Pain at midnight: Representation of trauma and justice in Sri Lankan civil war literature; and judgement, a novel
Luther Uthayakumaran
A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
School of Arts and Media Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
September 2014
Acknowledgements
I thank the following
Associate Professor Anne Brewster for the supervision, her guidance and patience. I especially acknowledge Anne for her caring nature and her unyielding confidence in the project even during its most difficult moments. If it had not been for her encouragement the project would not have reached its conclusion.
Professor Bill Ashcroft for his thoughtful input and support, especially to the dissertation.
Dr Andy Kissane for his valuable input into the novel during its early stages.
Dr Dorottya Fabian, for her patient support during the project.
Henryk Kowalik and Lyn Vellins for proof reading
My family for their support and the many hours of neglect that they had to endure.
Finally, I would like to remember all those who lost their lives and suffered as a result of the long civil war in Sri Lanka and wish that they find justice and closure soon.
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THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet
Surname or Family name: Uthayakumaran
First name: Luther Other name/s: Perceival
Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: Ph.D
School: Arts and Media Faculty: Humanities and Social Sciences
Title: Pain at midnight: Representation of trauma and justice in Sri Lankan civil war literature; and judgement, a novel
Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)
The dissertation, Pain at midnight, explores the depiction of trauma and justice in Sri Lankan civil war literature. It argues that in conflicts such as civil wars, institutional mechanisms that protect civilians from the unjustified use of force during peace times get progressively dismantled, as the condition of the civilian is reduced to that of the homo sacer (Agamben), the person stripped of all access to justice. On the other hand, the dissertation canvasses recent developments in trauma theory that have explored the relationship between trauma and justice, arguing that trauma is often the underlying reality that defines pursuits of justice. Therefore, it could be argued, that recognizing the trauma of the homo sacer could be the starting point for restoring justice to disenfranchised people. Thus literature which successfully represents the trauma of the unprotected civilian - the homo sacer - can contribute to the restoration of justice to the civilian.
The novel, judgement, explores the complex impact of war on the individual and the injustices that it imposes. The narrative opens with a group of children befriending each other before civil war breaks out in Sri Lanka and follows them through the conflict. It explores the effect of violence on their selves, their relationship with each other, and the world. The story focuses on experiences of individuals and on particular situations, describes events, backgrounds and landscapes. It differs from other contemporary Anglophone depictions of the war by seeking to depict the trauma of war through the subjective experience of its characters as seen from inside rather than outside the conflict. The narrative ends without strong closure. The characters come to terms with the futility oftrying to totally undo the effects of war, while nonetheless recognising the possibility of fmding meaning, justice and ultimately redemption.
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COPYRIGHT STATEMENT
'I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.' ~ ~f~~ Signed ·······························u··············-~·-··················
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Table of contents judgement (novel) - 5
Pain at midnight: Representation of trauma and justice in - 7 Sri Lankan civil war literature
Introduction - 8
1. Nature of violence – state and non-state force and the - 14 unarmed civilian
1.1 The state of exception and the homo sacer - 15
1.2 Criticisms of Agamben - 22
1.3 Two incidents from the Sri Lankan civil war and the - 24 relevance of Agamben
2. Contemporary literary trauma theory - 31
2.1 Literature and the law - 39
2.2 Felman, the Eichmann trial and post-conflict justice - 41
2.3 Recognising the trauma of the homo sacer - 46
2.4 Trauma and justice in literature - 50
3. Pain and language, how pain is shaped through literary genre - 52
3.1 Pain. language and silence - 55
4. Depiction of pain and silence in Sri Lankan civil-war writing: - 67 Nihal Silva’s The Road from Elephant Pass and Basil Fernando’s, Just another Incident in July 1983. 260
4.1 Trauma of the homo sacer and justice in Basil Fernando’s - 77 ‘Yet another incident in July 1983’ and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, and Michellle De Kretser’s Questions of Travel 271
5.0 Conclusion - 89
3
judgement
The novel is removed from this globally accessible version of the thesis to avoid copyright issues. It is available for reference in the University of New South Wales library collection.
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Pain at midnight: Representation of trauma and justice in Sri Lankan civil war literature
7
Introduction
In July 1983, a few miles north of the city of Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka, an army convoy on a reportedly antiterrorist patrol ran into an ambush set up by the Tamil insurgent group called the Tamil New Tigers – an urban guerrilla group in its very early stages of growth at that time. Thirteen Sri Lankan soldiers were killed in the attack. Ethnic tensions have been growing in Sri Lanka between the Tamils and the Singhalese, the country’s largest two linguistically defined ethnic groups, ever since the country became independent from Britain. Jaffna is an ancient city broadly seen as the cultural capital of the Tamils. The ambush took place a few miles north of the city centre, within walking distance of the University of Jaffna. On the night after the attack Sri Lankan soldiers went from house to house in the villages surrounding the place where the attack took place, killing dozens of young Tamil males. A few weeks later anti-Tamil mob violence broke out in the south of Sri Lanka and in what later came to be known as ‘Black July’ more than the 2,000 Tamil civilians were killed. The exact sequence of events that led to the breaking out of mob attacks is somewhat clouded – as different commentators have given different accounts – and critical differences of opinion exist on the extent to which the violence was spontaneous. Some commentators have suggested a high degree of state involvement, while others have vigorously denied it. However, regardless of the ambiguities, one thing stands out; the state was either unable or not willing to protect the largely ethnic minority victims of the riots. It is this particular failure of the state makes the July 83 inter-communal riots a defining moment in the history Sri Lanka. It was at this time the hitherto multi-ethnic state fell into deep crisis. Tamil insurgency would grow rapidly from this point onwards and the country descended into civil war by the end of the decade. By the turn of the century more than 100,000 people been killed. But as the war intensified, it also grew in complexity. In 1985, fighting broke out between different Tamil guerrilla groups which left hundreds killed. The Tamil groups also acted with impunity during this period killing Tamil political opponents, including human rights activists, academics and feminists. In 1987 the trajectory of the war took another
8 turn, when thousands of Indian soldiers (Indian Peace Keeping Force – IPKF) were deployed in Sri Lanka to implement an Indian sponsored peace accord between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan Government. Later in the same year fighting broke out between the LTTE and the IPKF and in the ensuing fighting, that took place in densely populated urban areas, almost 15,000 civilians were killed. Around the same period a Maoist insurrection of largely Sinhala youth arose in the South of the country, which was brutally suppressed by the Government. The insurgents were equally brutal. It is estimated that 60,000 people were killed. Most of them were innocent youth killed merely on suspicion. During the 1990s, the war returned to one being fought between the Government and the LTTE. However by this time a culture of impunity had taken over in the country. Civilians were routinely killed; the LTTE habitually used civilians as human shields and the government repeatedly used heavy artillery and aerial bombing in densely populated areas. In addition, political killings carried out mainly by the state, had become the order of the day. On the 19th of May 2009, after months of intense fighting involving extensive civilian casualties and suffering1, the Sri Lanka government formally announced to the world that it had ceased all combat operations against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam The war ended decisively in favour of the Sri Lankan government. Most of the senior leadership of the LTTE were killed and most of its rank and file had surrendered. At the time of writing it is not known how many civilians might have been killed during the final months of the war. However, a report published by an expert committee appointed by the Secretary General of the United Nations,2 claims that anything between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians might have died during the final months of the war. The causes behind the origin and evolution of the civil war in Sri Lanka are complex, involving a multi-layered interweaving of ethnic and class tensions. Ever since the country became independent from Britain in 1948, there have been allegations that the state systematically discriminated against the Tamils, with
1 University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), ‘Let Them Speak: Truth about Sri Victims of War’, Special Report No 34, December 2009 2 Darusman M. P. et el, ‘Report of the Secretory-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability of Sri Lanka’, 2011 http://www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/Sri_Lanka/POE_Report_Full.pdf, downloaded 01st January 2014
9 counter claims that Tamils were treated favourably by the British during colonial times and this placed them in an unfairly privileged starting position in the independent country. Some documented instances of systemic discrimination against Tamils are stripping citizenship rights of Tamil plantation workers – mainly indentured labourers brought by the British to work in the country’s tea and rubber plantations – and the introduction of ethnic quotas in university admissions and filling public service jobs. The latter was seen by the Government as affirmative action to improve conditions of the Singhalese masses hitherto marginalised by colonial British rulers, but it was seen by the Tamils as an attempt to exclude them from the running of the country. Tamil grievances – perceived or real – were further aggravated by repeated anti-Tamil programs and incidences of mob violence – the most severe of them being ‘Black July’ of 1983. On the other hand, progressive social policies such as universal free education, introduced during the beginning of the century, created large numbers of highly educated youth from among lower socio-economic groups. Though well educated, their social aspirations could not be met as economic growth did not keep pace with social progress, and most of the country’s modes of production continued to be controlled by the country’s feudal elite. This is generally believed to be the main cause behind the Maoist insurrections of 1972 and 1987. Both these largely Singhalese insurrections were also coloured by ultra-nationalist Sinhalese ideologies and had the tendency to blame the country’s ethnic minorities for the socio-economic problems of the majority. Over and above this, the conflict itself brought its own dynamics. Internecine fighting between Tamil groups led to some groups surrendering to the Sri Lankan government in return for protection from the dominant Tamil militant group – the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eellam (LTTE). There are also allegations that in 1989 the Sri Lankan government secretly supplied weapons to the LTTE to help it fight the IPKF, as some sections of the government were opposed to the presence of Indian troopes in Sri Lanka. The complex nature of the conflict means that a thorough analysis of the conflict is beyond the scope of this dissertation. However, it is not so much the causes behind the war, but the human suffering that it created that is of interest here. The tragic aftermath of the war, the effects that political violence had on individual lives, the pain it still entails, and any attempts to recover from it are the themes in my creative writing and therefore they also form the topic of this 10 dissertation. I seek to do this through exploring the nature of political violence in Sri Lanka, the impact it has on the individual, the nature of trauma that it gives arise to, and finally the quest for justice and redemption. The complex nexus of violence, the multiple fighting entities and the changing alignments of groups mean that it is not possible to divide perpetrators and victims along neatly defined lines of ethnicity and class. This poses a theoretical problem. There are a number of ways one can work through this, but I chose to explore this by placing the fault line between those who bear arms and those who do not. Right through the changing nexuses and the constant realignments between fighting groups, one thing remained steady; the ever increasing exposure of those who did not bear arms to those who bore arms – both state and non-state. The progress of the conflict was marked by progressive stripping of legal and other mechanisms that normally protect civilians from the exercise of power through raw violence. I draw from the thinking of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, his idea of the homo sacer – the naked human – a human being stripped of all legal and institutional protections, who can be killed by anyone at anytime, to explore this condition. The idea of the homo sacer provides the best intellectual framework to understand the condition of the unarmed. Though Agamben’s theorisation is primarily about the state, I argue that it could be generalised to apply to any situation where raw violence is used to control people, regardless of whether it is the state or the other armed groups who temporarily or permanently control large populations. In the chapter that follows a discussion on Agamben, I explore developments in trauma theory, relating to the trauma of conflicts. The chapter explores classical approaches based on the thinking of Freud and criticisms of this approach, largely for its Euro-centric cultural underpinnings and its tendency to treat trauma as brief out-of-normal experiences that consequentially ignore the trauma caused by permanent conditions of depravity. The trauma of civil-wars somewhat traverses both sides of this divide: on the one hand war is essentially an anomalous condition, but on the other, it is a permanent state because the effect of war often persists. And in cases where the war is prolonged for a long time, it may well define a normal
11 sate of existence for a whole generation. I draw here from the thinking Shoshana Felman, in particular her strong assertion that addressing the trauma of [civil] war essentially requires addressing issues of justice, relating to the events that lead to the trauma. In the case of the civil war in Sri Lanka, this requires addressing the injustices done to civilians; the homo sacer in this case. This creates a paradoxical situation, because giving justice to the homo sacer, means giving justice to the person who has been stripped of the right to justice. The thrust of my argument in this chapter is that while addressing the trauma of the homo sacer requires addressing the injustice done to the homo sacer, which may seem difficult, it could be argued that the reverse is true as well; that giving a voice to the trauma of the homo sacer is one way of restoring justice to the homo sacer, which is often the aspiration of literature. The concluding chapter of the dissertation discusses the use of language to express pain and trauma, especially theories that explore the limitations of language, when it comes to expressing pain. I conclude with the argument that though language may fail to express pain fully, and that literature can never really recreate the situations of extreme pain, the quest to do so remains at the heart of many literary and artistic pursuits. Some theorists may consider it a quest for the impossible, but it is nevertheless the quest which drives the practitioner. Writing in Sri Lanka has a long history, with its origins reaching well into prehistory. In modern times, the introduction of universal free education as early as the 1930s led the country towards achieving near first-world literary standards, and right through much of the last century, the written word played a key role in shaping political consciousness in Sri Lanka. Though the role played by other non-written forms of expressions, such as oral traditions, cannot be underplayed, the written word, ranging from the political pamphlet and the roadside poster to the novel, remained the most powerful means of political mobilisation. Though the distinct genre of the civil war novel took its time to emerge, the novel, with its ability to grasp complexity and depict a broad canvass, achieved a distinct level of representation that is of particular interest in this dissertation.
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The Sri Lankan novel itself has undergone changes as the war progressed. When the theme of the civil war first entered the novel, the main pre-occupation was political mobilisation and the nurturing of national(ist) consciousness – Tamil versus Singhalese (often falsely identified as Sri Lankan). Novels such as Lanka Rani, by an author identified only by his pen-name, Arular, was used widely by Tamil militant groups in their recruitment campaigns, while the short stories of Gunadasa Amarasekara were often used in Sinhala nationalist campaigns. Representations of suffering were imbued with nationalistic political rhetoric and were used for the sole purpose of promoting the interests of one side; the suffering of the Tamil was used to nurture Tamil national consciousness and the suffering of the Sinhalese was used to nurture Sinhala nationalist consciousness. Suffering was never represented at a human level. The violence of war was broadly divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and the victims of violence were correspondingly divided along a victim–villain binary. If the sufferer in the novel was on one side (the writer’s), then he or she was represented as a victim of unjust violence and, if on the opposite side, then the suffering was seen as somewhat deserved, in fact his or her suffering was not considered suffering at all. In these novels pain was recognised – or given meaning to – only in the context of the narratives of the two sides of the war. Suffering of the individual was legitimated only through membership to the political cause of the ethno-nation. However as the war progressed into the 1990s and attempts to end it through political negotiations kept failing, a general disillusionment started to set in, which reflected quickly in the novel of the 1990s. A new theme began to emerge. Instead of using representations of the suffering individual to nurture national consciousness, these novels did the reverse. The novel of the 90s told not the stories of the nation but some of its fragments – the individual, the family, and the local community – and their narrative was imbued with the burden of suffering that the nation imposed on them. With this change of perspective. the suffering of the individual was no longer a mere index of the suffering of the nation, but the individual was suffering because of the nation. The nation became the problem, the cause of the unnecessary suffering of its members. Novels such as Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, When Memory Dies by Sivanandan and Elephant Pass by Nihal Silva fall into this category. These novels crossed ethno- national boundaries in their representation of the suffering individual. These 13 novels were able to cast doubt on the concept of nationalism itself; all nationalisms, not just one, were seen as problematic. Individuals suffering political violence were no longer divided along a victim –villain binary, as all people who suffered as a consequence of the war were seen as victims. The whole war was represented as problematic. However in spite of the above these novels still represented the war mainly along ethnocentric terms. The pain of the war was still represented in ethno-centric terms, although they claimed it was symmetrically spread across all ethnicities. They claimed that the war was increasing the pain of everyone. The third wave of novels took this a step further as they sought to completely free the individual and other singularities, such as particular situations and local communities, from the ethno-nation and tried to place them in a broader human context. They dabbled with broader moral questions and called for empathy for victims of violence at a broader human level. These novels foregrounded the individual. Ethnicities were either ignored or trivialised. Light is shone upon the act of aggression and the ethno-nation was pushed to the vague background. The binary, if any, was between the aggressor and the victim. The underlying ambition in these novels to give a voice to the pain of individuals caught in particular situations, so that it can be understood outside these situations, placing that pain on a global (human) platform. Works such as Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje and ‘Just another incident in July 83’, both discussed in the chapters that follow, fall into this category. Sometimes the narratives are mere descriptions of abject situations, sometimes the narratives search for meaning. Sometimes they seek to contribute to redemption from the pain of the real world.
1. Nature of violence – state and non-state force and the unarmed civilian
Understanding the violence that marked the civil war of Sri Lanka like many of the other prolonged civil wars of the latter half of the last century poses a particular theoretical problem: The constantly changing nexus of violence renders it impossible to align the perpetrators and victims of violence along
14 neat binaries of race and class or even institutions. This problem is heightened by the fact that most theorising on the subject within the western canon is informed by the holocaust where these binaries are clearly defined, and this had entered theoretical developments as an underpinning assumption. While there are a number of ways of working through this, I choose to do this by using the theorising of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben; especially his thinking on the ideas of the homo sacer and legalised anomic zones in The State of Exception. Agamben’s work spans a vast area of philosophy including the philosophy of aesthetics, but it is his later works on radical political philosophy which is of interest here. Agamben is usually classified as being part of a group of continental philosophers who sought to intellectually grapple with what was thought to be the failure of humanism in the aftermath of holocaust. Agamben’s work is heavily informed by the holocaust. However in the idea of the homo sacer, there is way of extending it further without getting trapped into a perpetrator –victim binary, as the idea of the homo sacer is essentially a theorising of vulnerability, broadly defined as someone who can be killed by anyone. It theorises sanctioned vulnerability, in the absence of a need for a particular perpetrator. Such a state of vulnerability, I argue, underpins the state of the unarmed civilian in civil wars such as Sri Lanka.
