ABSTRACT

‘LABORS OF MEMORY’ AND ‘GUERILLA-TYPES OF ATTRITION’ IN POST-WAR SRI LANKAN MEMORY CULTURE

by Dinidu Priyanimal Karunanayake

Speaking of Sri Lanka’s civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Ananda Abeysekara observes an authorization of a power dynamic between Buddhism, the state head, and the nation. The official end of the war on May 19, 2009 has reaffirmed this religio- national power grid. Correspondingly, the religious fervor has become an indispensable ingredient in post-war memory culture. This thesis concentrates on state-sanctioned memory work and the ways in which it is resisted by artists who draw from memories of trauma. Using Sarath Weerasekara’s Gamani (2011), this thesis explores the “uses and abuses” of memory (Jelin) in the state–sponsored post–war cinema. The thesis also examines how this hegemonic memory narrative is deconstructed, through a close reading of Sanjeewa Pushpakumara’s Flying Fish (2011), and engages with the work of artists Thamotharapillai Sanaathanan and Bandu Manamperi. It thus shows how memories are merged with a quest for justice.

‘LABORS OF MEMORY’ AND ‘GUERILLA-TYPES OF ATTRITION’ IN POST-WAR SRI LANKAN MEMORY CULTURE

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English by Karunanayake Pathirannehelage Dinidu Priyanimal Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2014

Advisor______Professor Nalin Jayasena Reader______Professor Anita Mannur Reader______Professor Yu-Fang Cho

Contents

Chapter One: Sri Lankan War and Mnemonic Premise ------1

Chapter Two: Militant Buddhism and Post-War Sri Lankan Cinematic Memory Work—A Case-study of Sarath Weerasekara’s Gamani ------26

Chapter Three: Post-war Cinema of the Oppressed —Flying Fish and “Guerilla Types of Attrition” ------45

Chapter Four: Imaging Memories—Post-war Art and Performances of Resistance ------58

Chapter Five: The Question of Justice —Wither Post-war Aesthetics of Resistance? ------75

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List of Figures

Image 1: War Remnants flyer ------8

Image 2: The former LTTE cemetery in Kopai ------13

Image 3: What has survived the demolition ------13

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Nalin Jayasena for his mentorship and for guiding me thorough the process of drafting this thesis, Professor Anita Mannur and Professor Yu-Fang Cho for their valuable feedback and support, Sammani Perera for being my indomitable spirit, Daniel Ringold for the brotherhood, all the artists who contributed with their time, insights, and good will, and the Department of English, Miami University for empowering me to become who I am today. May 19, 2014

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Chapter One Sri Lankan War and the Mnemonic Premise

We have something called the Terrorism Prevention Act. It is forbidden to commemorate the deaths of certain people, and to light up lamps in their memory according to our Constitution. Therefore, it is forbidden to organize any remembrance events on the 18 th and the 19 th . —Military spokesman Ruwan Wanigasuriya speaking to the media on May 11, 2014 1

Fear of the archive At an election meeting organized by the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) in Jaffna, Sri Lanka on May 31, 1981, the police on duty were attacked by an unidentified gang.2 Two policemen died while one was injured. The incident that happened in Jaffna, the cultural hub of the Sri Lankan Tamil community, was forthwith interpreted by the state in ethnic terms as an attack on the Sinhalese state by the Tamil minority. Within a half an hour, truckloads of policemen arrived and unleashed a wave of “state terrorism” that continued until June 4. They went on rampage, burning Tamil-owned business places and property, the house of the Member of Parliament for Jaffna, and the office and the press of the Tamil newspaper Ealanadu 3 (Human Rights Watch 87, Knuth 84). Statues of Tamil cultural and religious figures were defaced and demolished (Peris qtd. in Knuth 84). Five bookshops were destroyed. 4 Among the places that were burnt down was a notable landscape, the Jaffna Library. The arson resulted in the destruction of 95,000-97,000 books including numerous culturally important, historical documents and ancient manuscripts which were irreplaceable (Human Rights Watch 87, Burning Memories ). The burning of the library presaged an outbreak of violence between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities which later evolved into an ethnicity-based civil war between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). 5

1 The speech is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4KcAbmJkZs .

2 I refer to Santasilan Kadirgamar’s article, “May 31-June 4 1981: Five Days of State Terror in Jaffna.”

3 The first ever regional daily newspaper in Sri Lanka as Burning Memories documentary mentions.

4 Kadirgamar writes that three of the books stored belonged to Poobalasingam, a member of the Communist Party committed to a united Lanka. His book stores were “a rallying point for those committed to a left agenda, providing the best of reading material, books, journals, periodicals and newspapers from the Sinhalese south and India, especially Tamil Nadu” (“May 31-June 4 1981: Five Days of State Terror in Jaffna”).

5 Qadri Ismail observes that the Sinhalese state-sponsored pogroms against Tamils in 1956 and 1983 are utilized by Tamil nationalism as the main buttress to justify its separatism (220). As he further notes, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) emerged in the wake of the pogrom of 1983, challenging both Sinhala

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Archival locations have always been targets of state-sponsored destruction throughout history, in particular, under oppressive political establishments. In the seventh century BC, the first Emperor of China, Shin Huang Ti, decreed that all books prior to his regime be burnt in order to prevent dissenting forces from referring to the former emperors and thereby question his rule (Borges 166). Notwithstanding the three-thousand-year-long chronological history, Emperor Huang Ti ordered that Chinese history begin with him.6 In another example, the Khmer Rouge assumed power in Cambodia on April 17, 1975 with the declaration of the “zero year” by way of constructing a new form of memory. They “scattered libraries, burned books, closed schools, and murdered school teachers” (Kiernan qtd. in Schlund -Vials 2). Other notable examples of biblioclasm include the burning of books by Nazis on the streets of Bebelplatz in 1933, by Communists in Russia, and by the clerical regime in post- revolutionary Iran. In light of these harrowing instances of burning, a burning question arises—what is achieved out of erasing archives? What can we extrapolate from the violence levied against archives? Archives store knowledge and history. Anjali Arondekar maintains that the archive has become a “register of epistemic arrangements…[and] debates about the production and institutionalization of knowledge’ (qtd. in de Mel 48). Its intricate relationship with power is articulated by Jacques Derrida in “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” For him, Arkhe denotes two principles: the commencement and the commandment . The first principle pertains to nature or history where things commence in a physical, historical, or ontological sense, while the latter concerns a legal context “where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised…from which order is given-nomological principle” (Derrida 9). Tracing its etymology within the Greek political setting, Derrida says ‘archive’ derives its meaning from arkheion meaning the residence of the superior magistrates or archons who commanded (9). As guardians of official documents which state the law, the archons were assigned the responsibility to ensure the safety of what was deposited with them, and were accorded the hermeneutic right and competence, hence the power to interpret the archives (Derrida 10). Along the lines of Arondekar’s definition and Derrida’s account, nationalism and Tamil nationalism of the “bourgeois, ‘non-violent’, collaborationist” Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) (Ismail 225). According to the University of Maryland archive, TULF was created as a political platform to represent the interests of the Tamil people. During its formative years, a group of young, radical members left the Party to form a militant group called “Tamil New Tigers,” which became the LTTE in 1976 under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran.

6 Jorge Luis Borges observes another major reason for the Emperor’s decree, and say that he had been incensed by his mother’s promiscuous behavior and it is likely that he “tried to abolish the entire past in order to abolish [this] one single memory” (167).

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archives originate nomological, epistemological and political power. The Jaffna library, in these terms, becomes a central power icon for Sri Lankan Tamils. Karthikesu Sivathamby in the documentary Burning Memories calls the library “an intellectual heritage,” while the former Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva similarly refers to it as “undoubtedly the richest literary heritage of the people of Jaffna” (39). As such, the demolition of this landmark by the state police can be understood as an attempt to erase the intellectual, historical, and cultural identity of the Tamil community. More significantly, archives are powerhouses of memories, and hence, are deeply involved in politics of memory. History and memory are mutually constitutive, and the archiving of history becomes a concomitant process of archiving memories. Lisa Yoneyama reiterates the correlation between the two, and argues that “the imagined opposition between History and Memory seems to rest on and contribute to a false dichotomy” (27). 7 In her book Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory , she positions memory as something “deeply embedded in and hopelessly complicitous with history in fashioning an official and authoritative account of the past” (27). In a similar vein, Derrida writes that “[T]here is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” (qtd. in Manoff 9). As such, the state has to wield control over the archive as well as memories in order to retain political power over its subjects. The Sri Lankan state governed by a nationalist agenda would naturally endorse the elimination of ‘rival’ archives which embody cultural, intellectual, historical and mnemonic identities of minority ethnicities that can pose a threat to its own national archive. This anxiety is well represented by the Derridian notion of “archive fever,” a term Derrida borrows from Freud’s work which is particularly marked by foundationalism, or fever for origins (Steedman 1160). The fever or the sickness of the archive is related to the establishment of state power and authority. Correspondingly, there is a feverish desire which is “not so much to enter it and use it as to have it” (Steedman 1159). The 1981 Sinhalese nationalist violence levied against Tamil archival sites—not only the library but also bookstores and the Tamil newspaper—is a precursor to the state’s “feverish desire” to control the archive by militant means.

7 For Yoneyama, History tends to stand for rational and scientific knowledge, while Memory is associated with the “subjective,” such as nostalgic passion, longing, devotion, or allegiance (27).

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The burning of the Jaffna Library was given close attention because historically it set the stage for a study of a post-war memory politics, which is the focus of this project. A post- war discussion of the archive needs to take into consideration, at least briefly, how the state’s “feverish desire” to own the archive evolved in tandem with its war with the LTTE. The civil war broke out in the wake of the state-sponsored 1983 pogrom. 8 The riots started on July 24 centered in Colombo, and prevailed until August 5, with rioters brutally murdering 2,000- 3,000 defenseless people (Tambiah 94). Recalling the disturbing nature of the state’s complicity in violence, Tiruchelvam writes: The state not only mishandled the funeral of 13 soldiers who had been ambushed by the LTTE on July 23 rd , 1983 9 but also allowed the inflammatory news to be projected in banner headlines in the newspapers on the 24 th . On the other hand, the retaliatory violence of the security forces in Tirunelveli and Kantharmadu which resulted in an estimated 50 to 70 persons being killed was suppressed from the media. Army personnel appeared to have encouraged arson and looting and in some instances participated in the looting. Neither the army nor the police took any meaningful action to prevent the violence or to apprehend the culprits…. It was also widely believed that elements within the state or the ruling party had either orchestrated the violence or encouraged the bloodletting. No Commission or inquiry was ever appointed to clear the state of these allegations or to investigate the causes of violence. (6) The state media, in this fashion, has presented an incomplete account of violence that supports the Sinhalese nationalist agenda. Such media archivations have significantly influenced the ways in which the origins of civil war are being remembered and recreated in popular media. Popular understandings of the history of the armed conflict are simultaneously fashioned by this “hypomnestic” archive (Derrida 14). Invoking Freud, Derrida observes the politics of memory that spread its tentacles over the archive:

8 Neelan Tiruchelvam and Stanley J. Tambiah reiterate that 1983 is the flagship moment of a trajectory of violence that originated in 1956 in newly independent Sri Lanka. The passing of the “Sinhala Only Bill” on June 14, 1956 that officialized Sinhala and segregated all other languages sparked tension among minorities, in particular Tamils. The 1956 violence claimed 20 to 200 people as Tambiah documents in Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia.

9 On July 23, 1983, 13 government soldiers were killed in an LTTE ambush in Jaffna. The government brought the dead bodies to the capital and sensationalized the killing by giving wide publicity to the funeral. The government’s action is criticized as a shortsighted measure that was instrumental in sparking ethnic violence targeting Tamils in Colombo.

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As the death drive is also, according to the most striking words of Freud himself, an aggression and a destruction ( Destruktion ) drive, it not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mnéme or anamnesis , but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mnéme or to anamnésis , that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnéma , mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum. Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory. (14) Selective amnesia, which the Sri Lankan media intended to achieve as evident in the Tiruchelvam account, is an indispensable component of the politics of archive. Post-war premise The Derridian notions of the “annihilation of memory,” “radical effacement” and “eradication” operate in a heightened sense in the post-war period. The civil war was officially concluded by the Government with a landslide victory on May 19, 2009 when the state forces killed the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Since then, the state has been using the military victory as panacea for virtually every political objective within the country, in particular, during election campaigns where public support is in need. 10 Despite the absence of a military confrontation, effective measures are being taken to strengthen and expand the armed forces. Militarization is a process that begins before the war, Neloufer de Mel writes, “for it works to lay the groundwork that justifies and legitimizes war, and lasts long after the last guns have fallen silent on the battlefield because as an ideology, [it] has seeped into our institutions and ways of thought” (12). At a press conference on August 31, 2013 during her mission to Sri Lanka, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay noted, “I am deeply concerned that Sri Lanka, despite the opportunity provided by the end of the war to construct a new vibrant, all-embracing state, is showing signs of heading in an increasingly authoritarian direction.”11 Bearing witness to Pillay’s apprehensions and echoing de Mel’s definition, the GOSL’s budget for the year 2014 has allocated 19.9% on defense—a 5.8% increase from last year—as opposed to allocations on higher education

10 A good example is the 2010 presidential election.

11 See http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=13673 .

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which are as low as 1.9%. 12 Disregarding the pressure of the international community to demilitarize the former war zones in the northern and eastern parts of the country, the state is further expanding the armed forces (“Sri Lanka Raises Defense Budget Despite Foreign Pressure”). 13 Against the backdrop of post-war militarism, the state is notably invested in establishing an official version of the history and memory of the civil war, in particular the “Eelam War IV” which is the last phase of the war. Called “Humanitarian Operation” by the state, 14 this war is a key landmark in the nation’s history from several perspectives. On the one hand, the government forces recaptured all the LTTE-controlled territories and every single military base belonging to the enemy. In the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist imaginary, President Mahinda Rajapaksa emerged an incomparable national ruler who “unified” Sri Lanka after 544 years, the only ruler who managed to do so after King Parakaramabahu VI (1412–67) (Krishnaswamy “Government Fares Extremely Well at the Polls—Udaya Gammanpila”). On the other hand, the state started receiving allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity from the international community. 15 The Report of the Secretary- General ’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka (2011) prepared by the United

12 For a statistical breakdown, see http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article- details&page=article-details&code_title=91373 .

13 The presence of the military, particularly in the former war zone, seems to be becoming more ubiquitous but in clandestine ways. When I made my first trip to Jaffna in October 2011—slightly more than two years since the official end of the civil war—I had to go through dozens of military checkpoints. I also witnessed an armed vehicle patrolling the streets in Omantai (a town in Vavuniya in the Northern Province). In my second trip in January 2014, all the checkpoints had been removed, and there were few signs of armed vehicles in public areas. Unlike what I witnessed in the previous trip, soldiers’ presence was also minimal. On a street in the Jaffna town, a soldier had been deployed on a rooftop, where he was not easily visible. My personal experience and interactions with two officers in the Intelligence Division of the Sri Lankan Army convinced me that Sinhalese soldiers in Jaffna are mostly bilingual, which helps them merge well with the Tamil civilian community.

14 The government calls the last phase of war (July 2006—May 2009) “Humanitarian Operation.” According to Humanitarian Operation: Factual Analysis , a report published by the Ministry of Defence, it was an endeavor to “free the country from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam” (1). It is highlighted as a “necessary” “last resort” against the LTTE “after enduring decades of violence and terrorism committed against its citizens and the State” (1).

15 The Report to Congress on Incidents during the Recent Conflict in Sri Lanka drafted by the US Department of State in 2009 documents a series of allegations against the state armed forces such as use of heavy artillery that caused considerable civilian casualties (16, 18, 19), destroying a non-governmental organization providing humanitarian services (19), shelling a community of internally displaced people (IDPs) (20), and shelling hospitals (21). Killing Fields (2011), a documentary made and released by the British TV station Channel 4 levels accusations at the state forces of torturing blindfolded naked captives, summarily executing them in cold blood, and bombarding civilian places such as hospitals.

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Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon highlights the possibility of an alternative to the official version of the final stages of the war promulgated by the state: The Panel’s determination of credible allegations reveal a very different version of the final stages of the war than that maintained to this day by the Government of Sri Lanka. The Government says it pursued a “humanitarian rescue operation” with a policy of “zero civilian casualties.” In stark contrast, the Panel found credible allegations, which if proven, indicate that a wide range of serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law was committed both by the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, some of which would amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. (ii) The GOSL rejected the report and its allegations (Haviland “Sri Lanka Rejects Secret UN War Report as ‘Flawed’”). The political denial has not been all convincing internationally. 16 However, at a local level, the state has obtained noticeable success by highlighting prospects of the military victory, one of which is its ability to economically develop the former war zone. The state initiated the Uthuru Wasanthaya (“Northern Spring”) and Negenahira Nawodaya (“Eastern Revival”) development ventures in order to reconstruct and develop the infrastructure facilities in the North and the East. 17 Memory Culture 18

16 On March 27, 2014, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution requesting the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights “to undertake a comprehensive investigation into alleged serious violations and abuses of human rights and related crimes by both parties in Sri Lanka” (Human Rights Council Adopts a Resolution on Reconciliation, Accountability and Human Rights in Sri Lanka”).

17 These two massive development projects were commissioned by Mahinda Chinthana , the government’s main policy plan. See Sri Lanka—The Emerging Wonder of Asia: Mahinda Chinthana—Vision for the Future . In relation to development projects, it states, “Public investment will be directed to promote growth and value creation opportunities. Spending on social security will be encouraged through community participation” (9).

18 “Memory culture” is a term used by Andreas Huyssen to highlight the increasingly dominant role memory has been playing in global politics after memory discourses accelerated in the West in the early 1980s following the debates about the Holocaust (22). He calls memory culture “an increasingly successful marketing of memory by the Western cultural industry” (25). Thus he uses the term to show the way in which memory has come to assume a cultural identity or “a cultural obsession of monumental proportions across the globe” (26). I also understand memory culture through Elizabeth Jelin’s definition of memory: “Memory…incorporates knowledge, beliefs, behavior patterns, feelings, and emotions conveyed and received in social interaction, in processes of socialization, and in the cultural practices of a group” (9). I insist that memories are instrumental in giving a cultural identity to humans, and this context can be identified as a memory culture. It can be an imagined identity, similar to Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities.” Notably, Huyssen articulates the notion of “imagined memory,” which he credits to Arjun Appadurai’s discussion of “imagined nostalgia” (27).

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The rebuilding process in the former war zones demands our attentions due to its investments in an archival discourse of memory and history. While renovating buildings and places affected by the violence, the government has been keen to preserve a selected number of sites destroyed by the LTTE in the state of debris. In this regard, the Kilinochchi water tank that was allegedly destroyed by the LTTE on December 31, 2008 is a good example. A sign with the statement “Say no to destruction never (sic) again!” in Sinhala, Tamil, and English is displayed in front of the ruins of the massive water tank that has been converted into a memory site. There are several other sites with the same sign around the Jaffna city premises. Furthermore, the government assigned a cultural and nationalist capital to many places associated with their victory. Among them, the underground bunker used by LTTE leader Prabhakaran and a safe house used by Sea Tiger leader Soosai, both located in Puthukkudiyiruppu, the Nanthikadal lagoon where Prabhakaran was killed, and Farah-3, a merchant ship hijacked by the LTTE are notable examples. The underground bunker and the safe house soon became war museums attracting thousands of domestic and foreign ‘tourists.’ In his discussion of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Kevin Doyle shows how Cambodia’s killing fields have become “new revenue fields, fertile grounds for foreign investment, domestic development, and governmental support” (qtd. in Schlund-Vials 64). A similar trend of atrocity tourism emerged in the post-war Sri Lankan scenario. A flyer distributed around May 2013 with the title “War Remnants” offers a “tour to Mullaitive to see the “war remnants” and experience the final battle to defeat the LTTE” under “double” and “quadruple” packages (Figure 1). In the middle of the flyer is a picture of the merchant ship, Farah-3, that represents the “remnants” to be looked-forward to. This offer merges atrocity tourism with a memory discourse by giving the tourist an opportunity to recollect the final moments of victory in ‘real’ locations. Moreover, the tourist can enjoy it as a family or as a couple by using the “double” package, and with two kids via the “quadruple” package.

Image 1 : “War Remnants” flyer

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While ascribing a historical value to certain sites and thus archiving them in a nationalist memory discourse, the state also started erecting memorial sites that have become major tourist attractions in the post-war milieu. The flyer above (Image 1) features the Puthukkudiyiruppu Victory Monument near the Nanthikadal lagoon where the LTTE leader met his demise. Other important examples are the Elephant Pass War Memorial and the Kilinochchi War Memorial. Public memorials sites are key to nationalizing memories as Yoneyama maintains with reference to post-war Japan’s spatial politics of “taming” memories (44). She pays attention to the preservation of iconic sites such as the Nippon Bank Building, the Atom Bomb Dome, the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital and the construction of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. While commodifying and flattening out history through tourist appropriations (44), Yoneyama elucidates how dialects of memories associated with those spaces are subjected to nationalist and political maneuver: The process of remembering…necessarily entails the forgetting of forgetfulness. In our case, it masks how the nation’s military aggression, its destructiveness, and the loss of its brutal imperialist dreams have been deliberately and at times forcibly repressed for almost half a century since the end of the war. The ongoing reformation of knowledge about the nation’s recent past is a process of amnes(t)ic remembering where the past is tamed through the reinscription of memories. Precisely because many perceive this danger, the struggles over memory, particularly over the ways in which remembrances take place, have intensified in the local scene of the late- twentieth century Hiroshima. (32) She critically engages with official memorization of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and argues that “nuclear universalism”—the idea that “Hiroshima’s disaster ought to be remembered from the transcendent and anonymous position of humanity, and that remembering of Hiroshima’s tragedy should invoke natural and commonly shared human thoughts, sentiments, and moral attitudes not limited by cultural boundaries” —has converted the A-bombed city to a universal symbol of peace (Yoneyama 15,18). In this nationalist task, the pre-war atrocities committed by the Japanese Empire, its military aggression, and its history of imperialism and racism in the region are willfully obfuscated and obliterated. Allegations of “crimes against humanity” committed by Japan were downplayed while Nazi crimes and cold war politics diverted the international attention (Yoneyama 12). Japan’s “historical amnesia” (Yoneyama 5) is shared by the post-war Sri Lankan state that endeavors to lionize its military and thereby obliterate its historical role in creating fissures within the

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Sinhalese and Tamil communities and endorsing violence leveled against Tamils. Through a myriad of activities including a municipal festival, inner-city and waterfront re-development projects, tourism promotion, and other corporate events, post-war Japan successfully transforms “dark” memories of “a landscape of death” into “one of opulence, seductiveness, and comfort,” one of “bright and cheerful peace” (Yoneyama 44). The post-war Sri Lankan state’s endeavor that involves similar mnemonic practices can be best understood in light of the Japanese experience. While post-war memory sites in Japan “symbolize[ ] the nation’s rebirth and departure from the past” (Yoneyama 3), post-war Sri Lanka also has envisioned a “rebirth,” which was well illustrated in the mottos of the state’s development agenda, “A New Sri Lanka—A Bright Future,” and “The Miracle of Asia.” 19 The “peace culture” that is inextricably part of politics of post-war memory culture in Japan (Yoneyama 57) is a paradigm emerging in the post-war Sri Lankan setting as well. The Kilinochchi War Memorial deserves special mention at this juncture due to multiple levels at which politics of memorization operate. The memorial features a wall cracked by a giant bullet. A lotus flower, which is an iconic symbol of peace in the Sinhalese culture, is seen to be blossoming through the cracks. The state has built the memorial in a former LTTE-park called “Selvan Park,” named after S.P. Thamilselvan, the chief of the political wing of the LTTE who was killed in an air attack by the state forces on November 2, 2007. 20 On the one hand, the memorial symbolizes the official version of the war—which centralizes the destruction caused by the enemy—that the state expects to archive. By capitalizing on the ruthlessness of the enemy, the state intends to invoke sympathy about the Sinhalese community targeted by the LTTE, which is on par with the post-war Japanese discourse of “nuclear universalism” that implores sympathy from people in lieu of a historical interrogation of pre-war Japan’s political violence. Correspondingly, the plea for peace is meant to transmit the idea that post-war Sri Lanka is committed to peace and reconciliation, and thereby to divert critics’ attention away from pre-2009 aggression and post-war militarization.

