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.

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..

Another Interview

(An edited version of this interview appeared in the Indian Express North American. Sujeet Rajan interviewed me for the weekly. This came out about a month ago, but only today I was suitably lazy to do this job)

You write candidly of love and love-making; leaving windows open to the bedroom sometimes. If it is autobiographical, how difficult is it to tabulate emotions of love and love-making through poetry?

I am not sure it is always the bedroom window I leave open, for love, after all, happens everywhere. And again, I am going to keep the suspense and not own up or disown the possibility of my poems being autobiographical! I think poetry is best equipped to enclose some emotions and exhibit others, because writing of love/ love-making in prose would simply call for too many excruciating details, and in the most cautious of cases, it would require a great deal of aesthetic and choreography to get the damn scene right. And only rarely can such elaborate construction capture spontaneity, which is what love is all about.

From an artistic medium, what is best to express love: the written word, the spoken word, brush on the canvas, silence? Why?

I have done everything but paint. And well, you have left out something which I see as central to love: movement. As in dance, as in theater, and also as in all of language.

3. Is anything taboo for you to write about?

No. Except of course if someone asked me to write a poem of praise, that tends to make me nasty.

5. You were displaced from home, from Chennai, for more than three months, having been invited to a writing residence program in Iowa. What has been the experience like?

I loved the time I spent in Iowa, and I also got to travel widely across the USA. The best part of the program was getting to meet these fabulous writers from other countries. The next best was the University library and the second-hand bookstores. My novel is about the Kilvenmani massacre, and surprisingly I completed most of the research while I was here, in a foreign nation. And lastly, I did write like crazy. I wrote the 50-odd poems that go into my second collection of poetry (Six Hours of Chastity).

6. How has the West influenced your writing during these last three months?

Nothing radical happened. And the subtle changes, if any, will have to be picked out by scholars or theorists, and even in that case, one never knows how accurate it is! I am always in a state of flux, so I do believe that coming here, and being footloose and fancy-free, would have changed me in some ways, and which would change the poetry in a sense.

7. If you were to write a poem based on the experience of your last three months, what would you write about?

I am too involved with the experience to verbalize it right away. There will be a diary at some point, and trust me, there will be love poems too.

8. You are an intrinsic part of the Dalit movement; an indelible, vociferous voice for the underprivileged in India. How do you reconcile yourself to a situation where you yourself live in a metropolitan city which is removed from the caste predicament for the most part, and now are in a developed world which has only academic interest in the problem?

I don’t think the Dalit movement is a rural movement, or that untouchability/ casteism does not exist in cities. The migration to the city does erase some identities even as it allows the scope for anonymity, but the Dalit remains a Dalit for the most part. The metropolitan cities are better suited for the Dalit movement’s growth and establishment because they allow for the Dalits to carry out democratic/ public agitations/ demonstrations without fear of a backlash, of being targetted and done-to-death and crushed by oppressor castes whose violent diktat operates much more freely in the villages. Coming to the second part of your question, yes, the developed world only has a superficial interest in these issues, which is quite disappointing. However, the struggle against caste should be waged only by those who have suffered because of it, and it should be supported by those who don’t believe in discrimination. I guess here the curiousity of the West could help since it actually brings things to the world’s attention. There’s another way of looking at it: the militant and political Dalit struggle (or even literature) has hardly been effectively theorized, or documented, so the academic interest emanating from this is certainly beneficial.

9. You write, commiserate with Tamils in Sri Lanka; is it emotional baggage for you now that crisis in Sri Lanka is no longer in the news with the Tamil Tigers gone?

The Sri Lanka crisis is now in the news in a way in which it has never been before. The US State Department’s report of what happened earlier this year in the war zone in which tens of thousands of Tamils were mercilessly bombed to death by the SL Govt., the Tamil Diaspora re-mandating their right to a homeland in the North-east, people all over the world being concerned about the three hundred thousand Tamils caught in concentration camps, Sri Lanka being the second-most unsafe country for journalists all over the world–these are issues of prime importance, irrespective of whether the media in the US, or India decides to highlight it or not. I take up a cause because I am involved with it, or I empathize for it, and not on the basis of the amount of media spotlight that it accrues. I guess the Tamil issue will always be an emotional baggage until we receive the right to a life of safety and security and self-determination. I trust that now is the time for humanitarian people all over the world to actually support the Tamil cause because things have never been worse.

