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Essential (serious) Reading: Rohini's Playing Lions and Tigers May Yee * (2004, Chennai: Earthworm Books, earthwormbooks@hathway.com An indispensable book, a must-read, yet perhaps it is better not to emphasize its 'weightiness' too much, in case it scares people from actually picking it up. It is really a book all readers who care about Sri Lanka should take up, and hopefully it will soon be translated into Sinhala and Tamil to make it more accessible to everyone on the island. As Silan Kardirgamar stressed in his talk at the launch of Playing Lions and Tigers in March 2004, in Colombo: it is crucial that the new generations in Sri Lanka today properly learn the hard lessons of the difficult history of the past decades of war and political struggles the country - especially those active in the left and social justice movements - have gone through; and this novel serves as an extremely valuable tool towards that objective. Silan in his foreword to the novel writes: "In order to keep alive the flame of hope for the future, it is necessary to confront the memory of mistakes in the past, and Rohini's novel does that beautifully." (xiv) It is perhaps best to start off by saying that the highest recommendation for Rohini's writing is what also made her first novel, Do Something Beautiful, such a joy to read: its simple language and style, weighted mostly by a generosity of human compassion. Even her political/economic writings are refreshingly characterized by this straightforward, simple quality which is needed more than ever in these days of 'post-sense'. She manages to trim the frills, ditch the excess baggage, and cut to the chase, getting directly to the point, sometimes leaving the reader in simple awe that such complicated issues or complex events can in fact be grasped if we look beyond all the modern-day BS, the overuse of jargon, glossy packaging, high-flown language - and get down to the basic problems of living, to the heart of the matter, whether it revolves politically/economically around the basic issues of power, or personally around issues of the human heart. "Aha, of course, that's it!" - often leaving one with the feeling, that's what I knew or felt all along but never thought to put it so simply into words. Whereas her first novel - also highly recommendable - was focused
on unionizing of garment workers of Bombay, where Rohini herself worked
as an organizer; this second novel brings her powerful writing skills
and insightful analysis home to look at Sri Lanka's recent history.
Rohini herself introduces her new book this way: "This novel
is about the ways in which ordinary people have resisted the barbarism
resulting from the imposition of one-dimensional identities - the
'lions' and 'tigers' of the title." She also points out how similar
practices of genocide and state terror could be found all over the
world including the Americas and Australia: The novel seamlessly draws you in, starting with stories around a group of friends and activists in Sri Lanka who become close during university, and then together reach a political consciousness fostered by older mentors - Sarath's father who is a trade unionist (see excerpt in lines II: 3) and 'Uncle Bala,' a doctor, both active in the plantation areas. Rohini begins the book with a strong focus on the plantation workers, driving home the country's failure to deal with the issue of the shameful conditions and disenfranchisement of the plantation workers, originally brought as forced labour from India, as the early roots of obstacles to development for the united benefit of all Sri Lankan people. Rohini in her narrative powerfully brings home this crucial aspect that has been detrimentally ignored in writings as well as meaningful policy and action. Some of the most convincingly written scenes of the novel are in this early part, describing Dr Bala's commitment to the plantation workers and how the group of young Peradeniya University students become politicized and inspired through their work and theatre activism with them. Two characters whose political and personal maturation develop out of this are Shameem and Agnes, who stand out along with Jaffna-based Dr Kamalam and nurse Saro among a superb character range of strong women found in the book. This wealth of characters are all likable and compelling, of varied ages and backgrounds, easy to empathize with and relate to. To many readers, the main characters who are struggling through their medical, teaching, journalism, theatre, volunteer or organizing work, to help those around them and resist the growing terror and authoritarianism, are people who seem familiar, like so many often publicly unrecognized generous souls one might know who have been active in trade unions or social justice movements, who whatever their personal foibles or political differences, harbour a genuine commitment to people and society. Certainly this novel deserves to be read and praised if only as a fitting tribute to these unsung examples of the best of humanity found during the worst of times. This varied collection of main characters, with a few side characters tied in looser ways, grow closer together through shared work and