Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism: A Speculative Ethnography of War 3030826643, 9783030826642

Citation preview

Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism A Speculative Ethnography of War

Yamuna Sangarasivam

Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism

Yamuna Sangarasivam

Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism A Speculative Ethnography of War

Yamuna Sangarasivam Nazareth College Rochester, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-82664-2 ISBN 978-3-030-82665-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82665-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Maria Jose Balta This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated with love to my parents Indiramathy Sangarasivam & Dr. S. Sangarasivam

Acknowledgments

This book comes into being with the love, determination, guidance, and support of my mother, Indiramathy Sangarasivam, and my father, Dr. S. Sangarasivam. They will always inspire me to remain grounded in the truth of our collective experiences and endeavors to follow an ethical path in the work of politically engaged scholarship that supports social justice. Leaving behind your parents, the fellowship of friends and extended family, and your privileged life at home to migrate to foreign lands, Amm¯a and Daddy, you sacrificed much of your lives in order for your kids to have the greatest opportunity to realize our dreams of higher education and meaningful work to create a life of integrity. I trust that you will hold this book in your hands, in the divine realms from which you both continue to shine your love and light to guide me in all my thoughts and endeavors. Thank you for your insights, analyses, and guidance through each step of this project. Thank you for holding my feet to the fire when I wandered off the ethical path divinely designed for me in this life. Thank you for nurturing and supporting the gifts of music, dance, critical thinking, and scholarship that allows me to remain grounded. I began this project as a study of Tamil nationalism in 1993 when I was a graduate student at Syracuse University. Amm¯a, you accompanied me in the numerous ethnographic journeys to Sri Lanka, Canada, and the U.K. Amm¯a, you were my principal advisor and teacher throughout my studies. You helped me with hours of Tamil translations and analyses of political posters, songs, radio and television programs, newspapers and texts.

vii

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Daddy, thank you for your generous, forgiving, supportive presence, and steadfast encouragement to do my best. You taught us to stand firmly in our transnational identities. You and Amm¯a gave us the tools to resist the forces of assimilation. Thank you. I learned about the history of the Tamil community’s struggles for national recognition and inclusion in Sri Lanka from the lived experiences of my parents and maternal grandparents, R¯amalingam and Kanahamm¯a Kandi¯ah. They taught me and my siblings the importance of knowing and understanding the daily practice of sustaining our sense of Tamil cultural integrity. They instilled in us the foundational lessons of Tamil language, heritage, and history, which remain a wellspring of inspiration to sustain a sense of cultural integrity amidst the demands of living transnational lives. Thank you to my sister, Santosh Sangarasivam, and my brother Div¯aker Sangarasivam, for their loving support and encouragement over the years. I am so thankful to my parents and grandparents for their teachings and the path they created for us to endeavor in realizing our potential. Their courage, determination, and love guide me. Always. My deepest gratitude to my spouse, Peter Hykel Abdella. His steadfast love and support held me through the darkest moments of bringing this book into existence. When my confidence falters, when doubt arises to consume me, he patiently and constantly brings me back to my true self and reminds me to stay on my path, shed the nonsense, and do the work. He does the tedious work of reading each version of each chapter, encouraging me to check my ego, and remain grounded in the analysis and perspectives that I intend to bring forth through my work. I am thankful for his unwavering support and confidence in me. Always. There are Tamil community members who have been essential in facilitating my research and studies over the years. They were instrumental in providing access to interviews with people in the Tamil communities of Sri Lanka, Canada, the UK, and in the USA. This is a multi-sited ethnographic project that was made possible by the generous support of these Tamil community members. For the purpose of maintaining their safety, I am unable to share their names here. I am especially thankful to the LTTE cadres who were willing to meet with me and allow me to learn from their lived experiences. My sincere gratitude for their teachings and confidence in me to represent their perspectives and analyses. My heartfelt gratitude to Kristin Prevallet who blew my mind and opened the door to the world of poetry and invited me to step in fearlessly to learn from avant-garde poets like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Layli

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ix

Long Soldier, and M. NourbeSe Philip. Kristin is a gifted writer. She is a guru of grammar and poetics who has guided me through critical stages of this project. She is instrumental in showing me the way through poetry to create the methodology of speculative ethnography that I present in this book. She is a manuscript Doula who holds me through the painful, tedious, and exciting work of bringing a book project to completion and to life. With her careful guidance, I was able to break down the blocks and barriers in order to proceed with the work of writing and revising each draft of the manuscript. I am thankful for her generosity, her teachings, and her sustained support. Thank you to Jacob Stump for his support of my work. His understanding of and willingness to witness the need for interdisciplinary perspectives to advance the fields of international studies, critical terrorism studies, and critical security studies allowed for this project to move forward when some publishers questioned the validity of my work. Along with Jacob, Priya Dixit affirmed my work and invited me to contribute to their edited volume on methods in critical terrorism studies. These are the scholars that allow us to break the barriers of colonizing structures. They create the space to include and encourage innovative approaches to research and direct our scholarship to encounter amazing possibilities. Thank you to Peter Castro who has encouraged me to publish my work from the time that I was a graduate student. He has consistently valued my work and has invited me to present earlier versions of chapters from this project in his graduate seminars at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs. I am thankful for his sustained faith in me. Thank you to Elizabeth Chin for introducing me and many others into the realm of speculative ethnology through her innovative and groundbreaking, interdisciplinary scholarship and performance practice. She created and curated the radical space for experimental research and scholarly work at Wakanda University within the 2018 and 2019 American Anthropological Association Conference. This book project truly came to life after having the opportunity to participate and learn from Elizabeth with her invitation to join her in a transformative practice of experimental ethnography. Thank you to my soul sisters, Barbara Clemons, Wellesley Henderson, Mayra Monserrate Sylvestri, and Susan Smelt, who consistently walk me off the ledge and affirm all that is good and beautiful within me during the times when I didn’t think I could make it

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

through the painful and debilitating moments of disasters and despair. Their wonderful sense of humor and insightful discussions remain a source of strength and love for all who are blessed with their presence. Wellesley, thank you for drawing out the athlete in me to transform the doubt and insecurities into courage and perseverance from, as you say, “the inside out.” You inspire me. Mayra, thank you for reminding me to write unapologetically. Barbara, thank you for reminding me of Amm¯a’s playfulness and Daddy’s quiet conviction. Always. Thank you to Maria Jose Balta for working with me to create and design the cover for this book. She is a talented graphic designer. It is a pleasure to collaborate with her. Thank you to the reviewers who read through the manuscript and provided detailed feedback that allowed me to clarify my analyses and become a stronger, more grounded writer. Their comments were extremely helpful. My sincere thanks and appreciation to Mireille Yanow and Mary AlSayed. They were the acquisition editors at Palgrave Macmillan who recognized this work and its potential to make meaningful contributions toward the advancement of literary anthropology, critical terrorism studies, and experimental ethnographies. I am deeply grateful for their sustained faith in my work and their unwavering advocacy throughout the publishing process. Thank you to Liam Inscoe-Jones, Elizabeth Graber, Brian Halm, and Karthika Purushothaman at Palgrave Macmillan for their support in guiding me through the production process and bringing this book to life.

Contents

1

1

Prologue

2

A Speculative Ethnography of War

15

3

Another Brick in the Wall: The Cultural Value of Terrorism

69

4

Goodbye Blue Sky: The Ethical Demands of Suicide Bombing

115

5

Comfortably Numb: Abjection & Anarchy

175

6

Run Like Hell: Mullivaikkal

211

7

A Great Day for Freedom: Life Under Occupation

261

Bibliography

297

Index

327

xi

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Day of Commemoration for the Bravest of the Brave, 1992. Poster commemorating Black Tigers, produced by the cultural and political wing of the LTTE In Praise of Heroes! Poster commemorating seven Black Tigers, produced by the cultural and political wing of the LTTE The First Woman Black Tiger of the Sea. Poster commemorating Captain Aungkaiatkanni, produced by the cultural and political wing of the LTTE

123

135

146

xiii

CHAPTER 1

Prologue

Taking its cue from art and literature as much as from the sciences, anthropology might understand itself less as the study of an objectified humanity than as the open-ended, performative exploration of alternative possibilities of collective existence—of new ways of being human and other than human. … [A]nthropology’s most radical potential consists—and has always consisted—of its capacity to undermine conventional distinctions between documentary and fiction. By collapsing the representational distance on which such distinctions depend, reality—and not just human beings’ culturally circumscribed representations of it—is rendered open to questioning and, potentially, refashioning. Anthropology, in other words, is a fabulatory art that plays not only at the interstices between human worlds… but also at the thresholds of emergence or dissolution of the human, where the travails of human world making unravel into the becoming of a universe that has, finally, no need of humans to observe, interpret, or affirm it. —Stewart McLean, Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human 1

I came into the field of anthropology through the fabulatory experiences of migration, displacement, transnational border-crossings, and racial trauma. Born in Sri Lanka in the midst of ongoing, postcolonial violence, I began crossing borders as an infant, traversing continents with my parents who were in search of a place to ensure their children’s future to achieve the highest education and arrive on the shores of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. Sangarasivam, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82665-9_1

1

2

Y. SANGARASIVAM

professional success. To ensure a future free of the state-sponsored persecution spurred by the violence of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism that they had witnessed and lived through in their homeland, they stepped into the unknown realities of migration. Amm¯a and Daddy were in search of alternative possibilities of collective existence, as transnationals grounded in Tamil language, heritage and culture while becoming skillful in adapting to radical change—political, economic, environmental, cultural, and social change from one country to the next. My grandparents left Sri Lanka to live and work in Singapore and Malaysia as administrative officers within the British colonial regime. Amm¯a was born in Kuala Lumpur and Daddy was born in Singapore. They lived through the Japanese occupation of Malaysia and Singapore during the Second World War. They returned to Sri Lanka in 1949 only to find that the seeds of division, discrimination, and war planted by the British would persist into decades of civil war in their homeland. They migrated from Sri Lanka to North Borneo and then to the United States. In search of safety, freedom, peace, and prosperity for their children, they arrived in a place where the ongoing emergence of racism and white nationalism spun them around to come face-to-face with the reality that the state-sponsored violence they were fleeing from was chasing them and their children even here. In the land of freedom and democracy life was also contingent upon the dissolution of the human. Here, white supremacy defined the landscape that dehumanizes and brutalizes non-white, black, and brown people. Our family’s migration from one country to another trained us to become transnationals. Our parents taught us to be politically engaged and rooted in our Tamil language and heritage while acclimatizing to the people we learned to live beside in each new place we found ourselves arriving. Always in a continuous state of arriving. Letting go of belonging. Letting go of belonging to a single nation, a single country, a single place. They taught us to attune ourselves with an awareness of alternative possibilities, of new ways of being human and other than human. Embracing multiple spiritual traditions and philosophies while always being rooted in our received traditions of Tamil-Hindu ways of knowing and being in the world. Embracing the radical potential of risking everything they had worked for, facing failure, and persevering through struggle to start all over again, they continue to teach us now even after they have journeyed beyond this world to a universe that has, finally, no need of humans to observe, interpret, or affirm it.

1

PROLOGUE

3

My parents taught me to keep arriving without attachment to belonging. They taught me to embrace the radical potential found in crossing borders, however dangerous and dehumanizing, to take a risk at opening myself to alternative possibilities of collective existence within each community and within each place I arrive to inhabit and learn from the travails of human world making. Embracing diverse practices of classical and popular culture, my siblings and I grew up listening to Nat King Cole, practicing the music of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Debussy on the piano, listening to M.S. Subbulakshmi, singing along with The Beatles, dancing to the groove of the Jackson Five and the funkadelics of Prince, going to see The Chorus Line, and going to see Harry Belafonte live in concert. They taught us the fabulatory art of living politically engaged, transnational, transcultural lives. They inspired me to study piano, Carnatic voice, Bharatanatyam, and Odissi dance. They inspired me to keep striving, to keep moving with the spirit of radical potential, to keep becoming an interdisciplinary scholar. With a liberal arts foundation, I completed my undergraduate training in musicology with piano as my principal instrument and arrived in the field of dance ethnology to study the intersection of gender and sexuality in the Indian classical tradition of Odissi dance. It was the fall semester of 1990, when I arrived as a first-year graduate student at UCLA. It was when President George H.W. Bush declared war with Iraq on the heels of President Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. A year later, I joined a group of graduate students to audition for a Michael Jackson music video project. I got the part to dance a duet with a twentieth century pop icon. A once in a lifetime experience. In the fall of 1991, I arrived at the production set in a Hollywood studio to rehearse a duet with Michael Jackson for his music video, Black or White. Among his iconic video productions, Black or White was released on the heels of the Los Angeles Police beatings of Rodney King, an unarmed black man who was stopped for speeding on a highway. Michael Jackson’s video portrayed images of racist violence as a backdrop against a message of celebrating multicultural traditions and racial harmony. I was the “Indian” classical dancer, dancing the duet with Michael Jackson in the middle of a highway in Los Angeles. The music video portrayed Michael seamlessly crossing cultural borders, dancing across continents, dancing with Africans, Asians, Native Americans, me (representing all of South Asia!), and Russian Cossacks, singing of equality, celebrating the beauty of multiple races and faces melting

4

Y. SANGARASIVAM

from one into another and another. This fabulation of America’s melting pot, celebrating the marvel of multicultural harmony, unravels into another fabulation of Michael morphing from being human to becoming nonhuman. Transforming into a black panther gliding through dark alleyways to morph back into a black man embodying the sexual fantasies, rage, and pain of a white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal society that brutalizes black and brown bodies. His music video foreshadowed the events that would unfold after the acquittal of the police officers who were captured on video beating Rodney King. The L.A. riots, otherwise known as the L.A. rebellions, broke out in the spring of 1992 as I was completing my M.A. thesis. My mother was with me at the time. President Bush deployed the National Guard to secure the streets of L.A. Amm¯a and I would have to pass military checkpoints as we walked to the grocery store. This reminded her of her experiences of surviving the war back home in Sri Lanka. She was there in 1987 when India arrived to intervene in Sri Lanka’s war with the Tamil nationalist movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The Indian Peacekeeping Forces (IPKF) soon became an occupying force and joined the war against the LTTE. Amm¯a was there and witnessed the brutalities of the IPKF occupation. India withdrew its IPKF contingents from Sri Lanka in March 1990.2 When she returned to the United States after surviving the IPKF occupation in Sri Lanka, Amm¯a shared stories about building a bunker in our backyard behind our ancestral home, about living in a refugee camp, about going through military checkpoints in order to go to the local market to collect groceries, about living through IPKF soldiers killing her cousin who was having tea on his front porch, about the everyday realities of living through war and military occupation of a place you know as home. She brought back political posters and cassette tapes with political songs. Like the nationalist movements that preceded them, the LTTE created political posters, songs, street theater performances, and films to educate and mobilize Tamil community members about their struggle for national self-determination and the creation of a separate state of Tamil Eelam where we would be liberated from the tyranny of successive colonizing regimes of the Sri Lankan government. Throughout my studies as a student of musicology and dance ethnology, I listened intently, captivated by Amm¯a’s telling of what she had experienced and witnessed. I paid attention to how she made the connections between the presence of the National Guard in L.A. and her memories of war in Sri Lanka. I knew that I no longer had the

1

PROLOGUE

5

privilege of pursuing my interests in musicology and dance ethnology without making a connection with what was going on back home in Sri Lanka. I needed to understand and learn about the LTTE and the Tamil nationalist struggle that they were waging. I needed to know how people like me, graduate students, were taking a sabbatical from their graduate studies in medicine, engineering, law, music, and other fields of study to join an armed struggle against the government of Sri Lanka and India, letting go of any certainty that they would survive to resume their studies. This is how I arrived in the field of cultural and political anthropology. With my training in the anthropology of music and the anthropology of dance, I realized that anthropology is a vast interdisciplinary space that advanced critical race studies, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, and cultural studies. I was excited to arrive in a doctoral program where I had the opportunity to study with faculty whose research focused on ethnographies of resistance and cultural studies in South Asia. As a first-year student, I learned about the early history of anthropology as a discipline, a social science based on a set of methodologies and theories to observe and understand human cultural variation, evolution, progress, and diversity. I learned about the rules and representational frameworks of ethnographic research set by white, European and North American colonizers whose analyses were buttressed by the privilege of invading territories, to set up camps without permission among communities and families with the purpose of observing and documenting the lives and cultural practices of non-white others they perceived as exotic and racially inferior. ● And then, I arrived at failure. I failed the first set of comprehensive exams. But what did I actually fail? I didn’t just fail a test. I failed to understand unspoken rules. I deconstructed the questions. My failure was to choose not to align with their rules. I was to simply respond to. Their questions. I was not supposed to. Deconstruct and analyze. Their questions. I was not supposed to. Reveal. Their unspoken rules. Their rules were based on research conducted on the grounds of colonial invasion, occupation, theft of land, theft of life, and livelihoods on the grounds of slavery, indentured servitude, torture, genocide, all cloaked by the mendacity of the hierarchy of races and nation-states. Their unspoken rules were based on the unspoken reality that European and North American scholars are supported by grants from corporations, private endowments, and governmental agencies, and held passports that

6

Y. SANGARASIVAM

allow them to traverse the world while scholars of color from non-white nation-states have little to no chance of traveling to the heart of empires in order to study the life-ways of “the natives” there. The hierarchy of races and nation-states they created—and we are taught to believe—as civilized democracies are now coming undone by the world waking up to the pandemic of racism and the brutalities of policing. Soldiers at war with enemies who resemble themselves in order to answer their comprehensive questions requiring us to accept the colonizing grounds upon which their racist knowledge is constructed about the American West and the benevolence of anthropological treatises that enabled us to know the native and authorized you to explore the Other while unspoken is their rule that we are not allowed to deconstruct and make visible the racist colonial violence embedded in the structure and content of their curriculum revealed in their questions? Just answer the questions. Don’t question the questions. ● Question: Did they not speculate when they constructed the hierarchy of races? Question: Do you still have faith in the idea of race—the ideology that white, European forefathers created out of their own dismay of encountering themselves as they brutalized us, them, theirs, ours?

● At first, I was ashamed. Embarrassed. I was the only student in my cohort who did not pass the test. This was another border crossing to navigate. Amm¯a and Daddy were there urging me to persevere. And I did. In the end, I was the only student of my cohort to complete the Ph.D. program. Decades later, I reflect back to realize that I was following the path that my parents had cleared for me: to embrace the radical potential of risking everything, facing failure, and persevering through struggle to start all over again. I questioned their questions by aligning myself with postcolonial scholars like Talal Asad (Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter), Edward Said (Orientalism), Albert Memmi (The Colonizer and The Colonized), Ashis Nandy (The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism), Arturo Escobar (“Anthropology and The Development

1

PROLOGUE

7

Encounter: The Making and Marketing of Development Anthropology”), and Johannes Fabian (Time and Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object ). I was required to revise and resubmit the exam three times. And so, I started all over again. At the first and second revision, I willfully refused to submit to their rules. I retained my focus on analyzing the racism and colonizing content embedded in their questions. On the third revision, I resolved to succeed. I decided. Just complete the exercise. Redact the initial analysis. Submit to their rules. And then. They declared. “You’ve passed the comprehensives,” they said, “but we missed your fire!” Apparently, they needed me. To submit. To their rules. And they wanted my fire? ● As the years passed, I continually found myself deconstructing their questions. I am a professor of Anthropology unapologetically disturbing anthropological conventions. Treading carefully in order to succeed. Treading across their guidelines. Crossing their lines of conventional distinctions between documentary and fiction. Even as white feminist anthropologists like Nancy Scheper Hughes called out “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology” and the importance of reflexivity and politically engaged scholarship, even as the lauded white patriarchs of the anthropological avant-garde like James Clifford and George E. Marcus announced that postmodern turn in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography and revealed the Predicaments of Culture, even as black feminist anthropologists like Faye V. Harrison cleared a path for Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation and Irma McClaurin called forth a Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics, even as bell hooks teaches us the importance of Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, even as Zora Neale Hurston showed us decolonizing anthropology’s most radical potential to undermine conventional distinctions between documentary and fiction through her struggles to publish Their Eyes Were Watching God and Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” 3 even as …. In 1931, Zora Neale Hurston was required to revise and resubmit in order to get her anthropological work published. In her introduction to Hurston’s Barracoon, Deborah Plant documents the history of Hurston’s attempts to publish her manuscript. Along with others, Viking

8

Y. SANGARASIVAM

press demanded that she revise her manuscript by eliminating the African dialect she transcribed to record the life history of Kossula, a man who survived to tell the story of capture, torture, and rendition into the institution of slavery. Viking press demanded Hurston to erase Kossula’s dialect and rewrite his words in the conventions of what they understood as the proper form for publication, the language of white vernacular English. Zora refused to revise. She refused to submit. She refused the demands of erasure. More than a half a century later, Zora’s original manuscript of Barracoon was posthumously published in 2018. ● Now, almost thirty years after learning about the unspoken rules of their comprehensive exam, I am preparing this manuscript for publication. In these pivotal years of 2020–21, locked-down by the pandemics of racism and COVID19, locked-down by the freefall of neoliberal wars of excess, consumption, and imperial expansion, in the midst of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in the midst of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and in the midst of witnessing the reality of pro-Trump, white supremacist mobs armed with Confederate flags, weapons, and zip ties to capture members of Congress, storming the Capitol in an attempt to occupy the Senate and House Chambers, and to disrupt and derail democracy, I am haunted by the wars in Sri Lanka. Civil war has arrived here in the United States, in the nation’s capital. I am haunted by the trials I was put through as a young scholar of color. Their rules. My refusal to submit, to conform. Still resonating. Even now, I fear. I am arriving at another border crossing. Getting ready to cross the lines of anthropological conventions. Again. They may be. Dissuaded and dismayed. By my methodologies. Of knowing. And thus unable. To comprehend or recommend. And yet, I am compelled. To keep wanting. To know. To remain true to my story. Engaged. Connected. Questioning. How do we continue, arriving at the thresholds of emergence and dissolution of the human, wherethe travails of human world making through patriotic pride and the disappointment of unfulfilled desires for national belonging unravel into the becoming of a universe that has, finally, no need of humans to observe, interpret, or affirm it ?4 ●

1

PROLOGUE

9

This book contains stories of failure, revision, submission, and resubmission. Stories of redaction. Stories that were erased from the published record. Stories that, in order to tell them, necessitated demonstrating our capacity to meet the standard of acceptance defined by gatekeepers of historically and predominantly white institutions. Demonstrating our capacity to persist. Resist belonging. These are stories that required redaction. These are stories that required erasure in order to appear, to belong. Layli Long Soldier, M. NourbeSe Philips, and Christina Sharpe are poets and writers utilizing the practice of erasure and redaction as a form to reveal content that is hidden in a text.5 They allow us to hear the violence of erasure resonating through the white space of those pages upon which colonial stories are imprinted to forge and authenticate the study of an objectified humanity, the colonial stories of white supremacy and the hierarchy of races, nations, and nation-states. They allow us to engage redaction and erasure as a poetic form through which being open to dialogue, to confront, to collaborate, to challenge, and to create alternative possibilities of collective existence is made possible.6 Redaction is a process of blacking out, deleting, sensitive or personal or actionable information in a document in order to maintain security. To maintain order. To order security. We know that this is information that must be obscured, erased, remain hidden, expunged from the record in order to maintain document security. Ensuring confidentiality. Ensuring marketability. Ensuring order. Erasure ensures. ●

10

Y. SANGARASIVAM

I questioned their questions by aligning myself with postcolonial scholars like Talal Asad (Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter), Edward Said (Orientalism), Albert Memmi (The Colonizer And The Colonized), Ashis Nandy (The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism), Arturo Escobar (“Anthropology and The Development Encounter: The Making and Marketing of Development Anthropology”), Johannes Fabian (Time and Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object). I was required to revise and resubmit the exam three times. And so I started all over again. At the first and second revision, I willfully refused to submit to their rules. I retained my focus on analyzing the racism and colonizing content embedded in their questions. On the third revision, I resolved to succeed. I decided. Just complete the exercise. Redact the initial analysis. Submit to their rules. And then. They declared. “You’ve passed the comprehensives,” they said, “but we missed your fire!”

● How do we erode the forces of erasure? How do we reveal that which was redacted from the record of what happened in the past, what is happening now, what will happen in the future? Elizabeth Chin’s “Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology” allows us to undermine conventional distinctions between documentary and fiction.7 She erodes the erasures of anthropological conventions by creating alternative possibilities of practicing ethnography. Chin experiments with performance as a form of data gathering in the process of exploring race as a geographical space of inquiry. In other words, she experiments with performance as a form of revealing the redactions. She steps into a form of knowledge production that literally moves beyond the monograph and into performance, where doing ethnography is a public performance of speculation itself—exploring, collecting, revealing race as a social fiction created by a variety of social facts, like white privilege and white fragility, and the many ways they articulate and reinscribe white supremacy. Hers is a kind of “fabulation”—what Stewart McLean describes as the making of fictions as always implicated and coalescing with nonfictions that are capable of intervention to the point of reshaping reality.8 Actually, hers is a fabulation upon fabulations.

1

PROLOGUE

11

This project on developing a speculative ethnography of war through a study of the intersectionalities of patriotism, terrorism, and nationalism is an open-ended performative exploration of alternative possibilities of collective existence. I step into experimental moments of choreography and performance to examine white supremacy as a cultural value that sticks at the interstices between human worlds and fashions terrorism, racism, sexism, nationalism, and neoliberal rationality, while undermining democracy. With Chin and Long Soldier as guides, I want to explore ethnography’s radical potential by collapsing the representational distance between documentary and performance in order to discover realities that are rendered open to questioning, and, potentially, refashioning alternative possibilities at the thresholds of emergence or the dissolution of the human. I break with conventional structures and rules of writing ethnography that claim to document the “native point of view.” In my own experimental process—in my own fabulations—I draw on Octavia Butler’s literary form of speculative fiction along with the poetic forms of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Layli Long Soldier, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Claudia Rankine to bend time, inhabit histories, witness present moments, and journey with people in unlikely juxtapositions of lived realities that appear as disparate but are in fact ecologically connected with one another.9 As poets and performance artists traversing fabulations of multiple worlds, Butler, Cha, Long Soldier, Philip, and Rankine show us a way of standing witness to our role in the making of the Anthropocene—this geological epoch through which we are living and co-creating where human beings are creating multiple wars and multiple solidarities in the process of impacting the mass extinction of human and nonhuman beings, while devastating the ecosystems that sustain the planet. This, I believe, is the work of anthropology in the midst of the Anthropocene.

12

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Notes 1. Stewart McLean, Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), x, xi. 2. For analyses of the IPKF and India’s intervention in Sri Lanka see: N. Shanmugaratnam, “Seven Days in Jaffna: Life Under Indian Occupation,” Race and Class 31, no. 2 (1989): 1–5; Rohan Gunaratna, Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka: The Role of India’s Intelligence Agencies (Colombo: South Asian Network on Conflict Research, 1993); P.A. Ghosh, Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka and Role of Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) (New Deli: A.P. H. Publishing Corporation, 1999); Yamuna Sangarasivam, “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Cultural Production of Nationalism and Violence: Representing the Integrity of Nation and the Choice for Armed Struggle” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2000); Adele Balasingham, The Will to Freedom: An Inside View of Tamil Resistance (Mitcham: Fairmax Publishing, 2001); J. N. Dixit, Assignment Colombo (Delhi: Konark Publishers, 2002); Harkirat Singh, Intervention in Sri Lanka: The I.P.K.F. Experience Retold (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2007). 3. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 3 (June 1995): 409–440; James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 1–26; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1–18, 117–151; Faye V. Harrison, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward An Anthropology of Liberation (Arlington, VA: Association of Black anthropologists, American Anthropological Association, 1997); Irma McClaurin, Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001); bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education As The Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Amistad/Harper Collins, [1937] 2006) and Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (New York: Amistad/Harper Collins, 2018). 4. McLean, Fictionalizing Anthropology, xi. 5. Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS: Poems (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017), 92; M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 113–130.

1

PROLOGUE

13

6. “Erasure: Glossary of poetic terms,” Poets.Org, accessed September 7, 2020, https://poets.org/text/erasure-poetic-form; “The Weight of What’s Left [Out]: Six Contemporary Erasurists on Their Craft,” Kenyon Review, accessed September 7, 2020, https://kenyonreview.org/2012/ 11/erasure-collaborative-interview/. 7. Elizabeth Chin, “Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology: Suits of Inquiry,” e-misférica 12, no. 1 and 2 (2015), Hemispheric Institute, ed. Gina Athena Ulysse, accessed September 12, 2020, https://hemisphericinstitute.org/ en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj/12-1-dossier/e-121-dossier-chinlaboratory-of-speculative-ethnology.html. I am thankful to Elizabeth Chin who created an alternative space that she called “Wakanda University” within the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) 2018 and 2019 Annual Meetings. This project on the speculative ethnography of war was inspired by the extraordinary experiences of participating in those sessions at Wakanda and learning about her work in developing radical methods of ethnographic research and representation through her laboratory of speculative ethnology. I also acknowledge Barbara Myerhoff, a foremother of feminist anthropology, who had also employed a speculative ethnographic methodology though she did not name it as such. In 1978, Myerhoff published her award-winning ethnography, Number Our Days, where she documented the lived realities and testimonies of Jewish elders who had survived the holocaust in Europe during World War II and who had then migrated to the United States to create a new life for themselves and their children. She developed an especially close and trusting relationship with one particular elder, Shmuel, who became her mentor, teacher, confidant, and beloved friend who she could count on for intense political debates and analyses. Shmuel was a sounding board for her and he challenged her to think critically about nationalism and Jewish traditions that were being transformed and changed over time. After his death, Myerhoff still relied on him to guide her thinking and writing. In one significant moment toward the end of her ethnography, Myerhoff seamlessly invites her readers to join her in an imaginary conversation with Shmuel in the afterlife, through which she reconciles with her own mortality. In this moment, Myerhoff cleared the path for anthropology to be a fabulatory art that plays at the interstices between human worlds. She certainly paved the way for future anthropologists to create alternative possibilities for ethnographic methodologies of research, representation, and analysis. 8. Stewart McLean, Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), x; also see Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).

14

Y. SANGARASIVAM

9. Octavia Butler, Kindred (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979); Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS: Poems (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017); M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008); Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014).

