War Harvest: Can There Be Such A Thing As A Post-Conflict Society?

Volume 9Copyright 2008

SOUTH A SIAN AME RIC AN WRITI NG

page layout-volume 9:page layout 12/7/08 12:16 PM Page 3

From the Editor

Sri Lanka: Imagined and Re-imagined by All Who Call it Home

Many years ago, in 1995, when Sunaina Maira and I were collecting mate-rial for our co-edited collection Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map NorthAmerica (1996), we contacted several writers of Sri Lankan origin and invit-ed submissions. One writer resisted, saying that she did not wish to be tok-enized in a collection that she suspected would be dominated by writers ofIndian origin. We emphasized that we were acutely aware of the unfortu-nate slippage between "South Asian" and "Indian" and were doing every-thing in our power to ensure a robust presence of writers whose originsspanned all the nations of South Asia. We acknowledged that our networkswere not uniformly substantial, that, yes, we did know more writers ofIndian origin than of other South Asian countries, but we were not trying toconceal the inadequacies of our connections and were in fact calling atten-tion to them in an effort to interrogate the reasons for the situation and ini-tiate necessary structural changes. This Sri Lankan writer, however, wasdetermined not to be drawn in. We did include other writers of Sri Lankanorigin, but I have never forgotten the justified critique of the one who didnot wish to participate. In some ways, then, this special issue of Catamaran,with its focus on writers and artists from Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan dias-pora, is a long overdue response to that accusation of thirteen years ago.Even before that time, Naheed Islam had written of the diminishment ofBangladeshi voices in South Asian forums. Unfortunately, the situation hasgotten only marginally better, and South Asia still often gets conflated withIndia. We hope that this issue of Catamaran will lead to future issues thatfocus on the many countries of South Asia that do not typically get the spot-light. For this issue, the stage is Sri Lanka's. Samir Dayal's introduction asthe guest editor of this issue offers a rich overview of the historical and cur-rent complex of forces that have shaped and continue to influence the cul-ture, politics, and economics of Sri Lanka. His remarks open the door onthis remarkable island nation and the imagined national communities of itsdiasporic citizens.

Rajini Srikanth,General Editor


A Small Pl ace:Introducing A Special Issue on Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is a small place, an island dwarfed in sheer size by its huge neigh-bor to the north, India. The two countries’ histories have been inextricablylinked, and not only since Independence—as key texts such as the Ramayanabear witness. In the more contemporary annals of globalization, Sri Lankais often treated as a mere punctuation mark at the foot of the subcontinent.“India Rising” is the slogan there, and if the sun is shining on India (settingaside China for the moment), Sri Lanka is often relegated to the shadows.As the “Asian century” dawns, following the purported decline of theAmerican century, what is the status and what is the future of the SriLankan state? How will it move beyond the deadlock of its ongoing civilwar and discover its path to the future? Does the future of Sri Lanka dependon the international community underwriting the sovereignty of the stateand effectively quelching the claims of the Tamil minorities in favor of theSinhala citizens? It is hard even to think of what might constitute an “objec-tive” account of the present, let alone of the future. Indeed, Qadri Ismail inAbiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place and Postcoloniality (Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 2005) goes so far as to argue that as an epistemological object,an object of study, “Sri Lanka” is not a given. It must be constituted in thevery act of understanding it: one might call this a radical constructionism,and it is a point worth taking seriously even if one is not a philosopher oracademic, precisely because there are so many discrepant constructions ofwhat kind of thing “the Sri Lankan nation” is, and what kind of politicalobject “a Sri Lankan” is whether at home or in diaspora. And what is therelation of each to “South Asia” or “South Asian American”?

Even if we bracket the issue of the construction of nation and ofcitizen, other questions of the present and the future of “Sri Lanka” persist.And those questions are inescapably complicated by the fact that there are avariety of perspectives: the claim to a separate homeland from the SriLankans on the one hand, and on the other the opposition and resentmentof the Sri Lankan Burgher communities and more significantly of theSinhala majority. Such resentments are intensified by the perception thatthe Tamils of Sri Lanka—and most notably the Liberation Tigers of TamilEelam (LTTE)—receive substantial material support from Tamils in India.


Opposition Tamil groups in Tamil Nadu (a state in South India whereTamils are the dominant group) for their part accuse the Indian PrimeMinister Manmohan Singh of exerting pressure through Congress to thebenefit of the Sri Lankan government. The Indian government’s support forthe Sri Lankan state needs to be understood, however, not just in terms of amotivated decision against Tamils whether in Sri Lanka or at home. Thegame is much more complex, for it has to do with India’s ambition to posi-tion itself as a global power. It is a game on a par with the Great Game ofthe old days when powers of the colonial era jockeyed for power in SouthAsia and later when the United States inserted itself into the equation.