10. Race, religion and caste come to play the most when elections are around the corner. In that respect the United States might not be much different from India. Emancipation apart, what needs to be done in India to remove barriers for equalization?

Yes, what you describe is the typical vote-bank scenario. I believe that equalization can come about only when the oppressors also decide that it is time for them to change, it is time for them to mend their ways. There is a possibility that such a change can come about through self-directed/ self-initiated efforts, but there are not enough pointers from history which lets us reinforce this belief. Those who seek to maintain the status quo, those who work against equalization and democratization, are known to change only when their own power is questioned and challenged. So, much of the responsibility for bringing about change lies in the hands of the oppressed people, since they have to continue their resilient struggle against oppression. If they resist the subjugation successfully, and if they manage to break out of it, then equalization will come about. It can never be beyond reach. What needs to be done in India is to encourage the freedom of the press, to bring out more stories of victimization and resistance to light, and to empower women without resorting to any cultural dogma. Anyone can observe that all systems of oppression ideally go hand-in-hand, so none of us can be free until all of us are free. For instance, I would like the feminist movement in India to really take up the ideology of annihilating the caste system not just because it is discriminatory and inhuman, but also because it is based on the control of a women’s sexuality (in order to keep the caste pedigree pure).

11. Do you agree with the quota system for the backward classes in government and educational institutions in India?

It is not for anyone to agree/disagree with the quota system, what people need to concentrate on is to ensure that all sections of society achieve real growth, and that no one is left behind and marginalized. I think the decision to extend the quota system for the backward classes (here i make a distinction from the Dalits) was taken because of their abysmal presence in both state-run educational and employment enterprises. We have to become a more tolerance and more inclusive society, and affirmative action is just one way of getting there.

12. Kamala Das backed your poetry; wrote a foreword to your debut collection of poems. Why does that mean so much to you? What do you like most about her poetry?

What Kamala Das said about my poetry meant so much to me because she is a woman who calls a spade a spade, she’s forthright and outspoken and doesn’t say things that she doesn’t mean. So, when such an authentic and genuine (not to mention accomplished and fiery) poet like her encourages your work, you just gain confidence in yourself, and you channel more efforts towards writing more, representing people more. I love her poetry, because she broke the barriers against Indian woman writing on troublesome/ taboo topics; at the core of everything, she was truth-seeking. Personally, I also adore her flamboyance, her fire.

13. How do you reconcile poetry with reality? Does imagination triumph?

My poetry is rooted in my reality: the reality of the Dalits fighting against caste-atrocities and violence of the oppressive forces who want to subjugate them, the reality of women who still have to fight to assert their equality and their rights, the reality of Tamils who have to express themselves in spite of the worst kind of threat to the freedom of expression, who have to struggle against systematic genocide in their own homeland. My poetry is a product of all my multiple, coexisting realities–right now, I don’t think I outsource my poetry to imagination.

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.

Flowers of Violence: Review of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Thing Around Your Neck

With her latest book The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun, proves that she is much more powerful on the rigorous terrain of the short-story. Hailed by Chinua Achebe as a “writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers,” Adichie leaves an indelible mark through her first foray into short fiction. Seven of the dozen unlinked, stand-alone short stories in this collection are set in a turbulent Nigeria whose crime and corruption she describes with detachment.

Set in the University of Nigeria campus at Nsukka, “Cell One”, is a young girl’s tender retelling of the story of her handsome brother Nnamabia’s arrest and subsequent release. Without screaming for attention, it also offers an insight into college cult warfare, police excesses and custodial deaths. In “A Private Experience”, Chika, an Igbo Christian medical student is herded into safety by a poor Hauza Muslim woman even as a violent regional-religious riot is on. Three hours later, both these women — who discover friendship and faith — return to a city full of charred bodies and unsure of the fate of their loved ones.