CHAPTER 2

A Speculative Ethnography of War

I A Willful Method Willfulness is the word used to describe the perverse potential of will and to contain that perversity in a figure. Our tendency to associate willfulness with human flaws and sin would become a symptom not only of the desire to punish the perverts but to restrict perversion to the conduct of the few. If willfulness provides a container for perversion, my aim is to spill this container. — Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects.1

● Speculative ethnography is a willful methodology. We are entering a willful archive: a speculative space where “research involves being open to being transformed by what we encounter.”2 You are encountering soldiers, insurgents, civilians—willful subjects in this place called terrorism. You are listening with them, listening to their testimonies of doing the dirty work of war, inhabiting their actions as an extension of your patriotism, listening with their fears as an extension of your need for national belonging, inhabiting their sacrifice as an extension of your citizenship, listening to your forgetting as an extension of the wars they are fighting within when they come back home. You are witnessing the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. Sangarasivam, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82665-9_2

15

16

Y. SANGARASIVAM

ordinary realities of war, “a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life.”3 You are keeping company with the ordinary affects of nationalism and patriotism that make killing and being killed an ordinary practice and a way of life.4 Here, in this place called terrorism, the will to kill and the will to be killed are simultaneously recognized as perversions and as “ordinary affects” of societies that have settled into accepting the brutalities and violence of war as normal. Kathleen Stewart describes these ordinary affects as, the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They are things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.5

Are you being caught up in that something that feels like nationalism and patriotic pride—that impulse to name an entire group of people as terrorists, that sensation of white supremacy that attaches to your habits of relating to a racialized other, that encounter with black and brown bodies that attaches to your expectation of white privilege, that desire for that exclusive prize of citizenship and national belonging that allows you to reject people you categorize as migrants and refugees to give form and content to your fear of terrorists hiding among them? You are now accompanied by soldiers, insurgents, and civilians who are bending time and space to step into this place called terrorism where “a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities.”6 Are they noncoherent? How will you? Cohere? With them? With their willfulness? Will you cohere their willfulness to kill and be killed with a sin? With a perversion? With a desire to punish? The perverts and their perversion? You are entering a willful method. ● Speculative ethnography. Is. Willful methodology. No to neutrality no to objectivity no to participant-observation no to essentializing terrorists no to the “clash of civilizations” no to studying the inner workings of a terrorist mind no to pathologizing the strategies,

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

17

tactics, and politics of non-state actants in war no to thank-you-for-yourservice no to colonial logics seeking to rediscover self and other no to the binary predilections of soldier/insurgent, settler/savage, citizen/migrant, nationalism/terrorism.7 ● What might we discover by journeying to that place called terrorism— a place of colonial and imperial encounters where a nation’s cultural values are regenerated, mobilized, and sustained in service of a fabulation sufficiently vivid and intense to reshape reality and carry forward a globalizing belief in what the founding fathers established as a truth at once unspeakable but real, inexorable but transcendent, unconscionable but triumphant? Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, reads the sign at the entrance to the US military base and concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Freedom, the preeminent cultural value sustaining the “national mythologies of white nation-states,” is in service of white supremacy as that unspeakable fabulation that inheres in the fabric of democracy. In her analysis of Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia, Sherene Razack breaks down the popular perception of Canada as a neutral, peacekeeping, anti-racist nation-state in comparison to its neighbor, the United States of America. She analyzes how Canadian peacekeeping soldiers performed violence on the bodies of Somali people and how this violence disappeared into the national mythology of white nation-stateslike Canada: White settler societies, such as Canada, come into being through a genocide of Aboriginal peoples and the theft of land, followed by the enslavement and exploitation of racialized peoples. Ex-colonial nations of Europe have similar histories, in that their own progress as nations has relied on the wealth of their colonies and the labor of people of color, both in the colonies and in the metropolises. These histories notwithstanding, the official mythologies of white nation-states are narratives of innocence: through dint of hard work, the settler conquered the wilderness; the colonizer civilized the natives. In this era of globalization, the story line has shifted only slightly: in the neocolonial narrative, whites must now contend with the disorder and chaos wrought by natives left to their own devices after decolonization. The chaos spills over from the lands of the South when migrants and refugees “invade” and “color” the spaces of the white North.8

18

Y. SANGARASIVAM

The normalization of this mythology of white nation-states is accepted and sustained by thes enduring commitment to the fantastic notion of and belief in the hierarchy of races. This belief rests upon the fundamental acceptance of white supremacy as a rational and transcendent truth, which underwrites Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political and philosophical treatise on The Social Contract of nation-states.9 Written and published during a period of European colonial expansion and encounters with non-European, non-white peoples, Rousseau drew upon the European Enlightenment values of freedom, cultural progress, and unilinear cultural evolution that established race as a scientific object of inquiry and thus the hierarchy of races as a theory of social, political, and economic order. He also drew upon the travelogues of Europeans who journaled their encounters and fascination with non-white people during their colonial expeditions—“récits de voyage [travel stories], vast collections of them … compiled, taking the readers among Orientals, Hottentots, Indians and Patagonians.”10 For example, in writing his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau acknowledged his “indebtedness to travellers like Coréal, Kolbe and La Condamine” to develop his theories on racial hierarchy and white supremacy through which he would “compare, without prejudice, the state of civilized man with that of savage man.”11 Rousseau’s Enlightenment-thinking contemporaries observed, classified, and experimented with ideas about a primordial human condition that eventually led to building what they believed to be the rational arguments to justify the supremacy of white Europeans by identifying and cataloguing non-white peoples as savages and primitive remnants of the evolutionary past. The European conceptualization of race as a product of scientific method and reason established the hierarchy of races and white supremacy as an inalienable truth and a preeminent foundation of knowledge production. Henceforth, the cultural values of freedom and democracy coexisted with European values of white supremacy based on their belief in the hierarchy of races to become the foundation of their model of governance and their model for formulating policies that justified the invasion of sovereign territories, the extraction of natural resources, and the enslavement and genocide of indigenous peoples.12 Among the most influential Enlightenment thinkers advancing the racist paradigms of white supremacy and the hierarchy of races was Immanuel Kant. Introducing anthropology as a field of study to German universities, he delivered lectures on “pure philosophy” and “knowledge of the world”

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

19

for more than forty years between 1756 and 1797. In his chapter, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,” Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze analyzes Kant’s philosophical writings on white supremacy and the hierarchy of races that Kant developed through his study of anthropology as a science of racial classifications to establish his doctrine of “human nature.” Kant was deeply informed by his reading of Rousseau’s “idea of a fixed essence of ‘human nature,’ which provided the needed shore for grounding metaphysical and moral knowledge” to not only confirm his own beliefs in the ideology of white supremacy and the hierarchy of races, but to also serve as a powerful epistemological and ontological foundation for Europe’s Enlightenment philosophers, scientists, and scholars.13 Eze systematically traces the connections between Kant’s development of race, racism, and white supremacy as integral and intersecting ideologies: In the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, especially section 4 (‘Of National Characteristics’), which essentially belongs to geography and anthropology, Kant, following Hippocratic lines, outlines a geographical and psychological (moral) classification of humans. From the geographic standpoint, just as other biological phenomena such as animals are divided into domestic and wild, land, air, and water species, and so forth, different human races are also conceived of as manifesting biologically original and distinct classes, geographically distributed. Taking skin color as evidence of a ‘racial’ class, Kant classified humans into: white (Europeans), yellow (Asians), black (Africans) and red (American Indians). “Moral” geography (which might as well be called “cultural” geography) studies the customs and the mores held collectively by each of these races, classes, or groups.14

To illustrate his table of moral classifications, Kant provided a description of Native Americans and Africans: The race of the American [Native American] cannot be educated. It has no motivating force, for it lacks affect and passion. They are not in love, thus they are also not afraid. They hardly speak, do not caress each other, care about nothing and are lazy. … The race of the Negroes, one could say, is completely the opposite of the Americans; they are full of affect and passion, very lively, talkative and vain. They can be educated but only as servants (slaves), that is they allow themselves to be trained. They have

20

Y. SANGARASIVAM

many motivating forces, are also sensitive, are afraid of blows and do much out of a sense of honor.15

Kant went on to describe how to “train” African servants and slaves into an abject state of subjugation and subservience: ... use a split bamboo cane instead of a whip, so that the ‘negro’ will suffer a great deal of pains (because of the ‘negro’s’ thick skin, he would not be racked with sufficient agonies through a whip) but without dying. … a cane but it has to be a split one, so that the cane will cause wounds large enough that prevent suppuration underneath the ‘negro’s’ thick skin.16

Similar claims were made by Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality where he observed that because they were closer to the uncivilized wilderness of nature “Negroes and Indians are so little frightened by the wild beasts they may meet in the forest” and that “… all these primitive races can go naked without experiencing pain, can sharpen their appetite with pimento, and can drink European liquors like water.”17 Advancing what was deemed as objective, scientific research methods of observation and classification, white scholars in Europe and North America correlated “technological inferiority” and “moral degeneracy” with the “supposed climatic inferiority of the New World … account[ing] for the inferiority of its indigenous peoples as well as of its plant and animal life.”18 Additional examples of European Enlightenment philosophers and scholars promoting the hierarchy of race and racism as integral and intersecting ideologies include Antoine-Yves Goguet who, in 1761, published his observations that “savages set before us a striking picture of the ignorance of the ancient world and practices of primitive times.”19 With the foundation of racist ideologies established by Enlightenment philosophers and scholars like Kant, Rousseau, and Goguet, the next generation of European scholars and philosophers advanced white supremacy through what they called scientific reason and scientific methods. For example, Samuel Morten collected and cataloged the human skulls of what he named as the “inferior” races in his publication of Crania Americana in 1839; Joseph-Arthur comte de Gobineau documented his findings on the hierarchy of races in his four volume publication of Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) in 1853–1855; John Lubbock advanced his ideas about the intellectual and emotional inferiority of non-Europeans with

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

21

his publication of Pre-historic Time, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages in 1865.20 In their evolutionary elaborations of “what the childhood of all humanity had been like,” political philosophers like John Locke imagined that “in the beginning all the world was America.”21 An unsettling prophetic image of the hegemonic aspirations of US imperial expansion, these imaginations and fabulations informed the political thinking of Locke, Goguet, Kant, Rousseau, and other white male European philosophers, scientists, and scholars whose writings became integral to the core curricula of colleges and universities in Europe and North America, well into the twenty-first century, and thus informs the “general will” of its citizenry to maintain the notion of a hierarchy of races.22 This “general will” that adheres to the belief in white supremacy and the hierarchy of races sustains the current social, political, economic, and global order of the so-called First World and Third World nation-states. In his conceptualization of the “general will” of the nation that paves the way for the articulation of freedom and democracy as he envisioned it, Rousseau proclaimed: Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free.23

Sara Ahmed deconstructs Rousseau’s exposition of the general will of the nation as a whole and what is required of the individual to be free. Ahmed systematically reveals “how force and freedom can operate in the same register” while assimilating into the general will of the nation.24 Essential to the logic underpinning Rousseau’s political theory of the general will is your understanding and acceptance that “the demand for obedience is not simply a demand that the part obeys the whole but is willing to become a part of the whole.”25 Do you obey the general will to adhere to the belief in race as essential to how you identify yourself and your nation? Do you hold on to the idea that you are White, or Black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or bi-racial, or multiracial? Do you obey the general will to be a race in order to belong to, to be accounted for, to be counted as a member of, a part of, your nation, your country as a whole? Do you find freedom in the force of a racialized identity? Do you find freedom in assimilating into the general will of your nation?

22

Y. SANGARASIVAM

In mapping out the distinctions and intersectionalities of willfulness, willingness and the general will, Ahmed clears a path for us to apply her analysis of Rousseau’s edict to examine a common will, a corporate will, a sovereign will, the individual will, the national will, the will of nationstates, and the will of the international community of nations and nationstates in relation to those who are willful in their refusal to obey the demands of the general will. She shows us that “if a part is to have a will of its own, then it must will what the whole of the body wills. The body part that does not submit its will is the willful part. […] The willful part is that which threatens the reproduction of an order.”26 Those who are observed, surveilled, identified, named, and catalogued as “terrorists” are those willful parts, which threaten the reproduction of the hierarchy of races that correlate with the international order of nations and nationstates established by the self-proclaimed First World status and supremacy of white nation-states. ● Follow the analytical path that Sara Ahmed has cleared. In the age of the global war on terror, transpose Rousseau’s political theory inspiring contemporary liberal democracies to read as this: terrorists, refugees, migrant families and children, black and brown youth, black and brown men and women, Muslim men and women and children, whoever refuses to obey the general will of white supremacy shall be constrained, detained, tortured, incarcerated, disappeared, choked, lynched, or struck by drones to do so by the international order of the whole body of nation-states, which means nothing else than that they—terrorists, migrants, refugees, blackbrown people, Muslims, non-Christians—shall be forced to be free of their willful refusal to obey and comply with the demands of white supremacy and the economic order of neoliberal democracy. Those who challenge and refuse to accept the white supremacy of First World nation-states—who assume to exist as sovereign, equal, ecological beings on the planet—shall be constrained and forced to experience freedom and democracy through the methods of mass incarceration, police brutality, neighborhood vigilante-shootings, drone strikes, torture, indefinite detention in cages at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sites, and extraordinary rendition to CIA black sites and to the concentration camps at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Extraordinary rendition is a US national security and counterterrorism policy of extrajudicial transfer of people from one country to another.27 It is a policy of

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

23

abducting and illegally detaining people categorized as suspected terrorists and holding them in CIA black sites, a covert internment network of secret detention and interrogation centers. CIA black sites operated within the member states of the European Union.28 It is a policy and strategy that was developed and refined by a series of US administrations dating back to the Clinton administration.29 At the behest of the United States government, suspected terrorists are abducted, held indefinitely, without evidence or charge of a crime, denied access to an attorney, denied contact with the outside world, and transferred to countries like Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco to be tortured and interrogated. Sapna Lalmalani, a legal scholar writing on the US government’s responsibility under the Fourth Amendment, defines extraordinary rendition; it is “also called ‘rendition to torture’ or ‘tortureby-proxy,’ is part of [the U.S. counterterrorism] strategy and attempts to circumvent domestic and international law by using other countries with poor human rights records to engage in methods that are unlawful in the United States.”30 These methods of extreme violence are accepted and normalized as a form of governance in neoliberal democracies, which claim to set an example for other nation-states to follow. These methods of extreme violence also become a practice of collective violence performed by the general public, by the “we” against the “they” who are catalogued as a threat to personal and national security. As we accept extreme violence as a necessary means of securing the cultural values of freedom and democracy, war is energized as a teleportation device that transports the “we” to a place where the “they,”—the terrorizing Other—are encountered and eradicated in service of securing the nation and the nation-state. And so, when the “we” of the nation deploy our loved ones as soldiers, insurgents, police officers, neighborhood vigilantes, military contractors to war with the terrorizing Other, we travel with them—our loved ones. At that moment of deployment, our loved ones become them—the “they,” the terrorizing Other in service of the general we, the general will of nationalism and patriotism. “Thank you for your service”: A declaration of patriotic gratitude toward the them, a soldier, who happens to cross the path of an everyday civilian in an everyday setting—at the deli counter of a grocery store, at an airport terminal, at the gym, at academic conferences. Both revered and reviled by them, it is simultaneously a declaration of gratitude and a demarcation of subjectivities; civilians giving thanks, channeling their

24

Y. SANGARASIVAM

patriotic pride through and to soldiers who have gone out there to that place of terrorism to kill and be killed, to secure freedom and democracy, to secure the nation, to secure the homeland, to secure the supremacy of white nation-states. This show of gratitude becomes a sublime show of force—the force of the general will of nationalism and patriotism. As a condition of the possibility for their own freedom, soldiers recruited into that moment of gratitude are obliged to obey the demand of the general will to celebrate the triumph of killing and being killed. ● War becomes a vehicle, transporter (like the ones in the Star Trek episodes), a way of converting and beaming the energies of nationalism and patriotic pride of the nation through the body of the soldier-police officer-vigilante-military contractor to travel to a place called terrorism—a place of cultural value where colonial encounters require extreme methods of violence to be used as constraining “mechanisms for the forcing of freedom” on not only those willful subjects who are deemed as a threat to local and national security and thus catalogued as terrorists, but also on those willing subjects that we have been recruited and deployed as soldiers and insurgents to kill and be killed on our behalf. As we continue to witness the rounding up and hunting down of people of color who are deemed a threat to the local and national security of white nations and white nation-states, what comes into focus is the reality that the general will of white supremacy, which predicates the cultural values of freedom and democracy, is the larger truth that is accepted by the international order of nation-states. In contrast, we don’t see white males, white nationalists and neo-Nazi organization members being rounded up and rendered to indefinite incarceration and torture as suspected terrorists posing a threat to national security and democracy. In other words, those who are identified and catalogued as dangerous to white people, white neighborhoods, and white nation-states and that are consequently catalogued as terrorists and dangerous to the security of the international order of nation-states, shall be forced to be free of their willful refusal of white supremacy as a fundamental cultural value to be obeyed and complied with in order to be a part of the whole of the international hierarchy and order of races and nation-states. ●

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

25

This project began as a of study the intersection of nationalism and terrorism when I was a graduate student in 1992. I firmly believed in the Tamil nationalist struggle that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were leading. The struggle for national self-determination was just, was real, was essential to the security and integrity of Tamil community members who had strived, to no avail for almost a century, to be recognized and accepted as citizens of the nation-state of Sri Lanka. When the historical record of state-sponsored and colonial violence was evident to the international community, like many community members in the Tamil diaspora living and growing up in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Europe, and Australia, I grew up as an expatriate troubled and haunted by witnessing the recurrence of state-sponsored violence along with the burden of having to prove the legitimacy of the struggle to live freely as equal citizens, like fellow Sinhala citizens, to prosper and maintain our language and identity as Tamil community members in our homelands within Sri Lanka.31 Especially troubling was that this historical record of Sri Lankan state-sponsored violence was what the LTTE was banking on to secure liberation, to achieve national self-determination with the support and recognition of the international community to create a separate state of Tamil Eelam. I couldn’t make sense of this nagging resistance within me, this willful refusal to accept the galling knowledge of having to gain the approval of white nation-states in North America and Europe who held the power to declare whether a liberation struggle was real, was legitimate and worthy of the support of the international community for national self-determination like Israel, the Baltic states, the republics of the former Yugoslavia, and liberation of all the eastern European countries that were granted statehood after perestroika, some of whom would be courted to join the NATO alliance. How did that work? How does sovereignty get recognized and legitimized if it doesn’t serve the political and economic interests of white nation-states? What purpose and who does it serve to name an entire group of people as “terrorists” or a political movement as a “terrorist organization”? These questions lead me to arrive at this book project, which explores the cultural value of terrorism by developing a willful methodology of speculative ethnography. ● My work is to endeavor through this conceptual impasse that has come into view: As long as there is a need to belong to an international order

26

Y. SANGARASIVAM

of nation-states—one that is based on the hierarchy of First World and Third World nations, which is founded on the hierarchy of races, thus maintaining the supremacy of white nation-states—the struggle for liberation is compromised by the very desire to belong to a white supremacist hierarchy that continues to define the international order of nation-states. It is a liberation that can only be achieved by complying to the general will of neoliberal democracy and the hierarchy of races, nations, and nationstates, which is tantamount to complying to the general will and authority of white supremacy. In this schema where freedom is conditioned by compliance with the general will of white supremacy, sovereignty is contingent upon subjugation: an unsustainable condition of existence that will fuel the need for struggle and solidarity in the work of transforming the general will of white supremacy to one of emancipation from an enduring commitment to a hierarchy of races, nations, and nation-states—those that are included and excluded from the nexus of power located in, for example, the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the NATO Alliance, and the G8 intergovernmental economic organization.32 The nation-states at the apex of the hierarchy occupy a seat in these sites of power and are authorized by the international community of nationstates to decide on the legitimacy and implementation of agreements on, for example: climate change and environmental protections to ensure a sustainable future of the planet; the right to produce and maintain nuclear weapons; initiating and sustaining economic sanctions; deploying peacekeeping military forces to sovereign countries, and; sustaining the global war on terror that allows for the militaries and military contracting companies of white nation-states to invade and occupy sovereign territories of non-white nation-states as a normalized practice of maintaining national security, economic prosperity, and stable governance at home. In his analysis of how the idea of “selective sovereignty” is translated to mean “the responsibility to attack” as part of the “National Security Strategy of the United States, otherwise known as the Bush Doctrine,” Amitav Acharya shows how the United States with the support its allies, especially the United Kingdom and Australia, normalized the practice of preemptive strikes as a necessary national security strategy that would “obey” the rules the United States set forth to promote global security.33 To illustrate how this idea of selective sovereignty gains traction in the context of the global war on terror, Acharya provides the statement of Richard Haas, the former director of Policy Planning in the US State

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

27

Department who defines the thesis of the “limits to sovereignty” as the foundation of the Bush Doctrine, which establishes the supremacy of the United States as a white nation-state: Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre your own people. Another is not to support terrorism in any way. If a government fails to meet these obligations then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone inside your own territory. Other governments, including the United States, gain the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism, this can even lead to a right to preventive, or peremptory self-defense. You essentially can act in anticipation if you have ground to think it’s a question of when, and not if, you’re going to be attacked.34

Working in tandem with the US Department of State, Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, made explicit the obedience required of all nation-states to understand that global security is contingent upon the national security of the United States: The United States strengthens its national security when it promotes a well-ordered world of sovereign states: a world in which states respect one another’s right to choose how they want to live; a world in which states do not commit aggression and have governments that can and do control their own territory; a world in which states have governments that are responsible and obey, as it were, the rules of the road. The importance of promoting a well-ordered world of sovereign states was brought home to Americans by 9/11, when terrorists enjoying safe haven in remote Afghanistan exploited ‘globalization’ and the free and open nature of various Western countries to attack us disastrously here at home.35

The strategic use of euphemisms by Feith in this quote must be noted: “promotes” is a euphemism for the US self-declared right to perform preemptive strikes against sovereign states, and; “the rules of the road” is a euphemism for the US declaration of the indefinite global war on terror that allow it and its allies to define, redefine, and bend the rules of international engagement with sovereign states in the name of counterterrorism. Khalid Rahman succinctly analyzes this geopolitical and geostrategic reality:

28

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Since the theatre of global war on terror has been set primarily in the Muslim World, centering upon the greater Middle East and engulfing Central Asia, South Asia and North Africa in the throes of war and pangs of destruction, the importance of understanding the complex dynamic of the Middle East has become even more emphasized. In this scenario, the claims of possessing the right of: preemptive strikes for bringing ‘freedom’; abducting, detaining, torturing or killing the suspects on mere perceptions for establishing ‘justice’; and obstructing the democratically elected ‘terrorist organizations’ to spread ‘democracy’ have aroused the desire of transcribing the neo-Orwellian doublespeak in strict political, strategic, economic and imperialistic sense.36

In my ethnographic interviews with men and women in the LTTE when they maintained a de facto administration of the northern region of Sri Lanka between 1990–2009, their request of me as a privileged academic at a US. university conducting anthropological research was to go out and tell the truth of their struggle for national independence from the violence of successive Sri Lankan governments that have refused a parity of status as citizens for Tamil community members. They believed that once they garnered the support of the USA, the UK, and the nation-states of the European Union to recognize their liberation struggle as legitimate and consequently removed from the list of terrorist organizations that these nation-states maintained, then the path to self-determination would be cleared and the goal of creating the separate state of Tamil Eelam would be realized. They believed that once they were recognized by “Western countries” as a legitimate political movement rather than as a terrorist organization, they would achieve not only their goal of national self-determination but that their emerging state of Tamil Eelam would be neatly folded into the international community, the international order of nation-states. ● Reposed. Safely. Authoritatively. Deep within. The desire for national self-determination. And thus, the desire to. Join the international order of. Legitimate nation-states. Is the willingness to. Obey. To be constrained by. To be in compliance with. The hierarchy of nation-states. To obey the general will of. White supremacy. From the standpoint of Sara Ahmed’s analysis, as subjects seeking to acquire the recognition and legitimacy of their sovereign state of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE and similar liberation movements “are asked to do

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

29

more than obey, they must obey out of their own free will” to accept and acquiesce to the supremacy of white nation-states who hold the power to recognize them as legitimate political entities or reject them as terrorist organizations.37 That nagging resistance and willful refusal to accept white supremacy as a condition for Tamil national liberation is the embodiment of that impasse between subjugation and sovereignty. In this book project on the intersecting cultural values of nationalism, terrorism, and patriotism, I am guided by Sara Ahmed’s formation of a willful methodology to witness and understand those identified as willful subjects who simultaneously resist and negotiate the demands of the general will in Rousseau’s Social Contract . My intention is to willfully travel with soldiers and insurgents, suicide bombers and drone pilots, civilians and settlers of colonial regimes who are deployed by the demands of nationalism and patriotic pride to that place called terrorism. Terrorism is a place where the general will of white supremacy is simultaneously refused and obeyed by insurgent political movements that desire recognition and the need to belong to, and engage in, political and economic relationships with the racialized, colonial schema of the so-called First World and Third World nation-states.38 This desire for recognition and need to belong to the international order of nationstates is a willing acknowledgment and agreement to a relationship that is based on the colonizing schema of the hierarchy of races established by European Enlightenment philosophers, who were invested in the belief of white supremacy. To excavate the cultural value of terrorism, I draw on Ahmed’s willful methodology of following willful subjects: those cultural others who are considered outside of humanity and categorized as terrorists, whose lived histories of resistance to colonial occupations are rendered incomprehensible, and whose death is deemed ungrievable. Ahmed’s method allows for a process of understanding the enduring commitment to the hierarchy of races and the consequent adhering capacity of white supremacy, which fuels the general will in Rousseau’s social contract that now manifests in the international order of nationstates who agree to comply with and sustain the US-sponsored global war on terror. This demand to obey the general will of the US-sponsored global security strategy, global counterterrorism strategy, and it’s claim to “peremptory self-defense” by intervening with preemptive drone strikes is a form of white supremacy; it shows up in the assumed supremacy of the white nation-states of North America and the European Union who

30

Y. SANGARASIVAM

support and implement the programs of targeted assassinations, abductions and disappearance, torture, and indefinite incarceration of people throughout the world who are captured as suspected terrorists through the US-sponsored extraordinary renditions program and targeted killing program where suspected terrorists were placed on “kill lists” maintained by the National Security Council, the CIA, the US military, and its Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).39 Jeremy Scahill documents the covert wars in undeclared battlefields where the United States conducts drone strikes in, for example, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria. Scahill interviewed officials who worked with JSOC under President George W. Bush and then continued to work under President Barack Obama, who expanded the targeted assassination program advanced under the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy.40 In his investigative study of these covert wars, Scahill writes: Unlike President Bush, who often delegated decisions on assassinations to commanders and CIA officials, Obama insisted on personally signing off on most strikes. On Tuesday afternoons, the president would preside over meetings that senior officials dubbed ‘Terror Tuesdays,’ during which proposed targets would be ‘nominated’ for spots on the kill list. […] In essence, the kill list became a form of ‘pre-crime’ justice in which individuals were considered fair game if they met certain life patterns of suspected terrorists. Utilizing signature strikes, it was no longer necessary for targets to have been involved with specific plots against the United States. Their potential to commit future acts could be a justification for killing them. At times, simply being among a group of ‘military-aged males’ in a particular region of Pakistan would be enough evidence of terrorist activity to trigger a drone strike. In Yemen, Obama authorized JSOC to hit targets even if the mission planners did not know the identities of those they were bombing. Such strikes were labeled Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes, or TADS.41

The practice of extrajudicial killings in the form of drone strikes and targeted assassinations by the United States and its allies sets a precedent for and authorizes other nation-states, like Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Sri Lanka to carry out executions and extrajudicial killings as a policy of counterterrorism. ●

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

31

The demand to obey the general willof the US-sponsored global war on terror is a form of white supremacy that also shows up in academic and scholarly spaces. It showed up throughout the process of my research for this project. In this choice of willful travel to that place called terrorism, I have encountered academics who called me “a resident terrorist” during a symposium at a university in upstate New York, when I presented an analysis of the history of state-sponsored violence in Sri Lanka that resulted in the rise of an armed struggle with the LTTE’s call for self-determination and the creation of the separate state of Tamil Eelam. I have encountered a white female student who called me “a terrorist cunt” and who then threatened to kill me and burn my house down. Fellow students found these threats that she posted on her Facebook page and alerted the chair of the department. This incident took place in the same week of the Virginia Tech shooting and massacre where twenty-seven students and five faculty members were killed. The killer was a fellow student. I have encountered academics in Sri Lanka who called me “a Patricia Hurst on a suicide mission” to kill a prominent member of parliament in Colombo.42 I have encountered academic experts on terrorism studies who have called me “an apologist for terrorist violence.” These are all encounters I experienced in that place called terrorism where civilians were asserting the demand to obey the general will of the US-sponsored global war on terror, through which my alterity is thrown into relief and amplified to give voice to their anxieties of white supremacy. The general will. Calling us. To fulfill Rousseau’s social contract. To wage war. With them. Each of these encounters are a form of micro and macro aggression. In the era of theUS-sponsored global war on terror, these micro and macro aggressions are a manifestation of linguistic drone strikes in themselves: Linguistic codes deployed to identify the enemy, terrorist, Other who poses a threat to personal, institutional, and national security; linguistic codes deployed to suspect anyone who questions and challenges the general will to support the global war on terror; linguistic codes deployed to target and carry the threat to kill by naming a person a terrorist; linguistic codes adhering to the general will of us demonstrating our national belonging with patriotic pride against them.

32

Y. SANGARASIVAM

II A Speculative Ethnography of War Speculative ethnography is a method that allows you to bend time and space, to be open to alternative possibilities of collective existence, to being vulnerable and being transformed by people who are destined to kill and be killed by one another, then and now, to arrive, and be on their way again. Come together. Face to face. Conjure into this present moment those you have renounced. Meet and walk with truth at the threshold of emergence in the unknown. Bridge the distance of foreign lands and their people. Defy violence as essential to knowing. Being human. Being nonhuman. Venture into another way of knowing. Risk another way of being. Step into moments preexisting and surpassing our attachments to linear expectations of time, and concrete notions of space. ●

…learn to write under conditions of emergency, when writing remains the measure of the human under the old Enlightenment rules.43 —Hortense Spillers, “Writing and States of Emergency”

Write in a state of emergency. Write a state of emergency. Write emergency. Write. Emergency. I attend to her warning. National emergency. National security. Global emergency. Global security. Global war. Global terror. Global War on Terror. Enlightenment rules. Bounties issued: hunt down, torture, render Muslim men and children, concentrate in camps, black sites, once hidden, then revealed, secret agreements sealed within international networks of nation-states, redact testimonies of torture and extrajudicial killings, secure democracy under occupation. Write in a state of democracy. ● Everything points to an ecological emergency.44 Devastating deaths and displacements from the impacts of climate change, pandemics, and war. No one is immune from the vitality of viruses and the force of winds, waters, fires, foreclosures, blackouts, burnouts, borders, and bullets. Tsunamis, Desert Storms, Kill Lists, Forced Migrations, Forced Separations of Families, wave after wave of mass shootings, mass destructions, mass infections, mass incarcerations, mass displacements. White

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

33

supremacy operates to satisfy an insatiable fear, enabling brutality, denying realities of interrelated ecosystems within which humans and nonhumans preexist and surpass immanent borders of belonging. Black and brown bodies hunted, captured, interned, enslaved, disappeared, dehumanized, denied habeas corpus. A will to war, is that not tantamount to a will to prepare for suicide? Witness us and them in the wake of war. Secretly sequester their freedom, our will, their determination, our redemption, their perseverance, our perturbations. ● Global War on Terror They found a cause to recalibrate the priorities of neoliberal democracy and called it terrorism

● Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution of the United States: the rights afforded to a person to petition for the writ of habeas corpus. We now know that almost none of the Guantánamo prisoners were taken into custody by U.S. forces or captured on any battlefield. The overwhelming majority were sold into captivity by Northern Alliance and Pakistani warlords for substantial bounties—$5,000 and more for each person they turned in; enough money, as leaflets the U.S. military distributed throughout Afghanistan said, “to take care of your family... for the rest of your life.” In fact, of the nearly 800 men that have been held at Guantánamo, only 10 have ever been charged with any crime.45

● What is. Habeas corpus . Translation. “You shall have the body.”46 Translation. The right of citizens to a writ of habeas corpus. Translation. A legal order whose origin is found in English common law, the writ of habeas corpus is “guaranteed by federal statute and the U.S. constitution.” Translation. It is a legal instrument to safeguard the freedom and fundamental rights of human beings in the face of lawless state actions, such as arbitrary arrests and indefinite incarceration. Translation. You shall

34

Y. SANGARASIVAM

have the right to have your body be brought before a judge to hear the charges and the right to answer to the charges placed against you. Translation. “When confronted with a prisoner’s application for the writ, the government must justify the prisoner’s detention. If the government cannot or will not make this showing, the court must order the prisoner released.”47 ● Under the administration of President George W. Bush, the United States government began transporting prisoners to the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba in January of 2002. The announcement was made on December 27, 2001 by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.48 The Bush administration created a new category of prisoners, called “illegal enemy combatants,” to refer to detainees captured, held incommunicado, and imprisoned at Guantánamo. Prisoners who were identified as members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and anyone who was captured as a suspected terrorist, was given this new designation; a strategy employed by the US. government and its allies to cast outside of the protections of domestic and international law those who were captured in the global war on terror.49 An analysis of the Combatant Status Review Board Letters “concluded that 93% of the detainees were captured not by US troops at all but by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to US custody, and that on the government’s own admission 55% of the detainees had not committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.”50 ● Enter here. You are conjured into a place called terrorism. You meet and join in on conversations between soldiers and suicide bombers, civilians and insurgents, who are sharing their stories with interrogators and detainees imprisoned at Abu Ghraib, at Guantánamo Bay, at CIA black sites; who are all keeping company with those captured in racialized systems of police brutality and mass incarceration to reveal terrorism as a destination where you can journey, to question, affirm, uphold, or undermine the cultural value of white supremacy and white nationalism. ● Enter here. You are invited to a gathering of friends and enemies, called to speak with one another about the demand of patriotism to kill and

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

35

be killed in service of citizenship and national belonging. Listen to each other’s stories of struggle, dreams of abundant futures. In for the long haul; the promise of liberation is worth it, they say. This journey invites you to fracture, regroup, displace, assemble, disrupt, and reassemble subjects and objects beyond time where nationalism becomes patriotism becomes terrorism becomes what M. Jacqui Alexander calls “the now of slavery.”51 ● Enter here. You are stepping into spaces of speculation. Willfully transgressing. Willfully disturbing the old Enlightenment rules of white colonizers, explorers, adventuring in search of documenting exotic others with scholarly traditions their elders fashioned into what they authenticated and authorized as ethnography. ● You are in the method. You may be apprehensive about us, them, you, I, we, they, theirs, ours, all fraught theoretically, pronouns taking space, making place, making moves, making trouble, assuming an intimacy that approaches too quickly perhaps, claiming to authenticate, and wandering off again. Subject positions and social locations are fluid here in this place of speculation. You can choose to align with and distance from us, them, me, you, paying attention to what moments, which pronouns draw you in to intimate relationships and those that push you out, push your will, your willfulness to show up and join the conversation in this place called terrorism. Are you willing to defy the conventions of aligning with, pledging an allegiance to, a singular pronoun, a singular identity, a singular nation, a singular nation-state, a singular space, a singular time? Are you willing to be in solidarity with them, us, theirs, ours, they, you, I, we, together bending rules, transgressing boundaries, crossing lines, breaking limits, surrendering to a way of being and a way of knowing fraught with potentials of multiple truths, multiple meanings, multiple paths that may or may not find respite or refuge in liberation, revolution, and peace?

