Abstract
This is the only account I know of which offers a glimpse into everyday life behind ‘enemy lines’ during a volatile period in the history of the Batticaloa district in eastern Sri Lanka. Margaret Trawick spent seven months, from late 1997 to mid 1998, as well as briefer stints in 1996 and 2002, living under the jurisdiction of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a Tamil militant group warring with the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) to wrest a separate state or Tamil Eelam. Her frequent forays into GoSL-controlled territory, just across the lagoon, to shop, visit the hospital and meet with other interviewees, heightened her awareness of the marked difference between what was commonly referred to as ‘cleared’ (GoSL-controlled) and ‘uncleared’ (LTTE-controlled) areas. Differences, she notes, ‘…in appearance, way of life, and shared and sharable knowledge between the two sides was striking’ (p. 2). Less distinctive divides between childhood and adulthood, warfare and play, are what Trawick seeks to comprehend. These are crucial areas of inquiry and I salute her determination to explore them under insecure and trying circumstances. However, I was disappointed with Trawick’s atheoretical and ahistorical stance, her political naiveté and lack of preparation prior to fieldwork, her cavalier attitude towards contextualisation and depth, and her disregard of the extensive scholarship on the conflict in Sri Lanka and Tamil society and culture in particular.
Enemy Lines is not an ethnography, but rather a weaving together of diary fragments, fieldwork notations, witness accounts and snippets of newspaper articles and interviews. Much of this, notes Trawick, are ‘…feelings and words…not professional views, and the opinions of that person in the field are not necessarily shared by the person now finishing this book’ (p. 4). Be that as it may, Trawick’s book rarely makes an effort to rectify misconceptions and discrepancies mentioned in her field notes. At other times, her own diary notations and observations contradict statements made in her book.
Such inconsistencies are particularly troubling with regard to childhood and child soldiers. When Trawick began her fieldwork, she ‘…had no special theory in mind except that children exercise their agency’ (p. 5). Such facile thinking is also reflected in her sweeping, introductory generalisation that ‘…[a]n important decision facing each child on entering his or her teens is whether to join the LTTE’ (p. 2). This is a disingenuous declaration given the circumscribed circumstances within which Tamil children in eastern Sri Lanka must make ‘choices’. Trawick’s own field notes illuminate how children are not only constantly bombarded with war videos and other propaganda by the LTTE, and mesmerised by tales of bravado shared by older siblings and friends already in the movement, but also often compelled to join in order to comply with LTTE demands that each family must contribute a family member or worse still, are abducted and forcibly conscripted. The latter practice has been exhaustively documented by UNICEF as well as international/national human rights organisations that Trawick chooses to ignore. 1 Parents were resorting to marrying off adolescent daughters, sending sons to live with distant relatives, devising ingenious hiding places and even informing on other families in order to avoid LTTE conscription. In such a context, Trawick’s shockingly unprofessional behaviour of reading out her field notes to a senior LTTE cadre and disclosing that her host family has three sons ‘as the household seems to hold its breath’, is chilling (p. 61).
Given such early indiscretions and incomprehension, it is not surprising that civilians as well as the LTTE distrusted Trawick—she was once accused of being a spy (p. 200). The cruel ways they ‘play’ with her by informing her that people she recently met had died or been injured is a clear indication of this mistrust rather than a quirky cultural characteristic, as Trawick would like to believe. It is a form of behaviour that I have never encountered during 15 years of fieldwork in this region and which many friends in Batticaloa not only found unfamiliar but disturbing.
Trawick makes no bones about the fact that she sympathises with the aims of the LTTE and cares for its rank and file. She succeeds in portraying them as romantic, caring, playful, fallible human beings, often even child-like. While Trawick does debate with one or two LTTE cadre, she also eschews opportunities to probe contradictions and deepen narratives. Though she finds the feisty LTTE-er, Sita, who disparaged marriage and motherhood in 1996, happily married with a baby in 1997, no effort is made to engage her opting out of militancy or her current domesticity. LTTE culpability in the massacre of over 100 Muslims at two mosques in Kattankudy is circumvented through the prevarications of one LTTE cadre (pp. 205–06). Horrendous massacres by GoSL soldiers and subsequent cover ups, in 1987 and 1991, are merely gestured to via schematic narratives despite detailed, nuanced documentation being available. 2
Trawick offers fascinating descriptions of various events choreographed by the LTTE—sports contests and parades, dramas ridiculing GoSL soldiers and politicians, and bharathanatyam performances in combat outfits using innovative mudras (hand gestures) for Tiger and the firing of rifles (pp. 258–89). Similarly, first-year birthday parties, picnics, ferry and bike rides are sensitively recounted. This is where Trawick is at her best given her keen eye for detail. Yet, I am baffled by her constant reference to such events, in the midst of uncertainty, fear and death, as surreal. Such labelling may be appropriate to describe Trawick’s own experiences under LTTE rule but it should not be imposed on those for whom it is their everyday reality. Indeed, the imbrication of the ordinary with the extraordinary, hope with despair, joy with sorrow, is very much part of life in a war zone. To assume otherwise is to not comprehend the fundamental contouring of lives endured under duress.
MALATHI DE ALWIS
Socio-cultural Anthropologist
Sri Lanka