Abstract
The 2001 Tamil novel Mmm (translated as Traitor in English) by Shobasakthi traverses spaces that are not often covered in contemporary Sri Lankan fiction. Set against the background of Tamil separatist movements of the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, the novel blends tales of caste and class oppression, while alternating between first- and third-person narrations. Traitor centres on a Sri Lankan Tamil militant, Nesakumaran, who flees to France as a refugee, and is eventually murdered, after being charged with the rape of his own child, Nirami. The novel showcases the breakdown of Nesakumaran’s self, as well as his familial and communal relationships, and reflects these dissolutions in the fragmentation of the narrative. This article argues that the narrative fragmentation of Traitor corresponds to the unnarratability of the violence that the novel tries to depict and illustrates the many fissures that are embedded within the rubric of Tamil nationalism. The novel depicts Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism as a more complicated concept than is conventionally assumed, a heterogeneous discourse marked by distinctions of class, caste, and gender. By wrestling with conflicts that are internal to the Tamil community, Traitor illustrates how Sri Lankan Tamil literature envisions the national space of Sri Lanka as merely a site on which to mourn the lack of an ethnic, Tamil solidarity.
Introduction
How did separatist Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka go awry? What does a failure of Tamil nationalism look like, and what are its effects? The 2001 novel Traitor (originally published as Mmm in Tamil) by the diasporic Sri Lankan Tamil writer Shobasakthi explores these questions through the figure of a Tamil separatist-turned-refugee, Nesakumaran, who is caught up in the Tamil separatist movements of late-1970s and early-1980s postcolonial Sri Lanka. Against the novel’s backdrop of the doomed Tamil nationalist movement, it traces both the state-sanctioned and casual caste-based violence fomented by nationalism, exposing the conflicts within the Tamil nationalist movement itself and the destructive effects of Tamil nationalism on the individuals, families, and communities it was meant to empower and unite. At the heart of the novel is a fundamental unnarratability, particularly around the horrific violence of torture and child rape — suggesting that unnarratability may perhaps be the essential feature of a nationalism gone awry. By wrestling with conflicts that are internal to the Tamil community, Traitor illustrates how Sri Lankan Tamil literature envisions the national space of Sri Lanka as a mere backdrop to mourn the lack of an ethnic, Tamil solidarity.
Shobasakthi was born Anthonythasan Jesuthan on the small island of Allaipiddy off the mainland of the Jaffna peninsula in 1967. In order to escape the life of a child soldier in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Shobasakthi fled to France as a refugee. Widely regarded as one of the foremost diasporic Sri Lankan Tamil writers, Shobasakthi became famous with the publication of his novel Gorilla (2003), which details his experiences as a child soldier for the LTTE. In 2015, Shobasakthi became known internationally for his role in the film Dheepan, directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, which won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Shobasakthi enjoys a huge readership in Tamil, and regularly publishes his short fiction and essays online in a blog. His writing articulates his views as a rebel and a member of the diaspora, and fiercely criticizes Tamil and Sinhalese nationalisms. The genesis of Traitor was his childhood experience with the violence of the Tamil nationalist movement. In an interview with the magazine Warscapes, Shobasakthi traces his decision to enrol as a child soldier in the LTTE to the violence of Black July, a period of anti-Tamil riots in the summer of 1983 that launched the civil war. The initial riots were sparked on 25 July 1983, when Sinhalese jail inmates massacred Tamil political prisoners in Welicade prison in Colombo. Some of the prisoners who escaped the slaughter later became Shobasakthi’s close friends (Ramaswamy, 2010: 204–10; Sivanarayanan, 2008: 52). It is their stories and recollections of the events at Welicade that form the basis of Traitor, which fictionalizes these events to complicate a straightforward understanding of the outbreak of the Sri Lankan Civil War. The novel was published in 2001 and translated into English by Anushiya Ramaswamy in 2006.
In recent decades, as postcolonial writers have grappled with the aftermath of colonialism, fiction writers in particular have often been confronted with the question of how to narrate and thereby assimilate the violence and trauma to make sense of the contemporary postcolonial nation-state. For Sri Lanka, the difficulty of framing a contemporary, postcolonial national identity is compounded by the trauma of having experienced multiple colonizations over five centuries and is simultaneously enmeshed with the violence of the civil war that lasted from 1983–2009.
While the Sri Lankan Civil War has been painted as a conflict between two competing ethnic nationalisms, its roots lie within a long history of unequal economic privileges and social mobilities that were dictated by the caste system. The Sri Lankan state has been built since pre-colonial times around the caste-based privileges of the ruling elite, which has long been linked to land ownership and caste-based occupations. Caste systems persist throughout Sri Lanka across different ethnic and religious groups today, including in the largely Hindu Tamil-speaking provinces of the northeast. The group identified as the most superior Tamil caste group, the Vellalars, comprise over 50 per cent of the population (Banks, 1960: 67) and have monopolized most of the lucrative positions in education and public-sector employment ever since the period of Sri Lanka’s colonialization by the Portuguese and the British.
Caste divides within Sri Lankan Tamil society are usually unacknowledged, even when we examine the Sri Lankan historiography of ethnic conflict. The official and popular historical accounts of the Sri Lankan war often frame the war as an opposition of two monolithic ethic groups and omit the struggles and dissent that were present within Tamil society itself. Even as the complexity of the Tamil caste system has gone unrecognized in official records and popular discourse, Sri Lankan Tamil literary works written and published as early as the 1920s have depicted the sufferings caused by caste segregation and untouchability.
