I am looking down the road of memory.
Selvam, my Selvam, I am waiting for you
To bring back our lost life.
You grabbed my hand hard and we ran like the wind
Under the shelling rain.
Do you remember, Selvam?
Praying, praying for life, for life with our kids?
They ran with us but so many others flickered and fell
Running non-stop, praying for life, till the rain of shells ended.
For a moment we had thought we saw Freedom
But it was a mirage.
Jasmine flowers wilted, Selvam, with your failing breath.
The white flag you were waving
Fell over your head like a shroud.
I’m looking through barbed wire
Down the road of memory.
Please come soon, Selvam,
I want to die together.
*Sri Lankan Government statistics say that are 80,000 war widows in the North and East of the country, the ex-war zones.
Written by Ajantha Roshani
Translated by Prasanna Ratnayake
Dreaming, I take the rifle and shoot my own heart.
Now our New Year has no moon.
The streetlamps of La Chappelle bend down to the darkness
but still spread their light.
I shoot them out, one by one.
An unknown Tamil comes along.
I say Hello and ask him for a match.
Then I see that his eyes are seeking a life.
I am asking for a light and he is asking for a life?
Yes, we are the generation
That lit our cigarettes
On the pyres of burning bodies.
Was there a dead person staggering along the street
Smoking a cigarette in your New Year dream?
He had a house
but no bed to sleep
He had a village
but no road to walk
He had a country
but no freedom to smile.
This is why our New Year has no moon.
When you gobble your milk rice
Do you smell the blood?
Does it taste yummy?
Written by Manjula Wediwardena, a Sinhalese poet, journalist and media activist currently living in exile in France. Translated by Prasanna Ratnayake.
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Missing for over 300 days
On 25th November, far away from my motherland, I rang Sandya Eknaligoda to ask her, How are you? Yesterday was the 300th day that her loving husband has been missing. And for all Sri Lankans, one of our best cartoonists, writers, journalists, painters and activists has been missing for 300 days.
Sandya told me that a group of about 60 people met yesterday at the Temple of the Innocents with lotus flowers and oil lamps to do a simple ritual for Prageeth. This little monument in front of the Parliament was commissioned by Chandrika Kumaranathunga Bandaranayake’s government, designed and built by the artist, Jagath Weerasinghe, to remember victims of the late 80s/early 90s Southern insurgency. It had been long neglected, its meaning forgotten.  Soldiers, whose job is to protect the coming and going Parliamentarians, had been using it as a place to piss. But friends cleaned it up and made it the place to be together on Prageeth’s 300th day.
My mind has been scrolling through the decades during which Prageeth and I have known each other. These are a few of those moments with my missing friend:
- In the years of 60,000 dead, the late 80s and early 90s, Mawatha (The Way) magazine was struggling to make sense of our country’s vortex of insanity. Bahktin, Bukharin, Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, all were being studied as fuel for our political thinking, trawled for a social analysis that might help us understand. It was 1990 and I had cycled into town, Galle in the south of Sri Lanka, to buy vegetables for my Auntie. I secretly bought a copy of Mawatha, rolled it carefully into the Government newspaper and hid it beneath the vegetables in the bottom of my basket because there were checkpoints every 500-1000 meters. Back at Auntie’s, I found a private place to read. This is where I first met Prageeth, in his writings for Mawatha 20 years ago.
- The next time was in person in 1992 in Colombo. A group of us, young and middle class, used to meet to discuss politics, culture, democracy, human rights – everything – how to make things better, practical steps, what to do about our disastrous country. Prageeth was always present, mostly silent, closely observing.
- Later, in 1992-4 we had a movement we called Freedom from Fear, confronting the cycles of violence in our world, against the killings and disappearances, trying to create a properly democratic space. Prageeth drew two portraits that became iconic images. One was of Richard de Zoyza, the popular actor, journalist and TV presenter whose slaughtered body had been found on a beach south of Colombo. Looking pensive, chin resting on his hand, his face, beard, and glasses aligned, Richard’s gaze was focused on the viewer. The other portrait was of Ranjini Thiranagama, the Tamil academic and human rights activist, founder member of the UTHRJ (University Teachers’ Human Rights Organisation Jaffna), who had been killed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). These pictures became the emblems of our group.
- My fourth moment was working together later in the 90s on the Values of Dissent publications for the Civil Rights Movement. Prageeth was designing the covers and layout, creating the visual concept for the series of books we produced.
- In 2007, while abroad, I was reading Prageeth’s pieces on the LankaeNews website; sharp insightful writings about the fundamental issues behind the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime, revealing the deeper meanings, the subtexts and hidden agendas.
- Later in 2007, the last time we met in person, we talked a lot about education, the future of the next generation, his kids, and the daughter of a friend. As we said goodbye, Prageeth warned that we have to be very careful. ‘These people know how to play the game with the world. They themselves were once democratic and human rights activists – this regime is full of them!’
Now he is abducted, disappeared, missing for 300 days.
There was a first time: a year ago he was abducted and then released because they ‘got the wrong person’. This second time they have dragged him into the vortex of Sri Lanka’s nightmare.
I am looking at the photograph of this little 300 Days ceremony. What can I read in it? I see many people with whom I have been involved the whole of my lifetime; people who fight for equal rights, for human rights, against abuses, war and corruption. There are small differences: people have got a bit old, there are fewer of them; many have been killed, exiled or silenced. But those in the photo, their eyes and faces are so bright, strong and energetic. They look like they have the inner strength and energy to fight for even more decades. They also know that the man filming them is from the Criminal Investigation Department.
Beyond this photograph of people gathered for Prageeth at the Temple of the Innocents, I see in my mind the Sri Lankan Parliament so nearby. Most of the Parliamentarians sitting there, Ruling Party and Opposition, are responsible as perpetrators, colluders, collaborators and beneficiaries of the violence, the arrests, the abductions, disappearances, tortures, wars, corruption and impunity that has cursed post-independence Sri Lanka. They know what they have done!
In one of his poems about Hitler’s Germany, Berthold Brecht asked: If you cannot protect your people, why should the sun rise on your country? In Sri Lanka people from all communities are being abducted, disappeared, tortured and killed. It pains me to say that my friend Prageeth is one amongst tens of thousands. There is a famous poem of Martin Niemoeller about those who dared not speak out when others were being taken. In Sri Lanka, whether you speak or not, whether you act or not, they will come for you.
[Editors note: For a related article on Prageeth, read …for The Missing by Gypsy Bohemia]
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An infant in Menik Camp.
Many thousands of the IDP children have lost both their parents comes news from the Sri Lankan ‘welfare camps’.
Bright red pottu
Every morning
Never missed.
The point of your finger
Right here between our eyebrows
For both of us.
Amma puts hers first
Then she puts mine.
Remember me insisting
Me first, me first!
That day Dad give me a biggest hug, squeezed so tight,
Lifted me so high, laughing so loud.
At midnight he went out of the bunker.
Amma must have known he wasn’t coming back
But still she smiled at me.
The day she went out of the bunker
Her pottu was still shining between her eyebrows.
Then her pottu went right into her head
And red blood came all down her calm, loving face.
Before then I only knew how to cry.
Then I knew how to shriek, to scream
Holding on to your body, Amma,
Scream!
Scream!
Scream!
Here too our school is under the trees
But they don’t take the register.
I don’t mind, I’m used to it.
The only thing different is
There are no bunkers here.
Sometimes my heart beats so hard
It’s louder than the gunshots
And tears just shoot out when I think about you.
Please don’t ask me about pottu
If Amma can’t put it on me I don’t want it.
And please don’t teach us about parents,
I don’t want to hear about them.
It’s not only me; none of us want to hear it.
Poem by Mahesh Munasinghe
Translated by Prasanna Ratnayake
The pottu is the red spot traditionally worn by Hindu married women, more recently also by children. It is believed to protect them from evil. Usually a widow stops wearing her pottu immediately after her husband’s death.
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On 4th February 2008, as the government celebrated the 60th anniversary of our independence from Britain, it struck me strongly that we Sri Lankans are going round in circles. For some time it has been obvious that ordinary political science terminology and analysis are insufficient and reason inadequate to the strange and twisted trajectory of our country. Sights and insights that stimulate deeper thought on these points are captured in Stephen Champion’s book of photographs, Lanka War Stories, the best account I know of the recent history of our tortured nation. This small essay cannot be an ordinary review because these are images of my own experiences; they trace the life of my generation. I remain inside the book, not a commentator but a participant.
In the late ‘80s, when I was studying GCL courses in southern Sri Lanka, we were in the midst of two civil wars. In the North the minority Tamils were fighting to liberate themselves from the oppressions of the majority Sinhala state. In the South, the exploited under castes and classes sought to be free from the social injustices of that majority society by taking power themselves.
We have a tradition, I believe from the Portuguese, of reciting poems for seven nights of mourning after a person has died. During my teenage years the poems we heard every day were the screams of the bereaved, amidst the smell of bodies burning in the streets or lying on pathways at the edge of fields or forests. This situation transformed us; we had to learn to survive. So we walked past the dead bodies concentrating hard on our studies, avoiding the sights, trying not to know what was going on around us.
