In his second novel, Distant Warriors (2005), Channa Wickremesekera, 17 a Sri Lankan diasporic writer and historian resident in Australia, focuses on the tensions between the Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhalese diasporic communities living in Melbourne. In Wickremesekera’s work, diasporics become not just interpreters of the conflict, but active and even destructive participants in it. The novel, which starts with a disclaimer (“The characters in this book are purely fictitious. Their prejudices are not” [6]) is set during the period of the Norwegian-mediated ceasefire, which began in 2002 and was ultimately abrogated in 2008. The plot focuses on the arrival in Melbourne of Father Anton Balasubramaniyam, a well-known Catholic priest and staunch Eelam supporter, the fundraiser organized in his honor by the Sri Lankan Tamil community, and the response by the Sinhalese community, which decides to disrupt the event and thereby show its mettle.
The novel emphasizes the extent to which diasporics in one location as well as diasporic communities in multiple locations are in contact with each other and with the homeland due to rapid developments in communication technology. The Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic community is easily able to organize gatherings throughout Melbourne in honor of the visiting dignitary, who is staying at the home of Bhanu Nagalingam, a doctor, and his wife, Nalini, a government administrator, both of whom are ardent supporters of Eelam and the LTTE. Meanwhile, some in the Sinhalese diasporic community fear that the funds raised by the events organized by Tamils in Melbourne will be handed over to the LTTE to continue its terrorist activities in Sri Lanka (8). Therefore, the self-appointed leader of the Sinhalese diasporic community, Ralph Seneviratne—a lawyer who is concerned about the apparent apathy of fellow Sinhalese diasporics (11)—uses his email network to rally together the Sinhalese in Melbourne by means of persuasion and sometimes even outright threats.
The narratives that are prevalent in each camp are shown to be polarizing. For the Tamils, there are stories of trauma and loss—memories of atrocities at the hands of the Sinhalese that prompted them to leave their homeland in the first place, particularly following the riots of July 1983. Father Balasubramaniyam’s brief is to describe to the diasporics the sufferings of fellow Tamils living through the brutality of war in Sri Lanka and to remind the diasporics of their own responsibility to assist those fighting for a Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka by providing funding and publicity. The Tamil diasporics in Melbourne upon whom the novel focuses do not question this overarching narrative due to their own experiences:
To many of them, the word “Sinhalese” conjured up images of burning homes, bombed out churches and temples, violated women and tortured civilians. Whether or not they personally experienced ill-treatment at the hands of the Sinhalese, all the associated violence had, over the years, become part of their collective psyche. (203)
For the Tamils, therefore, their very identity is based on collective trauma. For the Sinhalese, on the other hand, the Tamils are all terrorists intent on dividing Sri Lanka and doing their best to destroy or eliminate Sri Lanka’s sovereignty. “So they have started their game again, [Ralph] thought. Raising money for the terrorists in Sri Lanka by holding musical shows and dinners, money that bought guns and explosives that killed innocent Sinhala civilians and brave Sinhala soldiers” (8). Neither side shows any inclination to admit mistakes or wrongdoing and frequently views mere ethnic chauvinism as pure patriotism toward the homeland. Both sides, moreover, are drawn to the rhetoric of suffering, atrocity, and martyrdom as a justification for their cause. Fr. Balasubramaniyam sees the Tamils as a suffering people all too often martyred by the brutality of the Sri Lankan state, and Ralph sees the Sinhalese as martyrs at the hands of LTTE terrorism. In both cases, there is an absolute binary between a suffering ethnic group and another that serves as its tormentor, and it is this binary that justifies retaliatory violence on the part of the martyred ethnic group.
