{"id":191664,"date":"2018-06-29T09:17:44","date_gmt":"2018-06-29T03:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=191664"},"modified":"2018-07-03T23:59:47","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T18:29:47","slug":"the-poisoned-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-poisoned-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"The Poisoned Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan<\/a> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Prof. Charles Sarvan<\/p><\/div>\n

Epigraphs:\u00a0The easiest thing of all is to die; the difficult thing is to live (Kierkegaard) \u201cWe learnt life through pain. Now we must overcome pain in life”\u00a0(Poisoned<\/i> Dream<\/i>, p. 122).<\/p>\n

The author, born 1974, was a Tamil Tiger soldier. Captured, together with thousands of others at the end the war, he was interned and tortured, escaped from \u2018the Paradise Isle\u2018 (paradisiacal in geographic and scenic, rather than in \u2018man-achieved\u2018 political and economic, social and cultural terms), and now lives in exile. The book\u2019s rear cover describes it as a work of \u201cautofiction\u201c which suggests that the core experience \u2013 capture, torture, escape \u2013 is autobiographical, factual, here presented in fictionalised form. (To distinguish it from autobiographical fiction, the \u2018voice\u2019 in autofiction is usually that of a first-person narrator who has the same name as the author. See also, \u201cfact\u201d plus \u201cfiction\u201d going to form \u201cfaction\u201d.) Page reference given within brackets is to this text. Yeats in his poem, \u2018A Prayer For Old Age\u2018, writes: God guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone. Karthick Ram Manoharan\u2019s Afterword\u2018 combines perception and passion, and his contribution deserves reading by itself. Incidentally, the Afterword begins on page 215 and not as given in \u2018Contents\u2019: \u201cAfter word (sic) 213\u201d. The two translators (and the author) should have been better served by the printers: there are several mistakes and blemishes. Words are not infrequently run together as if they were one: the result either of carelessness or, more likely, an unrealized unfamiliarity with the English language.<\/p>\n

Posthumous atonement is not possible, except in imagination: see, for example, Ian McEwan\u2019s novel, Atonement<\/i>. Those who suffered and died are dead: they can\u2019t be extended a posthumous restitution. And yet there\u2019s the human drive to articulate; to express (ex-press); here, to give voice both to the dead and to the victims who are either unable or unwilling to speak. Recollection is not presented by an omniscient third-person narrator but through the voice of a subjective, fallible, first-person. The very first words are \u201cNothing to lose, nothing to look forward to\u201c: we are plunged in medias res<\/i>, and share the narrator\u2019s disorientation and closeness to despair.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Kuna Kaviyalahan, The Poisoned Dream.\u00a0Translated from Tamil into English by\u00a0N. Malathy and Karthick Ram Manoharan. Chennai, 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

In several literary (and non-literary) works, a character either at the end of life or in an extreme situation of crisis or sorrow asks: How did I come to this? What were the steps? Were they fortuitous or inescapable? To what degree am I to blame for what I now endure? As Kierkegaard wrote, life is lived forwards and understood backwards. This introspection, this mental investigation, is not to alter the present which is often beyond the ability of the character, nor even to shape the future. It is the human desire to know; to understand: knowing for the sake of knowing. So it is that Shakespeare\u2019s Othello, even though he knows he\u2019ll be dead in a few minutes, wants to know why Iago destroyed him. (Iago declines to answer and Othello dies, like many others, uncomprehending.) Poisoned Dream<\/i> is a retrospective, introspective and inquiring work. Despite all the external brutality and humiliation, it is essentially a work of interiority: \u201cWhy were [are] we cursed like this?\u201d (37).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Turning to the title of this book, W B Yeats in his poem, \u2018Among School Children\u2018, asks: \u201cHow can we know the dancer from the dance?\u201c\u00a0 <\/span>Similarly, there can be no \u201cdream\u201c without dreamers. This leads to questions such as who is the dreamer? What led her or him to dream? What was the dream? That one dreams implies present reality is unsatisfactory or unhappy. What then was or is that reality? Dreams can be said to be of two kinds. The one, following Freud and his work on the interpretation of dreams, is often mere wish-fulfilment. Such dreams, whether asleep or awake, are an indulging in fantasy. In contrast, when Martin Luther King famously declared, \u201cI have a dream\u201c it was a wide-awake call to action. Dreams do not by themselves become reality, and Martin Luther King\u2019s call to \u201cdream\u201c was with the full knowledge that it meant effort, pain, sacrifice and, in his case, death. He dared to dream and died so that his people would lead a better life. (So when answered, prayer is answered it\u2019s because of, and through, human effort. As I have written elsewhere, prayer is prelude and preparation for effort, and not an easy substitute for it.)\u00a0 <\/span>The \u201cdreamer\u201d in Poisoned Dream<\/i>, the first-person narrator, is called Gouthaman; sometimes Gouthama. Ironically, it\u2019s a name Sri Lankans associate with Gauthama Buddha, \u201cthe Soul of Greatest Compassion\u201c.<\/p>\n

