Notes
1. The ethnic conflict has been discussed widely within the Anglophone literature of the Sinhalese, Tamil, and Burgher ethnic groups. Anglophone writing by Muslims has largely focused on other issues. Two exceptions, however, are Ameena Hussein (who includes some short stories about the ethnic conflict in her collection Zillij), and Afdhel Aziz (who addresses the conflict in his poem “1983” from the collection China Bay Blues).
2. Dutugemunu is a fabled Sinhalese king in Sri Lankan history who fought and defeated Elara, a Tamil king.
3. The word “Sinhalese” incorporates the word “sinha,” which means “lion” in the Sinhala language; “Sinhalese” therefore literally means “people of the lion.”
4. Two films consider the point of view of (potential) female suicide bombers and why they might have chosen their respective courses of action: A Peck on the Cheek (2002), directed by Mani Ratnam, deals with the experience of an adopted child living in India whose biological mother is a Sri Lankan militant, while The Terrorist (1999), directed by Santosh Sivan, focuses on a young woman (from an unnamed country that we are led to believe is Sri Lanka—the character is based on Danu, the LTTE militant responsible for the suicide bombing that killed Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi) who has agreed to become a suicide bomber and the way in which she prepares for this act. Both films are Indian productions.
5. For detailed accounts of how ultra-nationalist Sinhalese-Buddhist groups such as the JVP and the JHU hampered meaningful negotiations between the government and the Tamil militant groups, see Kasun Ubayasiri’s “Failed Peace Talks”; Jehan Perera’s “Sri Lanka: Confrontation to Accommodation”; Jayadeva Uyangoda’s “Sri Lanka: A Fractured Mandate”; and Selvy Thiruchandran’s “Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism.”
6. I searched for copies of Wijeratne’s collections of poetry in all the major bookstores in Colombo in June 2005 and was unable to find a single one. Many of the bookstores told me that her books were either out of print or on back order. The latter claim was hard to believe because the books never appeared on the shelves during the two months I was in Sri Lanka.
7. Interview, July 6, 2005.
8. For detailed discussions of Arasanayagam’s themes before the ethnic conflict, see Silva (“Situating” 111); Siriwardena (“Jean Arasanayagam” 4); Sjobohm (14); Wijesinha (“Spices” 6-7); Gooneratne (25-30); and de Mel ( Women 175-81). On her relations with her husband’s family, see “Where Did They Come From?” ( Fire in the Village 59-63).
9. Kumana is a well-known bird sanctuary in Sri Lanka.
10. The collection Kindura is long out of print and therefore very hard to come by. I have had to resort to looking at individual poems from the collection that have been anthologized elsewhere.
11. With reference to the work of Mahasweta Devi, Spivak has pointed out that naming is a very powerful exercise for a writer ( Outside 79). On the other hand, naming was a particularly dangerous activity during the time that Arasanayagam was writing her first collection of poems about the ethnic conflict and the JVP insurrection.
12. This is in contrast to expatriate writers such as Sivanandan, Selvadurai, and Gunesekera, who end their respective novels at the point when the 1983 riots occurred.
13. The title of the poem comes from Arasanayagam’s poem “Naked They Bathe in the Spring” (92), which is included in the collection.
14. The link between trauma and art has been asserted by Cathy Caruth (in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History [1996]) and others in trauma studies.
15. Literally, “Tamil dog” in Sinhala—the phrase is obviously a pejorative way of referring to a Tamil person.
16. Vanderpoorten has addressed questions about her mixed origins in a humorous way in her poem “Meeting a VIP”: “It was a bit tiresome / to explain / to say I think the 1/8th means / 12 and a half percent / Belgian / and then another 1/4th is Dutch / and two 25 percents on either side / probably makes me 50% Sinhalese / (but I cannot be sure, I could be 25% Tamil with my Kandyan blood)” (10-19).
17. For an analysis of the language used to describe the conflict and cultural representations of the conflict, see Neloufer de Mel’s Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory, and Narrative in the Armed Conflict (2007).
18. For Dayapala’s account of his relationship with Rajani as well as a detailed account of the manner of her death, see the UTHR-J website: http://www.uthr.org/Rajani/Keeping_memories.htm.
19. Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram, and K. Sritharan, all faculty members at the University of Jaffna, were the other co-authors. They went underground following Thiranagama’s murder but continued their work on human rights.
