If empathy is an identification with and an understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives, it could lead to tolerance of the other and a recognition of the other’s humanity. Arasanayagam advocates empathy as one way of approaching the problems of a society that has been wracked by ethno-nationalistic chauvinism for so long. Some might call this a hazy humanism. Others might say that empathy is too simplistic a proposition. Yet Arasanayagam’s proposition is analogous to that of Gayatri Spivak, who has argued that love, an openness to the other that takes risks, can be a way of dealing with subalternity:
We are talking about using the strongest mobilizing discourse in the world in a certain way. … This learning can only be attempted through the supplementation of collective effort by love. What deserves the name of love is an effort—over which one has no control yet at which one must not strain—which is slow, attentive on both sides—how does one win the attention of the subaltern without coercion or crisis? —mindchanging on both sides. ( A Critique 383)
For Spivak, love is a necessary condition for responsible one-on-one contact and mindchanging, which in turn will lead to reform and the ultimate goal of inserting the subaltern “into the long road of hegemony” ( A Critique 310). While Arasanayagam is not writing about subalternity, she is, in a different context, suggesting a similar strategy by means of her emphasis on empathy as a necessary step towards finding a solution to the ethnic conflict. Attempting to understand and feel for the other is something that can be done by everyone, even though such an endeavor takes courage and commitment. At a time when it is almost the norm for the individual to believe that he or she is helpless, that the conflict is too huge a problem to be resolved, empathy holds out the possibility of change at the grassroots level.
Contact and Dialogue: The Road from Elephant Pass
Unlike Arasanayagam, who has been writing for over three decades but only started addressing important socio-political issues after she herself had gone through the crucible of ethnic violence mid-way through her writing career, Nihal de Silva deals with the conflict directly in his very first novel. A Sinhalese Catholic and the owner of a successful business, de Silva said that he took up writing to occupy his time following his retirement. 9 He was killed in a landmine explosion—ironically enough, in Wilpattu, the wildlife preserve that features prominently in his first novel—in June of 2006. Written in the aftermath of the 2002 ceasefire between the government and the LTTE, The Road from Elephant Pass 10 was published in 2003 and gained much publicity in Sri Lanka because it was awarded both the State Literary Award and the Gratiaen Prize 11 for that year. Like the works of Fernandopulle and Kamala Wijeratne, de Silva’s novel has not, however, received scholarly attention.
The Road from Elephant Pass could be classified as popular fiction; it is a fast-paced and suspenseful action/adventure story as well as a romance.12 Set in the year 2000, at the time when the LTTE launched a fierce and ultimately successful attack to regain control of Elephant Pass from the Sri Lankan army, the plot revolves around Wasantha Ratnayake, an army captain stationed in the north who is assigned to take Kamala Valaithan, a female activist of the LTTE turned defector, to his superiors in Colombo. Kamala has important information about the whereabouts of the LTTE leader Prabhakaran that she wants to give to the Sri Lankan armed forces in exchange for safe passage to Canada. Wasantha is given the task of ensuring that both Kamala and her information reach the proper authorities because the capture or death of Prabhakaran could lead to the end of the war.
De Silva seems to be aiming for a wider audience for his work than do writers like Fernandopulle and Wijeratne. He assumes nothing about his readers’ knowledge concerning the country or the ethnic conflict. For instance, if any of the characters speak in Sinhala or Tamil, the Sinhala or Tamil words are given in Roman letters and then translated into English in the very next line. Every historico-political event referred to in the novel is glossed within the text, even those with which Sri Lankans would be all too familiar—for example, the 1983 riots and the second JVP uprising.
