The Disappeared: Fiction and Ethnography in Sri Lanka's Postwar Reconciliation

The Disappeared

I. Saint Anthony's

Ajith Dissanayake, part-time friend and part-time drummer for much of the previous winter, disappeared the following spring outside the St. Anthony's Church on Inner Flower Road, half-way into the street. In the midday heat, St. Anthony's smelled like salt and spicy sambol in abrading teeth. A thick cross extended cumbersomely off its roof. The cross, hanging exhausted in the sky, obscured the sun during the day, the moon and stars at night. The past half-century had not been kind to the building, only recently recovered from its long state of disuse and disrepair. I often walked at night with friends—the hidden poets of work, or school, from the first floor apartments of faces I can't remember—in search of St. Anthony's. We drifted, always vibrating forward, too drunk to all stay still and quiet. For days, we wandered across Colombo, through postal codes and endless bowls of curd and honey, through cameras, pens and ink on spiral note pads.

When we came upon the church we showed our pens and cameras to a pair of old uniforms at the corner. They laughed at us through all the holes where teeth once were.

"Aren't you children Buddhist?" Did we say yes?

But they always let us through and we recorded our youth against the leaning cross, and the way the stars moved in and out of focus on the building's stained glass, its rotting wooden door, cockroaches twisting, hissing about the pews. Thick roots slipped through cracked windows, around delicate ornaments, into bibles, slender from missing pages and worn print, almost illegible. A veneer of dried mud carpeted the building's concrete floor. Outside, orange

1 clay roof tiles tumbled toward the ground, worn and cracked, covered with thick moss as if they had been perched there, on the roof, for centuries, anticipating their own plummet to earth.

We thought St. Anthony's would stay like this forever. For so long it was our broken beauty, and then suddenly it wasn't. In only days, the inhabitants of Colombo—restaurant owners, artists, gas station attendants, professors and master builders, politicians and beggars— came from all over the city in a giant procession to restore the church. They ground off the mud from the concrete floor and painted it a dull black. They rebuilt the door, rebound the bibles, wrote in the missing words with shaky hands. They painted murals of the Buddha and of Jesus.

Stories from the Bible and the Mahavamsa fell from the beige walls into the adjacent street. They painted the cross upon the roof a shining gold and hammered in nails, fixing it at its crooked angle outward into Inner Flower Road. Its tilt the only remaining evidence the building had ever been abandoned.

Migara de Silva, the filmmaker—camera around his neck, a cigarette permanently in his left hand, wax matches that kept breaking in his right—said he saw the reconstruction happen.

He said he filmed it, had the faces memorized.

"They came like ants," he said.

To us they were just empty faces we didn't know, lions and almost secrets.

On the day Ajith disappeared, we came upon St. Anthony's only by accident. We'd planned to attend a matinee adaptation of King Lear—the whole thing being put on at the Wendt by a favorite professor from the University of Colombo. Instead, we found ourselves among a small assortment of students and artists drifting rootless in the city, eventually arriving at the church. For a moment we all gazed upon the building. On my right, Ajith stood, his adolescent

2 shoulders pulled back onto a straight spine. Migara de Silva squatted to my left, close to the ground, a carton of cigarettes and matches in his hands. Unhurriedly, he brought a cigarette from its container to his face. With his lips, he worked it to the corner of his mouth and lit it with a slow-burning match. I turned my attention to him, away from the church. The smoke billowed and swirled as he exhaled. It hung nervous in the humid air.

"Gihan, do you want to share?"

I said, "I guess," and knelt with him to the ground. The rough concrete cut into my bare knees with uneven patterns. Migara removed the burning cigarette from his mouth and brought it to my lips, his fingers still holding onto the filter.

"Breathe," he said.

As I inhaled, he spoke about the church.

"They say St. Anthony restores the missing." He exhaled a cough of smoke and gestured to the church. "If you listen on quiet days, you can sometimes hear the prayers to him, all in unison, all wanting to find the forgotten, a peace of mind, a faith in God."

Ajith turned to interject. Scars of adolescent acne adorned his arms, a tattoo of a dragon peaked through his collarbone. "Machang, these people don't know what they have lost."

On the day Ajith disappeared, the sun's heat broke through the leaning cross and the new stained glass windows of St. Anthony's, casting pockets of shadows and colorful light onto the street below. My skin was sweaty from the heat and clammy air. I wiped at my face with the hem of my shirt to reveal a new fuss of acne spreading down my forehead. I listened for the prayers to

St. Anthony coming from inside the church and I thought about the performance at the Wendt we were sure to miss, the favorite professor I might disappoint. I hadn't been to his class in weeks. I

3 thought about the spring exams I already missed, and then about the way my mother would cry, and the way my father would yell when I called them on the phone and told them all my plans. I thought about how I would break their hearts. How I would say that I was dropped from the university's program, that I didn't have a real job or house, but that I wasn't coming home either.

I looked up to Ajith with all my worries. He looked down to me, and as if he knew what I was thinking, said that we were better Buddhists than our mothers.

"Why?" I asked.

"They don't tolerate our lifestyle. My mother doesn't tolerate me. Do you know why I'm a better Buddhist than her?" I waggled my head. "Because I tolerate people. The Buddhists here can't tolerate shit."

I thought about tolerance and I imagined my two parents pacing the floors of the home in which I grew until the soles of their feet turned black from dust and dirt.

On the day Ajith disappeared, it was too humid and too bright. Ajith looked pale in the sun and wobbled tall on the ground above me. I reached out to steady him, grasping onto his lower leg as support. My hands inadvertently pulled him unsteady to the ground. As he fell, he let go a short holler that brought silence to the group. He stayed for some time sprawled out upon the ground. Blood dripped from behind rips in blue jeans. White scrapes hung from his sun- darkened knuckles. His eyes were closed. His hands slid about the pavement as he lifted up his face to look at us. Maybe he was crying.