Yet if the Indian government’s transnational political calculus can becalled a game, there’s nothing funny about it—especially if regarded in thelight of the terrible terrorist attacks India has recently suffered. As I write this,the policy wonk discourse circulating around this episode of terrorism impli-cates extremist Islamicist elements linked with Pakistan and Afghanistan suchas Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad and of course Al-Qaeda. PrimeMinister Manmohan Singh has suggested that the perpetrators are “external”actors, but it is clear that they were supported by a large and developed net-work and were well-organized (they used GPS, mobile and satellite phonesand were in contact with parties in at least one “foreign nation” not identifiedby the police at the time of this writing). The Mumbai bombings and shoot-ings will inevitably be followed by a hardening of India’s stance on issues ofnational security, state sovereignty and the claims of political insurgents of allstripes. There will also be broader implications for India-Pakistan relations,which have until recently been improving. We are already seeing that the U.S.and Israel are being drawn into measures to ensure greater regional security.For India playing in the “game” means among other things working to estab-lish itself as regional leader by cultivating international partnerships such aswith the U.S. and Israel, and seeking support and policy consensus frommultinational bodies such as the UN, or even from organizations of whichIndia is not a member, such as the G8, the European Union (EU) and theAssociation of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

In this connection, it has to be said that international consensus isincreasingly, and understandably, aligning against insurgent forces, guerillagroups, or any other organizations that can easily be tarred with the epithetof “terrorist” organizations. And this has implications for India’s policy with


regard to Tamil insurgents against the Sri Lankan state. The tendency todisapprove of the LTTE’s strategies and tactics has been in the ascendant atthe level of the U.S., the UN and among the member states of the EU. Asa case in point, the EU issued an official ban on the LTTE in May 2006.The central government in India has been anxious to appear on the rightside of history in this and other regional conflicts. These have included con-flicts in the North with Pakistan and Afghanistan, or until recently withChina over the status of Tibet and the Dalai Lama. India’s history with SriLanka has been no less convoluted.

Of course, in its bid to achieve global player status the Indian gov-ernment has also to be cautious with its internal and regional constituencies,not just with EuroAmerican partners or with major parties in global nego-tiation such as the G8, the UN, the EU, and so on. To the criticism fromwithin India (such as criticism from opposition groups in Tamil Nadu) thatthe Indian government has intervened improperly in Sri Lankan politics onthe side of the Sri Lankan state, Manmohan Singh himself has responded ina recent interview that such charges of the Indian government’s desire tothrow its weight around in the South Asia region is a “mindset of the past.”He has argued that these are attitudes we need to “jettison” in favor ofgreater regional unity among the 1.4 billion people of South Asia. India,Singh asserts, is reducing international barriers and promoting exchange atvarious levels among the eight member-states of the South AsianAssociation for Regional Co-operation(SAARC). There are everydayreminders of the increasing contact between these neighbors including near-ly 120 weekly airline flights to Sri Lanka from India; and most tourists toSri Lanka, he points out, are Indian. Indeed Sri Lanka is touted as a specialinstance of regional economic cooperation, since the signing of the India-SriLanka Free Trade Agreement in March 2000, which positioned Sri Lankaas India’s largest trade partner in the SAARC region (to the tune of US$ 3.3billion in 2007) and continuing through the Comprehensive EconomicPartnership Agreeement (CEPA) between India and Sri Lanka.

Still, there is no denying that the Indian government’s official pro-motion of trade and exchange benefits primarily the Sri Lankan government,and not the Tamil minority, who have agitated for a separate homeland(Eelam) on the island ever since ethnic divisions emerged soon afterIndependence, many of these divisions having to do with land issues that


impacted plantation workers. The political tensions on the island have beenon low boil or worse for several decades now, with tens of thousands being“disappeared” or killed during the last two decades, and ten times that num-ber going into voluntary or forced exile, especially to the West. This consti-tutes a significant global diaspora in North America, as well as in ContinentalEurope, Britain, and Australia. Yet Sri Lankans are often underrepresented ormarginalized even within the South Asian diaspora. Today the Sri Lankangovernment of President Mahinda Rajapaksa holds most of the cards innational and international political negotiations. For instance, the governmenthas successfully argued that international humanitarian organisations mustwithdraw from key battle zones; the argument hinges on the government’ssovereignty in such matters regarding internal affairs in Sri Lanka.

As a primarily “guerilla” operation, the LTTE is often assimilated tothe category of “terrorist”—and not just in the international discourse of theEU but even in a popular South Asian film such as Santosh Sivan’s 1998 filmThe Terrorist (although that film it should be admitted also humanized theTamil fighters by focusing on a beautiful young woman as would-be suicide“terrorist” who is redeemed by a choice of life over death). This has made itdifficult for Tamils to garner international sympathy, which goes almost bydefault to the government. The international Norwegian-led peace processculminating in the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement (CFA), dissidence within theTamil groups about whether the LTTE truly speaks for all Sri Lankan Tamilsand the common good, as well as internecine divisions regarding the militarystrategy of the LTTE fighters—all of these developments have also reducedthe mandate of the LTTE under the leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Thus theTamil Eelam votaries remain the underdogs in Sri Lanka, and this demand isthe focal point of the three-way tension within the country. There is a risk inthe exclusion of non-partisan international human rights observers and organ-izations including Amnesty International from battle zones in Sri Lanka onthe grounds that the center enjoys sovereignty. The risk is that the humanrights of Tamils can be trampled upon with impunity.

