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Abstract

Uses and Traces of Memory: A sketch

This brief paper assumes that when we speak of ‘memory’ in the aftermath of war, we are

usually gesturing beyond the existence of memory to its potential uses: looking past

personal memory to collective memory, historical memory, acknowledgment of the past,

safeguards for the future. As the word ‘reconciliation’ simplifies the momentous task of

structural realignment and reparation, the term ‘memory’ too may be charged with making

invisible the politics, resources, geography, ownership and compromise implied in the work

of memorialisation, masking them with a euphemism of human scale. The account that

follows aims only to highlight multiple and often contradictory uses of memory as well as

the formal expression of these concurrent imperatives.

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And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses’1

— closing line of Homer’s Illiad

Uses and Traces of Memory: A sketch2

This brief paper assumes that when we speak of ‘memory’ in the aftermath of war, we are

usually gesturing beyond the existence of memory to its potential uses: looking beyond

personal memory to collective memory, historical memory, acknowledgment of the past,

safeguards for the future. As the word ‘reconciliation’ simplifies the momentous task of

structural realignment and reparation, the term ‘memory’ too may be charged with making

invisible the politics, resources, geography, ownership and compromise implied in the work

of memorialisation, masking them with a euphemism of human scale.

The exploration which follows is sketchy not scholarly. It does not attempt the difficult task

of drawing measured conclusions in this field, but hopes only to provoke discussion around

multiple and often contradictory uses of memory. Some material cited here comes from

writings on public art and public space rather than memorialisation and I include it to

introduce a level of abstraction that is more difficult to invoke within the emotive discourse

of memorialisation.

I start by asking ‘why are we remembering?’ and address several possible answers in turn,

despite their interconnectedness. I separate and name uses of memory — by no means all

of them — to give us a preliminary checklist; acknowledging that the checklist format is

naturally reductive. I mention examples from Sri Lanka and other parts of the world, in a

wilful manner, using them for meanings that may be abstracted from them. It is necessary

1 Homer, The Illiad trans Robert Fagles, (New York: Penguin, 1990), 614. 2 Written by Sunila Galappatti, as a rudimentary discussion paper for the GIZ Memory Culture Project. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of GIZ as an organisation.

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that in a deeper study we would remind ourselves of the divergent histories behind their

production — an all-important contextualising that I don’t do here.

*

When we talk of memory in the context of conflict (when else do we talk of memory in this

way?) is it fair to say we are usually speaking of difficult memory or memory under threat?

The conditions of conflict naturally affect the nature and ease of remembering but also

usually what we talk about remembering. These assumptions bear probing — how, for

example, do we remember a life beyond marking the loss of it? But let us start with the

obvious:

To mourn/ To remember

At the simplest level, shall we say we remember what is past? What has changed; what is

lost.

In Sri Lanka, the forms of memory often first discussed relate to rituals following the death

of a loved one. This might be said to constitute almost the basic unit of remembering. It is

also the form of remembrance for which cultural and religious defaults exist (surrounding

the last rites for a body and subsequent observances). When rituals around death are

invoked, the question being asked, often rhetorically, is whether we are able to perform

them freely?

Where we are not, it is often because a restriction has been placed on whom we are

permitted to remember (excluding for example the stated enemies of whoever holds power

at a given moment). Or because the death occurred in circumstances where it was

impossible to recover the body. Or because we do not in fact know what happened to the

body of the person after they disappeared.

These obstacles to basic remembrance are themselves widespread enough in Sri Lanka to

invoke the monolith ‘memory’.

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To document/ To archive

Memory may be read as an inventory – the record of who and what we have lost, how and

when we lost them. The document shows scale as well as consequence (or a lack thereof).

This count is also under siege – affected by the conditions, the censorship and the politics of

war. The inventory is contested. Yet it exists in multiple forms – be they the reports of the

University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna (UTHR (J) or the records of the Batticaloa

Peace Committee or the submissions made before successive state commissions, to say

nothing of police reports filed.

