Out of the Scar: Memory, Diaspora and the Cultural Politics of Reconciliation
- - on 08/21/2013
Notes of a talk at the Sydney Reconciliation Forum, August 17, 2013
there is an unexploded land mine heart in us
under every breast chest
waiting for breath
tears a moan
to crack the land open
and let the stories come walking
out of the scar
under every breast chest
waiting for breath
tears a moan
to crack the land open
and let the stories come walking
out of the scar
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha “Landmine Heart” 2006
My thanks to the organizers for this initiative. I know it must take a great deal of imagination, energy, resilience, courage and hope to make this kind of leap in the dark. I commend their faith in the future.
I would like to begin by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation on whose land we are meeting. I also acknowledge the Nyoongar people on whose lands I live and work. They have given me the closest thing I have to a home.
I only became aware recently that this was the thirtieth year since the pogrom of July 1983 when a young colleague of mine posted on his Facebook page. What we now call Black July happened several years before he was born, but he saw it as the event that changed his life, causing his parents to move to Australia after his father was attacked on the streets of Colombo. Black July in many ways signals the beginning of the war, and for many of us diasporic Sri Lankans, primarily for Tamils like myself, but for others as well, it is the formative event. I was not living in Sri Lanka at the time, but for me too it was a turning point. Although this has only become clear in retrospect, from then on there was no going back for me, as for many of us.
The President Visited Kandy: O Lord! The Clouds Are Gathering
Tobias Vishvabaratha
The Pageant of the Golden Palanquins or the Randoli Perahera held for 5 days ended last night which was undoubtedly the most attractive and colourful night of the festival. The Tooth Relic was temporarily deposited in the Gedige Vihara of the Asgiri Temple last night until it is taken back to theMaligava (Temple of the Tooth Relic) today.
At about 3am today the lay-priests of the devales went in procession to the ford at Getambe, Kandy on the Mahaveli River. They got onto a boat and rowed to the middle of the river with golden swords and caskets containing water collected the previous year. The boat was surrounded by a white cloth so that no one can see how the casket is emptied and refilled with water. They say that refilling is done in a magical way: the lay-priest empties the casket, draws a circle in the water, immerses the casket in it, re-fills it while striking the water with the sword.
To fill the casket, water is actually cut. How can you cut water? Only solid things can be cut. Cutting water is based on two kinds of beliefs: first, that there is no rain because all the water in the sky is enveloped into one huge block and second, that it will rain again if that block can be cut.
However, no one can go up to the heavens to cut that block of water. All that can be done is to imitate that cutting in a place that man can reach. Hence it is done by the Getambe ford in the Mahaveli River. Buddhists strongly believe that it rains on the day of the water-cutting ceremony or ‘diya kapime mangalle’.