20. The title of the film is taken from one of the sections of The Broken Palmyra that was written by Thiranagama and entitled “No More Tears Sister—The Experiences of Women.”
21. The novel The Limits of Love by Rajiva Wijesinha, de Zoysa’s close friend and his most consistent and devoted elegist, centers on de Zoysa’s life and death and deals explicitly with his identity as a gay man and also makes his sexual relationships somewhat crucial to the plot. According to Wijesinha, extracts from de Zoysa’s private diary were read out in parliament “in an attempt to suggest that his sexual proclivities had something to do with the death” (“Time’s Music”); the incident concerning de Zoysa’s diary being read out in parliament is also mentioned by Hoole ( Sri Lanka: The Arrogance 267). It is significant that in the parliamentary proceedings mentioned above, de Zoysa’s sexuality was linked to his murder. The disturbing implication seems to be that the victim’s sexuality provided sufficient justification for the murder or that certain interested parties were attempting to use such bigotry to cover up their culpability and avoid being held accountable.
Chapter 3
Talking with the Enemy: Dialogue and Empathy in Fiction
If Sri Lankan Anglophone poetry has in recent decades focused on mourning the losses associated with violence and terror, Sri Lankan Anglophone fiction has tended toward the search for dialogue, empathy, and common ground in a divided nation. This has been the case even when the same author has written both poetry and fiction; for example, Jean Arasanayagam, who is among the most distinguished Sri Lankan writers of both poetry and fiction, has tended toward commemoration in her poetry and empathy in her fiction. The fiction written by local Sri Lankan writers thus complements the poetry written by local Sri Lankan writers: the former gives voice to the complex mourning of a diverse nation, and the latter engages creatively in the quest for solutions to ethnic divisions. The following pages examine the efforts of three Sri Lankan writers to create common ground through their fiction by means of role-playing, empathy, and dialogue: Neil Fernandopulle, Jean Arasanayagam, and Nihal de Silva. 1
Each of these three writers calls attention to the commonalities shared by all members of Sri Lankan society and challenges readers to empathize with others whose experience might initially seem alien to them. Fernandopulle, Arasanayagam, and de Silva each ask their Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher readers to engage in the imaginative act of identification necessary to see the conflict through each other’s eyes. Moreover, each of these three writers calls into question the rhetoric of heroism and martyrdom that both the state and the militants used to bolster their case and rally their supporters. Perhaps the most powerful intervention that these writers make is to cast productive doubt on the very rhetoric of war itself, thus challenging their readers to think creatively about peace and reconciliation. Even now, with the military phase of the conflict at an end, this sort of creativity and empathy is essential.
“Small, Sharp Pieces”: The Short Stories of Neil Fernandopulle
In his first collection of short stories, Shrapnel—which won the Gratiaen Prize in 1999 and comprises many stories that had previously been published in Channels—Neil Fernandopulle focuses on complex issues emerging from Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict in an extremely nuanced manner. According to Fernandopulle, “I called my collection of st
ories Shrapnel because they are small, sharp pieces, not because some of them relate to the war” (Mathew). The title of the collection also draws attention to the fact that each story is a mere fragment resulting from the explosion that is the country’s long-running conflict; one can examine the fragment by itself, but there is always a reminder that the fragment is only a part of a much larger whole that cannot be put back together. Fernandopulle is not a writer by profession; as the blurb on the inside cover of the collection tells us, he is “a molecular biologist by trade and a writer by habit.” As such, he is one of the many Sri Lankan writers in English who engage in other professions and pursue writing as an avocation. Fernandopulle is a Tamil, but he insistently tries on a different identity in each of his stories—a wounded Sinhalese soldier; the Sinhalese widow of a soldier; a British aid-worker—and shows how and why the choices of individuals matter in a time of war and violence. Each of his stories depicts issues that have arisen for people of different ethnicities and varied circumstances over the course of the conflict. Not all of the stories in Fernandopulle’s collection focus on the ethnic conflict; I have chosen pieces that explore the way in which violence and war affect interpersonal relationships, interrogate concepts such as heroism, sacrifice, and survival, and examine the impact of international attention on domestic conflicts.
