It’s not cricket

“Ancient rulers of Sri Lanka built monuments established institutions to honour the philosophy of Buddhism. In turn this led to lesser folks following the principles advocated by Buddhism en masse.”

Lankapuvath, accessed 15 Feb 2009

“I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities and we treat them like our people… They can live in this country with us. But they must not try to, under the pretext of being a minority, demand undue things.”

Army Commander Sarath Fonseka, National Post, 23 September 2008

Every time a highly placed individual from the Rajapakse administration says something offensive – which sadly occurs quite frequently – I recall a photo of the President hugging, with great affection, his brother Gothabaya, who had just escaped an attempt on his life by the LTTE in Colombo. It’s an awkward photo in a sense – neither of them are posing, the President has this grin of relief plastered on his face and Gothabaya looks, well, human.

The photo is dislocating too, for you are acutely aware of just how much power they control and yet how little they seem to be moved by the plight of hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in the embattled North today. They are starving. They are dying. They are sick. Children are being killed and maimed for life. The condition of life in IDP camps, for those displaced by the heightened conflict, from reports that sporadically come out from the region can only be described as hell on earth. As Human Rights Watch notes in a press release on 4th March,

In addition to preventing civilians from leaving combat zones, the LTTE has deployed their forces close to civilians, thus using them as “human shields,” fired upon civilians trying to flee to government-controlled areas, and recruited children for their forces. The Sri Lankan armed forces have repeatedly and indiscriminately fired artillery at densely populated areas, including unilaterally declared “safe zones” and hospitals. Government statements have suggested that all ethnic Tamils who remain in LTTE-controlled areas are combatants, effectively giving a go-ahead for unlawful attacks.

Jacques de Maio, ICRC’s head of operations for South Asia said on the same day that the current situation in the Vanni is one of the most disastrous situations he had come across. The lack of clean water and proper sanitation are also major concerns in IDP camps, which are high security zones accessible only by the ICRC and some agencies of the UN to mask them from public scrutiny. The leader of the TULF V. Anandasangari in a statement released on 5th March said that he was “reliably informed that people are not merely on the verge of starvation but some people had in fact died of starvation”. As one seasoned photojournalist noted at the Galle Literary Festival this year, this was the most hermetically sealed conflict he had ever encountered. Make no mistake, though remarkably well hidden from the public gaze, this is our Gaza and Darfur combined.

This is our shame.

On the other hand, there was no shortage of genuine concern for the safety and security of our cricketers. The outrageous attack on our cricketer team usurped vestigial local media coverage of the humanitarian crises in the Vanni. Instead we now consume penetrating analysis of the future of cricket in Pakistan, insights into the nature of injuries sustained by players and replays of tearful reunions at the airport. Perhaps life imitates art – anyone who has read David Blacker’s A Cause Untrue will also recognise the familiarity of some of the theories bandied around now suggesting the LTTE’s involvement in the attack. A President who cut short a foreign tour, a Foreign Minister who rushed to the scene of violence, and a Media Minister who wants the international community to sign a treaty on the prevention of terrorism with special emphasis on the safety of sportsmen and sportswomen. Some media have even gone as far as to draw parallels between this attack and the infamous Munich Olympics. Cricket is our opium, and we are intoxicated.

Is there some way we can channel at least a bit of this concern towards the situation in the Vanni? Are we so inured, misled or confident that killing a Tamil children, women and men is inevitable or even necessary to decisively end the war against a larger enemy? Is this not the same perverse logic the LTTE employs, to date, and with disastrous consequences? In a bid to secure peace, must we become in form and action that which we revile in order to defeat it? And if we must become less than democratic in our response to terrorism, what guarantee is there of democracy’s quick and full restoration after war?

This is why pronouncements such as the Army Commander’s deranged notions of what it is to be Sri Lankan and Lankapuvath’s tragic-comic bifurcation of our peoples to better and lesser beings are disturbing. There are of course many other of examples of incipient and blatant racism, notably the race riots of ‘58 and the anti-Tamil pogrom of ‘83. These suggest that the majority of the majority do not yet demonstrate the capacity to envision and embrace a Sri Lanka without the deeply ingrained, systemic racism. As the Peace Confidence Index of the Centre for Policy Alternatives clearly indicates, the majority today unequivocally support the President and his war. As a consequence, many columnists in this paper including your author have little or no traction in the mainstream Sinhala Buddhist consciousness. The looming danger for Sri Lanka is precisely on account of this – the sheer euphoria of the LTTE’s defeat coupled with the frothing intolerance of democratic dissent are the ingredients that can very easily give rise to a totalitarian rule no different to the LTTE.