19 President Rajapaksa keeps reiterating his goal to make Sri Lanka “the Miracle of Asia” as evident in his Sinhala-Tamil New Year message (“Determination to be Crowned the ‘Miracle of Asia’ Through National Reconciliation”). Miracle, which is defined by the OED as “A remarkable, wonderful, or very surprising phenomenon or event; an achievement or occurrence seemingly beyond human power; an outstanding achievement,” complements the idea of ‘rebirth.’

20 I owe this piece of information to painter Thamotharapillai Sanaathanan who I interviewed during my second trip to Jaffna in January 2014.

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The fact that the Kilinochchi War Memorial has replaced another memory-site and thus erased, or at least has attempted to erase, points to another important aspect of politics of memory. According to Freud, memory and forgetting are indissolubly linked to each other, and memory is only another form of forgetting, and forgetting a form of hidden memory (Huyssen 27). 21 Both Lisa Yoneyama and Elizabeth Jelin agree with Freud. Jelin notes, “Dealing with memories entails paying attention to remembrance and forgetting, to narratives and acts, to silences and gestures. Knowledge and information are at play, but so too are emotions, lapses, voids, and fractures” (8). Who remembers and forgets, what is remembered and forgotten, how and when it happens are crucial concerns. She continues, The past that is remembered and forgotten is activated in a present and in relation to future expectations. Be it within the dynamics of the individual, in interpersonal social interactions, or in more general or macrosocial processes, certain memories are activated in special moments or conjunctures; in other moments, silences and even forgetting prevail. (9) Huyssen, on the other hand, seeks to understand if the relationship between memory and forgetting is “being transformed under cultural pressures in which new information technologies, media politics, and fast-paced consumption are beginning to take their toll” (27). He stresses that many of the “mass-marketed memories” that we “consume” are “imagined memories” which are “thus more easily forgotten than lived memories” (Huyssen 27). Huyssen’s idea shows us a way of interpreting post-war Sri Lankan state’s prompt actions to commodify former LTTE-military bases by transforming them into war museums. It shares an analogy with post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia’s atrocity tourism industry that is built “upon a vexed characterization of Cambodian public memory by way of politicized tensions, competing narratives, and increasingly commodified remembrance” (Schlund-Vials 59). When the commodification process merges with a national memory discourse, it can ignite mnemonic tensions. As Jelin has shown, remembering and forgetting are engineered in relation to future expectations, which are nationalism and militarism in the case of Sri Lanka. In the post-war memory culture, the exhibition of some items belonging to the enemy seems to have produced competing narratives that challenge the hegemonic narrative. For instance, in the immediate post-war era, the state displayed sophisticated weaponry manufactured by

21 Huyssen further says, “What Freud described universally as the psychic processes of remembering, repression, and forgetting in an individual are writ large in contemporary consumer societies as a public phenomenon of unprecedented proportions that begs to be read historically” (27).

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the LTTE including a partially-built submarine found in the Puthukkudiyiruppu area, the underground bunker of the LTTE leader which was a breathtaking architectural design, the Sea Tiger leader’s safe house, and the massive swimming pool in Puthukkudiyiruppu used for training Sea Tigers. 22 While bearing proof to the magnitude of the state’s victory, they also contributed to a discourse of memorizing the military excellence the LTTE once possessed. In other words, they build up a memory archive of the LTTE. The prospective threat posed by a counter-archive rationalizes consequential measures taken by the state to demolish the houses of the LTTE leaders in March 2010. In defense of the state’s action, Tourism Ministry Secretary George Michael noted, “The official government policy is not to highlight former LTTE landmarks for tourism purposes. The government has already begun to clear some LTTE landmarks in line with the government’s view that terrorism, the LTTE and the violence which affected the public during the war should be forgotten” (Senanayake “Lanka to Clear LTTE Legacy”). His equivocal rationale 23 encapsulates the mnemonic tension created by the enemy’s historical ‘legacy’ in the hegemonic memory culture which is under the purview of the state. During my first trip to Jaffna in October 2011, I visited the LTTE war cemetery in Kopai. Once home to thousands of tombstones dedicated to the memory of fallen LTTE cadres—thus an archive of memories of Tamil nationalism—was nothing but a land of debris. All the tombstones and graveyards had been bulldozed to the ground (Image 2).

22 The GOSL was at times surprised by the enemy’s armory that it captured. The state forces did not have some of the weaponry found in the LTTE’s possession. The submarine (though it was still under construction) is a good example. More importantly, the state forces were not even familiar with certain high- tech weapons used by the LTTE such as the “paddle anti-aircraft gun,” which they used to call the “mysterious weapon” (Weerakoon, “LTTE’s Mysterious Weapon Uncovered—But How These Weapons Ended up in the Hands of the LTTE?”). 23 It is obviously equivocal because up to that point, the state was facilitating atrocity tourism by grating local and foreign tourists access to those places, displaying signs with information about places and captured weaponry, and deploying soldiers as guides, in short by converting the former LTTE-locations into war museums. TamilNet reports that between March 2009 (when the A-9 road—the highway connecting the north and the south—was opened for the public) and March 2010, nearly 300,000 local and foreign tourists have visited Jaffna (“SL Government Begins to Wipe out Traces of Tigers in the North”).

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Image 2 : The former LTTE cemetery in Kopai Image 3: What has survived the demolition

What remained was a heap of shredded pieces of tombstones and plaques on which the names of the dead had been written (Image 3). The post-war erasure of memory sites shows us the state’s paranoia about the rival archive, Tamil nationalism. Cemeteries and memory sites contribute to the archive, and the state-sponsored destruction directed towards them evokes the memories of the burning of the Jaffna library. Paradigms of ethnic enmity that surfaced in the wake of the 1981 burning of the library can repeat themselves. 24 War is a Spectacle—Post-war memory work 25 Against this political background, the role played by popular culture and mass media is very crucial. As Roger Stahl notes, “entertainment has been part and parcel of military propaganda from the invention of mass media forward” (10).Speaking of the post-Vietnam War US culture and the post-first Persian Gulf war era, he illustrates how “state violence [is] translated into an object of pleasurable consumption” (6). Media reinforces this practice by creating a “spectacle” out of war, which is instrumental in controlling the public opinion by distancing, distracting, and disengaging the citizen from the realities of war (Stahl 3). Stahl delineates this phenomenon with reference to “living-room war,” a term coined by New Yorker critic Michael J. Arlen in relation to the Vietnam War era:

24 Writing to The Guardian , Malathi de Alwis criticizes the state’s decision to bulldoze the LTTE memory. She maintains that such measures will “only further alienate the Tamil citizenry and stall any attempts at reconciliation.” Highlighting that memorials function as repositories of memory, suffering and grief, she says, “Bulldozing and obliterating these cemeteries not only deprives the kin of the dead a place to commune with their lost loved ones, but also displays a callous disregard for both the dead and the living. It is also a telling indictment of us as a nation that we do not have any memorials to the civilians who have died in this war, as well as in all the anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim riots that have taken place in this country” (“Sri Lanka Must Respect Memory of War”).

25 I owe this term to Andreas Huyssen and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials. Huyssen writes about the “globalization of memory works” (24) to show the universalization of memory culture. In her book War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work , Schlund-Vials focuses on the persistence of Khmer culture and memory in the phase of war, genocide, and relocation in post-war Cambodia and the diasporic setting. I follow their notion of memory work as a work produced within a memory culture.

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[…] the television had smoothed and contained war’s brutality, introducing almost imperceptibly into everyday life as something to be habitually consumed at six o’ clock along with supper. In the guise of bringing the home front closer to the conflict…television news paradoxically alienated the citizen from war, rendering the repetitious and chaotic banality of nightly footage a normal part of domestic existence. (qtd. in Stahl 22) Arlen’s words find much relevance in the Sri Lankan experience, especially in the media coverage of the Eelam War IV. A dominant segment of the evening television broadcast in every television station was the war coverage which became so popular that some channels got into the habit of playing teasers on upcoming news from the battlefield 26 while some presenters became household names. 27 Common features are shared by each channel’s coverage. For instance, the daily narrative has linearity, and it is paused every evening ‘to be continued’ the following day. Thus, the channels introduced a tradition of enjoying war as an episode of a daily-reality program, creating the impact of a mega soap opera. The reduction of battlefield events to a daily ritual in the form of ‘episodic war’ in this manner is aimed at providing entertainment more than informing the audience. Stahl calls this type of merging between war and entertainment “militainment.” Militainment best functions through “spectacular war” that is composed of three ingredients: “clean war” or a manner of presenting war that maximizes viewer alienation from death and destruction in order to maximize to war’s capacity to be consumed;28 “technofetishism,” or the worship of high-tech weaponry, 29 and “support of the troops,” which turns civic attention away from debates about legitimacy and toward the war machine itself (Stahl 25, 28, 29). All these features predominate the Sri Lankan television coverage of war that would privilege a stock of shots

26 Telling examples are the war-coverage by the two state-owned television stations, the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation (SLRC) and the Independent Television Network (ITN). ITN’s segment was titled “Vanniye Rana Handa ” (“The war heroic sound of Vanni”). Follow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdAu_UTDzKU for an example. Private television channels like Swarnavahini, Sirasa TV, and Derana TV also ran similar news segments. Swarnavahini’s coverage, “Ranabimin Atata ” (“To the 8 o’ clock newscast from the battlefield”) was very famous due to its engaging way of presentation. An example can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n42WyGVFsM .

27 One such ‘star’ is Saman Kumara Ramawickrama, the war correspondent for the SLRC.

28 Stahl further says that “clean war” also eliminated the body from the language of warfare through the mobilization of euphemism. Referring to Paul Fussell’s observation of WW1 literature, he shows how ‘the dead’ becomes “the fallen,” ‘die’ becomes “perish,” ‘enemy’ becomes “foe,” and ‘conquer’ becomes “vanquish” (Stahl 26, 27).

29 “The techno-spectacle sometimes works by eroticizing weapons, imbuing them with overt sexual symbolism” (Stahl 28).

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which include for instance, shots of heavy artillery, sophisticated weaponry, huge craters created by aerial attacks, military tactics deployed by state forces, their ‘mesmerizing’ camouflage, aerial shots of enemy targets under attack, enemy dead bodies, and weapons captured from the enemy. Its spectacular quality is enhanced by treating it with borrowings from the genre of epic war cinema. For example, it was typical of the ITN to use Hans Zimmer’s score for Gladiator as the background music in its coverage. The correspondents would give commentary on a moving tank or against the backdrop of a captured enemy post. 30 The coverage includes over-the-shoulder shots, and bird eye-view taken from choppers and fighter jets, providing the spectator with a first-person viewpoint of a soldier deployed in the field. 31 As Stahl convincingly argues, the first-person “consuming position” has heralded a new character, the “virtual citizen-soldier” (21). Moving beyond the former passive- consuming position, spectacular war has facilitated the citizen’s “participation” in the mediatized spectacle, thus making him/her an ‘almost’ soldier. Needless to say, the military victory on May 19 would make Sri Lankan citizen (–soldiers) go over the moon because they finally won a war that they have been participants of, not mere spectators, for as long as they could remember. On the other hand, the media spectacle seemed to be stunned by the temporality of the end of the military conflict. With the real-time coverage of the war gone, a huge crater was created in the supply–demand chain of militainment. There were no more new spectacular episodes in the war-news coverage in the evening news. In other words, the “virtual citizen soldier” was deprived of action to participate in. Under these circumstances, a practical need was created for the media to revisit the trajectory of war to sustain the spectacle. Correspondingly, post-war memory culture has provided the state with a good platform to further apply militarism and reinforce the nationalist discourse. The official end of war coincided with a new trend of mnemonic exigencies exercised in the medium of cinema. Cinema is understandably a very powerful medium for memory work due to its audio-visual capacities, and its versatile identity in the spheres of entertainment, mass media,

30 For examples, follow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS5OSl1lvUs . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mFuEpal8a8 .

31 Examples are found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqL3NByihPI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zn6h-4b6Vs . It must be noted that drastic changes exist in the type of media coverage between the 1980s and the Eelam War IV. At the early stage, the war coverage was mainly a radio and press event because television was not as popular or widely accessible as it is now. The presentation of war as a spectacle is a more recent phenomenon in the Sri Lankan context, starting from the mid-1990s in tandem with the wider availability of television and the emergence of many private television stations.

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and popular culture. Between 2009-2014, a plethora of Sinhala films have emerged ‘based on’ or ‘inspired by’ ‘real events’ related to the Eelam War IV or the GOSL’s ‘Humanitarian Mission.’ 32 Sarath Weerasekera’s Gamani (2011), Sanjaya Leelarathna’s Selvam (2011), Boodee Keerthisena’s Maathaa (2012), and Asoka Handagama’s Ini Avan (2012) are prominent examples in this regard.33 Made with state sponsorship, they reiterate Jelin’s idea concerns about ‘who’ has the capacity to remember and forget, ‘when,’ ‘how,’ and ‘what’ is remembered and forgotten. The epigraph quotes a speech made by Military spokesman Ruwan Wanigasuriya speaking to the media on May 11, 2014 in which he prohibits commemorating the deaths of “other people” on May 18 and 19. 34 In his flawed reference to the country’s constitution—the Constitution does not decree politics of remembrance—he tries to establish a legal foundation for the prohibition. The state commemorates the “Victory Day” on May 18 to showcase its defeat of the LTTE. 35 The same dynamics of remembrance are promulgated by state-sponsored cinema which lionizes the heroism of Sinhalese soldiers and demarcates the memory of enemies. While the state stipulates the distinction between acceptable and non-acceptable remembrance, cinematic memory work that is sponsored by the state puts forward the same axiom. For example, Selvam documents the trajectory of a ‘real’ ex-LTTE cadre, Shanthilingam Gokulam, and documents the ‘healthy’ process of his rehabilitation in the hands of the Sri Lankan military. The film constantly flashes back to the trauma experienced by child soldiers abducted and conscripted by the LTTE. Handagama’s Ini Avan , on the other hand, illustrates the plight of a failed rehabilitated LTTE cadre and his struggle to enter into a

32 However, it must be noted that revisiting and reliving the memory of war was already in existence even before the end of war, as evidenced by war-cinema. Gamini Fonseka’s Koti Waligaya (1986) and Nomiyena Minisun (“Immortals”) (1994) which were instrumental in establishing the war-film genre in Sri Lankan cinema reconstructed battlefield events, and thus engaged with the historical backdrop of war. A later example embedded in memory culture is Me Mage Sandai by Asoka Handagama (2001). This film presents a Sinhalese soldier’s struggle with the memory of the battlefield that stalks him in the form of a woman. However, it can be argued that the trend of creating work that is ‘based on true events’ emerged in a conspicuous manner only after the military confrontation came to an end.

33 Other examples include Alimankada by Chandran Rutnam (2009), Ira HandaYata (2010) by Benet Rathnayake, and Sthuthi Newatha Enna by Sumith Rohana Thiththawelgala (2010). Vimukthi Jayasundara’s Ahasin Wetei (2009) makes a strong critique of Sri Lanka’s history of violence. Since it was never released (expect for a handful of special screenings), it did not get a wider access to post-war audiences in the country.

34 Very obviously he refers to the LTTE leader who was killed on May 18 or 19. Despite the official ban, the Tamil media reports that Tamils in the North had commemorated former LTTE cadres on May 18, 2014 in their private events of mourning (“Tamils Defy Army Ban - Dead LTTE Fighters Commemorated in Kilinochchi”).

35 The fifth anniversary of the “Victory Day” was celebrated on May 18, 2014 in Marata, the Southern province with military parades.

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normal life. Even though the film does not claim to be based on an actual figure, the filmmaker endeavors to state that it represents the present-day tragic reality of someone who had walked the wrong path. Perhaps, the most visually stunning film out of the above examples is Keerthisena’s Maatha. Scripted by Ariyarathna Ethugala, the then chairman of the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation, the film introduces “a visual form of atrocity tourism” (Karunanayake and Waradas 9). While the former war zone became a similar revenue field in the Sri Lankan economy, their representations on media and cinema came to provide a similar visual experience. Maatha claims to be shot on “real locations” and in this manner, promises the ‘virtual citizen soldier’ an ‘atrocity tour’ via a cinematic spectacle. The film emulates the war coverage in the media by minutely documenting entire processes of military missions. For a consumer/audience base that has been fed militainment, this film became a good way to commemorate the military victory. Post-war militainement thus becomes an effective vessel of militarism, and keeps the population in tune with official justifications of war (Stahl 15). In line with Elizabeth Jelin’s discussion of “uses and abuses” of memory under the purview of hegemonic memory-makers, the second chapter of this project focuses on Sarath Weerasekera’s Gamani (2011) to examine the ways in which the state endeavors to graft a single narrative about the civil war and how justice ought to be realized. This chapter will show how the majoritarian religion, Buddhism has percolated into a hegemonic memory culture, pushing subaltern testimonies into the periphery. 36 In this context, Gamani stands out as a representative text of the official memory discourse in a number of ways. It embodies the main ingredients of the chemistry of post-war memory culture: officialization of the narrative, militainment, reinforcing a Sinhalese Buddhist archive in opposition to Tamil nationalism, and selective amnesia. It was Sri Lanka’s official selection for the SAARC Film Festival 2013, held in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The film screening was promoted with the tagline: “A week showcasing some of the best films in the SAARC region.”It received state sponsorship from the stage of pre-production to the release, and was endorsed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa as an exemplary memory work. The film also reiterates President

36 I borrow the terms “hegemonic” and “subaltern” from the scholarship of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci believes, “The supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as “domination” and as “intellectual and moral leadership”: and “The “normal” exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterized by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent” (Storey qtd. in Gorlewski 96). The “subaltern” is a segment of society subjected to the rule of the hegemony. The term was appropriated for the post-colonial discourse by Eric Stokes and Ranajit Guha.

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Rajapaksa’s polarization of citizens as “those who love Sri Lanka or those who don’t” 37 which seems to have been inspired by President Bush’s polarization of post-9/11 US patriotism. 38 In Judith Butler’s words, such an official polarization “makes it untenable to hold a position in which one opposes both and queries the terms in which the opposition is framed” (2). In a similar manner, Gamani stipulates and enforces roles of national significance for its viewers. They can either be patriots who are inspired by the Buddhist legacy to work towards the betterment of the Sinhalese nation, or traitors by not being so and consequentially get eliminated. Thus, hegemonic cinematic memory work preempts the emergence of dissenting voices, which has been the prime political objective of the post-war state agenda. Resistance emerges nevertheless, which will be the focus of the third and fourth chapters of this project. Mnemonic dissent In Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture , Shelley Streeby engages with “the process of relearning [the] history” (Alewitz qtd. in Streeby xv) of the Haymarket riot of 1886 through creative work. The book shows how radical world movements of the era adapted the memory of the riots in their struggles for social justice. Through an analysis of Hosé Martí’s and Lucy E. Parson’s interventions in visual culture, in the Haymarket area, Streeby shows how state-crafted dominant interpretations of the anarchists’ crimes were challenged and re-narrated by “re-envisioning iconic sentimental and sensational Haymarket scenes, and raising questions about violence, the visual, and state power that connect world movements across space and time” (36). While the state and the police tried to use new visual technologies and cultural forms to turn Haymarket into a spectacle and thereby enforce their own interpretations, and regulate the responses of viewers and readers, dissenting forces used the same exigencies of visual and popular culture to challenge the dominant narrative (35-36). For instance, in his newspaper writings, Martí “works over and re-envisions” the images of Haymarket that were circulated by the state (Streeby 22). 39 Parsons, on the other hand, illustrated a few prominent images assigning them

37 Ranetunge “Rajapakse Regime has been Ducking and Diving for too long and as a Result Lost all Credibility before the World.”