The document has significances for the present and future: a (more/ less) powerful tool for

seeking justice and redress, it is also the record for history and generations to come. At the

same time the document – in all these forms and for these reasons – is itself under threat

of deliberate or accidental destruction. Issues of impermanence and entropy enter the

arena, even due to natural causes such as time and weather.

To mark a (grave) site

Against the tides of erasure and inevitable change comes the urge to fix reminders in the

landscape of what has taken place there. In the recent report of the Consultation Task

Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms (or CTF) a call was registered for sites of memory to be

marked. In another conversation, a woman living in Batticaloa town reported an ambivalent

feeling: she said that since the town had been developed and whitewashed, when she

walked past sites of former violence, she no longer got that feeling.

Making a mark in the physical landscape demonstrates the scars of history and refutes their

denial. A recent proposal for a memorial marking the massacre at a youth camp on

Norway’s Utoya island took this conception to its literal extreme: the artist Jonas Dahlberg

proposing to cut a gash into the island itself as a permanent mark of this wound. (As may

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perhaps be expected, the proposal caused controversy and has been suspended, awaiting

legal hearings). As in this Norwegian example, the literal and ideological ownership of

public land is one soil (of many) in which controversy takes root.

We will come shortly to the acknowledgment represented by marking sites of violence, and

later to the ‘Never Again’ subset of that acknowledgment, but let us note first the

implications of marking public sites; the access, permission and politics implied. And then

the ways in which the public — another monolith — is easily co-opted and spoken for

because it is proliferated and diverse. This may especially be true in situations where its

freedoms to organise are curtailed. ‘Is public a qualifying description of place, ownership or

access? Is it a subject or a characteristic of a particular audience?’ asks Suzanne Lacy.3

Where a monument represents a hegemonic view, it is naturally easier to build in public; and

more difficult to resist. The opposition to military memorials in Sri Lanka, for example, appear

largely to be limited to the private complaints of those who have to live with them. The 9/11

memorial in New York City is a useful example for its sheer monumentality, wealth and

totalitarian control of its space (though by no means built without a good share of political

controversy). The site of the destroyed Towers has been inverted – a deep pools dug into

the ground on the footprint of each tower. These pools are necessarily enormous – and the

monument impressively deemed a worthy use of phenomenally expensive and coveted land

on the island of Manhatttan (to say nothing of its water use). When I visited the site in 2012,

one had to go through airport style security to enter the Plaza. Asked why, a member of staff

explained that it was important to restrict numbers while the site was still under construction.

Why bags had to be search and metal detectors used for this control of numbers, he did not

say. It was also mentioned that there was only one group they ‘let’ give tours of the site. How

public a space had it turned out to be?

In his book, Memorial Museums: the Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities, Paul Williams

asks in what direction we go if we give over ever more space (mental and literal) to

commemoration. He writes: ‘At worst, the growing obsession with identity and memory will

3 Lacy, Suzanne, ‘Site Specificity’ in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art ed. Suzanne Lacy, (Bay Press, 1995) p.20

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mean that global calamities may come under ownership claims by ethno-cultural groups –

effectively privatising history and tipping it towards a zero-sum game competition’4.

Proposed memorial on Utøya island, artist Jonas Dahlberg ref: Image taken from 'de zeen' 21 September 2016

To acknowledge/ To shame

Where the impulse is to mark a site of violence, there is in the act an implicit

acknowledgment of what has taken place. To demand such a site may also include a form of

public shaming. It is still rare in Sri Lanka to find monuments on public land that that

implicate the state – existing monuments to the disappeared, for example, such as the

monument at Seeduwa, are located on private land (in this case, belonging to the church).

But the distinction between the culpability of the state and other actors is not yet

necessarily the point, one might argue memory itself is suspicious, invoking the anxiety –

what are we planning to do with it?

For a brief period in the early 2000s, a handful of former bomb sites in central Colombo,

were marked by artist and activist murals with symbols of flowers and doves and the slogan

4 Williams, Paul Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities, (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 189.