struggles, becoming a chosen family, an interconnected community. The issue of the communities their parents are from is an aside, making clear the real historical processes of how differences in language and background do only become factors dividing people as the politics around them become communalized by powerful organized forces. This still fatally unheeded lesson is another invaluable contribution the book makes. In fact, Rohini should be commended for the fact that the novel's narrative does not define and delimit people in this now too usual way, even avoiding now fundable words like 'ethnic' or 'ethnicity' (from Greek for 'heathen' outside the gates - notice that nowhere around the world do we hear of the English or Anglo-Americans described as 'ethnic'). Each short chapter is written from the perspective of one of fourteen characters. Fourteen may be too many major characters to easily hold a book with depth, but the main problem is not so much in keeping track of them, but in becoming impatient, wanting to continue reading about certain ones, to find out what happens! Given the complexity of Sri Lankan society, especially given its colonized divide-and-conquer history, this attempt to cover such a difficult bend in history through the perspective of fourteen different characters is inspiring and laudable; and in most part, Rohini adroitly meets the challenge of maintaining the readability of the interwoven stories, though in the balance sometimes depth and cohesive power are lost. However, all the characters do seem just genuine, in all their human strengths and weaknesses, you care about them. There are even chapters written from the perspective of children such as Amita, just starting school, who must grow up much too quickly through horrific experiences of communal violence, surviving with Thambi, her little brother, through a refugee camp. Rohini at times deftly weaves children into the stories, showing how they are not only innocent victims but often can be crucial in bridging the suspicions and growing gaps between people divided by events, and re-instilling humanity into the survivors of inhumanity. "How clever of you to think of bringing a baby! Some people think babies don't know much because they haven't been in the world very long, but one thing they know better than anyone else is how to make people love them. He had been able to make Thambi see that there was no difference between a Sinhalese baby and a Tamil baby, which was something no one else had been able to do." (346) Chapter 12 also makes the point of how easily children learn other languages, showing how simply two different linguistic communities can begin to bridge communication gaps. However, there are some questions over how certain characters' lives become introduced into others in forced or overly coincidental ways. Also, another gut reaction felt in reading through the later parts of the book was a certain amount of incredulity - where you want to question the author, why she had to have those particular characters killed? Knowing how each and every one of those 'disappearances,' massacre and war victims, through especially 1983 and 1989, and onward, were appalling, unjust - thus, if familiar with the recent history, your rational mind knows what is bound to happen to some of the activists, the uncompromising critics and the principled ones, or just some of the plain unwitting bystanders. Yet you still want to cry out: "No, why that person? Why so many? Stop! Didn't that family go through enough surely?!" But then, maybe that again is just Rohini's power to take you through
just a little bit how it actually feels to lose someone you know,
much less close to you, through those senseless, destroying times
of violence and repression. Writing a flowing literary narrative about
all the years of fear and upheaval is no clearly easy task. There
are places where the narrative breaks off or gets resolved too abruptly,
where the reader may wonder: why didn't she seek legal assistance
or family or friends' support earlier? Or would that character have
accepted the idea of death so easily, or not seen more clearly the
risks involved? But then again, these may be such impossible things
to judge or 'analyse' without actually going through what is often
the unthinkable. More often, Rohini does insightfully express the
incredibly torn feelings of people caught up in the unpredictable
whirlpools of history, as with the characters who at first fully support
certain militant movements, until their gradual realization they cannot
reconcile the contradictions between, the often deadly, practice and
