Sivanandan, in this novel, is also attempting to show that class is as responsible for the rise of the ethnic conflict as ethnicity. In a chapter titled “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness” in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon warns against nationalism—which he considered a useful tool in the fight for independence from the colonizer—after independence (96-144). Neil Lazarus has suggested that Fanon’s warnings are not about the effects of an abstract notion of nationalism, but against the pitfalls of nationalism caused specifically by a post-independence government of the native elite. According to Lazarus, Fanon definitely sees a use for the nationalist consciousness that has been awakened during the decolonization process in order to develop national liberation: “For Fanon, the national project also has the capacity to become the vehicle—the means of articulation—of a social(ist) demand which extends beyond decolonization in the merely technical sense, and which calls for a fundamental transformation rather than a mere restructuring of the prevailing order” (79). Lazarus argues that a nationalism that leads to a national liberation movement which genuinely includes subalterns would not present the problems normally associated with nationalism. Sivanandan emphasizes how the native elite who came to power after Sri Lanka had gained independence from the British used nationalism not to make a genuine change in society but to maintain their own position. As discussed previously, one of the key factors of the ethnic violence was the Sinhala-only policy implemented by the S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike regime, ostensibly in order to end the influence of imperialism since English—the language introduced by one set of colonizers—would no longer be the official language. Proponents of this reform also argued that the Tamils benefited more from English being the official language since their command of English was better and enabled them to get prestigious government jobs over the Sinhala-speaking majority. However, as Rajan’s brother-in-law Lal points out to a supporter of the reform, the majority of Tamils were not English-speaking bureaucrats but Tamil-speaking peasants and a Sinhala-only policy would be devastating to them: “You are confusing race and class, like your whole bloody party, so that you can keep your class while shouting race” (202). 10
While the first two sections of the novel emphasize storytelling (the prime storytellers being Samuel Wijepala, the old Sinhalese railway worker and union organizer who is usually referred to as “S.W.,” and Lal), the final section of the novel focuses on the importance of writing. Storytelling and writing both produce narrative, but the former—being oral in Sivanandan’s novel—presumes an immediate sense of communication and community which is differed/deferred in the latter, even as writing has the potential for permanence as well as a wider audience than storytelling. Both Vijay and Para believe in the power of writing. At one point in his life, as he meditates on what his vocation should be, Vijay ponders on a possible career as a writer.
Perhaps he should be a writer, a historian maybe, recover for his people the history they had lost? Put them back on course, help them change the history inflicted on them? It was not as though he had not given a lot of thought to his country, its formation, its predicament. But for whom would he write? He did not want to write for intellectuals, they made playthings of knowledge. For ordinary people? (291)
It is significant that the question of audience is crucial for Vijay, just as it is for Sivanandan himself. Sivanandan does not comment upon or question Vijay’s apparent belief in the power of writing as a way of influencing the direction of his country and its people. The only reason Vijay postpones his endeavor is because he decides that he has not experienced enough to be able to identify and understand the audience to whom he should direct his writing; he defers his desire to write until much later, when he has gained more experience. Vijay finally begins to write when he is in Jaffna, attempting to conduct a dialogue with “the Boys.” Para, too, in his later years, begins to keep a journal:
He entered into deep conversation with himself about the world out there, but in writing. Writing reflected and refracted that world through his numerous selves, brought those selves together, cohered them, and connected him with events he could no longer enter into. It gave him a hold on reality and allowed him to go along with those who wanted to change it. It kept him involved and active. (329)
While Vijay has thought of writing as a means of addressing a wide audience, Para is intent on informing an audience of one—himself. For both, writing is not a diversion or an avocation—they consider it a powerful means of communication, enabling them to engage actively with what is going on around them. Ironically, we gain access not to the writings of these two, but to the writing of the diasporic Rajan.
This emphasis on writing—and storytelling 11—is connected throughout the novel to memory and history as sites of contestation. Sivanandan constantly reiterates the importance of memory in the life of both the individual and a people, and storytelling and writing are a vital part of keeping memories alive. At the beginning of the novel, Rajan speaks of why he wants to recount the stories of his father, his son, and himself—their stories and memories are inextricably entwined with those of Sri Lanka and its people.
But there is no story to tell, no one story anyway, not since that day in 1505 when the fidalgo Don Laurenco de Almeida, resplendent in gold braid and epaulettes and hat plumed with all the birds of paradise, landed on our shores and broke us from our history. No one story, with a beginning and an end, no story that picks up from where the past left off—only bits and shards of stories, and those of the people I knew, and that only in passing, my own parents and son, or heard tell of, for there was no staying in a place or in a time to gather a story whole, only an imagined time and place. And no story of the country—or, if of the country, not our story but theirs’, the parangis’. Except that we all bore the imprint of that history, like a stigma, internalized it even, made it our own against our will, calling to memory the while to lose it by losing memory itself. (5-6)
Rajan firmly identifies colonization—which, for Sri Lanka, started with the Portuguese, who were followed in turn by the Dutch and the British over a period of almost four hundred and fifty years (from 1505-1948)—as a violent force that wrenched the people of Sri Lanka from their own cycle of time and thrust them into a different cycle, the colonizer’s time. The resulting hegemony—in the sense in which Antonio Gramsci used the term—not only left an indelible mark on the course of events in Sri Lanka but destroyed the people’s conception of themselves, their way of recording and preserving their own stories, and, most importantly, what Wijesinha refers to as “the capacity of people to work on the basis of what they had in common, without looking for differences” (“Spices”19). 12 The irreparable damage that colonization, under the guise of the civilizing mission, caused is repeated later by S.W.:
I am not saying that everything they [the colonizers] did is bad. … But we must ask ourselves why they did it, we cannot just believe what they say. They say they are bringing civilization to us, with railways and roads, when what they are really doing is transporting the wealth out of the country. … We would have come to it in our own time, at our own speed.
