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Journalism of Courage
THERE have now been more than three years of relative peace in Sri Lanka. But little progress has been made towards a final settlement of the conflict, and the ceasefire is far from stable. Many Sri Lankans believe a return to war is a strong possibility.
This book by journalist Nirupama Subramanian is a reminder of just how much Sri Lankans of all ethnic, religious and linguistic backgrounds have to lose if the fighting should resume.
Accounts of war are too often dominated by derring-do. The horrors of warfare are sanitised by redemptive tales of soldiers who survive against all the odds, or mythologised by politicians whose careers are resurrected by bloody victories on the battlefield. In this book, Subramanian helps redress the balance.
Denied permission to report on the actual fighting, the author searches out other stories, stories of ordinary people, whose lives have been damaged or destroyed by war. She argues, convincingly in the end, that the fact that she did not see any of the fighting ‘‘helped me get a better perspective on the conflict’’.
Her account begins with the tragic tale of the father of a Tamil woman, Vasumathy, killed in a Tiger suicide bomb attack at the Central Bank in Colombo in 1996. Vasumathy’s father is angry with the Tigers but also blames himself. He explains that Vasumathy would have been abroad studying if he had not stopped her, and then pushed her into an arranged marriage that lasted only six months. Vasumathy’s mother stops speaking after her daughter’s death; she has a stroke and dies two years later.
In a series of what she calls ‘little histories’, Subramanian writes with great sympathy and some skill, interweaving each of them with the social and political background that makes them intelligible in the context of war. She avoids traditional foreign-journalist-in-Sri-Lanka stereotypes and takes great care of the nuances of complex individual stories.
Subramanian travels across the island, meeting soldiers and widows, refugees and politicians, migrating maids and child monks. There is no one whose life has not been touched by the war. This is simple, spare journalism at its best. She lets people tell their own stories—though sometimes I wished she would allow them continue telling those stories for just a little longer.
The most touching account of all is of a young Sri Lankan woman who goes to Lebanon to work as a maid. Her aim is to earn enough money to have reconstructive surgery on her hair-lip and then to be able to pay her own dowry. (It doesn’t work out that way—but she finds another route to happiness.)
This otherwise excellent book does suffer from a few minor problems. There is no index, the map is next to useless for the chapters dealing with north and east Sri Lanka, and just occasionally the author repeats herself—telling us twice in 10 pages that India has sixty million Tamils, and giving us two accounts of the battle of Mullaithivu.
A more significant problem is one that affects so many books by working journalists—it already feels out-of-date. As if to make amends, she returns to Sri Lanka shortly after the ceasefire and refers parenthetically to the tsunami in her introduction.
But this is window-dressing really, and I was left feeling abandoned by the author in mid-2003 Sri Lanka. So please, Nirupama Subramanian, return to Sri Lanka to tell the story of an uncertain peace, and get your next book published a little more quickly.
