Channel-4′s Sri Lanka war-crimes video

One of the women victims, stripped naked, hands tied behind back, and shot dead, as seen in the video footage that has recently reached Channel-4 has been identified as 27-year-old Shoba, with nom de plume Isaippiriya, who worked as media specialist with the LTTE, according to the TamilNet Vanni correspondent who recently reached a free country in the West. “I am able to learn through those who have been at Mu’l'livaaykkaal in the final days of war, that Shoba remained unarmed and did not take part in combat,” the Vanni correspondent told TamilNet, adding that Shoba lost her 4-month-old baby girl, named Akal, in the last stage of the war. (Read the rest of the story here)

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I have been disoriented ever since I watched the video.

We were children in the 1980s. We grew up watching IPKF rape our Tamil women in Jaffna, bomb whole villages. We learnt our first lesson about India, we learnt (as girls do), to shiver at the sight of men in army uniform. We are in our 20s now, blessed with women’s bodies that know what rape means. We’ve watched a genocide, we’ve sisters who’ve withstood it. We are still shocked by what state terrorism can achieve and get away with. We have lost all faith in the international community. We may not have all/any of the answers, but we are angry, we are aggrieved, and that is the first place to start.

Opinion piece in Mercury, South African daily (October 6, 2010)

Corrective history and collective hatred

The roots of xenophobia in the Indian subcontinent are not difficult to trace: the ancient Sanskrit law-giving text Manusmriti as well as the epic Mahabharata, labelled foreigners, strangers, aliens, and non-Aryans as Mlecchas, meaning barbarians. They were described as cave-dwellers and people of crooked faces; predictably, they were condemned to be outcasts and slaves.

The dictionary definition of xenophobia might point towards ‘an intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries,’ but in the hands of Hitler’s ideological descendants, it also involves the cunning depiction of a section that is culturally/ethnically/religiously/linguistically different from one’s own as ‘foreigners’ in order to fuel hatred and build a systematic hate campaign. When such an in-group usurps the power of the state to push its agenda, the out-group faces the risk of becoming the voiceless victims of a genocide.

The horrors of xenophobia, like the story of its cross-cousin caste discrimination, has a long history in South Asia.

A pathological aversion towards the Indian Tamil plantation workers in Southern Sri Lanka, made the Sinhalese-Buddhist state disown them overnight and close to a million people became stateless non-citizens. Several of them who had never seen their country of origin were shipped back to India. The hatred grew unhindered in that island nation, with the state flaunting an openly an anti-Tamil character, robbing the language its official status and making Tamil people second-class citizens.

The oppression of the Tamils in North-East Sri Lanka gave rise to militancy and violent resistance movements like the LTTE, but nothing could contain the juggernaut of state-sponsored terrorism that was trained to look at Tamils as unwelcome foreigners. Former Army Commander Sarath Fonseka, who under President Mahinda Rajapakse led the genocide of Eelam Tamils said in an interview with Canada’s National Post said, “I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese.” Xenophobic hatred ensured that in a couple of months, by May 2009, the Fonseka-led Sinhalese armed forces had brazenly killed a few hundred thousand Tamil civilians using every weapon―from cluster bombs to chemical bombs―at their disposal.

In a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-religious nation like India, hatred leads to hallucination, and the minorities are conveniently re-imagined as aliens/foreigners/outsiders so that it becomes easier to rob them of their rights.

As I write this article, my nation stands divided over the verdict in the Ayodhya case. We are burdened with a judiciary that seeks to appease the Hindu majority; a judiciary that ignores the solid existence of a masjid that was used as a place for worship by the Muslims for over 450 years; a judiciary that does not decide to be shocked over the brazen, daylight demolition of the masjid on 6 December 1992 by fanatic Hindu mobs; a judiciary that instead decides to gift two-thirds of the mosque’s land to the fundamentalist Hindu groups based on the mere ‘belief’ that it was the birthplace of an epic/mythic hero, Ram. This happens because the nation prefers to willfully forget the fact that Muslims are also sons-of-the-soil, that they are as Indian as any of us. When the Indian imagination is indoctrinated to look at its own citizens as the Other, there can be no greater danger and defeat to our idea of nationhood.

