Terror and Reconciliation

by Maryse Jayasuriya

  A particularly powerful aspect of the film is the way in which it traces the evolution of Thiranagama’s political thinking and engagement due to two very personal ties: prominence is given to the narratives of Thiranagama’s elder sister Nirmala, under whose influence she first joined the LTTE, and Thiranagama’s husband, Dayapala, whose poverty-stricken background and radical political views and activism had a significant impact both on their relationship and the development of Thiranagama’s political vision. Not only do Nirmala and Dayapala underscore the difference between their respective beliefs in the necessity of armed struggle and Thiranagama’s views regarding the value of human life—that nothing was worth the destruction of human life—but they also display their feelings of grief as well as guilt about their respective roles in shaping the political views that ultimately resulted in Thiranagama’s death.

  The greatest emotional impact of the film comes from Thiranagama’s own words, in her letters to her husband and sister as well as her political writings, which are not merely read out but “performed” by an actor who, according to Klodawsky’s production notes, was chosen because her accent and speech patterns resembled those of Thiranagama ( POV n.p.). The extracts that are included in the film show us a woman who is struggling to negotiate among competing roles: what she sees as her calling to be a public intellectual, feminist, and activist, her own desires as a woman in love, and her responsibilities as a daughter, sister, wife, and mother. The film presents Thiranagama as an embodiment of the idea that the personal is the political, alternating between her public insistence that “someone, some few, have to stand up and fight for the survival of this community” and her private agony about undermining her marriage and putting her children in harm’s way due to her political convictions and her presence and activities in war-torn Jaffna. The most poignant extract, perhaps, is from a letter written by Thiranagama on September 15, 1989, a week before her death:

  Some times tears flow uncontrollably and I cannot work anymore. I know I want to be strong, I want to call my historical strength as a woman. I want to remember and hold on to memories of women who conquered the inability and pain. … I cannot leave this small country, its belly constricted by hunger and mind blurred by pain.

  One day some gun will silence me. And it will not be held by an outsider—but by a son—born in the womb of this very society—from a woman with whom my history is shared.

  You know how powerful it is to prove negative that women like me have not the courage to stay and fight—I want to prove that ordinary women like me have enormous courage and power. That there are in the world steel women. ( POV n.p.)

  The reading of this prophetic extract is accompanied in the film by a mini-scene of Thiranagama riding her bicycle followed by another of Thiranagama after she is shot—we do not see the actual shooting or blood, just the prone body next to the fallen bicycle. The juxtaposition of words and images highlights Thiranagama’s awareness of the risks she was taking and her commitment to the causes—human rights and social justice—in which she was involved. By using these letters, Klodawsky ensures that Thiranagama becomes a joint author of her own memorial and has some agency in the way her story is presented. In this sense, Thiranagama is the author of her own elegy.

  “I am the storm’s eye”: The Witness of Richard de Zoysa

  A few months after Thiranagama’s assassination, her story would be eerily echoed in the death of a writer and activist in the south of Sri Lanka. Richard de Zoysa was an actor, news anchor, poet, teacher, and journalist, the head of the Colombo office of the Inter Press Service, a UN-sponsored news agency focused on events in developing countries and based in Rome. He was the son of a Sinhalese father and a Tamil mother, each of whom was connected to the class of people in newly independent countries who have been dubbed “the native elite.” De Zoysa first gained attention as an actor while still in high school and then went on to gain prominence for his roles on stage (in English drama), screen, and television (in Sinhala films and in the television mini-series popularly known as “teledramas”). He did some propaganda work for the UNP-led government in the early 1980s and then worked as a news anchor for Rupavahini, the state television station. He was also a very promising Anglophone poet, whose poems show both artistry and great social awareness. For example, he makes prescient utterances about the devastating consequences of ethnic strife (in “Apocalypse Soon” and “Animal Crackers”) and the danger of an authoritarian government (in “Gajagavannama”), as well as critiques of the flaws of the Sri Lankan education system, which churns out students who are incapable of critical thinking (in “Lepidoptera”), and the exploitation of children by foreign pedophiles under the guise of tourism (in “This Other Eden”). He also wrote about the role of the poet as witness in “The Poet”: “i / am the storm’s eye / ceaselessly turning / around me the burning the death the destruction” (34-37).

