The JVP after Wijeweera

‘Lost Revolution’ was the title of Rohan Gunaratne’s part-fiction, part-fact account of the second JVP insurrection, i.e. the one which ended with over 60,000 people being killed between 1987 and 1989.  Puritanical Marxists, ex-JVPers included, would balk at the use of the word ‘revolution’ to describe that particular adventure.

The JVP was always colorful in event and pageantry

The strange arrangement of words, ‘lost’ with ‘revolution’, hints at ‘possibility’ and squandering of the same.  In other words, that there was something that was ‘winnable’ here.  It is easy, in retrospect, to say ‘it was doomed’.  It’s been a long time and long-time gives perspective.  The debacle was remembered this year (on November 13) by two groups, separately.  It made me think of ‘old’ and ‘new’, of both the general ‘Left’ and the JVP. 

The JVP had a selling point when the party was launched in the early sixties.  ‘New’ was the tag, which simultaneously pinned ‘Old’ on the Communist Party (both the ‘Moscow’ and ‘Peking’ wings), the LSSP and other groups that had splintered over the course of several decades.    The ‘old’ or rather the strength-wise significant sections of it had moreover sold out by entering coalitions with the SLFP. The JVP would be different.  It was.

It was, in 1971.  Different in approach to politics.  Different in dreams dreamt.  Different in assessment of victory potential.  They went for guns.  Got gunned down.  Back then there was nothing to suggest that the much talked of ‘objective preconditions’ had matured to a point that warranted an armed strike against the state, except of course that the state was ill-prepared to handle armed insurrection, a weakness that was quickly sorted out.  Years later, as Gamini Samaranayake points out, the LTTE picked on the state’s seeming incapacity and prospered, not because the state was incapable but successive governments weren’t sure of the state’s ability to wipe out such a movement. 

By 1988, the JVP was still young, although its leader was pushing 50.  In 2012, the JVP and its leadership is ‘old’, not just in age but in terms of the perennial youth-queries ‘relevance’, ‘knowing’ and ‘method’. 

The JVP had its moments.  It was a self-styled punchi  aanduwa (small government) that did a lot of big things including holding the maha anduwa by the proverbial short hairs on occasion, not to mention assassinating some big names.  Following the elimination of the entire leadership (apart from Somawansa Amarasinghe) in a matter of a few days, the JVP went out of circulation.  For a while.  It re-emerged following the assassination of President Premadasa, using avenues created by the Lakmina newspaper where Wimal Weerawansa, using the penname ‘Wimalasiri Gamlath’, first made his mark as a phrase-turner, and of course the spaces for politics reclaimed by the ‘Jathika Chintanaya’ group.  In 1994, the JVP used the vehicle of that good hearted by naïve politician, the late Ariya Bulegoda, to return one member to Parliament.  Until then no one had heard of ‘Galappaththi’. 

By the year 2000, the JVP had 10 MPs and the following year 17.  In that one year, the JVP succeeded in dictating terms to President Chandrika Kumaratunga, making for a new addition to the political lexicon, ‘Parivaasa’ or ‘probation’.  It was short-lived, naturally, but in that brief period the JVP authored and got through the only Amendment passed in Parliament since the UNP lost its two-thirds majority in 1989.  The 17^th Amendment was flawed, but it is the only concrete measure that sought to restore balance to a constitution heavily favoring the executive.

The JVP also got some important decisions from the Supreme Court, most notably a determination that the North and East should not remain merged.  The JVP played a key role in bringing down the UNP Government of Ranil Wickremesinghe by persuading the then President to dissolve Parliament and contest as a coalition.  The result was a massive surge for the party, with 40 being elected mostly from SLFP votes.   

The JVP, by that time, perhaps emboldened and cocky, and thick in parliamentary/coalition politics, no longer deserved the ‘radical’ tag.  Indeed it had all but buried all Left pretensions.   It made a massive error by supporting Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2005.  It was a gross underestimate of the man’s potential.  Within a couple of years, the new President had ensured that the JVP needed him more than he needed the JVP.  The second error was when the JVP decided to go it alone in the local government election, rejecting the President’s offer of control in 25 bodies.  They even lost the one they had, Tissamaharama.  It was downhill thereafter.

The JVP lost its most vocal spokesperson, Wimal Weerawansa, whose oratorical skills more than anything else was responsible for the resurgence of the JVP after the 1988-89 debacle.  In 2010, the JVP was forced (like the UNP) to back Sarath Fonseka to save electoral blushes.  They clutched on to him long enough to win a few seats at the April 2010 General Election. 

