Just as fear creates grounds for suspicion, it needs to be treated, both intellectually and politically, with suspicion. Unraveling the antecedents of fear is crucial to keep governments and other protagonists of nationalism in check. Without constant vigilance that probes the production of fear and crisis, both of these commodities will be used creatively and strategically to justify violence and exclusion. Insecurity expressed at scales of the body and household will remain largely effaced if militarized nationalisms continue to reproduce geopolitical life as a matter of nations and states, fear and violence.

– Hyndman, J. “The Securitization of Fear in Post-Tsunami Sri Lanka,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(2): 361-372, 2007.

(I have the full article if you want it.)

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

—

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.

—

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).

This is what comes of moving and bare cupboards.
With under a week to go, the kitchen is devolving into a patchwork of missing foods. The ketchup’s all done, as are nearly all manner of vegetables — except broccoli. On the other hand, there is a whole block of butter and a huge ziploc bag of frozen dumplings. And we went through the last teabag last night. So today I finally made a pot of tea with the looseleaf tea I bought in Gampola a year ago this week.

I could tell you that the tea stings with the taste of home and history and truth and belonging and all those other things. But it tastes like none of those things. I added too much ginger, the magic is skewed.

Mid-April last year, I got back from just under six weeks in Sri Lanka. Besides being born on the island, I’d visited it many times over the years, but that last trip was pivotal in the way no prior trip ever had been. Every day following that return until well into the winter, until long after I’d moved to a new province and commenced a new career path, literally not a day went by when I didn’t talk to someone about that trip. For months, I was convinced I was going to move to Sri Lanka as soon as I could, that that would be the homebase from which I would live the rest of my life. I had not one, but two research projects in mind. I had thousands of pictures and hours and hours of audio recordings. I had notebooks of material, and tightly plotted stories that kept looping through my every conscious moment.

Something happened along the way to now. I stopped talking about Sri Lanka, and the drafts I had saved on my desktop grew stale. The heartache grew a little less palpable. That thing that I knew, when I was in Sri Lanka, that would happen when I got back to Toronto began to happen — it was no longer possible to talk about home, about love, about family, about history without feeling that the conversations had already been determined for me. It was someone else’s novel, someone else’s award-winning screenplay about some maladjusted third culture kid undergoing a delayed and severely pronounced bout of false nostalgia. The force of this industry we’ve churned out about “lost” “identities” towered up and then came crashing down, and I let it go.

I think sometimes that all it takes to make some people come is the word diaspora.

The heartache grew less palpable, became a little less live. It receded from a constant pulse at the base of my throat to a pressure under my diaphragm, a soft throb that I could count beats to when conversations turned to the subject of love and blood, family and memory. I stopped talking about it, but it remains here still, a love I know as more real than most of the things I spend my time reading these days.

But I learned this thing from parents about the nature of love, a lesson that took some years in learning, a lesson I used to hold against them, but which in their stubbornness and wisdom, they never gave up drilling into me — that love is a verb. It is a thing you do, it is a responsibility you shoulder. It is not a pretty thing to put on display, not merely a thing of easy beauty, but a demanding combination of things out of your control. A measure of guilt, and anger, and courage. Blood is something to which you as self are irrelevant; it is the thing you do. What I’m saying is, it doesn’t matter that I claim to love my father’s hometown with a love that changed my life, and yes I know how trite it is to say that. You know, lives can change back.

Etha onagada kudumam, said my cousin one night, as she opened the gate to my aunt’s house. And then she paused, hand on lock, and said in English, Do you understand? Blood.
Literally: this is your blood.
And I smiled a dazed smile at the word, at how deep the knowledge of it runs.

So for a few months this past year, I had a goal in mind. I had tangible projects I was working towards, and I made an effort to speak Tamil to my parents, who sometimes forgot they weren’t speaking English to me. But the deadlines have since become less acute. The mundane drone of the life I’m living here has taken over, and taken with it the energy that kept me focused all through that bright summer and fall.

When I talk — and I’ve stopped talking about it — about how much it hurts that I have no one here to speak my stuttering Tamil to, what I mean is that the forgetting is an active process. And in the absence of any one person here with whom I can share this language, the distance between here and there becomes infinitely greater. The love becomes abstract, a mockery of action.

I spent the happiest weeks of my life with my father’s family, living in his sister’s house.