A small magazine of the time, Ravaya (Voice), carried a photograph of a little boy leaning against the post of a roadside fence, his head bowed. In front of him lie two mutilated bodies, awkwardly strewn, burned, chopped and distorted. Suddenly, I was the boy standing there, unable to look at what I had already seen. From this moment I could no longer ignore the horrors going on around me. There was no indication of where the photograph had been taken or by whom. For ten years I tried to find out who it was.
(c) Stephen Champion, All rights reserved
Although the photographer did not know it, this image (reproduced here on page 121) became iconic. It has been reappearing for twenty years; used – abused – by different political parties whose campaign posters promise: if you vote for us this will never happen again. Eventually I discovered that the picture had been taken by Stephen Champion; a person who has been photographing Sri Lanka for more than half my lifetime, a person who was important to me long before I knew him. His work is important to all of us who have survived – when so many thousands have not – because he has documented what our generation has been living through, the worst years ever in our country’s history.
Outsiders have been mapping, drawing, documenting and photographing Sri Lanka from the times of Ptolemy, Huin San, Fhahian and Iban Battuta, through the European colonisations by Portuguese, Dutch and British, until the present day. Sri Lanka is an exotic and beautiful island, colourful, drenched in strong tropical light during the day and pastels at dusk. A seductive paradise for the early travellers and for the tourists of today; this exquisite setting is also ravaged by tragedy, as bitter in its pain as it is beautiful in the blessings of nature.
Stephen is one of four leading contemporary photographers of Sri Lanka – the others being Nihal Fernando, Dexter Cruse and Dominic Sansoni – whose work most effectively conveys the beauty of our island and the events of our times. Dominic Sansoni’s skill is in his eye for the colours of Sri Lankan life; whether taking beautiful or tragic images, his concern is always with the colours. Dexter Cruse’s great ability is in capturing incidents, significant moments; and Nihal Fernando is the master photographer of Sri Lanka’s exquisite beauty.
Stephen Champion’s work is totally different from these. Although a photograph can only capture a single moment in the flux and process of life, for me Stephen Champion’s images do more than this. The moment is there, but so too is its context, caught not only in the perceived space but also in time; so that each image is emblematic of matters larger and deeper. A prism, the image conveys not just one but several planes of meaning, experience, emotion, reality. The drama of the picture is more than its beauty or its incident; it is the drama of something incomplete that emerges from a specific past and continues into its future. These dimensions of time are outside the moment of the picture but resonant and incandescent in its telling instant. Stephen’s images are often angry and outraged; they are also sarcastic, satirical and ironic. They make an argument, state a view, evoke a discourse; they challenge and insist upon engagement and response. This is not an easy encounter.
The design of the book immerses us in the Sri Lankan situation; this is not just about the Sri Lankan war, it is about Sri Lankan life. Stephen’s lens finds monks meditating in their hermitages, official, rebel and paramilitary killings, displaced people, soldiers, police, mothers, widows, teenage lovers, teenage fighters, bordellos, hospitals, rice paddies, environmental pollution and many other juxtapositions of militarism and ordinary life, of normality and the abnormal, of the brooding paralysis of permanent trauma.
Most of these images are arranged in pairs that show how beautiful the country is and how brutal, how innocent and how violent, how mellow and how melancholy. The landscape, the seascape, the living and the dead are juxtaposed with a poignancy that reveals dimensions deeper than their contradictions. Even the orange chosen for the endpapers and the title is semiologically resonant, because for Buddhists this colour symbolises the essential and eternal truths of their religion – wisdom, strength and dignity. Subtly, obliquely, these pictures show how inadequately such Third World realities are conveyed or understood using conventional political or sociological analysis. The complexity of this terrible, unmagical realism can only be sensed through nonverbal means.
Let me mention a few more individual photographs. On page 30, a dead body lies on the ground covered by a sarong. Across the middle of the picture is a woven palm leaf fence. On the other side of the fence kids play, jumping and frolicking, watched by other children and smiling adults. They do know the body is there, it is easy to see; but the corpse is not one of theirs, so they are not concerned. This is daily life.
On page 39, we see “School children on parade, Independence Day, Colombo”. Along the Galle Face, as far as the eye can see, children are marching towards us on the beach. From an army jeep in the foreground, soldiers watch the schoolgirls in white dresses, white socks and white shoes, with their long black plaits, swinging their arms in military unison.
(c) Stephen Champion, All rights reserved
To satisfy the international community countries must have elections to demonstrate their democratic credentials. On pages 130 and 131 of Lanka War Stories there are two photographs of Sinhala graffiti from the time of an election in the late ‘80s. The one on the left reads, “If you vote in the election you will be killed”. The one on the right, “If you do not vote in the election you will be killed”.
(c) Stephen Champion, All rights reserved
We are trapped inside such moments, our daily sights and sorrows. They drain us of wisdom, strength and dignity until consciousness becomes a vacuum. Stephen’s photographs record how stark and total our losses have been and continue to be. They also show the forces responsible. Sinhala and Tamil nationalism, Buddhist fundamentalism, political mismanagement, caste, class, gender and ethnic hostilities, failures of the left, arrogant and corrupt aristocracies, propaganda fantasies that idealise futures which can never be – all these have left us ungrounded, focused on dreams, mirages and hopes whilst we descend ever deeper into our vortex of catastrophes.
Stephen Champion has produced two books in the past twenty-two years: Lanka 1986-1992 and Lanka War Stories. His images make it clear that we are going in circles. The past reproduces its patterns in the present and cycles its way into the future; a past whose tragedies our elders have unwillingly bequeathed to us, as we shall unwillingly bequeath them to the next generation. But are these photographs more than mirrors and memorials? Could they be windows that can open us to a better understanding of ourselves?
Similar Posts:]]>July 1983
My mind goes back to how thrilled we were when our teachers suddenly told us that school was going to be closed immediately. There was no explanation; we had no understanding of why this might be and no reason to wonder. We were happy that we would not have to wait till August for our holidays.
I was even more excited because my father had just given me a fantastic present: a Kodak 110 camera and three rolls of film. I didn’t want to photograph my school or the hostel where I was staying. I wanted to do something interesting. So I had been hassling my father to know where we would be going on holiday in August.
My school was in the southern part of Sri Lanka. Established in 1870 when we were under British rule; it wasn’t just a school, more like a little village. We had a farm, a bakery and about 60 acres of land on the side of a hill. When we got the news, we all ran down to our hostel to get ready to leave. I saw my father’s car parking at the bottom of the hill. This was strange. I wondered how he had the news so quickly that we were being given a holiday.
As soon as I got to the car, before I had a chance to ask anything, Dad said, “We are going up country now”. Mum and my sister were in the back and I was in the front seat with him, so we must be on our holiday already. On the way, I was so thrilled to be using my new camera for the first time. Although it was a long journey, my Dad was very patient and stopped anywhere I asked so that I could take pictures – waterfalls, landscapes, flowers, mountains, tree shadows.
We stayed that night at the famous Ella Rest House near the Ravana waterfall. It was dark and misty. The rest house was almost empty, only two families besides ourselves. We kids were playing but I could feel that our parents were tense. They were going inside from time to time to look at the television, but we kids were not allowed to see what they were watching.
Suddenly a police jeep arrived out of the fog. The inspector got out and spoke to my father, “Here is your permit. You don’t have to observe the curfew; travel as you wish. If you need a backup vehicle let us know.”
As we set off the next morning there was a fantastic sunrise although the mountain was still blanketed in mist. I started my photo journey again. There were fewer people on the roads than the day before. The small towns we drove through had a lot of police around and groups of people were clustered here and there.
I saw a car burning ahead of us. Dad stopped and told us to stay where we were. I watched him run up to the burning car and look inside. Some local people came over and spoke to him. He came back and said, “Let’s go”.
As we passed the burning car, he slowed down and stopped for a couple seconds to look again. In that moment I took a photograph. From then onwards, every few kilometres police or army patrols stopped us and examined our papers before letting us drive on.
I kept asking my Dad, “What’s happening?”
“There’s a small conflict between Sinhala and Tamils,” he said. “They started to fight each other. But we spoke to your uncle last night and he said it will be sorted out in a few hours; not to worry.”
I knew that uncle was very big army person, so that was OK.
When we got to Nuwaraeliya – the area known as Little England because of its beautiful flowers and lovely climate – we saw buildings burning. My father’s face was getting anxious. I had seen a burning building two years before, but these fires were bigger and there were a lot of them.
We were trying to get to my auntie’s house but before we got there, a crowd stopped us. They were carrying sticks and axes. They asked my Dad in angry voices, “Are you Sinhala or Tamil?”
Dad said, “We’re Sinhala,” and told them where we were going.
“Are there any Tamils in this car?”
“Of course not, just my two kids and my wife.”
“Can you open the boot?”
They asked me and my sister: “Baba, are you Sinhala?”
My Dad went around to open the boot and said something to the gang I did not hear. The crowd got quiet and some of them came round to apologise to my mother for troubling us. They explained, “We have to chase these Tamils out of the country.”
When we got to auntie’s place all the adults were very nervous. The house was a big one that had been built during the British time. It had an attic and in the attic three Tamil families were hiding. They were absolutely silent, including their kids, and shaking. Mum and auntie took food up to them. We knew the kids and always played with them when we came here but, we weren’t allowed to go up and they weren’t allowed to come down. Everyone was very quiet and upset.
