He fled for his life from Sri Lanka 15 years ago and now lives in France where he does odd jobs to earn a living. Shobasakthi, the author of the ‘auto-fiction’ novel Gorilla, speaks about his tumultuous journey and how he plans to use his writing as a weapon to effect change in his native land and the Sri lankan Tamil diaspora
ELLE:What was the political situation in Sri Lanka while you were growing up and how did it affect you and your family?
SHOBASAKTHI:When I was seven years old, the Tigers committed their first political killing: The mayor of Jaffna, Alfred Duraiappa was shot by Prabhakaran. Because of their anti-government activities and intermittent socialist speeches on class equity and anti-imperialism the youth saw them as the saviors of the Tamil people.
I was born in a small, poverty-stricken island in the northern part of Sri Lanka. The various political circumstances in the country did not have a direct impact upon my family or village at that point. We were consumed in finding our daily bread and kerosene. And as my father was a local thug, all we cared was to protect the family from the violence of the police who came to our house periodically in search of him.
ELLE:Could you tell us a little about how you enlisted into the LTTE back in the early 1980s?
S:After the Sri Lankan government’s pre-planned attack on Tamils in July of 1983, the anti-government feeling among Tamil youth rose like a massive wave. We felt greatly encouraged when the Indian government provided arms and training to the young men demanding a separate state of Eelam. We were made to believe that the caste, class, and ethnic oppressions we were suffering then would all be eradicated when Tamil Eelam was won. The two major incidents of 1983 – the gruesome murders of 53 Tamil prisoners at Welikade prison by the machinations of the state, and the shiploads of Tamils who were forced out by ethnic violence in the southern and western parts of Sri Lanka and then arrived in Jaffna as refugees – propelled me towards joining the movement. I was a child soldier at 15.
ELLE:What drove you to disillusionment with the movement?
S:In 1985, the Tigers proclaimed a cease-fire in order to participate in peace talks in Bhutan. I began to lose my faith in the movement at that point. But if you ask me now, I would repeat what the President of Croatia said at the U.N. recently: “To have spent 10 years in peace talks is better than 10 days of war.”
Today, I have sound reason and proof to reject the Liberation Tigers completely on political grounds. All year, I write pages and pages on this subject. I strongly believe that the violence and atrocities committed by the Sinhala majority government is the only reason that the Tigers exist. Today the Liberation Tigers have formed themselves completely into right-wingers. They bow to the dictates of the United States of America and the European Union. The L.T.T.E. has none of the qualities that a people’s liberation movement ought to have. With their past political actions, the Liberation Tigers have identified themselves as an imperialistic, petit-bourgeois movement. With their sustained attacks and killings of other movements, alternative thinkers, writers, labour unionists, and Muslim and Sinhala peasants, they have shown themselves to be fascists.
ELLE:You speak of great torture inflicted on you and your family by both the LTTE and the Indian Peace Keeping Fotce. Would you say that they were two sides of the same coin?
S:You can also add the Sri Lankan government to this question. All three of them are similar in their activities of maiming and killing the Tamil people and transgressing human rights. There might be a difference between them in the amount of harm inflicted but there is none in the manner. To speak openly, it is from the Tigers that I face the most mortal danger. But if I were to speak from the position of many Eelam Tamils, we find the Tigers tolerable when compared to the Sri Lankan government. And even as we shake our heads over our fates in having to tolerate these two, we can never again bear the brunt of the IPKF.
ELLE:How painful was the process of rebuilding your life after the physical and mental torture you suffered for several years?
S:This is not an issue at all. When compared to the sufferings of Tamils in Sri Lanka that is going on even as we speak, what I experienced is nothing. I had endured all kinds of troubles since childhood and at one point, not just my mind but my body too became numb.
In 1990, I was detained in Colombo under the Prohibition of Terrorism Act and after two weeks in a police station, I was sent to the Mara prison. No one knew that I had been arrested. I did not know when I would be released from prison either. But at the time of going to prison, more than the fear and pain, it was the thought that I might be able to learn Sinhala in prison that was uppermost in my mind.
In my novel, Mm…, I have written, “Fear is as terrible as an elephant. And yet, when one has tamed it like an elephant, we can control it. Pain is also like fear.”
ELLE:You call yourself a man from nowhere. Could you share your journey from Sri Lanka to France?
S:I did not have the money to travel to France. I went from Sri Lanka to Thailand first. Under the auspices of the UNHCR, I lived for sometime as a refugee in a Bangkok suburb. During that time, Bangkok was the centre for refugees seeking to migrate to America and Europe. I came to France from there in 1993.
