Blood-free Memory: Reconciliation and Social Transformation in Ayathurai Santhan’s Post-Civil Conflict Fiction

Abstract

Ayathurai Santhan is a Sri Lankan Tamil writer who experienced and survived multiple conflicts targeting the country’s Tamil community, including a twenty six year war that ended in 2009. His writing is anchored on conflict memory and read as re-visitations, re-imaginings, and as efforts of working-through traumatic pasts with an aim at reconciliation for Sri Lankan society. In doing so, Santhan proposes an approach to conflict memory that radically deviates from the mainstream practice among Sri Lankan writers who, as a rule, bank on overly-disturbing, graphic images of violence in representing political conflict. To the contrary, Santhan’s fiction is arranged on a new imagination focused on shared differences, unexpected solidarities, and grey zones that prevail at times of conflict: an arrangement which the discussion identifies as “blood-free memory”. In an effort that draws on alternative approaches for commemoration in a time of transition, the paper also localizes Santhan’s “blood-free memory” within the larger post-war context in Sri Lanka where Tamil memory in the former war-areas continues to be under strict surveillance of the state.