36

Y. SANGARASIVAM

III Journey to a Place Called Terrorism This is a speculative ethnography of war. It is a methodology that invites you to visit terrorism as a place of colonial encounters.52 We are departing from the conventional views of defining terrorism as an ideology or a form of political violence by non-state actors, extremists, or “irrational” fundamentalists who pose a threat to personal, national, and global security.53 When you journey to and inhabit terrorism as a place, the signifier of “terror” brings into view a range of brutalizing subjects, objects, and practices of war, which state regimes and resistance movements rely on to pull us into mobilizing those unifying grand narratives of a particular history and heritage. To pull us in to proclaim patriotic pride and national belonging. ● As objects of terror, patriotism and nationalism draw on your enduring commitments to racialized identities and subjectivities, which in turn pulls you into a dialogical reproduction of violence, transporting you back and forth across time and space. Tanks and Humvees, airplanes and leaflets become objects of patriotism and national belonging, as do the practices of lynching in the past and extraordinary renditions in the present, as do the demanding shove of the Blackwater Humvee pushing Iraqi civilian cars off the road, as do the crushing arrogance of US tanks demolishing entire neighborhoods producing an experience that is responsive, that calls to soldiers and civilians running alongside and within it, as do choke holds by policemen killing unarmed black people, as do the execution of children while standing your ground as an expression of neighborhood belonging.54 ● Question How do we know terrorism is it the same way we know white privilege white nationalism white supremacy, how

2

do we arrive a decision what violence is the work of a terrorist George Zimmerman stood his ground and killed young Trayvon Martin killer acquitted democracy’s lynching affirming across the nation the sanctity of white supremacy secured in the Second Amendment found Nikolas Cruz his rights to bear arms killing seventeen students was that the work of a terrorist citizen soldier insurgent how do we arrive a decision who is a terrorist who is not who poses a threat to whose lives matter whose lives we mourn whose death calls upon our conscience our compassion to be whose mother father son daughter brother sister friend lover who must live with lives lost how do we arrive a decision whose lives are guilty deserving the protocol

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

37

38

Y. SANGARASIVAM

of torture deserving the penalty of death?

● Nineteen of them brought the world to its knees, it seems, while helplessly witnessing their unbelievable attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. By hijacking four American planes, they not only redirected the destination of those commercial flights, but the destination of war to arrive at the heart of empire. From those moments of watching human beings leap to their death, choosing suicide in favor of being incinerated, to being crushed to death as the twin towers of the Work Trade Center collapsed in to heaps of ash and rubble, September 11, 2001 became a date that is now and seemingly forever suspended in time. A hegemonic national security protocol, thoroughly assimilating the security of the United States into global security, allows 9/11 to take on a magical quality of returning repeatedly back to those experiences of horror and despair, revenge and patriotic pride, trauma and triumph that continues to recruit a will to sustain the US-sponsored global war on terror. This will to sustain war gives form and content to the “we” who take comfort in using the language of terrorist, terrorism, extremists, Islamists, insurgents, and fundamentalists to describe the willful “they” who become the enemy that fuels the will of nationalism and patriotic pride. ● The realities of war are at once familiar and strange. Your soldiers were being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, but you are estranged from the everyday realities of violence that they experience both over there in the theaters of war and over here at home upon their return. You are familiar with patriotism that pulls you in to find comfort from and for their sacrifice, to assume an intimacy in thanking them for their service. You are estranged from their hauntings and suicides in the wake of their killing children and elders, men and women, killing entire families in foreign lands, in the name of securing your nation, your borders, your families. ●

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

39

We are familiar with our attachment to race as a principal marker of identity, especially when we affirm ourselves as racialized subjects every time we choose to check the box, or find security in identifying as white, for example, but are estranged from the lived realities of everyday warfare in the form of racial profiling, mass incarceration, and police brutality while seeking assurance in “all lives matter,” while finding refuge in anti-racist reading groups, performing diversity, equity, and inclusion, attending workshop after workshop, training after training, webinar after webinar. ● You are estranged from the everyday realities of entire groups of people who are categorized as terrorists or as constituting a terrorist organization—for example, Tamil speaking people in Sri Lanka and in the Tamil Diaspora as embodying the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a political movement that has been labeled and censured by state regimes as a terrorist organization. Transgressing the fortified borders of normative conventions partitioning state-sponsored violence in opposition to the violence of nationalist movements in resistance to state regimes, we are disrupting the dichotomizing tropes of terrorism and counterterrorism. Enter here. ● You are inhabiting a performative text, bringing the phenomenon of war into your view, into your body in such a way that calls you to pay attention to the vitality and relationality of soldiers and insurgents, Humvees, IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and RPGs (rocket propelled grenades), as human and nonhuman beings whose force propels us into a place called terrorism. Enter here. ● The ubiquitous threats of drones and suicide bombers call you to respond and comport with your worlds in different and extraordinary ways. We sacrifice soldiers. They sacrifice militants, jihadists, insurgents. We deploy drones. They deploy suicide bombers. Enter here.

40

Y. SANGARASIVAM

IV Suicide and Sacrifice Nationalism and patriotism come home to suicide. Citizenship and belonging come home to death and displacement. Love and liberation show up to embrace the contours of your commitment to war in that place called terrorism. Witness the limits of your commitment to kill and be killed, that ultimate sense of national belonging, that something to die for. Can you find solidarity with their suicide and yours? With their sacrifice and yours? ● Nundthini joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam at the age of seventeen. It was midnight. IPKF soldiers stormed their home. Dragging her brother out of the room. They were setting an example of what happens to insurgents. She will remember. Always. Later that week, his body was found at the junction, at the top of the lane. Beaten. Tortured. Killed. She decided then. She would be prepared. ● I P K F

for for for for

Indian Peace Keeping Force

Keeping Force Keeping Peace. ●

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

41

Cyanide dangles from a string inside a glass vial as a locket, as a keepsake. Of sacrifice. Of courage. Of commitment. Of solidarity. Of perseverance. In this struggle for. National liberation. That sublime ideal. That something to die for. She wears it. Willfully. Around her neck. The vial resting against her chest. Nundthini understands this choice. She tells us why cyanide is a vital element of resistance. She is. Prepared. ● Resistance Prepared We can’t afford to be afraid of dying in such a terrifying way but we maintain the principle of integrity in being a liberation fighter. If we give up critical information about the movement under torture of the enemy, there is little integrity there. So let’s say I’m captured by the enemy I’m undergoing the usual beatings and torture and I give all kinds of information like this is where LTTE camps are, these are military soldiers the movement employs, these are the people in the movement, then there’s been no point in being a liberation fighter for all these years

42

Y. SANGARASIVAM

and furthermore, I am not worthy of being in the movement. Why? Because I myself came forward to sacrifice my life for my country. For fear of being beaten and tortured how could I betray my own people my own country. Is that not so? But in saying this, I am aware of our foibles as human beings. Under the extraordinary stress of torture, we cannot help but release some bits of information even if we are resolved to not give up any knowledge, they will not allow for this. They will only escalate torture until some kind of information is received.55

●

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

43

Franz Fanon called it. An “absolute line of action” in the struggle.56 For self-determination. For national liberation. That moment when. Your back is pressed. Against the wall. Confronting the force of a colonizer. In the face. Of capture. Of torture. Violence finds liberation. In the dissolution of self. ● one bite glass breaks skin rips cyanide seeps drawing absolute line of action sacrifice for nation first liberation at last.

● War is a choice for violence that is ecological. Our nation’s practice of violence simultaneously sustains and destroys theirs: their nation, their claim for the need, the legitimacy, and their just cause of war sustains ours. Terrorism, theirs and ours, is a place where we encounter each other’s need to colonize and be colonized by the forces of national belonging and patriotic pride.57 My research on the intersections of nationalism, terrorism, and patriotism began with the aim of learning from people in the Tamil nationalist movement to understand what their motivations were to give up everything—their families, their privileges of higher education, their security, and ultimately their life—to join an armed

44

Y. SANGARASIVAM

struggle in service of national liberation and the creation of a separate state called Tamil Eelam. I was drawn to the power of their determination and convictions that allowed for the courage to give up everything that one knows and step into such an extraordinary space of the unknown: unknown outcomes of whether this goal of Tamil Eelam would ever be reached in their life-time, whether they would survive war, whether they would return to civilian life and reconnect with their families, whether they would recognize their place in their communities once they returned from the work of killing in order to defend one’s ancestral territories known as home. The power of this willful conviction, courage, and determination is akin to those of willful subjects—those who willfully disobey the general will of community and belonging—that Sara Ahmed follows in her willful method in assembling what she calls “a willful archive.”58 ● How do you know terrorism? Does it show up in your nationalism, in your patriotism? Does it show up in your academic institutions, border crossings, grocery stores, football-baseball-basketballhockey games? What are the limits of your epistemological commitments to the global war on terror? Is your commitment to nationalism contingent upon their methods of marshaling, managing, and disciplining those cultural others who are pushing to break down the walls of systemic racism, who are migrating across racialized borders to arrive in this place you call home? Are your epistemological commitments—your ways of knowing terrorism—intimately tied up with your ways of knowing citizenship and national belonging? And is this intrinsic to the way you have come to know how you belong to your racialized identity, how you belong to your national community? Would you find the limits of your epistemological commitments to knowing terrorism in the physical and emotional trauma that soldiers bring home in the wake of war? Is your way of arriving at a sense of belonging tied up with your need to know an enemy, a person unlike yourself, who you are marshaled to see and name as a terrorist, as a threat to your personal security? Do you question whether or not your way of knowing citizenship and national belonging is contingent upon upholding the principle and practice of pointing to, and naming, another person or entire groups of people as terrorists? If so, are you willing to acknowledge that this claim to the privilege of naming racialized others as a threat to your personal and national security, rests upon the assurance that white supremacy will sustain the legal, economic,

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

45

social, and political structures of systemic racism that profiles and targets people of color while militarized white nationalists roam free without facing the consequences of indefinite detention, incarceration, torture, and death?59 If so, is your citizenship and national belonging contingent upon a perpetual state of national insecurity and war? ● Speculative ethnography is a willful methodology that involves questioning the questions, opening to being transformed by who and what we encounter; being open to alterity, a willingness to embrace a state of otherness that we may have grown accustomed to perceiving as inconsequential at best and repugnant, worthy of vengeance, violence, and murder at worst. You are in the method. It is a way of knowing and a way of being that allows you to witness war as “an attitude that shows a will to disappear in order to reach sovereignty.”60 ● What will you become. In the wake of war. Are you willing. To be transformed. To embrace otherness. To disappear in order to encounter. The sovereignty of soldiers, civilians, and insurgents. Whose realities emerge from one another. Whose identities simultaneously embody. The general will of the whole nation as well as. The willful refusal and desire for. Citizenship and national belonging. Enter here. Into this place. We call. Terrorism.

●

46

Y. SANGARASIVAM

V Subjugation & Sovereignty HE NEEDED REDEMPTION HE DIDN’T FIND JOSHUA CASTEEL WAS DEPLOYED WITHIN SIX MONTHS HIS COMMANDER APPROVED TRASH BURNING VETERANS RIGHT TO BREATHE ACT JOSHUA CASTEEL DIES MOHAMEDOU OULD SLAHI SURVIVES THE FBI’S INVESTIGATION CONFIRMED HIS INNOCENCE FOR FOURTEEN YEARS, HE WAS INTERNED THE PETITION FOR WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS WAS GRANTED THEY HELD ON TO HIM I HAVE COME TO LEARN THEY HELD ONTO AND TORTURED CHILDREN SEVEN-HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-NINE HONOR BOUND TO DEFEND FREEDOM FREEDOM. DEFEND. TO. BOUND. HONOR.

●

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

47

He needed redemption. He was a skilled interrogator with the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion of the United States Army. He was the son of Christian evangelical parents. Aspiring to join the seminary, he earned the moniker “priest” at Abu Ghraib prison where fellow soldiers confessed their sins in hopes of redeeming their humanity too. He was the president of the Young Republicans and received a four-year scholarship to West Point Military Academy. In the summer of 1997, he arrived at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri after enlisting with the Army Reserve at the age of seventeen. At boot camp he learned to become a soldier. Training in the bayonet assault course, the Drill Sergeant called out, “What’s the spirit of the bayonet?” Young soldiers in training responded in chant. “Kill Kill Kill without mercy Sergeant!” And the Drill Sergeant called out, “What makes the green grass grow?” Young soldiers in training responded in chant. “Blood Blood Bright Red Blood Sergeant!”.61 He didn’t find camaraderie at West Point. He returned home to become a scholar. He read Heidegger, listened to Jay-Z, drank SoCo, hung out with friends studying abroad, immersed in Medieval and Renaissance studies at Oxford University. After graduating from the University of Iowa, he had a choice to enter seminary at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He chose to become an Army interrogator instead, joining the initial waves of US soldiers deployed in Operation Infinite Justice to war with the people of Iraq.62 Joshua Casteel was deployed to Abu Ghraib prison as an interrogator in the summer of 2004. He was twenty-four years old. His supervisors trained him to humiliate and shame detainees into submission. He strived to remain steadfast in upholding the ethics of human rights and the codes of conduct defined by the Geneva Conventions. He cultivated empathy for the teenage children, taxi drivers, and imams, and everyday people who were detained and brought in for interrogation.63 Within six months of his deployment as an interrogator, he began to question the purpose and deadly consequences of his work as an interrogation officer, which increasingly conflicted with his faith and commitment to the teachings of Christ. He wrote letters to his family and friends. Seeking to be heard. Seeking to understand. Seeking for understanding. Seeking respect. For human life.64

48

Y. SANGARASIVAM

His commander approved his application for an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector and praised his maturity and success as an interrogator. While the Army processed the approval, the leadership dispatched Joshua to work at the burn pits. His work now involved pouring jet fuel on the trash collected from the work of maintaining the military base. Paint. Plastics. Batteries. Ordnance. Styrofoam. Petroleum. Soda cans. Plastic bottles. Medical waste. Tires. Computers. Amputated body parts. Humvee parts. Porta-Johns. Bunk beds. College brochures. GI Bill pamphlets. Deet-soaked tents. Blood-soaked clothes of the wounded. Trash collected. From the work of occupation and war.65 Trash burning. Day and night. Carcinogens and toxins burning. Veterans of the post-9/11 wars believe. This is their generation’s Agent Orange. More than 250 open burn pits have been used by US military forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Djibouti.66 Over twohundred thousand veterans have registered to receive care from the Veterans Administration for catastrophic illness caused by their exposure to or work at burn pits.67 “Veterans Right to Breathe Act,” is one of the burn pit related bills advanced by Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas. This legislation adds a list of diseases now inhabiting the bodies of soldiers returning from war. Asthma. Chronic bronchitis. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Constrictive bronchiolitis. Emphysema. Granulomatous disease. Interstitial lung disease. Lung cancer. Pneumonia. Brain cancer. Lymphoma. Skin cancer. Pancreatic cancer. Testicular cancer.68 Joshua Casteel dies on August 25, 2012. He was coughing up a thick black mucus, like many soldiers, while he was deployed in Iraq. After returning home, his mother took him to the Veterans Administrations hospital for debilitating back pain. They diagnosed him with bronchitis and sent him home. When he returned to the emergency room, xrays revealed the tumors in his lungs. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 adenocarcinoma. Cancer inhabited his lungs.69 Mohamedou Ould Slahi survives to tell his story.70 In the summer of 2005, he wrote a 466-page manuscript by hand while he was incarcerated in solitary confinement at the US military base and concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The US government revised and censored his

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

49

manuscript with more than 2,500 redactions. The manuscript remained classified and hidden for more than six years. They revised and censored his telling of the story about his capture by American FBI agents, his experiences of encountering American government officials and soldiers, and their policies and procedures of abduction, torture, interrogation, and extraordinary rendition. By the demands of the United States government, he was first detained in January 2000 and interrogated by Senegalese and Mauritanian authorities, and American FBI agents while he was en route from Germany, returning home to Mauritania. He informed them about his participation in the Mujahideen insurgency against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. This was the war where the United States supported the Mujahideen to overthrow the communist regime leading the government of Afghanistan. He recounted how and why he was recruited by al-Qaeda in 1990–1992 to join the Mujahideen insurgency in Afghanistan while he was a student at the University of Duisburg in Germany. “My goal was solely to fight against the aggressors, mainly the Communists, who forbid my brethren to practice their religion.”71 He has consistently maintained this as his primary motivation to join the Mujahideen insurgency. Unlike the recruitment by military contractors such as Blackwater Security (renamed Academi), Global Dynamics, Sandline, and Triple Canopy, who advertise a lucrative salary ranging from $500–$1,000 per day and over $100,000 per year, the Mujahideen relied on the political and religious commitment of its recruits.72 The FBI’s investigation confirmed his innocence. He was released to return home and continue living his life working as an electrical engineer, providing for his family, assuming the privileges of citizenship and national integrity in his homeland, Mauritania. But the harassment continued until November 20, 2001, when he was captured and disappeared into the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. On November 28, 2001, CIA agents boarded Mr. Slahi onto a rendition plane transporting him to Amman, Jordan where he was tortured and interrogated for more than seven months. On July 19, 2002, they stripped him, blindfolded him, put him in a diaper, shackled him, and boarded him on a CIA rendition plane to the US military air base in Bagram, Afghanistan. On August 4, 2002, they boarded him on a military transport plane with thirty-four

50

Y. SANGARASIVAM

people who were illegally detained like him and who were being transported to the US. military base and concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.73 For fourteen years, he was interned by US authorities in Guantánamo, illegally detained without charge of any crime. For fourteen years he survived the daily routine of torture and interrogation. Holding on to the truth that one day he would be free. Holding on to dignity and humanity. Holding on in isolation for months. Holding on in a cold, freezing cell. Holding on while shackled to the floor. Holding on without food. Holding on while forced to drink salt water. Holding on while forced to stand for hours with strobe lights and heavy metal music. Holding on while forbidden from prayer. Holding on through the beatings. Holding on through the sexual assaults. Holding on through the threats of violence against his mother.74 The petition for writ of habeas corpus was granted by US District Judge James Robertson. After reviewing the arguments presented by attorneys Nancy Hollander, Theresa Duncan, Linda Moreno, and a team of attorneys headed by Hina Shamsi with the American Civil Liberties Union, Judge Robertson granted Mr. Slahi’s habeas corpus petition and ordered his release from Guantánamo on March 22, 2010. Judge Robertson’s decision was filed on April 9, 2010.75 The United States government under President Obama’s administration filed a notice of appeal on March 26, 2010, which continued Mr. Slahi’s internment at Guantánamo. In July 2016, the US Periodic Review Board comprised of national security and intelligence officials cleared Mr. Slahi to be released from Guantánamo.76 They held on to him and kept him in a state of indefinite incarceration and torture until October 17, 2016, when US government authorities released him from imprisonment at Guantánamo and returned Mr. Slahi to his home to reunite with his family in Mauritania. More than 100,000 people from the United States and the United Kingdom signed petitions, written by the American Civil Liberties Union, Change. org, and MovOn.org, calling for Mr. Slahi’s release from Guantánamo.77 “I have come to learn that goodness is transnational, transcultural, and transethnic” said Mr. Slahi upon his release from imprisonment and torture at Guantánamo. “I am grateful and indebted to the people who have stood by me.”78

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

51

They held on to and tortured children between the ages of ten and eighteen at Guantánamo. The Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, at the University of California-Davis, estimates the number of children rendered to Guantánamo ranges from twenty-one to forty-six. There are no consistent records of the birthdates of individuals captured and detained there by the US government.79 Seven-hundred and seventy-nine men and boys from fifty different countries were captured and imprisoned at Guantánamo since January 11, 2002. They were citizens of countries representing almost every continent on the globe: Iraq, Afghanistan, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Spain, Turkey, Russia, China, Bangladesh, Sudan, Uganda, Zambia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Maldives. They were all identified as Muslim by faith and heritage. Of the 779 people captured, 8 have been charged with a crime and convicted by “illegitimate military commissions.” More than $11 million (US), is the cost to imprison a single detainee at Guantánamo. The oldest man captured and imprisoned was 89 years of age.80 As of July 2020, forty men remain in a state of indefinite incarceration at Guantánamo.81 “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.” Read the sign. As they entered. Camp VI. Camp Delta. Inside Guantánamo.82 Freedom. Defend. To. Bound. Honor. ●

52

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Interrogations83 So, I just experienced why it is I am here Somebody started to rip my clothes in Iraq with something like scissors I just “met my reason— I was stripped naked a young foreign jihadist who said It was humiliating, he might kill me if he had the chance but the blindfold helped me miss the nasty look of that is, as long as I am a US soldier my naked body in Muslim lands.

● During the whole procedure, I confessed to him my sins, the only prayer I could remember and asked him to look at his own was the crisis prayer, Ya hayyu! Ya kayyum! The Self-Subsisting, The Self-Existing One! upon Whom all others depend. In Your Mercy do I seek relief!

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

I did not try to justify myself but instead One of the team wrapped a diaper asked God around my private parts and my enemy Only then was I dead sure simply for mercy that the plane was heading to the U.S. What is terrifying Where are we? is that this jihadist genuinely wanted my conversion— In Ramstein, Germany? for me to see the emptiness Yes! Ramstein it is of “American beauty”.

I was in shackles 24 hours a day I asked him why I slept, ate, used the bathroomwhile he came to Iraq to kill completely shackled, hand to feet and then he asked me why I did

53

54

Y. SANGARASIVAM

asked me where I learned to speak German He said vengeance was his right and said that he was going to interrogate me again later I lacked the power , “Wahrheit mack frei, the truth sets you free”

to challenge him When I heard him say that, I knew the truth wouldn’t in the way that I did not challenge myself, set me free, because “Arbeit” because such ideas of “love” and “forgiveness” didn’t set the Jews free and “compassion” are not fully manifest After eight months of total isolation, and incarnate in me, tangibly I saw fellow detainees more or less in my situation and practically to be seen and felt—as if “Bad” detainees like me were shackled 24 hours a day to say, “LOOK at the love I give you” and put in the corridor, where every passing guard or detainee I transgressed no lines of “proper conduct,” but I stepped on them certainly, and without hesitation,

2

I saw

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

being force-fed used a man’s anxieties, weaknesses and fears, and

he was on a forty-five-day hunger strike my particular place of power and dominance, The guards were yelling at him, to assess him according to his word and he was bouncing a dry piece of bread So, why did feel like a complete failure between his hands. The utter contradiction and hopelessness

“What terrorist organization are you a part of?” levied against my forebears in Vietnam— “None,” I replied well-intending American men walking footpaths “You’re not a man, and you don’t deserve respect” each day under orders that came to embody “Kneel, cross your hands, the very barbarism they sought to overthrow and put them behind your neck” —I do not palpably sense or encounter here I obeyed the rules and he put a bag over my head

55

56

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Dad, I don’t know what you conceive war-fighting consists of, but I saw him torturing this other detainee it’s fucking dirty! I just want to tell what I saw I am constantly falsely accusing people of things, with my own eyes using a man’s emotions of vengeance for self-gain. It was an Afghani teenager, I would say 16 or 17

I am an intimate partner in the killing made him stand for about three days, sleepless of men without trial I felt so bad for him I’m not at the end of the road yet on what exactly my conviction, The punishment for talking was my understanding of a call to discipleship means hanging the detainee by the hands But I will take deadly serious Christ’s call with his feet barely touching the ground to Peter that he drop his nets and follow

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

I saw an Afghani detainee I cannot continue as an American warfighter who passed out a couple of times It sickens me day in and day out, while hanging from his hands and it’s treason against my King, The medics “fixed” him and hung him back up against my real Kingdom and home.

●

57

58

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Notes 1. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 12–13. 2. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 13. 3. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 1. 4. Throughout this book, I employ the concepts of patriotism and nationalism as experiences and sentiments that can be understood as distinct and yet capable of coalescing into practices of individual and collective empowerment. Both are cultural constructs that allow people to represent their membership and allegiance to a nation and nation-state/country (Gellner 1983; Gilroy 1987; Kapferer 1988; Crain 1990; Hobsbawm 1990; Eriksen 1993; Balakrishnan 1996). As a discursive and dialogical form of asserting cultural and political autonomy and self-determination, nationalism arose as an organizing principle in the eighteenth and nineteenth century with the early formations of nation-states in Europe (Calhoun 1993; Smith 2010). In the twentieth century, nationalism emerged as a powerful force to mobilize political movements in achieving the goal of national liberation from colonial rule (Fanon 1963; Nandy 1983; Chatterjee 1986, 1993, 1996; Williams 1989; Alonso 1994; Loomba 1998). The development of a national consciousness, one of belonging to and being recognized as a member of a distinct linguistic group rooted in a geographical territory of homeland and inheritance, is one among the many ways that people form and assert their cultural identity (Anderson 1991; O’Leary 1999). Patriotism, like nationalism, invokes and articulates a sense of identity, allegiance, and belonging. Arguably, though, patriotism adheres to citizenship in ways that nationalism may only aspire to through a political movement to create a nation-state. In her study of the paradox of American patriotism, Cecilia O’Leary observes that “for patriots, loyalty to family, friends, church, and place are subsumed under allegiance to one’s country on the assumption that each citizen’s welfare can best be realized through the preservation and expansion of the nation-state” (1999: 7). For those who are stateless, without the privileges of citizenship, of belonging to a country, they may cling to their sense of national belonging and find sustenance in their national consciousness even as they are categorized and dehumanized as refugees, migrants, convicted felons, and the incarcerated. These are identities cast out of the nation-state and thus without a country to define their place in the world. Question: Who and what purpose does it serve to pursue a distinction between patriotism and nationalism? 5. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 1–2. 6. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 4.

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

59

7. I am following the structure of Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto, where she resists making the dancing body, especially the dancing female body, into a spectacle. Here, we resist making the insurgent body, the soldiered body, into a spectacle of terror or patriotic pride. Yvonne Rainer, Work 1961–1973 (Halifax and New York: the press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University Press, 1974), p. 51. 8. Sherene Razack, “From the ‘Clean Snows of Petawawa’: The Violence of Canadian Peacekeepers in Somalia,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no.1 (February 2000): 128–129. 9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right, trans. H. J. Tozer (London: Wordsworth Classics, [1762] 1988). 10. Mercer Cook, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Negro,” The Journal of Negro History 21, no. 3 (July 1936): 296. 11. Mercer Cook, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Negro,” 296, 297. 12. Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 166–210; Also see, Patrick Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in Hobbes, Locke Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); John B. Noone Jr., Rousseau’s Social Contract: A Conceptual Analysis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980). 13. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ In Kant’s Anthropology,” in Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, ed. Katherine M. Faull (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 206. For further discussion on Kant’s theory of race and the development of racist ideologies see: Sally Hatch Gray, “Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color,” The Eighteenth Century 53, no. 4 (December 2012): 393–412; Bernard Boxill, “Kantian Racism and Kantian Teleology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, ed. Naomi Zack (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 44–53; Christian M. Neugebauer, “The Racism of Hegel and Kant,” in Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy, ed. H. Odera Oruka (Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1990), 259–272; Paul Gilroy, “Race Ends Here,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 5 (September 1998): 838–847. 14. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason,” 214. 15. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason,” 215. 16. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason,” 215. 17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau quoted in Mercer Cook, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Negro,” The Journal of Negro History 21, no. 3 (July 1936): 298. 18. Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 116. 19. Antoine-Yves Goguet quoted in Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 105.

60

Y. SANGARASIVAM

20. Samuel G. Morton, Crania Americana (Philadelphia: Dobson, 1839); Joseph-Arthur comte de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Paris: Didot, 1853–1855); John Lubbock, [Lord Avebury], Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages (London: Williams and Norgate, 1865). 21. John Locke quoted in Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 116. 22. The hierarchy of races can be evidenced not only in the preponderance of white writers that dominate the syllabi of courses across the curriculum; it is also evidenced in the structure of the liberal arts core curriculum in colleges and universities that, for example, institute philosophy as a requirement. In this context, white European philosophers are positioned as central to student knowledge acquisition and competency in white European logic and reasoning, which is assumed to be the foundation of a liberal arts curriculum. Non-white, non-European philosophers are categorized under Religious Studies. Implied in the curriculum is the dichotomization of logic and reason that students can learn from European philosophers as opposed to mystical beliefs and rituals that students can encounter in their readings of non-white, non-European writers who may not be recognized or named as philosophers. Attuned by the racist ideologies established by “European Enlightenment” scholars who advanced the idea of intellectually inferior races, what is communicated and implied in the structure of the core curriculum of colleges and universities today is the absence of philosophical thought, scientific reasoning, and intellectual practice in non-white, non-European societies. For further discussions on breaking down the dichotomy between Western and Non-Western or European and non-European epistemological and ontological developments and debates, see for example: Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber, eds. Comparative Philosophy without Borders (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Brian Bruya, “Ethnocentrism and Multiculturalism in Contemporary Philosophy,” Philosophy East and West 67, no. 4 (October 2017): 991–1018; Namita Goswami, “Thinking Problems,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2, Special Issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (2012): 189–199; Jayan Nayar, “Some Thoughts on the ‘(Extra)Ordinary,’” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 42, no.1 (February 2017): 3–25; Sandra Harding, “After Eurocentrism: Challenges for the Philosophy of Science,” Proceeding of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1992, Symposia and Invited Papers 2 (1992): 311–319; Naomi Zack, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

61

23. Jean-Jacques Rousseau quoted in Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 97. 24. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 97. 25. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 97. 26. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 99 (Emphasis added). 27. Suzanne Egan, Extraordinary Rendition and Human Rights: Examining State Accountability and Complicity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 28. Sergio Carrera, Elspeth Guild, João Soares Da Silva, and Anja Wiesbrock, “The Results of Inquiries into the CIA’s Programme of Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Prisons in European States in Light of the New Legal Framework Following the Lisbon Treaty,” Directorate General For Internal Policies, Policy Department C: Citizen’s Rights And Constitutional Affairs, Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, European Parliament, 2012. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/0e0 7596a-9e90-11e5-8781-01aa75ed71a1. 29. David Weissbrodt and Amy Bergquist, “Extraordinary Rendition: A Human Rights Analysis,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 19 (2006): 123–160. 30. Sapna G. Lalmalani, “Extraordinary Rendition Meets the U.S. Citizen: United States’ Responsibility Under the Fourth Amendment,” Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal 5, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 4. Also see: Erin E. Langley, “The Loss of American Values in the Case of Erroneous Irregular Rendition,” Georgetown Law Journal 98, no. 5 (2010): 1441–1479; Victoria Brittain, “Besieged in Britain,” Race & Class 50, no. 3 (2008):1–29. For investigative reports and analyses on extraordinary rendition also see: Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story Of How the War On Terror Turned Into A War On American Ideals (New York: Anchor Books/Random House, 2009); Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture: The Secret History of America’s ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ Program,” The New Yorker, February 7, 2005, https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/14/outsourcing-torture. 31. For analyses of the histories of state-sponsored violence leading to the rise of the LTTE’s political movement and armed struggle for the creation of a separate state of Tamil Eelam, see: A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, The Break-Up of Sri Lanka: The Sinhalese-Tamil Conflict (London: Hurst & Company, 1988); A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, S.J.V. Chelvanayakam and the Crisis of Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism, 1947–1977: A Political Biography (London: Hurst & Company, 1994); A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism: Its Origins and Development in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000); Stanley Tambiah, Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago

62

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Press, 1986) and Buddhism Betrayed: Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jonathan Spencer, ed., Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict (London: Routledge, 1990); E. Valentine Daniels, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Walter Schwartz, The Tamils of Sri Lanka (London: Minority Rights Group, 1998); Yamuna Sangarasivam, “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Cultural Production of Nationalism and Violence: Representing the Integrity of Nation and the Choice for Armed Struggle” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2000), 1–25, 134–159; Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (New York: Berghahn Books, [1988] 2012); Murugar Gunasingam, Tamil Eelam Liberation Struggle: State Terrorism and Ethnic Cleansing 1948–2009 (Sydney: MV Publications, 2012); Peter Schalk, “Ilavar and Lankans, Emerging Identities in a Fragmented Island,” Asian Ethnicity 3, no. 1 (2002): 47–62. See also: Neloufer de Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Armed Conflict (London: Sage Publications, 2007); Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram, K. Sritharan, and Rajani Thiranagama, The Broken Palmyra: The Tamil Crisis in Sri Lanka, an Inside Account (Claremont: The Sri Lanka Studies Institute, 1988). 32. For example, on May 22, 2003 the UN adopted Resolution 1483 by a vote of 14–0 by the 15-member Security Council where Syria was not present or abstained “to legitimize the U.S. led Iraqi occupation and smooth strained relations between the United States and nations, such as France, Germany, and Russia, that opposed the Iraq war. The Bush administration resisted giving the United Nations a substantive role in Iraq, and the resolution spelled out the U.N. role in vague and ambiguous terms. … ‘working intensively’ with U.S. authorities to establish a representative government, ‘coordinating’ humanitarian relief, ‘facilitating’ reconstruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, ‘promoting’ the protection of human rights, and ‘encouraging’ international cooperation to aid the country.” Quoted in Sharon Otterman, “Iraq: The U.N. Role,” Council on Foreign Relations, accessed October 2, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/ iraq-un-role; More than a year after the US invasion of Iraq, then Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) Kofi Annan acknowledged that the US invasion was “… not in conformity with the UN charter. From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal.” Quoted in Ewen MacAskill and Julian Borger, “Iraq war illegal and breached UN charter, says Annan,” The Guardian, accessed October 2, 2020, https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/16/iraq.iraq.