ELLE:Do you see yourself as a global citizen? Or do you seek to belong to one particular place – be it Sri Lanka or France?
S:A word like “global citizen” for a refugee like me is just a decorative term. Every nation in this world has thrust upon me the identification of “alien”.
My act of accepting or rejecting the identification of an Eelam Tamil is dependent upon specific political circumstances. By birth I am an Eelam Tamil; and each time I am oppressed in the name of my birth origin, I will insist upon claiming my Eelam Tamil status. And yet, as my community of Eelam Tamils has oppressed other Tamil minority groups like the Eelam Muslims and plantation Tamils, I am also ashamed of my Eelam Tamil identity.
There is simply no way to even mention French identity. Is it to take on the identity of bandits and racists that I write under the shadow of death?
ELLE:Could you tell us a little about your life in France? You worked as a dishwasher in restaurants…
S:For the past 15 years, I have worked as a dishwasher, cook, room boy, construction worker, and street sweeper, amongst other things. Now I work in a supermarket, shelving items. I sense a note of pity in your question. It is unnecessary. These are the kinds of labour-intensive jobs that suit my lack of formal education.
ELLE:How do you contrast your life in France from the one you fled from in Sri Lanka?
S:When I lived in my village I starved. Now living in Europe, I have enough to eat and drink. In Jaffna today, even after 30 years of war, there are 150 temples that are closed to the Dalits. This kind of direct caste oppression is not known in the lands of refuge. Moreover, I must admit that I have much more freedom to write and speak in France.
But before a refugee could enjoy these rights, he has to either throw sand into the eyes of the immigration officials or duck the border patrol and enter France illegally. On their way into France, many refugees have died caught in snowdrifts or drowned in the Atlantic Ocean. France has thousands of refugees, called ‘Sans Papiers’ who are living like thieves in daily terror of the police. They have no rights and those who get arrested by the police are sent back to the death fields by the French government in the name of deportation. The pain of becoming a refugee is no less than the pain of proving to the white folks that one is indeed a refugee.
ELLE:In what way has your personal journey impacted your writing?
S:There are some firm political stands that I have for myself. These ideological standpoints are more important for me than my own personal sorrow. I use literature as a means to express my political ideas to my people. My novels, short stories, and dramas are but the expanded versions of propaganda pamphlets.
ELLE:Does the protagonist’s character in your book Gorilla have autobiographical elements?
S:The novel Gorilla belongs to the genre of Auto Fiction. Its is not just my personal story. I have set out not only my experiences but also the stories and problems I have seen and heard about in the same wave length.
I am from Allaipiddi, a small sandy village. There were 30 young men in my ‘set.’ All of us were related, cousins of sorts. We all grew up together. In the August of 1990, the Sri Lankan army in its attempt to recapture the Jaffna fort, landed in our village. Out of the 30 boys, 23 were killed at the same time by the army and their bodies were thrown into a well. Today that whole village has been destroyed.
I have a thousand stories in my experiences. I wish to tell all of them too. But my intention is not to write our sorrow-drenched tales in the form of literature and evoke pity in the heart of the reader. I wish to ask for justice through my writing. Or even revenge.
ELLE:How difficult has it been to have your voice heard in political as well as literary terms?
S:There has been no difficulty at all. The Tamil nationalists who have been angered by my writings have threatened me, attacked me physically, and posted libelous statements in blogs and other publications. I have been proving to them through my writing that I cannot be silenced except in death.
ELLE:What does the word ‘freedom’ mean to you?
As a writer of fiction, I can elaborate on the answer to this question in an endless fashion. But I would like to answer this question from a social scientific point of view, that human freedom is dependent upon such elements as class, caste, and gender struggles.
In my view, human freedom is possible only within a communist system. But you should not point to the former Soviet Union or China as examples of communism. If you need to, you can treat them as lessons on the long journey towards human liberation. The road to human freedom would extend far beyond communism too. In fact, it has no end.
ELLE:Do you think we live in an extremely violent world where people are losing their humanity? Why do you think this has happened?
S:I have never thought that way. I am only saddened that people have become more tolerant. Especially in a rapidly globalising world, where the rights of people are being eroded on a daily basis, I am deeply saddened that there is no movement strong enough to gather a weakened population to rise up in arms against multinational corporations.
The state, police, courts, and prison are our society’s foremost violent structures. “The law is the State’s violence; violence is people’s law,” booms the Anarchist’s call, haven’t you heard?