In this novel, de Silva focuses on the importance of personal encounter and dialogue as steps toward solving the country’s ethnic conflict. As de Silva mentioned in an interview with Nirupa Subramanian, “I feel strongly that the road to settling our problem is for people to interact, and that their humanity has to do the rest” (“A Fresh New Voice” n.p.). Kamala is a Tamil and believes implicitly in the separatist struggle carried out by the LTTE even though she has apparently turned informer against the leadership because it is responsible for the unjust execution of her brother. Wasantha is a Sinhalese army captain who firmly believes that the country should not be divided and that the LTTE should be exterminated. At the beginning of the novel, the two characters only have contempt and condemnation for each other’s beliefs, actions, and causes and seem to have no common ground at all.
As Kamala and Wasantha continue their journey to Colombo together, travelling through the LTTE-held Wanni region and across Wilpattu, they are forced to rely on each other and consequently begin to talk and get to know each other. When Kamala and Wasantha engage in dialogue, both they and the readers are given an opportunity to understand the characters’ actions and motivations. Neither is a saint. Wasantha has been on the battlefield and has also tortured Tamil militants and burned Tamil villages in retaliation for terrorist attacks on the army. Kamala, as a female cadre of the LTTE, has presumably been involved in many acts of violence against the Sinhalese.
De Silva has set up his two protagonists to be very obvious opponents. In Wasantha’s case, he is a Sinhalese Buddhist from a poverty-stricken background in the south and has suffered at the hands of his alcoholic and abusive father. His primary reason for joining the army was to support his mother and younger sisters financially. Kamala is the daughter of a Tamil Christian teacher. Her family home in Colombo was burned down in the 1983 riots and her father was tortured and left traumatized. Since they had lost their home and the father could no longer work, the family was compelled to move from Colombo to Jaffna, to live with their relations there. Kamala joined the LTTE to avenge the sufferings of her family and her people at the hands of the Sinhalese.
Despite their different backgrounds and their dedication to diametrically opposed causes, Wasantha and Kamala begin to realize that they do have some things in common. They both know English, which serves as a link language—neither of them is fluent in the other’s mother tongue—and allows them to communicate with each other. They both also love ornithology. The passion for birds displayed by Wasantha and Kamala is de Silva’s way “of showing common ground between the Sinhalese and the Tamils” (“A Fresh New Voice” n.p.). According to de Silva, “When we talk about the conflict, we always seem to focus on the differences between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. … But we also have a lot in common. In my case, I know birds so I chose birds” (“A Fresh New Voice” n.p.). He gives detailed accounts of Kamala and Wasantha’s shared knowledge about and love for ornithology. The descriptions of the mutual excitement of the soldier and the militant at the sight of native Sri Lankan birds point toward a common love of the land that is expressed in ways that do not involve destruction and violence. Thus, de Silva refuses to adhere to any expectations about what should be focused on in war-zone writing—a refusal similar to that of the narrator, Rajan, in Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies, who, as we shall see in the next chapter, prefers to focus on the beauty of everyday life as opposed to the violence of the conflict. The unexpected commonalities between Wasantha and Kamala, along with their dependence on each other during their journey, encourage them to explore their different interpretations of the conflict in Sri Lanka and to challenge each other’s versions.
The novel is narrated in the first person by the Sinhalese male protagonist, so the Tamil female protagonist’s thoughts and mental processes are filtered through Wasantha’s perceptions; this also lets de Silva keep the twist in the tale hidden. De Silva seems to have chosen not t
o use third-person omniscient narration in order to increase the sense of immediacy and maintain narrative momentum. Even though Wasantha is the first-person narrator, the extensive dialogue and often heated debates between him and Kamala ensure that the account of the ethnic conflict given in the novel minimizes the possibility of bias toward either faction. Wasantha, the Sinhalese Buddhist soldier from the deep south, is a representative of the army—and Sinhalese chauvinists in general—while Kamala, the Tamil from a Christian middle-class background and victim of ethnic violence, is the representative of the militants. Goonetilleke’s call for “a presentation of the actual conflict in all its complexity, with its tangled web of wrongs—economic, political, and physical—perpetrated not by one side or the other but both” (“Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict” 453) is exactly what de Silva attempts to answer through the exchanges between his protagonists.