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

63

33. Amitav Acharya, Rethinking Power, Institutions and Ideas in World Politics: Whose IR? (London: Routledge, 2014), 119–121. 34. Amitav Acharya, Rethinking Power, Institutions and Ideas in World Politics: Whose IR? (London: Routledge, 2014), 120. (Emphasis added). 35. Amitav Acharya, Rethinking Power, Institutions and Ideas in World Politics: Whose IR? (London: Routledge, 2014), 120. (Emphasis added). 36. Khalid Rahman, “Contemporary Middle East Global Politics and Regional Issues,” Policy Perspectives 7, no. 1 (January-June 2010): 1–3. 37. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 97. 38. For an analysis of representational strategies and the critical genealogy of North–South relations that normalized the colonial constructions of “First World” and “Third World” nations and nation-states see: Roxanne Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation of North–South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–22. 39. “The Results of Inquiries Into The CIA’s Programme of Extraordinary Rendition And Secret Prisons in European States In Light Of The New Legal Framework Following The Lisbon Treaty,” European Parliament, accessed October 2, 2020, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/ etudes/note/join/2012/462456/IPOL-LIBE_N%282012%29462456_ EN.pdf; “Targeted Killing,” National Security, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), accessed October 2, 2020, https://www.aclu.org/issues/nat ional-security/targeted-killing. 40. See also, Bettina Koch, “U.S.-Drones Strikes: Acts of Terror, Violence, or Coercion?” in State Terror, State Violence: Global Perspectives, ed. Bettina Koch (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Springer VS, 2016), 151–170. 41. Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (New York: Nation Books, 2013), 351–352. (Emphasis added). 42. For a detailed discussion on these methodological challenges see: Yamuna Sangarasivam, “Researcher, Informant, ‘Assassin,’ Me,” Geographical Review 91, no. 1–2 (January-April 2001): 95–104. 43. Hortense J. Spillers, “Writing and States of Emergency,” in The Power of Writing: Dartmouth’66 in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Christiane Donahue and Kelly Blewett (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 64. 44. We can begin with a foundational understanding of ecological as the relational interdependence of organisms between and among each other and the surrounding environment and ecosystem within which they exist. We can then raise our awareness of the ecological to include the relational interdependence of human and nonhuman beings, existing and creating interdependent ecosystems of objects and institutions, nations and nationstates, nationalisms and patriotisms, wars and alliances, as well as other

64

Y. SANGARASIVAM

45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

social, cultural, economic, and political forces that act upon each other with consequence and vitality. I draw on Jane Bennet’s work on vibrant matter and the vitality of things. See, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Quote excerpt from “FAQs: What is Habeas Corpus,” Center for Constitutional Rights, accessed September 13, 2020, https://ccrjustice.org/ home/get-involved/tools-resources/fact-sheets-and-faqs/faqs-what-hab eas-corpus. “Definition of habeas corpus,” Merriam-Webster, accessed January 22, 2021, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/habeas%20corpus; Joseph Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 46. Joseph Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 44–84. Sapna G. Lalmalani, “Extraordinary Rendition Meets the U.S. Citizen: United States’ Responsibility Under the Fourth Amendment,” Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal 5, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 2. See also Rachel Meeropol, ed., America’s Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees and the ‘War on Terror’ (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005); David Rose, Guantánamo: America’s War on Human Rights (London: Faber and Faber, 2004). Derek Gregory, “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception,” Human Geography 88, no. 4 (2006): 415. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Groundings on Rasanblaj with M. Jacqui Alexander,” e-misférica 12, no. 1 and 2 (2015), Hemispheric Institute, ed. Gina Athena Ulysse, accessed September 12, 2020, https://hemisp hericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj.html. For a detailed discussion where I develop this analytic of terrorism as a place of colonial encounters, see my chapter on “Ecologizing ‘Terrorism’: Attending to Emergent Pathways of Ethnographic Fieldwork, Writing and Analysis,” in Critical Methods in Terrorism Studies, ed. Priya Dixit and Jacob L. Stump (London: Routledge, 2016), 59–74. In theorizing and developing a methodology of speculative ethnography, I locate this work and this book project in the interdisciplinary spaces of Critical Terrorism Studies: Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smyth and Jeroen Gunning, eds., Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda (New York: Routledge, 2009); Scott Poynting and David Whyte, eds., Counter-Terrorism and State Political Violence: The ‘War on Terror’ as Terror (New York: Routledge, 2013); Jacob L. Stump and Priya Dixit, eds., Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods (New York: Routledge, 2013); Bob Brecher and Mark Devenney, eds., Discourses and Practices of Terrorism: Interrogating Terror (New York, Routledge, 2015); Priya Dixit and Jacob L. Stump, eds., Critical Methods

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

65

In Terrorism Studies (London: Routledge, 2016); Tina Managhan, Unknowing the ‘War on Terror’: The Pleasures of Risk (New York: Routledge, 2020). As such, this work departs from the conventional attitudes and approaches to the study of terrorism represented in the works of, for example: David E. Long, The Anatomy of Terrorism (New York: Free Press, 1990); Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); David Whittaker, Terrorists and Terrorism in the Contemporary World (London: Routledge, 2004) and Terrorism: Understanding the Global Threat (London: Pearson Education, 2007); John Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2005); Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Paul Wilkinson, Terrorism versus Democracy: The Liberal State Response (London: Routledge, 2006); Martha Crenshaw, Explaining Terrorism: Causes, Processes and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2011); Christopher Deliso, Migration, Terrorism and The Future of A Divided Europe: A Continent Transformed (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2017); John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (London: C. Hurst & Company, [2010] 2018). See also the definition of terrorism provided by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI): “Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as ‘the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives’ (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85). […] Domestic terrorism is the unlawful use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States or Puerto Rico without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives. International terrorism involves violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any state, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or any state. These acts appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping. International terrorist acts occur outside the United States or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to coerce or intimidate, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum.” U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Terrorism 2002–2005,” accessed January 25, 2021, https://www. fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-2002-2005.

66

Y. SANGARASIVAM

54. Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men (New York: New Press, 2017); Matt Taibbi, I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2017); Lizette Alvarez and Cara Buckley, “Zimmerman Is Acquitted in Trayvon Martin Killing,” New York Times, July 13, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/us/george-zimmer man-verdict-trayvon-martin.html See also Wesley Lowery, “They Can’t Kill Us All” (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2016) and his analysis of George Zimmerman’s killing an unarmed seventeen-year-old kid named Trayvon Martin that sparked the #BlackLivesMatter movement. 55. This testimony is an excerpt of my interview with Nundthini, an LTTE woman cadre in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in February 1995. 56. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 85. 57. Eqbal Ahmad, Terrorism: Theirs & Ours (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001). 58. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 13. 59. Nicholas Reimann, “DOJ Reportedly Considers Not charging All Capitol Rioters, Sparking Outrage,” Forbes, January 23, 2021, https://www. forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2021/01/23/doj-reportedly-consid ers-not-charging-all-capitol-rioters-sparking-outrage/?sh=4486985027b9; Sophia Ankel, “Some Capitol Rioters Could Go Free to Stop Local Courthouses Being Swamped, Report Says,” Business Insider MSN News, January 24, 2021, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/somecapitol-rioters-could-go-free-to-stop-local-courthouses-being-swampedreport-says/ar-BB1d3eyb; Dan Barry, Mike McIntire and Matthew Rosenberg, “‘Our President Wants Us Here’: The Mob That Stormed the Capitol,” New York Times, January 9, 2021, https://www.nytimes. com/2021/01/09/us/capitol-rioters.html. 60. Jean Dragon, “The Work of Alterity: Bataille and Lacan,” diacritics 26, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 31. 61. Jennifer Percy, “The Priest of Abu Ghraib: Inside Iraq’s Most Notorious Prison. An Army Interrogator Came Face To Face With A Shocking Truth About the War - And Himself,” Smithsonian, January/February, 2019, 44–49. 62. Jennifer Percy, “The Priest of Abu Ghraib,” 49–51. 63. Jennifer Percy, “The Priest of Abu Ghraib,” 46–51. 64. Jennifer Percy, “The Priest of Abu Ghraib,” 53–55. 65. Jennifer Percy, “The Priest of Abu Ghraib,” 54–55; Jennifer Percy, “The Things They Burned,” The New Republic, November 22, 2016, https:// newrepublic.com/article/138058/things-burned.

2

A SPECULATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF WAR

67

66. Patricia Kime, “New Law Would Require Pentagon to Identify all burn pit Locations,” Military Times, December 12, 2019. https://www.milita rytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/12/12/new-law-would-requirepentagon-to-identify-all-burn-pit-locations/; “Department of Defense Open Burn Pit Report to Congress,” U.S. Department of Defense, April 2019. https://www.acq.osd.mil/eie/Dow nloads/Congress/Open%20Burn%20Pit%20Report-2019.pdf. 67. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, sponsored the Family Member Access to Burn Pit Registry Act and other legislation permitting family members of veterans who are deceased or unable to add their names to the registry when the veteran dies. Patricia Kime, “New law would require Pentagon to identify all burn pit locations,” Military Times, December 12, 2019. https://www.milita rytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/12/12/new-law-would-requirepentagon-to-identify-all-burn-pit-locations/; “Airborne Hazards and Open Burn Pit Registry” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, last updated August 24, 2020, https://veteran.mobile health.va.gov/AHBurnPitRegistry/index.html#page/home. 68. Patricia Kime, “New Law Would Require Pentagon to Identify All Burn Pit Locations,” Military Times, December 12, 2019, https://www.milita rytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/12/12/new-law-would-requirepentagon-to-identify-all-burn-pit-locations/. 69. Jennifer Percy, “The Priest of Abu Ghraib,” 56–57. 70. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary, ed. Larry Siems (New York: Back Bay Books, 2015). Slahi’s book was made into a film: The Mauritanian, Kevin Macdonald (2021; United States: Topic Studios and STX Films), https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761112/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt. 71. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary, xxv. 72. “Unique Job Section: Security Contractor Jobs,” Job Monkey: The Coolest Jobs on Earth, accessed December 26, 2020, https://www.job monkey.com/uniquejobs/security-mercenary/. 73. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary, xi–xii. 74. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary, ed. Larry Siems (New York: Back Bay Books, 2015). 75. Mohamedou Ould Salahi v. Barack H. Obama, et al., Civil Action No. 05-CV-0569 (United States District Court for the District of Columbia. 2010). https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/2010-4-9-Slahi-Order.pdf. 76. “Slahi V. Obama—Habeas Challenge To Guantánamo Detention,” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), accessed January 21, 2021, https://www.aclu.org/cases/slahi-v-obama-habeas-challenge-gua ntanamo-detention. 77. Hina Shamsi, “Finally Free: ‘Guantánamo Diary’ Author Released After 14 Years Without Charge,” ACLU National Security Project (blog),

68

Y. SANGARASIVAM

78.

79.

80.

81.

82.

83.

October 17, 2016. https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/detent ion/finally-free-guantanamo-diary-author-released-after-14-years; “Slahi V. Obama - Habeas Challenge To Guantanamo Detention,” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), accessed January 21, 2021, https://www. aclu.org/cases/slahi-v-obama-habeas-challenge-guantanamo-detention Hina Shamsi, “Finally Free: ‘Guantánamo Diary’ Author Released After 14 Years Without Charge,” ACLU National Security Project (blog), October 17, 2016. https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/detent ion/finally-free-guantanamo-diary-author-released-after-14-years. “Guantanamo’s Children: The Wikileaked Testimonies,” University of California-Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, accessed December 26, 2020, http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/reports/ guantanamos-children-the-wikileaked-testimonies/guantanamos-childrenthe-wikileaked-testimonies; Joseph Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 67. “Guantánamo By The Numbers,” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), accessed January 21, 2021, https://www.aclu.org/issues/nat ional-security/detention/guantanamo-numbers. “The Guantánamo Docket,” The New York Times, accessed January 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/guantanamo/ detainees/current. See an image of the entry to Damp Delta with the sign with the phrase “Honor Bound To Defend Freedom”: Jeannette L. Nolen, Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. “Guantánamo Bay detention camp: United States detention facility, Cuba,” accessed December 27, 2020, https://www.britan nica.com/topic/Guantanamo-Bay-detention-camp. I am following Layli Long Soldier’s poetic form and practice she employs in her poem “Resolution (6)”: Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS: Poems (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017), 94–96. The text at left is from the testimony of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary (New York: Back Bay Books, 2015), 4, 6, 14–16, 18–21; the text at right is from the testimony of Joshua Casteel, Letters from Abu Ghraib, ed. Joseph Clair and Kristi Casteel (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2017), 46–47, 68. The poem begins with the testimony of Joshua Casteel.

CHAPTER 3

Another Brick in the Wall: The Cultural Value of Terrorism

Hey you! Out there in the cold getting lonely, getting old can you feel me? Hey you! Standing in the aisles With itchy feet and fading smile can you feel me? Hey you! Don’t help them to bury the light.

“Another Brick in the Wall,” Pink Floyd, The Wall, Columbia Music, 1979; “Another Brick in the Wall,” Pink Floyd, published on November 6, 2010, YouTube video, 03:49, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IpYOF4Hi6Q. In the spirit of Pink Floyd’s departure from pop culture’s rules and conventions of the 1970s, I draw on this band’s philosophical insights and politics of performativity to inform this speculative ethnography of nationalism, terrorism, and patriotism. This chapter introduces the significance of Pink Floyd’s politically engaged music and poetics that transcends space and time to find its way into making a connection between our lives and the life of Shaker Aamer, a person who was brutalized and called a “terrorist.” Each of the remaining chapters of the book is titled after a Pink Floyd song. Please step into the soundscapes of Pink Floyd’s music and lyrics as you approach and journey through each chapter in this speculative ethnography of war.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. Sangarasivam, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82665-9_3

69

70

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Don’t give in without a fight. —Pink Floyd, The Wall

Play the Pink Floyd song. You will begin to understand how I feel. I can’t listen to it here, but I can sing my own version. —Shaker Aamer, Guantánamo Bay

In December 2001, members of the Afghan Northern Alliance, who collaborated with the United States to wage war against the Taliban, captured Shaker Aamer in Afghanistan. They sold him for a bounty to US military forces. You will recall that the going rate at the time was a bounty of $5,000 for capturing and handing over a suspected terrorist to US forces.1 In fact, the US State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security administers the “Rewards for Justice” program as a strategic and tactical tool for counterterrorism operations. Since its establishment in 1984, the State Department reports that it has “paid in excess of $150 million to more than 100 people who provided information that put terrorists behind bars or prevented acts of international terrorism worldwide.”2 According to a report by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post, the State Department “operates Websites advertising the program in 25 languages. Which suspects are included on the most-wanted list, as well as the size of their bounties, are decided by a panel of counterterrorism officials from several agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, as well as the Pentagon and the White House. … The largest single reward, $30 million, went to an informant who enabled the U.S. military to find and kill ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, in 2003.”3 After two months of interrogation and torture at the US military base in Bagram, Shaker Aamer was delivered to a CIA black site in Kandahar before he was finally rendered to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.4 He was never charged with any crimes, terrorism or otherwise. He was among the thousands of people who were delivered through the system of extraordinary rendition that was created and managed by the CIA since 2001.5 Captured and tortured by US soldiers, held in solitary confinement, Shaker Aamer called out to us. To join him in solidarity. To join him in the sustained protest and struggle to bring to light the multiple forms of torture and injustice that is. Redacted. Erased. Kept confidential.

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

71

Ensuring secrecy in the US internment camp at Guantánamo Bay. In a letter to his attorney Clive Stafford Smith, who founded the British human rights organization Reprieve, Aamer reminds us of a need to feel a sense of solidarity: to feel the determination of resistance and of not giving in to the violence of fear and hatred; to feel the obligation of carrying the light of freedom and democracy. Hey You! Aamer calls out. To anyone. Who is willing to listen. Through the words of Pink Floyd’s song. Listen.6 Now. Before you read any further. Listen to Pink Floyd’s iconic album, The Wall —a political oratorio and exposition of our collective human condition that leads us. From the alienation of compliance demanded by nationalism. To the disillusionments of war demanded by patriotism. Will you still hold on. To your idea of a “terrorist.” Can you. Find refuge. In them. Finding refuge in Pink Floyd? For it is here, in The Wall , that Shaker Aamer excavates a kind of refuge to sustain his humanity, his dignity, his intelligence, and his commitment to freedom from the tyranny of US imperialism and colonial domination that defined him as a terrorist: to be beaten and chained in unbearable conditions; to be starved and force-fed; to be tortured and locked down in solitary confinement. It is in the music of Pink Floyd that Aamer finds solidarity with us as people whose identities are inexorably linked and shaped by the transnational exigencies of making home in simultaneous places of war. That’s neoliberalism’s new normal: making war as a way of making home, making terrorism as a way of making nationalism, making migrants as a way of making patriots. In agreeing to comply with this normalization of war, our shared experiences of dispossession and desire for an ever-elusive sense of peace and belonging become necessary cultural artifacts of collateral damage. ● Shaker Aamer had traveled to Afghanistan with his wife and children to work on humanitarian projects. Like the many Christian charities that serve disadvantaged communities across the globe, Shaker and his wife sought to contribute to the efforts of Muslim charities that serve disadvantaged people in communities that experienced the long-term impact of political violence and war. Shaped by their faith in the teachings of Islam to serve communities in need, they went to Kabul prior to 9/11 to help build schools for girls and build wells that provided local communities with clean water. “The Americans say, however, that he was there as an enemy fighter and [was] close to terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden.”

72

Y. SANGARASIVAM

In an article published in the popular British media outlet, The Daily Mail, Guy Adams also reported that like countless others whose abduction was authorized by the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, “the US decided that he was a dangerous terrorist.”7 As a survivor of torture and injustice in the US sponsored global war on terror, Shaker Aamer’s lived experiences illustrate the cultural value of terrorism. This is a cultural value of acceptance and compliance that inexorably links us and them in an ecology of war: the faithful acceptance of violence as a foundation for the compliant demands of nationalism and patriotism. After his abduction by Afghan bounty hunters, he was incarcerated and tortured for fourteen years in Guantánamo Bay though without any evidence or any charges of terrorism held against him. He was cleared for release from the internment camp at Guantánamo in 2007 during the administration of President Bush, and again in 2009 by a task force comprised of six US governmental and military agencies, including the CIA and FBI, that reviewed his case under the administration of President Obama.8 As a result of growing international attention brought to Aamer’s story by Reprieve, Amnesty International, and other human rights organizations coupled with the insistence of then Prime Minister David Cameron and British members of parliament, the Obama administration conceded to the obligations of respecting fundamental human rights ensured by constitutional law and international treaties.9 Shaker Aamer was finally released and repatriated to the United Kingdom on October 30, 2015 after years of delay by the U.S. Department of Defense, which obstructed his release because they considered him “a national security threat and had proposed sending Aamer back to Saudi Arabia where he would have been forced to enter a rehabilitation center for jihadists”.10 ● Shaker Aamer was born in Saudi Arabia. At the age of seventeen, he came to the United States in 1985 to advance his education in Georgia and Maryland, after which he worked as a translator for the United States Army during the Gulf War between 1990 and 1991.11 He then moved to England where he became a permanent resident in 1996 and married his wife, Zinnira, a citizen of the United Kingdom. They have four children, the youngest of whom was born on February 14, 2002. The day that Shaker’s hands and feet were shackled to his waist. The day that he

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

73

was rendered to indefinite incarceration and torture at the US internment camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A U.S. Department of Defense Memorandum of the Joint Task Force (dated November 1, 2007) fabricated a profile of him as a “reported recruiter, financier, and facilitator with a history of participating in jihadist combat,” and falsely pegged him as “a close associate of Usama Bin Laden.”12 In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Aamer described what he experienced as one of the worst forms of torture. In an effort to extract false testimonies and to justify their labeling of him as a terrorist, American interrogators told Aamer that they had captured his wife and his fiveyear-old daughter. Before he was rendered to Guantánamo, one of the interrogators in Afghanistan told him, “if you don’t start talking, we will rape your daughter and you will hear her crying: ‘Daddy, Daddy’.” That was completely inhumane. It was worse than the beating as well, worse than everything, just thinking of my daughter, you know, and I just sat there, you know, silent completely, Aamer said.13

After fourteen years of incarceration without charges and without trial, a team of human rights attorneys, led by Clive Stafford Smith, secured Shaker Aamer’s release and safe passage back home to the United Kingdom to be reunited with his family. That Memorandum of the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Task Force was subsequently discredited in the deliberations which proved Aamer’s innocence. Stafford Smith founded Reprieve, a London-based human rights organization committed to providing legal representation and support for people who are targeted by state-sponsored violence. As a charitable organization also serving in a consultative role with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, they describe their work in this statement about who they are: “Reprieve provides free legal and investigative support to individuals who have been subjected to state-sponsored human rights abuses. Our clients belong to some of the most vulnerable populations in the world, as it is in their cases that human rights are most swiftly jettisoned and the rule of law is cast aside. In particular, we protect the rights of those facing the death penalty and deliver justice to victims of arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial execution.”14 As a human rights lawyer, Stafford Smith and his team of attorneys are especially committed to emancipating people

74

Y. SANGARASIVAM

who have been wrongly accused of terrorism and who were then consequently abducted, tortured, and imprisoned in the US naval station at Guantánamo Bay. Though not commonly referred to as an internment or concentration camp, the US military base in Guantánamo Bay operates a prison camp that features similar policies and practices. As a part of the US-sponsored global war on terror, people from all over the world were rounded up, branded as terrorists, and transported to Guantánamo to be interrogated, tortured, and indefinitely imprisoned. Through the work of human rights lawyers at non-governmental organizations such as Reprieve, the story of Guantánamo prisoners like Shaker Aamer were revealed to the public; subsequently, a vast network of political activists joined in solidarity to bring to light the realities of extraordinary rendition, torture, and extrajudicial imprisonment and killings practiced by the U.S. government, its allies, and its military forces. Clive Stafford Smith had received a letter from Shaker Aamer when he was indefinitely detained and tortured at Guantánamo. The letter begins with Aamer quoting the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s song, Hey You! Stafford Smith forwarded Aamer’s letter to Roger Waters, the principal lyricist/poet and songwriter for Pink Floyd, who was deeply moved by Shaker Aamer’s story. Waters consequently joined the political movement to bring an end to the injustices of extrajudicial capture of people who have disappeared into the system of extraordinary rendition, torture, and indefinite incarceration at Guantánamo Bay. Waters read Shaker Aamer’s letter out loud in a short video documentary to inform and politically mobilize support for the release of Aamer and all detainees held illegally without evidence and charge of any crime at the prison camp in Guantánamo.15 Listen. And follow the words Shaker Aamer wrote in his letter to us all: Hey you! Out there in the cold getting lonely, getting old can you feel me? … Hey you! Don’t help them to bury the light. Don’t give in without a fight.

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

75

Play the Pink Floyd song. You will begin to understand how I feel. I can’t listen to it here, but I can sing my own version. … I had to stop writing to relax my hands for a bit. Those three-inch plastic flexi-pens are useless and impossible to hold. What I wouldn’t give for a proper pen, but you’ll understand why we can’t have them. After all, the US military only outnumbered the detainees 10 to 1 and they only have a couple of M-16 assault rifles each as opposed to our flexi-pens. So you can see how they’re paranoid that I’m about to take over the base and maybe start swimming home to London. … I just came back from the photo-taking. They FCE’d Emad Hassan (ISN 680) to make him have his photo taken. I went with them without the FCE (forcible cell extraction), though I did not plan to cooperate when I got there. They were surprised. I told them that I had just finished reading a book on Gandhi. He reminded me that I should carry on my peaceful protest and keep up the civil disobedience, just as he did with the British. “First they ignore you,” Gandhi said, “then they laugh at you, then they fight you… then you win.” … In Guantánamo they fight you every time, no matter how silly. There are few people who understand Gandhi here. I found someone today who finally understood it. The guard who had the camera. He told me it was a good book. He’d read it. … So the protest continues. I am content to carry on, though it is always joyous to find that there are others who support us. This is very important. I want to translate the sermon by Reverend Nicholas Mercer and send it to many Internet sites especially Muslim ones. I want the Muslim world to know that a Christian Reverend, who was previously an officer in the British military, has been fasting in support of Muslims in Guantánamo and preaching about it in the pulpit of his church. Muslims must see that our struggle is universal. It is not just about Muslims. It is about justice. Thank him for the light that he brought to this dark place. Tell him that while I cannot avoid getting old, his support means I don’t feel quite so lonely. And tell him, will none of us give up without a fight. Your friend, if you’re willing to have me. Shaker Aamer ISN 239 Guantánamo BayGuantánamo Bay, Cuba

● In the midst of a struggle to reclaim his humanity, there is a necessary acceptance in standing witness to how he is defined as a terrorist; hence

76

Y. SANGARASIVAM

appointed an identity whose consequent dehumanization and objectification is made official with the “Internment Serial Number” ISN 239 as it becomes a part of his signature in communicating with the outside world.16 In his letter, Shaker Aamer calls for solidarity by asking us to understand the connections he makes between Pink Floyd’s song, Hey You, and the everyday lived consequences of our sentiments of nationalism and patriotic pride that allow us to carry on. Carry on. While the global war on terror continues. Carry on. Disconnected to the people we call “terrorists.” Carry on. Disconnected to the lives of people tortured. Carry on. Disconnected to families and loved ones of those who are indefinitely imprisoned. Carry on. Disconnected to people we have no obligation toward. Is this what nationalism and patriotic pride tell us? Is it surprising to you that Shaker Aamer identifies with the politics and philosophies of Pink Floyd and with the spiritual teachings of Islam? It shouldn’t be. For him, home is London, love of family, Islam, Pink Floyd, and the struggle for freedom, solidarity, and justice. Like many Pink Floyd fans, he finds refuge in an understanding of how our respective cultural and political histories are tied to the prophetic and revolutionary insights about citizenship and belonging. Insights that are revealed in the compositional form and poetic content of Pink Floyd’s music. Each song track of The Wall resonates in the background and the foreground of our current reality and the stories we tell. About the need for wars. Wars that sustain neoliberal regimes. Regimes that thrive on. Discipline. Punishment. Submission. Then finally, unraveling to an individual and collective awakening that propels people toward resistance and liberation. Aamer’s letter tells his story by speaking to us directly in this place called terrorism: Hey you! Can you feel the perseverance of civil disobedience? Can you feel the everyday struggle for solidarity in the search of justice? Hey you! Can you smell the banality of everyday life in the torture chambers of Guantánamo Bay or Afghanistan and can you hear the souls of American soldiers as they imagine raping a five-year old Muslim girl? Can you hear satire finding its way into animating flexi-pens to become as equally powerful as M-17 assault rifles in the global war on terror? Hey you! Can you see the ties between British and American colonial desires to humiliate and dehumanize people they deemed as disposable? Can you find your place in Gandhi’s struggle for liberation with Aamer’s own struggle for freedom? Shaker Aamer’s story exemplifies how people with seemingly irreconcilable cultural differences do, in fact, share a cultural heritage, like Pink

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

77

Floyd; thereby disturbing the stereotypes prescribed by hegemonic, white supremacist nation-states that shape conventional attitudes and assumptions about “Islamists,” “jihadists,” and “terrorists.” These experiences of shared cultural heritage created by musicians, poets, and philosophers, for example, illuminate the beautiful and powerful pathways that can guide us out of a place of fear and alienation and into a place where we can recognize and honor our desire for life and liberty. Where we can recognize. The kind of shared cultural heritage we find in the music of Pink Floyd and other artists. Allowing us to know. We are ecologically connected. And reliant upon the respect for life and liberty of people who live and thrive beyond the confines of our national borders and our sense of patriotic pride. ● In his written statement published in the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, Roger Waters recounted how he came to know about Shaker Aamer’s story: I have a deep personal involvement in the campaign to release Mr. Aamer, ever since his case was brought to my attention by the renowned defence advocate Clive Stafford Smith. With a spirit of selfless determination, Clive runs the organisation Reprieve, which campaigns for the rights, among many others, of British prisoners held overseas. Appalled by Mr. Aamer’s plight, Clive had contacted him and lent him his support. That is how I became involved. In one letter to Clive from Guantanamo, Mr. Aamer began with the opening lyrics of one of my songs, Hey You, from the 1979 Pink Floyd album The Wall. Mr. Aamer said the lyrics captured his experience in Guantanamo.17

In concluding his short video documentary where he read Shaker Aamer’s letter out loud, Waters responded, with a direct message to him: So Shaker, I feel for you, and I send you my love, and good luck to you and all the others who have been so harshly and insanely treated. Do not give up without a fight as you say. I know you won’t because I can tell from reading this letter that you’re not the giving in without a fight type. So, love and respect.18

●

78

Y. SANGARASIVAM

War teaches us that we belong to each other. This sense and sensibility of belonging to each other transcends that of belonging to nation and country as nationals and citizens. After all, these designations can be erased and forgotten in time as national borders form and fade in the wake of colonial occupations, reorderings, and remappings of once sovereign spaces. The belonging that war produces, however, is one that is infinitely ecological: my will to kill and die for citizenship and national belonging that my nation bestows upon me, resonates in proportion with, your will to kill and die for citizenship and national belonging that your nation bestows upon you. Our desire for national belonging and citizenship invites us into a process of understanding terrorism as a place that nurtures a perfect medium for “transforming the ubiquity of violence into the viewer’s personal, revelatory shock” of nationalism’s and patriotism’s call to kill and be killed.19 This call to a global war on terror is at once familiar and strange. So familiar that we don’t really know when it began and that it existed long before and continues long after September 11, 2001. For the moment, we speak of only this war as the one that really counts. We’ll selectively forget those other wars that were waged to set the stage for this global war on terror. Did this war begin on August 2, 1990 when President Saddam Hussein ordered his troops to invade Kuwait in the wake of his alliance with the United States in waging war with Iran and in the wake of intractable economic disputes over “Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates supplying over their OPEC quotas” during the collapse of oil prices in the 1980s, and because “Kuwait was slant drilling into [the Rumaila] oil fields in southern Iraq”?20 Or did this war begin on August 7, 1990 when President George H.W. Bush invoked his executive powers to commence with Operation Desert Shield? Or did this war begin on January 16, 1991 with Operation Desert Storm following the January 15th United Nations authorization for the use of force (a euphemism for war) against Iraq?21 Or did this war begin with President Ronald Reagan’s Administration that undermined Congress by covertly selling weapons to Iran and diverting millions of dollars to fund the Contras in Nicaragua while simultaneously facilitating the intensification of Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons program to support its war with Iran from 1980 to 1988?22 Or did this war begin on November 4, 1979 when the United States Embassy was seized and more than 50 Americans were detained as hostages for 444 days as a part of the Iranian Revolution against the regime of the Shah of Iran?23 Or did this war begin

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

79

on August 19, 1953 when the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeq, and his government were overthrown by the military coup that was orchestrated and spearheaded by the United States and the United Kingdom with their classified strategic plan titled “Campaign to Install Pro-Western Government In Iran”—an episode of US foreign policy that targeted the removal of Prime Minister Mossadeq and the reversal of his government’s nationalization of the British AngloIranian Oil Company (later to be known as BP-British Petroleum), and “replace it with a pro-Western government under the Shah’s leadership with Zahedi as its Prime Minister”?24 As we keep receding back in time, traveling through the historical archives of this global war on terror now, we are estranged from the realities of the past as we are taught to be increasingly disconnected with our own histories of political and military engagement and intervention in Iraq, Iran, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, and the list of wars and colonial interventions goes on. The choice and/or predicament of not knowing, of not having a clue about our country’s and their country’s histories, becomes a way of knowing and a way of being that is at once familiar and strange. This logic of fashioning a reality out of not knowing, of fashioning a reality out of cluelessness, is essential to the core curriculum of nationalism and emerges as an expression of patriotic pride. ●

The Cultural Value of Terrorism Though terrorism has been articulated as a form of political violence since the French Revolution, it has taken on a new significance and new purpose in clearly identifying political movements in opposition to the global reach of neoliberal regimes forwarded by the United States and its allies.25 Terrorism, in other words, creates a cultural value around the delineation of us versus them. It is a cultural value that supports a hidden neoliberal curriculum, which secures its power by alienating us from the everyday realities and histories of war we export to them in the name of national security: those who are outside of our nation and our national borders. After the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., those of us who value freedom and democracy, who value human rights, who value plural