Situating Traitor within Sri Lankan Tamil literary histories
From the dawn of independence in 1948, Sri Lankan literature in Tamil has always been vested with the task of portraying Tamil society in a way that both reveals the injustices of race, social class and caste and inspires a call for transformative action. Certain genres like poetry have been instrumental in this regard. Postcolonial Sri Lankan Tamil poetry produced from the 1970s onwards shows a transformation of its aesthetic registers, from the traditional form of the marabu kavidhai to the more contemporary pudhu kavidhai, a form that reflected colloquial speech patterns and local landscapes. The change corresponded to the new use of poetry as a form of rhetoric to inform and instruct people about the ethnic struggles in Sri Lanka. Notably, translated poetry from other newly decolonized countries such as those of Latin America was made available in Tamil during this time, which indicates that the Tamil literary world and general audiences were keenly invested in reading about anticolonial struggles and drawing from others’ postcolonial experiences to understand their own. 1 Besides poetry, another postcolonial genre that found favour among Sri Lankan Tamil reading publics was the social realist novel. A celebrated novel that falls into this category is Thelivathai Joseph’s Kalangal Savathilai (“Time does not die”). Published in 1974, the novel portrays ethnic divisions and the social class structures that exist within the Tamil community, in which the Hill country Tamils (who are the descendants of Indian Tamils who worked in the tea plantations from the time of British colonialism), are subject to economic exploitation and social exclusion by the Sri Lankan state and the larger Sri Lankan Tamil community.
In the English-language literature 2 produced from Sri Lanka, the idea of caste has hardly been given any serious attention by fiction writers. This could be because Sri Lankan English literature, even when produced within Sri Lanka, has not concerned itself with subjects outside the urban centres of Colombo or Kandy. In contrast to English-language literature, Tamil literary works that depicted the sufferings caused by caste segregation and untouchability were written as early as the 1920s. K. A. Geetha (2010: 76) notes that the 1925 novel Neelakandan Illathu Oru Sathi Vellalan, written by Jdaikaadar, was the first work of long fiction to discuss this issue. Similarly, Tamil literature that began to emerge from diasporic spaces has consistently displayed a strong awareness of ethnic Tamil and caste-based subjectivities, expressing the anxieties of transnational migration, identity formation, and nostalgia for the lost homes in Sri Lanka.
While in its initial stages postcolonial Tamil literature was mutually constitutive with reclaiming the Tamil spaces of the Sri Lankan nation, Tamil writing from the 1990s onwards displays a markedly post-national literary idiom. In this case, the civil war prompted a shift: with the nation no longer a stable concept, and instead a deeply conflicted construction, literature had to find a way to exist in the absence of the nation. Here we see that loss of land does not impede the writer; rather, landlessness becomes a position from which a new kind of Tamil identity can be formed, one that can critique ideas of the nation and lament its unavailability for the writer.
In this sense, Tamil literature has shifted fundamentally from its origins. Tamil literature, which was once seen as reflecting a symbiotic relationship with the nation, now exists without a firm sense of the nation — which has been physically ruptured due to alternate claims of sovereignty that were proposed by the LTTE as well as the Sri Lankan state during the civil war and its aftermath. Tamil writers such as Guna Kaviazhagan, S. Vinothine, Sharmila Seyyid, and poets such as Rudhramoorthy Cheran have come to represent this loss of the homeland with a deep distrust both of Tamil nationalism and the Sri Lankan state.
It is within this postcolonial Sri Lankan literary field, where the narration of the Sri Lankan nation state takes place within varied and contradictory modes of readerly and writerly positions, that I situate my reading of Shobasakthi’s Traitor. My reading centres on the novel’s foregrounding of the unnarratable and the inexpressible, through the motif of child rape and torture. I identify the unnarratability of Traitor as the essential feature of a nationalism gone awry, especially for a Tamil refugee who has to locate himself within the diaspora.
The central protagonist of Traitor, a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee named Nesakumaran, flees Sri Lanka for France. Alternating between first- and third-person narratives, which are set in the background of Tamil separatist movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Traitor showcases the breakdown of Nesakumaran’s self as both an agent and object of violence and traces the dissolution of his familial and communal relationships. This article argues that Traitor’s formal unnaratability illustrates the many fissures that are embedded within the rubric of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism and that are centred around gendered erasure of the voices of women and violence perpetrated by caste and separatist nationalism.
Unnarratability in Shobasakthi’s Traitor
Traitor resists a straightforward summary. The novel begins in the year 2003, exactly 20 years after the events of Black July in Sri Lanka, and ranges back over the preceding two decades. It combines first- and third-person narrative voices, alternating between an omniscient, ruptured historical account of the rise of Tamil militancy in the northern provinces of Sri Lanka and a subjective, first-hand experience of a lone militant turned Tamil refugee. The unnamed I, who we later learn is a man named Nesakumaran, begins his narrative in a European city, within the space of a hospital waiting room. Here readers learn that he has been accused of raping his own child, Nirami. Nesakumaran confesses his crime to the reader but wants to make known the circumstances in which the abuse had occurred. He says that in order to explain the story of his child’s abuse, he must recount his own life’s history, going back to the early 1980s in northeastern Sri Lanka. In the pages that follow, Nesakumaran’s first-person account frequently alternates with that of an omniscient narrator.
