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Remembering the Unfallen

by E. Valentine Daniel, Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy, Columbia University

(Fourth Neelan Tiruchelvam memorial Lecture delivered at the SLFI, Colombo on July 29, under the auspices of the ICES, Colombo).

July 29th, 1983. We are here to remember that grim Friday and the twenty-years that have unravelled from it. For many Sri Lankans, that was the day when our world went spinning from God's hand; either in its pre-ordained arc or completely out of control. For some of us, that day of abandonment would return in another form on another day and year,in the loss of a friend, a father, a brother, a sister, a mother, a son or of a husband to the violence unleashed by July 29th. I lost a friend, not on July 29th but because of July 29th, and of whom there is so much to say, but for which I don't have the heart today.

Prof. Valentine Daniel

I speak of the death of Neelan. For those among us who had the good fortune to come near this gracious man, our loss is such that we are unable to find public words for what happened to him and to us on that day. In more ways than one, he left us speechless. His absence will remain for me, I am certain, forever unthinkable; his face, unforgettable.

For these and other reasons, which I am sure you can well understand, I can speak of the last twenty years in words that an only betray the indecency of language, its gross inadequacy and its failed eloquence in the face of the sensory intensity of the events of history. Even if our words betray this insufficiency of language, we cannot accept this lack as a sufficient response to the fallen.

We must keep trying to grasp what happened. I must confess that at best I can only roughly grasp the subject of these past twenty years. By roughly, I mean both untenderly and approximately; and for that I ask your pardon.

Neelan Tiruchelvam

Grateful as I am for the honour, the privilege and the trust you have bestowed on me, I cannot but wish that the circumstances were different: that this day, twenty years ago, had marked the beginning of inter-ethnic civility rather than an ignominious civil war, that the first President of our republic had been wiser than he was wily; that the second president had not ushered in a period of murder so abominable that the tongue could not utter what the eye allowed into consciousness; that some of our rivers of exquisite beauty had not, even if only for a shudderingly brief time, become clogged with bodies and foam with blood - "Sinhala blood"; that both these Presidents had not exploited legend, in the pursuit of power; that a third had not been so overtaken with face-saving so that the face-to-face had to be endlessly deferred; that our Tamil politicians' only instruments had not been the harp and fiddle on which they played mostly one tune and its thematic variations. It was called the language-issue.

Neelan tiruchelvam, who had a much broader vision, was conspicuous exception in this regard. Of course, in art these instruments do function to instruct and delight. But when I say of some politicians that they fiddle and harp, I mean that they pulled strings to get on, to better themselves. This applies, not only to some politicians, but it also applies to newspaper editors, intellectuals, as well as academics on both sides of the ethnic divide. Here again Neelan was an exception.

I wish: that our civic leaders could walk the streets with only a handful of unarmed acolytes without fear of being ambushed or assassinated; that over these twenty years the whimsical largess of politicians distributed to private armies of thugs had not become one of the innumerable perquisites of power that their children had not come to assume that power, aimless power, was their patrimony, and violence, gratuitous violence, their birthright; that our people had not turned its ear to the hasty 'prejudicate opinion' of capricious politicians whose judgements have been - to borrow a phrase from Dryden - "a mere lottery", that there had been fewer leaders like the late Cyril Matthew who cheated our citizens into passion and many more like Neelan Tiruchelvam who tried to reason them into truth; that 65,000 plus lives had not been lost in and out battle; that Sinhala soldiers had not dishonoured their own mothers and sisters by raping Tamil women, and worse, then subduing their bodies under rubble, sand and water, in unmarked graves; that so many young Tamil women had not been duped into enslavement and prostitution en route to places of asylum; that Tamil had not become alliteratively yoked to terrorism in the minds of so many here and abroad.

Nerverthless, even though the past is forever at the elbow of the present, being in the present obliges one to look to the future as well. I see a few rays of hope at the end of the tunnel. In fact I have noticed that many a bigot of twenty years ago has washed his mind off the grubby prejudices that had stunted this nation's material and spiritual growth over these two decades and longer.

This is heartening. I hope - and I am sure that you will join me in hoping - that in the year, 2023, a new generation will be celebrating twenty years of peace rather than reminiscing two score years of strife. I gather that the LTTE has finally seen, among other things, its folly in having evacuated the Muslims from the North. That is a good start. The LTTE and the Sri Lankan government have begun talking to each other. This is a another good start. I see the day when our public's opinion will no longer be constituted by the prejudiced voice and a prejudging ear of politician, priest, private citizen or press.

I see some monks in saffron robes opting for the Dhamma of the Buddha and not the Dhamma of war. This is encouraging. I have taken note of the fact that Tamils and Sinhala exiles in Europe, North America and Australia have found common ground in so many aspects of their lives that has undermined their differences. That some times this common ground lies in the realisation of the fact that Europeans cannot tell the difference between Aryan and Dravidian, Tamils and Sinhalese, and to some of whom, all the denizens who hail from this isle of splendour are but "niggers". This is sad, on the one hand, but sobering on the other. Many Tamil young men and women - and Sinhalese too - have opted to combat such racism in the manner they know best, by excelling in whatever they undertake.

This is exhilarating. It is small comfort, but comfort no less, to see that in Sri Lanka, unlike in many other parts of the world, civility is challenged but far from dead. I long for that day when, in the North and the East, no young man or woman will have to ever look upon a landscape ignited by bombs and artillery but cast their eyes on a horizon where sky and harvest meet; and in the south, gaze, as I did as a child in Kandy, upon rivers and lakes flecked with powdery sunlight, and upon ripples enkindled by the noses of fish gently surfacing to feed at dawn.

