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November 1, 2021
This article discusses the need to be sensitive to others' experiences of the war and their willingness or ability to express their grief through storytelling.
A decade ago, I worked for a few months with a group of women in eastern Sri Lanka. Soundari Amma, the eldest in our group, was in her 50’s then, though she looked much older to me. She fished for a poor living and was the mother of three dead children, chasing the authorities for the body of her murdered daughter and raising very young grandchildren because there was no one else to do it. She had a wry sense of humour and brought cheer to the group when it was needed. One day, she looked at me and said, not joking this time but fascinated,
“you are the only one among us who has had a good life.”
She said it kindly and immediately reflected on her own thoughts, saying nonetheless one could not sum up any life. She was right, of course — human experience is not easily reducible, and hierarchies of suffering can be destructive in themselves. But, for a moment, Soundari Amma had usefully lit up the chasm that lay between her experiences and mine.
Can I truly imagine the ordinary experiences of your life, every aspect inextricable from an ongoing conflict, your life itself part of that conflict’s matrix? How you were displaced from your home multiple times, routinely shelled? How your government helped to direct and sanction the mobs that burnt your homes, your businesses, your libraries? How you were caught between rival militant groups? How you lived in fear that your sons and daughters might be rounded up by every group on every side? How you were chased from your home to seek refuge in another part of the country? How you sat your exams against the odds? How your family hunted for sugar? How you managed to travel away from your hometown, uncertain if you would be able to come back? How you joined a fighting force because you were too poor to have another option, while the privileged of the land profited and shuffled their feet in Colombo? How your sister was shot as a dissenter, your brother was shot as an informer, your neighbours were shot as they prayed? How your child was sent back from battle in a coffin?
How you had a loved-one disappear decades ago, and don’t know what happened to them? Or how you must continue to live amongst the people you saw take them away? How you cannot go home, your land being unlawfully occupied? What it cost you to leave the only land you knew as your own, for a rough start in an alien world, oceans from home and haunted by your exile? What it is like to know your very existence – the name on your identity card, your place of birth – will be turned violently against you with the slightest shift in the wind? Can I imagine what it means to pass this litany of experiences on to your children?
I believe that I cannot. And I also believe that I am bound to you, because of that. For more than a generation, those of us living more securely on this island have not understood enough or done enough as citizens to hold back the tides of violence that have desecrated our history. All the while, our being able to live in relative peace, because of who we are, has prolonged and deepened the suffering of those who could not. I write for those of us who wish at least to do better now.
A colleague and I used to teach an annual university course for school teachers who were teaching the study of literature — each year, an engaged and lively group. The course that we taught focused on helping our students, and hopefully their students in turn, to read with greater openness and thoughtfulness. Above all, we wanted our students to constantly be aware of the ways in which their own beliefs and assumptions, and those of their society, shaped their understanding of what they saw and read. Deliberately, we delayed till week six, the study of writing about our own war. We expected our students to have stronger personal feelings about this material.
What we found in practice was that when it came to our own war, many of our students reacted less sensitively than they did to other subjects, even other wars. They read the stories and poems on their reading list that presented complex and detailed portrayals of conflict, but when they responded to this material, they seemed to look away from what they had seen. Instead, they repeated simple pre-scripted lines about the war that they had received from popular culture: they filled their presentations with words like ‘heroism’ and ‘terrorism’ and took less trouble than usual to make any sense of them.
It is possible that when my students spoke of heroic soldiers, at least a few of them were speaking of people they knew personally; less likely that they knew any of the people they described as terrorists. But their generalisations did both groups a disservice. In these sorts of accounts, heroes and villains are similar beings – one dimensional representation of either good or evil, never, as most human beings — trying to navigate a web of both. I was struck that when faced with their own history, even sensitive, thoughtful adults had found a way not to think at all.
This reductive problem with the stories we tell is found in all quarters. In recent years we have seen more activist ‘storytelling’ in which accounts from the lives of war-affected groups (they are almost always grouped) are presented as stories. I believe the intentions in these efforts are good — a wish that we see and respect the actual human lives involved in our conflict, a hope too that these efforts will help to pull the arc of history towards justice. The risk is that in the process of over-intention we instrumentalise these lives.
