Possessing memories, designing cemeteries - Part II
- 20 MAY 2013
- BY SINTHUJAN VARATHARAJAH
Ceremonies of possession
The end of the no-prisoner war and the defeat of the LTTE as the largest embodiment of Tamil resistance against an authoritarian and neo-colonial Sri Lanka state left a void in the Tamil territorial and social landscape. The complete destruction and the subsequent absence of Tamil war memorials post-war was and is in itself not just an act of violence, but also an act of humiliation and subjugation of a people. The contested pieces of land were reclaimed by taking possession of the grief and memory of its people. With the destruction of racialized war memorials, the sovereignty of the Sri Lankan state was bound to be reestablished. Tamil war memorials as challenges and contestations to the majority Sinhala state’s narration of the past and present were successfully erased from the war-torn Tamil homeland and people. With the disappearance of thuyilum illams and other sites of Tamil memories of oppression and resistance, the ‘representations of the past, the narration and visualizing of history, personal and collective, private and public’’ that ‘’spell the desire for holding onto the familiar(…) of landmarks that are disappearing and securities that are unsettled’ completely vanished post-war for Tamils .
To integrate the spatial and racial periphery of the Sri Lankan state and prevent a potential future rebellion by Tamils, the highly centralized state re-introduced policies of ‘Sinhalization’ of land and people. As part of it, the destruction of Tamil war memorials was followed by the construction of massive monuments dedicated to the military victory of the Sinhala victorious side. These Sri Lankan state or effectively also Sinhalese war memorials dedicated to the almost mono-ethnic Sinhalese Sri Lankan Army are constructed in often highly symbolic locations. This should further ensur the central state’s grip over land and people. The SLAF’s main war memorial , for instance, is situated in the former LTTE run de-facto state of Tamil-Eelam’s capital Kilinoichchi. As a conquered former capital with great historic, strategic and symbolic significance, the city has post-war transformed into a SLAF garrison town with an ever increasing flow of Sinhala war tourists flocking into the recaptured Tamil periphery regions of the state20. One of the major sites to visit on such tours is the central war memorial in Kilinoichchi. It was inaugurated by Sri Lanka’s President Rajapakse in an ostentatious ceremony and consists of a concrete block that signifies the LTTE rebellion. The concrete block is a spatial anomaly that violently interrupts the carefully crafted landscape planning of the monument. The rebellion in the form of the block is crushed by a bullet, which represents the SLAF’s successful military victory against the Tamil uprisal. The crack created by the bullet releases a lotus flower21, which neutralizes the spatial anomaly in regards to the surrounding green landscape of the site. The lotus can be interpreted as a symbol of peace, which could only emerge through the SLAF’s military victory. It is, however, also a motif heavily connected with Buddhist mythology symbolizing purity and progress. The lotus can thus also be seen as a sudden signal of interruption of hostilities and marker of a cease of war through the ideological purity of its devout carriers – the Sinhalese Buddhist majority people and its military extension, the Sri Lankan Army. The memorial park itself ‘sits in a lush green park which in itself seems like an abomination on the dry, arid landscape of Kilinochchi’ and used to be both a children’s playground and part of former LTTE political leader Thamilchelvam property22. The park consists of an installation of a number of Sri Lankan flags, which have virtually flooded the recaptured territories, and an empty room with the picture of Sri Lanka’s President Rajapakse, who is simultaneously mentioned at the adjacent tablet to the memorial. The tablet reads in reference to the Sri Lankan President: ‘born for the grace of the nation’ 23.
Just few kilometers away from Kilinoichchi, on a sandy beach in Puthukudiyiruppu in the Vanni, a beach strip that witnessed the lethal end of the war, another war memorial has come to disrupt the tranquil region and its bloody memories: a jubilant soldier posing on a base of granite rocks, holding a gun in one hand and a Sri Lankan national flag in the other. A pigeon is hovering over the soldier’s gun to symbolize the peace that has been achieved thanks to the might of the gun24. The granite base is decorated at each corner with a lion, which is not just the Sri Lankan state’s national animal, but more importantly connected to the Sinhalese’s (translated the ‘lion people’) identity and mythical origin as a people and nation. The mere symbolism of lions, symbolic and literally, standing on a piece of land that has become the burial ground for thousands of Tamils is not just problematic, but equally horrifying. The langue of geography and space is evidently one of violence and racial supremacy.