  De Zoysa increasingly became a critic of the then government’s human rights violations, particularly in his role as the Sri Lanka correspondent for the Inter Press Service. According to South Asia Bulletin, “In one such article, entitled ‘Sri Lanka: Nearing a Human Rights Apocalypse,’ published [in August 1989] de Zoysa accused the Special Task Force, a police commando unit, of extrajudicial executions of JVP suspects” (“The Murder” 20). He was abducted from his home on February 18, 1990, and killed. His body, which washed up on a beach the next day and was identified by his mother, “reportedly showed the signs of severe torture. … The head had been beaten and shot at close range and… the fingernails had been peeled off” (“The Murder” 20).

  There have been many tributes and memorials for de Zoysa, particularly by his friends and associates among Sri Lanka’s Anglophone writers. Ashley Halpé, in his “Pasan—a Threnody for Lanka” meditates upon the brutalities that de Zoysa must have faced in the final hours of his life; Halpé also ponders on the very idea of mortality, wondering whether he himself could face such a lonely and terrible end (19). This piece, begun in 1992 according to the author’s note, remains unfinished, like de Zoysa’s mission itself, perhaps. Alfreda de Silva, in “Lines for Richard,” likens de Zoysa’s brief life to that of a dragonfly. The tone of the poem conveys both shock and horror at the suddenness of de Zoysa’s tragic end and disbelief that such a vital life could be stilled.

  Manel Fonseka, in her poem “To Catch the Conscience,” emphasizes the senselessness of de Zoysa’s murder and weaves his untimely death with the plot of Hamlet, since he had both acted in and taught Shakespeare’s plays. The speaker sees no divine purpose in the ending of such a young and dynamic life and therefore questions the meaning of life itself (1-4). As with Siriwardena’s poem about Thiranagama, Fonseka underscores the choices that de Zoysa made for the good of others, especially with the power of his pen: by assuming the role of a person speaking truth to power, de Zoysa penned lines which ultimately led to his murder (15-16). Jean Arasanayagam also invokes de Zoysa’s role as Hamlet in her poem “The Darkness of Civilization—for Richard” when she writes, “They have never seen you in your several roles / Hamlet doomed standing upon a castle’s ramparts / so many others too, for your voice could capture / lives and make them breathe / however cold and still” (32-36). Arasanayagam seems to be suggesting here that just as de Zoysa made characters come alive on stage through his brilliant performances, his death itself might keep the memories alive of hundreds, perhaps thousands of others who have been killed but whose lives and deaths remain unmarked. Arasanayagam also emphasizes the hope that de Zoysa’s death could be a catalyst for the multitudes—a collective “we”—to become aware of their responsibility to expose the atrocities happening in Sri Lanka to the world, and thereby put an end to the violence: “the tragic hero falls / struck dumb before he utters / those lost lines, the last / it’s left to us to crowd the stage / drag down the curtain / shout not whisper; / ‘We are all betrayed’” (43-48). As in Sumathy’s play about Thiranagama, Arasanayagam’s poem urges those left behind to
take on and fulfill the unfinished goals of de Zoysa.