In Today’s iDiva, Times of India (interview-profile by Lakshmi Krupa)

Click on the picture for a larger version..

And here’s the text:

SUBALTERN SPEAK

City-based poet, writer and translator Meena Kandasamy lends her voice for the historically oppressed

By Lakshmi Krupa

In urban India, where caste, seemingly, does not interfere with day-to-day activities, many take the life opportunities they are offered for granted, even as caste cripples the lives and careers of a vast majority. It is this realisation that, in a broad sense, led 26-year-old city-based Meena Kandasamy to examine caste from close quarters and lend her voice for the sake of the oppressed. “I come from a very mixed background–almost four different backward castes including a Dalit,: she says, at the beginning of our discussion that lasts a good half hour, even as she traces her own life experiences and brush with political awakening.”My grandparents and my parents had an inter-caste marriage adding eclecticism to my identity,” Meena explains.

From 1997, around the time of Ambedkar’s centennial celebrations, when his thoughts  and writings gained momentum again, Meena’s interest in the subject grew deeper. “The Dalit Panthers were also on the rise when my understanding of Dalit issues was increasing and soon after finishing school, I started edited a bimonthly magazine, The Dalit, that was being brought out by the Tamil Nadu-based Dalit Media Network,” she says. Meena has also translated the works of Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (Liberation Panthers Party) leader, Thol.Thirumavalavan, including his speeches and books. “I have noticed that the market sells only Dalit first-person accounts on oppression and poetry and there really isn’t much in English that talks about their take on politics and what the thinking Dalit wants, and so I decided to translate Thol’s works,” she adds.

Born to academicians whose “careers staggered because of caste” Meena decided to focus on writing poetry and published her first collection, Touch, in August 2006 and worked for the cause of the Tamils in Sri Lanka soon after. “I grew up in Chepauk and as a child of the 80s, the Lankan Tamil issue was something I had heard about a lot and was familiar with almost everything that was happening,” she says. In 2007, she wrote a blog post about the death of Tamilselvan adn was then invited by TamilNet, “a newswire service that was independently reporting the war from Lanka” to wrier. Many people from war-torn areas in Sri Lanka would talk about what was really happening on the ground over Skype. I would receive these conversations (in Tamil) from Norway and spend hours translating them to English,” she adds.

Caste is not only self-defeating, Meena observes, but also reflects directly on the control a society exercises over a women’s sexuality. “If the system does not allow a woman to marry a man because he is from another caste, like honour killings for instance, is it not a direct oppression of her sexuality?” she asks. Caste identity, she says, is a double-edged sword in the sense that while it allows her to speak on certain issues boldly as she herself a part of the community, it also shuts the doors in many other areas. “I cannot escape that identity, it is who I am,” she says with a smile and continues, “But sometimes, even in my artistic work, critics look for political meanings while I yearn for a critical acknowledgement for exactly what it stands!”

So is politics on the cards for this youngster? “Never! Now I have the freedom to say what I want without sugar-coating it,” Meena says with a laugh. “But what I would like to see is an intense politicisation of our people; for them to be aware and make demands from governments. When people lack basic sanitation facilities what good will a television set do?” she asks, before signing off.

The Language Wars: On NDTV’s We The People

I participated in last week’s We The People hosted by Barkha Dutt on NDTV, where in the midst of some Hindi-language fanatics (Alok Rai, Ashok Chakradhar), some well-meaning people (Atul Kulkarni, Abhijit Bhattacharya), some confused identities (Sir Mark Tully, Arundhati Nag), I got the opportunity to share about compulsory imposition of Hindi, what it means to lose out on learning one’s mother-tongue, the linguistic roots of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, India’s silence over the genocide of Tamils, and why English is important for Dalits. (Hey, that’s all that I said, but you really have to watch the video to get a fair idea of how things went).

ps: Barkha is so unassuming and spontaneous and friendly. And she puts you at ease in such a brilliant manner, I am sure she can squeeze words out of stone if she just tried. : )

