I write this as a response to Concerned Citizen’s comments on the public lecture and discussion  on the Burning of the Jaffna Public Library led by  Silan Kadirgamar held at ICES a few days ago, recounting those pre-’83 days days of terror and terrorism.

In order to break the silence that concerned citizen her/himself is propagating, I will write in one of my many names.

Concerned Citizen says that the discussion was paltry and diverted attention from any comparison with current political developments being drawn; one of them obviously is the issue of accountability as regards the last phase of the war. I had a very different experience sitting through the event. And that experience I would say is theoretically registered through a critical phenomenological mode.

For me the most important aspect of the lecture and discussion was what was unstated, but nevertheless poignantly implicit. It was not one of your regular forums full of the bizarre jargon fashionable among NGO and now government circles, like ‘stakeholders,’ ‘civil society response’ etc. When Kadirgamar narrated the story of MIRJE and its unpretentious beginnings, we began to ponder concerns regarding how everything needed to have a proposal these days before one could act, about stakeholders, output and outcome. What his lecture in a way asked for at a deep seated political and theoretical way was: an intimate engagement with what’s going on in conflict situations.

He spoke for himself, as a Tamil, an academic and activist. He did not speak for others. He spoke of the spiraling violence of those few days in which he became not just an analyst but a victim, a participant and an agent.  He said with humility and introspection ‘In the aftermath of those few days, from ’81-’85, I wanted a Tamil Eelam.’ There was no rage, pride or shame in his words. For him the situation demanded analysis for the questions and answers emanating from that situation reverberate to this day in multiple ways. What happened between 31^st May to 3^rd June 1981? What had happened to the state? And importantly, what happened to us? Later he said, in conclusion, ‘we are all terrorists. When I contribute to state funds to bomb our households, do I become a terrorist?’ For me, who saw family become actively engaged in nationalism and the LTTE, in the post-Public Library era, this triggered other critical questions.

These were the questions stated and unstated that I found most touching in the presentation. To go back to my initial articulation, it was the stress on the personal, the subjective and the witness account that made every person seated there, wanting to say something, yet feeling inadequate and overwhelmed. A woman seated near me said, ‘I was there when it happened. I was a student at the University.’ ‘Why are you here?’ she asked my friend from the south who would have been three-odd years old in ‘81.

Concerned Citizen says that several respondents deliberately diverted attention from the political and from the event’s relevance to what is going on today. And I disagree. I did not think there was any deliberate attempt on the part of the commanding naval officer of that time who was present there to draw a red herring. He had a story to tell and he told it. In fact I must say I enjoyed listening to what he said. When Jolly Somasundaram intervened to say that there was a commission during Chandrika’s time that looked into the events of the burning of the Public Library and a public apology tendered by the then President, he was not trying to white wash the involvement of the state in any way. There were others, like Mr. Sirithunge, who stressed the need to reflect on what is going on now. With a chill I recall a loud assertion coming from the audience during discussion: Accountability! Accountability!

Overall, it was the poignant understatement of the lecture and its recounting of activism that kept the audience in thrall, silent and articulate. It is to Kadirgamar’s credit that he did not push the parallels between the public library event 30 years ago and the current political predicament too much. For one, the lecture was about reflection on issues of accountability, on the part of the state and the individual. Secondly, for me, I am glad he did not use the event as a platform to air grievances, though he laid the blame for it all at the door of the state in quite unequivocal terms. He gave the heinous act of terrorism of 1981 its due place in history, without making it a handmaiden to our preoccupations today.  And yet, precisely because he did not overemphasize the parallels between then and now, the poignancy and the event’s relevance for contemporary events became greater.

Concerned citizen speaks of the silence of the audience. For me the silence was not born of fear. Nor was it a silence of disengagement and annoyance. It was a thoughtful silence. It is like when you had watched a disturbing film. You want to get away and think of its import. And credit for that goes to Silan Kadirgamar and his accomplices!

