The Voice of Lost Identity!

An Interview with Shobasakthi:
Translated by Anushiya Sivanarayanan

‘My identity as a militant, the minute I left the country, became that of a refugee. When I began to write, it became one of a traitor….’

As a Srilankan LTTE child soldier, Shobasakthi fled the country to protect his life from the terror he faced every night wondering if he will live to see the crack of dawn. For five years he wandered and made his way through various countries such as Colombo, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore and Laos. Those five years saw him staying as a refugee under the UNHCR in Thailand, witnessed him as a hired hit man in Bangkok and found him without a kidney, which he lost in a inter-gang street fight. In 1993, he entered France using a false passport and has been living there since the last fifteen years as a dishwasher and a writer.

In this very honest and exclusive interview Shobasakthi shares with platform_ the disillusionments and frustrations he has encountered and experienced till date.

How did a school going child transform into an LTTE child soldier?

There is no way of giving a generic answer to this question. All the different reasons one could come up with – war, poverty, the seduction of weaponry, political interests, ethnic feelings, the caste structure, cleverness or foolishness defined by the circumstances and one’s childhood identities. As far as I was concerned, the massive violence that was let loose on Tamils by the racist Sri Lankan government in July 1983 and the structural violence I had suffered from poverty pushed me towards the Movement.

What was your association with the LTTE?

I was an LTTE weapons-trained fighter. In the region that I was placed in, I participated in the LTTE-sponsored propaganda arts forums and did intense propaganda and recruitment work. In those days, I was a major artist in the street theatre dramas of the Tigers in Northern Sri Lanka.

Would you say that your involvement with the LTTE was circumstantial or was it ever a part of your agenda as well?

An agenda at the age of fifteen, do you really think I was Harry Potter? Even though I liked and believed in the Movement’s oft-repeated rhetoric of socialism, my deepest desire at that time was to answer violence with violence. Our first pronouncement was, ‘Let’s wield weapons in our able hands: we know no other way!’

If you had to give a short 150 word précis of your life in and out of prisons how would you describe it?

150 words, that’s rather too much. The essence of my life could be expressed in a few words: ‘I Oppose: Therefore I Exist.’

What were your views as a child and a teenager growing up in Sri Lanka of the political scenario and what are they today?

In my youth, I erroneously believed that the Indian government was a kind and powerful friend of the Sri Lankan Tamils, that the Tamil Liberation Fighters would be able to win a separate Tamil Eelam state, and that this state that we win would be like Cuba or Vietnam. This belief lasted until the leaders of the Tamil Liberation Fighters went to the Thimpu peace talks in 1985.

We cannot understand the ethnic problems and violence in Sri Lanka as merely the conflict between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government or as Sinhala imperialism versus Tamil nationalism. Such binary thinking will occlude the roles played by other factors. My argument today is that we need to take into account the current international political realities of neo-colonialism, globalisation, the upheavals of international capitalistic markets and place the Sri Lankan problem as part of this larger scenario. Economically, culturally and politically, Sri Lanka has lost its independence and is now completely under the control of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Multi-national corporations.

The political groups that are in power in Sri Lanka currently, the SLFP (Sri Lanka Freedom Party), the UNP (United National Party) and the Liberation Tigers are the protectors of globalisation and this capitalistic structure. Both Sri Lanka, as well as Eelam, the purported dream of the Tamil separatist Movement, have lost their sovereignty to the power of globalisation. Sri Lanka has been completely neo-colonised; even the power to sue for peace talks as well as decide upon the resumption of war, resides in the hands of foreign imperialists.
The war that is being waged by the Tigers today has nothing to do with the good of the Tamil population. The Tamil people are kept in the status of taxpayers to the Tigers and receive war relief from the government. A whole society is suffering with trying to save their children from the Tiger kidnappers. Until this fascist culture is uprooted, there is no guarantee that a Tamil, Muslim or a Sinhalese who goes to sleep at night, will be alive in the morning. In Sri Lanka, the struggles to abolish racism, the battles against the villainy of the Tigers, and the movements to be free from neo-colonialism are all three bound together. The only way to save Sri Lanka from destruction is the solidarity of the Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim people and an intense anti-imperialistic, opposition politics.

Who would you hold responsible for the trial you and your family have faced in Sri Lanka?

The Sri Lankan Government, the Tamil militant groups, the communist parties that supported the racist governments, the Indian government that played a self-centered game in Sri Lankan politics, the two-faced Western powers that on the one side wear the mask of humanism and on the other, provide both the Sri Lankan government as well as the Tigers with arms. All of them share blame.

Currently what does your passport state as your name and nationality? And what are your thoughts on this subject?

I do not have a passport. I only possess a travel document given by the government of France. In that piece of paper, my nationality is noted as ‘Sri Lankan’. The same paper also notes that I have no permission to enter Sri Lanka. Any person who resides in France for five years is allowed to apply for French naturalisation. And even though I have lived in France for fifteen years, I haven’t yet applied for French citizenship. When I travel and suffer at various airports without a French passport with only this paper of a travel document, I question myself as to why I haven’t yet applied for a French passport. The answer is definitely not simply laziness.

What is your life like in France now?

Because I haven’t yet paid last year’s house tax of 180 euros (there is house tax even if one is renting a room), I got a letter yesterday from the Income Tax office that they would come, break open my room door, and carry away all my possessions. I wonder what these Frenchmen would do with a thousand Tamil books. To discover that there is racism in France, one must live here for at least ten years. That is how deeply and cunningly the French practice racism, much like the AIDS epidemic.

When and how did you begin writing about your experiences?

I was involved in movement politics from my school days. One month after my arrival in France, the Trotsky movement of the Revolutionary Communist League attracted me and I joined them. In my four years with them, I was able to converse with my party comrades about literature and politics. In 1997, when I cut myself off from the group, I faced emptiness. Let me explain. All the leftist groups here have narrowly defined their activities into labor unions only; the anarchists have stopped all their revolutionary calls and have focused quite wrongly on the green revolution and the AIDS problem, all I had in front of me was a political darkness. I began to write within this loneliness. I began to write of what I knew and the stories I had heard and experienced.

You have written a number of books ranging from short stories to fiction and non-fiction; and all of them centre on your Sri Lankan experience. Do you have a political agenda with this or this is more a personal story?

I am a Marxist. As far as the abolition of caste is concerned, Ambedkar and Periyar are my teachers. My morally defined dreams are as follows — the war in Sri Lanka should be stopped immediately; there should then be a rise of an alternative Leftist leadership to the Tigers within the Eelam Tamils and the Sri Lankan government be vanquished by democratic forces. Literature teaches us that when writing about dreams, it is only natural to touch upon the life of the dreamer.

Does your past still haunt you or have you moved on and accepted your way of life?

My present life style is a determined continuation of my past. I don’t have the guts to either kill or commit suicide. Therefore, I am forced to tolerate this life style. In this long journey, I have known countless fellow refugees, police officers, detective agents, and prisons. With the help of these experiences, I am currently writing a novel called One Way about the journeys of refugees_

Platform_ creative lifestyle March- April ’08