I was on my feet, Migara's cigarette still between my teeth, tobacco on my tongue. I reached for his hand. "I can help you up."

"Don't touch me." He spoke at me loudly as he pulled himself upwards.

"I really want to help," I said.

The group, no longer focused on the church, circled around him, asking questions, making suggestions.

"What's wrong, Ajith?" His skin was still a sickly grey beneath the sunlight.

"He needs a joint." They chuckled.

He pulled away from us, breaking out onto the street.

I called out, "Where are you going?"

From behind his shoulder, he said he was disappearing for a while. He said he wasn't afraid and that he might come back, eventually. He walked into the bright pockets of sunlight cast down from the church onto the pavement and vanished in this light. First his feet, then his tattooed arms. His torso, wrapped in loose fabric, softened and then dissolved.

When he disappeared, Ajith left behind his drumsticks in the middle of the street. They lay there for a while until a bus for Galle drove over them, cracking the smooth wood sticks into splintered pieces on the pavement, just barely visible under the harsh light. Migara was still smoking his cigarette. All of us stayed still, waiting for Ajith to return, maybe laughing, from the same place that he had left.

Two days later Migara disappeared too. Then the Devasiri brothers, Sudarashana and

Widarshana. I saw their mother at the market in a sari.

She waved me over with a subtle nod and greeted me, "Ayubowan, Gihan. Are you well?

It's too hot to be out shopping today." At the time, Colombo was experiencing a heat wave like no other. I went to bed with fan waves warping around my form, my body swaddled in humidity.

A film of brackish sweat was plastered permanently to my forehead and to the back of my neck.

The ceaselessly blistering sun, the still, clammy air, was accompanied by a feeling of drowsiness and a yearning for respite that consumed the entire city. The daily mid-afternoon naps were almost inevitable. The temperature never escaped a conversation.

"Hello, ammaa."

She asked me where her children went. "Why would they leave me?" Her sari was dyed with blue and white flowers. As she talked, she rubbed the decorated fabric between her thumb and index finger.

"Why would they leave me?"

"They just disappeared." I spoke, scratching a new growth of stubble beneath my chin. I turned away from her. "I have to go," I said, and began to make my way out of the market.

"Did you see it happen?" She called to me across limes, soft mangos and bananas, across smoke from upwind cigarettes burning over curry. Eventually the smoke and sweet fruit found their way to me, through my nostrils, into my pores. Everywhere was cigarettes and mangos.

Worry and missing loves.

I looked back to her. "No, ammaa, I didn't see it."

Her eyes looked flat and effortlessly sad. "I need to know if they will be back for dinner.

I need to know how much to cook."

A wind moved gracelessly through the open hallways of the market, knocking over papers and carrying with it the chaotic sounds of the city. In the wind, I heard the whisper of the brothers' long hair pulled back into buns, pens and paper tucked into blue jeans, Ajith thumping on a drum set I could not see. I heard the click of Migara's camera advancing film. "Breathe," he laughed. I turned my face to the smoke and mangos, the wind and Migara's laughing. I let the

6 sounds run through me, and I wondered if soon I too would disappear, only to make noises at a market on busy afternoons.

"Do you hear them?" I asked.

"I don't hear anything."

We idled for a while, swaying in strange languish.

"Do you want a joint, ammaa? It might help."

She shook her head and the sounds of the market quieted to a low indecipherable hum.

The wind slowed. She asked if I had plans for dinner. I said I didn't have any and she gave me directions to her home, a time to arrive.

"Wear a nice shirt," she said, but we both knew I wasn't coming.

"I'll see you," I said

She weaved her way from the hallways of the market. Her nylon shopping bags were empty. I wonder if she had known I would be at the market then, followed me through the shops and hallways, waited for a chance to speak with me, to ask about her two children, the two filmmakers. She had never seen their films, she probably didn't want to. When she spoke her sons seemed so foreign and so distant.

As I exited I saw her watching me from across the road. She waved her hands and shouted out to me, but I did not hear what she was saying. It was too dark, and she already was too far away for me to find.

II. Gunaratne Place, Colombo Five

I hardly knew the ones who disappeared—nearly twenty after Ajith, Migara, and the

Devasiris. I met them all at the beginning of the winter quarter, first Ajith and then the rest. They

7 already knew each other well. I saw Ajith—he seemed so mysterious then—outside a dreary presentation in Nadisha Silva's 3rd year fiction workshop. Ajith was staring into the window of the classroom and Silva, in a bit of disbelief, had tried to relieve her class of his inquisitive eyes, first shooing him silently with her left hand, and then interrupting her lecture, to knock upon the window and tell Ajith to go away.

He ignored Silva and remained in place, nose and lips pressed to the glass. I glanced at him and he waved back at me. He wore aviator sunglasses and a worn leather jacket. Inside the classroom the air was cool, but outside the sun still spit hot summer. Silva continued her lecture, every few minutes checking uncertainly on the conditions of her window, and eventually ending the class half-way through on account of the muggy weather.

"Have a pleasant weekend," she said, reminding us of the upcoming vap poya holiday.

Hastily, she left the classroom and the window behind, our most recent stories pinned against her chest. I left too, abandoning the remaining students to gather their belongings in my absence.

Outside by the stairwell, Ajith caught me by my sleeve.

I said, "I saw you in the window," and then guessed at his reaction behind the dark sunglasses.

"I know," he said.

"I think you surprised the class."

He smiled back at me. "They'll be alright."

"Do you do this often?"

"Whenever I have rehearsal," he said, then paused. "Have you heard my band?"

