This is a very self-conscious, self-reflexive narrative. Yalini, as she interviews her family members, reads scholarly books on the history of the conflict, and adjusts to the idea of writing in the first person, insists on reminding readers—in fact, addressing them directly—that they can never know the whole story about her own family—or the story of the conflict that drove her family out of their homeland; she dismisses the idea that she can “reenter” her family’s experience via a “back door of history,” concluding, “At the most, you can pull back the veil for a moment. But the imagination of a family can be as real as its history” (55-56). Kumaran, who at this point begins to almost become a mentor to Yalini, also warns her that the truth is not simple. Kumaran reminds her that his is “just one person’s story” among many, and further warns her that even if she investigates many stories, she will still falsify them if she attempts to find “meaning or unity” in them. He cautions that the account he will provide lacks “a defined shape or a pleasant arc”—the traditional narrative structure of a “beginning, a middle, and an end”—concluding that “to record it differently would not be true” (56-57).
Through this discussion between uncle and niece and the advice that the former offers the latter, the reader is able to gain some guidelines about how to approach this novel. It is fragmented, refracted through multiple perspectives, and told through Yalini in the form of a collage. Chapters are in fragments too—a section sometimes comprises a paragraph followed by a blank page, a powerful visual reminder of possible omissions, elisions, lapses in memory of the different storytellers, not excluding the narrator herself. Nonetheless, Yalini is adamant about the need for the preservation of stories even when there are so many competing versions with all their complications, contradictions, and messiness. She believes that these stories could prevent a recurrence of brutality; perhaps this belief is a naïve one since putting things down on paper and recording them for posterity can also prevent healing of wounds. This emphasis on the importance and efficacy of stories, along with Ganeshananthan’s use of fragmentation as a narrative strategy, connects Ganeshananthan’s work with the desire to witness that appears in many works by local Sri Lankan writers, both Sinhalese and Tamil, and demonstrates the degree to which works by diasporics function in dialogue with the works of writers resident in Sri Lanka. Indeed, the stories that Yalini records are precisely those that she gathers from the personal experiences of family members who have lived in Sri Lanka and are now part of the diaspora. Thus, the relationship between resident Sri Lankans and diasporics is not one of simple opposition; rather, it is a peculiarly intimate and complementary relationship.
This is especially important in relation to the second generation since they, unlike their parents, have not had firsthand experiences of what went on in Sri Lanka and can only learn from the first generation, even as they must remember that the versions that they get are colored by the experiences of their parents and others and are necessarily subjective. Radhakrishnan has posited that even as the first generation must not presume to think that they know what their children are going through in the hostland, the second generation must not attempt to sweep aside the ties that bind their parents to the homeland and must try to be informed and knowledgeable about what has gone on and what goes on in the homeland (123-25). In a sense, this is what Ganeshananthan and her narrator are doing through their juxtaposing of family stories with what has been written by scholars about the conflict.
Thus Yalini learns about her father’s difficulty entering university in Sri Lanka under the restrictions that were put in place (80). Ultimately, language issues drive him out of the country, when Murali decides that he is not going to be forced into being tested in Sinhala (87-88). She learns from her aunts and uncles about how they were forced to leave Sri Lanka, especially after 1983, departing with almost none of their belongings in order to become refugees in a new land (126). From her mother’s sister Kalyani, Yalini learns how one can be homesick even when “there is nothing to go back to there. Her house had been torched” (129). She also learns how Kalyani’s son Haran’s friend, a benevolent elderly school principal named Arun, was killed by the LTTE because he had the temerity to organize a cricket match between his Tamil students and the Sri Lankan army team (132). We hear about Murali’s Tamil friend Lucky, whose brother was killed for disagreeing with the LTTE (142) and whose Sinhalese wife Lalitha’s father was killed by the LTTE (146). It is significant that Lucky and Lalitha’s daughter is named Rajani—perhaps a reference to Rajani Thiranagama, who was, as we have seen, a dissident also assassinated by the LTTE.