Post-war, post-genocide poetry: Revisiting the Tamil Eelam tragedy

After the teaching semester came to an end this May, as usual I had this list of huge things I planned to do. Now university resumes in mid-July and I have to welcome a new batch of students and I look back at the vacation, and I feel, well, I did the stuff that had to be done. (Even if it was not part of the plan)

So, what did I do this summer? Well, I managed to translate this moving collection of poems written by Cheran Rudhramoorthy, V.I.S.Jayapalan, Latha and Ravikumar about the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka’s NorthEast last year. The poems emit bitterness and tragedy, even as they speak a language of hope and resistance and faith and pride. Some of them are extremely intense, most of them bleed.

Cheran and Jayapalan are well-known poets from Tamil Eelam and have been anthologized (along with my hero-of-sorts Puthuvai Rathinadurai) in Wilting Laughter: Three Tamil Poets. While I have translated Cheran, Jayapalan and Ravikumar (with generous inputs and help from Sascha Ebeling) for this as-yet-untitled forthcoming book, Latha’s poems have been translated by my dear friend Ravi Shanker.

Darker than the poems, and much more haunting in its directness is the extensive 4000-word introduction by writer Ravikumar (the editor-publisher of this collection) of this who captures the myriad facets of the genocide and its aftermath. He makes use of a wide range of sources: letters by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary Executions, report of the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), news-stories, eye-witness accounts in exposing the anti-Tamil, xenophobic and ruthless nature of the Sri Lankan state. He also writes painstakingly of how India betrayed the Tamil people and how it failed to protect them. Because I had to pause to cry, I found his prose deadly and damning.

Lest we forget the horrors of the genocide, this book was brought out in Tamil (Engaludaya kaalathildhan oozhi nigazhndhadhu – எங்களுடைய காலத்தில்தான் ஊழி நிகழ்ந்தது, published by Ravikumar’s publishing house Manarkeni) in May 2010 to mark the first anniversary of Eelam War IV that left nearly half a million Tamils dead.

Watch this space for more details on the English translation, its publication and so on. If you are highly curious, please drop me a line.

Two exciting lit/film events over the weekend

Sorry for this very late, Friday night notice.

1. Lit event. Thanks to Ajayan Bala’s insistence/ persistence, I will be speaking about contemporary Indian English fiction (as we say in Tamil, தற்கால இந்திய ஆங்கில நாவல்கள் மற்றும் அவற்றின் கதையாடல்கள்). This is guest-lecture will be sometime between 4pm to 7pm, June 12. It is taking place alongside  a discussion about the little-magazines scene here, organized by Sorkappal, a website for Tamil literary criticism. Venue: Discovery Book Palace, KK Nagar, Chennai. Other authors who’ll be giving talks on the little-mag scene are: Sri Nesan, Selva Puviyarasan, Veli Rangarajan, Latha Ramakrishnan, Yaazhan Athi, Thakkai V. Babu, Sa. Devadas, Yuma Vasugi, and Manonmani. More details here.

After Chandra Thangaraj’s book launch in January, this is the second time I rubbing shoulders with Tamil literary circles. Feeling a little nervous inside, and I m just saying a silent prayer that all goes well.

2. Documentary Film Screening.

Mullaitivu Saga (46 mins), directed by S. Someetharan (whose previous documentary Burning Memories about the burning of the Jaffna Library garnered critical attention). Sunday, 13 June, 6pm, Alliance Francaise Auditorium.

Film synopsis: A battered face believes that Kannaki, legendary heroine of the ancient Tamil literary work Silapathikaram; will one day come, fight for justice. This is recounted through a last Koothu played in the historic land before the war in Srilanka. ‘Mullaitivu Saga’ an episode of planned massacre of the suppressed people while most of the international human rights machinery remained a silent witness.

Mullaitivu Saga (46 mins), Sunday, 13 June, 6pm, Alliance Francaise Auditorium.