Partly out of a desire to counter the customary demonization of theSri Lankan Tamil (often collapsed into the image of the Tamil Tiger as bogey-man) in the international imaginary, and partly because we believe that it is agood thing to question or rethink all motivated “constructions” of Sri Lanka(whether partisan, reactionary, or just conventionalist), and because we would


like to make a small gesture in the direction of pluralism and openness to a vari-ety of points of view, we are pleased to be able to say that this special issue ofCatamaran presents several writers of Tamil background or with Tamil per-spectives. However, if there is a preponderance of Tamil perspectives in thisspecial issue, that is not a partisan, polemical or forced decision. It is a result ofthe submissions we actually received for consideration (and we welcomed allsubmissions without prejudice). We chose some of the best work submitted,quite simply. And there are certainly non-Tamil voices represented here as well.

It would also be a serious misconstruction to represent Sri Lankaonly as a political problem area, or as if “Sri Lanka” were only a political andnot a cultural entity or idea, and a diverse, vibrant society. And as a literaryand cultural magazine, our emphasis is on the cultural, though always histori-cized and contextualized by reference to the political. So in this issue we pres-ent writing and artwork that address both the political and the social/culturaldimensions of life in the country and in the diaspora. Plurality is desirable asa principle in any democratic society and important in any discussion of cul-ture or politics. But plurality does not commit one to random variety or dif-fuseness. In editing this special issue on Sri Lanka we also had to make someformal or aesthetic decisions. Rather than gathering together a random sam-pling, we have chosen to feature the work of a selected few writers and artists,including selections from some of the best artwork we received. We trustreaders will find many of our selections informative and enjoyable in their par-ticularity, as well as in the greater sum of the parts.

This special issue begins with a focus on Pireeni Sundaralingam’sWar Harvest, a play in two acts whose action bridges Sri Lanka and London.The excerpt is preceded by an introduction by Simmy Makhijani and by herinformative and probing interview with the author. In Sundaralingam’s playGeeta and Arani are two sisters, and at first they seem affectionate siblings.Geeta, the older sister, is a mentor who helps Arani with her genetics home-work. She also shares intimate feelings and frustrations with her. Theaction hinges on clever structuring devices: a police cell, always onstage, isjuxtaposed to the room in which 18-year-old Geeta has been imprisoned byher traditionalist parents for dating David (a white British boy). In theexcerpt we present from the play, readers will also note the device of a doorthat separates the characters, so that while characters can hear but not seeone another, the audience can do both, and so appreciate the discordances


between words and meanings of what is said across the door. There areother, subtler devices that, even in the brief excerpt reproduced here, strate-gically present contrasts and parallels. For example, the lesson on GregorMendel’s theory of the recessive gene being passed down to successive gen-erations, a lesson with which Geeta helps Arani, has larger implications forthe two young women themselves, and provokes a recognition in the audi-ence of Sundaralingam’s contrasting presentations of the two daughters asconstituting an “F1 generation,” as Mendel would have put it, with one ofthem inheriting a gene that makes her different from her sibling.

As if to emphasize that the play is something of a double or splitsession, Arani is portrayed as suspended between sisterly and patriotic alle-giances. She chooses country over blood—and in the context the implica-tions of this choice are profound both on the personal and on the politicallevel. Having chosen to betray her own sister for “patriotic” reasons, Araniis successfully recruited by a group of Tamil vigilantes. Although the fami-ly have migrated to London, Geeta is forbidden by her parents to get tooinvolved with non-Sri Lankans. She is shut up in her room like a prisonerfor wanting to see a white boyfriend (and here too the audience is remindedof the parallel with the threat of imprisonment for political reasons in thehome country). This unjust incarceration alienates Geeta from them,although she does attempt to reunite the family. She is something of amouthpiece for Sundaralingam, offering up as she does the occasional choicefeminist or otherwise progressive message.

In this play the painful story of the family mirrors the bitter ethnicfractures within Sri Lanka, although the excerpt focuses more on the famil-ial dynamics, and especially the internal contradictions that constitute thisfamily. Her mother is anxious that Geeta have a good education about theworld, but Geeta points out that in fact the mother is herself acting in waysthat run counter to the exercise of that education in the external world.What is the point of desiring that one’s daughters become educated, if themost radical implications of that education are to be denied in practice?Geeta’s mother herself doesn’t seek to acquire an education and she abets thefather’s strict traditionalism that constrains Geeta. Both parents live inabeyance, waiting for Sri Lanka to become peaceful enough for them toreturn home from England, but the effect of this waiting game is that theycannot imagine living in the present.


These contradictions have a broader significance for all immigrantsand their domestic and public lives. They define some of the key generationaland societal conflicts, inflected by gender, tradition, aspirations to materialsuccess, but also by political and social conditions in the “sending country.”The play provocatively connects the history and future of Sri Lanka with thepresent of postcolonial London: there are some intriguing political and socialresonances between the death and darkness that haunt the home country andthe gloom that seems to hang like a pall on this diasporic home, where adaughter is a virtual prisoner, and where all family members are in one way oranother closed off from one another. And the playwright’s directions fre-quently suggest that darkness through stage directions emphasizing achiaroscuro effect, as in the case of the mother: she is always silent, witnessingthe exchange of conversation between the sisters from the shadows onstage.Yet at the same time one of the features that make this excerpt fromSundaralingam’s play remarkable is sharp dialogue and witty structure.

