The Copper Tumbler & Donkeys in Mannar:A Work of Mourning

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‘it is not narrative that we should abandon but chronology’’ – Kumar Shahani

By Laleen Jayamanne

Rajani Thiranagama, sister of Nirmala and Sumathy, was shot dead by an LTTE gunman for criticising the organisation’s totalitarian ethos and violent actions. Both Nirmala and Rajani were members of the LTTE and Nirmala was jailed for her work with them, in the very early, seemingly idealist phase as an organisation for social and political justice for the Tamils. Escaping prison, she fled to Madras as a political exile, to escape arrest and now lives in Britain. Critical of the LTTE violence, she was unable to come home for Rajani’s funeral for fear of being assassinated by the LTTE which had become a terrorist force.

So, for those of us who know this thick political history, Nirmala’s presence as the mother is loaded with memory. I am told that some found Loganathan’s Malaiyaha Tamil accent jarring in his role as a son of the Northern Tamil family. Similarly, Anu also appears to break the realist link, through her confident dance, as a fresh presence unburdened by the family history. Sumathy’s approach to acting is therefore hybrid, eclectic, unconstrained by an idea of consistency of acting style.

The silent maid is part of the family but appears alienated. In the midst of her chores, she is given a moment of attention when she sips a hot cup of tea seated quietly on a step, resting. In her unsmiling, entirely silent, sullen presence, she remains quite unknown in the way some neo-realist figures remain, as in life. They are opaque, not consumed by the narrative which was an aspect Bazin especially admired in Italian neo-realist acting, because it does not tell us how to respond to it, in the way a performance in a Hollywood film might.

The ’mad’ mother is also quite opaque, though clearly delusional, she appears quite lucid at times. As an admired Teacher of English and a mother of four children, having nursed a terminally ill husband, run a large household, and sustained a friendship, she is quite fascinating. I have never seen such a mature professional woman, presented with a complex interior and social life in the Sinhala cinema, with its lamenting mothers and venerable grandmothers in Kandyan sari.

Her monologue, delivered as she is seated on the back veranda, is worth listening to carefully for all its contradictions, lucidity and craziness. She is not quite the blindingly insightful mad Lear. But King Lear is a fierce family squabble about inheritance between an egocentric king and his children, with soaring existential poetry on a stormy heath. The Single Tumbler meditates on mass political violence, evoked by a professional woman gone mad, stuck at home, broken by the weight of her history. Nor is she the stoic Maurya, at the end of J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea, after all her seven sons have died at sea. Though a mother and a grandmother, Nirmala does not present Daisy Teacher sentimentally with pathos, despite her grievous loss. Her religious faith is emphasised when we see her pray at her own little altar with holy pictures and statues of the Virgin Mary, Jesus and Saints. Though mentally delusional, Daisy Teacher, is a singular figure in Lankan cinema, made of strong mettle.

Daisy Teacher

with her short grey hair, usually wears a long chintz dress and we see her in a short white cotton nighty too. But there is a brief scene when, wearing a sari, she shuffles around the veranda calling out to Jesse and looking for Jude. Seeing her dressed in a sari for once, Lalitha exclaims going up to her saying, Amma How nicely dressed you are!’ She is draped in a luminous, soft-yellow cotton sari, with a grey and black border, with a striking dark bluish-green blouse. As she smiles in response but somewhat vacantly, we get a glimpse of her former self, a strong, handsome professional woman who dressed with flare. She even still wears a wristwatch, though she doesn’t function within chronological clock time. Nirmala’s Daisy Teacher is a superbly calibrated, illuminating performance of the mental decline and madness of a professional woman, under immense political duress.

