagama that contrasts sharply with the actual manner in which she—an unarmed woman on a bicycle on her way home from work to her two young daughters—was gunned down.

  Thiranagama is the inspiration for the central character, Savithri—described as “an activist, academic, a doctor” (12) who goes around collecting women’s stories of struggle during war in the one-act play In the Shadow of the Gun written by her sister, Sivamohan Sumathy, whose poetry was discussed above. In a way, the play performs what Thiranagama does in volume 2, chapter 5 of The Broken Palmyra, when she relates women’s experiences of war, using the women’s own words as much as possible. The play incorporates “Letter from Jaffna,” one of the letter-poems written by Thiranagama and spoken within the play by Savithri:

  I ask you, could you write straight

  When people die in lots?

  When you find them

  dead like flies…

  When you certify death and

  bury your neighbours in their own gardens? …

  Night after night, you lie under the table

  with the children—immobile

  listening to the sound of boots

  marching up and down.

  Not even a candle you light

  for a shadow could kill us all. (Sumathy, “In the Shadow” 15)

  Thus, just as Thiranagama cleared a space for the actual words of the women caught in the crossfire whom she interviewed in her documentation of the war in Jaffna in 1987, the play is able to include her own words about her experiences during that time. The single actor portrays six different women within the play and puts on a pair of shoes when assuming the persona of Savithri; at the end of the play, the shoes are left behind on stage to signify Savithri’s assassination. The shoes that are left behind convey the loss and absence of Savithri/Thiranagama but also seem to invite others to come forward and literally step into Savithri/Thiranagama’s shoes and role(s) and thereby continue her work.

  Sumathy’s strategy of interweaving Thiranagama’s own words into the fabric of the play is similar to the strategy Helene Klodawsky uses in her 2004 documentary film No More Tears Sister 20 : Anatomy of Hope and Betrayal (produced by the National Film Board of Canada), which recounts Thiranagama’s life and her heroic resistance and bearing witness to human rights violations carried out by the LTTE, the IPKF, and the Sri Lankan state. The film, made fifteen years after her death, seeks to document Thiranagama’s strong convictions, sacrifices, and heroism with a collage of archival footage of significant events in Sri Lankan history, family photographs, stylized scenes, interviews with her husband, parents, sisters, and daughters and a few colleagues, along with voice-over narration provided by Michael Ondaatje. Dialogue-free reenactments of crucial episodes of her life in which the role of Rajani Thi
ranagama is played by her own, now adult, daughter Sharika Thiranagama are juxtaposed powerfully with extracts from Thiranagama’s own letters. In the production notes to the film, Klodawsky writes that the form of the film resulted from her attempts to deal with a plethora of difficulties—many of them stemming from fear—she encountered during the process of putting the film together: the scarcity of surviving archives and photographs of a subject who had been dead for a decade and a half; the refusal of many of Thiranagama’s colleagues and associates to be interviewed on camera (even in shadow) due to fears about possible retaliation from the LTTE on themselves and their families; the impossibility of access to actual locations in Jaffna, the site of the majority of Thiranagama’s struggle, due to security concerns ( Point Of View n.p.). Thus, the film itself bears witness to acts of courage and perseverance by those who participated in its production—in particular, Thiranagama’s family members and the few UTHR-J associates who agreed to be on camera.