Sundaralingam’s dark wit also illuminates her poem included in thisissue, Cemetery, Sri Lanka. Or perhaps it is the other way round, as the play-wright herself suggests in Makhijani’s interview—that her poetic sensibilitylends a specific timbre to her play. This poem seems at the surface to recalla sparkling memory of childhood, a moment that stretches throughout thatinnocent time when the speaker and her friend, “a head taller” than every-one else, are presented as full of life-energy, and the walls of the children’sschool is bright and white. But literally and metaphorically this image oflight is just across the street from the cemetery of the title. It’s as if we cannever get away from the violence and death—this is as much an existentialtwist in the poem as it is a suggestion that everyone’s life is touched by thedarkness of a country riven from within by civil war.

The subtitle of Simmy Makhijani’s Introduction toSundaralingam’s War Harvest, “Can there be such a thing as a post-conflictsociety?” seems rhetorical to the extent that while it expresses an aspirationto live in a peaceful society, it also takes as a given the pervasiveness of theconflict mentality among Sri Lankans, whether at home or in diaspora.Makhijani helpfully clarifies some of the major themes and ideas of the playand in her interview draws Sundaralingam out to explore some of the impli-cations of her play in greater depth, such as the play’s treatment of patriarchyand pervasive violence.


Speaking of the pervasive atmosphere of violence, it is no surprise tosee that the title of one of two poems by Indran Amirthanayagam (one of SriLanka’s best known contemporary poets) is Fighting Words. In this poem, theundertone of conflict is transposed from Sri Lanka to other countries impor-tant in the history of the Sri Lankan diaspora, Guyana and Trinidad. Here,too, the undercurrent of interethnic and class conflict is visible. IfSundaralingam’s play translates the political through familial dynamics, thenAmirthanayagam’s poem, like his second poem entitled Before the Vote, refractspolitics through everyday social interaction. The two poems are examples ofthe postcolonial subject “writing back” to the neocolonial inheritors ofEmpire’s legacy—of the postcolonial speaking truth to power, whether it bethe protest of librarians before a vote or the warning communicated to the“Robber Barons” and Overseers to whom so many South Asians to theCaribbean were indentured in colonial and postcolonial times—and to thenew wielders of power who followed them: “beware …Coolie cool”!

The excerpt from an ongoing work of fiction by Mary AnneMohanraj, The Arrival, also presents this violence, albeit as a backdrop forthe story of a diasporic woman’s return to Sri Lanka. This is an intimatestory, in every sense of the word. Given the context of the traditional nuclearSouth Asian family, it is also remarkable for the way in which this story pres-ents unorthodox romantic arrangements in a matter-of-fact way: this mat-ter-of-factness is itself a political act, for it demands that readers accept asnormal behavior what would be seen as extraordinary in traditional SouthAsian societies. The third partner of the authorial persona’s former ménage-à-trois, Karina, will meet her on her arrival, we are told, but it is not cleareven to her what she wants from Karina, or why she’s arranged to meet herin Sri Lanka. She wants to write about a female member of the LTTE, theTamil Tigers, but this woman too remains at the margins of this story(admittedly it is only a small piece of the larger project). But a certainauthorial signature appears even in this “thin slice” of the whole story, asMalcolm Gladwell, the author of Blink, might have put it. Even in such athin slice of the whole, we can get a sense of the style and substance ofMohanraj’s larger project. The style is calculatedly understated, againbecause the story wants to unsettle received ideas about sexual politics,immigration policies and political ideologies in its traverse between NorthAmerica and Sri Lanka.


But writing back to the Empire and its neocolonial inheritors ofpower and influence in this way is not the only preoccupation of Sri Lankanwriters, by any measure. Ro Gunetilleke’s short story Bad Karma Girl pres-ents an entirely different scene in which a marginal person speaks back topower. This story presents Ethana, a leper who has been the victim ofcalumny and lies from powerful members of her community, and ostracizedby them—including women “with mouths like commodes.” Although stillan attractive woman at thirty-six, she lives alone and is ignored for the mostpart, ostracized from society—until they need her, that is. They need her tocook for the one-year death anniversary celebration for Mudlier Mahattaya,an important man. They need Ethana because no one else can cook like her,and there will be many important people, especially (Buddhist) priests, at theoccasion. Gunetilleke intimates to the reader that there’s more to this story,for Ethana is not just a victim of bad karma. She was also the victim of oneof the priests’ lust when she was twelve. She accepts the commission; butshe accepts because it allows her to cook up what turns out to be a deliciousrevenge. We also print a companion poem by Gunetilleke, The Burnt. Herethe violence is not limited to the ambit of one woman’s painful experience ofmarginalization and victimization: it is violence in the raw state, clinging toskin, eating into bones, “like asbestos.”