As we shall see in subsequent chapters, some of the diasporic Sri Lankans who write about the ethnic conflict start and end on the event that signaled its eruption—the riots of July 1983. Fernandopulle too writes about those infamous riots in the story “Drawing Bridges,” but he makes an effort to show that people and events have moved a great distance since those early—and perhaps most dramatic—days of the conflict. Lalith, the Sinhalese narrator of the story, encounters Selva, a Tamil childhood friend who has returned to the narrator’s village after a long absence abroad. Selva and his family had gone into exile after their house was burned down during the riots; he has returned to Sri Lanka only to sell off the piece of land that is their one link with their homeland. The story is told from Lalith’s point of view, so Selva remains as mysterious to us as he does to Lalith. We feel that we cannot know about Selva’s experiences, only attempt to guess what they might have been.
At the beginning of their encounter, Lalith feels nostalgia for the carefree days of their childhood when he and Selva, along with other friends, played and fished together and teased each other—a reminder of how Sri Lankans of all ethnicities lived in relative harmony at one point. Selva, however, seems to be embittered; for him, there are no fond remembrances of playtime, only the horror of persecution that abruptly brought his childhood to an end. Fernandopulle reminds us that for those who have lost so much and are now refugees or exiles, there is no pleasure to be had in remembering past happiness or revisiting the sites of former happy and carefree days since hindsight provides the palimpsestic vision that the happiness they enjoyed was all too brief and easily destroyed. Selva reveals to Lalith that his father died alone abroad without any of the traditional Hindu death and funeral rites and that his family is now scattered all over the world. The climax comes when Selva shows his surprise that life in Sri Lanka, particularly in his erstwhile village, goes on as it always has: “‘Yes, every time a bomb explodes in Colombo, they tell us our money is doing good work,’ Selva said unthinkingly” (29). The pronoun ‘they’ here is ambiguous—is Selva referring to the international press or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)? Lalith thinks it is the latter, and he is astounded by the idea that his childhood friend could contribute money to the militants who have wreaked devastation in the country and are responsible for the suicide bombings that have killed so many civilians:
“You give money to the LTTE?” …
“No!” He laughed, and shook his head, and laughed again to himself. (30)
Selva’s response is marked by ambiguity. His earlier comment seems to indicate that he has, in fact, contributed funds to the activities of the LTTE. This is the meaning that Lalith seems to accept at the end of the story: he believes that no point of connection, no bridge, exists between himself and his childhood friend anymore—their experiences in the intervening years have been too different. On the other hand, Selva’s self-mocking laughter seems to indicate either that he has had to contribute money to the LTTE under duress or that he has been deceived into doing so by misinformation concerning the still-wretched state of life for Tamils in Sri Lanka. The latter possibility emphasizes the importance of the press in terms of disseminating information about the home country to exiles abroad. The former possibility draws attention to the power of the diasporic to influence events in the homeland by means of providing financial backing to organizations acting against the state government of the home country or by agitating for international pressure on the home country. Through Selva’s laughter, Fernandopulle is able to also hint at the fact that diasporics like Selva might be manipulated, deceived, or even threatened by the very organizations that are ostensibly on their side.
The story ends with a sense of resignation on the part of Lalith. He realizes that if things had been reversed, he probably would be what Selva has become; therefore, he cannot condemn Selva’s possible contributions to the LTTE. After all, to Lalith, the July 1983 riots were part of a novel experience, something he could “relish” (28). For Selva, however, the riots destroyed the life that he knew and changed everything irrevocably for him and his family. Lalith had rescued a piece from Selva’s Meccano set from looters during the riots and has kept it with him for more than a decade in order to return it to his friend. He does not, however, give the piece back to Selva before he leaves because Lalith believes that it has become meaningless: “It was not worth the effort, trying to look for it. I am almost thirty now. I’ve been keeping it with me for sixteen years. Sixteen years is too long to hope for anything” (30). The piece from the Meccano set could be a metaphor for the land or property held by the Sinhalese that rightfully belongs to the Tamils and needs to be given back. I prefer an interpretation that is a little more subtle and that focuses on interpersonal relationships: Lalith assumes that Selva would no longer have any use for the piece since the set to which it belonged is long since gone and Selva is too grown up to play with it in any case. What Lalith does not consider is that giving the Meccano piece back would be a tangible sign to the disillusioned and alienated Selva that the positive impressions of his childhood were not totally false—his friend from the other side of the ethnic divide valued him enough to rescue and treasure a small piece of metal just because it belonged to him. If not for Lalith’s assumptions and resulting paralysis, a reconnection could have been made between himself and Selva. Fernandopulle is identifying this same paralysis, the same reluctance to take a risk, as a factor that contributed to the continuation of the ethnic conflict for over two decades.