80

Y. SANGARASIVAM

societies that celebrate the “interfaith dialogue” and synchronicities of multiple religious traditions as a way of life, who allegedly value diversity, equity and inclusion, are the “us” who “we” differentiate from them: those who allegedly don’t. Consequently, terrorism becomes a cultural value in fueling the fervor of nationalism and patriotic pride that justifies the need for the indefinite suspension of fundamental human rights, and the need for extreme violence—including torture, indefinite incarcerations, and extrajudicial killings—that are employed as tactics and strategies in the dialogical practice of suicidal warfare by both governmental regimes of nation-states and movements in resistance to these regimes. The principal difference being, a monopoly on legitimate violence that remains only within the purview of nation-states. ● Goodbye blue sky Goodbye blue sky Goodbye. —Pink Floyd, The Wall

We are familiar with the memories of watching the impossible: the plane, as if in slow motion, penetrated the first tower of the World Trade Center, and then it happened again, with another plane; as if to reassure us that what we saw in the first instance before was not a mirage. We are familiar with the memories. The shock and the awe of despair in watching people jump out of windows as a better choice of meeting death than being burned alive with the fire that collapsed the Twin Towers. On September 11th of each year, we are called together as a national community to never forget what happened here. We are taught to be familiar with this history, to hold on to this memory of all that was lost as we commemorate the death and destruction of the lives and livelihoods that collapsed when those planes penetrated the twin towers of the World Trade Center. This history is included as essential to the national curriculum. We are familiar with the reality of our soldiers being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, but we are estranged from the reality of our soldiers being deployed to the covert wars that sustain the presence of Special Operations Forces in seventy-five countries including Yemen, Somalia, Djibouti, Pakistan, Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, and the Philippines.26 We are familiar

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

81

with patriotism’s pride, which calls us to attend the banal pep rallies of the everyday. The bumper stickers proclaiming, “support our troops.” The spontaneous emotional pull proclaiming, “thank you for your service.” Simultaneously, we are estranged from the everyday realities soldiers experience both over there, in the theaters of war. And over here, at home, upon their return. Traumatic brain injuries. Post-traumatic-stress disorders (PTSD). Deportations. Suicides. Soldiers become familiar strangers among us.27 Did-Did-Did-Did you see the frightened ones? Did-Did-Did-Did you hear the falling bombs? 28

War reveals itself as a familiar sport of killing over and over again, yet we still find it shocking and strange that our team, our people, our soldiers will and are getting killed. The revelation that rooting for our team, our nation, and our people (as we do for sports teams representing our school, our university, our city, our country), not only involves crushing and killing the opposing team in a final act of domination—as in that final touchdown, that final goal—that undeniably determines the winner in an overtime game. Rooting for our team, our nation, our soldiers, also involves killing our own people. And so when our people are killed, when our homes, our restaurants, our concert halls, our movie theaters, our shopping malls, our temples, our sports arenas, our schools, our everyday lives are shattered by the suicidal spray of bullets and the explosion of bombs, terrorism reveals to us a place where we can find that perfect medium for transforming this ubiquity of violence into our personal, revelatory shock. To remind us: War. Theirs and ours. Is a sport of killing. Where winning demands death. In this age of neoliberalism and globalization, the sport of killing is distilled into easily chewable, consumable binary constructs of terrorism and counterterrorism. Their killing is barbaric. Our killing is civilized. Their killing is in service of fulfilling their barbaric desires, their pathological and savage character, their irrational hatred of us, and their hatred of our freedom and our democracy. Our killing is in service of protecting freedom and democracy for the world.29 Four days after the 9/11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and parts of the Pentagon, President George W. Bush retreated to Camp David in Maryland with Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft to

82

Y. SANGARASIVAM

formalize and mobilize their global war on terror. At a press conference with reporters, President Bush said: I would think the American people need to be - go about their business on Monday, but with a heightened sense of awareness that a group of barbarians have declared war on the American people. … Make no mistake about it: underneath our tears is the strong determination of America to win this war. And we will win. … Listen, this is a great nation; we’re a kind people. None of us could have envisioned the barbaric acts of these terrorists. But they have stirred up the might of the American people, and we’re going to get them, no matter what it takes. … The United States will do what it takes to win this war. And I ask patience of the American people. There is no question in my mind we’ll have the resolve - I witnessed it yesterday on the construction site. Behind the sadness and the exhaustion, there is a desire by the American people to not seek only revenge, but to win a war against barbaric behavior, people that hate freedom and hate what we stand for. And this is an administration that is going to dedicate ourselves to winning that war.30

President Bush made clear the distinction between the American people and the barbaric people who are terrorists. He also made clear the cultural values that mark the character of the American people. What distinguishes us from them? Cultural values. Distilled. By the global war on terror.The strong determination of America to win this war. This is a great nation. We’re a kind people. The might of the American people. The United States will do what it takes to win this war. We’ll have the resolve. A desire by the American people to not seek only revenge, but to win a war against barbaric behavior, people that hate freedom and hate what we stand for.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush clarified what Americans stand for. He announced how his administration would “use this moment of opportunity” to implement “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” which he authorized on September 17, 2002: The U.S. national security strategy will be based on a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests. The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer but better.31

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

83

In pursuit of our goals, our first imperative is to clarify what we stand for: the United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere.32 Finally, the United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets , and free trade to every corner of the world.33

What distinguishes us from them. Cultural values. Distilled. By the National Security Strategy of the United States of America. We stand for. Our national security. To defend liberty and justice. Our Manifest Destiny to intervene, for all people everywhere. To make the world. To invade, based on a distinctly American internationalism. To use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. To bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets , and free trade to every corner of the world by expanding our global markets. To extract human capital and natural resources from them, their lands, and their countries.34 After invading Iraq, the United States created the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Thereby, establishing the authority to rule Iraq and its people. President George W. Bush appointed Lewis Paul Bremer as the director of the CPA. He was the former assistant to Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, under Richard Nixon’s administration, and later became the ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism under Ronald Reagan’s administration. Upon becoming the director of the CPA and thus the de facto leader of the country, Bremer announced that “Iraq is open for business.” Subsequently, within months of the invasion in 2003, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz predicted that the United States could look forward to “$50-100 billion in oil revenues in the first two to three years after Saddam’s fall” and affirmed that the future of Iraq would be defined by “a self-financing (and market-regulated) transformation, thus freeing US strategists to advance wider goals in the region.”35 By June of 2003, Bremer announced a “wholesale reallocation of resources and people from state control to private enterprise”; including “the privatization of over 120 state-owned enterprises, along with tax reforms and removal of all restrictions on foreign investment through the suspension of all customs duties and tariffs.”36 Bremer and Wolfowitz were implementing the US national security strategy by mobilizing the neoliberal curriculum and governing rationality for both the invasion and occupation of Iraq. They were also setting the stage for the indefinite continuation of the global war on terror,

84

Y. SANGARASIVAM

which would provide further opportunities for the United States and its allies to intervene and bring development, free markets , and free trade to every corner of the world. Wendy Brown provides a framework for further understanding neoliberalism as a principal driving force behind the motivations and goals of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. In her book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, she analyses how neoliberalization reconfigures democracy as a governing rationality that involves the “economization of heretofore noneconomic spheres” and thereby normalizes the attribution of “a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life.” Keeping this normalizing process in mind, we can observe the economization of noneconomic spheres like nationalism and patriotism within the curriculum of neoliberal rationality: a normative order of reason developed over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized. In neoliberal reason and in domains governed by it, we are only and everywhere homo oeconomicus.37

We are in the wake of neoliberalism’s global war on terror. Where the cultural values of white supremacy intersect with the desire to wage and win wars to define freedom. Free markets , and free trade to every corner of the world. Where “neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities—even where money is not at issue— and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors.”38 We are in the wake of a soldier’s first kill that is framed and measured in economic terms and metrics. Lance Corporal Jon Michael Turner of the United States Marine Corps served in Iraq and Haiti. He describes his first kill as a soldier. He was twenty years old. On April 18, 2006, I had my first confirmed kill. He was an innocent man. I don’t know his name. I call him ‘the Fat Man.” During the incident, he walked back to his house and I shot him in front of his friend and father. The first round didn’t kill him after I’d hit him in his neck. Afterwards he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. I looked at my friend I was on post with, and I said, ‘Well, I can’t let that happen.’ I took another

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

85

shot and took him out. The rest of his family carried him away. It took seven Iraqis to carry his body. We were all congratulated after we had our first kills, and that happened to have been mine. My company commander personally congratulated me. This is the same individual who stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death would get a four-day pass when we returned from Iraq.39

We are in the method. We are following the neoliberal curriculum and governing rationality of bringing the cultural values of freedom and democracy to every corner of the world. We are following Lance Corporal Jon Michael Turner as his first kill is economized. We have journeyed to that place called terrorism. Our first kill by stabbing them—by stabbing an Iraqi father, mother, sister, brother or friend to death—is worth a four-day pass when we return home. We are in the wake of the economization of killing, which translates and transforms democratic political principles of liberty and justice, along with citizenship and sovereignty into the metrics of competitive economic conduct and militarized capital gains and campaigns. Where the winner in the wake of killing emerged from the global war on terror to declare: Iraq, is open for business. This is the twenty-first-century world order defined by the curriculum of neoliberalism. We are in the wake of the reality that the goalposts have been moved in this game of global war on terror that has gone into overtime. We are socialized by our leaders to believe that the United States, Europe and its allies hold the legitimate political authority to set the goalposts of war overtly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and covertly across the globe—that is, wherever we deploy our troops, our CIA black-sites, our overt and covert missions, and our drones. This all-encompassing global war is a part of our history and reality that we are also socialized to be both familiar with and estranged from. We are familiar with what drone strikes are as weapons and tactics used in the global war on terror, but we are estranged from the grieving for the loss of lives that results from these drone strikes in sovereign territories beyond our national borders. For example, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that there were 164 US drone and air strikes in Afghanistan in just the year 2015, killing 685–1002 people, injuring 111–116 people. In October 2015 alone, 80 drone and air strikes in Afghanistan killed approximately 186–270 people. Tallying the lowest estimates of the number of people killed and injured

86

Y. SANGARASIVAM

by covert CIA missions and US military drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports 3,678 people killed and 1,363 people injured in these countries since 2002.40 Similarly, we are socialized to be both familiar with and estranged from the consequences of setting the goalposts of war overtly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and covertly across the globe. The London Telegraph confirmed that “there were seven coordinated terror attacks in Paris carried out by militants, killing at least 129 people” and leaving 352 people injured on the night of Friday, the 13th November 2015.41 While reporting on the subsequent raid to hunt down those connected with the Islamic State’s attack in Paris, The Guardian reported that the “news that one of the terrorists cornered in St-Denis was a woman who apparently blew herself up as police closed in will shock.”42 Framed as shocking and strange is the reality that the Islamic State deployed their soldiers, particularly women, as suicide bombers on their mission to bring the war—which is being waged in Syria and Iraq—to France. They moved the goalpost in the game of our global war on terror. They moved the wars we wage in their homelands to ours. We deploy drones. They deploy suicide bombers. In response to the Paris attacks, French President François Hollande declared: “It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria - ISIS], against France.”43 After the Islamic State released a statement acknowledging their attacks, President Hollande responded: “So France will be merciless in its response to the Islamic State militants” and vowed to “use all means within the law… on every battleground here and abroad together with our allies.”44 President Hollande’s vows echoed the vows that President Bush made at the press conference at Camp David in September of 2001: “We’re at war. There has been an act of war declared upon America by terrorists, and we will respond accordingly. … we will smoke them out of their holes; we will get them running and we’ll bring them to justice. We will not only deal with those who dare attack America, we will deal with those who harbor them and feed them and house them.”45 It took them. Moving the goalposts from Iraq and Syria to the United States and France. To make the phenomenon of war present. In the consciousness of the West. As did the attacks of the World Trade Centers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. In other words. By announcing to the world that “there has been an act of war declared upon

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

87

America by terrorists,” President Bush maintained a narrative of innocence that supports the mythology of white nation-states like the United States and its North American and European allies, as Sherene Razack has argued.46 President Hollande followed the example set by President Bush by framing ISIS as coming out of nowhere with no reason to declare war on France.47 Robert L. Ivie has analyzed how the United States relies on the binary constructs of terrorism and counterterrorism to mirror the constructs of the barbaric and the civilized, “in order to rationalise world hegemony as a defence of civilization. America [and its allies] would expel the barbarian from the garden of democracy to cultivate perpetual peace. By this reckoning the savage in democracy’s empire was marked with the sign of irrationality, represented as coercive, and configured for aggression. Each of these discursive dimensions was a contrasting feature in an overall image of American civility that featured a quintessentially rational, freedom-loving and reluctant defender of the peace. … The enemy’s aggression was deliberate, wilful and unprovoked; America’s response was defensive, involuntary, and reluctant but necessary.”48 Framing the global war on terror in this manner, we are to believe that the United States and France did not declare war on Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria or any of the countries where the United States and its allies have sustained both overt and covert military operations coupled with economic sanctions, which are also not to be perceived as a form of warfare. When the “we” and the “us” of North America and western Europe are socialized and educated to be unaware. To be unconscious of our histories of military interventions and invasions of sovereign nations. Of sovereign non-white countries, belonging to non-white peoples. And when the “them” and the “they” retaliate and speak back with asymmetric warfare. “We” call it. Terrorism. Joining the US coalition in the global war on terror, “France began airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq in September of 2014.”49 While reports of these airstrikes and of increased French participation in military campaigns in Syria are acknowledged in public discourse, French air raids targeting ISIS leaders and oil operations in Syria throughout September and October of 2015 are not perceived as acts of war that would escalate violence and invite a counter attack in response. Similarly, when President Bill Clinton’s administration continued the policy of economic sanctions coupled with air raids and the use of biological weapons including depleted uranium while bombing the infrastructure of Iraq, including the country’s electrical and water supplies, these attacks

88

Y. SANGARASIVAM

were acknowledged in public discourse as a policy of containment: not as a declaration of war. Instead, the September 1996 cruise missile attack launched by the United States in Operation Desert Strike and the fourday air assault of Operation Desert Fox in December 1999 are listed under “A Record of Accomplishment” in the Clinton administration’s foreign policy toward Iraq. Clearly stated in the White House document titled “Containing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” Clinton’s policy focused on preventing Iraq from rebuilding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and “supporting regime change to remove Saddam Hussein from power so that Iraq and its neighbors can live in peace.”50 The “accomplishments” of the US foreign policy of military intervention in Iraq under the Clinton administration is in the public record. In 1999, a report by UNICEF documented that “500,000 ‘excess’ deaths in the under-5 population had occurred above expected levels between 1991 and 1998.” The estimated figures of Iraqi people “above age 5 and, subsequent to February 1999, where high prevalence of malnutrition persists gives a general estimate of 1.5 million excess deaths” as of 2003.51 Also in the public record is the response of the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, when she was questioned about US sanctions on Iraq. In a 60 minutes (Television news hour) interview in May 1996, Correspondent Leslie Stahl asked Ambassador Albright the following question: “We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And - and, you know, is the price worth it?” Madeleine Albright responded. “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”52 In the neoliberal curriculum, the price of killing a half-million Iraqi children with depleted uranium and sanctions denying food and medicine is worth it. Applying the governing rationality of neoliberal reason, Iraqi children are economized and slotted into the model of the free market that requires the military and economic intervention and occupation of “rogue states” to maintain the national security of the United States; a governing rationality that is accepted by the international hierarchy of First World and Third World nation-states, which subsequently configures US national security as tantamount to global security.53 The unspoken expectation of white nation-states like the United States and France, as coalition partners in the global war on terror, is that Iraq and Syria accept the air raids and economic sanctions as a fundamental

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

89

lesson of functional violence in the neoliberal curriculum: “the teach-thenatives-a-lesson violence.”54 The governing rationality of the neoliberal curriculum socializes us to perceive these attacks and economic sanctions as necessary preemptive strikes that are normalized as counterterrorism tactics to maintain the national security of white nation-states. When the United States and its allies, like France, compete with Syria and its allies, like Russia, to gain control of Syrian territory and governance, for example, these tactics work to increase the market value of war and the market value of “rogue states.” Drawing on Wendy Brown’s analysis of neoliberalism, we can understand war as an example of economic conduct with a market value where the spheres of terrorism and counterterrorism are measured in economic terms; attracting investors and entrepreneurs (global partners joining the “coalition of the willing” and enterprising military contractors) while increasing the market value of state regimes that support the global war on terror and the neoliberal agenda of the United States and its allies.55 As such, counterterrorism operations, in the name of national security, become an economic tactic within the curriculum of neoliberal rationality that state regimes invoke as a legitimate reason to suppress any opposition and resistance to its policies and governing authority. ●

Ecologies of War The vital materiality of neoliberalism takes form in that place called terrorism; where nationalism and patriotism nourish the estrangement we feel from the varying degrees of proximity to the everyday violence and threat of violence that war engenders. In her philosophical and political project to excavate the connections between vibrant matter and the political ecology of things, Jane Bennett draws us into further layers of analysis by asking: “How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies?” She invites us to observe and understand “a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans [so that we can] see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due.”56 Things like drones. RPGs (rocket propelled grenades). IEDs (improvised explosive devices). Humvees. Tanks. Bullets. And other things that are crafted into weapons of war. Bennett asks us to pay attention to the vitality of these

90

Y. SANGARASIVAM

things that have become essential to advancing the neoliberal curriculum of national security. In her pathway of analysis, “vitality” means: the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.57

The cultural value of the neoliberal curriculum is made visible through a process of bringing the vibrant materiality and the vitality of war more intimately into our view. Into our everyday landscapes. Into our bodies. A process through which all conduct and all spheres of existence is economized. A process through which we are only and everywhere homo oeconomicus. A process through which the work of invasion and occupation demands our attention to the relationality and vibrant materiality of, for example, Humvees and tanks, drones and suicide bombers, soldiers and militants/jihadists/terrorists; all as living beings thriving in their energetic interdependence. What difference would it make to our understanding of the cultural value of neoliberalism and the global war on terror if we gave the force of things—like Humvees, RPGs, IEDs, tanks, and drones—more due? We can understand, and therefore recognize these things not as passive objects or stable entities but as vibrant materials with a dynamic and interdependent vitality; as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. We can recognize the force of things, which are crafted into weapons of war, as quasi agents that are ecologically interdependent with soldiers-militants-jihadists-terrorists. As actants—they are animated by “a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events.” Applying Bruno Latour’s definition of actant as “‘any entity that modifies another entity in a trial, [through which its] competence is deduced from (its) performance’ rather than posited in advance of the action,” what if we observed the Paris attacks as emerging out of the force of actants, in the form of airstrikes and economic sanctions, modifying and mobilizing the creation and deployment of suicide bombers in the trial of asymmetric warfare?58 Bennett points us in a direction of understanding the interconnected ontological realities or being-ness of weapons—be they human or nonhuman: “…an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

91

always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces. A lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonoms but as vital materialities.”59 ● A veteran soldier reports from the theater of war. Brian Turner served for seven years in the United States Army. He was deployed to Iraq in November of 2003, where he was an infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. He invites us into the everyday lived reality of US soldiers and civilians in Iraq—making familiar the strange, making strange the familiar. We are accompanying him as he witnesses the vital materialities of actants in the theater of war: On patrol, some of the soldiers piss into plastic bottles and then screw the caps back on tight. As we drive through a small cluster of mud-walled homes, children chase after us with their hands gesturing for something to drink. I watch the children scramble to recover the piss lobbed their way as some of the bottles roll and spin once they hit the dirt shoulder, others bursting open to vent a spray of urine.60

The vital materiality of terrorism and war takes shape in the spaces created by the estrangement we feel from the everyday violence and threat of violence that war produces. Arguably, all acts of war are acts of terrorism. This practice of estrangement is a testament to neoliberalism’s transformation of human beings into human capital with its “constant and ubiquitous aim, whether studying, interning, working, planning retirement, or reinventing itself in a new life [as a soldier, insurgent, militant, military contractor, jihadist, interrogator], … to entrepreneurialize its endeavors, appreciate its value, and increase its rating or ranking.”61 As human capital, soldiers and children become collateral damage in the entrepreneurial endeavor of inventing piss-filled water bottles as weapons of war; appreciating the market value while increasing the ratings and ranking of the lives of our soldiers that compete with the lives of Iraqi children and their families. Our soldiers compete to win. That moment of pissing into plastic water bottles. That moment of lobbing them. That moment of watching the bottles burst to vent a spray of their urine hitting the bodies of Iraqi children. That is a moment of winning. Winning as a

92

Y. SANGARASIVAM

form of functional violence. Our soldiers doing the work of teachingthe natives-a lesson-kind-of-violence. A lesson on the cultural value of winning. In this place called terrorism. Estrangement itself acquires a market value when varying degrees of proximity to the everyday violence of war reflects a hierarchy of who is entitled to live in peace by maintaining the choice of not knowing and who deserves to have no choice but to live with knowing the everyday realities of invasion and occupation. A political ecology of war invites us to witness the cultural value of terrorism through a careful rethinking of the relationality of the subjects and objects of war that state regimes and resistance movements rely on to mobilize the unifying sentiments of national belonging and patriotic pride. Endowed with the enduring commitments to racialized identities, these unifying sentiments fuel the dialogical reproduction of violence that animates the piss that sprays out of the bottles. That carried the hopes of water that promised to quench a thirst for some kind of connection between soldiers and children. That manifests a need to reclaim the loss of humanity. That is found in becoming a weapon. Destined for death of self and Other in suicidal wars. In this we must be clear: all wars are suicidal. Arguably, no one can return or escape from war to simply re-enter, reinvent, or reintegrate back into a life they knew before being inhabited by war. When soldiers come home, and when we thank them for their service, what happens when we take seriously the vitality of all actants in that moment of war when the piss-filled bottles hit the ground and sprayed those Iraqi children running alongside the patriotic pride of US soldiers? These stories of trauma tell us something about who we are. These stories tell them something about how we value their children. What do these stories tell us about how we value our children in relations to theirs? How shall we assess the market value of these actants—soldiers, children, plastic bottles filled with piss—and how will we attract more investors, more soldiers, more coalition partners to follow the neoliberal curriculum of invasion, occupation, and erosion of democracy? Nationalism and patriotism demand that we elide and evade these vital materialities of neoliberalism that configures human beings exhaustively as market actors and as collateral damage. Herein lies the cultural value of terrorism. ●

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

93

In this study of the cultural value of terrorism, my goal is to invite us into a practice of witnessing the intersectionalities of nationalism, patriotism, and neoliberalism with an ecological sensibility that can allow us to understand how we have come to accept war as a way of life; as a way of making and maintaining relationships between people we perceive as aliens within and beyond our national borders. In applying the theoretical foundations provided by feminist political theorists and philosophers, Jane Bennett and Wendy Brown, we can excavate the cultural value of terrorism: HonorBound to Defend Freedom. Remember. This is the sign at the entrance of the US military base and concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. Defend liberty and justice. For all people everywhere. Make the world. Based on a distinctly American internationalism. Use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. Bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets , and free trade to every corner of the world. Remember. These are the words of President George W. Bush as he announced to the world what America stands for in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. As the preeminent cultural value sustaining the national mythologies of white nation-states, freedom is economized in service of white supremacy: that unspeakable fabulation that inheres in the curriculum of neoliberal rationality and governing authority. Bennett’s study of the political ecology of things—the interplay and inter-being of human and nonhuman actants to articulate a “vital materiality”—pushes us to question: “how would an understanding of agency as a confederation of human and nonhuman elements alter established notions of moral responsibility and political accountability?”62 Brown’s study of neoliberalism’s erosion of democracy pushes us to see how the neoliberal curriculum and governing rationality transforms human beings into human capital while simultaneously transforming practically all aspects of life into economic bits. These economic units are assessed within the model of the market where success is accomplished when: “both persons and states are construed on the model of the contemporary firm, both persons and states are expected to comport themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future value, and both persons and states do so through practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/or attracting investors.”63 Cultural and political constructions of terrorists are one of the many interrelated assemblages of people, places, and things that are competitively positioned and assessed with their capital values within a market

94

Y. SANGARASIVAM

model. Within the neoliberal curriculum, the global war on terror appears as a means of promoting the cultural value of freedom while undermining democratic principles of justice, sovereignty, and respect for human rights and national self-determination. The cultural value of white supremacy invites a form of distancing, from responsiveness, coupled with freedom, from responsibility for the consequences of imperialist wars advanced by white nation-states; those that set the example in the hierarchy of nationstates, which claim a monopoly on legitimate violence in service of a neoliberal rationality to entrepreneurialize and escalate the market value of national security. Adhering to the curriculum of neoliberal reason and governing rationality, national security becomes a foil through which neoliberal mandates of privatization and free trade are marketed to sustain the global war on terror.64 This includes the privatization of war with the United States employing military contractors who enjoy the privileges of operating outside the rules of war with impunity while also enjoying the privileges of higher salaries than soldiers enlisted in military service.65 Sean McFate reported on the ratio of military contractors to soldiers when the United States outsourced its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “For every American Soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan, there was at least one contractor—a 1:1 ratio or greater. At the height of these wars, contractors comprised over 50% of the US force structure in Iraq and 70 percent in Afghanistan.”66 McFate reminds us that “most of the contractors who fight in U.S. wars are not even American. To keep costs down, military companies hire personnel from the developing world where military labor is cheap, making these firms densely international.” He goes on to describe his experiences of working in the military contracting industry: “I worked alongside ex-special forces troops from places like the Philippines, Colombia, and South Africa. We did the same missions, but they got developing world wages and I did not. Mercenaries are just like Tshirts; they are cheaper in developing countries. Call it the globalization of private force.”67 How does nationalism and patriotism run alongside neoliberalism where “all domains are markets, and we are everywhere presumed to be market actors”?68 National security also acts as a foil to enhance and promote a neoliberal rationality that capitalizes on the increasing market value of a constant sense of heightened national insecurity that is produced by the ubiquitous fear of terrorist attacks, which in turn

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

95

increases the competitive market value of national belonging and patriotic pride. Neoliberalism’s promise of a brave new world unfurls beneath the ubiquitous threat of drones and suicide bombers that consequently produces intensified experiences of national belonging and patriotic pride, which calls us to comport with our worlds in strange ways that eventually become familiar. It’s a world that is populated by strange but familiar market actors. We deploy soldiers/patriots. They deploy militants/jihadists/terrorists. We deploy drones. They deploy suicide bombers. We deploy bottles of piss. They deploy videos of beheading Americans.69 And the market goes on. As examples of Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter,” through which a political ecology of war becomes visible, soldiers and terrorists, patriots and jihadists, drones and suicide bombers, bottles of piss and videos of beheadings are instances of “vital materiality” that coexist with mutual dependency to form an assemblage. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bennett allows us to see the mutual dependency of things human and nonhuman as actants in her analysis of “vital materialism”70 : bodies enhance their power in or as a heterogeneous assemblage. What this suggests for the concept of agency is that the efficacy or effectivity to which that term has traditionally referred becomes distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human body or in a collective produced (only) by human efforts.71

This understanding of agency allows us to pay attention to the weapons and practices of war as a diverse group of vibrant materials constituting assemblages that “have uneven topographies, because some of the points at which the various affects and bodies cross paths are more heavily trafficked than others, and so power is not distributed equally across its surface.”72 Are videos of beheadings circulated by ISIS traversing a path more heavily trafficked than the bottles of piss? At what points do the affects and bodies of suicide bombers, drones, airstrikes with depleted uranium, and economic sanctions cross paths? How does the cultural value of neoliberalism serve to distribute power across the uneven topographies of nationalisms and patriotisms to sustain a hierarchy of races, nations, and nation-states that define the market value of First World soldiers in relation to the market value of “cheaper mercenaries” and “terrorists” from so-called “developing countries”? And by

96

Y. SANGARASIVAM

extension, how does the cultural value of white supremacy support a globalizing narrative that mobilizes a natural dichotomy between terrorists and soldiers, between terrorism and counterterrorism? By relying on the power of the state to hold a monopoly on legitimate violence, white nation-states mobilize the cultural value of white supremacy by facilitating and normalizing the dehumanizing practice of naming people as “terrorists.” This naming is what consequently allows for both conscious and unconscious authorizations of violence to be performed on the bodies of those we are taught to perceive as the enemy Other. Consequently, when we allow for violence to be done unto them and their loved ones, they are obliged to respond with violence to be done unto us and our loved ones: and so, the game of war goes on. Violence begets violence. In this way, violence becomes a means of dialogue, a way of telling each other’s stories about who we are as a community, what we desire, what we are willing to give up, and what we are willing to do in order to win. The everyday cultural practice of calling a person “terrorist” or calling entire groups of people “migrants” or “refugees,” which signals that there are terrorists among them, for example, becomes normal simply through the practice of repetition—very much the same way that it was once normal to openly call a person “nigger” during the apartheid years of legalized segregation based upon the ideology of white supremacy in the United States. With the 1991 U.S. military attack on Iraq, the term “sand nigger” became a part of the everyday language of soldiers and highranking officials within the US armed forces.73 Similarly, the terms “rag head,” “camel jockey,” and “hajis,” entered the American vernacular with the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Rodney Roberts has argued, these racist terms are “clear signs that the racial fear implicit in the rationale for indefinitely detaining ‘terrorist suspects’ has some ground in the history of racial injustice in America … [when] every ‘Arab looking’ man with a darker-than-white complexion is subject to candidacy as a potential terrorist.”74 The use of racist slurs is a cultural practice of white supremacy and white nationalism that works as a linguistic signal to discriminate, to target, and separate a whole group of people; to say it’s ok and it’s for the good of the whole world, for the good of the white nation to dehumanize, traumatize, and go to war with racialized groups of people. Allowing the speaker to not only articulate their hatred toward a racialized other, these linguistic signals add form and content to their sense of

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

97

national identity and patriotic pride by taking pleasure in identifying those who are outside the nation, outside of citizenship, outside of whiteness, outside of humanity.75 In his article, “The Black Body as Fetish Object,” Anthony Paul Farley argues that “whiteness is a sadistic pleasure and that the black body is a fetish object” upon which violence is performed both discursively and directly; through linguistic signals and textual representations as well as through the direct violence of torture and the everyday brutality of occupation and war.76 In analyzing the connections between the violence of calling a person “nigger” or “sand nigger” and calling a person a “terrorist,” I apply the argument articulated by Farley that for white people and anyone aspiring to draw on the power of white supremacy, “race is a form of pleasure in one’s body which is achieved through humiliation of the Other and, then, as the last step, through a denial of the entire process. … By denying their fetishization of ‘race,’ whites create a culture in which they are both masters and innocents.”77 In the context of the global war on terror, the Muslim body, and by extension the migrant, refugee body, becomes the target of racist violence. In calling a person a “terrorist,” the speaker assumes the subject position of a colonizer, reinscribing who is within and who is outside of the nation and the nation-state, who is afforded the privileges of citizenship and who is rendered stateless, who is perceived as human and who is rendered nonhuman, deserving of being sprayed by a bottle of piss, deserving of indefinite incarceration, deserving of torture, deserving of death. But the power seized by white supremacy is fraught with this unspoken truth: “The colonizer hates the very thing he needs in order to maintain his identity as a colonizer. This contradiction is the worm in the heart of whiteness.”78 The race pleasures of the colonizer calling a person “nigger” or calling a person a “terrorist,” is a form of violence that is at once intimate and anonymous. It authorizes the forms of violent practices: in the intimate space of torture chambers and the anonymity of drone strikes; in the intimate space of soldiers filling plastic water bottles with their own piss and lobbing it at Iraqi children and the anonymity of launching RPGs; in the anonymity of legal statutes that authorized segregation in the past and counterterrorism measures under the USA PATRIOT Act in the present.79 Applying Farley’s analysis further, we can observe how the system of white supremacy is concretized in “the body of laws which maintains the

98

Y. SANGARASIVAM

distance between colonizer and colonized or between black and white or between men and women or between here and there, is reified in the bodies it both constitutes and circumscribes.” Segregation statutes maintain the distance between black and white. Aborting statutes undermine reproductive rights and maintain the distance between men and women. The USA PATRIOT Act undermines civil rights and fundamental human rights of citizens here at home and in the war-zones over there. Farley goes on to argue that “the body of law is both flesh and discourse. This is because the state, through segregation, arranges both the public forum and the intimate choreography for the race-pleasure tryst.”80 When invoked, the language of “nigger” or “sand nigger,” or “terrorist,” allows the colonizer to take part in the intimate choreography of race pleasures while maintaining a distance between us and them; one that is fortified by the legal statutes, which give form and content to white supremacy as a cultural value of terrorism. I am connecting these forms of intimate and anonymous violence in order to allow us to witness our attachments to our sense of nationalism and patriotic pride that shape our epistemological and ontological commitments to war, in person or by proxy, with a racialized enemy Other. ●

The Cultural Value of Neoliberalism: The Wall As a contribution to the interdisciplinary scholarship that informs critical terrorism studies, I am disrupting the dichotomizing tropes of terrorism and counterterrorism by witnessing war as a choice for violence that is ecological. These tropes are usually employed in conventional strategies designed to justify state-sponsored violence in opposition to the violence of nationalist movements that are resisting state regimes. Choreographing this performative text to songs and lyrics from the iconic album The Wall by Pink Floyd, I want to bring the phenomenon of war into your view; into the intimate spaces of your body in such a way that your attention is focused on the vital relationships between soldiers and children and plastic bottles filled with piss, between drones and heavy artillery, along with other subjects and objects; as human and nonhuman beings whose force propels us into witnessing the governing rationality of the neoliberal curriculum that animates the cultural values of national belonging and patriotic pride in that place called terrorism.