Last week I called home, and my mother told me my aunt had recently been diagnosed with a degenarative neural condition. Her doctor has given her 18 months. My father came home a few minutes later and when he took the phone, he said, So your mother told you about Maami. And unlike my mother, he had less to say about the details of the illness. The conversation was short, and ended as it always does when I talk to my father with a reminder to eat well.

I have listened several times to my father cry for the deaths of people he loved, and I cannot bear the thought of hearing it again. If people loved me in that village, it was solely because I was my father’s child. I have never known a person to be so loved as my father’s memory was in that place.

Why did you come, said my aunt, one day in her kitchen, if you’re going to leave again.
She had a particular knack for rhetoric. I stood silent and twisted my hands together. I did not know how to say, in English or in Tamil, that I had come because I am my father’s daughter and this was what love to him entailed, but that I was leaving with a connection more direct to the village. I was leaving as someone who — nervous chatter in the diaspora be damned — would claim this place, her house and her love as home.

Call them, says my mother. And then she reads out one of those hilariously long long-distance numbers that come appended with every regional prefix in the world.

I still haven’t called. It seems every conversation I have with family begins with an apology — I am sorry. Sorry for not being t/here, for not being more present, for not knowing how to say the things that need to be said. Sorry I’ve forgotten more Tamil than I thought I knew, sorry I didn’t call before. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

My parents taught me that love is not something you protest, it is something you do.

Two weeks ago, 76 Sri Lankan Tamil men arrived in British Columbia on a boat named the Ocean Lady. This is the first in a two-part article that seeks to contextualise their migration in a framework that addresses both the oppressions they left and the ones they have now entered. In this half, I present an overview of the state of post-war Sri Lanka, with special attention paid to the camps for Internally Displaced Persons. The second half will provide an analysis of Canada’s treatment of migrants, with a focus on the laws and processes that comprise Canada’s immigration system, its detention centres, and the media coverage of the story.

I. War and "Peace:" Detention Camps in Sri Lanka

There are currently a quarter of a million Tamil civilians being held in detention camps in Sri Lanka. When the government of Sri Lanka declared victory in its war on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) this May – thus concluding 26 years of intermittent civil war with a particularly bloody six months – it promised that 80% of the then nearly 300,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) would be returned to their homes within the year [1]. However, since then, not only has the government released fewer than 10% of the IDPs (only half of whom have been allowed to return to their homes), but on October 6 the government revealed that it plans to resettle only 100,000 of them by the end of 2009 [2]. This is merely the most recent in a series of broken promises from the government on the futures of the detainees and the detention centres. What this means is that "post-war" Sri Lanka – in which the government has raised its defence budget by 20% after winning the war [3] – can expect to greet 2010 with barbed-wire camps holding populations 170,000-strong. Note that this number includes 80,000 children [4].

The government justified confining the IDPs in the first place by insisting that "we are well aware that some cadres of the LTTE have infiltrated the ranks of the IDPs and, until and unless those cadres are filtered out, we have no option but to keep [the IDPs] within the welfare centres and relief villages" [5]. Thus, what followed the end of the conflict was the enforced confinement of virtually everyone displaced by the war in military-run camps. At its peak, the LTTE had a maximum of 2,500 soldiers – in other words, less than 1% of the population currently being held in the camps. It is revealing that not only has no court authorized the detention of the IDPs, but neither have any charges been filed against them [6]. In other words, the creation of these camps further institutionalises the systemic discrimination that triggered the war in the first place, though in ways much more blatantly violent than the Sinhala-chauvinist policies that had first bought that tension to the fore three decades ago.

With regards to LTTE support it is imperative we keep two things in mind. First, the LTTE’s military segment was reliant on services provided not only by supporters and sympathisers, but by forced labour from Tamil civilians. Second, until its defeat in May, the LTTE functioned for many years as the de facto government in several parts of Sri Lanka. Thus, anyone and everyone who has ever at any point either been forced to dig a road for the Tigers or who has accepted food from them can and apparently is being classified a risk to state security.

