Gorilla Read online

  Gorilla

  Gorilla

  Shobasakthi

  translated by

  Anushiya Sivanarayanan

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  For the emperor Karl Marx

  You were the lover; you died

  Bloody in the dark corners of history,

  In memory

  Of that working woman

  Helen Demuth.

  Foreword

  When he was fifteen Shobasakthi, born Anthony Thasan, joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Movement (LTTE), like countless others. The LTTE, commonly known as the Tamil Tigers, is the largest and most powerful of the Tamil militant organizations which arose in the 1970s to attempt to create a separate Tamil state, or Tamil Eelam, in north and east Sri Lanka. As a response to the repressive actions of the majority Sinhala Government against Sri Lankan Tamil minorities, the LTTE has waged a violent secessionist campaign in Sri Lanka since the 70s. And as a response to his close experience with this violence, Shobasakthi wrote Gorilla.

  Inventive and playful just as it is violent and disturbing, Gorilla was a sensation in the Tamil literary world when it was first published in 2001. It is the first of its kind—the fictionalized true story of a former Tamil liberation fighter. Set mostly in the salt marshes of Kunjan Fields, northern Sri Lanka, a colourful dalit colony in an island off mainland Jaffna, it tells the story of a child soldier through the dynamics of an explosive father-son relationship. A studious, sober type, Rocky Raj joins the powerful Tamil Eelam Movement when it comes to town, to get away from his abusive father. For his father is no ordinary man—he is Gorilla, a local thug who terrorizes the local population in his destructive yet amusing fashion. But the Movement soon becomes equally oppressive—the boy is thrown out, recaptured, tortured, and eventually becomes a refugee in Paris, where the second part of the novel takes place.

  I found Shobasakthi in the summer of 2006. There is a small bookshop in the corner of the Madurai bus station that has the best collection of Tamil literary small press publications in the whole city. I wandered in one day and the book-seller who runs it, a quiet man, suggested that I might want to take a look at the latest issue of the Tamil literary magazine Anicha, which he sells along with limited editions and other such gems. This issue featured Shobasakthi’s short story, ‘M. Mudulinga’ and I was instantly captivated by the writer’s style; it had a lack of sentimentality, a sly humor that was undeniably vulgar at times.

  I had some questions about the story and ended up emailing its author. Shobasakthi’s return email was immediate and read like a telegram, as if every word cost too much: ‘No English. Phone no…’ The next day I tried to call him but couldn’t get through; I emailed him my number instead. That very evening, Shobasakthi called. ‘Vanakkam,’ he said, in his precise way. Unable to stop myself, I slipped into what is known within Tamil speaking circles as ‘Jaffna Tamil.’ (I am a Sri Lankan-born Tamil of Indian origin and speak Indianized Tamil at home, but cannot help but slip into the dialect of the person I am speaking with when I am with Sri Lankans—I grew up amidst Jaffna-born Tamils in Colombo.) Shobasakthi expressed his surprise at how easily I spoke his Tamil. I then explained myself—my schooling, my multiple migrant histories, and my profession as English professor and translator. He listened without comment or question. I have found him, even in subsequent conversations, disinterested in personal histories. Let me rephrase that: Shobasakthi refuses to engage in the kind of intrusive interrogation of personal data that those from the sub-continent usually engage in. But conversely, he is open about his own lifestyle choices, work and creative endeavours.

  Shobasakthi is in his late thirties and says he does not need the trappings of a bourgeois family life; marriage and a steady job. He works as a dishwasher or supermarket shelver, and has always found employment at the minimum wage-level as he does not want to worry about losing his job or being indispensable at the workplace. This kind of employment allows him the kind of freedom to write that a more structured work environment would not allow. He has a large network of mostly male friends. (The Tamil community refers to members of the Movement as boys or ‘podiyal,’ bringing to mind a fatherless tribe of fearless children—who have now grown into men).