Through both the first- and third-person narration, the reader is presented with the harsh and cruel practices of caste-based oppression in the northeastern part of the island. Early in the narrative, we learn that Nesakumaran’s life has been defined by caste divisions. While Nesakumaran’s caste status is not explicitly stated, through the earlier parts of the novel, it is possible to discern that he occupies a position of caste privilege, which facilitates his mobility and access to higher education. As a teenager, Nesakumaran begins training to be a Christian priest in a seminary in Jaffna, but in his early 20s, he decides to abandon his studies to join the Tamil separatist struggle. The narrative then details the various violent operations against the Sinhalese population that he carries out around his village. After a series of failed operations, Nesakumaran is caught and imprisoned; he ends up at Welicade prison in Colombo, becoming an unwilling victim and survivor of the infamous Welicade massacres. As the novel fictionalizes these relatively unknown massacres, it complicates their meanings through Nesakumaran’s vivid first-person narratives of sexual torture and interrogation, which are set in Welicade prison. After two years of being shuttled between various prisons and being caught in an attempted jailbreak, Nesakumaran is released from prison. Once set free, he flees to northeastern Sri Lanka with his friend Pakkiri; near the end of the novel, he escapes from Sri Lanka to Europe as a refugee. Finally, in the last chapter of the novel, the omniscient narrator describes Nesakumaran’s murder on the fringes of a forest. The implied perpetrators are the relatives of his wife, Premini, and their motive is to punish him for raping his own child. By the end of the novel, the reader has still never heard the voice of the abused daughter herself, nor the circumstances leading to her incestuous rape mentioned at the outset.
As the translator Anushiya Ramaswamy (2010) argues in the afterword to Traitor, the child rape at the centre of the novel is an effect of the violence of torture: the violence of child rape is connected to the ethnic crisis unfolding within postcolonial Sri Lanka of the 1980s and the early 1990s. While Ramaswamy’s analysis does not explicitly focus on gender, she does acknowledge the familial nature of the violence, writing that Nesakumaran is “pathologically damaged by a violent history that is as much familial as it is national” (2010: 211). Indeed, several iconic postcolonial Anglophone novels that deal with racial oppression — such as Toni Morrison’s (1970) The Bluest Eye and Shani Mootoo’s (1996) Cereus Blooms at Night — also employ this strategy of connecting postcolonial oppression to other forms of violence such as child sexual abuse. In Ramaswamy’s (2010) reading of Traitor, Nesakumaran, like Toni Morrison’s Cholly Breedlove (the rapist father in The Bluest Eye), also comes across as pathologically damaged by a violent national history. That violence is so devastating that its after-effects spill over into the domestic sphere. Still, even though it may be plausible to read the child rape in Traitor as a consequence of Nesakumaran’s traumatic torture in the prisons of Sri Lanka, one that is aimed at reinstating his masculine control and power, we are nevertheless confronted throughout the text with the question of that act’s fundamental unnarratability (or at least, the text’s persistence of the lone voice that might narrate it — that of the daughter herself, Nirami). Whenever Nesakumaran attempts to explain how his rape of his own daughter occurred, he can only offer either circular narratives that are rooted in the violent colonial and postcolonial past of Sri Lanka, or fantastical narratives such as the one that concludes the novel, an episode in which an old man carries a decomposed corpse (Shobasakthi, 2010: 165–68). 3 Even as the novel alternates between his first-person perspective and that of an “omniscient” narrator, it resists listening to female voices that are present within the text.
This issue of the unnarratability of child rape is the focal point of my reading of Traitor. Like Ramaswamy, I view this violent act as the centre of the novel, but I focus specifically on the impossibility of its articulation particularly within a fissured national space torn apart by Tamil separatist as well as majoritarian Sinhalese nationalist discourses. I argue that this unnarratability showcases two essential facets of the idea of the nation for a Tamil Sri Lankan subject.
First, it reflects the chauvinist state of Sri Lanka’s separatist Tamil nationalism and its elision of the voices of women who are as much caught up in violence as the men. Second, Traitor presents the problem of unnarratability as entangled within the condition of refugeehood for the Tamil male subject who has to locate himself within the diaspora; for him, the national space of Sri Lanka is both literally and figuratively unavailable — any attempt to narrate this space only emerges as a failure of coherent articulation.
In examining this phenomenon of unnarratable violence, the specific textual features I consider are the novel’s vivid depictions of torture and its disjointed narrative structure. I argue that the presence of these embedded experiences of militant and state-sanctioned violence highlights the failures of Tamil nationalism as it strives for the creation of a separate state in northeastern Sri Lanka. The child rape is scripted as a part of a larger pattern of intermingled violence, both casual civilian violence and state-sanctioned military violence. As violence begets yet more violence, we see a breakdown of individuals, families, and communities. In the case of Nesakumaran, he loses his sense of a coherent self; he sees his familial relationships destroyed by his rape of his own daughter, and his community dissolves as he is beaten to death by his own relatives. The breakdowns at all three levels are inextricable from, and mutually reinforcing of, one another, culminating in the fundamental breakdown of separatist Tamil nationalism itself.