The mindless violence that haunts Nigeria is a theme that Adichie often revisits. A young asylum seeker in “American Embassy” refuses to hawk the story of her son being shot dead by government agents in order to keep her dignity intact. The most engaging story in this collection, “Tomorrow is Too Far”, is set in the amoral world of children where sibling rivalry leads to the young Nonso’s death.

In “Ghosts”, the despondent survivors of the January 1970 war, torn

between alienation and allegiance, share their memories even as they carry with them the weight of what could have been: Biafra, the nascent nation that

no longer exists. This short-story preceded the publication of her celebrated novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, which dealt with genocide and starvation in Biafra even as it explored how the Nigerian nation never allowed its peoples to break away but brutally forced them to stay together in submission.

Unlike the ideological rigidity that characterises states, Adichie portrays the family as a fluctuating unit that is free to fracture. Certain shared facets of her stories don’t evade notice — for instance, all (but one) of the protagonists are young Nigerian women. And, all the men, invariably, inexcusably, cheat. Therefore, when some of the stories delve into the multiple crises of married life in an alien land, there is nothing intriguing or puzzling about what the men will do. Women, on the other hand, hold the answers. They take the decisions that really count.

“Imitation” is the story of a middle-aged Nigerian wife who finds her voice when she has lost her space. When Nkem discovers that her husband has installed his young mistress at their Lagos home, she decides to leave the comfort of America in order to secure her marriage. Nkem’s rage, though legitimate, is more a reaction that springs from her own experience as mistress to married men than from harbouring tragic illusions.

“The Arrangers of Marriage” echoes Indian Diaspora writing as it brings out the series of shams that constitute any arranged marriage. Here, Adichie makes inroads in understanding an immigrant’s efforts to merge with the mainstream at the cost of his identity: Ofodile Emeka Udenna names himself Dave Bell, conveniently opts for a visa marriage with an American, and orders his African wife to forget Igbo language and food.

Adichie probes into same-sex love in two stories, “The Shivering” and “On Monday of Last Week”; but the doomed endings are disappointing, and sound almost as if the protagonists were punished for daring to love differently.

By dwelling on lesbian desire and the female body, “On Monday of Last Week” stands a great chance to be a influential story, but our hopes are dashed when we learn that artist Tracy was merely ‘flirting’ when she kept asking Kamara to pose in the nude. “The Shivering”, a story set in the Princeton University, follows the lives of Chinedu and Ukamaka who miss the obvious future by carrying the burden of past loves.

Once out of Nigeria, and in America, people enter into relationships that would never have been possible back home: an upper middle-class girl befriends an impoverished gay driver, a domestic help turns into a rich wife’s confidant and best friend, a waitress finds a college-going boyfriend, and a university-educated woman becomes a babysitter. The Thing Around Your Neck experiments with the second-person narrative to depict how the American dream is rendered meaningless for Anukka when she realises that most of the population in USA adopts either a curious, or a condescending attitude towards her.

Switching between dualities with ease, Adichie repeatedly returns to her preoccupation with cultural encounters. The mischievous and tightly-crafted “Jumping Monkey Hill” explores prejudices, subtle racism and attempts to define the Other that occur over a two-week long writing workshop. A British Africanist has the self-righteous superiority to tell a group of young African writers what constitutes “an African story.” Significantly, this story-within-a-story mentions no workshop participant by name, preferring to refer to them by their nationalities such as Ugandan, Kenyan, Tanzanian and Senegalese and so on.

She takes off from where she left in her debut novel Purple Hibiscus by using these short stories to explore how Christianity and colonisation succeed in demonising native traditions. In “The Headstrong Historian”, we come across Nigerians who have been conditioned by Christian education to disregard their own culture. Nwamgba’s soul is crushed when her son becomes a priest and treats her contemptuously as a pagan, but she is avenged when her grand-daughter Grace renames herself with Afamefuna (“My Name Will Not Be Lost”) and writes about the lost and undocumented history of the African peoples.

