Unlike diasporic writers such as Romesh Gunesekera, Arasanayagam makes it clear that exile is not always the answer or the obvious solution to those who have experienced the devastation of the ethnic conflict. Choosing to remain in a war-torn land, however, is not necessarily a heroic act. For some, staying on in Sri Lanka is not a choice at all because they do not have the financial and other resources they need to leave the country. Others are not able to face the unfamiliar or deal with being categorized as refugees or go through a discriminatory immigration process. In the short story “The Dividing Line,” which again is very autobiographical, the protagonist’s daughter decides to stay on in Canada and urges her mother, who has accompanied her, to do the same: “Stay back. Don’t return. Throw your passport overboard. What have you got to go back to? The same feelings of fear and tension that almost destroyed all of us?” (161). The protagonist realizes that she has “a desperate need to find security in what was the known, the familiar” (162). She does not want to be always viewed with suspicion as a potential terrorist in her place of exile. Thus, she chooses to go back to Sri Lanka: “I had asked for it. I’ll never be safe. Never. But then was there any corner of the world that would remain safe forever?” (181). It is a very valid question at a time when terrorism has become a global concern and systems of internal discrimination threaten the safety even of people who are living in spaces that have not experienced direct acts of terrorism.
In addition to bearing witness to the impact of the ethnic conflict on herself and her family and the daily lives of ordinary Sri Lankans, Arasanayagam also intensifies her own search for identity through her writing; she grapples with her multiplicity of identities and her associations with two ethnic minorities, the Burghers through birth and the Tamils through marriage. Alka Nigam claims that “it is Arasanayagam’s rare achievement that while responding to the political and ethnic upheavals of her country she is able to continue the journey of self-discovery” (106). I would suggest, however, that it is because of these political and ethnic upheavals that Arasanayagam feels compelled to engage in self-discovery. As she has said in an interview, “In 1983 my life took an absolute re-routing. I had to rediscover my identity” (Ramnarayan n.p.). She goes on to say that “writing became a way of looking for, and at, identity, as separate from the racially prejudiced and politically alienated people. I wanted to retrace my journey, go back to childhood and its echoing motifs” (Ramnarayan n.p.).
Stuart Hall has said that cultural identity is affected by the past, which “is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative, and myth” (213). In her search to position herself through representation, Arasanayagam engages in imaginings of what her Dutch forebears must have been like. 5 In the poem “Ancestors” from Reddened Water Flows Clear, the speaker says that though “it is so easy to say that one’s ancestors / Were degenerate or exploiters or that they were / The lazy hoboes of the seaboard” (1-3), she is still intrigued by them and gazes at images of their ships “with a kind of wonder” (23). She yearns to know more about that first Dutchman who arrived on the shores of Sri Lanka and began her line, but there is ambivalence in her speculations as well: “Who was he? Living in some southern maritime / Port, never to go back with the spice cargoes… / Engaged perhaps in private trade, found / Somewhere a woman whom he wived, begot / His offspring, named them with the good Dutch / Names which mixed with different bloods” (89-95). The speaker admires this intrepid adventurer who left the known and familiar behind and made a life for himself in a strange new land. At the same time, she seems to be ironic and dismissive when she mentions “the good Dutch names.” Arasanayagam feels a strong sense of guilt about her Dutch heritage and her connections to colonizers who once raped and pillaged her country. As she says in her poem “Colonizer/Colonized” from the collection of the same name, “The blood of the colonizer that runs / In my veins is also the blood of the / Colonized, an island invaded / An island raped” (1-4). Not only have her ancestors exploited Sri Lanka, they have probably raped its women—she herself could well be the product of such a long-ago (double) rape. Thus, she is left “guilt corroded” (in “I Search Myself through History” 54), and feels that she has to “expiate the sins of forefathers / In their violent expeditions” (in “Conversations at a Breakfast Table” 53). Arasanayagam seems to believe that it is partly due to “the sins” of her forefathers that she—and others—have to endure the violent present of Sri Lanka.