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(in all three languages): ‘Protect the Sanctity of Life’. That these were sites in affluent

spaces, that they were permitted for the marking of LTTE perpetrated crimes is necessarily

integral to their histories of production. I am not presently aware of how many of these

sites came to be erased or overwritten or simply left to fade, but can testify the sites on

Flower Road and in front of the Town Hall disappeared before that on Kynsey Road marking

the spot where the parliamentarian and activist Neelan Tiruchelvam was assassinated. Each

year on or around Dr Tiruchelvam’s death anniversary, a small group of those who had

known him or were connected to his work or what had followed from it, would gather to re-

paint and renew the mural; this act a ritual of remembrance. The road painting was done at

night when the road was quiet; this fact perhaps making it seem subversive too, although

the police were customarily notified in advance. In 2012, a few hours after the re-painting

was complete, a truck was seen dumping tar on the road painting, and checking again on

this obliteration on successive nights afterwards.

One may try to ask rational questions about the obliteration of the road painting – which did

not run specifically against the dominant politics of the time, remembering an act of

violence perpetrated by the separatist movement and not by the state. Yet that is too

simplistic a line of enquiry, viewed in the context of its being carried out by vilified activists

and its being a civilian assertion in increasingly militarised public space.

One might argue that the act of tending this memorial was also, in itself, too clear a display

of purpose and intention. The meaning of the memorial lay in its ritual maintenance. No

threat was posed by or to the physical monument to Dr Tiruchelvam located on the same

site – that monument, once built, was left alone by all concerned.

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Site of the obliterated road painting, image by RK Radhakrishnan and taken from The Hindu, August 6, 2012,

In background of image the monument to Dr Tiruchelvam which also stands on the same site.

To offer reparations/ apologise

The submissions on memorialisation to the CTF are interestingly reported under the heading

of Symbolic Reparations in the final report of the Task Force. Indeed state-sanctioned

memorials, in particular, often play a role of augmenting or — more problematic —

replacing reparations by the state for crimes against its people. To translate from Tamil the

comments of one woman about symbolic gestures: ‘a coconut child and a child are not the

same.’

Needless to say, the politics of memorial building become especially fraught when linked to

the political apparatus. James Young describes it thus: ‘In Sisyphian replay memory is

strenuously rolled nearly to the top of consciousness only to clatter back down in arguments

and political bickering whence it starts its climb all over again’5.

With the introduction of political purpose in memorialisation the arena of memorial

construction necessarily replicates the arena of conflict as it is constituted in the present

5 James E Young, The Texture of Memory, (Yale University Press: London and New Haven, 1993), page reference lost.

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moment. Arguably, the post-war moment we currently inhabit in Sri Lanka is not

substantively different in state and societal structure to the wartime context. Therefore,

the risk remains particularly high that in the creation of collective memorials people will re-

experience forms of marginalisation and structural violence (whose voices are heard, whose

memories are yet inadmissible, who is powerful in a community, whose money can be used

for which purposes).

To mark progress/ make amends

Much has been made historically of German Chancellor Willy Brandt falling to his knees

before a memorial to Jewish victims of the Warsaw Ghetto on a state visit to Poland in 1970.

This symbolic — and, he said, spontaneous — gesture took place 25 years after the

declared end of World War II. Looking up the date, I find it on an intriguing list of Top Ten

National Apologies compiled by Time Magazine. Willy Brandt’s gesture, UK Prime Minister

Gordon Brown’s posthumous apology to the code-breaker Alan Turing and a statement

made by F.W. de Clerk to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are relatively

fast-turn-around 20th century examples. Others, such as apologies for slavery in America,

for settlers’ treatment of the Australian aboriginal peoples, or the Vatican’s persecution of

Galileo, exceeded a century in coming. James Young writes ‘only rarely does a nation call on

itself to remember the victims of crimes it has perpetuated’6.

If the role that time plays in historical transformation and reflection is indisputable, it seems

also to follow that memorialisation matures with time. The German example remains an

interesting one, where even high profile memorials to the victims of Holocaust, such as the

Jewish Museum in Berlin or the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, have been

opened more than 50 years after the end of the war and symbolically in the German capital.

