ABSTRACT ‘LABORS OF MEMORY’ AND ‘GUERILLA-TYPES OF ATTRITION’ IN POST-WAR SRI LANKAN MEMORY CULTURE by Dinidu Priyanimal Karunanayake Speaking of Sri Lanka’s civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Ananda Abeysekara observes an authorization of a power dynamic between Buddhism, the state head, and the nation. The official end of the war on May 19, 2009 has reaffirmed this religio- national power grid. Correspondingly, the religious fervor has become an indispensable ingredient in post-war memory culture. This thesis concentrates on state-sanctioned memory work and the ways in which it is resisted by artists who draw from memories of trauma. Using Sarath Weerasekara’s Gamani (2011), this thesis explores the “uses and abuses” of memory (Jelin) in the state–sponsored post–war cinema. The thesis also examines how this hegemonic memory narrative is deconstructed, through a close reading of Sanjeewa Pushpakumara’s Flying Fish (2011), and engages with the work of artists Thamotharapillai Sanaathanan and Bandu Manamperi. It thus shows how memories are merged with a quest for justice. ‘LABORS OF MEMORY’ AND ‘GUERILLA-TYPES OF ATTRITION’ IN POST-WAR SRI LANKAN MEMORY CULTURE A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English by Karunanayake Pathirannehelage Dinidu Priyanimal Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2014 Advisor________________________ Professor Nalin Jayasena Reader_________________________ Professor Anita Mannur Reader_________________________ Professor Yu-Fang Cho Contents Chapter One: Sri Lankan War and Mnemonic Premise ------------------------------------------ 1 Chapter Two: Militant Buddhism and Post-War Sri Lankan Cinematic Memory Work—A Case-study of Sarath Weerasekara’s Gamani ----------------- 26 Chapter Three: Post-war Cinema of the Oppressed —Flying Fish and “Guerilla Types of Attrition” -------------------------------------------------- 45 Chapter Four: Imaging Memories—Post-war Art and Performances of Resistance --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 58 Chapter Five: The Question of Justice —Wither Post-war Aesthetics of Resistance? ------------------------------------------------------ 75 ii List of Figures Image 1: War Remnants flyer -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8 Image 2: The former LTTE cemetery in Kopai ---------------------------------------------------- 13 Image 3: What has survived the demolition -------------------------------------------------------- 13 iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Nalin Jayasena for his mentorship and for guiding me thorough the process of drafting this thesis, Professor Anita Mannur and Professor Yu-Fang Cho for their valuable feedback and support, Sammani Perera for being my indomitable spirit, Daniel Ringold for the brotherhood, all the artists who contributed with their time, insights, and good will, and the Department of English, Miami University for empowering me to become who I am today. May 19, 2014 iv Chapter One Sri Lankan War and the Mnemonic Premise We have something called the Terrorism Prevention Act. It is forbidden to commemorate the deaths of certain people, and to light up lamps in their memory according to our Constitution. Therefore, it is forbidden to organize any remembrance events on the 18 th and the 19 th . —Military spokesman Ruwan Wanigasuriya speaking to the media on May 11, 2014 1 Fear of the archive At an election meeting organized by the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) in Jaffna, Sri Lanka on May 31, 1981, the police on duty were attacked by an unidentified gang.2 Two policemen died while one was injured. The incident that happened in Jaffna, the cultural hub of the Sri Lankan Tamil community, was forthwith interpreted by the state in ethnic terms as an attack on the Sinhalese state by the Tamil minority. Within a half an hour, truckloads of policemen arrived and unleashed a wave of “state terrorism” that continued until June 4. They went on rampage, burning Tamil-owned business places and property, the house of the Member of Parliament for Jaffna, and the office and the press of the Tamil newspaper Ealanadu 3 (Human Rights Watch 87, Knuth 84). Statues of Tamil cultural and religious figures were defaced and demolished (Peris qtd. in Knuth 84). Five bookshops were destroyed. 4 Among the places that were burnt down was a notable landscape, the Jaffna Library. The arson resulted in the destruction of 95,000-97,000 books including numerous culturally important, historical documents and ancient manuscripts which were irreplaceable (Human Rights Watch 87, Burning Memories ). The burning of the library presaged an outbreak of violence between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities which later evolved into an ethnicity-based civil war between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the 5 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). 