On the one hand, Arasanayagam’s ruminations about her Dutch ancestry underscore the diversity in Sri Lanka, despite prevalent nationalistic myths of purity. This mixing of races and ethnicities is inextricable from the history of all Sri Lankans, Arasanayagam seems to be saying, whether they accept it or not. She shows that there were times when this type of mixing was accepted. Arasanayagam conveys this point most effectively in the short story “Quail’s Nest,” a thinly veiled autobiographical piece from her collection In the Garden Secretly. 6 In the story, the protagonist is a Burgher schoolteacher married to a Tamil and caught up in an ethnic upheaval that occurred in the late 1970s. At a time when ethnic tension is running high in her town, the protagonist’s mind goes back to “the night we had been guests at a performance of one of the Jataka stories, during the Wesak celebrations at Nittawala, organized by the Muslim owner of a joss-stick factory. We had been the chief guests and had sat in the front row, amidst the crowd of villagers” (40). This exquisite moment of hybridity and unity within a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society, so casually mentioned by Arasanayagam, is worth unpacking. Wesak is the prime religious holiday of Sinhalese Buddhists, commemorating the birth, enlightenment, and death of Lord Buddha. We are told of a performance of a Jataka story—the tale of one of the Buddha’s five hundred and fifty previous incarnations—that is held in honor of this festival. The organizer of this celebration is a Muslim owner of a factory that manufactures joss sticks—incense used in worship primarily by Buddhists. The guests of honor at this performance are the protagonist and her husband, who are, respectively, a Burgher Christian and a Tamil Hindu. We could subscribe to the view that it is merely commerce that has brought this motley group together—after all, the Muslim owner of the joss-stick factory might want to appeal to his Buddhist customers by sponsoring the performance of a play about the Buddha. But the protagonist and her husband are from two other ethnic and religious communities altogether. Both are teachers by profession and therefore not necessarily capable of great financial sponsorship. Yet they have been asked to participate in this event as chief guests and they have agreed. Their presence in a position of honor does not seem to evoke any questions or protests from the villagers who have come to watch the play. Arasanayagam thus highlights the fact that respect and tolerance did exist among different ethnic and religious groups in Sri Lanka before the madness of ethnic strife set in earnest. 7 Thus, even though Arasanayagam reminds readers that the conflict which erupted in 1983 was not the first of its kind in the island’s history, she also makes it clear that ethno-religious harmony did prevail in certain periods and places—indeed, prevails even in the midst of conflict. This is a necessary reminder at a time when what Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake calls “selective forgetting of culturally mixed and hybrid pasts” (41) has become the norm.
On the other hand, as Neloufer de Mel and Neluka Silva have each argued, Arasanayagam problematizes the notion that cultural hybridity is always to be valorized in relation to the dynamics of a postcolonial society. Homi Bhabha has said that “[the] interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (4). Arasanayagam lives in the realities of this interstitial passage and shows through her writings the complexities of ongoing and unceasing negotiation. For instance, as de Mel and Silva have demonstrated, Arasanayagam writes often about the unwillingness of members of her husband’s orthodox tradition-bound Tamil Hindu family, particularly her mother-in-law, to accept her since
she is a Burgher and a Christian. 8 In the poem “Women, Goddesses, and Their Mythologies” in the collection Reddened Water Flows Clear, Arasanayagam recounts how the autobiographical speaker was ostracized by her husband’s family, particularly by her mother-in-law. Throughout the poem, the speaker shows a desire to join her husband’s family in its traditions and rituals, but she is kept literally and figuratively at a distance. She is seen by her husband’s mother as a polluter, as “the one whose breath / Made the flames flicker, dwindle, almost die / On the altar of her gods” (7-9). Only “once, but barely once” (24) is she allowed entrance into the family’s shrine room, and even then she is made to feel that she “belonged not to a single of her [the mother-in-law’s] rituals” (33). Her mother-in-law looks contemptuously upon her as an intruder of dubious origins, whose flesh “was begotten from those roistering breeds / Who fed on all those unhallowed meats and mated / With those who were not always of their kind” (74-76). The mother-in-law condemns the speaker for marrying her son and thereby continuing the sins of miscegenation that her Dutch ancestors committed; when the speaker gives birth, the mother-in-law appears only to check whether her son is happy, not to look upon her new grandchild or inquire about the well-being of the speaker as she recuperates after childbirth. Even though the speaker once had hopes of forming relationships with her husband’s family, she realizes that this will never happen: “I believed that there / Would be that much kinship to knit in love our / Alien flesh; this could never be” (142-44). In her examination of mixed marriages in Ondaatje’s memoir Running in the Family, Silva reminds us that “if, in the spheres of domestic and personal relations, ethnic tensions impair relationships, then the ‘impossibility’ of achieving ethnic harmony at the macro, political level is foregrounded” (108). This applies also to Arasanayagam’s depiction of the problems that she had to face as a result of her marriage across the ethnic divide.