Usually when up country at night, you hear the soft wind in the trees. Sometimes you can hear a car climbing up or going down the hairpin roads. But that night we heard terrible sounds: flames whooshing, heavy things crashing and falling, glass exploding, cracking and snapping sounds; noisy and scary. Nobody slept much.
Some groups of people came several times in the night looking for the Tamil families upstairs. They were suspicious that my uncle and auntie were hiding them because they knew they were friends.
“Bring them out. Bring them out.”
“Do you have any cans of petrol?”
“Give us some Arak.”
My Dad made a call to someone and after a while police came to protect the house. He was also on the phone to Colombo. Two of his tea lorries were still in the city after making a delivery. He told his driver where to pick up two Tamil families that were our friends, how to hide them in the back of the lorry amongst the tea chests and to take them immediately to our estate in Deniyaya.
After a few days the violence died down but the Tamil families that had been hiding upstairs were still terrified. They had the clothes they had fled in but everything else was lost; they had run for their lives and had no lives to go back to. The adults talked amongst themselves about how shocked they were, they knew all the people involved but what had caused this, why had this happened?
I too was asking why over and over again and I begged my Dad to take me out to see. We drove through Nuwaraeliya. The big wooden pillars of the old mansions were still smouldering; the air was full of smoke and unfamiliar smells. Where the estate workers had lived even the chickens and goats were lying around dead. When we got to the little town of Kandapola, there was nothing but charred rubble; it was completely destroyed. I didn’t take any more pictures of flowers and landscapes.
When we were back at auntie’s house, the television showed that Wellawatte, the mainly Tamil area of Colombo, had been burned to the ground, all of it. My Dad was very upset. He had studied at St Peter’s school there and knew the district and lots of people who lived there.
After a few more days we went back to our home down south. The two tea chest families were still at our house. My Dad took me with him as he went around visiting our family’s close Tamil friends. They were all staying with different Sinhala families and they had all lost everything. They were spending hours on the phone getting in touch with relatives in Canada, India and elsewhere, arranging to leave the country. My father told me, “Be sure you learn both Tamil and English or you will never understand this country”.
I was pressuring Dad to let us leave with them. We didn’t leave but all our Tamil friends did. The mothers gave their jewellery and other little treasures to my Mum to keep for them. For the first time in my life I lost a lot of my friends all at once; they had to go with their parents. We promised that we would always write letters and not forget each other.
I was impatient to see my photographs but had to wait until the shops opened again. One evening my Dad brought them back. I didn’t look much at my landscapes and flowers. I was keen to see my burning buildings. But suddenly there was the photograph of the burning car. I had not seen at the time: the person inside, the person burning. From the moment I saw that image my life changed, I changed, everything changed. It dragged me across the boundary and I was no longer a child; from that moment I became an adult. That photograph stayed with me until 26th December 2005 when it was taken by the tsunami.
I’ve been trying to remember how all this occurred for my ten-year-old mind. It is difficult but a good exercise to try to go back into that sensibility. Of course, I already knew that for a boy with my family background there were only three possible careers. I would be a tea planter, a politician or a military officer.
But that photograph of the man burning in his car changed everything. From then on, I was focused on current events. Though still a kid, I went to the library to read adult newspapers and books. My friends were no longer my own age but all older than me. I had to know what was happening and had to talk with people who were also concerned about what was going on around us. My teachers sometimes criticised me for not playing with other boys my age, not being interested in cricket, reading obsessively.
So my next effort is to reconstruct the events of July 1987, our Black July five years later; but not in a remembered teenage state of mind. From now on, I shall have to speak from here, from my mind of 2008.
For more articles on July 1983, please click here.
Similar Posts:]]>At the junction of Kinsey Road, I waited to cross on the red light. On my right was the old OCIC Cinema Society, which was run for 25 years by Father Ernest Poruthota. From here some of our talented directors emerged: Asoka Handagama and Prasanna Vithanage. On the road to my left the painting by Chandraguptha Thenuwara which honours the spot where the LTTE killed Nelan Thiruchelvam. Set back from the street, ICES, the organisation he founded which continues to this day as a centre of culture, law and research. This junction is of importance to me personally: on the right the place where I saw and learned the visual and aesthetic discourses of cinema; on my left the site of work by Regi Siriwardene and many others that contributed so much to our awareness and our study of human rights, political and anthropological social science and ethnic realities. Though in time it became an élite place, it also gave many unprivileged members of our generation, little grasshoppers like me, the intellectual tools to analyse and see into the depths of our society and its history.
I continue my strolling monologue as I pass the red gateposts of a living monument of Sri Lankan history. No one is in the little guard hut. This is the home of former president JR Jayawardene, the man who introduced the executive presidency and the ‘open economy’. Of course, I have my own criticism of both these policies; but for the moment what I am thinking about is the way each character that followed JR in the top job claimed in advance that they would sort out the abuses of this constitutional dictatorship. Once in post, each one in reality expanded the definition and the practices of what such an Executive President could do.
In 2008 Sri Lanka celebrates 60 years of independence from the British. Of these 60 years, half have been consumed by civil wars; North and South, we have specialised in killing each other. Many people excuse this distortion of national development by pointing to JR’s constitution as the source of these problems. Yes, the executive presidency was a mistake, the ‘open economy’ another error; but the man is long since dead, there have been plenty of years to correct the problems, why should we still blame him for the horrors of the present? These claims that it is all JR’s fault are used to cover up the wilful suspension of human rights, collective sanity and social justice – the impunity with which our society is immolating itself.
Next on my little walk, I pass the Monitoring Mission, the institution set up to keep an eye on the Cease Fire and ensure that there was enough calm for the country to recover from the previous 20 years of hell and to strive for a more equitable future. Fifteen or twenty metres ahead of me I can see some police and army guys being agitated in the middle of the road. I don’t know what’s going on but take off my MP3 player, on which I was listening to the Somali singer K’Naan, and hesitate a bit to see if I can figure it out. I ask a policeman if any incident has occurred. “No, nothing important. The Security Forces are trying to calm down some students demonstrating in front of the University Grant Commission.” As I approach I see that a huge blue Leyland police truck has been positioned to block the main road. I hadn’t noticed until this moment that there had been no traffic on the road. My eyes begin to weep from the teargas spreading through the air. As I turn away towards the McCarthy Hospital to take a detour and escape the suffocating gas, I can hear the dull thud of rubber bullets. I am trying to get to Odel.
To be continued…
Similar Posts:]]>I do not remember how many times I crossed the Boralla Junction in my life but I do know that this relatively small area of less than two square kilometres has been a kind of cooking pot of much Sri Lankan culture, politics and intellectual life. When I pass the Boralla Cemetery, my mind goes back to many small incidents and key moments in Sri Lanka’s post-Independence history. I don’t have a chronological or complete way to describe these moments, but here are some bullet point recollections of a few incidents:
• In the late ’50s and early ’60s, an assortment of people interested in the arts, culture and contemporary politics called itself Appé Kattiya (Our Group). One of the main personalities in this group was Sugathapala de Silva, a novelist, theatre producer and translator of Pirandello, Ionesco and Peter Weiss. Appé Kattiya discussions also considered Sartre, Camus, Beckett and other contemporary cultural innovators. Amongst the notable people who sometimes came to join this group was Anton Balasingham, later to become known for his ideological work on behalf to the Tamil struggle. Other Sri Lankan bohemians of the ’60s included Cyril B. Perera, GW Surendra, Sumana Alokabandara and Ralex Ranasinghe. The group had several places they would meet, one of which was the Boralla Cemetery. There was no formal support or organisation, just a group of friends who would meet sometimes for a glass of beer and a chat about the events and ideas that interested them. They talked a lot about Existentialism. They were educated middle class professionals: clerks, government servants, accountants and bookkeepers, as well as artists, musicians, writers and other cultural figures. They didn’t only chat. In this immediate post-Independence period, they were responsible for major contributions to the cultural life of the country with their productions and other works, opening doors to international influences and debates.
• Many of Appé Kattiya’s productions were staged in the nearby theatre of the YMBA (Young Men’s Buddhist Association). The theatre still exists but is now devoted to more localised performances. The main YMBA building has been levelled and replaced by a huge shopping complex.
• When the 1971 JVP Southern insurgency erupted, the government responded by killing nearly 20,000 people and putting key leaders into the Weilikade and Magazine prisons in Boralla between 1971 and 1977. Many of these men first spent their time there analysing and criticising themselves for the failures of their tactics and philosophy. Later they studied the tenets and strategies of the Latin American revolutions, the Civil Rights movements, the Maoists, the Trotskyites and other political groups of the time. This period of study and discussion contributed greatly to the development of Sri Lankan intellectual discourses and many of those who survived their incarceration later became leading academics, journalists and social activists.
• On the eve of the 1983 Riots, after the LTTE had killed thirteen SL Army soldiers in the North, the government staged a common funeral for them in the Boralla Cemetery. That night State television broadcast a speech by the President, JR Jayawardene. A man educated in the old Oxbridge tradition, JR’s rhetoric was crafted to rouse the ire of his people. It was his Mark Antony moment and a rallying cry for Sinhala nationalists. Two days later, on 25th July, inside the Weilikade prison, the Sinhala prisoners massacred many of the Tamil political prisoners. Five days later there was a second similar massacre in the same prison. Needless to say, in both instances, the Sinhala guards did not intervene. From this time onwards, the country erupted in communal violence. The slaughter had begun.