1.1 The state of exception and the homo sacer
Jean-Philippe Deranty situates Agamben’s thinking in a particular intellectual context. He sees Agamben as belonging to a group of continental philosophers who were driven by an urgency following the end of the Second World War to solve “... the conundrum of the demise of humanism... that … collapsed with the horrific historical experiences of a mad century. ” 3 Deranty goes on to claim that humanism “is one of the key categories [that we need] to deconstruct urgently in order to avoid repeating the horrors of
3 See Deranty, Jean-Philippe, ‘Witnessing the Inhuman: Agamben and Merleau-Ponty’, South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1, Winter 2008, p. 166 15 an all too recent past.” 4 Deranty, though he does not say it explicitly, seems to sense a suspicion among a number of continental philosophers, including Agamben, that humanism, particularly western metaphysics, was not only insufficiently equipped to provide an adequate ethical response to horrors of the Second World War, but that there is in the work of these philosophers at least an inclination to suspect that humanism might have contributed to those horrors. While the existence of this suspicion can never be shown conclusively, it is something worth keeping in mind when reading works by Agamben. Agamben’s underlying concern seems to be with the problem of responding to what he calls the inhuman. He argues that the difficulty of witnessing the inhuman occurs in two ways: (1) The failure of humanism to provide the right ethical framework from which to communicate acts of inhumanity and (2) its inability to locate the inhuman within the human – in other words to identify the inhuman part of human culture. While the former seems a straightforward problem of witnessing, the latter seems a far more complex pursuit. Some works of Agamben, namely Language and Death (1982, 1991), Infancy and History: Destruction of Experience (1978, 1993) and the Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1998, 1999) engage directly with the problem of witnessing, particularly the problem of language and its potentiality to bear witness, while two of his books, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) and State of Exception (2003,2005), deal with the latter. Agamben draws two distinctions; one between the human and the subject and the other between speech and language. The human, according to him, is a basic biological state, something primordial, something prior – but not necessarily in a chronological order – to the political and cultural being. The subject is the political and cultural being who, according to Agamben is usually constructed in language. In a similar manner, by speech, he refers to something that is basic to human existence; the act of communication, the act of saying things to each other, whereas language is something that has evolved from that; it is a construct of culture and therefore it something that is bound by culture. Agamben associates speech with the human and
4 Ibid p. 167 16 enunciation with the subject. The key thrust of his argument is that something is invariably lost at the point of enunciation in language, therefore to express experiences such as the holocaust – particularly extreme experiences, such as that of the Muselmanne – the concentration camp inmate who had lost all hope and therefore had turned into something seemingly other than human – one has to free oneself from the bounds of mature language and enter a state of linguistic infancy – the point where language began – free of the bounds imposed by cultural constructs that contain it. While this argument has philosophical pertinence it offers little practical value in the real world, as it is really not possible to get rid of language or the subject. It would be more useful, as I suggest in Chapter 2, to find ways of pushing against this limitation of language, rather than surrendering to such a fatalistic view. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben develops the idea of the naked human, a term borrowed from ancient Roman law, which refers to a criminal who is excluded from the polis (the city), and is allowed to be killed by anyone, but cannot be sacrificed to the Gods. The concept of the Homo Sacer is used to draw an analogy with life in what Agamben calls legalised anomic zones; zones where the normal course of the law is suspended (as in the declarations of a state of emergency) by virtue of a legal declaration made by the sovereign. Thus creating a kind of legalised lawlessness. In his second work, The State of Exception, he makes a very provocative claim that in most democracies today – such legalised anomic zone – states of exceptions – have become pretty much the norm; the camp as nomos. He arrives at this conclusion by following a very complex path of reasoning which draws on three different bodies of theory; the ancient Greek concepts of zoe and bios, Michel Foucault’s notion of the bio–political and the German political theologian and later Nazi Party apologist Carl Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign. In his account of the origin of the polis, Aristotle speaks of two types of human lives or human existences: Zoe and Bios. Zoe is bare life, essentially biological life, the life we have in common with animals. Zoe is necessarily devoid of politics, excluded from the polis and, according to
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Aristotle, allowed to exist only in the household (the oikos). The opposite of zoe is bios, life in the polis, which is life that has access to politics. And Agamben’s Homo Sacer is in essence bios that has been forced into turning into zoe. Agamben borrows from Michel Foucault7 the notion of the bio- political, an idea first conceived by Foucault in his foundational work The History of Sexuality and developed through a series of later works. Foucault’s thesis is that there is an essential difference in the way power was exercised by the pre-modern state and the way it is exercised by the modern state. The pre-modern state, according to Foucault, exercised power mainly through its freedom to ‘kill or let live’. The state had the power to kill and the threat to kill was the means by which it controlled or regulated the lives of its subjects. The modern state on the other hand has a more intimately linked power relationship with its citizens. The sustaining of modern life depends on functions performed by the state. Unlike the pre-modern state where life was sustained not by the state but by the activities of its citizens such as farming and trading, the modern state plays a direct role in fostering life by performing certain functions that are prerequisites for the sustenance of modern life, such as infrastructure, a stable financial system, national security etc. Thus modern states create a body of fostered life. This, Foucault calls the bio-political body. The state regulates the bio-political body through its power to deliver, withhold or regulate the provision of these life-fostering services. This control (by the modern state) works at the very level of life itself, and Foucault calls this bio-power. Thus, for Foucault, the transition of the state from antiquity to modernity is primarily defined by the transition in the mode of its exercises of power: a transition from sovereign to bio-power. The modern state governs its population through the regulation of biological life, bare life, zoe, itself. Therefore, consequentially, politics too is now performed at the level of bare life. In the words of Foucault, “for millennia, man remained...a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; but modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as living being in question.”
7 Foucault, M., trn. Tan Hurley. R., History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, Penguin, London, 1981 18
Agamben claims to be expanding Foucault’s understanding of the state’s transition from pre-modernity to modernity when he claims that the state’s transition to modernity was not so much a transition from sovereignty to bio- power, as Foucault understood it, but it was the coming together of the two into a single integrated nexus. Thus for Agamben, the modern state is where the bios and the zoe – the sovereign and the bio-political – exist at the same time. Further, Agamben believes that such coexistence is necessary for the modern state. Agamban looks to Schmitt for a definition of the sovereign, but uses it for a different, if not opposing, intellectual purpose. The sovereign, according to Schmitt, is what has the power to suspend the law in times of national emergencies, and thus it is the sovereign that decides when a situation is sufficiently outside the norm that a declaration of emergency is warranted. Schmitt argues that this function can be performed only from outside the law, because it would not be possible to foresee and codify in the law all possible scenarios that would require the declaration of an emergency. Thus, Schmitt justifies the power of the sovereign. On the other hand, Agamben, who also understands the sovereign as existing outside the law, sees it as a deadly feature of the state that renders the possibility of the sanctioning of legalised lawless violence on its citizens – the state of exception and the camp - a constant possibility. Therefore for Agamben, as long as the sovereign exists, bios will be at the constant risk of being forced into becoming zoe. Thus the camp is an abiding possibility; camp as nomos; camp is the normal. Other than invoking the idea of the homo sacer, it is fair to say that camp as nomos is Agamben’s most poignant contribution to contemporary political thinking. However it is also where there is perhaps a theoretical overreach. While Agamben demonstrates the existence of the camp, both as a current reality in some cases and as a constant threatening possibility, and that the modern state is more or less defenceless against it, he does not explain why this should be necessarily so. In other words, he does not demonstrate why the camp is necessary for the modern state to function. He does not explain why it should be the normal since, as Malcolm Bull points out, the option to use violence against its citizens is available to the state
19 even without declaring a state of emergency. Bull in fact critiques Agamben for not giving sufficient consideration to the violence which the modern state is capable of even within law, and the violence (or the threat of violence) inherent in the law itself:8
states always maintain a monopoly of violence. The exception itself makes little difference, for under law your vulnerability is truly terrifying. You are born into the world where the state can, with the acquiescence of your friends and neighbours, deprive your property, liberty, limbs, even your life (3)
Further as Foucault points out, and Agamben concurs, the bio-political is available to the state to be used as a means of controlling its population even without having to declare a state of exception. In fact the only major difference between Foucault and Agamben is that for Foucault the entire population of the modern state is a bio-political body – is ultimately zoe. But for Agamben there are two populations; one inside anomic zones – zoe - and the one outside it – bios. However, what he does not explain is why such coexistence is necessary for the modern state to exist. The only tenuous explanation is that Agamben merely believes that this is the current state of the world. Not all life has been turned into zoe at this moment in time as politics still does exists in the world, but since there is no defence against the camp, the likelihood is that it is inevitable that all life will be turned into zoe in the end, though the certainty of this is not demonstrated in Agamben’s work. In practice, declarations of emergency and the consequent suspension of the law usually happen when nations face a perceived or real crisis such as war or civil war or an economic emergency such as a general strike, and they invariably involve the suspension of civil liberties normally enshrined in the constitution and the law. States of exception are ‘legalised zones of anomy’ where, although the power of the law does not hold, the power of the law is still felt, because the zone’s very existence is enabled by the law. It is different from the lawlessness that exists outside the boundaries of law because,
8 See Bull. Malcolm ‘States don’t really mind their citizens dying (provided they don’t do it all at once): they just don’t like anyone else to kill them’, London Review of Books, Vol. 26 No.24.16 December 2004 pp. 3-6 20 unlike anarchy, the lawlessness in the anomic zone has been given validity by the law itself. Stephen Humphreys describes this as legalised lawlessness. These legalised zones of anomy, do not lie outside the domain of the law, but rather they are zones of indifference within the domain of the law, where bios has been reduced to zoe; the human becomes naked, and all life is reduced to bare life. Agamben goes on to claim that in these zones of anomy fact and law run into each other, the space between life and law disappears, resulting in the creation of a state of normalised abject violence:
As long as the two elements [i.e., life and law] remain correlated yet conceptually, temporally and subjectively distinct...their dialectic...can nevertheless function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine. (86)
Agamben makes the point that politics happen in the space between law and life. Thus law and life have to remain different entities for dialectics (politics) to happen. In the anomic zone, argues Agamben, this space is made to disappear, and once it disappears the only politics possible is violence. Thus violence becomes the law. When The State of Exception was published in 2005, it waded straight into public debate, although it is the Homo Sacer that is the more provocative of Agamben’s work in a theoretical sense. There could be a number of reasons for his popularity, but the most important one is perhaps the one that Stephen Humphreys9 points to, that by 2006, a strong consensus had developed that a new paradigm of state power was emerging in many countries, based on executive privilege and containment of the judiciary; and that a nearly ubiquitous state of emergency has come into existence. It was also Agamben who provided the first theoretical framework with which to analyse this newly emerging paradigm. But ironically, if the warnings contained in The State of Exception are timely then, by implication, in spite of the urgency of deconstructing humanism to prevent a repeat of the horror of the Second World War, the world has not really changed much. The new
9 See Humphreys, Stephen, ‘Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception’, The European Journal of International Law Vol. 17 no 3, 2006, pp. 677-678 21 emerging paradigm that Humphreys points to is a conceptual replay of the suspension of the Weimar constitution in Germany in the mid twentieth century. Thus if Derrenty is right in saying that the thinking of Agamben comes as part of the broader intellectual project that was aiming at preventing the recurrence of events like the Holocaust, then Agamben is inadvertently pointing to the failure or incompleteness of this very project. In his work The State of Exception10 and in various other essays and lectures11, Agamben summarises the history of the state of exception of legalised anomic zones in modern times and brings the idea to life through a series of examples. These include a discussion on the suspension of the Weimar constitution in Germany by the Nazi party during the Second World war, when civil liberties enshrined in the constitution were suspended for almost 12 years, and developments in the early 21st century, particularly the US Patriot Act of October 2001, which denied habeas corpus rights to non- citizens suspected of terrorist activity and enabled the setting up of military tribunals.
1.2 Criticisms of Agamben
Despite the originality and the timeliness of the Agamben thesis, some critics have identified weaknesses, points where his thinking appears to be either incomplete or unconvincing. Some of these are relevant to my application of Agamben’s theoretical ideas to understanding the situation in Sri Lanka and I will briefly discuss some of them here. However I conclude that none of these criticisms render his thinking invalid, although considering them is important in order to modify and extend his thinking which will allow us to shed light on the unarmed civilian in the civil war in Sri Lanka.
10 See Agamben, Giorgio, Tran Kevin Attell, The State of Exception , University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 11 -22 11 See lecture ‘The State of Emergency’, by Girgio Agamben delivered at the Centre Roland- Barthes, Universite Paris V11, Denis Diderot, http://www.generation- online.org/p/fpagambenschmitt.htm downloaded 15th Sep 2011 22
The first of these criticisms relates to Agamben’s use of Aristotle’s notion of bare life – zoe – to describe life in the camp – legalised anomic spaces created by the state of exception. By implication, life in the state of exception is a life without agency. Agamben argues that it is possible for the sovereign to strip all agency from either all people or a given category of people. This is hardly convincing in light of the fact that most change in human history has happened as a result of people living in the margins acquiring agency and enacting change, although the exact means through which the change was brought about may vary. All the major movements of social and political change, from the antislavery movement through to the feminist movement and the anti-colonial movements, bear witness to this. Secondly Stephen Humphreys12 makes the case that a worrying gap in Agamben’s work is the insufficient consideration given to the separation of powers that normally exists in a number of democratic states. Particularly, Humphreys argues, insufficient consideration is given by Agamben to the potential of other arms of the government – the parliament (legislature) and judiciary – to offer oversight of or resistance to the executives drives to declare states of exception. He admits that in recent (early 21st century) history, several parliaments have shown a willingness to bend to the will of the executive, but also cites examples of instances of the “judiciary cordoning off and defending its territory”. (677) The first example is a case brought to Britain’s Law Lords and the other one is a case brought in the US Supreme Courts. In the British case, A. v Secretary of State for the Home Department, court action was brought about by eight non-nationals facing indefinite detention, who challenged the law which enabled the British government to hold non-nationals suspected of terrorism in indefinite detention. In the US case Rasul v Bush, ten detainees of Guantanamo Bay, whose existence itself according to Humphreys is a bold illustration of a legally constituted anomic space, challenged the legality of the conditions of their detention. In both these cases the courts moved to restrict executive power.
12 See Humphreys, Stephen ‘Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception’, The European Journal of International Law Vol. 17 No 3, 2006 , pp. 677-678 23
In the former, the law itself was discarded on the basis that it was a disproportionate response to the level of the threat and, in the latter, the court ruled that detainees in Guantanamo Bay are entitled to habeas corpus rights. A similar argument could be made in relation to action in the Australian High Court by an asylum seeker who was being held in detention in a migration exclusion zone – parts of Australia where normal migration law is suspended, identified by Suvendrini Perera13 as an example of a legalised anomic space - against being deported to an off-shore refugee-claims- processing-centre in Malaysia. In this case the court ruled that the executive did not have the power to deport the plaintiff. For Humphreys these are examples of the judiciary playing its role to abet the rise of a state of exception by putting constraints on the powers of the executive. A counter argument to Humphrey’s could be made that a more sophisticated suspension mechanism, involving tighter laws, could prevent such judicial interventions, and that the separation of powers may not always safeguard against the executive’s mission to declare a state of exception. Nonetheless, Humphrey’s argument that Agamben does not give due consideration to separation of powers and the branches of government other than the executive is a valid one. However, for me, it seems these examples reveal something much deeper: In both cases the court actions were initiated by people living inside anomic zones created by the states of exception. They demonstrate that in reality life inside anomic zones is not incapable of politics or stripped of agency. This weakens Agamben’s argument significantly as politics was possible, at least in the three examples discussed here, within the anomic zone.
1.3 Two incidents from the Sri Lankan civil war and the relevance of Agamben’s thesis In this section I apply Agamben’s idea of the state of exception to two different incidents that occurred during the civil war in Sri Lanka, with
13 See Perera,Suvendrini, ‘What is Camp…?’, borderlands e-journal Volume 1 Number 1, 2002 http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html 24 the objective of demonstrating the Euro (holocaust) centric lineage of Agamben’s thinking which limits its applicability to some contemporary civil wars such as that in Sri Lanka. But also to show that a few simple corrections applied to his thesis, without affecting its core ontology, are sufficient to render it applicable to these very conflicts. The first incident happened in 1987, in the course of a military operation carried out by the Indian Army15 to wrest back control of the northern city of Jaffna from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eeelam (LTTE). The second incident happened in May 2009, during the final months of the civil war, when a large number of civilians were caught in the middle of intense fighting between the Sri Lankan Army and the LTTE. Both incidents were recorded by the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna).
Incident 116 The incident occurred on the 21st of October 1987 at about 4.20 PM. The Indian Army stationed in Sri Lanka under the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Treaty was responsible for disarming the LTTE was in the middle of an intensive three week military operation, when it entered the Jaffna Teaching Hospital, a teaching hospital of the University of Jaffna and the largest hospital in the north of Sri Lanka. In the hours that followed and during the next day a number of doctors, nurses and patients were killed. The army later claimed that the killings happened largely due to people getting caught in the crossfire. However, a number of independent investigators 17 have rejected this version of events and claimed that, although some resistance was witnessed earlier in the day, there was no resistance after the army entered the hospital premises, and that the soldiers showed a general disregard for
15 The Indian Army was stationed in Sri Lanka Peace Accord, and was responsible for disarming the LTTE. The mission was never completed. The Indian Army left Sri Lanka in early 1990. For a detailed history of this period. See Marasinghe, M.L., ‘Ethnic Politics and Constitutional Reform: The Indo-Sri Lankan Accord’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 37, 1988, pp. 551- 587 16 The particular incident has been written about extensively. For detailed account see Hoole, R., and Thiranagama, R., et al The Broken Palmyra, the Tamil Crisis in Sri Lanka; An inside account Sri Lanka Studies Institute, 1992 pp. 265-271 17 Ibid 25 life on the day. One eyewitness records an incident that he saw the morning of the 22nd as follows:
Dr. Sivapathasundaram with a stethoscope around his neck was seen walking out of the hospital with three nurses. They were walking with their hands up shouting, "We surrender, we are innocent doctors and nurses." Shots were fired and Dr. Sivapathasundaram was killed and the nurses injured (266)
If one assumes that the above is a true account of what happened, which is not an unreasonable assumption, given that even two decades later no alternate accounts have emerged, unpacking the incident reveals quite a lot. Most recorded witness accounts18 suggest that by the time the shootings occurred, the army had not been facing any resistance for almost 24 hours. Further, given the age of the doctor, the stethoscope he was wearing, and the fact that the nurses accompanying him would have been wearing uniforms, the soldiers would not have had much difficulty identifying them as a group of civilians, who were making gestures of surrendering – even though, being civilians, there was no requirement that they surrender under either international law or the Geneva Conventions. On the one hand, it has to be acknowledged that in the thick of battle, with a constant threat hanging over their lives, soldiers often act irrationally and brutal acts are committed. But in this case, even though the particular incident happened in the middle of a fairly intense conflict, it seems that the situation surrounding this incident was one where there wasn’t much fighting and thus soldiers were not facing a threat to their lives.
Further, it is very likely that the soldiers would have been aware that they were in a hospital – which are among the most protected spaces under the Geneva Conventions19 that govern conduct of combatants during war. Therefore the most plausible explanation for the careless nature of the
18 Ghosh, P. A., Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka and Role of Indian Peace Keeping Force. APH Publishing Corporation, 1998. p. 125 ^ Pathak, Saroj, War or Peace in Sri Lanka. Popular Prakashan Ltd, India 2005 19 Article 14 of Geneva convention states “The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. Protection may, however, cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit and after such warning has remained unheeded.”
