What made me write ‘Fault Lines’

by Jean ARASANAYAGAM

All tremble at weapons; all fear death. Comparing

Others with oneself, one should not slay, nor cause to slay.

- The Dhammapada

In the light of one’s historical experience as a writer, these three plays in the collection Fault Lines had to be written, had to be published together. In writing these three plays, THE SACK, THE FIRE SERMON and THE CAPTAIN HAS COME I felt an intense need to record the tragic happenings that had taken place in the course of the years in my country not only as a witness but also as one who had been in the very thick of those cataclysmic events. Here again, how and where did these particular three plays begin. When and where did I feel that inner compulsion to construct those happenings and use the different genres of fiction, poetry and play writing to get my message across?

The writer cannot occupy a sealed chamber or live in a false Utopia. Mount Parnassus is the locale of the effete and dilettante poet in the current context. The writer has to lay bare the truth. THE SACK began with a few lines I once read in one of our local newspapers. It was an account of one of those horrific massacres that had taken place in a border village. All that the survivors of that particular village wanted to do was to return to their ‘golden land’. The poem I wrote was titled Goyaesque Etchings on ‘The disasters of War’. The longing for that return is reflected in the lines:

We want to go back

to our homes

We went to go back

to the golden earth

We want to sow our seed.

The chenas yield

new harvests

Rich gourds

Brimming with seed

Blood milk

Before

The villages go back

to the forest.”

(Trial by Terror)

Tragic scenes

The title of the poem derived partly from the etchings by Goya, ‘The Disasters of War’ and the paintings of Delacroix I had once seen in the galleries of the Louvre. Being a painter myself I was deeply moved by the tragic scenes of the battlefields in one of those European wars of the 18th or 19th century (or even perhaps earlier) with the ghastly spectacle of death, the dying, the rearing, snorting horses, the wounded lying in pools of blood. It was an agonizing experience to view that canvas painted in the realistic style. Those scenes of battle remain imprinted in my mind even today. Many paintings, etchings, sculptures have been part of my consciousness from childhood when I would lose myself in my father’s library.

Jean Arasanayagam

Among his books on travel, autobiographies of Generals and narratives of great epoch making battles was an enormous book with illustrations in black and white of the First World War of 1914-1918. The illustrations were reproductions by great British painters depicting trench warfare, storming the boundaries of barbed wire separating the ‘enemy’, bodies of soldiers wounded, dying, dead, cavalry horses, all the gory details. Those visual images of death and destruction made a powerful impacting impression on my mind and imagination. I pored over that book for hours.

Here lay the true reportage of war, not a romanticized one but the true reality of the waste and futility of human life and led to innumerable other poems. I write up to this very date on the devastation wrought on human life in an almost surreal terrain wherever there is war, conflict, terrorist attacks, conflagrations. Sometimes I translate paintings into poetry and fiction. In my mind the different genres mingle whether it be a painting by Picasso like ‘Guernica’ or ‘The Hiroshima Panels’ or my own poem ‘Kali Stands with Outstretched Hands’, to mention a few.

The poem on The Disasters of War not only became a short story The Sack (from the Dividing Lie/Indialog Publications Pvt Ltd) but became a play as well. The subject could not be exhausted. If only some of my stories could be made into films was a constant thought in my mind but that appeared to be an impossibility with the resources at hand so I created my own scenarios in the diverse genres I employed, poem after poem, story after story and I utilised the potential of every technique and device of both painting and sculpture, The Agony of the Pieta being one of the most poignant of them all. I also focus on the tremendous courage of women in conflict situations.

The mother in THE SACK takes her mortally wounded son after the border village massacre, in an empty grain sack through tortuous jungle paths to reach the nearest hospital. As she drags the grain sack through the jungle she carries on a monologue of her thoughts and emotions perhaps her words and utterances were meant to all women, all mothers whose children were caught up in the violence of political and ethnic conflict. It is however, a monologue meant to transcend ethnicity or its divisiveness, victim and victimizer. It has deep, profound implications where all humankind has to suffer loss, bereavement, displacement. The emotion the woman protagonist expresses is not purely personal and individual. She gives tongue to the grief of all who suffer the emotions of profound sorrow, despair and yet hope that must continue to sustain the living.

Central theme

The second play in Fault Lines, The Fire Sermon, is centred on those days (1989-1991) when the Beeshanaya was at its height. The central theme focuses on the reprisal killings in the village of Mahawatte which lies in the environs of the township of Kandy. An attack had been made on a military camp by the ‘insurgents’ (yet another new term by which those who by their radical ideologies aimed at destabilising the State) were described. A powerful new political lexicon was growing which I, as a writer became gradually aware of. There were significant distinctions too which had arisen out of the divisive political climate and this lexicon possessed clearly demarcated ethnic boundaries as referents.

