Deadlier than the Male
Featured image courtesy Kentridgecommon
- - on 03/10/2016
I have just read Kishani Jayasinghe’s excellent article ‘My Experience of Independence’, published in The Sunday Times ‘Plus’ of March 6, 2016.
In this, she expresses her perceptions of the barrage of comments she received from some members of the public after her recent performance at the 68th Independence Day Celebrations.
She organised the received responses into a hierarchical scale of malice, based on the punishments members of the public felt she should suffer, ‘in order to give a comprehensive idea of what lies beneath this veneer of civilisation and ‘culture’ that these individuals were fighting so hard to protect’:
In third place – ‘I should be born mute in my next birth.’
In second place – ‘I should have a painful and speedy death preferably in some sort of horrible road accident’.
The first place winner was ‘so driven by violence that they felt it necessary to include innocents in the message’.
Sifting through over 500,000 emails, messages and notes cannot have been easy. But the good thing about such a quantity is that they can be categorised by quality and kind (if not kindness). I am sure that, across such a range of responses, certain patterns would have emerged – of tone, and motivation: stances both posturing and feigned (‘well-meant advice offered out of concern for the benefit of the receiver’) and impossible to feign – of hypocrisy, of envy and of an unholy desire for retribution.
This incident highlights what many people know about contemporary Sri Lanka: that, despite its many positive aspects, it is a repressed, vindictive and punitive culture. There are practical reasons for the existence of exorcism ceremonies and protection rituals, and invocation of charms against the Evil Eye.
