Roundtable discussion at the 2010 Tamil Studies Conference - presentation notes

Notes from SAVAC's roundtable discussion at the 2010 Tamil Studies Conference.

[Haema Sivanesan] Good Afternoon, my name is Haema Sivanesan, ED SAVAC

I’d like to welcome you to this afternoon’s panel, which is intended as a round table to discuss the protests which took place in Toronto and Ottawa, and other sites in Canada from late 2008-mid 2009 at the end of Sri Lanka’s long civil war.

This roundtable has developed through a series of artist-led workshops which provided a forum for an examination of the protests using the strategies of a critical art practice.

The idea was to examine the significance of the Tamil protests in the context of a range of critical work by artists around the world, looking at questions of the efficacy of protest as a political strategy.  In developing the framework for these workshops I was thinking of work by San Francisco-based collective, Retort; as well as the work of the Otolith group, based in the UK, both of whom examine the 2003 protests in opposition to the Iraq War. 

The relationship between art and activism of course has a long history, some of which was examined at the workshops. But for us at SAVAC, this seemed a significant opportunity to engage artists and members of the Tamil community in a critical analysis of the protests, as an event which was highly visible, and which had a strong visual impact – both in terms of the occupation of public space, as well as in terms of its impact in the media.

 

[Kohila Kurunathan] My name is Kohila Kurunathan, I’m the Communications and Outreach coordinator at SAVAC. And I worked with the artists and participants to organise these workshops.

During the initial stages of planning these workshops we invited people to submit images of the protests to a Flickr page as a way of developing an online archive which would form a resource for us to work with. You can see these images here, and while 99% of the submissions are photos of the demos, we encouraged other media, like painting and drawing..

On the other side you see photo documentation from the three workshops, as well as images of the collage and writing produced through the creative activities,  along with images of news stories that covered the protests.

The idea for these workshops developed through informal discussions within the community – particularly amongst a second generation of Tamils in Canada – to begin to discuss a range of issues that were emerging as a result of the wider public response to the protests. The aim was not to produce any conclusive outcomes or a tangible end product, but rather to open up a forum for thinking and reflecting on the events in a constructive way, and to use the motions of art to do this. We found that in both the planning stages and the workshops themselves there was a consistent desire for multiplicity when speaking about the protests.

 

[HS] The workshops broached a range of discussions about the nature of protest and its impact. They raised critical questions around a number of issues including:

• issues of citizenship and race within the context of policies of cultural diversity or multi-culturalism in Canada;
• questions of politics and the limits of  Tamil nationalism within the diaspora setting;
• issues concerning the complexity of Tamil identity – the idea that Sri Lankan Tamil identity is not in itself homogenous, but a complex range of multiple yet affiliated though sometimes contradictory subject positions, examining the complex relationship between ideas of Tamilness and Sri Lankan-ness within the diaspora setting;
• alongside questions about the occupation of public space and the politics of the racialised body within the rhetoric of cultural diversity in Canada.

In short, the workshops examined what it meant to be Tamil in Canada during and after the protests; and what it means to be Canadian for a generation who for the most part have ended up in Canada as a result of the war and because of Canada’s policies of immigration which were intended as benevolent, but which following the protests have raised a complex set of questions about the limits of that benevolence.

 

[KK] One of the points that came up through these workshops was that the extreme visibility of last year’s events (not only in the media and on the streets, but emotionally too) meant that young Canadian Tamils who previously–for any number of reasons–may not have taken a position on the war in Sri Lanka and all its accompanying issues, suddenly found themselves in the position of having to make a decision, of having to take a stance, where not doing so was now even more a position in and of itself.

A lot of Canadian Tamils would have experienced a sense of shock at the general public's reaction to the protests, which was alarmingly  not one of empathy nor benevolence. When the demonstrations were not met with indifference, they were for the most part received with angry indignance, treated like a nuisance – there wasn't quite the solidarity one saw with the Iranian protests? So we were especially interested in what this meant to people who didn't identify with just one so-called label of Tamil OR Canadian (as if one needs to be one or the other).

 

[HS] The objective of the workshops was to create a dynamic and inclusive space which would allow a multiplicity of voices to come forward. The workshops brought forward a range of subject positions, and situated strategies for self-reflection, which in turn developed as mode of analysis, allowing a variety of issues and ideas to be brought forward and discussed, in order to reflect upon and better understand the wider impact of the protests.

