Jayawickrama Sharanya

Kwansei Gakuin University Repository

???????????????Sharanya JAYAWICKRAMA?Hong Kong Shue Yan University?The Fiction of Justice and the Craft of Healing :Literary Perspectives from Sri LankaThe challenges to the practice and application of transitional justice in Sri Lanka, following theend of nearly thirty years of civil war in 2009, have been manifold and demand a rethinking of theintersections between conflict, justice, memory, and healing. Sri Lankan literature of the civil warhas done the work of confronting, witnessing, and attending to the critical shifts wrought by con­flict, both during and after the years of war. Aesthetic work and the aesthetic product, including lit­erary fiction, can serve as a vital complement or counter to the representational and institutional dis­courses that shape post­conflict space and society. Such conceptualisations of the aesthetic empha­size the purchase that literary texts and the processes that constitute them may have, as they open updiscursive space in the wake of political violence. As such, literature may become part of the set ofprocesses and mechanisms used by a society in the transitional justice moment. Three notable SriLankan texts generate and maintain the imagination of justice in transition by representing justice asa fiction, a contrived form, something that is invented or false, but is often held to be true because itis expedient to do so. The representation of the dysfunctional quality of state­sanctioned or institu­tionalized justice is a common thread that binds otherwise dissimilar literary texts about the civilwar together. In each of the texts, a self­reflexive focus on the craft of fiction, including form andlanguage, is used by authors to suggest challenges and approaches to healing that have the capacityto both refresh and rupture discourses of justice and healing in post­conflict societies. Michael On­daatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost (2000) generates an unresolved narrative and ethical tension as it insis­tently relates the Sri Lankan experience to comparative spaces and times, thereby fashioning a com­mentary on war as a universal human condition, even as it strives to excavate localized context­sensitive understandings of truth, justice, and healing. The novel compulsively diverges into descrip­tions of the skills and crafts of the characters―forensic scientist, archaeologist, doctor and artisan―positioned in various fields of knowledge production and analysis that annotate the violence and lossthat disfigure the Sri Lankan terrain. The only character in the novel who finds some degree of re­demption is an artisan, traumatised by the disappearance of his wife, whose skills and knowledge ofcultural methodologies of creative reconstruction become the focus of Ondaatje’s imagining of reha­bilitation and reconciliation for a fractured community. By the novel’s end, Ondaatje has substituteda faith in the redemptive power of cultural work, symbolized by the artisan’s self­healing vision, forthe demand for a universal model of human rights and justice. Gorilla (2001) by Shobasakthi cri­tiques the construction of victimhood through physical violence as well as through the disciplinarydiscursive registers of the instruments of international justice. Within the form of an asylum petition,Shobasakthi’s protagonist tells a story of his wounds that exposes his vulnerability as a victim ofphysical violence and that yet refuses the discursive discipline imposed upon his experience that????????????? 3? ??? ?would curtail his identity as a victim alone. Rather than focusing on the loss of language that isoften perceived as a typical consequence of trauma, Shobasakthi draws attention to a superfluity ofrhetorical rules and demands for authentification that contain and curtail experience when one iscompelled to testify. Shobakathi’s rehearsal of the asylum petition also reveals that form has impli­cations for the language that a listener is capable of hearing. Moreover, for those who are located ina material world of borders and cells, the effort to draw pain into evidence and concretize it in lan­guage is a necessary act of survival. Rather than demonstrating that pain destroys language, the nar­rative confronts the corporeality of trauma, presenting pain in ever­increasing detail in order that itmay be acknowledged and thereby legitimated. The post­war novel A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014)by Minoli Salgado presents the unsettling capacity of violence as healing in a context where judicialmeasures and solutions have faltered and failed. Situating her exploration of the Sri Lankan conflictat the crisis point of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, Salgado’s novel explores what happens toan understanding of trauma and healing when a cataclysmic event, such as a natural disaster, col­lides with the new “normal” of protracted war which indexes violence, fear, displacement, and loss,as part of a pre­existing, prevailing and ongoing social condition. Like many other novels of itskind, it tries on the language of trauma, tests the currency of storytelling, rehearses the roles of testi­fier and listener and gauges the limits of empathy through the experiences, memories, conversations,and silences of the main characters. Strikingly, through the figure of a traumatised man who healshis psychosomatic symptoms through a brutally violent act, Salgado explores the notion of regenera­tive violence. Each of the authors discussed sheer away from universal concepts of justice and heal­ing to approaches that are unorthodox, provisional, recalcitrant and disturbing. In different ways,these texts deal with the limits and capacity for transformation stemming from trauma, underminethe model of the idealized subject or actor required for justice and healing, and suggest that not allknowledge is redemptive and that truth and the search for it may be counterproductive. Underlyingmy analysis of these Sri Lankan texts is the basic question of what purchase literary and culturalwork can have on discourses of justice and healing. Certainly, reading or hearing stories, fictional orotherwise, is a means of accessing memory and confronting the past, and thus confronting ourselvesand our societies. But more than that, articulating a space for literary fiction within discourses ofjustice and healing involves using a new lexicon as well as reassessing the customary disciplinaryknowledge and practices that shape our understanding and approaches to transitional moments.??????????? Vol.6 No.1? ??? ?

紛争、正義、記憶と癒し (国際学研究フォーラム講演録3: 2016年6月9日 (木)・10日 (金))

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紛争、正義、記憶と癒し (国際学研究フォーラム講演録3: 2016年6月9日 (木)・10日 (金))

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