Institutionalised racism, however, is the least of the concerns one might have about life in "peacetime" Sri Lanka. NGOs and local workers in the camps have consistently protested the camps’ alarming living conditions, citing severe overcrowding, unreliable medical care, and irregular access to water [7, 8]. About a third of children in the camp under the age of five are moderately or severely malnourished [9]. There have been several outbreaks of contagious diseases, with health officials recording thousands of cases of diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery, and chickenpox [10]. Worse, the camps have already suffered severe floods and, as the monsoon season persists, more floods have begun to descend on the area, exacerbating the already desperate living conditions [11, 12].

Besides all this, the detainees continue to be subject to undue violence, even with the end of the war. An estimated 12,000 detainees have been transferred, on suspicion of involvement with the LTTE, to separate detention centres and prisons operated by Sri Lankan security forces and affiliated paramilitary groups. Many of these groups have been already implicated in human rights violations. Many of these detainees are being held incommunicado, meaning they have no access to family members, legal counsel or the protections provided under Sri Lankan law. As Amnesty International notes, "Incommunicado detention of suspects in irregular places of detention (i.e. places other than police stations, officially designated detention centres or prisons) has been a persistent practice in Sri Lanka associated with torture, killings and enforced disappearances [13]."

Authorities have not provided the detainees with information about the reasons for their continued detention, the whereabouts of their relatives, or the procedures for their release. Furthermore, though authorities have reportedly finished registering camp residents, they are not making those lists available to people with missing relatives or to organizations, such as the Red Cross, who do tracing. In some cases the authorities seem to have deliberately misled the IDPs, as on September 11, when they told several hundred of them that they were about to be released, only to transfer them to other detention camps for further screening [14, 15].

That we know this much about the camps should not detract from the fact that we in fact know very little. Sri Lanka has long boasted some of the worst statistics globally with respect to press freedom: out of 175 countries, it ranks 162 [16]. Local reporters are routinely subject to anonymous death threats, seizures of their equipment, and arrests on charges of terrorism. Perhaps most infamous was the assassination in January of Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the widely-read and often anti-government The Sunday Leader, whose present editors received death threats in October [17]. The government has authorised the closure of several media outlets and the blocking of access to critical websites. In addition to the suppression of local dissent, it has gone out of its way to prevent any kind of independent international monitoring of its war-time or post-war activities. This is important since, as Amnesty explains in its interview of Sri Lankan journalist Sunanda Deshapriya:

The flow of information from the camps now consists mainly of information provided by relatives of those detained, of individual leaks from aid workers to journalists and of anonymous blog entries. In almost all cases, those providing the information remain anonymous to avoid reprisals. As a result, the information finding its way out of the camps is often unreliable. This can only hurt the detained civilians [18].

Further, Human Rights Watch notes:

The government has effectively sealed off the detention camps from outside scrutiny. Human rights organizations, journalists, and other independent observers are not allowed inside, and humanitarian organizations with access have been forced to sign a statement that they will not disclose information about the conditions in the camps without government permission. On several occasions, the government expelled foreign journalists and aid workers who had collected and publicized information about camp conditions, or did not renew their visas [19].

In May, the government detained incommunicado at least four Sri Lankan doctors accused of providing "false information" on civilian deaths to the international community. These doctors had been providing emergency medical care to civilians during the conflict. Physicians for Human Rights reports that "as the conflict zone became increasingly inaccessible to the outside world, the doctors provided first-hand accounts of shelling and civilian casualties and described the condition of their patients" [20]. Their trial is scheduled for November, meaning that by the time their case is heard, they will have been in jail for at least six months. (Under Sri Lankan law, individuals can be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months [21].) May was also when the first independently filmed videos from the Vavuniya camps became public. They had been filmed by a team of reporters from British Channel 4 News, who were then summarily deported [22]. In June, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the lone international humanitarian presence on the war’s last battlefield, was forbidden access to most camps and forced to close four offices in eastern Sri Lanka [23]. In September, the government expelled UNICEF spokesman James Elder from the country [24].

Canadian officials have also been denied entry into Sri Lanka. In June, Liberal MP Bob Rae was deported from Sri Lanka before he even had a chance to leave the airport. The government alleged that Rae had been "involved in pro-LTTE political activities in his home country" [25]. Earlier this month, two Conservative MPs, Patrick Brown and Paul Calandra, were denied visas. The stated purpose for their trip was to visit detainees and assist in reuniting their Tamil constituents with missing family members [26].