their original social commitment and ideals. The stories also move to England later in the book, when certain families find themselves forced to flee the island they love. Here Rohini also eloquently renders the real hard-to-describe, yet often paralysing, sense of loss, depression and alienation that many uprooted people feel trying to live in affluent countries that do not really welcome them except as a form of 'cheap labour.' But in the novel's overall admirable attempt to cover such great spans of geography and history, so many stories of political turmoil and personal love, it unfortunately does not always hold together or go deep enough to flawlessly accomplish its ambitious reach - perhaps overly epic in its scope (compared to the small jewel Do Something Beautiful was able to be). It is at times unevenly paced, sometimes too earnestly introspective or agonizingly detailed, with sudden gaps in certain other details. (Though it could be also argued that one noticeable gap, in the novel's absence of explicit detail into characters' intimate sexual lives, could be seen as gratifying - even daring - modesty in the face of current 'market' realities that everything needs a bit, if not a blown-up lot, of sex to sell!) Having read more than a few Sri Lankan novels in English, I would place Playing Lions and Tigers, in breadth and depth of reflection and analysis of the island and its people without falling into the usual traps of exoticization and oversimplification, close to A. Sivanandan's When Memory Dies - which is saying a lot, since I along with many others believe that to be the greatest novel in English covering a large span of 20th century Sri Lankan history, both in terms of literary power and political scope. Rohini's book reaches into even more recent and difficult times for its subject matter, and does it with an admirably great deal of historical detail, political analysis, and human compassion. Several years back, many finished reading Michael Ondaatje's newest novel, Anil's Ghost, with great disappointment - with the ending the only part where real emotion and immediacy finally broke through the frustrating alienation and emotional distance that ran like a trans-oceanic coated thread throughout the whole book. Is it the defensive distance and paralysis that comes from being too far away from, or being much too close still, to a too-painful reality? More likely the problem with writers like Ondaatje is the former, gone too far from his place of birth. While for the people determined or without choice but to remain, what is written, and so much more what is not written, tends to suffer still from the latter - also perhaps the reason why too few people here seem able to properly read or review that most moving and courageous novel, When Memory Dies, Sivanandan's call to people to remember what might be easier to forget (many, though awed by the first part's truly inspired literary weaving of labour history, still finding it difficult to get through the last half which deals with the recent tearing of lives by the war and terror). So, READ Rohini's book, as well as Sivanandan's too if you haven't already! And read to the end, since the last chapters do provide needed healing and light for the heart-rendering chapters in the middle. Don't let the title fool you: Playing Lions and Tigers is serious reading for the human head, heart and soul; if we are to get beyond child's play, and the violence of boys who can only grow up to be 'men' with more deadly 'toys.' A must-read in international fiction, for Sri Lankans and Asians especially and the world generally, unbeatable in scope and power about the destructive effects of colonialism (so effective we know why he never got the Nobel and recognition deserved!), is Pramoedya Ananta Toer's "Buru Quartet," written as a political prisoner, among which the 4th novel, House of Glass, is a classic in exquisitely delineating the 300-year-old deadly deliberate Dutch divide-and-rule roots of post-'independence' anti-Chinese and communal conflict in Indonesia. And in terms of classics in nonfiction, what is considered 'Essential Reading' that best explains why Sri Lanka is still in the political and economic quagmire it finds itself in today: Kumari Jayawardena's The Rise of the Labour Movement and Ethnic and Class Conflict, S.B.D. de Silva's The Political Economy of Underdevelopment; and for more on history of the plantations, S. Nadesan's History of the Upcountry Tamil People, and Nawaz Dawood's Tea and Poverty. And finally, this is written to give heartfelt thanks Rohini, as well as to urge more of the so many talented Sri Lankan writers out there to follow her courageous and eloquent example - for writing so simply and beautifully about times so painful and events so treacherous, for pointing out clearly the powerful forces that divide people rather than the divisive stereotypes used to rule people, and most of all for showing the power of people's basic humanity in the face of advanced inhumanity. In such times of ongoing hopes and fears around peace and war in Sri Lanka, along with ongoing wars of occupation and resistance in Iraq and Palestine and elsewhere, it is writing such as this that people truly need - as inspiring, insightful, compassionate beginnings toward building that just new world we all yearn and must work for. A world where play can just be play, work is valued as work, and lions and tigers fade into the background as only beautiful wild animals not even found in this small and lovely island. May Yee is a Colombo-based book editor, with family roots and editorial links to China and Canada, who constantly reads and sometimes writes. * Appreciative thanks to Ramani Muttetuwegama, Indrakanthi Perera, and as always Krisantha, for valuable input and feedback.
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