We excerpt one aspect of a person’s life — often the most painful — and place it on an interactive website or in a Colombo gallery. Viewers read edited, translated, accounts, in caption form. Without a doubt, it is good that we should know what happened, but we can make the mistake of thinking we understand it fully from a display in an exhibition. While we are absorbed in a woman’s search for her son, we may not know what she does for her living, or the fact she plants flowers despite chronic back-pain or hear the voice in which she speaks about her life. As such, she is essentialised and her lived experience extracted from its context and turned into a ‘story’. I am not sure this is fair.
Sometimes, I am told, people become too real for the stories — for example, when a woman who is a sex-worker or a woman whose husband was disappeared and who is now living with another man, are no longer deemed proper victims. When we group experiences by type and extract stories of suffering, we may end up leaving people out who don’t fit a simplified story, forgetting that the stories themselves were meant to speak of real people; people who exist and are still waiting for acknowledgment of what happened to them.
It is possible to do this work well of course – to gather testimonies in a process with true humanity and respect. That happens most readily when the people doing the gathering are also from the place in which the gathering is done, or they share some of the experiences they are hearing about. Or it happens when outsiders are ready to spend real time with the people involved and not just on the exercise of collection; to work alongside them, to keep coming back long after the testimonies have been recorded. It happens sometimes in the rigour and transformation of good art. But the risks naturally go up when we dislocate testimonies from the people who gave them or prepare them for an entirely different audience — because the stories can stop being answerable to the people whose lives they recount. None of the people in the stories will come to see their lives on show, their context is entirely different.
In truth, we don’t always even register those human beings who are present. As some of my students made presentations about heroes and villains, others — a more assured group sitting towards the front of the classroom — spoke brightly of remembering the war, as of an event long past. Almost nostalgically, they would cite the fear of bombs on Colombo buses as a personal experience of war. They were right of course, these were their experiences of our war, but I feared they had forgotten their colleague a few rows behind, who travelled to the class each week from eastern Sri Lanka, and had undoubtedly seen the war at closer hand. He did not wade into the conversation. Teaching the class from the front of the room, my colleague and I would look anxiously at Roy, wondering if he was pained by his classmates’ chatter. I could not tell – the more they spoke, the more blankly he looked on.
Nonetheless, when Roy’s turn came to present a response to the material we were reading, our sensitive, thinking adults woke again. Roy told us he had shared the reading with his own students and was presenting their responses to it, where they agreed and disagreed with it — responses that carried all the detailed life and feeling that had been missing from the earlier heroes and villains. As Roy spoke, his classmates were captivated, understanding immediately that they were listening to something they didn’t know.
Many people in this country are already accustomed to recounting their lives to strangers – to government authorities designated to respond to their troubles, to numerous commissions that were subsequently ignored, to NGOs offering conditional support, to international journalists.
In my limited experience of watching, I have seen people do it trustingly (placing hope in their listeners for some redress), cathartically (charting their own pain while another bears witness) and knowingly (deciding for themselves just how far they will let the listener intrude into their life). People I know well enough — friends with experiences others wished to collect — I have seen politely answer a question even while subtle shifts in their faces indicated the anger and wounded dignity rising like barricades within them.
To all this we have added a reconciliation discourse, which can sadly rub salt in the wound. At worst, we suggest that our history comes down to a matter of misunderstanding and not injustice. Or we ask people who want acknowledgment and justice to accept instead a weird form of compensation: the obligation to educate those who do not know, or do not want to know, about what happened to them.
I was living briefly in Batticaloa and renting a room in a house. I went with my brother to meet our landlord and at his house we drank tea and talked in the usual way. We talked about our family, he about his. He introduced his son, who was visiting from his studies abroad. My landlord mentioned he too had travelled as a young man, lucky that his sister worked for an airline; then he said “but she was taken by the LTTE in 1990 and we haven’t seen her since”. He paused only for the briefest of moments, before resuming the conversation.
