portion of my people
The imagery of me walking in a melancholic road happened to me, many many times during war. melancholy is a favorite word for me. i got it from the only book i read of joyce’s– Dubliners (i fell asleep reading the rest). In Dublin, the distant church bells will chime, and the little boys who were playing on the ground were being reminded in the next second, that, one of those boys’ sister will call for them, to drink tea… anyway, that word’s definition is near nothing to ‘my’ interpretation to it. its sad and thoughtful; deep and disturbing. melancholy, i say, such sadness surrounds me; as a winter blanket, it covers me in it.
as i walk, memories are accompanying the shadow; in the dead silence, faces of the abandoned become countless. the so many stories i heard from ‘this’ war – from not so many sides they have seemed. a deep, deep sorrow took over me. even though it happens far away, there are wars within…. I walk through them. it is, not in anyway comparable to the destroyed fragile feet, of the boy who had missed his parents, when he was running away, away from the bombs, hoping that he cud run away from all that he is not suppose to take, in such a flower like age of those littlest boys.
no, no bombs are following my head, than these thoughts becoming chains. *’Then the chains were fastened around me.’ i walk as fast as i can, walking into me, wanting to go further and furtherr, all alone, never to return. do not follow me, inside. please, leave me. alone.
during war, my maternal uncles will be running toward my amma’s dreams, and shout as loud as they can, in a haunting voice ‘akka… enkadaa pillaiyala kAppAttu‘ [sister, save our children] and my mom will jump out of bed, failing to touch or get a hold of her brothers’ hands; failing to assure them that she will kaapaattal [save] them. not doing so, failing and helpless, she will kaththal [shout] in the middle of the night, saying her head is going to explode, and her nerves will run out of her skin, like rivers made out of ropes, to strangle around her neck.
her voice threatening us off to become insane, ‘once again’, in the time of war, in the time of destruction. just this time, i won’t let her go, to those cold mental wards, where she ought to stay, without me. not in a foreign land. not when i am here, all grown up. no, no one can take her away to that hell, to visit her later, hearing her words through those merciless steel bars put between us. barring us from hugs after those long awaited childhood nights, in her absence.
~~~
In the time of war; i will walk, a long walk. passing strangers. or friends becoming strangers. other than that, what good does nationalism could bring? people are just like machines, with TWO mechanical political sides, against each other, never wanting to address the people’s issues than feeding the SIDES they belong to. all those talks pointing fingers at each other.. into a never ending journey!
the wounded are keeping quiet, because it will only open their old wounds to bleed. they don’t want to live it back, by doing that, shooting at their souls’ again. they are quite, not to defy anything, than drowning into miseries of war memories.
instead, it is, the great talkers who are talking, always talking. i am passing them. walking inside me, listening… searching. for the wounded, a remedy.
Ondu
In that land called Sri Lanka where i happened to be born, they – my ethnic brothers – who took up Arms to fight the injustice put upon them based on their ethnicity, took the different turns– there: they even killed their own brothers, in the name of One Nation, One Armed Group & One Leadership. the greedy men forgot, nations or lands will never mean a thing when there is no people to live in it.
In that land, when our people were killed like herds of abandoned animals, I started writing this, about a leader’s death. Or, is it about him? After my conscious age, i neither worshiped the leaders nor cared about them. but when the news arrived of Leader deceased, his fate was as of people’s. the ‘way’ he was killed and the linking stories…. there were stories after stories coming. so do the questions. why the leader didn’t bite the cyanide when the enemies captured him, just as he have ordered his cadres to do when captured alive? till the last point, the leader himself, who sent young to the war, even forcing them to fight, didn’t want to die? the people are his shields to protect him, so is that the reason why they were stopped from fleeing the war zone?