• Today at the Boralla Cemetery roundabout, the little area around the huge tree in the centre is sponsored and maintained by the All-Island Buddhist Conference. At each of four corners there are yellow boards stating the key Buddhist values: tolerance, kindness…. When you take a left turn off the roundabout, the road you are on is Buddhaloka Mawatha (Light of Buddha Road). Still thinking about 1983, I remember Sinha Rathanthunga’s book, The Politics of Terrorism, in which he documented how the Riots were organised and conducted by government ministers and a leading Buddhist monk, whom he names. He was not the only one to point out who had been responsible; similar conclusions were offered in publications of the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), the Sansoni Commission and many other investigations and reports. I do not know that there was any legal process to convict or reprimand this monk, who lives here on Light of Buddha Road. In fact, he is currently on several Presidential Commissions, so evidently he has not experienced any difficulties as a result of his services to the nation in the early ’80s.
• Sinhala nationalism escalated following the time of terror and was encouraged and implemented by the government, which laid down certain cultural precepts: classical music and songs were good, local popular songs were impure and therefore not good. Nonetheless, HR Jothipala, who was immensely popular and could sing perfect Hindi, Tamil or Sinhala melodies, recorded many thousands of songs that were circulated widely on LPs, film soundtracks and cassettes, performed at public concerts and occasionally broadcast on commercial radio. He was so adored that on more than one occasion a group of lady fans abducted him and he had to summon help to escape. When he died of a heart attack in the late ’80s, people came from all over the country to attend his funeral, the biggest that had ever been held in Colombo. At the time, Sarath Amunugama, who had a French academic background, wrote an article describing HR Jothipala as a cultural icon due to his enormous impact and his deep knowledge of Sri Lankan sentiments and values. The Sinhala academics were very upset by this but the confrontation initiated the first serious discussions of popular culture and politics in the country. For better or for worse, this became known as The Cemetery Debate.
• The Boralla Cemetery backs onto the Colombo Golf Club, an elegant and venerable colonial institution. On 13th November 1990, the founder and iconic JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera was gunned down in the narrow area between the cemetery and the golf club. Ironically, one of the witnesses of the killing, a man who worked as a photographer for the Security Forces, was actually a JVP spy.
• After the dark period of the late ’80s – with its killings, abductions, disappearances and more – in the early ’90s a newspaper was started called Lakdiva (Island of Sri Lanka) inside the Boralla junction supermarket run by moderate JVP, ex-JVP and some independent journalists and writers. Opposite this, on Eliot Place, was the VIBHAVI Centre for Alternative Culture where we cultural grasshoppers hung out. The two groups got together from time to time to share events like films or just engage in discussions.
These recollections are still with me during my lunch of Mihiri bath kadé (rice and curry), particularly while having a cigarette to conclude the meal. I am also keeping an eye open as smoking a cigarette in public is now illegal; though being kidnapped and disappearing in a white van or dying in a bomb blast can happen at any time – and is, of course, no problem.
To be continued…
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International human rights organisations accuse the Sri Lanka government, the LTTE and the paramilitary groups operating under the aegis of government portfolios or official military protection—like the EPDP and the TMVP—of continuous violations and killings. The government and its supporters scorn these accusations as neo-colonial interventions in the affairs of the nation and counter that these foreign NGOs ignore LTTE brutalities. In public spaces, on Television and other media, a conspiracy theory is disseminated about these neo-colonial criticisms and outsiders’ attempts to undermine the progress of our war. In Colombo and island-wide a poster asks: “We ate budgerie (cheap grain) during the OTHERS’ war, why can’t we be patient with the hardships we endure for OUR war?” Another poster says, “This government fights Human Rights Neo-colonialism and LTTE Separatism.”
In Colombo, Jaffna, the East, Vayvuniya, and elsewhere people continue to disappear. There are no investigations and no local or national records kept of who or how many they are. From one day to the next, people forget because another incident has occurred.
However, things are not all bad: last year the government decided it must stop the killing of stray dogs—not the right to be happening in a Buddhist country. The dogs have taken advantage of this ethical decision and packs of strays trot around enjoying the freedom of the capital city.
2008 – The Year of War: We will Show the World How to Exterminate Terrorism!
On December 31st 2007, the Lanka-e-News website reports that the opposition MP T. Maheswaren has visited the Jaffna peninsula. He says that in Jaffna District six or seven people are being killed every day by paramilitary groups who are protected by the Sri Lankan military. He promises to announce the details and name names when Parliament reconvenes on January 8th.
On my way home from New Year celebrations, between midnight and 1 a.m., I notice an Airforce vehicle moving around and stopping for soldiers to jump out and put up posters that read, “Gotabe the Great”. Emerging from my hangover later that morning, I hear the news that Maheswaren has been murdered inside a Hindu temple in the Colombo High Security zone. He is the third MP to be assassinated since 2005. A good start for the Year of War.
Following their victory in the East in 2007, the government strategy for 2008 is focused on the Vanni, the next Tiger area they intended to capture. However, the LTTE has also changed its strategy to random and indiscriminate killing of civilians in the South and the North Central province and bombs in the capital. As a result, the entire country is now the warfront.
The government continues to recruit civilians as Home Guards, Civil Guards and other categories. At the end of 2007 at Tissamaharamaya in the South following the Ranminithanna atrocity, they recruited 2,000 civil guards in one day. In January 2008 after the Bootala incident, they recruited another 2,000. And last week, the civil defence commander, Colonel Sarath Weerasekara, announced that they would recruit another 25,000 as an Urban Civil Defence force. If this continues, soon only the grannies and the under-fives will be without guns.
I cannot claim to understand either the government or the LTTE strategies as I am simply an ordinary civilian. Still, it seems to me that this massive distribution of guns to the population is a danger worse than missiles or rockets. Over the past 30 years, the LTTE has operated at different times as a conventional army and as a guerrilla army. In the present phase, as guerrillas, they may no longer be interested in holding land. They can move—and do move—anywhere and the consequences for civilians are irrelevant to them. So the government’s idea of capturing their territory may be misguided. After all, where is Al Qaeda’s territory?
In the mid-90s Brecht’s play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was staged in Colombo. At the time we believed that the dictator had finally gone. We were wrong. At present we are still watching the shadowy figures manoeuvre in the background, smelling the blood and waiting to see the dictator himself emerge. Perhaps the play should be staged again—but perhaps not.
References:
“Is the Eastern Province under Military Rule?” Lanka-e-News, December 20th 2007
25,000 new recruits to the Urban Civil Defence Force, January 20th 2008, Sunday Lakbima, Internet version
2,000 Home Guards for Tissamaharamaya, Lanka-e-News, January 20th 2008
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Travels in a Militarised Society – 3
Travels in a Militarised Society — 2
Travels in a Militarised Society — 1
In Bambalapitya, I am texting a friend while crossing the road. A man in a new military uniform I did not recognise accosts me, “What are you texting?” “I’m just texting one of my friends.” “Show it to me. I want to see that.” I smile, “Okay, you can read it,” and hold out my phone to him. I notice how young he is, with just a small show of adolescent fuzz above his lip. “And what’s in your bag?” “My laptop.” “Can you switch on your laptop?” “Yes.” I switch it on, he stares at it. In a friendly tone I ask, “Why are you checking my phone and my laptop?” He explains that the Tamil Tigers are using “infra red technology” to trigger bombs and explosives, so they have been instructed to check all these devices when they see people using them in the streets. “Even the Sinhala Tigers are using these things now.”
I walk down to the Café Lavinia, where the air conditioning feels cold after the 30º heat outside. I order a luxurious coffee and get to work on the free Wi-Fi. The Lanka-e-News page pops up. The heading reads: Is the Eastern Province under Military Rule? I scroll through the other items. A journalist has asked a Cabinet Minister at his news conference how many people have been recruited into the North and East civil defence forces over the past year. He answers, 250,000. My travels from the North Central Province to the East and from Western Colombo to the South have revealed that these new recruits are rarely given proper training. Some Home Guard youngsters—boys and girls—told me they don’t even know how to unload their new guns. I think too of the village blacksmiths that have been making copies of the Chinese T-56s, called T-kattas, and small hand guns called Gal-kattas for years. These craftsmen, who repair weapons for the local police, say that the old police guns are worn out; their replicas work better and are more reliable. Experts like these could have supplied weapons and lessons in how to use them far more cheaply than the government’s option.
I reflect on the fact that the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka which gets all the attention is only one element in the matrix of social contradictions that are contributing to the war situation. Caste, class, gender, employment, poverty, resources and land issues are also involved. In the past, local police stations were set up to deal with crimes that arise from caste and other social conflicts. At the moment the war is the overdetermining and predominant issue, but these other long-standing problems still burn beneath its surface. With the government giving arms to Montessori school teachers, monks, teenagers, farmers and many others, what good can come of it? For most of these people, their immediate enemy is not a Tamil Tiger—a person somewhere far away whom they have never met—but those in their own communities with whom they have serious issues.