Khachig Tololyan has discussed how diasporas tend to patrol communal boundaries and influence the actions and choices of members (14). In the novel, apathetic people like Bertie are drawn into the fray, not so much due to ideology, but because of pressure put upon them by members of their family or community. The younger generation of both sides is also pressured by parents and elders to participate—Bhanu and Nalini’s elder son, Rajan, from among the Tamils and Bertie’s nephew Priyantha from the Sinhalese. Both these teenagers feel that this is not their struggle. Priyantha joins the Sinhalese group that decides to protest the Tamil fundraiser for the sake of his beloved uncle, his own love of a good fight, and his fear that he would be regarded as weak by his peers if he refused to participate. Only Rajan questions the dominant narrative about the rival ethnic group and shows that he has read about another side to both the LTTE and the Sinhalese. As Rajan tells his parents’ honored guest, Fr. Balasubramanniyam, and other Tamils, “But I’ve also heard a lot of sickening things about the Tigers. About how they too kill in cold blood. Really brutal, gruesome stuff. I read somewhere—I forget where—that they once went into a village and killed all the people; just butchered them with knives and machetes. Didn’t even shoot them. Just cut them up. Even babies” (104). There is no response from his interlocutors, only silence—this narrative does not fit in with the one to which they subscribe and which justifies their activities on behalf of the Tigers. Radhakrishnan has posited the need for diasporics to be knowledgeable and well-informed about what is happening in the homeland; Rajan’s statement, however, underscores a discrepancy between the information to which diasporics might have access and what they might actually be willing to acknowledge.
As second-generation diasporics, Rajan and Priyantha feel that they are both Sri Lankan and Australian, and also neither. They face questions from adults within their respective communities with regard to their lack of patriotism—a patriotism that is supposed to be only toward their parents’ country of origin. While Priyantha is unable to articulate his feelings of literal and metaphorical distance from Sri Lanka, Rajan declares that he feels no sense of connection to either Sri Lanka or to his parents’ struggle for Eelam. “I live here in Melbourne. I have a life here. Why should I worry about something that is going on half a world away?” (53). Rajan seems comfortable with the hybridity of his diasporic identity and accepts it in a matter-of-fact way: “I like Dosai and I drink beer, I speak Tamil and English with an Aussie accent, I like jazz but I also like Indian classical music. What does that make me?” (114) He refuses to take sides because “when I said I didn’t feel Australian, I meant I didn’t feel any particular Australianness just as I don’t feel particular Tamilness” (114). He recognizes that due to his skin color, he will also “never be Australian enough” (115), hinting at racism and discrimination in the hostland. What he wants is to safeguard his independence instead of defending an identity or claiming a history as his parents do. The tense relationship between the first and second generations is a common theme in diasporic literature; 18 Wickremesekera points out in the novel, however, that the first generation’s attachments to the homeland also compete with those they form in and to the hostland. While Bhanu and Nalini contribute generously to furthering the cause of Eelam and constantly proclaim their desire to return, Rajan questions whether his parents will actually be willing to leave their hostland and the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed in order to go back to the homeland. This apparent hypocrisy in Bhanu and Nalini is paralleled in an exaggerated way by the hypocrisy displayed by Ralph, the leader of the Sinhalese protestors, who stays safely away from the proceedings that he himself organized but for which he wishes to risk nothing.
The Tamil fundraiser is well attended and proceeds smoothly at first. Special invitees include the local member of parliament and the local trade union leader. Both of these white Australian officials shy away from the label of “staunch supporter of Eelam” (bestowed upon them by the event’s organizers in their introductions), and talk about their desire for a negotiated settlement in Sri Lanka. Fr. Balasubramaniyam lauds the diasporic
community for their help, describes the devastating plight of fellow Tamils, and urges continued activism:
The Sinhala government was unlikely to [negotiate with the Tamil people] without external pressure. … [The Tamil expatriates] could lobby vigorously in the West to persuade Western governments to act in time to save the Tamil nation. They could… pressurize those governments to act, to make them in turn put pressure on the Sinhala government. (196)
The denouement is somewhat abrupt. The Sinhalese “troops” arrive at the fundraiser shouting slogans and waving placards. During the ensuing pandemonium, Priyantha, who is inebriated, ends up on the stage threatening the priest and brandishing a gun. Even though both the priest and the Australian police, who arrive soon thereafter, ask him to step away from the stage, Priyantha refuses to do so and is shot by an officer. Once he is killed, it turns out that the weapon with which he threatened the Tamils is merely a toy gun. While the police attend to the chaotic aftermath, the Sinhalese and the Tamils stand silent and horrified in their separate groups even as Australian bystanders make racist comments about troublesome immigrants (217). There is no sense that the tragedy of Priyantha’s needless death is going to pave the way for any reconciliation since the two ethnic groups do not mix or offer each other consolation.
