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Introduction
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Introduction: In My Mother’s House On 21 September 1989, my sister and I waited for our mother to come home from work to the temporary house we were renting at the time. We were living in the northern Jaffna peninsula, by then, already a war zone. We were half minority Tamil (my mother), half majority Sinhalese (my father), but brought up speaking Tamil. The years when our Sinhalese father lived in Jaffna with us, as opposed to our once or twice yearly trip to Colombo to see him, or when my Sinhalese grandmother and uncles would travel up to Jaffna to visit or to go on pilgrimage were becoming dim memories in our almost exclusively Tamil and Muslim world. For us, our world was Tamilspeaking Jaffna. Without being quite conscious of it, we were becoming witness to immense changes. We had already become accustomed to running into bunkers when the Sri Lankan army bombed us in 1986, were used to the idea that there were places and people we should be careful of, were cognizant that there was one really big militant group called the “Tigers,” and had some dim idea of other militant groups. We had seen the Indian army arrive, heard rumors of the rapes that accompanied their arrival, seen the disordering of our world as the Indians and the Tigers fought it out. I recall in art class at school, being asked to draw pictures of beaches with coconut trees, and farmers tending their fields with cows, images that no longer described our world. At home, I drew instead pictures of being in bunkers surrounded by my family with speech bubbles of the funny things that people said while helicopters hovered. My mother mounted that picture in her office at the university. I recall having an intensely happy childhood in the midst of this war. My mother never came back home that 21 September; her journey was ended by LTTE assassins in front of the house. Her body returned like us to “our home,” my ur, my grandparents’ house and village where she and we had been born and had lived for most of our lives. This house is still standing in 2 Introduction 2011, though scarred like all of us by war. My childhood ended. My sister and I left Sri Lanka for London with our father who came to get us, flying on 25 December 1989. On 26 December our new lives as refugees in London began. This is how my journey back to Sri Lanka to conduct my research began, but it did not end there. This book is not about myself and my personal journey , but instead the stories of others, and the society to which I returned a stranger over a decade later. A society which presented in its strangeness to me, new questions about what had happened and was happening. I experienced the very real sensation that I, like many others abroad, lived in memories inadequate to the task of comprehending what had happened in Sri Lanka in the 1990s. The title of this book is of course a reference to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (1992) essay “In My Father’s House,” which recounts his return to Ghana for his father’s funeral and the fraught family and community disputes that unfolded around the requests of the dead man. Lurking behind is the Bible, which he and I too were brought up with, and one of its most quoted statements: “in my father’s house there are many rooms.” This book is about returning to my mother’s house, but through a glass darkly, for I have put away childish things indeed. The book, while about Sri Lanka’s civil war, is more largely about war itself as “a social condition ” (Lubkemann 2008). The decades long Sri Lankan civil war was waged between the Sri Lankan state and most latterly the Tamil guerrilla group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, also called the “Tamil Tigers”), who emerged supreme through the elimination of all other Tamil militant groups. While there has been punctuated ethnic conflict since Independence in 1948, most would agree that large-scale violence between “armies” in the northern and eastern minority areas became a more everyday reality in the mid-1980s. It is a war that has involved the destruction of physical and human infrastructures, the permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, the pitting of majority against minority ethnic groups, and the rise of insurrectionary...