Despite these questions, in the event of the post-murder, in front of the computer screen, there is SL-mininstry-of-defence-law-&-order website, where the leader lays. leader was killed in a defeat (while surrendering or not). and for his defeat the cost is thousands of innocent civilians, within the months span. after the news, there are rumours about whether it’s him or what, alive or not. but, even, if he was in the Vanni jungles waiting to do miracles, to win the war, they do not matter any more. now, it is not abt him being alive. already people have paid the cost, human cost. those irreplaceable years of human loss! for nothing, but to send them back to ground zero, robing them off of everything, and leaving them homeless, in their land.
seeing the leader lying on the ground, while the army, the former LTTE member, the captured members and the Sinhalese faces looking at him, my head lowers as i shake and shake my head, since I can’t shake these Power Mongering Men. the uneasiness in the former cadre was transparent while some other faces even smiling. his genitals were covered as they are practicing the world’s greatest civilization i.e. humiliating a corpse, which can’t do a thing against them. they were standing UP while the corpse was laying low down. call it a foreshadowing maybe. In October 2007, in Anuradapura, in a tractor trailer ‘they’ put the bodies of LTTE cadres seized after an attack, stripped off clothes and exhibited them around that Sinhala village before turning them over to where they belong, to their people. in the ‘final war’ the leader was put there to exhibit. no one have known what had happened to his family members… in death, his fate became the fate of the people’s.
That day, when we talked after the leader’s death, —— said to me: “at last, they have humiliated us. whether we like it or not, what had happen to him, happen to put down our ethnicity, to humiliate it. (like a cigarette butt they stepped on it with their disrespecting boots). he is atrocious, and we have thousand other criticisms about him… but akka, avan enkada oru adaiyaalam allaa… sister, isn’t he one of our identity? killing him ‘like that’ and putting him with kovanam [a cloth piece to cover male's genitals]… isn’t it humiliating, us too? they should of gave a little respect at least. enna thaan irunthaalum avan oru periya aal thaaneh? despite all, he is a big icon, no?”
Said —–, though his brother was forcefully abducted by the rebels and killed in the ‘last’ war, which left his widow mother walking insane, losing her child who she raised and educated to make him successful, and such a momma’s boy he was, got University entry for that year [which is such a Big Accomplishment in those remote villages, especially - anywhere- in the household of a single mother]. and that’s just before ‘they’ took him to fight somebody else’s war and got him killed. The War took his brother along with thousand others as scapegoats, with/without their will & the war became somebody else’s and gone out of people’s hands, when it started to Force the young into taking Arms.
The trees outside my house got no language i could relate to. this is my brother who is speaking. in his voice, i cud feel not just humiliated identity, also the burden of losing everything – valuable members after members of our communities, for an end with such humiliation and nothingness, sighs with the bitter question ‘why all these have happened? for decades, how many young lives had went into this fire [the so called Tamil struggle], all for an end like this?‘
-—– continued: “i lived their all my life.. when a fight is over, we would take the weapons, not the clothes. never… at last they ended everything. with all these losses, they put a Kovanam on his body, and made all our tragedies into a big comedy Scene…”
the voice filled the silence afterward. we – who so badly want to remove our identities like the skin of a snake – are send back to share an event that connects us only because of such identities. if humiliation accompanies those of us who didn’t agree upon their regime, i don’t need to go on about the sympathizers of the regime, all around Diaspora, which never ask questions of the regime nor comfortable with people asking questions.
Rendu
Even now, in the bitter End of the war, people want to keep quiet. want to hush the stories from the camps. even to the voices coming through camps, through those relatives having back home connections, they say ‘not now’ or want to say, ‘it is a government propaganda’. they want to shrug it off like shrugging off dust in their clothes [but the dust got piled up, now they need infinite shrugs to clean up]. simply: they don’t want to hear something they don’t want to hear. “who knows what the government is up to?” they would say. and if the whistle-blower’s voice sounds ‘outside their political stance’ [which is believing what they want to believe] they say “how do you know that information? how come you are getting them? is the government backing you?”
Government who? its betrayal are promiseless. the main point is: our peoples’ children were not in the government’s army to begin with. Vanni people’s some 25+ years of remoteness is given to the war, trusting the cadres by choice or not– its a second thing to consider. first: people were defeated, by their own Army–the army that claimed to speak for them, represent them–failed to protect them. without a prevision for the future, The Leadership that even failed to protect its own life, took The People to the gallows, on the way, stealing their children, forcing to fight, slaughtering, banning their escape… all with the same Arms they took for people’s freedom. It is the worst defeat of all, on people’s behalf.
during war, dissent voices of people came slowly from zones where army bombardments killed along with LTTE’s threat to stop ‘their’ people’s plight. i cursed and cursed the Leadership when i first heard they have shot the people. Vanni the vast land of farmers, with its flaws and differences, is the land of giving.
