Abstract
This book stems from ‘a long and often a painful journey’ through ‘unmarked and unknown intersections’ and collisions between the ‘personal and the intellectual’, productive, in turn, of intensities ‘one’s own training [in sociology] has not necessarily prepared one for’ (p. xiii). The ‘journey’ premised on ‘precarious moments of fieldwork’ (p. xiii)—on the one hand, the cusp of terror and trauma, war and death, loss and disappearance, mourning and melancholia, and on the other, the sociological and the historical, the national and the communitarian, the public and the private, the psychological and the visual—has taken the author nearly 15 years to complete (2000–14). This in-depth work on violence and a ‘social framework of memory’ (p. 12) which presents itself like an unfinished journey and which does not reach a conclusive end (see chapter V) is menaced by questions like: What is it to research the uncanny ‘burden of memory’? Not just memory, but the ‘burden’, that is, the unbearable weight of the past on the living; a past that weighs, as Marx suggests, ‘like a nightmare on the minds of the living’ (p. 16). The burden of ungrieved loss, of absent bodies, of disappearance, but also the loss of the ‘receipt of recollection’ (p. 6) in rendering memory abstract or artifactual (as in the process of the construction of state-funded war memorials and also in art forms and practices), including the real erasure of the memorials of the ‘vanquished’ Tamil by the Sinhalese ‘victor’. What does it mean to research ‘sociologically’? What is cocooned or crypted in the psyche? History has turned to researching memory and ‘nostalgia’ (researching the holocaust and partition in India being two nodal moments in such a turn) and gendered forms of orality (as against the written archive), the latter being the methodological companion of the turn to memory in history where ‘personal memories and their articulations as testimonies constitute a substantial subaltern critique of conventional historiography’ (p. 150). What does it mean to do the same in sociology, when the ‘researcher becomes part of intensely personal discourses’? (p. xiii). What does such a research do to the standard tenets of sociology? Does the researcher need to shed the ‘axiomatic neutrality’ and ‘clinical limits’ of ‘sociological objectivity’, and move through the uncertain interstices of ‘subjectivity, interpretation, over-interpretation, reinterpretation’ (p. 4) in order to understand what Freud would call the Mystic Writing Pad of memory? What methodological departures are needed to research the complex maze of national, collective, individual and solitudinal burdens of memory? A memory that is stuck like an invisible thorn in the flesh of a society wrecked by nearly three decades of civil war resulting in the death, loss or disappearance of ‘both’ Sinhalese armed personnel and Tamil activists and civilians? What does it mean to research the memory trail and trace of both the ‘perpetrator’ and the ‘victim’, the ‘victor’ and the ‘vanquished’ in a kind of deconstructive embrace, in the dangerous coupling of enmity and intimacy, hyper-separation and identification, antagonism and dependence? The book takes the ‘risk’ of engaging with the question of remembrance and erasure in both the Sinhalese and the Tamil segment of society. It tracks the memory of soldiers who have lost their lives in combat in addition to engaging with the memory of ‘disappeared’ Tamil activists. It is a risk because the trailing and tracing of memory is suffused with the play of power. Which loss and whose loss? Which memory and whose memory is the foreground and what is the background is an important political question. The not-so-secret gradient in memorialising memory, in metamorphosing memory to the victor’s version of official history through statist, nationalist and the hegemonic culture’s (here Sinhalese Buddhism’s) sanctioned method of the ‘closure of grief’, as also the gradient between the ‘space’ offered to the victor’s (the Sinhalese discourse of ranavira or the army’s heroism) burden of memory and the vanquished’s largely familial and private processes of remembrance (the Tamil discourse of void) haunts the book; all the more because the author has taken the not-too-politically-correct path of ‘working through’ the process of ‘remembering’ and ‘repeating’ in the victor’s unconscious as well. The journey takes the author to, on the one hand, the ‘domains of private memory’ (p. 149; chapter IV) and on the other, visual art practices surrounding the twofold nature of public monuments, memorials and installations (chapter V). On one side of the spectrum is the Shrine of the Innocents, ‘essentially sponsored and coordinated by the government’, ‘located within one kilometer of the parliament’, ‘costing six million Sri Lankan rupees’ (pp. 109–12), and constructed through state agencies such as the Engineering Corporation and Urban Development Authority. On the other side is the Monument for the Disappeared in Seeduwa, designed and executed by the Sri Lankan artist Chandraguptha Thenuwara at the invitation of Kalape Api, a civil society organisation, ‘located at the busy Raddoluwa intersection of the main Colombo–Katunayaake Road’ (p. 127) and funded largely by the Asian Human Rights Commission. The author thus foregrounds the ‘difference’ between state and civil society initiatives, as also the army and peoples’ efforts at remembering, including the difference between the victor and vanquished’s somewhat hierarchised relationship with memory. The author also foregrounds the ‘distance’ between public, particularly state narratives where the dead, or the lost or the disappeared remain largely unnamed, and individual/personalised narratives of loss and suffering, acts of mourning and melancholic exegeses, which are not only not nameless but also inalienably stapled to embodied remembrance. In the process, the book also manages to foreground perhaps the fundamental and final futility of violence. This book—which is also a book on social guilt—can be the methodological ground for similar studies of the ‘shared’ burden of memory in situations of conflict. The book offers future researchers conceptual signposts for bringing the fossilised past, the ‘fading photographs’ (p. 3) of the lost or dead, the vanishing present, the future ‘reconciliation’ to come (pp. 15, 263–65) and the work of the unconscious at both the victor and the vanquished’s affective registers to a difficult yet interminable dialogue.