It would be simplistic to read this history as a single strand: other events in German history,

such as the fissure of the nation itself, may have played a part timing the emergence of

these concerns at the forefront of national consciousness. In fact, the higher profile/

national examples may be less interesting in themselves than many smaller initiatives, but

6 Young, The Texture of Memory, 270.

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they are notable as markers of reparation. The project of making amends would appear to

be a long one. Do we ask that memorialisation itself play a role in resolving conflict?

To protect an identity group/ To perpetuate a national project

What we acknowledge, admit, memorialise — whom we take care to protect — are

projected as markers of national maturity to constituencies that demand them; one might

argue in exactly the same way that triumphalism is a form of national glory projected to a

different audience.

In Sri Lanka today, the projection of the reflective state is largely reserved for meetings in

Geneva, certainly at the level of national government. Nonetheless, the national project is

not solely the preserve of the state. The triumphal war monuments and the memorials to

fallen soldiers (not the same thing) found in Sri Lanka today appear not to be a part of a

coordinated, state-led, project of memorialisation. Often they are built and maintained by

different Forces of the military – it would be interesting to investigate how widely the form

and content of these memorials are discussed and agreed. Many are sited within military

encampments and are therefore not accessible by civilians, except with special permission.

Similarly, it may be argued that discourse of memorilisation (in which we are presently

engaged) is framed and propagated within a liberal silo: a last-ditch attempt to take control

of the narrative at least, after losing the battle to determine the outcomes of our conflict.

Be they on smaller or larger scales, national projects are rarely characterised by their

inclusiveness. One imagines it will be some time before in Sri Lanka LTTE cadres and

government soldiers are remembered on the same site. Yet these are already mainstream

groups, perhaps with better chances than numerically smaller groups of specified ‘traitors’

(as deemed so by whichever party).

At the same time, national monuments are often necessarily non-specific. One remembers

Jagath Weerasinghe’s comments on the destruction of his Shrine of the Innocents; a

monument to the Disappeared. When the shrine was destroyed in a project of urban

landscaping in 2011, Weerasinghe reflected on its history, noting the possibility that the

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monument opened itself to vulnerability in the moment that it was moved (at the

President’s request) from its original site of construction in Embilipitiya to a location near

the Parliament. With this move, it became a more generic national monument to

disappearance rather than a specific monument to the schoolchildren disappeared in

Embilipitiya, and located near their families. Arguably, it lost the meaning that the families’

visits and maintenance would have accorded to it. In a conversation in Embilipitiya, we

reallised that some families were not aware of what had become of the proposed

monument – either its being built in the capital or its later destruction.

To preserve/ To wish for a permanent record/ To ensure non-recurrence/ To project to

posterity/ To create historical dialogue/ To foreclose historical dialogue

The story above reminds us of the sheer uncertainty of the permanent record. Even where

destruction does not come within decades, but centuries, one might ask how long is

permanent? In Sri Lanka, one hears that one thing or another is important (be it

memorialising or forgetting) in order to move ‘forward’. Similarly, one might ask, where is

forward?

Robert Musil writes ‘There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument’. He calls the

monuments (in the particular case of stone soldiers on horseback) a ‘backdrop of

consciousness’. One might argue that to create a backdrop of consciousness is in fact a

mighty aspiration, especially for a society in the aftermath of conflict. In a riposte to Robert

Musil, Nancy Princethal writes: ‘But I think a good argument can be made that the ultimate

value of public art, including memorials, lies in anachronism’7. The Japanese artist Tatzu

Nishi, simultaneously activates and debunks traditional monuments by building temporary

domestic living spaces around them.

*

7 Nancy Princethal, “In Praise of Anachronism: On Public Art and Its Critics”, ArtUS Nov/Dec 2003; page reference lost.

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Within the urge to preserve is, naturally, an anxiety about forgetting. In more explicit form,

there may be a wish to pass our histories on to generations to come – whether the impulse

is to expose history to their scrutiny or (as I feel too often is the case) to control their

understanding of it. The Szorborpark in the suburbs outside Budapest houses a symbolic

arrangement of massive monuments from the Soviet period, moved there from their former

prominent positions in the city, and leading to a blank wall. An inscription in the (English)

brochure reads: ‘it is a dead end; you can go no further’.