Many of the contributions discussed above speak of violence, painand darkness. But the reader should not think it represents an editorial pref-erence for the dramatic, for gloom and doom. It is a reflection in the firstinstance of a reality, a condition of pervasive trauma or suffering that definesthe modern Sri Lankan experience across the wide space from the littleisland at the foot of the Indian subcontinent to every corner of the diaspo-ra, in the Pacific Rim countries and elsewhere. Yet other facets of the enor-mous variety, creativity and sheer cultural productivity of Sri Lankan writersand artists are also in evidence here, not least in the witty, and even in onecase ecstatic, artwork on the front and back covers—as well as between thecovers. The front cover image is by designer and artist Dinesh Perera. Itperforms a postcolonial turn on the traditional colonial representation of theSri Lankan as serving tea—that quintessentially colonial beverage. Thisimage is part of a triptych, and had we space to do it justice we would haveliked to reproduce all three images because they work so well in tandem.Even today Sri Lanka markets tea using, as Perera himself puts it, “a British


image.” In these images Sri Lankan women dressed in hybrid traditional/modern Sri Lankan attire are served tea (albeit by native Sri Lankan ani-mals) rather than serving it. Perera is here engaged in a reclamation project,redefining and reinscribing the national beverage within Sri Lankan culture,imaginatively making tea truly Sri Lankan again.

The back cover is an image entitled Peacock Dance by the photogra-pher and filmmaker whose work we review in this issue as well, Andre Cooray.Born and educated in Hong Kong, Cooray also attended Deakin University inAustralia and film school in Los Angeles, and has now returned to work fromHong Kong—and his work reflects a peripatetic diasporic sensibility. Thevibrant and dynamic image on the back cover raises questions about, or per-haps comments subtly on, exoticism, and on the commodification of the other;it interrogates gender typologies, but it is also a lush image that can simply beconsumed for pleasure. Like tea. No harm in that, surely?

The interview with Dharini Rasiah, a teacher of Sri Lankan descentat Berkeley High in California, also strikes (a different) uplifting and hopefulnote in her account of her work and teaching about social justice issues usingmedia. Even though Rasiah’s family, like the family in Sundaralingam’s play,fled the civil war in Sri Lanka to go to England, and then ended up in NorthAmerica, and although she has a Sri Lankan flag in her office, Rasiah’sdescription of her background, everyday life, teaching and commitments ishardly circumscribed by the Sri Lankan political trauma. Yet even in thisaccount of the experience of a Sri Lankan woman teacher in a city with afamous university and close to some of the richest gated communities in all ofAmerica, it is difficult to get away from violence, as becomes clear whenRasiah (who has worked on domestic violence issues in the South Asian com-munity) speaks about a “domestic worker” who was brought over to the US byan Indian and exploited as a sex worker until she died.

Still, Rasiah’s story is truly a Sri Lankan American story, with theemphasis leaning more towards “American”: as she puts it commonsensicallyin the interview, “I guess wherever you buy a house is where home is.” Shespeaks about the broad vistas of her diasporic experience as a teacher. Notably,she traces her formation as a teacher to a course she took with Loni Ding onelectronic images of communities of color at U.C. Berkeley, which inspired herto make films about domestic violence against women—and how they “got outof it,” as well as a video about Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Toronto. As a


thought experiment, it might be interesting to juxtapose Rasiah’s activist artand Sundaralingam’s equally politically conscious playwriting to contrast theirtreatments of corresponding issues in the lives of diasporic women.

Rasiah’s interviewer, Tula Goenka, is a founding member ofSakhi for South Asian Women, and has herself assisted in the pro-duction of a docudrama as part of the organization’s work. Theinterview raises interesting issues of pedagogy and gender; in itRasiah reflects on her encounters over the years with many cohortsof multicultural students, on the political awareness of youths inhigh school, and of course on the implications of being a Sri LankanAmerican woman teaching high schoolers in America who some-times treat her like a peer while she tries to teach them to “unlearnwhat they learn” from the media, from the contemporary version ofthe Society of the Spectacle, as it were. Helping students unlearn themass-mediated messages, especially from the position of the minor-ity, as Rasiah says she consciously and deliberately tries to do, is anoble ambition, but one fraught with interesting dilemmas: is it agood thing or a bad thing that the videos and music of the politi-cally savvy activist performer MIA are their primary source forwhatever curiosity they have about Sri Lanka at all? Should webeware or celebrate such Cultural Cool?

The special issue concludes with reviews of two short films by SriLankan filmmaker Andre Cooray, and both of them, while taking up impor-tant issues in the lives of young South Asians, do so in a way that is not pon-derous or bleak.

We do not pretend to comprehensively “represent” Sri Lanka’s peo-ple or its cultural production—an impossible task, even if anyone were fool-hardy enough to presume to do such a thing. We offer a window on thecultural vibrancy of the admittedly small Sri Lankan corner of South Asia,and of South Asian America. As Rasiah puts it in her interview, “It’s justthat there aren’t that many Sri Lankans out there.” However many there areout there, we hope our modest special issue will reach all their shores, andcarry others who wish to travel there borne by the sails of the imaginativework included here.

