Abstract
Sri Lanka, 2018: 9 years after the end of the civil war, the memory of violence might be in the past, but the violence of memory is continuously refreshed. The overtly military guise evident in many aspects of life has been shed, but violence still lingers in the everyday. This violence exists in the culture as much as it does in national symbols and institutions. It lingers in conversations, the interactions between people, in casual looks exchanged in the streets. It even lingers in family environments, in carefully and subconsciously crafted self-perceptions, even and especially among those it oppresses.
The ‘violence of memory’ is the kind of violence that continuously seeks to maintain the status quo, ultimately invoking only a single thought: ‘know your place, and stick to it’. It operates largely in the invisible, and when it surfaces, it only does so in the minds of those it actively others. To everyone else, it is merely a ghost in the dark, an illusion conceived only by the mentally unhinged. People submit out of fear of ridicule, fear for their lives and livelihoods. It operates in the form of an Althusserian Ideological State Apparatus, and its subjects, that is, all Sri Lankans whether majority or minority, are continuously interpolated or ideologically indoctrinated in various sites of institutional power, including the family, workplaces and popular culture. 2
For more information, read Ismail (2014).
Sri Lanka, with thousands of years of history and heritage, is a country that has suffered enormously from conflict in its post-independence years. Most of it has been driven by the over-encompassing stake to the nation claimed to by its dominant Sinhala Buddhist majority, represented by the roaring, sword wielding lion in the country’s national flag. A national raison d’être driven by a unitary ethnic formation has, since the late 1970s, been bolstered by a complete adherence to the logic of late capitalism, exacerbated in the post-war economic boom which has seen big capital projects violently disrupt livelihoods and cultures of the poorer segments of society.
The war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s (JVP) Marxist ‘class struggle’ led to the loss of more than a hundred thousand lives. Today, in the post-war era, Islamophobia has reached dangerous levels, with many of the global stereotypes levelled against the Islamic faith surfacing in strong institutional propaganda and public discourse. Nearly a decade after the end of the civil war, transitional justice mechanisms continue to meet with strong opposition, and the country is nowhere near to healing wounds that triggered and were aggravated by its three-decade-long armed conflict.
Currently, the country slumbers in an uncomfortable and tenuous peace. The wounds that have been created by its 30-year-long civil war, and the root causes for the same, and the festering sores from its multiple other fears and insecurities are left unhealed. Post-war ethnic/religious othering has not been ideological alone. Mass racism and acts of brutal violence have been seen against Muslim and Christian minorities driven by extremist movements operating in the name of Sinhala Buddhism. Their crimes have largely gone unchecked and often, state actors have been complicit.
Meanwhile, the ultranationalist ideology that has pervaded Sri Lanka’s existence since independence constantly works in the background, looking for an opportunity to break out into the mainstream under pressure from and distracted by an urgent need to ‘develop’ and ‘progress’ at all costs.
The following series of photographs were mostly taken in December 2014. Just a few months before, post-war ethnic violence had reached a peak in the anti-Muslim violence at Aluthgama, a town located south of Colombo. The series was first published in January 2015, 3
The initial series was published in Groundviews. https://sway.com/5IFwxZAcOSPRbGeM (last accessed on 23 October 2018).
When Dharga Town in Aluthgama was attacked by extremists in June 2014, I was in Colombo gathering with friends and family. Not knowing the extent of the violence happening there, we did not know if the riots would spread. ‘Was this what the pogrom against Tamils in July 1983 felt like?’ I found myself asking.
In a remarkable instance of unsanctioned institutional racism, several educational institutions took it upon themselves to illegally police the dress of Muslim women, a testament to the power of racist discourses.
Is Buddhism violent? A mati pahana (clay lamp) symbolises the impermanence of life. A petrol bomb thrown by a violent extremist symbolises its destruction.
The Sri Lankan flag is racially constructed. The fierce lion represents the Sinhala peoples and cowering before it, slim strips of green and orange represent its two largest minorities.
‘Why is this monument to the independence of the whole nation commemorated by a flag representing only a portion of its population?’
A sign, eerily reminiscent of the pogroms of 1983, hangs in a Colombo suburb.
One of the justifications used to ‘otherise’ Muslims is that Muslims are ‘otherising’ themselves by importing Arab culture. One of the primary manifestations of this ‘Arabisation’ frequently pointed out is the changing dress code Islamic communities have increasingly adopted over the past couple of decades.
The social studies and history taught in Sri Lankan schools is woefully inadequate at best and highly damaging at worst, leaving students highly susceptible to online hate speech.
Islamophobia, bigotry and jingoism thicken Sri Lankan social media channels. The Internet was the prime breeding ground for hate speech in Sri Lanka; the very first indications of it appeared on social media platforms, mainly Facebook.
‘Hambaya’, the most popular derogatory term for Muslims, as a term has its roots in innocent, even respectable origins. It is derived from the Malay term ‘Sampan’, a name for a flat-bottomed boat frequently seen in Sri Lanka’s South and East coasts owned by Javanese people traveling for trade or migration. The word did not acquire its derogatory connotations until the 1915 riots, the first ever mass incident of tension between Sinhalas and Muslims.
SWRD Bandaranaike was the first post-independence head of state to come into power on an ethno-religious supremacist platform. His was also the first assassination in independent Ceylon. This was the result of forces he helped unleash, which he could not control
Scrawled on the walls of broken and burnt houses in Aluthgama, ‘God is with those who are patient’.