It is evident that Adichie subscribes to the show-don’t-tell school of story-telling, but sometimes she goes a little overboard with the symbolism. But for this slightly irritating flaw, there is no fantastic chutneyfication of language, no bombastic driving-the-reader-to-a-dictionary. Armed with broad strokes and a straightforward style, Adichie subverts on other levels.

Her critique spans continents, her stories flit across timeframes but throughout the book, she maintains the restraint of an oracle, never wasting a single word, never sitting in judgment.

It’s turned out to be something of an Adichie festival because the publisher has taken advantage of the opportunity to make available reprints of two earlier works, Purple Hibiscus and the award-winning  Half of a Yellow Sun. Both are ideal candidates for re-reading and enjoying again the world that she has created with her carefully crafted words.

(Published in the New Sunday Express, i.witness, 12 July 2009)

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 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.

TAMILS AGAINST GENOCIDE Counsel Bruce Fein in Chennai

The Tamils Against Genocide Counsel Bruce Fein (ex-Deputy Associate Attorney General, USA) was in Chennai recently. We (mainly Dr.Ezhilan who runs Max Foundation and me and our friends) organized a meeting Friday where he addressed select members of the media, and some of the city’s intellectual crowd. Our aim was to get people here understand that the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka is not something that only Tamils should be bothered about, it is something that every human being should react against. 

The meeting went off spectacularly well. And although we didn’t even *dream* of press coverage (we called the media so that they would *know* what was happening, and that would someday reflect on the way in which they covered the atrocities.. .)

Here’s the full-version Tamilnet.com report of his speech. And here’s the story in the New Indian Express (Pressure group bid to put Fonseka in the dock) and in the Times of India (US lawyer wants Lankan leaders tried for genocide) .

And, here’s a pic of Bruce Fein meeting with Dr.Veeramani (we rushed from the meeting venue ICSA to Periyar Thidal which is about five minutes away)..

Bruce Fein with Dr.Veeramani. Also seen are Kali Poongunran (Gen.Sec., DK) myself, and Dr.Ezhilan

Part of the reason why I am throwing myself so totally into this sort of activism is the gravity of what is happening in the Vanni. In the past four days, there have been over 150+ civilian deaths and hundreds more have been maimed/injured for life because of the Sri Lanka Army’s continuous shelling/bombing/what-not. I think the war is in its scariest phase, and I know I cannot sit still.

UPDATE: BRUCE FEIN’S SPEECH VIDEO (in 5 parts), AND THE TAMIL TRANSLATION (in 2 parts) CAN BE ACCESSED ON PERIYAR WEBVISION.

Book Review: A Love-Song to the Valley

Curfewed Night
By Basharat Peer
Publisher: Random House India
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 246

Stories from conflict zones sound suspiciously similar. In spite of the detachment that a written narrative provides, these stories share suicide-bomber sentiments—they wait for their chance to do collateral damage before returning to silence. It is easy to get lost in the machine-gun sounds of terminology that haunt these war stories—casualties, checkposts, crossfires, collaborators, curfews, detentions, encounters, landmines, torture—but Curfewed Night, the first memoir from Kashmir, India’s infamous conflict zone, evocatively chronicles the struggle for azadi (freedom).

A teenager when insurgency first reared its head in Kashmir in 1989, Peer has the secret ambition to be a militant. He wants lay down his life fighting for Kashmiri independence. Before he can achieve the glamorous status of being a guerrilla, he is bundled away to the Aligarh Muslim University in 1993 to complete his schooling and graduation. Going to Delhi and becoming a writer soon after, he returns home as a reporter and experiences first-hand, the liberatory potential of writing.