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

99

As a performative text, the narratives that follow invite us to join a collective of actants to take part in a critical, creative approach of weaving multiple literary practices of representation—music, memoir, poetry, and the public art of political posters—to understand terrorism as a place we can visit to encounter and be transformed by human and nonhuman beings through a speculative ethnography of war. By understanding terrorism as a place of cultural value, nationalism and patriotism emerge as bricks in the wall of neoliberalism; mobilizing its expanding powers of white supremacy, drawn from the age of Enlightenment, to justify the transformation of human beings into human capital, and other living and non-living beings into economic bits that can be discarded as collateral damage or enhanced in service of competing capital campaigns. In their prophetic concept album, The Wall , Pink Floyd captured the expanding power of neoliberalism’s rationality and its consequences of fear and alienation, it both breeds and feeds off of. Produced and recorded in 1979, on the heels of US forces withdrawing from its wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, the poetics and politics of Pink Floyd’s lyrics and compositions in this album resonate with the rapidly transforming identities that are being forged in the process of remembering and forgetting the realities of war. Undeniably, these realities continue to shape the unfolding histories of hegemonic white nation-states, which continue to intervene in the sovereignty of other nations through the ever-expanding global war on terror. Neoliberalism’s demand to transform almost every aspect of life into an economic matrix of competitive capital campaigns is exposed in the poetic lyrics and riffs of guitars, keyboards, drums, rhythms, and harmonies created by Roger Waters, David Gilmore, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason. As I’ve discussed earlier, conventional studies of terrorism tend to frame the violence of insurgents/“terrorists” as distinct or divorced from the violence of soldiers/military contractors who are representing the state, particularly in regimes of imperial occupation. My intention in this work is to move with the energies of poetry and prose in a performance practice that allows us to journey through moments across time, through dreams of liberation; witnessing erasures and redactions to excavate what they reveal through the protocols of classified documents and their need to remain secure from our ability to see what is there. ●

100

Y. SANGARASIVAM

You are in the method You are willfully lingering in spaces of erasure, engaging your own sensibilities and sensitivities to access some kind of connection, which may or may not be expunged by nationalism’s demand of a singular allegiance without a need for fixed meaning or didactic interpretations you can move with ease crossing lines, breaking rules, giving way to epistemic failure allowing yourself to be open to be transformed by new possibilities of another way of knowing another way of being.

● I situate this willful method of speculative ethnography amidst the scholarship of feminist philosophy, decolonizing anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and critical terrorism studies in order to witness how the intersecting forces of nationalism, patriotism, and neoliberalism are mobilized to create terrorism as a place of cultural value for waging imperial wars with sovereign peoples and for legitimizing the colonial invasions of sovereign territories. The next two chapters focus on a case study of the Tamil nationalist struggle for national self-determination that was forwarded by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka. I had the unique opportunity and privilege to conduct sustained ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with cadres and officials of the LTTE during their de facto administration of northern Sri Lanka from 1990 to 1995, through the cessation of hostilities in 2003–2005, and in recent ethnographic interviews with people in the Tamil diasporic communities in the USA, Canada, and the UK. A speculative ethnographic practice of weaving seemingly disparate narratives from multiple experiences of war, allows us to witness the

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

101

cultural value of white supremacy in that place called terrorism while following and situating ourselves amidst the LTTE’s cultural representations of: their ethical relationships with soil and identity; their resolve to maintain territorial integrity alongside the demands of displacement and diasporic life; and, especially, their need to be heard and recognized as a political and social movement to create the sovereign state of Tamil Eelam within the international order of nation-states and within the grand narrative of neoliberal democracy. Popular impressions of the Tamil Tigers are those that are associated with “terrorists” and suicide bombings. Since the LTTE has been internationally proscribed as a terrorist organization, a principal objective in my analysis of Tamil nationalism is to invite you into an embodied, dialogical perspective on terrorism not only as a trope, as a political ideology, as a form of political action or political violence; but as a discursive space and place where human and nonhuman beings inhabit to negotiate the precarity, efficacy, and vitality of actants through a speculative ethnography of war. You are in the method. With an experimental performance practice that departs from conventional studies of nationalism and terrorism, listen to the soundscapes of Pink Floyd’s lyrics and compositions that constitute The Wall . Walk with people who become soldiers and insurgents. Walk with children, with their mothers and fathers, and their brothers and sisters we are told to go to war with. What shall we learn from the experiences of people like Shaker Aamer and his family, and thousands of others like them experiencing the dehumanizing encounters with soldiers of occupying state regimes brutalizing their communities by invading and destroying their homes and families in “search and seizure operations” in war-zones from Sri Lanka to Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan and to Charleston, South Carolina that frequently result in torture, displacement, disappearance, and death? Given these realities of war, what I intend to do differently in this study of the intersectionalities of nationalism, patriotism, and neoliberalism is to make a connection between people and weapons, between human and nonhuman beings—especially between soldiers, whom we deploy and memorialize to kill and be killed on our behalf, and civilians whom we are taught to call and dehumanize as terrorists. ● In this age of globalizing political violence, my work here in this project aims to contribute to a process of understanding the consequences

102

Y. SANGARASIVAM

of dehumanizing, displacing, and destroying the lives and livelihoods of people in the name of terrorism and national security while simultaneously forwarding the cultural values of freedom and democracy. The white supremacist cultural practice of racist slurs works as a linguistic signal to target and separate a whole group of people, to say it’s ok and it’s for the good of the whole nation to dehumanize and traumatize racialized groups of people through, for example: the intimacy of torturelynching-sniper shootings, and through the anonymity of extraordinary rendition-indefinite detention-mass incarceration-drone strikes from afar. I collapse these forms of intimate and anonymous violence in order to allow us to witness our attachments to our sense of nationalism and patriotic pride that shape our emotional encounters (in person or in our imaginary) with the enemy Other who we find comfort in calling a “terrorist” in neoliberalism’s market economy of war. Ultimately, the cultural value of terrorism—theirs and ours—propels us into unsustainable futures; thereby demanding our attention to cultivate ecological practices of understanding and reconciliation that can lead to respect the dignity and integrity of human and nonhuman beings. In this project, of excavating the cultural value of terrorism, I situate the case study of the Tamil nationalist struggle for national selfdetermination within the larger context of the US-sponsored global war on terror. I place the testimonies of Tamil insurgents alongside and in dialogue with: US soldiers, British residents, Iraqi civilians, French, American, and Sri Lankan presidents and government officials, and people detained and rendered to the US internment camp at Guantánamo Bay, along with others who are participants in and who are impacted by the global war on terror. My intention is to chip away at the wall of fear and alienation that blocks us from understanding and connecting with the everyday lived experiences of men, women, and children whose lives have been radically transformed by imperial wars and colonial invasions. Neoliberalism’s wall of national security, with its foundational bricks of nationalism, patriotism, and white supremacy, is effectively reinforced in our consciousness to the point that we are paralyzed by fear and alienation; prepared to give up our shared humanity and our shared responsibility for all living beings. A speculative ethnography of war allows us to “direct sensory, linguistic, and imaginative attention toward a material vitality” of human and nonhuman beings that both animate and disturb our assumptions about freedom and democracy.81 A speculative ethnography of war also allows us to experience the ecological relationships

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

103

between human and nonhuman beings, between people and weapons, as assemblages with an agency that is invested with power; a force that is simultaneously tangible and elusive because it is not distributed equally across the uneven topographies of those bricks of nationalism, patriotism, and white supremacy that buttresses the wall of neoliberalism. Journey to this place called terrorism. Here, the public art of political posters and political protest coalesce with poetry and song, inviting us to learn how to stand in solidarity, supporting human rights and social justice by understanding our shared burden: to carry the stone of freedom, democracy, and justice that allows us to understand how to be in relationship with soldiers, insurgents, and civilians who choose violence as a means of dialogue and as a means of engaging an ethical demand to make sense of the connection between our lives and theirs. The precarity of their lives imposes an obligation upon us to understand our relationship with war, the people we name as “terrorists,” and the people we encourage and support to fight on our behalf to maintain a sense of national belonging and patriotic pride. ●

104

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Notes 1. Mona Samari, “Bounties Paid for Terror Suspects,” Amnesty International, Australia, January 16, 2007, accessed May 18, 2018. http://www. amnesty.org.au/hrs/comments/bounties_paid_for_terror_suspects/; Dominique T. N. Greene-Sanders, “The Plausibility of a Slippery Slope: Guantanamo Bay as an Example of Direct/Indirect Participation in Torture and the Corruption of Societal Morality” (Master’s Thesis, University of North Florida, 2014), 34–35, https://digitalcommons.unf. edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1578&context=etd; Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2006), 239–243; See also the Petition for Writ of Certiorari filed in Moath Hamza Ahmed Al-Alwi v. Donald J. Trump, et al., Civil Action No. 18-740, Case No. 17-5067 (United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, 2018) https://www.supremecourt.gov/Doc ketPDF/18/18-740/74187/20181205150643166_2018-12-05%20Peti tion%20for%20Writ%20of%20Certiorari.pdf. 2. “Rewards for Justice,” U.S. Department of State, accessed January 25, 2021, https://www.state.gov/rewards-for-justice/. 3. Craig Whitlock, “Bounties a Bust in Hunt for Al-Qaeda,” The Washington Post, May 17, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2008/05/16/AR2008051603921.html. 4. Richard Norton-Taylor, Ed Pilkington, Caroline Davies, and Ian Cobain, “Shaker Aamer Released from Guantánamo Bay After 14-Year Detention,” The Guardian, October 30, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/oct/30/shaker-aamer-released-from-guantanamo-bay. 5. Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor, “US Accused of Holding Terror Suspects on Prison Ships,” The Guardian, June 1, 2008. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/02/usa.humanrights; See also, William J. Chambliss, Raymond Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer (eds.), State Crime in the Global Age (Portland, Oregon: Willan Publishing, 2010). 6. “Hey You,” The Wall, Pink Floyd, YouTube video, 04:40, published on January 12, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soL8JK6kALc. 7. Guy Adams, “Troubling Questions That May Never Be Answered,” The Daily Mail, October 31, 2015, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art icle-3296382/Last-British-prisoner-Guantanamo-Bay-Shaker-Aamer-rel eased-13-years.html; For a definition on and references on extraordinary rendition, see above footnote #30 in the Introduction. 8. Jeremy Corbyn, David Davis, Andrew Mitchell and Andy Slaughter, “Obama’s Slap in Britain’s Face,” New York Times, June 7, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/opinion/obamas-slap-in-bri tains-face.html.

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

105

9. Nicholas Watt, “Barack Obama to ‘Prioritise’ Case of Guantánamo Detainee Shaker Aamer: David Cameron Discusses Case of the Last Briton Held at Guantánamo Bay, Amid Fears He Could Be Sent to Saudi Arabia,” The Guardian, January 16, 2015. https://www.thegua rdian.com/us-news/2015/jan/16/shaker-aamer-guantanamo-bay-priori tise-obama-case. 10. Jason Leopold and Ben Bryant, “Shaker Aamer, the Last Remaining UK Guantanamo Detainee, Has Been Released,” Vise News, October 30, 2015, https://news.vice.com/article/shaker-aamer-the-last-remaining-bri tish-guantanamo-detainee-has-been-released. 11. “Shaker Aamer: Timeline of Events Leading to Release from Guantánamo,” The Guardian, October 30, 2015, accessed February 15, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/30/shakeraamer-timeline-of-events-release-from-guantanamo; Tim Golden, “The Battle for Guantánamo,” The New York Times Magazine, September 17, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/17guantan amo.html?_r=0; Guy Adams, “Troubling Questions That May Never Be Answered,” The Daily Mail, October 31, 2015, http://www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-3296382/Last-British-prisoner-Guantanamo-Bay-Sha ker-Aamer-released-13-years.html. 12. See the original declassified document of the U.S. Department of Defense Memorandum of the Joint Task Force in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control for Guantanamo Detainee, ISN US9SA-000239DP,” published in The New York Times report, “The Guantánamo Docket,” http://projects.nytimes. com/guantanamo/detainees/239-shaker-aamer/documents/11. 13. British Broadcasting Corporation, “Shaker Aamer: ‘No Plans to Sue’ over Guantanamo,” December 14, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/ uk-35089908. 14. Quoted from the Reprieve’s report submitted to: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations: “Submission to the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism for the thematic report on the interface between human rights and international humanitarian law in the context of counter-terrorism,” Reprieve-GA75CT, https://search.ohchr.org/res ults.aspx?k=Reprieve (https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Terror ism/SR/GA75/Reprieve-GA75CT.docx). 15. Roger Waters, “Shaker Aamer,” Vimeo, accessed January 25, 2021, https://vimeo.com/104042185; Also see Reverend Nicholas Mercer’s sermon that Shaker Aamer refers to in his letter: Amnesty International, “Edited version of the sermon given by the Reverend Lieutenant Colonel N J Mercer at the Amnesty International service held on Thursday

106

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

Y. SANGARASIVAM

17 October 2013 at Salisbury Cathedral,” accessed January 27, 2021, https://www.amnesty.org.uk/groups/salisbury/sermon-nicholas-mercer. “Internment Serial Number (ISN): US0SA-00239DP” appears in the declassified document of the U.S. Department of Defense Memorandum of the Joint Task Force in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control for Guantanamo Detainee, ISN US9SA-000239DP,” published in The New York Times report, “The Guantánamo Docket,” http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detain ees/239-shaker-aamer/documents/11. Roger Waters, “My Pink Floyd Hit and This Tragedy,” The Daily Mail, December 22, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article2884488/My-Pink-Floyd-hit-tragedy-ROGER-WATERS.html. Roger Waters, “Shaker Aamer,” Vimeo, accessed January 25, 2021, https://vimeo.com/104042185. Wyatt Mason, “The Boundless Artistry of Steve McQueen,” New York Times Style Magazine, October 12, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2015/10/12/t-magazine/steve-mcqueen-artist-director-interview.html? _r=0. Alex Jeffrey, “The Politics of ‘Democratization’: Lessons from Bosnia and Iraq,” Review of International Political Economy 14, no. 3 (August 2007): 452. See also: Michael S. Casey, The History of Kuwait (London: Greenwood Press, 2007), 85–94; Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). For an account of Saddam Hussein’s presentation, to the member states of the Arab League of Nations, on his arguments regarding the political and economic dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, see also: Thomas C. Hayes, “Confrontation in the Gulf; the Oilfield Lying Below the Iraq-Kuwait Dispute,” New York Times, September 1990, https://www. nytimes.com/1990/09/03/world/confrontation-in-the-gulf-the-oilfieldlying-below-the-iraq-kuwait-dispute.html. For further analysis of Iraq’s intervention in Kuwait within the matrix of geopolitical alliances and power dynamics between the member states of the Arab League of Nations, see: Rex Brynen and Paul Noble, “The Gulf Conflict and the Arab State System: A New Regional Order?” Arab Studies Quarterly 13, no. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 1991): 117–140. “Gulf War Fast Facts,” CNN, last modified July 29, 2020, http://www. cnn.com/2013/09/15/world/meast/gulf-war-fast-facts/. For an analysis of a history of US interventions in Iraq and for the use of force as part of a military strategy that intersects with a complex political-diplomatic strategy the United States applied in its military and colonial interventions in Vietnam and Iraq, see Richard Lock-Pullan, US Intervention Policy and Army Innovation: From Vietnam to Iraq (London: Routledge, 2006). For a further analysis of the history of US interventions in Iraq leading up

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

107

to the US invasion in 2003, see: Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) and Benjamin Isakhan (ed.), The Legacy of Iraq: From the 2003 War to the ‘Islamic State’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). For further analysis on US interests in invading Iraq for the purposes of setting up a pro-US government, of setting up permanent military bases, and of setting up a neoliberal regime of privatizing Iraq’s natural resources and opening international investment structures, see: Doug Stokes, “The War Gamble: Understanding US Interests in Iraq,” Globalization 6, no. 1 (March 2009): 107–112. 22. For an analysis of the Reagan administration’s interventions in Iran and Nicaragua is not an anomaly in US foreign policy but a consistent practice of covert and overt political, economic, and military interventions to advance American economic interests and objectives and geopolitical power, see: Cheryl A. Rubenberg, “US Policy Toward Nicaragua and Iran and the Iran-Contra Affair: Reflections on the Continuity of American Foreign Policy,” Third World Quarterly 10, no. 4 (October 1988): 1475–1477; see also, Seymour M. Hersh, “U.S. Secretly Gave Aid to Iraq Early in Its War Against Iran,” New York Times, January 6, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/26/world/us-secretly-gave-aid-toiraq-early-in-its-war-against-iran.html?pagewanted=all. For an account and analysis of the consistency and policy of covert and overt regime change organized by the United States to secure political and economic power, see: Edward W. Said, “Irangate: A Many-Sided Crisis,” Journal of Palestine Studies 16, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 27–49; and Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, Henry Holt & Company, 2006). 23. Steven Smith, “Policy Preferences and Bureaucratic Position: The Case of the American Hostage Rescue Mission,” Royal Institute of International Affairs 61, no 1 (Winter 1984–1985): 9–25. For an analysis of US representations of the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis see: Catherine V. Scott, “Bound for Glory: The Hostage Crisis as Captivity Narrative in Iran,” International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March 2000): 177–188. 24. Quote from the declassified CIA document, “Campaign to Install Pro-Western Government in Iran,” George Washington University, US National Security Archives, accessed February 17, 2021, http://nsa rchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/docs/Doc%202%20-%20195400-00%20Summary%20of%20Wilber%20history.pdf. For an account and analysis of the systematic mobilization of the U.S. plan for regime change in Iran and the removal of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq (also spelled, Mosaddegh ) see: Stephen Kinzer,

108

25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, Henry Holt & Company, 2006), 117–128. Johannes Dillinger, “Tyrannicide from Ancient Greece and Rome to the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,” in The Routledge History of Terrorism, ed. Randall D. Law (London: Routledge, 2015), 15–27; Mike Rapport, “The French Revolution and Early European Revolutionary Terrorism,” in The Routledge History of Terrorism, ed. Randall D. Law (London: Routledge, 2015), 63–76. Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York: Nation Books, 2013), 354. María Ines Zamudio, “Deported U.S. Veterans Feel Abandoned By the Country They Defended,” NPR (National Public Radio), June 21, 2019, https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/06/21/733371297/ deported-u-s-veterans-feel-abandoned-by-the-country-they-defended. “Goodbye Blue Sky,” Pink Floyd, The Wall , Columbia Music, 1979. For an analysis of official levels of US war rhetoric and political discourse mobilizing the political myths of American exceptionalism and civilization versus the “barbarism and savagery” of terrorists, see: Joanne Esch, “Legitimizing the ‘War on Terror’: Political Myth in Official-Level Rhetoric,” Political Psychology 31, no. 3 (June 2010): 357–391; Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). See also: Talal Asad’s critical analysis and deconstruction of barbarism and the “clash of civilizations” as these ideologies are applied to the construction of terrorism and, in particular, the construction of the Muslim terrorist: Talal Asad, Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973), 7–38; Robert L. Ivie, “Savagery in Democracy’s Empire,” Third World Quarterly 26, no.1 (2005): 55–65. Emphasis added. “‘We’re at War,’” PBS NewsHour, last modified September 14, 2000, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/terrorismjuly-dec01-bush_comments_9-15. See also, George W. Bush, “President Urges Readiness and Patience,” Office of the Press Secretary, September 15, 2001, accessed February 18, 2021, https://georgewbush-whitehouse. archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/text/20010915-4.html. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, prepared by The White House (Washington, DC, 2002), 1, accessed May 24, 2021, https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/63562.pdf. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 3. Ibid., v. For an analysis of the history and ideology of manifest destiny animating U.S. imperial aspirations underlying the U.S invasion of Iraq, see: Ronald C. Kramer and Raymond J. Michalowski, “War, Aggression and State Crime: A Criminological Analysis of the Invasion and Occupation of

3

35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

109

Iraq,” British Journal of Criminology 45, no. 4 (July 2005): 454–462. See also, Adam Gomez, “Deus Vult: John L. O’Sullivan, Manifest Destiny, and American Democratic Messianism,” American Political Thought 1, no. 2 (September 2012): 236–262. Bremer and Wolfowitz quoted in: Christopher Parker and Pete W. Moore, “The War Economy of Iraq,” Middle East Report no. 243 (Summer 2007): 6, 12. The Sydney Morning Herald reported Paul Bremer’s announcement at a press conference he held two weeks after his arrival in Iraq as the director of the Coalition Provisional Authority. He said that “occupation officials were talking with banks in the United States, Britain and other countries to provide credit on favourable terms to foreign companies that trade with Iraq.” Bremer said, “This will be a symbol that Iraq is open for business and an incentive to those who want to export to Iraq.” Bremer quoted in, “Bremer Gets Ready to Open Iraq for Business,” The Sydney Morning Herald, last modified May 28, 2003, https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/bremer-gets-readyto-open-iraq-for-business-20030528-gdgu3g.html. Ibid., 12. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 30, 9–10. Ibid., 31. Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz, Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 25. Additionally, covert drone strikes since 2002 include: 421 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 to November 2015, killing 2,476–3,989 people, injuring 1158–1738 people; 107–127 US drone strikes in Yemen from 2002 to November 2015 killing 492–725 people, injuring 92–223 people; 15–19 US drone strikes in Somalia from 2007 to November 2015, killing 25–108 people, injuring 2–7 people: see, Jack Serle, “At Least 80 Airstrikes Hit Afghanistan in October: The White House’s Covert Drone and Air War—Monthly Update,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, November 2, 2015, https://www.thebureauinvestigates. com/2015/11/02/at-least-80-us-airstrikes-hit-afghanistan-in-octoberthe-white-houses-covert-drone-and-air-war-monthly-update/. Eleanor Steafel, Rory Mulholland, Rozina Sabur, Edward Malnick, Andrew Trotman, and Nicola Harley, “Paris Terror Attack: Everything We Know on Wednesday Afternoon,” The Telegraph, November 18, 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/ 11995246/Paris-shooting-What-we-know-so-far-on-Wednesday-aftern oon.html. Jason Burke, “St-Denis Female Suicide Bomber Is Not the First, and Will Not Be the Last,” The Guardian, November 18,

110

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

Y. SANGARASIVAM

2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/st-denis-fem ale-suicide-bomber-is-not-the-first-and-will-not-be-the-last. Adam Nossiter, Aurelien Breeden, and Katrin Bennhold, “Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS,” New York Times, November 14, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/world/europe/paris-ter rorist-attacks.html?referringSource=articleShare. “Paris Attacks: Hollande Blames Islamic State for ‘Act of War’,” BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), last modified, November 14, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34820016. “‘We’re at War,’” PBS NewsHour, last modified September 14, 2000, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/terrorism-july-dec01-bush_c omments_9-15. Sherene Razack, “‘From the Clean Snows of Petawawa’: The Violence of Canadian Peacekeepers in Somalia,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 1 (February 2000): 128–129. For a discussion and analysis of the absence of a coherent war narrative to justify the global war on terror and thus providing a way to frame the war with, as Sherene Razack argues, national narratives of innocence, see: Kathe Callahan, Melvin J. Dubnick and Dorothy Olshfski, “War Narratives: Framing Our Understanding of the War on Terror,” Public Administration Review 66, no. 4 (July–August, 2006): 554–568. See also, Noam Chomsky, “Wars of Terror,” New Political Science 25, no. 1 (2003): 113–127. Robert L. Ivie, “Savagery in Democracy’s Empire,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2005): 58–59. David A. Graham, “What Is France Doing in Syria?” The Atlantic, November 15, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/arc hive/2015/11/france-syria-iraq-isis/416013/. The White House: President Bill Clinton (Archives), Containing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” December 19, 1998, https://clintonwhitehouse5.arc hives.gov/WH/EOP/NSC/html/nsc-11.html. Neil Arya and Sheila Zurbrigg, “Operation Infinite Injustice: Impact of Sanction and Prospective War on the People of Iraq,” Canadian Journal of Public Health 94, no. 1 (January–February 2003): 10. For a documentation and analysis of the impact of the U.S. sanctions, the U.S. military operations targeting Iraq’s basic infrastructure along with the use of depleted uranium, and the rise in the rate of deaths of Iraqi civilians, especially children, due to cancer and malnutrition, see: Shereen T. Ismael, “The Cost of War: The Children of Iraq,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 38, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 337–357. See also, Phyllis Bennis, “‘And They Called It Peace”: US Policy on Iraq,” Middle East Report no. 215 (Summer 2000): 4–7.

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

111

52. “Democracy Now! Confronts Madeleine Albright on the Iraq Sanctions: Was It Worth the Price?” Democracy Now!, July 30, 2004, https://www. democracynow.org/2004/7/30/democracy_now_confronts_madeline_ albright_on. 53. Austen D. Givens, Nathan E. Busch and Alan D. Bersin, “Going Global: The International Dimensions of U.S. Homeland Security Policy,” Journal of Strategic Security 11, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 1–34; Mary Caprioli and Peter F. Trumbore, “Rhetoric Versus Reality: Rogue States in Interstate Conflict,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 49 no. 5 (October 2005): 770–791; Noam Chomsky, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000). 54. Sherene Razack, “From the ‘Clean Snows of Petawawa,’” 130. 55. John King, “Bush: Join ‘Coalition of Willing’,” CNN , November 20, 2002, https://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/11/20/pra gue.bush.nato/. 56. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), viii. 57. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii. 58. Bruno Latour quoted in Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii. 59. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 21. 60. Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014), 145. 61. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 36. 62. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 21. 63. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 22. 64. Patricia Owens, “Distinctions, Distinctions: ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Force?” International Affairs 84, no. 5 (2008): 977–990. 65. Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (New York: Nation Books, 2007). 66. Sean McFate, Mercenaries and War: Understanding Private Armies Today (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2019), 18. 67. Sean McFate, Mercenaries and War, 20. 68. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 36. 69. ISIS published a video, that went viral, of the beheading of James Foley, and American journalist. Foley was kidnapped in Syria. ISIS demanded the Obama administration to halt US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria while threatening to behead other Americans who they held as prisoners. “James Wright Foley, Kidnapped Journalist, Apparently Executed by ISIS,” NBC News, August 19, 2014, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyl ine/james-foley/james-wright-foley-kidnapped-journalist-apparently-exe cuted-isis-n184376. ISIS also beheaded British aid workers and citizens captured in Syria and Iraq. Joseph Gamp, “Journalist Beheaded: What Happened to James Foley?” The Sun, last modified October 13, 2020,

112

70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Y. SANGARASIVAM

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12849629/james-foley-isis-beheadedjournalist/. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23. Ibid., 24. See the testimony of Michael Prysner, veteran Corporal in the United States Army Reserve, in Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz, Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 98. For further discussion and analysis of the emergence of the racist terms in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, see: Yousef K. Baker, “Killing ‘Hajis’ in ‘Indian Country’: Neoliberal Crisis, the Iraq War and the Affective Wages of Anti-Muslim Racism,” Arab Studies Quarterly, 42, no. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2020): 52–58. Rodney C. Roberts, “The American Value of Fear and the Indefinite Detention of Terrorists Suspects,” Public Affairs Quarterly 21, no. 4 (October 2007): 414. For a comparative analysis of the racialization of the enemies of the United States during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War in conjunction with an analysis of “how ideas of race used to legitimize the United States’ wars in the Middle East can travel back to the homeland to sanction state violence against people of color domestically,” see: José I. Fusté, “Containing Bordered ‘Others’ in La Frontera and Gaza: Comparative Lessons on Racializing Discourses and State Violence,” American Quarterly 62, no. 4 (December 2010): 812. Yousef K. Baker, “Killing ‘Hajis’ in ‘Indian Country,’” 49. Anthony Paul Farley, “The Black Body as Fetish Object,” Oregon Law Review 76 (1997): 461. Farley, “The Black Body,” 464. Farley, “The Black Body,” 493. For analyses of legal statutes on segregation see: Henry Louis Gates, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin Press, 2019); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in American (New York: Bold type Books, 2017); Jerrold M. Packard, American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002). For analyses of counterterrorism measures legislated through the USA PATRIOT Act see: Herbert N. Foerstel, The Patriot Act: A Documentary and Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008); C. William Michaels, No Greater Threat: America After September 11 and the Rise of a National Security State (New York: Algora Publishing, 2005); Elaine Cassel, The

3

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: THE CULTURAL VALUE …

113

War on Civil Liberties: How Bush and Ashcroft Have Dismantled the Bill of Rights (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2004); Nancy Chang, Silencing Political Dissent (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002). 80. Farley, “The Black Body,” 493. 81. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 19.