Injustice can be reacted to with passive endurance or by an \u2018active\u2019 dream, as in the sense in which Martin Luther King used the term. In his novel, Great Expectations<\/i>, Dickens observes that nothing is so \u201cfinely\u201c perceived by children, and so finely (sharply, painfully) felt as injustice. And, one might add, by adults. John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice <\/i>states that <\/i>it\u2019s a sense of fair-play that leads to justice. Decree 1V of the 32nd<\/sup> General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (1975) states: \u201cthe promotion of justice is an absolute requirement. For reconciliation with God demands the reconciliation of people with one another\u201d. Human beings must be reconciled with each other before they can be reconciled with God, and this reconciliation can be based only on true justice. One cannot be at peace with the divine while not at peace with the human. A Hadith of the Prophet Mohammed expresses it differently: You will not enter Paradise unless you believe. And you will not believe unless you love one another. In other words, love for and among humankind is the basis of religious belief and salvation. The dream in this novel is to be permitted to live what ought to be (and is in some other countries) an ordinary life, a life of freedom (37). With defeat, that dream is shattered.<\/p>\n

The debate and discussion among the imprisoned soldiers is how and why their defeat came about (67). They believe their cause was just, and they had fought with commitment and courage. Then why did they lose? (72). What had they done wrong? (163). Is it that, unable to go further forward, they were yet unwilling to \u201cback-off\u201d? (65). \u201cA powerful and successful liberation movement had been destroyed\u2026 What is the root cause of this defeat? How many generations will suffer because of this defeat? Will my people face their end with this defeat?\u201d (38). Military defeat cannot be entirely explained on military grounds: there are several other factors at play. Gouthama and his former fellow soldiers are prisoners; cut off from the wider discussion; newly arrested, disorientated by torture, pain and uncertainty. They cannot be expected to provide anything like a comprehensive answer.<\/p>\n

Torture, extreme, degrading and often resulting in death, was carried out in secret camps known only to the then Minister of Defence and his associates (87). <\/b>Since the camps didn\u2019t officially exist, neither did the prisoners and so anything could be done to them. Lord Acton\u2019s famous observation that absolute power corrupts absolutely finds one of its most horrific truths in such officially non-existent camps. For most of us \u201ctorture\u201d is fortunately a word and not an experience, and so we can dismiss or discuss academically; deny or minimise. But one of the gifts of literature is that it enables us to enter the life and experiences of others, even those far removed spatially or experientially. Gauthaman, a soldier trained to observe, gives us not only a description of the minutiae of daily life in a concentration camp \u2013 one is reminded of Solzhenistyn\u2019s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>–\u00a0 <\/span>but even of the construction and layout of buildings.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The torture victim in a sense never recovers fully; he or she remains injured for ever. The wounds of humiliation never heal 81). What\u2019s more, the effects of torture can be passed on to succeeding generations. For example, the effects of torture can make a man or woman an unsatisfactory parent, in turn adversely affecting the child or children. The harm may not only be mental and emotional but biological. In the\u00a0 <\/span>London Review of Books<\/i> (10 May 2018, p. 5) it\u2019s claimed that transgenerational epigenetic inheritance has been demonstrated.” My nephew Dr Mithran Somasundrum, a research scientist, explained it to ignoramus me as follows:\u00a0<\/span>Trauma can cause a change in the activity of a particular gene, and this altered gene activity can then be passed on. So, basically it’s \u201cYes\u201d, a trauma can cause a change which can be inherited by the offspring. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On torture, I quote a few lines from Song of Prisoner<\/i> by <\/b>Okot p\u2019Bitek (perhaps best-known for his Song of Lawino<\/i>) <\/b>\u201cTen uniformed stones \/ Break into my tiny hell\u2026\/ The earth shakes her belly, \/ The walls jump \/ And dance, \/ The stone floor \/ Urinates\u201d.\u00a0 <\/span>In Poisoned Dreams<\/i>, inebriated soldiers share pictures they have taken on their cell-phones of their torture-victims and of the gang-rapes they participated in. Swift in \u2018A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms\u2019 (Book 4 of Gulliver\u2019s Travels<\/i>) writes that what distinguishes us from animals is our intelligence but that same intelligence, if perverted, can result in horror. I used to tell students that the not infrequently heard statement \u201cHe behaved like an animal\u201d is unjust – to animals. Animals are unable to devise torture both excruciating and prolonged; they never indulge in gang-rape. <\/b>The reaction of the majority of people to allegations of torture is one of outright denial, minimising or, in most cases, a deliberate looking away: they have their own life, its preoccupations and pleasures to pursue, and they simply cannot be bothered. But willed ignorance is not exculpation. Silence makes one complicit in that it enables torture to continue. (Ref. \u2018The Silence of Others\u2019, a 2018 documentary on crimes committed under General Franco.)<\/p>\n