The contrast between Yalini and her cousin Janani is striking. The latter has grown up amid the Tigers and her mother has died as one. It is Janani who makes Yalini feel guilty about her relatively privileged and sheltered upbringing in the United States and about her choice not to become fluent in Tamil or learn about the war (42) even as Yalini becomes aware that her cousin has never really had a childhood or experienced youthful pleasures (148). Through Janani, Yalini realizes that she—like her cousin—has inherited the struggles of her parents (23). To this extent at least, then, diasporics and residents seem to be similar.
Murali encourages his daughter to hear about her uncle’s experiences because he knows that Yalini cannot be protected forever from the conflict (53-54). Through Kumaran’s narrative, Yalini—and we—learn about the beginning and the evolution of the war (49). He gives his reason for joining the LTTE (133) after his bus is stopped by the army and he is nearly killed; he is appalled by the fact that at that moment of crisis, he almost denied being a Tamil due to his overwhelming fear. Thereafter he goes to London and learns to embrace the Cause (153), even though he is ambivalent about the Tigers’ use of violence (155-56). He also describes his first meeting with “Nadarajan” (161)—apparently a pseudonym for the LTTE leader Prabhakaran—and the origins of the Tigers and their goals (163-64). As she writes about “Nadarajan’s” exploits, Yalini is attempting to understand what this leader means in her own life, to sort out her feelings of ambivalence—is he a terrorist guilty of all manner of atrocities and a wanted man in more than one country? Or is he a fearless freedom fighter, using any and all means at his disposal, even suicide bombings and child recruitment, for the betterment of his people? This is at the heart of the narrative since it reflects on the uncle that she is beginning to love so deeply. Kumaran himself cautions Yalini against making hasty judgments about the guilt of combatants from both sides since no one can be considered innocent in the war (264).
There is a large gathering of the Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic community around the dying Kumaran. Some, like Lucky, do so despite Kumaran’s actions, while others seem to be paying their respects for all he has done on behalf of Eelam (139). There is also a suggestion that Kumaran is raising funds for the LTTE even on his deathbed. Kumaran’s presence with Yalini and her parents in his final days means that they are now more involved—or at least, perceived to be so—with the LTTE than they otherwise might be (36; 53; 256-57).
Love Marriage as a whole does what Yalini, the narrator, discussed with her uncle earlier: it eschews a “pleasant arc” to the narrative in the interest of telling the truth about lives that are fundamentally not “tidy,” beginning “without fanfare” and ending “without warning” (57). Thus, there is no clear sense of what becomes of Yalini or the decisions she makes at the end of the novel. She admits her emotional and mental anguish regarding her heritage, her divided identity, but there is no resolution about her stand on the conflict. She, like many second-generation diasporics, is in uncharted territory (283-84). Second-generation diasporics have been joined in this uncharted territory by the rest of their fellow Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher contemporaries as the result of the end of the military conflict in Sri Lanka. For a quarter of a century, being Sri Lankan meant belonging to a country at war with itself. Being Tamil meant taking a position with regard to Eelam, either accepting or rejecting the division of
the country, while being Sinhalese meant either embracing or rejecting the policies of successive governments toward Tamil nationalism and separatism. Now, the question of Sri Lankan identity, and with it the nature of Sri Lankan literature, must be framed in different terms.
Notes
1. For example, in the respective paratexts of Reef and Anil’s Ghost, it is stated that “Romesh Gunesekera grew up in Sri Lanka” and that Michael Ondaatje was “born in Sri Lanka.”
2. Salgado is specifically referring to Arun Mukherjee’s critique of Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Walter Perera’s critique of Gunesekera’s Reef.
3. The narrative structure in Reef is similar to that of a later bildungsroman, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun, which is set around the time of the Biafran War and gives the perspective of a young boy similar to Triton.
4. Gunesekera has consistently focused on Sri Lanka in his writing. Sri Lanka is the setting for his collection of short stories, Monkfish Moon, as well as for his second novel, The Sandglass. In his third novel, Heaven’s Edge, he writes about a nameless tropical island that has faced a long-term conflict. I have focused on Reef because this is Gunesekera’s best-known work and because he names Sri Lanka within the narrative.
