Courtesy: Miguel Candela/Al Jazeera
Harshana Rambukwella
T
here are a number of familiar frames through which we can approach writing about conflict in Sri Lanka – particularly ethno-nationalist conflict and the final concluding phase of the war in 2009. Of these the title of Ahilan’s collection Then There Were No Witnesses invokes one of the most affectively and politically powerful – that of bearing witness in a context where there has been a concerted and institutionally sanctioned attempt to mute the scale, intensity and depth of human suffering endured by people who lived in the war zones of the North and the East. Unfortunately this institutionally sanctioned silence has been all too eagerly embraced by a southern Sinhala polity keen to ease its collective conscience that the conflict was a necessary response to a terrorist threat to the sovereignty of the country. Within this imagination, the task at hand is to move forward – with the war successfully concluded and the specter of terror laid to rest. In stark contrast, what Ahilan’s poetry reminds us is that conflict produces forms of existentialist angst that people who experienced its de-humanizing effects cannot escape. Ahilan’s poetry is visceral, meditative and infused with a deep sense of existential insecurity that seeks remembrance – but remembrance tempered by a form of reflection that attempts to comes to terms with the trauma of conflict.
My first thoughts when reading this collection were the inadequacies of the mainstream Sri Lankan discourse on conflict – particularly a post-war narrative that seeks to fold the specificity of the conflict in the North and East into one which says, “we have all suffered, we have all endured, now it is time to move forward towards a new Sri Lanka.” If one looks at Sinhala poetry from the period that Ahilan writes of – from the early1990s up to the present moment, one is immediately struck by the difference in content, tone and mode of expression.
For many socially conscious Sinhala poets existence is informed by issues such as the increasing commodification of life, poverty, class conflict and ecological depravation which are sometimes punctuated by echoes of violence from the 1987-89 JVP insurrection period. It is rare to see references to the ethno-nationalist conflict and when one does, it is either from a patriotic nationalist orientation embodied in the figure of the “ranawiruwa” or in the form of a suicide bomber posing a nihilistic threat to life. Therefore, the aesthetic of suffering that Ahilan’s poetry crafts is an aesthetic that is largely absent in Sinhala literary discourse.
I also use the term existentialist angst to describe Ahilan’s poetry but this needs to be distinguished from the modernist pre-occupation with the meaning of existence.
The existentialist angst in Ahilan’s poetry is driven by conflict – its psychological, physiological, cultural and political manifestations rather than an abstract pre-occupation with life and its meaning.
The closest resonance to this structure of feeling I can think of is in the poetry of Jean Arasanayagam in the immediate aftermath of 1983. But here too I would make a qualitative differentiation because Arasanayagam’s poetry responds spontaneously to a moment of terror that unsettles her sense of being and then moves into a different mode of self-exploration facilitated by a period of relative stability and calm.
In Ahilan’s writing however, what one sees is a constant state of existentialist angst shaped by intense, ongoing trauma and a sense of mourning. For instance in a poem like “The Great Ancient City”, from 1991 the image of Jaffna is one in which life is in suspended animation. Some unnamable force has “unloaded the/ unutterable darkness/ in the market streets/ where once a saint/ wandered performing miracles”. The reference to the mythical saint (explained in the translation notes) evokes the sense of a once vibrant culture steeped in lore but now stifled by an uneasy stillness paradoxically created by the pounding of war drums.
These lines I think capture the existentialist angst I referred to. The city in reality is not still. War drums, which could either mean the LTTE or government security forces, are pounding but rather than patriotic fervor what they induce is an “unutterable darkness” that stifles both the contemporary moment and at the same time undermines the vibrancy of inherited traditions of social life. This sense of existentialist angst is also expressed in terms of life that is literally driven underground in the poems “Days of the Bunker I and II” inspired by the painting ‘Bunker Family’. In these poems existence gains a subterranean quality as people “crawl beneath the ground” “praying for peace” while above ground there is carnage and bloodshed. And a childbirth within this tenuous context inspires little joy as the people “turn/ trembling at the loud cry” of the baby’s birth.
I am unable to comment with any authority on the aesthetics of Ahilan’s poetry because my familiarity with the aesthetic conventions of Tamil poetry is next to non-existent. However as the translator Geetha Sukumaran’s careful contextualized reading of Ahilan’s poetry in the Introduction underscores, Ahilan works within and through the traditions and conventions of Tamil poetic tradition to extend and subvert them to craft a genre of expression suited to his immediate context. This is evident in the two poems I quoted above briefly. In the one on Jaffna city myth is invoked to contrast it with the loss of such mythic-romanticism in the contemporary city and in the bunker poems tropes of family life and birth are rendered surreal as life sinks underground.
