During the past two decades, non-commercial Sinhala cinema has been dominated by films dealing with the ethnic conflict. Asoka Handagama, Prasanna Vithanage, and Vimukthi Jayasundara have gained fame (and notoriety) both in Sri Lanka and abroad for their “war films.”
Sanjeewa Pushpakumara, too, made his debut film Flying Fish (2011) on the topic of the ethnic conflict but since then he has turned his attention to a largely neglected conflict in Sri Lanka’s recent history - the second JVP insurgency and the state’s counter-insurgency. Pushpakumara brings his international filmmaking credentials to bear on the topic of the insurgency in his latest feature film Burning Birds (2016).
Set against the backdrop of “the time of terror,” the film revolves around a mother of eight children whose commitment to her children is tested by ruthless institutional forces, who abduct and kill her husband and turn a blind eye to her economic struggle to raise her children. As such, Burning Birds fulfils a critical void in our national conversation about intra-ethnic violence that is gradually erased from memory and subsumed by the more politically expedient inter-ethnic conflict.
A Mother’s Story
Davena Vihagun (Burning Birds) revolves around Kusum, mother of eight children, whose husband has been abducted and killed by a government death squad. The rest of the film revolves around her struggle to survive without the breadwinner, and without any support from the state or her community. Like the widow in Flying Fish who has eight children to feed and who, as a last resort, takes a paramour who provides for her and her children, in Burning Birds, too, Kusum fights tooth and nail for her children but her quest is not for justice for her husband but for survival, given that she has to be both father and mother to her children. Unlike the widow in Flying Fish, however, Kusum spurns male suitors as she is consumed by her role as the sole provider. She accepts increasingly difficult jobs that put her at risk, first of physical injury at the quarry and later of sexual assault at the abattoir and, finally, at the brothel when she is forced to turn to sex work.
In the figure of Pushpakumara’s Kusum, we are reminded of that intrepid enterprise undertaken by thousands of mothers from the South of Sri Lanka seeking justice for their loved ones in the face of State-sponsored terror and a lack of accountability. Like the women in the Mothers’ Front, Kusum’s character taps into “the emotive discourse of motherhood”. Though it has little effect on her oppressors (men victimize her regardless of her struggle), the film appeals to viewers in the same emotive register that the Mothers’ Front functioned. The film’s emotive power is exemplified by “Kiri Madu Wel,” the mournful melody about the transcendent love of a mother. The song exhorts us to show our gratitude to our mothers who nursed us, by conferring on them a form of respect akin to worship.
Gender and sexuality are central to Pushpakumara’s cinematic vision. We see it first in his maiden feature Flying Fish, specifically in the characters of Wasana and the unnamed widow. The unconventional sexuality of both women challenge the gendered status quo and their “transgressions” come at a high price. Kusum, in Burning Birds, is quite unlike Wasana or the widow, as she represents a traditional maternal figure stripped of sexual desire; she lives only for her children and, just as in “Kiri Madu Wel” melody she gives her body to nourish them when they are infants and sacrifices her body, again, but this time to the commercial sex trade to feed her children. Though Kusum’s character is devoid of desire, sexuality enters the frame through pragmatic means, as the economics of survival supersede sensual pleasures. This, however, does not mean the exclusion of male desire, cast either as violent or exploitative, from the narrative, which dominates the film’s aesthetic.
However, Kusum’s dehumanization begins fairly innocuously and Pushpakumara’s script skillfully builds up to Kusum’s loss of bodily autonomy. Kusum’s first job, working in a quarry, is backbreaking and dangerous work, a fact evinced by the injury sustained by a woman coworker who is run-over by a tractor. Her next job, working in a slaughterhouse takes her out of the company of women and into the sphere of “men’s work.”
Although the owner forewarns Kusum that the work is gut wrenching, what he fails to reveal is that she too will be treated like an animal, like the beef they produce by slaughtering cattle. The choice of a slaughterhouse where cattle are butchered (as opposed to a poultry or fish processing factory) has a powerful resonance to a Sri Lankan audience that is approximately 82% Buddhist and Hindu, two communities that have an uneasy relationship with beef consumption.
As if to reinforce this aversion, Pushpakumara does not shy away from graphic scenes of slaughter and disembowelment with dismembered body parts of cattle strewn throughout the abattoir.