I hadn't, but I nodded an affirmation anyway. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a wrinkled business card with a phone number and a street address.

"We'll just play a few songs."

I nodded again, muffling an unsure excitement.

"I'll see you there," he said.

I went that night, just after dusk. The city busses were still running.

The house on Gunaratne Place was large and yellow and built by the Dutch when Sri

Lanka was still Ceylon. It had a bell and a gate that was also large and also yellow.

I rang the bell and waited. The windows of the house were dark, but the leftover sounds of music—heavy bass and drums—escaped out into the street for me to hear. Eventually a man opened the gate. He had long black hair that curled over his shoulders. He looked young and fragile.

"Do you know of me?" He asked.

I followed him through an empty courtyard into the yellow house. A large brown dog trailed us to the door, whining loudly when we closed it behind us. We crowded ourselves upon a faux leather couch and the thin man stood up, announced to the room—but really just to me— that he was Migara de Silva, the filmmaker, the owner of this house. He studied film in France, but came back to Sri Lanka, his home. He said he always comes back home.

The music died down moments later and Ajith joined us on the couch. He was shirtless and sweating. His chest was tattooed in green ink.

"Did you hear us?" He murmured in my ear.

"It was heavenly," Migara said.

I agreed. "Heavenly."

"Let's celebrate."

We twisted away from the couch, the impressions of our bodies, the residue of our presence, slowly receding. We passed through compact rooms, over carpets and tile floors, people wandering around banisters and long thin hallways. Ajith pointed to his right and I caught a glimpse of Amarakeerthi Liyanage and Rajitha Dissanayake sharing tea and cake in the kitchen. Heads together, arms swinging wildly in gesticulation, they were a generation of fathers and lovely imperfections. They wrote the novels that taught us how to live like animals, like we wanted.

When I now read these books I can still hear Liyanage, twisted hair pulled back upon his forehead whispering, just loud enough for me to hear, maybe he even says my name. "Gihan," he says, "this isn't my voice anymore. This is our voice." Then I finish the novels and store them in a drawer or in an attic where I might forget, and Liyanage's voice dies away.

We moved on from the kitchen and Liyanage's voice faded into fleshy skin and tempered walls. In a narrow patio outside, we sat down together at a flimsy plastic table with flimsy plastic stools across from a young woman dressed in a grey suit. Above us loomed Migara's yellow house.

"This is Randhula," he said.

"My brother is a good friend of Migara's." She reached out to shake my hand across the table. Migara began to smoke a joint.

"People of all sorts can gather here," Migara said, smiling. "Do you see all the artists?

They want to be here, among our chaos and confusion."

"Randhula, are you an artist?"

"No," she laughed, "I'm very much not an artist."

Darkness descended upon us and the mosquitoes started biting. I saw the tail of what could only be a giant rat swerve through expanding shadows. A band of filmmakers roamed the floors of the yellow house speaking a Sinhala-English mix. We watched them move in shadows.

A man with piercings and tattoos—he turned out to be Randhula's brother, another filmmaker— appeared through the door with forks and plates. "Here is the cake for you guys!"

Chain-smoked cigarettes burnt orange against the night and in the dark we ate until we fell asleep upon the flimsy plastic.

Randhula woke me up when it was still dark. Ajith and Migara were snoring on the patio floor. She spoke quietly, so only I could hear. "For me, it is Migara who started this artistic scene." She opened up her palms to me. "He had that madness in him, that love." I reached out for her hand. Her fingertips caught upon my own and we fell asleep again our hands only briefly locking together.

I kept running into them on campus, at the canteen, from a classroom window looking down upon a grove of cinnamon trees, running vaguely late to a meeting.

Migara and Randhula called me through thick crowds of students in uniform. The boys wore blue pants and white dress shirts so fine I could see their skin below. The girls were all black and white. Heavy blouses and skirts hit hard upon their ankles. I pushed through the crowds of students, past professors in tweed jackets. A boy ran into me with a tray of tea. He fell back and the tray took flight into the air above the crowds of students. The hallways turned upwards to watch the cups come off the tray. We twisted in circles as the world spun. Tea rained down upon our faces. It burnt our skin red. The glass cups shattered against the glossy brick

11 floor. Sunlight bounced from the tiny shards into my eyes. Everything was shimmering and bright.

"This isn't the place to stand." A professor put his hand upon my shoulder and told me to move. I slipped away on strong tea and shards of glass to Migara and Randhula, leaning, backs against the shaded wall.

I looked down. My white shirt was wet and stained brown from the tea. "Gihan, do you remember us."

"Yes." I always said I did.

They looked to my stained shirt and then around down to the ends of the hallway making sure it was just me who was listening. They said, "Machang, there is more to life than class. You have so much to learn. Let us be your teachers."

By the end of the winter term I had all but stopped going to my classes at the university. I moved from the dorm rooms near the Faculty of Arts on campus to living with Migara in the yellow house. The transition felt seamless. From the house I wandered down small streets that were never given names. I smoked cigarettes and joints on Migara's back patio and then fell asleep beneath the sun. My skin was black and burned when I awoke. I walked to the Colombo

Zoo and recorded the animals I met. I introduced myself to them. "Hello, I am Gihan. I am one of you." I smoked more joints and fell asleep again, beneath metal enclosures, protecting me from them.

At night, when I returned, I found Migara and the others—sometimes Randhula was there—on the couches. They showed me French films pulled down on projector screens. Jean

Renoir, La Grande Illusion. Marcel Carné's Hôtel du Nord. They played for me French music and then when we were drunk, they threw on Marley and Dylan. They mouthed the words to

12 every song we heard. When we were stoned we closed our eyes and listened to orchestral compositions I didn't recognize. They read to me French poets, Philippe Soupault, Prévert so lovely, Desnos so forceful with his words.

