In May 2009, the Sri Lankan military defeated the Liberation Tigers Tamil Eealam (LTTE) and consequently ended the civil war that was generally perceived to go on between the Sinhalese, the population majority, and the Tamils who were striving for separation. The violence that escalated in 1983 was not limited to two opposing political and ethnic fronts (cf. Silva 321).
Rather, one has to point to ongoing brutal power struggles within the respective ethnic groups, especially between the followers of different political parties, and attacks on other ethnic minorities like the Muslims (cf. Silva 321-23). Becoming the victim of an assault, therefore, was unpredictable, a fact that undermined every sense of security.
The roots of the conflict are manifold and originate far back in time. During the period of British colonization, the Tamils were preferred to the Sinhalese as the former were granted access to Western education and were given jobs in the public service sector instead of the less lucrative cropping the Sinhalese did (cf. Sabaratnam 185). In the 20th century, especially after Sri Lanka's independence, the Sinhalese fear of the large Tamil population in South India and its potential support of Tamil culture in Sri Lanka became highly problematic for the relation between the two ethnic groups. That, in turn, led to the discrimination of Tamils with regard to education and language. The increased competition for jobs and the dire educational outlooks made a violent struggle for separation attractive for young Tamils in the 70s and 80s (cf. Sabaratnam 203).
Prime Minister Mrs. Bandaranaike's opposition to the World Tamil Conference in Jaffna triggered violent riots that made the moderate TULF (Tamil United Liberation Front) flee to Madras, which allowed the LTTE to assume leadership of the Tamil community (cf. Silva 321).
The LTTE was the only Tamil party unwilling to give up their weapons to the Indian Peace Keeping Forces that intended to stabilize the region after the riots. Their resistance gained them support from the Tamil community, which finally allowed them to fight at two fronts: against the security forces and the Tamil rival groups. After expelling the Indian forces and annihilating the
other Tamil parties the LTTE ruthlessly pursued its goal of a separate Tamil state by using, for example, suicide bombers to target famous politicians or crowded places (cf. Silva 321-322). The Sinhalese government, on the other hand, responded with military actions to contain the LTTE geographically. Internally, it heavily relied on its police apparatus whose random arrests and tortures were and are infamous among human rights agencies:
The first executive president of Sri Lanka, JR Jayewardene (1978-1989), publically announced that the time has come for each person to look after his own security. [...] Subsequent Sri Lankan heads of state have done little to reverse the statement made by president Jayewardene. While national security is constantly talked about, the government shows no concern for the security of ordinary citizens. In fact, according to the prevalent discourse, the security of any individual can be sacrificed for the abstract notion known as national security. The absolute powers given to the security apparatus to deal arbitrarily with citizens’ lives is what in essence national security has come to mean. (Fernando 118)
The Sri Lankan state, therefore, eroded its moral authority, which only contributed to the loss of every sense of security. Sri Lanka’s violent maelstrom encompassed every class and every ethnic group. No part of society remained untouched. The undeniable result is a society of mutilated, dead, or vanished bodies.
Their representation in the chosen Sri Lankan postmodern crime fictions is crucial for the counter-discourse of Western values that are exemplified by transnational characters arriving on the island. These postcolonial bodies are evidence of war crimes, tortures, and other forms of violence, which also makes them the starting point of social detection. They are the media for the undoing of the Western binary way of thinking by illustrating how unfeasible these ideas are regarding a potential reconciliation process. Instead, it will be demonstrated how the physical experience of the deformed Sri Lankan bodies initiates a differing philosophical discourse focusing on intimacy and rather than totality.
The second step of this analysis will show that social detection also includes a historical one or rather a detection of the nation-state’s historiographic means. The postcolonial bodies are entwined in narrative structures, become historicized, or de-historicized according to the nation’s Grand Narrative. The Sri Lankan context offers an alternative to the Western historiography.
This approach can, just like the Sri Lankan body discourse, be called ‘intimate’ because it does
The last step is dedicated to the problems of the transnational detective. The social and historical detection of Sri Lankan society becomes for them who live in the West a detection of their own identity. Their return facilitates a confrontation with their flight, their forgetting, and their acculturation to the West.
At first, however, this analysis will foreground the role of the postcolonial body and its victimization in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Romesh Gunesekera’s Heaven’s Edge.
Additionally, Salman Rushdie’s Fury66 will be employed as a reference point for the representation of the postcolonial body. This novel is not set in Sri Lanka but on a fictional postcolonial island, where an ethnic minority fights for its independence. The parallels to the situation on Sri Lanka are obvious and allow comparisons. It will demonstrate that Sri Lankan issues are not to be regarded separately from the rest of postcolonial literature. Instead, they are to be integrated into a discussion of a postcolonial counter-narrative and the potentially ongoing tactics of colonialism.
