Global Peace Support Group

1My village down under by Sunil Govinnage’s poetry of the Sri Lankan diaspora:

Thiru Kandiah
Bilingual writer Sunil Govinnage’s English poetry of his
experience as a Sri Lankan immigrant in Australia achieves
distinction from the very striking way in which it sets itself
apart from a great deal of the familiar writing of the diaspora.
Th e latter is by no means uniform, but a lot of it tends almost
invariably to be unconscionably parasitic on the home that
has been left behind, using it mainly to further the selfaggrandising
aspirations of its often privileged producers, and
to earn reputations (and fortunes) for them in, particularly,
the metropolitanised quarters (highly transnational we must
not forget) of our globalised world. Th ere clearly are some
heartening exceptions, but they do not alter the general
pattern. A major consequence is the disquieting subversion
of the very endeavour of post-colonial creativity within which
the writing of the diaspora belongs, all the more disturbing for
the predominance assigned to such writing, and the kind of
treatment accorded to it, within literary post-coloniality and
Sunil Govinnage
2
the currently dominant forms of its study and theorization
(see Ahmad 1992).
Govinnage sets himself resolutely against the vice of
literary behaviour just pointed out. Locating himself fi rmly
within the very “diff erent” metropolitan city he has made
his new “home”, he still elects to write a poetry that gives
wholesomely, and in fact incalculably, back to his “lost home”,
the land of his birth and of his original, most pristine roots.
Th e notion of “home” in fact hovers over much of his writing,
like some kind of immanent presence, calling up sometimes
the new home, very frequently the old one. As he struggles to
recoup his own personal pain over the loss of his previous home
and the Sinhala-Buddhist traditions he had inherited from it,
and of the absence of the sustenance and assurance they had at
one time so satisfyingly aff orded him, he arrives, in an entirely
natural and uncontrived way, at a powerfully realized sense of
their meaning and value that, extending in scale far beyond
just himself, has the potential to make a profound diff erence
to that home and its peoples. Doubtless his style, the artistic
medium that is naturally emerging for what he wants to say,
is still evolving, and he still has some way to go before he can
achieve the major status to which his work even now allows us
to look forward. But through what might initially strike us as
just unpretentious “simplicity” and guileless spontaneity, there
is emerging a writing that, precisely by what it off ers back to
the lost home, acquires large dimensions of signifi cance that
distinguish it very positively from much of the writing going
on in the diaspora. Part of that distinction derives from the way
in which these diff erent dimensions of signifi cance help direct
some rather searching questions towards some of the presently
favoured modes of post-colonial literary theorization, but let
us hold this particular matter back to the end of the essay,
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3
by which time, we might hope, the factors that warrant the
questions would have been suffi ciently clarifi ed.
* * * *
Th e importance of what Govinnage has to off er his lost home
is immeasurably enhanced by the feeling, shared widely
among very many of those who care deeply for the country,
that it is at the present moment going through what, surely,
must be one of the greater of the crises of civilization, ethics
and humanity that it has ever experienced, the crisis caused by
the ethnic/linguistic/religious confl ict (and the accompanying
war) that had grievously affl icted it in recent times. As the
Foreword to this volume of poems has already indicated, the
prevailing circumstances of comparative calm and normality
in the country might well cause some sceptical questions to be
raised about this claim. However, as indicated in the Foreword
itself, with both the essays in this volume themselves providing
evidence in support of it (which makes it unnecessary for me to
explicitly enumerate here the considerations that warrant the
claim), there seem to be very good reasons for it. In any event,
a signifi cant part of the argument that is being developed in
this essay about Govinnage’s particular accomplishment as
a (post-colonial) poet depends critically on this claim, and,
consequently, on the kind of understanding of the confl ict
that underlies it. Th is makes it necessary to take a somewhat
extended excursion into a clarifi cation of the matters relevant
to all these issues before we return to our attempt to search out
the qualities that distinguish his writing.
* * * *
Sunil Govinnage
4
Th e crisis is one within which the country had, over the past
several decades, contrived to place itself, as it sought out its
post-colonial destiny under the modernist dispensation into
which it had been inducted, along with the rest of the world,
during the preceding fi ve or six centuries. Th e induction had
been accomplished as part of the process by which, through
their structural workings, the forces of capitalism, riding on
empire, had constituted the world as a contradictory and
unequal, hierarchised unity, outside of which no country
could set itself (Ahmad 1992). In the course of its induction
into modernity, the country had also, for the fi rst time in its
very long existence going back to Mesolithic times and earlier,
been constituted as a single administrative unity; specifi cally,
in the form of the modern nation state. Th is nation state, as
it happens, constitutes the primary local arena within which
the dominant bourgeois world order that capitalism/empire
had helped construct operates in transmitting to the polities
concerned the interpellations through which it re-produces
them in the (suitably amenable) forms that help secure its
hegemony.
A major challenge of post-colonial reconstruction
that the country faced as it moved towards and beyond
independence from the last of its imperial rulers, the British,
was to negotiate within the political realm of the state the
relationships among the whole widely diff erentiated range of
identity groups that existed on the basis of ethnicity, language,
religion, cultural attributes, territory, traditional occupation,
the time of historical entry into the polity, and now also class,
among a large variety of other social formation factors. In a
real sense, this had to be done anew, as it were, because the
conditions of modernity under which it had to be done were
very diff erent from anything that had prevailed earlier.
Perth: My village down under
5
Th e crisis of civilization/ethics/humanity the polity
faces today refl ects the utter, abject failure of the national(ist)
bourgeois leadership of the nation state to rise to the
responsibilities the task placed on them. Th e particular
modernist form of democracy that had been handed over to
them as part of the package of modernity had provided very
laudable means of resolving the issues involved, in the form of
those inalienable “givens” of the democratic way of life as they
had come to be valorized on the basis of the Enlightenment,
those fundamental norms and values under which the citizenry
could achieve a just and free existence for themselves: the
equal right to life, opinions, dissent, expression, movement,
assembly, safety and freedom from intimidation and
harassment, transparency and accountability in the conduct
of public life, protection from corrupt practices and from
abuse, justiciability under the rule of law, lifestyle, choice of
beliefs, and innumerable others. Th ese would in principle be
pursued, as part of the process by which modernity and its
bourgeois comptrollers could legitimate themselves, within
what manifested itself as the modernist “public sphere”,
wherein the exercise of public authority could be subordinated
“to the requirements of democratic publicness”, through
rational public scrutiny of political and also other forms of
action (Habermas 1973b, in Seidman, ed. 1989: 231, 232).
Th e public sphere, in other words, was the sphere in which the
ideal of civil society would be pursued at its fullest.
But, this was only one side of the picture. What we cannot
forget is that from its birth in the countries of its provenance,
modernity was driven by the imperatives of the middle class
leadership who ushered it in. For all the necessary role it played
in advancing human civilization through bringing nature under
control by an emerging science and technology for the benefi t
of humankind, the democratic system it formulated for the
Sunil Govinnage
6
purpose of legitimating itself was geared to the maintenance
of the authority and dominance in the political realm of the
class that steered it. Th is could be done either by means of the
elaborate democratic apparatus (universal franchise, periodic
elections, the party system, electioneering, panel discussions,
seminars and debates, coverage by an increasingly technically
sophisticated media, and so on) that the class went on to
develop for the purpose or, where these would not ensure
the desired results, by various forms of legitimated coercion
or licensed violence. Th e perceived cynicism of Machiavelli’s
doctrines as he endeavoured to fashion a viable new politics
for the new socio-political-economic order that was taking
shape in his modernizing times derives from here – the
“good and eff ective governance” with which it was implicitly
concerned was, precisely, one that guaranteed the conditions
of political control that met the interests of the then-emerging
new bourgeois class.
Behind its front of innocent propriety, therefore,
modernity inevitably incorporated, as something perfectly
ordinary and taken for granted, what appeared to be two of
its most defi nitive ingredients – power and its accompanying
violence, whether the latter was expressed through overt
physical means or through less penetrable, yet at bottom still
coercive, Gramscian consensual means. It is this, evidently,
that constrains Terry Eagleton, drawing on Hegel, and no
doubt too on Trotsky, to declare that modernity was “twinned
at birth” with “terror as a political concept”, so that “(t)here can
be no modernity without its attendant terror”, a phenomenon
that “springs straight from the heart of the bourgeois social
order” (2004: 151). Of course, the question of to whom and
to which parties or institutions this unprepossessing label
attaches itself as a descriptor depends, as we learn from the
sole contribution made by George Bush/Tony Blair to human
Perth: My village down under
7
knowledge, on who has the (military) might not just to apply
it but also to make it stick.
A further relevant consideration was of an
epistemological kind. If modernity was to successfully pursue
its goals of controlling nature through science and technology,
the human mind needed to be released from its entrapment
within the closures, repressions and enchainments imposed
on it within the outgoing social order by its institutions,
secular and religious. Th is in fact was what the Enlightenment
accomplished. However, the new emancipated, and
emancipatory, rationality that emerged as a consequence
began to move from the moment of its start towards its own
“abridgement” (to use a Habermasian term – see Habermas
1987, Section VIII, Subsection 3), reductively customizing
itself to the requirements of the “purposive rational action”
valued by the class. Th is was a form of action that, concerned
with “means-ends relations” and oriented towards the
“strategic” achievement of “practical goals”, regulated itself
“by its own results”. Its impact on reason was to transform
it largely into a positivistic kind of instrumental rationality,
“immanently one of control” and therefore in eff ect a
“rationality of domination”, that served the aspirations of the
class to power (Habermas 1971: 96, 87, 85).
All of this helped assign to modernity a thorough-going
ambivalence that rubbed off also onto the democratic mode
of governance it had fashioned as a means of legitimating
itself, requiring both of them to be seen in terms of a
dialectic, with intertwined positive and negative strands.
Th e crisis of civilization into which Govinnage’s lost home
had misdirected itself was brought on by the near-invariable
proclivity of its national(ist) bourgeois leadership to operate
within the political realm near-exclusively along the negative
strand of the democratic dispensation. Increasingly electing
Sunil Govinnage
8
to be driven by an unbridled Nietzschean kind of contrahuman
“will to power” (the guise in which the “desire” much
esteemed and celebrated by avant gardiste post-modernists
less-than-agreeably manifested itself in the political realm), it
fashioned what can only be seen as a distinct home-grown
form of post-Machiavellian politics that mutilatingly defl ected
the entire paraphernalia of the modernist democratic set up
– its structures, methods and procedures, its mechanisms
and instrumentalities, even its doctrines – to ends that were
grossly at odds with those for which they had been designed.
Th e important notions of one person-one vote (in whichever
refi ned or reworked versions in which it was at times applied)
and majority rule, for instance, were recognized very quickly to
carry great possibilities for the anti-democratic pursuit of the
will to power (Ismail 2005:xvi). (It is no coincidence that the
allied institution of universal franchise had been introduced
in the country more than a decade earlier than in any other
country of the region.)
Th e most foundational aspect of that politics was the
cultivation of an irredeemably exclusionary majoritarianism
based on race, language and religion that was explicitly
designed to exclude all of the minorities from any true
democratic participation in the polity. Th e way in which
this majoritarianism worked was to pervert certain very
necessary progressive initiatives of the eff ort of post-colonial
reconstruction and liberation within the polity (these
manifested themselves, for instance, in the spectacular “cultural
renaissance” of the 1950’s, as well as in the many invaluable
egalitarian projects that were launched around the same time
– see below too) and divert the energies they called up along
paths that could not but be highly destructive in their antidemocratic
nature. For the purpose, the national(ist) bourgeois
leadership appealed quite overtly to a backward-looking feudal
Perth: My village down under
9
outlook that seemed to be an ingrained feature of the polity,
an outlook characterized by a taken-for-granted readiness by
those at the top of the hierarchy to assume overlordship and
by very many of those elsewhere to accept that assumption.
Evidence of the deep-seatedness of the outlook in the polity
is plentifully provided by, among others, the well-attested
family and caste-ridden nature of Lankan politics (Jiggins
1979), the reluctance of most of even the working class to
support the kind of principled radical politics that is most
in their interests, and the enthusiastic readiness among many
people to espouse obsolete near-monarchical notions as well
as regressive theocratic practices.
* * * *
Needless to say, the anachronistic nature of these modes of
thought guaranteed a profound illiteracy in what were the
most valued ways of modernity, particularly with respect to
its democratic provisions, grievously incapacitating the polity
from generating the kind of reasoned – and ethical – responses
that the actual material complexities of its modernizing
multi-ethnic/linguistic/religious/cultural context demanded.
Th us, an emerging, empirically-attested account of the
provenance and development of the polity from the
earliest times was jostled aside in favour of an account that,
considerably more than an ancient myth of origin, would
feed the majoritarian ethno-linguistic-religious agenda.
Th e former account is set down with admirable clarity and
strong persuasiveness in Karthigesu Indrapala’s Th e Evolution
of an Ethnic Identity (2005), drawing closely on the highly
illuminating researches of a range of some of the country’s most
outstanding scholars, chief among them the historian, Leslie
Sunil Govinnage
10
Gunawardana, the archaeologists Senake Bandaranayake,
Shiran Deraniyagala, Senerath Paranavitane and Sudharshan
Seneviratne, and the anthropologist, Gananath Obeysekere,
as well as on its author’s own historical and archaeological
research.
In very broad outline, the crux of the empirically-attested
realities set down in the account was that both the majority
Sinhala and minority Tamil ethnies in the island were alike
descended from the various Mesolithic peoples who inhabited
the single or common cultural region constituted, in prehistoric
and the earliest historic times, by the South Indian
and Sri Lankan regions, across which there had always been,
and long continued to be, the free fl ow of peoples, cultural
traits, technology and even languages. Th eir emergence as two
distinct ethnies involved not any large-scale immigration or
displacement of the original inhabitants but, on the contrary,
the assimilation by each of them of the various segmentary
or tribal Mesolithic communities who already existed
across the region, as a consequence of certain developments
(particularly those relating to trade) that took place during
the fi rst millennium BC. In much of the island, especially in
its southern and central parts, the dominant group that so
emerged during the second half of this millennium adopted a
Prakrit which had made its way to the region on the back of
trade, which, subsequently, developed into Sinhala, a language
that together with Buddhism (which found its way to the island
later, under Mauryan infl uence) became the unifying factor in
the new polity which was emerging, assimilating the various
diff erentiated Mesolithic groups who occupied the territory
and displacing their languages. In the north west, north and
east during this same more recent period (the second half of
the fi rst millennium BC), essentially the same kind of process
Perth: My village down under
11
took place, but centred round the unifying factors of Tamil
and Hinduism, which already existed in the larger region. Th e
subsequent rise to power of Tamil kingdoms in South India
(around the 7th century) and the invasions of the island by
the Colas helped secure the fi nal consolidation of this ethnie
in its island regions.
As these two major identities and polities were being
set in place, there began to appear, as is almost invariably the
case whenever such human groups have evolved anywhere in
the world, legends and myths to support and secure them,
though again as usual, such legends and myths had much
less to do with the actual facts of the matters surrounding
these identities and polities than with the felt “truth” of their
existence. Th e rulers on each side tended, frequently enough,
to claim overlordship of the whole island, but it was only after
the arrival of the European invaders, and particularly with the
British conquest of Kandy in 1815, that the island was fi nally
unifi ed as a single political and administrative entity, the basis
of the modern nation state of Sri Lanka. Until quite close to
modern times, however, undeniable rivalries and hostilities
and the accompanying violence notwithstanding, there had
consistently remained close interaction and dialogue across the
two groups in very many spheres of life, and also a “mingling
of peoples” in general (Indrapala 2005: 285). Th is was later
to extend also to the Muslims (Moors, Malays, Borahs and
Memons) and Burghers, and indeed all of the other minorities
of the polity as and when they entered the scene, without,
however, obliterating their subjectivities and their distinctness.
Altogether, as Indrapala so well puts it, “a fascinating story of
ethnic interaction in a hospitable island with a long record of
human habitation” (p. 285). A metaphor that compellingly
off ers itself is that of a kaleidoscope, the beauty and integrity
of which rest ideally on the always mutual, exhilaratingly
Sunil Govinnage
12
enriching interaction among its necessarily – and welcomely
- distinct parts.
* * * *
Th e counter discourse of the majoritarian national(ist)
bourgeoisie set this account aside for a narrative that,
identifying the land of Sri Lanka, the race of the Sinhala
people and the faith of Buddhism exhaustively together with
each other, received its fullest articulation in modern times
in D. C. Vijayawardhana’s Th e Revolt in the Temple (1953).
According to it, the “pure” and racially superior Aryan-derived
majority, the Sinhala people, arrived from North India at
the beginning of historical times to displace the indigenous
inhabitants and stake their claim to the land, a claim that
was subsequently sanctifi ed by Buddhism, which arrived
shortly after. Several centuries later, hostile invasions from
India caused portions of the island to be misappropriated by a
Dravidian (Tamil) Hindu minority, who, though they settled
in it, never, consequently, had any claim to it. Subsequently,
this account was sharpened into what came to be known as
the Jathika Chintanaya (the “national” [= literally, “racial”]
ideology), an overtly exclusionary dogma according to which
it was the majority linguistic-religious tradition that truly,
and solely, represented the national cultural heritage of the
country; although that position required constant vigilance to
protect it against a perpetual threat from the Tamil-speaking
“intruders”, who traditionally had from the times of the
invasions remained its implacable enemies. However, owing
to its built-in forbearance, the tradition would, by its own
determination and on its own terms, allow the various other
ethno-linguistic-religious traditions, alien intrusions though
they were, the right to exist, implicitly in a suitably grateful
Perth: My village down under
13
and compliant house-trained form. In more recent times,
the ideology has seemed to allow in certain doubts about
whether indeed there validly could be other such autonomous
traditions at all, in eff ect eff acing them under what might be
seen as some kind of unspoken default “identity” (or, rather,
state of existence) of a highly unspecifi ed nature that warranted
no concessions to be made to it in its own right. Th e eff ect,
needless to say, is to give even more unrestrained rein to the
unabashed chauvinism that was the most defi nitive feature of
the ideology.
* * * *
Th is highly anti-democratic invented narrative, together with
the ideology that constructed itself on its basis, was promoted,
and in fact installed, by the majoritarian national(ist)
bourgeoisie as the unchallengeable mainspring of all political
thinking and action within the polity. Th is they did through
the (ab)use of the apparatus of the modernist democratic
dispensation, including the increasingly technologized media.
Th e feudal propensities of the polity already remarked on
above more than helped facilitate these processes, but it needs
to be observed, too, that the political leadership received
very active support in carrying them out from the surviving
representatives of the old feudal order.
An important role was played in the strategy by
what Marcuse (1972) terms “one dimensional thought
and behaviour” (p. 24), which works on the basis of the
“implanting” of “needs” in individuals’ minds that they come
so much to feel are their very own (p.19) that they assume the
status of “facts of life” (p. 23). Off ering to satisfy these needs,
the strategy induces an exclusive preoccupation with them in
the minds of these individuals that has the eff ect of helping
Sunil Govinnage
14
“expurgate” other “ideas, aspirations and objectives” that
actually do surround them, often in fact in contradistinction
to them (pp. 148, 24). Prevented through this squint in its
eye from seeing “the disease of the whole” (pp. 18, 19), the
individuals succumb to the “social control anchored” in the
needs that had been implanted in them, coming to see the
exercise of such control as “the very embodiment of reason”.
Th is helps achieve a certain “pacifi cation of (their) existence”
(pp. 22, 27, 174) in the service of “particular social interests”
that are, in reality, “repressive” of them (the individuals) and
erosive of their “autonomy” (p. 24).
It is this “one-dimensionality” that functioned as the
essential mechanism of the strategy. One set of major needs
on which it focused was indeed very real. Th is related to the
retrieval of the socio-cultural traditions of the people, which
had been marginalized, even suppressed, under imperial
rule. Despite their consignment to the backwoods, these
had continued to remain a very real and tangible presence in
the social, intellectual, imaginative, emotional and material
landscape of the people. Th eir purposive restoration now, under
the diff erent conditions of modernity, held out the promise of
the recovery of the resources of “blood, imagination and the
intellect” (to use a Yeatsian term) that would equip people
to reconstitute their subjectivity and identity for the purpose
of living their lives as meaningfully as possible within the
realities of their contemporary modernist existence. Ideally,
they would do so as free and equal beings, a matter that helped
defi ne a further relevant aspiration that was closely associated
with this one. Th is raised a separate need that also was, in
fact, catered to in its own right by various explicitly egalitarian
measures that were also taken at the time (I shall not elaborate
on these measures here). However, for the purposes of the
anti-democratic majoritarian strategy, these real needs had
Perth: My village down under
15
to be reductively re-cast in the uni-dimensional terms that
would enable the reality of much of the surrounding ethnic/
linguistic/religious/cultural reality of the context to be elided
within the consciousness of the people involved, along with
its claims for inclusion in an equal capacity in the restoration
process.
All of these various matters contributed to the appeal of
the strategy among the majority, by, specifi cally, helping foster
the populism that was the most palpably visible characteristic
of majoritarian politics. Th is was a populism that, feeding
avidly on the chauvinism of the governing Jathika Chinthanaya
ideology, was so surpassingly potent that nothing at all in
the majority regions could stand up to it with the hope of
getting anywhere – which is why, for instance, even the larger
established leftist parties set aside their professed radical
principles soon enough and succumbed pliantly to it. Indeed,
so overwhelming has the potency of the governing ideology
been in mobilizing the ethnic/linguistic/religious majority
behind it that the regions they occupy have witnessed in recent
times the virtual demise of the comparatively healthy twoparty
system that had prevailed earlier, as virtually everybody
from everywhere in these regions scrambles over themselves to
join the “national(ist)” mainstream.