If we were drunk and stoned enough, glued hard upon the faux leather, I asked them questions they didn't want to answer. "Where are the Sri Lankan authors? The Sri Lankan musicians? The Sri Lankan filmmakers?"

"We are here," they said, "we are really the only ones."

I interjected with names. "Ajitha Thilakasena and Simon Nawagathe. Kumar

Navaratnam. Prasanna Jayakody and Kumbiya. Indrachapa Liyanage."

Migara opened his eyes to speak at me, the volume of his voice surprising. "They don't know Sri Lanka anymore. They don't take risks. They don't fuck. They don't know Lanka like us."

"Have you written anything for us to read?" Randhula spoke to me. "You are Sri

Lankan."

I read them something, but it wasn't mine. It was a forgotten poem I found in a worn anthology from the public library. It was from the war. I recited the lines that I could remember—about a charred body and failing memories, about red tattooed city walls and temple flowers—as if they were my own.

When I finished reading the room was quiet. "That's wonderful," Randhula said. She put her hand on my knee. "Gihan, you're just so beautiful and talented."

After they began to disappear, Migara's yellow house became quite popular among artists and curious students. Most of them I didn't know, they often didn't stay for long.

A student from America came asking questions. But eventually he disappeared.

They swarmed the front patio in the late afternoon after work or classes waiting for their chance to enter the house, to explore the rooms, to search for the disappeared, poets and musicians with names easily forgotten, the experimental filmmaker, Migara de Silva. "Could they be hiding in this big house, under those cushions, in all the doors that we can't enter?"

"No," I told them. But still I let them look, break down the doors, tear apart the couch.

When they couldn't find Migara, they blamed the creative process and the government and the

Buddha. They blamed me.

They said, "There is no Buddhism in Sri Lanka anymore. It is only to maintain the power.

There is no love with the monks anymore. They don't know about love and compassion."

They stared me in the eyes. "Machang, this isn't what the Buddha taught."

We copied the poems that Migara read to me onto the house's walls. We copied them so that we would not forget. When it became too dark to read the poetry on the walls, we read our own poems, pulled from scraps of paper in our pockets, journals, diaries, and short-term memories. We screamed them out through the hallways and the patio, our voices merging with the howls of dog packs, and ambulances roaming the city at night.

Without Migara, the house more or less became my own. I knew if I really wanted I could close its doors to these questions to which I could not find answers.

On quiet nights, Randhula visited the house and kissed me at the door.

Inside, I asked, "Do you love me?"

She said, "You are the best heart I have ever met." Her shoulder length hair was pulled back into a high bun. She spoke slowly with a gentle timbre.

"Will you want to marry me?" My words came out unthinking and abrasive against her soft intonations.

She pulled back some. I waited in strained silence, lingering for her response, wanting to move backwards in time, to change what I said, to quote Prévert instead. "We're the whole of life, my love." I watched her face, her lips stained in makeup, curl as she answered my question.

She said, "I think marriage actually destroys love. The husband becomes the enemy, the one you don't love at all."

She reached out hesitantly, closing the space between us. For a moment her hand hovered just away from my hip, and I thought that we would stay that way all night, just apart, almost touching. "I still want to love you, Gihan."

We never talked about the disappearances or that soon we too could vanish from the house. Would we remember?

III. The Disappeared

When the house was still full with artists and students and wonder—before they stopped coming, before it was just me and Randhula in the yellow house—we began to make a film to honor Migara and the missing. It was just a poem recited at night at first, written in pencil on the yellow walls. Then it was a short story, a song and script. I recruited actors from the students, assistants from the artists. I handed out flyers as they entered the yellow house.

"In memoriam," I said.

"Will it help us understand?"

"They're gone."

We called it, affectionately, The Disappeared.

For months we marched around Colombo cameras and microphones between our arms, like the city was ours. We passed St. Anthony's and recreated Ajith's first disappearance. We all chuckled at the actors' dramatization. "This is how it was," I called out from the steps of the church. "This is how it will be."

We consulted experts, professors, philosophers. We staged mock interviews with dressed up actors. "Where did they all go?"

We journeyed across the island, on bus and train, on hard rubber seats, on dreams of telling a meaningful story, this meaningful story. In bed, my right arm caught around Randhula, I dreamt of film festivals and hotel rooms in Paris and Kathmandu. These were new dreams. We recorded sweeping panoramas of the ocean in Trincomalee and soldiers in Kandy. Music playing in the background, the camera would stop its curve and hover upon a distant point. "Is that Ajith?" a voice would say. "Is that Migara?"

Some nights in the yellow house I wouldn't sleep. I listened for police sirens driving past the house. I followed the squeaks and horns outside to nighttime crime scenes with bodies uncovered, face-up. Spotlights illuminating matted, lifeless hair. Blood sat there clinging to the sides of faces that I thought I knew.

In these bodies I saw my old friends.

I saw Migara's face rise off the skin of a shop owner in Colombo Five and on an ammaa in Borella, shot twice, just enough to die. I reached out to touch her long black hair and it felt like his. Police circled these bodies, hungry like lions or like vultures. In beige uniforms, they snapped at the dead, peaked hats falling to the ground, beneath the lights. Migara once told me

16 he didn't like the dull color of the uniforms. "The uniforms should be crimson. You know why?"

He laughed. "Blood."

I thought I saw the faces of the Devasiri brothers at a car crash on Marine Dr. It smelled like mangos and cigarettes.

When I got back to the yellow house, Randhula was asleep. I went quietly to call their ammaa, Mrs. Devasiri, from the kitchen. Instead, I found I had called my own mother. I hadn't spoken to her since before the disappearances.