As you will notice, even though I have tried to recover myself from looking at the grim past of the last twenty years and espy a hope-filled future, I have found myself, once again, reorienting my gaze toward the past. To the critical among you, and to my own critical self, my reminiscence of a past that I want reproduced in the future is as much nostalgia as it is memory. Nostalgia is an attraction to a real or an imagined past.

Memory, by contrast, need not hold any such attraction to the past. What possible attraction could the holocaust hold for a survivor of Auschwitz; or for a Tamil shipowner on Sea Street who saw his belongings go up inflames in 1983; or for a so-called untouchable in Jaffna, who could not enter the Nallur temple in years gone by; or for a Sinhala mother from Kelaniya whose son was murdered during President Premadasa's rule by personnel of the armed forces? there can be no nostalgia where there is no attraction.

Neither is tradition coterminous with memory. Those who follow a tradition, for instance, are confident in its own validity and are not likely to appeal to memory to defend that tradition. Instead, the appeal is to custom, established institutions, literary works, cultural artifacts, collective consciousness, and so on. In the normal course of human events, one does not turn inward to defend tradition. Tradition is "out there", so to speak, greater than any one individual, greater even than the sum total of all individuals in a society.

It is assumed that the defence of tradition, and even that of nostalgia, lies outside the self, in phenomena that are believed to be objective. For the purposes at hand, if we limit memory to all that is "remembered" minus nostalgia and tradition, then we have in memory, something very fragile, vulnerable, insecure, and forever on trial. The anthropologist Johannes Fabian went so far as to claim that, strictly speaking, we do not remember the past; rather, we remember the present. That is, we remember that which from the past continued to live within our situation in the world. Memory is not memory if it is dead; it may be tradition or nostalgia or even history, but it is no longer memory. Whatever the expression "living memory" might mean, it cannot be the opposite of "dead memory". If that were the contrast, then dead memory would be an oxymoron that would make living memory, a mere redundancy. Memory can be nothing else but alive.

In so far as memory belongs to the here and the now, it is one with the present. But what is the present? Of the three, the past, the present and the future, it is the present that has vexed the philosopher the most. And memory, not unlike the present, is evanescent and inscrutable. Memory is not a fait accomplish that belongs to the past, nor is it a possibility that points to the future.

The past and the future are characterised by their continuity in time. There is never a doubt that the past and the future are part of time. Not so with the present. The present is discontinuity actualised, and if you looked closely, you will find that it is not a part of time but is apart from time. You can infer the past.

You can infer the future. But you cannot inner the present. Inference is a logical operation in time. History is a narrative, and hence, a logical operation, a logical argument that unfolds inferentially. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that it is easier to justify the claim that history, by virtue of being a narrative of the past, belongs to the past, than it is to establish that memory concerns the past. If we can remember only the present qua present, then there is nothing to infer about the present qua present.

It simply is. Memory, living memory, is not something that was there and then; rather it is something here and now. History is made real, or realised, by the consensus of a group or community about the claims put forth by that history. In other words, history is independent of what you or I or any particular individual thinks about it, even though it is not independent of thought in general. History does not rest on a single person's experience or fancy. Its claims are some times supported by facts and sometimes unsupported by them.

Never mind! history is primarily a discourse that is based on truth claims arrived at by consensus. Memory, by contrast, is based on experiences that are unique; it emerges in individuals, and is not beholden to the community's opinion regarding its truth-value. To the extent that memory is unrealised by the group, it is not real; it is actual.

Nothing more brings this fact home more vividly than the memory of trauma and pain. The memory of trauma is itself traumatic; the memory of pain itself is painful. In pain there is neither before nor after; all you have is nothing but the infinity of now. In fact, it would be impossible to distinguish memory from pain and vise versa. They are mutually immanent. Perhaps we should call it "memoro-pain", or latinate it entirely and call it, "memoriumdoloro".

It is not surprising to find so many of us seeking relief from painful memories. To some, relief comes in the form of psycho-somatic or somato-psychic disorders.

Psychoanalysts call this displacement. Others find relief in work, mere work. Some find relief in the creative arts and sciences. This kind of displacement is called sublimation in psychoanalysis. There are myriad of ways in which memory can be suppressed or repressed. It can also be rendered into narrative, and thereby, made available for consensus and for the realisation by the community. What is said by the subject trying to express his or her Memorium doloro, however, can never satisfy the subject. The subject bearing the memorium doloro will in variably find it far too sublime to be sublimated into mere narrative. The urgency and magnitude of the telling will be deflated by the told.

Memory can also be banished into nostalgia, tradition or even oblivion. This is too is most often done by langauge. Of all the forces of language that do banish memory into nostalgia, tradition or oblivion, the cliche is the most powerful one. This, however, I shall argue, is also the most pernicious way of overcoming memoriam doloro.

Words, phrases as well as entire narratives are vulnerable to becoming cliches. Among words, "terror" and "terrorism" are worlds that have, by their over-generalisation and overuse, become cliches. But what exactly is a cliche? What does it do? Have you ever tried to define a cliche? The OED defines it as a stereotypic expression or a hackneyed word or phrase; Webster defines it as an expression or an idea that has become trite.

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