Then the final blow: a new split, and one on old-new/conservative-radical lines.  With it, the JVP lost its main agitation front, the Inter University Student Federation, whose hot-bloodedness found the Frontline Socialist Party more attractive. 

And so, on November 13, 2012, the (mis)adventure of 1988-89 was commemorated by two groups, the JVP and FSP.  Both seem to be fighting for ‘rump’ status, which alone speaks of the party’s decline in recent time.  The latter, though, is amply equipped to fancy another 1971 or 1988-89.  Tilvin’s group has had it.  If elections were held today and the JVP went alone, they will go back not to 2010, not to 2001 or 2000, not even to 1994 but to that seat-less period before. 

As for ideology, there’s no need to worry.  The JVP was never hot on ideology, not even during Wijeweera’s time.  They were good with slogans.  Good at coalition politics (just like the LSSP and CP).  Good at helping unpopular regimes regain control by inviting suppression.  Good, therefore, to help snuff out tens of thousands of lives.  Only, this time, it won’t be the likes of Tilvin, Vijitha, Anura and others who will do it, but the ideology-bereft, cloak-dagger-loving firebrands plotting ‘revolution’ with ex-LTTE cadres and politically displaced individuals such as Kumar Gunaratnam. 

‘Revolution’, then, was a faded banner that there was no one to grab and made it possible for an adventurer like Wijeweera to obtain youth appeal.  There was no ‘revolution’ that was ‘lost’; only young men and women who were unfortunate to have been born in the sixties and early seventies. 

It is not a history that we can afford repeated.  If 1988-89 is to be remembered only the learning of this lesson matters. 

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Fred D’Aguaiar undresses death and rebirth

‘Continental Shelf’ by Fred D’Aguiar, published by Carcanet Press Limited, 2009, reviewed by Malinda Seneviratne

Death disturbs and therefore when we have to confront it we want to get over it as soon as we can. And move on/away.  But death arrives.  It arrives in the news.  It visits us from war and massacre, genocide and capital punishment, from here and there, as names and numbers and as of late graphic visuals.  The more horrific the pictures and larger the numbers, the more difficult it is to turn away. Partly because of the fascination, partly the fear; for there’s love and hate about death. 

When we’ve seen enough death in horror and quantity, we become happily numb.  Until the next massacre, provided there is a long time between horrors.  The Virginia Tech massacre was not the first campus shooting.  Still, it shocked, for ‘record’ reasons.  It was the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in US history, some said.  Seung-Hui Cho, said to have been suffering from a severe anxiety disorder, a final year English major, shot and killed 33 people and wounded 15 others. 

It happened on April 16, 2007.  I don’t remember the date.  I remembered the place.  And duly forgot it as other tragedies, other words and images obliterated horror-memory.  I remembered, though, when I was invited for a symposium on ‘Writing and Reconciliation,’ early this month, organized by that university and in particular by The Creative Writing Program in the Department of English, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program in Sociology, and the Center for 21^st Century S’tudies in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.  It played on my mind for a while and went away.  The good people and the stimulating program are to blame. 

It came back on the last morning of the event.  And I realized that death and tragedy are ‘ ‘backburnered’ by event but stays with the witnesses, the near and dear, and those who are averse to ‘backburnering’.   It was something that had happened five years before.  Fred D’Aguiar knew the date.  It was also something that stayed. 

Fred read from his acclaimed poetry collection ‘Continental Shelf’.  He spoke by way of introduction of that day, the student who would never sit in his class again and how when he called his mother she said she’ll come over and cook Caribbean food for his students.  He read from here and there, but the poetry related to that day made the book for me. 

‘Continental Shelf’ is in three parts.  In its entirety the collection traces Fred’s journey from place to place and his growing up in that larger moving.  Fred traces social, geographical, political and ideological maps (with all the fault lines, disasters and sporadic reasons for cheer therein) by talking about people, describing event, unraveling and laying out all the contradictions and complexities of his mind-engagement. 

Fred begins with a question in the first part, ‘Local Color’.  He speaks of ‘bringing back’, laying out the past-idyllic and asking that it all be re-enacted, ‘as would sprinters to a start line after a false start where one bolts and the rest follow’.  Someone fouled.  Others followed suit.  We need to return to that all-things-even place, he suggests even though that happy location would have had its own contradictions, own disparities. 

