Vietnam was the first country to be informed by Sri Lanka of its victory over the Tigers. It was from the on the record remarks of a top Vietnamese leader that I learned that. In their separate speeches of welcome, the President, Prime Minister and Secretary General of the ruling Communist party of Vietnam all congratulated the Sri Lankan President for “the country’s historic victory over the LTTE” and promised to cooperate in “the elimination of the remnants of the LTTE”. On the issue of whether or not the Sri Lankan victory over the Tigers was one worth celebrating, the word of leaders who, as young men, actively fought the world’s mightiest superpower and won has an overriding credibility and authority.
Vietnam hosts an international Buddhist Conference next year but it’s purely part of the cultural matrix and plays no role in the identity of the state. This is because they have separated religion from the state and government. Vietnam is successfully Janus faced, balancing the continued emotive commemoration of its sufferings, sacrifices and victories in the wars against imperialist intervention ( so much for those who say we must forget the Tigers and the war) with a forward looking, liberalized economy (so much for those who want to stay mired in a wartime mindset and mood). There is a lighter ideological touch in Vietnam than there is in Sri Lanka. The past is part of the fabric of identity and culture and ideology weigh less heavily on the people than they do in Sri Lanka.
On April 30th 1975 as I watched on my TV screen in London, a North Vietnamese tank pushed its barrel through the bars of the main gate of the Presidential palace in Saigon, broke it open and rolled over it like some war elephant. 34 years later I was at a banquet hosted by the Chairman of the Peoples Committee of Ho Chi Minh City, who had joined the resistance fighters while in his teens. Next to me was a highly articulate and relatively young man who had done two years of postgraduate studies at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts and had just sat for his advanced political training examination at the Higher Party Academy. Throughout the dinner we discussed and debated Vietnamese foreign policy options in the 1970s. And this was a cadre attached to the Municipal authority of Ho Chi Minh City; the interface of the Foreign Ministry and the Municipality! We should be lucky to have Ministers, let alone officials and Left party cadres of this intellectual caliber and pragmatic open-mindedness. At one point President Rajapakse interrupted from across the table and at the center, mentioning smilingly that he had just told the top Vietnamese official next to him that I was very knowledgeable about the history of the Vietnamese CP and the revolutionary struggle.
Flashback: The first thing I did when having finished a lengthy chat over breakfast, Mahinda Rajapakse invited me to join him the next day on the first ever state visit by a Lankan leader to Vietnam, was to go to the BMICH and switch my tickets for the Mt Lavinia Hotel jazz concert from the Saturday to Sunday. There was only one disappointment: percussionist Sunil de Silva, my first cousin, hadn’t turned up from Sydney, but the rest of it was great and Sanja and I were glad we had got away from the high politics and the house repairs. It was good to see Mignonne still in action, guiding the band, Grooving High. We should all look so good and be as gracefully spirited at her age. In my early 50s, I belong to the generation that knew her as Mignonne Ratnam and had the Jetliners at the Taj album. I still remember her from my boyhood, when she used to play the Yamaha organ at the Taprobane’s Blue Leopard (wearing a long slinky, glitzy slit dress). My mum Lakshmi had taught her at St Bridget’s and Mervyn knew Tony Fernando. Jerome Speldewinde was of course the maestro, the Man, El Hombre, though I wish he had given himself a more challenging repertoire. With that voice he should be singing Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen. He did the very best version of Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy that I have heard, supercharging and Latinizing it in the same go. I told him he’s good enough to be playing Montreaux. He told me I was lucky to have been there and more than once and that if I’m back here maybe people like himself should think of coming back too. I didn’t know what to say.
Good as he was, and he was the best, what made me happiest were young Dellain Joseph and Natasha Rathnayake though not necessarily always in that order. It’s a heck of a lot easier for me to answer some of the questions that GV posters ask me like “what’s a nice intellectual like you doing with someone like Mahinda Rajapakse?” or words to that effect, than to decide whether Natasha or Dellain is the better singer. Depends on the song I guess. Natasha was better accompanying Jerome on God Bless the Child than Dellain was, but it was reversed when the same trio did Ain’t No Sunshine. I’d love to hear Jerome, Natasha and Dellain sing with Harsha Makalanda on the keyboard.
Mignonne represented continuity and Natasha and Dellain connected us back with the great Sri Lankan singers such as Yolande Bawan and Erin de Selfa. We‘ve still got the talent and social and cultural space; Cultural conformism hasn’t been able to stamp it out, I thought.
Flash forward: This new candidacy thing, maybe it’s the Black Swan event we needed; the game changer. In the first place it makes all those speculations about how we are almost the same as the Tigers look silly. Godfrey Gunatilleke (Uncle Godfrey to me) had told me some weeks back that he believes in the “reiterative principle in History”. He was right. The very possibility of a close run race reiterates the quintessentially competitive, democratic character of the Sri Lankan system, in contradistinction to Prabhakaran’s rule in the North east not to mention Hitler’s and Stalin’s. (Some Gulag Island, though my favorite bit of punditry was the quote propped Hitler-MR parallels of a Sunday before turning into cheering a possible democratic renewal a Sunday after). The Black Swan entry splits the ultranationalists and will draw a line of demarcation between the militarist hyper-nationalists and the relatively more moderate or pragmatic nationalists. It potentially enables the demarcation of a Third space between the militarist “majoritarians” and the neoliberal “minoritarians”. It enables the recognition that if anyone is auditioning for Hitler or Mussolini, it sure ain’t Colombo civil society’s favorite bad guy MR or the trimmer mustached GR! The peeling off, jettisoning or marginalizing of the hardest line Sinhala chauvinists elements from the mainstream ruling coalition is a necessary precondition for the reassertion of a centrist nationalism and unblocking the transition to a stable peace. It enables the posing of the question, to whom does Sri Lanka belong: the Sinhala Buddhist alone, the pro-west Fat cat elite, or all of us who were born and live here; all of us citizens?
Back to Jerome winding up the show and zipping his guitar case at the Mount. Some BB members and GV bloggers may say it’s the Dayan Paradox, though I prefer the more alliterative and accurate Dayan Dialectic: how can Dr DJ dwell in both the (erstwhile pro-war) statist-patriotic space and the (pacifist) nonconformist jazz space. Sri Lanka is one of those few places that would be considered a paradox, but the Sri Lankan cultural and political personalities are split, and this schizophrenia is a key to comprehending our crisis. F. Scott Fitzgerald, echoing Blaise Pascal, commended the ability to hold together two absolutely antithetical ideas at the same time, the hallmark of a first rate mind. As for me, I’m thinking, we produce – we have—singers like Natasha and Dellain and soldiers like Shavendra de Silva and Prasanna Silva.
Damn it, we’re good.