These are just two of the many war memories that were built and continue to be build all over the recaptured Tamil lands. By continuing the intrusion into the territory, the contested space is forcibly reintegrated by reinterpreting its landscape and with it, its history and its people’s memories. In light of the denial to the right of memory and memorial for the tens of thousands of Tamils who died in the last stages of the war, the construction of Sinhala-centric memorials on top of violated landscapes and bodies is just another extension of the state’s rejection of the dignity of the living and the deceased.
Dominant memories vs. subordinate memories
The symbolic nature, language and lack of memory of Tamils in conjunction with the virtual absence of Tamil visitors to the Sri-Lankan state’s war memorial leads to the conclusion of a memory of the Sinhala nation within the Tamil homeland. The intrusion into the landscape and sentiments of Tamil people is symbolically represented by an avoidance of Tamils of Sinhala war memorials and the ever increasing procession of war tourism from the Sinhala south into the Tamil north and east 25. With post-war tourism, the racial and spatial flow of people has with the end of war almost reversed in proportion and direction. Whilst Tamil migration to the capital Colombo and abroad from the war torn and socio-economically depressed areas dominated the people flow over several decades, today post-war tourism, neoliberal projects and the increasing neocolonialist settlement of Sinhala soldiers, monks and settlers in Tamil areas has proportionally changed the direction of the migration flow26. SriLankan sovereignty over its Tamil regions and people is thus expressed through forms of dominance embodied in violence and settlement.
Part of the process of post-war domination is embedded in the ‘ethnic dominant system’ which has coined much of Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history by producing a dominant and dominated social group. Symbolically speaking through the paradigm of war memorials, the state has post-war introduced ‘dominant sites of memory’ that dominate the dominated group’s places of commemoration27. The desecration and destruction of Tamil war cemeteries by the SLAF was often followed by the construction of state institutions such as military cantonments and police stations upon the very same pieces of land. On March 7th 2011, for instance, the new military headquarter of the SLAF in Jaffna opened its doors after being built upon the Koopay ‘tuyilam illam’, which was flattened twice with bulldozers by the SLAF in an attempt to eradicate the Tamil perspective on the past28.This falls in line with the GoSL’s announcement to replace ‘homes of LTTE leaders (…) with hotels and resort’ and free the land from memories of the ‘LTTE and the violence which affected the public during the war (…)’29.By doing so, the GoSL produces dominant forms of memories of one side that often quite literally dominate those of the marginalized group by constructing upon their deads’ ashes and memories. The role of memorials as ‘repositories of memory, suffering and grief’ as means to’ translate the unthinkable to the thinkable’ is thereby completely ignored whilst Sri Lankan state memorials are inaugurated time after time in ceremonies of possessions over Tamil land and people30. By destroying LTTE and Tamil memories, the space and right for Tamils to grief and remember as individuals and as a collective is denied, whilst being consciously exposed to the subjugation and humiliation of a state and its executive that forcefully tries to impose its narration of past, present and future to its alienated Tamil citizenry.
The GoSL’s attempts to eradicate traces of the LTTE serves further as an attempt to eradicate injustices and oppression committed by the state which gave rise and legitimacy to the LTTE as a force of resistance against a hegemonic state. As the Tamil National Alliances’ (TNA) MP Sumanthiran puts it, ‘the tragic irony is that the act of suppression removes the past memory from the past and places it firmly in the present’’31. As a result, Tamils are not just unable to forget and move on from the past, as it is conditioned by the Sri Lankan state-led reconciliation mantra, but renders it increasingly impossible for Tamils to escape the memories that still haunt their present lives. It is thus another form of imposing a dominant narrative, which denies legitimate grievances of the Tamil citizenry by taking away their rights to space and memory. With the destruction of public sites of memory, Tamil war commemoration has been re-transformed by the state from the public ceremony it was established as during the height of Tamil armed resistance into the private ceremony it has traditionally been reduced to prior to the insurgence. The removal of memories from the public and the visible is just another displacement from the public into the ‘private imagination where they can be neither checked nor measured only stirred’32.