And this is why I go back to the photo of the President and his brother. Google it and look at it yourself. We cannot escape the essential humanity here and it is undeniably a touching photo. And yet, we know that both subjects have gone on to demonise, with complete impunity, and arguably murder those who are staunchly and non-violently opposed to what they do and say. These are two men who command an army of soldiers and an army of voters, who without a moment’s hesitation will today support whatever they say or do.

They both say we are on the verge of a historic moment. We are. They say we must all be firmly committed to peace. We must.

But how we define history and make peace is up to us, not them.

A conversation with David Blacker, author of A Cause Untrue

1. What made you write this book? How long did it take you to complete it?

Well, I’d always been asked what the SL ‘situation’ was like by Europeans, and it was always a challenge to explain. It wasn’t as glamourous as Vietnam, it wasn’t as well-known as Northern Ireland, it wasn’t as important as Israel. So how did you describe it?I always felt popular fiction was the best way to tell it. But there was no way to make it relevant to the west. It was just a little war on a little island. The only way was to give it an international link, and for years there was no practical credible way to do it. Until 9/11 made terror internationally relevant. So why did I write it? I like telling stories.

It took me 10 days to plan the main plot and seven months to fill it in.

2. What is it that you wish to say through ACU?

Nothing at all. This isn’t some great definitive account of the war. It isn’t even a war story. Read it, enjoy it, it’s one story. There are many.

3. Is the fiction of ACU a catharsis of sorts?

If you mean, is this a way of me working out my feelings for what I did and saw, no. My demons are mine, and not for public consumption right now. I once thought I could work things out by writing about them, but it’s not that easy.

4. Why is writing as catharsis difficult for you?

I’m quite a private person, and not always comfortable with sharing my feelings and emotions. It’s easier to write about someone else. I’ve never really told anyone what it was really like in the Army. Though I’ve attempted it with some people, like my wife, Antje. I did attempt writing about it soon after I came out of the Army, but it was hard to rationalize what we did out there and explain why we enjoyed it without coming across as some sort of war-loving sociopath. But I’ve not rejected the concept, and maybe I’ll give it another go.

5. What did you think the reception to ACU would be from the Sri Lankan public?

Honestly, I didn’t know. I still don’t know what the reception’s been. I’ve never been published before and haven’t been in literary circles, so I haven’t a clue about how contemporary SL English fiction’s received. If the book’s enjoyed, sells well, and creates a demand for this genre, I’ll take that.

6. What made you join the SL Army at a time when there was all out war in the North and the East?

Ha ha. Here come the demons. I was brought up on war stories. My grandfather was a WW2 veteran, and a lot of those war stories were passed on second-hand to me by my father. My childhood was immersed in everything I could find on war, from comics to model aircraft to biographies and history. It was all I ever wanted to do. To see if I could handle what my heroes had. My younger brother and I grew up in an urban Christian home, and there wasn’t a lot of scope for adventure outside a young mind’s fantasies, and I wanted everything I didn’t have: death, violence, freedom, adventure. I wanted to know what it was like to kill.

7. You said you wanted to know what it was like to kill. Once you found out, was it difficult to stop? In other words, where does the war end and life outside of it begin?

8. What are the experiences from real life, in the battle field and outside, that fed into this book?

Well, some of the individual flashbacks in the book, particularly of soldiers, are my own. The plot obviously is total fiction, but many experiences are mine or second-hand stories.

9. What is the cause untrue in this book – terrorism or the war against terrorism or both?

I think it’s fair to say that it’s both. They are both great causes – freedom from oppression and national unity. The way we’ve fought to try and achieve them, the way we’ve been obscenely ready to sacrifice the lives of the young on these altars isn’t so great.

10. There is a curious mix of the real and fiction (what Muller would call faction) in this book – say for instance the comments on the Sunday Leader. Is this thinly veiled social commentary?

I wouldn’t agree that there’s a mix. It’s fiction based in a real world. The war, the government, the places, the causes, those are obviously fact. The plot springs from a real background, a real society. Beyond that, it’s a plausible story. Comments on real institutions – or publications – are just my observations.

