Notes
1. Another writer who touches on matters of empathy and dialogue in her short fiction is Punyakante Wijenaike, mainly in her short story collection An Enemy Within (1996). This emphasis is, however, largely tangential to her main body of work, so as I have discussed her work briefly in earlier chapters, I have not included an extended discussion of her work here.
2. This is reminiscent of First World War poetry, particularly of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
3. Sam’s Story , which revolves around a developmentally challenged youth working as a houseboy for a middle-class family, only deals tangentially with the violence in Sri Lanka. For that reason, I have not included a more extensive discussion of that text in this study.
4. See the UTHR’s contributions in Hoole et al.’s The Broken Palmyra and Rajan Hoole’s Sri Lanka: The Arrogance of Power: Myths, Decadence, and Murder.
5. Although this segment of my study is primarily devoted to Arasanayagam’s short fiction, I use her poetry here for context.
6. Arasanayagam is an autobiographical poet. She uses everything that has happened in her life, particularly what has happened since 1983, in her poems and short stories. Every situation in which she has found herself has been mined over and over again in her work. Thus, an encounter she had with a security guard is written about first in a poem (“Search My Mind” in Reddened Water Flows Clear) and then in a short story (“Search My Mind” in In the Garden Secretly); her family’s stay at the refugee camp is described many times in various poems (particularly in the collection Apocalypse ’83) and also in stories/autobiographical pieces (such as “Fear: Meditations in a Camp” in All Is Burning).
7. The short story also includes a Muslim neighbor, Mrs. Ismail, who is concerned about the welfare of the protagonist’s family and that of another Tamil family in the vicinity as well as a Sinhalese employee of the protagonist, Ranmenike, who puts herself at risk to warn the protagonist about the mob’s approach.
8. Neluka Silva points out that Tamil Hindu women share the responsibility with their husbands of carrying out worship of deities within the family; a Christian Burgher like Arasanayagam is unable to participate in such rituals. Thus, Arasanayagam’s very connection to her husband’s family has broken tradition. In addition, Silva posits that the Sinhalese and Tamils have long considered Burghers—descended as they are from Europeans who married indigenous women—as the personification of both impurity and sexual promiscuity, not to mention a constant reminder of Sri Lanka’s colonization by Europeans (“Situating” 114-17).
9. De Silva’s second novel, The Far Spent Day, deals with political corruption and was well received in Sri Lanka. Just before his death he published a third novel, The Giniralla Conspiracy. De Silva’s last unfinished book, Arathi, was published posthumously in 2010.
10. Elephant Pass is a narrow isthmus connecting the Jaffna peninsula, in the north, to the rest of Sri Lanka. This is a strategic military base and has changed hands many times during the conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil militant groups.
11. The Gratiaen Prize was established by Michael Ondaatje with the winnings from his Booker Prize award. The Gratiaen Prize is awarded annually to the best Sri Lankan writing in English by a previously unpublished author.
12. The Sinhala translation of the novel was adapted into a feature film entitled Alimankada, directed by Chandran Rutnam, and released in 2009.
Part Two
Diasporic Interventions
Chapter 4
Interpreting the Conflict: Historiography and Sri Lankan Fiction
In previous chapters I have shown that location needs to be considered because material conditions make a difference in a writer’s output. Even though I have made a division between local and diasporic Sri Lankan writers, this is not to suggest that there is homogeneity in the way that diasporic writers deal with the situation in the home country or that I believe that local writers should be privileged over diasporic writers. There is undoubtedly as much heterogeneity in the works of diasporic Sri Lankan writers about the ethnic conflict as there is in the works of local writers such as Fernandopulle, Wijeratne, Arasanayagam, and de Silva. 1
One useful way of approaching the heterogeneity of works by diasporic writers is to examine the question of implied audience. Unlike local writers who address their work mainly to fellow Sri Lankans since their compatriots, by necessity, form the primary audience for these works, diasporic writers can assume an international audience due to their access to Western publishers, publicity, and distribution networks. 2 This chapter explores the first novels of two diasporic writers who have deliberately chosen to engage a Sri Lankan readership and to make an intervention in the ethnic conflict, and the first short story collection by a writer who, after many years as a diasporic, chose to return to Sri Lanka. Their choice of implied audience is revealed in the way they use language 3 and narrative strategies in their respective novels as well as what they have said in interviews or lectures.