  In “For Richard,” Arjuna Parakrama begins with an indictment of those he believes to be responsible for de Zoysa’s murder and the subsequent attempts at cover-up, and the extent of complicity among those in authority: “The Police inquiry has absolved the Police of any blame / And now the government will surely rush to do the same” (3-4). Parakrama both emphasizes what made de Zoysa so unique and special—his “easily-worn brilliance” and “visibility”—and points to what ultimately made de Zoysa just another number in the list of those killed or disappeared by paramilitary agents of the state: “It is then, about a life, your larger-than-life life, a thousand / lives, LIFE; they chose yours to mutilate as a warning to the rest / and that must be the strangest of compliments” (23-25). Parakrama is engaged in the very personal act of mourning his friend, but he also is determined that de Zoysa’s death draw attention to thousands of less visible deaths rather than obscuring them: “You’ll get eulogies, a funeral for what it’s worth / A memorial lecture next year, that Sena and thousands / of others won’t” (7-9). Parakrama links the names of the two well-known victims of political violence—de Zoysa and Thiranagama—with the possible name of an ordinary person—a “Sena”—killed by death squads, suggesting that the lives that have been lost are all of equal value and need to be mourned together: “Richard-Rajini-Sena-a-thousand-names you share” (12). The concluding lines echo the defiant tone of Siriwardena’s poem for Thiranagama: “It is about life, then, and work ahead, and going back for me. / And death, your death; more than a thousand deaths / What death?” (31-33). The speaker seems to be making a promise to return to his homeland (the poem is datelined Pittsburgh, February 1990) and continue the work de Zoysa had begun even as the question in the last line seems to make a mockery of death and the apparent finality it poses.

  In the case of both Thiranagama and de Zoysa, no definite conclusions were reached about either the identity of the perpetrators or the motives for the murders. In fact, no official investigation at all was conducted into Thiranagama’s death. De Zoysa’s mother, Dr. Manorani Saravanamuttu, who actually witnessed his abduction from their home, identified a senior police officer as the man in charge of the abduction, but the investigation was later suppressed and Dr. Saravanamuttu and her lawyer harassed and threatened (Hoole Sri Lanka—the Arrogance 260-62). It is generally accepted that the LTTE killed Thiranagama and that paramilitary forces of the then government abducted and killed de Zoysa. Thiranagama’s murder can be connected to her outspoken and fierce criticism of the LTTE’s human rights violations while de Zoysa seems to have been killed, as Rajiva Wijesinha speculates, because of the reports he wrote criticizing the human rights abuses of the government, his possible JVP sympathies, and perhaps his involvement with a play entitled “Who is This Man and What is He Doing?” satirizing President Premadasa and his administration.

  Both Thiranagama and de Zoysa could be considered as relative outsiders in their societies—the former as a woman in a patriarchal society and the latter as a gay man in a society with a penal code that continues to criminalize homosexuality ( Sodomy Laws n.p.). 21 They are also similar in that neither clung to orthodoxies. Their ideas and political views evolved so that de Zoysa went from doing media work for the Sri Lankan government to criticizing its human rights violations, while Thiranagama moved away from supporting the LTTE to becoming a dissident critical of its atrocities against Tamil people and others.

  One question that the co-authors of The Broken Palmyra confront is “why should she [Thiranagama] alone be remembered and commemorated amidst so many killed and unremembered?” (xi). This is a question that can also be applied to de Zoysa since thousands died or were “disappeared” during the insurgency of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the south. Some have posited that it was Thiranagama’s and de Zoysa’s middle-class status that gained their deaths so much attention. In the memorials and tributes to Thiranagama and de Zoysa, there is an emphasis on their youth, their potential, their achievements, what they could have accomplished had they not been assassinated at ages thirty-five and thirty-two, respectively, as well as their commitment to a greater good even though they had access to foreign travel and the security of exile. There is also much written about their uncompromising stance on human rights and their critique of whichever faction violated human rights. According to Neloufer de Mel:

  Rajani’s smiling face, as well as that of journalist Richard de Zoysa,… had been on posters, T-shirts and placards as part of this [“Freedomfrom Fear”] campaign. Together they symbolized the loss to life and challenge to democratic rights that violence had wrought both in the north and the south. They became icons around which a renewed pledge could be made to free society from such fear and violence. ( Women 234)

  While each was active in a very practical way, it could be argued—as Wijesinha has suggested with regard to de Zoysa ( Inquest 54-55)—that the taking up of the pen to point out human rights violations through meticulous documentation, detailed descriptions, incisive analysis, and (in the case of de Zoysa) even satire is what ultimately led to their deaths. De Zoysa and Thiranagama are thus both victims and witnesses, the mourners and the mourned.