What none of this takes into account is the criminal underworld; the networks of gangsters, many of whom have connections to Cabinet ministers in Colombo, municipal politicians in other districts or local council authorities in the villages. These are the drugs barons, the contract killers, the thugs who collect ransoms and protection money—sinister characters of every description. And the freelancers: even in the High Security areas of the capital, it is possible to rent a gun, kill someone who has offended you, and return the weapon the next day. Some of these criminals slaughter whole families in the night to settle a score or on orders from their powerful masters.
As I sit with my coffee contemplating this nightmare, a cheerful friend who works for an international NGO sits down beside me with her coffee. She’s just come from a really successful workshop with the civilian actors who are going to organise peace and democracy. She’s very optimistic that they will sort everything out. She asks me to help her select the best photo in her digital camera for her report to the funders.
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Travels in a Militarised Society — 2
Travels in a Militarised Society — 1
The huge, busy conurbation of Anudharapura—once a sacred city—has become the major transit centre for military forces en route to and from the current war zones. The ancient archeologically important ruins for which Anudharapura is famous are dwarfed by the sprawling modern developments. An informal economy has grown up in which small traders sell the debris of militarism: single T56 bullets for 15 rupees each. Many young girls have come to the city to sell their favours to the military personnel. Guesthouses built for tourists who rarely come any more are now informal brothels. A trader approaches asking, “What do you want? Bullets? Weapons? Girls?” If you want a bullet, he takes one from his pocket. If you want a weapon, he guides you to a secret stash in this sacred city. If you want a girl, he directs you to the guesthouse. Three-wheeled taxis, Tri-shaws, fly around the city doing this business.
At Madawatchiya on the edge of the city, where the armed forces set off for the conflict area, I meet a trader who transports food and supplies into Vayvuniya. He is happy that the country has returned to war because he now carries far smaller quantities of goods than in peacetime and is making a much higher profit.
On my way from Anudharapura to Horowpatana, there is a big tank called Mahakanadarawera. As I sit by the tank watching the beautiful scenery; large green heavy-duty Tata trucks suddenly speed past full of proud soldiers with their guns at the ready. In the front seat next to the driver, his elbow resting on the windowsill, his orange robe fluttering in the wind, sits an equally noble Buddhist monk. The label on the front of the truck reads, Jathika Saviya (National Strength).
At a small tea stall beside the tank, I have a little chat with the owners. They too are very happy with the new war situation: lots of young villagers, girls as well as boys, have got good local jobs as Home Guards and no longer worry their parents by going off to Colombo looking for work. They are well paid; they have job security and social status as never before. So the youth are happy and their parents are happy that the war has brought this improvement in their lives. On the billboards along the roadside of this agricultural district, amongst the ads for fertilisers and weed killers, are others which encourage and praise our valiant troops.
In Horowpatana town, where there’s not even a petrol station, you see plenty of people walking around with Nokia N70 mobile phones. Small as it is, there is a lot of traffic in Horowpatana because the government is clearing the thick forest and building condominiums for the security forces. This construction of 3000 new houses in the town will bring new businesses, more money, perhaps a shopping mall; so all the locals are in a good mood, looking forward to richer times.
Beyond Horowpatana, there is a modest little temple by the side of the road. The Buddhist monk here spent the past several years working with the peace-building network run by Colombo NGOs. He is more interested now in searching for Buddhist archaeological sites between the Eastern and North Central provinces where, he says, Tamil and Muslim people have destroyed many of these ruins in order to establish their farms. But his main work is in response to a request from the government to persuade local army deserters to return to their old posts or to take new positions in the Home Guards. During the past 30 years of civil war, each village had an average of 30-40 deserters. It will be good to get them back into the army because they were well trained in the past, unlike the new Home Guards. Besides, when they left the army, these deserters took their weapons with them and have been using them in an unregulated manner since. This holy man is very happy to have these new responsibilities. He has also been asked to participate in the Peace and Democracy rallies in Colombo and to bring 40 people with him each time. Although these rallies are not called every month, so many local people have now joined the Home Guard they don’t have time for the five or six-hour journeys to and from Colombo. He is a bit worried about this.
At his temple I also meet a Montessori School teacher from Welioya. In her after-school time she is being trained in the use of weapons. She is pleased about this as she is earning more money than before and is treated with greater respect by her community. She tells her young girls seeking employment to join the Home Guard. They are very happy with this alternative as the only other jobs are in the Free Trade Zones where they are sarcastically referred to as ‘garment items’ and forced to supplement their meagre pay by working as prostitutes. As Home Guards—in their uniforms, carrying guns like the boys do—they get a good salary and a level of social dignity unimaginable before. A proper government job like this confers the highest possible status in their villages.
Along the roadside, the huge government-owned rice storage barns, where farmers have long delivered their harvest to be bought at controlled prices, have been converted into storage sites for military hardware. As a result, the farmers have to sell their rice to private companies or to individual buyers for the best price they can get. Nonetheless, they regard this as a temporary sacrifice for the bright future they expect once the war is won.
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Travels in a Militarised Society — 1
I am waiting for a bus holding a small transparent plastic bag of fruit for my mother. As usual, the buses are sounding their horns, conductors are shouting out the stops on their route, lottery ticket sellers are offering fortunes. In the middle of Boralla Junction there is a Bo tree by a little temple from which a loudspeakers project Pirith chanting. On every corner of the busy crossroads large posters bless our three military forces – air, land and sea — faithfully pursuing their duty until the final victory. Other posters advertise the Superstar competition on Sirasa TV, modelled on American Idol, encouraging us to text in and record our votes for the candidates. Prostitutes and beggars who have worked Boralla Junction for years, older now but still plying their trades, move amongst the crowds.
Suddenly, an ordinary person in civilian clothes accosts me, “Can I check your ID?” I am taken aback for a moment; then ask politely, “Who are you?” “You don’t have to know who I am. I am a Boralla Junction Civil Guard. We work for the Police.” I hand over my card. Twice he asks me, “Are you Sinhala?” Twice I answer, “Yes, you can see it on my ID card.” He checks my transparent bag, “What’s in it?” “Fruits.” He throws my ID card back at me, turns away and accosts another person.
I spot my bus with its slogan: “This is The Nation of Buddha” and climb up. Inside a sticker reads, “This bus does not charge for Buddhist Sunday School children or Buddhist monks”. After herding people onto his bus from the footboard until it is crammed full, the conductor moves up and down amongst us, gesturing aggressively with his hand and shouting: “Give me your money! Your money!” Honking its horn, the bus jerks forward and starts chasing another bus.
At the next stop, the Castle Maternity Hospital, many pregnant women are pushing to get out. The driver has no patience and the bus starts to move again, making the women jump off. Every ten metres along our route, on both sides of the road, is a member of the Home Guard, the Police, the Army or the Air Force. After a few more stops we are nearing the Parliament Junction and pass the Ambilipitya monument. It was designed by Jagath Weerasinghe as a memorial to the students massacred in the late 1980s. The small temple-like structure is overgrown with weeds and has become a security checkpoint. The guards go into the little hall to have a piss when the need occurs. This and many other checkpoints are sponsored by banks and private companies nowadays: their banners are pasted on the walls, roofs and barriers of these security posts.
When I reach home, Mother is watching an old Hindi movie on TV. From time to time the film is interrupted by an ad break made by one of the country’s finest filmmakers. It’s a beautiful ad; with emotive music and spectacular images it summons our brave population to join the armed forces and defend the motherland. (This highly respected filmmaker has also recently published a book for the peace industry that analyses the relationship between the nation’s conflict and its cinema.) Other less elegant TV ads exhort people to be vigilant, to suspect everyone, including members of your own family—even yourself; advising that bombs can be hidden anywhere, that we are all in danger and must report our suspicions immediately day or night to the military or police authorities.
Shortly after 7 p.m., in the midst of the News, another ad pops up for “Prayathna (Effort) for the Peoples’ Movement”, giving a website address. We are not told what this “movement” is; in fact, its existence is limited to posters and these TV ads. With only 3% of the population computer literate, it cannot be a very big movement, whatever it stands for. Immediately after the Prayathna ad another pops up for “Mindada” (two hearts joined by the arrow of love), telling viewers they need not wait for tomorrow to arrange their marriage, it can be done today! Of course, given that 28% of the country’s women are war widows; this is more likely to generate a social movement than the other summons to make an effort.
Switching to another channel, there is a serious discussion in progress about how to conquer the Vanni, the Tamil district in the centre of the country. The panel of civilian men, who call themselves academics, and Buddhist monks, are making war in the TV studio in their immaculate saffron robes and well-ironed shirts, with benefit of AC and bottled mineral water. Loudly, belligerently, they outdo each other, shouting “We will win!” “We will crush the Enemy!” “We will prevail!” “We will have a proper Sinhala New Year in April!”
On a third channel another big discussion is going on between members of the Sangha and some more self-designated academics. They are devising a Buddhist justification for war; how to legitimate the process of annihilating non-Sinhala elements of the nation. A listener phones in to protest that this is not the Buddhist way. The panel of authorities strongly and unanimously reject this. Ours is a revised Buddhism; a Sangha-ism that accepts no dissent.