The violence of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism: Representation and trauma
Critical theory has long acknowledged and extensively explored the slippages between representation and trauma and the sheer difficulty of describing and explaining traumatic experiences (Caruth, 1996; Friedlander, 1994; Rotheberg, 2009). Yet trauma also calls out for expression and articulation. Modern literature since the Holocaust evinces an abundant human need to represent and fictionalize traumatic events such as torture. In postcolonial literature, we see a pervasive concern with the violence of colonialism; in the aftermath of that violence, postcolonial writers often question the role of the nation in fomenting and perpetuating that violence. These writers tend to explore the relationship between nation and violence by fictionalizing the problematic events of a nation’s history, thereby questioning their meanings and interpretations in popular memory. This fictionalizing of past events is meant not to conceal history, but to imagine alternative accounts of it that shed new light on dominant and official accounts of those events.
In fictionalizing postcolonial history, writers face the difficult question of how to represent violent acts such as torture without making that violence appealing. J. M. Coetzee invokes these difficulties in the 1986 essay “Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State”, where he says that the writer who represents torture in imaginative fiction has the task of crafting this representation without letting it slip into easy pathologization. While the artist must bear witness to torture, the “true challenge”, argues Coetzee, “is how not to play the game by the rules of the state” (1992; 1986: 361). In other words, writers may find the torture chamber strangely alluring because of its forbidden status, and enraptured by this morbid fascination, may want to peer inside. However, Coetzee warns that in order for the writer to represent what they want their readers to witness, they must take care lest the reader be subconsciously co-opted into admiring the exhibition of violent power that the torturer represents (1986: 361–64). 4 In Traitor, Shobasakthi confronts this problem of how to represent the violence of torture by blurring the neat distinctions between the perpetrator and victim. He also juxtaposes normalized acts of class and caste violence with the exercise of torture that takes place in Sri Lankan prisons, in which the figures of victim and victimizer are no longer discernible. Thus, it is the double-faced portrait of the torturer/tortured that, in Traitor, Shobasakthi tries to paint with all its contradictions. By juxtaposing the torture chamber with the spaces of everyday violence that lurk within Pannaitivu, the novel warns us that casual violence is no different from the aggression exhibited in state-sanctioned torture: they share vocabularies and practices.
In Traitor, the everyday violence as well as the state-sanctioned political violence is inextricably linked to preserving caste hierarchy. Traitor begins with a “caste list” (16), which provides the statistical data of caste communities on Palmyra Island. The narrative goes on to detail the deep caste discrimination and untouchability practices on the island, which high-caste Christian Vellalars reinstated when they converted from Hinduism to Christianity. Only the Vellalars are allowed to enter the church, and the lower-caste communities are given very limited access to religious festivals such as the celebration of Christmas (16–18). A corrupted police force aids the caste-based discrimination in the Tamil provinces. Religion is used as a tool to legitimize caste control, in which only high-caste groups are allowed direct access to the Christian God. The lower-caste Christians are barred from these religious rituals for fear that their untouchable status may induce pollution. Shobasakthi writes that in Pannaitivu, to protect St. Anthony and the four Vellalars carrying him, there were four policemen and Inspector Jayakumar, standing guard with guns. There were many Vellalars who had left their Bibles and rosaries at home and come with sticks and knives in hand. Watching all this were about thirty to thirty-five men, women and children sitting in the street and blocking the way. (44)
Thus, Shobasakthi implies, the cultural impact of Christian conversion did not obliterate the social hierarchy of caste within the Tamil provinces; it only reinstalled this through new forms of religiosity that reified caste hierarchy through practices of social exclusion and untouchability.
The caste divisions in Traitor beget various kinds of violence, all of which are interrelated. Early in the novel, for example, the first act of Nesakumaran that readers witness is his burning down of the school for Dalit children in his hometown of Pannaitivu. He does this because the school is run by Sinhala Buddhist monks (11). Nesakumaran’s act highlights his intentions, as a high-caste Vellalar, to safeguard caste hierarchy. This in spite of the noble intention he had expressed to fight against the hegemony that had resulted from the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, which had instituted Sinhala as the sole official language of the country. As the narrative progresses, we learn that Nesakumaran’s father, Earnest, headmaster of the local school, believes in this caste-based oppression. Later in the novel, Earnest returns home after Nesakumaran’s arrest and weeps in sorrow at having witnessed his son’s torture at the hands of the police. But his first call is to burn down the house of Srikanthamalar, a nurse in the village of Pannaitivu, because she belongs to the Kadayar caste, which is viewed as one of the lower castes in Sri Lankan Tamil society. Earnest urges his compatriots thus: All these troubles came about because of that accursed house of the Kadayar. I told you again and again not to allow these Kadayars to live inside our village limits. But you thought you were being kind. But in the end, that Kadayar woman revealed her low caste origins. That house of a prostitute cannot remain in our village any longer. Come on boys, burn down her house. (54)
This short extract demonstrates how the logic of caste operates in the novel, within spectacular acts of violence in Sri Lankan Tamil society, acts that reinstate the society’s inherent feudalistic hierarchy.
The intermingled nature of the everyday cruel practices of caste and the separatist violence of Tamil militancy groups exposes the hypocrisies that frame Tamil nationalism and exposes the deep fissures that exist within Sri Lankan Tamil society. This is particularly evident in the nationalist discourses espoused by militant Tamil organizations such as the LTTE, which believed in the ideals of valour, sacrifice, and devotion to legitimize Tamil separatist violence. The novel illustrates this hypocrisy through Nesakumaran’s actions when he turns to militancy after abandoning his theological training. In the earlier parts of the text, we see that Nesakumaran is associated with a separatist Tamil militant organization, which remains unnamed and bears many similarities with the LTTE.