In When Memory Dies, Ambalavaner Sivanandan undermines the myths of purity propagated by the opposing sides in the ethnic conflict by valorizing the concept of bastardization and by emphasizing cultural hybridity and co-existence. Sivanandan complicates the question of ethnic identity by means of discussions of class and Sri Lanka’s colonial past. He is interested in storytelling and writing and attempts a more inclusive, revisionist history than ones currently in play by means of narratives that bleed into one another along with fragments of narrative that create a type of collage.
Shyam Selvadurai, in Funny Boy, highlights the necessity of bearing witness—both to the communalism that leads to ethnic tensions and violence, and to other types of oppression relating to ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation. By using a narrator who is a young, gay, Tamil boy living in a heteronormative and ethnically polarized society, and by conflating the personal with the national, Selvadurai emphasizes that the personal is the political in this novel.
Finally, Pradeep Jeganathan’s short story collection At the Water’s Edge, is the product of the often shifting and ambiguous relationship between diasporic and local status. Jeganathan’s stories narrate the growth of a young Sri Lankan Tamil who is born in Sri Lanka, becomes part of the diaspora, and briefly returns to his homeland. Jeganathan himself, meanwhile, has followed a similar trajectory to that of his protagonist, but has ultimately chosen to dwell in Sri Lanka himself, thus demonstrating that for some Sri Lankans, “diasporic” and “local” are not mutually exclusive identities.
Class Acts and Counterhistories: When Memory Dies
Sivanandan’s ambitious work focuses on three generations of one Sri Lankan family, spanning nearly a century from the time of British colonization to the beginning of the ethnic conflict in the early 1980s. The novel traces the lives of Sahadevan, a Tamil from Jaffna in the northern peninsula, his son Rajan, who comes of age in the post-independence era, and his grandson Vijay, who experiences the growing ethnic tensions that reached a climax in 1983. Sivanandan, a Tamil, left Sri Lanka in 1958 following the ethnic riots of 1956, and had been domiciled in the United Kingdom for almost four decades at the time he wrote this novel. He has said that despite his decades-long activism against racism and injustice in Britain, 4 he felt a “hollowness” stemming from the fact that he had not done something constructive for his homeland: “I hadn’t made a contribution to my own country and my own people. So the novel came out of that” (“Interview with Sivanandan”).
R. Radhakrishnan has posited that it is the responsibility of a diasporic to be knowledgeable about the home country when commenting on what goes on there (128). Sivanandan’s extensive knowledge of Sri Lanka and its political and social environment is evident in the novel, which covers many different political movements, class struggles, communities, and historical events. Sivanandan also uses certain narrative strategies that enable him to create some balance between his position as an exile and the vision that he has for Sri Lanka
.