A great deal of that potency derived from the extravagant
rhetoric through which the politics was delivered, a rhetoric
that took the form of an elaborate language game that would
have delighted the heart of any post-structuralist. Perhaps the
most “amateur” aspect of the game was the way in which the
familiar “purr” and “snarl” words of languages were deployed
not just in the linguistically sanctioned ways that might have
been expected, but also with tendentious selectivity, both to
separate those who agree with one from those who disagree, and
also, when expedient, to whitewash the former and blacken the
Sunil Govinnage
16
latter. A slightly more sophisticated version of the game took
the form of a very overt form of semantic inversion, whereby,
for instance, “war” would become “humanitarian operation”,
and “surveillance camp” would become “rehabilitation village”.
Th e most Orwellianly disquieting feature of the rhetoric was,
however, its reifi cation of itself, seemingly on the strength
of its own self-assurance, as some kind of tangible material
proxy, as it were, for the national(ist) bourgeois state, seen as
a real, self-validating entity or agent in its own indisputable
right; so that, depending on whether one was inclined to ask
questions of that entity (through challenging its rhetoric) or
not, one would be discursively fi tted into an overriding binary
demarcation of the polity into “patriots” and “traitors” that
was beyond challenge.
We recognize here the truth of what Mattelart (1983)
and Siegelaub (1983) have demonstrated to us, namely that
populism, as distinct from the popular will, always operates
as a means by which the latter is distorted and bent to or
consensually enlisted in the service of the dominant groups in
society. Not, as Gramsci has reminded us, that consensuality
was the only means available to the strategy. In addition to
straightforward concealments, suppressions and distortions of
the facts of the situation, together with blatant untruths of a
kind that seemed to assume that the very distinction between
truth and falsehood itself did not at all count any longer,
there were other straightforwardly coercive means at hand.
Th ese took the form of a variety of authoritarian sanctions,
repressions and suppressions, exerted with varying degrees of
harshness against both individuals and institutions, including
the media, to fi x the limits of dissent, protest and resistance,
even in fact to do away with their possibility.
* * * *
Perth: My village down under
17
All of this undisguisedly reveals the inbuilt violence of the
bourgeois social order remarked on earlier. Quite predictably,
violence has, from quite early, been an unusually recurrent
feature of the modern polity in the country, directed quite as a
matter of course, both in straightforwardly physical as well as
in other forms, not only against “other” groups of people but,
noteworthily, even against people within what are purportedly
the “same” groups. Th e record is a very sorry one, showing
exactly the kind of mutual spawning and nurturing and exactly
the kind of inevitable escalation of brutality, viciousness and
hatred of the other that may be anticipated.
As instances of the former kind of violence (directed
towards “others”), we recall the 1915 Sinhala-Muslim riots;
the 1949 disenfranchisement of the Malayahat Tamils
(descendants of the indentured labour imported from India
by the British in the 19th century to work the tea plantations),
who amounted then to as much as 12% of the population and
contributed in large proportion to the economy of the country;
the subsequent repatriation of considerable numbers of them,
often against their own wishes, to India; the several violent
and repressive anti-working class operations before and after
Independence, including those undertaken to quell the strikes
and the so-called “hartal”; the very eff ective near-eff acement
of the small Burgher, Malay, Borah and Memon communities,
among others, carried out with a taken-for-granted casualness
that seemed to refl ect the assumption that these people were
hardly worth noticing; the violent suppression of the peaceful
democratic protests the minority Tamil-speaking bourgeois
leadership launched along Gandhian lines on behalf of the
democratic right of their people to linguistic equality around
the time of the passage of the Sinhala Only Act; the extended
series of offi cially instigated, majoritarian anti-Tamil riots that
followed, extending between 1958 and 1983, which subjected
Sunil Govinnage
18
both Lankan Tamils and Malayahat Tamils, as well as Muslims
(who were largely Tamil-speaking) to vicious forms of
violence; the organized, but indiscriminate, atrocities infl icted
on the ordinary Sinhala populace and the authorities who
represented them by militant groups of Tamil fi ghters who
emerged in retaliation for the riots and as a consequence of
the failure of even the possibility of a democratic negotiation
of minority rights. Th is failure was associated among other
things with the reduction of the Tamil-speaking segments of
the nationalist bourgeois leadership to political impotence
(though they were permitted to continue, if in considerably
diminished form, to perform their economic function of
propping up the bourgeois economic order), thus creating
the void that the militants rushed in to fi ll. Th e latter, more
than reproducing in their thinking and behaviour all of the
reprehensible political features outlined above, pushed them
even further, setting themselves outside the established
political order and its structures for the purpose and fully
realizing the fascist tendencies latent, if only just below the
surface, in the entire situation ; the 1985 Tamil-Muslim riots
mainly in the east of the country, and the ferocious attacks
by the more powerful Tamil militant groups on the largely
Tamil-speaking Muslim minority in regions they (the former)
dominated; and, of course, the recently concluded decadeslong
civil war between the Government and the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam, extraordinarily high in both its human
and material cost, brought to an end by carrying to its logical
conclusion the escalating violence of the situation.
Examples of the other kind of violence (internal
internecine violence, though there always is some kind of
“othering” involved, not necessarily ethnic-linguistic-religious
in nature) include the southern insurgencies of 1971 and the
late 1980’s (when tens of thousands of Sinhala youth were
Perth: My village down under
19
killed by forces of the Sinhala-dominated state that they
attacked – the “othering” involved here was class-based); the
widespread killings by the Tamil militant groups of Tamilspeaking
rivals or others who would not toe their line; the
quite callous exploitation by these groups of a range of Tamilspeaking
constituencies spread over other regions of the island
(for example the east, or the central highlands) than their
own specifi c ones to further their own cause without any
consideration for the latter’s own concerns and interests; the
chronic violence that has for decades surrounded elections,
often recasting democracy itself as some kind of “goon
democracy” (the “othering” here was based on political party
lines); and so on.
Several of the instances cited under both categories are
associated specifi cally with the so-called ethnic confl ict that
engulfed the country during the last few decades, leading
to the recently concluded war. Th ey refl ect the inevitable
downwardly spiralling course on which a politics of violence
sets a polity, spawning an active retaliatory politics which, even
while it often consciously sets itself outside the established
order, actually mirrors that which set it off , and with equal
if not greater reprehensibility and ferocity. It was a politics
that was marked not just by a thoroughgoing reproduction by
the victims of the majoritarian strategy of, mutatis mutandis,
all of the features that have been listed above as defi ning that
strategy (for example, the exclusionary Jathika Chintanaya
ideology was substituted for by an equally exclusionary
ideology of a separate state), but also, in its anti-establishment
manifestations, by increments to it (in the form of forced
child soldiers or suicide bombers, for instance) and increasing
escalations of all dimensions of it. Th ese were increments and
escalations that, ensnaring within themselves larger and larger
groups of ordinary, innocent people, subjected them, as well
Sunil Govinnage
20
as the polity as a whole, to utterly meaningless and destructive
violence. Th e potential benefi ciaries of such violence,
moreover, could only have been the rival off -centre leadership
group driven as obsessively as anybody not by concern for
those for whom they were purportedly fi ghting but by their
own gargantuan will to power.
* * * *
Th e record is depressing enough. But what adds huge
dimensions of gravity and urgency to the continuing crisis of
civilization and democracy that all of this exemplifi es is a set
of other considerations that are discouraging in the extreme.
If the end of the war might quite justifi ably be considered
to mark a watershed or defi ning turning point in the polity’s
recent history, there aren’t suffi cient grounds for optimism
with regard to what we might expect on this side of that
watershed. Th e undeniable fact is that the last, and biggest,
of the mutual escalations that fi nally brought the war to
an end does not seem to have achieved, and not just at the
fundamental underlying level, anything like the results that the
polity actually needed from the point of view of its underlying
malaise. At the most overtly material level, evidence of this is to
be found in the heavy economic burdens placed on “ordinary”
people, certainly not the affl uent benefi ciaries of the whole
situation, by the escalating cost of living, among other things.
Equally practical considerations are raised by worries about
the chances of retrieving the country from the massive longterm
economic liabilities that the crisis had placed on it, and of
ransoming the future generations of people who had in eff ect
been pawned to raise the exorbitant sums of money required
to prosecute the war; and further, by the vulnerability of the
country to the predatory geo-political and economic designs
Perth: My village down under
21
of other countries, often in confl ict with each other, each
looking for some toehold within it as a means of drawing what
advantage they can from the situation created by the confl ict
(this only confi rms that, for all its “local” complexion, the
contradictory unity of our world does not allow anything to
be seen in purely local terms).
But, there are very many other disturbing considerations
too. Th e so-called “rehabilitation villages” (or camps or
farms or whatever) for the very large numbers of “ordinary”,
mainly minority, persons displaced during the closing stages
of the war, as well as what might have actually gone on on
the ground around them during those closing stages, call
urgent attention to one very considerable set of them. Th e
impenetrable opacity that obstructs free and clear view
of these matters or of the conditions of existence and the
treatment of these people before and after they entered the
camps does not allow any fi rm claims to be made about any of
it, in spite of wide media publicity given in many countries of
the world to appalling accounts, fi lms, and so on purportedly
emanating fi rst hand from the locations involved themselves.
However, this hardly helps allay the uncertainties and fears
that insistently raise themselves. Doubtless, measures have
been and are being offi cially taken to address some of the
more immediate issues the situation raises. But even if and
when the camps eventually cease to exist, and time has carried
us somewhat away from them and the events of those closing
stages, they will together always remain symbolic of something
from which there is a conclusion to be drawn, and a less-thanencouraging
one at that – which is that they off er not even
minimally convincing evidence that would dispel the question
marks that hover importunately above these people and their
future. Certainly, these people, trapped, especially during the
closing stages of the war, between two sets of dominant forces
Sunil Govinnage
22
in confl ict, neither of whom had anything to off er them except
uncertainty, repression and pain, have been reduced to an
utterly choiceless condition where they could be considered to
number among the most wretched of the people of the earth.
But, it is not only they and their future that are at stake;
the question marks raise themselves equally worryingly over
all of the minorities in the country and their future, involving
among other things, their self-hood and, also, their relations
among themselves and between them and the majority. For,
talk apart, there is very little in the environment to reassure
them that the political problems that spawned the crisis will at
all be addressed in a just and equitable manner. Aggravating the
situation is the apprehension over the possible intensifi cation
of an endeavour that has been going on apace for many
decades, the purposive alteration of the ethnic proportions
in historically Tamil-dominant areas of the country through
colonization, settlement and, now, “development”. Such
anxieties, it is important to note, are shared even by the large
numbers of the Tamil-speaking minorities who had had no use
for the LTTE and who, in fact, were relieved that the justice of
their cause need no longer be clouded by its association with
a group whose own unacceptable conduct readily lent itself to
use in diverting attention away from it.
And that is a real worry. For, by prolonging the sense
of genuine grievance among the minorities that contributed
towards the nurturing of the crisis, it will make it all the more
diffi cult for them to lift themselves out of what Jayadeva
Uyangoda has somewhere termed the “victimology syndrome”.
Th is is a disorder that, precisely because of the legitimacy
of the cause that underpins it, gets in the way of the kind
of rational, balanced, ethical, responsible – and sagaciously
realistic – negotiatory response that the prevalent democratic
structures require, not least by inhibiting the self-refl exivity
Perth: My village down under
23
that could release people towards such a response. Th e reckless
adventurism of the rump of the militant undertaking, made
up of the remnants, largely overseas, of the vanquished in the
war, hardly helps promote the clear-mindedness for which
there is such an urgent need. Th eir impotent anger seems to be
inclining some of them at least towards irresponsibly mindless
repetitions of disastrous militaristic courses of action that have
demonstrably caused untold disruption, suff ering and sorrow
to very large numbers of “ordinary” people, not least those on
whose behalf they had claimed to have fought their war. Th e
senselessness of such courses of action is heightened by, among
other things, the near-certainty that they will self-destruct on
the landmines of both national and geo-political realities.
* * * *
An apparently diff erent set of exceedingly worrying
considerations is raised by the fears that receive expression,
often cautiously and mutedly but, nevertheless, courageously,
in the media and the internet and through the Sri Lankan
and global grapevine, about massively dangerous threats
to the entire democratic way of life within the polity, the
drastic erosion within it of all of those inalienable democratic
entitlements and givens of its existence as a modern entity.
Developments within the polity since the conclusion of
the war have generated a noticeable proliferation of such
expressions particularly from those who live in the south of
the country, where power and administrative control tend to
be centralized, and belong among the majority community.
Th eir concern is with what they perceive as a mortal threat to
all of civil society and the public sphere, refl ected particularly
disturbingly in the general atmosphere of uncertainty, fear
and intimidation, going alongside a sort of normalization of
Sunil Govinnage
24
violence even in many areas of everyday living that prevails in
the milieu.
In a real sense, these expressions of concern belong
within a long and impressive, if very small, tradition of
independent progressive thought for which the polity had
always, to its immense credit, provided a place, even when
nearly everything around it was being carried near-helplessly
along the less-than-promising path along which the country as
a whole had elected to go. Consistently critical of and resistant
to such trends, it was a tradition of thought that had ensured
that the ideals of human rights, equality and freedom would
never be forgotten.
It is, however, an index of the potency of the pressures
of the mainstream that, while these expressions of concern
have continued as laudably as ever to call attention to some
deeply troubling issues with regard to such ideals, too many
of them, even some of the very stirring and concerned among
them, appear to share a certain failure of recognition that is
highly disquieting. Th is is that they implicitly tend to see the
situation as in a real sense involving matters that are quite
separate from the war and the extended set of circumstances
leading up to it. Th at is to say, they seem unable to make
out that such matters are only in fact more recent episodes in
the very same sorry anti-democratic narrative along the lines
of which the polity had long been proceeding, an inevitable,
if more recent, outcome of the logic of the same escalating
syndrome of violence of which they already were a consenting
part. Th e tearful disbelief of a close relative of a candidate
arrested after the recently concluded presidential election
expresses it all: “our own people are doing this to us”. Th e
most revealing of the unwitting sub-texts here would read
something like “it was alright as long as we on this side, our
own people, together did it to them on the other side”.
Perth: My village down under
25
Th is failure to recognize the connectedness and
continuity of the issues signifi es, underlyingly, a refusal, often
almost perverse in its resoluteness, to look too probingly at
the politics of the situation with a view to seeking out what
might account for its loudly unsatisfactory characteristics
and hold out some reasonable possibility of extricating the
polity from the morass of its crisis. In a sense, this is not too
diffi cult to understand. Th e conclusion of the war had, very
understandably, brought an immense sense of sheer relief
to people everywhere in the country, relief that at last they
need no longer be constantly exposed to the indiscriminate,
if purposive and deadly, acts of violence (suicide bombings,
land mines, artillery fi re, heavy aerial raids and bombings of
settlements, and so on), whichever side in the confl ict they
were perpetrated by; and relief, too, that they now had some
chance of trying to pursue their ordinary lives in some kind
of way at least. Th is was something that did not incline them
to ask too many uncomfortable questions. It needs to be
recognized, however, that this disinclination itself was not
entirely innocuous, in the sense that it was associated with
a deep and genuine need of people that lent itself easily to
the strategic one-dimensionality mentioned earlier, which
worked to encourage indiff erence to all other dimensions of
the situation than those most salient to one’s own immediate
interests.
* * * *
Th ere were other less-than-innocuous considerations, too,
that inhibited proper recognition of the issues, which was not
entirely surprising, given that it is in the nature of military
resolutions to confl icts that they do not encourage people
to poke too nosily around abstract conceptual, or for that
Sunil Govinnage
26
matter ethical, matters. On the minority side of the balance
sheet, the irresponsible adventurism we have already noted of
some of those associated with the losers very much refl ects
this same tendency to evade the issues, with the resentment
or helpless defi ance that in any event many of those identifi ed
ethnically with them could be expected to nurse over the
defeat also showing the potential to buttress it. On the other
side, a predictable consequence of the military victory was
the euphoria and the jingoistic triumphalism it generated
among many people among the ethnic majority. Th is was
accompanied by what must be seen as a militarization of
their psyche, matching in full measure that of their defeated
enemies, which seemed to issue in an implicit belief that since
military might has demonstrably solved all the problems,
it had an absolute claim to their trust in all matters. Th e
exhaustive reach of that faith is well expressed for them in the
legend reportedly displayed in the press briefi ng room of the
military during the closing stages of the war: “It is the soldier,
not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the Press.
It is the soldier, not the poet who has given us freedom of
speech” (cited by Bell 2009). A corollary of all this was the
attenuation of the very notion of civil society and the public
sphere so critical to modernity.
Both of these sets of responses to the conclusion of
the war were, in their fundamental nature, overpoweringly
mindless, and led not to self-refl exive re-examination of the
issues but, rather, with the help where necessary of covers-up,
whitewashes, charges and accusations and denouncements of
the “other side”, distortions, even straight slanders and lies,
smug, self-extenuating claims about one’s own “goodness”
and so on, to unabashedly partisan reinforcement of the
positions already fi xed infl exibly in place by the parties to the
confl ict. Causing the actual defi ning contours of the confl ict
Perth: My village down under
27
to be obscured, this could only have the eff ect of stranding
the perceptions and views of it in the uncomprehending stasis
of its current and recent confi gurations, thus putting beyond
reach the very possibility of working, however diffi cultly,
towards the kind of understanding of it that would enable
the forms of praxis that a just and satisfying resolution of it
demanded.
* * * *
Th e cynical opportunism that military victories tend invariably
to generate helped graft further unsightly wrinkles onto this
undesirable state of aff airs. Th ese were especially apparent in
the fi eld of scholarship, which could ideally be expected to
help shed the kind of light on situations that would lead to
better understandings of them. However, succumbing to the
allure of the thinking expressed by the choice Sinhala phrase
vaasi peththata hoiyya (“pull towards the profi table side”),
some scholarship, including that emanating from the Lankan
diaspora, came to drop all pretence at the kind of non-partisan
balance and distance valued in academia. Committing itself
to pure instrumental rationality rather than an ethicallyinformed
reasoning, it unblushingly off ered rationalizations
of the confl ict explicitly based on strategic exigencies of the
military campaign (this was especially when it was becoming
increasingly apparent that a military victory was imminent)
or on a form of statism that makes fast the supremacy of
the national(ist) bourgeoisie state (this was particularly after
the victory had been achieved), or some such. Th e eff ect, of
course, was to purposively legitimate in its entirety the state of
aff airs set in place by the military victory, by securing the fait
accompli delivered on the ground by the military campaign,
Sunil Govinnage
28
and, equally important, shielding it from any possible
questions.
In fact, this last-mentioned matter seems to fi gure
quite signifi cantly even in some of the pronouncements made
on the situation by scholars and other writers, including
well-established ones in the diaspora, who seemed to show
a genuine concern over the confl ict and its horrendous
human and material cost. Containing itself within the
protective limits of the familiar “liberal-humanist” approach,
this was a concern that safeguarded itself against the eff ort
of taking a real, self-evident stand on the issues that might
raise themselves, by, among other things, making a case for
avoiding any kind of independent, transparent investigation
of anything of what had gone on on either side of the confl ict.
Th e implicit suggestion was that such an investigation could
lead to profi tless and unforgiving un-Nelson Mandela-like
recriminations and accusations that would prevent the polity
from putting its ugly past decisively behind it – which was
another way of conceding that there is indeed something
to be put behind. Needless to say, in spite of the lofty tone
in which such pronouncements were generally delivered,
a tone patently designed to earn the pronouncers an image
of some kind of wise, humane, all-knowing, unquestionably
trustworthy, visionary luminary, it is easy to see that one very
important thing they were designed to actually do was to help
secure the status quo.
Alerting us to the kind of ingenuity to which such
opportunism was capable of resorting is a very intriguing
variation of it that has recently emanated from the minority
side of the confl ict. Th is is something that might best be
understood if it is borne in mind that the physical elimination
of the LTTE leadership that had sought to wrest sole control
of the Tamil-speaking cause by violent means had created a
Perth: My village down under
29
signifi cant leadership vacuum in that sector of the polity. Th e
recognition from which this recent approach seems to stem
is indeed an eminently reasonable and necessary one. Th is is
that the widely assumed view of the confl ict in terms, almost
exclusively, of a binary oppositionality between two manifestly
high profi le polarized constituencies corresponding, more or
less, to the two main ethnic-linguistic-religious constituencies
of the polity is distortingly simplifying in the extreme, for two
reasons at least: one, that each of these designated blocs is by
no means homogeneous, incorporating a very wide range of
peoples, loyalties, concerns, interests, territorial affi liations and
so on that are widely discrepant with each other; and two, that
absolutely all sectors of the populace, never mind their ethniclinguistic-
religious affi liations, have been thoroughgoingly
caught up in the confl ict.
Th e next step of the approach is the critical one.
Exploiting particularly the kind of radical relativism and
fractionalism valorized by avant gardiste post-structuralist
thought, it throws the focus sharply on all of those divergent
and discrepant elements and interest groups among the
Tamil-speaking minority that separate and divide them,
pre-emptively calling into question the claims that any one
group among them might make to the mantle of leadership.
While doing so, it also implicitly raises doubts about the
viability of any notion of a unity constructed round the Tamil
language, indeed explicitly undermining any eff ort to even
grope towards a theorized articulation of an identity that
might construct itself as the nucleus of such a unity.