When they discuss human rights and army attacks on civilians, for example, Wasantha points out that the army no longer attacks civilians in the north and the east due to pressure from the media and non-governmental organizations. When Kamala tells him “you mustn’t believe in your own propaganda” (61) because she has just recently lost her uncle in one of the army’s retaliatory attacks, Wasantha responds by saying that sometimes such attacks are necessary since “the villagers are not so innocent. They damn well know about these things in advance. Because they do nothing, our men are maimed and killed. They must pay a price for that” (62). Kamala says that this is why the army is hated by her people, who have suffered so much at its hands, and adds that the reason villagers do not give information to the armed forces is because they fear punishment at the hands of the LTTE. Wasantha’s response is that the LTTE takes cover under international human rights regulations without adhering to any such conventions themselves.
In another instance of debate, when the talk turns to the separatist struggle of the LTTE, Wasantha asks Kamala how the Tamils, a mere 8 [ sic] percent of the population of Sri Lanka, can demand a third of the country. She replies that the Tamils have lived in particular regions of the country for centuries and the Sinhalese are the actual interlopers. When Wasantha contradicts her, saying that according to the Mahavamsa—the chronicle of Sri Lanka’s history from the sixth century BCE to the fourth century CE, written in Pali by Buddhist monks—the Sinhalese arrived in Sri Lanka first, Kamala argues that “your written history is a religious text” and therefore not sufficient proof of Sinhalese rights to the entire country (131). Wasantha points out that the Sinhalese are quite happy to share the whole country with the Tamils, while the latter want to keep a section of it only to themselves. Kamala’s response to this is that after the riots of 1983, the only way Tamils can feel secure is to have their own state and not be at the mercy of the capricious goodwill of the majority Sinhalese.
Even though the viewpoints of Kamala and Wasantha sometimes tend to sound like the slogans and talking points of their respective factions, making their discussions seem stilted and even trite, the very fact that the soldier and the militant talk to each other helps them to clear up some of their misconceptions and erroneous ideas, and sometimes to question what they had earlier taken for granted to be true. Wasantha, who had earlier declared that he “hated it when someone argued tactics with me. Specially subordinates. Specially enemies. Specially women” (84), begins to admire and respect his traveling companion’s courage, independence, and self-control: “Although she was really an enemy activist, she had also been a staunch and courageous ally in every crisis we had faced” (138). Kamala, who had thought of Wasantha as an uneducated brute, is surprised to learn that he has both a sense of compassion and a university degree: “You know, Captain, in spite of being a Sinhalese, you are a good man!” As a result of their discussions, they gradually begin to realize that generalizations are “dangerously wrong sometimes” (270). As Wasantha points out:
If I say that only some Tamils are criminals, I have no right or justification to attack all Tamils! I have to seek out the criminal element and punish them. In the same way, if only some Sinhala are the guilty ones, the Tamils cannot justify indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians. (270-71)
De Silva suggests that personal contact between individuals from the warring groups could do much to ameliorate the ethnic conflict by enabling them to recognize the extent of their prejudice toward and misconceptions about the other, even to take responsibility for the suffering that each has caused the other.
Through the account of his protagonists’ travels through the Wanni and Wilpattu regions, de Silva is able to highlight the plight of the ordinary people living in those areas and going about their lives despite the war that is raging around them. They manage without phones, electricity, or gas and have modified their vehicles so that they can run on kerosene. Essential supplies are rationed. Injury, death, and destruction are very much a part of everyday life. As Wasantha puts it, “In that unfortunate part of the country that had known nothing but war for 18 [ sic] years, being disabled and incapacitated helped make one invisible. Perhaps it was the norm” (37).