Ironically, in a recycling of oppression, the mother-in-law herself becomes a pariah and an outsider within her own patriarchal society following her husband’s death. It becomes apparent that the power that she wielded has come to her only through her position as wife. Once her husband dies, she has nothing left and is compelled to seek shelter under the roof of her despised daughter-in-law. “Her white and widowed hair, its parting once streaked / Thick with bright vermilion, now bereft of marriage symbol / Tracing through their sparse strands, a bare and lonely path” (4-6). The speaker recognizes that both she and her mother-in-law “were lost, each in our own myths / Wherein lay naïve deception and duplicity” (145-46). The mother-in-law has subscribed to and tried to maintain a patriarchal system that discriminated against her son’s wife and ultimately preyed upon the mother-in-law herself. The speaker, on the other hand, tried to ingratiate herself to her husband’s mother and family and therefore avoided challenging the treatment they meted out to her or questioning their assumptions regarding her cultural hybridity; therefore, she has been unable to change, improve, or ameliorate matters.
We see that Arasanayagam, in her personal life, attempted to suppress her Burgher Christian identity in order to gain acceptance from and into her husband’s Tamil Hindu family by showing a willingness to embrace the traditions of her in-laws and participate in their religious rituals. During the ethnic riots of 1983, however, it is her identity as the wife of a Tamil man that gains in significance. Even though she is a Burgher, she is also a woman married to a Tamil man and therefore the Sinhalese mobs automatically categorize her under her husband’s ethnicity. This is despite the fact that her mixed heritage is visible on her body and at other times, she has to answer questions about her mixed heritage, as she describes in the poem “A Question of Identity”: “The talk comes up / In odd places / Who are you? / What are you?” (1-4). These are questions that become very common during times of ethnic conflict, when categorization of people as “desirable” or “undesirable” is paramount. Arasanayagam thus has to defend herself “against / The conservative morals of other tribal groups” (132-33). According to de Mel, “Here is the challenge to the hybrid-multi-cultural argument that is not sufficiently cognizant of the lived, everyday realities at high points of nationalism which determine which identity is to be foregrounded, which to be suppressed” (176). Silva states that while Bhabha makes a persuasive case for the political efficacy of hybridity, “Arasanayagam’s poignant plea for the recognition of her traumatic ethnic identity is one of the strongest critiques of the universalizing tendency of this theoretical position” (“Situating” 115). While de Mel’s and Silva’s arguments regarding Arasanayagam and hybridity are persuasive, both have focused only on Arasanayagam’s poetry. I would add that Arasanayagam has made an effort to show the positive potential of cultural hybridity, particularly in her short stories.