For the purpose, it closes its eyes to the reality that,
beyond the purely analytical realm and in the actual, practical
terms of what really happened on the ground, the entire
prosecution of the ethnic confl ict, reprehensibly violent
on all its fronts, was based on the perceived threat of just
Sunil Govinnage
30
such a “Tamil” identity to the majority identity, and on
the retaliatory measures to which those associated with the
former resorted to protect themselve against those associated
with the latter. Th e entirely laudable analytical resistance to
the simplifi cations of singular oppositionality and binarism
does not entail a refusal to recognize the negative dimensions
of the processes of othering that the constitution of the self
involves. Confl icts do result, and they do involve sides or blocs
in opposition to each other! What we seem to have in the
reluctance of the approach under discussion to come squarely
to terms with this fact, therefore, increasingly begins to look
like that oh-so-very-old policy of divide and rule, but in a
surreal form of it that in eff ect says “we in this bloc will divide
it so that you in that bloc might rule it”, implicitly continuing
into a proviso that, though left unstated, is not too diffi cult
to recover: “appointing us your functionaries in a designated
leadership role in this bloc, underwritten by you and carrying
the stamp of your unchallengeable authority.” Behind its
overt rejection of the “us” versus “them” binary, then, the ploy
covertly exploits exactly that same binary to pursue, under the
relativizing obfuscations of its post-structuralist manoeuvres,
the will to power of its practitioners.
Interestingly, no parallel treatment is extended quite in
that way to the other, majority bloc of the binary, something
that might have allowed a further position on the confl ict that
implicitly lurks behind the whole ploy to be brought into the
open. Such a treatment of that side would, of course, have
only helped, with its relativist logic, to suggest that there were
in fact no real opposite sides at all but simply some incoherent
free-for-all among all kinds of confl icting forces. It would be
from this suggestion that the further position just mentioned
would issue. Th is is a position that would necessarily have to
be expressed in the form of some such declaration, indiff erent
Perth: My village down under
31
to and violatingly insulting of the horrors and suff ering to
which the victims on all sides of it were subjected, as the one
that Jean Baudrillard was constrained to make about the Gulf
War, namely that it “never happened” (1995). (Baudrillard
was, of course, concerned with a diff erent point, though as
precious as this one and as disrespectful of the victims, which
is that in any event, it was all just a matter of language games
and stagings.)
All such shabby scholarly capers as have been outlined
above do more than simply add to the laughability that the
term “intellectual” had begun to take on itself in the country
during the past decade or so, owing to the way in which it
had been so liberally applied to many whose only claim to it
seemed to be their servile readiness to be pressed, along with
the letters they happened to carry after their names, to the
discharge of a whole range of degrading political chores. More
somberly, they give rise to distressing refl ections of the kind to
which Julien Benda gave expression in his book Th e Betrayal
of the Intellectuals (1955/1927), when contemplating what
intellectuals in France had allowed to happen to themselves
as apologists for all kinds of unworthy nationalistic or racist
war-mongering causes at a time when political conditions had
put heavy strains on their scholarly integrity.
* * * *
And this matters, very much; not just for scholarship in its
own professional right, as it most certainly does, but even
more, for the way in which it strongly reinforces an overriding
tendency of the prevailing politics to push out of view a whole
large set of very fundamental matters that we need to keep
sharply in view if we are at all to understand the confl ict and
respond creatively to it. Th e disastrous outcome is to bring on
Sunil Govinnage
32
a radical amnesia with regard to the confl ict, an erasure from
memory of its very roots and causes (all of those things which
led to it in the fi rst place) and of its nature and eff ects, of the
cruel and reprehensible ways in which it has been prosecuted
and of the exceedingly heavy material and human (including
ethical) cost it has exacted.
Th is is something that the polity simply cannot aff ord.
It just has no alternative but to look unfl inchingly at all that
has happened and continues, though diff erently, to happen,
to face fully up to it with self-refl exive recognition and a sense
of accountability, to acknowledge that something has gone
horribly wrong, accept collective responsibility for it and,
more, do all that can be done to help repair it. For, without
recognition and acknowledgement, there can be no atonement,
and that is something from which the wrongs of the confl ict
allow absolutely no escape. If memory cannot be allowed to
die and has inescapably to be recovered, such recognition and
acknowledgement alone can ensure that it would be for the
purpose not of endlessly reciting unforgivable past wrongs
but of atoningly setting them right. Th at purpose, though,
would need also to be complemented, where necessary, by a
further one, whereby remembrance itself would be educated
to a discriminating mode of forgetting that would exorcise
all those demons of the past that would get in the way of
the polity moving collectively on with understanding and
magnanimity to a future that is more satisfyingly democratic,
accepting and human.
If these tasks are to be eff ectively carried out, there will
of course need to be a clear, principled account of the confl ict
and its complex dimensions and facets that would supply the
solid bases of information, knowledge and understanding on
which that might be done. By “principled account” is here
meant an account based on a rigorous theorization of what
Perth: My village down under
33
is under scrutiny by reference to a reasoned set of coherent,
explicitly articulated and sustainable axioms and principles
that will enable satisfyingly adequate, dispassionately reasoned,
non-ad hoc description and explanation of it. It is just such
an account towards which this essay, drawing also on similar
principled theorizations in other relevant fi elds of study, has
expressly, if cautiously, endeavoured to struggle. However, as
I hope we will see as we go on, the principles of the account
called for will by no means be solely of the epistemological
sort just described, for it can be anticipated that they would
involve also ethical principles – as Samuel Johnson took the
visionary risk of affi rming, “they that think reasonably must
think morally”. Ultimately, though, the success of the eff ort
will depend very much on the human subjects at the very
centre of it, their goodwill, their magnanimity and their
capacity for convivial human living, all these things to be
sure, but, even more, a resolute will among them to change
things. For without these, there can be no release from crisis,
no reconciliation, no redemption.
* * * *
Th is, precisely, is where the most worrying of the doubts raise
themselves. Th e various matters catalogued above, manifesting
the workings of modernity, as well as of the modernist
democratic dispensation associated with it, along the negative
strand of their dialectic, confi rm that the polity is in acute
crisis. In addition, presenting themselves as the factors that
caused and defi ned that crisis, they also help account for
it. But they also do more. Of their nature, they (the whole
anti-democratic complex of them, on whichever side of the
confl ict they manifested themselves – the will to power, the
governing ideologies and the rhetoric supporting them, the
Sunil Govinnage
34
exclusions, the one dimensionality, the mindlessness of the
euphoria and of the angers and resentments, the meaningless,
destructive violence, the cynicism and the opportunism, the
non-recognitions and mis-recognitions, the amnesia, the
distortions, concealments, suppressions and untruths, the
repressions and denials of rights and entitlements, the fears and
uncertainties, even, for that matter, the enervating dimensions
of the understandable sense of relief felt by ordinary people
over their release from their subjections to violence) together
work in a way that guarantees a kind of mindset in the polity
that grievously impairs its capacity to extricate itself from the
crisis. It is a mindset characterized by, among other things,
a willing suspension of reason and the intellect, the eviction
of self-refl exivity, the suppression of memory, the inhibition
of recognition and understanding, an unbelievable unconcern
with the tearing apart of the whole communal and moral
fabric of (civil) society, and the abdication of a sense of ethics,
accountability and responsibility.
Th e collective impact all of this had on the ways in
which the polity sought to respond to the crisis may be seen
in terms of a regressive movement, as what could have been
considered to be simply an absence of a sense that there was a
need to look probingly at what was going on (with a view to
recognizing and self-refl exively understanding it and, on that
basis, working – and this is all-important – to change things)
gave way to a disinclination or even a quite steadfast refusal
to do so. It was not, after all, that people were unaware of a
lot of what there was to know (for instance, that what they
were confronted with was not only a “terrorist” problem but,
undeniably and very decidedly, an ethnic-linguistic-religious
one); or that they did not see a lot of what was going on –
the information dissemination resources and methods of
modernity hardly made these a possibility in spite of all the
Perth: My village down under
35
coercive pressures to ensure them. Neither was it that they
had suddenly lost the human ability to distinguish between
right and wrong or truth or falsehood, or even that they had
become cynically indiff erent to the distinctions they knew
were involved. Rather it was that in spite of all this and even of
the inescapability of the dehumanizing horror that was often
a feature of the realities, they showed a readiness to go along
with it all, to acquiesce in the politics and the rhetoric, even if
it meant going against the better impulses of their minds and
hearts, even of their inbuilt moral sense. After such knowledge,
what forgiveness? But, then, the controversial Milgram
experiments in the early 1960’s have shown us that this is
not an unthinkable state of aff airs – even perfectly ordinary,
decent people do show themselves ready to act against such
impulses, under certain circumstances. In Milgram’s case, the
circumstances involved, primarily, the appeal to authority. In
the case under discussion, however, authority was only one
factor, fi guring as such only in the appeals to the authority
confi gurations of the feudal mindset. Th e rest of the complex
of factors outlined above made their own potent contribution
to securing that kind of response.
In practical terms, the most disastrous of the ways in
which they worked in this respect was in their irrevocable
embedment in the psyche of the polity, as it were, of a view
of things that received its bluntest expression in Margaret
Th atcher’s infamous declaration: “there is no alternative (to
what is)”. Condemning people, through its pretensions to
something cynically called “being realistic” or “pragmatic”, to
the impotence of operating helplessly within the parameters
of the status quo as they had been laid down by those who
had had the power to do so, this noxious doctrine took
away from them the very possibility of making choices and
acting in terms of their own actual sense of what they could
Sunil Govinnage
36
see in front of their eyes, thereby rendering true change
itself an impossibility, however desperately the polity might
have needed it. Th e recently concluded Presidential Election
(2010) provides striking evidence of how near-completely
this disempowering viewpoint has taken people’s minds over.
Although there were as many as 21 candidates involved, and
although there defi nitely was at least one, possibly two or even
three, among them who, at the cost of not attaining high
offi ce, had resolutely over the decades stood by principles that
secured immunity to all of those unhealthy factors that had
contributed to the making of the crisis, the choice was de facto
reduced, even in the minds of those who had suff ered greatly
under the crisis, to just two candidates, those who, alongside
each other, had played the most decisive role in leading the
polity up along the way to the military victory. Th e record
low voter turnout at the subsequent parliamentary elections
of April, 2010, much celebrated by eff ete liberals and other
disgruntled elements as evidence of an edifying expression of
the disillusionment of the electorate with politics and the tribe
of politicians as a whole, is further disconcerting evidence of
the acquiescence of people in this belief that nothing can
actually be changed (that is, apart from the fact that in any
case many people in the majority areas are quite satisfi ed with
the state of aff airs that had been set in place).
* * * *
Th is Th atcherite kind of entrapment, we might note in
passing, adds yet another facet to our general understanding
of how modernity and its democratic system tend typically
to work along the negative strand of their dialectic, in eff ect
taking any real choice away from people. From the specifi c
viewpoint of understanding the situation under exploration,
Perth: My village down under
37
however, it also, together with the other factors detailed above,
helps reveal how alarmingly grave the crisis actually was and
how unhealthful it indicated the state of the polity to be. In
fact, all of the less-than-acceptable, indeed discouragingly
dystopian features of the polity set down above may together
with tolerable accuracy be considered to represent the varied
kinds of “morbid symptoms” that, Antonio Gramsci submits,
appear in the “interregnum” when “the old is dying and the
new cannot be born” (1971: 176).
Th e ominous question that then raises itself is whether
it could, very frighteningly, be some rough beast that is
slouching towards the beloved country to be born. Yeats’s
contribution to the phrasing of that question, from out of
his own experience as his Ireland moved into the twentieth
century, helps us see something of the nature of the disquieting
condition the polity has just been claimed to be in, even
while not letting us forget the role played by modernity in
ushering it into that condition. Alan Paton’s intervention
in that phrasing helps remind us of an essential ingredient
that, while enabling that question to be asked at all, would
contribute to countering the overwhelming power of the
operations of those factors. Th is ingredient would be a deep
commitment to and caring for the country that would leave
far behind the obsessive preoccupation that Th atcher (again!)
perniciously set in concrete as the solitary, all-determining
basis for political decision making by individuals within the
modernist democratic system, namely, “what’s in it for me?”
Such institutionalization of self-interest as the sole basis of
political thought and action is, we will recognize, what lies
at the heart of the so-called “neo-liberal” dispensation that
currently holds sway almost everywhere in polities claiming
to be democratic. Th e dispensation is something that had
come to be laid down within the polities as their bourgeois
Sunil Govinnage
38
leadership pursued their driving desire, the will to power,
through the promotion for popular/ist consumption among
the populace, by means of Marcusian one-dimensionality and
utilizing the mechanical apparatus of the democratic system,
of that further, “democratic”, desire, the desire for absolute,
untrammelled individual freedom – “Operation Infi nite
Freedom”, as Eagleton (2004) terms it.
* * * *
Of course, that ingredient by itself could hardly suffi ce.
From its characterization above, the crisis is very evidently
one that would for its resolution call for a supreme eff ort of
will from all concerned, institutions as well as individuals,
drawing, in the greatest measure, on all of the resources of
mind, heart, imagination, ethicality, sensibility, whatever,
available to them. Very discouragingly, it appears from that
same characterization that the polity might not quite be up
to the task, grievously wanting as a whole in the wherewithal
needed to meet its demands.
Th e problem is that all of the various developments
outlined above have conspired to cut the polity off from
exactly those cultural-psychological resources or assets that,
embodied in the traditional worldviews of the polity, had
already been available in the environment for the purpose,
and more saliently and immediately than anything else – this,
notwithstanding their provenance in pre-modern (including
feudal) times. Far worse, the developments have eff ectively
subverted all of these resources and assets. Such traditional
worldviews, Habermas (1971) suggests, characteristically tend
to be directed towards “the central questions of men’s
collective existence and of individual life history”, addressing
Perth: My village down under
39
them by reference to “consensual” social norms (p. 92). Th e
norms themselves are arrived at by means of “communicative
action” or “symbolic interaction” (p. 92), that is, a form of
“reciprocal communication” (p. 67) among people carried
out through the symbolic means of “ordinary language” and
oriented towards “the maintenance of intersubjectivity of
mutual understanding” (p. 113) as part of the goal of “the
moral realization of a normative order” (p. 107). Th ey are,
further, “secured by the general recognition of obligations”
and “enforced through sanctions” (p. 92).
All of this holds out great promise in principle, even
including, despite the individualistic libertarianism of (post-)
modern times, the “obligations” and “sanctions”. Nevertheless,
history has throughout the ages incontestably demonstrated
that, when institutionalized, such traditions, whether religious
or secular ethnic (in this latter case, the institutionalization
takes the form of various nationalisms), have tended, without
exception, to play a major role in propping up hegemonic
socio-political groups and legitimating designs and regimes
that are oppressive of individuals and their freedom, through
dogmatic metaphysics, foundationalist master narratives and
teleological prescriptions that take choice away from individual
minds by imposing tyrannical closures on them. Th is takes
place whenever conditions in the environment encourage,
in the interests of the powerful, a certain deformation of the
ways in which traditions work within traditional societies.
Th e way they work is to legitimate through their authority
the institutional framework through which a society conducts
its aff airs as required, on the basis of the norms it defi nes;
which framework then emerges as the unchallengeable means
of legitimating, too, its political system or its structure of
power, becoming, not least through distorted enforcements
Sunil Govinnage
40
of obligations and sanctions, “identical with the system of
political domination: traditional authority was political
authority” (Habermas 1971: Ch.6, especially, pp. 91-97). It
is not diffi cult to envisage how this arrangement could under
certain conditions be pressed in directions totally incompatible
with communicative action as it has just been depicted. And
this indeed is how things tended to work even in traditional
times when the institutional framework was feudal – rather
than, for instance, tribal, slave, capitalist, or other such).
As it happens, modernity, operating along the
negative strand of its dialectic, creates conditions of its own
particular sort for such deformation. As societies modernize
and traditional structures are “increasingly subordinated
to conditions of (the) instrumental or strategic rationality”
valorized by modernity (p. 98), the whole institutional
framework is brought under the governance of purposive
rational action (pp. 114-115). Th e accustomed modes of
legitimation of the framework are thereby rendered obsolete,
causing them to “break down” and to be replaced by new
modes of legitimation related to the economic imperatives
of the class driving modernization (pp. 96-99), imperatives
that involve the relations of production, the market, exchange
values, issues of political economy and so on that contribute
to defi ning further dimensions of modernist desire or will.
Th e more mechanical “means-ends” logic of the instrumental
rationality adapted to purposive rational action “render inert
the frame of reference of interaction in ordinary language”
(p. 112) by which traditions ideally maintain themselves,
among other things by reducing everything to the status of a
“commodity”, something that has a practical exchange value,
whether economic, social or political (Appadurai 1988). Th e
eff ect is that the fundamental questions of life and existence
that the traditions address, along with the intrinsic shared
Perth: My village down under
41
values, beliefs, themes and concerns, as well the norms by
which they are evaluated (Habermas 1971:107) are diverted,
displaced, erased, distorted, mutilated, even defi led, as the
legitimating force of the traditions come eff ectively to be
exploitatively appropriated in the service of the controlling
class and their modernist will to power (“desire”).
With the very ground on which they stood being thus
taken away from under them, the traditions become vulnerable
to reduction, largely, just to (the shell of ) the formal institutions
that had set themselves up to represent them in the organized
social system, and to the rituals and dogmas through which
they present themselves in the public sphere. Under the new
form of legitimation that has now begun to take over, however,
this is a public sphere that has yielded some of its “democratic
decision-making” political functions (Habermas 1971:105)
to the need of the system to “depoliticize” the mass of the
people (pp. 103-104), as a means of securing and maintaining
its stability and legitimacy in the face of “the dysfunctional
tendencies” (or contradictions) that “threaten” it (p. 101),
putting strains on the “loyalty” (p. 102) of these people to it.
Th is depoliticization it achieves by “sever(ing) the criteria for
justifying the organization of social life from any normative
regulation of interaction” (p. 112), causing “the disappearance
of the diff erence between purposive rational action and
interaction” from the consciousness of people (p. 107). Th e
eff ect of such depoliticization is to restrict the democratic
participant role that modernity had, along the positive strand
of its dialectical operations, off ered the “ordinary people” in
the determination and running of the polity (Habermas 1973)
to, largely, the machinery (periodic elections and so on) that
it had simultaneously established for the purposes of realizing
its democratic ideals, thereby reducing the public realm to
Sunil Govinnage
42
one “confi ned to spectacles and acclamation” (Habermas
1971:75).
* * * *
All of this predicts to exactly how things may be seen to
have worked in the Lankan polity under the adoption of the
majoritarian strategy by the nationali(ist) bourgeois leadership
in their pursuit of their will to power. Especially in the period
since Independence, not only have traditional institutions
and their persona been restored to utmost visibility and
prominence in society, all of their signs, symbols, practices,
rituals, beliefs, and so on have come to conspicuously fi ll
the landscape. However, appropriatively if not unwillingly
brought under the governance of purposive strategic action
by the political leadership, they seem to have more than lost
their moorings in their pristine frame of reference constructed
around communicative action and its values and inspiration,
with all that such loss entails.
Th e results may most transparently be observed in
the behaviour of some of those who most benefi t from the
political rearrangements eff ected, including, very much, the
affl uent, middle class adherents of the traditions, many of the
most infl uential of them with a knowledge, too, of the other
privileged language of the context, English. Th e past several
decades have seen traditional practices, beliefs and rituals that
had fallen into disuse among many of them coming to assume
an increasingly signifi cant place in the conduct of their lives
and in their presentation of themselves, retrieved for the
purpose from age old practices (such as customary meditation
sessions, pilgrimages, religious and other culturally-related
ceremonies and observances) of the ordinary people who
Perth: My village down under
43
had long followed them simply as a matter of course for the
assurance and meaning they gave to their lives.
Th is is just as might be expected, given the process of
post-colonial retrieval in which the polity was engaged. It did
not, however, as also might be expected, secure these practices
and so on against the depredations of the dehumanizing facets
of the post-Machiavellian politics that had led to the crisis of
the polity, the one-dimensional pursuit of the will to power, the
mindless chauvinism, the triumphalism, the rhetoric and all
other such matters as have been detailed above. For, retrieved for
expedient purposes as, in eff ect, commodities that had sociopolitical
exchange value, and cut off under the conditions of
modernity from the vitalizing energy of their sustaining frame
of reference, these practices and so on have got considerably
diminished in too many cases to ostentatious displays of selfvalidating
feel-good piety, religiosity, patriotism and so on,
glamorized, not-infrequently, by fashionably “sophisticated”
modernist “refi nements” of them – pilgrimages, for instance,
have taken on extravagant international dimensions, in the
form of meditation trips to resorts overseas.
A major eff ect of such displays has been to deliver
these people into that chain of regression in the sensibility
detailed earlier, while also throwing a covering of legitimating
sanctimony over it by the way in which they supply a virtuous
license for what is observable at each stage of the chain – from
an inability to see and recognize what is visibly pleading to
be seen and recognized; to an acquiescence in it based on
a callous indiff erence to the horrendous cost of what was
going on in terms of material damage and human loss and
suff ering, except to the extent that it aff ected one’s “own side”;
to a determined refusal to look too closely at any of it lest
it opens out possibilities of change; and beyond even that,
to an endorsement and approval of the entire unwholesome
Sunil Govinnage
44
situation – all the time under the assumption, sometimes
rendered as an explicit claim, that the displays refl ect not
just devotion to the cause but, even, devoutness as such. Th e
denial of reason that all of this implies, one of the traits that
most distinguish humankind, and also of the accompanying
sense of ethics, which is among the fi ner of those traits
(Habermas observes that the “technocratic consciousness”
seeking dominance within modernity refl ects “the repression
of ‘ethics’ as such as a category of life” – 1971: 112), is indeed
very distressing, representing as they do a certain diminution
of humanity itself. But, what is perhaps equally if not more
saddening is the utter loss of the capacity to care that all of
this constitutes in actuality a tragic violation or defi lement of
everything that had lent meaning and validity and beauty and
lustre to the traditions professed, at their best.
What this means from the point of view of recovery
from the crisis is that the resources immediately available in
the environment for meaningfully addressing it are not only
placed beyond access but also distorted towards ends that
are the opposite of what they were in principle designed for
- which can only help lock the polity inextricably into the
perception that there is no alternative to what is, with all the
intellectual and moral capitulations that that entails.