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What can we learn as Sri Lankans from this excellent Chadian film that deals so profoundly with the social and personal consequences of civil war, difficulties so similar to our own?
With all the ‘solutions’ offered for Sri Lanka being top-down technical fixes; the piles of bodies, the traumatised population and the sufferings of individuals and their communities remain largely ignored. Persistent ultra-nationalist political propaganda and a feudal obedience to the directives of their rulers appear to have hypnotised much of the population and deprived them of independent thought. Fantasies about ‘peace building’ that were never grounded in practical political mobilisation have not prevented the slow slide back into civil war for over a year now, albeit not yet formally acknowledged. What is desperately needed in the Sri Lankan context is a resurrection of moral responsibility, of conscience and recognition of what we have done to ourselves and to each other.
Daratt, the third feature from Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, focuses on unresolved issues that follow the decision of the Chadian Truth and Reconciliation Committee to grant amnesty to all those who robbed, raped and murdered during the country’s 37-year-long bitter civil war. After hearing the radio report of this failure of justice, his blind grandfather gives 16- year-old Atim a revolver and sends him off to kill the man who killed his father. Atim leaves his village for the capital N’djemena, to seek a man he does not know and soon locates him, the former war criminal Nassara who can no longer speak without a device pressed against his throat. Nassara is now married and has settled down as the owner of a small bakery. With the firm intention of killing him, Atim gets closer to Nassara under the guise of looking for work, and is hired as an apprentice. Nassara explains to Atim that bread has to be made with love if it is going to taste good. Intrigued by Atim’s attitude toward him, Nassara takes him under his wing and teaches him the secrets of making bread. Over the weeks a strange relationship evolves between the two. Despite his disgust, Atim seems to recognise in Nassara the father figure he has always needed, while Nassara sees the teenager as a potential son. One day he suggests adoption. The film ends with Atim’s brilliant, silent and unexpected decision which enables him to bring both his grandfather and Nassara a kind of justice, a kind of reconciliation.
When Mahamat-Saleh Haroun moved from journalism to filmmaking, his Bye Bye Africa won the First Feature prize at the Venice Film Festival. In 2002 he directed Abouna (Father) which was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Of his third feature Haroun says, “Daratt does not emerge from the civil war but from its consequences. What interests me is the landscape after the storm. Life forging on stubbornly amidst fields of ruins and ashes. How can people carry on living together after so much hate and violence? How do you react, faced with such impunity? Resign yourself to it or choose to mete out justice? And if you take the latter path, what does it mean to kill a man?â€Â
As film critic Roy Armes observes, Haroun’s cinematic language relies on ambiguities and absences. Its pervasive quietude and simplicity, which arise organically from the desert landscapes and the primary colours, light and darkness of the city; its violence heard but off screen; and its sparse dialogue; all require imaginative emotional engagement from the viewer. As with great drama down the centuries, what is suggested demands responses from our own experience to resonate with the symbolic and literal story unfolding before us. Daratt’s carefully composed style communicates through small gestures, physical spaces and interactions rather than contrived visual effects.
Daratt emerges, as it were, from the earth, from the personal, from the moral imperatives that make us human. The sensitivity, intelligence and beauty of this film contrasts painfully with the approach we have taken in Sri Lanka where, as George Orwell said in 1946, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.â€Â
We Sri Lankans also must create languages through which to address and redress the consequences of our bitter civil war; the disappearances, the torture, the mutilations, the robbery, rape and murder of bodies and of consciences. In a civil war everyone is a hostage, everyone a victim. We cannot continue to be hypocritical about the cost to each of us as individuals and to our society as a whole. Reconciliation and amnesty are not technical devices that can be implanted in our brains through conflict resolution, peace processes or road maps. They must start in the heart; they must be imagined and lived creatively. We need to allow ourselves spaces in which to reflect, rethink, reinvent and heal. Like Haroun, we need to take responsibility, to chronicle our country’s tragedy and shape a sensitive visual language which can regenerate our individual and communal moral capacities and the possibility of a society that can become sane again.
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Afroreggae, the favela-based Brazilian project, has trained young people from impoverished and violent communities using percussion, dance and song, bringing the energy and creativity of these abandoned youths to new options at home and to an international audience.
Sri Lankan society also has folk art forms of resistance, protest and social concern — in the North, South and East. For example, in the South in the colonial period the Kõlam masked folk dramas criticised and commented on social problems in performances such as Police e Kõlam, Arachchi Kõlama and many others.
After the 1956 Sinhala-only political restructuring and the 1972 constitutional reforms, a soviet style Sinhala regeneration effort was initiated to transform the South. Projects to improve agriculture, local industries and so on created the environment for an upsurge of nationalist, ethnic and religious self-righteousness. In her concert of the mid-70s, Srãvanãradhanã (Invitation to Listen), and in Saththeye Geethaya (Song of Truth) of the early 80s, Nanda Malani’s songs supported this exclusive Sinhala project. Later in the 80s, her Pãvĕna (Soft Wind) added oxygen to the JVP anti-government uprising. Even those who disagreed with her political line appreciated her melodies and many of the lyrics of her songs.
In the late 80s/early 90s the Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality (MIRJE) organised a concert called Nidinathi Nãdiyë Nadaya (Song of the Sleepless River). It was a huge event and included everyone from the highest profile performers to new groups of young musicians. Amongst them were Premasiri Kemadasa (the great Sri Lankan composer known for his classical as well as his popular music), Gamini Haththetuwegama (lecturer in English at the University of Peradiniya who introduced Street Drama as a mode of addressing social problems to the country), Sunila Abeysekara (actress of the late 70s, singer and human rights activist), Prasanna Abeysekara, (guitarist, singer and leader of a small Colombo band), Nidra Vittachchi (a singer in English), Granville Rodrigo (a great actor and singer) and Sunil Wijersiriwordane (a guitarist and cultural activist who had studied agriculture in Russia). One song was a localised rendition of Bob Dylan’s anti-Vietnam war Blowin’ in the Wind. There was even a performance of Bertold Brecht’s poem about Hitler’s Cabinet. The wide range of types of music, forms and voices — the cheerful, positive, profound, ironic and sarcastic mix — conveyed the optimism and determination behind the MIRJE movement. Unfortunately, it failed to build a country-wide movement and the tapes of this concert were not widely distributed. It seems that the only remaining record of this event is in the BBC World Service archives in London, taken out once in a while to play a song on the Sinhala Service.
In the early 90s, the singer Gunadasa Kapuge staged a concert titled Kampana (Vibration), an emotional evocation of the sorrows of the North-South war. He sang of the things that all Sri Lankans have in common; protested against ethnic, class, gender and caste discrimination; and mourned the thousands of people we have lost in the killings and disappearances, North, East and South. The encouragement these songs offered made them popular with all sectors of society and thousands attended his concerts, which were staged throughout the Southern part of the country. There was no chance of going to the North or East.
Jayathilake Bandara and many other performers contributed — as did Kemadasa’s fantastic song Killer — to the vision and the soundtrack of people’s hopes for a saner more peaceful future. The Gypsies’s peace songs of the early 90s were followed by the tremendously popular I Don’t Know Why in 2000, whose sarcastic lyrics observed the failures of management and the corruption which have condemned the nation to endless political crises and war.
Back to the Barbican — on the way home I am considering the failure of the many Sri Lankan peace initiatives: why is there no social language which allows those seeking a motherland and those defending a motherland to connect in a positive way? The theories and behaviour of the elites — national and international — bring nothing to the population as a whole. Despite the endless workshops, projects and reports, the peace industry in Sri Lanka has made no real progress. It has failed to connect to the realities on the ground and developed no link to the human resources or languages of popular society, struggle and creativity. The expensive projects and the overall impotence have only further revealed the underlying weaknesses of a society whose problems cannot be solved by bringing in outsiders; they cannot rescue us from this deadly paralysis which neither brings us together nor moves us on.
Why have our inspiring concerts, our protest songs and our activist musicians had so little lasting impact? Why have Sri Lanka’s decades of suffering failed to produce internationally recognised performers like Hugh Masekela and Afroreggae? Why is there no Sri Lankan equivalent to the venerable protester Thomas Mapfumo of Zimbabwe, or the young campaigners like Emmanuel Jal, rap emissary of Southern Sudan, or K’Naan from Somalia?
Many look to Nelson Mandela’s success in leading South Africa’s peaceful transition from Apartheid to freedom as a model to follow in their own circumstances. What the Sri Lankan peace industry fails to see is that Mandela did not rely on ethnic loyalties or tribal ties. His appeal and his wisdom recognised that the South African struggle was a political struggle; that all sectors of the population needed to work together to resist their oppression. This inclusiveness opened the space for artists, musicians, dramatists and other activists to contribute their skills and their passion for change — however dangerous it was to do so. Their efforts led eventually to international outrage, which in turn contributed to the end of the Apartheid regime.
Malcolm X once said that the social movement needs to be strong like the brain and gentle like the heart; the one for strategy, the second to mobilise and build the capacity and the spirit of resistance. The work of the Black struggle must be like electricity: moving everywhere, invisible but powering the light.