  The Work of Mourning

  Now, drawing on the mourning and memorializing of Thiranagama and de Zoysa discussed above, I turn to the idea of the work of mourning victims of violence. In a long-running situation of war and violence that has gone through many permutations involving countless atrocities, murders, and disappearances, mourning becomes a necessary expression of grief and an acknowledgment of loss and trauma. Mourning is also a stay against dehumanization, which becomes possible since numbness or apathy can be a way of coping with the sheer numbers of people who have been killed or abducted and because of prohibitions on public grieving for the victims put in place by the perpetrators. One way of avoiding dehumanization is to focus on a well-known figure that has also been killed or disappeared and to make that figure an exemplification of all the nameless, faceless, and what Butler calls “ungrievable” ( Precarious 36) others. In such a context, the very act of mourning and memorializing can become an act of resistance and a re-membering of a community. How are the representative figures to be mourned? As we have seen, their unique attributes are very often emphasized and enumerated in order to understand the full extent of the loss, the void they have left behind. The manner in which they were killed is delineated but very often not dwelt upon at length, not only to avoid the sense of making a spectacle of the victims and play into the hands of the culprits, but also to minimize the idea of victimhood itself. There is undoubtedly manipulation of the image of the representative figure, perhaps even some myth-making.

  I now return to Butler’s insight that mourning has political consequences. Butler speculates that “perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation). … There is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss” ( Precarious 21). The mourning for Thiranagama and de Zoysa over the last twenty years has attempted to create this sort of transformation. As mentioned above, the UTHR-J continues its work, reporting on the status of human rights in Sri Lanka and invoking the name of Rajani Thiranagama and what she represents. It is telling that Thiranagama’s image is included immediately above the mission statement of the UTHR-J on its website as a constant reminder of her vision, contributions, and sacrifice. With regard to de Zoysa, Dr. Manorani Saravanamuttu, following her son’s death, campaigned as president of the Mothers Front on behalf of women whose sons, brothers, and husbands had been disappeared or killed by government-sponsored death squads. The image of de Zoysa was utilized by the Free Media Movement in Sri Lanka in the 1990s in its goal of creating an environment where democratic expression was possible. The Inter Press Service has renamed its Award for Excellence in Independent Journalism in de Zoysa’s honor.

  Butler asks, “Is there something to be gained from grie
ving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? … If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another?” ( Precarious 30). When we consider the particular ways in which Thiranagama and de Zoysa have been mourned, the answer to the last question seems to be a resounding yes. On the other hand, V.K. Perera’s warning to Sri Lankans against making a fetish of commemorating murdered icons such as Richard de Zoysa must be heeded: “What should be stressed is that we should not let Richard’s memory and its commemoration be reduced to the state of ‘a ritual of desire.’ Rather, it should be seen and analysed in the light of the larger political backdrop of our own era. As much as we speak of the loss of this individual, let us also observe that the circumstances that face free expression and activism have only deteriorated further” (n.p.). What Perera is highlighting is that sentimentality and nostalgia are not enough. The standards and goals of the murdered icons—even if mythologized after their death—need to be held up to each of us, to make us uncomfortable, to spur us on to similar goals and standards.

  Mourning thus emerges as a politically charged construct. It can be used to reinforce the power of the state or of separatist militias, but it can also be mobilized as it so often is in the poems as well as the play and film discussed above, as a means of resistance to violence, whatever the form and whoever the perpetrator. The capacity of Sri Lankan Anglophone writing to cut across ethnic lines has provided an important opportunity for Sri Lanka’s ethnic communities to mourn together.