To see Poisoned Dreams<\/i> as an anti-Sinhalese work would be a simplistic, if not crude, reading. The picture the author presents is complex; it\u2019s not a simple \u2018black and white\u2019 opposition. There\u2019s a Sinhalese sergeant who tries to soften the harsh edges, though his powers are over shadowed by others, and he must be careful not to endanger himself. Another officer tells his prisoners: \u201cWe fought each other in the war\u2026 Who won and who lost is also a different matter. But we must not forget we are all soldiers. I have seen your fighting skills [and] am really surprised that you were defeated\u201d (p. 138).\u00a0 <\/span>The escape of Gouthaman and three comrades is significantly enabled by a woman at very great risk to herself. She even hides Gouthama in her house, thus endangering her old mother as well. That woman was a Sinhalese, in love with one of the escapees. The autobiographical novel ends will Gouthaman heading to the home of someone who he thinks will help him escape the Island \u2013 again despite very grave danger. If the friend does help, it will not be for payment or for material reward of any kind. That man is a Sinhalese. Besides there are Tamils who collaborate, spy, help in running the camps and in torture.<\/p>\n

The author\u2019s intention, as I read it, is not to apportion blame, not to cry \u201cJ\u2019accuse<\/i>\u201d but to share both experience, and reaction to that extreme experience. I will not rehearse details, dwell on the physical aspect of torture where crude men and women, devoid of culture and religious doctrine; bereft of morality and compassion unleash suffering on the helpless. Human nature is such that, in some, degraded specimens of humanity excite and justify degradation. What is central is the narrator\u2019s observations and reactions. Lord Byron in his sonnet, \u2018On the Castle of Chillon\u2019, asserts that though one can be imprisoned physically, the human mind is \u201cchainless\u201d. And so it is with the narrator who finds patches of \u201cfreedom\u201d through using his mind (146). The mind sometimes, even in dire situations, registers the inconsequential, such as the military trucks making the wet ground muddy and slippery (154). In extreme physical and mental pain; disorientated, he wonders why he now hears the wind. How could it now burden his mind? \u201cWas the mind in the heart?\u201d He registers the paradox that silence, the sudden absence of sound, can explode violently like a bomb. He observes an imprisoned father seeing his baby for the first time and tenderly stroking its soft hand through the cruel barbed-wire. A heavy darkness descended: \u201cDoes darkness have weight?\u201d (23). There\u2019s no \u2018human nature\u2019 in the abstract, separate from wider, external factors. In battle, comrades would risk their life to carry away the wounded. Now defeated; fellow comrades become fellow prisoners; without hope, ideals and goals. Some of them turn spies; lie and betray in order to save their lives or to gain slightly better treatment. As I have written elsewhere, Lord Acton\u2019s words are thought to apply to those who possess and wield power, but power also corrupts some of the powerless in their struggle for survival. As the narrator observes, they have been made tattered pieces of cloth caught in thorny bushes. Gauthaman notes that what appears to be sympathy for the vanquished (\u201cVae victis<\/i>!<\/i>\u201d) in some could in reality be a covert expression of arrogance (64). I suppose it\u2019s rather like the rich man who throws a coin to a beggar not out of sympathy but as a demonstration of his own material superiority.<\/p>\n

Milton\u2019s Samson is pained by thoughts of \u201cwhat once I was<\/a>, and what am now\u201d (\u2018Samson Agonistes\u2019, line 22). No longer functioning as a group, each prisoner is thrown on himself, and each reacts differently. The struggle was begun because community dignity was being constantly violated (102) and now \u201cdebased\u201d men force them to lose their dignity. Without individual dignity, there can no community dignity.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cWe laboured so hard to build something. Why these unbearable lashes on our back?\u201d (214). Morality and justice are lies. In such a state, suicide becomes seductive. The ultimate dishonour for a Tamil Tiger fighter was to save her or his life at all cost, surrendering every other consideration. Then why not strike at the torturer and be killed? Isn\u2019t it dishonourable to survive in these circumstances? (82). The cyanide capsule he has successfully concealed is comfort and temptation. And we leave Gouthama in the bus, journeying into an unknown and uncertain future: the subtitle of Stud Terkel well-known work, Hope Dies Last<\/i>, is Making a Difference in an Indifferent World<\/i>.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

And the light shines in the darkness (New Testament. John 1:5)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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