26 killings is the fact that there was no sanction against killing, legally. The act of killing had the same legal status as carrying out any other casual act. The soldiers were acting in a space where both local and international law had been suspended by Emergency Regulations, which had been in place for the whole period of the war and for many years before that. Two arguments can be made to support the claim that these killings had legal sanction. Firstly, the enactment of the Emergency Regulations and suspension of law itself had legal sanction. Secondly, the arming of soldiers and the creation of the asymmetry of power that placed the lives of civilians at the will of soldiers was legally sanctioned.
But the more subtle aspect of this incident was the denial of a space for even the most basic form of political engagement. The civilians used both verbal speech such as crying “we are innocent civilians” and non-verbal gestures, such as wearing a stethoscope around the neck, to indicate their status as civilians and claim the fundamental right that civilians are entitled to, the right to life. They were stopped from making that claim. They were killed while they were trying to engage in a very simple form of political activity, which is to speak. In many aspects this is a bold illustration of what Agamben describes as the destruction of the space for politics as life and law become one and the same, in anomic zones.
Numerous incidents such as this could be cited from contemporary civil wars around the world and they give Agamben’s ideas on the state of exception much appeal in the current condition, where civil wars (intra-state conflicts) have replaced interstate conflicts as the most prevalent form of deadly conflict. It seems that it is during civil wars, when the law is invariably always suspended, that Agamben’s idea of the destruction of politics has greater resonance than in the legally sanctioned exclusion zones such as those discussed in his works.
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Incident 2 This incident occurred either during April 2009 or May 2009 during the last months of the civil war. The Sri Lankan Army was advancing into an area in the North-West of Sri Lanka taking back parts of the country that for some time had been controlled by the LTTE, which while withdrawing from the advancing army, forcibly took a large number of civilians with them, reportedly around 200,000, allegedly to be used as civilian shields. The University Teachers for Human Rights records it as;20
A group of people from Jaffna was trying to escape towards the army moving west from south of the A 35, lines when some LTTE cadres stopped them. A woman was with her granddaughter and the latter’s two younger brothers in their early teens. The granddaughter prostrated herself before an LTTE man and pleaded with him to let them go. The LTTE man pushed her with his foot. Her grandmother then lay at his feet and repeated the same plea. The LTTE man then opened fire injuring the three children. The injured granddaughter and the two children were helped by others to the army line and were dispatched to Vavuniya Hospital. The boys recovered. The granddaughter was sent to Colombo Hospital where she succumbed. One of the young boys who survived says that he would recognise the LTTE man who shot them anywhere and he would kill him. (31)
Incidents such as this (and the previous incident) are bold examples of bio- political power. However, there are critical differences between the two incidents, if considered in the light of the concept of bio-political power as developed by Foucault and Agamben. There are two key points that one needs to take into account with respect to the second incident: Firstly, the power that is described in the second example is not state power, and secondly, even though it is not state power, it is still exercising significant control over a large population. It cannot be attributed to a pseudo-state or an emerging state in a Foucauldian sense, because power here is not derived from its ‘life-fostering’ capabilities such as providing basic life sustaining infrastructure. For, although there is some evidence that the LTTE was running a skeletal civil administration in the areas that it controlled, there is
20 The LTTE denied forcibly taking civilians forcibly, but for independent reports see; University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) Let Them Speak: Truth about Sri Lanka’s Victims of War Special Report No 34, December 2009 International Crisis Group War Crimes in Sri Lanka Asia Report No 191, May 2010
28 no evidence to suggest that it was running any of the key infrastructure such as a financial system, legal system, health and education services etc that can be called life-fostering in the Foucauldian sense. The nature of power here seems to be closer to that of a pre-modern state, exercised simply through the potential to kill, rather than that of an emerging modern state where power is exercised through the fostering of life (or the threat of its potential withdrawal). This violence, although happening within a legalised anomic space, is not something that features in Agamben’s ontology. Neither can it be found in Agamben’s long and elliptical engagement with Walter Benjamin’s thesis on two different kinds of violence. Firstly he describes ‘mythical violence’: this is law-making violence, which brings about guilt and retribution and a regime based on bloodshed. This is the violence of the state. In contrast to this “divine violence”, defined by Benjamin as anarchistic, law destroying and non-sacrificial. Agamben’s claim is that both these forms of violence could exist in the legalised anomic zone. However, the kind of violence one sees in this incident cannot be classified as either mythical or divine. It is not mythical, because it is not the violence of the law or the state. It is not divine, because it is not directed against the state or the law but against a population it is seeking to control. The size of the population is so (unprecedentedly) large that it is not possible to consider it a simple hostage situation either. This violence arises out of a desire to establish a new law – a primitive alternative – to the one that is in existence, albeit suspended. This kind of violence does not exist in Agamben’s ontology. Agamben’s thinking is both extraordinary and insightful. It penetrates deep into particular situations and discovers widely applicable general truths. His contributions are both original and relevant to the contemporary situation. However, it does not go all the way to explaining all kinds of violence that existed in the civil war in Sri Lanka. I argue that is the result of the archaeology of Agamben’s thinking, and I return here to Deranty’s suggestion that Agamben’s thinking is routed in the intellectual urgency that arose as a result of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is one of the most horrible tragedies of the last century, at least in terms of magnitude. However, theories that arise out of a particular history and human crisis, in this case
29 the Holocaust, may not always explain every other history and crisis and, attempting to do so may result in significant theoretical blind spots. Nevertheless, Agamben offers two valuable and poignant insights that are applicable to almost every situation. Firstly, as long as the sovereign exists, so will the state of exception (camp as nomos), and secondly, the ancient construct of the homo sacer is as much a reality in modern time as it was in ancient times. On the one hand, as I have demonstrated, the ideas of Agamben do not apply to every movement of the civil war in Sri Lanka. However, on the other hand it is also true that if you build on his ideas in a few simple ways, they become applicable much more widely, including to the situation in Sri Lanka. I would suggest, by way of revision, that creation of anomic zones is not entirely a prerogative of formal states. Rather, they can easily be created by anyone who has the power to protect others. For anyone who has the ability and power to protect someone else also has the power to withdraw that protection. And anyone who has the ability to protect others also has the power to use that to control others. Therefore proto-states and pseudo-states which exercise control over large populations can – and often do – create their own states of exception, as did the LTTE in one of the two incidents discussed earlier. The second extension or revision of Agamben’s thought is the argument that while states of exceptions come into being when certain people are legally excluded from the protection offered by law, other forms of denial of protection can also work at the level of practice, where even those formally protected by the law can fall out of its protection due to a number of factors such as race, gender, but also due to collective moral consciousness of a community. For example, sex-workers are often not sufficiently protected from sexual assault due to the misconception in many societies that they are likely to be less traumatised by sexual assault. In the end, Agamben makes an extremely poignant point, which is that if we are to find a way of protecting all people at all times, then we need to look for something that works outside the juridico-institutional realm, namely, empathy in order to address the trauma suffered by the homo sacer. This is key theme that informes the novel judgement.
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2. Contemporary Literary Trauma theory
The field of trauma theory – the study of the effects of overwhelming and terrifying events on individuals and communities – is vast. The application of this theory spans – in addition to areas of clinical psychology – a number of academic disciplines including but not restricted to literary analysis, historical analysis, Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies and African-American studies. The application of trauma theory to literary analysis is primarily concerned with two things: how the effects of trauma are inscribed in texts and (especially in the case of fiction) how trauma is represented in texts. Broadly speaking, the dominant axioms of literary trauma theory are informed by theories of psychoanalysis: Freudian and more recently Lacanian and other poststructuralist schools. One notices the dominant presence and influence of the Freudian tradition, a point of reference against which other ideas and criticisms are introduced. Cathy Caruth21 best summarises this dominant Freudian paradigm in her work ‘Unclaimed Experience’ The underlying assumptions of the Freudian paradigm is that trauma alters consciousness and traumatic events disrupt one’s previously held notions of self, one’s relationship to others and one’s relationship to society and its values. It breaks the continuity of the self and its relationship to the world. The disruption usually happens unconsciously. The self never becomes fully aware of the trauma and is never able to articulate it. But it remains in the subconscious and comes back to haunt the individual repetitively. Thus it becomes a permanent presence, a form of speechless terror that comes back to haunt the individual throughout his or her life. An underlying assumption in the Freudian tradition is that this repression and resurfacing of trauma essentially leads to a pathological condition that only leads to negative outcomes. Freud proposes redemption
21 See Caruth, C., ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History’, Yale French Studies, No. 79, Literature and the Ethical Question, 1991, pp. 181 - 192 31 from this condition through abreaction; a process of speech and narration through which the self regains awareness of the trauma. This very notion of repression and repeated resurfacing is applied at a collective level to explain the collective effects that traumatic events of history have on collective communities and how they play out on not just the generation that lives through the traumatic event but also subsequent generations of the same community. Generally known as intergenerational trauma theory, the study of this subject draws from the Freudian notion that a survivor of a traumatic event can, as Caruth claims, have “the experience of a trauma [that] repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor against his own will” (183) and pass the effects to the broader community that shares some characteristics such as race, gender and social class with the original sufferer. By implication, trauma can be passed beyond one’s own generation. Thus the effects of a serious traumatic experience of an individual or community can resurface many generations later in a community or individual because some characteristics are shared between the original sufferer and the latter. This has led writers such Kirby Farell22 to claim that traumatic events of history leads to the creation of a post-traumatic cultures. A similar claim is made by Brooks J. Bouson23, in an analysis of Toni Morrison’s novels. Bouson claims that the trauma of past slavery has become an inherent part of the current African-American identity. This school of thought more or less claims that trauma is not contained within the individual, but it is passed on through shared identities, and ultimately the trauma of the individual and the trauma of the community merge into one. To many theorists in the Freudian school the drama of repression and resurfacing plays out at the collective level in the history of communities, just as the trauma of the individual replays in the life of the individual. Thus there is an emphasis on knowledge and narration; an emphasis on the telling of history as way of communities healing
22 See Farell, Kirby, Post-Traumatic Culture: Inquiry and Interpretations in the Nineties, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD,1998 23 See Bouson J. Brooks Quiet As Its Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. SUN P, New York, 2000 32 themselves of a traumatic past. Institutions such as Truth Commissions are often informed by such thinking. The notion of collective and intergenerational trauma opens up the space for thinking about how traumatic of events from the distant and recent past impact the work of writers. Cathy Caruth carries out such an analysis on one of the works of Freud himself, Moses and Monotheism. This is Freud’s only fictional work and it retells the biblical story of the liberation of Hebrews from Egypt and the Hebrews’ return to monotheism. In the text, Freud hints that the Jewish return to monotheism after liberation from Egypt is a replay of the trauma of slavery. But Caruth observes the second replay of the same trauma in the writing of the work, which is Freud’s own trauma in German occupied Austria. Between the writing of the first and the second chapters of the book Freud fled Vienna and arrived in London. By this time the practice of psychoanalysis, Freud’s profession, has been banned in Austria, but he was allowed to practice in London. Therefore Freud’s journey to London, fleeing oppression in Austria, also marks his return to psychoanalysis. This, argues Caruth, is the replay of the ancient trauma of the Jewish people in slavery in Egypt. It is a story of a journey away from oppression – from Egypt and Austria – and the return to something – monotheism and psychoanalysis. A similar kind of analysis can be carried out in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, especially it may offer clues to understanding some of the extraordinary parts of this novel such as where the protagonist Sethe kills her youngest child in order to save the child from the possibility of future slavery. The idea of intergenerational trauma may offer clues to unlocking buried significances in Morrison’s novel: It contextualising slavery in the modern world. The only way that Morrison could negotiate her own existence in contemporary United States is to be assured that the African- American people’s liberation from slavery is permanent, that the path of emancipation is not a path that could be threaded backwards. In a narrative set in the 18th century the only way of ensuring the non-continuality of life under slavery is, depicted in infanticide. This trope was a way of declaring a condition as unliveable, for even the mere possibility of a return to slavery
33 would make life unliveable for modern day African-Americans. Here we see the trauma of slavery resurfacing in modern day America. However propositions about the conflation of individual and group trauma is critiqued by Michelle Balaev24 who argues that in many cases particularly involving political violence, this may be too simplistic, as it may well be the case that the perpetrator and victim share some form of identity. Thus conflating the traumas may lead to the problematic notion that the perpetrator may share the trauma of the victim. Balaev’s contention with applying the Freudian paradigm to literary analysis goes much further. She argues that the Freudian tradition’s focus on repression and the inability to speak, and recovery from this through narration, plus the underlying assumption that trauma, inevitably – unless recovered through narration – leads to affects that are essentially pathological, offers too narrow a framework to analyse trauma in novels. To Balaev the novel is far more complex an artistic form than a mere narration of trauma. She argues that silences within a narrative, discontinuities, and other elliptic features in narrative, should actually be seen as narrative strategies to communicate trauma rather than as mere acts of capitulation to the loss of speech. One of the examples which she uses is from Harriet Jacob’s (pen name Linda Brent) memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), 25 in which Jacobs describes an incident where she tries to tell her grandmother the experience of being subject to multiple rape by her slave owner.
My lips moved to make confession, but the words stuck in my throat. I sat down in the shade of her tree at her door and began to sew (387)
And, a few pages later,
He came every day; and I was subject to such insults that no pen can describe. I would not describe then if I could; they were too low (405)
24 Balaev,Michelle, ‘Trends in literary trauma theory’, Mosaic, 41/2, 2008, pp. 149-166 25 See Brent, Linda, ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’, 1861, Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Penguin New York, 1987 34
In the later passage Jacobs explains her earlier silence. The explanation suggests that the silence is something that she chooses, rather than something that she is bound by. Hence, the silence is actually a narrative choice rather than a capitulation to the speechless terror of multiple rape. Balaev suggests that the reason Jacobs is choosing not to describe the rape in descriptive terms has more to do with what the social norms of the time allowed to be talked about in public; that it would have been not possible to express the detail of the horror within the permissible social norms of the times. In other words, if she were to describe what actually happened to her, it would have been possible only after the story was watered down to the extent that it would have fallen far short of expressing the real horror she suffered. Hence she chooses not to say anything. She chooses silence as a way of keeping her agency, as a way of keeping her own control of the traumatic event. But such a reading is possible only outside the dominant Freudian abreaction model of western psychoanalysis. Balaev also argues that the way an individual responds to trauma is unique, and through the analysis of the protagonist Sethe in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved suggests that, in the end, trauma plays out differently for each individual who is positioned within a criss-cross of historical, social, cultural and political contexts. Although the individual is inextricable from society, he or she is also a unique entity. Hence, each individual is likely to develop their own strategy to deal with the trauma being imposed on the community, and if one tries to understand this response purely in terms of the collective, it is inevitable that something is lost. As in the actions of Morrison’s protagonist, Sethe, who escapes slavery, the individual can use his or her agency to escape the collective community. Such readings disturb some of the traditional readings of collective trauma. The American cultural theorist Kali Tal suggests two other problems with the Freudian notion of abreaction and offers a more political analysis in her work, World of Hurt 26 Tal’s criticism comes in two parts. The first one is to do with the way trauma interacts with language. She draws from Roland
26 See Tal, Kali, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1996 35
Barthes’s ideas about language as a series of signifier and signified. Barthes claims that a word or image that may relate to trauma – such as hunger, thirst, blood, or a phrase like “waiting to die” – are essentially signifiers, which will invoke a “floating chain of signified, among which readers may chose some and ignore others”. 27 Citing the work of psychiatrist Chaim Shatan, Tal argues that when someone enters the realm of catastrophe he or she passes through a membrane, which separates their experiences from the normal experiences of quotidian life. In this space of trauma normal linguistic guideposts fail. The normal relationships between signified and signifiers fail, as a whole new range of signified become available to the sufferer that are not available to those who did not suffer the same trauma. This radical realignment of the relationship between the signified and signifier, according to Tal, is what makes communication of trauma difficult. Tal continues to argue that even if the reader himself or herself is a survivor, he or she is likely to interpret the images in terms of their own experience rather than the experience of the sufferer. Thus the word “hunger” will mean something totally different to the survivor of trauma, to the reader who has survived a different trauma, to the reader who has not suffered trauma. This, according to Tal, makes the narration of trauma virtually impossible. Tal’s argument deeply problematises the Freudian notion of abreaction. But Tal goes even further and argues that even if such narration were possible, it would be impossible for it to be narrated purely in terms of the experience of the sufferer, as in the contexts of deeply politicised historical events the narratives of individual experiences of the event get co-opted into dominant narratives of the event. She illustrates this through her analysis of the poetry of the American Vietnam War veteran, W.D Ehrhart. Tal claims that throughout his poetry one finds “…evidence of Ehrart’s struggle to prevent his own traumatic experience from being appropriated and incorporated into an American national myth that does not reflect his [real] experience.” (78). She goes onto argue
27 See Barthes, Roland, ‘Rhetoric of the image’ ed Robert E.Inis, Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1985, p. 197 36
The profound dislocation of combat, the confusion of perpetrator and victim, the power and powerlessness, create in the survivors of war a duality of perception characteristic of trauma survivors. Their choice – to close their eyes to the horrors of the past and deny their own experience – or to attempt to integrate the traumatic experience into the banality of everyday life – is always difficult (114)
The thrust of Tal’s argument is that the experience of combat is so complex that, regardless of which one of the two above options the survivor chooses, it will invariably lead to repression. Even if survivors do choose to integrate their experience into their post-war daily lives, they are likely to face problems, due to the pressure to be “assimilated and incorporated … into a national myth.” Therefore a repressive simplification is bound to happen when individual experiences of trauma are co-opted into dominant survival literature. A consideration of this issue is thus germane in applying trauma theory to the condition of civilians caught in the civil war in Sri Lanka, and the silencing of individual trauma by dominant nationalist narratives. At this point let me explore the issue of trauma and its narration with respect to the Sri Lankan civil war through a different perspective; namely, the notion of justice, or more precisely the chasm between the self’s desire for justice – the need for the affirmation of the value of one’s own life and its dignity – and the self’s conflict with the external world where these are casually denied. This state of existence, which is an exception to the normal state of civilised life, in itself becomes both a point of origin of trauma as well as a point of silencing. To demonstrate this, let me start by questioning whether a slightly different reading of the passage from Harriet Jacob’s book is possible – of her silence, of her decision to keep sewing instead of talking about her rape under the tree in front of her grandmother’s house. This begs the question, is this silence the result of the futility of speech? Or is it the result of a conscious or sub-conscious decision that telling the story at the expense of reliving the rape would be futile, that nothing would come out of it? In the historical- social context within which the event happened, what could a slave girl’s story of multiple rape by a slave owner actually achieve, except a reliving the trauma? It would not stop it happening again; it would not achieve justice; it would not bring about closure. So what is the use of talking? I suggest that 37
Jacob’s silence, among other things, is also a protest – an act of resistance against a group, a community that, though through no fault of its own, had become helpless to protect its members. Plus it is a protest against the wider American state that has denied the most basic form of protection that a child needs, and perhaps even against the whole of humanity that has, in the consciousness of the child, denied it justice. The consequence of this is that the private horror of the self never enters the public; a wide chasm develops between the inner self and the outer world. It is a central fact of the human condition that the individual depends on the group for security and justice, and when society denies that to the individual, a wide abyss opens between the two. What this particular reading of Jacob’s silence suggests is that the traumatic event is doing the reverse of that suggested by some conventional intergenerational theorists. It suggests that even though the trauma of the individual may have passed to the group, the trauma has also caused a fissure to develop between the group and the individual. This fissure is defined by the chasm between the self’s internally held notion of justice and the casual denial of justice in the world outside the self. Without in any way denying the horror or uniqueness of the experience of slave women as expressed by Harriet Jacobs, let me suggest that there is a similarity between the experience of the slave woman and condition of civilian victims in contemporary civil conflicts. The notion of justice in relation to trauma invariably raises the question of the role of institutions – institutions of justice – institutes of governance – in other words the institutes that civilian victims of war rely on for justice. I will now explore the functioning of the institute of law and its relation to trauma, and the function of literature in relation to trauma through two works on the subject by the American theorist, Shoshana Felman.