* * * *
And this is where Govinnage makes a distinguished re-entry
into the argument, through, precisely, his act, alluded to at
the beginning of this essay, of giving back to the home he
has left behind. It is an act that defi nes itself by reference to
the particular form in which Govinnage invokes the Sinhala
Buddhist traditions he has inherited from that home and by
the specifi c way in which he allows that invocation to play
Perth: My village down under
45
itself out in his writing. Th ese derive expressly from the nature
of Govinnage’s own distinctive response to his diasporic
circumstances. But, in the especial implications and value
they have from the viewpoint of the crisis in his lost home
and the ethnic-linguistic-religious confl ict that caused it, they
help noteworthily distinguish his writing from a great deal of
the writing of the Lankan diaspora, creative or otherwise (and
we cannot forget the prolifi c exchanges on the internet), that,
whether directly or not, is relevant to those matters.
Doubtless, that writing is quite heterogeneous in
its nature. But, the most high profi led of the responses
and attitudes to these matters to which it gives expression,
the ones that most call attention to themselves by virtue of
their visibility, vociferousness and the intensity of their selfpresentation,
and not just in verbal terms but in the actual
actions and behaviour of the people involved as well, seem
to suggest, empirically, some kind of importation of the
confl ict, hardly altered in its essentials, to the new places of
domicile. Closely reproducing many of the negative features
shared across the confl ict in the home back there, they project
themselves, by and large, in terms of two implacably polarized
constituencies, each varied enough within itself but together
more or less corresponding, on the whole, to the two major
camps of antagonists in that home. Indeed, in some ways
the negative features acquire sharper profi les, as they lend
themselves to the service of an endemic conscience-salving
impulse among the people concerned. Aroused by a certain
gnawing sense within them of disloyalty to the home that they
have left behind, in many cases in response to transparently
self-serving motivations, this is an impulse that prevails upon
them to demonstrate their loyalty by indulging the negatives
even more uninhibitedly than usual.
Sunil Govinnage
46
Th is is further encouraged by the certainty that those
who do so would, in the safety of where they currently are,
run no risk of having to pay the immediate violent physical
costs to which the people left behind are constantly vulnerable.
Th e only real constraints would, of course, be the conditions
laid down by the adopted places of domicile (which would
certainly not look with favour upon any intrusive disruption
of their own stability) for the continued enjoyment of the
material and other benefi ts in search of which they had found
their way to them. Th is is something to which a judicious
eye is always kept open; which partly explains why, outside
of homes and such venues of ordinary social dealings, places
of religious gatherings have become favoured safe havens for
the seemingly innocuous pursuit of these less than helpful
responses and attitudes, providing, generally outside of their
realms of strictly religious worship and observances, the
requisite conditions of social interaction for the purpose of
cultivating and promoting them.
* * * *
Govinnage’s writing decidedly separates him from all such
aberrancies. His struggles, in several of his poems, to recover
meaning and self in the unfamiliar and sometimes forbidding
surroundings of his new home have awakened in him a
heightened consciousness of the distinctive nature of his
bonding with his traditions and, also, with the home from
which he had inherited them. It is a bonding that had taken
place by way of the mutually nourishing and constitutive ways
in which he and they had together grown with and into each
other over the many years before he had left for his new home.
Th rough enduring memories that fl ood back of all of those
taken-for-granted routines of behaviour and action, those
Perth: My village down under
47
observances and beliefs and understandings and so much
more that had been immediate part of his lived experience in
his one-time home, he arrives at fresh new recognition of the
meaning and beauty and satisfaction his traditions had once
lent to his life, and a deep sense of the promise of regenerative
sustenance and energy that they had held out to him; also,
furthermore, of their continuing presence within him. Th e
pain of their loss in the very diff erent circumstances of his
adopted home only helps to acutely sharpen and reinforce all
of this. Th e unconcealed sadness of his nostalgic recollections
of these things to which he now no longer reassuringly has
direct access is held from overfl owing into mere self-gratifying
sentimentality by a pithy, near-prose narrative style. Laced
with a dry, ironic kind of wit that puts on view an alert mind
at play among the matters under scrutiny, this is a style that in
fact directs the sadness into a telling poignancy.
Such features of Govinnage’s writing help defi ne for
it an aesthetics that rests sturdily on, among other things,
an immediately felt and entirely convincing sense of his
inherited traditions as estimable endowments, rich in the
utterly wholesome integrity of their human potential. It is a
sense of them that, precisely by virtue of this wholesomeness,
remains refreshingly immune to the defi lements and
distortions that could be wreaked on them through the
alluring interpellations that the post-Machiavellian politics
of the country would deliver to them through its seductive
populist rhetoric, its mindless chauvinistic appeals, its squinteyed
one-dimensionality and so on.
And out of that aesthetic, Govinnage creates a poetry
that off ers to the homeland that he has left behind (but
which has not let him go) a priceless bounty in the form of a
compelling reminder of something critically important that
it had allowed itself to forget, the resources it already has in
Sunil Govinnage
48
its own immediate environment to meaningfully address and
retrieve itself from the crisis in which it has ensnared itself. Th ese
are very much the resources that would enable its modernist
sensibility, which has lost its way under the compulsions of the
politics of a modernity working along the negative strand of
its dialectic, to re-educate itself towards placing itself back on
track. As part of the process, it would release that modernity
to work along the positive strand of its dialectic and restore
to the polity its capacity to move productively forward in the
direction of the truly equal and enriching democratic destiny
that its multifaceted ethno-linguistic-religious post-colonial
realities both call for and promise, the alternative that, the
Th atcherite invitation to acquiescence notwithstanding, it
actually has available to it.
* * * *
Th e account of the politics of the polity given earlier, detailing
the eff ects of the workings of modernity along the negative
strand of its dialectic, could well have caused this positive
strand to have been lost sight of. But, it had always of the very
nature of modernity, very much been there, intertwined with
the negative strand; the intrinsically dialectical makeup of that
modernity does not allow it to have been otherwise. Habermas
(1971) characterizes the situation as one that represents the
“dialectic of potential and will” (p. 61) within modernity
(emphasis his). “Will” we have already looked at (from two
angles, political and economic), as something identifi ed with
“desire”. “Potential” refers to what is “possible and feasible”
within the societal realities of modernity that purposive
rational action had helped construct (p. 61), and involves “life
problems” (p. 56), fundamental “questions of value and life”
(p. 66) the “rational clarifi cation” of which cannot be supplied
Perth: My village down under
49
by the methods of instrumental rationality. Such clarifi cation
requires another kind of rationalization, one that, freed of the
“rigidity” and “repressiveness” of instrumental rationality, and
providing “access…to refl ection” (p. 119), would enable “ a
transformation of the institutional framework” (which is the
level at which this kind of rationalization works – p. 118) that
would “furnish the members of society with the opportunity
for…emancipation and progressive individuation” (p. 119).
Th at other kind of rationalization and the changes it
would help bring about could not clearly take place under
“self-regulated” purposive rational action (p. 117); it would
require, instead, “symbolic interaction” or “communicative
action”, the form of “reciprocal communication” through the
symbolic means of “ordinary language” that was mentioned
earlier as what the traditions had in principle encouraged. Th ese,
oriented towards mutual understanding among participants
such that “each could recognize himself in the other” (p. 88),
presuppose an equal negotiation, under conditions that are
“free from domination” and “compulsion” (pp.118, 88), of
the norms by which action would be governed. Habermas
shows here that he strongly shares the understanding of the
workings of language and of the discourse it goes to make up
expounded so well by Bakhtin many years earlier – they are of
their most rightful nature not monologic and unidirectional
(from the stronger to the weaker) but reciprocal and dialogic.
As Bakhtin put it, these latter features represent "the natural
orientation of any living discourse" (1981: 279).
Th e norms negotiated by such discursive means would
be “consensual norms, which defi ne reciprocal expectations
about behaviour and which must be understood and
recognized” by participants, alongside the “obligations”
to which they bind them (Habermas 1971: 92) and the
“values” they cause to be “internalized” by them (p. 107).
Sunil Govinnage
50
Needless to say, the whole exercise places a high premium
on refl exive self-awareness, and, also, renounces an exclusive
preoccupation with the self at the expense of the other. It
would also, of necessity, entail a diff erent kind of rationality
from instrumental rationality, namely “communicative
rationality”. Th is is a more encompassing form of rationality
that seeks not to discard or void the instrumental rationality
on which so much of modernity has constructed itself but to
go beyond and transcend it; and to do so in ways that would
free us to seek out not just “what we want for our lives” –
much of which instrumental rationality would after all take
care of -, but “how we would like to live if we could fi nd out,
with regard to attainable potentials, how we could live” (120 –
emphases Habermas’s).
Th at modernity furnishes polities and peoples with such
potential along the positive strand of its dialectic is attested
by, among other things, its provision, as an inevitable part
of the package it supplies, of the various modernist forms of
democracy in contemporary polities, along with their declared
ideals, their varying types of apparatus, the public sphere
and so on. Habermas calls attention to the student protests
of the 1960’s in Germany, which divested of the coercive,
anti-rational tendencies they sometimes manifested, present
further evidence of its actuality (1971: Ch. 2, pp. 120-122).
Noam Chomsky leads us to recognize in his extensive writing
on politics that what is involved in this kind of protest does
not remain, simply, irrelevant potential, citing the actual
impact that, among others, youth activism oriented towards
democratic concerns, had had on the responses of people in the
United States to the Vietnam War, and also to the Gulf Wars
of the past two decades. In the latter cases, they also helped
bring about some signifi cant positive diff erences in these
responses across the wars. Th ese are, moreover, concerns that
Perth: My village down under
51
expressed themselves with equal vigour right across the world
in the radical protest against, especially, the second Gulf War.
Aung San Suu Kyi and the “Saff ron Revolution” of
2007 in Myanmar represent further stirring manifestations
of similar concerns and the potential they manifest. To
these must be added the impressive movements, campaigns
and acts of resistance, protest and affi rmation constructed
around issues of imperialist domination, women’s rights,
blackness and colour, peace, the environment, disparities in
global terms of trade, the unequal distribution of wealth and
resources, and many other such that set themselves against
modernity whenever, working along the negative strand of
its dialectic, it oversteps the mark. A particularly revealing
instance is provided by the global fi nancial crisis of the closing
years of the fi rst decade of this century. Even though state
after state did all they could to rescue the banks that had,
through their greed and untrammelled desire for profi t,
caused the crisis in the fi rst place, and even though once these
banks had recovered they sought to continue in the same old
way, not least by continuing to reward their top executives
who drove the collapse the same kind of obscene bonuses they
had always paid themselves while leading the world to crisis,
there is some talk, real enough if not entirely focussed on
the actual need, about restraint, control and regulation, even
among those who most benefi t from the system. Refl ecting,
to some extent at least, values-oriented modes of thinking
that remain, in analytical terms, fundamentally autonomous
of the empirical rationality that governs these workings, all
such initiatives as those listed above have demonstrably made
it impossible for modern states, and their agents, to act any
longer with absolute impunity. Th e persistent and courageous,
if slender, line, mentioned above, of reasoned dissent over the
past several decades within the Lankan polity itself, in the
Sunil Govinnage
52
face of increasing erosions of democratic ideals and human
rights, belongs with distinction within this tradition. Yes,
the potential undeniably is there, along with the chances
of at least its partial realization in praxis, which after all is
what counts ultimately. Govinnage’s poetry provides further
estimable evidence of that reality, doing so, moreover, in a
way that inescapably directs his modern polity to the resources
it has available for the purpose of turning it to constructive
account in action.
* * * *
Th is he does with a natural ease that derives a lot of its persuasive
strength from his openness to and identifi cation with his
traditions and what he has received from and constructed out
of them at their healthful best in developing his aesthetic. His
writing aff ords no place to the formal institutions; neither has
it any dogmas or pieties to present, conventional theological
injunctions or prescriptions to deliver, or sermons to preach.
Govinnage is, after all, an artiste. Familiar practices, beliefs,
rituals and symbols do fi gure in his invocation of his traditions,
as indeed they cannot but; never, however, in evangelistic
advocacy of them or, simply, in unthinking obedience to
any binding routines that they might conventionally impose
on people. Th ey are there, rather, for the potential and the
meanings they embody, the potential and the meanings that, he
knows from his own lived experience, they could contribute to
properly perceiving and understanding the issues of existence,
interaction, self-realization and so on raised by the human
happenings under exploration. From the point of view of the
crisis of the polity, this would, by raising consciousness of the
potential and resources its people actually do have available to
them and the choices that these would allow them in making
Perth: My village down under
53
their decisions, help point towards the praxis through which
it might be creatively addressed.
What we are seeing here is one of the more concrete
forms in which Govinnage’s invocation of his traditions
tends to actually crystallize in his writing, namely as an
acute, ethically informed, and also politically quite radical,
social consciousness and awareness, leavened by a perceptive
critical intellect, all of it highly modernist in its nature and
contemporary texture. Emphatically repulsing the implicit
invitation to use the traditions in his writing as an incitement
to modernist violence, and declining, too, to deploy them with
pious conventional religiosity or, even, merely decoratively, as
some kind of, to use T.S. Eliot’s phrase, pleasing archaeological
reconstruction, he turns them to pointed account in the form
of, among other things, this critical social consciousness/
awareness.
Issuing often in quite forthright critiques of features
of his modernist surroundings, this, in fact, is among the
attributes that substantially help assign to Govinnage’s
writing the larger import it was claimed above to have, by
the way in which it carries his aesthetic beyond the strongly
personal emotions of loss and grief that play so pronounced
a role in it to a sense of something more encompassing. It is
this consciousness/awareness that leads him in his poems set
in his adopted home, for instance, to his deep concern over
the notorious plight of the Australian Aboriginals, though its
expression in these poems is not restricted to just that subject.
* * * *
It is that same consciousness/awareness that expresses itself
also in his writing about his lost homeland, not least in his
Sunil Govinnage
54
poems built around the ethnic confl ict. In these it does
so with especial distinction, owing, particularly, to the
unequivocal way in which it causes him to thrust aside the
noxious temptations to which allegiance to traditions all
too often make people overly vulnerable and, instead, draw
affi rmatively from them what matters most to the polity and
its peoples at this moment of their crisis, in terms of sensibility
and understanding (in both the epistemological/theoretical
and the human-interactive/ethical senses of the word) as well
as of the praxis that that would help generate in pursuit of the
alternative which it needs to fi nd.
In his poem For Th ose Diasporic Islanders Who Left
Behind a Weeping Land, written when the war was at its height,
he laments:
We have supported
Two warring parties
In the north and south
To keep a fading dream
In our heads
And to keep our hopes
For an imagined homeland.
None of the all-too-familiar misrecognitions here
or, which is worse, unyielding refusals to recognize, nor
the denials and transfers of culpability and evasions of
responsibility – those stultifying features that so defi ne the
politics of the confl ict and the crisis it has spawned. Th e
sorrowful reproach expressed in the poem is directed towards
the “we” of the poem, an inclusive “we” that does not allow it
to be selectively targeted at any kind of implacable “enemy”
on the “other side”, only at the tragedy of the collective failure
of the community as a whole, including, very particularly, the
Perth: My village down under
55
“we” who “supported” the parties in confl ict with each other.
(No doubt, the pronoun specifi cally refers in the context to
the Lankan diaspora, but given that, as observed earlier, the
diaspora has tended in a real sense to reproduce the major
features of the relevant situation back home, it may be
considered to implicitly take in the whole Lankan community
in general.)
Th e reproach takes on darker hues as it moves from the
exposé in the lines above of the illusory nature of the objects/
goals desired to a very remorseful recognition of the appalling
human cost of that shared failure:
We have given our dollars and hopes
And poisoned the minds of our kids
Left behind
To kill each other creating
A weeping land
Like their mothers
Who are crying for the dead.
Grief and compassion fl ow mingled in these lines, as they
do across the whole poem, directed towards “our children”,
whose minds, “poisoned” by “us”, would lead them to
….kill
Not knowing each other
As they speak diff erent words;
towards their mothers on both sides of the confl ict, to whom
these very actions of their own children can, in their reciprocal
workings, bring only tears of sorrow; towards “our imagined
homeland” itself, which shares fully in this sorrow as it is re-
“creat(ed)” by these actions of its children as “a weeping land”;
and, also, towards “ourselves”, whose
Sunil Govinnage
56
hopes and prayers
To create our homes again
In a weeping island,
“tucked” into “our dollars”, fade into nothingness in the
meaningless futility of it all – without, however (and this
renders the dismay even more dire), teaching us anything
whatsoever: “we still keep our hopes” and “dream of a country”
(emphasis mine). Nothing that matters has changed, allowing
the poem to end with only a slightly altered version of the very
bleak stanza with which it began.
Th e anguish is very strong, but we cannot set aside the
remorse and the sense of self-reproach that are mixed into it,
both refl ecting not that generally unproductive disposition
to assign blame but a readiness to accept responsibility, and
in a shared, collective manner. Th is is important, for it selfevidently
signals the workings of the intellect in Govinnage’s
writing, more than once alluded to above. Primed by his
inherited traditions, which had had no truck with that
modernist deformation known as the dissociated sensibility, to
both think his feelings and feel his thoughts in an integrated
manner, he eff ortlessly wards off the mindlessness of the
emotions of patriotic chauvinism, triumphalism, militarism,
hatred of the other and so on, through the obfuscating force
of which the confl ict is sustained by its politics. Instead, he
draws everything, including the emotions that matter so much
to him, whether positive or despondent, fi rmly into the realm
of rational contemplation and self-refl exive consideration,
opening it all out, thereby, to their “redeeming power”
(Habermas 1971: 61). A lot of that power, it is becoming
increasingly apparent from the nature of Govinnage’s responses
to the confl ict, derives from the quality of self-refl exivity,
that all-important ability to turn the gaze inward and to see
Perth: My village down under
57
unfl inchingly what there is to see, allowing no escape from
recognition (whether in the form of failures or of refusals
to recognize), no suppressions of memory, no concealments
of the uncomfortable, no abdication of the moral sense
and acquiescence in the unacceptable, no anaesthetizations
of human sympathy, no evasions of responsibility – all of
these as well as the various other such unseemly features that
defi ned the politics of the confl ict and the more prominent
of the responses to it, disastrously obstructing the polity from
making its way out of its crisis.
Th e self-refl exive intellect may be very consistently seen
at work across all of Govinnage’s writing, most immediately
and concretely at what might be considered its most “local”
level, the actual manner and movement of the verse itself.
Here it expresses itself through a pervasive irony that reveals
that intellect bearing alertly all the while on the tragedy
under contemplation, seeing all round it and its various often
incompatible facets and refusing to allow any self-mitigating
escape from the reality of the challenges of understanding
they pose. Part of the reality that it thus helps lay bare in the
poem is a paradox that lies at the heart of the tragedy, that
of the disparity between the highly illusory hopes and desires
entertained on the one hand and the actual outcomes that
their pursuit has accomplished on the other. Th e irony ensures,
sometimes with bitterness, that that contradiction cannot
possibly be missed, working through purposefully unexpected
contrasts designed to surprise us: as in the collocation “dollars
and hopes”, which works through bathos in reverse; or in the
lines cited above, where killing “creates”, be it a “weeping” land;
or in the unusual metaphor of “tucking” hopes and prayers
into dollars, as if they were tangible commodities to be bought
and sold; or in the pointed incongruity of the way in which
Sunil Govinnage
58
(we) talk about a peace with a hatred
In our hearts towards each other.
Yet, however harsh the recognitions to which we are led
in this way by the conscious, self-refl exive intellect, they only
help enhance rather than diminish or dispel the emotions of
sympathy and concern that express themselves alongside these
recognitions for the victims that the tragedy so comprehensively
draws into itself. Th ese are often sorrowing, sometimes even
vinegary or sardonic in their texture, but always marked
distinctly by a deep and outreaching compassion for all alike
of these victims. In the poem we have looked at above, the
victims include the entire “weeping land” left behind by the
“diasporic islanders” in whose voice he makes to speak, as well
as these islanders themselves, their own role in contributing
to its plight notwithstanding. In his poem Unaccompanied
Children, the victim is a little boy, identifi ed by his language
with the majority side of the confl ict, whom he runs into on
a visit he makes as a tourist from his new home to a camp for
children displaced by the war in his old home, obviously under
violence perpetrated by the other side. Th e boy’s parents have
been killed and his younger sister’s eyes have been blinded
by shrapnel, and he pleadingly asks the visitor, in Sinhala,
“What can I do, where can I go?” Th e terrible desperation
in these questions reduces the poet to an intolerable sense of
his own utter uselessness in the face of the tragedy, and this
issues in a bitter, mercilessly self-mocking irony that has an
overpowering impact:
I couldn’t answer his questions
I can only give him Australian apples
Sri Lankan rupees.
Perth: My village down under
59
And yet, through all of the intense negativity of the emotions,
there shows through even stronger an unmistakable sense of
compassionate identifi cation with the boy and his plight.
It is this very same sense of compassionate identifi cation
that extends also, and with no less intensity, in the poem
A Request to the “displaced child”, this time on the “other”
side of the confl ict, whom he sees in a photograph published
in a newspaper, standing by his fl ooded dwelling in a Camp
for Internally Displaced Persons “in northern Sri Lanka” (as
the legend that prefaces the poem has it), after the conclusion
of the war but not, clearly, of the crisis. Addressing this boy
as “dear son”, across an ethnic divide that gets wiped away as
he does so (this mind you, despite the fact that the expression
barely captures the evocative resonances of protective aff ection
that distinguish the Sinhala kinship term he uses in the original
poem of which this is a loose but self-suffi cient “translation”),
he says:
We did release you but the other day, rescuing you from a cruel war
Th is fable of your joy is now to me mere news.