Moreover, the blood and gore of the abattoir foreshadow the sexual violence Kusum subsequently experiences. The same men who slaughter cattle for consumption actively reduce Kusum to flesh that they “consume” for their own gratification. For instance, when she rejects the sexual advances of her boss, he abducts and gang rapes her. Thereafter, the only employment available to her is to become a sex worker. This narrative trajectory is not coincidental. When she is working in the quarry (supplying granite for the neoliberal market), she sees the dehumanization of labour, which is compounded in the abattoir that blurs the distinction between women and cattle.
Though Kusum struggles against the idea of sex work, she is left with no other option, as she is adamant that her children should not abandon their education and take up employment. Up to this point, her entire life has been overturned by men - the hooded man who identifies her husband, the men in black who take him away, her rapist employer and co-workers are all men. It comes as no surprise, then, that she is recruited for sex work also by a man.
Kusum’s radical transition from nondescript village woman to sex worker is marked by a range of physical adornments, such as the red dress she wears and the cosmetics, like nail polish, she wears but also by foregrounding her personal grooming.Subsequently, the brothel is the setting for several graphic sex scenes, now derigueur amongst filmmakers of the third revolution, where Kusum’s dehumanization is complete.
Developments in the brothel are not the only way Kusum is victimized. When the police raid the brothel and arrest Kusum along with other working women, her secret is made public. This, in turn, unleashes a maelstrom of hatred towards her family. At school, her children are ostracized and at night, villagers pelt stones at their house as the eight kids huddle within in fear. Yet again, the state seems to be colluding with local forces to victimize Kusum. First they kill the breadwinner and then the law fails to protect Kusum when she is gang raped by her boss.
The state that failed to intervene when Kusum and her children were starving now steps in to punish her for selling her body to support her family. This proves further that the state reinforces the status quo - the wholly unequal power dynamics in place in the film.
This is a topsy-turvy world where the oppressed are victimized further and the oppressors (like members of the death squad) are protected and roam the streets with impunity. Justice is conspicuously absent in such scenes and when it finally intervenes, it harms those it needs to safeguard. While the latter is a crime of commission, the former is a crime of omission, but both are crimes committed by the state in the name of self-preservation, of protecting its vectors of power. These scenes also provide a commentary on how state sponsored violence has led to the breakdown of community. While Kusum’s life circumstances and economic constraints are well known to the community, they fail to go beyond the moral dimension of the sex trade.
Thus the collective amnesia of the Sinhala South is reflected in the characters in Burning Birds who all but forget the tragic circumstances of Kusum’s downfall, partly because they too have suffered similar injustices and are desensitized to loss, but also because of the fear psychosis produced by the ruthless and arbitrary violence unleashed by the state.
Justice or ‘Just Revenge’?
In Pushpakumara’s maiden film Flying Fish, a young woman named Wasana has a sexual relationship with a soldier named Parakrama, who abandons her when she becomes pregnant. The cultural expectation, expressed by the Buddhist monk residing in the community, is for Wasana to accept her fate like numerous selfless women that populate Sinhala cultural mythology. Instead of adopting a model of self-sacrifice, however, Wasana lures her lover into a compromising situation and dismembers him by cutting off his penis. This act of dismemberment represents an attack on the culture of masculinity fostered by the armed conflict, specifically by the cult of the soldier.
In the context of the film’s setting in wartime Sri Lanka, the military wields supreme power over civilians; hence the film endorses Wasana’s vigilante justice as a corrective to the power disparity between military personnel and civilians. More specifically, sexuality, as a site of vulnerability for women (in both consensual and non-consensual relations), is turned into a mode of resistance and a means of securing justice.
On the contrary, in Burning Birds, the military is conspicuously absent. Instead, the film invokes the power of paramilitaries or death squads. At the time these death squads operated with the assistance of the local community who helped identify JVP suspects. Kusum, sees her life turned upside down by the indiscriminate methods of counter-terrorism adopted by the state where a mere accusation is sufficient to seal one’s fate. At times, as in the case of the Sooriyakanda massacre, personal grudges and petty jealousies were the real motivations behind accusations of subversive activity (Akmeemana).