Personal and political at once, he breathlessly tells us the life stories of cousins and friends who embraced militancy and the martyrdom that came with it, of the perilous border crossings to get arms-training to become militants, of the hundreds of disappeared young men and their “half-widows”, of psychologically disturbed young people, of graveyards growing monstrously and in absentia funerals, of temples and palaces that were turned into paramilitary camps, of detention and torture cells that were exorcised to make homes for politicians, of the destruction of a Sufi shrine and six hundred years of history in a single day.

Employing a spare prose style and shunning away from any kind of propaganda, Peer acutely traces the alienation and resentment that built up among Kashmiri Muslims because of Indian (mis)rule, militarization and the systematic use of state terror to rig elections and crush insurgency. He adheres to history as he narrates how the UN endorsement for a plebiscite for Kashmiris, to determine which nation they wanted to belong to, was dumped by New Delhi. The memoir gains credibility because of a narrative structure that desperately chases every story and every reference point in Kashmir’s recent history. He meets survivors of the Gawkadal Bridge massacre in Srinagar where more than 50 people died in paramilitary firing while taking out a peaceful march to protest police brutality—a tragedy that irrevocably pushed people towards secessionism and made them reject all symbols of Indian nationalism.

Peer deserves accolades for his sensitive portrayal of the women victimized by war. He writes about meeting Mubeena Ghani, a bride who was raped by an Indian paramilitary group a few hours after her wedding, and her quest for a dignified existence; he visits the village of Kunanposhpora, where the Indian army raped more than 20 women; he chronicles the angst of mothers; he sympathizes with Parveena Ahangar who founded a support group for parents of disappeared persons; and he decries attempts by a puritanical Islamic women’s group to impose the veil on Kashmiri women.

The book courageously and uncompromisingly records the third-degree custodial torture methods employed by the Indian armed forces at Papa-2 and the Indian efforts to breed counter-insurgents. In equal measure, he also notes how Pakistan promoted strife in Kashmir, and how the excesses of the militant groups made thousands of Kashmiri Pandits flee their homeland.

Peer provides an intimate reading experience—he equates dying for freedom with the first kiss on an adolescent’s lips, and the absence of books on the Kashmiri experience with the absence of a lover. Kashmir thus ceases to fit into the traditional categories of a motherland/ fatherland: she is the beloved. Buried within the pages of this memoir is a love-song to his land and its liberation struggle.

(First published in The New Indian Express. Read the online version here.)

In which the Poetess becomes a Terroristress

तमिल ईलम संघर्ष के पिछले ४० बरस से मुख्य स्वर रहे, क्रांतिकारी-लिरिकल कवि कासी आनंदन से युवा दलित अंग्रेज़ी कवि मीना कंदसामी की बातचीत और उनकी कुछ कविताओं के अंग्रेज़ी एवं हिन्दी अनुवाद. मूल से अंग्रेज़ी में लाने का काम मीना कंदसामी ने किया है और अंग्रेज़ी से हिन्दी अनुवाद गिरिराज किराडू ने. राजनितिक कविता के बोझिल बड़बोलेपन के बरक्स कासी की लगभग सूक्तिनुमा छोटी-छोटी कवितायें मितव्ययी होने के साथ ‘अचूक’ होने में विश्वास करती हैं;, वे महाकाव्यात्मकताओं के छल को पहचानते हैं. दूसरी तरफ़ साक्षात्कार में वे ‘सुंदर’ के विरूद्ध अपनी रणनीति के बारे में बात करते हैं.

ON PRATILIPI: Meena Kandasamy’s conversation with revolutionary-lyrical poet Kasi Anandan who has been the voice of the Tamil Eelam struggle for the past 40 years, along with some of his poems translated into English (Meena Kansadasmy) and Hindi (Giriraj Kiradoo). In contrast to the tedious stridency of most political poems, Kasi’s poems are epigrammatic and precise: he has come to recognize the emptiness of the epic grandiosity. On the other hand, he also talks about his stand against beauty.

ps: Forgive me for the title of this blogpost.. I don’t have any such intentions in the foreseeable future ; )