Terror and Reconciliation

by Maryse Jayasuriya

  It is also significant that Triton and his master only seem to know about the 1983 anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka by watching television news reports, viewing televised images of “young men… going berserk on what could have been our main road. The rampant violence made the television news night after night. … Images of cruelty, the birth of war, flickered on the screens across the world” (188). It seems as if Triton and Salgado have no contact with anyone actually living in Sri Lanka and experiencing the outbreak of violence firsthand; nor do they seem to have made connections with the fairly extensive network of Sri Lankan diasporics in London. Thus, they have to rely on what they see on the television screen. Furthermore, Triton does not seek to interrogate or analyze the images he and Salgado see on the screen. Their passive viewing and acceptance of the images of carnage in Sri Lanka as shown on television in England heighten the sense that violence in such a society is inevitable.

  In fact, Gunesekera’s novel makes it appear as though violence is ingrained in the cultures of Sri Lanka. Even when the young Triton speaks of the time before the insurrection and the beginning of the ethnic conflict, there is an emphasis on the violence that prevailed:

  Our barbarities were startling but domestic [emphasis added]: the dismembering of an adulterous husband, drunken homicide; occasionally acid thrown in a fit of jealousy. … But there were no death squads then, no thugs so zealous in their killing that they felt no pleasure until they saw someone twitch against a succession of bullets. In my childhood no one dreamed of leaving a body to rot where it had been butchered, as people have had to learn to do more recently. (42)

  Though the narrator is speaking of the time before the “official” start of the period in which Sri Lanka became “a landmark for gunrunners,” he makes it clear that “barbarities” were common enough in the country. As Perera says of this passage, “If this sequence is supposed to contrast Sri Lanka’s recent history favourably with the present, that objective is certainly not achieved. The savagery of the present is only a natural descent from the ‘barbarity’ of the past” (“Images” 67). Very early on, the novel provides us with an example of the apparent barbarity of domestic life in Sri Lanka: when Pando, Salgado’s neighbor, is unfaithful to his wife, the latter—ably assisted by her maid—takes revenge by rubbing chillie powder all over her husband’s body. The violence of the two women on the erring husband when juxtaposed with the gleeful reaction of the itinerant haberdasher as he describes the incident and that of the people listening to him seem to indicate that it is not surprising that such people—who take obvious delight in violence and torture—would also, years later, be involved in the brutalities that are listed in the novel. 7

  The framing device used by Gunesekera in this novel also re-emphasizes the idea that the people of Sri Lanka have always been violent and barbaric since the mature Triton’s knowledge of the current problems in the country are superimposed on even the most innocuous of his recollections in a kind of palimpsestic vision. Thus, when Triton retells, upon Salgado’s request, the tale of Angulimaala, he embellishes this episode from the Jathaka stories about the previous incarnations of the Buddha with details from the violence in Sri Lanka in the 1980s 8: “Bodies of men and boys who had disappeared from their homes, who had been slaughtered by him and thrown in the sea, were washed in by the tide. Every morning they reappeared by the dozen: bloated and disfigured” (176-77). The embellishments to the tale (which echo what the narrator says about the carnage in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s: “The bodies would roll again and again in the surf, they would be washed in by the tide and be beached by the dozen” [183]) add to the impression of consistent and gruesome violence in Sri Lanka. In another instance, when Triton recounts Salgado’s bosom friend Dias’s memories of the single Japanese bombardment of Ceylon during the Second World War, we learn that this attack by foreigners was nothing compared to the Sri Lankans’ attacks on themselves, which he describes as “self-mortification” caused by “our squadrons of reconditioned MiGs and their drums of home-made napalm, imitating a war in heaven more terrible than any kamikaze pilot might have imagined” (67). It is significant that, according to the novel, the Japanese bombardment apparently did no damage to any Sri Lankan on the Galle Face esplanade; the only casualty is a Sri Lankan man who accidentally—and literally—shoots himself in the foot as a result of his shock and excitement. Sri Lankans, Gunesekera seems to suggest, are very good at metaphorically shooting themselves in the foot, just like the clumsy and excitable man on Galle Face green; they are solely to blame for the conflict going on in the country. This idea is reflected in Gunesekera’s title, which refers to the central metaphor of the novel: the coral reef that acts as a protective barrier around the little island. As Salgado explains to his friends, the thoughtless acts of Sri Lankans are damaging the fragile natural barrier, and this gradual destruction of the reef will ultimately sweep the whole island into the sea, just as the violence committed by Sri Lankans upon each other will have disastrous consequences. There is some truth to Gunesekera’s portrayal here; on the other hand, this depiction seems to ignore external influences that have affected Sri Lanka’s past and present, such as European imperialism and global capitalism.