Samir DayalGuest Editor


C A TA M A R A N C R E W

Front cover image: Dinesh Perera, Ceylon Tea-GreenBack cover image: Andre Cooray, Peacock DanceDesign: Christine CicconePrinting: Thames Printing Company, Inc., Norwich, CTPrinted on recycled paper

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Editorial Board:Rajini Srikanth, Shona Ramaya, Samir Dayal,

Subhashini Kaligotla,Bandana Purkayastha & Roger Buckley

Consulting Editors:Tahira Naqvi, Vijay Seshadri

University of Connecticut contact for sponsorships:Angela Rola, [email protected]

ISSN: 1935-2115


War Harvest

Interview with Pireeni Sundaralingam

War Harvest

Bad Karma Girl

The Arrival

Interview with Dharini Rasiah

"The Lyric Voice"—a fewSri Lankan poets

Reviews

Artists’ Statements

9 introduction by Simmy Makhijani

10 by Simmy Makhijani

17 play by Pireeni Sundaralingam

39 story by Ro Gunetilleke

47 by Mary Anne Mohanraj

54 by Tula Goenka

68 poems by Ro Gunetilleke, IndranAmirthanayagam, PireeniSundaralingam

74 by Samir Dayal

82 Andre Cooray, Dinesh Pereira

C O N T E N T S

The word “catamaran,” although colloquially associated with a high-speed boat, hasits origins in South Asia. It is an anglicized form of the Tamil phrase “kattu maram”(which translates literally as “tied wood/log”) for a raft. For us, therefore, “catama-ran” has multiple evocations—South Asia, the shared colonial history of South Asiannations, the contribution to English of South Asian languages, the sense of adven-ture in setting out on a raft, the energy of movement, the turbulence of the oceans.


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Simmy Makhijani has just completed her Ph.D.coursework in Social and Cultural Anthropologyat the California Institute of Integral Studies.She is also the Development Director of Art inAction, a grassroots women of color led collectivethat uses arts and arts activism to work with low-income Bay Area youth impacted by violence.Her previous degrees include an M.A. in AsianStudies in Religion and Philosophy and a B.A. inJournalism.

Her areas of specialization and researchinterests include: South Asia and diaspora; reli-gious studies; postcolonial and feminist theory;gender and violence; immigration history andlaw; human rights, cultural survival, minorityissues and economic justice; globalization, devel-opment and state accountability.

Over the years, she has written and per-formed poetry, been a vocal contributor for musicprojects, and has been a creative adviser and nar-rative and editorial consultant for both independ-ent feature films and documentaries. She hasalso been a contributing feature writer for severalnewspapers and magazines.


WAR HARVE ST: C AN TH E R E BE SUCH A TH I NG A S A POST-CON F LICT SOCI ETY?Introduct ion by Simmy Makhi jani

POLICE CAPTAIN: You think that taking up a gun is the only harm that a person cando? You think your naive little ideas aren’t harmful? You think, we should all just for-get who we are, live together as if we were all the same? We’re different: our language,our culture, our stories. What are we without these things? And you want to take all thesethings from us, make us merge together as if we were just some kind of grey soup.(from the play War Harvest by Pireeni Sundaralingam, Act II: Scene 1: A Sri Lankanpolice cell. The captain is interrogating a woman suspected of civil disobedience)

Sri Lanka is a place of high security zones, military occupations, and decadesof conflict, named civil, ethnic, religious. Each year brings new “casualty”totals but how do such numbers begin to measure the reach of war? Howdo we calculate the unspoken? What of those left behind? What of thegone and all that goes with them?

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees andHuman Rights Watch, as many as 80,000 Sri Lankans were ‘disappeared’ inthe 1980’s and 1990’s, with numbers rising again over the past two years,over 70,000 killed (Reuters, India, Jan. 3, 2008). Additional tens of thou-sands have been internally displaced each year and hundreds of thousandshave fled the country. Roughly 600,000 to 800,000 Sri Lankan Tamils arereported to be living abroad, mostly in Canada and the United Kingdom.

It is in this context that the Sri Lankan family of War Harvest—father, mother, and two sisters—lives in a house in suburban London.Pireeni Sundaralingam sets the intimate family quarters as the stage wherea broad range of power relations play against and within loaded subjects offreedom, imprisonment, silence, misunderstanding, memory, diaspora, anddifference. And though these unstable dynamics are configured at home,more specifically around a door that separates one character from the others,the home itself functions like the door, by which the family is separated fromLondon and Sri Lanka, but still always in relationship to these ‘outsides’.

We witness a watchful father who commandeers the mobility of hisdaughters and wife through literal lock-up and surveillance, in the name oftheir own protection. Similarly, the State too functions to regulate move-

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ment of its ethnic others, through laws and practices that legitimize its ownoperations of supervision and confinement. David, the only ‘white’ charac-ter in the play, is speechless throughout, represented in the form of a letter.The mother is silent. A Sri Lankan interrogation scene of the past inter-rupts the present. In all these ways, Sundaralingam shows that theater canand must challenge facile understandings of history, repositioning story-telling to critique ideas of good and evil, identity and home, and thrustingthis drama onto the very charged plane where art, politics, memory, andnation intersect. Writing/acting becomes a site where these challenges can,and do, here, occur.

This positioning renders War Harvest relevant, urgent, critical, andthought provoking. Through refusals and resistances that obstruct allattempts at fixing, the play surfaces as a seminal piece of Sri Lankan dias-poric literature, one that opens continually into something always uneasy,always demanding, never still.

Interview with Pireeni Sundaralingamby Simmy Makhi jani

SM: I’ve seen the stage reading of your play and was very moved. How is the playeither a departure from your work as a poet or an extension of your previous workas a Sri Lankan poet?