She answered. "Ayubowan."

"Ammaa?"

"Gihan." Her voice sounded tired. "It's late."

I told her that I had quit the university.

She said, "You can't do this Gihan. How are you going to live?" Her voice seemed so far away, such that she was only a whisper.

When we found them, a monsoon was raging. When we found them we almost didn't recognize them. I saw them smoking outside in the cramped back patio of the yellow house.

They had let themselves through the gate and hallways without ringing the bell, leaving a trail of muddy boot prints through the kitchen. Randhula was by the stove making them tea.

"They're back," she said.

Migara greeted me through the glass. "Machang, how are you?" Heavy beads of warm water saturated his dark skin, cut through patches of grey smoke.

I stepped outside to welcome them back, put my arms over the shoulders of the Devasiri brothers. "Do you remember me," I asked. They smiled and nodded, but I don't know if they

17 really did. Ajith asked me if I wanted a cigarette or a joint. I declined. They seemed different sitting there, but not really there, maybe smaller, maybe paler. Amidst the downpour, the hum of nearby busses and course engines singing in the rain, I watched them flicker. I felt the plastered yellow walls grow expansive and bright like that sunlight at St. Anthony's.

IV. Fiction, Ethnography, and Me

Late in the spring of 2013, as the high-spirited excitement of the Sinhala-Tamil New

Year quickly began to wane, I traveled by means of unsteady train to Sri Lanka's capital city of

Colombo. For approximately one month (from mid-April to mid-May) I wandered the streets of

Colombo, intermingling with a subculture of contemporary creative-thinkers, writers and musicians who offered—in the face of a recent ethnic conflict, in the face of an increasingly commercialist and repressive mainstream, in the face of blinding and dehydrating heat—a lifestyle and belief system counter to that of a dominant Sinhala Buddhist culture. Among those I met—authors, playwrights, musicians, intellectuals, filmmakers, artists, and fashion designers— there was little consistency, there was no center. I endeavored, as a student of anthropology, to employ a holistic ethnographic methodology, conducting semi-structured interviews (rooted in an extensive list of questions), as well as using participant observation (attending artist events and concerts). By the end of my time in Colombo, I had conducted interviews with eighteen countercultural artists and academics based in Colombo, totaling more than forty hours of recordings. I hurriedly converted this data into an analytic essay and left from Sri Lanka.

It has been nearly a year since I first arrived in Sri Lanka, almost nine months since I conducted those interviews in Colombo. Over the course of the last several months I've revisited the interviews and data from my fieldwork with critical reflection and discussion on the practice

18 of ethnography. Here, I've chosen not to simply write another analytic ethnographic essay, but also an ethically responsible short story (read: creative fiction), informed by my fieldwork in

Colombo, conversations and research performed over the semester, and art (specifically the film,

The Forsaken Land by Vimukthi Jayasundara) crafted by the same artists whom I interviewed.

Ethnography is a staple of anthropology and religious studies. While both disciplines often rely on fieldwork and ethnography to reveal a reality and truth separate from abstraction and fiction

(often associated with 'armchair' anthropologists of the past), the opposite seems more true. This common notion in anthropology—that the field provides the academic total access to that which has been excluded from theory—is flawed. Recent theoretical debates and developments in the spheres of art, activism, and anthropology indicate that, perhaps, it is the field that is the fiction, lacking a complete and unrefined picture of reality (Vickers 2010:564).

I titled the short story (that appears above) The Disappeared. The frame of disappearance

(as it turns out) is a useful tool to discuss the relationship between ethnography and fiction, especially as it relates to a focus on countercultural artists in Sri Lanka. Over the last half- century, as a result of Sri Lanka's often violent ethnic conflict between a Sinhala Buddhist government and a Tamil minority population, disappearance has become a very real, distressing and sensitive topic in Sri Lanka (Goonetilleke 1993:450). As well, among the identities of the countercultural artists that I interviewed in Colombo, Buddhism itself existed as a disappearance, a self-conscious absence, a decided de-emphasis amid a hyper-Buddhist nation. Theoretically and methodologically, recent conversations in the field of anthropology raise concerns about the disappearing ethnographer, who participates in fieldwork, but vanishes from the written ethnography. In Buddhist studies, researchers have recently refocused the field towards violence in Buddhist cultures: a disappearing innocence in the discipline (Kent 2010). Finally, in both

19 ethnography and in creative writing, the author chooses (either deliberately or unconsciously) the information that is presented to and kept from the reader: a disappearance of the observed

(Narayan 1991:141).

This series of disappearances, in conjunction with discussion on the status of fiction in ethnography, helps to explain the value of fieldwork in religious studies as rethinking the discipline as an imaginative field. Both the religious studies ethnographer and the novelist aim to inhabit other worlds through the process of imagination; this is significant and valuable for both disciplines. Most specifically and practically, this can take form in rethinking and revising

Western conceptions of 'good' and 'bad' manifestations of Buddhism. Buddhist studies academic and ethnographer, Daniel Kent exercises a sort of imagination to challenge dominant forms of

Buddhist studies, moving away from religion in the head to also the physical and tangible experience of religion by individuals (2010).

As a student of anthropology with a strong interest in creative writing, there has been a disconnect in my post-secondary education between the practices of creative writing and ethnography. Only recently was I exposed to a new set of scholarship bridging this gap between these two writing practices. Kirin Narayan, fiction author and academic ethnographer, uses the term "ethnography" to "refer to a practice of writing about people that is explicitly rooted in fieldwork and which originated in the discipline of anthropology even if it has now been co- opted by a range of other fields, whether sociology, education, or cultural studies"(1999:134).

