In My Mother's House: Civil War in Sri Lanka

4. Becoming of This Place? Northern Muslim Futures After Eviction

chapter four Becoming of This Place? Northern Muslim Futures After Eviction Meditate that this came about I commend these words to you Carve them in your hearts At home, in the street, Going to bed, rising; Repeat them to your children, Or may your house fall apart May illness impede you, May your children turn their faces from you —Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (1996: 11) Farook and I were in a Jaffna Muslim majority refugee camp in the Puttalam district one evening in 2003. We had arrived there late, dusk was approaching fast, and the camp rang with the busy sounds of the women beginning their household labor for the evening. The camp leader explained this to us, asking me to come another time. Looking at me, while Farook explained my purpose in the camps, the leader had the same question for me that all the refugees had begun with “what was my sonta ur?” By sonta ur he meant my “real/ancestral” home, where I was “really from” rather than where I lived at any given time. Sontam itself is a term that denotes and mutually implicates ownership and kinship. I knew and recognized the terms of the question, not only because I had been answering it continually through my time in Puttalam, but because I knew how to ask that question too. When I told him 146 Chapter Four that it was Nallur, Jaffna, he looked at me again intently in recognition of our shared home. The road I grew up in, as it gets into the heart of Jaffna Town, ribbons into the famous Moor Street complex, where the large majority of Jaffna’s 15,000 or so Muslims had lived.1 He turned me to face outward from the camp with him. Beyond the half glimpsed abandoned salt fields, was a distant black palmyra tree splitting the sky open. The palmyra is the famed symbol of the Jaffna peninsula, a familiar sight to anyone who has grown up there and the symbol most often used to represent it. Pointing at the tree he told me, “they call this S—— B camp, we call it the one palmyra tree camp. Every morning we wake up and look at it and we remember our homes and we remember what we have lost.” This was not just a poignant story of loss; it was also about the kinds of objects in which loss could be read. It was a story of internal displacement and the physical and psychic landscapes of proximities. For internally displaced people such as Northern Muslims, there was, and the palmyra tree was the symbol of this, no absolute separation from the object of their memory. They lived in the peripheries of landscapes they once knew and still knew. Puttalam and Kalpitiya in the northwestern province were not so dissimilar in physical appearance from the northern districts with which they are contiguous. The palmyra tree was a distinct reminder of how close home was, and yet how different Puttalam was, even though it shared much of the same landscape. The uncanny unfamiliarity of the seemingly familiar physical landscape thus also mapped an alienated social and interior landscape. Puttalam district itself was highly mixed, with large numbers of Muslims. Articulating difference from others, Tamil, Sinhalese, and especially Puttalam Muslims had to be on the basis of practices that were not exotically other, but had to be put to work in such a way that differences not apparent to outsiders could seem to those inside as crucial and cataclysmic. These had to sufficiently express the alienation of the like us, but not us. Proximate displacement, as is common in civil wars, creates very different ways of inhabiting loss from that of external displacement. Research I had carried out with externally displaced Tamils in Toronto, Canada, immediately stood in stark contrast (Thiranagama n.d). For those who have left the country, “home” can remain in a static time left at the point of departure, with tantalizing scents, memories, sounds of another landscape markedly different from the one they inhabit. This is highlighted in Bahloul’s (1996) The Architecture of Memory centered on her maternal family, the Senoussi’ and their memories of their former home Dar Refayil, shared between Jews and Becoming of This Place? 147 Muslims, in colonial Algeria. The monograph itself is focused on the quotidian practices that become memorialized when taking the house as...