11. Sri Lanka’s fiction sometimes plays out the violence and conflict as something exotic. Do you feel fiction’s role is to obliquely throw a mirror at the real world or provide a means of escaping it?

It all depends on the reader, doesn’t it? Terrorism was probably seen as something exotic in the US until 2001, not anymore, so it isn’t escapism to read about it. It might be to someone else. On an individual level, yeah, it’s escapism to read about things one will never ever experience, I guess. If that’s fiction’s role, it’s one of many, I think. And each genre takes on a role appropriate to it. It’s hard to compare a book or movie that deals with a political or social subject with one that is a historical romance, for example.

12. Your meticulous attention to detail is impressive – what fed your imagination for such a breath of locations and events?

It was just a case of making the plot credible. All of the events had to feed the pace and build-up. Many of the locations were picked by balancing off personal knowledge of those locations against plausibility. For example, I’d rather have replaced Canada with Norway because I think that would have been a lot more pointed, and also a lot more credible. On the other hand, I’ve never been to Scandinavia, and doubt I could have given the scenarios the authenticity required.

13. There is a certain glorification of actions against the ‘terras’ – is this personal bias showing through the fabric of the novel?

I’m not sure I understand, but do you mean that there’s a glorification of the war? If so, that’s natural. War’s pretty glamourous. People tend to forget that because popular thinking in the last decades has focused on the fear. But war’s the most exciting thing one can experience, and fear does have a lot to with that, but not just fear. A lot of current thinking on war is done and published by people who’ve been observers of war rather than participants. But read anything by a vet, be it as old as Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, James Webb’s The Fields of Fire, or the new stuff out of Iraq like One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick, and you’ll see what I mean. War’s the single most intense thing in a human’s life. High’s and lows that love, sex, drugs, or even the birth of your firstborn can’t compare with. How can you take the glamour out of that? As Tim Page said, “How can you take the glamour out of war?It’s like trying to take the glamour out of a Cobra gunship, or getting stoned at China Beach. Like trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones.”

If there’s a bias against the Tigers, yes, it is mine, and it’s not surprising. I’ve tried to be objective, but it isn’t always possible.

14. How important is objectivity important in fiction?

I think it’s important for the sake of credibility and authenticity. Particularly in the genre of the military or political thriller, where you want to convince your reader that this is possible, even probable. A bias is easily detected and cripples the story.

15. Your novel is shows great texture in the characters of the Special Forces but less so when describing those from the LTTE. As noted in my review, the character of Devini is simplistic and flat in comparison to others in the novel. What were the difficulties you encountered when imagining characters from the LTTE and their motivations?

Well, it was easier to put myself into the heads of the soldiers, because I once was one of them, and their motivations are familiar to me. It wasn’t as easy with Devini because while I have met one or two ex-Tigers, I had to presume many things. Also, in the end, I wasn’t trying to empathise with her, or make the reader walk in her shoes. She remains a terrorist. But if she seems simplistic, then that is my failing rather than intention.

16. The novel is very violent – did you feel this was a necessary condition of fiction based on the conflict in Sri Lanka?

It is a violent subject, be it a hijacking or any other hostage situation, to say nothing of war itself. I don’t think it is a necessary condition. There are several novels with plots situated in the war that are not as violent, true, but I saw no reason to gloss over the violence. ACU may seem more violent than most, but that maybe because of my graphic style of narration where I describe many details.

17. Love is only skin deep and there is a lack of any meaningful transformative human relationships in ACU. Why have you not explored more the possibilities of redemption and change in the novel?

Why should I? This isn’t a parable with a nice moral at the end. Many human relationships aren’t very meaningful, and don’t really transform our lives, and my story just takes a slice out of many of those lives. It would have been very ‘Hollywood’ to end it neatly and take a stand on something, to make a point, but life often isn’t like that, and I sacrificed many things to authenticity.

18. Would you endorse real world events to combat terrorism that mirror those in ACU?

Yes and no.

19. If not, why not?

Many of the methods in the book have already been used by nations expert at fighting terrorism; Britain, Israel, and South Africa, to name a few. Some have been adapted by Sri Lanka in the past, and are currently in use, so it’s nothing new. But there are certain moral grey areas, some things that would be disastrous if detected, as seen in the book. To carry out a ‘black op’ against a friendly or neutral state in order to gain an incremental advantage can be counter-productive. Also killing someone in order to frame another is unethical.

