This month marks the first anniversary of the Tamil genocide, which culminated in the Mullivaikkal massacre. On May 18, 2009, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE or Tamil Tigers) were routed by the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL). The so-called “theater of war,” which was the product of decades of tension between the Sinhalese-Buddhist majority and Tamil minority, lasted 25 years and was marked by the ruthlessness of both the GoSL’s military and paramilitary campaigns and LTTE’s guerilla warfare and suicide bombing, both with little regard to the cost of civilian life. Over 100,000 Tamil civilians, herded into a tiny spittoon of land in the Northeast, used as human shields or impressed into service by the LTTE, chased by the GoSL’s relentless and indiscriminate shelling, lured by soon-to-be broken promises of No Fire Zones (NFZs). Whataboutists focus on that part, making it a both-sides argument. But the GoSL had power and means and committed war crimes on a scale the LTTE couldn’t match, and shelling designated NFZs with known civilian presence flagrantly disregards the laws of war.
The point was the physical, linguistic, and cultural erasure of Tamils from their ancestral homelands in Sri Lanka’s North and East. I grew up with this. That wasn’t surprising. I just didn’t think I’d live to see the bloody climax.
In May 2009, my sanity was eroding, and I cried almost every night, barely slept, was spiritually hollowed out, permanently, somewhere, by President Rajapaksa’s victory speech. People celebrated in the streets of Colombo and throughout the country. Like many others, most of whom were Tamil, this victory felt hollow and strange. Thousands upon thousands of civilians died in the months leading up to May 18. When the death of LTTE leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran was announced, the news segment showed his blank-eyed corpse, his forehead covered with a bloody cloth, greedy flies hovering nearby. I wanted to see the bullet hole for myself. Wanted proof. Felt like part of my life had ended. At that point I hadn’t lived my life outside of the shadow of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict. I felt like I had survived nothing, and could not call those feelings trauma.
A year has passed. I’ve kept living my life. I endure by bringing my positionality with me, explicitly, into my creative work, into classrooms where I show students how to use writing to become thoughtful, rational, compassionate people, at a time in their lives when they are most impressionable. I’ve encountered racism, ableism, and sexism in several of my classes before. I’ve encountered unthinking prejudice to the point where some students have felt that it’s all right to kill Middle Easterners as they are “monsters,” or that the U.S. does not need to get involved in world politics because “it isn’t our business” or that academia is “apolitical,” hypocritically so. I know it’s not my job to address their thinking. I’ve wrestled with this inclination on more than one occasion.
One of my M.F.A. professors used to say, slowly and emphatically: “Question their logic. The rest will follow.”
I didn’t originally intend to use this blog as a forum for non-academic news. Others mediate the news much better than I can hope to. I’m just in my office waiting to collect my last few final portfolios of the spring semester, feeling—as I did last May—as though my life is happening, but I’m somewhere else.
There are many Tamil journalists who have been murdered, disappeared, or spectacularly harmed for reportage that doesn’t align with state propaganda, but the journalist who went mainstream in an international sense is Lasantha Wickrematunge, a Sinhalese journalist who was critical of the GoSL, enough so that he was repeatedly threatened, attacked, and finally killed in January 2009. What made the international community take note of this murder was the letter he left behind in The New Yorker, forecasting his own death and reflecting on writing, journalism in Sri Lanka, and “the call of conscience.”
In my literature courses this semester, I incorporated his “Letter from the Grave” into a unit themed around the notion of bearing witness. We discussed the significance of the production of literature under oppressive regimes as well as from outside perspectives, long after the fact; we read survivor accounts, fictional interpretations, works with no clear genre, and this essay, which gave us the terms we needed to discuss the pieces in question. I was initially unsure of how to use Wickrematunge’s essay, as it has always pushed me to tears, but it seemed to open students’ eyes to the harsh realities of war, the frequency of war crimes in certain conflicts, and the risks people take in speaking out about them. It’s an excellent piece to highlight the viewpoint of a person undergoing those risks and is easily accessible, especially to students who seem baffled by the idea of repression of media, free speech, and other human rights we take for granted.
I know I’m lucky. My family is lucky. I want to be thankful for what I have, for the professions I’m in, all of which I do find rewarding, for the fact that I can do this work with minimal persecution or fear. But the subtext to being lucky is having to be grateful, and I’m not grateful, I remain angry with everyone who didn’t know what to say and so said nothing for the past year, with the international community for remaining silent until after the fact, with academia for following the same pattern.