On the one hand there were the insurgents, the misguided youth, on the other the militants and the terrorists to mention a few. In the village of Mahawatte all the males, 200 of them were taken out of their homes, lined up and shot. Here again my information had filtered through the reportage in the media and had appeared in a newspaper article I had come across. It was a period in my personal and professional life where I was exposed to the happenings during the Beeshanaya. I lectured to students in the Teacher Training College at Peradeniya who were either veterans of the Che Guevara Movement of the 1971 Insurgency and those who were now embroiled in the 1989-1991 radical movement.

Some of the veterans of 1971 were now engaged in the process of indoctrination in political cells in secret enclaves. Most of them were willing to speak of their past experiences to me and one of the students, I recollect exhorted me to complete the literature texts in the shortest possible time so that he could return to his own ‘lectures’ with his own students. Some of them would show me the scars of their bullet wounds and also relate their experiences in detention. No detail was spared. There were many stories and poems I wrote on the ideological radical movement at that time. The days were fraught with fear, tension, danger.

The chief protagonist of my play however was not one of the ‘misguided youth’ but a woman named Alice. I heard her personal saga from someone and wrote this poem for her.

A Woman I once knew

A woman walks searching for her daughter’s

Lover, among the dead, two hundred males,

Young, old, turning face after face

To the light, there is no recognition in any

To say that he is one of them.

Woman, an ordinary woman

Who cooked food for others, washed their cloths,

Scrubbed pots and pans, had a child,

Fatherless, who wore other people’s out-grown

Dresses.

Even her name, Alice, that’s all we knew

Of her, was not her own.

To history she is anonymous,

But to me who once knew her,

She is Medea, she is Antigone.

Alice was not only the main subject of my poem but also the chief protagonist in the short story, The Fire Sermon and in my play. Woven through the story and the play is a strong thread of Buddhistic ideas, something that I was consciously aware of in the theme I was handling and yet at times seemed to surface naturally as the play progressed. I thought that the Buddhist ideas also gave immense leverage to what I was speaking of for I felt that the sayings of Gautama Buddha were of great significance to my theme, the opening lines being from the Adittapariyaya-sutta, The Fire Sermon.

The third play, The captain has come is based on experiences in refugee camps in 1983. I began writing the play in the latter of the eighties, then took it with me to Iowa where I was on an International writers fellowship, brought it back, thought it was complete until I began to embark on its publication when I recast certain scenes. In the meantime, an excerpt had been published in ‘Ariel’ (University of Calgary) in an issue on commonwealth Drama. Earlier, David Woolger who was the English Consultant for Teacher Training methodologies where innovative techniques were being introduced in the teaching of English Literature, had discussions with me on staging the play in a very avant garde manner. It was a tragedy that we lost such a talented man as he died in Sri Lanka, long before his time.

The years passed. I was involved in other pursuits, travelling, writing. But the time was ripe for its publication. Dr. Minoli Salgado (University of Sussex) saw the play and used excerpts in her Routledge Publication in the section ‘Territoriality and the Refugee” (Fugitive Selves. Writing Sri Lanka. Literature, resistance and the politics of place) Other academics too saw the play and evinced an interest in it. Prof. Jasbir Jain, Assoc: Prof. Mini Nanda, while Prof. Kamala Radha had written a Paper on the fictional aspects of the experiences which had been published in “All is Burning, Fear; Meditations in a Camp”.

There was also Apocalypse ‘83 which embodied those experiences. I would not have been able to record those harrowing experiences of fear, alienation and divisiveness had I not been in the Refugee Camps myself. I was an insider-witness, it was my Dente-like descent to Hades, my pacing the corridors of interior Piranesi-prisons, the barrier that separated me from the rest of humanity.

Samsaric journey

Fault lines: is the result of all the experiences that I have gone through in my samsaric journey. These experiences have added dimension to my writing in many genres and also left me with deep consciousness of humanity. My writing is my legacy to posterity.

The critiques on my plays have been specially significant. Tissa Jayatilaka has written with great and sensitive understanding on The Sack and The Fire Sermon, an understanding that derives from his knowledge of the complex political scenario we live and survive in.

These plays will not be like the Dead Sea Scrolls concealed, but preserved for centuries until they were discovered and their script interpreted.

The writer has to bare the truth - without bias, without prejudice. I have lived through two Radical Movements and ethnic conflict. And survived without having to embark on diasporic journeys. I live in a country which is in need of healing but healing is a very long process and here I feel, the writer can play a crucial, if controversial part. One has to be prepared for contumely or even hostility.

I still remember the day many years ago when I sat in the audience of the E.O. Pereira Theatre at the University of Peradeniya and watched the Trial of Dedan Kimathi on stage. I wondered to myself whether The Captain Has Come would ever be produced on the stage.

As I watched the play I thought of the political concerns that pre-occupy all writers yet what emerged from home ground seemed at that time to be of less importance to that rapt audience. When I watched a play in Glasgow that came from South Africa ( a play by Athol Fugard) at the commonwealth conference in which political prisoners lived isolated on an island, one of them being Nelson Mandela, I once more thought of The Captain has come.

We have to question all these happenings in the here and now in whatever manner we can, surreal, existential or using realistic techniques. There is no turning back