De Silva also draws attention to issues arising from the conflict that have often been neglected, such as the Tamil children who are forcibly recruited into the “baby brigade” of the LTTE and the poverty-stricken young Sinhalese men who join the armed forces and either become cannon fodder on the battlefields of the north and the east or deserters on the run from the law. During their encounters with the army deserters who have now become poachers at Wilpattu, Wasantha—who also joined the army to support his family—meditates on the plight of his more unfortunate peers:
I thought about the thousands of young men who jostled each other to join the army, lured by the lush benefits and prestige of the uniform. The army was often the only employer who would give them a second glance. But after a couple of years in the front line with little training and poor leaders, many of them lose their stomach for war. Deserting was easy. Get home on leave and just fail to report back. Their problems only started after that, for deserters had nowhere to go. … A life of crime was their only recourse. (216)
De Silva also touches upon other issues such as the corruption in arms purchases and the making of strategic and tactical decisions by politicians with ulterior motives and inept military officials who are all safely ensconced in the capital city (167) as well as the victimization of women at the hands of the police and the armed forces (169). While Arasanayagam concentrates for the most part on the impact of the conflict in Sri Lanka on civilians whose only goal is survival, de Silva shows the extent to which active participants in the conflict are victimized as well. Kamala’s involvement in the activities of the LTTE have separated her from her family and prevented her from marrying her Tamil boyfriend and getting the university education that she has long desired. Wasantha’s duties in the army, which range from combat on the battlefield to intelligence-gathering by means of torture, seem to have begun to erode his previously compassionate character.
De Silva’s emphasis on the complexity of the issues relating to the ethnic conflict is laudable. A weakness in the novel lies, however, in the fact that de Silva’s protagonists—somewhat predictably—fall in love with each other towards the end of their ten-day journey. This love plot allows de Silva to circumvent the difficult issues that he has highlighted in the novel by shifting the focus of the narrative from delineating and wrestling with the complicated issues relating to the ethnic conflict to resolving Kamala and Wasantha’s dilemmas concerning their sudden love relationship. In addition, the heterosexual romance plot limits the possibility for exploring more complex approaches to love. In All About Love, bell hooks talks of love “as an active force that should lead us into greater communion with the world” (76). She argues that a “love ethic” is the basis for social justice and a force that can change society:
Individuals who choose to love can and do alter our lives in ways that honor the primacy of a love ethic. We do this by choosing to work with indivi
duals we admire and respect; by committing to give our all to relationships; by embracing a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet. (87-88)
The love between Wasantha and Kamala does indeed help them move beyond themselves; their chief concern now is to ensure each other’s safety. Since their love is based very much on the affection and sexual attraction between two individuals, however, it does not make it possible for the two protagonists to seek ways of bringing their respective communities together.
There is a surprise at the end: it turns out that Kamala did not really have information about the LTTE leader’s whereabouts and her actual mission was to set a trap for the Sri Lankan armed forces—feeding them misinformation so that they would bomb a host of visiting Indian dignitaries and civilians instead of Prabhakaran, their actual target—that would incur the wrath of the international media on the government. This twist, however, is weakened because it is revealed too soon: fearful of her imminent betrayal of Wasantha’s trust, Kamala confesses the truth to her lover, who in turn risks his career to protect her. Since Wasantha is no longer in a position to continue as narrator, the novel ends with two news reports and a letter informing the soldier’s mother of his “Missing in Action” status.
Arasanayagam’s short story “In the Garden Secretly” ends with the soldier walking out of the abandoned house with the statue of Christ in his bag and his T-56 rifle in his hand. De Silva’s The Road from Elephant Pass concludes with Kamala going into exile in Canada while Wasantha is presumed killed. These endings suggest that neither the self-discovery and empathy that Arasanayagam advocates nor the personal contact and dialogue that de Silva proposes can be considered adequate means of reconciliation in and of themselves. Nonetheless, these two writers, along with Fernandopulle, provide necessary reminders of the power and possibility of individual action to their target audience—Sri Lankans living in the midst and aftermath of long-term violence.
Terror and Reconciliation Page 13