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

Footnotes

  1. He was an import into the school via its enhanced academic program, one specifically meant to give more attention to kids from better off neighbourhoods than the working-poor one that formed its constituent base. In fact, the vast majority of the white kids in my school didn’t actually live anywhere close to it. [back]
  2. I was overly fond of the word ‘fucker’ in grade 12. And then one day a very skeezy, very grimy boy said, logically and proudly enough, replied, “But I am.” [back]
  3. This was way back in the day, long before kafiyyehs came tie-dyed and decorated with hearts, when the only places you could them from were York students and the tiny hijab store in the mall. [back]
  4. Via Reporters Without Borders: Sri Lanka was ranked 165th out of 173 countries in the Reporters Without Borders 2008 press freedom index. [back]
  5. 100,000 in the last 2 and a half decades is the standard, conservative (and I think un-updated) estimate, and does not include the numbers of people who have simply disappeared. [back]