Singing & Dancing

Song and dancing are familiar motifs in Sumathy’s films where people sing to each other, mostly when asked, but also when alone. We know that she comes from a family of trained musicians. Nirmala sings a long hymn of intersession to Mother Mary of Madhu while reading the newspaper attentively, a most engaging scene where she seems to ‘multi-task’ with ease. We are left wondering if she is as mentally disabled as we were led to believe. The sister-in-law who sings regularly in church, requires little persuasion to sing for the family and they all join in keeping time by clapping – a delightful scene. A male voice chants the Kyrie as Jude enters the church having walked by the ramparts of the old Dutch Fort (built on the Portuguese original from 1560), on his way to request that the parish priests speak to the LTTE not to expel the Muslims who are their brothers. It’s a slow walk through the long history of Mannar, which was colonised and Christianised by the Portuguese beginning in 1543 when 600 locals were baptised en masse. In another of Jude’s slow walks by the Fort and the sea we see minarets of a mosque in the distance and hear the Muslim call to prayer faintly echoing in the distance.

Then there is a long dance sequence by Daisy Teacher’s young granddaughter, Anu, who for the most part has been absorbed in her new cell phone gifted by the aunt from Canada and we see a recording of her school dance passed around. Later, out of the blue she does the same Bollywood-derived dance in the courtyard, looking at the camera, at a point in the film which marks a strong break in tone from what I think of as the elegiac sequence of the film. One doesn’t feel like asking why she is dancing and for so long, because the quality of her attention, her gaze and the strength of her gestures are in themselves sufficiently persuasive and beguiling. (To be continued)

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By Eng. Thushara Dissanayake

Water is often undervalued and insufficient attention is paid to its pollution. The water quality degradation is a blooming environmental issue in Sri Lanka. According to World Bank findings, the invisible crisis of water quality degradation is reducing potential economic growth in heavily polluted areas of the world by one-third. It further points out that the situation will further escalate with ongoing climate change. Climate change will alter the spatial and temporal availability of rainfall while intensities will become high. Sea level rises will further push saline water upstream along the rivers. Resultant droughts will cause the contamination concentrations in fresh water to go up by many folds when the water availability of rivers and reservoirs goes down. Eventually, there is an increased risk of damage not only to human health and ecosystems but also economies though not well understood. In fact, water pollution has transcended its environmental concerns and poses threats to the economies worldwide and Sri Lanka is without exception.

Freshwater availability on the earth is just 3% while the rest remains as saline water in the ocean. Almost 99% of that freshwater is locked up in glaciers and deep groundwater aquifers leaving just 1% in lakes and streams as surface water. This little quantity of available freshwater is often subject to localided anthropogenic pollution which is hard to observe in most of the cases. Agrochemicals, industrial discharges, household wastes, land degradation due to development activities, and deforestation are the main causes of anthropogenic pollution.

Water pollution has severe impacts on public health especially when the drinking water sources are affected. Pollutants like fertiliser, animal and human waste, plastics, toxic industrial chemicals, petroleum products, and solid wastes can cause silent health issues. Consumption of water contaminated with pathogens leads to many waterborne diseases some of which are fatal. When children are exposed to nitrates, mainly contained in fertilizer, their growth and brain development are retarded. Further, various contaminants can enter our bodies through the food chain causing many health-related issues. Eventually, the economy has to deal with an additional burden as healthcare spending goes up when the populace becomes unhealthy. On the other hand, water treatment costs are increased and large investments are needed for infrastructure equipped with advanced water treatment technologies to treat degraded water.

Agriculture production is also affected when the water is contaminated. In Sri Lanka, nearly 40% of agricultural lands get water from irrigation systems and hence maintaining the quality of these water sources is important. Saline water also can have significant effects on crop yields where yield is either diminished or become poor in quality though the severity of impact is crop-specific. Aquaculture is also affected by water pollution. When the water of inland fisheries is polluted fish morality is increased while reproduction is retarded causing a decline in yields. Water pollution can affect the livestock industry as well. When the animals raised on farms consume polluted water, they can get water-related affecting their health and productivity.

Deforestation, development works in hilly areas and unsustainable land use practices in agriculture cause land erosion making water rich in sediments. These sediments often deposit in storage reservoirs and other waterways. Thus, a reduction in reservoir capacities and consequent water shortages can affect agricultural production and hydropower generation.

