Archives for January, 2009

Last fall, I read Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka by Neil De Votta. A friend had recommended it as an introduction to Sri Lanka’s civil war. It was a good book — or perhaps more accurately, I’m glad I read it for reasons that have less to do with the quality of its content than the paucity of my knowledge of Sri Lankan politics. Following his further recommendations, I’ve begun reading Learning Politics From Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka by Mark P. Whitaker. The blurb reads:

This is the story of the life and impact of the political activist, journalist and freedom-fighter Sivaram Dharmeratnam. Sivaram dedicated his life to helping the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. He started out as an active participant in the war against the Sri Lankan government — in the eyes of some, a “terrorist”. Yet he eventually stepped away from the ruthless violence it involved. Instead, he became a high profile journalist in the Sri Lankan press, and used his position to fearlessly critique the government — despite repeated threats on his life, and the murder of other journalists. Finally, in 2005, Sivaram himself was assassinated.

When I was in high school, I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be precisely the kind of journalist that anyone who’s known me in the slightest capacity would imagine me wanting to be. Wars, genocides, arms races, dirty dirty local politics, corrupt cops — I wanted to immerse myself in misery. Maybe I’d get killed and maybe I’d win a Pulitzer.

“You’ll need to take self-defence classes,” said my eleventh-grade Sociology teacher. “You’re very small.”

But besides having periodical fits of rage directed, if confusedly, though correctly, at a fundamentally fucked-up school system, I never did anything patently ‘political’ in high school. Nor did I read any particularly important nonfiction. The extent of my civic engagement was arguing in law class about racial profiling when a boy with a particularly pansy ass¹ said, “But it is the black guys.”
“No,” I said, genuinely (naively) taken aback that I was actually in the same class as someone who’d seemed decent enough yet was so oblivious. And then I elaborated under my breath, “You stupid fucker.”²
Or bitching loudly and at length in the cafeteria about the vice-principal who’d suspended a student in the twelfth grade for wearing a kafiyyeh to school.³ (She was later quietly fired. The students, for their part, had never thought to mobilise on the issue, despite her history of blatantly racist policies.)

It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve become politically involved, in the sense of consciously surrounding myself with the kind of people who agitate for change like they believe it matters, like they believe it could happen, people who know that Yes We Did is never going to happen, but live like Yes We Can is true. Sometimes I believe them, sometimes I don’t, but their praxis is a certain kind of optimism, at once angry and boundless, that rings true to me. Ironically, as I’ve become more ‘political,’ my career goals have become correspondingly less conducive to the kind of heroics that thrilled me in my teens. I won’t get into the reasons here for the disconnect, but it doesn’t bother me as much as it might appear it should.

So anyway, I read Blowback and I was glad I did. As I told my friend,

what i did like about having read this book – and i think i’d feel the same way if i’d read any political overview of lankan politics – is that it’s got me thinking about how sri lanka relates to the rest of the world (esp wrt the us, india, and israel). previously, i was fixated on the internal cultural politics of the diaspora – and those conversations very quickly become frustratingly circular. so i’m glad to have a framework with which to escape that navel-gazing.

(Those comments shouldn’t be taken a reflection of the current state of discourse on issues relating to Sri Lanka, only an indication of the reductiveness of my own thinking about those issues.)

That was sometime last year. I picked up Learning Politics a few weeks ago. In light of Lasantha Wickramatunga’s recent assassination, the timing was unfortunately and accidentally appropriate. In the days since Wickramatunga’s murder, a number of eulogies on him were published on the net, and rightly. His self-written obituary is a forceful piece of writing:

As for me, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I walked tall and bowed to no man. And I have not travelled this journey alone. Fellow journalists in other branches of the media walked with me: most of them are now dead, imprisoned without trial or exiled in far-off lands. Others walk in the shadow of death that your Presidency has cast on the freedoms for which you once fought so hard. You will never be allowed to forget that my death took place under your watch. As anguished as I know you will be, I also know that you will have no choice but to protect my killers: you will see to it that the guilty one is never convicted. You have no choice.