38 In his Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People on September 20, 2001, President Bush said “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (The White House “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People”). 39 Streeby closely reads an instance where Martí reworks the original text: “After revising the execution scene, Martí ends his chronicle with an account of the funeral rites that is also saturated with keywords and signifiers of sentimentalism and that privileges cultural memories of the meaning of the execution rather than

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new interpretations. In one illustration that depicts the gallows scene, she “instructed her reader to “look at” while swearing “in your heart” to work for the overthrow of the “accursed system” that was responsible for the “awful murder of our comrades”” (Streeby 40). Thus they were in a mission to fill the gaps in and decentralize the hegemonic narrative while making space for subaltern narratives to come to the foreground. Similar to the way Martí and Parsons responded to a changing visual culture and new mass-produced images of Haymarket, dissenting voices have emerged to resist the hegemonic memory discourse in the post-war Sri Lankan context. Expectedly, such voices are not welcome in the hegemonic modes of expression, certainly not in the state-run media and state-sponsored art venues. Disregarding conventional platforms, defiance seems to thrive in cyberspace, an effective ‘new medium’ in the post-war era, a platform that has been effectively maneuvered in the Arab Spring. 40 In the realm of creativity, although not in dominant ways, artists also engage in a resistance movement that draws from a counter-memory discourse. Artists like Thamotharapillai Sanaathanan, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, and JagathWeerasinghe utilize aesthetics by way of political expressions. Cartoonist Avantha Artigala infuses satire into his political cartoons. Manjula Wediwardena responds to day-to-day political events via poetry while Bandu Manamperi utilizes performance in provocative ways. Even though expressed individually, all these voices constitute a body of collective expression that shares several common features. They challenge the spectacle accompanied by militainment. As I will examine in due course, their work seeks to sharpen the critical capacities of the spectator, thus illuminating a major objective assigned to “the Aesthetics of the oppressed.” According to Augusto Boal who theorized the Theater of the Oppressed and the Aesthetics of the Oppressed, the aesthetic process should allow “the subject to exercise themselves in activities which are usually denied them, thus expanding their expressive and perceptive possibilities” (18). By highlighting resistance artists’ commitment to producing “emotional and intellectual stimuli”

the execution itself as a spectacle of state power. He lingers on the funeral scene, a privileged focus of sentimentality, and on the display of the bruised corpses, the caskets containing the bodies, and the parade of workers’ associations that marched mournfully that day (56).”

40 Examples include sites of journalism such as Groundviews , Lanka Heard and Colombo Telegraph , anti-government sites such as LankaeNews , journalistic blogs like dbsjeyaraj.com , infortainment blogs like Boondi.lk , and satirical websites like LankaLuNews. As of now, much of the web content is being filtered and censored within Sri Lanka. For example, LankaeNews and Colombo Telegraph have been censored or blocked by the state. Nevertheless, their access is still possible via proxy sites. It must be noted that many such sites have a faithful audience in the diaspora.

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(Boal 36), a key ingredient of political art, I will argue for a way of contextualizing post-war Sri Lankan memory work of resistance. The intensity of political oppression is invariably met with a correlating movement of resistance. In many instances, the dominant memory culture enforced by the state is defied, challenged, and overlooked. For instance, the people of Kilinochchi still call the place where the war memorial has been built “the Selvan Park.” 41 As such, dissent is not always conspicuous. It can be as subtle as deliberate negligence of authority. It can also be openly subversive as in the case of political cartoons regularly posted on LankaLu News . Using clandestine and improvised strategies, or what James C. Scott calls “guerilla types of attrition,” they circumvent tentacles of the state rule which operate in the form of censorship and direct/indirect intimidation. They do not wield any social power or nationalist capital, something hegemonic memory workers earn by consorting with the state. Whereas hegemonic memory workers contribute to what Walter Benjamin calls a “universal history” which “loyally recounts the events as they took place,” dissenting memory workers becomes “historical materialist[s]” who “take[ ] into account that which has been omitted from the former’s inventory of happenings” (Yoneyama 29). Yoneyama also says, “By capturing them as a monad in a dialectics of thinking, as in a moment of revelation, the historical materialist frees “the oppressed past” from a history that is made to appear as if it unfolds through time naturally and automatically” (Yoneyama 29). Thus, the discourse of mnemonic resistance “reclaims missed opportunities and unfulfilled promises in history, as well as unrealized events that might have led to a different present” (Yoneyama 29). In exploring post-war memory work of resistance, Chapter Three will observe the deconstruction of the hegemonic discourse that Gamani heralds using Sanjeewa Pushpakumara’s Flying Fish (2011) as a touchstone. A close reading of the film will delineate Pushpakumara’s investments in initiating ‘a cinema of the oppressed,’ which is akin to “the theater of the oppressed” theorized by Augusto Boal. As much as Gamani becomes exemplary of the hegemonic discourse, Flying Fish emerges as an embodiment of the resistant discourse. From the initial stage of screenwriting to the final stage of its release, the film defies mainstream traditions. The kind of resistance depicted in the film thus depicts reverberates James C. Scott’s discussion of “guerilla-types of attrition.” The forth chapter engages with the world of painter Thamotharapillai Sanaathanan and sculptor/performing artist Bandu Manamperiwho are significantly invested in the post-war memory culture. On

41 I credit this piece of information to Thamotharapillai Sanaathanan.

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par with Pushpakumara, they endeavor to decentralize the precarious single narrative and make way for subaltern memories of trauma. I will insist that the artists respond to Judith Butler’s questions about human existence in a context of political violence. This chapter will also observe the effectiveness of their work in relation to the intended audience, post-war Sri Lankan citizens. Taking the cue from this chapter, the final chapter will explore a viable objective of resistant memory work—justice. In her analysis of Cambodian–American memory work, Schlund–Vials explains the ways in which artists such as Prach Ly and AnidaYoeu Ali utilize memory in their artistic expressions in a bid to clamor for justice. In a similar vein, I seek to explore if and how resistant memory-workers envision justice outside the popular officialized framework in post-war Sri Lanka. I will establish a paradigm between post-colonial literary practice and ‘aesthetics of the oppressed.’ The concluding chapter will also engage with Gayatri Spivak’s question, “Can the subaltern speak?” and will apply it in a mnemonic context and conclude how effectively subaltern memories can speak in the post- war Sri Lankan milieu.

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Kadirgamar, Santasilan. “May 31-June 4 1981: Five Days of State Terror in Jaffna.” Colombo Telegraph. 3 Feb. 2013. Web. 12 May 2014. Print. Rpt. of Transcurruents. 4 June 2011. Web. Karunanayake, Dinidu, and Thiyajaraja Waradas. “What Lessons are We Talking About? Reconciliation and Memory in Post-war Sri Lankan Cinema. ICES Research Papers . International Center for Ethnic Studies, Colombo. Sep. 2013. Web. 4 Mar. 2014. Knuth, Rebecca. Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence And Cultural Destruction . Westport: Praeger, 2006. Print. Krishnaswamy, P. Government fares extremely well at the polls—Udaya Gammanpila.” The Sunday Observer . 6 Apr. 2014. Web. 12 May 2014. “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).” University of Maryland archive. Web. 2 May 2014. Manoff, Marlene. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” Libraries and the Academy 4.1 (2004): 9–25. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Web. 12 May 2014. “May 18, North Sri Lanka Army Warning.” Online video clip. YouTube . YouTube, 10 May 2014. Web. 14 May 2014. Ministry of Defence. Humanitarian Operation Factual Analysis: July 2006 – May 2009 . 2001. Web. 5 Mar. 2014. “Miracle.” The Oxford English Dictionary . Web. 2 May 2014. “Rana Bimen—Sri Lanka War Situation Report 28/04/2009.” Online video clip. YouTube . YouTube, 28 Apr. 2009. Web. 6 Feb. 2014. Ranetunge, Dushy. “Rajapakse Regime has been Ducking and Diving for too Long and as a Result Lost all Credibility before the World.” Transcurrents . 16 Sep. 2011. Web. 1 May 2014. “SAARC Film Festival 2013: Film Screening Schedule.” Colombo: SAARC Cultural Center, 2013. Print. Sanaathanan, Thamotharapillai. Personal interview. 4 Jan 2014. Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. War, Genocide, And Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Print. Senanayake, Gandhya. “Lanka to Clear LTTE Legacy.” The Daily Mirror 18 Mar. 2010. Web. 14 May 2014.

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Silva, Sarath N. “Sketch of the Life of Lakshmann Kadirgamar.” Democracy, Sovereignty and Terror: Lakshaman Kadirgamar on the Foundations of the International Order. Ed. Adam Roberts. London : I. B. Tauris, 2012. 37-40. Print. “SL Army: LTTE Losing Another Major Base in Mullativ.” Online video clip. YouTube . YouTube, 23 Sep, 2008. Web. 6 Feb. 2014. “SL Government Begins to Wipe out Traces of Tigers in the North.” TamilNet . 18 Mar. 2010. Web. 14 May 2014. “Sri Lankan Air Force Jets Destroy Two Artillery Guns on 13 January in Chundikulam 14/01/2009.” Online video clip. YouTube . YouTube, 15 Jan. 2009. Web. 12 May 2014. “Sri Lanka Air Force Sink LTTE Terrorist Military Cargo Ship!” Online video clip. YouTube . YouTube, 18 Sep. 2006. Web. 6 May 2014. “Sri Lanka Raises Defense Budget Despite Foreign Pressure.” DefenseNews . 21 Oct. 2013. Web. 17 Apr. 2014. “Sri Lanka Street Party Celebrates End of Civil War.” CNN.com/asia . 19 May 2009. Web. 17 Apr. 2014. “Sri Lanka War Situation Report. 17.03.2009 (ITN).” Online video clip. YouTube . YouTube, 18 Mar. 2009. Web. 12 May 2014. Stahl, Roger. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print. Steedman, Carolyn. “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust.” The American Historical Review 106.4 (2001): 1159-1180. Oxford University Press. Web. 12 May 2014. Streeby, Shelley. Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture . Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. Print. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence In South Asia . Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1996. Print. “Tamils Defy Army Ban - Dead LTTE Fighters Commemorated in Kilinochchi.” Asian Mirror . 19 May 2014. Web. 19 May 2014. Tiruchelvam, Neelan. “July ’83 and Collective Violence in Sri Lanka.” Lanka Guardian 16.7 (1993): 6-7. Print. United Nations Human Rights. “Opening Remarks by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay at a Press Conference During Her Mission to Sri Lanka Colombo, 31 August 2013.” Web. 3 May 2014.

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United Nations Organization. Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka . 31 Mar. 2011. Web. 4 May 2014. U.S. Department of State. Report to Congress on Incidents During the Recent Conflict in Sri Lanka . 2009. Web. 10 May 2014. Weerakoon, Ruwan. “LTTE’s Mysterious Weapon Uncovered—But How These Weapons Ended up in the Hands of the LTTE?” Asian Tribune 7 Apr. 2009. Web. 14 May 2014. “War Remnants.” Poster. The White House. “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People.” 20 Sep. 2001. Web. 2 May 2014. Yoneyama, Lisa. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory Berkley: University of California Press, 1999. Print.

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Chapter Two Militant Buddhism and Post-War Sri Lankan Cinematic Memory Work —A Case-study of Sarath Weerasekara’s Gamani

“These Buddhist Clergy who are engaged in a nationally important task should not be feared or doubted by anyone.” – Secretary of Defense Gotabhaya Rajapaksa at the opening of the Buddhist Leadership Academy of the Bodu Bala Sena 42

On June 15, 2004, the Bodu Bala Sena (the Buddhist Power Force or “BBS”)43 organized a rally with the motto “ Avadiwawu ” (“Wake up!”) in Aluthgama, a coastal town in the western province of Sri Lanka. The rally was organized in response to an alleged attack on a Buddhist monk by a group of young Muslims in the neighboring town, Dharga Town on June 11 (Athas and Hume, “Fear, Shock among Sri Lankan Muslims in Aftermath of Buddhist Mob Violence”). Speaking at the occasion, BBS General Secretary Galadoba Aththe Gnanasara raved about a timely duty assigned to Sinhalese Buddhists in the country to “contain” the Muslim community (“Bodu Bala Sena Meeting–Aluthgama”). The speech presaged a wave of anti-Muslim riots in Aluthgama, Dharga Town and Beruwala. After two days, the riots culminated with four deaths—three Muslims and one Tamil—and the displacement of ten thousand people (Karunarathne, “The Human Tragedy of Aluthgama”). Colombo Telegraph accuses that not even the most basic investigations have been made into the incident by the state as of July 4, 2014. (“Anti-Muslim Violence: Not Even the Most Basic Investigations Launched”). Among several other chauvinist organizations such as “Ravana Balaya” (“Ravana’s Power”) and “Sihala Ravaya” (“Sinhalese Roar”), the BBS has, in this manner, emerged as a paramilitary organization with a self-acclaimed nationally and religiously important mission in the post-war Sri Lankan political milieu. Speaking of Sri Lanka’s three-decade long civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Ananda Abeysekara observes an authorization of a power dynamic between Buddhism, the state head, and the nation. Buddhism, which the Constitution of the country deems necessary to be given a “foremost place” (Chapter II: Buddhism), has

42 “Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa Openly Supportive of ‘Ethno Religious Fascist’ Organization Bodhu Bala Sena.”

43 Founded in 2012, The Buddhist Power Force is a hard-line Sinhalese-Buddhist organization that promises to safeguard Buddhism against threats and to “lead the nation to build up a Buddhist society” in Sri Lanka (Bodu Bala Sena official website).

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percolated into the very core of national politics of Sri Lanka. The official end of the civil war between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the LTTE on May 19, 2009 has not only reaffirmed, but also heightened this religio-national power grid, as evident in the activities of the BBS mentioned above. Most notably, the religious fervor has become an indispensable ingredient in dominant memory work in the post-war cultural milieu. As common in other historical contexts in Asia, Africa, and the West, cultural and literary texts emerging in the post-war era are loaded with a desire to revisit the history of war and narrativise real stories. Through an analysis of Sarath Weerasekara’s film Gamani (2011), this chapter examines the ways in which post-war cinematic memory work positions the Sinhalese Buddhist identity as historically, culturally, and racially supreme over ethnic minorities.44 The film represented Sri Lanka at the SAARC Film Festival 2013, held in Colombo. As I will point out later in this chapter, the film also gained recommendations from bureaucratic voices including the President. Due to its hierarchical position in the world of art, Gamani has assumed an identity beyond that of a film. It has most notably become an embodiment of the zeitgeist of hegemonic post-war popular culture. Through a close reading of Gamani , this chapter seeks to identify the position of militant Buddhism in post-war hegemonic memory work. The chapter also argues that post-war hegemonic cinematic narrative commits epistemological violence by promulgating a single story of war that celebrates sanguinary justice and legitimizes the government’s military endeavors against the LTTE, thus reinterpreting the non-violent Buddhism philosophy in tune with post-war nationalism. I will also articulate a causal relationship between the seeds of retributive justice and the Sinhalese Buddhist nation’s inability to mourn properly, which Freud calls “melancholia.” Mnemonic exigencies of war and Gamani In The Archaeology of Knowledge , Michel Foucault maintains that memory is not a tangible element, but is “developed” by a society through its relations with history. Accordingly, the past is often reproduced and treated in an epistemological sense in order to ‘educate’ present generations. In a similar vein, speaking of how Latin American countries changed from dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s to democracies in the 1990s, Elizabeth Jelin identifies a power matrix between the past, the present, history, memory, identity, and knowledge. For her, the past cannot be changed but “its meaning …is subject to re- interpretations anchored in intentions and expectations towards the future” (26). She contends

44 Minority ethnic categories in Sri Lanka constitute of Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher communities.

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that the construction of memory-based narratives becomes very problematic when they are connected to social and political events, because hegemonic forces in power would decide the orientation of such work. In light of Jelin’s articulation of “labors of memory” and Foucault’s take on history, it will be a worthy task to examine Weerasekara’s film Gamani which makes an assiduous attempt to standardize memory in post-war Sri Lanka. With the claim that it is based on the “true story” of the LTTE’s massacre of a group of civilians on August 25, 1999 in Gonagala, Ampara, 45 the film revisits a melodramatic moment in national memory. The film starts with the depiction of the LTTE’s massacre of a group of Sinhalese Buddhist villagers on their way home from an alms-giving ceremony,46 held in memory of a fallen soldier. It chronicles the ways in which home guards 47 and the villagers master military strategies under the leadership of the Buddhist monk of the village temple, a Sinhalese Sinhala teacher 48 newly appointed to the village school, and an experienced young military officer. With the blessings of the Buddhist monk, the villagers successfully thwart a second attack by the LTTE cadres, eliminate them, and celebrate over enemy dead bodies on a full moon poya day. 49 Using this ‘exemplary’ narrative, the film reiterates that all Sinhalese Buddhists have a ‘patriotic’ and religious duty to enact the role of ‘Gamani,’ which was the designated post of ‘village-protectors’ in ancient Sinhalese kingdoms. 50 Gamani garnered state-sponsored publicity and island-wide circulation, and became a local blockbuster. At the launching ceremony of the film’s official website, President

45 Gonagala is a ‘border village’ located between a battleground and the civilian area, in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka.

46 An alms-giving ceremony is a Buddhist religious event held in order to invoke blessings on a dead person’s soul, by virtue of which the dead may attain a better rebirth.

47 Home guard is the lowest-ranking post in the Sri Lankan armed forces. Often denigrated as “ gam batta ,” a home guard occupies a peripheral space in the military hierarchy.

48 A teacher of Sinhalese descent who teaches the Sinhala language.

49 A ‘ Poya day’ is a full moon day which is of much religious significance for Buddhists. Every full moon day is associated with an important event in the Buddha’s life.

50 According to Professor Senarat Paranavitana, the word gr āman ī (or gāman ī) embodies the idea of movement. Its etymology is found in Vedic and early P āli literature. Gr āman ī means one who leads (from the Vedic root nī) the gr āma (village). Thus the leader of every gr āma was assigned the role of gr āman ī (or gāman ī) (Perera 169).

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Mahinda Rajapaksa—who was himself an actor in the 1994 film Nomiyena Minisun 51 — hailed it as: […] a film that refreshes our memory of a history that is being forgotten. The film best explains to the viewer the suffering of the people in villages targeted by terrorists, the sacrifice made by the armed forces to protect the people, and various difficulties and challenges encountered by government servants working in those areas. (“Gamani Refreshes Memory of a History Going into Oblivion—President”) While positioning the film as a memory work that serves an indispensible role in rectifying ‘national amnesia,’ the President applauds its representation of the sacrifice and ‘humanistic’ services rendered by the armed forces. In a similar vein, responses of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist forces to the film within Sri Lanka were very positive,52 and the film continues to be revered as a cult memory work. 53 It must be noted that none of the critics questioned the obvious contradictions which exist between the film’s representations and historical accounts. For instance, as far as historical records reveal, hands-on combat training was not provided to the home guards or the villagers of Gonagala, nor did they thwart a second attack by the LTTE. In fact, the LTTE did not wage a second attack at all. Furthermore, the ‘real’ event—widely known as the “Gonagala Massacre”—happened on September 18, 1999,54 and not on August 25, 1999, as claimed by the movie. As for the death toll, while the film gives it as 57, The Sunday Times gives it as 54. 55 The Official Website of the Data and Information Unit of the Presidential Secretariat, Sri Lanka, quotes the film and gives it as 57. Other sources mention varying figures. 56 These factual and historical discrepancies were never contested by those who held the film as a text that revives a past which is going into oblivion, echoing President Rajapaksa’s words. Instead, Sinhalese viewers seemed to be dazzled by its emotional appeal. For instance, a reviewer writing to The Island —a mainstream Sinhala newspaper—says: “My

51 Nomiyena Minisun (“Immortals”) (1994) directed by Gamini Fonseka narrates sacrificial roles played by ultra-patriotic soldiers in the Sri Lanka Army. This film is referenced in the previous chapter.

52 The film was positively reviewed in mainstream Sinhala newspapers such as The Lankadeepa , The Dinamina , and The Silumina. These reviews have not been digitally archived.

53 As stated in the Introduction, Gamani was Sri Lanka’s official selection for the SAARC Film Festival 2013, held in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

54 For more information about the event, see “Pre-dawn Horror in Ampara” in The Sunday Times . 55 The Sunday Times on 19 Sep. 1999

56 SLNewsOnline says 61 died while a US cable puts the figure as 54.

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critical eye was dimmed very often with tears at the sheer pathos, deplorable difficulties faced and tragedies submerging the poor villagers of Gonagala in Ampara” (Pethiyagoda “Comments on the Film Gamani ”). Likewise, the Official Government website is in full praise for the movie because it “illustrates the arduous life spent by villagers amidst ruthless and malignant activities of the terrorists” (“Gamani Refreshes Memory of a History Going into Oblivion—President”). Along these lines, it is clear that the audiences’ perceptions of memory are more attuned to nationalist sentiments rather than a critical interrogation of history (and even the historicity of history). In other words, a ‘humanitarian’ depiction of the victims of war—who are Sinhalese Buddhists as the film and its reviews suggest—can willfully override any dissimilarity to the events that happened in reality. The state seems to be endorsing this logic in composing the chemistry of post-war memory culture. As this paper seeks to explore, it is a strategy of the post-war state to officialize and legitimize a master narrative of its war—the self-proclaimed “Humanitarian Mission” or the “World’s largest hostage rescue mission” (The Ministry of Defence website)—against the LTTE. Officializing memory and master narratives Meaningful links between history and memory are intimate. As Jelin holds, memories generate meanings of the past, framed by the power relations in which their actions are embedded in the present (xv). Thus, memories occupy a central space in present-day power politics, and can best serve a national imaginary. Jelin also elucidates the ways in which the past is “use[d]” and “abuse[d]” by actors with bureaucratic powers to “officialize” and “institutionalize” their own “master narratives of the nation” (23-27, 44). These discourses of nationalism and national identity compel ‘master narratives’ to be selective and to privilege ‘saviors’ of the nation. Along these lines, Gamani ’s attempts to officialize a dominant version of memory are noteworthy. Sulochana, the ultra-patriotic Sinhala teacher, newly appointed to the village school, levels the culpability for the massacre at the armed forces that are officially responsible for the protection of civilians. This is evident in her sardonic question to the young military officer, Major Vikum: “Officer, what did the army do until this kind of predicament befell the village?” This question would certainly occupy a ‘legitimate’ space in the nationalist mindset of a Sinhalese viewer. Furthermore, the film repeatedly flashes back to intense moments of the massacre in a bid to remind the audience of the LTTE’s violence. Unarmed mothers and fathers are hacked to death while infants are smashed on the ground. The notion of culpability is used, in this fashion, as a point of departure to legitimize the course of militant actions taken by the Sinhalese Buddhist victims who are seemingly driven by a search for justice.