The grim conclusion of Distant Warriors has become all the more significant and suggestive since the conclusion of the war in Sri Lanka itself: ultimately, reconciliation in Sri Lanka is dependent upon reconciliation among diasporic communities that have long been suspicious of each other. Attitudes towards the othered and othering ethnic group can become calcified particularly among first-generation diasporics, who will then transmit these attitudes to the second generation, which in turn will contribute to the continuation of conflict. Although Distant Warriors lacks the artistic sophistication and narrative inventiveness of the other works discussed in this chapter, thematically it contributes an important perspective on the conflict. If a sustained and sustainable peace is to emerge among neighbors who were recently enemies in Sri Lanka, the “distant warriors” that Channa Wickremesekera describes must resolve their differences as well. One suggestion of a possible avenue to such a resolution appears in the most recent novel published by a second-generation Sri Lankan immigrant in the United States.
Fractured Stories, Uncertain Justice: Love Marriage
Tololyan has posited that involvement or investment in the homeland is a key characteristic that differentiates the diasporic from an ethnic (13), and it is this type of move from the ethnic to the diasporic that is traced in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s first novel, Love Marriage (2008). Ganeshananthan is herself a second-generation Tamil immigrant resident in the United States, and Love Marriage began as her Harvard University honors thesis. Whether in spite of or because of her status as a second-generation immigrant, Ganeshananthan’s novel is remarkable for its self-awareness and its willingness to put inherited preconceptions to the test. Ganeshananthan’s work is also notable for the light that it sheds on the variety of Tamil communities in the diaspora—Ganeshananthan’s narrator negotiates not only the gaps between her family history in Sri Lanka and her own history in the United States, but also the gaps between the U.S. and Canadian Sri Lankan-Tamil diasporic communities.
There is less distance between the authorial persona and the protagonist in Love Marriage than there is in Anil’s Ghost, perhaps because Ganeshananthan is much earlier in her career than was Ondaatje when he wrote Anil’s Ghost. The protagonist of the novel, Yalini, like the author herself, is the daughter of Sri Lankan Tamil parents and has been born and raised in the United States. Yalini is drawn into the politics of her immigrant parents’ homeland when Kumaran, her maternal uncle who has long been a member of the LTTE, is allowed to come to the West on compassionate grounds due to his terminal illness, and Yalini (a college student) and her parents (a doctor and a teacher) take time off from their lives to nurse him in his final days. Even though Yalini is at first nonplussed about these new developments following her immediate family’s temporary relocation from the United States to Canada, she begins to establish some rapport with her uncle and starts to trace her family’s past and collect stories from her parents, her dying uncle, and other family members. She begins to realize that the events in Sri Lanka—a place she has visited only once in her life, as a two-year-old—have an impact on the second generation, including herself, and that she is compelled to take a stand regarding the conflict in Sri Lanka. The novel is a disjointed narrative framed by the story of Kumaran’s last illness, death, and funeral rites and emphasizes how the personal and the political are intertwined.
Ganeshananthan attempts to depict the situation in Sri Lanka in all its complexity. She focuses on the discrimination faced by Tamils in Sri Lanka, delineating the 1956 language reforms, the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981, the crucible of successive riots (in 1958, 1977, and particularly in 1983), as well as the education reforms of the 1970s that limited opportunities for young Tamil students and resulted in waves of immigration along with rising Tamil militancy. The narrator, Yalini, also mentions the atrocities conducted by the LTTE. In fact, one of her dilemmas is trying to reconcile her growing affection for her long-lost and now dying uncle with what he is responsible for as a long-standing Tiger—the killings, the violence, the planning of suicide bombings—that has given him the label of “terrorist” and made him a wanted man in the eyes of Interpol.