Just as Arasanayagam’s epiphanic moment came in 1983 when she experienced ethnic violence firsthand, much of her fiction deals with a single protagonist (usually the first-person narrator) going through an epiphanic moment or at least entering a process of thinking, rethinking, and awareness; Arasanayagam emphasizes that when one is living with death and danger, one needs to look inward, to consider things carefully without being swept away by external events. There is usually little plot development; instead, the first-person narrative enables us to see the protagonist coming to certain realizations. In the short story “In the Garden Secretly” from the collection of the same name, the first person narrator is a Sinhalese pilot in the Sri Lankan Air Force walking through a Tamil village that has been abandoned after an attack by state forces. His mission is to find out whether there is anyone hiding in the village. As he enters and explores one of the battered houses, he reflects on his own role in the conflict, his reasons for being in the armed forces—it is not purely patriotism that has motivated him—and the guilt that he has to bear as he carries out his orders. He knows that some of his actions have not always been above scrutiny or reproach even though rhetoric protects him: “war has its own distinctive language. A ‘terrorist’ is ‘killed.’ A ‘soldier’ ‘sacrifices’ his life. … Who’s to decide who is what, what is the difference between them” (7). During the course of his walk through the house, he gradually becomes curious about those who once called it their home. He comes across a statue of Jesus and realizes that the Tamil homeowners were also Christian, just like him: “We have that in common then” (12). This realization sparks an awareness of how much else he has in common with Tamils and the extent of suffering that war has caused to all. “Here, at this moment, in this shelled house, I wonder what the difference is between those who lived here and me. They have gone into exile. But in reality, we are in exile too. We have all been forced to leave the homes familiar to us” (14). This story defines Sri Lankan experience across ethnicities as one of exile, making the displacement of Tamils a metaphor for a broader sense of displacement caused by the conflict.
In the short story “The Crossing,” a middle-aged Tamil woman who is making the dangerous crossing between the Jaffna peninsula and the South takes shelter for a little while in a Hindu temple that has fallen into disuse. She is a Christian, a mother who is risking all to see her son and his family living in the south. Even though she is far from being a rebel herself or even a sympathizer of the militants fighting for a separate Tamil homeland, she begins to understand what might motivate young women to join the militants as she looks at the images of the goddesses in the kovil.
In “I Am an Innocent Man” from the collection All Is Burning, the protagonist, Das, is a young Tamil schoolteacher who begins to realize that despite his best efforts to “stay out of trouble” and “play it safe” (27) by neither joining the Tamil militant groups nor cooperating with the government’s forces that are attempting to defeat the militants, he cannot pretend to be neutral or innocent:
Whoever has witnessed death as I have seen it, men falling, hit by bullets, dying under a clear sky, not knowing sometimes from what direction they were fired upon, could not think himsel
f to be innocent. Nor could I do anything about the killings on either side. It made me feel guilty, as if I had been a participant in all that had happened. I had knowledge, I was a witness; I could not claim to be innocent. (33)
The implication here seems to be that the very act of witnessing—as opposed to the taking of sides, direct participation, and involvement—can be associated with a kind of complicity and engender feelings of guilt.
Like Arasanayagam herself, many of her characters dwell in interstitial spaces and negotiate their identities, such as the Sinhalese airman and the Tamil woman featured in the above stories, both of whom are Christian, or people who are of mixed ancestry or in interracial marriages. These characters, perhaps due to their conspicuous cultural hybridity and the negotiations that they have to make in daily life, are able to gain some comprehension—however slight or fleeting—of the various sides of every story and empathize with the plight of others. The airman feels pity for the homeowners who have been forced into exile or even killed, while the woman who has adhered to tradition all her life begins to understand why women of the younger generation feel the need to break all those conventions and become militants. In “Search My Mind,” the speaker is apostrophizing a young soldier who has rudely asked her to get off a bus and subject herself and her belongings to a search. She is annoyed and angry at his treatment of her; yet she begins to realize his plight: “Your innocence squandered as easily as / Bullets, your energies spent to leave / Your life like empty cartridge cases / Strewn upon this desert earth, our past times / Were less dangerous than your death / Picnics” (29-34). The tropes drawn from war and weaponry effectively convey the waste of youthful lives such as that of the soldier. The speaker’s annoyance and anger gradually turn to sorrow and pity for this man who will never know the pleasures that she herself experienced in her youth, because his life is bound by the war.
Terror and Reconciliation Page 12