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Along these lines, the film valorizes retributive justice in the final encounter between the villagers and the LTTE in which the Sinhalese Buddhists’ war heroics get the better of the LTTE cadres, reversing the aftermath of the former massacre. Women, who were once taken aback by the LTTE’s hostility, are armed with guns to confront the LTTE’s swords and knives. Fathers, who could not hold their ground, excel in martial arts and the use of weaponry. Children, who were once traumatized by the LTTE’s ‘terrorism,’ now revel in witnessing the Sinhalese Buddhist ‘heroism.’ A child, who lost her voice at the shock of witnessing the deaths of her parents and sibling, regains her voice when the perpetrator is strangled to death by a Sinhalese home guard. Clearly, the film presents a reverse narrative to illustrate the Sinhalese Buddhist national imaginary’s stance on how things should have happened . This seems to be an attempt to pacify Sinhalese Buddhists’ melancholia, their inability to grieve over what they once lost in war. As Freud states, melancholia borrows some of its attributes from mourning, which is the reaction to the loss of a loved person, object, or ideal (243). Unlike normal mourning, melancholia is marked by “pathological mourning” (Freud 250). In other words, it stems from a situation in which the subject cannot properly manage the act of mourning. In a similar vein, Judith Butler writes that melancholia is “the repudiation of mourning” (29). During the three-decade long civil war, Sinhalese Buddhist civilians and their state underwent woeful experiences of material and human loss. Correspondingly, their self- esteem was disparaged by the ‘enemy-other’ in many instances of military defeat. The film, by reversing the events of a defeat into a phenomenal victory, seems to address the melancholic mindset of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists, who are in a tiring process of mourning. The end of the film amends the mistake they make at the beginning by letting their kith and kin get molested by the enemy. This moment points to Qadri Ismail’s discussion of the notion of loss that has been historically and culturally troubling the Sinhalese Buddhist majority for several centuries: Crushed culturally and politically for some four and a half long centuries by three Christian Western powers (Portugal, Holland, Britain), attacked incessantly by Tamils (Hindus from southern India) in the even longer centuries before colonialism; in short, subjugated, dispossessed, victimized, and wounded by history itself, the Sinhalese Buddhist majority in Sri Lanka…, is simply trying, according to its autobiography, to redress the balance, heal those injuries, correct those wrongs, attempting to finally live in peace and security in the post-colonial period. (34)

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Ismail’s criticism sheds light on a national state of melancholia that dates back to classical times. One way of “redress[ing] the balance” seems to be getting even with the enemy—or more correctly, getting the better of the enemy. The centuries-long anxiety displays a state of inability to mourn properly, which is in other words, a state of national melancholia. A viable solution recommended by hegemonic memory work is to promulgate a culturally superior narrative for Sinhalese Buddhists, and ensuring that it remains the only narrative, as evidenced by the national mission assigned to Gamani . This ‘single narrative’ painted on celluloid embodies the ideology behind the Government’s final offensive—the ‘Humanitarian Operation’—against the LTTE. As the state reiterates, its war against the LTTE was a mission for justice on behalf of innocent civilian victims. This ‘official truth’ reverberates in Gamani in which the villagers overpower their enemy through ‘civilized’ warfare. On the contrary, the LTTE cadres’ ‘savagery’ and the lack of humanity are displayed in their use of ‘basic’ weapons like swords and knives with which they sadistically hack unarmed innocents to death. Their actions are placed on par with images of tribal genocide in movies like Hotel Rwanda , Tears of the Sun , and Blood Diamond . The tyrannical nature of African victimizers as captured by Hollywood is well replicated in the violent gestures and grotesque physiognomy of the LTTE soldiers. The emphasis on the state’s ‘civilized’ weaponry illustrates “technofetishism,” one of the three pillars of Roger Stahl’s articulation of “militainment.” “Weapons not only take the central stage,” Stahl writes, “but also become the primary symbolic currency through which war negotiates legitimacy, righteousness, and a host of other related values” (28). He refers to Asu Askoy’s and Kevin Robins’ scholarship and notes that “the deathless war borrows much of its credibility from the notion that high-tech weapons are inherently more ethical as a means of destruction” (Stahl 28). Weerasekara highlights the use of weaponry by the state forces and the LTTE to segregate between the ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ warfare the two parties had been respectively involved in. Thus it bears witness to Stahl’s claim that “technofetishism organizes the world according to the divine right of high-tech “civilization” to conquer and defeat low-tech “barbarism” (28). In this manner, the film pronounces a strong adoration for the ‘human-ness’ of the state forces in tandem with its denunciation of the ‘sub-human’ nature of the LTTE. It, most importantly, recreates the death of the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran 57 who was

57 Velupillai Prabhakaran (November 26, 1954 – May 18, 2009) founded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 1976 with the intention of creating an independent, separate state for Tamils in Sri Lanka. The war he started against the Sri Lankan state is one of the longest civil conflicts in South Asia.

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reportedly killed in an attempt to use innocent unarmed civilians as a shield. 58 In the movie, the LTTE leader keeps Sinhalese villagers as hostages, and tries to use a Sinhalese mother and her child as a buffer when he is surrounded by the government forces. The scene in which he is shot in the head restages how Prabhakaran was killed by the state forces in their endeavor to ‘salvage humanity.’ The Government viewed the killing of the LTTE leader as an ultimate moment of rendering justice to the nation as pronounced in a Defence Ministry news report which says: “The end of the megalomaniac killer and the megalomaniac outfit he created finally did the justice to the 19 million Sri Lankan citizens who suffered immensely due to the madness he unleashed” (“The End Battle”). In a similar vein, the elimination of the LTTE leader in Gamani restores order and justice to the victimized as it marks the climax of the Sinhalese Buddhist villagers’ victory. They jubilantly celebrate their accomplishment in a way that suggests that the Sinhalese Buddhist nation is invincible. Moving beyond the recent events of history, the film also invokes the onset of the ethnic conflict—the 1983 July riots. 59 A Tamil displaced woman who is ‘rescued’ by the Sinhalese home guards asks Sulochana, “How did the Sinhalese people who treat us so well kill Tamil people in 1983?” thus emphasizing that the LTTE had “lied” to the Tamil people about history. Sulochana replies: They massacred young monks in Aranthalawa. 60 They attacked many other villages like this and hacked the Sinhalese to death. They were terrorists, not Tamils. It was the same in July 1983. That injustice was caused to the Tamils by terrorists, not the Sinhalese. The real Sinhalese never harms any other ethnicity on the basis of his own ethnicity. However, if someone comes to harm the Sinhalese nation, he protects his nation with life. That’s the difference between nationalism and patriotism. It must be noted that terrorism and ethnicity are mutually exclusive and the former supersedes communal markers. While the Sinhala teacher ’s definitions between nationalism, patriotism,

58 Based on the widely publicized ‘beliefs,’ The Time reports, “By the final weeks of conflict, he [Prabhakaran ] was believed to be using thousands of Tamil civilians as human shields against the advance of the Sri Lankan military.”

59 After 13 soldiers were killed in an LTTE ambush in Jaffna on July 23, 1983, the government brought the bodies to Colombo for final rites. In reprisal, anti-Tamil riots broke out in several parts of the capital (“Ethnic Conflict of Sri Lanka: Time Line-From Independence to 1999”). The events of the ethnically-oriented violence are known as “Black July.”

60 The LTTE massacred 33 young monks and their mentor Chief Priest Ven. Hegoda Indrasara at Arantalawa in Ampara on June 2, 1987 (“20 Years for the Aranthalawa Massacre”).

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and terrorism are rather nebulous, her over-simplified version of the July Riots, which is mutely acknowledged by the Tamil woman, composes a key chapter of the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist discourse. Even though she says that injustices were caused to the Tamils in 1983 by terrorists, the terrorist label had never been attached to the Sinhalese, not even in the face of the JVP violence. 61 As Gananath Obeysekere and Neelan Tiruchelvam point out, the 1983 July Riots were well thought-out and orchestrated by Sinhalese gangs with state affiliations. Gamani , in its evocation of memory, fails to capture nuances of terrorism waged by Sinhalese mobs at the onset of the civil war. Arguably, the film’s flippant simplification of history points to the national imaginary’s desire for selective oblivion. The erasure of facts, forgetting, and silence are part and parcel of the politics of narrative memory and historical development, as Jelin mentions (17-18). This scenario is marked by the dangers of institutional amnesia and “the fixation of the ‘militants of memory’ on specific events of the past, which obstructs the possibility of creating new meanings” (Jelin 45). The interpretation is adamant, or in Jelin’s words, “militant,” because it does not leave space for alternative meanings. This environment privileges “incomplete” “single stories” about war, which creates “dangerous” stereotypes, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie states. Her words are vividly exemplified by Gamani which commits epistemological violence by displacing and marginalizing non-Sinhalese Buddhist identities in the overarching national narrative. The single story about victory takes place at a cultural level as well, as seen in the use of the lessons on Sinhala Literature and history that are incorporated into the home guards’ training sessions to give them “a good morale.” This also illustrates another aspect of the officialization of the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalistic master narrative. Such narratives are drafted by professional historians whose link to power is crucial to their task (Jelin 28). In the film, the official narrative-tellers—the monk, Sulochana, and Major Vikum—have socially hierarchical positions. At a symbolic level, these three characters serve three aspects indispensable for Sinhalese Buddhist chauvinism: the monk represents ideological leadership, Sulochana the need to ‘educate’ citizens on history, and the Major the mechanism that officially implements military decisions. Notably, the film is directed by a Former Rear Admiral in the Sri Lanka Navy. As Jelin holds, ‘official’ memory workers claim authority in the practice of assigning meaning to historized memories (44). Even though the film features

61 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP or People’s Liberation Front) is a communist political party formed by Rohana Wijeweera. Its membership mainly consisted of Sinhalese Buddhist youth including students and Buddhist clergy. The JVP pioneered two armed insurrections against the ruling Sri Lankan governments in 1971 and 1987-89.

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a Tamil displaced family that has undoubtedly undergone similar experiences, their narratives are positioned on the periphery, and only in service of the hegemonic narrative. Along these lines, the film overwhelmingly depicts ‘our-ness’ which points to another paradigm of post- war Sri Lankan memory work—the polarization between superior ‘us’ and inferior ‘them.’ Brandishing Sinhalese Buddhism, memory culture and sanguinary justice Foucault states that society infuses history and memory into “a mass documentation” (The Archaeology of Knowledge ). As Jelin puts, “Memory…incorporates knowledge, beliefs, behavior patterns, feelings, and emotions conveyed and received in social interaction, in processes of socialization, and in the cultural practices of a group” (9). These ideas are suggestive of a cultural relationship. Speaking of the intimate relationship between memory and identity, John Gillis in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity argues, “The ability to recall or remember something from one’s past is what sustains identity” (qtd. in Jelin 14). “Identities and memories are not things we think about , but things we think with . As such, they have no existence beyond our politics, our social relations, and our histories” (qtd. in Jelin 14). This process involves “advancing one version of history that, together with patriotic symbols, monuments, and pantheons to national heroes, could serve as a central node for identification and for anchoring national identity” (Jelin 27). Gamani ’s evocation of memory happens in an exclusively Buddhist environment. “Collective memory” can best function against such a cultural backdrop. Paul Ricoeur defines collective memory as “the set of traces left by events that have shaped the course of history of those social groups that, in later times, have the capacity to stage these shared recollections through holidays, rituals, and public celebrations” (qtd. in Jelin 12). Based on this view, Jelin says that collective memory can “be construed in the sense of shared memories, layered on each other—as the outcome of multiple interactions structured by social frameworks and power relations” (12). Such memories grant ownership of memorization to a dominant cultural group, as in the case of Sinhalese Buddhists in Gamani . Notably, Tamils are not given an opportunity to engage with collective memory. Instead, their experiences are narrated for them by Sinhalese Buddhists. Obviously, the family of displaced Tamils is introduced and their victimization is narrated in order to reiterate Sinhalese Buddhist humanism that is collectively celebrated. Thus, the film shows that collective memory functions in an insular way in the context of religio-nationalism. Further, in line with Gamani’s depiction of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, its music track is overshadowed by the Buddhist monk’s preaching, which is also used as a background soundtrack. The Buddhist chant in the opening scene that invokes samyak dushtika gods—

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gods who have been graced with the enlightenment of Buddhism—to come and listen to the preaching is almost an invitation to a Sinhalese Buddhist audience to congregate to witness a narrative crafted for their taste buds. Clearly, the film is not meant for an all-inclusive Sri Lankan audience, but only a selective Sinhalese Buddhist audience. It mistakenly conflates the Sinhalese Buddhist identity and Sri Lankan-ness while excluding Tamils and non- Buddhists as ‘others.’ In one scene, while the village monk preaches about the woeful experience in departing from the beloved with an emphasis on the ‘ Buduwadana’ (the word of the Buddha), a home guard enters the kitchen to flirt with his fiancée who is preparing alms. He asks for food in a flirtatious way, and she replies in a similar manner that he has to wait until bana (Buddhist preaching) is over. At this juncture, he retorts, “ Bana ? If we are listening to bana , who’d be protecting the village?” While the significance of the indispensable role of the home guard in civil and national security is pronounced in this manner, this scene also sheds light on the need to take up arms to protect the ‘national’ religion, Buddhism. The woman changes her mind, and ‘offers’ food to the home guard by subverting the religious convention, 62 as if to acknowledge his superior position as a “ jaatiye muradewatha ”—the ‘protective god of the nation’—a name attributed to armed forces in the nationalist imaginary. This scene conflates the Sinhalese Buddhist identity and Sri Lankanness as something indispensable for the safe upkeep of the Sinhalese nation. On par with the home guard, another seminal ‘Gamani’ figure emerges—the Buddhist monk who is positioned as the inspirational live wire of the Sinhalese Buddhist military mobilization against the ‘enemy.’ In Buddhism Betrayed , S.J. Tambiah documents the emergence of “militant monks” (Jayawardena, qtd. in Tambiah 18) whose active involvement in Sri Lankan politics dates back to 1935. Influenced by Indian nationalism and left-wing politics, and armed with an anti-British attitude, they had formed various movements with political affiliations. He illustrates how monks are drawn into political violence—as perpetrators as well as victims—in the 1971 JVP insurrection and the Sri Lankan Government’s war against the LTTE. He examines how the “sons of the Buddha” dedicated to non-violence have transformed themselves into a militant, violent, ‘radical,’ and political identity as “sons of the soil” which entails militant and violent politics and thus defy the non- violent teachings of Buddhism (Tambiah 95-96). “With some notable exceptions,” he says, “the majority of monks explicitly or privately supported and condoned the Sinhalese army’s killing of Tamil guerillas and had not felt the moral imperative to object to the tribulations

62 As the convention goes, the alms are not supposed to be consumed until offered to the Buddha.

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imposed on Tamil civilians” (Tambiah 95). Even though this seems to be a sweeping generalization which is later refuted by Daniel Kent’s study 63 —many monks interviewed by Kent are of the view that Buddhist monks should never encourage soldiers to kill enemies— the dominant Buddhist rhetoric which is under the purview of the prominent monks is often linked to the state’s interests. These attributes are embodied by the monk of the village temple who is enraged by the incapacity of villagers to hold their ground following the massacre: We cannot tolerate these crimes…We are a nation of good blood. You better know! Our ancestors fought the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the English with poised swords and daggers. We are such a nation. We must remain in these villages even if it means killing (enemies) with suicide. If anyone wants to go, go! If home guards cannot safeguard this village, I will disrobe and take a gun into my hand. He also uses address terms such as “ yako ” (hey!), “ thopi ” (you), and directives such as “denaganiyaw ” (know), “ pala ” (go) which are loaded with commands. The monk’s vocabulary is notably reminiscent of that of Ven. Anagarika Dharmapala who was a Buddhist revivalist in colonial Sri Lanka (Ceylon). He initiated an island-wide campaign of national regeneration “ Sinhalayini Negitivu ” (“Awake, oh, Sinhalese!”) (Jayawardene, “Versatile Anagarika Dharmapala—Communicator Par Excellence”). The revivalist rhetoric used by him was directive and militant. It is possible that the monk’s character in the film has been modeled on this iconic religio-nationalist figure who refuted some central teachings of the Buddha. Reflecting on “ Samm āvāca ” or “right speech” espoused by the Buddha in What the Buddha Taught , Walpola Sri Rahula identifies four characteristics. Accordingly, “blacklisting and slander and talk that may bring about hatred, enmity, disunity and disharmony among individuals or groups of people,” and “harsh, rude, impolite, malicious and abusive language” are not condoned (47). The monk’s speech in Gamani is driven by a consuming desire to avenge the massacre of Sinhalese Buddhists by the LTTE. Expectedly, his language is not in tune with “what the Buddha taught.” Thus he widens an existing gap between the two factions at war. He further exclaims in an alarming tone, “[…] be informed. Even if we are killed in hundreds, we don’t leave our

63 Daniel Kent’s 2010 study “Onward Buddhist Stories: Preaching to the Sri Lankan Army” recounts interviews with monks who reject the idea that Buddhism justifies any form of violence. However, it must be noted that those monks do not occupy any position in the dominant nationalist rhetoric, unlike the informants in the studies by Tambiah and Bartholomeusz.

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villages. Did we leave then when we were attacked by Chola, and Pandya? 64 Our kings organized armies for years, attacked them and chased them away. Those noble people will curse us from their graves if we leave our villages in fear of these.” He mistakenly conflates the identity of South Indian Chola and Pandya invaders with that of Sri Lankan Tamil-ness, which in his eyes, is embodied by the LTTE. This idea echoes the articulation of “religious nationalism” by Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka who are of the view that “Buddhism has always been the national religion of the people” of Sri Lanka (Tambiah 102). The monk sees the 7 th Century Sinhalese and the 20 th Century Sinhalese in the same light. This view reinforces a notion of the Sinhalese identity that has remained constant and can be traced back 1,400 years. Furthering Sulochana’s justification of retributive justice, the monk interprets violence as a ‘Buddhist’ solution to war: “Killing a man is parajika 65 ….But killing someone for one’s own safety is not parajika . Even Lord Buddha has sanctioned it.” Along these lines, he advocates a ‘just-war’ theory, and interprets Buddhism in militant terms. He even questions the non-violent position traditionally assigned to a monk: “So what’s the role of the present-day monk? Does it mean going into woods and meditating while his devotees are being killed, or helping save those innocent people?” This points to Bartholomeusz’ discussion of the prima facie just war theory, a mechanism used by Sinhalese Buddhists since classical times, to rationalize their involvement in war despite non-violent teachings espoused by the Buddha. 66 Similar views are expressed in Gamani which links the just-war theory to the Sinhalese Buddhist’s right to restore order and claim ‘justice.’ This fits into the nationalistic agenda and justifies the Government’s use of violence and military power in ‘resolving’ the ethnic problem. The film voices the need to arm Sinhalese Buddhists against the LTTE/Tamil ‘invaders’ who have no rightful claim to the Sri Lankan ‘motherland’ which is the sole property of Sinhalese Buddhists. Similar to the monks in Bartholomeusz’s study who talk about a ruler’s “ethical obligations regarding war” (46), the monk in the film

64 Cholas were South Indian Tamil rulers whose occupation of Sri Lanka dates back to the Kingdom of Anuradhapura (377 BC–1017). Pandyas were Tamil rulers from the extreme south of India, and they invaded Sri Lankan during the Kingdom of Polonnaruwa (1056–1212).

65 ‘Parajika ’ refers to a set of actions that result in a monk’s expulsion from monkhood. There are ten such actions in the case of a novice monk, and four with respect to fully-ordained monk.

66 Accordingly, the obligation to refrain from killing can be overruled by the obligation to protect Buddhism. Bartholomeusz shows how Sri Lankan state leaders in the recent history, while making references to the Mahavamsa portrayals of ancient Buddhist rulers such as Dutugemunu, have “asserted [their] right to wage war against the LTTE for the greater good of the citizens of [their] country” (37). These “ethical obligations regarding war” claimed by a ruler are central to Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism (46).

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invokes blessings on the Government’s military ventures against the LTTE. He is invested with powers which supersede even the military hierarchy. He walks into the training sessions at his will and preaches about the grandeur of the Sinhalese Buddhist ancestors. Clearly, he is positioned as a proxy for the ruler. It must also be noted that when he addresses the villagers, he is positioned standing against the backdrop of a huge Buddha statue. This example of mise-en-scene contributes much to the overarching presence of Buddhism in the monk’s political activism. Interestingly, seeing “the utopian past” as “a beacon for the future” is a prominent feature in the militant Sinhalese Buddhist rhetoric as Tambiah explores (106). Based on the success stories of ancient Sinhalese Buddhist kings’ military ventures against ‘terrorism,’ the monk defies ‘Western’ political solutions to the country’s problem, which he considers to be flawed: “Giving political solutions to terrorism is extremely dangerous. When they realize they can win their demands by killing innocent civilians, they ask for more.” The fact that these words are addressed to a gathering of representatives of a non-governmental organization (NGO) is also significant. During the time of war, the GOSL frequently accused that NGOs under the auspices of Western donors were in a mission to destabilize the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. 67 Along these lines, Gamani ‘writes back’ to the ‘Western’ solutions to war, while upholding the Buddhist state’s decision to resort to militarism. While Buddhism is thus used to rationalize the state’s military ventures, the ‘enemy’s’ use of religion in war is denounced. For instance, when the LTTE leader tries to console the mother of a fallen cadre saying, “The son martyred himself for the Eelam. He went to heaven. Now you’re a Mahaveer 68 family.” But the mother objects, “My son did not die for Eelam. He died for us whom you kept in custody in fear that he would shirk the assigned task in Colombo.” She accuses the LTTE of telling lies from the outset “That the Sinhalese kill Tamils and rape Tamil women.” She retorts, “If someone kills innocent people for his/her own advantage, that person does not get to heaven, but hell, according to our religion.” This dubious take on religious justification of war furthers the film’s endorsement of Buddhism’s ‘legitimate’ warfare. Such a legitimization is also closely linked to the idea of “clean war,”

67 Speaking in December 2008, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee that was appointed to investigate the operations of the INGOs and NGOs and the transparency of their activities said some of the leading INGOs and NGOs were supporting the LTTE directly and indirectly (Sriyananda, “How NGOs Threaten Sovereignty of State”). Four years after the war ended, this is still a popular accusation repeatedly made by the state (“President Warns of Foreign Plot to Destabilise Sri Lanka”).

68 ‘Mahaveer ’ is a title given as a tribute to the fallen LTTE carders in memory of their sacrifice for the organization.

