Thoughts on “Playing Lions and Tigers”

Playing Lions and Tigers by Rohini
Published by Earthworm Books, India in March 2004

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Pretty much the only time I had to read Playing Lions and Tigers was when I was on public transit. This was a problem, since on several occasions the book moved me dangerously close to tears. That kind of reaction is to be expected with a novel about a war as horrific as Sri Lanka’s (aren’t they all), and with a plotline that, consequently, boasts so much death it’s essentially Shakespearean.

What made it unexpected, however, is that, unlike every other contemporary novel that’s capitalised off conflict in South Asia, the prose in this book is anything but poetic. It is also not a novel about diaspora. While England does make a brief appearance near the end, the story is centred firmly in Sri Lanka, with none of the diasporic angst that has come to define popular Western literature about South Asia.

Also, the cover has no paisleys. FYI.

But first, this issue of prose. It was offputting at first, how prosaic the writing was. Where were the passages spanning pages describing the claustrophobic verdure with so so delicate metaphors and carefully careless use of native languages? Where was the brilliant and severely self-conscious young protoganist, caught in conflicts of families and cultures and civilisations? Where were the metanarratives and the obscure intertexts and the pop culture references? No footnotes, no structurally existential guilt, no vulnerable flippancy.

No wonder Random House hadn’t picked this up.

This is its first paragraph:

Bala took a deep breath, as though drawing the intoxicating mixture of peace and excitement into the hidden recesses of his lungs. He had looked out on the breaktaking beauty of the hill-country almost every day of his life for as long as he coould remember, yet it never ceased to stir him. Other people might smoke tobacco, drink alcohol or take drugs, but for him nothing could beat this.

The straight-forwardness of the writing — straightforward to the point of apparent amateurishness — persists through to the novel’s end. And I think it speaks to how cannibalistic my consumption of art about war is that it wasn’t until about a third of the way into the the novel, when the murders and the disappearances began in earnest, that it occurred to me that this mode of writing, made unfashionable by [insert the names of any 5 top-selling diasporic brown writers here], is perhaps the most the ethical in this context.

I have been thinking for a long time about writing about Sri Lanka and have been thinking about the ethics of creating beautiful things — poetry, for instance, or films — about violences that are irremediably horrific, especially when those things become consumer products, off which whole industries of pleasure and fame are created. Broadly, there is the recogntion that publishing industries, given how they commodify and package grief, are hardly innocent spaces. But much more personally, given how invested I am in imagining peace in this particular country, it would be disingenous to exploit traumas I know at most as macabre family gossip in order to indulge my own desire to realise myself as a writer. Anything can be turned into poetry; that doesn’t justify the poem.

This sounds like a backhanded compliment. Which it isn’t meant to be.

So one afternoon, I was on the subway, moving west out of Scarborough, and I was reading a particularly difficult passage and I had to stop for a moment because the backs of my eyes stung, and I realised it’d hurt less — or it’d hurt in that way we’ve learned to enjoy — if this death had been written about differently, more lyrically. Then I could have distracted myself with rhythm and simile. Then I could have said the pain was bittersweet, and waxed philosophically indifferent about how violence is constitutive of history. And then we’d all have a book club meeting about it and, while sipping tea, talk about how terrible it all is, and maybe Oprah would give us a sticker.

Instead we have this:

The prominent mode was disappearance. The victims vanished without trace, as though they had never existed. She heard of instances where all the young men in a village were carted off in the night, there was a valley of shots, and the next day their relatives had to search through the pile of corpses for the remains of their loved ones. It got to a stage where those who found a body were considered lucky. Because very often they were taken and dumped somewhere else — perhaps in a river or the sea, where the bodies would decay beyond recognition — or burned, or buried in a mass grave. Generally, there was virtually no hope that they would ever be seen alive again. But not always. So you had to keep trying, battling the feeling of hopelessness, just in case someone might have survived [pp 240-1].

Yeah. People die, and they die like this. Or they survive, and there are camps for the survivors. Or we butcher the English language to make up a new verb tense for an old word — people are disappeared. What underscores the heartbreak of reading about all this in a novel is that this violence is true, is right now, and is home. And so I think, if art about war must make people cry, I would rather have them cry because war is that fearful, not because the art is that beautiful. The first pain might be productive, the latter could only ever be self-gratifying.

But in a literary era where postmodernism holds sway and where I will always be skeptical of any claim that facts can be unassailable, it is difficult to accept that what I appreciate most about this narrative is that its narrator is invisible and omniscient.