5. “A House in the Country” features Raj, a Sri Lankan who has returned to his native land after many years in London and has to confront the violence of the second JVP insurrection. Raj is startled to discover that the violence of the period, which to him is merely an inconvenience, has resulted in the killing of his employee Siri’s brother. “Batik” focuses on the tensions that arise in the marriage of Nalini, a Sinhalese woman married to Tiru, a Tamil man, following the 1983 riots. The safe haven they have lovingly created for themselves in the “neutral” space of London cannot withstand the pressures of their being on opposing sides in terms of the ethnic conflict in their homeland.
6. Elmo Jayawardena’s Sam’s Story presents an interesting contrast to Gunesekera’s novel. As in Reef, the protagonist and first-person narrator in Jayawardena’s novel is a servant boy in a middle-class household. In addition to being as uneducated and task-ridden as Triton, Sam is described as “slow.” Yet unlike Triton, Sam challenges what other people tell him or what he overhears, such as the reasons for the ethnic conflict.
7. Gunesekera seems to be referring to the fact that applying chillie powder on people’s bodies is a form of torture that has been used by both sides during the second JVP insurrection as well as the ethnic conflict.
8. For an unembellished account of the story of Angulimaala—the virtuous young scholar who is corrupted when he obeys his vindictive teacher’s command to gather a garland made up of one thousand fingers—see http://www.metta.lk/pali-utils/Pali-Proper-Names/angulimaala.htm.
9. According to Rajiva Wijesinha, “Gunesekera is in fact trading on his background. … He is serving up the exotic fare he knows his audience wants in order to feel it has been given a dose of reality” (“Spices” 14).
10. In fact, the novel’s epigraph, “Of his bones are coral made,” is from Ariel’s Song (I.ii.98) in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The cover blurb in question is by The Guardian’s James Wood.
11. Ondaatje’s first work with a Sri Lankan focus was his fictionalized memoir, Running in the Family, which deals in particular with his grandmother’s escapades and his parents’ troubled relationship.
12. This is emphasized in one conversation between Anil and Sarath: he tells her of an archaeological site located in China with which he was associated. The archaeologists unearthed a water tomb of an ancient king who had been buried with twenty female musicians. Apparently the culture had valued music above all else, which was why the ruler had been buried with the musicians and their instruments instead of with gold or jewels. Anil at once responds by condemning the values of the entire civilization by focusing on the “twenty murdered women”; Sarath, on the other hand, points out that “it was another world with its own value system that came to the surface” (261). Anil’s response is obviously understandable, considering that twenty women had to give up their lives for the well-being of one man in his afterlife; on the other hand, she adheres to a Western feminist viewpoint and is not willing to even consider the reasons why the women might have gone to their deaths willingly. A practice such as Isabelle Gunning’s “world-travelling”—which is a means of “approaching ‘culturally challenging’ patriarchal practices… without prejudging them. World-travelling walks the tightrope between interconnectedness and independence, between women’s shared perspectives and their differences” (Bulbeck 84)—would be more productive in this type of situation.
13. According to Spivak, an economic migrant is an expatriate who is seeking justice—and wealth—in the capitalist system (“Teaching” 474).
14. Though the name has been changed, this is a depiction of Ranasinghe Premadasa, Sri Lanka’s second executive president, who was assassinated by a suicide bomber in 1993 in the same way that President Katugala is assassinated at the end of Anil’s Ghost.
15. Sarath’s fears are justified since he himself is killed at the end of the novel, presumably by government forces, for aiding Anil’s investigation and for getting her and her evidence against the government safely out of the country.
16. It is important to emphasize that Ondaatje’s own sense of diasporic responsibility is evident in the fact that he established the Gratiaen Prize with his Booker Prize winnings in order to encourage creative writing in Sri Lanka and his involvement in projects like the film No More Tears Sister, in which he is the narrator.
17. Wickremesekera’s first novel, Walls, featured a Sri Lankan diasporic family in Australia, while his third novel, In the Same Boat, is an allegory about what happens to people during a crisis situation when they are driven by selfishness and fear instead of cooperation and concern for each other.