Sri Lanka earns a considerable amount of foreign exchange from the tourism industry. Apart from the ancient heritage sites, one other aspect appealing to foreigners is the rich and diverse natural beauty of the island. Some of the attractions where tourists engage in recreational activities are beaches, waterfalls, tanks, and rivers. If these water bodies are contaminated and become unpleasant it will badly affect the industry.

Today we are in a world where everybody is connected to international commerce and news reporting. Therefore, water pollution has a risk of damaging the brand image of the country as a tourist destination. Further, investors will be reluctant to start ventures especially when those industries use water for the production processes as they have to bear the additional cost of treating water to the desired level. In the meantime, demand for exports produced in areas with poor water quality can go down impacting export revenues.

Water pollution is a moral issue as well. If there is an increasing trend in water pollution the remediation cost will be transferred to the future generation raising issues with regard to intergenerational justice. Further, if polluted water contains substances with long latency, the health issues and associated economic costs will also be transferred to future generations.

Taking action on water pollution is no longer confined to a matter concerned with the environment. It has many implications for the economy. A sound water conservation program that consists of pollution prevention, management, regulation, monitoring, and enforcement of laws is a must for a country. Education and risk communication are also important as people will intervene if they are aware of the future impacts. Prevention of water pollution, by all means, is cheaper than treating polluted water.

(The writer is a chartered Civil Engineer)

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Above is the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) USA Weather Radar live forecast for 1st August 2023. These forecasts are extremely accurate and accessible to all and sundry.

The red colour depicts the potential of clouds to produce rain. Now if these types of cloud could be seeded with Silver Iodide and Salt, without delay when observed, the intensity of rain can be enhanced in the Samanala Wewa/Udawalawe Area. The farmers in Embilipitiya are already protesting that they have no water for their fields. Every extra drop of water will count. It will be a win/win situation for both Electricity and Agriculture, if it works.

If only the three stooges in charge of Power/Energy, Agriculture and Irrigation get off their butts and seek help from India, without being confined to their own silos for the general good of all, the case might be different.

India has been seeding clouds for years. They possess the true expertise. They could base a few aircraft and equipment at Koggala, Mattala or Weerawilla. Since the prevalent winds are South Westerly, they can easily make rain to fall in copious amounts in the Samanala Wewa area by cloud seeding. By the way, the wind direction is defined from where it blows and not to where it goes!

Perhaps the SLAF personnel could be trained in these techniques as well. I am sure our Airmen will gather the basics in no time.

It is Urgent.

GUWAN SEEYA

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‘it is not narrative that we should abandon but chronology’’Kumar Shahani

By Laleen Jayamanne

Mourning the Dead: Phaneroscopy“There is a reality which we each create in our own minds.”(C.S. Peirce)

The American logician and semiotician C.S. Peirce using the Greek word phaneron, meaning ‘that which appears,’ and adding the suffix skopein, (the Greek word to see, as in Bioscope!), coined the term phaneroscopy. He wanted thereby to capture something common to how we all perceive. He didn’t want to call this subjective mode of seeing an ‘illusion’ or ‘fantasy’ posited against ‘reality’. He elaborated his idea of ‘phaneroscopy’ by saying it is a way of seeing which is not cognitive (being prior to it), a pre-logical, direct awareness, without ego. I think this is much like the way a child, presumably, sees the world before it’s captured in language. Sumathy gives Lalitha phanero-scopic powers. So, as she slowly begins to remember her own childhood in that house, absorbed in the photographs of Jude and of herself as a girl, becoming reflective, but also prodding her siblings insensitively about what actually happened during the war to both the Muslims and to Jude, she begins to perceive visually, what she hears. She herself appears within each of the following events, from which she was in fact absent, away in Canada.