Along with the themes of loss, broken relationships, and lost opportunities that emerge in the above story, Fernandopulle also offers a stringent critique of terms such as “sacrifice” and “heroism,” which are essential in the discourse of war and become a façade for the sheer brutality of war. “Afterglow” is about Nimal, a Sinhalese soldier who has lost his leg to a land mine explosion and has been honorably discharged. As he goes about in his village, he is treated with much respect and honored as a hero by everyone for the sacrifice that he has made for the sake of his country. At first, “he didn’t know what to feel. He knew he had to be happy that people appreciated what he had done” (32). Nimal is humbled by the gratitude of the villagers who are “determined to make a hero of him” (32-33) and even feels that he should have done much more to deserve such commendation. Gradually, however, he begins to reflect on what he has lost forever—his girlfriend has married someone else because she could not accept the burden of a husband with a disability, and Nimal now has to live with and rely on his sister’s family since he is unable to do a job or work in the paddy fields as a farmer. He realizes that he has nothing left to look forward
to personally or professionally and the very gratitude of the villagers begins to feel stifling to him, and he feels compelled to silence by their praise: “Today he is a hero. They wouldn’t let him be anything else. A hero cannot do an ordinary job. A hero cannot struggle to make a living, he cannot tell you how much pain he is in. A hero cannot ask for more. He didn’t want more than this. He wanted less, he wanted nothing” (37). Being classified as a hero is identified here as both a consolation prize for the violence that has been wrought upon Nimal’s body and a trap from which he cannot extricate himself. His disillusionment with the rhetoric that drew him into enlisting as a soldier in the first place is complete: “He wanted to scream. He wanted to explode like that land mine. So that they’ll hear him” (38).
As discussed in a previous chapter, Buddhism is the aggressively promoted state religion in Sri Lanka, and very few openly dare to criticize members of the powerful Buddhist clergy, some of whom vociferously discouraged political parties from negotiating with Tamil militant groups. In a bold move, Fernandopulle hints at the important role played by some Buddhist clergy in encouraging the continuance of the war. In the story, it is the head priest of the village temple, after all, who first turned Nimal’s thoughts to enlisting in the army: “Loku Hamuduruwo had done so much for him. He encouraged Nimal to join the Army and showed him how important it was and why he should go to war” (35) and pointed out that “‘death is such a small price to pay. … Life is but a line drawn on water’” (35). The emphasis that the monk puts on Lord Buddha’s teaching is that one’s own life is insignificant—it can be “thrown away” for a worthy cause. Yet war does not only mean the possibility of sacrificing one’s own life—it also means taking the life of others. The teachings of Lord Buddha forbid the taking of any life, and this flip side of sacrifice is apparently left unmentioned by the monk. Having encouraged Nimal to enlist, the monk has used him once he returned from the battlefront as an example for other young men: “There was hardly a sermon he preached in those days that did not mention the courage Nimal had shown, and the sacrifice he had made. Nimal, after all, was only just a common village boy. Loku Hamuduruwo had made him what he is now” (36). The last sentence is ambiguous: at one level, Fernandopulle makes Nimal appear grateful to the monk for making him “what he is now.” But what Nimal actually is now is a veteran having to deal with the trauma of the battlefield as well as a crippled and embittered young man who feels that he has no future. Thus, Fernandopulle suggests at a deeper level that the monk merits not Nimal’s gratitude but his blame. Nimal does not want to be a participant in propaganda aimed at sending other young men into war; however, he feels trapped—he cannot speak out against the war and disillusion the people who constantly help and honor him. At the end of the story, Nimal feels that he is like the injured waterbug he sees struggling in the water: “so small, and so impudent as to disturb the comfort of a people’s conscience” (38)—very much like the young girl Vanderpoorten describes in her poem “Vadani in Our Hostel.” Nimal realizes that the gratitude and generosity shown to him because of his heroism is a mask for a people’s guilt and a bribe for keeping him silent.
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