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by sumathy

ooo, how sad that
thing called a sri lankan-thing
who
thinging this thing of
of englees or inglisss
has no capacity, no?
for funny funny joking thing
in the morning,
day, evening or
night. only thing
he, boyfriend, can find is thing
that, thing this, and good old papa shakes
peare, no great shakes
but sitting on the fence of the globe, passing on
this or that thing frommm
eliza to james, accumulating
primitively othello’s thing? of course,
this is way above the ways of pearl,
bin dalen or the pumpkin lovers of the
fricative z, but
write i, nevertheless, of
the base indian, richer than all his tribe,
this thing, no caring no, meyler’s
injunction against poetry
in the sri lankan
that thing.

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19th may. you have nothing
to say? i can only
falteringly
mouth, nothing of ….
nothing begets nothing, a king says, and
launches a war
against garrulous daughters and sulking ones;
and i think of an
other daughter, too too loud or too soft,
of other wars and other deaths, slipped between
a pillow and its case, a letter, a bomb, a whisper, slipped
between the familiar and the family, the nation and its engender.

on 19th may, 1991, sivaramani,
took her own positive life, her cry strangled
with that strenuous cord, blazing a trail of blood
of the nation and its many stories;
300, 000 slipped between
a miserable soul-dead wretch, who
would not take his life and the dark
of a storm shelling sky, a black and blue sea,
dotted with doom, a king
without daughters striking those
‘[trojans =delete] crushed between sea and sky’,
a tale slipped between waiting and waking,
an impossible 30-years;
18 years later.

*sivaramani the poet committed suicide in 1991, after burning to cinders much of her poetry, a few days before dhanu detonated herself to annihilate rajiv gandhi. though translated much and celebrated as an activist and a woman poet, the significance of her incisive and multi faceted critique of the nation is rarely spoken of.

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the parrots displaced.

we wondered about why they cut the tree down. the parrots found another home.

this morning we woke up to the sound of a humming drill. a shed with an asbestos cover
stood in its place.

my old school had a bicycle shed like that.

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1

i am not a writer

i am not a writer
nor am i under siege,
i do not frequent
the commons, nor the
poetic corner.

2

i, savage

why do i write
when i had promised myself
aching silence
after kethesh’s fall
and maheswary’s stunted end?
why talk suddenly
of the siege now,
when i have stood at
death’s door,
refused its dare
and now can finally
slumber,
in a snow stirring fantasy
surrounding turkey’s trouble
with its torture
chambers, lulled by the
bewitching tones of
orhan’s magic?

why the artist
and the writer and colombo’s array
of poets, rushing to versify,
riding on
guilt ridden stirrings of the heart,
of us and them?
it’s a tale told
by an idiot, and yet,
signifying so much,
a tale told a countless
times, to still the night,
to strike terror into the
hearts of recalcitrant babes,
a tale about ‘us
and them’, jehan’s
white prayer, ‘lead
not into temptation
but guard us
from the murderous
tribe and a tragic end,
the tamil way.’ (1)

i, savage, long
out of siege, trapped in the
sanctuaries of the polite talk
of the court, of
murder, massacre and the masque
of death, break
open the seal on my
spiritless sleep,
my fast with wounding words, to
drown in the play of the puppets of
the shadow world, a chorus
of pleading demons
clutching at
my heart.

and yes,
douglas too,
in his arms bearing career, unlike
indran’s measured prose, (2)
is, was, and will
always be
one of
us.

(1) the reference for this phrase is the following line by jehan perera: ‘ the challenge facing sri lankan society as a whole today is to avoid the tragic fate of tamil society.’ in himal southasia february 2009.

(2) this reference to douglas devananda and his arms bearing career is a response to the poem ‘By Other Means’ that indran sent in for publication initially, where he says,
‘Devananda
ride an
armored carrier
up the A-9,
on Jaffna
High Street, ….’

3

easter, 2009

as i lie still
in an unquiet rest,
the bright brusque midday sun
descending into a dull glow,
the fluted tones of ‘it’s a
small world after all’, drifting through
the yellowed pane, breaks
into my reverie, to conclude on
a dying note, the cheery tune,

and i refuse
once more
to write of war torn limbs, bodies
scattered far apart, scarred foetuses, and
the white flag, burning in the
whiter sun, held aloft by a fleeing
refugee, in the desert sand;
i can write only
of my own otherness and
the survival of a song, drafting
words of fleeting fancy on the
canvas of my thought.
i refuse to sing any requiem
for me and my own.

For more information, click here.

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