One of the most effective of his narrative strategies is the way in which Sivanandan constructs and represents the self of the narrator in the text. At first glance, the novel seems to be a straightforward chronological realist narrative. 5 However, the question of narrative voice adds much complexity to the way the story is told. Even though the three sections of the novel focus on Sahadevan, Rajan, and Vijay, respectively, we are led to believe that the novel as a whole is narrated by Rajan. In the very first pages of Book One, it is Rajan who talks about his first memories and ruminates about the plethora of stories that need to be told. He then begins to recount the story of his father, Sahadevan. At the very beginning, Rajan refers to the latter as “my father” and narrates in the first person. Gradually, he effaces himself from the narrative and the story is told from the third person, and his father is referred to as “Saha.” This method of narration continues until Book Two, which is basically Rajan’s own memoir. Rajan reappears as the first-person narrator providing the story of his own formative and adult years. Finally, in Book Three, the focus shifts to Rajan’s son Vijay and the former disappears again, leaving an unspecified third-person narrator, who, we can assume, has to be Rajan since Vijay dies at the end of the novel. 6
Sivanandan’s positioning of Rajan as the narrator enables him to do a fine balancing act as the outsider writing about a country from which he is exiled. Right from the beginning, Rajan identifies himself as an exile. Along with his own story, he is telling the stories of his father and his son, which, it could be argued, he has authority to do by virtue of his familial relationship to them. 7 At the same time, we are being made aware that Rajan, apart from the section in which he is the protagonist, cannot know firsthand what he is recounting. After all, Rajan was not born at the time about which he is writing in Book One, and he is away in England for much of the time he is writing about in Book Three. At best, he is extending and embellishing the stories he has heard about his father’s youth, as well as the information he has gathered from various sources about his son’s adult years and violent death. Therefore, by his choice of narrative voice, Sivanandan underscores the fact that Rajan is engaging in an act of imagination and creation, much like Sivanandan himself. Rajan is filling in the gaps in the stories of his father and his son. Thus, the narrator’s authority to relate his own experiences and to speak for his father and his son is juxtaposed with his status as an exile and an outsider and the acts of imagination that he engages in to fill in the gaps. This status is similar to Sivanandan’s own subject position as a writer who is simultaneously an outsider due to his exile and an insider with authority to speak about his homeland and its people because of his emotional investment in Sri Lanka—a self-positioning of the Third World intellectual that Spivak has recommended. Sivanandan has built fissures into the text; we are given room to question the narrator’s claims to authority, along with those of the writer.
Sivanandan also represents Rajan as someone who could be trusted to speak about a country divided by ethnic conflict. Rajan, like Sivanandan, is a Tamil. He is positioned as someone who is not infected by ethnic prejudice, someone as close to being neutral as possible since the love of his life is Lali, a Sinhalese woman. Not only does Rajan cross the ethnic divide by his marriage to Lali in the face of his own family’s opposition, but he even adopts Vijay, Lali’s son by Sena, a Sinhalese dockworker killed in the 1953 port hartal. 8 Rajan says that “the Sinhalese were my friends, I had married one, my son was a Sinhalese” (228). Yet he loses his wife, his son, and ultimately his country as a result of communalism. Who better to recount the story of Sri Lanka’s descent into the abyss of ethnic violence, then, than Rajan, a Tamil by descent but whose immediate family is Sinhalese? Rajan’s subject position seems to give him motivation and authority to comment on the faults and erroneous thinking of both the Sinhalese and the Tamils. From this positioning of his narrator, Sivanandan himself intervenes as someone who has a stake in the country.
The novel, as a whole, traces how communalism became a tool in the hands of unscrupulous and opportunistic Sinhalese politicians such as S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who came to power by stirring up ethnic tensions. At the same time, Sivanandan’s Tamil narrator points out how Tamils, too, were prejudiced against the Sinhalese and therefore responsible for what was happening to the country. In one powerful scene, Rajan is a witness as his father, Saha, confronts his friend Visvappa—a respected Tamil writer and intellectual—about his communalism. Visvappa refers to the Sinhalese by a derogatory name, “Cheenapulis,” and blames them for inciting racial tensions: “‘They are not civilized. They have no culture. What can you expect from them? ’” (205). A furious Saha retorts:
Here I was getting mad about this Sinhala-only business and it dividing our people and all that… but you, you have put me right. You have shown me that it is precisely because Sinhala is spoken only in Ceylon that Ceylon must preserve Sinhala. … And it is people like you… so-called learned people—oh, they are among the Sinhalese too, make no mistake, people like you—who make communalists of us all. (206)
Here, the normally placid Saha is making a radical charge: Tamils can be as prejudiced against the Sinhalese as the latter can be against the Tamils, and instead of clearing away such ethnic bias, intellectuals on both sides have fanned the flames.