Film synopsis: A battered face believes that Kannaki, legendary heroine of the ancient Tamil literary work Silapathikaram; will one day come, fight for justice. This is recounted through a last Koothu played in the historic land before the war in Srilanka. ‘Mullaitivu Saga’ an episode of planned massacre of the suppressed people while most of the international human rights machinery remained a silent witness.

See you there folks. ; )

Poetry as an enemy of the oppressive state

This 10-minute video is a part of a hour-long discussion on how poets are regarded by totalitarian regimes. Sohail Najm of Iran and Milos Djurdjevic of Croatia, Khet Mar from Burma and I participated in this discussion that took place on September 11, 2009 at Pittsburgh. We were there as poets from the IWP to take part in the City of Asylum Jazz Poetry Concert.

In this video I speak about Tamil poetry, poetry as resistance, Kasi Anandan, Tamil Tigers, suicide bombers, Eelam, language, oppressive states, exile and whatever else 3 minutes can hold..   : )

On a related note, here is an article in Sampsonia Way Magazine by Desiree Cooper about the collaboration between the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and the City of Asylum Pittsburgh. Check it out..

Book Review: Sam’s Story by Elmo Jayawardene

(First published in The New Indian Express, 02 August 2009.)

Sam is poor, Sinhalese, and a servant in the Master’s River House. His only best friend is the owners’ dog Brutus. Sam is someone who can never figure out what a problem is, someone who doesn’t know why people cry. He has never learnt anything, not even how to write his name. He is a village idiot who doesn’t know what breasts are, but then, surprisingly, he knows about the Tamil militants.

Employing the first person narrative throughout the text, Sam’s Story succeeds in its attempt to imitate the raw, sparse prose style of Hemingway — the stark simplicity blends with the irreverence and dumbness of the protagonist, and the sudden shifts of action make for an aesthetic reading experience. But the story-telling embeds a clear-cut political agenda and is nowhere as remarkable as the superficially successful prose-style.

Sam’s Story, first published in 2001, painstakingly avoids even a single oblique reference to Tamil suffering on the island. Perhaps, it is left for us to infer that just as the stupid Sam is incapable of looking at reality, even to the minimum extent of noticing that Tamils are being discriminated against, people too refuse to accept that linguistic and racial chauvinism have wrought a climate of hatred on the island.

Most of the novel is a successful study in hate: the narrator prefixes everything about the Tamil language, people or culture with the word “stupid” and goes little beyond depicting Tamil people as those “who threw bombs and killed our soldiers and tried to divide our country”.

After more than 100 pages of a monotonous rant, we are privy to the picture on the other side, of how the Sri Lankan military is also a convoluted place to be. Perhaps, this is one way of striking a balance and attempting neutrality, although the damage is already done; no amount of salvaging can help the text.

The depiction of the brutalities of army life begin when Sam talks of his brother Jaya who’s killed-in-action, and his brother Madiya who deserts the armed forces. From this point forward, the book changes vastly in tone and treatment. Madiya, in his brief stopover at his home (after his desertion, and before going into hiding) explains the poverty draft and the meaninglessness of the war.

Against this backdrop, Jayawardene explores how poor people, bereft of all opportunities, send their children to war; and how they make do without food and medicine whereas a rich man’s dog gets immediate access to the best doctors and a stream of visitors inquiring about its health. He writes of this divided world where the political ‘punishment’ for a Sinhalase man campaigning for the Other Party involves being transferred to teach at a faraway Tamil school.

Sam’s lives his life in a climate of mutual hatred, and he instinctively distrusts the Tamil servants at River House. While Sam tolerates the housekeeper Janet, he resents the cook Leandro, who, with his talk of Eelam, divides the world into easy binaries — the people who are willing to kill (The Army) and the people who were willing to die (The Tigers).

Sam’s suspicion of Tamils extends to everybody: he thinks Velu, a servant in a nearby bungalow is a spy; and he doesn’t appreciate that Master’s son has found himself a Tamil girlfriend. The fatal climax, replete with a truck-bomb driving into a national bank, throws them all apart, and widens the rift to such an extent that any coming together seems fraught with impossibility.

