When reconciliation is made of violent memories
Radhika Hettiarachchi. Pic by Chanchala Gunawardene
Radhika Hettiarachchi had a clear goal when she devised a Children’s Memory Mapping exercise. She wanted to connect kids who knew nothing of the conflict with their grandparents who had experiences of war. “This exercise helps with the transference of memory of place and time, while having a conversation about non-recurrence of violence by looking inward,” Hettiarachchi says.“The idea is to inculcate values, which is all we can personally control, towards a future of non-violence.”
It’s a theme that runs through her new project Memory Map. Currently, the archive she helped build is travelling from village to village in nine divisions. Hettiarachchi has plans to share it even more widely – through the media (social media platforms, TV and radio talk shows based on memorymap.lk) they are hoping to have a wider public discourse on how we create a value-based society. She hopes to engage individuals, like those children learning from their grandparents, and through them the wider society. “Hopefully these individual changes in attitude will lead to a collective movement towards a better future,” she says.
Below are edited excerpts from her interview with the Sunday Times.
- Tell us about the project. Who participated? What was your process?
The Community Memorialization Project is a follow up to the Herstories Project, both initiated by me. The project looks at collecting and archiving peoples’ life histories of experiences of violence from the past decades, including the civil war and the JVP insurrections. Like the Herstories Project which collected and archived 285 women’s stories, this has archived 350 stories of women, men, youth, elders and even children.
While the Herstories Project was implemented together with Viluthu, Centre for Human Resources Development, the CMP is implemented together with Search for Common Ground, Sri Lanka who is the primary implementing organization with district partners Viluthu in Mannar, Prathibha Media Network in Matara and Akkaraipaththu Woman’s Development Foundation in Ampara.
More information on methodology, the objectives and reasoning behindthe project can be found at – http://www.about.memorymap.lk.
- You have spoken of the urgency of memorialisation in Sri Lanka’s present context. Eight years after the end of the war, why is this moment so crucial?
I believe that, as Michael Rothberg posited, memory is multi-directional. How we remember, what we remember and what it will become has a lot to do with how we negotiate these histories to create collective action and realities for what we want our future to look like.
Therefore, collecting multiple histories that contrast and contradict the single narrative of history, and sharing it through a platform such as memorymap.lk to create a public discourse in the public sphere, from memories emerging from personal experiences of people who have lived it, adds to this multi-directionality.
The objective then is to learn lessons from our violent past, of what we have done to each other, and recognize that emerging conflicts in this country can only be dealt with by building a society that has certain values and principles of non-violence, de-escalation. A conversation through which, one hopes that what happened before will not happen again, because we don’t forget what violences ‘feels’ like in reality.
There is always a need to move beyond the abstract usage of the word ‘violence’, and truly feel what the cost of violence is on families and lives for decades after an act of violence. In this sense, while there is an argument to be made for moving on, it shouldn’t be at the cost of preventing it in the future by keeping in mind what we have lost of ourselves, our dignity and our rights.
- Memorialisation can be a complicated and fraught process. How do you ensure that the community themselves have a say in the process?
In the process of collection, it is with each individual that we engage. There are protocols to how life histories are collected and these involve, full disclosure of what will happen to these collected histories, the ability to be anonymous or not, the ability to withdraw from the process at any time, even after the stories are published.
These are all stories that are volunteered, never coerced. The mere fact, that so many still want their stories recorded for posterity and included in the National Archive (much like the Herstories Project), highlights the need at a personal level for memorialization to happen.
Sri Lanka is not new to memorialization at a community level. We have been building bus shelters for the dead in the South for years. But in the North, the case is different. Memorialisation is denied to them at so many levels, including the loss of a place to grieve (see the destruction of Kopay cemetery for example).
In this context, memorialization is almost a duty for us as citizens. This kind of citizens’ initiative for archiving memory, is therefore about letting people tell their story and making that available as a memorial. Surprisingly, communities themselves are very active in the process. When the exhibition of stories goes from village to village, they take time to read every single story and reflect on it with empathy.
- Tell me about the challenges of memorialisation in the context of the thousands who are missing. How do you see the disappeared being represented in memorialisation efforts?
This is actually where traditional memorialization fails. How do you memorialize the missing? They are not dead. So in most places, there will not be a grave, or a plaque, or even a practice of something like a memorial service. It is a gap in memorialization.
But through their life-histories and stories, especially online, sometimes those that are grieving can find a repository of stories, to place the name or memory of their missing child. It helps that the cathartic experience of telling the story, having it recorded somewhere – not just the name of the person and where they went missing – but the full consequences and emotions of the person grieving the ‘empty space’ of the missing person in their lives. And the public can engage with these stories much more, to actually think about the fact that we should not be passive about disappearances as a society but should fight for justice.