CHAPTER 4

Goodbye Blue Sky: The Ethical Demands of Suicide Bombing

The precarity of life imposes an obligation upon us. We have to ask about the conditions under which it becomes possible to apprehend a life or set of lives as precarious, and those that make it less possible, or indeed impossible.1 —Judith Butler

The practice of suicide bombing is an aporia that we must confront. Suicide bombers demand us to witness the impossible: to attach explosives to one’s own body and deploy the self as a weapon in war. This is an impossible reality that brings everyday people and government officials to an epistemological, ontological, and ethical impasse. It leaves us at a loss. Questioning how to know and be in relationship with people who make a choice to give up their life in such an act of violence. This state of being at a loss fuels the apprehension that surrounds conventional “cultural modes of regulating affective and ethical dispositions through a selective and differential framing of violence” in this age of global wars on terror.2

“Goodbye Blue Sky,” Pink Floyd, The Wall, Columbia Music, 1979; “Goodbye Blue Sky,” Pink Floyd, published on January 12, 2016, YouTube video, 02:47, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn6YnUt4Vuk. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. Sangarasivam, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82665-9_4

115

116

Y. SANGARASIVAM

As Talal Asad has explained, suicide bombing is perceived in the West as an irrational, fanatic expression of fundamentalism and extreme nationalism that is morally repugnant, ethically bankrupt, and affectively incites horror at what is perceived as senseless violence.3 Western liberal democracies rely on the media to shape and regulate these affective, political, and ethical dispositions of “Third World” subjectivities and political violence for their own populace to make sense of the wars that are being waged on their behalf to protect and promote freedom and democracy. We are taught to believe that the suicide bomber is culturally unrecognizable as human. As a quintessential manifestation of a terrorist, he or she is considered to be outside humanity, without family, without identity, and without social connections to be in relationship with anyone as a brother, sister, husband, wife, daughter, son, cousin, friend, lover, teacher, engineer, carpenter, musician, neighbor, artist, and so on; thereby foreclosing the possibilities of recognizing a relationship between us and them. Suicide bombers present an epistemological problem of comprehending how to be in relationship with people who choose violence as a means of dialogue, as a means of engaging an ethical demand to make sense of the connection between our lives and theirs. In the context of asymmetric warfare, suicide bombers highlight the predicament of nationalism and patriotism; one that demands the annihilation of self as the ultimate form of resistance to colonial domination and self-sacrifice for nation. This predicament of national belonging calls upon us to encounter those who choose to deploy their bodies as weapons: asking us to witness the precarity of their lives while at the same time imposing upon us an obligation to witness their desires and their vulnerabilities; their commitments to particular ideologies and structures of identity; their aspirations to sovereignty and to the creation of what they perceive to be a prosperous and safe place where present and future generations can thrive. The precarity of their lives imposes an obligation upon us to understand our relationship with war and the people we encourage and support to fight on our behalf to maintain a sense of national belonging and patriotic pride. We live in an era in which the US-sponsored global war on terror has been internationally accepted by white nation-states and their allies as a normalized, legitimate practice of securing and facilitating globalization, freedom, and democracy. Suicide bombers impose upon us an obligation to question what links our lives with the lives of people we are taught to hate as an enemy in this infinitely protracted global war: those we are

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

117

taught to name as terrorists; and those we are taught to fear as a threat to our personal and national security. What is our relationship with suicide bombers? What is the relationship between soldiers and suicide bombers? Is the recruitment of young people to fight the global war on terror in service of our safety also an invitation to suicide—theirs and ours? What is our relationship with soldiers deployed to and returning back from the wars in distant lands, which are waged in service of securing our lives here at home? How do we understand our relationship with soldiers who invade the homes and destroy the lives of families across the globe in Iraq and Afghanistan? How do we understand our relationship with soldiers who operate drones from the privacy and safety of their homes and offices in the United States as they systematically kill individuals and families, destroying the lives of everyday people in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other undisclosed sites that are targeted in the global war on terror? What can we learn by juxtaposing our desire and our horror with theirs? What can we learn from our desire to kill people in the countries that we are at war with? What can we learn from our horror incited by their suicide bombings in relation to their horror incited by our drone strikes? How do we understand and rethink our will to uphold the normalized, fearful assumptions about entire nations of people, which sustain wars at a distance as a way of maintaining a peaceful way of life at home, in our homeland? And what about their homeland? What connections can we make between our desire and need for national belonging with their desire and need to maintain a peaceful way of life in their homeland? My intention in this chapter is to invite us to encounter suicide bombing as an epistemological and ontological practice of understanding the suicidal commitment that war demands. It is a commitment that is founded on the precarity of nationalism and patriotism. In her analysis of a precarious life within the frames of war, Judith Butler defines precarity as a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.” She goes on to identify the paradox of “the condition of being conditioned” by the frames of war that structure how we support the killing of others in order for us to live, and thereby come to apprehend and know a life as precarious, as worthy of protection from injury and violence, and worthy of being grievable—or not.4 We are conditioned to apprehend terrorists and suicide bombers as lives that are precarious though unworthy of protection from injury and

118

Y. SANGARASIVAM

death, and certainly unworthy of being grievable. It is in this context that I ask us to think about how we might respond to the question, what is our relationship with soldiers and suicide bombers? By juxtaposing our relationship with our soldiers and the people we name and fear as terrorists and suicide bombers, we open ourselves to the possibilities of witnessing the precarity of our own lives in relation to theirs. Perhaps the experience of horror, of being at a loss at how to relate to someone who kills themselves and others in service of nationalist struggles can help us understand the precarity of our relationship with our own soldiers whom we celebrate as they kill and displace families across the globe in order for us to feel safe and secure to carry on with “our way of life” here at home. Can this experience of being at a loss, this “affectivity of ‘being beside ourselves’ serve as a political resource for effecting new, democratic modes of being-in-common, whereby a certain impossibility of being-in-common is also shared?”5 By developing this ability to stand in ambivalence—in this liminal place of willing to be-incommon while accepting the impossibility of being-in-common—we can allow our focus to be drawn to the ethical demand of suicide bombing: our shared obligation to attend to the precarity of life while questioning the cultural values of nationalism, patriotism, and war that we willfully hold on to. ●

Being-In-Common with Precarity and Dispossession Suicide bombing is adamantly successful as a tactic in asymmetrical warfare. No matter how abhorrent and unacceptable, horrifying and despicable it may be in the eyes of state regimes that retain the monopoly on legitimate violence as coalition partners in the global war on terror, suicide bombing works as a tactic; one that demands responsiveness and responsibility to the condition of dispossession, which is felt by all who experience and witness the fallout of its destructive mastery of violence. This fallout may be experienced at a distance and at close proximities, at the immediate site of suicide and bombing. For the suicide bomber, to deploy oneself as a weapon of war is arguably a form of mastering the violence and fear of capture and death that war engenders. It is an act of self-mastery and an insistence of sovereignty in the midst of recognizing the precarity of one’s life that is caught in the “politically induced

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

119

condition of maximized precariousness for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence who often have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they need protection.”6 It is a politically induced condition where the right to exist and thrive as equals—with fundamental human rights, citizenship, peace, justice, and prosperity—is precarious. This condition of maximized precariousness and dispossession paradoxically conditions a form of resistance that seeks recognition and engagement with state regimes for the right to self-determination and statehood with an implicit understanding; that violent retaliation and continued escalation of dispossession is assured as a response from the state, which initiated the conditions of precarity and dispossession to begin with. Reciprocally, there is also an implicit understanding that suicide bombings summon state regimes into an experience of dispossession that lurks in the omnipresent fear of a sudden, horrifying attack on its citizenry and on its economic, political, and cultural institutions. Because of the imminent insurgent power and will that suicide bombers hold in their capacity to penetrate the security apparatus of the state by outwitting and undermining the most advanced technologies through which state regimes assume superiority in warfare, the precarity and dispossession of the state is revealed by its inability to maintain national security and its inability to contain the disruptive and destructive authority of suicide bombings—both as a strategy and as a tactic. In this reality of asymmetrical warfare, precarity and dispossession is reciprocated. Shared. And invites the possibility of being-in-common with the need for people to live without the fear of being blindsided by a sudden, seemingly random explosion of violence destroying the everyday flow of life. Be it the violence of a suicide bomber. A drone pilot. A soldier bursting through the door of a house in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan to snatch, detain, torture, and kill members of a family in “search and clear” operations. These conditions of precarity and dispossession have been normalized in the post-9/11 era. It is an epoch in which the international hierarchy of nation-states have accepted as normal in order to benefit from the indefinitely protracted, US-sponsored global war on terror. Precarity and dispossession, which entangle us with fear and insecurity, have become a way of conditioning how we exist and connect with

120

Y. SANGARASIVAM

people who we are socialized to know as a terrorizing enemy across the globe. In their discussion of ethical relations, whose substance is found in a “constitutive sociality” where the self is implicated in the lives of others, Athena Athanasiou and Judith Butler develop an analytical framework of “dispossession-as-disposition” that can be helpful in understanding how our sentiments of fear and insecurity entangle us with those we are taught to perceive as an enemy; as terrorists who pose a threat to our national security, and consequently, to our daily existence. This entanglement allows us to recognize our ability to transform the fears and insecurities instilled by the precarity of dispossession and develop a responsiveness and a sense of responsibility to others in relation to ourselves. The condition of dispossession—as exposure and disposition to others, experience of loss and grief, or susceptibility to norms and [violence] that remain indifferent to us—is the source of our responsiveness and responsibility to others. Dispossession-as-disposition thus becomes an occasion for thinking through the issue of responsiveness and responsibility: taking responsibility for one’s own position in the world and relationality to others. We might consider what kinds of enabling spaces of politics open up on occasions where we find ourselves affected, undone, and bound by others’ calls to respond and assume responsibility.7

Suicide bombing is a call to respond and assume responsibility for the condition of dispossession that is engendered by state-sponsored war. Under the conditions of dispossession—having to survive the daily reality of living under military occupation and facing the constant threat of arrest, detention, rape, torture, disappearance, and death—the choice to deploy the self as a weapon is an ethical and political disposition. The choice for suicidal warfare by killing oneself and others is also a strategic and tactical response in an asymmetric war against the economic, political, and military supremacy of the state, which holds the privilege of drawing on the allegiance of international state regimes to mobilize multinational support of its monopoly on the legitimacy of just wars. The exploding bodies of self and others exemplify the conditions of dispossession and precarity of living with wars that casts every member of the population as an enemy. If suicide bombing is an ethical and political disposition as

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

121

well as a strategic and tactical response, then what are the responsibilities of a suicide bomber in the context of responsiveness and responsibility: of taking responsibility for one’s own position in the world and for one’s own relationship with others? To seek answers to this question, we can begin by studying the selfrepresentation of suicide bombers and the movements from which they emerge. The commemoration of suicide bombers in the political posters and songs produced by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) invite us to think through the ontological and epistemological practice of “dispossession as disposition”: a condition of being in “a world of differentially shared sociality, [where] we are already ‘outside ourselves,’ beyond ourselves, given over, bound to others, and bound by claims that emerge from outside or from deep inside ourselves.”8 Suicide bombers call upon us to witness our cultural values of freedom and democracy, nationalism and patriotism, citizenship and belonging, in relation to our implicit or explicit support of drone strikes, extraordinary rendition, and invasion of sovereign countries through the global war on terror. These cultural values are mobilized in that place called terrorism. In holding on to these cultural values, we are called to be-in-common with the incessant insecurity of fearing an omnipresent, terrorizing, enemy, Other. The suicide bomber, the drone pilot killing remotely, and the soldier on the ground killing in person, embody what Butler and Athanasiou describe as the “very notion of responsibility [that] requires this sense of dispossession as disposition, exposure and self-othering.”9 For the suicide bomber, a mission that requires the responsibility of taking one’s own life with the intention of taking the life of others, the responsibility of suicide and homicide, requires an exposure of self and other to an impossible aporia of war: the experience of loss and grief that alienates the self from the other in the act of killing, while simultaneously uniting with the enemy other in an embrace of death. This simultaneous act of alienation and embrace is witnessed and experienced against the background of a relationship between self and other, which has been conditioned by war. Arguably, for the drone pilot and the soldier on the ground, whose relationship between self and other is also conditioned by war, the responsibility of objectifying people as targets for execution and murder or as collateral damage also requires the condition of dispossession that accompanies the experience of grief in the loss of one’s own

122

Y. SANGARASIVAM

humanity while deploying the self as an instrument of warfare, as executioners who are susceptible to becoming indifferent to the norms and violence of asymmetric wars. ● You are about to be introduced to US drone warriors who will be in conversation with Afghan family members and Tamil community members who joined the LTTE’s nationalist movement. You will encounter LTTE cadres who became Black Tigers through their commitment to deploy their bodies as weapons in a suicidal war. You will encounter them through their testimonies, their songs, their hopes and aspirations that they represent in their political posters. By lifting these posters from the landscapes of war and presenting them here, I invite you to be a witness to the ontological and epistemological spaces of being-incommon with the precarity of dispossession that suicide bombers, drone pilots, and soldiers share in their fight for securing and defending the freedom and liberation of the nation and the nation-state they represent. Enter here. Into this place called terrorism. My intention is to bring an awareness that does not isolate the suicide bomber but places him or her in relationship with, and to, soldiers whose bodies are deployed as weapons and instruments of war to do the work of killing on our behalf. By placing them in relationship with one another and with us, we can begin to understand and act in solidarity with people we are socialized to fear and love and loath. All at once. We are all in the method. Are you willing. To witness. To be-incommon with. The dispossession we produce. To defend our freedom. To bolster our feeling of national belonging. By deploying them. To war on our behalf. This disposition of a willingness. To be-in-common with dispossession. Allows us to develop an ethical relationship. With them. Calling on our responsiveness and responsibility to those who fight and kill in service of our patriotic pride and our need for national belonging. ●

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

123

Fig. 4.1 Day of Commemoration for the Bravest of the Brave, 1992. Poster commemorating Black Tigers, produced by the cultural and political wing of the LTTE. See the translation of Tamil text below in italics (Author is the Rightsholder of this image)

Beautiful, brilliant gemstones—they are not Foundational stones—they are. The Soil that lost its children, in remembrance of… Day of Commemoration for the Bravest of the Brave. In remembrance of memories unthinkable In remembrance of memories planted within hearts. 1992

●

124

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Being-In-Common with Responsiveness and Responsibility A suicide bomber is named by the LTTE and is known within the —karumpulli (Black Tiger) or greater Tamil community as —ooyir-aayuthum (life-weapon). The cultural and political wing of the LTTE produced the poster above in 1992 (Fig. 4.1) to remember and honor the members of the movement who committed their lives to become a karumpulli (Black Tiger) or ooyir-aayuthum (lifeweapon). Posters, like the one above, were plastered in public space as a way of memorializing and recruiting people in the Tamil community to join the liberation movement. A select group of cadres were recruited into a special force unit of the LTTE, known as Black Tigers, to be uniquely trained to perform unconventional maneuvers in high-risk missions. As I will discuss in the next chapter, the language of “suicide” or “suicide bombing” is not spoken in the everyday flow of Tamil speech in referring to members of the Tamil nationalist movement who, in fact, exploded themselves in suicide bombing operations.10 Quite meaningfully, in the poster above, though there is no explicit mention of (karumpulli) “Black Tiger,” or (ooyir-aayuthum) “life-weapon,” a Tamil community member reading this poster can ascertain that the singular, dark figure drawing one’s attention is, in indeed, a karumpulli. A set of signifying elements, which the artist has chosen, invites the reader to witness and think about the accompanying poetic text that surrounds this central figure. ] of the Barely recognizable at first glance, the first two letters [ - karumpullikhal, is identifiable Tamil word for Black Tigers, at this figure’s breast where a soldier’s division of military service (such as army, navy, air force, or marine corps) is typically sewn into the fabric of a military uniform. The beret shows the outline of the quintessential LTTE emblem of the tiger flanked by two AK-47 rifles. The figure itself is transgendered. Transhuman. Beyond human. Perhaps part human and part tiger. Features receding into darkness, empty black spaces devoid of eyes spilling into a face scarred by the likening of a tiger, poised, patient, and prepared to persevere. Beautiful, brilliant gemstones—they are not. Foundational stones—they are. The ominous darkness of this otherworldly figure speaks to the responsibilities of suicide bombers. As the accompanying poetic text

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

125

declares, they are the foundational stones of a movement for national selfdetermination and liberation. Unlike the sleek, beautiful, glossy images of conventional, military recruitment posters featuring physically fit, handsome soldiers in dashing uniforms, looking forward to living a brilliant life with honor and prestige, this poster features a warrior’s precarity, dispossession, responsiveness, and responsibility to and for the work of killing and being killed in war. Black Tigers are bound by nationalism’s call for the ultimate act of self-determination and liberation: the act of killing oneself and killing others. This is the impossible responsibility of a suicide bomber who carries the ugliness and the sickening, shamefulness of doing the unthinkable work of killing in nationalist, patriotic wars. In other words, it’s important to recognize that suicide bombers and soldiers (going to war in person or remotely in drone warfare) not only carry the responsibility of doing the work of killing, they also carry the ontological responsibility of having to live and die with the un-beautiful, un-brilliant, disgraceful reality of what it means to be an executioner: to carry the identity of a killer—a condition of war haunting soldiers who survive with post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) that, at times, lead to suicide. ● Let’s not pretend that the deployment of drones is somehow protecting our soldiers from the un-beautiful, disgraceful reality of what it means to be an executioner. At the age of twenty-one, USAF Airman First Class Brandon Bryant executed his first kill.11 He was a soldier in the United States Air Force flying a Predator drone that loomed two miles above the countryside of Kunar Province in Afghanistan. It was another day in his life as an airman flying a drone, entering the virtual space of a high definition screen as he went to war seated in an airconditioned box in the middle of the Nevada desert. After completing a ten-week course, he had become a “sensor operator” in a team of “drone warriors” in the US Air Force who operated Predator drones. The teams consisted of analysts, mission intelligence coordinators, sensor operators, safety observers, and pilots.12 They would work twelve-hour shifts. Most of the time the work involved tedious hours of surveillance. Circling over a house for weeks. Tracking human subjects he was trained to see as targets. He tracked them. Drinking tea with friends. Playing with their kids. Having sex with their wives. Going to weddings and soccer matches. Taking a crap in a field. Tracking “patterns of life.” Tracking what airmen

126

Y. SANGARASIVAM

seated in front of a screen in Nevada defined as “dangerous” and “suspicious” patterns of life in Afghanistan or Pakistan or wherever, which would then justify the kill.13 His job as a “sensor,” as they were called, was to act as the eyes of the MQ-1B Predator. When it was time to kill, his job was to bring the multiple cameras of the drone into focus and to aim its laser on the human target. He sat next to the pilot who pulled the trigger to launch a Hellfire missile. “Terminal guidance” was the responsibility of the “sensor”: guiding the missile to the desired target. His first kill was in 2007. Six years later he remembered it vividly. It was a midwinter landscape. Three men walking down a dirt road. The directives from a disembodied chain of command told him they were carrying rifles. He couldn’t tell if this was true, “for all he knew, they were shepherd’s staffs.” He remembered the infrared heat signatures of the three men upon which he locked his targeting laser to release the Hellfire missile at supersonic speed. His screen lit up with the white-hot clarity of the kill. He remembered. The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s holding it, and he’s rolling around, and blood is squirting out of his leg, and it’s hitting the ground, and it’s hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.14

Years later. He would remember. Dropping Hellfire on humans. Over and over again. By 2011 he had logged approximately 6,000 hours of flight time. Completed hundreds of missions. Targeted hundreds of human beings. Completed hundreds of kills. There came a time, eventually, when he would step through the entrance of his flight headquarters to read the bulletin board. To read the kill list for the day’s work. He remembered saying. What motherfucker’s gonna die today?

Years later. He would remember. Over and over again. Dropping Hellfire on a child.

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

127

Missile off the rail. This figure runs around the corner, the outside, toward the front of the building. And it looked like a kid to me. Like a little human person. … There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there. Did that look like a child to you? 15

He asked the pilot. He asked his team of analysts who were all watching the shot from “somewhere in the world.” Bagram. The Pentagon in Washington D.C. Maybe elsewhere. One of the intelligence observers responded back in a chat message: Per the review, it’s a dog.16

He remembered the message. He was told. To see a child in Afghanistan as a dog. Whose life is not worth grieving. After the work of killing. Will we remember. What we were told. Will we remember a child in Afghanistan. As a dog. Per the review. Of history. When drones became the weapons of choice. To uphold our national security. To uphold our cultural values of freedom and democracy. To uphold our cultural values of national belonging and patriotic pride. We were told. In March 2013, a Gallup Daily tracking survey revealed that 65% of Americans “think the U.S. government should use drones to launch airstrikes in other countries against suspected terrorists.”17 We were told. Drone strikes are “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists,” said President Obama. “I want to make sure that people understand: actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. … For the most part they have been very precise precision strikes against Al Qaeda and their affiliates.”18 We were told. Michael Hayden is a retired four-star general of the United States Air Force and former director of the National Security Agency as well as the former director of the CIA. Speaking about drone warfare, he said it demonstrated “the most targeted and effective application of firepower in the history of armed conflict.” He described the drone as “an exquisite weapon when you want to be both effective and moral.”19

128

Y. SANGARASIVAM

We were told. Florida Congressman Alan Grayson invited Rafi ur Rehman and his family to testify at a Congressional hearing in October 2013. “Rather than simply questioning military and intelligence officials about the efficacy and wisdom of drone strikes, Grayson had invited some of the victims.”20 Mr. Rehman and his family live in Trappi, a rural village in Waziristan, which is located in the northwest region of Pakistan near the Afghanistan border. A US drone strike killed Mr. Rehman’s mother, Momina Bibi. Speaking to members of congress, Mr. Rehman’s thirteen-year-old son, Zubair described the day of the attack, as their family prepared to celebrate the Muslim holy day of Eid. Zubair said. As I helped my grandmother in the field, I could see and hear the drone hovering overhead, but I didn’t worry. Why would I worry? Neither my grandmother nor I were militants. When the drone fired the first time, the whole ground shook and black smoke rose up. The air smelled poisonous. We ran, but several minutes later the drone fired again. People from the village came to our aid and took us to hospital. We spent the night in great agony in at the hospital and the next morning I was operated on. That is how we spent Eid. Now I prefer cloudy days when the drones don’t fly. When the sky brightens and becomes blue, the drones return and so does the fear. Children don’t play so often now, and have stopped going to school. Education isn’t possible as long as the drones circle overhead.” 21

We were told. Remember. Shaker Aamer told us to play the Pink Floyd song, Hey you! So now we listen again as a young boy looks up to the sky and laments: “Now I prefer cloudy days when the drones don’t fly. When the sky brightens and becomes blue, the drones return and so does the fear.” His words are unintentionally poetic, yet the trauma of his recounting mirrors almost exactly the Pink Floyd song, “Goodbye, Blue Sky”: Look Mommy, there’s an aeroplane up in the sky. Did you see the frightened ones? Did you hear the falling bombs? Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky? Did you see the frightened ones? Did you hear the falling bombs?

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

129

The flames are all gone, but the pain lingers on. Goodbye, blue sky. Goodbye, blue sky. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.22

Speaking to members of Congress, Zubair’s father, Mr. Rehman said. Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day. Some media outlets reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mother’s house. Others reported that the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All of them reported that three, four, five militants were killed. Not a militant but my mother. In urdu we have a saying: aik lari main pro kay rakhna. Literally translated, it means the string that holds the pearls together. That is what my mother was. She was the string that held our family together. Since her death, the string has been broken and life has not been the same. We feel alone and we feel lost.” 23

We were told. When President George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on January 29, 2002, his statements were affirmed with applause. After applause. After applause. After applause. After applause. The significance of his report on the State of the Union in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon weighed heavily in this nationally televised speech to the nation and the world. President Bush said. Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished guests, fellow citizens, as we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our union has never been stronger. (APPLAUSE) We last met in an hour of shock and suffering. In four short months, our nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation and freed a country from brutal oppression. (APPLAUSE)

130

Y. SANGARASIVAM

The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul. Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan now occupy cells at Guantanamo Bay. (APPLAUSE) And terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives are running for their own. (APPLAUSE) ... Our enemies send other people’s children on missions of suicide and murder. They embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We stand for a different choice, made long ago, on the day of our founding. We affirm it again today. We choose freedom and the dignity of every life. (APPLAUSE) Steadfast in our purpose, we now press on. We have known freedom’s price. We have shown freedom’s power. And in this great conflict, my fellow Americans, we will see freedom’s victory.24 (APPLAUSE)

We were told. Years later. Airman First Class Brandon Bryant would remember. As he drove past the strip malls and neighborhoods of his hometown in Montana. He started sobbing. He pulled over. Stopping the car. To call his mother. She just was like, ‘Everything will be ok,’ and I told her I killed someone, I killed people, and I don’t feel good about it. .And she’s like, ‘Good, that’s how it should feel, you should never not feel that way.’” 25

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

131

His mother, LanAnn, remembered. It was summer. Brandon would leave a strange locked case on her kitchen table. One day she found the case open. Lying there in the open, a loaded semi-automatic pistol unfurled the terror of wondering. Whether her son might kill himself. She told him many months later. She told him that she gave the gun to a friend to store in a locked safe. He had no memory of the gun.26 We are told to draw a line between Brandon’s body and the intimate spaces of our own in such a way that our attention is distracted from the vital relationships between soldiers and children, fathers and sons, sons and mothers, grandmothers and grandsons, between Predator drones and dogs, between hellfire missiles and the holy day of Eid, between a string of pearls and a loaded semi-automatic pistol on a kitchen table. Can we still draw the line. Between us. And them. We were told. In a statement released by the US Department of Defense (DOD), “there were a total of 319 suicides among active duty personnel and 203 among those in the reserve components [and] a total of 841 service members had one or more attempted suicides in 2012.”27 According to the Pentagon and DOD reports, the number of suicides surpasses the number of soldiers killed in combat in Afghanistan in the same year. The Department of Veterans Affairs reported in 2017 that the average number of suicides per day among Veterans remained at the rate of 20 since 2001.28 We were told. Shall we still pretend. That the deployment of drones is an exquisite weapon when you want to be both effective and moral. Shall we still pretend. That only Our enemies send other people’s children on missions of suicide and murder. Shall we still pretend. That somehow we are protecting our soldiers from the un-beautiful, disgraceful reality. Of what it means to be an executioner. ● The condition of haunting that may lead to suicide, enables us to witness and understand the realities and the responsibilities of soldiers and suicide

132

Y. SANGARASIVAM

bombers who are recruited to missions of nationalist wars that inevitably lead to the killing of others and the killing of oneself—whether the killing of self and other is simultaneous and visible to the public, as in the case of the suicide bomber, or as in the case of soldiers, the killing of self is discreet, private, and displaced by space and time from the killing of others. Perhaps it is this unthinkable knowledge of killing and preparing to be killed in the work of war that the authors of the LTTE’s posters call upon us to plant in our hearts; as a way of opening up spaces for beingin-common with those we fear as terrorist, as enemy others, and those we celebrate as heroic soldiers at home. Heroism is a significant theme in the cultural productions of the LTTE. The poster in Fig. 4.1 implicitly references the yearly date designated by the LTTE to remember and honor the sacrifices of all who died in the struggle for national liberation: November 27th, Day of Commemoration for the Bravest of the Brave.29 The heroic feats of Black Tigers are not highlighted here as they are in other posters. The heroism (Maaveerar Naal ) commemorating “the bravest of the of brave” is tempered by the poetic text that introduces this day of remem). Precarity brance—the soil that lost its children ( and dispossession are not only experienced by people. These conditions -munn) of Tamil Eelam, of war are also experienced by the soil ( the emergent nation-state that is envisioned by the LTTE. The soil is represented here as a living being, as an actant who maintains a familial relationship with people as its children. By narrating the ontology of the soil that mourns the loss of its children, the reader is invited into an ecographic practice of being and becoming one with the land. The work of killing and being killed, of suicide and homicide, is felt by the soil upon which the precarity of dispossession nourishes nationalist and patriotic wars. Imminent in the ontological reality, in the state of becoming and being a soldier or suicide bomber, is the simultaneous understanding of corporeal vulnerability, autonomy, and self-determination that resonates with the demands of nationalism and patriotism. The LTTE’s political posters are a performative space where the ontologies and epistemologies of nationalism’s demands are narrated through the self-representation of this social and political movement. How is the individual’s struggle for self-determination linked to the struggle for national self-determination? What does it take to be a part of a nation? What does it take to become a patriot? How do we know that we belong to a nation? Drawing from a history of “feminist and queer struggles for corporeal self-determination,” Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou raise meaningful questions that

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

133

may be instructive in understanding the intersectionalities of corporeal vulnerability, autonomy, and self-determination, which inform the ontological realities of suicide and soldiering that nationalism and patriotism demands. In those moments when we rush to show our patriotic pride and claim our sense of national belonging, we can question: How then might ideas of corporeal vulnerability resonate with socialmovement strategies and political claims of corporeal autonomy and self-determination? How do we fight for the right to be and to matter corporeally when our bodies are battlefields that are never simply our own—never entirely under our individual control?30

The LTTE’s poster, below (Fig. 4.2), speaks to a heroism that is defined by the corporeal vulnerabilities, autonomy, and self-determination of Black Tigers whose bodies are envisioned and experienced as a battlefield. The poster commemorates the seven LTTE cadres who penetrated a fortified Sri Lankan military base in a Black Tiger mission on August 2, 1994. Built by the British Royal Air Force during World War II, the Palali airport became Sri Lanka’s second international airport since independence from Britain in 1948 and received travelers, including Tamil expatriates visiting or returning home to the Jaffna peninsula. When my family went home for summer holidays, my grandparents waited eagerly to receive us at Palali airport. It was a place of arrival. Signifying an arrival home for expatriates like us. It was a small airport with a welcoming ambiance of ease and beauty that the people of Jaffna were proud of. The entryway lined with tropical palm trees, vibrant bougainvillea, and hearty crotons welcomed all who arrived there. As the civil war escalated after the state-sponsored genocide of Tamil community members in 1983 and the consequent rise of the LTTE’s armed struggle, the civilian airport was seized by the Sri Lankan Air Force to establish and secure a base for the containment and military occupation of the Jaffna peninsula and the Tamil territories in the northern regions of the island. The Sri Lankan military declared the Palali region a “High Security Zone” and forcefully expelled Tamil families from their homes, farms, and livelihoods after establishing the military airbase. After decades of war, this region is littered with landmines placed by the LTTE and Sri Lankan military. These are also conditions of dispossession and precarity experienced by the land, by the soil during a time of war. Farming lands are abandoned, left to fallow and many of the homes that remain are

134

Y. SANGARASIVAM

skeletal structures after repeated bombings by the Sri Lankan forces. Some of the homes and surrounding lands belonging to Tamil families have been cleared of mines in order to be taken by the Sri Lankan government as a part of its colonization policy. As an initiative with the aim of demographic change, the colonization policy facilitates the relocation of Sinhalese military families to establish residencies in the Jaffna peninsula. While sharing her experiences with me, an elder Tamil woman in Toronto who had returned from her visit to Jaffna said, “They [the Sri Lankan government] are bent on forcefully changing the demographics of Jaffna…they want to see that we are outnumbered in our own homeland. It is a sadness that we must endure, child.” ●

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

135

Fig. 4.2 In Praise of Heroes! Poster commemorating seven Black Tigers, produced by the cultural and political wing of the LTTE. See the translation of Tamil text below in italics (Author is the Rightsholder of this image)

In Praise of Heroes! For those who embraced a heroic death in the Black Tiger attack that penetrated the Palali military airbase on the 2 nd of August 1994, we acknowledge and join our palms in prayer, in praise of their bravery and courage. Black Tigers are our nation’s armored shields of self-protection and selfdefense. They remove the obstructions in the path of our armed struggle. The enemy’s military strength is broken and discarded by the strength of will of these human beings of fire. ●

136

Y. SANGARASIVAM

This poster (Fig. 4.2) commemorates seven Black Tigers: Major Nilavan (known as Kennedy), Major Jayam, Major Thilahan, Major Sehran (known as Ashok), Captain Thiru, Captain Navaratnam, and - VeeravanLeftenant Rangan. The title of the poster is nakkam. It is a word beyond grammatical tense—one that is not locked into the specificities of past, present, and future. It can be translated and understood in multiple ways: “In Praise of Heroes,” “In Praise of Bravery and Courage,” and also as a formal expression of recognition and greeting—“With Joined Palms in Prayer, Greetings to the Courageous.” In the past tense, Veeravannakkam commemorates the valiant endeavors of these seven cadres as fellow community members who have died in service to their nation in a struggle for liberation. It is also an expression of greeting to acknowledge and recognize their existence now, in the present. As such, commemorative posters, songs, video documents, and other forms of cultural productions, are a way of remembering the lives and celebrating the contributions of people who participated in the LTTE’s national liberation struggle; allowing them to continue to live in the present, transcending the limits of time by incorporating them into a narrative of Tamil history and heritage. The corporeal vulnerabilities of these cadres are visible in the eyes and expressions of these youthful faces that project an awareness and acceptance of their fate as Black Tigers. Theirs is a comportment that carries the knowledge and the strength of will to embrace a certain death in service of a nation’s struggle for liberation from a discriminatory, violent, and oppressive governing state. In this struggle, the body of the self represents the body of the nation to fight for the right to be and to matter as citizens whose lives are precarious in the killing fields of war. The precariousness of their lives is witnessed by the eyes of the international community of nation-states whose youth are also recruited or drafted into military service as the nation’s armored shields of self-protection and self-defense. The Vietnamese monastic, poet, and activist for peace, Thich Nhat Hanh, shows us a way to recognize the corporeal vulnerabilities we share with our soldiers and our revolutionary cadres we recruit to serve in nationalist and patriotic wars. In writing to American veterans who went to war in Vietnam under the leadership of President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as those who went to war in Iraq during the First Gulf War under the leadership of President George H. W. Bush, Thich Nhat Hanh speaks to the corporeal vulnerabilities that are cultivated within soldiers and civilians by watering the seeds of hatred and

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

137

fear in order to encourage soldiers and insurgents to kill. 31 The seeds of fear and hatred were planted by the leaders of nation-states who identified an enemy, a threat to national and personal security, and a need for military intervention, which were then reinforced by the coercive power of mass media images and sound-bites of communism then and terrorism now. The seeds of fear and hatred have been instrumental in mobilizing nationalism’s and patriotism’s demand to support the unsustainable wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. As a Vietnamese monastic, writer, and peace activist who pioneered the practice of Engaged Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh shares the teachings of nonviolent social change to transform the suffering that is nurtured by fear, anger, hatred, and the attendant experiences of shame, guilt, and regret. These are sentiments and emotions that arise from the personal wars within us, which then spill into wars outside of us and onto others. His teachings show us a way to witness how these internalized personal wars water the seeds of fear and hatred, which then fuel the nationalist and patriotic wars we support. By cheering for the recruitment of our community members to fight in global wars as a form of service to one’s nation and country, we nourish the fears and hatred that sustain our sense of personal and national belonging. He shows us a way of being-in-common with the disposition of soldiers and revolutionary fighters like the LTTE. As a result of his experiences in working for peace and social justice while living through the French and American occupation of his homeland, Hanh came to understand the symbolic significance of the soldier’s body that’s deployed into the killing fields of war to represent the body of the nation. When you went to war, you went for the whole nation. The whole nation was responsible for what happened there, not you alone. Your hand was the hand of the whole nation. If you made mistakes, the whole nation made mistakes. If you went to war believing you were doing something important—trying to save a people, fighting evil—it was not your thinking alone; it was the thinking of the whole nation. You were sent there to fight, destroy, kill, and die. You were not the only one responsible. We cannot just shout at you and say, “You did that!” We all did it collectively.32

Once we are able to recognize this shared responsibility and shared corporeal vulnerability between ourselves and soldiers/insurgents/ revolutionary cadres, we can then begin to understand the precarity of our fears and our hatred toward entire groups of people. We can begin to witness the precarity of our antagonism taking form and giving content