For today’s round table we’d like to dedicate the first part of the time to reviewing the workshops with invited participants and presenters, and the ideas that these workshops have raised with some short presentations by various workshop participants. Following these we would like to open up the discussion to all of you. 

Kohila and I will approach this discussion by outlining the main points which seemed to emerge from the workshops:

•••

Workshop1 dealt with ideas of the archive;

It critiqued the idea of the photographic archive as a source of a nationalist discourse and examining the implications of the internet as positioning alternative discourses and subject positions that unsettle the dominant discourse. We worked with artists Jayce Salloum and Abbas Akhavan to examine ideas of “the missing archive” and how artists work with images to examine how knowledge is constructed, and thereby to question or destabilise notions of truth.

 

[KK] For this first workshop we asked participants to bring in photos, images, clippings, objects, writings, found texts etc, which they felt were relevant to the ideas were were planning to discuss. These items did not have to be directly related to the protests themselves, and would be reworked and altered through the workshops.

You may see some of the images we used here, many were pulled off the internet, and some were from email forwards being circulated by a nostalgic Sri Lankan community (under subject headings like “Wellawate in the 80s” or “Mother Lanka Old Days”). More recent newspaper articles were selected by a participant who felt that the stories exemplified racial and political issues similiar to those we saw in the press a year ago.

During the workshop we worked specifically with the idea of collage as a method by which to examine and organise images. And to examine the contingencies of making meaning through the framing, structuring and organization of images. Of how images – and the photographic image – which is typically positioned as an object of truth/reality/evidence, are themselves subjective

 

[HS] The framing of an image is a process of choosing what to show and what not to show…and thereby selective in the truth that it purports to depict.

The central discussion in terms of this workshop juxtaposed the nostalgic/romantic idea of "Sri Lanka as home", against the militarism of Sri Lanka’s recent history and alongside the red flags, “black flags”, and placards of protestors in the diaspora. This juxtaposition reflected on a state of “interstitiality” of a community living through often successive states of displacement and examining, primarily through a second generation lens, a kind of fractured relationship to a Tamil homeland and identity the implications of this in shaping political attitudes. Attitudes of ambivalence, contradiction, juxtaposition, disjuncture seemed to emerge from the discussions at this workshop, locating the ambivalence of many second-generation Tamils who have had no direct experience of the Civil War in Sri Lanka, but also locating the lack of a space for a more complex political position which is neither pro-LTTE nor unsympathetic with the concerns of the Tamils in Sri Lanka.  

***

[KK] The second workshop was facilitated by Nahed Mansour and Meena Murugesan and it dealt specifically with performance art as an area of contemporary art practice that utilises the body as the site and medium of art. The workshop looked specifically at artists who deal with issues of race and gender through a performance art practice. These are typically practices of contestation – so they are political practices as much as they are aesthetic. The framework of performance art situated an important analysis of the protest (which also relates to an analysis of the archive) and which raised issues of the gaze alongside ideas of the body in public space.

Nahed Mansour talked about a number of performance artists, and discussed the notion of the body as a site of dissent, covering artists like

• International artists: Ana Mendiata, Marina Ambramovic, Mona Hatoum, Adrian Piper, Coco Fusco, Guerillmo Gomez Pena, etc.
• Indigenous artists: Rebecca Belmore, Terrance Houle, Kent Monkman, Adrian Stimson, Lori Blondeau, Nadia Myre, etc.

We had printed out a number of random photos from the flickr page, and after a few movement exercises Meena Murugesan had us select a photo which "spoke to us personally." We then came up with a gesture or a pose that quoted our chosen images, and worked to put these together.

In discussing what each of us would envision were we to put together a more fully realized piece many of the participants asked for an expression of multiplicity. What also came up was the complexities of re-enactment.

During the demonstrations  protestors would re-enact scences of violence and rape, and you can see some of these in the images here, of a Tamil man being attacked by a Sri Lankan Army soldier. Not done with the kind of consciousness that an artist would bring to the idea of re-enactment, but they served a purpose within the context of the protest to bring a heightened awareness of the violence and human rights injustices, along with the very graphic posters and statistics.

While we can acknowledge that the format of a protests in and of itself is reductive and can't possibly address every facet of an issue, it seems that this was sensationalising the violence in such an extreme way, without any hint of acknowledgment that the perpetrators were coming from both sides.