Why are you so alone this early morning amidst the fl oods?
What today has caused the relief of freedom to dissolve?
…….
Why do you lament this early morning in your seclusion?
Th e feelings expressed in the three poems we have
looked at are obviously very strong. But, given particularly
the polarized attitudes that the confl ict had helped set in
place, what most arrests is their perfect non-selectivity, their
magnanimous and unqualifi ed openness to the suff ering
infl icted by the confl ict wherever it was to be seen, and the
entirely spontaneous extension of the deep, outreaching
concern and compassion that it induces towards all alike of the
Sunil Govinnage
60
victims, no matter with which side they might conventionally
be identifi ed. Th is quality, refl ecting impressively on the
wholesomeness of the natural impulse of human sympathy
that underlies the emotions expressed, shows itself consistently
across all of Govinnage’s writing on the ethnic confl ict. In the
process, it sets it decidedly apart from a great deal of the many
other expressions of concern over the human suff ering that
the confl ict had elicited. Such expressions appealed no less
to natural human sympathy, neither were their emotions any
weaker. But, they invariably tended to slant towards one or
another favoured side of the confl ict, directing the feelings
towards the tendentious end of promoting the concerns or
commending the virtues of that side or, even, particularly
outside the realm of creative writing, of securing support,
material and otherwise, for it, not-uncommonly with a great
deal of self-promotional fanfare.
Govinnage’s responses are diff erent, for if his emotions
are strong, they do not run beyond reason. His self-refl exive
mind had led him to see into the contradictory complexities
of the confl ict, to accept that responsibility for it needed to
be shared by all those who had allowed themselves to drift
along with it on the terms it had imposed on them and to
acknowledge that the fallout from it had grievously aff ected
people, many absolutely innocent, on both sides of it alike.
Th at same mind had also simultaneously helped protect the
impulse of human sympathy within him from the assaults of
partisanship and release it to express itself as it was naturally
disposed to whenever it was confronted with those terrible
consequences. Emphatically, though, none of this amounted
in any way to a closing of the eyes to the reality of the
confl ict and of the issues it raised. Th is would have rendered
him vulnerable to all of those features mentioned earlier as
obstructing extrication from the continuing crisis of the polity
Perth: My village down under
61
and securing its entrapment within a status quo to which there
could be no alternative, namely the failures or refusals of
recognition, the amnesia, the abdication of the moral sense,
and so on.
* * * *
If, in disallowing such an escapist stance on the confl ict, the selfrefl
exive mind had also ensured that Govinnage’s responses to
the confl ict would not be discriminatory in the ways remarked
on a moment ago, it had, correlatively, ensured too that they
would not be indiscriminate. Th e way out of the crisis was not
to be sought in unctuous disregard of the fact that something
had gone horribly wrong, and continued to remain so, nor in a
benign expurgation of that fact. Th e self-refl exive gaze needed,
necessarily and unfl inchingly, to fall on all those factors of
the confl ict that cried out to be frontally acknowledged and
addressed if there was to be any hope or chance of a proper
and just resolution to it, and these included very much its
very roots and causes. Th erefore, as we have already seen, in
his poem for Th ose Diasporic Islanders, Govinnage relentlessly
exposes the illusoriness of the respective desires that on the
two sides fuelled the confl ict, tightening the screw even more
painfully as he does so by laying out in full view the vicious
destructiveness of the violence unleashed by these desires and
the way in which this actually brings on the opposite of what
was desired. At the same time, he refuses, too, to appeasingly
play down the role of those for whom he claims to be speaking
(the “diasporic islanders”) in bringing this situation about, or
to shield them from responsibility.
Th e following lines from his poem A Request (already
cited but reproduced here for ease of reading), supply further
evidence of the way in which the self-refl exive mind disposes
Sunil Govinnage
62
Govinnage to look straight on at all of those seemingly
incompatible features that so bedevil the crisis and at the same
time equips him to do so eff ectively.
We did release you but the other day, rescuing you from a cruel war
Th is fable of your joy is now to me mere news.
In the complexity of the workings of language within
them, these lines alert us to the contradictions of the situation
and the confusions of recognition they might well cause. Th e
fi rst line sets down as an incontestable fact that the little boy
had been helplessly caught up in a cruel war, the end of which,
secured by the military victory achieved, if recently, by one
of the two sets of combatants, had “rescue(d)” him from its
cruelty. Th e semi-emphatic use of the auxiliary “did” makes
it impossible to dispute that this was indeed for the boy a
“release”, allowing the poet, through the use of the plural fi rst
person pronoun “we”, to approvingly identify both himself
and by extension his readership with this outcome. Th e gaze
remains steadily on the human issue of the cruelty of the war,
and the recognition remains clear, if implicit, that neither
of the two armed parties involved could be absolved from
responsibility for it, including, very much, the party that had,
professedly, been waging the war on behalf of the boy.
Th e next line turns all of this sharply around (without,
however, taking away from any of it), as the sight of the boy
in the photograph, attesting to what has actually happened in
the aftermath of the boy’s liberation, brings disillusionment,
reducing the “joyous” news announcing it to but a “fable”, a
form of fi ction. Th e expression of the disillusionment in the
line is, however, by no means as prosaic as its statement in the
preceding sentence is. If I might use Hallidayan grammar for
the purposes of exposition, the theme position in the sentence
Perth: My village down under
63
is fi lled by the phrase “Th is fable of your joy”. Conventionally,
this is the grammatical position that announces the point
of departure of the message communicated by the sentence,
and it is, also by convention, fi lled by a phrase signifying
something that is taken as given, supplying the necessary
taken-for-granted background for the rest of the message, and,
therefore, not, by normal expectations, open to challenge.
By implication, therefore, the claim made by this taken-forgranted
phrase, namely that the joy is but a fable or fi ction,
lies, in principle, beyond dispute.
By contrast, the original “joyous” news, which might
well have been expected to claim theme position by virtue of
the objective fact that it is the availability of this news that in
the fi rst place allowed the claim being made in the sentence
to be made at all, thereby claiming indisputable taken-forgranted
or “given” background status for itself within that
sentence, is consigned to the rheme position. Conventionally,
this is the position assigned to those linguistic elements that
supply the “new” information that is being communicated
about what has been presented in the theme as the given or
taken-for-granted factor in the message, thereby supplying,
from a communicative point of view, the very rationale
of the sentence – sentences are conventionally expected to
communicate through their grammar something “new”
to their recipients that they did not already know, beyond
simply the taken-for-granted or assumed knowledge. It is this
“new” information that most calls attention to itself in the
communicative act, and for that reason, the rheme is where
the focus of attention of the recipients conventionally tends
to fall.
Given all of this, Govinnage’s reversal of the
conventional grammatical expectations in the sentence works
Sunil Govinnage
64
ironically to powerful eff ect. It is not just that the phrase that
might have been expected from the objective circumstances
to appear in theme position as the supplier of the takenfor-
granted background information has been transferred to
rheme position, where, by convention, it now calls attention
to itself as the supplier, instead, of “new” information. In
addition, it has, in the process, been stripped, by courtesy
in fact of the phrase that has now claimed indisputable,
taken-for-granted theme status for itself, of all that lent it
distinction and value, its original “joyousness”, even worse its
“truthfulness”, and reduced to the ignominy of being “mere
news”. Calling attention to itself in this inglorious form as
the new information that is being communicated, even more
so in fact by its occupation of the fi nal position in the rheme,
the most prominently focal position within it, it devastatingly
undermines the original claim made, namely that this had in
actual fact been a “joyful” “rescue” and a “release”.
Th is dispiriting betrayal of the hopes that had been
raised launches Govinnage on a series of rhetorical questions,
clearly designed not only to elicit compassion for the little
boy, as those of them already cited above obviously do, but
also, very expressly, to stimulate untrammelled probings
of the situation with a view to uncovering the factors that
would account for his plight. Th eir eff ect, therefore, is to
throw the spotlight sharply on the majoritarian politics that
so self-evidently off ers itself for the purpose, opening out its
discourse to penetrating self-refl exive deconstruction, in the
process also putting under challenging interrogation the role
uncomprehendingly and desecratingly assigned within that
politics to the Sinhala-Buddhist traditions that Govinnage
himself so deeply values.
Perth: My village down under
65
Was your sin that you disinherited my Language?
……
…why are our dear children imprisoned in a forest encampment?
What parentage and appearance have you inherited?
What mother tongue would you keep in the years to come?
Most of the questions here, like all those cited earlier, are whquestions,
seemingly open-ended in their nature. But, the one
polar question included, the fi rst one above, more specifi cally
points the direction in which the answers are invited to go.
Latching on to a central claim on which the majoritarian
politics involved turned, namely that the minority language
fatally endangered the majority language, the question
demands just one of the two possible answers, negative or
positive, that, by the grammatical conventions that govern
polar questions, are expected to what it asks about that claim.
Th e answer to which the information provided in the rest
of the poem, indeed its whole thrust, clearly points is the
negative one.
Once this negative answer is implicitly elicited in this
way, the wh-questions that follow reinforce it by uncovering,
through the answers they themselves implicitly elicit, the
violations, of the traditions as well as of humanity, into
which the politics had pushed the polity. Th ese are literally
exemplifi ed for the poem by the camp in which the boy had
been confi ned; and among the more disturbing of its future
implications that the questions bring into the open are those
that raise deep fears about the lethal severance from and
attrition, through assimilation/incorporation (“what parentage
and appearance”) and linguistic expropriation/subjugation
(“what mother tongue”), of all of those reassuringly familiar
inheritances which sustain and help make him who he
Sunil Govinnage
66
is. Th e spectre that raises itself is of the obliteration of his
self-hood and his linguistic-cultural identity. We remember
in this respect that what most imprints itself on the poet’s
consciousness when he sees the boy’s photograph is his
aloneness, his separation from community and from all the
sustenance that would have comfortingly supplied him.
Govinnage’s identifi cation with this is immediate and intense,
for in his own diasporic existence, his sense of his severance
from the reassuring familiarities of his traditions is something
that recurrently returns to torment him.
But all of this prompts us to return for a moment to the
polar question. Th e way it is formulated, it appears to take for
granted (or presuppose) that the boy has in fact committed a
“sin”. Th is is because, the inverted subject noun phrase of a
polar question (in this case, “your sin”) appearing, as expected,
together with a preceding fi nite verbal element (in this case
“was”) in theme position, conventionally signifi es something
that is presupposed (to exist, to be true) and, therefore, not by
normal expectations, open to challenge, with the possessive
pronoun (“your”) that qualifi es the head noun (“sin”) further
reinforcing its presupposed status. Th e nominal “that-clause”
that follows functions, in rheme position, as the grammatical
complement to supply the (new) information needed to fi ll
in or complete the question, in this case by specifying what
that sin was, identifying it in precise terms. Given the nature
of the presupposed subject phrase (“your sin”) relative to
which it is positioned, this clause functions as what might be
termed its “factive” complement, that is a complement that
makes a claim that, by convention, is presupposed to be true.
As such observations accumulate, it becomes evident that the
polar question formulated out of all of it does more, in the
way it works, than simply elicit the negative answer desired,
going signifi cantly further than that. Drawing on all of the
Perth: My village down under
67
knowledge of the world (in this case, of the confl ict) implicitly
elicited or supplied as background information in the rest
of the poem, including the series of other questions asked,
it eff ectively, if still implicitly, “defeases” (that is, cancels/
dispels) the very presuppositions it started with in the fi rst
place, thereby suggesting that there was no disinheritance of
the poet’s language, indeed no “sin” at all.
Th e revelations bared along the way by the implicit
answers to the questions build cumulatively up to a point
where the poet can no longer contain himself. Momentarily
leaving behind the interrogative structures he had favored
until then, he bursts into an assertive exclamatory statement,
that, with utmost fi nality annuls the exclusionary assumption
that lies at the heart of the Jathika Chintanaya ideology on
which the politics of majoritarianism rests and, thereby, the
entire majoritarian pretext for the confl ict. Starting off with
a very scathing, and irrevocable, one-word dismissal of the
assumption, this statement goes on to specifi cally counter it
by sharing equally out with all of its peoples, and in the most
intimate and incontestable way possible, namely “son-ship”,
the ownership of the land that the ideology would deny to
the boy, an ownership the right to which he, the poet, himself
quite as a matter of course assumes (through his use of the fi rst
person possessive pronoun).
Absurd, to query your son-ship of our soil!
* * * *
In other poems, Govinnage’s deconstructive challenges to the
institutionalized ideology of the polity become even more
direct and explicit.
Sunil Govinnage
68
We all began with Lion’s blood, descendants of ‘Sinhabahu’
Who began the myth that divided the country.
It’s the reason why we came here, to protect you
From the bloody Civil War in Sri Lanka.
Th e war that made Ragu leaves his Sri Lankan dream home
And run to Toronto to start again – my friend alone,
Like we were here, without friends or relatives,
And not knowing even the names of the trees.
(To Our Daughter who is on the Move)
We see here again, in testimony to Govinnage’s
consistency in these respects, several of those defi ning
themes and features to which we have already seen his nondiscriminatory
but discriminating self-refl exive mind directing
his writing: the incalculable cost infl icted by the confl ict on
the country and its people, the anguish of the severance from
the home country forced upon many of the émigrés by it, the
consequent sense of aloneness engendered by separation from
family and friends, even from the familiar landscape (“not
knowing even the names of the trees” – the impact of this
is powerful), the shattering of dreams – all of this calling for
unreserved concern and compassion for the victims, including
both the Sinhala poet himself and his family as well as his
Tamil friend, Ragu, all alike caught up in the same tragic web
of violence.
What is particularly noteworthy, however, is his
courageous readiness to go against the grain of the approach
to the confl ict that was increasingly consolidating itself,
particularly after the conclusion of the war, as the standard
approach in the mainstream, which was not to look too closely
at or remember too much of how the confl ict came about.
Govinnage opts, instead, to direct the polity back to the very
Perth: My village down under
69
sources of the confl ict, even though this entailed the painful
acknowledgement of the role and responsibility of his own
ethnic-cultural-linguistic traditions in it. For the purpose, he
targets the myth of origin that functioned as a rallying symbol
of the majoritarian ideology, the ancient legend of Sinhabahu,
off spring of a lion and a princess who, after rescuing his mother
and his sister from his father (who had loved and cared for
all three of them, if possessively) and then killing him, went
on to progenitor the Sinhala (or “Lion”) race. Tracing in this
patricidal legend of the origin of the race innate sources of the
violence that projected to that of the confl ict that “divided”
(the people of ) the country (we note how “bloody”, with its
connotations of violence, destruction and death, is played
against “blood” in the sense of a vital life force involved in
descent), he unequivocally places responsibility for its plight
on it.
Another poem selects for similar interrogation
Dutugemunu, the Sinhala king who in the second century
B.C. had attacked and subjugated the Tamil kingdom in the
island, and who was perhaps the most potent rallying symbol
of the majoritarian ideology, having been made so by assiduous
propagation, even through the offi cial education system, over
the years (Siriwardena et al: n.d.). In Th ree Views on History
and the Nation, Govinnage sandwiches the perspective of
majoritarian ideologues, constructed around their yearning
for a latter-day Dutugemunu who would, as expressed by
“(a) ‘Buddhist monk’ from Colombo”, “rescue the nation”,
by “destroy(ing) the Tamil terrorists”, between two questions
that work to put it penetratingly on trial. Th e fi rst, from
“A cinematographer from Sydney”, asks, in a dispassionate
scholarly tone, about the ethics of the king’s actions “(w)hen he
‘cleaned’ the Tamil kingdom”, with the word ‘cleaned’, between
inverted commas, more than just hinting, modernistically, at
Sunil Govinnage
70
the abomination of ethnic cleansing. Th e second question,
less circumspectly academic in its formulation and more
acidic than the fi rst, comes from “My son who is learning
Buddhism”. It moves from a childlike and seemingly naïve
query to a weighty invitation, equally “innocent” in texture,
to measure the violence that is so readily promoted against the
tenets of the religious tradition invoked by its advocates.
“Why is it okay to kill Tamil terrorists?
I thought among other things
Th e ‘Five Precepts’ don’t allow killing
Of any living beings!”
Th is opens the way for the line that immediately follows to
bring the poem to a perishingly pungent conclusion:
I wish he had asked that question of the ‘monk’.
* * * *
Th is works, of course, as does the rest of the poem (we
note, for instance, at its most obvious and literal level, the
inverted commas round the word/phrase referring to the
monk), through that irony that we have come to recognize
as a characteristic feature of Govinnage’s writing – often, as
here, quite acerbic, even sardonic, but always concerned, in
many cases sorrowingly so. We see here again that consistent
concern with the human cost of the violence of the confl ict.
But the poem particularly directs us to recognize also that
that concern is almost invariably accompanied by a profound
concern over the traditions that are his cherished heritage,
which expresses itself here in an aching grief over their defi ling
(ab)use by the majoritarian ideology. Stanzas 4 and 5 of the
Perth: My village down under
71
poem are especially explicit in this respect, expressing that grief
in what issues as a heartfelt plea to the “saviour of the land” to
recognize the gross incompatibility between the wrongness of
the situation and the compassionate potential of the religion
that has so distortingly got caught up in it and, on that basis,
to release the latter to its fi nest human potential.
We see this again in Th e World is Burning Around Me,
a translation of a Sinhala poem written immediately after the
commencement of the notorious anti-Tamil July Riots of 1983
that once and for all secured the psychological polarization of
the polity along ethnic lines, making civil war inevitable and
democratic extrication from it impossible.
I try to search for my lost friends
In a city that has been burnt
Telling a tale of the heritage of a country.
Govinnage seeks, in this poem which launches the collection,
no extenuating escape from the painful recognition to which
his self-refl exive intellect has remorselessly led him. Th e city
in fl ames speaks the heritage of the country, his heritage, the
heritage he holds so close to himself, and the unqualifi ed
sincerity of his mortifi ed acknowledgement of its role in the
tragedy shows itself in the dedication of the poem to two
Tamil friends: “For Ragunathan and Sivananthan.” Th is is as
remote as can be from the standard response to the violence of
the riots made by large numbers of (English speaking) middle
class members of the majority, who, glibly passing the blame
for it entirely onto “a handful of unruly thugs” or some such
whom they and their people had nothing to do with, often
habitually went on to say something banal like “In fact some
of my close friends are Tamil” – always and without exception
a disingenuous attempt to conceal and, also, favorably dress
Sunil Govinnage
72
up, under self-congratulatorily pious guise, their own eff ective
endorsement of the blatant acts of violent hatred involved,
something that reveals itself in the often implicit but sometimes
explicitly articulated “but” clause that follows it. Once again,
Govinnage cannot be more diff erent. Th e dedication signals,
beyond even unfl inching acknowledgement of the wrongs
that had been perpetrated, a rare and genuine redemptive act
of atonement for them on behalf of his traditions.
Th e anguish that accompanies the bitterness in the
lines just cited, as in all of his poems of the confl ict, reveals a
particularly distinctive aspect of his responses to it, something
that outstandingly distinguishes him from all of those who
celebrate the traditions under the banner of majoritarianism,
namely his willingness to incorporate some pointed critiques
of these traditions, issuing from out of his self-refl exive critical
intellect. What is remarkable, however, is that the critiques
point not to a turning away from the traditions but to its
very opposite, a profound identifi cation with them, a deep
and intense caring for them that is genuine enough for him
to feel pain over their abuse and betrayal. It is important
to recognize this. Govinnage does not break faith with his
traditions; he just cannot. Growing up in and with them,
he had come to know for himself and deep within himself
how invaluably they had given to him, how very much they
had become an integral part of him as he had gone on to
internalize them, awakening as he did so to an intuitive sense
of their potential for truly humane living.
* * * *
It is this that gives him the motivation as well as the confi dence
to subject his traditions to searching critical scrutiny by his
Perth: My village down under
73
self-refl exive intellect, truthfully identifying, and rejecting,
anything that worked against their inbuilt positive potential,
anything at all that either was the consequence of their abuse, or
lent itself to such abuse, under whichever extraneous pressures
that might be exerted. Th roughout, Govinnage shows that he
is completely unafraid that the eff ort will undermine or subvert
the traditions, making it necessary to provide alibis for them
or to protect them at all cost from the truth of imperfections
and failings revealed by the critical intellect. Such protection
would be extended by means of denials, evasions, refusals
to recognize, sophistry, covers up, untruths, whatever, that
would conceal, extenuate or justify them. Th e conviction
that reveals itself in his writing is, on the contrary, that the
traditions had no need at all for such fabricated protection,
for in the positive potential they carried within themselves
they had the resilience and the strength to justify themselves
in the integrity of what they were in their own right, even in
the face of the revelations of the critical intellect. Indeed, the
assumption seems to be that unfl inching acknowledgement of
such revelations, far from undermining that integrity, would
protect it, apart from further enhancing it.
It is, therefore, unsurprising, in fact quite fi tting,
that many of the most central of the norms and values that
Govinnage intuitively invokes and the concerns, emphases and
approaches he spontaneously adopts in making his critiques,
though they plainly refl ect also his other, modern, sources of
enlightenment, appear to belong very much also within his
traditions and their mythologies, world views and practices at
their creative best. Th ey need, as the following paragraph will
reveal, barely a modicum of rephrasing for their congruence
with much that we could expect to encounter in those
traditions as a matter of course to be immediately recognized.
Sunil Govinnage
74
Th e constant presence of the self-refl exive mind
in Govinnage’s writing, for instance, refl ects his abiding
commitment to a fundamental mindfulness that enables him
to ward off with ease the mindlessness on which the “success”
of the politics so depends and to identify with unerring
specifi city the decisive role played in the production of the
crisis by desire, built around the attachment of individuals to
various things, matters, concerns, interests, goals and so on.