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which Stahl calls “a manner of presenting war that maximizes viewer alienation from the fact of death in order to maximize to war’s capacity to be consumed” (25). In line with Stahl’s words, hegemonic cinematic memory work—as proved by the case of Gamani—does not pay attention to the disastrous impact of war, but only focuses on fulfilling religio-nationalistic taste buds of post-war audiences. Conclusion Due to its evocation of hyper nationalist sentiments which constitute the post-war hegemonic discourse, it is no wonder that Gamani received a sensational welcome at home. Simultaneously, the film’s dazzling impact on the audience sheds light on another aspect of post-war Sri Lankan memory work—“militainment.” Roger Stahl coins this word to show the ways in which war has entered into a system of consumption in present-day popular culture (20). Speaking of post-Vietnam War US popular culture, he says that war was first perceived as a “spectacle” which divorced the individual from a critical and political engagement with war (20). It dazzled the spectator into a submissive, politically disconnected, complacent, and deactivated consuming status. In the post-war Sri Lankan experience, Gamani is an excellent example which attempts to distance the audience from critically engaging with deleterious socio-political realities. While capitalizing on sanguinary justice granted by the state to the Sinhalese Buddhist nation, it captures the military action in ways that provide entertainment through a thriller effect. A close analysis of Sarath Weerasekara’s Gamani points to the emergence of several political and cultural paradigms in post-war Sri Lanka. While post-war cinematic memory work functions within the political agenda of the ruling state, such work also complies with religious and nationalist interests of the majoritarian Sinhalese Buddhist community that is eager to establish their cultural superiority over ethnic and religious minorities. On one hand, the desire for cultural superiority can be comprehended as an attempt by the Sinhalese Buddhist nation to grapple with post-war melancholia. On the other hand, this situation sheds light on Adichie’s views in the epigraph that memory-workers in power create a dangerous “single narrative” which robs people of dignity because it endorses differences and segregation between human beings. The ‘impossibility of equal humanity’ is manifested in the post-war Sri Lankan milieu that has witnessed Buddhism-based violent mobilizations, the likes of the BBS, hate speech campaigns targeting religious minorities, and ‘anti-halal ’

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movements.69 The film also presages a new phase in militant Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism that is endorsed by the state as something ‘nationally important,’ and hence ‘not to be doubted,’ as evident in the Secretary of Defence’s words quoted in the epigraph. It is not an understatement to say that Gamani sets the stage for the birth of neotribalism, which Hywel Williams defines as modern government’s desire to justify their existence in historical terms and to propose tribe which is “savage in instinct and ritualistic in religion” as “the basis of a grunting solidarity” (67), in post-war Sri Lanka. In these terms, hegemonic memory work renders a tremendous service to the task of converting the country into a military regime that is established on cultural supremacy and militarized Buddhism.

Works Cited Abeysekara, Ananda. Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity, and Difference . South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED Global . 7 Oct. 2009. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. “Anti-Muslim Violence: Not Even the Most Basic Investigations Launched.” Colombo Telegraph. 4 July 2014. Web. 8 July 2014. Athas, Iqbal, and Tim Hume. “Fear, Shock among Sri Lankan Muslims in Aftermath of Buddhist Mob Violence.” CNN . 24 June 2014. Web. 30 June 2014. Bartholomeusz, Tessa J. In Defense of Dharma: Just-war Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka . London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. Print. “BBS Gnanasara Strikes Again in Full View of Police.” Colombo Telegraph . 9 Apr. 2014. Web. 4 May 2014. “BBS Mob Storms Rishad’s Ministry.” Colombo Gazette . 23 Apr 2014. Web. 4 May 2014. Bodu Bala Sena. Web. 9 May 2013. “Bodu Bala Sena Meeting–Aluthgama”. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 15 June 2014. Web. 30 June 2014. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . London: Verso, 2006. Print.

69 As part of the ‘Sinhalese Buddhist awakening,’ hyper-nationalistic forces made a request to all Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka to boycott ‘ Halal’ - labeled products, with the claim that profits of such products are being used to expand Islamism in the country. (A ‘ Halal ’ label is issued to a marketing product by way of signaling that it is ‘permissible’ for the consumption of Islamic consumers.)

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Childress, James. F. “Just-War Criteria.” Moral Responsibility in Conflicts: Essays on Nonviolence, War, and Consciousness . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1982. 63- 94. Print. “Chola Dynasty.” Encyclopedia Britannica . Web. 27 Apr. 2012. The Constitution of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka . Web. 10 May 2013. “The End Battle.” Ministry of Defence and Urban Development Sri Lanka. 30 Apr. 2013. Web. 15 Nov. 2013. “Ethnic Conflict of Sri Lanka: Time Line-From Independence to 1999.” International Center for Ethnic Studies . Web. 30 Apr. 2013. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge .1972. Web. 27 Apr. 2013. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud . Ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1917. 243-258. Print. Gamani . Dir. Sarath Weerasekara. Perf. Bimal Jayakody, W. Jayasiri, Dilhani Ashokamala, and Mahendra Perera. 2011. Film. “Gamani Refreshes Memory of a History Going into Oblivion.” PresInform 16 Sep. 2013. Web. 30 Apr. 2013. Himbutana, Gopitha Peiris. “Ven. Thotagamuwe Sri RahulaThera Scholar Monk Par Excellence.” Buddhist Era 29 Jan. 2006. Print. Ismail, Qadri. Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Print. Jayakody, Ruwan Laknath. “BBS Storms Bathiudeen’s Ministry.” The Ceylon Today 24 Apr. 2014. Web. 4 May 2014. Jayawardene, Lakshman. “Versatile Anagarika Dharmapala: Communicator Par Excellence.” The Daily News 17 Sep. 2002. Web. 28 Apr. 2013. Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory . Trans. Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-Anativia . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Print. Jeyaraj, D.B.S. “Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa Openly Supportive of “Ethno Religious Fascist” Organization Bodhu Bala Sena.” dbsjeyaraj.com 10 Mar. 2013. Web. 4 May 2014. Kamalendra, Chris. “Pre-dawn Horror in Ampara.” The Sunday Times 19 Sep. 1999. Web. 26 Apr. 2013. Karunarathne, Waruni. “The Human Tragedy of Aluthgama.” The Sunday Leader . 15 July 2014. Web. 20 June 2014.

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Kent, Daniel W. “Onward Buddhist Stories: Preaching to the Sri Lankan Army.” Buddhist Warfare . Eds. Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. 157-177. Print. “Looking Beyond Muttur.” Editorial. The Island 05 Aug. 2006. Web. 7 May 2013. “LTTE Tamil Tiger Terrorists Massacred 61 Sinhalese Villagers Including 17 Women and 7 Children on 18 September 1999.” SLNewsOnline . Web. 15 Oct. 2013. Ministry of Defence: Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. Humanitarian Operation: Factual Analysis . 2011. Web. 12 May 2013. Obeyesekere, Gananath. “Some Comments on the Social Backgrounds of the April 1971 Insurgency of Sri Lanka (Ceylon).” The Journal of Asian Studies. Association for Asian Studies, 1974. 367-384. Print. “Pandya Dynasty.” Encyclopedia Britannica . Web. 27 Apr. 2012. “People’s Liberation Front: JVP Sri Lanka.” Web. 05 Feb. 2013. Perera L.P.N. “The Gr āman ī (G āman ī) in Ancient India: An Addendum.” Senarat Paranavitana Commemoration Volume . Eds. Leelananda Prematilleke, Karthigesu Indrapala, and J.E. Van Lohuizen-de Leeuw. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978. Print. Pethiyagoda, Nanda. “Comments on the film Gamani .” The Island 08 Oct. 2011. Web. 30 Apr. 2013. “President Warns of Foreign Plot to Destabilise Sri Lanka.” The Sunday Times 19 May 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2013. Rahula, Walpola Sri. What the Buddha Taught . New York: Grove, 1974. Print. “SAARC Film Festival 2013: Film Screening Schedule.” Colombo: SAARC Cultural Center, 2013. Print. “Sri Lanka Pledges ‘Homegrown Political Solution.’” The Standard 19 May 2009. Web. 4 May 2013. Sriyananada, Shanika. How NGOs threaten sovereignty of State. The Sunday Observer 21 Dec. 2008. Web. 21 Dec. 2008. Stahl, Roger. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Buddhism Betrayed: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Print. Thottam, Jyoti. “Prabhakaran: The Life and Death of a Tiger.” The Time 19 May 2009. Web. 5 Dec. 2013. “US embassy cable-99COLOMBO2324.” Web. 30 Apr. 2013.

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Williams, Hywel. “Neo-Tribalism and Postcolonial Melancholia.” Philosophia Africana 10. 1 (2007): 67-68. Web. 22 Apr. 2013. “World’s Largest Rescue Mission Becomes Success.” Humanitarian Mission: Sri Lanka. Web. 22 Apr. 2013. “20 Years for the Aranthalawa Massacre.” Ministry of Defence and Urban Development in Sri Lanka. Web. 4 May 2013.

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Chapter Three Post-war Cinema of the Oppressed—Flying Fish and “Guerilla Types of Attrition”

The dominant tradition of recuperating memory and history that coincided with the official closure of the civil war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on May 19, 2009, does not flow unabated. As discussed in Chapter Two, popular cinema in the country has invested heavily in revisiting and reconstructing the memory and history of the preceding three decades. While fawning on the government’s bureaucracy, mainstream cinema seems to be weaving a discourse that upholds the hegemonic construction of memory and history. It celebrates retributive justice and justifies the state’s military crackdown on the LTTE, and thus promulgates an axiom of post- war militarism. In pre-2009 Sri Lankan cinema, the hyper-nationalist fervor promulgated by hegemonic narratives was resisted by an aesthetic cinematic movement initiated by Prasanna Vithanage, Asoka Handagama, and Vimukthi Jayasundara. This chapter concentrates on Sanjeewa Pushpakumara’s Flying Fish (2011) that initiates a ‘post-war aesthetic cinema of the oppressed’ that seeks to deconstruct the hegemonic single narrative drafted by state- sanctioned popular cinema. In tune with Augusto Boal’s theorization of “the Theater of the Oppressed” and James C. Scott’s “weapons of the weak” and “guerilla-types of attrition,” this paper will argue that Flying Fish demonstrates resistance in post-war Sri Lanka on behalf of and by the oppressed. Due to mainstream cinema’s intricate links to power that were discussed in the previous chapter, it has become a powerful tool of hegemony. According to Gramscian thought, hegemony is constructed by privileging a certain “dominant” way of life, and diffusing it throughout society to inform norms, values and tastes, political practices, and social relations (Sassoon qtd. in Katz 335). It happens through “coercive orthodoxy,” a blend of coercion and consent, (Persaud qtd. in Katz 335), under the purview of elite “ideological sectors” of society—culture, religion, education, and media—who engineer consent for their rule (Scott 39). The likes of Gamani privilege a set of dominant norms and values which further the ideology of militarization, and thus contribute to a hegemonic memory discourse.

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Pushpakumara’s Flying Fish , on the other hand responds to this, and in a myriad of ways, challenge the hegemonic memory discourse in the post-war cultural milieu. 70 Some fish strive to fly Flying Fish is a landmark text due to the nature of its production, content and form, and the ways in which it was distributed and received. Produced in 2011, the film was premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on January 28, 2011, where it was nominated for the Tiger Award. It had the Sri Lankan premiere during a French Film Festival supported by the French Embassy in Sri Lanka on July 11, 2013. The film was forthwith banned by the Sri Lankan government on the grounds that it had “illegally” used military costumes. 71 It was further accused of disgracing the state armed forces, and of having links with the LTTE and non-governmental organizations. 72 The Government immediately called for a “fact-finding investigation” into the film; its crew members were interrogated and its circulation within Sri Lanka was prohibited. The ban, reportedly imposed by the Ministry of Defence, 73 led to the cancellation of the entire film festival. However, the film was eventually released on YouTube in October 2013. Even though the director denied intentions of insulting the armed forces or harboring links with the Tamil diaspora and NGOs, 74 the film continues to be criticized as a work of treason. The Flying Fish controversy is significant vis-à-vis the post-war cultural milieu from several perspectives. Primarily, it has been instrumental in igniting a critical dialogue about artistic expression among the public. Amidst strong criticism against the film in mainstream media, praise for the film has also emerged in alternative media outlets, in particular Facebook and journalistic blogs. Simultaneously, Flying Fish directed international attention towards post-war Sri Lankan militarism. In the 5th Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival 2011 , Tony Rayans starts a review of the film with an analysis of the post-war political climate in Sri Lanka. 75 Similarly, Mike Hale reflects on the brutality of the Sri Lankan war in his review

70 The other film, Between Two Worlds (2009) by Vimukthi Jayasundara, was never released to the Sri Lankan audience. Using a surrealist and highly imagist approach, this film problematizes the inception of the Sinhalese tribe in the island. It shows how the Sinhalese settlement is embedded in bloodshed, chaos, and violence.

71 “Sri Lanka Ban on Film Flying Fish Sparks Anger”

72 As observed in Chapter Two, the state and the nationalist rhetoric have been considering Non- Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as a threat to national security during and after war.

73 “Flying Fish vs. Blind Donkeys” 74 “Flying Fish Director Pushpakumara Responds to Ban”

75 I quote this review from the “Reviews” section of the Sanjeewa Pushpakumara Website.

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in The New York Times . In this manner, the film has created a critical platform to revisit ‘legacies’ of the three-decade-long era of war. When revisiting memories of war, Flying Fish rebelliously utilizes narrative form and content in an attempt to defy the state’s grand narrative about war. Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition introduces grand narrative as a modern concept established upon a totalized system. It “produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status” (Lyotard xxiii). In other words, they are “the theoretical worldviews that are used to legitimize and manipulate various projects, religious, political or scientific” (Lyotard qtd. in Brewer 32). Taking a cue from the postmodern school of thought, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about “dangers of the single narrative” that creates incomplete stereotypes, and “make[s] one story become the only story” (Ted Talks). Its construction is inextricably linked to power. “How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.” The precarious nature of the grand narrative is criticized by Flying Fish by highlighting the possibility of multiple narratives. Instead of a single linear narrative that characterizes mainstream cinema, Pushpakumara’s film presents three interwoven narratives. The three-interwoven-narrative vignette was first used in Sri Lankan cinema by Prasanna Vithanage in his 2003 film Ira Mediyama (‘The August Sun’) which criticizes the trope of militainment spearheaded by media. 76 In tune with Vithanage’s critical engagement with war, Flying Fish presents neither a celebratory account of war, nor larger-than-life heroes who make sacrifices in the name of patriotism. The three ‘every-day’ stories in the film would be willfully sidelined by the hegemonic narrative due to the fact that they are not ‘extraordinary’ enough to evoke nationalism or patriotism. The events in the film happen in Kanthale, a border village 77 in the Eastern province of Sri Lanka against the backdrop of war. In one story, a Tamil girl experiences her first menstruation on her way home from school. Her father is approached by the LTTE for ransom. On his failure, both he and his wife are shot dead while the little girl runs away from the LTTE, escaping possible conscription. In another story, Vasana, a young Sinhalese woman, makes love with a Sinhalese soldier named Parakrama, in the woods. This is accidentally witnessed by her

76 Ira Mediyama presents three stories, a young widow who is searching for her missing soldier husband, a Muslim boy who is separated from his best friend, a dog, in the wake of the LTTE’s forceful evacuation of citizens, and a Sinhalese soldier who comes across his sister in a brothel. The three narratives are interconnected by the commentary of the 1996 Cricket World Cup. While decentralizing the single narrative framework, Vithanage equates the consumption of the battlefield coverage to that of World Cup updates.

77 Here I refer to a village bordering the war zone.

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father, Muthubanda who consequently develops a neurotic disorder. Together with other villagers, Muthubanda is recruited as a home guard 78 to protect the village. He is punished by the other soldiers upon negligence of duties. Overcome by frustration and humiliation, he commits suicide. In the meantime, Parakrama leaves Vasana pregnant when he is transferred to another village. Vasana visits him and severs his penis during a quasi-love making moment. The third story is about a widowed Sinhalese mother’s struggle to sustain her under- aged children. Her eldest-teenage son sees her romantic escapades with another villager. Exasperated by shame and fury, the son stabs the mother to death and leaves home. The final scene brings together all the three young escapees—the Tamil girl, Vasana, and the boy—in a bus moving towards an indefinite destination without a driver. The director’s use of multiple narratives is a way of deconstructing the deleterious metanarrative, a major objective of post-structuralism and post-modernism. Three stories are seamlessly intermingled in a way that it is sometimes impossible to distinguish between them. The director has deliberately blurred the transitions between narratives to illustrate the fact that everyone is equally oppressed in this setting, irrespective of ethnicity (Personal interview). 79 On the other hand, it gives voice to ordinary characters who are marginalized in the grand narrative. Arguably, it is a way of legitimizing their experiences of war. In an interview with Tiger Awards Spotlight , Pushpakumara claims that the film is about the people of his hometown. He says he grew up amidst the violence of war, and the film captures what he had witnessed. 80 Flying Fish has no individualized protagonists. In a sense, all the villagers become main characters. For the director, many stories matter. The under-privileged testimonies which do not make headlines in the nationalist rhetoric are given a central space in the film, challenging the selective scope of the grand narrative. Quoting Laub, Elizabeth Jelin says, “The ‘not telling’ of the story serves as a perpetuation of its tyranny” and often provokes deep distortions in memory…. In the extreme, the witness becomes trapped in an irresoluble situation” (63). The perpetuation of such injurious silences is resisted by Pushpakumara’s film which fills a major vacuum in the hegemonic narrative. Opting against the metanarrative related to the memory of war, he makes room for marginalized testimonies. He notes, “I made the film for myself. I am a wounded person who lived amidst gunfire. The film was a cathartic exercise. Even if I made it for myself, I knew it would speak for

78 Often denigrated as “ gam batta ,” the home guard occupies a peripheral space in the military hierarchy. It is the lowest-ranking position in the Sri Lanka Army. 79 I conducted a personal interview with the director on November 23, 2013 via Skype.

80 “Tiger Awards Spotlight: Flying Fish ”

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thousands of others who are equally wounded like me” (Personal interview). In these terms, the film is a venture by a person representing an oppressed segment of society made on behalf of the oppressed. It is also a good example of the “labor of listening” which requires “a keen awareness of the subjective processes of the people that are invited to narrate their life experiences” (Jelin 66). ‘Writing back’ to the Metanarrative On par with the resistance waged by form and structure, the film’s attempt at deconstructing the hegemonic post-war narrative is important. The use of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist parables is a key ingredient of the hegemonic post-war discourse, as discussed in Chapter Two through a close reading of Sarath Weerasekara’s Gamani . Weerasekara depicts a Buddhist monk who violently mobilizes villagers against the LTTE by way of seeking retribution. He also refers to historical anecdotes about Sinhalese kings’ victories over South Indian invaders, and evokes intense religio-nationalist sentiments. However, Flying Fish does not draw inspiration from such sources. It rather highlights the distance between the Buddhist narrative—which is presented as utopian—and real-life circumstances. The film makes constant allusions to the story of Siddhartha and Yashodhara. 81 In one instance, Parakrama tells Vasana, “You know, even though Prince Sidhdartha left Yashodhara, she loved him forever,” in a bid to pacify her after she is jilted by her soldier-boyfriend. She retorts, “I would kill him (the would-be Buddha) if it were me.” As her response reveals, their problems cannot be resolved by inspirational historical or religious accounts. Simultaneously, this is also a powerful moment of subversion of patriarchal norms endorsed by Buddhist historiography. In another example, following Vasana’s pregnancy which coincides with Parakrama’s transfer from the village, the Buddhist monk tries to console her saying, “Princess Yashodhara did not cry or hate when Prince Siddhartha left.” In this scene, the monk is given a submissive position while Vasana wields agency over the conversation. Instead of consulting the monk in face of a problem—as required by the Buddhist nationalist discourse—Vasana ignores the monk when she meets him on her way. She keeps turning her back on the monk who volunteers to advise her on dealing with trauma. After a brief exchange of words, she moves on saying, “I don’t have what Yashodhara had.” With these words, she not only dismantles the Buddhist mythology that dominates the nationalist rhetoric, but also displaces the central stage accorded to the monk in Sinhalese village life.

81 Siddhartha is the lay name of the Buddha. He was married to Princess Yashodhara. Their relationship has been idealized in Buddhist scriptures.