At the end of the workshop, Meena gave us an interesting, and really difficult list of questions with which to think about the ethics of performance. And these can be applied to this workshop series as a whole. Some of the questions include:

1. How can we ever truly represent and stage real lived experience?
2. Building performance as an artifice, yet aiming for authenticity.
3. Thinking about often disturbing ideas in technical and aesthetic terms.
4. Considering the multiple ways the public will watch, witness, interpret.
5. How do we not senesationalize?
6. How do we not "eroticize trauma?"
7. Our responsibility as story-tellers and performners in that we want to make people feel something, and then they will feel as though they understand something or are informed.
8. That a performance is also a part of a process and not the final product.
9. Self-reflexivity – who am I to be doing this work, giving this workshop?
10. How to avoid recreating colonialist practices.
11. How to avoid reenacting trauma, reenacting victimization (I was more than a victim, I am ore than a victim. Not defining someone by their trauma).
12. What is getting beyond victimization?
13. As creators, can we mutate history?
14. How do we take responsibility for the gaps, fissues in and within all our stories and blood memories?
15. How do we share authority?
16. What is the dissonance between life, history, city, climate, now.

***

[HS] When we look at the photographs and media images of the protest it immediately raises important questions about representation. I don’t believe that these issues  have been discussed in the emerging analysis of the protests. These are questions  which reflect on the representation of the Tamil community in the media, questions about Who is looking? How are they being looked at? How are they being characterised? But also a question here of how are Tamils representing themselves?

 

[KK] If we go back to the Flickr pool here, the group has more than 250 photos submitted from about 20 members. Most the submissions were from Canada, but we had a few from India and the UK.

What I noticed when I initially began the group was that many of the contributors were not actually involved with the protests, and that the images were taken in the manner of a journalist. For anyone who has a camera, and who doesn't these days, the protests offered a spectacle that was too attractive to pass up: racialized bodies of all ages in the middle of the city waving graphic banners and placards and the perpetually inflammatory Tiger flag.

The labels assigned to these images vary, with sympathizers often including descriptive tags such as "justice" or "eelam" along with the more geographic adjectives. The captions often read in a very journalistic manner -

Thousands of Tamil Canadians protest in downtown Toronto in reaction to the escalating conflict in Sri Lanka. Sunday May 10, 2009, Toronto, Canada. Tamil Canadians, the largest concentration of Tamils outside of Asia, are calling for Canada and other nations to intervene in the conflict.

The prob lem is the actual journalists didn't seem to analyze much more, and the language being used around the events was quite prob lematic, and very limited. An event at UTSC in November examined "Tamil Canada in the Media Lens" and professor Aparna Sundar brought up the sense of complacency and ignorance shown by a number of journalists, bringing up writers like Christie Blatchford of the Globe and Mail, and Mark Steyn of the National Post. A Toronto Sun piece by Lorrie Goldstein, criticised the media response to the protests as being racist, and then itself received a lot of criticism for "pulling the race card" or being "reverse racist." Steyn's response to Goldstein's piece was one titled "Tamil Questions that Can't be Asked - that's because professional ethinic grievance mongers cry racist at the drop of a turban."

One of the biggest issues was that the protestors were suddenly identified as THEM - as being separate from and outside the rest of "Canadian society." In order to justify this exclusion people began to talk about the demonstrators as people who were cutting work, or not paying taxes while receiving state benefits.Underneath the mainstream media's limited analysis of the events was the very troubling ideas that all Tamils were Tigers, and that the didn't deserve to be here, and that they were most certainly not Canadian citizens, or Canadian at all.

 

[HS] In this workshop the conversation developed along the lines of disrupting assumptions of Tamilness, and the representation in the media of the homogeneity of the Tamil community. Through strategies of performance this workshop examined the physicality of the protests and raised a notion of the multiple and complex subject positions of protestors and how protesters negotiated their individual political identity positions within the mass of the protest, defining the space of the protest as itself a space of contestation; a space where notions of Tamil identity were being negotiated.