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2.1 Literature and the Law
The first work that I would like to discuss is an essay by Felman published in 199628, a few years after the conclusion of the murder trial of American football player and actor, O J Simpson, who was accused of murdering his wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Simpson was finally acquitted of all charges, and freed, though later a civil trial found there was sufficient evidence to implicate Simpson in the trial and upheld claims for compensation for the family of Nicole Brown. The trial deeply divided the country along race lines. Many news reports suggested that most Afro-Americans held right from the beginning that Simpson was innocent, while most White Americans thought he was guilty. News reports claimed that even the jury was divided along race lines.29 Felman draws a parallel between this trial and the novella The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy. Kreutzer Sonata was first published in Russia in 1889. It was banned almost immediately after publication, but it is claimed that is spite of this it was widely circulated and was a topic of discussion in Russia at the time. The novella is the first person narrative of Prodnyshev who was put on trial for murdering his wife and her friend, on seeing them together when he returns home unexpectedly early from a trip. They had just played – she on the piano and he on the violin – Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A Major also called the Kreutzer Sonata. However Pozdnyshev is acquitted on the basis that he was justifiably outraged at the fact that his wife had betrayed him. The novella is set in a train where Pozdnyshev narrates the story to a stranger, to whom he confesses that his murder was not driven by any justifiable anger, but by a blind rage, that he could not quite explain. He tells his story to a stranger in a train, that although he tried his best to explain this at his trial, no one would hear him. The novella is a confession of sorts.
28 See Felman, Shoshana, ‘Forms of Juridical Blindness, or the Evidence of What Cannot Be Seen: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Repetitions in the O J Simpson Case and in Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata”’, Critical Inquiry, Vol 23, No 4 Summer, 1997, pp. 738 - 788 29 Archives of most news magazines of the time give a good account of the trial. But a fairly comprehensive account of the trial can also be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._J._Simpson_murder_case 39
Felman draws a parallel between the O J Simpson trial and the fictional Kreutzer Sonata. Her claim is that in both cases the trial had little to do with the facts of the actual case that it was supposed to try, that the cases were constantly blinded by the presence of what she calls resurfaced trauma from the past. In the O J Simpson trial it was the trauma of the past oppression of Afro-Americans, particularly the brutalisation of African- Americans by the police in the United States. She particularly draws attention to the Rodney King trial, the case involving the beating of a black man by Los Angeles police. The police officers involved in the beating were initially acquitted, which led to the much publicised Los Angeles riots of 1992. In the case of the Kreutzer Sonata, there was the long repressed trauma of violence against women, which Felman claims Tolstoy to be suggesting is at the very heart of the institution of marriage itself. The point that Felman is making is that the final events of violence are usually the tip of something more entrenched, the origins of which have become unrecognisable. The problem with trials, Felman claims, is that they start from questions that cannot be answered. She says “… what they have asked in court cannot receive a simple answer–it cannot be answered, in effect, except by recapitulating the whole story from the start” (785). In the case of the O J Simpson trial that hidden history is the history of violence against Afro-Americans and violence against women – stories that can never be told, according to her, in their entirety. Similarly, in the case of the Kreutzer Sonata, it is the life story of Pozdnyshev, his wife, and her friend, plus the history of the institution of marriage itself. However Felman argues that literature can, in some senses, get a step closer to the truth: “In a situation in which justice is impossible, in a culture that does not forgive, a literary story puts the century on trial and begs for mercy it cannot receive” (787). In other words she suggests that, unlike the law, literature is capable of shining a light on a whole history, and therefore is in a better position to cast a more authentic judgment; a judgment on a history, rather than a judgment on the individuals caught within that history, in violent situations that are mere outcomes at the tail end of a long and invisible well of repressed trauma. It can pass judgement on a whole history as opposed to a single violent incident at the edge of a long traumatic history.
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2.2 Felman, the Eichmann trial and post-conflict justice.
In spite of her criticism of trials in her earlier works, Felman does not completely dismiss the significance of trials. In a later work she makes the case for the significance of a post second world war trial which came to be widely known as the Eichmann trial. Otto Adolf Eichmann was an officer in the German SS during World War II. Though identified by many survivors of the Holocaust as having played a significant role in organising the death camps in Germany, he escaped the Nuremberg trials by fleeing to Argentina. In 1961, he was abducted by Israeli operatives and brought to Jerusalem and was put on trial for Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes. The trial, which received extensive international attention, saw hundreds of witnesses testify in great detail about the atrocities in the concentration camps in Germany during the Second World War. The extraordinary way in which Eichmann was apprehended and brought to Israel, and the trial itself, which created legal precedent, led to a surge of analysis and criticism in academic and popular literature of the time. Of particular interest here is a debate Felman has with the criticism of the trial by the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Felman draws from Nietzsche’s formulation that there are two ways in which one could view a particular historic event, as either monumental or critical. While not directly contesting Arendt’s criticism, Felman proposes that there is a different intellectual angle from which one could look at the trial. She argues that Arendt’s criticism of the Eichmann trial, which is based on jurisprudential conservatism, comes from an activist tradition. It is a critical reading of the trial and proposes the possibility of a monumental reading. Nietzsche’s30 view of monumental and critical readings can be best summarised as:
If the man who will produce something great has need of the past, he makes himself its master by means of monumental history…and only he whose
30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Use and Abuse of History for Life, trn.Adrian Collins, Liberal Arts Press, 1957 41
heart is oppressed by an instant need and who will cast the burden off at any price feels the need of “critical history”, the history that judges and condemns (17)
Monumental history is concerned with looking for inspirational events in history, events that change the course of events for the better, events that present times can draw from. Critical history, by contrast, does the opposite; it critically evaluates history to seek deliverance from it. The latter is a less emotional, and perhaps, a drier process. For Felman, monumental history looks for deliverance in the past, whereas critical history looks for deliverance from the past. Hannah Arendt, herself a Jewish immigrant, is one of many journalists who travelled to Israel to witness the trial of Eichmann. At the end of observing the trial she wrote a lengthy criticism of it which was published as a book Eichmann in Jerusalem; A report on the Banality of Evil. She used her analysis of the trial to introduce the concept that has now come to be known commonly as ‘The Banality of Evil’. Arendt observes that during the trial, at no point did it appear that Adolf Eichmann was anti-semitic, nor did he show signs of holding a desire to commit the monstrous crimes that he committed. He was, according to Arendt, in any measure, just an ordinary man. She goes on to ask: what then led him to commit the crimes that he committed? Arendt argues: it was not the evil intent, but the banality of carrying out one’s orders – of doing one’s job – in the absence of any moral sense or purpose. Thus, according to Arendt, the crimes that were committed were not the result of the evil of Eichmann, but the result of the fact that evil could enter a banal day-to-day situation quite easily. Arendt sees a degree of injustice in Eichmann being found guilty of the crimes he was being accused of. For Arendt the Eichmann case was not an exercise in the execution of justice, but more a matter of the state of Israel exercising its political power. Felman does not necessarily disagree with Arendt’s position, but argues that this critical reading of the trial misses the historic significance that could be attributed to it in light of Nietzche’s notion of monumental history. The thrust of Felman’s argument is that the Eichmann trial – for the first time since the end of the Second World War – enabled the victims of the
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Holocaust to speak for themselves. They had a voice that was unmediated by the political agendas of the key political military players of the Second World War, as was the case with the Nuremberg trials, where the agenda of the trials was driven more by the political interests of the Allied Nations. During the Eichmann trials the victims of Holocaust were able to speak unmediated; in other words unmediated through the history (the winners of) of the Second World War. The victims had authority over their voices. The unmediated voice of the victim became the voice of prosecution, and was thereby empowered. This was recovery. Memories which up to then remained in the private realm, moved into the public sphere. Felman argues that this expanded perception. Thus memories of incidents that had remained as mere private memories came to be seen as public injustice. Thus the chasm between the private and the public was bridged. Memories (of the Holocaust) that were hitherto private memories could now be spoken in public, not just as terrible memories but as great injustices. In addition to this the trial broke new legal grounds, for trying the crime of genocide – which had no precedence. It perhaps contributed towards preventing something like the Holocaust happening again. It provided a bridge to the future: hence it was monumental history. Felman is right in that for the first time the trials did enable many Jewish people to break their silence about what happened to them during the Holocaust, and speak with the confidence that what happened to them would be acknowledged as injustices. This, as Felman claims, did expand the perceptions of the victims, and that of the world. It should be noted, however, that there are a number of problems with her argument. The first one is Felman’s claim that there is no precedent for the Holocaust. This may well be true, but it is somewhat puzzling that someone like Felman, who has written extensively about the silencing of atrocities of that scale – as the Holocaust itself would have come to be if not for Eichmann trial (as claimed by Felman) – could be blind to the possibility that the stories of many prior genocides could have been silenced. One could certainly suggest that genocidal tendencies were identifiable in some of the policies towards indigenous Australians adopted by successive British Administrations during the
43 colonisation of the continent. But I think the graver error of Felman is her claim that the Eichmann trial enabled the victim’s stories independent of the history of the Second World War. In my opinion the Eichmann trial was heavily rooted in the history of the Second World War; it is rooted in the victory of the allies. It would be hard to imagine how this trial would have come to fruition if the Second World War had ended differently and if the state of Israel had not come into existence. The thrust of the rest of my argument is that it is a series of historical events that enabled a trial such as the Eichmann trial to take place. Similarly it is a (different) series of historical events that prevent such trials from happening at the end of other conflicts. This makes this particular trial a unique situation in history, rarely repeatable in other situations. The civil war in Sri Lanka officially ended on the 19th of May 2009, when the government of Sri Lanka formally announced to the world that it has ceased combat operations against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). On the same day the Government also announced that it had killed the leader of the LTTE, and displayed his body to the media. The government also announced that about 10,000 members of the LTTE had surrendered to Government forces. For all intents and purposes the war finished on that day, a statement supported by the fact that no skirmishes have been reported between Government forces and the LTTE since May 2009. In the days leading up to May 2009, intense fighting was reported during which the LTTE continuously accused the Government of committing war crimes. The Government maintained that the LTTE was forcibly recruiting people, including children, and that it was using civilians as human shields. Most of the civilians who were caught in the fighting during the final days of the war are now living in camps for Internally Displaced Persons run by the Government and, until they are in a position to speak freely, it would be hard to know exactly what happened. However, a number of local and international organisations have documented witness reports31, and have
31 For a reasonably not partisan accounts of the war, see; International Crisis Group, ‘War Crimes in Sri Lanka’, Asia Report No 191, 2010 http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/south- asia/sri-lanka/191-war-crimes-in-sri-lanka.aspx 44 more or less come to the conclusion that there is truth in both positions; that is, war crimes – including intense shelling of heavily populated areas, and possible use of chemical weapons – were carried out by Government forces and, it is also probably true that the LTTE forcibly conscripted people and used them as human shields and executed people who tried to flee. Now that the war has ended in the destruction of the LTTE and the victory of the Government, the Sri Lankan Government has ruled out any possibility of investigations. Most leaders of the LTTE have been killed, and some who surrendered have been pardoned and have become part of the Government’s administration. If one were to compare the situation of those civilian victims of the war in Sri Lanka and the Jews persecuted during the Second World War, the first difference is this. In the case of the Jews, persecution came from a single source. Namely the German Schutzstaffel, commonly known as the SS32, whereas in the case of Sri Lanka it came from both sides. The second and perhaps the most important distinction is how the conflict unfolded in history. Germany was defeated in the Second World War and the end of the war led to the creation of the state of Israel. If not for these two essential facts of history the Eichmann trial would not have been possible. But in the case of Sri Lanka, the persecution of civilians came from both sides and the war ended in one of these sides destroying the other. This makes a trial such as the Eichmann trial a virtual impossibility. The situation in Sri Lanka is more akin to Kali Tal’s analysis of the deceptions one is likely to encounter when thinking of the Vietnam War – the lack of clearly defined lines of separation between perpetrator and victim, as well as the absence of a single identifiable perpetrator. Thus we are left with “…the confusion of perpetrator and victim, the power and powerlessness…”. So, is there a possibility of justice for civilian victims in Sri Lanka, where, not just a few people but a
‘Let Them Speak: Truths About Sri Lanka’s Victims of War’, University Teachers for Human Rights, Dec 2009 http://www.uthr.org/SpecialReports/Special%20rep34/Uthr-sp.rp34.htm 32 Some, see Greyling A,C see Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime (2007), have argued that during the Second World War, war crimes were committed by the allied forces as well as Germany. However, with respect to this argument, it is reasonable to assume that the overwhelmingly major of potion persecution suffered by the German Jews came from the SS. 45 whole history needs to be put on trial? I am thinking here of drawing from Felman’s analysis of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata. Though the situations are different, the underlying truth appears to be the same. The possibility of justice and redemption may lie in narration and literature rather than in institutional mechanisms such as trials.
2.3 Recognising the trauma of the homo sacer
The condition of civilian victims of wars is not dissimilar to the description of Harriet Jacobs’s, slave girl, who after being raped, sat under a tree in front of her Grandmother’s house unable to speak the pain of rape. People, at the end of a war, pick up whatever they can recover and continue their lives. There is no cry for justice, because justice is not available to them, at least at that moment of history; like Harriet Jacobs, are homo sacer. This gives rise to the possibility of narration, the possibility of prompting empathy in the face of trauma of the homo sacer, just as empathy is prompted by the trauma of the slave girl. And through empathy one gets a sense of the injustice. Empathising with another’s trauma marks the beginning of a journey of bestowing justice. Having discussed classical trauma theory and its limitations – particularly the criticisms of Dominick LaCapra, Laura Brown, Ann Cvetkovich and Kali Tal – for their Euro-centricity and over-reliance on the Freudian ideas inherent in the classical approach, I return to the thinking of Felman. Despite minor weaknesses in her thesis she makes the powerful and pertinent point that issues of justice cannot be separated from an understanding of trauma. Felman, more than any other contemporary trauma theorist, lays the theoretical foundation for exploring this link between trauma and justice when she claims “trauma – individual as well as social – is the basic underlying reality of the law.” 33 Although there had been a long relationship between the fields of legal studies and trauma studies, in the post-Freudian era, the focus in the application of trauma studies to legal
33 See Felman 2002 The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Trauma in the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 172 46 studies has remained restricted to the context of legal institutions and their processes. But Felman opens the way to a broader discussion. There are two themes that run through her thinking: firstly that addressing issues of justice relating to violent events is inseparable from the process of addressing the trauma caused by those events. Secondly, the issue of justice is much larger than the institutions of the law; pursuits of justice emanating from particular traumatic events can act on as much as they act within the institutions of the law.34 Felman continues to argue that though the juridico-institutional often arises out of the need to address trauma, it also invariably fails to address it fully. Sarat et al 35 take Felman’s claim one step further, as they argue that legal forms such as trials, while offering the potential for addressing justice for traumatic events, also impose their own limitations on the way those events are understood. The claim that not all trauma can be understood from within a juridico-institutional order may sound a truism, as history is replete with examples of traumatic events of seismic proportions that were neither recognised nor addressed by the juridical institutions of their time. The trauma of particular events such as the Holocaust and older historical conditions such as slavery, apartheid and practices based on caste and gender discrimination, were acknowledged only decades after they occurred; only after the juridico-institutions of their day were overthrown and replaced with new ones. When the trauma of individuals is not addressed by the juridico-institutional, it affects the subject in complex ways. Trauma is not just repressed, but it is suppressed as well. In such cases, the repression of trauma (as understood by Freud) is worsened by the conflict between the private and the public, between the corporeal (traumatic) experience of the subject and the external juridico-institutional and political order that refuses to acknowledge that experience. In such cases the subject may be prevented
34 It should be noted here that in the case of civil wars such as Sri Lanka, moral-consciousness the juridico-institutional does not just constitute the law and institutions of the state, but also that of pseudo-states run by non-state military groups that have the capability to control large populations. However, as I will demonstrate in Section 5.1, these two (states and pseudo-states) work more or less in the same way 35 See Sarat A, Davidovitch N and Alberstein M eds 2007 Trauma Memory and Reading, Healing and Making Law. Stanford University Press, Stanford. 47 from finding the meaning of her own trauma, distorting even her own understanding of her (real) experience. Such situations heighten the need for the pursuit of justice outside that of the juridico-institutional order and, addressing trauma demands pushing against the existing juridico- institutional order. In fact the need to address trauma often becomes the compelling force that drives the push to change the juridico-institutional. In this chapter I explore this theme further through a discussion on the trauma of the homo sacer – the one who has been excluded from the juridico- institutional – who has been stripped of protection from the law. Thus the central question of this chapter is: how does one recognise the trauma of the homo sacer? And, how does one do this in literature?. I will discuss here how literature thematising this war depicts the trauma of the homo sacer, or fails to depict it, by discussing two pieces of literature: the poetry of Sri Lankan poet Basil Fernando and Sri Lankan born Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost. I will show that while both works depict the homo sacer in relation to the war, the poetry of Fernando finds a way of working in an ethical space independent of juridico- institutional orders by imagining the inner life of the homo sacer, which enables the reader to recognise and address the trauma of those excluded from the jurico-insitutional order. I argue that the position adopted by Ondaatje, namely his cultural-moral relativism and his invocation of the unknowability of the Other, actually prevents access to the trauma of its characters. It lets the homo sacer remain the homo sacer and bankrupts the ethical apparatus needed to critique the juridico-institutional order which created the homo sacer. I support my argument by drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek. Agamben theorises the homo sacer and the boundary of the juridico-institutional. Zizek, I argue, offers insights into how literature has the potential to develop an ethical project advocating justice that can work beyond situational and juridico-institutional boundaries to create empathy at a universal human level, in this instance for the homo sacer; to engender a sense of righteous anger that lends justice to the trauma of the homo sacer.
