Archives for May, 2009

The day drags. I manage to do some of the things I had to do today, but doing them gives me no sense of satisfaction, leaving me with no desire to do the more pressing things I haven’t yet done. Like writing, or processing pictures. Or reading the things that it scares me to read.

I spend the morning and then the afternoon flitting between my novel and my laptop, computer screen and blotted typefaces alternating until my head hurts and a thick-clotted frustration begins to settle itself, heavy-haunched and maudlin, behind my eyes.

I’ve been in the country, been in Toronto for three weeks now. Sri Lanka is at once at the forefront of everything I talk and think about, and also somewhere so far back in the recesses of my memory that I cannot believe that I was there less than a month ago, that I was there for longer than I’ve been back in Toronto. It is at once the central point of interest around which I am constructing lifeplans and also some place, some history that I am not quite sure exists. There is so much to say — so much to say, in fact, that I’m overwhelmed. I cannot put words to paper, cannot write about Sri Lanka. There is too much preamble, too much of Toronto to wade through first.

So anyway, I’ve been in Toronto for three weeks and have yet to walk through this city, really walk through this city: on my own, with no destination, where the point is the streets you find that you’ll never find again and the people you meet who you’ll never speak to again. When I was in Sri Lanka and thinking of Toronto, sick with longing for and dread of this place, it was of those solitary walks I’d think with relief, the way you can spend days entirely anonymous in public places, how people talk to you when you know you’ll never see each other again.

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I wrote this with Noaman.

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Since the initial publication of this piece, LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran has allegedly been killed by the Sri Lankan forces and the Tigers have surrendered. According to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaska this victory in his military campaign against the LTTE has ushered in an era of peace on the island.
Thus, the demands we made below for a ceasefire may now appear moot. However, because of the Sri Lankan government’s continued refusal to address the structural problems that led to Tamil discontent in the first place and its refusal to acknowledge the horrific manner by which it killed thousands of Tamil civilians in the Vanni in just this latest round of war, there is enough reason to believe that violence will flare up again in the country, perhaps sooner rather than later. Any peace that does not recognise its own limitations will be shortlived. For this reason, despite the ending of Eelam War IV, it is still necessary that we work toward more humane alternatives, involving strategies to push the Sri Lankan state into a political resettlement.
– May 19.

The recent burst of mass mobilizations by sections of the Canadian-Tamil community in Toronto has brought to the fore several contradictions concerning the conflict in Sri Lanka and its presence in and connection to Canada. Mainstream media’s responses to the protests have been overwhelmingly racialist, exposing many of the limits of Canadian multiculturalism. In order for Canadian multiculturalism to accept any given group of people as a cultural community, it must define that group by differentiating it from a supposedly mainstream Canadian identity. This focalising Canadian identity—in effect a non-identity—is white and middle-class. Thus, when the Toronto Star publishes an editorial entitled “Protesters vs. the public” [1] it effectively notes that the protesters are not part of the public by pitting (Tamil) protesters against the (Canadian) public. Rather than focusing on the war, media outlets have focused on the inconvenience posed to commuters, thereby shifting attention away from deaths in Sri Lanka to traffic regulations in Canada. Consequently, responses to the protests have largely demonstrated pernicious xenophobia. For instance, in the Toronto Sun, Peter Worthington argues that not using excessive force (e.g., water cannons) against Tamil protesters who block streets is tantamount to “reverse racism” against white Canadians. [2]

But if the coverage of the protests has made certain contradictions about the performance of cultural politics in public spaces in Canada apparent, other contradictions about the negotiation of those politics within cultural communities have also been rendered largely invisible. The impetus comes, once again, from a multiculturalism that defines ethnic, immigrant identities against a supposedly mainstream, local one. The act of defining a cultural community necessarily ignores the cultural, economic, and political differences that exist within that community. When these differences are ignored, political representation to mainstream political actors (i.e. those in the government, political parties, and state apparatuses) is mediated by non-elected, self-appointed community “leaders” who may not, and often do not, capture all cultural and political differences. In fact, the very articulation of those differences is precluded: a-cultural white English-speaking Canadians may lean left or right as individuals, or as voting blocs based on class and region, but the articulation of such political differences is absent in the representations of the politics of minority communities. The responses of politicians, activists, journalists, police and vocal sections of the public to the rallies protesting the war provide key examples of this.
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Apr 5 to Mar 8, 2009.

I did not wear a sari, sunscreen, or sunglasses; see a waterfall; figure out cricket; drive; end the war; overcome my distrust of curries that are white; read a book; cook; talk to anyone in the Special Task Forces, ever; go north; vote; develop a taste or the necessary olfactory desensitivity required for durian; lose a limb; take the train; get married; or die.