Review of V.V.Ganeshananthan’s LOVE MARRIAGE

(Exclusive to my blog, this hasn’t been published elsewhere)

DANCING ON LAND-MINES

Love Marriage
By V.V.Ganeshananthan
Publisher: Phoenix
Price: Rs 350
Pages: 310

Set in a land where death is alive and has renewed lifetimes, Love Marriage, is a work of fiction that deals with the ethnic strife in Sri Lanka. By tackling the complex issues of violence, politics and identity in the war-ravaged island, Love Marriage, with its deceptive title, joins the prestigious league of Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens (Shyam Selvadurai), Anil’s Ghost (Michael Ondaatje), and Bodies in Motion (Mary Anne Mohanraj).

Using several dozen short chapters to embody the scattered narratives, the author succeeds in creating a split-screen effect through which we watch the protagonist Yalini caught in the crossfire between tradition and modernity. Born to Jaffna Tamil immigrants in the US, she enters the world during the gruesome 1983 Black July riots. As the state-sponsored Sinhalese mobs massacre lakhs of Tamils in the Sri Lankan capital, the separatist, secessionist movement in the island embarks on a path of no-return. After locating Yalini’s birth in such troubled times, V.V.Ganeshananthan traces the Tamil struggle through her story, and the stories of her Sri Lankan ancestors.

Interwoven into this saga, are the many marriages that make up their family tree, and the many single women who never attain the privilege of entering into such arrangements of convenience: the burnt and disfigured grand-aunt Thevayani, the jilted Mayuri, and the schizophrenic Uma. Faced with such a plethora of possibilities, Yalini strives hard to figure out what could work for her. The source of these stories/ scandals is her mother’s brother, Uncle Kumaran, a terminally-ill Tamil Tiger smuggled into Toronto for treatment. The genesis and the growth of Eelam liberation struggle are recorded through his credible/ incredible confessions that traverse continents. One can see through the gossamer veils of fiction that LTTE Chief Pirabakaran is depicted in this novel as Nadarajan and the London-based rebels’ ideologue Anton Balasingam has been conveniently transformed into Victor Rajadurai.

In order to keep the plot moving forward, Yalini makes futile attempts to stop Kumaran’s daughter Janani from marrying Suthan, a young man who works for the Tamil Tigers in Canada. Janani, however, believes that her marriage to Suthan is the only manner in which she can continue to contribute to the movement to which her parents dedicated themselves. The novel ends with Kumaran’s funeral and Janani’s marriage.

This novel’s Tamilness is its strength, but the novelist goes overboard with her enthusiasm and provides ethnic-lit description of culture and (marriage/death) ceremonies making us wonder where the author ends and the anthropologist takes over. This weakness gives rise to the digressions on Proper and Improper marriages, and the cataloging of the whole spectrum of marriages that lie between Arranged Marriage and Love Marriage. Why delve so deep into man-woman relationships that are relentlessly marriage-bound, in a novel that tries to capture the pain of exile and the importance of political engagement? Is the only connective thread, that both a love marriage and a liberation struggle emphasize the right to make choices, sufficient to hold it all together?

This fine first novel discusses an exhaustive array of cultural and political issues—even as the novelist chronicles the Tamil peoples’ suffering and struggle, she also puts forth a powerful indictment of genocidal state terrorism  (“a government that gets away with everything because it is a government”) through an evocative description of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library, and the discovery of the Chemmani mass graves.

Within the framework of fiction, V.V.Ganeshananthan documents every major massacre that took place in the island’s north. Diaspora memory, like its imagination, is burdened with responsibility. Here, despondency is self-destructive. Here, hope has to outweigh the 14.4 million kilograms of military grade explosives that have been air-dropped into the Tamil homeland. Here, dreams have to outlast death. Love Marriage gracefully captures this unique situation of the Tamil Diaspora whose last refuge lies in the land of recollection.

Rajapaksa-inspires India?