Szorborpark, Budapest, Hungary, image by Tom O’Connor, 2001, taken from

https://oconnortom.com/sculpture/hungary/

On the outskirts of Beliatta, home town of the Sri Lanka’s former ruling Rajapaksa family, one

finds a new monumental site marked on the landscape. Two abstract structures in chrome

and glass are built on a plinth, to honour the parents of former President Rajapaksa and his

powerful siblings. Looking beyond the central monument, one sees that it is set within a faux-

ancient network of walls, with a moat and a mock-stone background. It would appear that

the monument, while partly framed as contemporary, is being situated within a discourse of

antiquity. Beneath the monument is a sparse museum, containing family artefacts,

photographs and letters. As much as the narrative infuses the monument the monument is

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also constructed to attach to the family narrative a sense of permanence and stature reaching

both into the past and future.

Rajapakse monument in Beliatta, image author’s own.

An emphasis is often placed on non-recurrence and ‘Never Again’ campaigns that replay

the violence of an episode supposedly to prevent its recurrence. There are some inherent

paradoxes in the construction of history repeating (does it ever repeat in exactly the same

form; if it does, might that suggest that a conflict simply prevailed, hence the seeming

repetition) but let us not explore those here. In the context of memorialisation, one worries

that the replaying of violence keeps people experiencing it who lived it and attempts to re-

kindle it for those who did not. An American Jewish friend reported leaving the premises of

Yad Vashem (Israel’s national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust) because what she

had seen there (despite her already knowing this history) so shook her that she needed to

throw up. In the temporary ‘Tribute Center’ on the site of the former World Trade Center in

New York I saw some photographs of a workshop with schoolchildren that was described as

‘Helping middle schoolers connect with 9-11’. One wonders in the context of an event

presented in emotive rather than historical terms, what it is exactly the schoolchildren are

intended to connect to.

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In his book, Paul Williams poses this dilemma: ‘what exactly can we learn from the worst of

human experiences?’8. He highlights too a question asked about ‘the fate of meaningful

locations’ quoting an article that suggested either the obliteration of the Abu Ghraib prison

site or its conversion into a museum9. Discussing the memorial museum site in general he

claims that such spaces are ‘advantageous to visitors not only in the way they conveniently

condense historical narratives within a single authentic site, but also in the way they impart

moral rectitude to those who visit’10.

In a discussion of the map at the District Six Museum in Cape Town — on which visitors place

their homes, sometimes realising that others have also claimed the same space — Crain

Soudien writes that responsibility replaces empathy in the exercise.

It is when this is able to be achieved, I suggest, that public pedagogy through the

Museum comes into its own. When the Museum project is able to help the viewer

recognise him or herself in a story, or in relation to a story, forms of learning are

yielded that force the viewer to come to the recognition that it is not sufficient to take

refuge in a community but, critically, to assess the position of that community in

relation to a whole range of social choices and his or her own responsibilities in

relation to the community and its choices. The learning is both personal and social11.

As someone else framed the question: ‘How does it make you feel, in terms of your next

action?’

To forget

Is it possible we also memorialise to forget? As James Young notes, ‘once we assign

monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation

8 Williams, Memorial Museums, 154. 9 Williams, Memorial Museums, 191. 10Williams, Memorial Museums, 191. 11Crain Soudien, ‘Memory and Critical Education: Approaches in the District Six Museum’ in City.Site.Museum: Reviewing Practices at the District Six Museum ed. Bonita Bennett, Chrischene Julius and Crain Soudien, (Cape Town: District Six Museum, 2008), 118-119

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to remember’12. We may memorialise to draw a line under our histories, to finish our

engagement with them, and in a sense to silence ongoing lived memory by displacing it into

concrete monumental form.