This is the situation that frames the flight of the 76 men who arrived in Vancouver in October. Thousands of other people risk similar such life-threatening trips across the world every year. In 2007, the global population of refugees was over 11 million. In addition, there were 740,000 asylum-seekers and nearly 14 million IDPs [27]. In the next part of this essay, I will consider the ways Canada’s immigration system and media construct and control refugees, by focusing on how these 76 men have been treated by the Canadian state.

The recent arrival by boat in Vancouver of 76 Sri Lankan Tamil men has triggered heated debate about Canada’s refugee system. On October 28, the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia held a forum on the topic, entitled “The “Ocean Lady”: A New Challenge of Illegal Migration on Canada’s West Coast?” One of the panellists, Daniel McLeod, who is duty counsel for the migrants, called these men “classic refugees,” because of the persecution they face in Sri Lanka. “It’s young Tamil men in Sri Lanka who are most at risk,” he said. He also observed that though “the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam at their peak had probably 1500 to 2500 soldiers,” there are currently a quarter of a million Tamils awaiting security clearance by the Sri Lankan government in internment camps in the northern parts of the island.

McLeod, who is also an instructor in Refugee Law at UBC, noted that Canada is a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, which states that refugees cannot be penalised for entering the country through illegal means. Canada’s acceptance of the Convention was triggered by its refusal in 1939 to admit the St Louis, a boat containing 907 Jewish refugees, who were forced to return to Germany, where a third of them were killed in concentration camps. However, host and fellow-panellist, Benjamin Perrin, Assistant Professor at UBC Law and Faculty Associate at the Liu Institute, said that because the 1951 Convention only addresses the criminalisation of the entry, “it does not preclude countries from exercising detention where the identities of the individuals are uncertain or there are undetermined security risks.”

McLeod cautioned against assuming the men were Tamil Tigers. “It is common for people who have been forced to work as labourers for the Tigers, to be rounded up, arrested by the army, police, or the special task force – which is a police commando force – and simply disappear,” he said. When describing the men, nearly all of whom are currently confined in a Lower Mainland jail, McLeod said, “Some of them are students, some are farmers, some of them are clerks, office workers. They are all very scared.”

In Canada the acceptance rate for refugees is approximately 47%. In comparison, according to Andreas Schloenhardt, Associate Professor from University of Queensland, in Australia, that number is 80%. (However, Australia has a very different immigration system, which involves using whole islands far from the mainland as detention centres, so these numbers may not be analogous.) Yet the 2007 acceptance rate specifically for Sri Lankans in Canada was 97%.

In 1986, local fishermen came to the rescue of 154 Sri Lankans found floating off in lifeboats off the coast of Newfoundland. Those people were not subjected to what McLeod called “the political frenzy that’s occurring today,” suggesting that in the intervening two decades Canada’s policing of its borders has become progressively more exclusionary and reactionary. This fear was solidified on November 2, when Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, after accepting the fewest refugees in 10 years, dramatically cut the 2010 target number of refugees to be accepted by more than half. Opposition MPs assert that “by steeply dropping the targets, refusing to appoint Refugee Board members for 2 years, cutting $4 million in the department and allowing for board appointments not based on merit, Harper’s Conservative government is deliberately creating a crisis in the refugee system. The crisis is then used as an excuse to bring in draconian measures to close the door to the most needy and vulnerable.”

At the lecture, Perrin claimed that the focus on the “human interest story” of the 76 men, while legitimate, shifts attention away from an analysis of the means by which refugees move illegally between countries. He argued that “Canada must take action to discourage illegal migration and disrupt migrant smuggling operations where they do exist.” Further, Canada is a party to the 2004 UN Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, which, he said, “calls for [migrants] not to be criminalised, but to be treated humanely. But at the same time, it does not give them the right to temporary or permanent residence in Canada simply because they are smuggled.”

When one student then questioned him about the language used to describe the men, specifically the term “illegal migrant” (which was featured in the panel title), because of the way it implicitly criminalises the men, Perrin responded that “the title of the presentation has a question mark at the end of it, which was very deliberate.” Another audience member had a query about how that kind of vocabulary negatively affects media coverage. Perrin responded, “I think it’s important that before there’s been an impartial determination of the legal status of these individuals, that our language reflect that. So I’m not calling them refugees right now because I don’t know if they are.”

