Abstract
In 2009, decades of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka officially ended in an orgy of violence. The International Red Cross called it ‘an unimaginable human catastrophe’, the United Nations a ‘bloodbath’. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were bombed, shelled, starved and denied proper medical care – punished by the government for their support of an armed Tamil rebellion.
It now seems possible 40,000 minority Tamils perished on white sand tropical beaches in the space of just five months, making Sri Lanka one of the bloodiest wars so far this century.
Eyewitnesses describe children in the war zone having their limbs amputated without anaesthetic in hospitals that smelled like butchers’ shops, and people being blown up in front of them as they fled to escape the shells.
When the guns went silent on 18 May 2009, exuberant Sinhalese from the majority community poured onto the streets, waving flags and letting off firecrackers, oblivious to the loss of life. Soldiers exchanged trophy photographs of half-naked dead women’s bodies and the rebel leader’s corpse – pictures that swiftly appeared online.
All the exhausted, traumatised Tamil survivors were herded into squalid refugee camps – supposedly for security reasons. Thousands bribed their way out, fearing rape, torture or disappearance if they remained. Everyone who walked out of the war zone alive had cheated death. The number of amputations and injuries was staggering even for aid workers used to war. Many children were separated from their parents in the rush to escape, others orphaned.
Never had Sri Lanka’s two main communities been so far apart. For years they had been divided by language, with some young Tamils growing up in areas of the north of the island controlled by the Tamil Tiger rebels without ever meeting a Sinhalese civilian. Even if they had met, they would have required a translator.
This makes it all the more surprising that Tamil and Sinhalese poets have both been writing – in isolation from one another – about the catastrophe that occurred in their divided island in 2009.
Much of the poetry expresses views that cannot be published inside Sri Lanka. Sinhalese who criticise the military solution to the conflict have been threatened, silenced or hounded out. Many of the country’s top journalists have gone into exile. Anyone who raises the issue of war crimes is denounced as a traitor. Tackling the subject of rape is particularly sensitive. While the army denies the use of rape as a weapon of war, the situation of survivors is made even worse by the powerful stigma in Tamil society. Very few women will come forward and admit to having been sexually abused for fear of rejection by their own families, with the result that they often try to commit suicide as the only way out of their predicament.
The Tamil poetry of Elil Rajan is raw, jagged and dripping with fresh horror. Rajan is a Jesuit priest, who has faced criticism from his peers for writing graphically about sexual abuse. Priests and nuns in Sri Lanka hear first-hand about the horror of rape because they are some of the few people the victims will confide in afterwards. ‘It’s difficult to explain rape as it happened,’ he says. ‘I do it in poetry through metaphor.’ The imagery includes the symbol of a woman to denote both the Tamil motherland and the individual – raped literally and figuratively by the Sinhala soldiers.
As a Tamil, Elil Rajan was first displaced by the war at the age of 11. Knowing from experience what it’s like to be a refugee, he wrote this poem about a Tamil child in the government detention camp at the end of the war:
The child lies in the hot sun The dust in his eyes Sweat trickles down his ribs And collects in his hollow stomach As starvation.
Tamil refugee camp, Vavuniya, Sri Lanka, 26 May 2009
Credit: Sipa Press/Rex Features
To see once prosperous farmers reduced to begging for food and water rather than demanding their political rights was shocking:
A hungry hand stretches out
It’s neither his nor hers
Reduced from people to
Just pots and pans
Fighting for food
Elil views his poetry as a way of capturing the cultural memory of genocide. He is critical of those in his own community who betrayed the Tamil cause and now profit from the war. In his poem ‘May 18th’ [p. 171], the term Black July refers to the anti-Tamil pogrom in July 1983 which triggered full-scale civil war; Black May refers to the month when the war ended in the last rebel-held village of Mullivaikkal on the coast.