Along with his accomplice Kalaichelvan, one of the first missions that Nesakumaran undertakes is the bombing of the local police station. After their failed bombing attempt, Nesakumaran and Kalaichelvan head home. On their way, Nesakumaran discovers that Kalaichelvan has been in an intoxicated state all along, having consumed toddy beforehand. Nesakumaran chides Kalaichelvan for failing to adhere to the rules of the separatist militant organization, which emphasize morally upright behaviour that is rooted in medieval Tamil culture. Kalaichelvan tries to defend his actions, claiming he has acted out of nervousness and pleading that he would never repeat this action in the future, but Nesakumaran remains unmoved. He proceeds to lash Kalaichelvan with a belt as punishment for defying the rules and justifies his actions by saying that he is acting on behalf of the organization, “which will never build a movement” if it treats such transgressions lightly (41). The LTTE believed that upholding of maanam or honour, closely associated with a sense of pride in Tamil cultural antiquity and connoting values of righteousness, was vital to moulding Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka (Rudhramoorthy, 2001: 205). In its version of Tamil nationalism, the LTTE upheld ideals of valour and morality to promote the idea of an ideal Tamil society that was built on righteous behaviour.
And yet, as Rudhramoorthy Cheran has shown, the LTTE’S rhetoric of belonging and its claim to represent a monolithic Tamil society unified by shared values and history belied the fact that the group was actually quite exclusionary. In its conceptualization of Tamil identity and belonging, the LTTE made deliberate omissions in its definition of who was considered worthy of being identified as “Tamil”. For instance, in conversations about Sri Lankan Tamil identity by both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government, one group that is routinely left out are the “Up-Country Tamils”, Indian Tamil immigrants who came to work in the tea plantations of Sri Lanka in the 1830s. 5 In a study of the plantation Tamils in Sri Lanka, Daniel Bass (2013: 53) observes that while the LTTE and many other militant Tamil groups employed “a pan-Tamil rhetoric” for the creation of the separatist state of Tamil Eelam, this talk is only “lip-service”, and the group did not include the central highlands where most of the Up-Country Tamils reside. Within the Tamil community in Sri Lanka, Up-Country Tamils are usually looked down upon by the high-caste Jaffna Tamils because of their lower caste and class status as immigrants from India, who were brought to work in the hill plantations as coolies.
The disjunctions within the Sri Lankan Tamil community are evinced at various points in the narrative of Traitor. In the earlier sections of the novel, Nesakumaran’s family hires Rajendran, an Indian Tamil boy from the plantation country, as domestic help. Nesakumaran’s sisters Maria and Martha subject Rajendran to ill treatment for their amusement and exploit his powerlessness. Their cruelty toward him imitates the torture rituals that we witness elsewhere in the novel, particularly when Nesakumaran is interrogated by the police inspector, Jayakumar (64). Shobasakthi writes, The minute they got home from the school in the afternoon, they would run to the garden, where Rajendran would be chasing parrots or weeding the grass. The girls would critically examine his work and find fault with him. Maria would order Rajendran to kneel, facing the sun. She would then place a small stone on the upturned forehead of the kneeling boy. If he moved and dropped the stone, Rajendran would be threatened with a caning. (79)
Such instances of casual, caste-based violence are threaded throughout the novel and are juxtaposed with the official, state-sanctioned violence of the civil war in a way that highlights the inextricability of the two modes of violence.
Strikingly, the novel’s accounts of violence, particularly the acts of torture, are centred specifically on the masculine body, which suffers due to its allegiance to the nationalist cause. In the following section, I examine the ways in which the novel’s torture scenes depict these suffering male bodies, in which the ideal of valour breaks down to showcase the fissures embedded in the Tamil separatist cause. Through a close reading of the novel’s descriptions of violence and torture, I argue that these scenes provide a space in which Tamil nationalism and ideas of the Sri Lankan nation can be critiqued. In addition, the striking absence of the voices of women who suffer violence in the novel points to the gendered discourse of separatist Tamil nationalism.
The suffering male body and Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism
In Traitor, Nesakumaran’s loss of his homeland is intimately connected with the physical breakdown of his body. Over the course of the novel, Nesakumaran recollects the experiences of torture and his physical and emotional breakdown that took place in the prisons of Sri Lanka. In one of the later sections of the novel, Nesakumaran remembers the time he spent in detention as a Tamil political prisoner in the early 1980s: Chained to the wall, as I lay in the Annai Iravu Sea Salt Refinery Army Camp, I was like a broken statue made of salt. It was as if I were talking in a polythene bag filled with gasoline, my lips moving desperately for air while my tongue swirled […] it was during this time that Sinhala and the English newspapers were continuously carrying articles to the editor filled with racist vitriol. We heard news that the Sri Lankan army had been attacking the Tamils living in the border regions of Trincomalee and Vavuniya. In all, the whole nation was awaiting another whole-scale ethnic violence to burst forth at any moment. (64)
Throughout the course of the novel, the violent acts committed by and against Nesakumaran’s body, as well as the large-scale ethnic violence of the civil war, are both centred on the male body. In Nesakumaran’s narrative of torture, the suffering bodies that undergo torture are all male, and their anguish is in part the anxiety of emasculation. Traitor’s association of the loss of homeland with the suffering male body raises two questions: Why is the suffering body only that of a gendered, male subject? And what are the implications for the participation of the Tamil male body in crafting discourses of Tamil nationalism?