  Deeply thoughtful, Shobasakthi explains his political commitments as inseparable from his everyday life. He and his writer/activist friends maintain his blog, organize literary and political meetings and activities, and ultimately maintain a network of writers and thinkers within the Tamil-speaking refugee world. With a friend, he has brought out three literary collections on dalit politics, postmodernism and anti-fascism. In Tamil communities in Sri Lanka as well as in the refugee communities, these collections have helped to spark conversations about these issues and introduced in Tamil Nadu the alternative voices of those against the Tigers.

  ‘There are about fifty of us: those gone wild in the literary world,’ Shobasakthi says. He defines himself primarily as a refugee writer, and his writings to me reflect a profound homesickness and homelessness.

  Our conversations are lessons in refugee life. Shobasakthi left Sri Lanka in his late teens and made his way to Thailand as an international refugee. After an extended stay in many of the places that fall within the itinerary of the undocumented traveler, he arrived in Paris in the early 1990s. He is at present completely bereft of any of the rights that come with belonging to a nation. But he takes his standing as a writer within a large diasporic community that stretches into every Asian, European and North American country on the map, very seriously.

  Shobasakthi never sleeps. He gets calls from friends and fellow writers all through the night. ‘Someone from Canada or Chennai, fully drunk, will call at 4 am, my time, and want to talk,’ he laughs. That dry sense of humor I recognize as peculiarly Sri Lankan—the irrepressible need to laugh at authority figures, the inexhaustible supply of nicknames—comes through both in Shobasakthi’s writing and in conversation with him. His popular Tamil blog, with its clearly political agenda, allows him free reign to mock and satirize; his interviews with literary magazines in south India are usually followed by outcries from offended readers who bemoan what they term his unfortunate habit of slipping into vulgarity.

  This penchant for humour and satire can be witnessed in the delight Shobasakthi takes in describing Rocky Raj’s father, Gorilla. A particularly Sri Lankan maverick, Gorilla is what Sri Lankans, Tamil and Sinhala alike, call the rasthiyathi karaya; the indigenous thug who is anti-establishment and capable of great feats of daring, cunning and cruelty. His infamy is such that even his poor son is given the sobriquet of Gorilla, much to the boy’s disgust. Gorilla is a rogue who is abusive to his wife and children— to Rocky Raj especially when he runs away to join the Movement—and yet strangely compelling in the way he refuses to bow to the strictures of a society whose laws, and even its militant revolutions, benefit only the rich and the powerful. If it weren’t for his extreme cruelty (he is not above plucking out the odd eyeball or burning down his own house when he discovers that the estranged Rocky Raj has secretly visited his sister), Gorilla could be seen as a kind of folk hero. In fact, the encounters between Gorilla and his son are some of the most poignant and entertaining moments in the novel.

  Ironically, due to censorship in Sri Lanka, it is only possible to write the truth as diaspora writers. The paradox at the heart of the novel, of Rocky Raj being unable to claim his name even when he wants to, is, according to Shobasakthi, the condition of the Sri Lankan Tamil refugee in the West. The laws of many of the refugee granting nations refuse asylum to anyone who admits to having carried weapons against government forces. As many asylum seekers are former child soldiers like Rocky Raj/ Shobasakthi, they are forced to lie on their refugee applications. Each time a petition is denied, the applicant comes
up with a different name and localized history. ‘We cannot admit to having ever borne arms. The asylum process depends upon this crucial lie.’

  When Shobasakthi explained to me, in one of our conversations about Gorilla, the Kafkaesque process former child soldiers in Paris, Geneva, Toronto and London undergo when petitioning official agencies, I went on about the terrible ontological state of losing one's sense of self through violence. Shobasakthi listened without interrupting, then said, simply, ‘There is nothing philosophical about it. The reality is we won’t get asylum by speaking the truth.’ It is ironic and utterly in character, that Shobasakthi’s blog is titled Satiyakadatasi; speaking the truth in the face of power.