He describes that childhood world in detail.  It is in a way an exercise of  ‘I/we did this’ or ‘I/we did that’, but what takes us there and makes us belong to that world is the delicate weaving of human commonality or rather childhood commonality into narrative. 

‘Playing House’, for example, is not about Fred and some Guyanese context; it is everyone’s memory of a time that has been gently taken to ‘starting line’.  ‘Bullroarer’ is an ancient ritual of sharing among friends.  Or siblings.  It is as Sri Lankan as it is Caribbean. 

Fred returns to the Guyana of his childhood or rather draws from it in the third (and final) section, ‘Continental Shelf’ and the poem of that title, calling not for a return to starting line but for a wake-up: ‘This country needs to wake up faster, for my body could use another couple hours rest’.  That ‘country’ is both Guyana and the USA, it is every country that is made for idyllic rendering and ready for lament.  It is each and their connectivity, for Fred is acutely conscious of the political economy of trade, the commerce of resource and surplus extraction:

Give me back my slippers, my robe
And my favourite cup  purchased at Whatley
Diner from another life and laced with two
Per cent milk and beans from Central
America.

The world has whirred around him and his eyes need rest.  He returns again and again to his Guyana on a ‘same-moon’ ship which seeks him out wherever he goes, especially Blacksburg, Virginia where he lives and teachers, and is witness to things that disturb but cannot rob him of hope. 

Fred’s poetry is musical, as poetry ought to be (I think) and not because he can easily pick the words and sounds that make for the kind of rhythm he wishes his lines to dance with.  It is not strained or artificial.  The rhythm comes from both word choice and thought strand, the poetry of life that he lays out in word configuration and line-break.

There’s a narrator here who made me think ‘he would write great short stories or novels if he puts his mind to it’.  No, there’s nothing ‘grand’ about his narration.  He reports stories that we’ve heard, events we’ve seen many times, people we have met and things that have caught our eye.  It’s only the outer cover that is different. 

And ideas too.  They are not ‘Guyanese’, they are not foreign. 

Never a book opened for anything

But reprimand and nothing but rules
In any book worth opening or so it seemed
Waist-high with things that gripped me
As a wave grips the sea and sea grips sand
As a current runs through the sky’s open hand. 

That’s how ‘The Never-Never’ ends.  We are all rule driven and rule made.  We are all doubters and rebels.  We are complicit in the processes that trick, suppress and overwhelm us.   We read books, but not as authors want us to read them.  We know rules and what they do, and when necessary we ignore them, go around them or even break them. 

There are moments when his words take out to a never-never world of dreams which come and go, which allow for visitation but not permanent residency.

I hand my life over to you

Embrace this gift for what it is
A raft of night afloat in days.  [Succession]
 
‘Elegies’ is sandwiched between ‘Local Color’ and ‘Continental Shelf’.  That’s his word-memorial to those students who died.  It is a twenty one part turning-inside-out of all that came to him and all that went out on that day and thereafter. 

Erin will not come back. 

I see her desk three desks back in that first row where she dived

For Cover, like the rest of the class she always sat in one spot.

She won’t come back, for she has never left:

‘But Erin’s desk will be empty? I see her loping way

Of crossing a room.  An athlete, she moves off the basketball
Court with so much economy for her strong body, as if space
In which she did not compete, hardly merited movement,
Like a coiled sprint, off duty, or a loved government.’

The absurdity of it all is apparent to all and said often enough, but Fred says it nevertheless because it must be said again and again:

‘Not twenty but thirty-two innocents killed, just think,

Thirty-two mown down in classrooms by weapons
You can buy legally before you can legally drink.’ 
 
Life returns, as it will.  Fred speaks of the return to routine, the back-to-groove of ‘Blacksburg back on its feet, Blacksburg undefeated’.   Not to him, and perhaps not to anyone of that moment, that incident:

‘How stunned April 16^th left me

So that now is exactly like then till kingdom come’
 
April 16^th is a day I remember.  Not 2007, but 2000.  Massive protests against the IMF and the World Bank in Washington DC.  Not anymore though, not after reading Fred’s narrative of all that took refuge in the underside of the mind’s many leaves of coping. 

They say aggregates (human ones, say) are greater than the sum of their constituent parts.  Perhaps it is the reverse that’s true.  The sum is less than the aggregate of parts because human beings are false-start bullies and followers of such cheats.  Some poets, sometimes, make things more even.  Fred D’Aguiar.   Just by saying the as-is and more importantly the un-ease that gets buried for convenient and eye-relief.  He is an outlier, if you will. And that’s what his life is all about, I felt, as he laughed, clapped, cheered, was silent and recited.   And shared. 