By contrast, Mahesh Munasinghe is a Sinhalese poet born in 1970. He started writing while actively involved in student politics in the late ‘80s and early 90s, heavily influenced by survivors of the leftist JVP (Sri Lankan People’s Liberation Front) uprising in the south of the island. Mahesh emigrated to Canada in 2000 and went silent until he made a remarkable comeback in 2008, just as the civil war in Sri Lanka intensified. His poems were published online as well as in Sri Lankan newspapers and were read publicly at anti-war rallies and campaigns. Many readers circulated emails containing his poems as a way of expressing their opposition to the mass killing taking place in the north of Sri Lanka. Most of his work expresses the painful collective guilt experienced by those Sinhalese who opposed the war.
His poem ‘Broken Pottu’ [pp. 172–173] refers to the red spot, or pottu, traditionally worn by Hindu married women on their foreheads and more recently also by children to protect them from evil. Usually a widow stops wearing her pottu immediately after her husband’s death, but in this war so many men have disappeared that women do not even know whether they are still entitled to wear it.
Ajith Herath, also Sinhalese, was born in 1967 and became involved in student politics during the JVP uprising in the 80s in the south of Sri Lanka. He was arrested by the military in 1989 and tortured, witnessing terrible brutality. Losing most of his close friends during that period of history, he learned to express his loss through poetry as a way of overcoming his own pain. While held in jail for almost three and half years, he wrote passionately and prolifically. His poems were frequently published in the alternative media in the first half of the 90s and he became one of the leading poets of his generation in the South. He is also a painter, political cartoonist and political analyst who worked as a journalist until he was forced into exile in 2008, when the civil war was reaching its denouement. Ajith received a scholarship and stayed at Böll House in Germany (affiliated to the Heinrich Böll Stifftüng) as a guest writer from May 2009 to January 2011.
His poem ‘Seven Dreams’ [pp. 176-178] blurs what happened in the past in the south with the recent killings of Tamils in the north, to show how it was the same army that conducted atrocities, first against an uprising by a youth movement and then by a minority.
May 18th
Black July
Black May
Everything looks dark
White hope has faded
People wear black clothes
And our faces disappear in the darkness of mourning
Along with all traces of our identity.
Demonstrations do not give any hope
Because we’ve become the greedy Lion’s prey
Now we ourselves have even prostituted Freedom
In order to wear rich clothes
The rape will continue until the Lion’s lust abates
And there’s nothing else left.
Every year we will mourn
And write in our history books of mass murder
We will say that Tamils are all gone
Chased away from our land
Because of those traitors ready to betray Freedom
Resurrection is not for us
The dove is alive but
Drinking the blood produced in Mullivaikkal.
Elil Rajau
Broken Pottu Poem
‘Many thousands of the children in the camps have lost both their parents’
News from the Sri Lankan ‘welfare camps’ – 2009
Bright red pottu
Every morning
Never missed.
The point of your finger
Right here between our eyebrows
For both of us.
Amma [Mummy] puts hers first
Then she puts mine.
Remember me insisting
Me first, me first!
That day Dad give me a biggest hug, squeezed so tight,
Lifted me so high, laughing so loud.
At midnight he went out of the bunker.
Amma must have known he wasn’t coming back
But still she smiled at me.
The day she went out of the bunker
Her pottu was still shining between her eyebrows.
Then her pottu went right into her head
And red blood came all down her calm, loving face.
Before then I only knew how to cry.
Then I knew how to shriek, to scream
Holding on to your body, Amma,
Scream!
Scream!
Scream!
Here too our school is under the trees
But they don’t take the register.
I don’t mind, I’m used to it.
The only thing different is
There are no bunkers here.
Sometimes my heart beats so hard
It’s louder than the gunshots
And tears just shoot out when I think about you.
Please don’t ask me about pottu
If Amma can’t put it on me I don’t want it.
And please don’t teach us about parents,
I don’t want to hear about them.
It’s not only me; none of us want to hear it.