Killers everywhere: Civil War and the Postcolonial Body in Sri Lanka
In the novel by Michael Ondaatje, the protagonist Anil, a forensic, arrives in Sri Lanka by order of the United Nations to inspect skeletons found at a historical site to which exclusively government officials have access. Among the historical skeletons, one is found that only dates back a few years and raises suspicions of a political murder. Anil, who was born in Sri Lanka but educated in the West, presses her local partner Sarath to investigate the circumstances of the skeleton’s murder, whom she names Sailor. She firmly believes that the scientific proof of the government’s involvement in political murders will lead to international intervention and a
66Salman Rushdie’s Fury is one of his controversially discussed novels. Criticism ranges from the reproach of only providing a superficial explanation for the origins of violence in the American context (cf. Abele n.p.) to the allegation of an unreflected reproduction of the Western value system (cf. Bhattacharyya 153-54).
On the other hand, academics such as Soo Yeon Kim oppose the positions above by concluding that Fury “reveals cosmopolitanism and nationalism as false ideologies concocted by an American empire” (65). This analysis, in turn, will point out that Fury certainly has a complex approach to the postcolonial discourse, which is particularly evident in the relationship between reality and fiction.
solution for the Sri Lankan dilemma.67
Hence, Anil perceives a tie between Sailor’s individual body and the Sri Lankan social body. He bears the scars of society’s violent struggle, the scars, so many local bodies share, and is according to her a means to free Sri Lanka from its situation:
There had been a continual emergency from 1983 onwards, racial attacks and political killings. The terrorism of the separatist guerilla groups, who were fighting for a homeland in the north. The insurrection of the insurgents in the south, against the government. The counterterrorism of the special forces against both of them. The disposal of bodies by fire. The disposal of bodies in rivers or the sea. The hiding and reburial of corpses. [...] 'The reason for war was war.' (A 42-43)
The multi-front war produces countless corpses that undergo the same acts of violence and the same disposal as Sailor did. He becomes a representative of Sri Lankan suffering. The autopsy Anil performs on his body is also an autopsy of Sri Lankan society (cf. Knepper 39).
In Sri Lanka, the path to freedom and peace is in Anil’s opinion, the notion of truth, which is based on scientific facts that she tries to provide with the help of the analysis of Sailor’s body.
She is able to determine his cause of death, therefore strengthening a cause and effect assumption:
She could read Sailor's last actions by knowing the wounds on bone. He puts his arms up over his face to protect himself from the blow. He is shot with a rifle, the bullet going through his arm, then into the neck. While he's on the ground, they come up and kill him.
Coup de grace. The smallest, cheapest bullet. A .22's path that her ballpoint pen could slide through. Then they attempt to set fire on him and begin to dig his grave in this burning light. (A 65)
The association of Anil's forensic autopsy with reading reminds strongly of the classical detective fiction and its belief in readability. Anil, like the classical detectives, has faith in the hermeneutic code and science that stereotypically grants an objective approach that guarantees truth according to the Western discourse. In the Sri Lankan context Anil will have to learn that the means of science despite all their forensic accuracy have their limitations, though (cf.
Derrickson 140).
The representation of the body in Heaven's Edge is quite similar. The protagonist Marc, a third-generation migrant in the UK, returns to an island modeled after Sri Lanka and experiences the
67 Ondaatje, Michael. “Anil’s Ghost,” 51-52. In the following quotes from this novel are going to be highlighted by
ongoing atrocities against its citizens. His lover's abduction and his search for her also make him an enemy of the state. On his flight from the military, Marc views many victims of violence, members of a society in which the brutalized body is the norm:
War here, like everywhere else, was once about land and identity. But after the death cloud in the south everything changed.
You see, we were reshaped by gangsters into new collectives held together only by conscription. You could say myopia, no?
Not language, not religion, not any of these outmoded notions of nation. After so many years of fighting, violence became
ingrained into our way of life. So now we have only thugs for politicians and tyranny in every tribe. Killers everywhere.68 Uva, Marc’s lover, turns against the traditional socio-cultural categories of a nation and, instead,
propagates that Sri Lanka is not held up by a uniform language or a uniform religion. Both components were essential for the Sinhala-Buddhist movement in the 1950s that opposed “the pluralist orientation of the state.” Members of these groups “also advocated degrees of future closure against other ethnic groups and religious groups by introducing a hierarchy based on moral appropriateness.” (Sabaratnam 162-163). As elaborated before, these exclusions of ethnic or religious minorities have, on the one hand, to be understood as violent acts because they limit a person’s freedom and right to self-fulfillment.