No doubt one reason I am willing to accept such a narrator here is because I agree with its politics. The simple writing belies the carefully chosen characters, who are attractive not because their personalities are especially real, but because they espouse very real and subtle perspectives on the war. The novel spans almost the entirety of the twentieth century and its roster includes assorted Sinhalese union workers, male and female; an anti-government Burgher human rights lawyer; an anti-LTTE Tamil journalist who moves from Jaffna to Colombo; a Muslim private school teacher; a Tamil nurse in Jaffna who opposes the LTTE and escapes during the expulsion by the Tigers of Muslims from Jaffna; her son, a Tamil university student who joins the LTTE; two hill-country Tamil doctors, one of whom moves to Jaffna and supports the LTTE; a working poor Sinhalese university student who joins the JVP; her professor, an undercover Sinhalese radical who opposes both the government and the JVP; several Sinhalese factory workers; and assorted multiracial children. Pretty much the only group missing was the always absent Veddas.

The people themselves are all somewhat too perfect, all of them rather angelic, but their interactions and conversations are nuanced and fascinating. They provide rare insights into the intersections of class, gender, and resistance. When was the last time you heard about women in the war, except in a sensationalist piece on female LTTE cadres? And who these days, except diehard, oldschool, and ageing academics, talks about how class has informed this war? But this is a novel peopled with women whose positions on marriage and reproductive rights are real and therefore complex — birth control, in fact, was a recurring issue. The novel has a strong socialist vein, at least to the extent that most of the characters are acutely aware of the ways in which the frustrations of working poor Sinhalese and Tamil youth in the South and the North respectively were exacerbated and exploited by the war, but this awareness of class is tempered also by critiques of how gender hierarachies are maintained within movements whose purposes are avowedly anti-oppressive. It’s not surprising then that in addition to the stories of female nurses, lawyers, and JVP and LTTE members, special attention is paid to the importance of unpaid domestic labour, particularly with respect to the rearing of children, both biological and adoptive.

On the issue of non-violence, Rohini’s position is clear. This is an excerpt from her dedication:

It [this book] is also a tribute to the activists of University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), past and present, and all the other courageous people who kept alive the values of truth, compassion, and solidarity in the midst of a culture of cruelty.

This is a statement from UTHR(J)’s website:

Our reports deal with several aspects pertaining to violations and are very unorthodox as human rights documents. In order to clarify our position, we once more reiterate the purposes for which these reports are written:

1. To document human rights violations by all forces in order to bring about general awareness and to make violators accountable.
2. To bring out the human background to these violations through a portrayal of individual characters together with an analysis of social pressures and external circumstances governing their behaviour. We try to show that the characters involved, even in the worst violations, are often human, whose actions are governed by mislaid human potential, past choices and oppressive circumstances.Its an endevour to capture a narrative space for the people who were trapped in the conflict and in their name only many atrocities were justified by the protagonists.
3. To leave behind a historical record of this crucial part of our history. Since there is no space in our community to discuss and choose between different options,and the young especially are giving their life even without knowing our recent history, we feel it is necessary to leave a record. Moreover, in this country, we seem to suffer from historical amnesia combined with a moral vacuum, forcing us to re-live an unpleasant history again and again. We trust these records will also help benign minds who in the future would like to make a re-evaluation.
4. As responsible members of an academic institution and citizens of our community, we would like to express our opinions and make room for free expression and an edifying debate. We also seek to highlight the untapped human potential in all communities in our country, for both internal regeneration and to make a success of living in one plural nation.

I don’t know that Rohini is or was a member of UTHR(J), but her book definitely addresses its mandate. It records not only specific instances of violence perpetrated by disparate groups, but in so doing, presents an overview of how those violences stem from systemic abuse. The book’s conclusion is that the best way to fight this is through non-violent resistance. That position is dissected almost incessantly during the latter half of the novel — at one point, one of the characters most opposed to violent resistance actually ends up killing someone, and that death is justified by its circumstances. Yet the policy of nonviolent resistance remains the take home message. This is a particular political stance to take in this conflict. It is by no means neutral. And this is what makes the invisibility of the narrator’s omniscience so troubling, at least theoretically. My only response is that it is a position for which I have a lot of sympathy, the more so in this case because it isn’t forced on readers dogmatically.

And as to the irrelevance of the diaspora: Finally.

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Edits:

1. A friend pointed out that there is a Burgher in the novel.
2. I should’ve added this from Rohini’s introduction:
   

   This novel is about the ways in which ordinary people (all too often ignored by professional peace-makers) have resisted the barbarism resulting from the imposition of one-dimensional identities — the ‘lions’ and ‘tigers’ of the title — and have in very different ways worked for a world in which working people will not allow themselves to be bamboozled by their leaders into killing and dying in order to establish fictitious identities and spurious claims over territory”[ii].

3. Rohini identifies as “a Sinhala-speaking half-Burgher Tamil from the south” (via).