The history of war and grief that we needed to understand from this line depended on us being aware of the context. We needed to be able to hear the line the way our landlord said it and absorb it without interrupting or asking more of him. We needed to have heard it before. You could say we needed at the very least to have a history of listening.
The conversation with my landlord was the moment I realised how often I had heard this tone before. Reflecting on it later, I was transported to the first time I had heard women, in very different circumstances to my landlord, speak of disappearances in their families. It was probably a decade earlier; then I was the visitor from abroad, accompanying my sister-in-law and a colleague as they visited a few women they were supporting through their work. I knew even less Tamil language then than I do today, I simply listened hard to the tone of the conversations — and what my sister-in-law translated for me afterwards. I knew I was hearing something I had never heard before.
In the years that followed, I moved to Sri Lanka again, and I never stopped hearing that tone in which my landlord spoke. I heard it in Monaragala, in Embilipitiya, in Batticaloa, in Jaffna, in Kilinochchi, in Mannar. I heard it from people remembering night-raids, I heard it from people remembering assassinations. I heard it in the voice of a man recounting his years in LTTE captivity. I heard friends speak in it when they remembered their years growing up. Hearing all these people speak normally about struggle, taught me more about their experiences, and the periods and conflicts they lived through, than I could ever have understood from just imagining the circumstances.
It may seem a laughably simple suggestion — that we talk less, listen better, pay closer attention — but, if we think of what how much we regularly miss in other people’s lives, and they in ours, we realise it is easier said than done. I write about a tone of voice, but I also simply mean the detail you notice if you are paying close attention. Half the meaning in what we say is in the way we say it: a person’s words, their mannerisms, their pauses, the details they remark on, the moments they smile, all tell us how they live their experience. To me this is far more important than standing in their shoes — let them stand in their shoes, we only need stand beside them.
There are several people in my own life whom I am aware to have had profound and difficult experiences – specifically of our war – that we have never spoken of or that we have only spoken of in fragments. There are other people – like Muslim friends in present day Sri Lanka – whom I have not asked outright if each day brings more personal fear of what is to come. As I write now, I see many of these people in my mind — and the number of people feels large, the silences vast. I genuinely don’t know if I am right not to ask questions, even among friends — I am simply following an instinct that I should not be the one who decides those conversations. In these relationships, I sometimes feel that I stand with animal alertness — it is not that I am waiting for my friends to speak, not at all, but that I am aware so much is unsaid.
If we are lucky, life will be long — we will be able to accumulate a history of listening and keeping vigil with each other. A friend who can share only so much with me today, in some years’ time may be ready to tell me more — as he lives longer with the experiences that have transformed his life. Equally, he may not. We place too much emphasis on things being put into words.
What I remember of that day, a decade later, are specific, intimate details — and, with those details, the feeling of being present in that moment. Today, I think about the previous months of sitting and talking together with Soundari Amma that had led me to be at the funeral, made it natural for me to be there, alongside two others who had known her longer. I think about the families who never received a body or word of their loved ones, unable even to hold a delayed ceremony like that one.
We sat for a while with Soundari Amma, who seemed reluctant to let the body go. Eventually, the men came to carry the coffin across the road to the cemetery, to the plot Soundari Amma told me she had prepared for Valli’s body when it came, the first time I visited her house. We followed her, to throw handfuls of sand into the grave. Valli’s father made three cuts in a Margosa tree, to release her spirit. All the trees around us bore the same marks.
This is as far as I have got, in the context of our history in Sri Lanka, to hope that for people whose lives were caught up in our conflicts — who have experienced a scale of griefs too great to release — you and I might become people it is bearable to have present, or to stand next to. It is not enough for the long run but for now this would be something.
*All the names of people in this account have been changed, for privacy’s sake.
Sunila Galappatti has worked with other people to tell their stories, as a dramaturg, theatre director, editor, and writer. She is the writer of A Long Watch, which recounts the life of a prisoner of war in LTTE captivity, as he remembers it. The book has been translated into Sinhala and Tamil.
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