Violence against women is hinted at in Traitor, usually in allusions to sexual assault or rape, but for the most part, this type of violence is elided. Of the four women in the story, three are subjected to sexual violence: Srikanthamalar, the nurse who gives Nesakumaran money to help the Tamil movement, and Nesakumaran’s sister Ranjini are both raped, the latter by Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) soldiers on Christmas Day; Nesakumaran himself rapes his daughter Nirami. Premini, Nesakumaran’s wife, is the only female character not subjected to sexual violence. Yet, the voices of all these women are subsumed by the narrative voices of Nesakumaran and the third-person narrator. We never hear the women speak; nor are they given a space to voice their versions of the sexual violence they have suffered. While we do hear the voice of Premini reprimanding Nesakumaran for his daughter’s rape, this is only heard as an unreasonable enunciation that does not and will not hear the root motives for Nesakumaran’s behaviour, the trauma of torture and its related traumatic effects. It is notable that, once again, Premini’s frustration at being unable to understand her husband is narrated through Nesakumaran’s voice. Given the considerable attention that is paid to the LTTE women tigers and suicide bombers in anthropological analyses of Tamil nationalism, Shobasakthi’s narrative move to sideline the acts of violence committed against women — and focus on the male subject as a suffering body — is a striking one, worthy of closer consideration. 6
What, then, are the implications of eliding the female body and associating only the male body with nationalism? To address this question, we turn to Frantz Fanon, whose work on psychoanalysis within a colonial timeframe is illuminating here. For Fanon, national violence is not simply about wholesale liberation; it is also motivated by a drive to restore a black, subaltern masculinity. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), as many critics have noted, 7 the image of the black man that Fanon challenges is grounded in a male physiology. Throughout his analysis, it is evident that Fanon’s alignment of “sex” and “the Negro” does not represent the experiences of black women; the examples he offers are limited to black men. While the black male body is the site upon which the nationalist struggle is played out, the female black body is reduced to a mere metaphor within the Fanonian national imaginary (Tomlinson, 2010: 76). As Tomlinson has incisively pointed out, Fanon’s discussion of black women is limited to the Caribbean female writer Mayotte Capécia’s novels and autobiography (2010: 67). With its sexist undertones, Fanon’s masculinist gender trope resonates with the plot of Shobasakthi’s Traitor, where the trauma of gendered violence against women, specifically their rape and torture, is rendered unimportant, and the women’s voices remain muted throughout the text. It is tempting to dismiss this narrative move as a gross instance of chauvinist nationalism. Yet, it seems to be motivated by something more complicated — perhaps a recognition of the shortcomings and inconsistencies within a Tamil liberation struggle that is essentially patriarchal in its outlook.
Tamil nationalism has been heavily inflected by the presence of male-dominated discourses since the first half of the twentieth century. The discourse of Tamil nationalism began circulating in northeastern Sri Lanka immediately after independence, when S. J. V. Chelvanayagam called for the “unity of Tamil-speaking peoples” (Wilson, 1994: 134) by founding the Tamil Federal Party (TLF) in 1949. The establishment of about 30 Tamil militant groups followed soon after the founding of TLF (Rudhramoorthy, 2009: xxii–xxiii). The rhetoric of these militant groups was strongly shaped by masculine combative ideals, as expressed in Tamil cultural discourses of warrior heroism and self-sacrificial martyrdom. Militant Tamil youth were fondly referred to as the podiyal, or “the boys”. Their rebelliousness largely exemplifies what R. W. Connell (1995) calls “protest masculinity”, which occurs when “growing boys put together a tense façade making a claim to power where there are no real resources for power” (1995: 111). Connell argues that such exaggerated claims are accompanied by a violent resistance to authority (1995: 113–15). In the case of most of the Tamil militant organizations that sprouted in the late 1970s, this masculine behaviour of protesting and attempting to lay claim to control and power was expressed in defiant and violent acts against authority, such as assassinations, robberies, and bombings. This resistance and rebellion was often seen as a reassertion of masculine power in the face of Sinhalese domination. Such expressions of machismo were solidified into the representation of Tamil masculine identity not as something that is merely rebellious, but as an extension of ancient Tamil warrior identity from the feudal, Sangam period. Emphases on discipline and austerity within articulations of LTTE masculinity are tied to devotion and martyrdom, signifying a break from earlier groups that advocated a purely rebellious masculinity (Gross, 2009: 61).
In Traitor, “violent devotion” (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 1994, 2005; Schalk, 1997; Thiranagama, 2010; Trawick, 2007) to the cause of separatist Tamil nationalism exemplifies the paradox inherent in a chauvinist national struggle. This paradox is manifested through the male body, which simultaneously suffers and breaks down even while it inflicts suffering on others. The stories of Nesakumaran and of his friends Pakkiri and Selvaratnam, who are involved in different Tamil insurgent groups, expose the hollowness of the grand narrative of Tamil nationalism. At the end of the novel, the reader notices that a basic fact unites all of these men’s stories: despite their grandiose claims that they are fighting for independent Eelam, their suffering male bodies never achieve the martyrdom that is promised to them by nationalist discourse. The prospect of such validation for their suffering is forever out of reach. Every major male character in Traitor dies in a reprehensible manner, and none will be remembered or praised for his actions on behalf of the movement. These men who dedicated their lives to the cause are cynical, even comical. Their dark, cruel violence makes it impossible for us to see them as heroes or martyrs.