In a volume of essays produced by the District Six Museum in South Africa, a decade after

it’s opening, researchers and museum workers probe the practice of the museum, with an

intention ‘to help steer it to a point where it is aware of its own historicisation’13. The

writers indicate ‘the dangers of monumentalising [the site] into a dead space’14 and

acknowledge that one reason for conducting memory work is ‘to close a chapter in history

and avoid the deep exploration that can assist nations to come to terms with their past’15.

The writer of the last goes on to say ‘What is evident is that history and memory work is not

neutral and not always a benign practice…Memorialisation projects should not be allowed

to freeze history and close down the important discussions about how the past continues to

live with us.’16

*

12 Young, The Texture of Memory page reference lost. 13 Bennett et al City. Site. Museum: Reviewing Practices at the District Six Museum, 28 14 Bennett, Bonita and Chrischene Julius ‘Where is District Six? Between Landscape, Site and Museum’ in City.Site.Museum: Reviewing Practices at the District Six Museum ed. Bonita Bennett et al (Cape Town: District Six Museum) 2008, 56. 15 Sawyer, Mandy ‘Education work in the District Six Museum: layering in new voices and interpretations’ in City.Site.Museum: Reviewing Practices at the District Six Museum ed. Bonita Bennett et al (Cape Town: District Six Museum) 2008; 96 16 Sawyer, 102.

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Forms of Memorial: Temple and field

Given the multiple – and contradictory – uses of memory I would argue for a greater

consciousness of the forms in which we create memorials in Sri Lanka, so that we may be

more aware of the potential and limitation of each. At the most basic level I posit here a

spectrum marked at one end by the temple (sacred physical spaces, such as the museum,

the physical monument, the temple itself) and at the other end by the field

(ephemeral/passing forms of memorial that sow seeds in our consciousness; mutable in

their manifestation).

The triumphant gilded soldier at Mullivaikkal is a temple, inviting offerings at the altar of

violence and jubilation. The hands holding up Sri Lanka at Elephant Pass is a temple,

exalting nationhood. The sculptures on roundabouts of mothers holding up babies are

temples of survival against the tsunami. The Shrine of the Innocents was a temple, until it

was destroyed. The World Trade Center memorial is a temple. Take even the S-21 Tuol

Sleng prison site in Cambodia, marking a former torture centre — could that be described,

albeit uncomfortably, as a temple? A temple need not be a place of celebration but perhaps

inviting some form of reverence, even awe and horror. Museums may be temples (of

cultural artefacts/ national history etc) but arguably open to be used as fields.

The former road paintings around Colombo: are they temples or a field? In their each

marking a particular site, inviting our reflection on what had taken place there, they may

have been temples. Yet in their proliferation (albeit limited), in their forming a collective

gesture of transforming sites of violence, in their lying low in the landscape, even in their

fading, they would seem closer to the field in orientation.

Take another, more proliferated example – the stolpersteine or stumbling stones that

number up to 56,000 across 22 European countries (According to Wikipedia, at 31 January

2017). These brass-plated ‘stumbling stones’, the size of cobblestones, are fitted into roads

at the former addresses of victims of the Holocaust (mostly Jewish victims but also

individuals persecuted for other reasons). The project began in Germany with a single stone

laid in 1992, specifically to commemorate 50 years since the order (known now as the

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Auschwitz decree) that propelled mass deportation to concentration camps. The idea for

proliferation, to commemorate all victims — and crucially to bring them symbolically back to

the places from which they were deported — is said to have developed over time. This

organic growth of the memorial along with the cobblestone scale of each marker, seems to

identify it as an example of the seeded field. Interestingly, however, the installation of

stolpersteine are still linked to the original artist Gunter Demnig (while on the project

website it states that anyone can sponsor a stone for 120 euros).