Still, I can’t share in the hagiographic spirit, as I’d never heard of him prior to learning about his death, so it’d feel false. More importantly, mass posthumous hero-worship always leaves me cold: it’s reductive, it’s self-indulgent, and it deflects attention from the ongoing, groundroots, anonymous work that other people are doing. Without a proper awareness of the way crises continue even after the deaths and – more importantly – the memorialisations of popular figures, we run the risk of further calcifying the very struggles that those same figures were struggling to keep vital for an often indifferent public.

In any event, I’m less interested in specific journalists than I am in the general state of the media in Sri Lanka, which is rightly known for its media suppression.⁴ Just days before Wickramatunga’s murder, armed men attacked the largest private TV broadcasting station in Sri Lanka. So it appears that as the war progresses, Wickramatunga’s death and the future such killings it anticipates are indicative of a degenerating state of affairs. It’s the tip of the iceberg: if journalists are being killed merely for suggesting that things are amok, the number of civilian dead is likely much higher than anyone’s willing to admit or able to count — which theory gains credence when you consider just how this war is being enacted. On the face of it, the sheer minimalism of Western mainstream coverage suggests that as civil wars go, this one appears fairly clean: army cracks down on rebels; it’s simple, with little to no mention of civilian casualties. Meanwhile, noncombatants are dying – if not of direct violence, then of starvation and exposure. Razed villages, cut-off aid, these things don’t get mentioned, but they are all as much a part of war as immediate deaths.

I’m thinking also about how and if the national media suppression feeds into and supports international silence/ignorance. Granted, Sri Lanka is this tiny country that only a neglible number of people in the world give half a shit about. That people are dying there⁵ is nowhere near as interesting a fact as people dying in the Middle East, even if this island is the birthplace of the practice of suicide bombing as we know it. Still, I suspect if the Sri Lankan government weren’t doing such a good job of cracking down on dissent, more people would know about this war — more people, that is, than just teenage WarChild activists and inconvenienced tourists.

Learning Politics, by the way, is a fascinating read. I’ll put up a more extensive quotation from it later. Even if you’re not interested in Sri Lankan politics but are interested in the ethics of doing anthropological fieldwork, this is a good book to read, as it’s as much about the practice of anthropology as it is about Sivaram. Additionally, for theory-heads, the book’s a veritable minefield of all your most beloved names, from Wittgenstein to Derrida, except shifted out of the false comfort of quiet classrooms to the immediate contingencies of lived wars.

(Also, Whitaker was in town last year for the Tamil Studies Conference, as were several people cited/mentioned in this book. Check it out if you’re around this May.)

Updates

I began writing this about a week ago. Things have gotten significantly worse in the last few days.

First, on the media crackdown bit, Reporters Without Borders writes (Jan 23):

The editor of the privately-owned weekly newspaper Rivira, Upali Tennakoon, and his wife were attacked and wounded by four men on motorcycles as they drove to work this morning near Colombo. At the same time it was learned that at least five journalists have fled the country or gone into hiding and a news website had ceased operations because of threats.
[...]
Lankadissent, a news website with a reputation for being outspoken, chose to suspend its operations on 10 January for fear of reprisals.

More urgently, on Monday, Jan 26, there was news that the death toll had taken a spike up. This via TamilNet:

In a scene of carnage of untold proportion on civilian targets hit by hundreds of Sri Lanka Army fired artillery shells, more than 300 people have died and several hundreds are bleeding to death within the last 24 hours, amidst pouring rain inside the ‘saftey zone’ declared by the Colombo government. Houses and vehicles burn for a stretch of three km between Va’l’lipunam Kaa’li temple and Moongkilaa’ru towards Paranthan road, reports from Vanni said on Monday. Unattended bodies and injured people unable to move are lying around everywhere, while a remaining doctor fled and helpless ICRC officials virtually cried at the scene from their bunkers, TamilNet correspondent said.

