Monumental history and the politics of memory:
Public space and the Jaffna public library
-- Vasuki Nesiah
The Government of Sri Lanka named the 22nd of February as the
National Peace Day – dedicated not only to the one year anniversary of the
MOU, but also to commemorate all those who had lost their lives in the conflict
- the memory of the dead officially commandeered to legitimize the terms of
the current peace. How we ‘remember’ the dead is invariably about how
we reclaim the future – about the struggle to control memory, shape its contours,
to mobilize it in advancing particular agendas, and marginalize others.
Orwellian official historical narratives are mobilized in celebratory monuments
to rulers and battle heroes, days of commemoration to battles won and peace
treaties signed, the issuing of stamps and the naming of roads, school children
organized to march to the drumbeat of national ‘history’… the struggle
over official memory however is also then a struggle over the stakes of war
and peace, the debate over the cult of heroes and the appropriation of life
even in death.
Is the history of the burning of Jaffna public library also at risk of being
appropriated and pressed into servicing the agendas of the powerful?
The Jaffna public library was burned under state supervision in 1981 – the
memory of that event burned into Tamil consciousness as an iconic marker of
the physical and imaginative violence of state sponsored Sinhala majoritarianism.
Today the rebuilding of the library is embroiled in a different kind of battle
over memory and history; the scaffolding and reconstruction captured in the
cover photograph by Dominic Sansoni represents how the memory of Tamil victimhood
is itself under construction. Yet as Sansoni’s photograph suggests,
the scaffolding gets assimilated into the clean lines and reconstructed façade
of the rebuilt library (in fact at first glance I didn’t even notice the scaffolding),
i.e., the construction of memory itself becomes naturalized into our narratives
of the past. In that context, the controversy over the reopening of
the libraryreminds us that memory
is itself a field of contestation: Who ‘owns’ the memory of 1981 in
the Tamil community – “heroes” and rulers or their victims and survivors?
The burning of the library is a story about the Sri Lankan government’s racist
and violent campaign to conquer public space in Jaffna. Perhaps the
debate over the re-opening of the public library constitutes a reclaiming
of public space from the reach of the LTTE?
The burning of the library was an attack against public space in Jaffna not
only in terms of an assault against bricks and mortar, not just the physical
presence of the library and the books that it housed - it was much more …it
was a symbolic assault on a community’s freedom to come together, exchange
ideas, and collectively enrich a robust civil society. The events that followed
that burning over the last two decades has seen that public space suffer blow
after blow, not only by the continued ruthlessness of the Sri Lankan government,
but in addition, by the actions and policies of the LTTE and others who wielded
military power in the peninsula. There has been an assault on the community’s
freedom to debate its present, hold its leaders accountable, confront the
ghosts of its past and determine the direction of its future – all of this
is part of what is connoted by the attack on public space in Jaffna. If the
loss of this kind of public space suggests the enormity of what was lost in
that historical burning of the library – rebuilding that public space, not
just physically (as has already been done) but in the texture of day to day
life in Jaffna, may be a valuable goal for the historical re-opening of the
public library.
The broader canons of Tamil nationalism also often underscore the point that
the burning of the Jaffna library was not only a material attack on the building,
and the books and manuscripts stored in it – but with less emphasis on the
loss of public space, they focus more on how that burning was also, and even
more significantly, a symbolic attack against the value the Tamil community
placed on learning. In this narrative, the core of the ‘loss’ experienced
by Jaffna was that this was an attack against a culture of intellectual striving
and a long tradition of academic achievement. In that context,
there is frequent reference to the extraordinary resilience of a tradition
of acadmic acheivement in Jaffna even during the war, where, like Sita surviving
the test of fire, Jaffna’s secondary schools churned out spectacular A’ Level
results even in war’s most heated moments to demonstrate a deeply entrenched
fidelity to education. Yet this widespread claim that the Tamil community
was characterized by its commitment to learning is itself suggestive of amnesia
about the battles fought within the Tamil community to stifle intellectual
exploration, deny access to education and inhibit learning. Thus even
as everyone from C. W. Thamothrampillai to Prof. C. J. Eliezer, institutions
from St. John’s College to Jaffna University, are invoked to underscore a
history of Tamil academic achievement, we may also want to remember the underside
of that history: the exclusion of those designated as lower castes from admission
to the most celebrated secondary schools for many decades – and the bitter
battles fought by significant sectors of the “Jaffna establishment” to keep
the schools’ academic resources closed off to underprivileged castes; Or,
to take an example from more recent times, the pressures against the education
of Tamil women is represented in the hazing rituals imposed on first year
women at Jaffna University. Moreover it is not only in the limiting
of access to education that Tamil nationalist claims to prizing an intellectual
culture are belied – it is also in the intolerance of dissident ideas, in
the stifling of a critical culture of questioning by public intellectuals,
that killed scholars like Rajani, poets like Chelvi, and indeed, many many
others….
More inspiringly however, all these examples where there was a tradition
of Tamils who fought to limit education and learning, are also the very examples
where one can also track a counter-tradition of Tamils who fought for academic
institutions that were inclusive, and a public intellectual culture that was
critical and courageous. Sadly, the period after the burning of the
library (because of that event but also a number of others) has also been
a period where this latter Tamil tradition has been under attack – scorched
by the history of repression and brutality unleashed by all the dominant actors,
including the GOSL, the LTTE, the IPKF and many of the smaller Tamil militant
groups. As noted earlier, our post-1981 history has been scalded not
only by death and suffering, but also by the assault on public space.
In fact, situating it in a history of public space in Jaffna, the symbolism
at stake in the burning of the public library may not have been a mythologized
ancient culture of learning, but the public space for a culture of questioning
and resistance. Libraries are here markers not of academic heroism,
but of a space for ideas and questions, of public debate and contested histories.
Counterposed to monumental history, set alongside the burning of the Jaffna
library, we may also want to remember another burning – the bonfire of poetry
ignited by a Jaffna poet Sivaramani as prologue to her own suicide. To me, the memory
of Sivaramani’s poetry burning speaks to how nationalist histories of the
past advanced by war’s henchmen (Sinhalese and Tamil) are accounts where victims
and survivors are crowded out by heroes and rulers. Against the dominant
history of Tamil culture as a culture of leaning, her poem, “A War Torn Night”also reminds us of the
dark battles against critical learning in the Tamil community:
“our children
grow
in the oppression
of a war torn night..
…
To not ask
To be silent
When questions remain
Unanswered,
They learn
To be mute,
To pluck the wings
Of dragon flies…”
The memory of the burning of Sivaramani’s poetry is then both a counter-history
to the dominant narrative regarding what was at stake in the
burning of the library, as well as an argument for the denizens
of Jaffna to engage in the debate to re-open the library.
The past is not merely the province of the LTTE and the city
councilors – but also the space of civilians who have suffered
the oppression of many ‘a war torn night’. Perhaps
the debate over the public library may be the very moment when
a robust civic dialogue may rise, phoenix like, to address contested
visions of Jaffna’s past. Rather than pluck the wings
of dragon flies to build monuments to history’s official story,
we need to re-engage the past to reclaim our future…