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Unlike in Gamani , the Buddhist monk in Flying Fish is not positioned as a demigod who propagates religio-nationalism. He walks into the army bunker, sits on a bench with the soldiers, shares food with them, calls them “malli” (younger brother) and in a humble tone asks them what is happening in war. This is an interesting twist, because in the hegemonic narrative, the monk—who is an omnipotent and erudite figure—distances himself from the masses. He is always presented on an elevated level preaching the uninformed masses and ‘enlightening’ them with his ultimate knowledge of the art of war. In Pushpakumara’s film, the monk is as uninformed as the common man. This way, the monk is presented as an ‘everyday’ character who is enmeshed in the same whirlpool of socio-political issues together with the villagers. When he learns that the government is going to provide weapons to villagers, he is not reminded of patriotism. Instead he sees the new job prospects the villagers will have. He also says, “Sometimes villagers will have to protect the camp instead of the border.” In this manner, he mocks the sense of invincibility that the armed forces are characterized with, in the hegemonic narrative. As Neloufer de Mel observes, the hegemonic discourse capitalizes on the martial virtue of the state soldier and demonizes the LTTE. It thus polarizes the armed forces and the LTTE as ‘the self’ vs. ‘the other.’ Pushpakumara’s film challenges and deconstructs this binary opposition by giving a voice to the LTTE. In one scene, an LTTE regional leader intrudes into the village school and gives a history lesson. He emphasizes the richness of Tamil history in Sri Lanka, which is not recorded in the dominant discourse. He also discusses the political displacement of Tamil people in the present-day context, which has always been sidelined by mainstream cinema. The LTTE leader’s words are suggestive of Tamil nationalism, which is altogether erased in the grand narrative. Thus, in a very rebellious manner, Flying Fish gives voice to the hitherto absent legacy of the “other.” In fact, there is no “other” identity in the film, as both the state forces and the LTTE cadre are depicted in the same light. Both have to carry out duties assigned by their military hierarchies. None are presented in binaries as good and bad, right and wrong, or civilized and primitive. Furthermore, Flying Fish evokes the theme of paramilitarism and its negative toll on oppressed villagers in a bid to challenge the celebration of war in the hegemonic narrative. With reference to the post-Vietnam War US milieu, which witnessed a proliferation of cultural artifacts targeting the American psyche, Gibson introduces “paramilitary” culture as a byproduct of militarism. He says that the new culture is characterized by “a cultural or imaginary ‘New War,’” of which the “warrior hero” is not part of the state’s law enforcement

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mechanism but is an idealized citizen in the caliber of Rambo (5). Similar to the post- Vietnam experience, post-war Sri Lankan cinema also embodies features of a paramilitary culture in which non-military personnel take up arms to restore law and order. Unlike civilians in the hegemonic narrative who eagerly assume new military duties, those in Flying Fish do not become ‘warriors’ committed to national duties. They take up arms either due to coercion, or because they are rampantly available in their immediate environment. In several scenes, the director shows the monk, the young boy, and Vasana trying their hands at handling guns. Pushpakumara’s film blatantly challenges “warrior fantasies” (Gibson 14) crafted by mainstream cinema and exposes how paramilitarism leads to a loss of innocence. An illustrative example is the scene in which the young boy stabs his mother to death. It is not an isolated moment, but the climax of a series of events the boy is forced to get involved in. Correspondingly, the boy inevitably gets familiar with instincts of violence against the backdrop of militarism. By downplaying the heroic aspect of violence, Flying Fish compels the audience to play critical attention to the trajectory of violence. Weapons of the weak While being victims of social, economic, and political oppression, the characters in Flying Fish exhibit signs of resistance as well as resilience. However, their resistance is not conspicuous. Referring to “everyday forms” of peasants’ resistance, James C. Scott writes, Being a diverse class of “low classness,” scattered across the countryside, often lacking the discipline and leadership that would encourage opposition of a more organized sort, the peasantry is best suited to extended guerilla-style campaigns of attrition that require little or no coordination. Their individual acts of foot dragging and evasion are often reinforced by a venerable popular culture of resistance. Seen in the light of a supportive subculture and the knowledge that the risk to any single resister is generally reduced to the extent that the whole community is involved, it becomes plausible to speak of a social movement. Curiously, however, this is a social movement with no formal organization, no formal leaders, no manifestoes, no dues, no name, and no banner. By virtue of their institutional invisibility, activities on anything less than a massive scale are, if they are noticed at all, rarely accorded in any social significance. (35) Several important factors can be gleaned from Scott’s description. First, even though peasants’ resistance is improvised and does not require formalities of a typical resistance movement, they can make a considerable impact on the oppressor. The very fact that they do

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not require careful planning, leadership, organization and publicity can be effective in the sense that resistance can become an “everyday” act. Second, since their resistance does not come on the radar screen by virtue of its “guerrilla” nature, it can persevere without being surveilled and crushed by hegemonic forces. Scott’s idea of “guerilla-types of attrition” is notably reflected in many ways in Pushpakumara’s film. Even though the characters do not wage resistance in prominent ways against oppressive agents of power, they defy authority through ‘everyday’ actions. In the beginning of the film, we see the Tamil ignoring a military order to get off the bus. In another scene, Muthubanda is bold enough to shirk the military duties assigned to him. When he is punished and disgraced in front of his family, he does not beg for mercy, but exhibits a mute resilience. Simultaneously, even seemingly agentive figures like Parakrama are victims of the existing circumstances. His action of leaving the gun behind and making love with Vasana is arguably a rebellious act. While ‘the cinema of the elite’ features patriotic soldiers who embrace weapons to fight the enemy, driven by selfless and ‘noble’ intentions, here we see a soldier indulging in his selfish desires and thus deconstructing the exemplary image he is supposed to emulate. Concurrently, the filmmaker ascribes sexuality to the soldier, which has no room in the nationalist narrative. 82 However, utilizing the powers invested in him by the military structure and patriarchal system, he leaves Vasana pregnant. In an ultimate moment of resistance, Vasana severs his penis. This impromptu moment ennobles “weapons of the weak,” as she emasculates the aura of military patriarchy that abounds in the mainstream war narrative. While celebrating such individual acts of resistance, the film points to the birth of a cinematic genre—the post-war cinema of the oppressed. The Cinema of the Oppressed In tandem with the resistance waged by form and content, the making of Flying Fish becomes a rebellious act. With focus on militarism and military rule in Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, John A. Lent discusses how “independent” filmmakers dare dissent state-sanctioned regulations and use cinema as a tool of resistance. As he elucidates, rejection of traditional methods and styles of filmmaking, and departure from massive studios and mainstream film industry in terms of production, distribution and screening are also features of South Asian independent cinema. It is

82 Soldiers’ sexuality is portrayed by Asoka Handagama in This Is My Moon , Sudath Mahadivulwewa in Sudu, Kalu Saha Alu , Prassanna Vithanage in The August Sun and Vimukthi Jayasundara in The Forsaken Land . All these films were produced during the time of war, and all of them, except for The August Sun , were censored in Sri Lanka. A major reason for censorship in the cases of This Is My Moon and The Forsaken Land was the ‘defamation’ of the Sinhalese soldier by highlighting his sexual indulgence.

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interesting to observe the ways in which Flying Fish embodies the features of Lent’s classification. In order to fly under the radar of militarism, artists in Sri Lanka deploy various strategies, ranging from using pseudonyms to avoiding mainstream publicity. 83 In this context, Flying Fish represents a notable and effective “guerilla-filmmaking” strategy. The director had presented a fake script entitled “Aluth Irak Payai” (“A New Sun Rises”) which evokes pro-nationalist sentiments, to the Ministry of Defense and Urban Development to obtain official permission for the shooting (Personal Interview). However, the Ministry had been informed of this act of ‘treason’ by virtue of its surveillance network. Ministry officials had continuously intimidated and interrogated him via telephone from the third day until the end of shooting. Upon completion, when the director applied for permission for public screening from the State Censor Board, he had submitted a different version of the film omitting scenes that are critical of the state and the armed forces. These production strategies crystallize a guerilla tradition of filmmaking that subverts hegemonic state politics. When executing his ambitious project under tight budget restrictions, Pushpakumara had looked up to alternative movements in the history of cinema, in particular, the French New Wave (Personal interview). The French New Wave (late 1950s—early 1960s) was pioneered by a group of young filmmakers including Louis Malle, Francois Truffaut, Jean- Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol who defied the orthodox French mainstream cinema and its dominant constraints. They used their own limited economic resources for productions, filmed in locations they were familiar with—on the streets and in apartments where they grew up—used new or lesser known actors and small production crews, found ‘unconventional’ producers who were interested in making low-budget films, and used available technological facilities (Neupert xvii). They also made effective use of hand-held cameras. Sharing many parallels with the New Wave directors, Pushpakumara had finished the film with a relatively small budget of Rs. 2,500,000.00 ($20,000.00)—a sum which is barely adequate for a film production. 84 Except for one actress, all the cast and crew members are amateurs and lesser known, semi-professionals. Interestingly, the film is set in the

83 I recall a performance held in commemoration of Richard de Zoysa in 2010 at the Namel—Malini Punchi Theater, Colombo. The performance included reading sections from Harold Pinter’s work, and theatrical vignettes. The performers made direct allusions to the contemporary Sri Lankan context of militarism. The event was publicized by word of mouth to eschew the state’s attention.

84 If he had “gone by the book,” the film would have cost at least Rs. 300,000,000.00—twelve times more costly than the actual production cost (Personal interview).

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director’s own village, and many minor roles are played by villagers. Instead of artificially constructing settings, available spaces such as the village school, military bunkers, dilapidated buildings cracked with bullets, and even the director’s own house, were used as central locations. Lodging and transport had been economized. 85 Military costumes and weapons were been borrowed from his acquaintances in the army. Following French New Wave directors, Pushpakumara also makes abundant use of hand-held camera. Like the New Wave directors who looked for modes of distribution beyond the dominant industry, the release of Flying Fish on YouTube is a noteworthy move. The director denies any involvement in its release (Personal interview), but it cannot be ignored that the film obtained widespread distribution outside the realm of mainstream cinema. In this fashion, every stage of the film bears witness to a rebellious filmmaking tradition that challenges the hegemony in the Sri Lankan filmmaking industry. Concomitantly, the rebellious use of aesthetics in the film is also worth examining. While oppressive forces use the theater as a tool of domination, the oppressed can use it as a weapon to gain freedom (Boal, Theater of the Oppressed ix). In so doing, the most effective strategy would be to enable the oppressed’s critical engagement with their social conditions through “the poetics of the oppressed” (Boal, Theater of the Oppressed 122). Boal stresses the need to change spectators from passive consumers into subjects, “into actors, and transformers of the dramatic action” ( Theater of the Oppressed 122). The same axiom is valid in relation to cinema. Boal’s ideas invoke Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theater, and to some extent Third Cinema. In the context of cinema, the same axioms of oppression and resistance can take place. While hegemonic ‘elite’ cinema tries to distance the spectator from a critical engagement with war through militainment, the cinema of the oppressed utilizes “the aesthetics of the oppressed” to facilitate a critical dialogue. As Boal delineates, three components are significant in the realm of the aesthetics of the oppressed—the Word, the Sound and the Image. They need to be effectively used to create emotional and intellectual stimuli. Boal sees this as an endeavor targeting the emancipation of the individual imprisoned in an oppressive world. In a similar vein, the film applies dialogue, sound, and image in an aesthetically political manner. Dominant features of the film’s cinematography are the recurrent use of the

85 Lodging and food had been provided at the director’s house, and the crew had been encouraged to use public transport (Personal interview).

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long and extreme long shots, minimalist editing, minimal music, and sparse dialogue. 86 This is a significant departure from the war-thriller genre that heavily depends on fast-paced editing, close-ups, profuse use of dialogue, and abundant use of sound—both background sound and music. Even though the characters are granted the power to speak, their conversations are frequently interspersed with uncanny silences. The director uses silence to expose the intensity of psychological trauma experienced by the survivors of war. They are wounded by war to such an extent that they cannot coherently express themselves or communicate with others (Personal Interview). The extended long shot, that sometimes encapsulates all the three narratives in the same frame, is notably influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky’s theorization of cinematic language. 87 The long shot effectively captures individuals roaming in ‘extreme’ locations—rocks, cracked earth, stubble, gravel road, and dilapidated buildings—thus signifying their experiences of trauma. It simultaneously plays a political role in the film by depriving the post-war filmgoer of high-octane action. Thus it disrupts a passive consumption of cinema which happens in the context of “militainment” and “living room war.” The film also uses a rich array of symbolism, echoing Tarkovsky’s idea that cinema should privilege imagism over action. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes, “[…] the image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as a drop of water. Only in a drop of water!” (110). As opposed to the post-war hegemonic cinema’s use of clear-cut nationalist symbolism, Pushpakumara uses abstract and layered images which challenge the viewer intellectually. For example, in several scenes, the hand- held camera captures intestines of rotten fish, which symbolizes the trapped and nightmarish status of citizenship in the war-torn environment. The intestines of the fish bear witness to the bloody violence they have endured. The villagers are hapless and helpless in a similar manner. Muthubanda’s naked wanderings symbolize the disillusionment of the Sri Lankan citizen who has been stripped of all marks of decency. Only in suicide, can he achieve redemption. The use of symbolism reaches a climax in the final scene of the film that unites Vasana, the young boy, and the Tamil girl—who all represent the future—in a bus that is rattling forward without a driver. This surrealistic scene, on one hand, shows the realistic impossibility of escaping the precarious circumstances. On the other hand, the bus without

86 Robert Crusz in his reading of Asoka Handagama’s This Is My Moon refers to a similar use of cinematography that creates a disengaging effect in the audience. 87 The director says he was highly influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman (Personal interview).

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the driver becomes a strong commentary on the post-war Sri Lankan bureaucracy, which according to the film, is moving without proper navigation. In this way, Flying Fish ’s effective use of cinematic aesthetics echoes Boal’s idea that aesthetics of the oppressed need to be an attempt targeting the emancipation of the individual imprisoned in an oppressive world. Conclusion A close analysis of Sanjeewa Pushpakumara’s Flying Fish illustrates the emergence of a cinema of the oppressed in post-war Sri Lankan popular culture. Composed by the oppressed on behalf of the oppressed, it fills the deleterious gaps created by the hegemonic narrative of war crafted by the cinema of the elite. In so doing, the cinema of the oppressed challenges and resists the key ingredients of the grand narrative—militainment, paramilitarism, and religio-nationalism. It thus endeavors to mobilize the audience towards a critical engagement with cinema. Simultaneously, it pays homage to Boal’s words that the aesthetics of the oppressed should concentrate on “the creation of conditions in which the oppressed can develop fully their metaphoric world—their thought, their imagination and their capacity to symbolize, to dream…” ( The Aesthetics of the Oppressed 40). Along these lines, the cinema of the oppressed makes a praiseworthy attempt to empower the hitherto obliterated testimonies of a category of people who have been politically and socially marginalized by mainstream Sri Lankan cinema. Thus, the cinema of the oppressed is on a mission to “repair” the dignity of a people impaired by the epistemological violence of the single hegemonic narrative of war.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED Global . Oct 2009. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. Boal, Augusto. The Aesthetics of the Oppressed . London: Routledge, 2006. Print. -----. Theatre of the Oppressed . New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985, Print. Brewer Robert K. Postmodernism: What You Should Know and Do about It. Lincoln: iUniverse, Inc. 2001. Web. Crusz, Robert. “The Forms of Contentious Content: A Reflection on Asoka Handagama’s This Is My Moon (Me Mage Sandai ).” Cinesith 1 (2001): 23-32. Print. de Mel, Neloufer. Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative In The Armed Conflict . New Delhi, India: Sage Publications, 2007. Print.

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Flying Fish . Dir, Sanjeewa Pushpakumara. Perf. Kaushalya Fernando, Rathnayaka Marasinghe, Chaminda Sampath Jayaweera, and Gayesha Perera. 2011. Film. Gibson, James William. Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture In Post-Vietnam America . New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. Print. Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory . Trans. Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-Anatavia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print. Katz, Hagai. “Gramsci, Hegemony, and Global Civil Society Networks.” Voluntas (17) 4. December 2006. 333-348. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. Lent, John A. “Southeast Asian Independent Cinema: Independent of What?” Southeast Asian Independent Cinema: Essays, Documents, Interviews . Ed. Tilman Baumgärtel. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. 13-19. Print. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Print. Macrae, Callum. “Sri Lanka: Slaughter in the no fire zone.” The Guardian . 13 Sep. 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2013. Neupert, Richard John. A History of the French New Wave Cinema . Madison: University Of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Print. Porter, Patrick. Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes . New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Print. Pushpakumara, Sanjeewa. Personal interview. 23 Nov. 2013. Rayans, Tony. “For a Debut Feature, It’s a Work of Remarkable Restraint.” 5th Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival 2011. 46-47. Sanjeewa Pushpakumara Website. 22 Nov. 2013. SAARC Film Festival 2013: Film Screening Schedule. Colombo: SAARC Cultural Center, 2013. Poster. Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work . Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. “Sri Lanka Profile.” BBC News South Asia . 16 May 2013. Web. 12 Nov. 2013. Stahl, Roger. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print. Tarkovski ĭ, Andre ĭ Arsen ʹevich. Sculpting in Time . London: Bodley Head, 1986. Print.

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Chapter Four Imaging Memories—Post-war Art and Performances of Resistance

“Wounds are always more harrowing than dying.” –Bandu Manamperi, sculptor/performing artist (interview with the artist)

This chapter concentrates on two Sri Lankan artists whose work has been inspired by personal and collective memories of trauma. It examines the ways in which painter Thamotharapillai Sanaathanan and sculptor/performing artist Bandu Manamperi seek to reposition subaltern memories—memories that have been displaced, marginalized, fetishized, and pushed to the periphery by the hegemonic discourse—in the center of a mnemonic discourse. As Vincente M. Diaz writes with reference to survivors’ eagerness to narrate their memories in the post-war Guam experience, 88 a major form of commemoration that “doesn’t wait for big events [and] celebrations is the unforgettable memory scarred onto the bodies of Chamorro survivors” (159). Diaz’s words shed light on Sanaathanana’s and Manamperi’s body of work that endeavors to find meaningful expressions for indelible physical and psychological wounds inherited by survivors of the Sri Lankan war. The form of commemoration the two artists engage with fills gaps in the mainstream discourses of memory culture that prioritize memories of national significance. Memory architecture Speaking of “perilous memories,” Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama direct our attention to “precarious or endangered memories in need of recuperation” and memories “that continue to generate a sense of danger” for various peoples throughout the Asia-Pacific region (3). They hold that memories in the Asian and Pacific regions are invariably embroiled in practices of decolonization, nation-formation, and promises of liberation from past oppression and domination (Fujitani et. al. 9). They discuss the “problem of memory,” and show how dominant national histories of war “transform and submerge” memories through narratives of unity across ethnic lines (Fujitani et. al. 9). Even though our knowledge of the past is always mediated via memory archives, they stress that sometimes “memory is negotiated through its very absence” (Fujitani et. al. 16). It is this very precarious absence of memories that becomes the central locus of Sanathanan’s artistic career. He dwells on the absence of the physical structure of home in the wake of the

88 Home to the Chamorro people, Guam became a territory of the United States in the wake of the 1989 Spanish-American War. During the WW II, it fell under the Japanese military occupation. The United States claimed it from Japan following the Battle of Guam in August 1944.

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destruction caused by war, and explores the consequential trajectory of memories connected with the notion of home. Speaking of a 2004 paintings entitled “Grandma’s Courtyard II,” Qadri Ismail deliberates on how Sanaathanan’s depiction of home invokes dislocation, loss and estrangement in the experience of people directly affected by war. “War, the painting reminds us, scars more than just the body, destroys more than property. It can recolor cherished memories; transform the past into the terms of the miserable present” ( Raking Leaves website). Sanaathanan’s best investment in post-war memory work is arguably a project he undertook in 2011 which eventually materialized as a book entitled The Incomplete Thombu . The book compiles testimonies of eighty people directly affected and traumatized by war and their memories of home. Each narrative is interspersed with the artist’s graphic and visual responses. For him, “home” is not simply the material structure of a house, but a hub of relationships, emotions, connectivity, and an individual’s rootedness ( Groundviews interview). It is a task to recuperate “perilous memories” that are dissolving into a vanishing point against the backdrop of post-war Sri Lanka’s nation-building endeavors. In this project, he has interacted with eighty people displaced by war and given them a seemingly simplistic task—to draw the map of their (non-existent) house from memory. He has encouraged them to recollect something related to the place, such as a person, a story, an incident, or an object and thereby narrate the memory of their home while sketching the ground plan. This process would initiate a journey into deep recesses of their minds and enable them to unravel memories of experiences about their lives and others. Sanaathanan calls this practice “architecture of memory:” “We saw this destruction in terms of architecture… Whatever the injuries we found in those buildings were representative of what happened to those people who lived in those buildings” (Groundviews interview). In these terms, reconstructing the space provides a way to reconstruct the memories of the people who used to dwell in them. Based on the participant’s hand-drawn sketch, a professional architect would draw a formal plan of the house while filling the voids in the original drawing. Thirdly, Sanathanan would make an abstract painting by way of responding to what he understands from each participant’s recollection of home. Even though this project seems to be rather simplistic, it defies the politics of post- war memory discourse in a significant manner. “ Thombu ” is a word coined by the Dutch to refer to a public land registry, derived from the Greek word “tomos” which originated the Latin word “tome” meaning “large book” (rakingleaves.org). Sanathanan’s decision to invoke the colonial vocabulary in naming post-war memories, on the one hand, revisits the dynamics

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of power between the Dutch oppressor and the post-war Sri Lankan state. Similar to the former colonial ruler’s “incomplete” understanding of the Ceylonese citizenship, officialized versions of the citizen’s existence in the post-war era is also “incomplete” as it has been since the colonial period. 89 While the boundaries of the colonial thombu concerns boundaries of property, the book, on the other hand, uses the concept to speak of emotional boundaries related to property ( Groundviews interview). The idea that survivors’ “ thombu s” are “incomplete” conveys that their testimonies have not been adequately captured in the post- war hegemonic memory discourse. As opposed to using the more popular methodology of interviewing the displaced people and making them narrate their memories of trauma, Sanaathanan has approached his participants in a manner that empowers them. The participants would “get energetic about drawing their houses and start responding with excitement to the memory of the house as they draw” (Personal interview). 90 Even though the artist had introduced himself as an artist, who is neither a psychiatric nor a counselor, in the course of his interactions with the people, he has eventually assumed a psychologist’s role. This is evident in a response given by a participant who noted, “Nobody is asking these questions. At least you listened to us” (Personal interview). Obviously, the project has enabled the people to retrospectively talk about their identities, past, relationships, emotions, and loss from a different perspective, something that they are deprived when they are ‘interrogated’ by relief services or state agencies. Sanaathanan’s attempt has arguably been cathartic and curative. The efficacy of the curative process has contributed to the ethnic and religious diversity of the project, enabling him to reach out testimonies across caste, ethnicity, and religion. Sanaathanan also forgoes the dominant polarization constructed by the state-sponsored memory discourse, putting the survivors into camps, victorious Sinhalese and defeated Tamils, as illustrated in Chapter Two. As Primo Levi puts it, a witness can be assigned with the “duty to remember,” to testify “in the name of others,” as a “delegative” narrator (Jelin 62). Levi also talks about two groups of survivor-witnesses: those who remain silent and those who speak. Silence or the impossibility of telling the story can be attributed to a “lack of open ears and heart of people willing to listen” (Jelin 63). Silences can become “a perpetuation of … tyranny” (Laub qtd. in

89 It must be noted that Sri Lanka’s post-independent administrative system was modeled after the British parliamentarian system. However, it had been significantly influenced by the governing systems of the former Portuguese and Dutch colonial rulers.