– The very people of this very land, gave you its children to fight ‘your’ wars, despite decades old promises telling them that, “THIS is the LAST WAR!”
– With its agricultural paddy fields, this very people of this very land produced and gave food for you. its vast wilderness, where your guerrilla ambushes.
in return, despite their resistance, you took their children in force, but, at last, you even dare to shoot them? at the end, all that you gave back to them were couple of bullets, in an undefeatable war? there is no justification for it. B’cause the bullets have defeated the people. when the bullets entered their war-torn hearts’, its the end to all their hopes and decades long waiting. [thuppakikalin thOddAkkal, makkalin mAril adiththu viddanna. the bullets have hit hard on their chests taking away their hopes and patience].
my eyes were eyeing the leader just like eyeing the leaders he had slain in the past. just like i had eyed the body of a childhood sinna bala uncle, who was gunned down in the Colombo streets. who knows who have shot him. land where men are ceaselessly forming groups after groups believing only the Arms they carry, it is n/ever been easy to locate them, than knowing for sure they are of the same ethnic blood.
that night viewing the leader’s body i wondered… the singhala eyes (now, how could i not separate them?) in Anuradapura village, eyeing the dead ‘tigers’, would they have felt the same? does those slain corpses wake them up in their dreams and through out the whole night haunt a human haunt, saying *”i am the enemy you killed, my friend”? would their body shiver like thin strings in pain and haunt their nights for their lifetime? i don’t know. witnessing the unheard history, as a female, with a numbed womb, *’it hurts like fuck’, that, forced into the very personal place within a body.
in death even the great leaders become the abandoned. bloody victorious, their guns got no speech in da hands of their enemies. YOU – T R Y – *innerSTAND this: if a leader supported by majority or a portion of the Tamils around the world, is murdered when he was surrendering (or ‘if’ he was surrendering), and if in the aftermath he is stripped and put on a little piece to cover only his genitals, what would be the fate of captured people of that ethnic’s minority – especially the low level cadres and the female cadres? the captured female cadres, who, the vulnerable ones even when they were dead.
There were females among the 21 Black Tiger bodies exhibited in Anuradapura too. The Chauvinist State wanted to scare the women who see such exposures, warning, ‘if you join to fight, same thing will happen to your body’ – as a female of vast West, in the hidden washrooms, do you ever want to exhibit your nudity in the postures that are not in your hand nor in any way ’sexy’? those brave women who defeated their society’s norms and came to join the Armed Groups formed by Men, at last, defeated by their Patriarchal Men counter parts in death. proving after all, what is the actual role there to be led by a woman: being sexual objects.
the new Conquers who treated even the dead leader in such way, going to treat the ‘others’ differently? reality is: they are going to be humiliated, on the one hand, for what they believed in; on the other though – the abducted and forced into the war front – punished for something they did not believe in. paying for something that they didn’t ‘choose’ as a right. to continue the war, in spite the death tolls of innocents, the same government which ‘worried’ in propaganda for ‘child soldiers’ and nailed the tigers with human rights campaigns after campaigns to terrorize them, what would it do now, when the chance is given to capture the child soldiers? are those ‘child soldiers’ waiting there for dead chambers, in the hands of their captured New Masters’? Or a life of chances and possibilities (as low as promise not to take their lives) awaiting them?
out side that land: everybody is mimed during war. they take up the streets. going crazy, On-ing & Off-ing the TV, radio, internet – cursed with death news. bad news. just to realize there is no one to stop when the people suffer, to the lowest level possible. believe me, our legs, hands, fucked up mouths, anals, every part of us is cloaked.
………………… and i walk and walk into insanity, to hear this around those corners where women are afraid to go in the dark. Maybe it is a Bazaar which sure got a Brothel or a place where dangerous men walk into kill the servicing sex workers after they’re done their thing; and, it is where i found ‘her‘. She, a Singhala lady who resembled The Late Mannemberi, Sitting like the female cadre’s stripped naked dead body of the 1995 manal Aaru [Weli Oya] Camp attack, with thighs Wide Open purposefully in forced sexual position by the Conquers, her Sinhala Brothers, became the narrator. With widen legs becoming a sudden Giving–Birth-to-YOU position, she said:
“its The Men’s War – period.