Similar Posts:]]>An email arrives from my friend Sathyajith Maitipe. He has just received instructions from the Censorship Board to remove the sexual scenes from his film, even if he expects to get an Adults Only certificate. This is no surprise; similar demands have been made of other filmmakers: Ashoka Handagama (Aksharaya / Letter from the Fire) and Prasanna Vithanage (Purahada Kaluwara / Darkness of the Full Moon) in the past. In this small response to Sathyajith’s situation I shall not write about film criticism or censorship, but I do want to share some of my first reactions.
Image courtesy Scent of the Lotus Pond website
I saw Bora Diya Pokuna (Scent of the Lotus Pond) at a private preview at the Russian Culture Centre in Colombo. There are many levels at which one can read this film, particularly in the context of modern Sri Lankan cinema. Using the style and forms of the great Buddhist Jathaka narratives, Maitipe addresses issues such as the economic crisis, poverty, gender discrimination, desire and sexual politics — all crucial to the current state of our society. For me, these reincarnations of Jathaka-style stories give us many insights into contemporary society and it is incomprehensible to me that the cultural authorities should want to prevent us engaging with them.
The Sri Lankan Public Performance Board operates under the Ministry of Defence. Their brief is to keep an eye on anything they considered might damage Culture or interfere with National Security. It strikes me as ironically amusing that this authority thinks it can protect national culture and security by banning several sex scenes from a film. Whose culture are they trying to protect? Who’s security? The fantasy that the Public Performance Board is protecting us from insidious influences by banning the creative contribution of an astute filmmaker reveals the macabre contradictions that are destroying our country. With the enormous damage to human beings and to culture in Sri Lanka unfolding daily, the two orders of destruction somehow do not compute.
Last month in Geneva the Human Rights Council expressed its concern about the internal displacement of 300,000 people in the past 18 months and the thousands of abductions, extrajudicial killings and the general humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka. The chairman of the Presidential Committee on Disappearances says: Last six months 430 killings, 2120 Abductions and disappearances. And last week members of the UN Security Council equated the crucial tragedy in Sri Lanka with those in Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.
The sheer weight of these seemingly endless disasters has encouraged widespread amnesia in the country itself, compounded by the difficulty of determining what is real and what myth is in the highly charged militarised, sectarian and bigoted atmosphere.
Protecting Culture? Is this banning of sex scenes not a distortion of what is essentially a political not a cultural problem? It is a political question because it is a question of how political power controls culture. But there is also a cultural question— about our relationship with the present political power structure.
Sexuality can hardly be considered absent from Sri Lankan culture! Our ancient literature, religious texts and rituals, folk customs and cultures, art, music and dance, all are deeply imbued with sexual references and representations. Sexuality has always been essential to our culture; in fact, much of our classical erotic literature was written by Buddhist monks. As an institution, the traditional Buddhist temple has long had its internal and external sexual politics. The State too has sexual politics: a good example being the glorification of the frescoes at Sigiriya with their overtly sexual and secular representations of ample maidens serving their earthly lords. However, this note is not about the history of our erotic culture.
As mentioned earlier in the UN and other statistics; displacements, disappearances, abductions, assassinations, round-ups, raids and rapes — none, apparently, threats to National Security — are entirely acceptable in Sri Lanka under the category of Patriotism. We are assured, however, that the government is sincerely and relentlessly engaged in liberating us from all insecurities, so we should be grateful to them that they include sex amongst the insidious enemies from which we must be protected!
A last observation: over the past two months more than 100 unidentified, mutilated, decapitated and burned bodies have been found in Colombo and the surrounding region. Abductions take place in full daylight, often in the High Security zones protected by the government. These phenomena, however, are clearly far less dangerous than glimpses of intimacy between lovers in a couple serious works of cinema.
This oppressive and pernicious contradiction has historical precedents: the Nazis famously burned tens of thousands of books to protect German Culture; the State in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil eliminated the intellectual class in the period of the Generals; similar slaughters occurred closer to home in China and Cambodia. As books are no longer the main means of circulating modern culture, the attack is now on cinema. We are forced, or at least inclined to conclude that the methods of fascism have not changed greatly since the last century.
©PR
July 2007
- Scent of the Lotus Pond: Censoring art or protecting culture?
- Freedom to create, censorship and the future of Sri Lankan cinema: an anecdote
- In conversation with Iranganie Serasinghe: Environmentalist and cinematic icon
- Sri Lanka’s Dirty War
- Between The Artist and Hugo: Nostalgia for what cinema is really about
On reading this new book, I was immediately reminded of R. A. Brohier’s books Seeing Ceylon (1965) and Discovering Ceylon (1973) and of Martin Wickramasinghe’s Kalunkla Seveema (In Search of a Panacea) (1950). The reflections which follow are not a proper review but more a set of reactions, as idiosyncratic and personal as the book itself.
Tissa is an outstanding writer both Sinhala and English, with a gift for poetic expression which began in his childhood and has become more powerful and sophisticated as he has aged. This book, neither predominantly academic nor poetical, is written in a language which uses both modes. Nor is it chronological or methodological in its research and reflections. With profound insight and no apparent effort, Tissa deconstructs modern Sri Lankan discourses, showing us how hybrid is our island culture, indicating our weaknesses but not condemning us for the narrow-mindedness of our preoccupations.
The first section of the book deals with the Kotte period, followed by a series of pieces on contemporary Sri Lankan music, then poetry and finally thoughts on visual arts, national traits and cinema. It appears sometimes to be a collection of articles; sometimes a meditation on his personal work and interactions with world culture, art and history; and sometimes a conflation of his internal discourse with the unfolding of events during his lifetime. Flashbacks into the thousands of years of Sri Lankan history occur in the midst of commentaries on present day subjects, moving back and forth like a cultural time machine.
The early part of this book about the historical Kotte period is politically the most interesting. Unlike other kingdoms of the past, whose ruins are now international tourist attractions, no physical traces remain of the Kotte era but a rich literature, especially the Sandesha Kavya (message poetry), has survived to the present day. The Kotte kingdom ended when it was overthrown by the Portuguese in 1505.
Tissa is struck by the fact that hardly any of the surviving complexes of temples and religious institutions from later periods have any trace of secular life. Seeking such evidence, Tissa has discovered in the historical and archaeological records that the first traces of secular life are found from the Sigiriya and Polunnaruwa periods onward. During the Polunnaruwa era, King Prakkramabahu tried to enhance the feudal system by developing and building up secular life, but many historians have observed that these large scale projects took ordinary people off the land in service to the king, leaving no one to tend or harvest their crops. As a result these schemes were unpopular with the farmers and craftspeople and overall did not succeed. The last of these failures at secular innovation was during the reign of the last king of the Kandyan era, Sri Wickramarajasinghe.
Despite considerable complex archaeological and historical evidence, the ethno-nationalist project of recent decades channels interpretations of our island’s past into the narrow lens of Sinhala-only accomplishments, considering the Mahavamsa to be the sole authoritative text on Sri Lankan history. From the works of archaeologists H.C.P. Bell, Senarath Paranavithana and Daraniyagala to those of Sudharshan Senevirathne and the parallel investigations of many historians, a much wider perspective is opened on our past and present. Surely the time is long overdue for Sri Lankan scholars and cultural commentators to initiate analyses similar to those of the Indian Subaltern Studies Group. So far, Sri Lankan academics have followed in the intellectual footsteps of colonial historian, accepting their imperial misinterpretations. We have failed to generate any truly post-colonial studies of our social or cultural evolution, unwilling to go beyond the ethno-nationalist glorification of a Sinhala-only viewpoint.
By contrast, Tissa tracks the events of our history cinematically, moving through maps, folklore, historical and archaeological studies, interpreting as he goes along in a vivid personal manner. Whether we agree with him or not, his argument is so interesting and clever that we await the evidence which will confirm his speculations.
In the second part of the book, Tissa looks at developments in Sri Lankan music from the 1940s to the present time. He covers what is known as the gramophone phenomenon, the policies of the Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) and the attempts to develop and experiment with musical traditions by a range of different composers and performing musicians. He is particularly interested in the work of Devar Sooriyasena, Ananda Samarkoon, Sunil Shanta, C.T Fernando, B.S. Perera and Neville Fernando. These artists were experimenting with Western music in combination with Sri Lankan and Indian folk traditions. At the time the acceptable music was predominantly Hindustani and little space was available for other approaches. Nonetheless, many of the songs these composers wrote became and remain popular. Tissa’s observation about the obligatory piano in the middle class sitting room for the dissemination of gramophone and radio songs adds a class dimension to his analysis. However, I am sorry to see that Premasiri Kemadasa’s and Sarath Dasanayake’s film music, the wonderful Clarence Wijewardane and other popular groups are left out of the account.
As most access to music was available through the radio, Tissa looks at some of the internal struggles within the SLBC, where various individuals promoted certain music according to their personal interests and connections rather than the inherent quality of the compositions. Tissa points out how many of these selections and approaches actually damaged the development of Sri Lankan music. (If, by comparison, we look at the development of West African music during the same period, infused with influences from Latin America, the blues, jazz, etc., we can appreciate what a loss it has been to our tradition for apparatchiks to impede the freedom of creative musicians through rigid broadcasting policies.)
