Book review: ‘Beyond Checkpoints’ by Bishop Duleep de Chickera
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| Front cover of "Beyond Checkpoints" by Duleep de Chickera |
By Lakshman Gunasekara
“The need for survival slings a gun on the
shoulders of those who search for bread.” So writes a Bishop of the Church of
Ceylon, a religious community whose native identity is better stated in the
formal Sinhala translation of its denominational name: “Lanka Sabhaava”.
In this reflection on his own, active,
social-spiritual ‘being’, a witness to “slinging the gun”
on all sides of the ethnic conflict, Bishop Duleep de Chickera lyrically propels
the reader of his book ‘Beyond Checkpoints’ into
Lanka’s world of societal turbulence. His, is a literary effort that is
seductive in its poignancy and, is a valuable contribution toward inter-ethnic
justice and broader Lankan sociability.
The actual brute violence of that social
conflict may no longer be direct human experience today, not, at least, in
terms of armed conflict (not forgetting the post-war anti-Muslim pogroms). The
armed conflict ended – at least for now – in May 2009 after a whole nation’s
physical and mental agony of over a half century.
That is, if one is to include the decades, preceding
the war, of anti-Tamil pogroms and, the repeated physical suppression of civic
dissent by state security agencies during the linguistic minority protests of
the 1950s onwards. This suppression of civic dissent then drove elements of
that ethno-linguistic minority to armed struggle beginning with the slaying of
Jaffna’s Mayor in 1975 by the Tamil New Tigers (LTTE’s original name).
Churches produce theology – generally
speaking, as does the Sasana produce Buddhist philosophizing. This
ecclesiastical scholarship is largely, formally, intellectual. But sometimes
clerics speak at a popular level, fulfilling the need to guide their respective
religious adherents. This book is one such expression. This imaginative
dissection of personal experience of larger sociopolitics blazes a brightly
different trail from the morass of religious rabble-rousing whether to incite
violence or to build triumphalism and unfriendly exclusivism.
“Slings a gun..” describes the political
reality. “..Those who search for bread..” describes the desperately existential
compulsions of individuals and whole social groups. The ‘gun-slingers’ are the
poor/needy whose endeavour is to avoid starvation, exclusion and identity
disempowerment.
Whatever their religion or philosophy,
Lankans – even those not poor - easily appreciate the social fact of economic
poverty and consequent inability or difficulty of obtaining food for survival -
of individuals, families, whole socio-economic classes. In his book, the Bishop
starkly throws these ‘facts’ at the reader.
His book sweeps through the gamut of political-cultural needs and the
desperation of identity survival, both physical and political.
The Bible, which is the Bishop’s testament
in the world, certainly describes ‘poverty’ in many other ways, including
spiritual and moral poverty, political disempowerment, etc. This includes whole
displaced communities needing their homelands, such as the biblical Israelites
in search of the ancestral homeland in Canaan and, Samaritans collectively
marginalised within the larger Judahite community.
This ‘need’ is there for the Palestinians
of today. Or, in terms of Lankan nationhood, for the Thamil-speaking minorities
seeking firm and comprehensive identity security and fulfilment.
Emperor Dharmasoka, in his ancient edicts,
also demands governors of his domains to especially care for minority social
groups in order that their provincial integrity is not destabilised by minority
dissatisfaction. Later Moghul Emperor Akbar’s adviser Abu Ul Fazl’s ‘Ain-I-Akbari’
also emphasises community inclusivity as a plank of state management.
The Maurya and Moghul empires are
essentially political impositions over many territories, essentially
undemocratic and structurally unstable. Those imperators knew this full well.
Hence those injunctions for inclusivity (however pretentious).
In ‘Beyond Checkpoints’,
in his chapter on ‘Counting shells’, Bishop Duleep (as he is known to his
immediate religious constituency, the Diocese of Colombo) clearly enunciates
the spiritual disarray of a people ethnically subjugated and, also, subjected
to brutal war. Various chapters also refer to the challenge of starvation or,
at least malnutrition in the chaos of the war zone.
His recounting of the emotional discomfort,
the tension, nay terror, of life in the war zone and his own glimpse of this
life, is vivid and demonstrates his literary skill.
The Bishop evokes emotion through
contrasting recollections of actual human experience amid war on the one hand and,
on the other hand, in comfortable conditions outside the war zone.
He observes the ‘normalcy’ of children in
the midst of a war zone in the North as they habitually counted the shots of
artillery gun fire by the army. The staccato blasts of a salvo, totally out of
the control of those being targeted, reminded him of the infinitely more
innocuous, but equally loud, bellowing of ships’ sirens off-shore from the
college in which he worked, disrupting the midnight worship at the dawning of
New Year. That deafening cacophony was also completely beyond his control.