Another important aspect of the novel is a depiction of the way in which the Tamil nation is thriving in the diaspora and the amount of influence it wields on what goes on in Sri Lanka. Scarborough in Toronto, Canada, is a predominantly Tamil area where white people almost seem to be a rarity. This is where money is raised for the “Cause”—the establishment of Eelam, a separate state for Tamils—through persuasion, extortion, and even illegal activities such as drug dealing.
The novel, like Distant Warriors, depicts the mental and emotional struggles of the second generation due to the implications of their parents’ ties to the homeland. The more she finds out about her extended family’s history and the reasons for their exile from Sri Lanka, the more Yalini is torn about the conflict. She begins to feel steadily alienated from her own environment and becomes immersed in the past—in her case, the past is not merely figuratively but literally another country, one that has started to dominate her present. She also becomes aware of the different experiences, choices, and actions of other second-generation immigrants, a generation deeply affected by the events of July 1983 and its aftermath (92)—Suthan, described as a “Tiger in the New World” (169) who engages in illegal business activities in Canada to fund the Cause; Rajie, the product of an inter-ethnic marriage who learns both Sinhala and Tamil and blames those who seek to continue the conflict. In addition, Yalini sees her cousin Janani, who grew up among the Tigers in Sri Lanka, making the decision to marry Suthan in order to cement her commitment to Eelam even following her relocation to Canada and her father’s death.
The book is built around the conceit of the love marriage (as opposed to the arranged marriage) of Yalini’s parents following their meeting in the United States, which initially led to much consternation and conflict among family members back in Sri Lanka—a conflict that few at this point want to remember or discuss and about which Yalini hitherto has not been told. The narrative begins with what appears to be a definitive statement about marriage, immediately followed by a disclaimer: “In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality there is a whole spectrum in between” (3). The emphasis here is not on the ontological, on what actually happens in relation to marriage, but on what the narrator’s family is willing to talk about or acknowledge. The novel proceeds to delve into the lives of members of Yalini’s extended family and the variety of unions they have made, and most significantly, the ways in which those unions complicate the categories of marriage itself
(3). The divergence from the two categories of marriage that Yalini’s family speaks about—not to mention other categories indicating unions that do not materialize such as “Unfinished Marriage” and “Promised Marriage” (167) and those of individuals deemed “Too Special to Get Married” (187)—seems to suggest the multiplicity of stories as well as the many versions of truth that are possible, particularly in relation to the events in Sri Lanka. In this way, the lessons that Yalini learns in Canada are quite similar to the lessons that the much more experienced Anil learns as part of her return to Sri Lanka in Ondaatje’s novel. Yalini acknowledges the power of stories when she says, “None of the stories will be absolutely complete, but their tellers will be absolutely certain. This is how we make war” (119).
Just as Salman Rushdie’s protagonist Saleem Sinai’s birth at the exact moment of India’s independence in Midnight’s Children affects the trajectory of his whole life, Yalini’s birth in July1983, a month that is profoundly significant in the life of Sri Lankan Tamils, underscores that she can never get away from the events that destroyed so many Tamil lives and drove so many others into exile or militancy. It is a scar that can never be erased, a trauma that cannot be healed. As Yalini says, “Black July: more than two decades later, every Sri Lankan Tamil knows what it means. I was born, and halfway around the world, Tamil people died, betrayed by their own country, which did nothing to save them” (18). The 1983 riots is the point at which Yalini’s father, Murali—by then a doctor in the United States—realizes that he can never return to Sri Lanka. Even Yalini’s name is a reminder of what her parents left behind and yet cling to: “My parents named me Yalini, after the part of their home that they loved the most. It is a Tamil name, with a Tamil home: a name that means, in part, Jaffna, Sri Lanka, the place from which they came” (21). The narrator’s parents are making a powerful statement by naming their only and beloved child with a name that is so associated with their place of origin. Yalini herself realizes that she can never avoid or escape her parents’ past, and that she has “grown up with [the war] without realizing it” (28). She chooses, therefore—with encouragement both from her father and her dying uncle—“to know this story, all its sides and wonders” (32).
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