At its exclusive centre, therefore, is the individual self and its
interests. Consumingly driven by this self, desire demands a
form of praxis whereby the objects of its varied attachments be
pursued without restraint, regardless of its cost to the “other”
or even for that matter to the self, as it turns out. As for that
“other”, they are often looked upon with envy for what they
might have, and this tends to issue in the cultivation of hatred
towards them, warranting the use as required of violence
against them. Such hatred inevitably begets hatred in turn,
predictably amplifying accordingly into futile, unendingly
self-replicating successions of itself that catch everybody
destructively up in them. Th e one unavoidable outcome that
such unbridled pursuit of desire guarantees is suff ering or
sorrow, as, its immediate practical consequences apart, each
object of attachment sought after is one after another shown
up in the end to be unattainable, nothing more than illusion,
placing everybody, the pursuers as much as those at whose
expense the pursuit is carried out, within reiterated cycles of
striving after and non-attainment that leave them completely
dissatisfi ed. Th e only way out of the impasse is for the
enlightened intellect to help cast off the wrong thinking that
lies behind all this and put in its place thinking based, among
other things, on self-refl exive awareness, compassion for all of
the living beings involved and concern for their happiness, the
cultivation of non-violence, and many other such things. Th is
Perth: My village down under
75
would be the kind of right thinking that would issue in right
action, the productive form of praxis that would realize the
possibility of redemptive change in, and an enlightened move
away from, the prevailing undesirable state of aff airs.
Th e comparative adequacy with which the preceding
paragraph restates in/“translates” into the “idiom” of his
traditions Govinnage’s understanding of and insights into
the fundamental issues raised by the confl ict and its crisis,
testifi es to his openness to them and to how deeply he has
imbibed the discernment they had to off er him. What
they decidedly do not do at the same time is to deny him
his modernity. Govinnage is no rigid, backward-/inwardlooking,
anachronistic traditionalist, dogmatically plugging
some conventional doctrinal line or mechanically imposing
predigested theological formulae or prescriptions on situations
in some obscurantist way.
Th e closing line of his poem, A Request, looked at above,
What karmic sins shut the eyes of the Triple Gem?,
allows us to transparently, and very specifi cally, illustrate
how viably he brings his inherited “tradition-bound selfunderstandings”
(Habermas 1971:74) and his modernist
sensibility into productive phase with each other. Building itself
around two key notions of the tradition, both presupposed
and in principle beyond denial, the line puts the fi nal position
it has in the poem to good use to bring it to a challenging
close, through what issues in eff ect as an almost desperately
anguished cry on behalf of the little boy around whose plight
the poem is written. A great deal of the power of the line
derives not only from its privilege of having the last word in
the poem but also from its positioning immediately after the
exclamatory statement
Sunil Govinnage
76
Absurd, to query your son-ship of our soil!,
repeated here for ease of reading.
We recall that this exclamation, drawing into itself
all the force of the resonant matter supplied to it through
the varied statements and questions about the crisis of the
modern polity that went before it, irrevocably dismisses the
most fundamental claim of the majoritarian ideology that
was responsible for the boy’s plight. Taking off from here, the
concluding line launches a heartfelt plea on behalf of the boy.
Th e compelling strength of the plea derives obviously from
the two traditional notions around which it frames itself, but
even more from the particular manner in which it calls upon
the notions. Reverting to the open-ended wh-question form
that the poem had abandoned for a brief moment, it gives
itself the space to resist any attempt to use the notions in some
uncomprehendingly rigid or narrow doctrinal way to in eff ect
blame the victim for his own plight (he is suff ering for his
past sins), thereby diverting attention from that plight and
from the actual circumstances that are materially responsible
for it, in unacceptable extenuation of them. Th e whole
emotional and dramatic thrust and movement of the poem,
gathered together and poured into this concluding line via the
exclamatory line immediately preceding it, just does not allow
this, almost obliging it instead, even possibly in defi ance of
the conventional ways of invoking the notions, to throw the
spotlight on what humanly matters, the tragedy of the boy’s
plight, undividedly deserving of compassion, and, certainly,
not something that we can come to terms with; for, very
obviously, it is a plight that is inconsistent with what might
be associated with the Triple Gem were its eyes (allowed to
be) open. Th ere is implicit recognition here of the potential
the tradition carries within itself to transcend that plight, a
Perth: My village down under
77
potential that might have been thwarted by the prevailing
circumstances but which is assumed with utmost assurance
to be there, always available in principle for the purpose of
envisaging a diff erent, changed situation.
* * * *
We see here again what we have recognized earlier, that
Govinnage’s identifi cation with his traditions is inspired not
by any proselytizing zeal to promote their institutions, rituals
and doctrines but by his immediate sense of this potential
embodied in their worldviews. And it is to this potential,
oriented, as we have noted, towards fundamental “questions
of value and life” (Habermas 1971:66) and, therefore, in no
sense at all anachronistic, that Govinnage’s writing, just by
issuing as it does, helps awaken his modern polity. Th e frame
of reference that had maintained the traditional worldviews,
we remember, had been rendered inert by the instrumental
empirical rationality that had enabled modernity to constitute
itself, causing the modern polity that it was also at the same
time helping bring into being to get “detached” (Habermas
1971:105) from that frame and leading it thereby to lose sight
of its potential. Govinnage’s attained aesthetic accomplishment
challenges his modern polity to restore to itself some
contemporarily viable sense of that frame of reference as a way
of grasping for itself something of its potential. It is, as we
have characterized it earlier, a frame of reference constructed
around communicative action and symbolic interaction,
along with the communicative rationality that went together
with them, all of these alike by defi nition involving reciprocal
communication through ordinary language.
Govinnage’s own very discerning understanding of
these concepts reveals itself in the central role he instinctively
Sunil Govinnage
78
assigns to language and communication through language in
his treatment of the crisis. Th e children who are misled to
kill each other in his poem for Th ose Diasporic Islanders, we
recall, “speak diff erent words”. Th e failure of humanity that
the tragedy represents cannot be separated from the failure
of communication through language. Not only are the words
diff erent, they remain unspoken:
(We) lament… over our lost homes
But not talking with each other,
and language itself, contrary to what it seems to have been
designed for, falls silent. Worse, it is travestied, along with the
communication it facilitates:
(we) talk about a peace with a hatred
In our hearts towards each other,
so that in the end it is left, in Th e World is Burning Around Me,
to a burnt city to speak the story of “the heritage of a country”.
In A Request, the isolation of the little boy, his separation
from community, itself ensures a certain cessation of language.
But that cessation is recognized to be integrally linked to
certain other, more overt, issues of language that appear in
a substantive sense to be very diff erent. Th ese are those wellknown
issues of language status planning that raise themselves
in a particularly troublesome manner in multilingual situations,
involving the institutionalized allocation of functions within
the respective polities to their various languages. In the Lankan
polity, the practical decision that its majoritarian politics
caused to be made in this respect expressed itself in the form
of the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, which declared the language
of the majority the sole offi cial language, to the exclusion of
the minority languages, implicitly projected as a threat to it,
Perth: My village down under
79
thus even through its Constitution setting the polity on its
path of confl ict. Govinnage’s disquiet in his poem, from the
lines cited above, stems from his recognition of the unhappy
auguries, from the viewpoint of the boy and his future, of
the decision as it, and the attitudes behind it, have played
themselves out in actual subsequent events and developments.
Th ese presage nothing but dispossession and denial of his
language, perhaps also its replacement by the language of his
remaining oppressor.
And this too, Govinnage sees, works, though in a
diff erent way, towards that same failure of language and
communication that, he has already shown, would cause
communicative action and symbolic interaction to break
down. Th ere is something especially interesting in the
seemingly paradoxical way in which these two diff erent sets
of linguistic considerations come together in this respect. Th e
boy’s own language is indeed diff erent from that of those who
are contriving to take it away from him, and presumably,
therefore, incomprehensible to them, while the new language
that is being imposed on him would be one that they would
all share. Contrary to superfi cial expectations, though, the
linguistic change thus engineered by the majoritarian politics,
far from promoting communication (by virtue of the fact that
they all now speak a common language) can only in fact wreck
it, by destroying, at the more fundamental level, the reciprocity
that lies at the heart of communicative action and symbolic
interaction. Clearly, reciprocal communication depends far
less on the sharing of a linguistic code than on the condition
that it be free from compulsion, repression and domination,
something on which Habermas insists. It is an index of the depth,
sensitivity and integrity of Govinnage’s intuitive understanding
of communicative action and symbolic interaction and also
of the potential his traditions holds out for them, that he
Sunil Govinnage
80
recognizes this seeming paradox, namely, that allowing the
boy to speak his language, which is incomprehensible to one,
is more likely to help communication and understanding than
insisting that he speaks the language one does comprehend.
* * * *
No, clearly, nothing anachronistic in any of this. On the
contrary, through concretely demonstrating in assured artistic
terms the contemporaneousness of the potential embodied
in his traditions, Govinnage helps awaken his modern polity
to consciousness of the resources it already has available to
it to recover what its politics had caused it, at immeasurable
cost, to disconnect with, the enlightened “action-orienting
self-understanding” (Habermas 1971:52) that historically
this potential had always enabled social groups to attain, not
least by facilitating awareness of the choices that they and
the individuals who made them up had available to them for
their purposes. Th is understanding would receive expression
in the “moral-practical knowledge/consciousness/insight”,
comprised of a framework of shared understandings and
meanings, that all civilized societies need to construct for
themselves for the purpose of achieving the kind of identity
formation and social integration by means of which they would
hold themselves together in their own distinctive nature.
Th e form and dynamics of the socio-cultural processes
through which this is done would, of course, vary with the
nature of the “organizing principle” around which a society,
depending on the level of civilization it had attained in the
course of its natural evolution, organizes itself. Societies that
had arrived at modernity would have their own distinct kind of
organizing principle, determined by which their socio-cultural
processes would enable them to construct their own form of
Perth: My village down under
81
“moral-practical knowledge/consciousness/insight”, in terms
of the actual realities of their modernist circumstances (see
Habermas 1979, especially Chapter 4, for details about this
matter, as well as about several of the other matters mentioned
in this paragraph and the immediately preceding and following
ones). Nevertheless, in all civilized societies alike, traditional
or modern, the processes would be directed towards reaching
reciprocally agreed understandings of norms and meanings,
implicitly arrived at through coordinated negotiations of
common defi nitions of situations, terms, notions, evaluative
measures and so on, and the formation of consensus on them.
Th is would be accomplished through “practical discourse”
embedded in interaction contexts and involving exactly
the kind of communicative use of language that, taken-forgrantedly
governed by self-refl exive reason, lies at the base of
communicative action and symbolic interaction.
Th e reason involved, however, would not be the
practical goal-oriented instrumental rationality governed by
a positivistic logic geared to the “objective” verifi cation of
truth claims, but the more encompassing form of rationality
referred to earlier, communicative rationality. Th is would
involve a diff erent kind of logic, oriented towards other kinds
of concerns and goals than those of instrumental rationality,
including also issues of individuation, identity and identity
formation, social roles and relationships and their integration
in the building of community and communal solidarity,
democratic entitlements, human values and ethics, and other
similar matters. It is a logic that would be preoccupied not
with the positivistic establishment of truth claims but with the
empirical attestation of the adequacy, validity and “correctness”
of the norms and judgments applied to these various matters.
It is out of all of this that the moral-practical knowledge/
consciousness/insight of a society issues, never static but always
Sunil Govinnage
82
adapting to the demands made by changes in the environment
of the society as it evolves, especially as it gets applied for the
purpose of resolving the various crises that these changes bring
about. In such application, it facilitates the kind of novel
adaptive response to the crises that enables the kind of change
in the status quo that is needed for the social system to move,
transforming itself and its institutional framework, beyond
the stage of such crises. Th at moral-practical knowledge/
consciousness/insight is what embodies a society’s potential
to address the “fundamental questions of value and life”.
And it may be accessed/retrieved/sought out in the same
way that it is acquired/learned by citizens as they grow up
together with their society; namely, through openness to the
social and ethical meanings and the structures of reason that,
however much they might often get distorted in reality, inhere
in a society’s institutions, beliefs, traditions, socio-cultural
processes, modes of behaviour, everyday practices and so on,
which have come to symbolically realize and express them,
through, we must not allow ourselves to forget, the interactive
use of (ordinary) language.
Practically speaking, even within a modern Lankan
polity that has gone through the horrors that it has, anyone
who has had everyday interactions with ordinary people,
even across the presumed ethnic and other borders, would be
able to readily attest to the real presence of this knowledge/
consciousness/insight among them, if in a pre-refl exive way.
While such interactions would certainly by no means be
exempt from the characteristic human imperfections, therefore
defying sentimental idealization, they would still display,
when out of reach of the poisonous violence and divisiveness
propagated by the polity’s politics as well as of other more
ordinary human fallibilities, a certain spontaneous warmth
and generosity of spirit and ready open-hearted acceptance
Perth: My village down under
83
of others, irrespective of ethnicity and so on. In a real sense,
this seems only to confi rm the correctness of Habermas’s
claim that “Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of
human speech” (1984: 287), with “understanding” here
extending well beyond simply “comprehension”. It is this
indeed that, leaving aside economic, professional and other
such practical exigencies, would account for the satisfaction
expressly displayed by the many speakers of one language who
have chosen to make their lives among speakers of the other;
and we cannot forget either the many stories of extraordinary
welcoming hospitality with which during the days before the
confl ict visitors to the then-remote Tamil-speaking areas from
outside of them invariably returned. It is important not to
forget that if all of this is as satisfying as it actually is, it is
precisely because, as we might gather from the stories and
statements themselves, that the exchanges that went on among
the participants must have shown the generous and accepting
reciprocity that rendered them a shared dialogic discourse of
the Bakhtinian kind.
Th e moral-practical knowledge/consciousness/insight
of ordinary people, then, drawing on the logic made available
to it by the traditions but adapting it in application to the
circumstances and modes of its modern polity, has the potential
and the resilience, under conditions of communicative action
and symbolic interaction, to prevail over and help transcend
the demoralizing assaults of the politics. Th is is the insight
that Govinnage passes on to us in attained form. His writing,
through its discerning receptiveness not to dogma and ritual
but to the self-refl exive communicative reason embodied in
the worldviews of the traditions and the related everyday
interactive practices in terms of which it realizes itself, has
cleared the way for his modern polity to return to awareness
of that knowledge/consciousness/insight, which is available in
Sunil Govinnage
84
the context. Th is would equip it to lay claim to the potential it
also, therefore, already possesses to counter the will expressed
in the politics, the will with which, as remarked earlier,
that potential is in constant dialectical relationship and, on
its basis, to move away from the status quo in which it has
trapped itself and towards an alternative state of aff airs that
does indeed remain a conceivable possibility.
From the specifi c viewpoint of the politics of confl ict
in the situation, the potential will work towards helping
enlighten the political will in ways that would lead it to bring
the crisis of the polity fi rmly into the realm of refl ection and
rational contemplation under a resolve to both understand
and change the situation. Th e praxis of communicative action
to which it would thereby direct the political will would
enable it to comprehendingly recognize and negotiate the
collective issues of self-realization, interaction and existence of
the diff erentiated humanity who make up the modern multicultural/
religious/linguistic polity. Th is in turn would point
the diversifi ed polity towards the alternative that is actually
potentially there for it to claim, through the exercise of the
actual choices that are recognizably available to it – if only it
had the will to do so. Th is would be an alternative that would
hold out the promise of a truly equal and democratic order
and of a future justice “which may or may not come to birth”,
but in which the particularities of these human diff erences
would be liberated from the violent confl ictual ends to which
they have been defi lingly misdirected and turned to enriching
positive account, as they come to be seen “as a way of living
a common humanity, not as an alternative to it” (Eagleton
2004: 155).
* * * *
Perth: My village down under
85
We can, of course, anticipate that these claims will be sceptically
dismissed for what might be seen as its incurable utopianism,
all the more derisively so under the jaundiced conditions of the
polity’s entrapment in choiceless Th atcherite fatalism. Frederic
Jameson, however, in his literary/cultural critical refl ections
on the world order dominated by capitalism, gives us a take
on utopianism that allows us a more than forceful rejoinder
to such scepticism. Warning us against the familiar propensity
to view utopia as some kind of chimerical state of attained
pastoral or idyllic perfection, literally depictable in the form of
a wish-fulfi lling programmatic blueprint for the society of the
future, he argues, on the basis of his study of literary utopias
as expressed, especially, in science fi ction, for the political
necessity of the utopian impulse in these our dystopian
times (and also for the need of a Marxist thinking that seems
somewhat to have lost its way, to recover some tangible sense of
it) (2005: 12; 1971: 110-111). [In all references to Jameson’s
work below, unless dates are expressly mentioned, they are to
Jameson 2005]. For, if utopia is a fi gure of hope for the future,
it is one that emerges integrally out of the trenchant critique
of the present that it also simultaneously is. Th is critique is of
the essence, for it is what “keeps alive the possibility of a world
qualitatively distinct from this one” (1971: 110), focusing
sharply as it does on the systemic “sources of exploitation and
suff ering” (p. 12) that have caused the prevailing situation and
made necessary an alternative to it that demonstrably cannot
be attained under the conditions that prevail within it,
As it happens, the factors that the critique identifi es
are also those that have worked to impose on us a “systemic,
cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one
way or other prisoners” (1982: 153). Th is closure, inducing
us to “capitulate”, as the “practical thinking” that drives the
scepticism about utopia has done (1971: 110-111), to the
Sunil Govinnage
86
“necessity” of what is (pp. 231-233), had ensured “our own
incapacity to conceive [of utopia] in the fi rst place” (1975:
230). But, by forcing us “to concentrate on the break (from
what is) itself ”, rather than “off ering a more traditional picture”
of what might follow it (pp. 231-232), the critique pushes us
to think “beyond” the limits determined and pressures exerted
by the closure, and to challenge, “demystify” and negate the
terms of the current state of aff airs (p. 211) in all of its totality.
As such, it constitutes a “rattling of the bars and an intense
spiritual concentration and preparation for another stage
which has not yet arrived” (pp. 231-233). Th is would be one
that, marked by “radical diff erence, radical otherness” (p. xii),
would represent “a radical and systemic transformation of our
world” (1983: 302), a transformation in which, ultimately,
the hope of the world would lie.
* * * *
It is just such a transformative fi gure of hope that Govinnage
off ers his polity and its people, redirecting them through
the by-no-means-delusory literary utopia that his poetry
constitutes to the potential they do possess to lift themselves
out of their crisis. What his writing accomplishes is to “bring
home (to us) in local and determined ways our constitutional
ability to imagine an Other of the system” (p. xii, emphasis
mine) – which, exactly, is the point at which the polity and
its people are stuck. Th e accomplishment depends not least
on the critique of the status quo that is a central ingredient
of his aesthetic. Th is, representing not just a negative but
an affi rmative hermeneutics, clears the way for the kind of
“dramatic rupture” with the present (p. 220) that would break
the hold its (normalized) ideology exerts on the mind and
sensibility of the polity and its people and release them to
Perth: My village down under
87
imagine the radically diff erent future into which they so need
to move. As this itself indicates, while the focus of the critique
is on the break from the present itself and its possibility rather
than on what follows it, the latter, that other “stage which
has not yet arrived”, does not by any means cease to concern
us. On the contrary, there is what can only be described as
a great yearning to tangibly know for ourselves within the
realities of our existence in our own time and place that all
of this constitutes not just some fantastic pipe dream, a mere
despairing attempt to escape through idle speculation from
what cannot be escaped from, but something instead that
could (or, even more satisfyingly, would) make a diff erence
that truly matters to the humanity caught up in the crisis,
precisely by making us aware of the choices available to us for
the purpose.
Doubtless, the critique itself, inviting us to think
beyond the limits and act beyond the habits imposed by the
present, does contribute somewhat towards the satisfaction of
that yearning. In principle, the failings of the status quo that
it identifi es not only point toward the programmes or agenda
needed for arrival at a radically diff erent future but also the kind
of praxis of change through which it might be accomplished.
Jameson himself lists several specifi c possibilities for the
pursuit of that utopian project relative to the crisis of the global
capitalist order that is the immediate target of his attention;
for instance, “full employment at a living wage”, “the right of
migration”, “the abolition of taxes” and money, freedom from
hunger, all unrealizable, even in fact inconceivable, within the
current globalized order (pp. 147, 219-220, 172, and all of
the concluding chapter of Part 1 of the book). In fact, he is
even ready to conceive of a “pluralism of utopias”, each built
around its own concerns (pp. 217-220, 225).
Sunil Govinnage
88
As Jameson himself recognizes, however, none of this
allows any easy optimism, beset as the entire notion is with
all kinds of complicating dilemmas that raise problems for its
“knowability” (see, especially, the penultimate chapter of Part
1, pp. 168-169). Th e problems are caused by the oppositions
or paradoxes that of their nature mark the various issues the
notion of utopia diff erently yet interrelatedly brings up. Th ese
involve the relationship between, for instance: the impulse
itself, as expressed in the literary genre and the critique it
incorporates, and the actual programme it gestures towards
(xiii-xiv, 11); the discursive representation/representability of
utopia and the “literal” depiction of the state ensuing from
it (pp. xiii-xiv, 12, 142); its imaginability and its empirical
realization (pp. 142, 231-233); “idealism” and “materialism”
(p. 172); and, in a sense taking all of these various oppositions
overarchingly into itself, diff erence (from what is in the
present, representing thereby what might be in the future) and
sameness or identity (what actually is in the present) (pp. xii,
241).