 

[KK] The interesting thing about this prob lem of homogeneity is that it seems to come from all sides:

1. For the purposes of Canada’s so-called multicultural policies, Tamils and even South Asians at large are expected to fit into a certain category, or fulfil a certain checklist.
2. This prob ably leads to the fact that amongst the general Canadian public [read: white Canada?] there is of course that image of the exotic yet unthreatening South Asian - putting on colourful cultural variety shows and cooking fragrant and spicy food - nothing more.
3. Within the “tamil community” many people hold a rather singular idea of what being Tamil entails, and often this image aligns itself with Eelam or LTTE ideology (and how it comes to that is is a whole other topic, but not one that is unrelated).
4. Finally, within the media Tamils are represented a certain way, and certain adjectives get thrown about: Red-flag waving, welfare-sucking, unemployed, nuisance, unappreciative etc.

It's also interesting to think about how Sri Lankan Tamils identify themselves - whether it's as a Sri Lankan or not. Often a distinction is made due to Eelam ideology or the increasing unease with associating with "Sri Lankan" when that means an association with the Sri Lankan Government. These ways of identifying oneself seem to carry through the generations and  are more than simply labels.

The prob lem is that in many cases members of the Tamil Community have not really had a choice (or even options) about their political alliances, so that one either supports the Tigers, or simply don't participate. The latter, leads to an absence of all those who aren't LTTE supporters, perpetuating the stereotype that "all tamils are tigers." This somewhat extreme stance often gets passed on through the generations as a sort of parental expectation. For younger people who have grown up here this can be quite difficult, because on all sides people are asking them to choose only one.

 

[HH] The third workshop worked with spoken word and sound, and examined the language of the protesters – the chants, the drumming, the ambient sound. Sound seemed to be a powerful presence at these protests, and the opportunity to examine the nature of this sound was an opportunity to examine some thing that was powerfully evocative and even visceral.

 

This workshop was facilitated by Gitanjali Lena and Nilan Perera who worked with participants to examine the power of sound in the context of protest, the use of words and language in the chanting at the protests, the physicality of chanting and its impact on the body.

The chanting was of course an important way for the protesters to communicate their message:

• "Recognise Tamil Eelam" x 3
• "What do we want? Permanent ceasefire! When do we want it? Now!"
• "President Obama, Save the Tamils!"
• "Canada Help Us!"

But one of the questions that seemed to emerge was about the efficacy of these chants and the overarching message that was being communicated. And question about   who the protesters were speaking to /addressing.

The most emphatic and powerful chants seemed to be aimed the Sri Lankan government : "What do we want? Permanent ceasefire...". However the chants aimed at the Canadian and US goverments positioned the Tamils as victims, and gave Tamils a weaker, submissive voice. On the other hand the chants in Tamil drew on a more colloquial language and took a self-assured, even defiant tone which underscored an ethnic pride and sense of solidarity. [Class?]

• இந்த  படை போதுமா  (intha padai pothuma), இன்னும் கொஞ்சம் வேணுமா (inuum konjam venuma?)
  Is this enough, or do you want some more?
• தலை நிமிர்ந்து நில்லடா (Thalai nimirndhu nilladaa)
  Proudly say you’re Tamil, stand tall

However, as Meena Nallainathan has written,"what was being left out was a demand for human rights from the LTTE" which would be a demand for accountability from both sides of the war. As Meena suggests, and as other critics have suggested in examining the efficacy of protests in advocating for peace , "[the protesters] message did not break away from the kind of polarisation that characterises most discussions of the conflict, and was not linked to any real discussion of how to create peace in Sri Lanka." Meena's observation  recalled for me a key concern of the work of the Retort Collective in California who, examining the protests following Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, argued that “any opposition to the war needed to look both enemies in the eye”.

And it became clear, even in the context of the workshop discussions that this kind of polarisation, and the deeply felt loyalties - or if not loyalties, at least the sense of betrayal -was not something that was going to be easily bridged or healed. And perhaps even that the process of self-reflection and critique was also going to be a difficult one.

Through a series of writing exercises Gitanjali invited participants to examine their individual experience of the protests, invoking the senses of the body as a way to retrieve the memory of the experience. Examined how sound triggered certain memories, certain responses, and very powerful emotions - fear, loss, anxiety, shock, sadness, grief.

Once again, the opportunity to bring forward individual speaking positions was revealing in important ways in providing insight into the meaning and power of the protests within the community. Whilst the overarching message in the media seemed to be one of the threat of the Tamil community overtaking the city, impeding the function of the city and demanding political action; there was an important function of the protest as a space within which the community could come together to grieve.

With war’s end being brutally "declared" people had to suddenly come to terms with the loss and trauma of 30 years. How does one express a pain that has not had words for so long?