The narrative works to expose the hollowness and hypocrisy of these nationalist claims through several narrative features, including the disjointed structure discussed above and ironic language that lurks throughout the text. Indeed, the disjointedness of the narrative structure can be seen at two levels. At one level, it emerges as a metaphor for the effects of the torture that pervades the novel. Traitor deftly captures the breakdown of Nesakumaran’s self through a fractured narrative structure that oscillates between first- and third-person narrative to offer a powerful commentary on the unavailability of the national space of Sri Lanka for its Tamil citizens. At another level, the disjointedness corresponds to Nesakumaran’s status as a narrator who is simultaneously a refugee. In Traitor, Nesakumaran’s voice appears as speaking from the position of a deterroritalized space in which the breakdown of the text is reflective of the refugee story which is always broken, partial, and destabilized through movement.
Fractured narrative structure and traumatic memory
In Traitor, ironic and subversive language becomes an important ingredient in the story and a tool for critiquing and exposing the limitations of separatist Tamil nationalism. In the simplest definitions of the concept, irony conveys a meaning in which what is implied is other than that which is directly said. Holoch argues that ironic language reveals “an incongruity between the idealized version of ‘what ought to be done’ and the real version of ‘what is actually being done’, a gap the speaker is satirically exploiting through indirect articulation” (2012: 32). In Traitor, irony serves a similar purpose; the self-referential jokes in the narrative mock the ways in which Tamil nationalist discourse sprouted in the early 1980s.
Before the LTTE emerged as a potent separatist force, the dominant rhetoric of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalist politics in the late 1970s and the 1980s was shaped by the upper caste, land-owning Vellalars. Earlier in the novel, Shobasakthi shows how S. J. V. Chelvanayagam, one of the forerunners of the Tamil nationalist cause in the North and the North-East, was eager to retain power in his own hands as a venerable Tamil opposition leader despite his old age, and refused to assign a successor. Shobasakthi details how young men would “practically carry” the frail Chelvanayagam to stage at public meetings and place him in the centre, and when it was time to speak, Chelvanayagam would garble some unintelligible nonsense […] the only man who had the ability to translate Chelvanayagam’s incoherent speech was Appapillai Amirthalingam. Amirthalingam would stand on stage and with great humility listen to Chelvanayagam’s meaningless jabber and then translate it as “Our great Tamil Father wants me to take on the leadership of the party”. (17)
This parodic approach to nationalist political discourse runs like a thread through the novel. In 1977, the United Liberation Front under Amirthalingam became the main opposition party in Sri Lanka. When the Sinhala government came to power, it was clear that Amirthalingam’s rhetoric was merely an empty promise and was unable to match the power of the Sinhala majority government, which did not heed the demands voiced by the Tamil leaders. Nesakumaran ridicules this rhetoric at various points in the narrative by highlighting the purely performative and rhetorical aspects of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism. For instance, he shows us the theatrical nature of the public meetings in which Amirthalingam, through his fiery Tamil separatist rhetoric, tried to mobilize young Tamil men into the movement. In order to pledge allegiance to the cause of Tamil Eelam, the Tamil youth were ordered to anoint Amirthalingam’s head with blood cut from their fingers. Shobasakthi describes the melodramatic spectacle thus: Nesakumaran kept staring at his finger, angling the blade in the various directions. As blood poured out around him, Amirthalingam stood unmoving on the stage offering the front part of his head to the eager crowd. After a decent interval, he got up from his seat and spreading his arms out began to coo at the young men. “Aiyo enough, enough, my lions, you have cut yourself enough, my lions. Hmmm…” (24)
Ending with the characteristic, deflationary sound of a nonchalant “hmmm” and offering no comment or judgement upon this display, this short extract showcases how expressions of Tamil nationalism, which bordered on absurd spectacles of male sacrifice, did not serve any real purpose. Most notably, characters’ frequent use of the verbal filler mmm — the novel’s original, Tamil title which denotes a sense of half-interested acknowledgement when listening to someone speak or tell a story — represents a mockery of the grand rhetoric of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism that took root in the late 1970s and the early 1980s and led to the civil war.
The novel is located amid the loss of land and nation, both within Sri Lanka itself and in the diasporic expanse of France to which Nesakumaran flees after his release from the Welicade prison in Colombo. Traitor suggests that for the Sri Lankan Tamil, nation and sovereignty are in flux even within the borders of the Sri Lankan nation, which transforms itself into a detention zone that is doubly controlled by the Sri Lankan Sinhala nation state and Tamil separatist nationalism. The novel implies, through the extended use of broken and partial first- and third-person narrative voices, that Nesakumaran’s subjectivity as a refugee evades narrative cohesion. In this sense, the breakdown of the narrative is directly related to the non-belonging and precarity of the Tamil subject as an internally displaced person within Sri Lanka and in the diaspora as an abject, refugee figure.
