To Speak of Silence Postcoloniality and the narration of pain in context of the civil war in Sri Lanka Luther Uthayakumaran A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by Research School of English University of New South Wales March 2003 Abstract The aim of this thesis is to point to the existence of silences with regard to the civil war in Sri Lanka. The thesis consists of a fictional component and an exegesis that investigates several issues pertaining to the fiction. The civil war in Sri Lanka is driven on either side by the opposing ideological positions of Tamil and Singhalese nationalisms, and it is chronicled from these two perspectives. The two nationalist narratives position the victims of war in a martyr - loser binary based on whether the victim is on the same side or on the opposite side to that of the narrator and his/her nationalism. However, in the context of a war fought amidst a hybrid and complex postcolonial society such as that of Sri Lanka, the narratives of all people(s) do not at all times align with the binary positions determined by these two nationalisms. The stories the nationalisms exclude leave an area of silence. If the pain of war (as the result of violence) is to be narrated representatively, then it needs a form of narration that enables the telling of stories from multiple perspectives. Postcolonial literary theory, through its criticisms of grand narratives, has cleared a space for such a polyphonic narrative to emerge. It is now possible to move away from the total, and towards the fragment. Thus the stories of the fragment - the individual, the family, the local community etc - can now be told at the same level of legitimacy as that of the histories of totalising entities such as political movements, aspiring nations, and governments. Page 1 of2 The theoretical part of the thesis is an exegesis relating to the fictional part. Based on postcolonial literary theory, it situates the fiction and explores pertinent issues with respect to representation, nationalism, imperial and postcolonial narratives, narration of history, post-traumatic silence, and exile and immigrant writing. The fictional part of the thesis is based on my memories of living in Sri Lanka during the late 1980s. This is made up of the stories (fictional) of individuals, journal entries, letters etc, and depicts a writing of history as that history unfolds. The voices that this fiction depicts cannot usually be heard from within nationalist narratives, thus they point to occluded silences. The stories are imbued with gaps in knowledge, uncertainties, and missing links in threads of events. Thee fictional section as a whole does not follow a linear trajectory, but takes its overall form only in the coming together of its several component stories. Page 2 of2 Acknowledgements No work, creative or critical, emerges entirely from the mind of a single individual. It is not possible for me to even count the number of people who would have contributed in some form towards the creation of this work. I am indebted to my supervisors Dr Anne Brewster and Dr Sue Kossow for all their guidance, help and support. Especially to Anne, for patiently going through the numerous drafts, and for being always available and ready to help in spite of her very busy schedule. I am grateful for her confidence in me, and her ceaseless encouragement. Thanks to Dr Paul Dawson and Dr Suzanne Eggins for reading and commenting on the drafts at different stages. I am grateful for the feedback I received from the two writing groups: Margaret Vermeesh, Charles Bridges-Webb, and Rowena Finnane, of the non-fiction group; and Rebccea Jee, Shoko Oono, Melanie Symons, and Fiana Stewart of the fiction group: not only for their feedback, but also for their company and the several stimulating conversations during which a number of ideas took shape. Thanks to Suji, for her patience and support, especially during the stressful movements, when minds froze and computers crashed. Page 3 of 3 Finally, a very big thank you to Satara, who had to sacrifice much needed attention during her first few months on earth. I hope this would not instil in her active mind too much an antipathy towards literary pursuits. I gratefully remember my parents and others who shared with me the pain of war and never saw it end. If not for my memories of them, this project would never have started. Page 4 of 4 Table of Contents Abstract 1 Acknowledgements 3 Fiction 7 Part 1 8 1975 -The Church Where God Walked 9 1976 - The Durga Puja 12 1986 - St Francis Xavier College 13 1987 - The Return 27 Mallika Stores 30 Part 2 38 Silent not by Choice 39 After the Red Glow 42 Nights of Fate 52 Love 56 The Atheist and the Priest 67 The Departure 78 Destiny 85 Epilogue 87 Page 5 of 5 Exegesis 90 I .Introduction 91 1.1 Introduction to the Creative Thesis 93 2. The relevance of Postcoloniality (Postcolonial Theory) 94 2.1 Historical Background 94 2.2 The De-Secularising of the Sri Lankan State and the Tamil Nationalist Response 96 2.3 The Relevance of Postcolonial Theory 100 3. The civil war in Sri Lanka; representations in literature 102 3 .1 The persisting Problem 102 3.2 The relevance of Stories 107 3.3 Individuation - problematising fixed identities in literary representations of Sri Lanka 114 4. Narration of History 118 4.1 Spatial History 118 4.2 Linear and Non-Linear Narratives of History in Literature 120 5. Narration of Pain as a Struggle against Suffering 128 6. Metropolitan, Third World, Immigrant or Exile 132 7. Conclusion 143 8. References 144 Page 6 of 149 Fiction Page 7 of7 Part - 1 Page 8 of 8 1975-The Church Where God Walked 1975 was the year Maya joined my school, and I invited her to play with us - Me, Dheep, and Sidharth. My name is Rowan. Maya turned out to be the only girl in the group. After school we walked home together and played for another two hours, after which Maya's mother would drive her home, Dheep and Sidharth would walk home, and I would go indoors to bathe and have dinner with my parents. On Fridays one of our parents would drive us to the fort to play. One day my mother read me a poem about a merman who fell in love with a human woman. But the woman wanted to go to church first, and her prayers took so long that her lover had to return to sea without her. From that day, every time we went to the fort church, I would run out before mass ended and stand on the rocks at the shore to see mermaids and merman arrive to pick up their lovers. The Old Portuguese fort stood at the edge of town. The fort protruded into the sea, and a narrow road squeezed between the ocean and the fort's ten-foot thick ramparts serpentined around it. Many 100 years ago it guarded the entrance to the bay. Now we get to it by driving past the tum to the causeway. The surface of the rampart, swept by three hundred years of sea-wind, was covered with overgrown grass and shrubs. There Page 9 of9 were two cannons on either side of its entrance, facing the sea-gate into the bay. There were even two unused cannon balls by the side of one of them. No one had touched them for two hundred years, so neither did we. There were a number of buildings inside the fort, including an unused prison. Among them was an old church, where mass was said once a month. It was in that church that Dheep claimed God walked every night. He was so tall that his head touched the roof. The next night before Poya 1, we decided to go there at midnight to see God. It was that night of the month when our parents danced all night at the Officers' Mess. We slipped out, only the three of us, since Maya couldn't get out. The moonlight cast a blue shroud over the rampart and the sea around it. We entered the church through the door opening into the altar on the other side of the keeper's house. The door was never locked, since in my part of the world no thief ever dared to steal from a church. We dropped to the floor and crawled on our bellies to keep out of the gaze of the sacrament. Wrapped in the scent of the burning wax and the sea, we lay under the altar-tables, and waited for God. The day after Poya, I made sure that I stood next to Maya during morning prayers. While the prefects tried hard to sound enthusiastic repeating the same prayer yet another day, I whispered into her ears. "I saw God last night". 1 Full Moon day, holiday in Sri Lanka Page 10 of 10 "Which God?" "God. I mean God, father of Jesus" "At the church in the fort?" The headmaster looked in our direction "Yes, shhhhhhh" "Who was so tall, that his head touched the roof?" "Yes ... but how did you know?" She giggled. "That's not the father of Jesus you stupid. That's Neptune, god of the sea." Dheep turned back to say something. The headmaster's eyes stared straight at us. "Oh God, please ... sorry ... er ... Neptune, please save us." The headmaster looked away.