It wasn’t the right time. Like a namban mango, they had got ripe before time. The rhythm was all wrong, they were no longer in tune with themselves. (38)
Throughout the novel, there is a challenge to dominant, seemingly “disinterested” (Spivak, Critique 208) notions of history, which tend to give only the versions of the victorious and the powerful while suppressing other histories. Sivanandan strongly suggests that these dominant and authorized narratives have to be questioned instead of being passively accepted as the truth. As S.W. points out to Saha:
There were rebellions going on all the time. … But your school history books wouldn’t tell you that, would they? After all, they are written by the English. Soon no one will know the true story of our country. … No history, no heroes. I wonder what your children and Tissa’s will do. Invent their own histories, I suppose, to suit their o
wn purposes. (40)
What is so dangerous about invented histories? They become tools to be manipulated at will by anyone who wants to prove a particular point or argument—which is just what happens during the ethnic conflict as each side invokes originary myths in order to validate its own particular claims. 13 The nefarious ways in which invented histories can be used are exemplified particularly in Book Three. Vijay discovers, to his horror, how “history” is manipulated in school history books to teach young Sinhalese children that Sri Lanka belongs solely to the Sinhalese and that the Tamils are the interlopers who need to be driven out; according to the school history book in question, “‘The history of Lanka… is the history of the Sinhala race. The Land nourishes the Race, the Race civilizes the Land. Buddhism is the golden thread running through the history of the Race and the Land’” (308). It is to counter this type of pernicious “history of Lanka” that Sivanandan himself writes of people from a variety of ethnic groups who love the land, till the land, and travel all over the land in countless railway journeys in the novel, thereby making and maintaining connections throughout the country. Later on, Vijay discovers during his discussions with Tamil intellectuals in Jaffna that they too are using false histories to justify their desire for a separate state:
All they [the Tamil intellectuals] would say over and over again, and in nightmarish unison, was that they were a separate people who had, for five centuries, been mixed up… by European colonists and now wanted to be returned to their pristine separateness in their pristine homelands. And their historical and archaeological findings led them, like their counterparts in the Sinhalese universities, to the conclusion that they had worked for. They now had the history they wanted and nothing that Vijay could say—and he tried argument, analysis, fact, common experience, common sense—would move them. (324)
Sivanandan is asserting that the negation of the common heritage of the Sinhalese and the Tamils is responsible for the bloodbath that is the ethnic conflict. This becomes evident in what Para says later in the novel during his conversation with Vijay:
“When memory dies, a people die.” …
“What if we make up false memories?”
“That is worse,” replied the old man, “that is murder.” (335) 14
Making up false memories implies a forgetting, an eradication of past generations of people who were capable of living together and working together because they focused on similarities instead of on differences. Therefore, the falsifying of history means a figurative “killing” of the Sri Lankans who, for two thousand years, did live together in relative harmony, as well as the literal murders of those who have died as a result of the ethnic conflict.
And yet, can there really be a “true story”—as S.W. puts it—of the country? Obviously not, since there is a constant reiteration in the novel that there can be no one single history. What can counter the dominant version of history is each individual’s memories as they are passed from one generation to another through stories (as in the cases of S.W. and Lal) or written down in journals, letters, or memoirs (for instance, in the exchange of letters between Para and Lali, Para’s journal, Vijay’s journal, and Rajan’s memoir). As Georg Lukacs asserts, “This indirect contact between individual lives and historical events is the most decisive thing of all. For the people experience history directly. History is their own upsurge and decline, the chain of their own joys and sorrows” (285). When Vijay goes in search of history, he realizes in the process that his own life is pockmarked by what happens in and to Sri Lanka: “Everything that happened in the country appeared to touch and mould and wound him. There seemed to be no escape from it; he carried his country’s history like a running sore” (289). He also begins to understand that Sri Lanka has multiple histories, not just one: “We had no history, or we had several, mostly not of our doing, or we had forgotten that part of it which was, or it was a part too late to remember: it could only unmake the present” (289). By consciously preserving memories of individual lives, alternative versions of history become possible. After meeting and talking with Uncle Para and being amazed to find “such wisdom and understanding and tolerance tucked away in a little hamlet beyond the reach of civilization” (217), Lali tells her husband, “People like Uncle Para and Uncle Pathi were the real backbone of the country. They were the real custodians of our history and our culture, and they were everywhere” (217). The Tamil Para and the Sinhalese Pathirana are “real custodians of history” because they do not have ulterior motives in the way they remember what has happened to the country and to themselves, unlike those ordained to keep the “official” records, and they don’t privilege the heroic or contained narratives.