Fiction then is a "practice of writing that is not linked to any particular discipline and leaves the author free to invent" (1999:134). There is in fact a disjointed history of creative writing among anthropologists and religious studies academics, deriving pieces of fiction from fieldwork. A number of social scientists have utilized fiction, "depicting insights from their fieldwork in this

20 alternative medium" (Narayan 1999:136). These include, Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Paul Radin and more recently Kirin Narayan and Margaret Vickers. In 1929, Oliver La Farge won the

Pulitzer Prize for Laughing Boy, a fictional novel drawing on his fieldwork among the Navaho

(Narayan 1999:136). For the most part, however, the use of fiction has remained relegated to the sidelines of academia, rarely considered by the majority as a useful tool to complement fieldwork and present important truths to a reading audience.

Susan Sontag writes in her seminal text, On Photography, "despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth" (Sontag

1977:7). The photograph is not reality; it can never perfectly depict the world beyond the lens.

Similarly, the ethnography of the social scientist is not reality; it too can never depict the world beyond the words upon its page. Anthropologist and historian, James Clifford offers a strong claim to the fictional qualities of ethnography. In engaging in fieldwork and crafting ethnography, the researcher (much like the creative writer or photographer omitting certain particulars from a fictional narrative or framed picture) makes both deliberate and unconscious decisions on the material included and excluded in the product available to the public. Though fieldwork complicates theory, fieldwork is also inherently theoretical, presenting such a myriad of choices that it must have a fictional quality. Ethnographies emerge from "systematic and contestable exclusions," the disappearance of the observed (Clifford 1986:6). In turn, Clifford maintains that "ethnographic writings can properly be called fictions in the sense of 'something made or fashioned,' the principle burden of the word's Latin root fingere, but it is important to preserve the meaning not merely of making, but also of making up, of inventing things not actually real" (1986:6). For Clifford, "ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial—committed

21 and incomplete" (1986:7). It stands to reason that fiction and creative writing derived from fieldwork (but making no claims on fact), also offer a partial, but important, set of truths

(Vickers 2010).

Clifford takes an extreme approach to fiction and ethnography, stripping away the boundary between the two forms of writing. More recently Kirin Narayan has offered a nuanced qualification to Clifford's argument. Narayan, as both an ethnographer and fiction author, recognizes an important border between fiction and ethnography. Stepping across this border with deliberateness and intentionality can be beneficial for both disciplines; however, blurring it completely can come with certain perils. Narayan writes:

For fiction the danger of merging with ethnography is to lose the power of a good story in favor of becoming a forum for mechanically transmitting facts. It is to stand back, scanning the scene for generalities rather than specifics, and to stress the statistically probable over the startling possible. It is to pay more attention to the social resonance of actions than the particularity of individual passions. Finally, it is to lose the imaginative freedom to playfully mix and recombine elements from the known world. [1999:144]

Conversely, she argues:

For ethnography to become too much like fiction is to lose clarity, so that readers have to puzzle along, trying to guess what is the point of the text and how likely such events would be to happen. It is to lose the power of disciplinary shorthand for situating lives with broad contextual strokes. It is to confuse whether anthropology's mission is to write about other people or oneself and to take potentially dangerous liberties in attempting to speak from within other minds. Most importantly, it is to undermine what I consider the heart of anthropology: the importance of close, respectful attention to the lives of other actual people that characterizes fieldwork. [1999:143]

Finally, she comes to a conclusion:

To assert the existence of a border, then, is also to emphasize the enrichment that can come from travel. In terms of the past, reclaiming the legacies of our disciplinary ancestors who also wrote fiction is to gain heightened respect for anthropological creativity, which may spill beyond circumscribed genres. In terms of the future, accessibly written ethnographies and novels drawing on ethnographically honed insights have the potential to bring the practices of our discipline to wider audiences. In a globalized world of many crosscutting, transcultural conversations, to reach audiences beyond our disciplinary purview is to enhance anthropology's relevance. [1999:144]

The two forms of writing are useful complements to each other, each offering insight that the other traditionally does not. Fiction and ethnography both endeavor to inhabit other worlds and

22 cultures. Historically, ethnography has striven to achieve the "native's point of view" (Narayan

1999:141). According to Geertz as well as Narayan, "this is accomplished is not by getting into the heads of the people being studied but by carefully examining what they say and do. Fiction is more shameless. Writing fiction, authors have no qualms about speaking from within the subjective worlds, thought processes, and emotions of their characters" (Narayan 1999:141).

This notion of inhabitation through writing is fundamental to understanding religious studies an imaginative discipline, grasping and transmitting the lived experience of religion.

Post-Geertz, the voices of ethnographic subjects have invaded the ethnography. Narayan explains that fiction "usually withholds, rather than giving away the author's intentions, these are slipped into the narrative line. Fiction keeps a reader turning pages not through what is said as much as what is left unsaid, creating, suspense" (1999:139). There is a useful distinction between what is said by the ethnographic subject and why it is said; imaginative traditions of religious studies and writing about real people in real places draw upon this why. Narayan, uncomfortable with writing fiction through the voice of the subjects of her fieldwork, writes that "like listening to people's words, watching them closely allows ethnographers and fiction writers alike to depict people without presuming to speak from within their own minds" (1999:141). However, reading the fiction of great writers "who move effortlessly between subjectivities," she wonders, "might the scruples generated by an ethnographic training not constrain a fiction writer's leaps of imaginative identification?" (1999:141). In their joint ethnography, Listen to the Heron's Words,

Raheja and Gold "were persuaded by the power of women's voices to listen, pay attention, and attempt to comprehend their words" (1994:xii). It takes a certain imagination as an outsider

(ethnographer or fiction writer) to explore and inhabit new identities in writing.