PS: Poetry has a tendency to focus on static images and, in a sense, my own poemsfunction as word paintings of my life in Sri Lanka and England. However, as awriter, I’ve felt an increasing need to interrogate the dynamics of our lives in thediaspora—particularly to chart the way in which the effects of war permeate ourthoughts and actions, long after we have moved away from the physical space ofwar. I didn’t feel that I could capture all that within poetry; I needed to look atdialogue and relationships in their physicality, which is why I’ve gone back to thetheater—my first love. Having said that, hopefully poetry now informs my play-writing. Some of the play’s underlying themes—the limitations of language, themultiple meanings of certain words—are subjects I’ve had to spend a lot of timethinking about as a poet.

SM: Why is the piece entitled War Harvest?


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PS: In writing this play, I wanted to explore the consequences of war. It concernsme that, all too often, these are calculated in terms of immediate deaths andinjuries, without acknowledging the long-term effects on survivors once they’veleft that space. In War Harvest, I’ve set out to explore how family relationships inthe present grow out of the seeds planted in the past. For example, in an earlyscene, as one of the characters does her genetics homework, we encounter this ideaof the recessive gene, the idea that an organism can look like one thing on the out-side, but have a different truth buried within it—an invisible story about its past ifyou like—and that sometimes it’s that hidden truth that actually gets passed on tofuture generations, like the recessive gene.

SM: This idea of code comes up several times; you’ve said that the summation ofthe play is, in a way, the statement made by the police captain during the interro-gation: “Genetic code, karmic code, there is no difference. The future is alreadywritten.” In this moment, it’s not just a biological code, but also a code binding usto the histories of nation, culture, and ethnicity.

PS: Absolutely. Both biological and religious models tend to suggest a certaininevitability when it comes to the idea of destiny and the question of whether wepossess ‘free will’ becomes complicated when we consider lives so hemmed in byhistory, particularly a history with such violence. In a way, the dead weight of trau-ma acts like a black hole, an irresistible force pulling the characters back into thatviolent space. And we know that with such an intense force, time and space buck-le in on themselves.

SM: This notion of what is already written is emphasized in the play and yet weare able to see the characters as having agency in how they resist what is written.By being aware of history and our own relationship to it, or being informed ofour own conditions as an effect of certain histories, changes how we act. Thattension is kept alive throughout the play. We are never quite sure what of thispast belongs specifically to the mother and what is a shadowed past of the SriLankan diaspora.

PS: Yes, I deliberately wanted the Sri Lankan police cell scenes to occupy a myth-ic space, haunting the actions of the characters in present day London, reflecting apossible past, while also foretelling a possible future.


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SM: Complicating the already numerous unresolved ambiguities within the play,you also portray the mother as silent; she moves through many of the scenes andis a pivotal player, and yet she never speaks. How do you want the audience to seethis intriguing figure?

PS: As a writer, it was demanding to create a central character that never speaksbut I wanted to explore the power of silence and how the absence of speechimpacts human relationships. As audience members, we might be tempted to dis-miss a silent, maternal figure as peripheral but, as the play unfolds, maybe we canreevaluate this assumption, and perhaps question the importance of spoken words.In contrast, in the scenes between the sisters, the words they keep trying to use tocommunicate, in the end, tear them apart. The door that stands in the middle ofthe stage throughout the play, separating the two sisters, hopefully has both aphysical and a symbolic relevance, reminding us of the fragmentation of languageand trust that happens in survivor communities.

SM: The door becomes the literal representation of intangible things, also mak-ing it impossible from the point of view of the audience to flatten the characters,because we see the door and how it mediates every communication. Throughoutthe play there is an impressive refusal to show any one person as being right orwrong. This comes across strongly in the father’s monologue where, as audience,we experience empathy, seeing him bound by his own history.

PS: Throughout, the father is described by the other characters in ways that makeus assume he’s the archetypal villain, but when we finally meet him in the lastscene, his monologue hopefully portrays his humanity. I wrote this character inthis way partly in response to the fact that, far too often, I’ve been approached byWesterners who’ve glibly informed me that the “real” issue facing Sri Lankanwomen is that we’re victims of our overbearing male relatives and a heedless patri-archy. I don’t think such simplistic labels are useful in understanding our prob-lems. I find it far more interesting to work as a writer, analyzing the forces ofemotion that bind together our relationships.

SM: Yes. What you’re saying reminds me of lengthy exchanges between ChandraTalpade Mohanty and others on the necessity for “decolonizing feminism”.Overemphasis on how patriarchy functions (albeit differently) in the Global South


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often distracts attention from where these debates are being staged. In suchmoments, it’s as if it is completely forgotten that the Global North also has its ownoppressive patriarchal structures. Given this, can you specifically explain how yourportrayal of the father intervenes upon standard ideas of patriarchy?

PS: When we finally meet the father, we realize that he is not simply a unidi-mensional man who locks up his daughters because he enjoys power, but rather heis someone who has been attacked by English skinheads, which has made himscared of public spaces. He wants to protect his daughters in the safety of his ownhome. In another instance, he questions whether freedom of choice is as morallyrighteous as it is often portrayed in the West, if it obscures the moral importanceof duties, such as looking after loved ones. He says, “Choice is a luxury! This isan illusion that white people chase after because they’re too scared to stand still andface their responsibilities.”