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The breaking out of civil war in the mid 1980s brought about a historic condition that was in many ways unique to Sri Lanka, and this led to the rise of a distinct, though polyphonic, literature which was identifiable through the fact that all these works thematised the civil-war36,37 and all these works depicted trauma in one way or the other. Shyam Selavdurai’s Funny Boy explores the trauma of growing up gay in a community which not only rejects his sexuality, but where growing inter-communal tensions are tearing his social fabric apart. Nihal Silva’s The Road from Elephant Pass explores the trauma of the killing of the protagonist’s father and brother and the effect the resultant depression of her mother has on a young woman, who becomes a guerrilla fighter, and whose rational self is shattered. Ernest Macintyre’s play Rasanayagam’s Last Riot explores the trauma of communal violence and the consequent birth of nationalism on the individual and his relationships. Similarly, S Sivananthan’s, When Memory Dies, explores political violence and class struggle forcing the public to collapse into the private and explores the effect this has on families, through a story of three generations of a Sri Lankan family. The civil war itself is a recent historical event and it would be reasonable to expect that it is yet to emerge as a substantial literary category as this small number of works might indicate. It is also likely that as post-war normalcy returns to the country, the centre of the literacy voice is likely to shift to local writers. However for the moment, one has to look at diasporic novels and other shorter forms such as poetry and short stories published in ad-hoc and disparate sources for the literary voices of the war. The two works I discuss here are chosen because of the two distinct ways in which they deal with the voice of the victim.
36 See Sivathamby, Karthigesu 50 years of Tamil Literature, http://tamilelibrary.org/teli/srilitt.html 37 See Lutesong and Lament - An anthology of Tamil writing from Srilanka – ed. Chelva Kanaganayakam. Published by TSAR - ISBN 0 -920661 - 97 –1 and a criticism of it by Santush Pararajasingham on http://issues.lines- agazine.org/Art_Aug03/Santhush_review.htm 49
2.4 Trauma and Justice in Literature
In an essay ‘Justice in the gutter: representing everyday trauma in the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman’, Honni Van Rijswilk and Karen Crawley38 argue that the means by which trauma is represented determines which experiences are privileged and recognised and that some forms of harm will become invisible under some frameworks. They further suggest that literature can supplement or even alter law’s version of justice. They argue that the law works by classifying and fitting particular events into a universal framework of legal-logical principles of justice, which is essentially an exercise in abstraction. In Residues of Justice, Wai Chee Dimock,39 claims that while the law ignores the experiences that cannot be fitted into the neat universal system of abstract logic, literature does the opposite. It captures ‘incommensurate’ particularities that resist universalising tendencies 40 and places them in an alternate domain of a more complex and layered version of justice, an abiding presence, according to her, that captures the desolation as well as the consolation of what lies outside the law as well as what lies inside the law. In their discussion of trauma and justice in the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman, Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers, Rijswilk and Crawley make three points in relation to these literary works; firstly, that literature enables the creation of an alternate domain, where a perspective of justice that is different to that of the prevailing juridico-institutional can be developed. Secondly, they argue that literature enables not just the representation of trauma but, importantly, the act of representation itself – that it creates a sort of ‘meta’ that enables a perspective to be developed. Thirdly – in relation to comic forms – they suggest that graphic literature depicts different events of history in a single panel – leaving the reader with the option of responding to them together. Within the static space of the
38 See Crawley, Karen and van Rijswijk, Honni ‘Justice in the gutter; representing everyday trauma in the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman’, Law Text Culture 16(1), 2012, pp. 63-118 39 Dimmock, W Residues of Justice; Literature Law, Philosophy, University of California Press, Berkley, 1967 40 ibid 50 panel, different events are made to ‘bleed into’ each other, but without losing their specificity. The graphic form is able to bring them together, without having to classify them together, or link them together, under an abstract universal principle (e.g. crimes against humanity, or genocide). It is in this way that Art Spiegelman draws together events such as the Holocaust, the quotidian and pervasive injustices of everyday life, and realities of racism in the United States, following the attacks on the World Trade Centre. There is no relative comparison of events, but a depiction of how events ‘bleed into’ each other. The perspectives of justice, never explicitly stated, are developed, according to Rijsvik and Crawley, in the empty spaces between the panel – the ‘gutter’ – these silent spaces that lie in the way of the narrative flow of the graphic novel – the movement from panel to panel. The last of the three points made by Rijsvik and Crawley pertains to the particularity of the graphic novel. However, Slavoj Zizek41 opens up similar possibilities for literature that are of a much wider scope. In examining the longstanding claim that pain can never be adequately expressed in language (discussed in previous chapters) Zizek contests Thedore Adorno’s famous claim, “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. According to Zizek it is poetry and music that are the more appropriate mediums for writing about events like Aushwitz, beacuse what describing such events demands is not describing them physically, but recreating the experience of trauma. Writing about trauma requires,
not a description which locates its content in a historical space and time, but a description which creates, as the background of the phenomena it describes, an inexistent (virtual) space of its own, so that what appears in it is not an appearance sustained by the depth of reality behind it, but a decontextualised appearance, an appearance which fully coincides with the real being...it extracts from the confused reality own inner form (5)
In a poetic logic of his own, Zizek suggests that one has to consider the possibility that there is some truth in the claim that there was a kind of historic premonition of the Holocaust in the music of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, which it is claimed, articulated the anxieties and nightmares of Auschwitz, though composed much earlier than the Holocaust.
41 1 See Zizek, Slavoj, Violence Profile Books, 2009 p. 5. 51
Zizek’s suggestion is that certain art forms – in this instance poetry and music – though failing to literally describe traumatic events in descriptive terms – recreate them as inner subjective experiences of pain. Thus they contextualise the event through the mind’s and body’s responses to the event, rather than through detailed descriptions of the event itself. These works draw from a common abiding interior space. Further, the absence of the need to describe means that they resist the need to deny the external traumatic event its specificity, or lose some of the specificity in an abstraction that the law demands (such as fitting events into abstract categories like Crimes against humanity). Such works of art look for connections rather than similarities; connections between subjectivities and events and connections between events through subjectivities. Connections, rather than the event are drawn, thereby resisting the need to force events into abstract universal categories. This way the audience or reader can attach experiences to an event, while keeping the specificity of the event intact. This forms a virtual space of shared traumatic experiences. If such a virtual space does exist, it would surpass the externally imposed boundaries created by juridico-institutional and juridico-political orders. Therefore, the connections that hold it together would cross the boundary of the anomic zone to reach the homo sacer, and thus has the potential to address the trauma of the homo sacer, and do justice to her trauma. This is a space that literature often occupies.
3 Pain and Language; how pain is shaped through literary genre
Not all criticisms regarding the inability of pain to find meaning in current times have come from abject situations such as war. In the French film Hell by Krysztof Kieslowski – a film about continuous agony, hopelessness, and the absence of redemption – the character Annie, in a moment of eloquence compares her private pain to that of the Greek mythological character Medea and laments: “What happened to Medea was tragedy. But in modern times, having got rid of God, we are no longer capable of tragedy …we are only destined to live and die in the meaninglessness of our pain, as we move through the day to day mundaneness
52 of our lives.”42 The literary critic David Morris (1996) expresses despair as he blames the post-modern condition for bringing about the cultural inability, particularly that of arts and literature to deal with our pain 43. Morris (1996), blames the arrival of what he terms “post-modern upstarts” (25) such as discourse analysis and grammatology for having taken away the redemptive power that arts and literature once had.44 He does this is in spite of his acknowledgment that postmodernism has been brought about by the heightening of awareness, during the post Second World War years, of the oppressive and excluding tendencies of western literary traditions and their indifference to the suffering of the Other. We can identify a twin movement in the second half of the twentieth century. On the one hand there was the rising sensitivity to human suffering; artistic and intellectual traditions such as post-structuralism and post-modernism, at their very heart, are criticisms of traditions emanating from the European enlightenment and their role in the human catastrophes of colonialism, the Holocaust, the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities etc. On the other hand criticisms such as that of David Morris and Krysztof Kieslowski have also increased in frequency. While criticisms such as that of David Morris and Krysztof Kieslowski have come from within what may be called the developed world, a more nuanced criticism of dominant contemporary cultural sensibilities of the First World and their inability comprehend pain has come from the Third World (low and middle income countries, broadly speaking, lying outside the western-cultural sphere). These criticisms vary significantly. Some, such as the literary criticism of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who in her earlier works argued that the voice of the most oppressed in Third Word – the subaltern – can never be heard in the global centres, shine the light from a Third World perspective. Theorists such as Gayatri Spivak Chakravorty tend to focus on politico-cultural differences, while other criticisms come from a less provincial perspective; they pin the problem on post- modern artistic and cultural temperaments such as playfulness, an emphasis on surfaces, and inherent suspicion of concepts such as emancipation, progress, and cosmic meanings, have rid culture of its potential to deal with human pain, such
42 Translated by author 43 See Morris David B, ‘About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community’ in Daedalus Winter 1996: 125, p. 25. 44 I will return to a critical analysis of Morris’s claim later in the thesis. 53 sensibilities are thus unable to provide the redemptive potential in arts that those in the Third World often seek. Writing a dissertation to accompany a work of fiction is beset with a methodological tension between the broad engagement required for the creative work and the thematically narrowed down focus needed in the theoretical work. Further, while creative works have the space to deal with themes that are somewhat vague and hard to define, dealing with these is fraught with difficulty in theoretical dissertations. Therefore, while broader themes such as the redemptive power of arts and literature in a postmodern condition and the chasm between dominant cultural sensibilities of the First and the Third World enter the fiction part of the thesis, I will not deal with them in this dissertation. I seek to engage with a theme that is far more focused, fundamental and relevant to the broader purpose of this dissertation, that is writing a work of fiction that thematises pain; it is the question of expression of pain in language. Though pain and suffering exist at the heart of human experience and have existed pervasively as a theme in arts and literature throughout history, there is a relative scarcity of it in academic debate. It usually enters academic debate only as a sub-theme to something else. In an essay on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s seminal work Philosophical Investigations, Veena Das laments, “Wittgenstein on pain is a major philosophical and anthropological issue, yet there is no highway of thought available to traverse”(191). Similarly, in the introduction to his work, The Culture of Pain, David B Morris claims that, apart from Elaine Scarry’s classical work on the subject, The Body in Pain, no major work emerged in the field in the two decades preceding the writing of The Culture of Pain. However this paucity of debate somewhat bears witness to the problem at hand, mainly that there is something incommunicable about pain and this poses a difficulty in terms of developing a discourse. Researching this theme forces one to cross disciplinary boundaries, which at times leads to argumentative stalemates, as one is left with a collection of competing theses rather than a dialectic debate.
54
3.1 Pain, language and silence
The inexpressibility of pain and the link between pain and silence has been explored by a number of writers. The American poet Emily Dickinson45 in the (American) civil war poem ‘The Mystery of Pain’ starts with the line “Pain has an element of Blank”. She suggests that pain wipes out the mind – it takes over consciousness – after which only pain exists. The blank state of mind in pain is one where all forms of distinctions vanish. The mind is reduced to a single plane – where meaning and language, both of which are capable of existing only in a state where distinction is possible, cease to exist. David B. Morris46, in his essay on the cultural dimension of pain, suggests that the kind of blanking that pain creates can be seen in the scream and in silence – the two most common expressions of pain. These are essentially similar in that they destroy speech: “A scream is not speech but the most intense possible negation of language; sound and terror approaching the limits of absolute muteness.” Both the silence and the scream reflect the ‘blank’ that Emily Dickinson refers to. References to the loss of voice in the face of pain and suffering (many writers do not distinguish between the two) resonate through literature. W H Auden in ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ makes a suggestion that pain and suffering fall out of the vision of others – namely those not in pain – by the very nature of not being in pain. The theme of silence has been explored at length in an analysis of post-Holocaust literature, and in recent times in linguistic studies carried out on refugees.47 So much so, that Morris (27) warns that “the silence of the sufferer” is in danger of becoming a modern day cliché. However the Holocaust writer Primo Levi, dismisses claims about the incommunicability of pain, arguing that they are nothing more than a result of intellectual laziness. The Indian anthropologist, Veena Das, whose work I will discuss at some length later, expresses a similar sentiment when she warns that suggestions pointing to the
45 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12242/12242-8.txt No XIX 46 See Morris B. D About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community Daedalus, Winter 1996:125,1 p. 27 47 See Wajnryb, Ruth . The silence : how tragedy shapes talk, Allen & Unwin, 2001 55 incommunicability of pain are actually foreclosing the search for different ways in which pain can be expressed and understood.
Let me start with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who perhaps poses the question most pertinent to the subject: can pain be shared? Wittgenstein writes in his Blue and Brown Book:
In order to see that it is conceivable that one person should have pain in another person’s body, one must examine the sorts of fact we call criteria for a pain being in a certain place … Suppose I feel a pain which on the evidence of the pain alone e.g. with closed eyes, I should call a pain in my left hand. Someone asks me to touch the painful spot with my right hand. I do so and looking around perceive that I am touching my neighbour’s hand … This would be pain felt in another’s body. (49).
Stanley Cavell48 and Veena Das49 have subjected the above passage to densely argued interpretations, which I will draw from. Before that I wish to make a few observations of my own. Witgenstein’s question is: can pain that exists in someone else’s body be perceived as if it exists in our own? The only condition under which this is possible, according to Witgenstein, is if we can come up with a set of criteria capable of revealing pain when it exists in a particular place. Thus, in the example above, if the first person can come up with such criteria based on the pain that he is feeling in his left hand, then by using these criteria he can at once recognise the pain in his neighbour’s hand. It would be possible for him to recognise the pain in his neighbour’s hand as pain, just as he would be able to identify the neighbour’s hand as a hand, or his nose as a nose, by applying the set of criteria that defines a hand as a hand or a nose as a nose. The impossibility of achieving this, according to Witgenstein, shows that language belongs to the external world. The reason why something like pain – that is internal to oneself – cannot be expressed in language and the reason why a set of criteria could not be developed and attributed to define it in the first place, is because language exists only in the
48 Das, Veena, ‘Language and body: transactions in the construction of pain’ Daedalus 125, No 1,Wntr 1996, p. 67, 49 See Cavell, S., ‘Comments of Veena Das’s Essay ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the constructions of pain’’, Daedalus: Winter 1996, p. 125 56 outside, the external world. Therefore, for Witgenstein, pain lacks a language. The fact that pain could be imagined but not experienced, for him, shows that the question itself is a beginning of a (another) language game. Now, let me pose a different question, one similar to that of Wittgenstein’s. Can the pain felt in one location (a situation) – a point in space, time, and psyche, in the geographic, socio-cultural, and socio-economic mosaic on the surface of the earth –be perceived in some other location, in exactly the same way as it is perceived in the location where it happens. In other words, can someone outside a particular situation perceive the pain of someone in a particular situation in exactly the same way? We can try to answer this in the Wittgensteinian way by substituting the body of the individual with the virtual body of the ‘situation’. It might be possible, if a set of criteria can be found which can point to pain where and when it exists, provided the criteria are recognisable to all. We can now reimagine Wittgenstein’s question in the above manner – that is in respect to a situation – and pose the question: If the subject is not the individual but the situation (as defined in the beginning of the paragraph), would the situation be not just as imaginable but also experienced. I will return to this question after discussing a few other theoretical developments in the area. The Indian anthropologist Veena Das engages with the arguments of Wittgenstein in her crucial essay, ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the construction of pain.’ 50 It is possible to draw a number of different assertions from this very densely argued essay. Das threads her analysis through three scenes extracted from three different works – “three phantasms” – as she calls them. The first is a passage from page 49 of Witgenstein’s Blue and Brown Book, the second is Rabindranath Tagore’s well known novel, Ghore Baire (Home and the World) and the third is a short story by Indian writer Sadat Hassan Manto, ‘Khol Do’. Ghore Baire is set just before independence and ‘Khol Do’ is set during partition. Firstly, Das contests Wittgenstein’s assertion in the Blue and Brown Book that pain is essentially incommunicable, that it lacks a language. Instead, according to Das, pain is
50Das, Veena, ‘Language and body: transactions in the construction of pain’ Daedalus, Vol 125, No 1, Wntr 1996, pp. 67-91 57 somewhat awkwardly hooked to language. And according to her pain becomes communicable when the assertion that pain lacks a language is built into the very grammar of articulating pain. Her points are made much clearer in her later essay, ‘Wittgenstein and Anthropology’,51 when writing on the same topic she posits “The statement ‘I am in Pain’ is both a statement and the statement that I am making a statement [about my pain]” (191) Therefore, the statement ‘I am in pain’ is a call to acknowledge the pain of the utterer even if the listener is unable to feel the same pain and, given it can never be felt by the listener, the authority over which can only be deferred to the utterer. The call for acknowledgement, to Das, is a spiritual and ethical one rather than an intellectual one, since it is something that can never be intellectually deciphered or verified. Thus, the call for acknowledgement, argues Das, can only be “given or denied” (70). It cannot be conditionally granted or doubted. The listener does not have the option of postponing a response or expressing measured doubt or retaining a level of scepticism while acknowledging authority to the utterer. Therefore to make any statements along the lines of “I acknowledge, that to you, you are in pain”, or “I would never know, whether you are in pain or not, only you would know that” would not constitute a sufficient response to the utterance ‘I am in pain’. Because to say so would amount to the denying of acknowledgement, since in neither of these statements the listener is acknowledging nor denying whether the utterer is in pain, but is simply just allowing for that possibility, and as Stanley Cavell (94) interprets; the listener does not have the liberty to believe or disbelieve at his leisure. Das’s second point is to do with the possibility of one person’s pain existing in the utterances of another. She demonstrates this through an analysis of confronting scenes in Manto’s ‘Khol Do’. In the midst of the violence of partition following India’s independence, a young girl Sakina goes missing and her father asks a group of young volunteers, helping search for lost relatives, to look for his daughter. The young men find Sakina who gets into a jeep with the men after they tell her that they know her father. The
51 Das, Veena, ‘Wittgenstein and Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol.27, 1998, pp. 171-195 58 next scene is in a hospital, and the body of Sakina is wheeled in on a stretcher. She has been raped. Her old father Sarajjudin follows the stretcher in a dazed state. The room is hot and humid, and the doctor points to the window and says “Khol Do” (open the window). As if in a response to the doctor’s words Sakina’s hands move towards the belt of her Salwar and fumbles to loosen it. On seeing the movement, old father Sarajjudin shouts, “My daughter is alive, My daughter is alive” oblivious to the horror of what had just happened – in the story only the doctor, who is detached from the situation, can see what is really happening. Das argues that for Sakina, “the normality of language has been destroyed, as she can hear words conveying only the other command”. While part of this can be explained through Michelle Ballaev’s idea52 that extreme trauma destabilises the relationship between the signified and the signifier, thus making quotidian functioning of language redundant, Das goes much further, in asserting that for Sakira this breakdown is permanent. For her words will never mean the same thing again. They will always get pulled towards the context of their use during her rape. Thus Das argues, though Sakina is still alive, her living is now only a living death. The loss of language makes her life a living death. Das then shifts her analysis to the father’s joyous shouts. She first celebrates Sarajjudin for being different to many other fathers who may have thought it better for their daughter to die than to live the living death – though the assumption that in some cultures families of raped women wishing for the victims to die, could be seriously contested as a cliché more found in popular culture than in reality. Das then shifts her analysis of the joyous cries of Saraijudin. Das suggests that in those cries he is calling for Sakina to find an existence in him; in his utterances. Sarajudin’s cries are not a cliché. According to Das, a cliché would have been the father uttering that it would be better for his daughter to die. But Sarajudin is not only stepping out of this cliché, but he is giving meaning to the movement of her hand – a sign of her life – and this overruns the other terrible meaning. He interprets the movement of Sakira’s hand only (and only) as a sign of her being alive. Das claims that in this fresh interpretation a new relationship is born between the father and daughter. It
52 op citus21 59 is a relationship in which the continuation of life (after pain) is rendered possible. Two points could be drawn from Das’s analysis. Firstly, that pain is not incommunicable; that it becomes communicable when the breakdown of language and its insufficiency are factored into the communication itself; what Das calls the grammar of pain. In Minto’s story, Sakina does not express her pain in language, but in the narration of the story. The redundancy of language depicts the extremity of the pain she suffers. The second point, which is perhaps more subtle, is that, it seems that Das is suggesting an affirmative answer to Wittgenstein’s question as to whether it is possible to feel pain of someone in the body of another, though in roundabout way. Stanley Cavell argues in a response to Das’s essay: 53
I take Wittgenstein’s fantasy in that passage as a working out of Descartes’s sense that my soul and my body, while necessarily distinct, are not merely contingently connected. I am necessarily the owner of my pain, yet the fact that it is always located in my body is not necessary (125).