  In her vigorous defense of Gunesekera’s work against charges that it exoticizes the violence in Sri Lanka, Paula Burnett argues that “far from sensationalizing the portrayal of Sri Lanka for a blood-lusting global readership with its neocolonial smugness, Gunesekera positions himself … as referring to violence in a responsible and aware way, by uncovering its effects on not just the immediate victims, but on the wider society” (7). Burnett is referring in particular to Gunesekera’s collection of short stories, Monkfish Moon. In Reef, however, we cannot really see “immediate victims” of violence since the focus is so firmly on Salgado and Triton, and these two characters actually leave Sri Lanka before the beginning of the 1971 insurrection. Salgado’s motives for going to England are his failed relationship with Nili and the offer of a job in London, not violence in his own country. Continuing her defense of Gunesekera’s work, Burnett claims that Gunesekera is fulfilling a writer’s obligation to create comprehension among his readers: “Atrocities have happened; that cannot be denied. What to make of them, and how to respond, are questions for the artist as much as for the politician, and perhaps the writer has a particular role in leading readers—of all nationalities and cultural identities—into understandings and sensitivities which, at best, may circumscribe the capacity we all have for barbarous action” (7). What Burnett says is valid; unfortunately, Gunesekera does not truly enable readers to understand the violence in Sri Lanka in Reef since he gives them little or no context for that violence. It is difficult for readers to respond effectively or sensitively to descriptions of violence when the violence is made to appear endemic to a country. Therefore, it becomes easy for readers to merely express horror at all the carnage and then label Sri Lanka as being “a spoiled paradise,” as the blurb on the cover of the book does. The only possible and rational way to deal with the problems in Sri Lanka, the novel seems to imply, is for its citizens to go into a self-imposed exile. It is not surprising, then, that Rocio Davis commends Triton for staying on in London and refers to him as a survivor, whereas she sees Salgado’s decision to return to the chaos in Sri Lanka as an unwise choice.

  Sri Lanka, in Reef, seems to provide mere backdrop for the events of the novel. 9 The narrative could very well have taken place in any tropical island which has erupted into violence. Gunesekera’s claim that the story has privilege over the place and context in which it is set seems disingenuous considering the fact that he has obviously attempted to particularize the location of the story in Reef by using markers of authenticity, as discussed above. The consistent references to violence move the plot forward but do not necessarily enable Gunesekera to deal with the complexities of the political situation in Sri Lanka. It seems as if there can be no solution to the kind of violence taking place in Sri Lanka because there is
no real sense of history or causality. Indeed, according to one critic whose comments appear as a blurb on the cover, Gunesekera’s novel is like “a kind of Asian Tempest, drenched in the unreal, tropical colours of dream.” 10 This tendency to equate Sri Lanka with the unreal, the exotic, and the dream-like limits the novel and prevents it from making any intervention and can lead to a type of sanctioned ignorance, to use Spivak’s term, among its readers. Ultimately this novel, with its lyrical language and sensuous descriptions, imitates the ways in which the European colonizers, according to Stuart Hall, have long represented the countries and peoples they colonized, through “the romance of the exotic, the ethnographic and traveling eye, the tropical language of tourism, travel brochure and Hollywood, and the violent, pornographic languages of ganja and urban violence” (218). Reef , which often seems to cater to the “the continuing marketability of the exotic in the West” (Prakrti n.p.), enables its implied readers to gaze in and marvel at perceived difference, without having to contend with the complexity of that country’s crises.

  Fractured Truths: Anil’s Ghost

  Michael Ondaatje makes the sort of complexity that Reef elides an explicit goal in his 2000 novel Anil’s Ghost. Like Reef, Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost begins with a return to the homeland by an expatriate. However, the return in Anil’s Ghost is a physical one and not a return through memory, as in Reef. The title character, Anil Tissera, is a forensic anthropologist educated in the United Kingdom, based in the United States, and living a peripatetic life as a result of her work. She returns to Sri Lanka, the land of her birth, under the auspices of the United Nations to investigate human rights violations allegedly carried out by the Sri Lankan government against its people. Anil, along with Sarath Diyasena—a local archaeologist appointed by the Sri Lankan government to be her partner during the investigation—attempts to discover the identity of “Sailor,” the name they give to an exhumed skeleton of a man they believe was killed by the government. This skeleton, once identified, would represent all the nameless Sri Lankans who have been tortured and killed as insurgents by secret government forces. The skeleton is characteristic of Ondaatje’s artistic method in Anil’s Ghost, which seeks to make a few specific instances emblematic of the moral and ethical quandaries of Sri Lankan society during the second JVP insurrection and the ethnic conflict.

  Ondaatje, who is most easily identified as a Burgher, is a Sri Lankan diasporic who went to study in England at the age of eleven and then settled in Canada. This is the first of Ondaatje’s novels to focus on Sri Lanka, 11 and he has said that this setting presented him with a special sense of responsibility predicated on the influence his novel—though a work of fiction—might have on a real, ongoing situation in his country of origin: “This was not the imagined world of my parents in the 30s or 40s or Toronto at the turn of the century; it was the real contemporary world. Even if the central characters were fictional, there was always a fresco of reality in sight [emphasis added]” (“Pale Flags” 62). As a diasporic writing about his homeland, therefore, Ondaatje has positioned the protagonist, Anil, as a diasporic herself. Like Sivanandan in When Memory Dies, Ondaatje has thus created room within the text, through the character of Anil, for us to keep in mind his own position as a diasporic writer who has chosen to focus on his homeland.