90 The interview was conducted on January 4, 2014.

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Jelin 79) because they “often provoke [ ] deep distortions in memory,” making the witness “trapped in an irresoluble situation” (Jelin 63). Unlike the hegemonic discourse that silences survivor-witnesses with scarce attention or apathetic questions which would aggravate their trauma, Sanaathanan’s approach creates a conducive environment for them to expose themselves. His deep understanding of trauma experienced by the survivors can be attributed to the fact that he has lived in the same socio-political environment since before the beginning of the civil war, undergoing similar circumstances. 91 “My house was burnt when the IPKF 92 came,” he says. “I also have had similar kind of experiences. That actually helped me to empathize with people…. Their stories are in a way building up my own story” (Personal interview). These words reveal that memory work has been mutually therapeutic— it has enabled the artist to unlock himself together with the participants through art. In neurology, a number of studies have shown the positive impact of art therapy on trauma victims. Savneet Talwar cites several such case studies, and highlights relationships between the body, mind and creativity (23). Sanaathanan’s project bears witness to scientific claims about the productive role of art in alleviating trauma. Deconstruction of militainment, that was identified as a major characteristic of resistant memory work in the previous chapter, plays a key role in Sanaathanan’s work as well. The abstract paintings are rather disturbing than visually spectacular. The reader cannot passively consume them, but is made to go back and forth between the survivor’s sketch, the small write-up about the background of the testimony and the artist’s work. The monochromatic colors used in paintings are not visually stunning. The colors compel the reader to ruminate on the state of destituteness, displacement, and annihilation of brightness in lives of survivors. Even though the book may find a marketable value as a coffee-table book, it is a text to be ‘consumed’ while sipping coffee. The artist invites the reader, on the other hand, to participate in his venture to fill the gaps in survivors’ testimonies by challenging the reader to interpret his abstract visual expressions. The attempt at ‘architectural’ memory work challenges the dominant discourse of displacement according to which, internally displaced people or IDPs are “persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed

91 Sanathanan was born in Jaffna in 1969, and have lived there ever since.

92 The Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) was deployed in the Jaffna peninsula in 1987 in a bid to bring a closure to the Sri Lankan civil war. The IPKF is leveled with many allegations such as having a double standard—helping both the state forces and the LTTE, and war crimes.

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conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human- made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border” (United Nations 1). IDPs in post-war popular culture are associated with a range of negative stereotypes. For instance, they are depicted as gravely in need of humanitarian aid. Like gypsies, an ‘untouchable’ mobile community in Sri Lanka who belong to a lower caste, IDPs tend to be considered a mobile community at the mercy of the rest of the country and a burden to the national economy. They are seen and considered as expendable. Mainstream media often pictures them as a segment of society without a meaningful existence, or in Judith Butler’s words, as people with a state of “unreality.” Butler writes, I am referring not only to humans not regarded as humans, and thus to a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon their exclusion. It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the question, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization. What, then, is the relation between violence and those lives considered as “unreal?” Does violence affect that unreality? Does violence take place on the condition of that unreality? (33) As she suggests, the perpetuation of violence is inextricably linked to a segregation constructed between “real” and “unreal” human existence. The hegemonic discourse would statistically record displacement whereas personal trajectories of those involved are paid scarce attention ( Raking Leaves website). By erasing the personal element and reducing IDPs to statistics, it perpetuates the binary that Butler has shown between ‘reality’ and ‘unreality’ of existence. Sanaathanan complicates the official definition of displacement and challenges the significance placed on physical movement within national borders. He argues for cultivating a sense of emotional belonging in citizens who have been ‘displaced’ by war, and thus to see their citizenship beyond a mere state of “unreality.” Sanaathanan’s work helps survivors of war find value of their existence which is invariably negated as a nightmarish experience by most-acclaimed post-war memory work such as Asoka Handagama’s Ini Avan 93 and Sanjaya Leelarathne’s Selvam . Conversely, for Sanaathanan, survivors cannot be essentialized as hapless ‘losers.’ They are not necessarily vessels of traumatic memories, but do pride themselves in having precious memories. While

93 It must be noted that this claim does not speak for Handagama’s entire oeuvre.

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complicating the stereotype of the IDP, he compels post-war Sri Lankans to try to grasp a complete picture of war survivors. It is true that they have been deprived of their home in a physical sense. However, they are not simply IDPs who are in need of sympathy of the winning majority, as Sanaathanan seeks to argue. In the immediate post-war period, many Sinhalese groups from the South got into the habit of “touring” the former war-zone including the IDP camps, as I have discussed in relation to “atrocity tourism” in the Introduction. Such tours are guided by a pseudo-sympathy directed towards IDPs, but in reality, the visual spectacle of survivors in camps would give the “tourist” a voyeuristic pleasure. This trend is scathingly denounced by Sanaathanan’s approach that redeems the survivor from the dangers of falling into a state of Butlerian unreality. In one instance, a Muslim survivor had expressed his willingness to participate in Sanathana’s project but he had not owned any property or a house to memorize. Under circumstances, he had been forced to shift to many places from time to time (Personal interview). Since Sanathanan’s project merges the concept of home with the physical entity of house, the participant’s story has space in the book, and it appears without a ground plan. Another person from Kankesanturai had re fused to give the ground plan of his house. For him, home had been the entire street he lived on (Personal interview). In another example, a Tamil student who had lost his entire family during the last phase of war had not got a house to remember. He had provided with the ground plan of the orphanage he grew up in. Sanaathanan’s work maintains that these survivors have meaningful and legitimate existences—and hence not psychologically displaced. The compilation of individual testimonies gives rise to a collective commemoration. Collective memories make possible a common platform for grief, which shows them a way to come to terms with loss by witnessing and identifying with others’ experiences. The book presents all the testimonies without personal details so that each participant would have to search for his/her story among dozens of others: People think that only they are affected and not others. When they saw that others also had suffered, it changed their (self-reflective) perspective like in the Patachara story. 94 It made them share their experiences and realize that it

94 Sanaathanan was actually referring to the story of ‘Kisagothami,’ not Patachara. In this popular anecdote found in Buddhist scriptures, Kisagothami desperately tries to give life back to her dead son. She is eventually asked by the Buddha to bring a handful of mustard seeds from a house where none had died. By witnessing that every household has experienced death of their beloved ones, Kisagothami realizes that death is not a problem unique to her, but is a natural phenomenon collectively shared by everyone. Thus she comes to terms with her child’s death.

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was a collective tragedy, not individual. This was creating a new base to think about common loss. (Personal interview) Clearly, the project has been instrumental in transforming individual loss to a common loss. This is an objective which the artist had realized in one of his earlier exhibitions, which significantly inspired the present project. He had organized this exhibition at the Jaffna Library in 2004 during the Ceasefire Agreement between the GOSL and the LTTE. In preparation for the exhibition, Sanathanan, together with four of his students had walked from door to door asking the Jaffna citizens for objects that would remind them of the then twenty-five-year long war. The outcome was a vast collection of five hundred objects, many of which were mundane everyday items such as barbed wire (Personal interview). The items were bottled and displayed akin to exhibits in a museum or a laboratory. Notably, items did not carry annotations or personal references. This created a platform for the citizens to ruminate on collective memorization. They would come to see items similar to what they had given as representations of their memories. While sharing collective grief, they would also share a collective consciousness of their experiences as survivors of war. This is vividly evident in their selection of items such as barbed wire, a symbol of forceful confinement and oppression. This action can be considered a “guerilla-type of attrition” along James C. Scott’s interpretation. On the part of the artist, the exhibition is a bold way of making space for ‘everyday’ memories of survivors, which is deliberately sidelined in the hegemonic discourse. More importantly, it is a site that allows the exhibition of an everyday act of resistance. The book’s design parodying a thombu is also a guerilla move of resistance. It challenges the original motives of the land registry by showing its obsession with physical boundaries as problematic and incomplete. The book’s cover also features an upside-down map of Jaffna. While the artist claims that the orientation of the map is inspired by a Dutch document (Personal interview), at a symbolic level, it mocks the ‘standard’ way of ‘mapping’ citizens’ lives. The upside-down map underscores a criticism of post-war treatment of survivors and the state’s failure to effectively respond to survivors’ testimonies. 95 This venture is further continued by the sculptor/performing artist Bandu Manamperi in his performances inspired by memory and trauma. Performing Memories

95 In “The Promise of the LLRC: Women’s Testimony and Justice in Post-War Sri Lanka,” Neloufer de Mel criticizes the failure of the LLRC to grant justice to women communities affected by war.

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Reflecting on performance, politics, and activism, Lynette Hunter writes that “Performance has always been a way of articulating the conditions of contemporary society, and of pointing through the body of the performance to ways of defining, understanding and changing those conditions” (1). Performance, in its very form, is vested with a political agenda of transforming society while responding to its concerns. It is an art form whose primary aim is to “undo” theatrical “competencies” (Féral 179). Josette Féral, on the other hand says, “Performance readjusts these competencies and redistributes them in a desystematized arrangement” (179). 96 Performance has the capacity to deconstruct and disrupt the order and status quo invoked by the conventional theater modeled on the Aristotelian ideas. Féral holds that performance corresponds to Artaud’s New Theater which is “a theatre of cruelty and violence, of the body and its drives, of displacement and ‘disruption,’ a non-narrative and non-representational theatre” (171). Manamperi’s performative premise illustrates Féral’s theorization of performance. Like Sanathanan, Manamperi has been engaged with the socio-political milieu of Sri Lanka since early 1990s as a member of the “90s Trend.” 97 From the outset of his career as a sculptor and performer, his work has been influenced by his traumatic memories during the 1988/89 Marxist insurrection. A telling example in this regard is the performance entitled “Perforated Body,” in which the artist exhibits his bare-chested body that inundates with marks resembling gunshots. While he was in high school (in the late-1980s), he had been apprehended and detained due to his involvement in a student protest against discriminatory drawbacks in the state education system. During the interrogation, the police “burned my whole body with cigarette butts” (Personal interview 98 )—a common interrogation method used by the state in the JVP crackdown. 99 Through the performance, he displays his ‘perforated’ body that has

96 Féral highlights two currents in the contemporary theater articulated by Annette Michelson: mythopoetic theater grounded in the idealistic extensions of a Christian past; and a secular theater proceeding from Cubism and Constructivism (170).

97 The “90s Trend” is an alternative art movement initiated by the painter JagathWeerasinghe. Reflecting on its inception, Manamperi notes, “In that time, we could not paint anything beautiful. The socio- political environment did not facilitate any spectacular work. What we had was a society replete with depression. When we were engaging with this environment, what we had experienced started to come onto the canvas. The name of the group was coined by us” (Personal interview).

98 The interview was conducted on March 15, 2014.

99 In his memoir entitled Eliyakanda Wada Kandawura: Killing Point (“The Torture Camp at Eliyakanda: Killing Point”) (2000), survivor Rohitha Munasinghe narrates his experiences of trauma at the state- run ‘torture camp’ at Eliyakanda in the hands of the Sri Lankan Army. He recounts a number of interrogation methods used by the Sri Lankan Army, ranging from verbal abuse to gang-clubbing to death. Kulasena Fonseka’s 1995 novel Gini Binduma similarly discusses many such methods which include sadistic practices

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survived to the present day. The memory of the wounds is more harrowing than death as his words quoted in the epigraph reveal. The “manipulation of the body,” as Féral points out, is a key characteristic of performance. Since it is a physical accomplishment, the performer “explores it, manipulates it, paints it, covers it, uncovers it, freezes it, moves it, cuts it, isolates it, and speaks to it as if it were a foreign object. It is a chameleon body, a foreign body where the subject’s desires and repressions surface” (171). Manamperi experiments with his body, paints it, exposes, and transforms it into a vessel of memories that speaks for physical and psychological wounds suffered by many other survivors of political violence. This performance has much relevance in the post-war environment in which all Sri Lankans, irrespective of religious or ethnic differences, live with physical and/or psychological scars. On par with “Perforated Body,” stands another poignant performance, the “Bandaged Barrel Man.” First performed—or rather improvised—under the title “Barrel Man” in 2004, it has been a spontaneous response to the “political vacuum” surrounding the Jaffna Library at the time 100 (Personal interview). The UPFA government was going to reopen the library while sidelining the former history of violence underlying the archival site. Manamperi, who was in the premises of the library, had witnessed a corroded barrel with holes, and started an impromptu performance by walking with it on his shoulders. This has become the foundation for two other performances, “Bandaged Barrel Man” in which he carries the barrel while his body is wrapped in bandage, and “Golden Barrel Man” in which he carried the barrel while his body is painted in gold. Given its relevance in the post-war era, “Bandaged Barrel Man” demands closer attention. The artist’s bare body—head, arms, elbows, chest, waist, groin, thighs, knees, ankles, and feet—is all covered with bandage resembling a bomb victim under treatment. The image of the artist who lumbers under the weight of a rusted and crumpled barrel evokes an eerie feeling about post-war existence. Arguably, it adds to the continuation of violence. The violence that the body is subjected to in performance is a way of rejecting “theatrical illusion originating in the repression of body’s “baser” elements” (Féral 171). Manamperi’s performances illustrate Féral’s opinion about the violence embedded in performance. According to Féral, performance is more poignant and ‘basic’ than theatrical exercises:

such as burning with electric iron and inserting barbwire into the interrogatee’s anus. Burning with cigarette butts and pulling out nails are supposed to be common interrogation methods.

100 In 2001, the United People’s Freedom Alliance government started reconstructing the Jaffna Library that was destroyed in 1981.

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For this reason, some performances are unbearable…, which do violence not only to the performer…, but also to the spectator who is harassed by images that both violate him and do him violence.’ The spectator has the feeling that he is taking part in a ritual that combines all possible transgressions—sexual and physical, real and staged; a ritual bringing the performer back to the limits of the subject constituted as a whole; a ritual that, starting from the performer's own “symbolic,” attempts to explore the hidden face of what makes him a unified subject: in other words, the “semiotic” or “ chora ” haunting him. (Féral 172) By showcasing wounds, Manamperi reminds us about paradigms of cyclical political violence in the recent Sri Lankan history. As spectators, we are invited to participate psychologically in a ritual of commemorating violence. Correspondingly, the exposure of the bare body is a political gesture towards the “sovereign violence” perpetrated by the state in line with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the state of exception. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , Agamben develops the concept of “bare life” as both the counterpart of the sovereign decision on the state of exception and the target of sovereign violence (Ziarek “Bare Life”). Bare life can be understood in the modern political order when humans are reduced to a naked depoliticized state without official status and juridical rights (Lee 57), similar to the experiences of Homo sacer in the Roman statutory context in which a person would be denied bios or the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group (Agamben 9). Accordingly, bare life is the effect of sovereign violence, is damaged life, stripped of its political significance, of its specific form of life (Ziarek “Bare Life”). Manamperi manipulates his body and takes it through different mechanisms of violence to reinforce the idea that the Sri Lankan citizenship is at the disposal of the state. Similar to the figure of Homo sacer who is stripped off every right to a meaningful existence within the polis , by and large, average Sri Lankan citizen in the post war era has come to assume bare- life identities. The vacuum created by the pomp and pageantry in the name of the military victory in the post-2009 era is precarious, as Manamperi foretells. Tragically, civilians celebrate it at the cost of their own wounds. The harrowing physical and psychological wounds have not yet healed—so they are bandaged—yet citizens are constantly reminded of their duty to keep in their mind what the Sinhalese Buddhist state has achieved for them. Even though the burden is overwhelming, it has no core value other than emptiness. The “Golden Barrel Man” performance satirizes the ways in which the state puts forward the closure of war as the end

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point of all socio-economic problems Sri Lanka was faced with. The inclusion of the golden color is inspired by what he had witnessed in Myanmar during an art festival in 2011. By that time, the civil war 101 in Myanmar had ceased and the whole country war shining with the golden color (Personal interview). Conceptually, Manamperi observed a paradigm in the post-war situations in the two Buddhist countries, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Unlike the Burmese experience, Sri Lanka was golden not visually, but discursively. “Post-war Sri Lanka was teeming with “golden” ideas. It became a Swarnabhoomi .102 War was golden. Peace was golden. Everything was becoming “golden.” Then it occurred to me that the once corroded barrel has now become golden. People have to carry it and walk” (Manamperi, Personal interview). These performances reiterate politics of theater in many ways. On a fundamental level, Manamperi holds that post-war Sri Lankans are ‘acting’ on the victorious stage built by the state mechanism. Rather than consciously acting, their behavior is being maneuvered by the omnipotent state. Manamperi’s mission is to remind citizens of their ideological blindness, by visually expressing what they do. His use of aesthetics is indicative of some radical ideas theorized by both James C. Scott and Augusto Boal. Much of his work requires neither prior organization nor widespread publicity. Interestingly, his theatrical performances do not require an elaborate theater either. In these terms, they embody several fundamental attributes of “weapons of the weak.” For instance, what happens in the performance entitled “Elusive Space” is simply the action of Manamperi’s aimlessly wandering with a colleague while wearing sunglasses and headphones. The state would never have any rationale to censor this performance. However, in a symbolic way, he seeks to say that post-war Sri Lanka is in an illusory phase, intoxicated by the aura of the military victory. Having consumed the state’s single story about war, Manamperi argues that the post-war citizen has become ‘color blind.’ The fact that these performances take place in an alternative theater—on the street, art exhibitions, and public venues other than the conventional theater—call attention to Boal’s discussion of the theater of the oppressed. Manamperi denies any technical knowledge in theater and says he is much influenced by the performance artist Parnab Mukherjee, but his

101 Patrick Winn calls the civil war between Myanmar’s army and the jungle-dwelling Karen ethnic group, one of the longest-running civil wars in the world ( Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ). It is interspersed by a number of ceasefire agreements.

102 “Swarnabhoomi ” means “the golden land,” a term often used in the Sinhalese nationalist discourse to emphasize the value of the country.

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work can easily be situated within the parameters of “invisible theater,” which is one form the theater of the oppressed can operate. In Boal’s words, invisible theater is: […] the presentation of the scene in an environment other than the theater, before people who are not spectators. The place can be a restaurant, a sidewalk, a market, a train, a line of people, etc. The people who witness the scene are those who are there by chance. During the spectacle, these people must not have the slightest idea that it is a “spectacle,” for this would make them “spectators.” (143-144) Not only does Manamperi deconstruct the spectacle that is part and parcel of militainment, he also baffles and thereby makes his audience ruminate on what they have seen. He takes a daring step ahead of Boal. While Boal emphasizes the need “to rehearse the scene sufficiently so that the actors are able to incorporate into their acting and their actions the intervention of the spectators” (144), Manamperi ventures without rehearsal (Personal interview). “This is not something I do with pre-determined plans and decisions. I depend much on the environment. The feelings I might have then and there, tension, audience all influence my work,” Manamperi notes (Personal interview).Unlike Boal’s actors, Manamperi has no clue about his audience beforehand, which makes his work more challenging. 103 Sharing a similarity with the work by Pushpakumara and Sanaathanan, Manamperi’s performances do not evoke a spectacular appeal. Like in Flying Fish , his performances are marked by a pervasive silence, which allows the audience to interpret the performance in their own way without authorial interference. Interestingly, silence is a tool often used in political theater. For instance, it is an iconic mark in Harold Pinter’s stagecraft. Calling it the “opaque terror of silence,” Phoebe Wray writes that the cracks of silence in Pinter’s plays open doors for “unnamable terror” (421-422). “The Western World abhors a silence,” Wray continues, “noise must continue, meaningful or not, and gaps in conversation are a social disgrace” (421). Likewise, “spectacular war” that dazzles the citizen subject into a

103 A good example that came up in the interview with Manamperi is “Window Shopping Man” that he improvised during his tour in Myanmar, in response to the country’s post-war consumer culture. “The country had been devastated by a military rule, and it occurred to me that I had to do a “window shopping” after I came to Myanmar.” While he was walking on a street, he had witnessed a fish tank for sale with a landscape picture on the back wall of the tank. He had made window with it, and inserted his head into it—thus creating the effect of ‘looking through a window.’ “I decided this on the spot. I did it stubbornly without the consent of the art festival organizers because I hate when photographers come with their cameras to capture, like ‘wedding photographers.’ However, when the festival organizers got to know about it, they cancelled the entire festival. They argued that they could not allow international artists to perform without being approved by the censor board. But I refused to perform in front of a censor board. We secretively organized another art festival without the knowledge of the organizers of the main event.”

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submissive, politically disconnected, complacent, and deactivated audience member” (Stahl 20), demands noise, meaningful or not. Manamperi’s decision to deprive the audience of auditory pleasure aligns his work with political theater. It is an effective way of showing the intensity of trauma that can leave survivors speechless. 104 Correspondingly, it speaks of the threat of censorship. Even though survivors of war are aware of socio-political injustices and atrocities, their freedom of expression has been incapacitated by the ubiquitous nature of state repression. Manamperi illustrates his acute awareness of the severity of social oppression and uses mundane, ‘everyday’ props to exhibit dissent and to make his audience think about their own state of victimization in post-war Sri Lanka. This goes along with “aesthetics of the oppressed” of which the prime objective is to “produce emotional and intellectual stimuli” (Boal 36) in the audience. Art as Explosive? From a political point of view, what Sanaathanan and Manamperi create can be called ‘explosive’ art. Commenting on the resistant elements in Sanaathanan’s selection colors, Qadri Ismail observes a shift in tune with political motives: “[…] Shanaathanan’s early work…is marked by bright, riotous color, turbulent but whole bodies. Over the course of this decade, the colors have turned somber, the bodies become torn – in one painting by pliers, in another by an electric prod. The Tamil body is now a tortured one” (Raking Leaves website). The Incomplete Thombu is an illustrative example for Ismail’s observation. Conversely, the myriad of performances by Manamperi are loaded with political expressions. Performances such as “Highly Explosive” 105 verge on explosiveness both literally and symbolically. Butler notes that “a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experience, and that the frame works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as an oral justification for retaliation” (4). As Chapter Two argues, the hegemonic discourse precludes testimonies that do not contribute to Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism. Via their creative expressions, Sanaathanan and Manamperi

104 The idea of silence has tremendously influenced Manamperi’s 2009 solo exhibition of sculpture titled “Numbed.” The exhibition features life-size figures of men sculptured with the posture of being “benumbed.” They are hanging with threads attached to their heads, and have Sinhala letters carved onto their bodies. The exhibits convey the plight of the post-war Sri Lankan who is physically and mentally overwhelmed by regulations. On the one hand, the Sinhala letters ‘carved’ onto the bodies resemble the state-sanctioned nationalist memory archive that is enforced on citizens.

105 “Highly Explosive” is worth noting at this juncture. In this, he appears in a dress made with a huge amount of fire crackers, and is trying to light up a bunch of firecrackers, with an apparent ignorance of its outcomes. While working alongside “Elusive Space,” this vehemently criticizes the post-war Sri Lankan’s celebratory reception of the official closure of war.