  Gorilla opens with a long, passionate petition that attempts to present documentation and proof of a request for asylum. The book then launches into a circular narrative that uses some of the conventions of bureaucracy—attachments, dictionary definitions, copious footnotes which document the killings of countless Sri Lankans to become a veritable litany of death—to prove that these too cannot be objective. The petitioner is identified as Anthony Thasan, whose torture and near death experiences we read of in painful detail. But then the novel moves to Rocky Raj and focuses on his story. When we find out, towards the end, that Rocky Raj is the Anthony Thasan of the petition, we realize that the step-by-step story he laid out in his petition is a fabrication. He lacks the distance to be able to tell his own story. So whose story did he co-opt to come up with the events that led to his arrival in France? The question is moot, for by the time the authorities come for Rocky Raj, who is working in a Parisian fast food place using someone else’s identity card, even he has no sense of his name. Connected to a lie detector, his own body tells the machine that he is lying. That young boy who wanted to rename himself Arafat has absorbed the stories and names of a hundred others like him: Eelam Tamils, potential militants hunted and killed in droves or stuck in prisons or camps.

  I read Gorilla in one sitting, unable to put it down for a minute. On one hand, what is most interesting about it is its peculiarly regional nature, the way it highlights northern Sri Lankan island culture; caste, class and the familial dynamics of a tiny hamlet in wartime all emerge. The novel belongs to the genre of autofiction— where the author is the narrator and the main character, but the narrative uses the techniques and creative license of fiction—and uses this freedom to refer to specific figures within the history of the Movement, known to many of us by name and deed as part of our oral culture.

  On the other hand, Gorilla is also absolutely a novel of the Tamil-speaking diaspora. If Bama’s Karukku was hailed as the first Tamil dalit novel to depict the lives of Tamil dalit women like her, I would call Gorilla the Karukku of displaced Sri Lankan Tamils. It is one of the major contemporary Tamil novels to critically interrogate the situation of northern Sri Lankan Tamils, who have borne the brunt of ethnic violence for the past thirty years. And not only does it describe, in vivid detail, the unthinking obedience demanded by militant organizations and their violent infighting, it speaks of the marginal life of that stateless being, the refugee. And these two distinct realities speak of irresolvable contradictions: unfinished lives, disconnected selves, and a war that never seems to go away.

  The novel ends with an assassination in the Paris Tamil diaspora community that eerily resembles the real life assassination of Tamil politicians A Amirthalingam (leader of TULF, Tamil United Liberation Front, which was the main opposition party in 1977, when JR Jayawardene’s United National Party came to power—Anthony’s friend Lokka is said to have worked for him) and Yogendran in Colombo. Here too the killers didn't come in with guns blazing; they were part of the Tamil community so they entered the homes of their victims as guests, sipping tea with them and chatting amiably, then calmly shooting their victims. The violence that Lokka bemoans—and ironically perpetrates when pushed to it—is the violence engendered by the Sri Lankan culture, following its people even into the refugee lands. In Gorilla, the killer is from Kunjan Fields, and so is his victim. They have both travelled as far from the ideal of a Tamil Eelam as they have from the Kunjan Fields of their birth.

  Anushiya Sivanarayanan

  1. Jakkappu Anthony Thasan

  Chez R. Jeyakkodi

  64, Rue Myrha

  75018 Paris

  2. Le Directeur

  OFPRA

  Immeuble Le Forez

  45, Rue Maximilien Robespierre

  94126 Fontenay-sous-Bois Cedex

  3. Application for political asylum (a petition)

  4. Sir,

  5. My name is Jakkappu Anthony Thasan. I am a Jakkappu Sri Lankan Tamil. A Roman Catholic. My date of birth: 26.12.1967. I belong to a coastal area in Jaffna district known as Mandaitivu, that is located about three kilometres from the city of Jaffna.