Das does not clearly demonstrate how the pain of Sakira is being felt in the body or soul of Saraijudin. However, she does seem to be suggesting that once you step beyond the Descartian binary of body and soul, in the ethics of Saraijudin’s response to Sakira, his stepping out of clichés, his celebration of her life, the healing which the relationship entails, the acknowledgement of the one’s pain, the celebration of life and the transfer of one’s pain to another is possible. As Cavell notes:
This is what Wittgenstein wishes to show – that it is conceivable that I locate [pain] in another’s body. That this does not in fact, or literally, happen in our lives means that the fact of our separateness is something that I have to conceive, a task of imagination … (125)
The suggestion is that there is an inherent connection between humans, a shared human spirit that allows us to see each other’s pain, in spite of the limitation of language.
53 See Cavell, S. ‘Comments of Veena Das’s Essay “Language and Body: Transactions in the constructions of pain”’, Daedalus: Winter 1996; 125, 1 60
The other theorist who has perhaps the greatest contribution to this field of knowledge is Elaine Scarry54, whose ground breaking work, The Body in Pain, has become somewhat a classic on the subject. Scarry is a literary critic and most of her arguments are based on the reading of texts, both ancient and modern, and documents such as Amnesty International reports, affidavits of torture victims etc. Scarry’s arguments can be summed up into three very brief statements:
Pain (particularly extreme pain) shatters language Pain unmakes the world Pain remakes the world
Although the above three happen in a causal sequence, the sequence does not have to be in chronological order, according to Scarry. They can happen sequentially or may happen at the same time. They are more like concentric circles, with pain at the centre. Scarry does not restrict her conclusions to politically charged forms of pain. However most of her illustrations are drawn from situations such as war or torture, or other forms of political violence, and it is within these situations that her arguments make the most sense. Let me take the three phenomena above in the order they occur. Firstly, the destruction of language. For Scarry this is rooted in the fact that pain is the only human sensation that lacks an external object. Sight has an object, in that one sees something. Hearing has an object, in that one hears something. Similarly mental sensations such as love and grief have external objects of reference. One loves someone or something. One grieves the loss of someone for something. None of these sensations can exist in the absence of an external object. However, argues Scarry, pain always lacks an object. It is a sensation that exists within and entirely within one’s body (and mind); it is never of something. This according to her is what makes it inexpressible. It is what
54 See Scarry, E The Body in Pain; The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, 1985.
61 strips pain of a language, and hence it is how language is destroyed at the instance of pain. Scarry’s second point is that pain unmakes the world. It is with respect to this point that Scarry’s ideas become more contingent to manmade and politically-charged abject situations such as war and torture. The structure of war and torture are such that they are meant to go much further than invoking mere destruction. They, according to Scarry, reverse creation. This is best illustrated through methods used in torture. According to Scarry torture, wherever it is practiced, uses familiar and homely objects to cause excruciating pain. Bathtubs are used to submerge or threaten to submerge prisoners, dental equipment is used to administer unnecessary dental treatment. Scarry argues that the use of these objects is not accidental. They are used because they not only cause pain, but in their use what is familiar and lifeaffirming for the victim is turned against oneself. These lifeaffirming objects will no longer be just life affirming but will also be life destroying. The ‘bathtub’ is no longer an object used to take a bath, but it is an instrument for inducing pain and possible murder. The object that normally supports life has been turned into an object that destroys it – the “bathtub” is not a bathtub anymore; this is the unmaking of one’s world. It is not too dissimilar to the relationship that Sakira in Manto’s ‘Khol Do’ is likely to have with the innocent act of opening a window to let in fresh air. The objects and the words that represent them are displaced from their normal usage. One’s world is turned against one self. This is what Scarry calls the inversion of one’s world. However she goes on to argue that even though pain destroys language, it eventually (a causative rather than a chronological ‘eventual’) gets expressed. This, she argues, is achieved through the process of overcoming the absence of an object by adopting an object from outside the body. Thus, when someone says “I feel as if a dog is chewing my spine” to express excruciating pain the external object of the dog is adopted. Thus, according to Scarry, the awareness of excruciating pain and pain’s lack of objects, compels one to search for and adopt objects from outside oneself and in that process verbal and/or material artefacts are created. In this process of
62 creation she sees a making of the world. But she goes much further and argues that the making and unmaking of the world around pain is at the heart of (all) creativity itself. She writes, “the story of physical pain becomes as well a story of sentience…just as the story of expressing physical pain eventually opens into the wider frame of invention. The element “as if” of the person in pain (“It feels as if…”, “It is as though…”) will lead out into the array of counterfactual revisions entailed in making. (22) Scarry’s ideas have become canonised in the study of pain. A number of writers use them as if they were truisms. But, as stated earlier, in spite of the provocative nature of her claims it is hard to locate a significant body of debate around her arguments. Theorists tend to use her arguments, either taking them as truisms, or by being simply dismissive of them. I will discuss just two criticisms of Scarry here. Just a few months after The Body in Pain was published, it was reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Peter Singer.55 In the article Singer dismisses Scarry’s arguments as being too speculative, claiming not only that they are not based on historical research but that they are not based on logical reasoning. The point Singer is making is not totally incorrect, but it also seems that he is missing the most central point of Scarry’s argument that pain by its nature not only cannot be expressed in language but it is an experience that lies at the edge of human experience and sentience. It works in a region where the normal use of language and reasoning somewhat fail. Therefore, if one were to trace its expressions, one would have to do so in multiple indirect ways – such as Veena Das’s suggestion of a grammar of pain, that if a statement about pain is to be made then that statement should also include a statement that it is a statement about pain – the grammar of pain. Pain, particularly extreme forms of pain, exists in a region of human existence where normal rules of reasoning – evidence and verification – don’t work. But what Singer’s criticism does point out is the serious methodological difficulty that one is up against when discussing issues of pain. In a reply to Singer’s review, Paul Weis argues “ …[This book is] daring,
55 Singer, P., (Judge). Vol. 33, New York Review of Books, 1986. p. 27.
63 challenging, and will, I think, outlast our time. Again and again, I had to stop reading to reflect on what she said, to rethink issues on which I had worked on over the years…”. In fact, it is when read in this way, that Scarry’s arguments make the most sense – reflecting – her ideas appeal to both common sense and real life experience. I will demonstrate this in a moment. I reflect on Manto’s story ‘Khol Do’ to point out Scarry’s ideas will make sense in a reading of this story that Veena Das has put to a different use. But before doing so let me point to a more measured and perhaps useful criticism of Scarry from David Morris. Morris claims that most of Scarry’s claims make sense, but what doesn’t make sense is her generalising, the extending of her arguments to offer an explanation of how the whole world works. Morris writes; “…[Scarry’s ideas] developed with learning and argued with skill – require careful consideration, but what it does not require here is a full counter-theory concerning the development of human culture.” Scarry’s assertion about all human sentience, and her suggestion to the effect that pain is at the centre of all human creativity, is what Morris finds objectionable. Morris’s criticisms are valid, in that Scarry in her entire book, does not really do much to justify her overarching view of the world. However, this does not really impact on arguments in my essay, as I am not using Scarry to offer a view on how the world works, but rather only to point out how pain is communicated and how it finds a place in the world. Let me now return to Sadat Hassan Manto’s story ‘Khol Do’. Meditation on this story makes it possible to recognise the presence of Scarry’s idea of the shattering of language, and unmaking of the world. Firstly, I turn to Sakina’s silence when she is on a stretcher wheeled into a hospital room. Everyone thinks that she is dead because she doesn’t say anything and no part of her body moves. There is no expression; no moaning, no complaining, no crying or wailing – all speech is lost. It is reasonable to read the destruction of language into this silence. But something even more terrible is revealed when Sakina’s hands move, when she takes the doctor’s order to open the window as an order by her rapists. Das sees this as destruction of ordinary use of language – “a living death” (77), whereas Scarry would suggest that this is the unmaking of Sakina’s world. Just as a
64 bathtub has ceased to exist as an instrument of cleansing for the one who has been subject to certain forms of torture, the window as something that brings fresh air has ceased to exist for Sakira. The bathtub for the former exists only as an instrument of death; the window exists for Sakira only as the commands of her rapists and the pain of her rape. However, things begin to change after this. The creative remaking of the world that Scarry asserts is not present in this story. While something is being created and there is a remaking of Sakira’s world in the joyous shouts of Sarajoudin, this is not being born out of the creativity of Sakira but out of the ethics of Saraoujidin’s response. Thus, in spite of many similarities, here lies the difference between Scarry and Das. Scarry locates the problem of communication at the point of speech, whereas Das locates it at the point of listening. Scarry locates the solution purely in creativity of the speaker – the one who is in pain – whereas Das locates it in ethics – the ethics of the listener. For Scarry, voice is destroyed in the person who is in pain, and it is recovered in the same person – in creativity – in what she calls making. In Scarry’s analysis it seems to be that the listener remains passive. Das, on the other hand, not only places the responsibility of breaking the silence (of pain) on the listener, who has to find and then factor in the grammar of pain into the communication, but frames this not merely as an act of speaking and listening but an act of ethical responsibility. By framing pain’s calling for acknowledgment as a spiritual problem, Das makes the act of listening a moral obligation. When Das writes “the men and woman of India have always spoken of their pain” there is a tacit suggestion that it is up to the others to find the meaning of those expressions, by lending their ears. In spite of the analytic depth and penetrating nature of Scarry’s analysis, it is with Das that I choose to stay, because Das’s analysis provides, by implication, the means to recognise the pain of the homo sacer. By rendering listening to the one in pain an ethical responsibility, Das brings the homo sacer, the one who has been excluded from the juridico-political order back into an ethical relationship with the rest of society. The ethical responsibility to recognise the pain of the homo sacer brings the homo sacer back into a domain of justice. Thus, unlike Scarry, Das does not force a
65 closure on her arguments by offering a grand view of the world. However, by merely suggesting a beginning of a relationship with those in pain is the suggesting of a beginning of a possibility in that relationship, whereby, the pain of those living in the margins of the world can find habitation in the world, just as in Manto’s story, Sakina’s pain could find a habitation in her father and creates the beginning of a new relationship. In such a relationship a possibility exists in the aftermath of the terrible monstrosities of our times, even for the homo sacer. Let me make just one more point before bringing this section to a close. It is important to note here the power of stories such as Manto’s ‘Khol Do’ and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, do not only give voice to pain but demonstrates the power of fiction. Which, even though an artefact of language, is able to depict not only how language fails to express pain, but also depicts how it eventually gets expressed. The multi-layered nature of narratives within a novel which encapsulates the voices of those in pain and that of characters who are external observers such as that of the doctor in ‘Khol Do’ enables such an expression.. Similarly, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the scene of the slave girl – the narrator – sitting by her grandmother unable to tell the pain of her rape depicts the failure of language, while the voice of the older Harriet Jacob – the narrator – Linda Brendt – explains the silence and reveals the inner life of the young girl, the pain and the silence. Novels through the voices of character and the plot, access the interior lives of people, their relationships with each other and society, and break silences and reveal pain. David Morris makes this point emphatically in his essay, ‘About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community’. He argues the importance of plot in creating knowledge of suffering that may otherwise seem impossible. He states “writers can open up the interior or private life of a character in ways often difficult or impossible outside of texts, revealing a personal side of affliction that we rarely see…Literature, in short, holds a power to address, or even reverse, the inherent pressure within affliction toward isolation and silence.” Morris goes even further as he argues that literature has the power to expand the boundaries of moral communities. Moral communities, as defined by the
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American philosopher Tom Regan, are communities which are bound by a common sense of morality that is applied only to those within the community, while the same morality is denied to those outside it. Morris argues, pointing to a number of 19th century writers including Dickens, that although it is true that literature, especially the novel, can be seen to create moral communities in the order of imperialist systems of morality that exclude and hide the pain of some, it nonetheless also holds within it the power to break those boundaries, and make visible suffering in places where suffering has not been recognised. He supports his argument with an analysis of the transition that took place within the western canon between the Greek tragedy and the novel. The Greek tragedy was a form primarily sensitive to the pain of the aristocracy. Whereas the novel, in the tide of political changes sweeping the 19th century, almost solely preoccupied itself with highlighting the suffering of ordinary people, workers etc. When the novel shines a light on suffering, where suffering was not seen earlier, suffering is eventually seen. It seems to me that the fact that this is constantly happening, and literature is constantly pushing the boundaries of Raegan’s moral community, suggests that literature, especially the novel, has within it the power to constantly cross the boundaries of incommensurability
4. Depiction of pain and silence in Sri Lankan civil-war writing: Nihal Silva’s The Road from Elephant Pass and Basil Fernando’s, Just another Incident in July 1983.
In examining a common claim (analysed further in the next chapter) that pain cannot be adequately expressed in language, Slavo Zizek in the introduction to his work, Violence, suggests that pain (caused by violence) is perhaps best understood when it is looked at sideways. Zizek contests Theodore Adorno’s famous claim; “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. According to Zizek it is not writing poetry, but writing prose – accurate prose56 – that is difficult after Auschwitz. I would argue that it is
56 Does not include fiction, as is clear from examples taken by Zizek later in the chapter 67 poetry, music, and sometimes fiction that can portray pain in a more accurate manner. Pain is best expressed, according to Zizek, when it;
is not a description which locates its content in a historical space and time, but a description which creates, as the background of the phenomena it describes, an inexistent (virtual) space of its own, so that what appears in it is not an appearance sustained by the depth of reality behind it, but a decontextualised appearance, an appearance which fully coincides with the real being(5)
The thrust of Zizek’s argument is that art forms such as poetry and music have the ability to depict pain as an inner experience, where the emphasis lies not on the accurate physical descriptions of a place or a moment in history but on extracting accurately the form of inner subjective experience (of pain) that a moment in history creates. He demonstrates this by referring to the music of Arnold Shoenberg, which though composed before Auschwitz, Zizek suggests, accurately evokes the experience of the camp by evoking the effect of totalitarian terror on subjectivity.
It should be noted that Zizek does not explicitly discuss fictional prose. It is not clear from his writing whether he would consider fiction prose as being closer to poetry and music or to the prose of history and biography from which he draws most of his examples of prose. But it would be easy to argue (as I will demonstrate) that since the crucial difference here is the ability to evoke subjective experience most of the time, fiction can do what poetry and music do. The two works I want to discuss – one of them fiction and the other poetry – both cast such ‘sideways’ glances at the intense pain of individuals, which in the opinion of the authors, a meaningless civil war had bestowed upon the citizens of Sri Lanka. I will analyse the effect of the war on the individual as well as the silence that surrounds it using the theoretical frameworks developed by Elaine Scarry.57 These works not only depict pain and the silence that surrounds it, but also the source of this silence.