Sivanandan’s novel is an attempt at what Jonathan White refers to as “an alternative way of doing history and politics” (209) because he makes an effort to bring the marginalized, the subaltern class, those whose doings are not considered important enough to be recorded as “history,” into the world of his novel—he gives the “real custodians of history” an opportunity to emerge. The very first paragraph, in which Rajan speaks of his earliest memories, mentions Sanji, the son of a Tamil estate laborer of Indian descent—one of the most disenfranchised classes of people in Sri Lanka. Sanji’s story—he is ejected from the educational system for not being able to afford shoes and subsequently becomes a gardener; his daughter Meena is the woman that Vijay ultimately falls in love with—is one of many “bits and shards of stories” in Sivanandan’s collage. We hear about Saha’s father, Pandyan, the Tamil farmer who loves his—albeit barren—land and meditates about the cycles of time (11); Podi Appu, the hero of the carters’ strike of the 1890s (55-56); Dockyard David, the trade unionist whose legs were broken by the police (183-84); Vijay’s maternal grandfather, Pathirana, the Sinhalese farmer who says that race does not matter to him since he is not a Sinhalese politician; Para, the tram and railway worker; Kugan, the crippled toddy tapper who dreams of Eelam, a just society for Tamils. These are all from the working class, struggling both to survive and to obtain justice. In addition to creating space for these disenfranchised people, who are, for the most part, ignored in Sri Lankan novels in English, Sivanandan also brings in the stories of the unanglicized lower middle class: Saha’s fellow teachers and colleagues in the Rights and Justice Movement, Sarath and Dhanapala; the dedicated school principal Mrs. Bandara and her daughter Padma, who participated in the 1971 insurrection; Rajan’s brother-in-law, Lal, the doctor who goes out of his way to treat those who cannot afford hospital care; Nadesan, the bank clerk. Even though he depicts the courageous struggle of the marginalized characters in the novel, Sivanandan generally manages to avoid idealizing them. The efforts of the above characters end in failure and they themselves fade into obscurity. As Walter Perera points out, “S.W., Para, Pathi, and others either die before they can make lasting contributions or are swept aside by people who are more interested in the material rewards offered by the open economy and in promoting the ‘superiority’ of their race and class rather than in pursuing what they regard as the quaint idealism propounded by these others” (“Attempting” 16). On the other hand, despite Sivanandan’s attempt to be inclusive, he privileges a masculinized perspective in this novel. Female characters, for the most part, are there to nurture and support the male characters, and the focus of the narrative is firmly on the struggles and relationships of the male characters. The struggles of the handful of female activists—such as Padma—are mentioned briefly in passing, never fully delineated or shown. 15
Sivanandan employs a Socratic method to “educate” his three protagonists, a method that sometimes seems clumsy and obvious; Saha, Rajan, and Vijay appear to be surprisingly like blank slates in terms of what they know and do not know about historical and current events, which they learn about by questioning other, more knowledgeable characters. However, each case illustrates how “real” histories can be reclaimed by individuals as they exchange stories of their experiences with each other. It is significan
t that when S.W. recounts stories, Saha, “who was immersed in Some Facts of Our History, put aside his book to listen to S.W.’s tale” (55). Sivanandan seems to be suggesting that sometimes the history books—which might neither be factual nor really “ours” in the Sri Lankan sense—should be put aside for individual memories and retelling of experiences. Also, the act of mediation that occurs when one character tells the story of another to a third character seems to be an acknowledgment that something is lost in the process; while an attempt is being made to tell someone else’s story, the whole story cannot be known or told by the storyteller. I suggest that this enables Rajan—and by extension, Sivanandan—to avoid ventriloquizing to a certain extent. By making personal histories and interpersonal connections the core of his sweeping history of the conflict in Sri Lanka, Sivanandan suggests that there is a way forward to reconciliation, and that individuals are not powerless to effect it.
Bearing Witness: Funny Boy
While Sivanandan’s solution to the ethnic conflict in When Memory Dies seems to be class and national solidarity across ethnic and religious lines, Shyam Selvadurai, in his novel Funny Boy, seems to suggest a solution that lies in self-realization and expression and an opposition to all varieties of oppression. Selvadurai’s novel is told in episodes that focus on the growing awareness of the protagonist, Arjie, about his homosexuality. This awareness is juxtaposed with his gradual realizations about the mounting ethnic tensions in the country. The novel culminates with the eruption of the 1983 riots, which drive Arjie and his family into exile. Selvadurai himself left Sri Lanka at the age of eighteen, after his family home had been burned by Sinhalese mobs during the riots, and he is now a resident of Canada. Since Funny Boy ends with the riots, 16 he seems to have restricted himself to delineating a period that he actually experienced firsthand in this first novel.
Terror and Reconciliation Page 15