  6. When my family and I were tortured and harassed by the Sri Lankan army, the Indian military, and the Tamil liberation forces, I was destroyed physically and mentally. After a two-year incarceration, in order to save my life, I escaped from Sri Lanka and appealed for political asylum in your country. But you have thrice refused my application for asylum. The police have sent me a letter ordering me to leave France immediately. Where do I go? Even after I explained in detail the terrors that were inflicted upon me and the real danger to my life in my country of birth, you quoted the July 25, 1952 Geneva Code, Division II and refused political asylum all three times. According to that most unfortunate Division II, your explanation is that I face no specific danger. You have argued that the perilous nature of life that all Sri Lankan Tamils face in Sri Lanka is similar to my condition and therefore I cannot be given political asylum according to the law. It is unfortunate that even after I explained in detail my individual circumstances, you reject my narrative as baseless, as I am unable to provide you with official documentation of my sufferings. Sir, in my country, the military does not cut up a Tamil and then give a certificate to the injured saying, ‘We cut you.’ Though there is a strong political reason for when the gun is aimed at us, often we can never ascertain precisely the individual circumstances motivating the release of that particular bullet. My lawyer advised me to add in my petition that there are new dangers to my life, and that such a statement would make my petition stronger. I am sorry to say that at this point, there are no new dangers.

  7. Attachment

  8. I left Colombo by airplane on 31.12.1992 and arrived in Ukraine. Then on 06.01.1993, I left by plane for Turkey. From Turkey, on 10.01.1993.

  9. I travelled by ship and arrived in Italy on 16.01.1993. As I was refused political asylum in Italy, I started for France by car on 20.01.1993.

  10. I was arrested and handcuffed on the French border by the French border patrol. I appealed to them for political asylum. Immediately, I was taken to a police station and put in a cell. They told me that they were going to deport me back to Sri Lanka and asked for my name, age, and other details (my passport had been confiscated by the travel agent in Turkey). Afraid that the police were going to deport me to Sri Lanka, I gave a false name of Radha Sethupathy and also signed using that name.

  11. I knew very well that if I were to return to Sri Lanka under my own name, I would be arrested by the police at the Colombo airport itself.

  12. The next day (21.01.93) at 10 am, a woman came to interview me and take my deposition. This white lady spoke such fluent Tamil that I was able to tell her my problems in detail. That afternoon I was given a certificate (permission to stay in France for eight days) and allowed into France. I have attached a copy of that certificate.

  13. My early education was at the Mandaitivu Roman Catholic Tamil Mixed School and my higher study was at Jaffna Middle School.

  14. In July 1983, following the ethnic violence in the country, my older brother Devadasan joined the LTTE Movement. On 04.11.1983, he went to India for his training. Since then, I have heard no news about him.

  15. A few days after my brother left for India, the army came to my house hunting fo
r him. They came often and searched the house. In March of 1984, they took my father to the Gurunagar Army camp and tortured him for nine days. After they beat him and broke his leg, they released him.

  16. As the army gave my family constant trouble and my father had become a broken man, constantly sick after his torture, I left my studies at the G.C.E. Advanced Level (Commerce group, first year) and took over my father’s job hauling sand.

  17. During my leisure, I also painted advertising signs for businesses. The LTTE asked me often to draw posters for their Movement, and I made posters and advertisements for them.

  18. I wrote and directed three stage plays and a street theatre drama supporting the cause of Tamil Eelam liberation. ‘The Sacrificial Fire’ (1985), ‘Until the Thirst Stops’ (1985), and ‘Will Kannan Come?’ (1987) were staged many times. The street play ‘The Song of the Sufferings’ (1986) was enacted more than three hundred times all over the district of Jaffna.

  19. On 10.10.1987 the Indian Peace Keeping Forces and the Tigers began to clash. Following this, on 18.01.1988, at 7 in the morning, covered in masks, the Indian army came to my house.

  20. I wasn’t at home at that moment as I had gone to work. My father was told that if I did not surrender myself at the Velanai Army camp, the next day my whole family would be arrested.

  21. The next day, 19.01.1988, through the Velanai Justice of Peace Mr. Gopalapillai, I surrendered at the Velanai-Vangallavaadi IPKF camp. The Madras Aid Regiment was stationed there and the lieutenant of that regiment, Major Krishnasamy, interrogated me.

  22. Two Tigers, Raghu and Kasi, who had been captured already by the IPKF, bore witness against me. They told the peacekeeping forces that I drew posters and wrote dramas for the Movement. Seeing no other way, I gave my deposition, accepting all charges against me.