I won’t forget April 16 or Virgina Tech or Erin.  Each death will come running, from now on.  I could curse Fred D’Aguiar, but I think I will say ‘thank you’.   

 

[First published in the FINE Section of 'The Nation', November 18, 2012]

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Tilak Samarawickreme's 'Voyage in Sri Lanka Design'

BOOK REVIEW

Tilak Samarawickreme can talk about art.  He can talk about design.  He can talk about handicraft or with a broader brush fill the mind’s canvass with opinion on culture, heritage, history and politics, both of the mundane diurnal and of the more abiding ideological.  He can also talk of exploration, the search for and encounter with all manner of things, with different shapes, lines, colors and meaning. 

‘A Voyage in Sri Lanka Design,’ an elegant volume put out by Vijitha Yapa Publications is a life story.  It is an account of exploration along many pathways with astute acknowledgment of intersection and commonality, and sensitivity to connectivity across time and space of multiple spheres.  The text and illustrations are neatly organized in a by-subject manner, but within these chapters the signature of a man with multiple interests and one who has resolved to keep mind open to both the fresh and abiding is apparent. 

Tradition and the traditional are things he has clearly encountered and occupied himself with, in both gaze as well as creative work.  His, however, is not a hard-grip encounter but a caressing.  This is what probably allows him to see unevenness in what his gaze encounters.  It allows him, moreover, to slip under sheen and observe the delicate and violent mix of ideology, philosophy and political economy. 

Tilak is not a transcriber of things past and things on their way out.  He obtains inspiration from the traditional and adds social and economic shelf life by using idea, motif and material in what he produces for modern day consumption.  That’s not a surprise, given unabashed veneration of Ananda Coomaraswamy and in particular of his definitive (for many) work, ‘Mediaeval Sinhala Art’, which he says has framed this book and indeed, one could argue, his life.  Coomaraswamy saw art not as ornament but as something alive and which obtained value mostly from utility.  Tilak’s excursions have gifted him ample examples of live art and his urban encounters probably made him see enough of ‘art as ornament and nothing else’.  His own work appears to take direction from the Coomaraswamy definition.  His ‘journey’, therefore is vibrant, his work speaks, they engage and perhaps even transform. 

The world and in particular Sri Lanka has not picked up on Coomaraswamy, though.  ‘Tradition’ hangs from walls wherever we go, from hotels to the living rooms of the affluent and even the art loving Bobos (Bourgeois Bohemians), but utility value has for the most part been reduced to eye-candy and showcasing.  Tilak’s tapestries speak of a past as well as an abiding sense of ‘way of life’.  They have market value, yes.  They also speak. They teach. They preserve and nurture something more than a color-line mix that pleases eye.

Art connoisseurs would probably speak of Tilak’s aesthete and his contributions to create ‘a new aesthetic order’.  What the uninitiated realizes is how Tilak’s reinvention of the tradition has spilled over to real, lived, experienced life, for example in the world of fashion. 

The book contains the words and appreciations of experts.  Those essays illuminate. They also help us understand where Tilak stands in the global art firmament.  Bruno Munari’s piece on his drawings is a case in point.  He speaks of the amazing economy of Tilak’s hand.  He expresses so much with so little, which of course implies the ‘lot’ that is constituted of study, experimentation, reflection and imagination.  He must possess the most delicate fingers, that much can be concluded. 

Those line drawings manifested themselves in the now celebrated and oft-wowed  Munchee TV commercial aired during the recently concluded T-20 World Cup.  It demonstrated that ‘tradition’ to Tilak is not cast in stone and not buried in the past either.  It is up to those present to do what they will.  Tilak is firmly rooted in the moment, which is a high vantage point to those who sees it as such from which gaze can be cast on that which came before and that which is yet to unravel.  This is why there is a certain futurism in his work that is (interestingly) familiar as well.  He takes line and he makes it dance.  He gives a third dimension even in a two-dimensional activation.  That must take a lot of skill. 

He says his architecture ‘has a universal and cosmopolitan approach’.  Perhaps it is something intrinsic to ‘buildings’ but his designs are a stark contrast to his drawings. Curve is replaced with straight line.  There is less ‘dance’ and more ‘standing’ if you will.  Neat. Elegant. 