Perrin maintained that “there are advantages to cooperating with other countries, not just the source countries, but also other countries along the migrant smuggling chain,” because this would assist Canada in “creating proactive responses to protracted refugee situations.” One reporter asked, “How are we to trust the Sri Lankan government if they say these people are members of a terrorist organisation? [...] How do you trust a government which is treating a minority as harshly as them?” McLeod answered, “I hope we’re not going to trust the Si Lankan government to make that determination for us. There are a number of ways that Canada Border Services Agency can obtain information in normal ways.” These include taking fingerprints to run through international police records and analysing accents to determine where in Sri Lanka the men are from. However, the RCMP has already begun collaborating with the Sri Lankan government to identify the men.

“There are 16 million refugees worldwide as of June 2009. There’s another 26 million internally displaced persons, who don’t count as refugees,” said McLeod. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of irregular migrants are reported dead or missing every year,” said Perrin.

—–
A previous version of this article first appeared in Canadian Lawyer. This article was last modified on Nov 5.

But there is no story to tell, no one story anyway, not since that day in 1505 when the fidalgo Don Laurenco de Almeida, resplendent in gold braid and epaulettes and hat plumed with all the birds of paradise, landed on our shores and broke us from our history. No one story, with a beginning and an end, no story that picks up from where the past left off — only bits and shards of stories, and those of the people I knew, and that only in passing, my own parents and son, or heard tell of, for there was no staying in a place or in a time to gather a story whole, only an imagined time and place. And no story of the country — or, if of the country, not our story, but theirs, the parangis‘. Except that we all bore the imprint of that history, like a stigma, internalized it even, made it our own, against our will, calling to memory the while to lose it by losing memory itself.

– Sivanandan, A. When Memory Dies. London: Arcadia Books, 1997. 5-6.

We are deeply conscious of the lacunae in this volume caused by the absence of [...] a paper on Arabic-Tamil, a dialect which was mainly Tamil with a profusion of Arabic conceptual terms, which were indispensable to convey Islamic thoughts and feelings. And it was written in Arabic script. It was a dialectical synthesis of Semitic Arabic and Dravidian Tamil – an ingenuity of the Moors, which remained the tool of Moorish intellectual writing and discourse from the end of the thirteenth century right up to the end of the nineteenth century. And Arabic-Tamil had its parallel in the Swahili group of languages along the East African coast. A deeper research of Arabic-Tamil and the immense corpus of literature that came out of it is bound to reveal much about the origin and history of the Moors of this country, at least, such was the contentions of one of our foremost eudcationists and scholars – the late Mr. A. M. A. Azeez.
[...]
Some of the source material, I should say, a greater part of them – namely, the immense body of literature of the early Arab settlers in Arabic and the much later productions in Arabic-Tamil are irretrievably lost. The Moorish leaders in the past had expressed a desire that the younger generations of this community should delve into their past and continue the initial effort made by I. L. M. Abdul Azeez. It should be borne in mind that Mr Azeez’s contribution to this field is of a polemical nature as it arose in the course of a controversy to refute Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan’s thesis* on the origin of Moors.

The term ‘Muslim’ denotes a religious denomination and not an ethnic, and not necessarily an ethno-cultural one, but an ethico-religious one. This should be clearly grasped by the readers to avoid confusion. Conceptual clarity is vital to understand the problem we are dealing with, namely, Muslim Minorities. For instance, while all Moors are Muslim, all Muslims in this country are not Moors. Cultural varia[tion] within even a local or regional community such as the Sri Lankan Muslims is a fact, but it is glossed over even by serious-minded scholars. “Moor” is not a synonym for “Muslim,” at least as far as Sri Lanka is concerned. There is a sizeable number of Malays, Bhoras, and Memons; and in the recent past there were substantial numbers of Coast Moors, Khojas, Afghans, etc.

* Ethnology of the Moors of Ceylon. Vide Article on the Moors of Ceylon by Sir ir Ponnambalam Ramanathan. Proceedings f the R. A. S. (C. B.) Vol X No 36 of 1888.

– Skukri, M. A. M. “Preface.” Muslims of Sri Lanka. Avenues to Antiquity. Jamiah Naleemia Institute: 1986, Sri Lanka. iii-v.

Notes.

• What are “Islamic feelings”? I think he meant Islamic concepts or terms (masjid, mosque, palli; sawm, fasting, nombu). However, the rest of his writing indicates that he is in fact invested in the construction of a unifying Muslim spirituality, which is what finds expression here as “Islamic thoughts and feelings.”