The crucial difference is the terror of the
shelling and the joy of the sirens. Those children hearing the incoming
explosives know they are the targets. The church-going New Year celebrants
enjoy that noisy sirens as a wider sharing of their ‘great joy’. This stark
contrasting of human experience so succinctly crafted delivers a poignancy that
seduces.
One is persuaded about the significance of
the Other, whichever the side of the checkpoints, the frontlines.
That school is socially well known. The
sounds of Southern coastal urbanity are an aspect of metropolitan civilian life.
Thus, through his book, the part of the nation outside the war zone is thereby
emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, drawn into the Northern children’s
peculiar experience of war. A step further in the peace-time aural experience would
simply extend to the sounds of church bells, vihara and kovil bells and the
call of the muezzin.
That aural environment was, and is, as
routinely daily for those outside the war zone, as was the artillery shelling
heard by the children inside the war zone.
This deft matching of similar disruptions
as similar occurrences that are ‘normal’ to their respective contexts, imposes
on the reader an uncomfortable but authentic recounting, a common historicising,
of Lankan life that compels a, perhaps undesired, but unified
experience of starkly different normalcies. We have no choice but to appreciate
the children’s experience of deadly shelling at the same time as we learn how
ships’ sirens disrupt a New Year worship.
From the pathos of children listening for
the shells coming towards them, to the peculiar but routine, punctuation of
church worship by ships’ sirens, the reader must make a literary leap of spiritual
realisation of experiential commonality, a shared terror and loss.
This book of has 14 chapters of
descriptions of a wide range of personal experience and corollary pithy reflection
on that experience. The book well resonates with this reviewer’s own experience
of crossing checkpoints and frontlines since the 1970s, first as a social
activist, then as a journalist and, later as a political analyst and rights
monitor. The book re-visits this writer’s own tensions, grief and other
emotions experienced in visiting refugee camps and military bases, military and
militant trenches, and, bloodier, combat locations after a firefight.
Bishop Duleep does well to focus fully on
the war and its immense societal trauma. The larger trauma of the overall
ethnic conflict – a conflict that involves all ethnic communities – can and
needs be dealt with in other endeavours and by others. His fine focus helps
refine his narrative very sharply and enables a simple lyrical poignancy that persuades
in its compelling authority.
Lankan historiography has yet to
comprehensively publish, for the general public, a measured narrative of this
particular post-colonial crisis of the nation-state. Significantly, while there
are thousands of academic speciality studies and even small circles of online
discussion (and inter-ethnic diatribes), the national school curriculum, too,
largely excludes a measured narrative of the war whether in teaching of
religion, language, history, demography and other subjects.
However, there is much narrativising of
the war in popular literature, song,
music, drama and other creative reflections, both within ethnic communities as
well as across and between ethnic communities.
Bishop Duleep’s 172-page autobiographical
narrative of the war is a powerful contribution to this literature and
aesthetic. Being fully autobiographical, it is a critical reflection from his
personal standpoint as a South-based, anglicised and middle class, urban
cultural minority person himself. He writes frankly as an outsider to the
actual combat zone and the ethnic community so severely devastated by the war.
It is that deliberate and lyrically-written
juxtaposition of his own existential experience ‘outside’ with his learnings
and experience during his travels ‘inside’ the war that is his literary and
spiritual accomplishment. It is no accident that his full life experience and
formation as an Anglican pastor, theologian, and Christian community leader
during these war years is well manifested here: in his selection of episodes to
memorialise, the political and social themes to draw out and, his unambiguously
prophetic-critical practise in the recounting.
A Christian will easily appreciate that
‘prophetic’ role. All others (depending on future translations) will appreciate
the spiritual contribution or, to his antagonists, at least the provocative
ideological contribution, whether ‘for’ or ‘against’.
His style of recounting is non-historical
and thereby largely avoids the progression of human affairs in terms of
political or social behavioural logic and the distracting issues of causation
and repercussion. That is for others to do – historians, students, political
scientists. ‘Beyond Checkpoints’ is
then a literary challenge to mundane scholarship, serious public historiography
and, formal education, to step-up and fill a yawning gap in our nation’s
intellectual life.
In his own creative way, Bishop Duleep has
made a bit of history, if not in circumstances of his own choosing, at least,
in this 2020s decade, in a context of possible early movement beyond the ethnic
conflict. In this sense, ‘Beyond Checkpoints’
will complement ongoing endeavours, social and political, toward both
inter-ethnic justice and trans-ethnic Lankan sociability.
This contribution will become more effective with the translation of the book into Thamil and Sinhala.
The writer is a senior journalist based in Colombo.
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