18. While the parents tend to feel loss, nostalgia and a yearning for their homeland along with a desire to preserve culture and tradition, the offspring very often have a divided sense of identity and struggle to straddle two worlds. See, for example, If the Moon Smiled by Chandani Lokuge; The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri; Brick Lane by Monica Ali; The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan; and No-No Boy by John Okada.
Conclusion
As of this writing, the military conflict in Sri Lanka has been over for nearly two years. The nation’s concerns now have less to do with suicide bombings and high-profile assassinations than with questions of the reconciliation between communities that have long been at war, the state of media freedom in a country where journalists have faced daunting obstacles to their work, the plight of internally displaced persons, and the economic development of the nation and the sharing of resources. What role, then, does the literature from 1983 to 2009 have to play in this new situation? Can Sri Lankan Anglophone literature about the ethnic conflict make a meaningful contribution to the nation’s healing of a generation’s worth of wounds?
A recent article by Robert Ivie on the subject of the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contains some ideas that may be relevant to these questions. Ivie argues that the rhetoric associated with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the United States tended to draw on an absolute dichotomy between good and evil with roots in the Christian tradition. Ivie argues that this sort of dichotomy makes peacemaking difficult but not impossible. What is required, Ivie suggests, is that former adversaries use storytelling “as a ritual practice for re-humanizing adversaries” (241). Remembering war can result in demonizing one’s adversaries and deifying one’s own combatants, but it can also, Ivie suggests, undermine the logic of these destructive binaries by embracing moral complexity. Ivie calls on would-be peacemakers to “invent humanizing narratives and rites of reconciliation to remediate demonizing images of adversaries and deifying rituals of redemptive violence” (242).
Ivie’s recommendations seem particularly pertinent to the aftermath of the war in Sri Lanka. Although neither th
e Sinhalese (who are predominantly Buddhist) nor the Tamils (who are predominantly Hindu) locate themselves primarily within the Christian tradition that resonates so powerfully in the United States, the rhetoric surrounding the war on both sides drew extensively on rhetoric of absolute good and evil. In the rhetoric of the Sri Lankan state and its adversaries, terms like “terrorism,” “atrocity,” “genocide,” and “ethnic cleansing” were used quite freely, and both sides made use of religious imagery borrowed from the dominant and minority religious traditions within each community. (Buddhism and Hinduism form the majority religions among Sinhalese and Tamils, respectively, but as we have seen there are small but significant Catholic and Protestant Christian minorities among both groups.) Moreover, the rhetoric of martyrdom, heroism, and sacrifice has invested combatants from both sides with the kind of reverence that serves to justify and perpetuate enmity.
When Nihal de Silva allows a Tamil militant and a Sinhalese soldier to give full voice to both sides of the conflict and their respective grievances and justifications, he is engaged in “inventing humanizing narratives,” to use Ivie’s terms. Likewise, when Jean Arasanayagam and Neil Fernandopulle create first-person narratives from a variety of subject positions related to the conflict, they humanize all sides of the war. When Kamala Wijeratne, Amila Weerasinghe, and Sivamohan Sumathy direct criticism at combatants from their own respective ethnic groups, they undermine the rhetoric of heroism and martyrdom that justifies violence. When A. Sivanandan, Shyam Selvadurai, Michael Ondaatje, Channa Wickremesekera, and V.V. Ganeshananthan dismantle myths of identity, it becomes a little easier for erstwhile adversaries to recognize each other’s humanity. The form of these works, meanwhile, mirrors the sort of humility that necessarily informs efforts toward reconciliation. Both in the penetrating fragments of short fiction and poetry by the many Sri Lankan short story writers and poets discussed in the foregoing pages and in the ambitious collections of fragmentary perspectives created by many of the novelists considered in this study, Sri Lankan Anglophone writers have sought to acknowledge a diverse set of stories. The writers who have represented the conflict have provided, in a modest yet meaningful way, grounds for hope.
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