Twenty-six years ago I was writing the earliest of the
stories that would end up in my first book, in which a man called CK dreams
about opening a guest house on the east coast of Sri Lanka. If one tries to pin
his dream down on a map, I guess it would be just a few miles from the so-called
"no-fire zone" today, a place where Tigers are said to be shooting Tamil
hostages who do not want to be human shields and the government of Sri Lanka is
accused of bombing civilians; the strip of land where the BBC says the endgame
of this long civil war is being played out and from where 1,60,000 men, women
and children have fled in the last couple of weeks. The heart-wrenching images
of those refugees are superimposed for me on CK’s dream and an idyllic sepia
photograph, in a family album, of the small town of Mullaitivu where an uncle
and aunt lived 60 years ago.
Between my first draft of CK’s story in the spring of 1983 and
the second in the summer of that year, Sri Lanka went into free fall. Tension
had been building up for some years in Sri Lankan politics. Many Tamils felt
heavily discriminated against in the increasingly Sinhala-focused agenda of
successive nationalist governments in Sri Lanka whereas many in the majority
Sinhala population saw the government’s changes as redressing imbalances
instituted under British rule. These tensions burst into sporadic militant
attacks in the north through the 1970s and an increasing government military
presence in the area.
Then, in 1981, in an act of incomprehensible malice, the revered
Jaffna Public Library was set alight by a policeman.
Although there had been a precursor in the serious communal
riots of 1958 (in part flowing out of the controversy over the national language
issue), 1983 was a horrific watershed. In July that year the ambush of 13
soldiers in the north sparked anti-Tamil riots all around the country,
especially in the capital, Colombo. Hundreds, some estimate 2,000, ordinary
Tamils were killed and many tens of thousands were made homeless.
The fledgeling militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE), formed in 1976 and commonly known as the Tamil Tigers, gained
massive support at home and abroad and grew quickly to become a formidable
guerrilla force. Very soon it was engaging in conventional warfare with the Sri
Lankan army to establish an independent homeland.
Over the next few years the fighting in the north of the island
and the invective between partisans around the world intensified. My small story
finally found its shape and a publisher. The editors of Stand magazine
wrote to me and said: "We want to print it but the office is divided on the
coda. The final paragraph on the violence politicises the text. Half of us want
it in, half of us want it out because maybe the story does not need it." I said
it could not be left out; the war had invaded even that little page.
By the time the story became the core of a book, Monkfish
Moon, in 1992, the earlier lines had expanded: "…the east coast, like the
north, would become a blazing battleground. Mined and strafed and bombed and
pulverised, CK’s beach, the dry-zone scrubland – disputed mother earth – would
be dug up, exploded and exhumed. The carnage in Colombo, massacres in Vavuniya,
the battle of Elephant Pass, were all to come. But that day …in the middle of
May, we knew none of that."
Today we do know all of that and more. We know that in the 26
years since 1983 at least 70,000 people have been killed in the conflict.
Another 6,500 have died in the last three months, as reported by the UN. Large
numbers of both government soldiers and Tigers who had not even been born at the
time the story was written are dead. Their lives, as well as the foreshortened
lives of thousands of ordinary people, had never known anything but the war.
Tanks have rolled, fighter jets have roared and suicide belts and trucks have
exploded.
Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been
bombed by one side or the other for decades. Many MPs and ministers, too –
Sinhala and Tamil, hawks and moderates – have been murdered in this conflict.
For 26 years the main story in Sri Lanka has changed little:
bombs, bullets, carnage and suffering. LTTE suicide bombs on buses, at train
stations, suicide trucks at the Temple of the Tooth, the Central Bank, the
assassination of one president, the wounding of another, and government military
campaigns with increasing firepower and increasing casualties, terrifying air
strikes and massive bombardment. Sadly, there have been other spikes of horror
in the country with tens of thousands of dead – the 2004 tsunami, floods, the
’80s insurrection in the south, disappearances, abductions – but the war has
gone on relentlessly, in one area of the north or another, with only short
periods of truce in which the Tigers and the government each gathered strength
for the next round.
