Sri Lanka fought a series of wars between 1971 and 2009, during which some several hundred thousand Sri Lankans were killed, many of them civilians. The war was marked by excessive brutality, terrorist attacks, torture, and disappearances. The government was responsible for disproportionate violence against insurgents, especially in the final days of the war when an unknown number of civilians (somewhere in the tens of thousands) were killed by government bombardment.
“Feb 18 Walking in downtown Colombo at night, like walking in a city of the dead, the city of the living dead. First the sun sets and the sky is postcard pink, but a storm is blowing in, and the sky over the island is dark, black as night, even while the sky over the sea is still glowing. That part of the city is all towers and government buildings, 5-star hotels and military patrols, badly lit areas and bright windows far overhead. Walking into one area I realized that everyone was wearing a uniform, and I doubled back, though there had been no sign saying that it was a Restricted Area. This part of the city is the over-city, the city of the soldier and the capitalist, devoid of human life, real commerce, history, justice, space to walk. Black SUVs and sedans and police cars flash down the empty roads while the men with machine guns salute. There aren’t any stars over that part of the city. There aren’t any bus stops of cafés. Coming towards Galle Face, the city behind me was black, the sea a purple sheet, the sun headed down and every lamp glowing in the high humidity. The cloud above the city looked like a conflagration, like the end of the world, but no storm burst out and I only walked down the Green, past the other walkers and the groping lovers who I couldn’t see in the dark.”
I started to believe that Sri Lanka was best when you didn’t think about it. At the beach it was easy to see only the sand and the water, the sky and the palm trees that rimmed everything. There, on the South Coast, you didn’t have to confront anything about the country—the war crimes, the foundering democracy, the militarization, censorship, murder of journalists. The beach and the breeze and a cheap Lion Lager, these things made it easy to believe that you weren’t anywhere at all, which was what they wanted mostly—the droves of European tourists, I mean. In the guidebooks and the government records, in casual conversations with hoteliers, the war was best known by its absence. It was something that had happened, an unfortunate thing that was over now.
Coming on a night ride near on the east coast, the driver flicks his high-beams on and off almost constantly, revealing the things at the road’s edge and then plunging them back into darkness. Up and down, up and down. Once the light catches a heard of buffalos, black as the night, almost directly in front of us and the driver swerves just in time. At another point the light flicks up to revel a man on a bicycle, as if appeared from nowhere. His right arm is missing, the sleeve of his white shirt flapping as he rides. Is he a victim of the war? Who knows, we are past him in a second. But there are victims of the war. In a flash of light you see what you don’t otherwise have to, that this place nearly dissolved in bloodshed; that ‘the war,’ which we tended to see as an abstraction of recent history was, in reality, a phenomena of the body, the severing of limbs, the leaving of scars, the obliteration of lives.
Nobody’s wrong. Sri Lanka is the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen. The people are friendly and kind. If you look at it quickly you wonder how it could happen, where the viciousness came from.
I couldn’t think beyond the war. My own imagination appalled me. I felt like those Americans I loathed. Nick Kristof and Dexter Filkins, the Kony 2012 and Save Darfur junkies. Those who never saw past a conflict to the complexities of the history, who reduced the context to platitudes. How can you generalize a country after having spent a tiny amount of time there? A few days. A week or two. After having read a few books and reports. Yet I couldn’t see past the idea that the war was the only obvious thing. It lasted for thirty years, been finished for only four. How could it not be the central object of the place’s narrative?
What struck me finally was not that my judgment was wrong, but that it was unfair, hypocritical. Yes, the violence could be the center of Sri Lanka’s history, if you wanted to look at it that way. The problem was in our myopia, or utter unwillingness to engage in self-reflection. We judged the war to be Sri Lanka’s whole history and from the outside we pretended not to understand what had made Sri Lankans kill a couple of hundred thousand other Sri Lankans over thirty years. The West recoiled in horror when the Sri Lankan government played off the war crimes as if they were nothing. But the government’s perspective was really wider and more accurate, in sense modern, while the Western observers were behind the times, seeing Sri Lanka though a conventional colonial lens as a tiny, barbarous people. Half devil and half child. The Sri Lankan government and military and even the Tamil Tigers saw themselves as historical actors, adherents to the tradition of killing that every nation honored. The dates of the Sri Lankan wars, 1971-2009, marked, very roughly, the end of American participation in the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Sri Lanka’s violence was only incomprehensible when we ignored out own history, the violence of the American nation, replete with human rights violations and war crimes. From a certain perspective, Sri Lanka and the United States were walking on the same road, hand in hand down the path of counter-insurgency.
To read a history of Sri Lanka’s wars, I realized, wasn’t so much an exercise in the incomprehensible. The unpleasant truth, which the “law abiding” nations of the world rarely acknowledged was that watching the violence play out in Sri Lanka was, more than anything else, like looking in a mirror. The terrifying thing was that most people—the tourists and the guidebook writers, American diplomats, the heads of State and the UN, most of the Human Rights activists and a good many Sri Lankans themselves—didn’t seem to see anything at all when they looked into that mirror, that history. It was all just blank, something that was over.
Looking into that history I could not help but think about how similar it was to our own, the main exception being that Sri Lankans had killed other Sri Lankans while Americans killed people of other nationalities. In the scale of the violence in America’s wars had dwarfed those of Sri Lanka’s. Yet Sri Lanka’s war became a totalizing experience which (in the eyes of the West) consumed culture, media, religion, history. On the other hand, our own wars, which transpired simultaneously, are rarely seen as the center of the American experience. Almost nobody, not ourselves or others, has attempted to implicate our culture in the killings of thousands of thousands of people in the war on terror. Looking back we can see everything: Girls, Lil Wayne, David Foster Wallace, Vassar College, the Westboro Baptist Church, distinct cultural entities, which live outside the war. But when we turn to Sri Lanka, to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the place we don’t know, we see only the darkness, the conflict, the history which begins and ends in bloodshed.
To Measure The Earth 