Most of the framed photographs we see in the house are from Sumathy’s own childhood home in Jaffna which she shared with her parents, three sisters and also her two nieces. Even before I learnt this detail, I felt that this home had a shadow cast on it by Sumathy’s own family history which is now public. So, it is the most personal of her films, but she uses her autobiography to testify to those innumerable nameless Muslim folk, too.

The house has shadows, ‘ghosts’ who come in and out. The brother who disappeared, Jude, comes in and out of the film, just as Fatima Teacher does, both as a young woman carrying her precious possessions and then as an old woman. Intriguingly, Sumathy only credits one actor, Asiya Umma, as both the young and the old Fatima Teacher, when realistically one would expect two actors to be named. In the course of the monologue, when her mother tells Lalitha that Fatima Teacher stood right where she now stands, the latter appears. As her head is partly covered by her sari, it is unclear if Fatima Teacher is in fact played by Lalitha, who has inserted herself into that story as she hears it narrated by her crazed mother. But the credits resolve it. However, this sense of uncertainty is important because (disturbed by her mother’s accusatory account of Fatima Teacher), Lalitha creates a film-within- the-film, placing herself in the position of the victim. In appearing at that moment as Fatima Teacher, addressing her friend Daisy Teacher, Lalitha performs an act of mourning.

It’s the musical composition of sequences, with intervals, repetitions and disjunctions between them, which allows Sumathy to abandon chronological progression (without using the usual tired devices like flash-backs as memory images), to play with time in this way.

Three different accounts of Jude’s disappearance are given, two shown. There is that dreaded knock on the heavy wooden door late at night, with two men on a motorbike and car, the boys as they are called, to take Jude away. Lalitha in bed with her cell phone hears the knock and goes to the door in her nighty wrapped in a sheet, asking him to not open the door and watches him being taken away by ‘the boys.’ Earlier there is a snatch of conversation that the story is that the army took Jude away. We see him walking to the church to meet two young Catholic priests, to ask them to intercede with the LTTE, on behalf of the Muslims. Within this sequence we are taken into a large Italianate, grand Catholic church with polished pews and woodwork. But we also see Jude walking into the sea, watched by Lalitha, in the film within the film she creates with herself as a presence.

In this strange retelling, Sumathy is able to make the dead Jude testify to the stories of the many disappeared, without ceasing to be that irreplaceable son of Daisy Teacher. That quiet act of Jude’s suicide, witnessed by Lalitha, standing amongst the braying, foraging donkeys, is a ritual of burial and mourning, an epic cosmos-centric event. The old Fatima Teacher also walks through the mangrove, and earlier through the debris of bomb blasted houses (without their solid timber doors and windows), that might well have been her own dense urban neighbourhood.

In this strange elegiac scene by the sea at night, with the wind and sound of waves lapping the shore, Jude slips off his sarong and simply walks into the ocean slowly. The entire qualitative, tonal, atmospheric mood of the scene amidst nature with Fatima Teacher and Jude and the donkeys as they appear to Lalitha, has a ritualistic, musical quality with its varied rhythms. One exiting life and the other returning from the dead, unreconciled, one might say, amidst the sound of waves. After this long sequence, the film cuts to Jude’s naked corpse washed up on the beach at dawn, spotted by two fishermen who look closely and abandon it.

Lalitha asks her mother to sign over the family home to her. The younger brother asks Lalitha to send the monthly payment for their mother’s expenses directly into his bank account. Neither request is granted. The sister who actually takes care of the mother makes no demands of her more affluent sister but complains about the tedium of her life of chores. But the family gather together with affection as well as acrimony and learn of their trauma and the family history. And the terror of the war years is expressed through a truism of that era by Jesse, who has no time or inclination to linger in the past. She quotes a folk saying of the war years when Lalitha bugs her as to why she didn’t call her or write to her: “People here say those were times when one opened one’s mouth only to drink tea”. A biting sentence condenses the lack of food with terror.

