Towards a post-complicit moment for those in pre-sleep slumber
The Sri Lanka Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language
Studies (SLACLALS) titled their annual conference ‘21st Century
Postcolonial: Issues and challenges in literature and languages’.
Professor Ashley Halpe, delivering the keynote address at the annual
gathering deliberated on the validity of the term ‘post-colonial’.
This took my mind to a previous such conference where a friend
observed that there was never a commonwealth, only a common thief and
that talking about it won’t get our loot back. I ran into him this year
too, and he said ‘there never was a commonwealth, there’s only a common
welt’.
British Museum
He related a story about walking into the British Museum and bumping
into someone he thought was from Africa who had asked him where he was
going. My friend had responded, ‘I am going to take back some of the
loot they robbed’. The man had said it wouldn’t work: ‘they will just
rob it back all over again!’ He had added, ‘rob something they can’t rob
back!’ My friend had responded, ‘such as?’ The man had said ‘Jesus
Christ!’
Members of print and electronic media launched a protest
campaign on August 2 opposite the Fort Railway station against
the British Channel 4 video. Picture by Sulochana Gamage |
(I am not sure if he meant the blond-haired, blue-eyed appropriate of
the bronze-coloured individual mentioned in the Bible. I do know that
the looters robbed and slaughtered using convenient misquotes from the
Bible to justify it all, in accordance with the interpretive authority
that sanitized and helped vanquish doubt and remorse; i.e. from the
killers, Buddhist and Hindu temple-destroyers, book-burners, rapists and
looters. I doubt if those who did receive Jesus were offered the real
version, although some, theoretically speaking, may have outwitted the
peddlers of ecclesiastical counterfeit).
Let me continue, post-parenthetically.
I responded with my common-thief, common-welt, commonwealth story,
about how Juliet Coombe had protested against the decision of that
museum to do away with free entry for students. She admitted that the
building held loot from other countries such as Sri Lanka, but didn’t
tell the audience (who were attending a book launch on the outside,
literally and metaphorically, of the Galle Literary Festival earlier
this year) if she had demanded that the loot be handed back. ‘White men
don’t kill,’ was the title of an article I wrote recently about the mis-naming
or non-naming of Anders Behring Breivik as the terrorist he is
(reference the recent attacks in Oslo). ‘White men don’t rob either,’ my
friend observed, in different words.
Humanitarian operation
Liyanage Amarakeerthi, speaking on what he called a post-colonial
moment in the modern Sinhala short story, suggested in passing that the
‘Centre’ of colonial is no longer clear. True, the headquarters of
mind-control, resource extraction, subjugation etc. etc. is now all over
the place and strangely peopled, eventhough, as I pointed out, it can be
called ‘Rupert Murdoch’ too.
I don’t know about literature. Don’t know about political literature
that academics talk about. Common-thief makes sense and common-welt too.
I don’t know about post-isms. All I know is that I would like some
people to wake up, post-sleep.
I am talking about people pretending to sleep and pretending to
sleepwalk. I am thinking of a man called Alan Keenan, supposedly a
senior ‘analyst’ for the ‘International Crisis Group’, who has
deliberately lied when referring to the document released by the
Ministry of Defence (MoD), Sri Lanka, on the humanitarian operation to
liberate the country from the terrorist menace.
Keenan says that the MoD claims that there was absolutely no use of
heavy artillery or aerial bombardment, when in fact the claim has been
that once all key LTTE heavy weapons were taken out of the equation and
no-fire zones demarcated, the military was instructed not to use such
weaponry and tactics. The reason was simple. It was necessary to save
the vast majority of the close to 300,000 people that the LTTE had taken
hostage. Keenan needs to sleep for until he does no one will be able to
wake him up. I would like him post-slept, so to speak.
I am thinking also of Elaine Pearson, Deputy Asia Director, Human
Rights Watch (HRW) who on June 30, 2011, wrote that the Channel 4 film
‘Killing Fields of Sri Lanka’ adds weight to what she erroneously calls
a ‘UN Report’ (i.e. the document submitted by a panel of highly
discredited, intellectually dishonest and politically compromised people
appointed by the UN Secretary General to advise him about Sri Lanka) and
‘conclusions’ therein that 40,000 civilians were killed in the final
stages of the war. The Channel 4 film and claims therein have been
effectively countered by a recently released documentary titled ‘Lies
Agreed Upon’. She needs to sleep, so she can wake up. I want her
post-slept too.
Al Qaeda
Then there’s a man called Charles Haviland, working for the BBC,
whining about a former LTTE cadre complaining that he is finding it
difficult to find a job in post-LTTE Sri Lanka, post-rehabilitation. I
hope this person does find a job soon, but doesn’t Haviland have a sense
of proportion? Would he write heart-rending pieces about a rehabilitated
Al Qaeda operative finding it hard to get a job, I wonder? Sorry, I
forgot, Al Qaeda operatives are not rehabilitated and integrated into
society, they are either summarily executed or else subjected to endless
torture. Anyway, Haviland might do well to take a nap, a real one. I
want him post-slept.
Professor Halpe, ended his presentation with a poignant reference to
Mozart’s ‘Requiem’. I didn’t quite catch the entirety of his comment,
but I distinctly heard him mention the term ‘liberation from our
complicities’. We know that those who pretend to sleep cannot be woken
up. They are essentially comfy in their complicities. Now were they fall
asleep by accident, then there is possibility of lie-rupture; a wake-up
to a post-complicit reality, if you will.
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