In those 26 years the great map of the 20th century was
transformed: the Berlin Wall came crashing down, Germany was reunified, the
Soviet Union disappeared, China became the factory of the world and India
boomed. But in Sri Lanka, the story remained the same.
A country that was once an admirable model of democracy, leading
the way in agrarian reform, quality of life indices and health and education
services, got stuck as the prototype for suicide bombers on the one hand, and
the new benchmark for "shock and awe" tactics with unbridled military muscle on
the other. I find it difficult to believe that it was allowed to happen.
Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside
themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo,
dreamt about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of
sinewy poetry. Even those who plant landmines, blow up innocents, destroy
villages or ravage the jungle still love the place. They love the sight of it,
the sound of it, the smell of it, the taste of it, the memory of it, the dream
of it. Whether they carry coconuts or grenades, poems or bombs, cyanide or
charms, there is a deep affection for the place which is an unbreakable common
bond. Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing
for the place in some small form – hiraeth, the Welsh call it – wherever
they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and
politics might try to divide them.
In recent years, despite the escalating violence, I found it
bubbling up in so many places in Sri Lanka: in ethnically mixed children’s peace
camps, in young writers’ imaginations, Sinhala and Tamil, in cricket crowds that
brought everyone together. Only a few months ago an armed soldier I spoke to on
the street put it very simply: "There is no country like Sri Lanka anywhere in
the world, is there? That is why everyone wants to come here, no?"
Today, watching video clips on the Web of the grim situation on
the east coast, the demonstrations around the world, the half-reports, the
exhortations, the accusations, the propaganda, the excuses, I don’t know what to
make of the future. Is there anyone now who "can look into the seeds of time and
say which grain will grow and which will not"?
Under a pile of newspapers, I find a copy of the old tragedy
from which I filched that quote. I open it and find Macbeth in the second act,
speaking after he had killed the men he wished to pin Duncan’s murder on. His
cunning excuse sounds familiar:
"Who can be wise, amazed, temp’rate and furious,
loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man.
The expedition of my violent love
outrun the pauser, reason."
It doesn’t tell us much about how to live but we can certainly
see how not to live. Disturbing, traumatic events do not reduce the relevance of
poetry and fiction. For me they make imaginative writing all the more urgent and
necessary.
I have been back to Sri Lanka twice in the last six months,
trying hard to find something of the optimism I felt writing my last book,
The Match. I started writing it when peace had unexpectedly broken out in
2002. The novel was going to be like a bookend to the story I mentioned at the
beginning of this piece, to celebrate a new beginning. But soon after it was
published in 2006, the peace talks floundered. A few months later the war
entered a new and more fearful phase.
Wherever I went on these last two visits, no one – Sinhala or
Tamil – wanted to talk about the war. They were fed up with the war. It had gone
on too long, cost too many lives, hurt too many families. They all wanted it
over one way or another. Taxi-drivers, waiters, businessmen, writers,
journalists, cobblers, farmers and even soldiers. No one wanted to talk because
no one believed it was nearing an end. No one believed anything about the war in
the news. Too many journalists had been intimidated.
A famous editor had just been killed by yet unidentified gunmen.
The concern I heard was about corruption and censorship.
Even when government forces finally took Kilinochchi, the LTTE
administrative headquarters for years, my trishaw driver did not believe it.
Now, it seems, there is a growing belief that the war, at least the one of tanks
and planes and artillery bombing, will soon be over. The government is
determined to completely destroy the military capability of the LTTE under its
present leadership and is unlikely to deviate from that mission. It has made
single-mindedness one of its core characteristics and an electoral attraction.
The paradigm has shifted.
What comes next? Some fear a dangerous mix of triumphalism and
chauvinism; entrenchment of resentments; internment, radicalisation and
insurgency. Others see an opportunity for reconciliation, reconstruction and a
slow, painstaking path towards real respect. The compassionate and exemplary
treatment of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people would be the first
step.
The other night, in London’s Nehru Centre, I heard the Bengali
poet, Sunil Gangopadhyay, recite a powerful poem against the warped beliefs we
use to excuse our sometimes atrocious behaviour. It made me think: what should I
believe in now? What can I believe in? What must I believe in?
S
* I must believe that journalists will not be
intimidated.