Sorry for this late-night, incoherent post, I had to get it off my chest. Many of the mainstream media reports on Lalgarh (with pictures if you please) use the same terminology that Rajapakse used when he started his genocidal war on the Tamils (“flushing out the militants”, “clearing operation”, “liberated zones”, “deployments of companies” (not the ones that sell stuff, but the ones which send your souls to hell), “security forces-militants face off”, and those many requests by the Army to the people to refuse to be allowed to use as “human shields(!)”, the promise of minimum damage, the wiping-out, the calls to lay down arms, the setting up of base camps).. Either it is my memory at this late hour, or are they really mouthing Sri Lanka. Doesn’t all this sound like a rerecording of the Fonseka-Rajapaksa statements? I am scared for the adivasi people and their homelands.

To get a clearer picture/history of the problem, read this fact-finding report by JNU students. I really believe that this is a classic case of “Then they came for me”..

Only the future ought to tell us who will be spared and who will be silenced. But, right now, looking at what’s happening, it does not look as though even the silent ones will be spared.

Some poetry news in an otherwise impossible world

What’s happening in the Vanni is becoming more atrocious by the day: we earlier mourned for the hundreds dead each day, now it is into the thousands. Reading any news simply sends me spiralling into depression. Wanted to sort of take stock of what is going on with my life. Blog posts here shall become fewer each progressing day, and here’s why

1. Come Oct ’09 I will be finishing the third year in my Ph.D. I can’t do it any longer than that, and I already feel that three oh-so-precious years of my life have gone into something that I will not remember with much fondness later in life (If you cannot be happy about somethign when you are old, you better don’t do it: my motto so far). So, since the beginning of this year, I have been working damn hard at finishing off my degree and dissertation. Attended two workshops on ELT, presented papers at two national conferences, sent a paper for publication. Spent most of April preparing a 6-page, 250+-questions questionnaire for the Engineering students in the city. Have been getting it filled up FRANTICALLY. And students are a bit angry too, having to answer so many questions… That, I can understand. I plan to take off in May-June and sit and write my dissertation… And once this Ph.D. is done, I am thinking of giving up this job (my contract stipulates that I work till 2012, and that is dreary)…

2. Talking of job, things here are as messed up as they can be. Some inefficient people run the goddamn show and so I get the salary for March only on April 20. And this is a Government educational institution. A university in fact. (And did I forget to mention to that inefficient could also mean male-chauvinist). More on this later, and when I quit this job. 

3. Since most of this sounds like bad news, let me continue on that vein. My publisher’s decided not to go ahead with the anthology of urban poetry by Indian women (Sheher), and has asked me to look out for other publications. The recession’s hit him, he says. Now, if you have good suggestions about whom I can approach, please tell me. It should be a lovely book going by the quality of poems that have gone into it. Hope it gets a publisher!

4. My poem REVERENCE: NUISANCE has appeared in 3quarksdaily, a blog that is read by the likes of Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. I nearly fainted from the surprise, and thanks to Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta for pointing it out to me in the first place. Go, read the poem on 3QD. It is one of my earliest poems, so please read with the eyes of a seventeen year old.

5. If I have a crush on any one of my poems, it’s this one. And it’s got me some good news too. MULLIGATAWNY DREAMS has been anthologized in the National Book Trust anthology Both Sides of the Sky. Edited by Eunice de Souza, this anthology has been released fairly recently. I haven’t yet seen the book/cover anywhere on the web, and if I receive it sometime soon, I will upload the covers. I am thrilled, because I am really the last person who believes that what I write will finds its way into state-sponsored anthologies… Just guess life is full of surprises. I am also smiling to myself all the time, thinking of the fact that I am in an anthology of Post-independence English poetry. That sounds like a great category, except that I am not entirely comfortable with a word like independence. It has eluded a great many of us, I think. 

6. Back to some non-poetry news. My article has been quoted extensively in Green Left Weekly’s take on the genocide of Tamils in the Vanni.  

Which takes us back to square one right. I am not a believer, but right now  I pray every minute. To some one, somewhere. I reall want this massacre to stop. The civilian death toll since Jan 2009 could have easily crossed the 5000-mark. How many more Tamils should die before the world decides to do something?