*come & see the past! its 1970s. its 1987.. in 1989 too. call it the *mannaeberi era. the strongest sympathizer and a woman of JVP era. She is a Singala Woman. They stripped her off of her clothes (b’cause that’s what they can do). they dragged her in those streets where poor sinhala ‘boys’ revolted against the State. when they dragged her, her blood was pouring down the streets… it’s their own sister’s monthly blood. it’s their mothers breast fed blood now boiling inside them. they raped her of course (another thing they can do). Amidst the smell of young Sinhala Boys’ young sinhala flesh burned along with tires, they humiliated ‘her’ participation, gender, and told those frighten villages, told those women inside those houses, not to ever commit such crime. not to ever come out. not to desire freedom. not to revolt. they said: go back. go back. go back into those kitchens, and bear children. 1, 2, 3, what is your nation asking for? in whateva number your men want them to be. dont bear a baby girl of course, bear little little boys. bear ‘em for your men, those power mongering men. never ever, go back against conformity. nor revolt against it. all you have to do is, spread your legs. and be ready for us.”
in the given, Chauvinist Men history of SL, we came & saw the past, so many damn times. and how can a minority ethnic group trust the State, which in fact fucked its own people?
Moondu
But A Leadership have left the people, left there in that land called Sri Lanka, with no choices. They are refugees in their own land, waiting for the next meal, life’s necessities. such abandonment no one can imagine, since like the existent of prisons in each of all nations, they are hidden away from y/our eyes.
in spite all the atrocities, betrayals, lies and justifications to cover up taking lives, for whatever reasons, i walked in a melancholic silence hearing the last pleas of the leader. the last minutes of life. the surrendering words against the martyrdom. the fierce desire to live. the fear and agony in knowing and losing the family in front of his own eyes. the irony of all his bravery becoming so damn small in front of the same guns, now only the enemy is holding, with the same power.
In the Documentary of Tupac Shakur, the ‘Gangster’ Image of Young adults in Abroad, the young boys who are so induced by his Brave Thug Life, would not see the hand shivering of Tupac, when he comes out in a wheel chair from that hospital day before he was shot again to die, and his chasing away the journalists’/fans’ hands like we chase away the flies from our food… fearing as if each of ‘em are after his life. fearing those hands becoming the chains to tight his neck. fearing those hands becoming the welcoming ones to death. ah… that fierce desire to live. the kisses, dreams and the love filled lips of little kids. he sat in that chair, like a scared little boy wanting to find a place to hide. a little boy who does not want to die. who wants to follow his mother around holding on to her house gown, feeling safe.
“aren’t we all scared to die, when we want to live, tasting all the abundance of life? wouldn’t we have invited death, if we really want to die?”
that’s what the Street-walker inside said and continued:
“Listen… His story is like the Local Rowdy Vs Big Mafia series. them the Biggies always be the Government’s – puppets- Politicians. and, The Biggies will raise local rowdies to use them, instead of them playing the murderer’s games. The local Rowdies will be given Arms & Training. and from them, A Leader will arise and rule, killing the other Ones (proving no wrong to survival of the fittest). Who knows where the Bad Move starts, maybe when He forgets the fact, his place of importance might change in a key move of a Biggy. and in greed and blindfolded with praises instead of criticisms, he will start to believe Him as the Biggest Rowdy. he will started to act that way. not knowing there are Biggest Rowdies out there, way WAY BIGGER than him. slowly, any second, when his power and existence becomes the threat to them, he will be gone. just like that; dead.
was the leader’s fate decided upon like that? with such an end. the Countries’ the Governments’ the Heads’ behind the creation and elimination of an Armed Group will continue on doing their parts, in some other contested lands. only the innocent victims (of decades long promises) will ask ‘ Whose war did we fight?’ for whom and for what were we fighting? at the end we lost all the reasons and the causes. people became tired of losing and dragged along as herds in every defeat and displacements within. moving house after houses. bombed after, chased after. they just looked for an end.”
An end.
there is no joy when the life is defeated. like all the innocent people who have died in the leader’s regime’s hands there is no triumph to hear his death, especially when it is humiliated and betrayed. as same as the people who were forcefully taken by him to fight, he died in somebody’s calculations, for a shrewd decision. when a Big Key moves and decides the value, his death, does not make any stir other than a local rowdy’s death. there, he was laying so powerless, unArmed. unWanted. DEAD.
it is there i debuted first and last of my stage dance. also it being my last joyous moments to hold onto with my cousin/class-friends/mates. and it’s the home where my mother gave life to us. it is where my foot is rooted in, very deep, in the brown soil. enough to become nostalgic. but i deny that. i deny nostalgia.