Compare the proliferated stolpersteine memorial to the listing of names on monuments. The

listing of soldier’s names on war monuments is a practice now proliferated beyond this

military context to include civilian victims. Tsunami memorials in Sri Lanka often carry names

of those who perished at a site; the Kattankudy mosque lists the names and ages of those

men and boys who were massacred there in 1990. The listing of names appears increasingly

to represent the default action in memorialisation. In visits to practitioners in the field in

different parts of Sri Lanka both the positives and the negatives of this default were

highlighted – at one level it allowed people to feel a sense of connection to the monument

concerned, at another we were told it caused pain for those whose loved-ones’ names had

not been included. One woman spoke of the burden of knowing that her husband’s name

was on three monuments, perhaps obliging her to visit them all. Another woman told us that

mothers of the disappeared searched for their children’s faces on the Seeduwa monument,

even if they were lost long after the monument was built, and in a different region of the

country.

The Monument to the Disappeared at Seeduwa, image taken from AFAD secretariat blog October, 2011

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Does the gathering of names on a single site make that site a temple? Or a field, with at least

as many personal meanings as names listed on it? Is a commemorative park a temple or a

field? A day of mourning? Or is it simpler than this: is the memorial the temple, while its use,

its transformation and the transformations of time itself are the field? The distinction

between temples and fields may not be a clear one. Perhaps each is an implicit quality we

might search for in memorials – useful markers of sacred versus mutable space, or

permanence versus ephemerality.

In Sri Lanka and elsewhere, a keen interest can be found in the gathering of testimonies and

oral histories recounting experiences of conflict and war. This gathering has happened as a

result of public commissions but also through a number of more and less publicised projects

to gather histories or create advocacy or art. Like the listing of names, the gathering of so

called ‘stories’ has become a default action in the field of memorialisation, but perhaps

without probing the consequences of this action. When we record testimony do we reduce

the field of lived experience, fixing it into the singularity of the temple?

A testimony given today would not necessarily be the same as the testimony given by the

same person of the same events, ten years from now. Similarly, if we gather these

testimonies by category (‘mothers of the disappeared’, for example) do we sometimes risk

making a temple of one aspect of a person’s experience, simplifying the field of their life?

Do we also isolate the individual testimony from communities of testimony that might

surround it (for example by neighbours, doctors, local officers who have borne witness to

the events described)? Do we remove the account from specificity (a problem once

described as ‘could be Batticaloa, could be Mannar’). Do we think sufficiently about the

difference between the moment in which the testimony is recorded and its future in the

archive? Once again, how much awareness do we show of the way form will affect the

meaning of a process we undertake? Or indeed how process solidifies into form? Do we – as

oral historian, listener, ultimate audience - borrow worthiness from the weight of the

experience we are recording, evading a more probing study of our own actions and their

consequences?

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We have heard that each year in the city of Prijedor in Bosnia a memorial is built in the town

square to commemorate 102 children who went missing from the town during the Bosnian

war. Dismantled at midnight on the same day it is constructed, this temporary monument

has grown from an action of one man to become a collective enterprise. It replaces a wished-

for (but as yet not-granted) permanent memorial to the loss it memorialises. A field where a

temple was wanted, might it nonetheless exceed the potential of the temple in its power as

a repeated, ritual action, capable of transformation?

Put another way, does the physical memorial need to disappear for us to retain a memory of

it — and prevent its displacement from the arena of lived memory? Arguably, the most classic

example of the field is found in religious rituals —and specifically the rituals surrounding

death — for attaching transformative meaning to a passing observance.

*

Sunila Galappatti has worked with other people to find form for their stories — as

a dramaturg, theatre director and editor. She started her working life in the theatre, at the

Royal Shakespeare Company in London and Live Theatre, Newcastle, working with

professional playwrights and productions as well as developing and directing documentary

pieces.

Moving back to Sri Lanka, Sunila became the Director of the Galle Literary for two years

(2009 & 2010). She has worked with Raking Leaves on its Open Edit project and as a non-

fiction editor at Commonwealth Writers. A Visiting Lecturer at the Open University of Sri

Lanka, she has also taught at Newcastle University and been a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at

Brown University, this last reflecting on processes carried out in different parts of the world

to curate public histories. Sunila Galappatti recently published A Long Watch, retelling the

memoir of a prisoner of war.