On the other hand, they are also prime examples of nation forming and the generation of a Grand Narrative that includes a nation’s mythical origin (cf. Gellner 89). This attempt has to be seen in the context of Sri Lanka’s independence. The transit from a colony defined by the British Empire to an independent nation-state caused social unrest and the urge for identity re-definition. In orchestrating the ethnic and religious exclusionary technique, Sri Lanka follows the Western paradigm, which illustrates that Sri Lanka’s formal independence is only a partial one. It is still influenced by Western propositions.
The violence that Uva names the common denominator of Sri Lanka is not metaphorical but literally affects the whole society and even nature. The government destroys any wildlife outside of its approved plantations and dictates the plants that are to be grown:
“I knew the family that lived here,' she said. 'They were meant to grow only bitter gourd and radish for the market, but they
68 Gunesekera, Romesh. “Heaven's Edge”, 37. In the following quotes from this novel are going to be highlighted by
“HE.”
had young children and got some sugarcane going. It was against the rules. One day the military came and saw the boy eating sugarcane. They tried to catch him and beat him, but he ran away. The soldiers couldn't find him so they burnt the whole place down.“ (HE 29)
The regulation and the violation of human life equals the regulation and violation of natural life.
Thus, the deformation of the individual and human social body extends to the natural body.
Alternatively, the maimed human body is just a symptom of nature’s sickness. Humankind and nature are interdependent.
The postcolonial body also bears a collective dimension in Salman Rushdie’s Fury. Rushdie’s main interest lies in the depiction of the creation of a story and its interaction with reality. In the first part of the novel narrated by a third-person narrative voice, the protagonist Malik Solanka is obsessed with a sudden murderous trait in his personality and the option of being the killer of three society girls.69 The second part of the novel focuses more on his artistic creation of an online science fiction narrative, which then becomes a reality and is adopted by a radical group on a postcolonial island to carry out its revolution (cf. F 95-259). The postcolonial bodies visibly transform into machines by using masks (cf. F 226). They become dolls with implanted chips.
As Michel Foucault has shown in Discipline and Punish the subjugation of the human body creates the soul:
It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, supervision and constraint. [...] The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and the instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. (29-30)
It is this soul, the acceptance of the Western value system, that keeps the colonial and the postcolonial human in place, but it is no longer the Christian understanding of the soul that Foucault references. The modern soul is formed through the body, is part of it, and controls it.
The same applies to the generation of the cyborgs:
But in the master program Kronos added a Prime Directive: whatever order he gave, the cyborgs and their replicas were
obliged to obey, even to the point of acquiescing in their own destruction, should he deem that necessary. He dressed them in finery and gave them the illusion of freedom, but they were his slaves. He gave them no names. There were seven-digit numbers branded on their wrists, and they were known by these. [...] And as well as characters – strengths, weaknesses, habits, memories, allergies, lusts – he gave them a value system by which to live. (F 163-164)
The value system given to them is integrated into their bodies. One can state that the postcolonial body, just like the cyborg body, is at the center of a subjugation process by the dominant power – either the West or science.
The collective formation of the postcolonial social body is, however, only a paradigm for the global subjugation of the human body which can also be found in the distant US:
But now living women wanted to be doll-like, to cross the frontier and look like toys. Now the doll was the original, the woman the representation. These living dolls, these stringless marionettes, were not just “dolled up” on the outside. Behind their high-style exteriors, beneath that perfectly lucent skin, they were so stuffed full of behavioral chips, so thoroughly programmed for action, so perfectly groomed and wardrobed, that there was no room left in them for messy humanity. Sky, Bindy and Ren thus represented the final step in the transformation of the cultural history of the doll. Having conspired in their own dehumanization, they ended up as mere totems of their class, the class that ran America, which in turn ran the world, so that an attack on them was also, if you cared to see it that way, an attack on the great American empire, the Pax Americana, itself.... A dead body on the street, thought Malik Solanka, coming down to earth, looks a lot like a broken doll.
(F 74)
The mechanized bodies of the three female US-citizens echo the postcolonial bodies. In contrast to the latter, who assume a globally low rank in the American system of power relations, the former belong to the elite. The thorough rules do not even exempt their leaders; in fact, they are the most adapted. The attack on the three society women has, according to Dirk Wiemann to be seen as “an attack on the great American empire, the Pax Americana, itself.” (155). The similarities between the US and postcolonial citizens as well as the term “American empire”
depict Rushdie’s assumption of the continuation of colonial tactics. The global politics of the American empire regulate many spheres from the elite to subaltern bodies.