It is noteworthy that the narrator, Rajan, has had a history of nervous breakdowns since the rape and murder of his (Sinhalese) wife by Sinhalese thugs during the riots of 1956 and has to live in England in order to preserve his sanity. Each time he has attempted to return to Sri Lanka, believing that he is cured, he finds himself regressing, completely unable to cope with the memories of the horrors he has endured. He has to retreat as fast as possible to England. What does this say about the narrator? Is he, due to his ever-encroaching psychological distress, the only one able to understand the madness into which his homeland has plunged, as Walter Perera speculates (“Attempting” 26)? Or is this an instance of the privileging of the expatriate’s vision over that of the local? When Rajan leaves Sri Lanka after his final futile attempt to return and resettle in his homeland, he leaves Vijay a letter in which he blames his exile squarely on the country and the feuding people: “He refused to forgive the country that had separated him from his finer feelings, kept him from his duties and sent him off to a country which had history, but no beauty of ordinary people in their daily relationships” (282). To Vijay, this does not ring true and seems like mere rationalization: “His father had found someone else to blame for his own weaknesses” (282)—weaknesses displayed in his inability to deal with the violent reality of life in Sri Lanka. Yet this is Rajan, the narrator, imagining his by now dead son’s response to his letter. It seems to be Sivanandan’s acknowledgment—and preempting—of possible criticism from some of his implied readers about his authority to speak to the problems in Sri Lanka. At the same time, Rajan’s words in the letter reveal that he values the beauty of everyday life and ordinary people as opposed to traumatic, epiphanic, cataclysmic moments. Through Rajan, Sivanandan is attempting to shift the terms of the discussion to things other than the crisis-laden, epiphanic language of violence.
If Sivanandan is a diasporic writer invested in Sri Lanka and attempting to speak to Sri Lankans, what exactly is he saying? He is trying to show that an emphasis on hybridity is necessary to temper ethnic divisions, particularly by means of his characterization of Vijay. Sivanandan is not focusing on biological hybridity, which is itself predicated on binarism. As Jane Ifekwunigwe asserts, “The notion of biological ‘hybridity’ is itself problematic. The presumption here is that the ‘races’ that are being mixed are themselves discrete and pure” (195). Vijay, significantly, is not born from the sexual union between the Tamil Rajan and the Sinhalese Lali. Instead, he is the biological son of Sinhalese parents and the adopted son of a Tamil; therefore, his is a cultural hybridity. After Lali’s premature death and Rajan’s departure from the country, Vijay is raised by his grandparents, who a
re Sinhalese Buddhist peasants. Yet he fully accepts his adoptive father’s Tamil relations as his own extended family and feels a sense of kinship with them. Sivanandan highlights the fact that it is Vijay’s cultural hybridity that motivates him to attempt to explore the ethnic issue from different angles. Vijay’s direct interaction with both the Sinhalese and the Tamils, and the influence of both the Sinhalese and the Tamils on him, enable him to contrast his personal experiences and interactions with each ethnic community against the prejudiced notions that those groups have about each other. Therefore, he comes to his own conclusions and subsequently becomes a political activist: he joins the Rights and Justice Movement and attempts to become a mediator between the Sinhalese in the south and “the Boys”—the moniker given to the Tamil militants—in the north who are agitating for a separate state.
In opposition to the discourses of racial purity and essentialism that have become prevalent in Sri Lanka, Sivanandan valorizes bastardization—a term that applies literally to two of the most clear-headed characters in the novel. 9 Saha’s half-brother Para is illegitimate—the result of an affair between Pandyan and a midwife who attended to his pregnant wife. As mentioned above, so is Vijay—a fact that Lali repeatedly points out, much to Rajan’s discomfiture. As Vijay proclaims to a group that rejects him due to his parentage, “I am a Tamil, and a Sinhalese, and a bastard… and that’s why I am more civilized than you” (254). In Sivanandan’s hands, the meaning of the word “bastard”—with its suggestions of dubious origins and irregularities—is inverted; instead of being an insult, it can actually be a badge of honor and remind Sri Lankans that their origins—like those of all peoples—are historically intermingled and somewhat dubious. Sivanandan has said in a recent interview that “the only way that culture can be progressive and dynamic is through bastardization” (“Lines” n.p.). Thus bastardization—no longer a pejorative but a crucial reminder of cultural mingling and mutual enrichment—becomes an active force against chauvinism and oppression.
Terror and Reconciliation Page 14