Reclining Buddha in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka http://student.britannica.com/eb/art-92517
maybe some of you reading this know that i spent a summer living and working in sri lanka while i was in law school. i was working in a constitutional reform NGO, which was great especially since there were 2 or 3 constitutional crises while i was there (back when public officials totally giving the finger to any accountability mechanisms in their government was still a novel experience for me, this was an exciting place to be around). i don’t know how much you may know about sri lankan history and current events, though the country has gotten some more attention in recent years with the global war on terror, since for the past 25 years there has been a terrorism-ridden civil war going on there between the Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamil populations. i’m writing about this now because i happened to see a reference in the news to the fact that this week marks the 25th anniversary of the week-long genocidal riots that killed 1000 Tamils and started this civil war. here is an article from a canadian paper that summarizes what happened in what is now known as “black july,” and a more personal account from a sri lankan journalism blog.
there is this weird cloud of naivete hanging over the summer that i spent there, which was the summer of 2001, after my first year of law school. i was excited to go somewhere that was different from anywhere else i’d ever been, and though i informed myself about the terrorism situation there i also relied on the assertions of the global law program director at NYU that it had calmed down quite a bit and was pretty safe there. while this was actually true, “calmed down” still meant a visible military presence in the city, a lot more searching than i was used to before going into buildings and tourist attractions, and not the absence of risk but a population that had become accustomed to it. “it used to be scary but things don’t happen that much anymore, and you don’t have to worry so much if you aren’t a public figure that would be specifically targeted,” the friends i made would say. “except july, something almost always happens near the anniversary in july.”
i remember feeling pretty edgy about this…not terrible, and in many other ways i had a really fun summer there, but i still was edgy, and the constant presence of the thought that something bad might happen wore on me. there were all these beautiful paintings on the street in a lot of places, and i often admired them innocently, until discovering about halfway through my time there that the paintings were there to commemorate places where bombs had gone off…and they were all over places that i passed all the time! finally near the end of july, as predicted, something did happen - a suicide bomber destroyed a grounded airplane at night at the airport. it was actually kind of a relief when it happened, because whatever thing was going to happen in july was over with, and the attack seemed to be designed to not hurt anyone but the bomber (still sad since it is not unlikely that this person was someone taken as a child and indoctrinated for this purpose).
when i left sri lanka i was just starting to feel comfortable there, and was sad that i had to leave just when i was getting my bearings and knew enough people to really learn about the culture properly. at the same time, i remember arriving home to new york - my passport says this was on august 20, 2001 - and for the first time fully appreciating the blessing of living in a place where i didn’t have to worry about crazy suicide bombers blowing up airplanes in my city, where it didn’t happen that nonfunctional checks and balances in government would result in judges and presidents being able to ignore their constitution with impunity, where you didn’t have to be uber-searched before going anywhere, and where people were not subject to all kinds of intrusions and civil liberties violations because of their ethnic similarity to members of a terrorist organization.
i feel like writing this is kind of trite except for the fact that i really was having exactly this kind of conversation for a few weeks in the late summer of that year whenever people asked me what i learned on my trip. i think everyone who makes travel a big part of their life collects a bunch of memories of new fruits and dishes and music and landscapes, but also has some place that is the first place that makes them think differently about their home and themselves. so even though i haven’t often kept up with what is going on in sri lanka, and am not still in touch with anyone there, i have this bond with the place as having given me this weird gift of forcing me to be mindful of what it meant to live in america in the last week of august of 2001, which was the last time i would ever have the opportunity to be mindful of quite that version of it.
so all of that is to say that seeing that this week is the 25-year anniversary of the week that changed the sri lankans’ world the way that 9/11/01 changed ours, i thought i’d use this medium to share their story with some people who maybe haven’t heard much of it.
i think literature is a good way to get the real feeling of historical events, and so recommend two books that give a flavor of what sri lanka has been like in the 1980s and since. one is anil’s ghost, which maybe is already well-known, since it is by michael ondaatje, who also wrote the english patient. less well known is funny boy, a novel/collection of related short stories by shyam selvadurai that sets a coming-of-age story of a young boy questioning his sexuality on the backdrop of the 1983 riots. if you pick either of them up, please enjoy.