One of the joys of writing, at least for me, is in getting the chance toexplore a character and see how it comes out. I’m often surprised. So I might haveone idea about a character when I start writing a play, but as I write more scenes,and the character is put in different situations, I end up finding out new thingsabout them and understanding them in a very different way. I was happy that atthe Q&A at the first staged reading, the audience was arguing vociferously as towhich sister was “right”. I don’t want there to be a “right” and “wrong” for thesecharacters. Instead, I’d rather we explored the way in which, given the right cir-cumstances, any one of us could make the same moral decisions as the charactersin the play.

SM: Additionally, how does your play challenge (Western) and even mainstreamfeminist ideas of freedom and imprisonment?

PS: Hopefully, it makes us question our assumptions. So, for example, physicalimprisonment isn’t the only way people are robbed of freedom in this play: all ofthe characters are trapped in different ways, such as the mother’s silence, thefather’s Victorian moralizing, the sister whose own sense of isolation leads her toadopt an even more isolating militant cause. In some ways, the sister who is phys-ically locked up ironically ends up exerting more choice. She chooses not toescape, she chooses to try and change her family, and she chooses to use literatureto become a soldier of the mind.


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It’s related to your earlier comment about codes. The conversation of thetwo sisters throughout is filled with references to personal anecdotes and familystories, and as audience members we can see how these anecdotes act like moralbeacons, guiding every decision the sisters make. When Arani refers, in passing,to the young man who wants to join the Tigers and ends up committing suicide,we see how this story hangs in the air, haunting their choices through the rest ofthe play. There’s a sense that, no matter how much physical freedom we mayappear to have,we can still be imprisoned by the stories to which we cling,whetherit’s the Ramayana or the humdrum anecdotes of our own daily lives.

SM: And the way our personal family stories circulate in private, yet inform howwe are public parallels the way forms of State, here Sri Lanka and England, func-tion similarly. The State has its stories that define its own statehood, its own strug-gles to be allowed a certain kind of memory and a certain kind of forgetting thatwill enable one’s own subscription as citizen. And the lines between what is pri-vate and what is public remain blurred.

PS: This sense that the State only accepts certain stories is present in the SriLankan scenes: when the Police Captain interrogates his victim, he is only willingto see one of two stories, either she is a member of the rebel LTTE, or she is apacifist. The fact that she’s neither, that she’s unwilling to associate with any onecause, and is trying to create her own identity is actually something much morethreatening to him.

SM: Which also positions her as someone the State can really use strategically.The police plan to release her with a bag of rice because that way she will do themost damage; the rice will tie her to a particular story: some will think she wasbribed to collaborate with the police, while others will think she has been set freebecause of her bargaining power as a Tiger.

PS: Right. However much she wishes to be free, her future will likely be dictat-ed by the stories that other people will tell of her. The simple fact of her releasecan have two different (false) interpretations depending on which story one choos-es to believe, and either story will lead to her being killed.SM: In the director’s note the door is described as an obstacle, which “serves tomake dialogue at best obsolete, or worse, treacherous”. You mentioned the door


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as a device earlier. Could you speak to the function of the door as a sort of ‘char-acter’ in the play?

PS: Having trained as an actor at drama school, I wanted to create a play that reallychallenged actors. Normally, human conversation depends on not just the semanticsof words but also on body language and vocal tone to convey meaning. Bifurcatingthe stage with a door that separates the actors effectively cuts off those other forms ofcommunication and we experience first-hand how words can fail when they standalone. As audience members, we’re placed in this peculiar, privileged position wherewe can see both sides of the door; we can see the intended original meanings of thewords and how they fail to penetrate the door, despite the characters’ best intentions.The script serves as a bare framework. It’s been exciting to watch different stagedreadings and see how each new set of actors and directors finds fresh ways to play withthese multiple interpretations, depending on their own sensibilities.

And, as you said, the door is a character in itself. It has a very real brood-ing presence within the play, and each human character ends up having theirunique relationship with it. For example, we see how in the father’s case the doorgrows to resemble the partition of a confessional box.

SM: Yes, and as you mentioned earlier, if only we could see and recognize thedoors that are always there, symbolically, interrupting and informing our interpre-tations of each other, making certain our views will only be partial and influencedby our own conditioning and histories.

PS: Absolutely. In a way, the door reflects my own sense of growing up in a dias-poric Sri Lankan family: the way in which the meaning of words failed to cross thedivide between generations, between East and West, between lives lived duringwar versus peacetime. Both war and theater are arenas that put normal socialtransactions under intense pressure. Both force us to confront what we assume tobe givens in civilization, such as the power of language and the importance of trust,and to see how they break down.

In last month’s Harpers’, Gornick noted that Jewish-American writersplayed a crucial role in English literature, in terms of creating a new syntax forapproaching ideas. Perhaps the way in which writers from war-torn societies cancontribute to English literature is by forcing people to rethink the fault-lines ofhuman relationship, to chart what ultimately survives.


War Harvest: Can There Be Such A Thing As A Post-Conflict Society?

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