Not unlike in the real-life case of Sooriyakanda, in Burning Birds a hooded school principal implicates Kusum’s husband, who is abducted by men in black and executed. The absence of a motive for the principal’s treachery underscores the arbitrary nature of his actions. Kusum’s revenge, carried out at the end of the film, is not aimed at the paramilitaries, however, but the school principal.
Unlike in Flying Fish where even a soldier is susceptible to Wasana’s vigilante justice, in Burning Birds the paramilitaries are unassailable. When Kusum realizes one day that one of her clients at the brothel is her husband’s executioner, she accuses the man of destroying her family. For speaking the truth, she is brutally beaten and raped by the assassin. It seems, then, that Kusum has less power than Wasana who successfully emasculates her soldier-lover in Flying Fish.
Since Kusum is only permitted to accuse the assassin of destroying her life but not act on it, the only justice available in Burning Birds is for Kusum to murder the school principal. At the end of the film, when she loses her most valued possession, her family, Kusum realizes that she has a score to settle with the principal. Because she is a persona non grata (an indigent widow turned sex worker turned ex-convict), the state will not intervene on her behalf, so she seeks justice on her own terms. In both films, however, justice may be construed as revenge - a universally maligned response to injustice. According to common wisdom, an eye for an eye is a form of retaliation that can render the whole world blind, but does that also apply to the extra-judicial contexts depicted in Burning Birds?
In “Eye for an Eye: the Case for Revenge,” Thane Rosenbaum argues that the distinction between justice and revenge are misplaced. He claims that when we call for justice, we are actually demanding vengeance, except that justice is mediated by the state. In other words, justice is achieved through juridical means and is sustained communally. The only difference between the two is that revenge is typically an individual’s quest that brings her/him in contact with the source of injustice and it is the individual who determines the form and degree of punishment. For Rosenbaum, revenge is no more reprehensible than justice, notwithstanding its reputation. In Pushpakumara’s cinema and in the world of Sri Lankan realpolitik, justice is a promise perpetually deferred. It is true that the post-war state has merely paid lip service to justice but among the Tamil community there was at least “talk” of transitional justice. There was no such imperative from the international community regarding atrocities in the Sinhala South. And Sinhala society that suffered during the JVP crackdown has taken the pragmatic approach of forgetting the injustices (i.e. disappearances, abductions, summary executions, etc.,) purely as a means of survival.
Thus Pushpakumara’s invention of women like Kusum and Wasana were necessitated by the failures of the state to restore the moral equilibrium in the country.
On the other hand, Pushpakumara’s shift in focus from Flying Fish to Burning Birds, from the ethnic conflict to the Southern insurgency is itself an attempt to restore this balance. In its refusal to forget Sri Lanka’s grisly past hidden beneath the post-war, neoliberal present, the film itself could be seen as a form of transitional justice achieved via the now ubiquitous visual medium. The scene in which Kusum’s husband’s body is hauled into a mass grave with other murder victims, Pushpakumara provides the viewer with another unexpected shot: an extreme close-up of the dead man’s face. The shot lingers as if to engrave his bruised and bloodied face in our minds, to remind us of thousands of innocent lives that were snuffed out without rights and without justice.
Violence
The conspicuous silence regarding state-sponsored violence during the counter-insurgency nearly 30 years ago is an open wound that continues to fester and impair civil society both in the South as well as in the North. This self-imposed silence impedes our ability to examine the root causes of violence in the South and to have a national dialogue about the commonalities between the marginalized communities in the South and the North.
While the intermittent discovery of mass graves (as recently as 2012 in Matale) may serve as a device that keeps the memory of those harrowing events from complete erasure, the artist has a unique role in narrating this story that has been largely excluded from our collective consciousness. In that sense, in Sanjeewa Pushpakumara’s Burning Birds, one victim does speak for many victims; at the same time, one victim multiplies into many victims within one narrative: first Kusum’s husband, then Kusum and, finally, their eight children are all victims to varying degrees of state-sponsored violence. If there is an advantage to the institutional and communal silence in place in Sri Lanka, it is that such suppression gives rein to alternative/unofficial modes of remembering, narrating, and hopefully, to learning - that is the promise represented by Burning Birds.
Nalin Jayasena
Associate Professor
Department of English
Oxford