The disappearing voice of the ethnographer too has in recent years returned to the ethnography. The "paradigmatic" disappearance of Geertz into anecdotes of rapport ("the quasi- invisibility of participant-observation") during his fieldwork with the Balinese is an outmoded convention for staging a sense of ethnographic authority (Clifford 1983:132). Consequently, the reader is uninformed "that an essential part of the cockfight's construction as a text is dialogical, talking face-to-face with particular Balinese rather than reading culture 'over the[ir] shoulders' "

(Clifford 1983:132). More recently, in Listen to the Heron's Words Raheja and Gold "recount in personal voices" their own experiences and fieldwork in India (1994:xvi). Clifford notes that in ethnography, "every use of 'I' presupposes a 'you' and every instance of discourse is immediately linked to a specific, shared situation" (1983:133). Today self-reflexivity is important in drawing the once disappeared ethnographer back into the ethnography, as well as recognizing the imaginative, subjective and fictional qualities of the text.

In a recent interview, Jagath Weerasinghe, one of Sri Lanka's older influential artists and civil activists, remarked that the writer and artist "has a duty to depict the moment we live in, in the current frame of time through his art and in doing so be responsible to the social and political statement he is making through his creation" (2009). Past trends in anthropology and religious studies, have produced fictional writings by 'armchair' academics on other cultures and religions.

These, of course, were not informed by fieldwork and fell upon generalization and speculation, rather than particularity and context. Both creative and ethnographic writing must not be excused from an ethical responsibility and accountability to the people and culture that such writings are representing "to the world outside the text" (Narayan 1999:141). In a time of immense globalization, it is quite possible that the people represented in a text will eventually read that text and make judgments about it. The ethnographer and fiction writer are both often outsiders

24 assuming the voice of the insider. Jagath, who was briefly abducted and tortured by Sinhala-

Buddhist forces in February 1978, aptly observed that any artist, like the ethnographer and writer, is "inside and outside at the outside at the same time" (2009). For my story, The

Disappeared, I assumed the voice of a young Sri Lankan student and writer swept up into lifestyle among countercultural artists in Sri Lanka. As I wrote I tried to be conscious of the way in which the living artists would feel about this character, the repercussions of my writing. How would Vimukthi Jayasundara feel about my character, Gihan? I intend to eventually ask for their feedback on the story. (It would be interesting to pair a future draft with their critiques, allowing the reader another source of truth and reality.) Ethnography, in this way, is a piece of activism, like Matthew Engelke's ethnography, A Problem of Presence. For Engelke, "the Western stereotype of Africans as corrupt is not one I want to reinforce. It is grossly misleading...I hope the ethnography presented here is strong enough to counter the negative stereotypes of Africans and African Christians" (Engelke 2007:251). In Sri Lanka, the ethnographer as an artist has the responsibility to undertake the job of imagining a multiplicity of identities, as well as violence and peace in a modern Buddhist nation.

Here I would like to briefly comment on my story, The Disappeared, its relevance to a discussion of fiction and ethnography in religious studies and anthropology, and its role in a series of disappearances in this complementary essay. I will try my best to elucidate the choices I have made as writer, however "as with most creative processes, one never knows what thoughts, happenings, and connections the mind will make until we are in the middle of things" (Vickers

2010:556). Even now, afterwards, I am still unsure about what I have crafted. As such, I will not, nor am I able to, comment on every detail of my short story.

In the middle of the story, the main character, Gihan, recites an anthologized poem, written during the Sinhala-Tamil conflict, as his own. Much of the creative writing critical of the ethnic conflict at this time was written in the form of poetry. D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke notes that creative writers found "the escalation of strife...a traumatic new experience which they were impelled to express and interpret, even if they were unable to come to terms with it" (1992:451)

I was shown the poem during my time in Sri Lanka. It is entitled Shere Khan Age by Devika. It describes the disturbing bloodshed during July 1983:

Where there were memories now ruins—a charred body, and scavengers come to kill each other for the pieces of a dying nation. Bloodstained, O island of gentle welcomes and temple flowers, your red sands are now more red. Tear-shaped, you are now also fear-swept. [quoted in Goonetilleke 1992:451]

This poem, heartbreaking and poignant, is representative of the body of creative work written since tumultuous period, authors divulging their fear and anger about the ethnic violence through the written and spoken word. In the short story it is an easily forgettable moment; yet Gihan's recitation of this poem raises questions of authenticity and layers of identity that permeate the story and more generally the field of religious studies. The identities of the characters are shifting and changing. They are unsure of the way in which they fit into Buddhist and Sri Lankan identities. Gihan, like much of the story is both a created character and a real amalgamation of the real artists that I interviewed (as well as perhaps myself). To some degree the voice of Gihan, as Sri Lankan student turned countercultural writer, as narrator, is inauthentic because it too is my voice writing as an outsider.

Buddhism is not singular, nor is it simple. The setting of the first scene, "St. Anthony's

Church," presented with an amalgamation of Christian and Buddhist imagery, serves as a physical reminder of that multivocality, moving away from idealist, pure forms of Buddhism. It speaks to the heterogeneity of religion. Similarly for Christian studies, Jon Bialecki contends,

"the fact that Christianity can at once be read as championing modernity and challenging is indicative of Christianity's deep heterogeneity. This heterogeneity means that numerous different forms of Christianity have to be accounted for" (Bialecki et al. 2008:1152). Although religious studies and anthropology have tended away from the physical, like many contemporary authors I emphasized the physical details—drumsticks, cigarettes, rain and tattoos—and places of the story to give it life and a sense of inhabitation. Such details are generally ignored in most ethnography. The significance of this story is not static—in its future presentation and forms, it could, and should, be revised and expanded upon.

