Nonfiction rarely makes me teary-eyed. Something about the brittleness of all that truth and information, I suppose, which prevents the empathy that fiction, with all its imaginative manipulations, so easily coaxes out of me. But reading Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island: Stories From the Sri Lankan War, I felt pulled into strange, powerful, (and yes, teary) new territory.
How does one begin to write about a country in the aftermath of 25 years of civil war? How does a country transform itself, and how do people go about trying to lead ordinary lives out of so much extraordinary violence? These are some of Subramanian’s concerns, and his device is simple and unsettling intimate: by telling stories.
Here is T. Sanathanan: a Jaffna artist obsessed with the physical detritus of war. He asks people to bring him objects that remind them of the past 25 years, and to tell the stories behind these things. He then places these objects under bell jars on red cushions and puts them on the shelves of the Jaffna library so that the memories of war can take the place of books. And here’s Razeena, who says, “We could run easily. We had lost everything, hadn’t we? So we had no weight to carry.” Still another: Ismail, who lost four members of his family in the LTTE-led Husseiniya mosque shooting in 1990, who asks Subramanian: “What good will this conversation do for me?”
Speaking to this occupational hazard of having to prise stories from people; the journalist’s constant teetering on the edge of voyeurism, Subramanian tells me, “You have to maintain a belief, that by doing your job fairly and sincerely, you’re enlarging perspectives and perhaps, even, in the case of more literary journalism, enriching souls the way art can do. But these are highfaluting ideas, and in their abstract form difficult to grapple with….Day to day I draw satisfaction from unearthing individual facts, discovering original detail, talking to people who have something fresh to say. This is what sustains me – that, in this piecemeal way, I can add to the world’s knowledge of itself.”
So much about the Sri Lankan war is shrouded in rumour. And with the current regime vigorously rewriting Sri Lankan history, there is so much that will never be known to us in exactness. How many Tamil civilians were trapped in the Vanni at the end of the war? Seventy thousand, as the Sri Lankan government claims? Or 3,50,000, as per the UN report? Add to these uncertainties the stories of disappeared journalists, right-wing Buddhist monks, detention camps, an army base constructed over the skeletons of fallen Tigers.
Subramanian takes us through Sri Lanka’s diverse regions, whittling away at the layers of the stories he gathers, not to arrive at a singular truth, but to show us the impossibility of that notion. And when he writes of the “parade of slaughter,” of “dusk haemorrhaging out of the sky” and “palymras standing tall as pushpins,” of “slender Kolpetty streets that lie perfectly parallel to each other, like the teeth of a comb,” and “the vast Rajapaksa clan moving into the Sri Lankan state as if it were an ancestral house,” he is honouring not just the stories that have been shared with him, but allowing us to read our own history of a ravaged nation told through this palimpsest of stories.
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