1 The speech is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4KcAbmJkZs . 2 I refer to Santasilan Kadirgamar’s article, “May 31-June 4 1981: Five Days of State Terror in Jaffna.” 3 The first ever regional daily newspaper in Sri Lanka as Burning Memories documentary mentions. 4 Kadirgamar writes that three of the books stored belonged to Poobalasingam, a member of the Communist Party committed to a united Lanka. His book stores were “a rallying point for those committed to a left agenda, providing the best of reading material, books, journals, periodicals and newspapers from the Sinhalese south and India, especially Tamil Nadu” (“May 31-June 4 1981: Five Days of State Terror in Jaffna”). 5 Qadri Ismail observes that the Sinhalese state-sponsored pogroms against Tamils in 1956 and 1983 are utilized by Tamil nationalism as the main buttress to justify its separatism (220). As he further notes, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) emerged in the wake of the pogrom of 1983, challenging both Sinhala 1 Archival locations have always been targets of state-sponsored destruction throughout history, in particular, under oppressive political establishments. In the seventh century BC, the first Emperor of China, Shin Huang Ti, decreed that all books prior to his regime be burnt in order to prevent dissenting forces from referring to the former emperors and thereby question his rule (Borges 166). Notwithstanding the three-thousand-year-long chronological history, Emperor Huang Ti ordered that Chinese history begin with him.6 In another example, the Khmer Rouge assumed power in Cambodia on April 17, 1975 with the declaration of the “zero year” by way of constructing a new form of memory. They “scattered libraries, burned books, closed schools, and murdered school teachers” (Kiernan qtd. in Schlund -Vials 2). Other notable examples of biblioclasm include the burning of books by Nazis on the streets of Bebelplatz in 1933, by Communists in Russia, and by the clerical regime in post- revolutionary Iran. In light of these harrowing instances of burning, a burning question arises—what is achieved out of erasing archives? What can we extrapolate from the violence levied against archives? Archives store knowledge and history. Anjali Arondekar maintains that the archive has become a “register of epistemic arrangements…[and] debates about the production and institutionalization of knowledge’ (qtd. in de Mel 48). Its intricate relationship with power is articulated by Jacques Derrida in “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” For him, Arkhe denotes two principles: the commencement and the commandment . The first principle pertains to nature or history where things commence in a physical, historical, or ontological sense, while the latter concerns a legal context “where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised…from which order is given-nomological principle” (Derrida 9). Tracing its etymology within the Greek political setting, Derrida says ‘archive’ derives its meaning from arkheion meaning the residence of the superior magistrates or archons who commanded (9). As guardians of official documents which state the law, the archons were assigned the responsibility to ensure the safety of what was deposited with them, and were accorded the hermeneutic right and competence, hence the power to interpret the archives (Derrida 10). Along the lines of Arondekar’s definition and Derrida’s account, nationalism and Tamil nationalism of the “bourgeois, ‘non-violent’, collaborationist” Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) (Ismail 225). According to the University of Maryland archive, TULF was created as a political platform to represent the interests of the Tamil people. During its formative years, a group of young, radical members left the Party to form a militant group called “Tamil New Tigers,” which became the LTTE in 1976 under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran. 6 Jorge Luis Borges observes another major reason for the Emperor’s decree, and say that he had been incensed by his mother’s promiscuous behavior and it is likely that he “tried to abolish the entire past in order to abolish [this] one single memory” (167). 2 archives originate nomological, epistemological and political power. The Jaffna library, in these terms, becomes a central power icon for Sri Lankan Tamils. Karthikesu Sivathamby in the documentary Burning Memories calls the library “an intellectual heritage,” while the former Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva similarly refers to it as “undoubtedly the richest literary heritage of the people