20. Do you intend writing more in the future? If so, do you intend branching out into non-fiction?

Yes, I do want to keep writing, but it’s unlikely to be non-fiction. There’s a chance I might team up with another writer and a photographer to do a history of certain SL military units, but that’s as far as I’ll go down that road.

21. What kind of fiction should we expect from you in the future?

I think a lot of my stories (if there are lots!) will have a connection to the war, even if they are not war stories. I think there’s a lot of potential in an event that has had such a defining role on SL and it’s people for almost three decades. But I don’t think I would spread myself across such a ‘large’ plot for awhile. Some of the criticisms of ACU has been in the areas of character development (or lack of it) and I’d like to have a closer look at that. The scope of ACU prevented too much character detail, and I’d like to experiment with a more linea plot, with a more defined single protagonist.

22. As perhaps the first and only author of fiction to date with front-line experience, what are your thoughts on the transformation of the real world ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka?

Well, I see a certain amount of change where public enthusiasm has faltered, compared to the early 1990s. There’s also been a more balanced attitude to the war internationally, which wasn’t there in the last century. As for the war on the ground, I don’t see a lot of difference. Just better armour, more choppers. The move to a more conventional style of warfare was inevitable due to the disastrous handling of the situation on the PR front, internationally.

23. Do you feel this book will resonate more with a Sri Lankan audience familiar with the fictional terrain of violence or with an audience unfamiliar with bloody terrorism?

I think the impact will be heavier on a local audience because of its familiarity. For a westerner it’s more likely to be just an exciting read, which is OK too.

24. Someone recently said ACU would be a great read on a long haul flight – which makes ACU airport fiction, that breed of books churned by hacks to read and dispose. What makes, in your mind, ACU more enduring as fiction?

I can’t say it is more enduring. Will you remember it in six months, or a year? If you will, then you tell me why.

25. What would make you remember a work of fiction?

I think it’s more about remembering the way it made me feel at the time. For all its hype, I doubt the Da Vinci Code will stay with me for long. But I still remember and can quote whole passages of Webb’s Fields of Fire. It’s written by a former US Secretary of the Navy who’d been an infantry officer in Vietnam. I read it just after I left the Army, and its bitterness and sense of loss touched something in me I’ll never forget. I think even the greatest works of fiction are forgettable if not for that touch. Stories about love and death go very deep because what else touches us more?I think contemporary fiction is memorable when it brings us something we’ve experienced and lost, or never experienced but would like to.

Technorati Tags: Conflict and Peace, Fiction, Review

A review of “A Cause Untrue” by David Blacker

Also published here on Moju.

“He missed that first cigarette”. The first line of this novel.I didn’t. Easing back into my own chair after lighting my first, I didn’t realize that it would be many more before I finished A Cause Untrue.

Combining the pace of Forbes, the action of Ludlum and the imagination of Forsyth, Blacker’s intoxicating thriller is a technical tour de force. But to compare it against Western authors is an injustice – Blacker’s achievement lies in his ability to make what is essentially Sri Lankan into a thriller with global appeal. There is simply no comparable work of fiction by a Sri Lankan author.

Writ against backdrop of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and terrorism, the book weaves a plot that ricochets from Sri Lankan battlefields to the autobahns of Germany, from clandestine meetings of terrorists in British pubs to suicide bombers on the rampage in Canada.

Blacker’s novel begins with one of the flights that plowed into the World Trade Centre towers in New York on 11th September 2001, which is then linked to the international terrorist network of the LTTE. In the ensuing global war against terror led by the US, the novel masterfully plots the developments leading up to a covert operation in Europe, run by Sri Lankan Special Forces operatives, to weed out LTTE agents. This is conducted in the backdrop of proposed anti-terrorism legislation in Canada that agitates the LTTE and results in cataclysmic consequences around the world.

The action takes place in the battle scarred landscape of the North and the East of Sri Lanka, Europe, America, Canada and with decisive events in many other countries and continents. It is an expansive and exhaustive palette of locations that Blacker draws from – each drawn with great accuracy giving an uncanny sense of location and time. This authenticity is what is at times jarring – Blacker’s ability to mix the real with the imaginary is magical, in part explained by the author’s combat training and active military service.