Reconstructing cemeteries, redesigning landscapes
The iron fist of the current GoSL is uncompromising in attempts to stir the private imagination by intruding the intimacy of private remembrance: post-war, severe prohibitions, restrictions and state violence is repeatedly inflicted upon Tamils all over the country on November 27, the LTTE’s marveerar naal. The GoSL aims to prevent them from actively mourning and remembering their war dead and Tamil resistance to Sri Lankan state oppression33.Neither the ringing of temple bells nor the lightening of traditional deepams (oil lamps) are allowed to mark respect on that meaningful day in temples and churches all over the Tamil homeland. Private or public assemblies are violently dispersed and warned against. Last year, despite an army and police clampdown prior to ‘marveerar naal’, Tamil students lid oil lamps in the premises of the University of Jaffna campus to mark the day of commemoration. Their non-violent activities were, however, soon met by a brutal terror campaign of the Sri Lankan Police and Army to suppress their right to remember.
Similarly as to the failure to accommodate Tamil rights and grievances in November, May marks another symbolic period of the year when the state’s interpretation of history and politics clouds over any hopes of possible ‘reconciliation’ under the current system of power: in May, when the Sinhalese majority starts to celebrate in a notoriously triumphalist mood and lavish as well as decadent fashion the end of war, Tamils are actively prevented from publically or privately, individually or collectively mourn for the thousands of Tamil causalities that occurred during the final months of the war34. Instead, the state imposes patriotism lessons upon its Tamil citizenry, which includes the distribution of flags and forced participation in end of war celebrations35.
Sensitivities of one seemingly trump another’s, just as memories of some are meant to eradicate another’s. Both days essentially mark the failure of the process of racial and spatial reconciliation of the island and embody the polarization and distance that continues to persist and rise between Tamils and Sinhalese. Neither Sri Lanka’s regained territorial integrity nor its strengthened sovereignty aided in the process of reconciling of what remained to be separated. The nation that never became a nation found itself with the end of war in a historic position to rewrite its path ahead, but also the one left behind. Instead of reconciling and healing wounds of a fatal, blood trenched past, the GoSL chose to silence upon the narrative of oppression and suffering of its Tamil citizenry by denying it any legitimate right to grief and memorize its sacrifices and human losses. With the absence of Tamil war memorials and the imposition of prohibitions and restrictions for public and collective signs of Tamil grief and memory, Tamil past and present grievances seem to continue to be delegitimized and externalized within Sri Lanka, as well as recapitulated into the present by being reproduced into the current post-war context.
With the criminalization of Tamil memories and memorialisation in relation to anti-state resistance and civilian causalities, the island state is actively invisibilizing and externalizing Tamil’s history, but also putting their position and relation to the state into question. Tamils’ continuance of remembering their dead relatives and fighters, despite a virtual clampdown and stigmatization enacted by state authorities, has thus risen to become a clear act of disobedience and resistance against the state’s dictate of Tamil amnesia. To create safe spaces to memorialize that alternate from the violent landscape of Sri Lanka, diasporic Tamils have in recent times increasingly resorted to the internet as a platform for political mobilization. The virtual world as a relatively anonymous entity helps to create a de- criminalized environment where a widely dispersed and displaced population can become the interpretant, architect, and participant in commemorations and memorialisation of the dead. Concurrently, with the emergence of projects such as the Canadian based www.maaveerarillam.com, the tulliyam illam that were razed to the grounds in the Tamil homeland find themselves today reconstructed in a virtual landscape. By doing so, the memories and memorials of the dead that are illegalized in Sri Lanka find a new home in an increasingly fluid and shifting space that provides the freedom for alternating narrations of the past as well as present. As the recent uprisal of Tamil students in Jaffna and the concurrent violence against them has, however, shown, the memories of the past cannot be eradicated without provoking the ghosts of the past.
Image: LTTE Heroes War Cemetery (Maveerar Tuyilam Illam) in Selvanagar, Kilinochchi, 27 November 2004
© JDS
Sinthujan Varatharajah graduated in 2012 from the London School of Economics and Political Science in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies. Interested in migration, diaspora and critical race theory, he wrote his thesis on conceptions of caste under migration and refugeehood. He now works as a research intern at the Institute of Race Relations in London as well as a researcher on Islam and Muslim communities in France, Belgium and Switzerland for Harvard University’s and CNRS France’s joint academic research network Euro-Islam. The author can be followed at twitter.com/varathas
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