The institutional paranoia which plays out through such decisions reflects an insecurity about the resilience and flexibility of Sri Lankan culture; the argument often being that a piece of art which seems experimental will be damaging to our culture. Such rigidity and fear may reflect subjection to the long history of sequential colonialisms, all of which denigrated and despised local traditions and culture and insisted on the superiority of those of Europe and elsewhere. Another example was the 43 Group, which included Lionel Wendt, George Keyts, Justine Daraniyagala, Ivan Peiris and Richard Gabriel, intellectual and artistic innovators strongly resisted and resented by the cultural authorities. The librarian and intellectual historian, H.A I. Gunathilake, assembled a large collection of articles written against The 43 Group which are now in the Peradiniya University library.
A further example pertains to Sri Lanka drama. In 1956 Professor Ediriweera Sarchchandra’s historical play Maname retold Buddhist Jataka stories and folk tales, combining the classical Sri Lankan poetic language with nadagam music, resuscitating the ancient form. Maname was massively popular with the cultural authorities and was declared to be authentically Sri Lankan, becaming the template or formula for subsequent productions. When Bandula Jayawardana wrote his adaptation of a Sophocles drama Berahanda (Sound of the Drum) in 1961 using colloquial expressions from the South and the language of ordinary people, there was a huge outcry. Bandula was condemned and his play severely criticised as not being authentically Sri Lankan since neither the language nor the music followed the established formats.
In this second part of the book, Tissa also talks a lot about jazz, its history and development in Sri Lanka. His ability to appreciate the trajectory of original Sri Lankan music, from Devar Sooriyasena to Harsha Makalanda to Pradeep Ratnayake, gives a picture of the scope and depth of cultural developments largely suppressed and ignored by the authorities. These insights are not abstract observations or opinions, but the reflections of a skilled filmmaker whose attention to detail avoids all superficial commentary and conveys a profound sensitivity to the music he discusses.
The third section of the book is about poetry: the folk poetry passed down through the generations as an oral tradition; the European and Sri Lankan classics; and modern political poetry including the Sri Lankan poets writing in English which has never been adequately appreciated. He also looks at the more obvious influence of traditional Indian and Tamil poetries in the development of Sri Lankan styles and formats. Tissa is interested in how modern poets have adapted classical Sinhala genres as well as those of English and Western poetry to address contemporary issues. His discussion includes the graffiti poems at Sigiriya; the classical Sinhala poems of the Parakumba siritha, Wannam and Nadagam; the Tower Hall Theatre songs to Ananda Samarakoon’s songs; Wordsworth; Regi Siriwardena; Gajaman nona; Sirilal Kodikara; Mahagama Seakara; Yasmin Gunarathne, Reyenzi Crazh; S. Mahinda and Pablo Neruda.
The fourth section of the book is a hodgepodge of articles on various subjects – everything from the nature of patriotism and our national anthem to questions of censorship and freedom of expression, from German expressionist cinema to the films of Tarkovsky and Wim Wenders. The chapters are not held together by a central argument, but are more like adventures in thought, cinematically cutting from one image to another, creating a mood but not a conclusion.
In these appreciations Tissa is trying to cohere the many strands of influence, style, genre, classical and hybrid forms and the politics of Sri Lankan life, sharing his personal emotional and intellectual responses and opening a wider appreciation of the rich context which gives rise to and sustains the essential dimensions of our historical and contemporary culture. He is interested in the way innovations disrupt received and official views, pushing the development and possibilities at different moments in the long history of an art form.
His attitude and arguments can be compared to those of E.J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition. That analysis is relevant to the Sri Lankan experience in which certain individuals have introduced forms of art, music, literature, theatre and film claiming that they represent our traditions, when in reality they are only a matter of personal taste. These then become official and are considered to be rooted in history. To date there has been no systematic study which deals with the origins and perpetuation of our modern cultural discourses from the early 20th century to the present time. Although it is episodic and idiosyncratic, this new book from Tissa Abeysekera contributes significantly to the possibility of such a project.
Although a few of us are mentioned, what troubles me and is missing from this fascinating and engaging book is an interest in the experience of my own generation: the young people who have suffered most from the political upheavals, language policies, ethno-nationalism and civil wars which afflict our country and have impacted so heavily on us. True, he includes in his discussion of Sri Lankan cinema the work of Prasanna Vithanage, Ashoka Hadagama, Vimukthi Jayasundara, and Sudath Mahadeulawewa. But I am puzzled by the absence of any reference to the major events of 1958, 1971, 1983 and 1989, the huge numbers of creative people who have lost to exile and the present return to war. Many works of art, and art movements have been stimulated by and responded to these tumultuous times, amongst them the No Order Group Jagath Weresinghe, Chandragupta Theanuwara, Kingsley Gunathilaka and Anoli Perera. And where are the poets V. I. S. Jayapalan and Chearan, or the paintings of Shanatahnan and Kiko? One cannot expect a total catalogue perhaps, but the absence of these important contributions is strange and, to my view, very sad.
Perhaps even more surprising, key works of his own generation A. Sivanandan’s great novel When Memory Dies, the poetry of Dominic Jeewa and of M. S. Numann, the music of R. Muththuswamy have escaped his attention. Tissa seems equally unaware of the developments in Tamil and Muslim literature or even the contributions made by Tamil lyricists like Augustus Vineyagarathnem to Sinhala songs in the period he deals with.
Despite my delight in the scope and depth of this excellent book, it sparks such questions in my mind. I hope that Tissa will return to examine these strands in our history and discourses and provide as exciting and insightful an account of these missing elements, so essential to a comprehensive view of the country’s rich culture.
Similar Posts:]]>Considering this Vesak ceremony of denial, it is sobering to watch Lisa Kois’s Art of Forgetting which covers the past thirty years of brutal civil wars and assassinations in the North, East and South of Sri Lanka. The subject of this documentary is the impact and scale of human suffering for people caught in the clash between those demanding a motherland and those defending a motherland. The absence of any vision or concern for the overall sanity of the country is due to the fact that civil society has no institutions capable of contributing to resolution of this conflict.
Lisa’s use of Albert Camus’s phrase the art of forgetting as her title epitomises the experience of these dark decades in Sri Lanka’s history. During this time, Sinhala Buddhists have characterised their nation as Free, Beautiful and Triumphant. But the reality is light years away from these fabrications. The sheer weight of endless disasters has encouraged widespread amnesia, compounded by the difficulty of determining what is real and what is myth in the highly charged sectarian and bigoted atmosphere. As a consequence, many people have lost the ability to remember accurately or interpret the past and have become experts in forgetting their own and their compatriots’ sufferings, usually in a matter of weeks. Nonetheless, one day the traumatic collective memories of these times will emerge to challenge the brutal system that destroyed lives, values, a sense of a future and the sanity of a nation.
Lisa constructs her film as a journey from the North to the South of the country, travelling along the one road that unites the country, the A9, which was opened after the 2002 ceasefire. She meets people from all sides who have been affected by the catastrophe and manages to convey their innocence and helplessness. Beyond the suffering they have experienced Lisa is interested in their courage and resilience, their determination to survive with whatever dignity they can under dreadful circumstances. This is revealed in the small things they have rescued from their personal tragedies: the cheerful camaraderie of a murdered schoolgirl’s friends; the laughter with which a man displays a mortar he has been saving as a souvenir; the poignant account of his torture by an ex-Buddhist monk; a young woman’s memories of her murdered student leader boyfriend; and the smile on the face of a young Tamil girl in her white school uniform, whose hopes echo the same timid optimism that each generation over these decades has clung to and then lost.
But Lisa does not only see the desolation of the people. She also shows the hopeless state of ravaged buildings, the small shrines in the derelict, bombed out remains of once revered temples and the debris of normal domestic life, shoes, pots and pans, scraps of clothing.
Lisa’s techniques include soft focus frames, voices off, rapid editing and devastating detail; such as the bullet-pocked house in Jaffna with Sinhalese graffiti expressing the frustrations of the occupying soldiers; elsewhere Tamil graffiti encouraging the devastated local people to stay true to their struggle for liberation. In all places, on every side, the distraught tears of mothers. Even the music Lisa chooses for her soundtrack adds emotional, sensitive, sometimes ironic dimensions to her evocation of the country’s complex tragedy.
The significance of this film lies in the way it manages to capture so many facets of Sri Lanka’s past thirty years of riots, disappearances, assassinations and wars, declared and undeclared, in a semiotics of prejudice. The Sinhala majority, in its extraordinary denial, constantly tries to bury this history and the current tragic situation, whether in chauvinist cultural events or in the expectation recently that a win by the cricket team will demonstrate the moral superiority of the nation. Meanwhile, a huge campaign of state-managed propaganda promotes war and makes bigoted politicians celebrities of slaughter. Similar bombastic claims are made by all sides.
This film represents a serious contribution and a challenge to the previous practices of Sri Lankan documentary filmmakers. As Brecht found in 1934, the struggle to rescue reality from propaganda demands: ‘the courage to write the truth although it is being suppressed; the intelligence to recognise it, although it is being covered up; the judgement to choose those in whose hands it becomes effective; the cunning to spread it among them.’
© PR 2007
Editors note: There’s an excellent facilitation guide to the film, authored by Lisa Kois herself, available for download here. (Full colour PDF, 2.4Mb)
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