  Anil, who is from an upper-middle-class Sinhalese family, left Sri Lanka at the age of eighteen after winning a scholarship to pursue her tertiary education in England and subsequently in the United States. She has been away for fifteen years and has had no contact with anyone in Sri Lanka following the death of her parents in an accident. She has even stopped using her mother tongue, Sinhala, after the failure of her brief marriage to another Sri Lankan student in England. Far from dwelling on the past and on her homeland with nostalgia, Anil seems to have rejected them both. Ondaatje’s characterization of Anil makes the important point that not all diasporics are yearning for their homeland. The omniscient narrator tells us that “the island no longer held her by the past” (11) and also that she has “turned fully to the place she found herself in” (145). Moreover, she has embraced the foreign countries in which she lived; during her time outside Sri Lanka, while being educated in Europe and North America, Anil “ courted foreignness [emphasis added], was at ease whether on the Bakerloo line or the highways around Sante Fe. She felt completed abroad” (54). Anil is “court[ing] foreignness” in relation to her country of origin, attempting to become a stranger to Sri Lanka by refusing to go back, speak her mother tongue, or maintain any ties to friends and extended family. It is significant that Anil sees herself as not merely being a confident cosmopolitan traveler, but as someone who has found a sense of fulfillment away from her native land or in the instabilities of “foreignness.” Since she appears to no longer have any contact with her compatriots either in Sri Lanka or elsewhere, Anil—just like Triton and Salgado in Reef—apparently learns of the conflict in the country only from news reports: “Anil had read documents and news reports, full of tragedy, and she had now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze” (11). The “long-distance gaze” seems to imply objectivity and clarity. Anil’s gaze, however, is not objective because she has subscribed completely—“turned fully”—to Western value systems and worldviews and suppressed what she learned and experienced growing up in Sri Lanka. As Heike Harting points out, Anil has wholeheartedly accepted and believes “the grand narratives of Western civilization, in the empirical Truth and Reason” (53). This is evident in the manner in which Anil compares what she sees and hears of Sri Lanka unfavorably with what she has experienced in Europe and North America. Whereas in the West, she could depend on “clearly marked roads to the source of most mysteries,” in Sri Lanka truth seems more elusive: “Information was made public with diversions and subtexts—as if the truth would not be of interest when given directly, without waltzing backwards” (54-55). There is a disturbing sense that Anil is engaged in what Edward Said has famously delineated as orientalism; she is differentiating Sri Lanka negatively from the West in an essentialist manner. Whereas in the West, according to Anil, information is always accessible and it is actually possible to make “truth” known, the opposite is the case in Sri Lanka. She seems to have accepted this assumption that there is no propaganda or maneuverings to cover up information in the West. Despite the fact that she is “at ease” elsewhere in the world, Anil seems distinctly uncomfortable once she returns to Sri Lanka. There is a sense that she is unable to reconnect or communicate with people—such as Lalitha, the aged servant who raised her, or Ananda Udugama, the artist enlisted to help Anil and Sarath in their investigation—and unwilling to understand the points of view of people that she encounters.

  Some critics suggest that Anil is a Janus-like figure. Victoria Cook sees Anil in a positive light, as a transnational with a “doubleness” (106), who creates new perspectives by crossing divisions and blurring boundaries (111). Brenda Glover also praises what she sees as “the duality of Anil’s perspective” (76). And yet, it may not always be the case that “doubleness”—that discomfiting sense of similarity and difference—is a necessary and inevitable condition of being a migrant. Despite being a diasporic, Anil does not show much evidence of having diasporic double consciousness, perhaps because she valorizes her “foreignness” in relation to her homeland and has attempted so vigorously to forget her past and sever her connections in her country of origin. Apart from the outward markers such as her British passport, Anil identifies herself with the West. As a result, she feels only a sense of personal and cultural dislocation, alienation, and loss when she returns to Sri Lanka, and we see her caught in the grip of a rather limited perspective. 12

  Harting posits that Ondaatje, through the character of Anil, is critiquing diaspora as a whole and that “her [Anil’s] representation as an emotionally and socially impoverished character without social and personal agency negates the possibility of imagining diasporic identities in politically and cultur
ally meaningful ways” (52). I would argue, however, that Ondaatje is not negating diasporic possibility by means of Anil; instead, he has deliberately created a very particular type of diasporic—an economic migrant (to borrow Spivak’s term 13) with ambivalent feelings towards the homeland—in his protagonist in order to explore specific issues such as representation and diasporic responsibility in the novel. Ondaatje uses multiple other characters—Sarath, her partner in the investigation; his younger brother Gamini, a surgeon addicted to methamphetamines; Palipana, the epigraphist-turned-archaeologist who was once Sarath’s mentor—to question and critique Anil’s beliefs and assumptions. There is a sense that when Sarath, Gamini, and Palipana are talking to and debating with Anil, they consider her simply a representative of the West, not a fellow Sri Lankan. Anil has to have a Eurocentric mindset in order for the local cast of characters to critique Western assumptions regarding the situation in Sri Lanka.