Before writing The Disappeared, I watched the film, The Forsaken Land, written and directed by Vimukthi Jayasundara. Vimukthi is filmmaker whom I interviewed during my fieldwork in Colombo. With stunning cinematography, the film takes place on a desolate and empty coast in war torn Sri Lanka, where "men and women drift through life as if they were ghosts, casualties of a civil war that hangs over them like a curse" (Dargis 2005). Notions of emptiness, loss, and disappearance recur throughout the film. Following its release, The

Forsaken Land, was quickly banned by Sri Lankan government, and subsequently received international attention, winning the Camera d'Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

Given my fieldwork experience in Colombo, my interview with the director, it is easy to take this film as a piece of ethnographic evidence, of data, on these Sri Lankan artists. I choose, however, to take a different approach to this film. Instead of data, the film itself (like my short

27 story and this paper) is a piece of co-ethnography; Vimukthi Jayasundara instead of an ethnographic subject is a co-ethnographer. This is a shift from these artists as subjects (on which the ethnographer can place his tender gaze) to collaborators (Schneider and Wright 2010). As such, with this shift the object of ethnographic research, and hopefully in my own writing, is no longer a culture as whole, or even the individual. Instead it is that fleeting moment when the past resurfaces in the present (Schneider and Wright 2010:12). Situating myself as a co-ethnographer affects the way in which I talk about myself in the fiction product; in a perfect presentation the film would be given equal attention, shown in conjunction, my short story. Moreover,

Jayasundara's The Forsaken Land represents a set of truths, characters, and themes very differently than an ethnography or short story. This is part because of perspective, but also because of form and medium. It offers a visual and auditory experience rather than a read one; it conveys often-unexpressed emotions and experiences to the viewer.

This multiplication of sources (the film, my short story, this essay) offers new venues for the representation of a multiplicity of voices. In ethnography, there has been a recent shift to imagery and visual media as part of fieldwork, challenging the interview as the best way to present voice. Raheja and Gold argue that the interview is not enough: "If we rely only on women's interview statements, or on our observations of women's public adherence to the norms of silence and submission, we run the risk of assuming that women are incapable of using verbal strategies to oppose that dominant ideology" (1994:23). These multiple sources offer voices that mutually inform each other (Schneider and Wright 2010:12).

Of course, the reader can interpret the film and my short story in a variety of ways. There is a always a difference between the intention of the creator and its meaning to an audience.

Clifford writes:

There are always a variety of possible readings (beyond merely individual appropriations), readings beyond the control of any single authority. One may approach a classic ethnography seeking simply to grasp the meanings that the researcher derives from represented cultural facts. But, as we have suggested, one may also read against the grain of the text's dominant voice, seeking out other, half-hidden authorities, reinterpreting the descriptions, texts and quotations gathered together by the writer. [Clifford 1893:141]

It is not possible to reduce a piece of art to its creator’s intentions. In my conversation with

Jayasundara he noted that The Forsaken Land was inspired by a documentary that he filmed early in his study of film about disabled army soldiers. He recorded many stories about soldiers and their backgrounds, their families, and their experiences in the war (interview with the author,

18 April 2013). In The Forsaken Land, I think Jayasundara was trying to realize how Buddhist soldiers understand and experience violence, in a country that is still not in total peace.

Early in the film, at the first real moment of dialogue, a soldier and a guardsman smoke marijuana in a bomb hole, speaking about soldiers committing suicide. It is a clear moment in which Jayasundara counters Sinhala-Buddhist traditions. The soldier says, "If I were serving up north, I'd be flying in a helicopter. You don't know the thrill you get after smoking a joint up there, like a god fucking you in the ass" (Jayasundara 2005). The guardsman says, "Don't be blasphemous" (Jayasundara 2005). The soldier then responds, "Hey, did I say anything bad? I also believe in Buddha and in the gods. I make a pilgrimage each year" (Jayasundara 2005). In critiquing the Sinhala government and the ethnic conflict, Jayasundara is also offering multiple experiences of Buddhism, including his own.

In many ways, Daniel Kent's research on Buddhist soldiers parallels Jayasundara's film.

Kent like Jayasundara explains that "the first step toward reconciliation was the separation of

Buddhism-the-religion from Buddhists who adopt violent means" (Kent 2010:160). Kent attempts to break down conceptions and simplifications of Buddhism as a peaceful religion based in text. Buddhism in Sri Lanka is complex; it includes violence, it focuses on the physical,

29 and the day-to-day experiences and questions from "informants whose voices are normally not heard" (Kent 2010:159). Kent and Jayasundara complicate the Western academics trying to find justifications for Buddhist actions of violence. Justification is not an important concern to the

Buddhist practicing warfare and the question of justification no longer a useful lens for viewing

Buddhist violence; he writes, "rather than asking monks and soldiers how Buddhism justifies war, I asked about the karmic consequences of individual actions on the battlefield" (Kent

2010:163). I hope that my short story too can join the work of Kent and Jayasundara, responding to Western simplifications of Buddhism, and challenging Buddhist studies privilege to written doctrine over spoken word, beliefs and actions. This takes creativity to re-imagine conceptions of religion, practices in the field, and new forms of presentation.

The Forsaken Land concludes with a radio playing of missing persons in Sri Lanka. The voice says, "Radio bulletin of the police. Colombo, 14th of this month Mr. Tangawelu disappeared. Age: 24. Height: 5 foot 4 inches" (Jayasundara 2005). In this story these missing will not come back. In the end of my story the disappeared return, but they are not the same as when they left. As fiction, drawn from lived experiences, both attempt in a way to offer a set of partial truths, validated by the interviews and fieldwork that informs them. Alone each form of presentation offers an incomplete notion of reality, but perhaps together, they offer a truth more comprehensive, more intriguing, more complex, more human.

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