As the sun rose over what have been called the “killing fields” of Sri Lanka, I fought to keep my eyes opened and focused on the scenes rushing past the window of my bus to Jaffna.
The journey here had been a long one so far - as most in South Asia admittedly are. The third term of teaching English in the Access Academy at AUW had come to a close the 14th of July, at which point Ms. Christa’s desk contents were emptied into a box that I’ll reclaim in three weeks. My apartment was vacated, and I was off to Dhaka, and from there to the northwest to visit my parents. After a delightful three-day visit in Rajshahi, the seven-hour Pabna Express brought me back to Dhaka, where I boarded a bus to Kolkata with one of my Sri Lankan students, Aara. We crossed the Bangladesh-India border by foot, completing necessary paperwork and successfully avoiding payment of bribes, then resumed the bus journey taking us to the massive railway station in Kolkata, where we crammed ourselves and our luggage into a cozy little birth for a thirty hour journey south to Chennai. From Chennai, we hopped over an insignificant portion of the Indian ocean on an airplane that landed us in Colombo, Sri Lanka. I spent a fantastic afternoon with my other Sri Lankan student, Nima, cartwheeling along the “Gold Face” - the impressive stretch of beach along the capital’s western border.
Before meeting Aara and Nima in my classroom one year ago, I would not have thought it any significant utterance to refer to them both equally as ‘Sri Lankans’. At least not until Aara enlightened me one Thursday afternoon in my office, exclaiming, “Ma’am, I have never thought to call myself ‘Sri Lankan” - because my identity was as a ‘Tamil girl’. But here in Bangladesh, for the first time, I am ‘Sri Lankan’ and so is Nima - but I have never before been friends with a Sinhala girl...”
These two young women - from the two ethnic groups that have been engaged in civil war for 26 of Sri Lanka’s 39 short years since independence - forged a deeply inspiring friendship at AUW. Not merely symbolic, it was genuine, and as one who has little reference for what post-war reconciliation means, I might never understand what degree of strength this action of the two students actually took.
In my office, Aara had gallantly processed not only her shifting identity, but the effect of the Sri Lankan civil war on her Tamil people and her nation as a whole. So when, toward the end of our academic year, she suddenly extended the invitation for me to visit her nation and her family, I was eager to continue the learning I’d been privileged to begin acquiring through my Sri Lankan students. So by this series of events, I now found myself in the final hours of a three-day journey from Bangladesh to the northernmost Sri Lankan province of Jaffna. The bus ride had been grueling, and I was finally conceding defeat in my futile attempts to sleep when Aara sidled up next to me. She’d switched seats with another so she could point out to me the war-ravaged land being gradually lit by a pale sun, and I was grateful to have a knowledgable narrator.
I will not try to give a history of the struggle between the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sinhala-majority government military (Sri Lankan Army - SLA), although if you're ignorant as I was a year ago, please take some time to learn. A controversial documentary by the UK’s Channel 4, with footage of the undeniably atrocious war crimes was produced recently and strongly opposed by Sri Lanka's government. The war narrative has many sides and is worth studying, if we ever hope to learn from our grave human errors. (See a BBC link here.) Some of the events that led to the devastating climax of the fighting in early 2009 too closely match those that preceded the Rwandan genocide of ’94. And it is not by error that the designation “Killing fields of Sri Lanka” echoes the memory of events during the horrific rule of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.
With Aara’s warning that we were now entering the lands in which the majority of fighting took place, I began intently scanning the horizon. For the first few miles, there was simply nothing to see. But this emptiness, and total abandonment of such a great expanse of land on such a little island, was strange and disconcerting. Actually, the land was nearly empty, save for government’s soldiers patrolling the roads, but at five in the morning, these were the only human presence. The camouflage uniforms made me recall the checkpoint we’d encountered around 2am, at which point I'd been asked to exit the bus with my passport, and provide the army officers with some photos and my letter of invitation. I was interviewed briefly, and a form was filled out with my personal information, after which the satisfied guards dismissed their groggy visitor.
These roads and fields that had formerly been the strongholds of the Tamil militia were now heavily patrolled by those who had been their mortal enemies. I couldn’t tell whether some of the barricades along the roads had originally been set up by the LTTE, or were more recent creations of the military.
Aara pointed out the bullet-ridden and bombed out buildings, voicing her surprise that they hadn’t all been torn down yet. “The government doesn’t want it to look like there was a war here,” she explained. Understandable, I thought, but is it still somehow insensitive? I tried to read Aara’s face for her sentiment on this matter but I sensed her mind was consumed with other thoughts and memories - those of an insider.
We passed many cows. In India, I had joked with Aara about how the way you can tell that you’ve crossed from Bangladesh into India is by the look of the cows - skinny and sad in Bangladesh, where they’re kept for a while then served up at a Muslim feast, but fat and proud in India, where they’re revered by Hindus as sacred beings. Aara pointed to the cows of Hindu Jaffna and remarked, “But see ma’am, even the cows here are skinny, because after the war, not all of the owners returned, so many animals just wander.”
Soon we came upon an area I had dreaded seeing, for the confirmation it would supply for how repulsive humans at war can be. “Land mines,” said Aara, gesturing toward the yellow tape marking off many acres of deadly territory. She had written in her final essay about the discrimination faced by Tamil war widows in the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka. As part of her evidence for how social norms have so ostracized this vulnerable sub-population, she provided stories of the widows who have all-too-willingly volunteered to take jobs as land-mine sweepers.
It was hard to avoid painting upon this landscape the gruesome images of 2009 that I’d seen portrayed on the Channel 4 documentary some months before. The actual scene before me was quite benign, but little things stood out - like the posters of the smiling Sinhala president plastered upon every building, here in this defeated Tamil town.
And I noticed how all the houses being erected in the process of rebuilding northern Sri Lanka were all being made from the same prototype. A little song about the creation of the first American suburban neighborhoods suddenly popped into my head…
little boxes on a hillside...made of ticky-tacky, little boxes, little boxes, little boxes all the same.
That bus ride from Colombo to the north was the only time during my week in Sri Lanka that we dwelt on the sad, surreal quality of the post-war state. As we saw the first signs of approaching Aara’s seaside town of Point Pedro, my student brightened up at the joyful thought of seeing her family for the first time in a whole year. The sun rose high in the sky that day, and by evening time we were carefree swimmers in a clear blue sea.