Overall, the Sri Lankan novels demonstrate the collective approach to the Sri Lankan body, and that harmed individual bodies are no exception in Sri Lankan society but exemplary for the national situation including torture, lamp-postings, and the abduction of children to serve as child soldiers (cf. Silva 19). Sri Lankan society is a violated social body. Anil’s Ghost emphasizes the readability of the human body, makes it a subject to logic and science, and consequently a site of truth (cf. A 65). Heaven’s Edge, on the other hand, is less interested in any form of abstract truth but stresses the human and natural bodies’ interdependence. Harmony and peace can, therefore,
never be attained without considering nature (cf. HE 187). In Fury, the postcolonial body finds itself the aim of subjugation techniques of the American empire (cf. F 55-56). Rushdie focuses in contrast to Ondaatje and Gunesekera less on the representation of actual physical violence but emphasizes the abstract one that integrates the body into a discourse system to control it. All three novels have something in common: They feature a postcolonial body which is still prone to subjugation. In this way, they question the post- in postcolonial studies. How long past the colonial era are we considering that bodies can still be enslaved, mutilated, and disposed of at the will of the once in power? Have only the names of the ones executing the colonial tactics changed?
Doubts about the role of the human body in the achievement of truth arise for Anil as soon as the bodies become inaccessible to analysis. The body of the fictional president Katagula, who becomes the victim of a suicide bombing, dissolves in thin air, thus exemplifying political and social helplessness and chaos (cf. A 294-295). The head of the state has only limited power over his body and is no guarantee for smooth social operations. He is dispensable and replaceable.
The same political discontinuance can be regarded in the actual Sri Lankan context as leading Sinhala politicians, or even prime ministers were among the most preferred targets of the LTTE suicide bombings (cf. Silva 311). Another example for the human body as a non-access to truth is Sailor’s skull, whose face is reconstructed by Ananda, a sculptor. Nevertheless, the provided face does not look male. It somewhat resembles Ananda’s wife, who disappeared and was most likely killed (cf. A 187). The divergence from the facts, which are Anil’s truth becomes Ananda’s private closure. The president’s and Sailor’s bodies deny access to the truth due to an absence of rationality and the overwhelming presence of emotions in the form of hate or love:
hate resulted in the disintegration of the president’s body and love in the shaping of Sirissa’s face on the top of Sailor’s skull.
As the lifeless body of Sailor and countless other human victims show, Sri Lankan culture is a culture of absence: an absence of life, of bodies, of body parts that generate different social and cultural needs than in the West which so heavily relies on the presence and tangible evidence that presumably will guarantee absolute truth. Ondaatje’s fictional deliberation of the Maipattimunai massacre of 23 young men in 1985 and the ensuing social problems of mourning are not far-fetched from reality (cf. A 42). Sasanka Perera describes similar consequences for the relatives of the victims in Suriyakande: the desperate need for closure makes the relatives resort to an unscientific approach of identification. Clothing or the seeming recognition of teeth is sufficient for them. A DNA test is never run (cf. Perera 5-10). What is unthought-of in the West, the unscientific identification of corpses is essential in the Sri Lankan context. Science, Anil’s path to social healing and forgiveness, does not grant any comfort. The narratives of the Sri Lankan lives do not need any scientific basis. It is not practicable.
The essence of Sri Lankan culture and its opposition to the West are best illustrated in an episode with Sarath and Palipana discovering a painting of a mother in a cave that they illuminate with branches on fire:
Years ago he and Palipana entered an unknown rock darknesses, lit a match and saw hints of colour. They went outside and cut branches off a rhododendron, and returned and set them on fire to illuminate the cave, smoke from the green wood acrid and filling burning light. [...] He [i.e. Sarath] remembered how they had stood before it in the flickering light, Palipana's arm following the line of the mother's back bowed in affection or grief. An unseen child. All the gestures of motherhood harnessed. A muffled scream in her posture.
The country existed in a rocking, self-burying motion. The disappearance of schoolboys, the death of lawyers by torture, the abduction of bodies from the Hokandara mass grave. Murders in the Muthurajawela marsh. (A 156-157)
The mother’s cradling of an unseen child mirrors Sri Lanka’s situation that seems to forever continue its ‘rocking, self-burying motion’ over the disappearances and deaths of its loved ones.
The intimacy between mother and child is echoed by Palipana and his affectionate behavior towards the painting itself. Private moments and intimate physical exchanges, either on an artistic or on a personal level, counteract the brutal reality, but these moments have something in common with torture and murder: the human body. Physicality is both a curse and a blessing.
Emphasizing the human body as a means of experience gains philosophical and political