• My mother’s maternal grandmother – who I think was from Gampola, and therefore not a coastal Muslim, i.e. without direct contact with Arab traders, who anyway stopped coming to the island some centuries ago, so can we please stop with the ridiculous “Sri Lankan Muslims have Arab connections” myths, unless you want to talk to me about how the Sri Lankan government benefits from its labour ties with Arab nations, in which case go ahead, because it’s not Al Qaeda I give a fuck about, it’s modern-day slave conditions in Middle-Eastern households, and this applies as much to Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhalese housemaids and labourers as it does Muslim ones – could speak and read Arabic-Tamil (aka Arwi, aka Arabu-Thamizh). I don’t know if any of her offspring could. I should find out. In any case, my mother, who knows both Arabic and Tamil (and can read the first, but not the second), doesn’t know Arabic-Tamil.

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i set up spaces that start to suck in so much meaning that i can’t return to them after a while: old emails; and people i used to know; and some books; and, since i’ve come back from sri lanka, certain folders on my computer.
but i looked today, and apparently i’ve written nothing about sri lanka since June 5. that’s a month today — but it’s not like the stories haven’t writhed every day in the back of my mind. it’s not like i don’t go to sleep every night guilty with the thought of all the work i’d intended to do, all the work i’d said do. it’s not like i’ve stopped wanting to do those things.
but somewhere, the hurt is profound enough that i cannot bring myself to touch it just yet. i’m not sure why. i lost next to nothing there, just took on more than maybe even i had prepared myself for.
but it’s counterproductive to wallow in self-pity like this. when it’s death you’re dealing with, even when the deaths are decades old, time is of the essence. so i’m trying to write about sri lanka, and i’m trying to learn to do something productive with grief.

for weeks now, i have been talking about writing, and i have been doing little of it. i know i’ve promised a few people articles i haven’t delivered. i’m hoping that putting up drafts will help trigger some sort of process to get this shit started. it’s not like everything’s not already too late, but it’s also not like everything is not vitally important right now. this is some sort of experiment, making public things that i’m afraid i’d never complete otherwise.

- July 5, 2009.

—
Draft 1.
Written May 30, 2009. I spent the latter half of April in Pottuvil, which is the closest I came to the actual war, which is closer than nearly everyone I met in Kandy and Colombo.

I think this was the morning we were driving out of Pottuvil, or the last afternoon I drove through its main street. This is where you found the highest density of soldiers from the Special Task Forces. They’d be strolling through the street, or standing in clusters under the shade of trees and store canopies, or grouped around the checkpoints. The van, or maybe the three-wheeler, that I was in that day was making its way down the street, either we were leaving for Gampola or I was going to the post office, and we drove by two soldiers walking past us. I remember they were both young, teenagers, their faces still clear. Thin boys in full army regalia: camouflage trousers and jacket, guns and clips slung over their right shoulders, one hand on their straps. I remember the one on the right in particular, the way the sight of him made something in me twist. He looked unlike anything I’d have expected anyone, let alone anyone in the Task Forces, to look. There was nothing untoward about his uniform or his demeanour: two young boys, two young soldiers, walking through a coastal village in eastern Sri Lanka, laughing, the sun hot on all our skins. It was something about his face and the transparency of his smile. He looked like a girl, and he didn’t. Hair cropped close to his scalp, unblemished skin, and soft cheekbones flaring up below his eyes. Nothing effeminate, only something so untouched and so youthful that I stiffened as though stung. Simultaneously, I drew closer, trying to force the sight of him into imperishable memory. The image I have of him now is the sight of him passing my window, the sun’s light so bright in his eyes that they shone blinding and black.

They were boys, the recruits they got into the army. Teenagers, recruited from the impoverished South. The country’s private schools boasted innumerable cadet troupes, but few of those students would ever join the army, however much military discipline and nationalist rhetoric they’d absorb during their training camp sessions. Ultimately, the army was manned by young men who had nowhere else to go, boys who wore their youth so unselfconsciously on their skin that nothing, not even five pounds of accumulated artillery, could counter it. But these were boys, after all, at work in the more peaceful parts of the East. It was the ones in the North, towards Trincomalee and further north still towards Mullaitivu whom I wanted to see, the boys who were killing that I wanted to see.

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.