July 2009
Mahesh Munsinghe
Translated by Prasanna Ratnayake
The Emperor’s Clothes
Do not question
the numbers
when speaking of
your dead sons
in the field of war.
accept quietly
your death dues.
Hush! Don’t worry!
just in case
you trouble
Our Army Officers.
Gentlemen of the Black Robes,
you who were called traitors,
we know your Glory!
Hush! Shut your ears!
No Legal Action against
The Power Holders now
just in case
you distress
Their Leader.
A billion ends with nine zeros!
war is indeed costly
on what, pray, was it all spent?
Hush! No questions please!
Just in case
you embarrass
Our Rulers.
The liberated are free
in detention camps,
should another
Liberator descend to
free them.
Hush, Make no noise!
just in case
Our Sensitive Parliament
collapses
At such Heavy Questions.
Do not inquire
about the corpses
appearing here and there
of course, once in a way
Disappearances do Happen!
Hush! Don’t worry!
just in case
The Power and Glory
of our King
that rises by the day
Shatters.
Hungry? Just a little patience!
don’t you know?
this is only the effect
of a worldwide crisis.
Hush! Shut the Door!
stay Indoors …
Just in case
You expose
Our apprehensive government
shying away
in Stage Fright
from The People
Hear nothing!
See nothing!
Say nothing!
Until the little child
who saw through
the Emperor’s Clothes
… Into the Nakedness,
Arrives
To
Awaken Us.
Mahesh Munasinge
Translated by Francesca Bremner
Excerpt from ‘Seven Dreams’
Sixth Dream – As I was late, I missed you forever
I woke up in sorrowful vigilance.
Unaware, if it was early or late.
It was still dark.
All of a sudden, a feeling persisted
That someone somewhere was waiting for me.
Who and where was uncertain,
At times it might have been you.
The days ahead, the tasks and appointments,
Were torn off the calendar.
Only the months and days that had passed are remaining …
Walking along the A-9 road, 1
I cleared the last military checkpoint,
Yet nowhere could I see you.
As I was late,
I did not know, if you had left.
I was in the Vanni, 2 but you were not there.
So I was sitting on the doorstep
Of a house in ruins
Waiting with your half of the cigarette …
Seventh Dream – The past shattered and floated away
Once the search operation had been completed,
The soldiers left.
And in the demolished room I found
Our group’s last portrait
Torn into shreds.
Lingering on those time-faded scattered pieces
Was our smile
Of the last moments we spent together
Just before going our ways
Towards unknown destinies.
I placed the pieces on the window sill
Wanting to mend them.
A sudden mysterious wind
Stirred them up.
Piece by piece they scattered
With the last autumn leaves
Moving to sites far away.
We had become tiny pieces of paper
Tumbling away in the wind.
Reflections on the Metamorphoses
Lying on a bed early at dawn,
Listening to the song of a bird
Is a dream
Which may collapse from a fatal scream
In yet another dream.
Who are you?
Dream by dream …
You follow me, while I follow you
And before we can meet
You escape
Only to reappear in different form.
Who are you?
Who are we?
Following each other, escaping each other again
Through the mountains, valleys and meadows
That once we crossed.
Who are we?
Thousands of metamorphoses in a single soul,
Thousands of souls in a single shape.
Even now,
I cannot distinguish myself from you,
As I cannot tell you apart from the others.
You are the prime universal matter,
While I am but the reflector.
With the second wave,
The corpses were flushed out to sea
And the swords were cleaned.
Everything but the difference
Between the quick and the dead
Was washed away …
The nights they want to erase from our memory
Knock on the doors
Of wrecked houses full of bullet holes.
The dreams that were dreamt
During sleepless nights
Now are but short notes in an old diary …
Paths never taken at the junction of indecision
Are blurring in the mist of time. …
Ajith C Herath
Translated by Dawson Preethi and Karin Clark
Footnotes
1.
The main north-south highway in Sri Lanka – leading into the war zone.
2.
Vanni is the name for the rebel-held areas in the north where the war took place.