Zone of death and despair

Safety zone in Sri Lanka: Story published in The New Sunday Express

Colombo calls it a no-fire zone, but it could also be called a no-food zone, a no-care zone, even a no-safety zone, if the story of Prasad Siva­tharsany is anything to go by. Early last month, the pregnant 24-year-old was injured in army shelling. Twelve days later, on March 14, she gave birth to a baby girl at the zone’s only hospital, a makeshift affair. Staff noticed a piece of shrapnel in the baby’s thigh. So even before her first feeding, the child underwent surgery.
By some accounts, mother and child were lucky. Two days earlier, doctors found that the feet of a six-month-old foetus of another pregnant woman admitted with shell-blast injuries had been severed by shrapnel. Mother and foetus died. (Read rest of the story here)

Published in The New Sunday Express, i.witness, 5 April 2009.

Interview with Siritunga Jayasuriya

(First published in Countercurrents.org)

SIRITUNGA JAYASURIYA, a trade unionist and leader of the United Socialist Party is best-known for being a high-profile Sinhala dissenter against the war on the Tamils in Sri Lanka. A fierce critic of the current regime and an ex-Presidential candidate, Jayasuriya has survived several attempts on his life. His unwavering voice of dissent cannot be silenced wherever he is. During a recent visit to India, he spoke to Meena Kandasamy about the situation in the war-torn island and bravely answered questions on India’s role in the war. 

Meena Kandasamy : You were telling me about your friend Deshapriya who had to flee Sri Lanka because he happens to be a mediaperson with his own individual and independent opinion. Right now, a lot of coverage especially in the Tamil Nadu press is about how Sinhalese journalists have been forced to flee their country just because they are dissenters. What is your take on that?

Siritunga Jayasuriya : You see that is a very good point to start, because not many journalists started their discussion in that angle. Now, many people think Sinhala people live okay, and that the problems lie with the Tamils. I think that is not the correct picture. Of course, Tamils are the worst-hit victims, but at the same time, the Sinhala people are also victimized. The first victim of war is democracy, followed by rights of all the people. 

[Read the rest of this one-hour interview here. IMHO, it was one of the scariest interviews I have done so far. Everytime he spoke, I was wondering about what would be the repurcussions of his statement back home, in Sri Lanka. If he will be safe there, if the Army's goons attack him, if his family can live peacefully. I just admire the man's courage. It's one thing to be Tamil to oppose the genocide, but it takes quite a bit of daring to be Sinhala and oppose the Sri Lankan Government and its war. . . ]

Interview with Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan

Vasugi (popularly, V.V.Ganeshananthan was in Chennai recently to promote her first novel, Love Marriage. I interviewed her on one of my most maddening days (don’t even ask me to elaborate). And this was the first time I was actually interviewing someone in my age-group (that can be quite unsettling: you have so much of respect for their work, but the desire to be a fan is at war with your desire to be a friend, so you end up being neither), so I am not sure how this interview has actually turned out.

This interview appeared in today’s The New Indian Express, i.witness. (I was unable to find a link on the Indian Express homepage. However do check up the e-paper if you want to be doubly sure of this!) Do read the novel, it’s lovely. The review might be carried here in a few more days. Sometimes, I feel this review should be read alongside the interview, just so that things are in context, and everything makes greater sense. 

The average writer shies away from politics. What made you choose such a political theme like war to tell a family’s story?

People’s personal lives are affected by politics in any country, and at any time. I was aiming for a certain level of realism, and people’s personal lives don’t exist in a vacuum removed from politics or the news. 

Why do so many varieties of marriage populate the book?

I have written about marriage partly as a metaphor for choice. A marriage can involve two people—or a person and an idea, or a person and a community, etc. Here, the range of marriages shows the range of choices. 

I was lured by the fragmented narratives, by chapters that are, sometimes, three sentences long. Why did you choose this literary technique?

No one learns the story of their family in strict chronological order. People learn about their families in fragments, in bits and pieces. The currency of the family story is the anecdote. 

Tamils in Sri Lanka often despair that the roots of the war lie in the cultural genocide that is being carried out against them. Is this one of the reasons why culture is accorded such a place of prominence in Love Marriage?