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create an alternative space frame to include “perilous memories” (Fujitani et. al. 3) of a subaltern community. While Sanaathanan’s canvas and Manamperi’s body become purveyors of multiple narratives, the artists challenge the first-person point of view that is an intrinsic feature of the hegemonic frame, as Butler notes in reference to post-9/11 US culture. 106 From a Butlerian perspective, both artists engage with questions inherent to a discourse of violence, such as “What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? …What…is the relation between violence and those lives considered as “unreal?”” (Butler 33). The artists legitimize memories and experiences of an ‘excluded’ segment of people whose existence is ‘unreal’ in hegemonic post-war discourses. Thus they grant justice to those people who are victimized by not only national politics but also a form of epistemic violence. Even though Sanaathanan’s and Manamperi’s art is politically explosive, a fundamental question arises about its effectiveness in relation to its audience. In the earlier chapter on Flying Fish , Pushpakumara was dismissive of having any audience in mind while making the film with the claim that his expression was more cathartic than speaking for an oppressed segment of society. Unlike Pushpakumara, both Sanaathanan and Manamperi eagerly engage with an audience that has survived the civil war. For the continuation of their craft, audience’s feedback is unquestionably essential. How their work is received by their audiences is simultaneously important. The information gleaned from the personal interviews reveals several issues in the effectiveness and accessibility of the artistic expression. Sanaathanan’s The Incomplete Thombu is published in English and marketed as an expensive ‘coffee table’ art book. A majority of his exhibitions have been held in places such as the Heritage Art Gallery (in 1998), the Saskia Fernando Gallery (in 2011), the Paradise Road Galleries—the Galley Cafe (in 2001 and 2005), and the Barefoot Gallery (2011) which are socially and economically “elite” places situated in the capital of the country. Places like the Paradise Road Galleries and the Barefoot Gallery are invested in the high-end culture of consumption which is far divorced from the common citizen’s way of life. Thus, Sanaathanan’s work is easily accessible to neither his target community—civilians in the Jaffna peninsula—nor the average Sri Lankan who may not necessarily be fluent in English or rich enough to buy the book. 107 Upon completion of the work, the eighty people have been given the professionally-

106 In Precarious Life , Butler says, “We have to shore up the first-person point of view, and preclude from the telling accounts that might involve a decentering of the narrative “I” within the international political domain” (6-7). 107 This, however, does not apply to the exhibitions he has held in free ‘public spaces’ like the Jaffna Public Library.

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made ground plans of their houses, which is a concrete object that represents what they once used to have. Having something concrete to stand for their memories is a positive outcome of the project. However, the participants’ fluency in English to get to know others’ stories, or even to know how their own story has been documented is arguably questionable. By making the work accessible to a niche readership, it is suspicious whether the artist can realize the kind of political awareness he envisions in his art. For an average person to ‘read’ his art, additional information needs to be provided. In this sense, his art, particularly abstract paintings, can be intellectually challenging. Simultaneously, Manamperi’s politically inflammable performances also tend to go unnoticed both by the hegemonic state as well as the average citizen. His art is well received by an aesthetically informed audience, but outside that, it sometimes gets misrepresented. A good case in point is “Iron Man” in which bare-chested Manamperi is ironing a shirt in public. This was interpreted as “a crazy man ironing clothes in public without shame” in the Sinhala press (Personal interview). Thus he cynicizes the idea of masculine heroes, national and military, as represented by Iron Man, who is reduced to performing a domestic chore. 108 However, neither the masses nor the state would be able to understand it. As Manamperi states, he has not faced any problems or censorship yet from the state because “politicians are not knowledgeable enough to read our art” (Personal interview). Nor the mainstream media would read it critically. Quite obviously, the issue lies not with their art but with the audience’s intellectual emptiness, which is of course, criticized by Manamperi—but if the audience cannot understand it, wither do the aesthetics of post-war memory-resistance go? This I intend to explore in the next chapter.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life . California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print. Bandu Manamperi Blog. Web. 29 March 2014. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . London: Verso, 2006. Print. de Mel. “The Promise of the LLRC: Women’s Testimony and Justice in Post-War Sri Lanka.” ICES Research Papers. Colombo: International Center for Ethnic Studies, 2013. Web. 12 May 2014.

108 I owe this insight to Nalin Jayasena.

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Diaz Vicente M. “Deliberating “Liberation Day”: Identity, History, Memory, and War in Guam.” Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) . Eds. Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Print. 155-180. Féral, Josette. “Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified.” Modern Drama 25.1 (1982): 170-181. Web. 10 May 2014. Fonseka, Kulasena. Gini Binduma . Colombo, Subha Publishers, 1995. Print. Fujitani, Takashi., White, Geoffrey M. Yoneyama, Lisa, eds. Introduction. Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) . Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Print. 1- 29. Groundviews. “ The Incomplete Thombu : A Compelling Interlace of Architecture, Drawing, Memory and Art.” Groundviews: Journalism for Citizens . 12 Feb. 2011. Web. 1 March 2013. Hunter, Lynette. Introduction. Performance, Politics and Activism . Eds. Peter Lichtenfels and John S. Rouse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 1-14. Print. Ismial, Qadri. “Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan.” Raking Leaves . Web. 1 Mar. 2014. Jelin, Elizabeth, State Repression and the Labors of Memory . Trans. Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-Anatavia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print. Knuth, Rebecca. Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence And Cultural Destruction . Westport: Praeger, 2006. Print. Lee, Charles T. “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Space of Citizenship.” Women's Studies Quarterly 38. 1/2 (2010): 57-81. Web. 10 May 2014. Manamperi, Bandu. Personal interview. 15 Mar 2014. Munasinghe, Rohitha. Eliyakanda Wada Kandawura: K Point . Colombo: Godage and Brothers, 2000. Print. “Sanathanan Thamotharampillai.” Flying Circus Project 2013 . Web. 1 March 2014. Sanaathanan, Thamotharapillai. Personal interview. 4 Jan 2014. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Print. Talwar, Savneet. “Accessing Traumatic Memory through Art Making:An Art Therapy Trauma Protocol (ATTP).” The Arts in Psychotherapy 34 (2007): 22–35. Web. 18 May 2014. United Nations. Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement . 2004. Web. 4 Mar. 2014. Winn, Patrick. “Myanmar: Ending the World's Longest-running Civil War.” Pittsburgh Post- Gazette . 13 May 2012. Web. 9 April 2014.

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Wray, Phoebe. “Pinter's Dialogue: The Play on Words.” Modern Drama 13.4 (1970): 418- 422. University of Toronto Press. Web. 18 May 2014. Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. “Bare Life.” Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change 2 (2012). Ed. Henry Sussman. Open Humanities Press. Web. 10 May 2014.

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Chapter Five The Question of Justice—Wither Post-war Aesthetics of Resistance?

The post-war Sri Lankan state has placed emphasis on the notions of justice and sustainable peace, as evident in its major political move to appoint the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) in 2010. 109 The report of the Commission that was submitted to President Rajapaksa in November 2011 blames leaders of both Sinhalese and Tamil political parties for not forging a consensus between them to provide an acceptable solution to the Tamil people whereby the conflict could have been avoided (387). Summing up citizens’ responses, the Commission states that they are “ready and willing to support consensual approaches advancing national interest, national reconciliation, justice and equality for all citizens, so long as the political leaders take the lead in a spirit of tolerance, accommodation and compromise” (1). 110 In consideration of the state’s and its citizens’ proposed interest, this chapter seeks to examine the role played by memory work—both hegemonic and resistant—in shaping their notions of justice and equality in the post war Sri Lankan environment. Tracing the Latin and Greek roots, Jacques Derrida points to the common meanings associated with the word ‘justice’—a concept, an idea, a value, a quality, a manner of judging, a judicial apparatus, a juridical figure of right and of law (“Justices” 692). Drawing from J. Hillis Miller’s writing, he broadens the concept of justice and examines it as a ‘verb’: It then designates a way of being, of shining forth, of radiating, and of acting, a way of doing things, most often with words, with the performative force of a speech act: to justice . To justice would be to produce justice, cause it to prevail, make it come about, as an event, but without instrumentalizing it in a transitive fashion, without objectifying it, but rather making it proceed from itself even as one keeps it close itself, to what one is, namely just, closest to what one thinks, says, does, shows, and manifests. The one who thus justices does not refer in the first or the last place to the calculable rules and norms of law. He is just by essence, just as he breathes. (“Justices” 692)

109 The LLRC was commissioned by Mahinda Rajapaksa on May 15, 2010. The Commission’s mandate was to look back at the conflict Sri Lanka suffered as well as to look ahead for an era of healing and peace building in the country ( Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation 1). The LLRC was for the most part inspired by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

110 Even though the LLRC report was positively received within Sri Lanka, the international community was highly critical of it. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10934663.

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For Derrida, the idea of justice cannot be contained within the norms and rules of law, since it is something beyond the human transitive action. It corresponds to indecidability in the sense of an “experience.” Justice is “ l’expérience ...de l’aporie / the experience of aporia,” “l’expérience de ce dont nous ne pouvons faire l’expérience / the experience of what we are not able to experience,” “ une experience de l’impossible / an experience of the impossible” (Gehring162). Memory workers in the post-war Sri Lankan cultural milieu engage with experiences of trauma, and Derrida’s ideas will provide a good framework to engage with them. Sarath Weerasekera’s Gamani (2011), as discussed in Chapter Two, celebrates sanguinary justice as the most effective element in resolving the ethnic conflict. A similar message is buttressed by other state-sponsored films dealing with memory, Sanjaya Leelarathna’s Selvam (2011), Boodee Keerthisena’s Maathaa (2012), and Asoka Handagama’s Ini Avan (2012). They all envision justice as a juridical apparatus. Many of them also incorporate Buddhism into their vision of justice in a problematic way. Since the LTTE has been legally branded a terrorist organization, its elimination is deemed just. Simultaneously, since Tamil nationalism has posed a threat to Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism for centuries, the eradication of the threat is perceived as just from a cultural perspective. A similar idea governs the official discourse of justice, as seen in the response given by the LLRC to the “Channel 4 video” entitled Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields .111 Notwithstanding the state’s over-emphasized commitment, juridical justice still remains an unrealized goal. As the 2013 World Report published by the Human Rights Watch claims, “Sri Lanka made no progress in 2012 toward ensuring justice for the victims of numerous violations of human rights and the laws of war committed by both sides during the 26-year-long conflict between the government and the LTTE” (368). The discourse of hegemonic memory culture pays heed neither to the origins of ethnic violence nor the trajectory of historical violence to which minority ethnicities were subjected. Against this backdrop, it is worthwhile to note if alternative avenues of justice are made possible by resistant memory work that makes space for subaltern memories, as

111 The LLRC Report says that Channel 4’s footage is artificially constructed and such “conduct would constitute grave damage and injustice to the people of Sri Lanka and to those soldiers who fought professionally and sacrificed their lives in order to save other innocent lives from the LTTE stranglehold” (152). The Commission also notes its negative impact on the notion of the Freedom of Expression: “From the perspective of its Warrant, the Commission is also concerned that such acts would seriously prejudice and place major obstacles in the way of the ongoing efforts, both national and international, to promote and consolidate a viable process of reconciliation, healing and reconstruction in Sri Lanka” (152).

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illustrated in the two previous chapters. When the official mechanism set up to investigate and grant justice to victims of the Khmer Rouge regime, the hybrid UN/Cambodian War Crimes Tribunal, failed to yield results, Cambodian American artists became “remembrance activists who actively recollect and archive an intimate story of life before, during, and after the Khmer Rouge regime” (Schlund-Vials 17). They “militate against the amnesiac registers of the Cambodian Syndrome by concentrating on the facts of the US intervention and Khmer Rouge authoritarianism” (16). 112 In their articulations of resistance, Cambodian American memory workers “reimagine (via cinema, literature, hip-hop, and performance) alternative sites for justice, healing, and reclamation” (Schlund-Vials 17). Schlund-Vials’s words are relevant to the case of post-war Sri Lankan memory work of resistance in significant ways. As with the Cambodian American experience, the Sri Lankan artists in the discussion exhibit their acute awareness of the gaps in the state-sponsored post-war mechanism. The chemistry of hegemonic memory work that is forged with a close alliance with the mainstream religion, Buddhism, as depicted by Weerasekera’s Gamani is resisted by Sanjeewa Pushpakumara’s Flying Fish by reducing the figure of the Buddhist monk to the level of an average citizen. Pushpakumara also highlights that the Buddhist rhetoric is incapable of resolving the complex socio-political issues that the villagers are embroiled in. Thamotharapillai Sanaathanan, in a similar vein, challenges the focus of the hegemonic memory culture that overlooks the testimonies of IDPs. According to Dori Laub, testimony “is a dialogical process of exploration and reconciliation of two worlds—the one that was brutally destroyed and the one that is different and always will remain so. The testimony is inherently a process of facing loss—of going through the pain of the act of witnessing, and of the end of the act of witnessing—which entails yet another repetition of the experience of separation and loss” (qtd. in Schlund-Vials 18). Laub’s account does not characterize the kind of testimony that is privileged in the hegemonic memory culture. For instance, Gamani does not present a dialogical process of reconciliation between the two parties in conflict. Nor does it provide a balanced picture of separation and loss. It simplifies the 1983 pogrom as an isolated incident that has no relationship with a historical trajectory of ethnic violence; as a moment created by “terrorists, not Sinhala people.” The film also seeks to defend vindictive justice by making a distinction between patriotism and nationalism: “The real Sinhalese does not harass anyone based on ethnicity. But if someone comes to wreak havoc on the nation, he

112 Schlund-Vials models the “Cambodian Syndrome” on President Ronald Reagan’s label “the Vietnam Syndrome” to expose attempts made by the hegemonic discourse to forget the memory of the Killing Fields. It is “built on the deliberately incomplete acknowledgement that the genocide was somehow linked to the Vietnam Conflict” (Schlund-Vials 13).

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protects the nation with life. That’s the difference between nationalism and patriotism.” Thus, the hegemonic discourse seems to disavow the toll of nationalism by covering it with patriotism. Pushpakumara, on the other hand, criticizes this façade by exposing the iniquitousness of gruesome violence that engulfed both Sinhalese and Tamil communities throughout the entire course of war. He disparages patriotism by providing it with sparse room in his film. For his characters, unlike in Gamani , a post in the state forces does not mean anything more than an employment opportunity. While criticizing the selective omission of testimonies by state-sanctioned memory work, Pushpakumara and Sanaathanan place the subaltern testimonies in the foreground. However, Manamperi’s engagement with the mnemonic discourse is different. Provoked by personal experiences of the political violence that he was subjected to, he responds to contemporary moments that have the capacity to victimize citizens. His performances also bring into focus subaltern experiences—day-to-day experiences of discrimination that do not make headlines. The artists evidently empower marginalized segments in society, but do the subaltern memories speak? Are they empowered enough to narrate their memories? In other words, are representations of resistance successful? In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” criticizing the West’s desire for subjectivity, Gayatri Spivak shows us how the Western criticism has failed in understanding the position of the subaltern. Through a close study of theories developed by Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, she highlights the gaps of politics of representation in the Western criticism. 113 She writes, “Contemporary invocations of ‘libidinal economy’ and desire as the determining interest, combined with the practical politics of the oppressed (under socialized capital) ‘speaking for themselves’, restore the category of the sovereign subject within the theory that seems most to question it” (Spivak 72-73). Questioning the class consciousness in Marxism, thus, Spivak maintains that the west is “speaking for themselves” with their own theory related to the oppressed. This S/subject, curiously sewn together into a transparency by denegations, belongs to the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor. It is impossible for contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the

113 For instance, she highlights the failure of Deleuze and Guattari to articulate a theory of interest due to their inability to consider the relations between desire, power and subjectivity (68). While criticizing Deleuze’s take on representation, she holds that representation is two-fold: representation as “speaking for”, as in politics, and representation as “re-presentation”, as in art of philosophy (70).

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debate of the production of that Other, supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary—not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law. (Spivak 75) In this epistemic space created by the west that is obsessed with the subject position, the subaltern cannot speak for himself/herself. The Western criticism’s production of the Other is a way of reinforcing its own Euro-centric power position, and hence, a form of epistemic violence levied against the subaltern. Along these lines, a close examination of works by Pushpakumara, Sanaathanan, and Manamperi can raise similar concerns about subaltern memories because in every case, the artist’s interference seems to dominate. Similar to the Western critical theory through which the subaltern is represented, it is through the artist’s creative vision that war survivors and their testimonies are represented. It is true that the oppressed cannot directly communicate with the audience of memory work. Their testimonies and memories are always mediated. However, it must be noted that the Sri Lankan artist, unlike the Western critic who is spatially and ideologically distanced from the subaltern setting in Spivak’s argument, is deeply engaged with the experiences of the oppressed. In all the three cases, artists’ memories and those of the oppressed communities they represent overlap. In the interview, Pushpakumara noted that he made the film not for anyone but for himself, by way of purging himself. There would not be any other way for him to tell the story, or better put, no one else would be ready to listen to his story unless he himself tells it through the cinematic medium he is familiar with. For him, the making of the movie has been a recuperative and cathartic experience. While representing the memories of many other villagers who are destined to survive against the background of war, Flying Fish, according to its director, has encapsulated subaltern memories. Likewise, Sanaathanan, who had been a victim of the violence unleashed by the Indian Peacekeeping Force, is capable of giving expression to his own memories of destitution while curating post-war testimonies that are marginalized by the hegemonic discourse. Manamperi, on the other hand, notes that his endeavor, in particular through the “Perforated Body,” is “only to understand those memories” (Personal interview). “There is no burning hatred here,” he further notes. Manamperi’s statement that his invocation of memory is not connected to enmity toward the oppressor makes us think about the justice he invokes. Certainly, it is not

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sanguinary or vindictive justice espoused by hegemonic memory work that has arguably become an apparatus of post-war militarism. Instead, Manamperi seems to have come to terms with forgiveness, which is a strong antithesis to the Sinhalese Buddhist code of justice that we see in Gamani . In “On Forgiveness,” Derrida states, “In principle, there is no limit to forgiveness, no measure , no moderation, no ‘to what point?’” (27). Engaging with the concept of “crimes against humanity” and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, he says that when forgiveness is at the service of a finality, or when it aims to re- establish a normality, the ‘forgiveness’ is not pure. “Forgiveness is not, it should not be , normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible” (Derrida “On Forgiveness” 32). Accordingly, he says that forgiveness should forgive the unforgivable. Derrida’s notion is paradoxical because if the unforgivable becomes the object of forgiveness, then it can undergo the same ordeal as what is forgivable. However, what can be extrapolated from his articulation is, forgiveness cannot be interpreted or defined as a monolithic entity, as with justice. He provides a good framework to understand the notion of justice pronounced by post-war Sri Lankan memory work. Both forgiveness and justice cannot be comprehended within juridical walls. Hence, both are processes which demand solutions beyond legal and political solutions. Both Pushpakumara and Sanaathanan grapple with the outcomes they envision for their subjects. For Pushpakumara, resolutions may lie in an unknown future, but not in the binaries constructed by religio-nationalist politics. The three young characters in his film get together in a bus that moves forward without a driver towards an unknown destination. Notably, the characters move forward, exhibiting resilience. They survive to tell their narratives on behalf of thousands of others who perished in silence. It is a form of justice that they render for an entire community. Sanaathanan’s subjects help compose an archive on behalf of displaced memories. In this manner, Sanaathanan is involved in a form of archival justice—a justice for epistemic violence targeting the ethnic minorities in the country. It is a justice that is denied by the hegemonic memory which is determined to wipe out rival archives. The media-saturated hegemonic memory work, as pointed out in the Introduction, puts forward a spectacle that is invested in a capitalist system. Stahl uses Slavoj Žižek’s notion of “war without war”—which is a manifestation of the immoderate consumer society that joins the list with coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, sex without sex (pornography), and more—to reinforce his criticism of the spectacular war (Stahl 27). Žižek’s idea is very relevant to post-war Sri Lankan memory work that commodifies victims and their memories and makes them ‘memory work without remembrance.’

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Along these lines, the three resistant artists show us deficiencies in the state-crafted memory culture and its concomitant delivery of justice. Citing an example from Desmond Tutu’s accounts in which a South African woman (the wife of a victim) states during her testimony to the TRC that “A commission or a government cannot forgive. Only I, eventually, could do it,” Derrida stresses that a political institution does not have the capacity to grant justice or forgiveness on behalf of the victims (“On Forgiveness” 43). He concludes, “if anyone has the right to forgive, it is only the victim, and not a tertiary institution” (Derrida “On Forgiveness” 44). In this manner, justice becomes a complex phenomenon, particularly in the case where the victim is dead. A similar observation can be made with regard to remembering. In tune with Derrida’s thoughts, if someone has a right to remember, it should be the victim, not a tertiary institution. If “[o]nly the dead man could legitimately consider forgiveness” (Derrida “On Forgiveness” 44), only the victim of political violence could best think of a way to recollect past memories. In the case of the dead, the task would be near impossible. The three resistant memory workers in the discussion have shown their awareness of such complexities in the task of recuperating memories, unlike Sarath Weerasekera, for whom remembering is under the purview of official story-tellers. Weerasekera’s privileged Sinhalese Buddhist narrative willfully obliterates dozens of harrowing stories which clamor for justice and remembrance. “The disappeared , in essence,” Derrida continues, “are themselves never absolutely present, at the moment when forgiveness is asked for, the same as they were at the moment of the crime, and they are sometimes absent in body, often dead” (“On Forgiveness” 44). Pushpakumara, Sanaathanana, and Manamperi, though not in predominant ways, acknowledge the presence of those who are not in the picture. The memories they recuperate speak for a wider spectrum of victims and oppressed segments including the dead. They deconstruct the narcissistic desire displayed in Weerasekera’s Gamani to narrate a metanarrative about the majoritarian ethnicity. They highlight that the subaltern have a voice. And that they can speak.

Works Cited Derrida, Jacques. “Justices” Critical Inquiry 31.3 (2005): 689-721. The University of Chicago Press. Web. 19 Mar. 2013. -----. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness . Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge. 2001. Print. Gamani . Dir. Sarath Weerasekara. Perf. Bimal Jayakody, W. Jayasiri, Dilhani Ashokamala, and Mahendra Perera. 2011. Film.

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Gehring, Petra. “Force and “Mystical Foundation” of Law: How Jacques Derrida Addresses Legal Discourse.” German Law Journal 6.1 (2005): 151-169. Manamperi, Bandu. Personal interview. 15 Mar 2014. Pushpakumara, Sanjeewa. Personal interview. 23 Nov. 2013. Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation. 2011. Web. 4 May 2014. Sanaathanan, Thamotharapillai. Personal interview. 4 Jan 2014. Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Marxism And The Interpretation Of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Macmillan Education: Basingstoke, 1988: 66-111. Print. “Sri Lankan War Inquiry Commission Opens Amid Criticism.” BBC News South Asia 11 Aug. 2010. Web. 15 May 2014. Stahl, Roger. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

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