In this case, Traitor prompts us to consider its tale as a “refugee narrative” in which its formal narrative features highlight the exclusion of the Tamil subject by both geographical and textual parameters. Thus, Traitor argues that the loss of the Tamil subject is of a double nature: he or she is interminably bound by the unavailability of a spatial home as well as the right to belong within written and spoken language, memory, and credible narration. The fragmented narrative structure of Traitor demonstrates the paradoxical nature of giving testimony about violence and trauma; it highlights the limits of what an outsider can know about the event, and, at the same time, underlines the tensions inherent in documenting objective facts about subjective and unrepresentable experiences of pain and torture. Traitor exemplifies the struggles between “deep memory” and “common memory” that have been discussed by theorists of trauma studies in relation to the Holocaust. Friedlander (1994: 266) argues that “common memory” tries to iron out the inconsistencies of remembering a traumatic event by the “imposition of coherence, closure and possibly redemptive stance”, whereas “deep memory” tries to prevent the imagination from accepting a linear narrative that can effectively explain an experience of trauma. In Traitor, the self-referential structure of the narrative, which switches between objective narration in the third person and subjective narration in the first person, can be seen to exemplify the conflicts between “deep memory” and “common memory”. In this context, the subjective response of deep memory that is exemplified by the first-person narrative voice forces the reader to think critically about the histories of the Sri Lankan civil war and compare it with the objective representations in official histories of the Sri Lankan nation, in which the disjunctions between the Tamil communities are not represented. For instance, in the state’s version of history, the LTTE has been viewed as the sole representative of the Sri Lankan Tamils for the creation of a separatist state. However, the LTTE has a long tradition of terror and violence by which it has carved its spokesperson status. The LTTE was infamous for quashing dissent of any kind within its ranks as well as eliminating any Tamil groups that differed from its ideologies. The first-person narrative voice in Traitor highlights these cleavages by showcasing the existence of other separatist Tamil groups, and how the LTTE used force as well as intimidation from civil groups to assert their sole authority as the representative of the Sri Lankan Tamils. Shobasakthi writes how Nesakumaran’s father, Earnest, aided the LTTE in their terrorism: From the time the Movement created a village court in Palmyra Palm Island — they called it a resolution organisation […] Earnest Master became an extremely loyal supporter of the Tigers. He made a list of how much each individual could be taxed in the village, how much money could be asked as donation and from whom, who could give gold, etc., and gave all the information to the Movement. He secretly informed on those who made faces at the Movement behind its back, on those who made fun of it, and on those who made negative remarks about the movement when drunk. All of these folks received public whippings. (155)
The subjective “I” voice appears when we hear about Nesakumaran’s experience of torture within the text, which switches to the omniscient third-person narrative when it details the other events in Nesakumaran’s life. In addition, the third-person narrative voice that constantly intrudes upon the first-person accounts further complicates the issue of authorial reliability and commentary. The “truth” of the novel is constantly out of reach, and empathy for the character of Nesakumaran can never be straightforward. His double nature as both victim of ethnic-based violence and alleged perpetrator of child rape looms large over the narrative. Readers of Traitor are destabilized from the beginning of the narrative as they are constantly left to question whether they can trust in Nesakumaran’s boastful, hyperbolic, and fragmented narrative voice.
Written in a disjointed narrative style that negates the voices of women while sweeping across the homeland of Sri Lanka and the expanse of the diaspora — the space of the resident and the space of the refugee, both of which are unavailable for the Tamil male writer — Shobasakthi’s novel traces the intersections between caste and gender in the framing of Tamil nationalism, in its insistent masculinity. The tale of rape, meanwhile, and its persistent stifling within the narrative of Traitor, raises questions about the possibility of the narration of sexual violence, within a refugee narrative that elides the voices of women, including the one raped within a refugee narrative — in which the refugee is himself accused of sexual assault. By muting of the voice of the daughter Nirami and her experience of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, Traitor questions whether the textual space of the novel is capable of articulating the experiences of gendered trauma within dominant, masculinist nationalist projects of both the nation-state and separatist nationalism which equally subsume the voices of women.
Conclusion
The narrative of Traitor signifies, in many ways, an aberration in the discourse of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism. Translating the title of the novel from the original Tamil “mmm” into English as “Traitor” changes its meanings significantly, and by doing so, captures a strong feature of Tamil nationalism as it is embedded in popular perception. The idea of the “traitor” is central to Sri Lankan Tamil imaginings of communal identity. Anthropologist Sharika Thiranagama (2010) notes that when she asked Tamils whether Sinhalese or Muslims could be considered traitors, the answer was unequivocal — only Tamils could be traitors. Sinhalese and Muslims were instead ethiri (enemies), because of their ethnic and religious affiliations respectively. Muslims, though Tamil-speaking and sharing the north and east with Tamils, were nonetheless, by virtue of being religiously distinct, marked as “other” and clearly differentiated from belonging to the Sri Lankan Tamil community. Thiranagama notes that for Tamils, the greatest betrayal comes from inside the line that one has constructed between the “self” and the “other”. In this sense, the figure of the traitor is someone who is simultaneously inside and outside the community (2010: 135). Through his writings that point out the inconsistencies in the Tamil nationalism espoused by the LTTE, Shobasakthi is often thought of as a traitor who does not believe in the Tamil nationalist cause of Eelam. As the author puts it in one of his interviews after the English version of Gorilla came out, “My identity as a militant, the minute I left the country, became that of a refugee. But when I began to write, my identity became that of a traitor” (Sivanarayanan, 2008: 52).
Shobasakthi’s novel adds an important dimension to the mobile genre of the “refugee narrative” in Sri Lankan Tamil writing. Traitor interrogates whether the dimensions of the refugee narrative can be identified in thematic terms of displacement and belonging, but also through textual and formal narrative elements which reflect the idea of failed nationalism, the unnarratability of violence, and gendered erasure. In addition, by viewing Shobasakthi’s novel through the framework of the Tamil refugee narrative, we can register the impact of mobility and its attendant meanings in contemporary Tamil worlds across different landscapes. This re-envisioning in turn enables the creation of new subjectivities that can reflect the framing and workings of separatist Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.