I never sat down and made a conscious decision about culture’s role in the story . The story is about what is important to the people within it. I was just thinking about them. That said, Yalini is certainly interested in exploring her family’s history and its meaning to her. 

Do you think you would have given your novel a much different ending if you had written it in these turbulent times?

I am sure I would have. I started writing the book before the tsunami, before 9/11. I didn’t put those bits in until much later. Even the militant uncle didn’t figure in the first draft of the novel. But the characters ended up being affected by the world around them, which makes sense. 

As a responsible journalist, who’s once been the Vice President of South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), how do you think the global media views the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis?

I hesitate to identify the global media as some sort of collective, and to make generalisations about it. That said, right now, there is a lot more media coverage on the conflict than earlier, and hopefully that is helpful. Of course, it is also hard to get information in these difficult circumstances. I’d like to see more American news organisations putting resources into covering international news, but unfortunately , in this economy , many media organisations have been forced to cut back. It’s a critical time for this kind of coverage.

An Indian writes about his government

I don’t publish letters that friends write me, but I am making an exception this time. Manoj, who wrote me this letter is a nice friend of mine and we have talked about all topics under the sun. Of course, we spoke in times of peace, and I don’t remember discussing the Sri Lankan situation with him. He’s not even a Tamil (even though his Tamil is better than mine, he grew up in our state). I am putting this letter here so that Indians (who really believe that they can remain detached when their government is waging a proxy war) change their attitude, and that change, possibly, causes a turnaround in the Indian Government’s attitude.

Why did I receive this letter btw? I wasn’t aware that he had left India, so I had invited him to a students’ rally in support of Tamil Eelam that is scheduled to take place tomorrow (18.2) in Chennai.

**

Hello Meena,

How are you? How is ____?
I would like to tell you about an incident that occurred recently here in New york. You will know that a lot of refugees from Eelam have come here over the past decade.

I have one such friend named Guna. He works in a grocery store and sends money to his poor mother(living in Eelam) from here. For most people, life is about luxury and fun. But all this boy can think of is his next meal and make sure that his mother is safe. She lives in formerly Tiger-governed eastern Sri lanka which recently fell to the Lankan Army.

He works in the store at nights (it is a 24 * 7 store owned by an immigrant from pakistan) and when I was getting back home from college at around 11 PM, I stopped by to buy some milk. Guna was standing there in te store alone and crying. He said that he called his village and got the information that people had either fled or been killed during the SL army’s assault. He did not know the where abouts of his mother. He is hopeful that she is alive.

He stood there helplessly and asked me why our government is supporting S Lanka. he said, Even if you had just left us alone(instead of supplying weapons to their army), we would have lived our lives peacefully.

India supplied a cache of deadly weapons to Sri lanka. (Chetak light helicopters with machine guns, heavy artillery guns, and INSAS assault rifles.) The Indian government officially denies having supplied any of these weapons (they admit to selling some others). So the real problem here is our own government. Instead of trying to solve the issue, the Congress government is probably taking revenge for Rajiv gandhi’s killing. In the process, they have aided the murder of thousands of Tamilians in Eelam.

“Why isn’t Tamilnadu government doing something?” he says. All i could say was that I had no control over the government’s policies. Then I asked myself if India really was a democracy .. If a government that I chose, fails to do the legitimate things I want, there’s is no point. it is as good as a dictatorship.

I then went home and saw some gruesome pictures of children (no more than three years old) with their heads busted open and bled-dead. It was not one or two children, I could see some tens of kids like that in some videos. So, when one video can capture this much, how about thousands of villages where the war was not video-documented? (go watch youtube videos on this – Dont get fooled by the many sri lankan media videos, see the videos uploaded by the Tamilians.)

Anyways, Guna is a strong person, and he continues to work the way he always did, unfazed by everything that happenned to him. I met him a day before yesterday and he smiled at me and talked normally. It is amazing how easily they get over their biggest losses in a few days. I guess since they live a life of agony, they got used to it.

You are doing a great job, Meena. One of the few voices raised against these attrocities. I hope the government stands up and takes notice atleast now. All my support to you.