I would now like to turn briefly to the sequence of poems collected under the title “devastation of 2009”. These are possibly the most visceral in the collection and they literally embody violence. The poem simply titled “leg” asks with dark naivety “Isn’t it astonishing?/ The leg had a head, /and the head had two eyes.” The extreme dehumanization of violence rendered here in literal terms reminded me of a similar embodied rendering of violence in Anuk Arudpgarasam’s Story of a Brief Marriage. In that novella, as in this poem, the conflict is rendered through the body.
As an aesthetic strategy of visualizing the dehumanizing effects of violence this is a powerful and affective mode where individual bodies bear witness to the trauma that can all too easily become lost in the clinical prose used in documenting conflict – in terms of numbers and statistics.
However, Ahilan’s poetry also uses numbers to highlight the loss of human subjectivity in conflict. In a series of poems that follow the “leg”, the titles are numerical codes assigned to corpses. For instance in “Corpse No 178” narrated from the perspective of a medical professional preparing dead bodies for burial, the body itself has become a site of collective trauma as the “I” in the poem retrieves family photographs from the cavity of the body. In “Corpse No 183 and Birth No 02” a dead mother is separated from her newly born child still connected to her by the umbilical cord.
It is easy for poetry narrated through such a visceral aesthetic to be overwhelmed by the intensity of the very violence it seeks to portray. But Ahilan and his translator Geetha Sukumaran succeed through economy of style and a restrained use of language to capture the dehumanizing effects of extreme violence.
In concluding I would like to move away from the specifics of Ahilan’s poetry to reflect again on situating these poems in terms of writing on conflict in Sri Lanka. Ahilan’s collection as a whole bears witness to the collective trauma experienced by the Tamil community in the North. It moves through the years of LTTE domination, occupation by the Indian Peace Keeping Force to the final stages of the war leading up to 2009 and its after effects. In Sri Lanka, in the Sinhala literary mainstream the dominant aesthetic, particularly in poetry and song, has been one built on a sense of ‘rasa’ – or a kind of aesthetic pleasure which has taken different forms ranging from classical eroticism to romantic love. This is evident in the tone, vocabulary and form of the dominant poetic traditions in Sinhala.
While poetry in Sinhala has been used for protest, subversion and political expression, the mainstream aesthetic form has been predominantly shaped by a romantic orientation to life. Within a context like this how do we situate the poetry of Ahilan and others who write of trauma and collective violence? I do not have any short or satisfactory answer to this question. But one thing is clear.
The aesthetic forms that receive institutional recognition and are often popular within a particular social context mirror the dominant contours of the nation-state within which they are located.
Given this context it is unlikely that the kind of poetic sensibility expressed by Ahilan will receive institutional recognition until we see significant changes in how the Sri Lankan nation state is imagined and politically configured. But at the same time what Ahilan’s collection reminds us is that a major portion of the post-colonial existence of Sri Lanka has been shaped by the collective experience of violence and until we find ways and means of articulating this suffering in ways that are meaningful to audiences across the ethno-nationalist divide, we will struggle as a nation-state to articulate any kind of overarching national identity.
Then there will be no witnesses reminds us that there are always witnesses and that violence has been and therefore has to be very much a part of Sri Lanka’s contemporary aesthetic. Violence and the memory of trauma cannot be suppressed forever – it will always manifest and express itself in myriad ways. Recognizing the existentialist angst expressed in Ahilan’s poetry is one powerful, poignant and affective mode through which the violence and trauma of Sri Lanka’s past few decades can be articulated – which can perhaps lead to the beginning of a meaningful conversation about our past and what our future should be.
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Author Note. Remarks made at the online launch of Then there were no Witnesses on 04 July 2020. Modified for print.
Professor Harshana Rambukwella is Director, Postgraduate Institute of English, the Open University of Sri Lanka. He is the author of the Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism published by University College London Press (UCL Press) and is a trustee of the Gratiaen Trust which awards the Gratiaen Prize for Sri Lankan writing in English and has been a member of the State Literary Sub-committee His work has also appeared in a number of journals such as the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, boundary 2, and Journal of Asian Studies. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Social Studies and Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh and the Sri Lanka Chair at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
–More on Ahilan in The Beacon
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