57 See Scarry, E The Body in Pain; The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, 1985 68
Nihal Silva’s novel, The Road from Elephant Pass, was published in 2003 by a Sri Lankan publisher. It was published at a time when a fragile ceasefire was in effect in the country and there was a degree of reflection in the community about what had transpired during the war, coupled with the hope that the war may have finally ended.58 The novel won a number of prestigious local awards, including the State Literary Award and the Grataen Prize for new English writing. The narrative starts with a female member of the guerrilla organization, The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Kamala Velauthan, surrendering to the Sri Lankan army in a village in the north of the country, claiming that she has vital information regarding the whereabouts of the leader of the LTTE, which she was willing to exchange in return for a safe passage out of the country and residence visa to settle in Canada. A male army captain by the name of Wasantha Ratnayaka was entrusted with the job of accepting Kamala’s surrender and accompanying her to the military headquarters in Colombo, where she would be presented to the commander of the army intelligence unit with whom Kamala would negotiate directly as per her request. However, soon after they set off, the convoy comes under attack and most members of the party are killed. Kamala and Wasantha survive, and Kamala convinces Wasantha that they should proceed to Colombo on their own, and convinces him that contacting the army anytime before reaching Colombo would prove fatal to her. She tells Wasantha that if he hands her over to anyone other than the commander of intelligence, he would not only end up getting her killed, he would also be responsible for fouling up the rare opportunity both of them had to end the war. They then decide to go to Colombo by themselves through the now abandoned Willpattu nature park. The major portion of the novel focuses on their journey through this now forgotten game park. The novel lovingly describes the park’s diverse fauna and flora, and memorable landscapes. But it is also replete with conversations about their personal lives, the war, and politics in general. Having to survive in the wild and having to move through
58 In early 2006 the ceasefire was abrogated and war broke out again. The country witnessed an intensity of fighting not experienced before, and in May 2009 the Sri Lankan government formally announced that it had ceased all combat operations, following the killing of almost the entire leadership of the LTTE. 69 hamlets and towns, all the while inventing ways to pass through rebel and military checkpoints without getting caught, draws them closer to each other. The gender difference plays a role in their relationship, but there is no explicit mention in the novel of a sexual or romantic association. During their journey Wasantha learns that Kamala and her brother joined the LTTE after her father – a gentle person with a keen interest in wild life – was killed by Singhalese mobs during the 1983 racial riots. Wasantha then asks her what led her to change her mind and make the decision to surrender. She tells him that it was because the LTTE had killed her brother. Her brother whom she describes as “just a child” got frightened during a battle with the army and had fled the frontline. As punishment, the LTTE had executed him. They did it to send a message to others who may also feel the temptation to flee under the threat of fire. He was only a frightened child, yet they killed him, she tells Wasantha, and according to her after the death of her brother her mother had turned into a living corpse; “She doesn’t do anything now, except to sit in a chair and stare into space.” Betraying the whereabouts of the LTTE leader and, getting him killed, would not only avenge the murder of her brother, but for Kamala it was also a way of bringing the war to an end, which in her opinion has gone completely off track and had lost sight of its original purpose. When the pair reach Colombo the narrative takes an unexpected turn. In the days and hours before going to meet the commander of military intelligence, Wasantha notices Kamala becoming restless and starts to feel that something is bothering her deeply, which Wasantha attributes to mere nervousness. However, while waiting outside the Commander’s office, Kamala drops a bombshell. She tells Wasantha that the whole thing is a ploy. The leader of the LTTE would not be in the place where she was going to say he would be. Instead it was an international human rights activist who would be in that place. The activist had been critical of the LTTE for its human rights violations, and in response the LTTE had invited the activist to come to a part of the country controlled by them to see for himself the real situation. The operation via Kamala would ensure that the LTTE would achieve two things in one go; kill the activist, and the shift the blame to the Sri Lankan
70 government, which in turn would turn the world against the government. An exasperated Wasantha asks Kamala whether she knew what the army would do to her when they find out that she had done this, “… they will keep you at the edge of death for weeks”. To which Kamala’s reply was “But I will eventually die, and that will be a release”. Wasantha asks her whether what she had told her about her brother was also not true, to which she replies “No”. Kamala tells him that all that was true. Since her brother was killed and her mother had become totally incapacitated, she had no reason to live anymore and that is why she had volunteered for this operation. In other words her volunteering was a way of committing suicide. This novel can be read at many levels. The issue of the female guerrilla fighter in the psyche of male writers has been discussed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak59 in her critique of Santosh Sivan’s film, The Terrorist60 and Viken Berberian’s novel, The Cyclist.61 In both texts the main character is a female suicide bomber who is pregnant. This leads Spivak to argue that in both of these, the female suicide bomber is gender marked only by the reproductive norm, and that they do not make a gendered statement. They are stripped of agency and have been co-opted into a nationalist struggle. In relation to this, Nihal Silva’s female guerrilla, in The Road to Elephant Pass is less stripped of agency. In fact it is the decisions that Kamala makes that set the direction of the narrative. It may seem that at several points Nihal Silva as a male author tries hard to avoid falling into gender bias, such as making them pass through rebel held areas where the safety of Wasantha depends on Kamala and then reversing this dependency when they pass through areas under government control. The representation of the minorities through a female character and the many aspects of the portrayal of a female guerrilla terrorist make the novel rich in possibilities with respect to feminist readings. However, this is not the what I want to focus on here. Rather, I want to focus on the part of the narrative that relates to the choice made by
59 Spivak, Gayatri Chravorty , Terror: a speech after 9-11, Boundary 2 31:2, 2004, p. 97 60 The Terrorist” Directed by Santosh Sivan, Moderne Gallerie Motion, Pictures, Chennai, India, 2000
61 Berberian, Viken The Cyclist Simon and Schuster, 2002 71
Kamala to volunteer for an operation where she offers herself to be sacrificed for the benefit of an organization that she hates. The seeming irrationality behind this decision is what I want to discuss. The reader might find Kamala’s claim that she offered to take part in the operation as way of committing suicide unconvincing. Firstly, a member of a guerrilla organization with ready access to firearms would have other, less painful, ways of killing herself. Secondly, why would she help the very organization that in her opinion had unjustly killed her brother? Even if she did choose a more painful path, it would have been more convincing if there was a reason such as an opportunity to enact revenge. Thus, the reason behind Kamala choosing to commit suicide in the manner she does remains somewhat unconvincing for the reader. In a different novel, one would have given allowance for the possibility of this being just the result of bad writing: a somewhat lazy attempt to close a gap in the narrative. However, in this otherwise very well thought out novel which goes to great lengths to realise accuracy and realism in describing landscapes, characters and even the politics behind the war, it cannot be dismissed thus. This prompts me to ask whether the author is deliberately leading the reader to conclude that the reasoning behind Kamala’s actions is in reality inaccessible, and should remain inaccessible to the reader. Is he depicting the way in which someone who has gone through the trauma of losing her father to political violence and then seeing her brother executed by the organisation that she thought would bring liberation to her people, would behave? Does the reading of this text through the theoretical framework laid out by Elaine Scarry reveal what she calls the ‘unmaking’ of Kamala’s world? As I have suggested Scarry’s argument62 can be summed up in three very basic statements: Pain shatters language. Pain unmakes the world. Pain remakes the world.The central thrust of Scarry’s argument 63 is that in addition to the unspeakability of pain, pain unmakes one’s world by turning it inside out. It is a situation where images and actions are taken out of their
62 See Scarry, E The Body in Pain; The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, 1985 63 Scarry’s arguments are presented in highly summarised form here. For a more comprehensive critical analysis, please See Chapter 2. 72 quotidian context and their role in life is inverted. Scarry illustrates this by using examples such as the practice of using bathtubs in methods of torture such as ‘water boarding’, where the usual life affirming role of the bathtub is reversed. Some of the other examples she uses are the ‘wall’: which in the home plays the role of protecting one from danger but in a torture chamber plays the role of the preventing one from fleeing danger. Another very powerful example she presents is the use of medical and dental implements during torture. Scarry argues that such inversions of the quotidian roles played by objects and images occurs widely in war and associated violent situations such as torture, and contribute to the unmaking of one’s world that these activities intend. While what primarily concerns Scarry is the inversion of roles and objects, it could otherwise be argued that the examples that she presents involve more than just a reversal of roles. They involve also a reversal of reasoning. The assertion that ‘the wall protects you from danger ‘ in other words ‘the wall lies between you and danger’ when inverted becomes ‘the wall prevents you from fleeing danger’ or the ‘wall instead of being between you and danger, is now preventing anything from coming in between you and danger, by preventing you from fleeing from that danger.’ Thus what Scarry argues as being the inversion of an object’s role in normal life is in fact also the inversion of the reasoning behind what the role of that object in normal should be. Therefore what may be happening here is not just an inversion of objects and images but also an inversion of reasoning. We can juxtapose Scarry’s examples with Nihal Silva’s depiction of Kamala’s actions that appear towards the end of the novel. After seeing her brother executed by the LTTE for fleeing the frontline, Kamala choses to kill herself by volunteering to take part in an operation that would see her killed in a painful way, and in doing so she also seems to be choosing to help the very organization that she hates so much. Is one seeing here a reversal of reasoning? For in a quotidian situation the kind of reasoning that one would have expected to see with respect to (a) Kamala killing herself, and (b) her reaction to the murder of her brother, would respectively be, to kill herself in the least painful way, and to avenge the murder of her brother. But what
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Kamala is doing is the reverse of both. It could be argued that this comes very close to the reversal of reasoning that one sees in the examples presented by Scarry. Further, the author does not give Kamala the opportunity to explain her action in a way that would seem reasonable to a reader of the novel, neither does the omniscient voice of the narrator try to explain Kamala’s actions. When the writer leads the reader to understand the action of a character as unreasonable while simultaneously not letting the character explain her action, then we need to acknowledge the possibility that the writer may in fact be demonstrating the character’s inability to speak. That, if there is reason behind the action of the character, it is silenced; it cannot be stated in language. Thus, we could argue that the depiction of Kamala’s actions typifies two of the three things that Scarry identifies; the shattering of language and the unmaking of the world.64 The second text is a poem by a Sri Lankan poet and human rights activist, Basil Fernando. ‘Yet another incident in July 1983’ . Basil Fernando went into exile in the late 1980s and still lives outside the country, but the following poem was published when he was still living in Sri Lanka and appeared in a number of local publications. It was republished later as part of an anthology in 2001. It also appears now at several sites in the World Wide Web. The poem refers to either a real or imagined incident that took place during the interracial riots of July 1983, where it is reported that approximately two thousand members of the minority Tamil community were killed largely by Singhalese mobs who allegedly had the backing of the government at the time.
Yet another incident in July 1983
Basil Fernando
Removed for copyright reasons. Please refer appropriate reference for full text of the poem.
64 I will return to the third item that Scarry attributes to pain later. 74
The shock value of the poem for many readers might come from the vivid depiction of the father with his shirt and hair already on fire dragging his children back into the burning car. Though shocking, one has to accept that such depictions have appeared in literature before. In ancient literature there are allusions to this in Tacitus’s Agricola. In Tacitus’s descriptions the practices of Britons during Roman invasions, was to kill their families rather than let them fall into Roman captivity. In more recent times, it makes a more poignant appearance in the portrayal of the complex character Sethe, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved65, who after escaping from slavery attempts to kill her children (and succeeds in killing one of them) when they are about to be reclaimed by their former owner. In Morrison’s novel, the character Sethe tries to explain the reasons for her actions to Paul D who finds it hard to understand. Now, if we were to examine this carefully, while emphasising the tragedy in it and while recognising that such acts are committed only when one is pushed to the very edge of human experience – at a point when not only the self but the world the self inhabits is being unmade – it has to be recognised that a reasoning does nevertheless exist behind such acts; a reasoning which, though disturbing in the extreme, may still seem comprehensible. There may be moments in history when parents might be led to think that it would be better to end the lives of their children rather than allow them to survive in a world that had become too violent and hostile. This is the crucial difference between the behaviour of the father in Basil Fernando’s ‘Just another incident in 1983’ and the character Kamala in Nihal Silva’s, The Road to Elephant Pass. But even though the reasoning behind the actions of the parents in Yet another incident in 1983, is not oblique as is the case with the character Kamala in The Road to Elephant Pass, it still presents an unmaking – a reversal of reason – in the sense not too dissimilar to that of Kamala in The Road to Elephant Pass. It could be argued that these moments lead parents to do the opposite of what a reasonable parent may be expected to do to their children in a quotidian setting, which would be to protect them. Instead they do the opposite; they kill them, along with themselves. The inversion of roles
65 See Morrison, Tony Beloved, Alfred Knopf, 1987 75 presents a parallel to some of the examples that Scarry presents as ‘unmaking of the world’. In literature, the depiction of the reversal of reason where the parents are forced to reverse their quotidian roles highlights the intense pain the person is subject to. However, in spite of its shock effect, the real horror in Basil Fernando’s poem comes in the lines that appear just before the above incident takes. In these lines a powerful depiction is being made up of what Scarry refers to as the shattering of language – the silencing of pain. Consider the following lines:
“…around the fire they chattered of some new adventure. A few scattered. What the two inside felt or thought was no matter. Peace loving people were hurrying towards homes as in a procession”.
While a family including two children, still alive, is being burned inside a car, a perfectly mundane scene surrounds it; people chattering. There is a total obliviousness to what was going on inside the car, and to the terrible crime that had just been committed.
Now consider the moment just before the father drags the children back into the car.
“…Then, bending, [he] took his two children. Not even looking around, as if executing a calculated decision, he resolutely re-entered the car. Once inside, he closed the door himself.”
There was no scream. There was no plea to save him, his wife or his children. It would be impossible for us to know what went on through the mind of a person in such an abject state. While it’s a question worth contemplating, it could also be suggested that what had just happened lies beyond the possibility of human
76 expression. No language, no scream, or any other form of expression could convey the man’s pain – his horror – the shattering of language, and the abject unmaking of the world – his and the others.
Finally, it should be noted that in neither of these texts can one read the remaking of the world in creativity – the third outcome of pain, according to Scarry – within the text. It can be seen only in the extra-diegetic reality around the text; in other words the creation of the text itself. Even if these texts fail to articulate the pain of its victims in the words of it characters, they depict the existence of a pain, which makes speech impossible. This is the sideways view that Zizek speaks of. This is the often truest and the most honest expression of pain that one can manage to do when writing of pain. Works of fiction and poetry, though they cannot make their characters to break out of their pain, can point to its existence. The silence highlights the intensity of the pain.
4.1 Trauma of the homo sacer and justice in Basil Fernando’s ‘Yet another incident in July 1983’ and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, and Michellle De Kretser’s Questions of Travel
A different reading of Basil Fernanado’s, ‘Yet another incident in July 1983’66 is possible too. Firstly, the incident described in the poem occurs in an Agambenian space, an anomic zone in his words. It a zone where all protections have been stripped from an innocent family, including children four to five years old. Their lives have been placed at the mercy of the mob. The emergence of this space was sanctioned by the authority of the state. This is established through the irony found in the first and the last stanzas, that there was an expectation in the country that events such as this should not be seen as extraordinary, that no special significance should be attached to them, that they should be seen as part of the quotidian experience of the life in the city.
66 Full text of the poem is given in p.273 77
One of the first things that one notices in the poem is the absence of all law enforcement. There is no answer to the question that would come to anyone’s mind “why did not the police do anything?” If not for a biographical detail of the poet67 it would have been possible to dismiss this as not being of central importance. Fernando is a lawyer – a human rights lawyer – who, among other things, worked on setting up judicial mechanisms to address human rights violations in a number of places, including Cambodia, and has written a chapter in a book on the role of police in enforcing human rights law in Asia.68. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assume that his depiction of the law as absent is intentional. It is something that should be noted if the poem is to be understood correctly. It seems to me that the absence of the law is taken for granted in the poem. Particularly, we notice that the frustration and anger of the poet is not vented on the absent law enforcers but on the passers by, the ordinary people walking past, either not noticing, or choosing not to notice the frightening crime being committed. The poet’s ultimate outrage is that even these people have abdicated their responsibility, but at the least, a response from them to the pain of those in the car is still seen as a possibility. If there was anyone to whom the family could look for help, it is from those walking past. The response of the law is not seen as a possibility at all. It has ceased to exist. This is an anomic zone. A poem as complex as this could be read at several levels: at one level it could be read as crying out in rage against a state which has fallen apart and no longer protects its citizens, particularly the most vulnerable; the children, but I suggest that it goes much further. Having depicted characters who are abandoned by the state, the law and its institutions, it is calling for a sensibility – a form of thinking and feeling – that works outside the ambit of these, but also works outside the ambit of a collective consciousness. It is actually looking for something that would work at the level of mere human existence, at the level of mere human-to-human contact, which requires
67 See Curriculum Vitae of Basil Fernando at http://www.basilfernando.net/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=321&cid=1 downloaded 10th Nov 2013 68 See Fernando, Basil, ‘Police and Human Rights In Asia’ In Human Rights and The Police in Transition Countries ed. Danish Centre for Human Rights, Kluwer Law International, 2003 78 neither institutional nor social constructs for it to function. In other words, something that works at the level of bare life. Hence, it is an exercise in witnessing/depicting something in an Agambenian space, a state of exception; the ultimate anomic zone. I call it ultimate, because it is something that has not just been (legally) excluded from the legal order, but also from the collective moral sensibility of the moment. The poem draws the reader into the internal subjective experiences of the victims. It demands that the reader see the people marching past, ignoring them, from inside the car, rather than from outside it. It demands that the reader enter the subjective experiences of the parents soon after their children had been forcibly removed by the mob. And once again, through the irony of the phrase “what the two inside, felt or thought did not matter”, the poem invites the reader to do exactly that. What the reader is called to do is to enter this terrifying reality of not just being burnt alive, but of witnessing that the world that had turned against them. It is the trauma and injustice of this state of things – nearly incomprehensible to the mind – which leads the parents depicted in the poem to do what they do next, to drag their children back in the car to burn alongside them. It is a ‘calculated decision’ according to the poem. The extremity of the physical action of the father gives us only a glimpse into his unspeakably terrifying inner experience. It is a glimpse into that inner state – the formless virtual inner space of terror that Zizek alludes to. It is something that goes far beyond empathy, because empathy is imagining the experience of someone else as that of your own. But that is not possible in this case of experiences that are so extreme. What the poem does is to take the reader to the edge – the edge of experience, language and life – and enables her to look at it, and be terrified. You see one irreducible experience of pain where the corporeal physical and mental pain of death and loneliness, combine with the socio-psychological terror of isolation and abandonment. The victim becomes fully human and the reader is able to develop an intimacy with the terrifying reality of the victim. The second work I want to discuss is the novel Anil’s Ghost, by the Sri Lankan born Canadian writer, Michael Ondaatje. This is Ondaatje’s second
79 work of fiction based in Sri Lanka. The other one is Running in the Family, which is a semi-autobiographical work based on his extended family in Sri Lanka. In addition to these two, it is in his poetry that he has often returned to the theme of Sri Lanka. Two collections, The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting, thematise Sri Lanka. The latter touches on themes relating to the civil war and was published only a year before Anil’s Ghost. To understand Ondaatje, one needs to take note of the broader mosaic of his works, which have traversed a wide range of global themes ranging from the underground Jazz culture of New Orleans, in Coming Through Slaughter, to the building of Toronto during the early 19th century, in In the Skin of the Lion, to the global and transcultural approach to war and its effects on people in The English Patient, to nuclear family and life in the farming communities of Northern California, in Divisadero¸ and the transcultural interactions among teenagers in The Cat’s Table. Though investigating the global- cosmopolitan voice of Ondaatje is outside the scope of this dissertation, it is important to take note of this in order to understand the perspective he takes on the civil war in Anil’s Ghost, which essentially is the view of the outsider. Thus, his depiction of suffering, I argue, represents an external rather than an internal gaze. It is different from Fernando’s. I would argue that Anil’s Ghost fails to sufficiently represent the trauma of such events. The trauma of the homo sacer is seen, but its depth is not fully rendered. This, coupled with the moral-relativism of the novel, makes its depiction of trauma problematic, and obstructs the development of a perspective on justice. The novel starts with Dr Anil Tisera, a 33 year old Sri Lankan-born American forensic anthropologist, being sent to contemporary Sri Lanka by the United Nations to conduct an investigation into the mass civilian killings happening as part of the country’s multiple civil wars. The Sri Lankan government reluctantly allows the investigation to take place. On arrival Anil is teamed up with a 49-year-old Sri Lankan archaeologist, Sarath. The pair discover a relatively new skeleton in a sixth-century archaeological excavation site, and on finding the skeleton Anil is keen to start an investigation into it, as she believes it is a good opportunity to prove government involvement in the killings, as only government officials had
80 access to the particular excavation site. However, right from the start, Sarath dissuades her, as he thinks that Anil’s investigations are likely to lead to more problems than solutions. The other characters in the novel are Gamini, Sarath’s brother, one of the few surgeons left in Sri Lanka and whose wife had killed herself, unable to bear the violence of the war. Gamini finds an escape, working long hours treating the victims of the war. Another character is Paripalna, a blind epigraphist, who is also a mentor to Sarath. The only other significant character is Ananda, a ceremonial statue painter, who is usually called upon to perform the ritual of painting the eye of newly erected Buddha statues. In spite of the differences between them, Anil and Sarath continue with the investigation. They name the unidentified skeleton the ‘Sailor’ and set about trying to establish the Sailor’s identity and the date of his abduction. The narrative takes a twist. Just before Anil is about to present the results, Sailor goes missing. Anil, who is suspicious of Sarath’s political motives, suspects his involvement in the skeleton’s disappearance. She rushes to Colombo to present her findings to a group of senior military and police officials and during the presentation is surprised to find Sarath in the audience. He confronts her with hostility and casts doubt over the conclusions of her investigation, particularly on account of the fact that she was unable to produce Sailor. But through the presentation the naive Anil is unaware that her own life is in danger and that she may not be able to get out of the building alive. But Sarath knows that the only way to save her life now would be to prove her wrong, which was what he was trying to do by discrediting her. In the end Anil leaves the building alive, but is stopped and searched several times on her way out. The novel alludes to the fact that Anil manages to leave the country safely. But a few days later Gamini finds his brother Sarath’s body among a number of bodies brought to the hospital. There are marks of severe torture on his face. The suggestion is that he has been killed by the government for helping Anil’s investigation. There are two recurrent themes running through the novel. The first is that there is a clash between the way the UN and its employee, Anil, see the truth and the way truth ought to be seen in Sri Lanka. This is depicted mainly
81 through the debates between Anil and Sarath as they go about investigating the death of Sailor. Though the discussions happen mainly between Anil and Sarath, others wade into it as well. Each character has his or her view on the violence going on around them, but there is one common theme running through all of them. It is that there is something wrong with the way Anil is going about things. Derrickson69 argues that this is the central theme of the novel. In fact, the theme of moral ambiguity enters into the novel fairly early on when after arriving in the country Anil notes:
here in Sri Lanka it was a more complicated world morally. The streets were still streets, the citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed. Yet the the darkest of Greek tragedies were innocent compared to what is happening here (11)
However, in spite of the recurring presence of this theme, the moral ambiguity of the novel is never convincingly investigated. It is expressed largely through the subjective opinion of its characters, and is often confused with other issues. Although the novel makes accurate descriptions of the complexity of the actual material situation on the ground, problems arise when logical leaps are made to arrive at broader philosophical conclusions based on these situations.
