Jewelled pendant, tear drop, whitewash and lye: not so gentle Sri Lanka

Hanging plump pear. Jewelled pendant. Sri Lanka has also been the object of plunder and its people have been cruel to each other.

“From Seyllan to Paradise is forty miles … a paradise to be sacked.” In these first days in Sri Lanka I have begun reading Michael Ondaatje’s “Running in the Family” where this legend is quoted. He continues:

“Every conceivable thing was collected and shipped back to Europe: cardamons, pepper, silk, ginger, sandalwood, mustard oil, palmyrah root, tamarind, wild indigo, deers’ horns, elephant tusks, hog lard, calamander, coral, seven kinds of cinnamon, pearl and cochineal. A perfumed sea.”

The island’s changing names follow the whims of invaders and empire-builders.  “The island,” Ondaatje writes, “seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as its shape, - Serendip, Ratnapida (‘island of gems’), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon – the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language.”

The island’s history of civil misery includes generations of despot kings and autocratic ruling families, along with their innumerable patricides, matricides, fratricides, battles, dismemberings, beheadings and torture.

Most recently has been the especially vicious 25-year-long war between the Tamil Tigers and the Buddhist-dominated government and military – a war urged on by nationalist monks and nuns, in which is it estimated 70,000 people were killed, including many civilians. Research suggests that in the last months of the war alone, 7,000 civilians were killed by government forces. And in a variety of ways the war continues today into the “peace”: the public, government and Tamil leaderships’ efforts to distort or deny the past, the absence of accountability for atrocities, the exclusion of most Tamils from social-economic opportunities available to the Sinhalese majority.

Most of the people we talk with are Sinhalese, guesthouse owners, restaurateurs. For them, as they say, the “peace comes as such relief.” The war, they soon add, was the work of Tamil “terrorists” and “thugs.” “We are getting along together now,” one says. The voices of the victors. Other conversations would tell another story, as does the little reading I have done on Sri Lanka.

Sri Lankans have suffered other kinds of violence as well – most recently the 2004 tsunami. We found ourselves thinking about this disaster as we travelled the island’s south beaches and struggled in the high surf. But it wasn’t until we stepped off the bus in Galle, in the city’s flat sea-level centre – crowded with buses, people, markets and shops – that we could more realistically imagine the tsunami’s impact. It was precisely through this bustling centre in the late afternoon on January 3 that the six-metre-high surge of water swept, drowning thousands and injuring thousands more, throwing buses like small toys, crushing stalls and shops. Well over forty thousand dead across the island, 2.5 million homeless, so many children orphaned, food and water sources in ruins.

Remarkably, really, the centre of Galle is again a crowded, hectic travel and market hub. But where, along this coast, is January 3 within people’s lives, their memories, their families? Some, protected by coves, experienced the tsunami not at all. For many others, though, memories of that day might be most clearly seen in the remaining concrete skeletons that were once their homes, the uprooted palm trees churned into confused stacks of roots and stems, or those small graveyards with their bouquets of fresh flowers buffeted by the sea winds.

This must be already too much to bear. But Sri Lanka’s social – human-spawned – violence also continues without seeming end. Today, for example, an online news article describes reports of the forced bulldozing of beach guesthouses, apparently by agents of the ruling family and the military to make way for large resort projects financed by they and their friends. Tourist numbers are rising since the end of the war, and those with money see even more in those long stretches of brown sand. When I ask Sri Lankans about this report, they are not surprised. “This is what the ruling family does.”  “This is how things are here.” 

In his “Running in the Family,” Ondaatje recalls another period of violence that feels like a parable of historical memory in Sri Lanka. In 1971, he writes, the government rounded up thousands of suspects from what was called at the time “the Insurgency,” a disorganized, chaotic revolt of hopeful young people against the status quo. The Vidyalankara campus of the University of Ceylon was turned into a prison camp. When the campus reopened, returning students found hundreds of poems written on walls, ceilings and in hidden corners of the campus. “Quatrains and free verse about the struggle, tortures, the unbroken spirit, love of friends who had died for the cause. The students went around for days transcribing them into their notebooks before they were covered with whitewash and lye.”

Ondaatje later talks with a librarian who has published a book with photos of charcoal drawings done by insurgents on the walls of one of the houses he, the librarian, has stayed in. The authorities immediately banned the librarian’s book. Ondaatje again reflects on the thousands of teens who were killed by the police in 1971, thrown into the Kelani and Mahaveli rivers that flow to the sea, made to vanish, just like their drawings were destroyed – the librarian’s banned book now the only tangible record. “The works,” he writes, “seem as great as the Sigiriya frescoes. They too need to be eternal.”