As noted earlier, the strength of Blacker’s writing is that it is hugely believable. We know we are reading a work of fiction, but the familiar names, places, incidents – all serve to sharpen the illusion of reality. Intense, thrilling and intoxicating – the Schumacher pace of this book fuels the careening progress of its plot. The thrill, primarily, is in reading the fictional accounts of familiar actors– the Government of Sri Lanka, the Special Forces of the Army, the LTTE etc

The resulting prose is tight with the action gaunt and visceral. This is not a novel for younger readers – many descriptions of death and murder are graphic, intense and grip the reader in their horrifying appeal. Blacker’s plot rarely meanders – every page has meaning and purpose, each character a pronounced destiny, each incident a deliberate and planned denouement. This is the world we inhabit 590 pages – meticulously planned, an intricate tapestry of love, murder and violence

Blacker’s violence is to print what Tarantino’s is to movies such Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction. Sadistic, cruel and strangely appealing, the visceral nature of Blacker’s gore satiates a hidden desire for catharsis, to read in and live through fiction what one has seen and experienced in real life. It’s not that the novel promotes violence or terrorism – if anything, the novel grapples with the problems of building trust and peace in contexts of pure violence and active terrorism.

In this sense, the novel intersects with reality – the dialogue between Minister Jayawickrama and Arjuna Devandra, two characters in the novel, is a case in point. “Without trust, there is no future…. What d’you think would have happened if we hadn’t ordered this ceasefire, offered the option of talks?… Do you then think this government – or successive ones – would have the political will to deal with the Tamil issue, to prevent it smouldering on and breaking out into violence again? I think not.” Arjuna’s laconic reply (“Bullshit, sir”) displays a remarkable maturity of the author, who refuses to allow the novel to be shafted easily into one that espouses peace or condones terrorism. The plot and characters, finely drawn, often grapple with the severity of their decisions – the outcomes rarely matching the intended aims, the ensuing violence rarely justifying their avowed intent.

Blacker’s fiction is about that which we have become desensitized to in real life. No more violent than the images of suicide bombings and the violence we have endured for 25 years as a country, this book is inspired by real life events and actors. This is a sobering thought since the action, characters, plot all mirror the cursed and bloody history of Sri Lanka, which by definition separates this book to similar works with gratuitous violence from Le Carre or James.

However, this novel is not without is failings. The novel’s strongest female character, a suicide cadre of the LTTE called Devini Sundaralingam, is best described as caricature – raped when young with the resulting bitterness fuelling a stereotypical fanaticism to a diabolical cause. Military acronyms litter the novel, confusing a reader unfamiliar with the argot of terrorists and the operational lingo of the military and police. A glossary of terms at the end of the book only partly serves to ease the annoyance of having to guess the meaning of an acronym that isn’t explained in the text. There is, on occasion, too much of detail. The average reader can only cope with so much of context and Blacker, through what Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu calls “a punctilious attention to detail”, overpowers the ability to grasp the pertinent details of the plot amidst a litany of peripheral detail.

There is also the danger of romanticizing the Sri Lankan conflict. To be sure, this is a work of fiction. However, the fiction constantly plays with the memory of the living and real – this is sometimes exhausting, as the passages sometimes bring to mind memories best left at rest. The violence, exuberant and thrilling, doesn’t leave in its wake characters who are influenced by its ultimate senselessness – the gore simply fuels more of the same. The terrorist remains a terrorist, the sniper a sniper, the Army General a cynic of peace, the politician ever the hypocrite – we don’t see the scope for change or the possibilities for trust and reconciliation. Blacker’s world is dark with no redemption – it is fiction without hope, a faux catharsis that long after the thrill of the first read, makes us wonder whether the novel would have been as compelling had it been about the IRA, the ANC or ETA.

These remain literary criticisms that when addressing a work such as A Cause Untrue, fail to capture why it will be a success. Blacker’s debut will undoubtedly sell in the thousands, if not millions, worldwide. We might want a more philosophical novel, a more sensitive novel or a more critical novel. A Cause Untrue isn’t any of these, but warts and all is an undeniably gripping read.

And that’s the heart of all great fiction.

A Cause Untrue, published by Perera-Hussein Publishing House is available at all leading bookstores.

Technorati Tags: Conflict and Peace, Fiction