As for example, when Sarath tells Anil
American movies, English books – remember how they all end?” Gamini asked that night. “The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombassa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look through at the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He is going home. So the war, to all its purposes is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit. (285-286)
The suggestion is that international investigators who come to countries like Sri Lanka to investigate extrajudicial killings often do not have to face the
69 Derrickson, Teresa, "Will the 'un-truth' Set You Free? A Critical Look at Global Human Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost.", Literature Interpretation Theory 2, 2004, pp. 131- 152 82 consequences of their work, while those who are left behind, particularly those who help them are left on their own to face the wrath of the perpetrators. They often pay with their lives. This is a poignant truth. However, it is a criticism of the way the UN and other international agencies carry out investigations, rather than a statement on the moral ambiguity behind the act being investigated. Might it not also ironically be describing Ondaatje’s position as a novelist? Similarly at another instance Sarath tells Anil. “Everyone’s scared Anil. It’s a national disease “(53), The statement is reiterated by the omniscient voice of the narrator as follows,
In a fearful nation, public sorrow was stamped by the climate of uncertainty. If a father protested a son’s death, it was feared another family member would be killed...This was the scarring psychosis in the country (56).
It is a fact that many killings went unreported for fear of further repercussions. However this statement supports the assertion that the level of oppression has become so brutal that uncovering the truth has become nearly impossible. It does not support or question the moral ambiguity of the crimes. The arguments between the characters go on. At another point in the novel Palipana says: The government was not the only side doing the killing. You had, and still have, three camps of enemies – one on the north, two in the south. There is no hope of affixing blame. “ The point is further emphasised by other characters. Gamini warms Anil “No body’s perfect. No body’s right.” (132). And Palipana confirms “...[even in ancient times] there was nothing to believe in with certainty. They still did not know what the truth was. We have never had the truth. Not even with your work on bones...Most of the times in our world, truth is just opinion.” (102). Once again while all these various statements about the reality are accurate, it is not possible to see how they lead to the conclusions that the various characters and the author of the novel himself draw: “No body is perfect. No body’s right” or “Most of the times in our world, truth is just opinion.” The fact that there are three killing machines in the country does not make everyone in Sri Lanka, particularly the millions of civilians, who were not part of the three organisations, guilty,
83 implicated or compliant. Neither does “truth is just an opinion” follow from the fact that uncovering the truth has been made hard. These comments in the mouths of a range of characters would not be so problematic if they were simply depicted as the subjective opinions of the characters. They go much further. Through the narrative a dichotomy develops between Anil and the other three characters. Anil believes in objectivity and moral absolutism. She is a positivist in the philosophical sense. She believes that the truth is uncoverable and that once it is uncovered adjudication is possible and that blame could be affixed. Sarath, Gamini and Palipana, on the other hand, believe not only that uncovering the truth would be too difficult and too dangerous, but that in the end, there may not be anything there to discover at all; as truth itself does not really exist. Sarath is proven right albeit tragically and posthumously as he is brutally murdered, and Anil gets away safe. This set of events demonstrates the naivety of Anil. The novel suggests that the naivety of youthful idealism, often valourised and admired in western culture, may seem unwise and lethal in other places. It also demonstrates the lethal naivety and insensitivity with which the UN and other international organisations carry out their business in countries like Sri Lanka. In as far this goes, Derrickson’s argument that the novel is a critique of international organisations and their philosophical underpinning is accurate. However, the suggestion that truth itself is somehow relative, or that it is different in a place like Sri Lanka, I suggest, is highly problematic. The second theme of the novel is a certain unknowability or opaqueness with respect to the violence in Sri Lanka that remains incomprehensible to the omniscient narrator. Derrickson argues that this is in fact the main point of the novel, that it not only critiques the way international law is administered by the UN, but it demonstrates that the true nature of such conflicts will always be elusive to observers from the outside. This, she argues, is the reason why the novel does not go into the reasons or the politics behind the conflict. To do so, according to her, would be to be less than honest. This is a complex argument that needs much more space than what is available within this dissertation to explore. However, I would illustrate one point, namely that demonstrating honesty by appealing to
84 unknowability can often end up doing the opposite of what is intended, and in fact calls into question the ethics of actually writing on a subject that one does not fully comprehend. It is claimed in the novel that there were three entities in the country involved in the killings; one in the North and two in the South. However, there is no further elaboration on what these conflicts are or the politics behind them. The conflict referred to as ‘one in the North’ is in fact an ethnic conflict. It started in the aftermath of the intercommunal riots of 1983 (the topic of Fernando’s poem), following perceived injustices done to minority Tamils, who are largely Hindu, Muslim and Christian, with very few Buddhists. One of the alleged grievances of the Tamils was the forced demographic reengineering, including government sponsored Sinhalese colonisation of Tamil areas, with one key allegation being the erection of huge Buddha statues in predominantly Hindu areas.70 With this background in mind, regardless of whether this allegation is true or not, the resolution depicted in the novel through the erection and painting of the eye of a Buddha statue, can be seen at least by some as a politically charged and partisan conclusion rather than offering redemption for all. The above leads to the most important point that one could make about this novel, which is also the most relevant one with respect to this dissertation, which is that in demonstrating unknowability the novel has taken an external almost cantorish description of violence, and in doing so has lost its moral voice. As the narrative progresses around the investigation around Sailor’s identity, the characters constantly witness the outcome of the war. Most of what they are witnessing are the remains of extremely gruesome killings of civilians, including women and children. For example:
On a night drive back to Colombo, for example, Anil and Sarath come upon a man spread-eagled on the quiet highway, taking a snooze in front of his truck, as was common practice in those parts (109). Miles down the road and yet increasingly suspicious of the scene they had just passed, Anil and Sarath return to the truck only to discover that the ‘‘sleeping’’ driver is very much awake, his palms hammered to the pavement with the spikes of two
70 See https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/tamils-trincomalee-and-the-real- scope-for-peace/
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large bridge nails—a live crucifixion in the middle of a desolate stretch of road (111)
Something even more gruesome is what Ananda’s wife discovers on an ordinary looking street one morning;
She is about ten yards from the bridge when she sees the heads of the two students on stakes, on either side of the bridge, facing each other. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old. ...she doesn’t know or care. She sees two more heads on the far side of the bridge and can tell even from here that she recognizes one of them’’ (174_75).
In the world depicted the law has ceased to exist. Everyone is outside the law. One sees the homo sacer everywhere. But what is missing is the voice of the victim. Instead, throughout the novel, the reader is presented with a phantasmagoria of gruesome images and abstract arguments. It does not give the reader access to the interior states of victims, the mental terror, the pain of isolation. The terrifying subjective experience of being killed, which Fernando gives access to, is unavailable to the reader of Anil’s Ghost. Thus, the very thing that enables one to recognise the trauma of the homo sacer and give it justice, is mute in the narrative of Anil’s Ghost. But the problems go further. There is something disturbing in the description of the bodies of victims. What is the significance of ‘cross-eagle’ of the crucified body? And what is the significance of the heads of the boys facing each other. What function do these images perform? Unlike the burning shirt of the father in the car in Fernando’s poem, these images do not help provide a view into the interior state of the victim at the moment of killing. So what is their significance? The only answer could be that they depict the absurdity of the situation, the pointlessness of it all. They are there to support the other claim in the novel “War is the cause of War.” While it is true that in long drawn out wars, the violence often becomes self perpetuating and disconnected from the reasons that led to it in the first place, but the killing of a child is never just an absurdity. It is a grave injustice. In Ondaatje’s passive description of body of the killed boys, there is no voice for justice; there is no outrage, just tragedy. The boy could well have died in an accident. The muted voice of justice dilutes the depiction of trauma. Here lies the difference between
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Ondaatje and Fernando. In a short poem Fernando travels much further than Ondaatje does in a novel. Yet, by any measure Anil’s Ghost is a remarkable work, which depicts a brutal war, the commonplaceness of violence and a helpless civilian population that has no hope and no option but to find a way of living under the terrible violence of war. The novel finds the homo sacer everywhere. In fact, everyone had been reduced to that status. There is no law. Only law enforcers exist, promoting the interests of those whom they serve. Everyone else is stripped of protection by law. The novel depicts the campus nomus in all its features. The failure of Anil’s mission dismisses even international law as a useful mechanism in the context of Sri Lanka. In the final pages of the book, redemption is seen through the return of Ananda, the painter of the eye of the Buddha, getting back to his work. As he is perched high above the world on a piece of scaffolding, his young assistant holds up the mirror that will be used to give the Buddha his sight. As the artist begins his work, the novel quietly concludes, ‘‘He felt the boy’s concerned hand on his. The sweet touch from the world.” (307). Teresa Derrickson sees this as the symbol of redemption not lying in the legal institutions of the world but on the material world – the human touch and in the re-establishing of a connection with the world. This can also be rephrased in an Agambenian sense, as something that works at the level of bare life, the human touch. Having dismissed international law – the last resort as far as law goes – the novel finds recourse in something that works outside the boundaries of the juridico- institutional. On the other hand, the novel views suffering only from the outside. Suffering is seen only through the gruesome shapes and exteriors of the bodies of those killed but there is no access to the inner subjective experiences of the victims at the moment of violence. While Ondaatje allows the reader the intellectual space to grasp the injustice done to the victim, in objective terms, it requires the reader to still depend on an existing moral and politico-juridical sensibility to do so. The silence on the subject’s inner experience means that it does not push against these sensibilities, by evoking the victim as fully human. Thus the gravity of the trauma and the injustice
87 done is never fully realised. Thus, Ondaatje fails to use the best device available to the artist to humanise the homo sacer. In conclusion, though the novel recognises the homo sacer, the homo sacer remains unredeemed. The third and final text I want to discuss, albeit only briefly, is the Sri Lankan born Australian writer Michelle De Kretser’s Questions of Travel. The novel thematises travel. It seeks to depict different reasons and motives for travel in the modern world and attempts to disturb cultural assumptions that privilege travel and cosmopolitanism. The narrative revolves around two main characters Ravi and Laura whose destinies merge when they start to work at a travel company in Sydney. Laura is an Australian brought up by an unloving father, and has returned to Sydney after travelling the world aimlessly. Ravi is born in Sri Lanka to a middle class Sinhalese Family and has an unremarkable early life. However he marries a fiery civil activist, with whom he as a son, and they become victims of the civil-war. In a horrific act of violence, his wife and son are killed. Ravi arrives in Australia and seeks asylum. It is important to note that the novel was published near the end of my research. Therefore it was not possible to give it the analytical attention that such a complex novel demands. Thus I will restrict my analysis only to a few brief observations. The civil war in Sri Lanka is not the theme of this novel. It enters the novel only as a subtheme, to depict a particular mode of travel that is distinct to Laura’s. Ravi’s travel is driven by necessity and not choice. It is escape from violence rather than one driven by wanderlust. However, the novel does not fall into the trap of moral relativism and does not shy away from engaging with the morality of the violence that Ravi had been exposed to. It also does not depict violence from the exterior as Ondaatje does, but does the exact reverse. The trauma of war is explored through the subjective experience of the novel’s characters, particularly Ravi, and how it shapes his relationship with the world, which culminates in his counter-intuitive (and irrational, in terms of Scarry) decision to reject the safety of Australia in order to return to Sri Lanka. However on the other hand, as Randy Boyangoda, who reviewed the novel for the New York Times points out, De Kretser’s characters are
88 somewhat sluggish and are disengaged with the world. They are different to the opinionated flair of the characters of Anil’s Ghost. Even Ravi’s suffering is the result of his wife’s, and not his, actions. It seems the characters are intentionally depicted this way and it is hard to see why, because this reduces the potential for empathy. As Boyangoda points out, it is hard to care about characters who do not care about themselves or others. Thus, I argue, the depth of their traumatic experience eludes the reader, even when the depiction of subjective trauma is accurate. In my novel I try to marginally push these boundaries. The characters are neither sluggish nor disengaged. They deeply care and are keenly engaged with what is going on around them, and in fact this constant drive to engage is what increases their trauma. Which, I believe, will enable the reader to have a better appreciation of the (unjust) effects of war on the individual.
5. Conclusion In many contemporary civil wars such as that in Sri Lanka violence rapidly grows in complexity. Multiple warring groups come into existence and frequently change alignments. Internecine battles, foreign involvement and changing geo-political developments, mean that on-going drivers of violence get quickly detached from the original causes of the conflict and it becomes impossible to demark perpetrators from victims along neatly defined lines of demography, such as ethnicity or class. However, even amidst these constantly changing configurations, one factor remains constant; it is the progressive militarisation of society and the consequential disempowerment of civilians. As such conflicts evolve, the interests of military groups get privileged over that of civilians, who in time get stripped of any form of protection, as power gets concentrated in the hands of armed groups; state and non-state. The lives of the unarmed are placed at the mercy of the armed. Therefore, in these circumstances, the most meaningful default line between perpetrators and victims would be the one between those who bear arms and those who do not.
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Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the homo sacer provides a useful intellectual framework with which to theorise the vulnerable state of unarmed civilians, forced to live constantly exposed to armed groups acting with impunity. Though the idea of the homo sacer was applied primarily by Agamben to refer to those excluded from the juridico-political protection of the state, I have demonstrated that this is an unnecessary logical restriction which has come into being due to the Euro-centric lineage of Agamben’s thinking rather than because of an ontological necessity The idea of the homo sacer can easily be extended to situations where non-state armed groups exercise control over large populations and have potential to provide protection and withdraw it at their will, just as a state can. Thus, Agamban’s definition of the homo sacer provides a useful theoretical framework to study the predicament of unarmed civilians caught in such armed conflicts. Trauma theorist Felman, argues that addressing the trauma of (civil) war is not possible without addressing issues of justice relating to the events that lead to the trauma. Thus addressing the trauma of civil wars, such as that in Sri Lanka, should include addressing injustices done to civilians - the homo sacer - which leaves one with the paradoxical task of having to give justice to those who have been stripped of justice. I argue that the way out of this paradox also rests in the relationship between trauma and justice, but in the reverse direction to that defined by Felman. Recognising and giving voice to the trauma of the homo sacer, invoking the empathy of the reader to that trauma, restores justice to the homo sacer, a task often attempted by literature. However this is problematised by the case put forward by a number of theorists who have argued that language is inherently insufficient to express pain and trauma, problematizing the notion of giving justice by giving voice to trauma through literature which is essentially an artefact of language. However, as it has been shown, in spite of this limitation, literary artefacts such as the novel and poetry point to the existence of trauma and go beyond. They enable the reader to imagine the inner-subjective experience of the sufferer at the moment of violence, even when the recreation of experience is not complete. They connect the reader to the terrifying inner experience of
90 being subject to violence, recognising the injustice being committed and restoring justice, even to the homo sacer.
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