Pedagogy of Film Programming: Suggestions

If a mini retrospective of Sumathy’s body of work is organised, then pairing The Single Tumbler with Ponmani (1976), by Dharmasena Pathiraja, could generate a few more ideas about how to creatively engage with linguistically and culturally diverse communities and cultures, without orientalising Northern landscapes and most especially the ‘Tamil Woman.’ Without a public release in the South and an indifferent short run in Jaffna, now Ponmani has the aura of a classic, one of a kind without a progeny.

This is not quite the case. The way the traditional Hindu Vellala home and its veranda is filmed in Ponmani, finds a different articulation in the way the Christian family inhabits the space of the open house, in the fluid spatial configurations of The Single Tumbler. In both films, changing or frozen family relationships are mapped out spatially through evocative gestures, postures and movements. The traditional Hindu home is marked by silences, while the bilingual Christian home with its different culture is voluble, rather urbane. Sumathy has clearly benefited from Pathi’s work in Jaffna though she is no clone.

It is essential not to forget that this singular film Ponmani was made possible by a visionary tri-lingual higher educational policy formulated by Tamil scholars at the Jaffna University. Pathi and several lecturers were sent to Jaffna University to teach there in the Sinhala medium. During this time, his friendship with Tamil intellectuals and artists resulted in the collaborative film, Ponmani. Until about this time Tamil students from Jaffna were able to study at the National Art School in Colombo along with Sinhala students and there were student exchanges of performances with Jaffna. That was of course possible because lectures were delivered in both English and Sinhala, but with the ‘Sinhala Only’ nationalism hegemonic, English was abandoned.

Sumathy’s documentary Amidst the Villus; Pallaikuli (2021), on the effort of the expelled Muslim populations to return to their homelands would also be important as a companion film to The Single Tumbler.

Ashfaque Mohamed’s debut film Face Cover (2022), with its fine spatial sensitivity and sense of tact, might also be screened together with these two films, to create a generative public context and discourse for these films from different generations and by directors from different ethnicities and set in different regions. He was the assistant director on The Single Tumbler. Sumathy has been a mentor to him and also played the Muslim mother in Face Cover.

Also, perhaps a few of Rukmani Devi’s and Mohideen Baig’s films might be part of it, and Sarungale by Sunil Ariyaratne, where Gamini Fonseka plays the role of a Tamil clerk, might also work well in such a non-linear, thematic mix. Sumathy’s Sons and Fathers about the multi-ethnic composition of the Lankan film industry during July ’83, would create a new political perspective on these films. Ingirunthu remembers the disenfranchisement of the tea estate workers at independence and also the deportation of a large number to India in 1964, despite having lived and worked in Ceylon for generations.

Expulsion of the Muslims

The Expulsion of the Muslims (estimated at 75,000), from the Northern Province by the LTTE is an event of epic magnitude in Lankan history. Refusing to forget the event and its aftermath, The Single Tumbler was made in collaboration with a dedicated ensemble cast and crew (with Sunil Perera’s cinematography, Elmo Halliday on editing and sound design, music direction by Kausikan Rajeshkumar), with a modest budget, but with a sophisticated understanding of ‘film as a form that thinks.’

That dented and burned single copper tumbler on fire is hard to forget, just like Sumathy’s other such images powered by fire. The fiery copper tumbler brings to mind two sentences by the French philosopher Deleuze, in a short piece written just before he committed suicide, being terminally ill. The brusque note, written in haste, is called ‘The Actual and the Virtual’.

He says: ‘Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images.’ This idea of ‘virtual images’ Deleuze owes to Henri Bergson who wrote a book titled Matter and Memory in 1895, the year the very first films were projected in Paris. And for Bergson, the concept of the ‘virtual’ is opposed to time as chronology, time as the simple linear succession of past, present and future. He says, speaking more like a poet, that the ‘virtual’, or duration, appears to us in its fullness when we are drunk with wine or dream, or in love, when all that has happened coexists in an intense, expansive present, open to a potentialized future. Film is surely the gift that plunges us into this cloud of virtuality – sometimes; as with The Single Tumbler. (Concluded)

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