For such a tiny place, we’re really fucking it up.

Further Reading

• Committee to Protect Journalists » Diplomatic pressure needed to protect journalists
• Committee to Protect Journalists » Journalists killed in 2008
• Committee to Protect Journalists » Journalists Imprisoned in 2008 (more)
• Reporters Without Borders » Global media rights groups condemn “culture of impunity and indifference” in Sri Lanka
• Reporters Without Borders » Statement of the International press freedom mission
• Asian Human Rights Commission » The letter by six former Ambassadors to the President of Sri Lanka

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I.

But at the age of eleven he suddenly raised his head and began to speak.

The teachers, male and female, did not always understand the meaning of his questions. “How is it that each thing has a left side and a right side?” That two hands could be at once identical and opposite, when he thought it over, seemed altogether disconcerting. The schoolmistress laughed along with the students. Remouald looked at the floor, his face a deep red.

His favourite subject at the time was geometry; the lessons plunged him into unsettling cogitations. He wished to comprehend why Pythagoras’s theorem, which was explained on the blackboard with numbers and figures that came out of one’s head, applied as well to the wooden frames that held up the roofs of houses, if the textbooks were to be believed. The schoolmaster impatiently repeated the demonstration, which Remouald had very well understood. That is not what he wanted to know. We develop laws in our heads, we create an entire abstract, ideal, mathematical world, and in reality things are in every way like those we have imagined: through what wondrous operation did this come about? The teacher settled the matter by saying it was necessarily so. Remouald left the classroom alarmed by that adverb.

- Gaetan Soucy. trans Lazer Lederhendler. The Immaculate Conception.

Salonika! tagged me, so here goes.

Rules

Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 16 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

I dare you not to believe anything that follows.

1. On my first day of work at a local digital marketing firm, I met one of my colleagues in the men’s washroom.
2. From ages 3 to 15, I had the world’s strongest British accent. Then I lost it and I can’t bring it back, because I can’t fake accents. But apparently, it comes out when I’m nervous, teaching, or being formal.
   I haven’t been to the UK in approximately two decades.
3. I am capable of talking faster than the speed of sound. Sometimes I sound like her.
   Continue reading this entry »

Minnale – Vaseegara (mp3)

The other day, for the second time in my life, I wore a sari. The first time had been for a fashion show in grade seven. I told people I was representing Sri Lanka, but really when it came down to it, I was representing all browns, given how often I got the response, “No, you’re not. That place doesn’t exist. I’ve never heard of it,” to my answer to the question, “Where are you from.”
Funny how that worked, when so much of Saudi Arabia’s most impoverished workforce is Sri Lankan, the housemaids and the drivers and the street sweepers and the construction workers. The people who die on their jobs, who don’t get paid.

A Bengali friend brought in a sari she’d borrowed from her mother (I hadn’t told my own mother about the show or my part in it, knowing what her response would have been – what nonsense is this) and wrapped it around me as best her thirteen-year-old hands could manage. Then I walked to the washroom to check the mirror, and it unravelled in the process, so the Somali sisters helped me put it back on, now with the aid of a thousand pins, though I suspect their sari-tying judgement may have been biased somewhat in favor of guntiinos. By the time I manged to get on stage, I was fervently grateful for the skirt I had on under the sari, because my stint as a runway model at an all-girls’ school was threatening to turn into the world’s most unfortunate striptease.

So the other day, I wore a sari. And I wore a pottu and there was even jewelry in my hair. Then I looked at myself and I couldn’t recognise the woman in the mirror. Whoever she was, she was beautiful.

“Would you wear a sari to your wedding?” asked Geetha. “What if he’s a white guy?”