Th is last mentioned opposition names the most central
and encompassing, if highly abstract, enigma. As we have
already seen above, because the “qualitatively distinct” future
that the present critically needs cannot even be properly
imagined under the circumstances and conditions that defi ne
the latter, utopia constitutes itself as a “call…to a radical
and systemic transformation of our world” (1983: 302), a
“dramatic rupture” from it (p. 220) that would usher in a
“fundamental change in our social existence” (p. xii). Not to
accept that commission to pursue “radical diff erence”, not
piecemeal but in terms of the social totality, is to run the
risk of being drawn back into a condition of existence that is
“little more than the projections of our own social moment
and historical or subjective situation” (p. 211). Replicating,
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89
if somewhat diff erently, what is already there in the status
quo and insidiously trapping us within its limits, this would,
therefore, strand us where we are, keeping us the “same”.
On the other hand, to accept the commission is to end
up facing the prospect of trying to make sense of a world
that has been put “beyond recognition” (p. 147), one which
would involve not only a radically transformed society but
even a mutated “human nature”, such that “human beings
can scarcely recognize themselves any longer” (pp. 168-169).
Such “radical otherness”, or other-worldliness if you will, is
hardly likely of itself to yield satisfaction to the many of us who
would seek to tangibly grasp in terms of what we can actually
know in our here and now the meaning of utopia and the
nature of the hope for change that it holds out. Moreover, it
will restore and reinforce the familiar scepticism over whether
utopia represents not change but an act of escape from the
only world we know into some other, delusional world out
there – a pie in the sky. However, as Jameson points out, to try
to fi nd our way out of this paradox of sameness-diff erence by
resolving it “in either direction” would be to evacuate utopia
of the very reason for its existence. Th e tension between its
two strands is “inescapable” (p. 168-169), essential for the
work it is required to do.
Which brings us right back to the notion of the dialectic
as the only viable way of handling what might otherwise
appear to be a mere pointless impasse, a notion that Jameson
not only throughout explicitly invokes (p. xvi, 142) but also
exemplifi es in his whole mode of argumentation. It does not
require too much refl ection to recognize that this is exactly
the notion, working in exactly this way that our account
above of the opposite faces of modernity within the Lankan
polity invoked. But if this notion itself is to help give us the
Sunil Govinnage
90
satisfaction we are in search of there still remains one further
matter to be addressed, relating to the question whether,
even if that radical future can be imagined, as Govinnage
has demonstrated it can be, the polity and, particularly, its
comptrollers, the national(ist) bourgeois leadership, would
have the will to change and move towards its realization.
Th e realities of the politics of the present within the
polity, as they have been described earlier, do not encourage
much sanguinity in this respect – the national(ist) bourgeois
leadership have no compelling reason to abdicate the positions
of power in which they have entrenched themselves, all the
more fi rmly so after the military victory, and their various
strategies of control have worked too spectacularly well for
most people among the majority to want any truly material
change in the status quo. It is cold comfort to insouciantly
set this down to the workings of the dialectic of modernity
along its negative strand, unless the “historical conditions of
possibility” (p. xiv) for the attainment of the utopian ideal
along the positive strand of the dialectic may at the same time
be identifi ed and demonstrated to carry some actual viability.
Without that the question would linger as to how that vision
may be tangibly possessed in our here and now – the dilemma
would persist and Th atcher would prevail. Jameson, acutely
alert to the dilemma, off ers us, in his epigraph to “Progress
versus Utopia, or, can we imagine the future?” (1982), a
stirringly insightful sentence from Marx’s letter to Ruge that
can lift us out of despondency: “It will then become evident
that the world has long since dreamed of something of which
it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality”.
For a demonstration of the reality of that possession,
we need to return to Habermas’s account of the dialectic of
potential and will, and, particularly, the ways in which “moralPerth:
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practical knowledge/consciousness/insight” would work
under the communicative action and symbolic interaction
that the modern polity provides for along the positive
strand of its dialectic. Th e socio-ideological knowledge and
insight thrown up by the utopian vision and the critique
it embodies will indeed be resisted by the polity, which,
pursuing “will” along the negative strand of the dialectic,
would seek to preserve the status quo. At the same time, there
is no way in which modernity can stop that knowledge and
insight from seeping into and renewing the moral-practical
knowledge/consciousness/insight of the polity and its modes
of communicative action and interaction, already primed for
it by its traditions, even less so under the highly mediatized
conditions that prevail within it. And this, by making the
polity and its people aware of their potential to resist the will
with which it is in dialectical interaction, creates in practical
terms the conditions of possibility whereby the vision might
be grasped, along with the alternative it holds out to what
is, and, hopefully, pursued in praxis. Th e contribution that
Govinnage’s writing, shoulder to shoulder with that thin
line of courageous dissent referred to earlier, makes to this
promising endeavour cannot be over-estimated.
* * * *
Of course, our sense of responsibility to the argument under
development requires that we acknowledge that all that it can
guarantee is not the attainment of the vision but the struggle
for its attainment – though it is equally important to affi rm
that this is by no means to undervalue the vision. As Terry
Eagleton has reminded us above, the future justice aspired to
“may or may not come to birth” (2004: 155). Th e dialectic,
the paradox cannot but have two sides, and its negative side
Sunil Govinnage
92
does appear to be decidedly on the rise and attempting to
putting itself beyond challenge, not just in our own particular
place and time but, as Habermas, Jameson, Marcuse and very
many others also concede, across the whole of the modern
social order and all human existence as we have known it
down the ages. Yet, there is, and in strongly felt human terms,
a compelling case for hope, not despair. Reproducing as fully
as possible Eagleton’s moving insights into all of this in his
extraordinary Commentary in the New Literary History of
2004, we might allow him, to the profound enrichment of
our understanding, to lead us to see why. [All page references
to Eagleton’s work below are to this Commentary.]
Taking us on a rapid tour of the history of the western
epistemological tradition he knows, Eagleton establishes that,
however it might have been diff erently labelled in the course
of history, the dialectic we have throughout spoken of above
has always been a necessary part of the existence of imperfect
humankind, a condition “much older than (just) modernity”
that, “lying as it does at the very root of our subjectivity”, lays
claim to be “the root or source of our creaturely existence”
(p.153). Th e several dazzlingly suggestive, indeed provocative,
descriptors he applies to the phenomenon – “dangerous
ambivalence”, “creative sickness”, “perilously ambiguous
force”, “destructive creativity” (p. 153) – shock us into just the
kind of enlightenment we need to grasp not only something of
its essential nature but also its critical importance for making
positive sense of our seemingly desperate human condition.
Th is, as history has confi rmed, is a condition marked by what
might appear to be our infi nite capacity, in our imperfections,
especially signifi cant among them, our consuming desire “that
confesses no dependency beyond itself ” (p. 151), to create
tragedies for our fellow beings – and for ourselves. But this,
not too curiously given the imperfections, is only because “we
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are bound up with each other as intimately as breathing”,
so that “the most innocent of our actions may breed dire
consequences in the lives of others” (p. 153).
And therein, precisely, lies, too, the opportunity and
the hope. For, “(w)hat makes for tragedy, often enough, is
exactly the fact that we can indeed conceive of a more humane
condition”, recognizing as part of the process the “outrage”
that, though “things could be feasibly a good deal better than
they are”, they, scandalously, are not so (pp. 157-158). And
this, combining with “the radical Enlightenment insight that
anyone whatsoever has in principle a claim on us by virtue of
their sheer raw humanity” (p. 155), the humanity in which
they and we are all bound together, has the eff ect of making
“(o)ur disabilities enabling”, converting “the curse of our
condition” into “the source of our creativity” (p. 152). It is
a creativity that allows us to imagine an alternative world to
what is, a utopia that is diff erent from and better than the
world we know but which, though not of this world, is still
very decidedly in it. Th e philistinist failure of understanding is
to see this “otherworldliness” “as an escape from the political
status quo rather than as a transformation of it” (p. 157). Th e
hope it holds out might be “tremulously” tentative, expectant,
but it is deeply embedded in the everyday realities of our
human nature and condition, emphatically not excluding the
mundane.
Indeed, the mundane, we need to recognize, “is not
the opposite of the transcendent but the very locus of it”
(p. 158) – transcendence lies not in all those grand things
conventionally associated with it, including institutions,
dogmas, rituals, glittering gestures and so on, but, if we might
replace Eagleton’s own eloquent example by other immediately
relevant ones supplied by Govinnage himself, in the desperate
Sunil Govinnage
94
anguish in the voice of that orphaned boy in the camp for
displaced children, in the helpless forlornness of that other
little boy in the rehabilitation camp, in the burnt city, the
lost friends, the shattered dreams. Herein is the crux of the
meaning of the dialectic within the tragedy of our crisis, a
meaning that lies in the recognition, “at once traumatizing
and liberating” (p. 153), that “only by an unutterably painful
openness to our frailty and fi nitude, to the material limits of
our condition, can we have any hope of transcending it” (p.
158), as we come to discern in it “the shadowy outline of a
new way of living, one which preserves a pact with failure and
mortality”, but “only in the perilous, reverent awareness that
(these) can always blow it apart” (p. 159).
It is, considerably, by the way in which Govinnage’s
writing throws us into the heart of such large matters that it
acquires those especial dimensions of signifi cance that were
claimed at the outset of this essay to distinguish it. Th rough
his poetry, Govinnage off ers to his lost home, and not only
in those of his poems that deal explicitly with the confl ict,
the hope it needs for transcendent redemptive retrieval from
its crisis within its contemporary modernist circumstances.
And hope, Eagleton reminds us, “is (always) bound with
possibility” (p. 157). Govinnage off ers it to his polity and
its people by raising them to awareness of their potential to
change what is, implicitly directing them to the choices and
possibilities this potential makes available to them to work
their way towards the “moral realization of a normative order”
(Habermas 1971: 107), through enlightenment of the political
will and a corresponding transposition of that potential into
praxis. Th is would be an order that would be distinguished,
among other things, by all of those democratic givens, ethical
considerations and basic entitlements of humanity for which
Perth: My village down under
95
modernity in principle provides a central place along the
positive face of its dialectic.
* * * *
We can expect, in the normal complex nature of things in
multi-linguistic/religious/cultural polities that a question or
two will raise themselves at this point that will need to be
addressed if the hope that Govinnage is off ering his polity is to
be perceived as viable. Th e likelihood of the expectation will
be made all the greater by the groundedness of Govinnage’s
writing in his own Sinhala-Buddhist heritage and the majority
constituency immediately associated with it, which results in
a considerably larger degree of attention being devoted to
them in it than to the other constituencies and their heritages.
Given, besides, that the hope held out would, from our
account, arise necessarily from out of a critique of the state of
aff airs currently prevalent in the polity, one of the anticipated
questions might even, in fact, take on a certain quality of
apprehension. Th is would arise from the recognition that
the reasoned critique on the basis of which Govinnage off ers
his hope is one that, refl ecting his commitment to the selfrefl
exive intellect and, consequently, his imperviousness to
the interpellations of the dominant ideology, lays bare the
catalytic role played in the crisis by the majoritarian political
impulse and its (ab)use of the apparatus of the democratic
dispensation. Th e apprehension then would be whether this
might cause an undesirable imbalance in the recognition and
allocation of responsibility for the crisis, as well as for retrieval
from it, with responsibility being passed solely or in undue
proportion onto the majority, with the share that the other
constituencies had (and continue to have) in the matter being
Sunil Govinnage
96
ignored, notwithstanding that they too, equally, if in diff erent
ways, had been (and still are) caught up or involved in the
crisis.
No reasoned critique out of which a viable hope can
be generated can, of course, permit such an exclusion. It
cannot, for instance, allow to be put out of sight the often
indiscriminate violence of the measures adopted by the
militant groups, which, taking on a mandate of its own
beyond that given by the violence it initially was retaliatory to,
contributed devastatingly to the worsening of the situation.
Nor can it ignore the readiness of too many ordinary people
in the minority constituency involved to go along with much
of this violence, even after its liberatory front was blown and
its fascistic nature exposed, a readiness that cannot always be
accounted for by recognition of the tragical, and also highly
intimidatory, entrapment of these people between/among
opposing groups, none of whom had little but distress to give
them.
Such considerations apart, at the present moment,
when the war is over and the urgent need is to work at
recuperation from the crisis, it is even less possible not to
insist on the important share of responsibility that falls on
the minorities, entrapped victims though large numbers of
them might have been, to meet that need, by bringing the
moral-practical knowledge/consciousness/insight that they
themselves must indubitably possess, to bear constructively
on the situation. Again, there are reasons that would account
for their continued reluctance, even incapacity, to do so. Th e
uncertainties of the prevalent situation, particularly from the
viewpoint of those ethnically associated with the losing side
in the war, for instance, are exceedingly demoralizing, all
the more so for the feeling these uncertainties help generate
Perth: My village down under
97
among them that that they aff ord them no real options at
all. Th e several far-from-positive reports about the ground
realities of the confl ict and their unpromisingly prolonging
aftermath that keep getting released with monotonous
regularity outside the offi cial media and across the world
do not contribute to lifting the misgivings. It would be
impossible, indeed a violation or travesty of a lot of things that
deeply matter, not to acknowledge all of this. Yet, and that is
the nature of the “dangerous ambivalence” of the situation,
while all of this further highlights how great a share of the
responsibility remains with the majority, it just cannot allow
it to be forgotten that, in the fi nal and most important count,
the responsibility for the realization of the hope for retrieval
from the crisis must rest unquestionably, if variously, on all
alike of the members and constituencies of the polity.
* * * *
Govinnage’s actual writing as discussed above demonstrates
how sharply he is attuned to these complexities. Th e
commitment he displays with unfailing consistency to selfrefl
exive reason could hardly allow any other. To be sure, some
of the most specifi c of his observations, including the criticisms,
are directed towards his own constituency and the heritage he
shares with it. Th is is not only because of the contingent facts
of his embeddedness in, and his greater immediate knowledge
of, them, but also because his self-refl exive reason points him
inescapably to them. But, there is also something else. Coming
through strong and clear in his writing is a sense of how highly
he esteems his traditions, how deeply and genuinely he cares
for them; so very deeply and genuinely as to be able to repulse
without hesitation the invitation of the majoritarian political
Sunil Govinnage
98
ideology to cover up or whitewash their degrading abuses in
its service and instead, beyond just facing fully up to them,
to put them unfl inchingly, if sorrowfully, on display. In its
intellectual integrity and moral courage, this gives them a real
chance, as it happens the chance that most necessarily needs to
be provided in the circumstances, to release themselves from
the thralldom in which they had been too long held by the
political ideology and fi nd their way back, within the realities
of their modern conditions, to the roots of their noblest
insights. For the many who truly care for and honour their
traditions, especially the religious tradition, and who have long
grieved at the violations to which they have been subjected
within the politics of the modern national(ist) bourgeois state,
this bequest that Govinnage makes them, defi ning yet another
very specifi c facet of his giving back to his lost home, will be
something for which they would not know how to thank him
abundantly enough. More generally, from the viewpoint of
the polity as a whole, it also helps retrieve for the adherents of
the traditions their potential to more eff ectively discharge the
large share of responsibility that falls on them for resolving its
crisis.
Emphatically, none of this signals in the slightest either an
indiscriminate or a tendentious loss of balance in Govinnage’s
understanding of the crisis and of the issues of responsibility
it raises. As we have seen, his treatment of events or situations
reveals no reservations at all in acknowledging fully the role
and responsibility of either or both of the opposing parties
involved in each case; nor in identifying and empathizing
with the victims of the actions carried out, to whichever side
of the confl ict they belonged. Th is not only allows him to
point in specifi c terms towards the kind of understanding and
praxis the polity needs to claw its way out of its crisis, but also
to put beyond doubt the fundamentally shared nature of the
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responsibility that devolves, in whichever distributions and
proportions the material socio-political realities determine,
on all alike of the parties involved to pursue that resolution.
Th is is entirely to be expected, given the consistency of his
intuitive understanding of communicative rationality and
his unwavering commitment to communicative action and
symbolic interaction. Th ese, we recall, are all built integrally
around the notion of reciprocity, based on mutual recognition,
understanding and acceptance of each other by people, and
involving the negotiation of relationships and the norms
governing them in pursuit of a democratic moral order
characterized by conditions of equality, freedom and mutual
respect. Th e underlying insight is that no person is an island
entire of itself, that human beings are indeed so inextricably
bound with each other that they just cannot avoid shared
responsibility for each other as their keeper. Democracy needs
to be achieved, and clapping with one hand is not the way in
which humanity can work at that.
Such are the insights out of which Govinnage derives
the hope, well beyond mere wishful thinking, that he off ers
his polity and its people, through a rationally enlightened
invocation of his traditions that restores this polity and its
people to awareness of their potential to realize it. Th at hope
is for a redemptive retrieval of them from the gridlock of their
crisis that would release them to reclaim their destiny within
the material and other realities of their modernist conditions,
through a transformative realization of themselves as a
kaleidoscope unity to which all of their multi-varied elements
would alike contribute in due ways determined by the creative
dialectical dynamics of their equal, reciprocal interactions.
* * * *
Sunil Govinnage
100
But this still leaves unaddressed a further query that
Govinnage’s especial preoccupation with his own traditions
within the heterogeneous realities of his multi-linguistic/
religious/cultural polity raises – which is whether it might
prevent the reciprocity aspired to, by limiting the ability of the
writing to speak in any truly adequate or meaningful way to,
or for that matter even about, the polity as a whole, including
its other constituencies. Of course, sameness has never been a
condition of reciprocity, though diff erence certainly has, just
as a kaleidoscope does not form itself out of a single colour
or pattern, understandings already glimpsed in Govinnage’s
handling of the linguistic paradox in A Request. In any event,
his writing supplies his polity with an exemplary model for
addressing its crisis, based on the moral-practical knowledge/
consciousness/insight with which of their nature people
are endowed, one that would in principle point the way,
invaluably, to all of its many constituencies, whether defi ned
along linguistic/religious/cultural lines or in other ways, in
their own interactive discharge of their responsibilities to it –
and to themselves.
But this is still not all there is to the response to this
particular query. For, if it is indeed a property of the model
that it is able to “translate” across and reach out to all these
constituencies, this must surely be because it appeals to features
and assumptions that are intuitively shared by all of them,
diff erences and all, presumably by virtue of their common
humanity? What we are talking about here are, obviously,
hypothesized universals of human nature and existence,
currently much denigrated under avant gardiste post-modernist
and post-structuralist impulses, which would instead throw
the focus on diff erence, particularity, the contingent and
the relative, exclusively and in themselves. Nonetheless, the
concern with universals has remained strong, and with good
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reasons supplied, among many thinkers throughout the ages,
including our own modern times. In fact, the scholars who
have supplied this essay with the most signifi cant of the
analytical and theoretical apparatus it has throughout used,
subscribe very decidedly to the notion. Th us, the matters
of which Habermas (1971) talks are “rooted in the human
organism” (p. 87), “projects of the human species as a whole”
(p. 88), “central questions of men’s collective existence and of
individual life history” (p. 96), and so on. So, Jameson (2005)
asks whether some at least of the utopian demands he addresses
might have “eff ective universality” (p. 172), and often calls
upon the notion of human nature. Eagleton (2004), too,
claims that the “radical Enlightenment insight” he expounds
represents a “revolutionary universalism”(p. 155). Chomsky
talks in his studies on language, though they utilize empirical
scientifi c logic rather than communicative rationality as
such, of “the laws of our nature and the conditions of their
fulfi lment”, going on to extend the notion of universals
invoked in these words to the question, central to the work of
all of the scholars here cited, of ethics or “moral judgement/
values”, which, he hypothesizes, are “rooted in fundamental
human nature” (1988: 152, 153).
From our discussion of Govinnage’s writing, it seems
inevitable to suppose that its various distinguishing qualities
and characteristics are fi rmly anchored in such universals
of human nature. It is this, considerably, that, assigning
it the kind of meaning and signifi cance that reaches across
diff erence, particularity, contingency and the relative, allows
it to speak with relevance and conviction, and also with
a certain persuasive affi rmativeness, to and across all of the
constituencies of the polity. Th is indicates that “particularity”
(which is the single term that for convenience of discussion
will be used below to refer to all four of the features just
Sunil Govinnage
102
listed) cannot constitute most of what there is to concern
ourselves with, as the avant gardiste approach would have it –
which is what Eagleton declares through his claim above that
particularity is not alternative to a common humanity but a
way of living it.
None of this, however, is in any way to take the position
that the particular ceases to matter; it does remain important,
critically so. For it is what, as much through its mundaneness
as anything else, allows the universal to be tangibly grasped
as something that we can immediately know and feel and
experience. By itself and in its own right, the universal would
remain in some rarefi ed abstract realm, a mere analytical
counter, insubstantial, indistinguishable, inert, remote
from the nitty-gritty and the groundswell of our lives. It
is the particular that, by realizing it each time in a unique,
distinctive form, infuses it with life and vitality and actuality.
It is of this that the Irish playwright, John Millington Synge
long ago reminded us, when he suggested that the power of
the large, universal human factors and ideals around which a
work of art might build itself, to concretely touch our lives
derives from its rootedness in a distinctive time and place.
Govinnage’s Sinhala-Buddhist traditions supply his writing
with this particularity, assigning it the distinctiveness that
allows it to speak with immediacy and conviction the large
universal human truths to which he awakens his polity and
its people, all of them alike, and, in principle, more even than
them.
What we have just identifi ed is yet another, specifi c,
manifestation of the dialectic we have assumed to be in play
not only within modernity but across human experience
in general, expressing itself here in the specifi c form of the
opposition between the particular and the universal. Th is is
an opposition that has recurrently surfaced in thinking across
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the ages, variously formulating itself in terms of such familiar
pairs of opposites as the one and the many, the ideal and the
real, sameness and diff erence, the self and the other, and many
others that resist treatment in terms of the static, simpleminded
contradictoriness of singular oppositionality that is a
mark of vulgar dualism.