That day, right after our dance, organizers of the event turned off all those battery-run lights. light went off leaving us in antharam [uncertanity]. a chill still runs into my stomach. they have ceased the light, when they heard the deadly sounds of helicopters in the distant. little exciting that whole thing was for me, since i lost my ma in the dark and how i looked for her – expecting her to guard me – pithukal[twisting] my sondu[lips], tears almost ready to burst out of the eye sockets, but i was chasing them back by pressing them hard inside. b’cause they have announced beforehand to keep quiet so the Helis wont hear us in heli [greed] for our death bells to ring. i was holding the tears like holding the pee, in pain and abandonment. i looked for amma in the dark (which wont lead me to her); in fear (which will only make me even smaller)…. it is my bit in war. all before i leave to Colombo, then to Toronto ‘living’ and singing out song lines like M.I.A’s ‘Congo to Colombo’ and so on. if i didn’t go, i might of seen stripped naked and humiliated; unidentified and nameless, other than being seen by my gender and ethnicity and by all those identities that i denied to hold on to, in the foreign fields where i got these rights to ‘choose’, while the ones who are poor, are the ones who are trapped there, powerless and left to choose the fate given by the Powers.
while they remain choiceless, for many outside that crowd, death of the leader is an end to a Veera [Brave] Saga. Still, the Great Sola Kings come in those young and the old Tamilians dreams and boil their blood, urging their nerves to revenge the defeat in war. but they wont fight the war. and, even though the news confirmed him dead and The Leader Prabhaharan is no more, i know those people who wait. a day will follow the leader’s birthday. November the 26th and then the maaveerar naal [marytyr's day] on the 27th. they would eagerly wait for their leader to appear to give his annual speech. they will wait for that day to arise, tolerating the Victory Roars of their opponents, with such unbelievable hope. i know it. when i get into a car, buying groceries in a thamil kadai [tamil store] and about to close the door, i will hear their song for the first time. like the unforgotten lines from that childhood song, about a heroic leader, this will go on as ‘en thalaivar saakavillai’ [our leader didn't die] while the instruments and the voice drags deep into that sentiment. that boy in the car will worship a heroic sorrow; and, men & women, they will deny it until that day. or even after that. perhaps, like god, they will carry him forever.
‘they’ who are absent in the war field. they who escaped it years back. they who have their children in safer hands. they who support the regime no matter what happens or happened or going to happen in terms of people, with partial responsibility of their regime. they who stayed in the moments of the political position they took, on the very day they left the country. no revisiting nor revising it, since after leaving their land, it is not them who is living/facing the political regime they are supporting. they, a portion of ‘my’ people. often, The Diasporic portion Or the portion outside the barbed wired IDPs’ Camps in Vavuniya, Settikulam, Jaffna, Mannar, Trinco.. you name it.
- Then the chains were fastened around me – From Anne Sexton’s long poem “Consorting With Angels”
- i am the enemy you killed, my friend - line from a war poem “Strange Meeting” by a first world war soldier Wilfred Owen [1893-1918]
- it hurts like fuck - Erica Jong’s line from my memory lanes, couldn’t locate the title
- *innerSTAND – instead of saying UNDERstand, when i first said ‘inner’stand, to me that’s sound of a word that practices equality
- come & see [released in 1985]– classic war movie. in ma opinion, it will be hard to sit through this movie if you are with those undying war torn meMORiEs. Background of the movie: World War II, Russia
- mannamberi era – 1971-1987-1989-1990: These are some of the important years in the Southern Sri Lanka. In these years in the south the singhala rural youth uprisings occurred and crushed by the State. It have cost the Singhala South all together some 75 000 or so of human cost along with arrests and disappearances. certain age group of a generation were burned down in their villages along with tires; there were corpses drowned in the rivers. An era of never ending mourning in singhala mothers’ history. and as mentioned above also, manneberi was one of a sympathizer and a woman who was raped, and killed by her own Singhala brothers ordered by the Govt Force, during 1971 JVP insurrection.