But ask someone next to you, very softly so as not to wake him: “are you asleep?” If he replies that he is, then that makes him a liar. But he can reply by pretending to be asleep, which is not actually lying, but pretending to lie. There is a big difference, since this is a lovers’ game. The question itself is a lovers’ game because it assumes the partner is not asleep while making every effort not to wake him. Besides, these are the same questions: do you love me? are you lying to me? are you asleep? And the reply – yes, I love you, yes, I’m lying, yes, I’m asleep – is equally paradoxical. But it is not untruthful. It simply comes from another world which is not the same as the first. “Yes, I’m asleep. Yes, I’m lying. Yes, I love you” all these answers reflect a marvelous somnambulism and, all in all, a very clear grasp of the relations we establish with reality when we are sleeping, lying or in love.

- Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories (via babelblogs)

I. Looking for Resistance

I posted a note on my Facebook profile of a list of Israel and Jewish voices opposing Israel’s attacks on Gaza (Word Doc). It begins, “Contrary to what popular media in North America claims, there are critical voices in Israel and among American Jews.” Though I put it up, I paused before writing that sentence, particularly the bit about American Jews, because of how uncomfortable I feel when people write carelessly about resistance movements among Muslims. I wondered if I was being just as condescending as others are when they take Muslim activists out of context in order to use their comments to bolster their own self-righteousness. In asking that American Jews denounce Israel’s indiscriminate violence, I was assuming that by and large American Jews do support Israel’s policies, while simultaneously attempting to dispel that same myth. In attempting to shatter the media’s misleading portrayal of a supposedly hegemonic Jewish/Israeli block that supports Ehud Barak’s war crimes, was I being paternalistic? I have no qualms demanding Israelis acknowledge the immorality of the violence, but can I demand the same from American Jews without coming across as reductive?

Ultimately, the links I put up are ones that need to be read, since the papers I read are doing a troublingly good job of not giving them publicity. I wish, though, that I could word it in a way that more carefully distanced American Jewry from Israeli policy, in the way that I demand people understand the distance between Muslims and Al Qaeda. I don’t do official “condemnations” of terror, because it infuriates me that anyone would expect to have supported the killings of civilians in the first place. Likewise, American Jews live existences independent of Israel; I can’t therefore expect them to forever be policing Israel.

On writing about America’s progressive Jewry, Steve Ackerman notes:

You don’t want to reduce yourself to the mere fact of your heritage and become a self-parody. You have other stuff to write about and pay attention to. You don’t want to hurt your mother’s feelings.

I can relate to that.

II. Looking

Though the war’s been going on for a few days now and though hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and many hundreds more injured, I’ve yet to watch a single video of the violence or look at any photographs. It’s not, of course, for a lack of first-person reports from Gaza (though Israel has forbidden journalists from entering Gaza), but it’s that I’m avoiding the images, as I tend to do. So though on a theoretical and rational level, I’m horrified at the violence, on a more private level, I’m untouched. This whole thing feels unreal, something like a story whose end I already know. Something artificial. And perhaps because I have no loved ones in or from Palestine, I’m afforded the luxury of this emotional distance. But it was like this after the tsunami, too, and still when the violence flares (and continues to worsen) in Sri Lanka.

There is a massacre happening right now in the Congo, which I’ve mostly not been paying attention to. The other day, I saw a photograph in the newspaper of a twelve-year-old boy carrying an toddler on his back. It was a technically beautiful shot, the colour of their skin and the colour of the sky in perfect contrast to each other. The caption noted that they were looking for their parents. Two black kids in Africa, crying. Stock photo material.

But something hurt just then, a visceral hurt, something that had nothing to do with the war, just the way they were crying — you could tell that they’d only recently gotten lost, that they thought their parents were still alive somewhere, that they were crying the way kids do the world over, like if you cry someone you love will fix this. It was something about the way he was holding his little brother, the way you protect the ones you love, something about all the different kinds of fear in the world, something about family and loneliness.

Maybe if that picture had been taken a few days later, when their pain had grown less acute, had given way to despair, I wouldn’t have flung the paper away. As it is, I stil haven’t read about the violence in the Congo — a selfish luxury I can enjoy that no one deserves.

I’m afraid of pictures.