* * * *
As it happens, our recognition of this dialectic of the
particular and the universal allows us to move at last into
the fi nal major cluster of issues with which we will need to
engage to complete our already many-faceted and complex
characterization of Govinnage’s act of “giving back to the
lost home” in his writing, the act on which the claims for
its especial signifi cance very considerably rest. Th ese issues,
alluded to at the commencement of the essay, relate specifi cally
to the phenomenon of literary post-coloniality that the
writing exemplifi es and the concerns raised by the treatment
of that phenomenon under the currently more prominent
theorizations of it in the mainstream, all of them heavily
infl uenced, notwithstanding their internal diff erences, by
avant gardiste post-modernist and post-structuralist thought.
Th e concerns, we will recall, centered around the
possibility of the “subversion” of literary post-coloniality,
and, by implication, of the entire eff ort of recovery and
reconstruction on which all post-colonial countries are
urgently engaged. (Th ese matters were elaborated on in,
especially, the preceding essay, but will, so that we will not
lose sight of them, be repeated here briefl y.) Th e preceding
several centuries, we noted, had seen the world drastically
reconstituted, materially and also textually, under the
structuring operations of capitalism/empire, to emerge as
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104
the current hierarchized bourgeois global order, an unequal,
hegemonic, “contradictory unity” within which all countries
necessarily belonged and outside of which no country had
the option to set itself (Ahmad 1992). A prime vocation of
the post-colonial countries in these circumstances was to seek
out their unique destinies within that unity on a footing of
equality and dignity.
A central task its pursuit entailed was for these countries
to constitute themselves as subjects on their own terms
and in their own distinctive right, possessed of agency and
entirely able to negotiate their shared relationships within
that unity in the ways that mattered most to them. Th e task
was obviously one that needed to be carried out within the
determinate material realities – social, political, economic – of
the global context. But it crucially required at the same time
that the countries resist the interpellations through which, at
the discursive level, the dominant global social order sought to
re-produce them in the (suitably amenable) forms that helped
secure its hegemony, interpellations that in the local arena
were transmitted primarily through its implicitly designated
functionary, the modern bourgeois nation state. An important
part of that task was the retrieval and restoration of all of
those defi ning cultural-psychological and other features that
had earlier assigned meaning and purpose to their existence
but that had been suppressed or consigned to the margins in
imperial times. Th ese had never, in spite of this, signifi cantly
lost their continued sustaining relevance in people’s lives,
but they now needed to be restored in terms that carried
viability within their current modern circumstances. Clearly,
post-colonial literary production, including the writing of
the diaspora, had a role to play in all this – which is why,
if this literary production is at all to be properly understood
and, also, turned to useful account, there would be no way in
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105
which it could be considered simply in the “local” terms of its
own immediate setting apart from its global context, a matter
that has throughout been kept in sight.
Th is is the role that mainstream theorizations of literary
post-coloniality are contriving, under the mentorship of postmodernism,
to very seriously erode, not only in the literary realm
as such but also in the closely associated realm of language study
(see Th umboo and Kandiah: 1995, Kandiah and Sankaran
2001, and Kandiah 1997, 2003 a, 2003 b, 2005 a, 2005 b,
2009). As already pointed out in the the earlier essay, they do
so by the way in which, in a mutually reinforcing manner,
they help generate and sustain, even as they are sustained by, a
practice – literary, linguistic, critical – that gyrates round what
is in eff ect a highly prescriptive kind of formula of instability.
Under that formula, post-coloniality itself, along with the
many diff erent homes, lost or otherwise, associated with it
and the human subjects who inhabit them, is constituted in
terms of such radical negatives as displacement, adriftness,
horizonality, extraterritoriality, alienation, estrangement,
absences, anxieties, ambivalence and so on, all of those
defeatist aberrancies that the modern condition had thrown
up. Th is is accomplished through recasting all things,
detached from their moorings in the material realities of their
situation, as “text”, the sole reality. Th is, then, is subjected to
reading or interpretation by means of a hermeneutics nonnegotiably
presided over by the contingent as such, something
thoroughgoingly relativist of its nature.
Th e result is that the particularities and the specifi c
diff erences on which the procedure causes attention to be
focused get pushed beyond construal by reference to any
identifi able shared or general patternings, each of such
particularities and diff erences remaining, therefore, not
Sunil Govinnage
106
just unique but suffi cient unto itself in its singularity. Poststructuralism
off ers support to post-modernism in the
exercise, converting the particularities and diff erences that
are so defi nitive of the distinctive nature and identity of the
homes and human individuals involved in post-coloniality
into diff érance, preventing any form of decidability of their
meaning. Condemning them thus to the aporia of perpetually
deferred meanings, it delivers these homes and peoples into
a bizarre state of ontological and epistemological neitherhere-
nor-thereness, a destabilizing state of uncertainty
that allows them no fi rm sense of how they can constitute
themselves and their subjectivities and of where they might
want to stand in resisting the interpellations of the dominant
order. Th is renders them vulnerable to easy inscription into
the discourse(s) through which the dominant geo-political
order imposes its authority on them, allowing them to be
brought docilely under its epistemological and also ideological
governance, confi rming Jameson’s resonant characterization
of post-modernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”
(1984).
In a real sense, our account of the politics of the ethnic
confl ict above, focused though it primarily was on the internal
circumstances of the situation, allows us revealing glimpses
into the ways in which the integral – and inescapable – link
between the global and the local plays itself out in defi ning the
larger context by reference to which it needs to be seen if it is
to be fully understood; and, also, into some of the debilitations
and disadvantages that would impose themselves on the polity
if that link is allowed to be defi ned along the disempowering
lines that mainstream literary theorization of post-coloniality
would institutionalize. We recall, for instance, the claim that
the induction of the polity into the modernist dispensation
was accomplished as part of the reconstitution of the world
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as the current dominant modern bourgeois global order by
the workings of capitalism/empire. Th e hegemonic nature
of these workings meant that while in principle the package
of modernity came “complete”, its negative strand assumed
an undue degree of implementational prominence, as the
polity and its people came to be eff ectively articulated into
the discourse by which the comptrollers of the order imposed
their authority on them. Th us, the modern bourgeois nation
state was set in place in ways that secured its functionary role
within the larger order, while modernist desire, in the form of
the will to power, was released to pursue itself primarily under
direction by the practical goal-oriented empirical rationality
favoured by the dominant system.
Th is only strengthened the marginalization of the
polity’s traditions that was already under way through the
displacement by modernity, under the aegis of capitalism/
empire, of the institutional framework of reference by which
they had familiarly legitimated themselves; all of which
ensured the loss of meaningful access to the potential and
resources that in their own right the polity and its people
had, in the form of what would normally have been an everrenewing
moral-practical knowledge/consciousness/insight,
to counter whatever problems and dilemmas the pursuit of
will would cause to be raised. Th e result, as we have seen, was
the delivery of the polity and its people into the intractable
crisis described above. While placing impossible strains on
them, this also debilitates them as a whole and, moreover,
undermines the entire endeavour of post-colonial recovery
they are engaged in. It does so by diminishing their image
and standing, and weakening their capacity and strength to
stand up to the vagaries of existence, or even perhaps of just
plain survival, within the global order, and to the varying
designs and buff etings to which they might be subjected there
Sunil Govinnage
108
as they strive to wrest their due place within it. No account of
post-colonial creativity can be complete unless it engages with
the fraught issue of the global-local interface that all of this
manifests, if in terms of the particularities of the post-colonial
polity under scrutiny.
* * * *
Perhaps some of the most penetrating insights that may
be obtained into this matter would be those that would
be provided by a glance at the responses of the so-called
“international community” to the ethnic confl ict and, more
pertinently, to its recent military “conclusion”. It would be
useful to bear in mind in this regard the general propensity,
especially in the popular mind, to identify the “international
community” principally with the more “developed”, “western”
nations of the global order, quite unsurprisingly, given their
dominance within that order and the extended historical
association that the imperial history of the polity had had
with the “west”. Superfi cially, the responses of this particular
segment of the international community might appear to
have little to contribute to understanding, for the reason that
they appear to represent the most exasperatedly helpless of all
of the responses made; in fact, though, they have much to tell
post-colonial countries about how in real terms they might
expect to be perceived, and treated, within the global order.
Somewhat drolly, the impotent bemusement of this
international community seems not to derive from any failure
to recognize the horrendous human and ethical cost of the
methods by which the two sides had pursued the confl ict,
something that had been put beyond the possibility of
either denial or inaction by the ground realities of the war
as, particularly, it drew to its end. Rather, it seems to issue
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from a certain embarrassment, what might be considered
the embarrassment of self-recognition, as, for one thing, the
community came to realize that the methods used by the
victors in the war had adhered quite scrupulously to the logic
of an approach that the dominant global order had themselves
over the centuries set in place, though in particularly explicit,
and resolute, form after the attack on the Twin Towers in
New York in 2001, as the authorized means of dealing with
dissent, opposition and confl ict, even while dressing it up in
a rhetoric of liberation, freedom, democracy and rights as a
means of legitimating it. Th at was an approach in which the
highly wearisome, if critical, task of diffi cultly searching out
and meaningfully addressing the actual underlying causes of
dissent, opposition and confl ict was summarily set aside in
favour of a resolve instead to contain or, which was better,
simply eliminate these undesirable phenomena, preferably by
force of superior military power – the well-known Superman
approach (“bash ’em up”) to the resolution of complex social
problems. Th e decision was made all the easier to “justify”
and implement by the often-reprehensible behaviour of the
targets of such action, which seemed of itself to invite the
uninhibited use of both the violent methods advocated and
the rhetoric that served to divert attention from them.
But there was a further, less obvious, consideration that
lurked around in the memory. Historically, all of the nations
involved, including those that most prided themselves on
being exemplary representatives of the modern democratic
way of life (and for that matter not just those nations either),
had emerged over the centuries in their current “settled”
form out of the repression, subjugation and dispossession
in earlier times, often by harsh and brutal means, of the
weaker among the then-prevailing social groups (defi ned in
terms of such identity-related matters as family, tribe, clan,
Sunil Govinnage
110
ethnicity, language, religion, culture, territory, whatever) and
the imposition on them, by means of whatever institutional
framework was in place at the time for the organization of
social life within the polity, of the dominance of the powerful
groups. “Jathika Chintanaya”, it appears, is in no way just a
latter-day creation of the Lankan majority!
In the course of time these societies moved through
feudalism to modernity, which was brought into being through
the workings of the rising new economic phenomenon of
capitalism, under the direction of the middle class, which was
an equally new phenomenon that emerged along with it. Th is
inevitably brought about fundamental restructurings of the
institutional framework of these societies (and their modes
of legitimation), as the prevailing political hierarchizations
of the established feudal order, which set itself in the way
of the unobstructed pursuit of capitalist activity, came as a
matter of necessity to be displaced by alternative, class-based
hierarchizations that allowed the emerging bourgeois class the
freedom and the legitimacy, also the dominance, they needed
to eff ectively pursue their economic imperatives.
However, the unequal identity-related social
arrangements that had been set in place in earlier times
remained intact, essentially undisturbed by these various
developments. On the contrary, modernity proceeded to
stabilize, secure and normalize them, to the extent in fact
of rendering them seemingly quite legitimate or innocuous,
more or less how things could unalterably, even acceptably, be
expected to be, at base at least. To challenge these inequities
would have been to rekindle traditional rivalries and, worse, to
send undesirable signals to any forces that might be inclined
to contest the class-based inequalities of the now-established
societal arrangements, leading to the disruption of the social
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order and stability that were essential for the pursuit of the
economic goals that defi ned the very rationale of the new
social order and the interests of its comptrollers.
As we have seen, however, this was not all there was to
it. Th e positivistic goal-oriented empirical rationality that,
emerging from deep within and together with these various
developments, had installed itself as modernity’s driving form
of rationality, had led also to a further recognition. Th is was
that, whereas the more static economic system that was being
displaced had permitted comparatively isolated, self-suffi cient
pockets of activity, the emerging new one depended very
much on the integrative participation, in whichever roles, of
all segments or constituencies of the populace. Accordingly,
participation in the all-important economic sphere, and,
therefore, in all other spheres too, was thrown open to all
sections of the polity, in a sort of “trans-sectionalization” of
capital that was anticipatory of its transnationalization in
recent times, in principle on the basis of equal access. Th e
emergence of the public sphere, and the development of the
apparatus of democracy, along with its defi ning ideals (of
equality, freedom, and so on) and the rhetoric that supported it,
were among the provisions made for such equal participation.
Th is did help articulate for modernity the “potential” for the
democratic conduct of life, achievable through the exercise
of communicative rationality, which now placed itself in
dialectical interaction with the instrumental rationality driven
“will” on which modernity in any event so depended.
At the same time, as the Lankan polity has demonstrated,
none of this guaranteed that potential would prevail over
will. Neither could it alter the reality that the displacement
by modernity of the then-prevailing social hierarchizations
did not secure the elimination of all stratifi cation; or that the
identity-related inequalities that had been institutionalized
Sunil Govinnage
112
before the advent of modernity were righted. In fact, the
immediate benefi ciaries of participation in the economic
sphere, as far as the identity-related sections or constituencies
involved were concerned, tended generally to be their own
emerging bourgeois leadership, who in return for the benefi ts
of position, wealth and power that such participation brought
them, were more than ready not to raise awkward questions
about the pre-modern relegations of their respective peoples.
Such are the varying considerations that could account
for the embarrassment of the nations of the international
community that most represented the dominant order when
confronted with Sri Lanka’s ethnic confl ict, the embarrassment
that seems to have made it so very diffi cult for them to work
out viable responses of their own to it. Th e situation seemed
too much to hold before them a mirror in which they could
recognize not just themselves but, with that, the discrepancy
between what they were and what, through their rhetoric of
freedom, democracy and so on, they projected themselves as,
in the process also superciliously judging the participants in
the confl ict on their shortfalls in these respects. Particularly
aggravating was the derisiveness with which the victors
in the war and their supporters dismissed the attempts of
these nations to reprimand them (again, the choice Sinhala
phrase hoo kiyanavaa – infi nitely more pungent than the
comparatively genteel “catcalling” – off ers itself as a means
of capturing something of its perishing fl avour), fl inging
such embarrassments in their faces as they turned their own
rhetoric against them, in contemptuous disregard of the
highly selective terms that its formulators had placed on its
application and deployment.
It is very interesting, in these respects, that China,
Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Russia, also very much members of
the international community, shared none whatever of the
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misgivings that have affl icted the more dominant members
of the global order in responding to the outcome of the war,
showing great alacrity in applauding it without reserve. None
of them has much use for the rhetoric by means of which
the dominant members of the global order project their
“free world” image of themselves, and all of them, as not just
recent events have shown, have had no qualms at all about
resorting, in dealing with their own internal problems, to the
logic of the approach under discussion, the approach that
that free world has set in place for the resolution of confl ict.
Equally interesting is the often disconcerting behaviour of
the polity’s immediate regional neighbours, who clearly have
preoccupations that do not allow straightforward responses.
All of which only signifi es that, given the contradictory
nature of the prevailing hegemonic global order, what ultimately
determines too much (fortunately not all – communicative
rationality and moral-practical knowledge/consciousness/
insight have this gratifying habit of making their universal
presence felt even in less auspicious situations) of how the
“international community” might be expected to respond,
however diffi cult it might be to come to terms with it, is not
reason or ethics or the positive terms of the rhetoric, but geopolitical
Realpolitik. Th is constructs itself around such factors
as geo-political distributions, arrangements and strategies
of power (though this must not be allowed to obscure the
critical role played in the matter by considerations of cynical
political expediency within the internal political arenas – how
do we make sure that we win the next elections?), spheres of
infl uence, the containment and possible elimination of rival
forces, the ownership and control of economic resources,
designs on territory, national self-interest, military muscle and
so on.
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114
Th is, however, is a lesson that the minority combatants
in the war had failed to learn, which explains the gross
strategic miscalculations that ensured their defeat. More
tragically, it also explains the almost pained, and somewhat
pathetic baffl ement of many ordinary and innocent members
of the constituency over the disinclination of the international
community to “rescue” them, in spite of what they saw as
the self-evident rightness and justice of their cause. It hardly
helped dispel the baffl ement of these people that they failed to
recognize, too, that the encouragement the dominant nations
gave in the matter to various human rights and other such
organizations, generally non-governmental, was more in the
nature of an attempt to preserve their rhetoric-defi ned image
of themselves than to edify themselves on the grounds on
which they might make honourable choices in deciding their
courses of action.
Th at lesson, though, was one that the bourgeois
nation(al[ist]) state of the island had, in spite of its feudal
proclivities, mastered only too well – after all, it had, along
with all other such nation states, been implicitly designated
by the structuring operations that constituted the dominant
global order as one of its primary functionaries. Th is must,
considerably, explain the states’s own utmost self-assurance in
the situation – it knew it had little to worry itself about. To
it must also be added the notion of “sovereignty”, which the
dominant global order had devised to protect this institution of
the nation state that had so critical a role to play in its designs.
Th is guaranteed “non-interference” in the “internal aff airs” of
the state, except (there always is an escape clause) in cases where
there were matters involved (highly valued economic assets,
strategic advantages, neo-imperialist aspirations, affi liations of
race, and so on) that were too important to the interests of
the powerful within the global order. Nevertheless, it can be
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anticipated that when it comes to the task of “reconstructing”
and “developing” this country that has emerged from its long
and destructive confl ict quite devastated in material and
other respects, the reservations and constraints that kept the
international community aloof will quite simply evaporate
under the quite matter-of-fact recognition of the material,
political, strategic and other such profi ts to be made, so that
there will be no dearth of queuers-up, from wherever they
come, to rush in, undeterred by any considerations!
None of this is to deny the positives of modernist
internationality. As throughout noted, no country can in
modern times belong outside the unity that is the global
order. All countries are inextricably bound to each other
within it, and, oxymoronically, that binding is, potentially,
a profoundly liberating one, bringing literally immeasurable
benefi ts, privileges and self-realizational satisfactions to
all of them, indeed to everybody everywhere, through the
innumerable collaborative, convivial and mutually concerned
and supportive initiatives that are evident all around us. No,
communicative rationality and moral-practical knowledge/
consciousness/insight are not to be denied. But neither can
we get away from the eternal dialectic – that global order is
contradictory.
Th e acidic nature of the preceding account of the
responses of the international community to the ethnic confl ict
is intended to remind us of just that. Like all of the nations
that belong within that unifi ed communal order, the nations
engaged in the post-colonial undertaking need to work out
their own salvation with diligence, turning to best account the
opportunities it aff ords them; but also with vigilance, vigilance
against the very real and ever-present danger that, along the
negative strand of the workings of modernity, the dominant
global order would bring them disempoweringly under its
Sunil Govinnage
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hegemony, preventing them from realizing themselves in their
own right.
* * * *
Our critique of mainstream post-colonial literary theorization
is, precisely, that it more than just buys into this hegemonic
project; in real terms, it actually vies to make itself an eff ective
channel for transmitting the interpellations through which
post-colonial literary creativity, and with that post-coloniality
itself, are, in the ways indicated earlier, debilitatingly reduced
to the status of docile objects, as, condemned to that dark and
negative modernist condition of hopelessness and despair and
stripped of all choice of their own, they are brought under the
governance of the reigning ideology of the global order.
Th is is what Govinnage, through the unique form
of post-colonial aesthetic he has fashioned for his writing,
fi rmly prevents, obliging the theorization to fundamentally
re-educate itself instead. We need not doubt (and some of the
commentary available on Govinnage’s writing confi rms that
doubt) that such theorization would see in the very deep and
real sense of separation, loss and uncertainty that Govinnage’s
diasporic circumstances have caused him to feel, the straw at
which it might clutch in escaping that obligation, using it to
try to run his writing aground on that destabilizing ontological
and epistemological homelessness that would deny it the
potential and the choices by which it would affi rm its postcolonial
identity in defi ance of the ideological impositions of
the dominant global order.
However, as this essay, and also the one preceding it,
have tried to establish, Govinnage puts his writing decisively
beyond such disempowering and appropriative violations.
Perth: My village down under
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Rooting himself deep within the particularities of his cultural
heritage, and safeguarding them from reduction to the aimless,
free-fl oating relativism of the merely contingent, he accesses for
himself through them, and in the concrete form they enable,
the potential and the choices that are in principle available to
all human beings for the purpose of at least struggling to work
at their destinies, with agency, and in terms that most matter
to them. Admittedly, there is much about both the global and
local material realities that is assiduously at work to frustrate
that struggle, but Govinnage resists it and eff ectively fends
it off . Th e result is a satisfying affi rmative writing that holds
out to his modern post-colonial polity and its peoples, and
indeed to post-coloniality itself, the possibility and the hope
of constituting themselves in terms of what, in the midst of
all those demoralizing things that would drag them down into
defeatist anxiety and despair, they would most positively want
to be.
* * * *
With the discussion just concluded of Govinnage’s handling of
the dialectical complexities of the global/local interface within
post-colonial creativity, we round off our characterization,
spread over both the preceding essay and this one, of the
several complex facets of his writing that, through their
mutual touching points and inter-sparklings, enter integrally
into the fashioning of that act of “giving back to the lost
home” on which, ultimately, the claims made for its especial
dimensions of signifi cance rest. As we have seen, it is not only
that lost home, which happens to have been the specifi c focus
of this essay, that might garner the bounty of that act and its
performance in the writing, not least through that invaluably
revitalizing awakening to a sense of the potential it has to
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overcome the devastating crisis of humanity and civilization
that is racking it asunder. Th e new home, too, as the preceding
essay has shown, has much it could gain from its insights
and energy, through the new themes and concerns, or the
hitherto inconceivable variations on those it already had, that
the writing off ers its world of literary creativity, enhancing its
potential for self-understanding, even while supplying that
creativity with further presently unfamiliar forms that could
only enrich it. And above all, there is the most encompassing
home, the home within which not just these two homes but
all homes and their people belong, which, through that act,
might get a glimpse of how, in defi ance of its own disturbing
contradictoriness, it might still be a true home to all of the
humanity who have the privilege of living in it.