This book can be a flip-through and that would please much, let there be no doubt.  That, however, would be a disservice to the man, the work, the pathways he has travelled, the treasures he has picked up and the painstaking but seemingly effortless polishing and crafting he’s engaged in all his professional and artistic life.  Most importantly, one would miss the significance of the ‘social’ in all his undertakings.  Even as his craft carries his distinctive signature, Tilak’s work has always been contextualized by a deep appreciation of the collective, a strong respect for those who came before, appreciation and acknowledgment of the wells he has sipped inspiration from and an abiding sense of social responsibility.  It all adds up to many things, including a kind of patriotism that flag-waving and anthem-singing ‘nationalists’ have no clue about. 

It is a journey in itself, this reading.  It is a quick-read book that needs to be read slowly and many times over, one feels.  It puts reader in touch with something that is hard to describe but perhaps speaks to him in a familiar voice of things he or she is made of but probably unaware of.  A treasure, simply. 

[Review was carried in the UNDO Section of 'The Nation', November 18, 2012]

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If 19 is to equal 13 +...

According to National Freedom Front (NFF) leader Wimal Weerawansa a petition to get the 13^th Amendment abrogated was held back considering the current tensions between the Judiciary and Legislature.  Talks with the UNP and SLFP suggest that there are few takers for dogmatic positions on the 13^th Amendment.  Even the leader of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), R. Sampanthan, while holding fast to ‘devolution’, has expressed a willingness to go for re-demarcation of unit, i.e. three or four zones instead of the present nine provinces. 

Sampanthan has warned that repealing the 13^th ‘could cause grave and irreparable damage to the country’s future’.   It is heartening that the TNA leader, even at this late hour, is concerned about the country’s future.   Indeed his re-demarcation proposal amounts to a radical political shift from the previous fascination with white-lines or those provincial boundaries based on a map drawn by colonial rulers.   A re-demarcation, though, would necessarily amount to ‘modification’ and/or ‘nullification’ of the 13^th, an eventuality that Sampanthan opposes.  It is best that these ‘concerns’ are treated as the business-as-usual rhetorical of a politician and something that should not be allowed to rob the ‘statesman-like’ suggestion that the TNA leader has made in his interventions during the Budget Debate.

Sampanthan is of course erroneous when he says ‘the 13^th is the only constitutional provision that recognizes diversity’.  All it does is legitimate the work of a frivolous map-maker later used by Eelamist myth-mongers for their own purposes.  Communities are not held by maps, and fall out of provincial boundary.  The recognition of difference, as in the existence of different communities and people with different religious faiths, finds more than adequate mention in the constitution.  The only major differentiation that the constitution is silent on is that of class. 

Still, Sampanthan does make a valid point about efficiency in resource allocation.  The 13^th has seen enormous sums of money going waste, mostly to maintain the provincial councils rather than alleviating the conditions of the citizenry.  Moreover, the current lines rebel against contemporary economic thinking given anomalies of resource endowment across regions.  A re-demarcation then must correct for these inequalities.  In other words, logic and science as opposed to political expediency and untenable ethnic ‘enclaving’ should guide the cartographer.   It would logically take us to Ruhunu, Maya and Pihiti, an option which even in these communal politicking times should be considered.  

What would result is ‘horizontal democratization’ as some have put it, provided of course that the devolved complement of powers exceed what is contained in the 13^th.  Provided, also, that the power of the citizen to participate in decision-making is enhanced in the process.  For example, devolving the power to exercise strong-arm tactics and be dismissive of manifesto post-election from center to province won’t make things easier for anyone but the politicians. 

The trick then would be to follow such re-demarcation as per a 13+ formula with vertical democratization which includes measure to correct current institutional flaws, ensure greater transparency and obtain greater degrees of accountability.  Ideally, the two processes, vertical and horizontal, can be sought through a single amendment or better still a new, that is a third, republican constitution, but this may not be the proper time. Insistence on a double-push might kill both. 

As of now, justice for all in the matter of having a meaningful say in designing laws and policies that affect people’s lives depend more on largesse than on constitutional provision.  That’s not a flaw in the 13^th Amendment but the 1978 Constitution. 

So if we have to go with ‘first-things-first’, then 13+ must necessarily pick up the Sampanthan proposal.  To make it really a ‘plus’ amendment, though, the vertical ‘re-demarcation’ if you will of power lines has to be pushed for.  

 

 

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