138

Y. SANGARASIVAM

to our sense of national belonging and patriotic pride; one that pushes our soldiers and their revolutionary cadres to kill themselves and others on behalf of their/our national community. Drawing on Rey Chow’s analysis, we can observe how the cultural values of nationalism, patriotism, and white supremacy also enhance, “the function of that socially constructed antagonism, polarized between the purity of our own position and the culpability of an enemy who is not one of us simply because we are struggling against it. Such social antagonism is typically mobilized in such a manner as to allow one group [soldiers fighting on behalf of the state] the privilege of monopolizing violence and loyalty.”33 In his 2002 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush defined Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as constituting “the axis of evil” in a rhetorical move to secure the purity of his country’s position in preparation for war with a culpable enemy. We may recall President Bush speaking to the international community of nation-states in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when he declared: “you’re either with us or against us.”34 Concretized as a strategy and tactic to secure an international consensus and support of the global war on terror, his dictum exemplifies the way the United States exercises its privilege of monopolizing violence and loyalty. In the years to follow, the coalescing forces of imperialism, nationalism, and patriotism fueled the power of President Bush, President Obama, and President Trump to mobilize the socially constructed antagonism against people of Islamic heritage as an embodiment of the culpable enemy to avenge the 9/11 attacks and to legitimize the indefinite global war on terror. Beginning in 2010, officials in the Obama administration catalogued whoever they defined as an enemy in, what they called, the “disposition matrix.” This is a database that catalogues information about “a list of suspects targeted for elimination across the planet. These spreadsheets are now a permanent feature of US national security.” As Ian G.R. Shaw has analyzed, this “marked a new phase of American exceptionalism” in the twenty-first century where the United States established a “Predator Empire” by implementing the “biopolitical power that digitises, catalogues, and eliminates threatening ‘patterns of life’ across a widening battlespace.”35 As avengers of nationalism and patriotism, soldiers are recruited to enact the violence of a “Predator Empire” to demonstrate a people’s loyalty to and pride in their country. Civilians experience and articulate their nationalism and patriotism by supporting their troops through

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

139

symbolic gestures. Flying flags. Donning bumper stickers on cars. Draping homes and businesses with banners that announce. “Support Our Troops.” And “The Power of Pride.” This symbolic show of support and pride is a way of acquiescing to the systematic erosion of civil liberties in service of protecting national security. This show of a people’s loyalty is also a way of agreeing to the need to racially profile, torture, and indefinitely detain in the concentration camps of Guantánamo Bay, those who are perceived as foreigners outside the nation, particularly people of Islamic heritage.36 As such, the body of the civilian is extended to the body of the soldier who enacts the violence of patriotism and nationalism on behalf of the nation. In this way the body of the soldier is not entirely his or her own. The soldier’s body becomes the body of the nation to wage war by proxy. This in turn enables the corporeal vulnerabilities of both soldiers and civilians, whose bodies are never entirely under their own control but are under the control of the colonizing demands of nationalism and patriotism. Grégoire Chamayou has rightly observed that soldiers participating in drone warfare are infinitely less vulnerable than suicide bombers and other combatants: “Not only is it not necessary for them to die in order to kill, but it is impossible for them to be killed as they kill.” In this context, he argues that “self-preservation by means of drones involves putting vulnerable bodies out of reach” thus creating an “antagonism between … suicide bombings versus phantom bombings.” Chamayou goes on to argue that the “polarity is primarily economic. It sets those who have nothing but their bodies with which to fight in opposition to those who possess capital and technology. But these two regimes, the one tactical, the other material, also correspond to two different ethical regimes: the ethic of heroic sacrifice, on the one hand, and the ethic of vital self-preservation, on the other.”37 What lives at the intersection of the socially constructed antagonisms of the state and the corporeal vulnerabilities of soldiers, insurgents, and civilians who desire the right to be and to matter corporeally when their bodies are battlefields and never simply their own? What makes these socially constructed antagonisms against a culpable enemy so enticing and seductive for people to follow and inculcate into their identity to the point they/we are willing to kill and be killed? By following Rey Chow’s analysis, we can observe the polarization between the purity of our own position that is fostered by patriotism’s demand of loyalty and nationalism’s gift of belonging. In a perpetual

140

Y. SANGARASIVAM

state of national in/security promoted by the global war on terror, the cultural values of loyalty and belonging are mobilized to consolidate our own identity in relation to the construction of a culpable enemy who is not one of us. It is this polarization between purity and culpability that President Bush banked on when he proclaimed “you’re either with us or against us.” He banked on this enticing and seductive polarization to clarify and define the purity of national belonging and patriotic pride against the culpability of “the evil ones.”38 The purity in our own subject position also waters the seeds of antagonism that convinces a nation to go to war. In this context, the antagonisms of the nation are soaked in the body of the soldier who goes to kill and be killed in war as a form of patriotic service to their country. In other words, nationalism’s and patriotism’s demand of loyalty by going to war to kill and be killed is identified as a privileged way of serving, and therefore belonging to your country. The attendant feelings of fear and hatred grow out of these seeds of antagonism to manifest in the shame, guilt, and regret that emerge from the confusion of soldiers in despair. The kind of despair that settles in after losing sight of their sense of purpose and reason for signing up for the work of killing and being killed in imperial wars. It is also a despair that arises from witnessing the death of their friends and comrades. The kind of despair that settles into contemplating suicide. The purity of loyalty and belonging, that once inculcated a sense of patriotic pride, is transformed through the work of killing and being killed. The choice for suicide speaks to the corporeal vulnerabilities of soldiers who come to see that the cultural values of loyalty, national belonging, and patriotic pride were not so pure after all. With every death and every attempt at suicide, the corporeal vulnerabilities of soldiers reverberate back to reside in the corporeal vulnerabilities of their family members, friends, and community members who are called upon to witness the impact of going to war on their behalf. Preceding the state of despair that leads to attempting suicide is the epistemological and ontological reality of abjection that is embodied in the experience of homelessness among veterans returning home from war. In 2012, the National Coalition for the Homeless reported that “approximately 40% of homeless men are veterans, although veterans comprise only 34% of the general adult male population.”39 The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness reported that “on any given day, an estimated 40,056 Veterans experience homelessness in America, according to Point-in-Time counts conducted in January 2017 by communities

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

141

across the country. Of that estimated number, two-thirds (24,690) were staying in shelters or transitional housing programs, while the other onethird (15,366) were unsheltered, living in cars, in encampments, or on the streets.”40 In this normative matrix of imperial wars, soldiers—the nation’s armored shields —come home to homelessness. Let’s not pretend that our patriotism and feeling of national belonging can protect our soldiers from the un-beautiful, disgraceful reality of what it means to come home to this contradiction: The United States, as the world’s leading superpower with the most technologically advanced weapons cannot protect its own soldiers from the abjection of homelessness and suicide when they return home from war. As the armored shields of self-protection and self-defense of the Tamil nation, Black Tigers were arguably the most advanced weapons in the asymmetric war against the military strength of the state regimes that provided military and monetary aid for the Sri Lankan state to defeat the LTTE and their nationalist movement. Black Tigers were also constituted by the purity of their own position as liberation fighters in combat with an infinitely more powerful, culpable enemy: the Sri Lankan state. Sharp lines of distinction are drawn by state regimes that hold the monopoly on violence in order to pursue a just war against a culpable, terrorist, enemy Other. The soldier, whose loyalty to country, is revered. The insurgent, whose loyalty to the nation, is reviled. In other words, the antagonisms of soldiers (and those of civilians that encourage and support them) serving in patriotic wars are seen as legitimate and pure in relation to the antagonisms of insurgents and suicide bombers (and those of civilians that encourage and support them) who are seen as illegitimate, deviant, fanatical, evil, and culpable; thereby rendering their lives unworthy of respect and deemed as ungrievable. The photographs of each LTTE cadre and the accompanying poetic text in the poster above (Fig. 4.2) commemorating the Black Tigers who penetrated the Sri Lankan military base at Palali, represents a reality that radically departs from the state-sponsored view of them as deviant and therefore unworthy of respect and grieving. As a response to decades of violence directed against the Tamil community-at-large by successive Sri Lankan governments, Black Tigers emerged with their determination to confront the power of state regimes. The cultural values of self-protection, self-defense, armed struggle, and strength of will are documented in commemoration of the people who sacrificed their lives in service of the Tamil nationalist struggle by becoming human beings of fire.

142

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Athanasiou and Butler have analyzed how social movements engage with a “politics of performativity” to articulate an experience of corporeal vulnerability that “enables (rather than undermines) claims of selfdetermination.” 41 Since the state organizes the regulatory fictions of just wars that it pursues to maintain a monopoly on legitimate violence, the bodies of soldiers and patriots are demarcated as those that matter, that are lauded, that are grievable. In contrast, the bodies of insurgents, in a struggle for national liberation from the state, are judged as deviant, as those who are perceived as outside the nation-state and therefore outside of humanity. Once rendered as outside of humanity, your life is deemed ungrievable.42 In their discussion of the “normative ontologies of the body [that] work to judge, adjudicate, and demarcate which bodies matter,” Athanasiou and Butler define the politics of performativity as: “norms, names, signs, practices, and regulatory fictions [that] can be invoked, cited anew, and challenged at once.”43 Within the normalized matrix of asymmetric war, the LTTE’s political posters enact the politics of performativity that names and challenges conventional attitudes toward corporeal autonomy and struggle for self-determination. This nationalist struggle emerged from the corporeal vulnerabilities of Tamil community members who are dispossessed of the fundamental civil rights and protections afforded to Sinhala community members who are acknowledged and respected as the real citizens of Sri Lanka. In response to the continued enactment of discriminatory legislation coupled with the policy of statesponsored violence against Tamil communities throughout the country, the LTTE’s resistance was “constituted as an impropriety” by successive Sinhala government regimes. As a social and political movement in opposition to the brutality and authority of the state, the Sri Lankan government displaced the Tamil nationalist struggle outside the history of state-sponsored violence and framed the LTTE as a terrorist organization. Anyone who joined the LTTE had to bear “the burden and the responsibility of injurious and unjust genealogies alongside [their] aspirations to freedom.”44 In this context, suicide bombers transform their bodies into human beings of fire in a quintessential act of self-determination and resistance to counter the precarity of existence under the hegemonic rule of discriminatory governments. This disposition of precarity is an outcome of government regimes that deny the rights and privileges of citizenship for entire groups of people who are perceived as outside the nation-state and

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

143

outside of humanity. The politics of performativity that inform the strategies and tactics of suicide bombing are represented in the political posters that commemorate the people who sacrificed their lives to become ooyiraayuthungal (life-weapons), as Black Tigers in the LTTE’s struggle for national liberation. These posters, along with other cultural productions of the LTTE such as songs, films, websites, YouTube, and other video documents, provide an instructive set of insights into understanding the politics of performativity; one that makes visible the precarity of dispossession from which human beings make a choice to deploy their bodies as life-weapons: performativity takes place when the uncounted prove to be reflexive and start to count themselves, not only enumerating who they are, but ‘appearing’ in some way, exercising in that way a ‘right’ (extralegal, to be sure) to existence. They start to matter. We can understand this more broadly as a way of producing a political subject, such that the subject is a political effect of this very exercise. The exercise of the right is something that happens within the context of precarity and takes form as a precarious exercise that seeks to overcome its own precarity. And even if it is not supported by existing law (laws that deny citizenship, for instance), it is still supported by extralegal cultural, political, and discursive conditions, translations from other struggles, and modes of organizing that are neither state-sponsored nor state-centered. In this way performativity works within precarity and against its differential allocation. Or, rather, performativity names that unauthorized exercise of a right to existence that propels the precarious into political life.45

For those who embraced a heroic death in the Black Tiger attack that penetrated the Palali military airbase on the 2nd of August 1994, we acknowledge and join our palms in prayer, in praise of their bravery and courage. This poetic text, which frames the poster in commemoration of the seven LTTE cadres who died by becoming human beings of fire (Fig. 4.2), recognizes and honors suicide bombing as a precarious exercise that seeks to overcome its own precarity in an effort to exercise the right to existence. LTTE insurgents, in particular Black Tigers who deploy themselves as life-weapons, work within the precarity of struggling against a criminalized identity that is rooted in the socially constructed antagonism of the state, in this case the Sri Lankan government. It is the kind of antagonism that Rey Chow describes, which consolidates the

144

Y. SANGARASIVAM

purity of the Sinhala nation’s own position by defining the people of the Tamil nation as “demonic,” alien terrorists, as the culpable enemy—as outside the nation-state and outside of humanity.46 From the precarious condition of being displaced from humanity and being dispossessed of the fundamental rights and protections of citizenship, Tamil youth recruited themselves into the exercise of suicide bombing; deploying their bodies as life-weapons, “appearing” through that unauthorized exercise of a right to existence that propels them to transform the conditions of dispossession into willful political action. By recruiting themselves as Black Tigers they endeavored to represent their fellow Tamil community members to be visible as citizens with the right to exist if not within the nation-state of Sri Lanka, then within the emergent state of Tamil Eelam they had envisioned. They propelled their precarious situation—of being criminalized and hunted as terrorists—into political life by transforming themselves into human beings of fire. They operationalized the politics of performativity to produce a political subject—Black Tigers— who were a political effect of the very exercise of suicide bombing. As political subjects, Black Tigers became a part of the LTTE’s movement to represent a people aspiring to live and thrive in a nation-state as citizens with equal rights. Suicide bombings operationalized the politics of performativity by working through the precarity of extralegal means against its differential allocations of power and legitimacy within the normative matrices of the global war on terror. The LTTE’s commemorative posters (Figs. 4.1, 4.2) demonstrate how those who are uncounted—how those who are denied citizenship and denied their humanity by criminalizing them as terrorists and rejecting them from civil society—prove to be reflexive and start to count themselves by memorializing their efforts to achieve national selfdetermination and liberation for future generations of Tamil community members. In the second poster above (Fig. 4.2), the seven LTTE cadres (six of whom are identified as Black Tigers) are recognized, made visible, and honored: by inscribing their rank, movement name, family name, place of family heritage and place of birth, and home district (or in some cases, where their families have been displaced to). They are counted and commemorated by the Tamil nation, for whom they sacrificed their lives: (Fig. 4.2—from top left to right): Black Tiger Major Nilavan (Kennedy) (Jesumy Fernando), Vunnarkullam, Adumpan, Mannar; Black Tiger Major Jayum (Kunanaayakham Thevarasa), Thirukonamalai; Black Tiger Major Thilakhan (Suppayah Raj), Maddakallapu; Major Seran

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

145

(Ashok), (Kunnasingam Kunnaraj), Thanangkillppu—Chaavakcheri; Black Tiger Captain Thiru (Konnamalai Mukunthan), Amparai; Black Tiger Captain Navaratnam (Chrisco Lemphert Annadas), Cheddikullam, current address: Madu Refugee Camp, Mannar; Black Tiger Leftenant Rungan (Kunnamaalai Rathikumar), current residence: Surapadi, Vaddakachi, Killinochchi. The acknowledgment of Black Tigers, and LTTE cadres in general, as fellow community members was prominently featured in the commemorative posters that identified specific individuals and their achievements in the LTTE’s nationalist struggle. Memorializing their names, place of birth and residence through cultural production and community rituals is a way the uncounted prove to be reflexive by remembering their right to existence. These posters identified their relationships with families and communities as well as their relationships with and attachment to a particular space and place, which then became significant in connecting the individual’s and the nation’s struggle for self-determination and liberation from histories of state-sponsored violence. ●

146

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Fig. 4.3 The First Woman Black Tiger of the Sea. Poster commemorating Captain Aungkaiatkanni, produced by the cultural and political wing of the LTTE. See the translation of Tamil text below in italics (Author is the Rightsholder of this image)

The First Woman Black Tiger of the Sea Captain Aungkaiatkanni (Pushpakala Thuraisingam) (West Munnkumpaan, 5th district Vehlanai) Valiant birth 10-5-73 Valiant death 16-08-94

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

147

(On 16-08-94 a commanding ship and the Dvora patrol boat were shattered in the Kankesanthurai harbor by the heroic achievement that was understood by the attainment of a courageous death.) Let us follow and walk in the footsteps of Aungkaiatkanni who dissolved her own body with the force of earthquakes realized are the eminence and legacy of women as dreams only of a nation are carried to fruition! Mobilize! Let us become Black Tiger. Student of Saraswathi Vithyasaalai, Inhabitant of Ariyaalai Vehlanai (place of education) (place of community)

One of the most widely known examples of a Black Tiger mission within the Tamil communities of Sri Lanka and the Tamil diaspora is that of Aungkaiatkanni. On the 16th of August, 1994, Aungkaiatkanni, a woman cadre of the Sea Tigers, the naval wing of the LTTE, attacked and sank "The Sagarawardene," a highly valued ship in the fleet of the Sri Lankan navy occupying the coastal seaboard of the Jaffna peninsula. The photograph of Aungkaiatkanni in the poster above (Fig. 4.3) is framed by a discursive representation that recognizes her subjectivity and the political effect of her heroic sacrifice in successfully completing the precarious exercise of suicide bombing. The poster engages the politics of performativity by: announcing her heroic achievements; commemorating her death; documenting a historic military achievement by the first woman cadre of the LTTE to become a Black Tiger; communicating the poetics of a struggle for national self-determination; and, messaging a call to join the struggle for creating a nation-state of Tamil Eelam. In keeping with all the cultural productions of the LTTE, this poster exemplifies the politics of performativity by demonstrating the kind of reflexivity that exercises a right to existence where a person, such as Pushpakala Thuraisingam, known in the movement as Aungkaiatkanni, becomes a political subject through her military achievements and through this process of representation in a commemorative poster. There is a haunting quality to this photograph of Aungkaiatkanni—a matter-of-factness in her determined gaze coupled with the accompanying Tamil texts that dislocates her from the reality of our everyday flow of life outside of a war-zone. Yet the immediacy of a photograph brings us, as readers, just that much closer to a history and experience of this young woman who deployed her body as a weapon of war in service of a Tamil nationalist struggle in Sri Lanka.

148

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Susan Sontag observed that “photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.”47 As Judith Butler notes, Sontag’s analysis echoes Roland Barthes’ response to witnessing Lewis Payne’s photograph before Payne was executed: I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake (dont le mort est l’enjeu). By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. … every photograph is this catastrophe.48

Every poster that presents a photographic portrait of an LTTE cadre carries this catastrophe—an anterior future where death is certain. Every member of the movement had at one time been photographed in anticipation of being commemorated after their death. This anterior future of death was confronted in the discursive practices of LTTE cadres who narrated their nationalist struggle through their posters, songs, street theater performances, video documents, and radio/television broadcasts. Here lies the cultural value of sacrifice in the struggle for national liberation, which emerged as a theme in discussions I had with people both within and outside the movement. The same is said of soldiers serving in state-sponsored wars. The theme of sacrifice speaks of an acceptance and celebration of death. Sacrifice acts simultaneously as: a noun, a willingness to surrender life for a greater cause; and a verb, implying an unqualified past tense of existence that offers the self to be killed or offers to kill for a greater cause.49 President Barack Obama invoked the cultural value of sacrifice in his speech to the parents and students of the graduating class of 2014 at West Point Academy: I know you join me in extending a word of thanks to your families. Joe DeMoss, whose son James is graduating, spoke for a whole lot of parents when he wrote me a letter about the sacrifices you’ve made. “Deep inside,” he wrote, “we want to explode with pride at what they are committing to do in the service of our country.” Like several graduates, James is a combat veteran. And I would ask all of us here today to stand and pay tribute—not only to the veterans among us, but to the more than 2.5 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as their families. (Applause.)

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

149

This is a particularly useful time for America to reflect on those who have sacrificed so much for our freedom, a few days after Memorial Day.50

An implicit distinction resides in President Obama’s words of praise for graduates of West Point Academy and the greater national community: a distinction between the grievability and respect for the life of a soldier who sacrifices and serves in military organizations that support the state and a cadre who sacrifices and serves in a resistance/insurgent movement against state regimes, and who is consequently criminalized and dehumanized as a terrorist. But in the “absolute past of the pose,” the haunting presence of a living being in a photograph neutralizes this distinction between soldier and insurgent. Judith Butler asks, “Is this quality of ‘absolute pastness’ that is conferred on a living being, one whose life is not past, precisely the quality of grievability?” She answers definitively: To confirm that a life was, even within the life itself, is to underscore that a life is a grievable life. …the photograph acts on us in part through outliving the life it documents; it establishes in advance the time in which that loss will be acknowledged as a loss. So the photograph is linked through its “tense” to the grievability of a life, anticipating and performing that grievability.51

The photographic portrait of Aungkaiatkanni documents the absolute pastness of her life and this loss is acknowledged and made visible through this commemorative poster and its accompanying poetic text (see Fig. 4.3 above and the translation of the Tamil text that frames the photograph). The poster tells us an abbreviated story about who Aungkaiatkanni is and what she symbolizes for people within and perhaps beyond the Tamil communities of Sri Lanka and the Tamil diaspora. From her valiant birth to the moment of her valiant death at the time of her successful attack of a significant Sri Lankan naval vessel, she is honored for her perseverance and courage to dissolve her body with the force of earthquakes. She is remembered by her relationships with her family, her community, and her place of belonging. Her life is confirmed by recalling her given name and family name, her place of birth and residence, and also by her identity , (Saraswathi as an alumnus of her high school, Vithyasaalai). Her individual identity as a particular community member is honored along with her identity as the first woman Black Tiger of the

150

Y. SANGARASIVAM

LTTE’s naval wing to successfully complete an impossible mission. Her personal history along with her military achievement signifies the revolutionary potential of Tamil men and women who are mobilized to follow and walk in her footsteps by joining the nationalist struggle to become [a] Black Tiger. In this commemoration of Aungkaiatkanni’s death as a Black Tiger, grievability coalesces with valor and sacrifice to signify the eminence of Tamil women who stepped forward to carry forth the struggle for (sumakkindra) national self-determination. The Tamil word means, “to carry” and culturally implies the carrying forth of a child in a state of pregnancy. In this instance, the subject position of women signifies the revolutionary potential of a movement to successfully carry forth the struggle and birth a separate state of Tamil Eelam.52 This revolutionary potential was found in the subject position of Aungkaiatkanni, and fellow Tamil community members who joined the LTTE’s struggle for national liberation. Aungkaiatkanni’s heroic achievement and sacrifice for the Tamil liberation struggle is memorialized in the poetic verses of a song composed by poet and songwriter Puthuvai Ratnathurai. He is known as a revolutionary poet who headed the Tamil Eelam Arts and Cultural Guild during the LTTE’s de facto administration of northern Sri Lanka. On May 21, 2016, the Tamil Guardian reported that Mr. Ratnathurai “was last seen in custody of the Sri Lankan military on 18 May 2009 in Mullivaikkal and to date his fate is not known.” We will learn about the massacre of more than 40,000 Tamil people by the Sri Lankan military forces at Mullivaikkal in Chapter 6.53 I have translated and transliterated Puthuvai Ratnathurai’s song for Aungkaiatkanni from the original version that is performed in Tamil54 : Aungkaiatkanni Aungkaiatkanni opened eyes of burning embers. Upon the sea a wondrous event took place. A Sea-Tiger entered into the caves of the Sinhala forces and all the directions experienced the vibrant tremors of a Black Tiger enflamed in red. For Aungkaiatkanni, raise a thousand, thousand sacred lamps of fire.

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

In the name of our young sister compose a thousand, thousand songs in exalted Tamil verse. As she inscribes upon the continuous chords of gale force winds recorded in new literatures of heroism, of a great battle won. Inscribe in your life, this poem. She is the rising sun, appearing in time to make visible the dawn of our future realizing time to come. For Aungkaiatkanni, raise a thousand, thousand sacred lamps of fire... Enfolded in the gale storm of the sea, Daughter, your life is dissolved, coalescing, one with the waters. You ventured into the abode, the cave of the enemy. Tiger! You exploded the enemy’s ship. In the intensity of your fire, not a single body escaped. For Aungkaiatkanni, raise a thousand, thousand sacred lamps of fire... Arise! Stand tall! In this world, daughter, you bestow upon us the distinction of Sea-Tigers. In the path of this Tiger, in all the directions, Tamilians arise with dignity! Upon the waves

151

152

Y. SANGARASIVAM

she carries her song. She will live a thousand cycles in time. For Aungkaiatkanni, raise a thousand, thousand sacred lamps of fire...

Confronted with the everyday violence of military occupation and war by successive Sinhalese governments, young people like Aungkaiatkanni joined the LTTE’s armed struggle in response to the situation of dispossession that Tamil community members often experienced as they were displaced from their homes and as they were faced with the threat of detention, torture, rape, disappearance, and death. A person’s decision to join the LTTE was not greeted with romantic idealization. It was common for parents to despair and mourn the loss of their kids because they had to assume that their children, upon joining the movement, would not return. Families were fully aware of the sacrifices they were making as they watched their children join the movement; some wondering if a child would choose to become a Black Tiger—a choice they would learn about only after their child’s life was deployed as a weapon and commemorated in a heroic poster or a ritual public memorial organized by the LTTE. Becoming a Black Tiger was the highest accolade an LTTE recruit could achieve. From the perspective of an LTTE cadre, when the violence of the state surrounds you and all alternative spaces for dialogue have been shut down, the deaths of Black Tigers were an accepted part of the military and civic goals for the establishment of an independent state of Tamil Eelam. When I interviewed Nundthini in 1995, an LTTE woman cadre from the political wing, she shared her thoughts about what meaning Aungkaiatkanni has for herself and for Tamil community members who see a need for national independence: It is really an extraordinary event in the history of our struggle. Aungkaiatkanni is the first woman Black Tiger of our naval wing, the Sea Tigers, to attempt and complete such a mission. Really, to approach a government naval fleet and with her own body to explode a highly esteemed and valued vessel is no small feat. It is by means of her inner strength,

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

153

courage and determination that she has been successful in realizing her vision of the dawning of our nation. Her successful endeavors represent a reclaiming of our territorial waters in the Kankesanthurai seaboard. She is greatly honored and respected in our movement, even as we proceed to record a new history with our lives in this freedom struggle.

What Nundthini spoke of—the need to “record a new history”—was a common theme in the experiences of not only those directly participating in the LTTE’s liberation struggle; it was also a shared experience for many Tamil community members who lived with the constant threat of violence under the conditions of military occupation by Sri Lankan military forces and the paramilitary forces that brutalized Tamil families throughout the country. She was describing the inner strength and knowledge of committing oneself to the discipline and rigor of armed resistance. As a member of the LTTE, her life and life’s work as a participant in the Tamil liberation struggle became a means of inscribing new histories toward a different future than the one they felt was certain while living under military occupation—a life driven by fear. With these sentiments, Nundthini was describing, in intimate terms, the process of coming to terms with an anterior future in which death was almost certain in armed struggle and resistance. Her subject position, as a cadre in the LTTE’s armed struggle, indicates the revolutionary potential of the larger Tamil community that is called to acknowledge their own sacrifices in relation to hers. Her commitment to armed struggle and armed resistance takes form as a powerful metaphor for the means of inscribing new histories—both personal and national. Courage. Strength. Determination. Residing in these words Nundthini spoke in describing Aungkaiatkanni, is the materiality of death that national liberation and national belonging are contingent upon: death of the self and death of a colonizing other. The theme of recording new histories was also a simultaneous erasure and rewriting of “old histories.” The old history of Tamil community members recoiling in fear or standing in passive resistance when faced with the systematic violence of the Sri Lankan state would be transformed through revolutionary struggle. The “new histories” called on Tamil community members to prepare for combat and stand with integrity to create a new nation and a new national narrative. The sentiments of national pride in praising the will to sacrifice the self, the will to kill and be killed in the process of creating new histories are evidenced in another

154

Y. SANGARASIVAM

song produced by the LTTE: As the Tiger Inscribes in New Histories. The refrain of the song states: Sing! With praise The brave Tiger inscribes in new histories with the showering of their blood Take their sentiments and compose in song With strength lift up your voices and sing!

Suicide bombers simultaneously embody the ethical demand and the ethical obligation of sacrifice and self-determination while disrupting and dislocating the ontologies of national belonging. As a cadre in the LTTE’s Black Tiger division, Aungkaiatkanni claims an honored position in inscribing the new histories of Tamil Eelam, an envisioned emergent nation-state. She embodied the revolutionary potential of women’s participation in shaping and determining their communities’ social and political landscape to a degree that was unprecedented. She epitomized the strength, courage, and determination needed to create a nation-state. Aungkaiatkanni’s life story represents not only the making of new histories but also the progress of a social, cultural, and political revolution for Tamil families and Tamil women, in particular.55 The Tamil liberation struggle was not solely a nationalist, separatist movement. It has also provided the means and the highly politicized space for radical social change and reform: such as, the erosion of the caste system, the recasting of class stratifications, and the breaking of social norms that placed women in subordinate positions within the patriarchal order of the Tamil communities in Sri Lanka and in the Tamil diaspora. In this manner, the LTTE disrupted and dislocated the traditional structures of Tamil life. As such, social, cultural, and political disruption and dislocation became a part of the process of creating new histories and new ways of being and becoming a Tamil nation. In this context of the LTTE’s nationalist movement, disruption and dislocation signified not only the fragmentation of Sri Lanka as a nationstate in order to create their envisioned separate state of Tamil Eelam; it also signified the fragmentation of the body, of self, of community, of identity, of place and space. Indeed, the opening stanza of Puthuvai Ratnathurai’s commemorative song, Aungkaiatkanni opened eyes of burning embers, invites the listener and the reader to witness

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

155

the ontologies of national belonging through the politics of performativity, which invokes the bodily experience of a Black Tiger. I asked Nundthini to explain her understanding of the song’s poetic text, from the standpoint of an LTTE cadre: Like the sustained heat of smoldering embers, Aungkaiatkanni’s eyes burned with such fury and sorrow as she witnessed the occupation of our seas by the Sri Lankan forces, the enemy.

The embodied experiences of Aungkaiatkanni becoming a life-weapon described in the song was familiar to Nundthini as she was easily able to empathize with the song’s narrative and emotional content. She understood the experiences of witnessing Sri Lankan military forces occupying Tamil territories, occupying her homeland, and her sentiments converged with those reflected in the song’s commemoration of Aungkaiatkanni. For Aungkaiatkanni raise a thousand thousand sacred lamps of fire...

This refrain in Aungkaiatkanni’s song, which textually and musicologically gives a sense of movement to the piece as a whole, makes explicit the liturgical significance of Hindu spiritual practice, ritual, and cosmology.56 The emotional content of the song is intimately linked with spirituality and attention to details of ritual, along with particular concepts found in Hindu philosophy. The significance of fire in Hindu thought and ritual points to multiple ways of understanding everyday cultural practices and cultural sensibilities, which informed the relationships that LTTE cadres had with Tamil community members.57 For example, the burning of sacred lamps and the offering of fire accesses an aspect of Hindu cosmology, which describes the cycles of creation and destruction. According to Hindu thought and practice, fire is a source of both creation and destruction; it is personified and embodied in Agni, the Lord of Fire. Lord Shiva, a principle deity in the Hindu pantheon, is also associated with the significance of fire, as he is understood to be the holder of creation and destruction.58 In his manifestation as Nataraja, the Lord of Dance, Lord Shiva dances to the rhythm of drums, announcing the forces of creation while simultaneously igniting the flames of destruction. His dance as well as his manifestation is an embodiment of the infinite cycles of time. The significance of his dance allows his worshippers to

156

Y. SANGARASIVAM

realize the embodiment of his divine power and understand that out of the inexorable forces of destruction, those of creation emanate; and out of the forces of creation, so too must the forces of destruction take form.59 Therefore, in Hindu practice, fire is both worshipped and becomes a part of the ritual of worship as a signifier of auspiciousness in the realm of creation and a signifier of austerity in the realm of destruction. From the life cycle ceremonies of birth, puberty, marriage, and death to the ritual ceremonies which inaugurate the performance of the fine arts, to the ceremonies which inaugurate the openings of public gatherings such as academic conferences and political events, sacred lamps of fire are offered and given prominence as a demonstration of respect and reverence. These sacred lamps of fire frame the photograph of Aungkaiatkanni in the poster that commemorates her life and death (Fig. 4.3). In the context of Aungkaiatkanni’s song, fire claims an immediate significance as an embodiment of destruction and dislocation while simultaneously embodying the energies of creation and integrity. The deployment of her body as a missile to destroy a vessel of the Sri Lankan naval fleet and the disintegration of her body speaks to the immediacy of destruction and dislocation.60 With the explosion of her body, the elements of the environment that she claimed—the waters of the sea, the wind and all the four directions—also experienced the force of destruction and dislocation.61 Enfolded in the gale storm of the sea, Daughter, your life is dissolved, coalescing, one with the waters…

Yet with the immediacy and violence of this destruction, Aungkaiatkanni dissolved her body, her life, to reinstate the territorial integrity of the Kankesanthurai seaboard that she reclaimed as a part of the rightful, territorial waters of Tamil Eelam. In other words, the destruction and dislocation of the territorial space of Tamil Eelam, by means of the Sri Lankan naval occupation of the Kankesanthurai shoreline, was once again unified, integrated into the whole of an emergent nation-state. In the context of war, any successful attack on the Sri Lankan occupying forces was understood as an act of reclaiming and reinstating territorial integrity. In materializing an ontology of national belonging that is bodily conveyed through the practice of becoming human beings of fire, Aungkaiatkanni transformed her body into a life-weapon to reinstate the integrity of the

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

157

Tamil nation and its territorial waters.62 Even as her body dissolved, it coalesced and became one with the territorial waters she reclaimed. A Black Tiger enflames in Red

This last line of the song’s opening stanza carries a range of meanings. The direct translation of the song ontologically signifies a Black Tiger who becomes red. In the process of exploding the targeted enemy vessel, Aungkaiatkanni manifests that which is auspicious and sacred as her body was consumed by the flames of red.63 In this context, black signifies austerity and red signifies auspiciousness. In the spiritual and ritual context of Hindu practice, the symbolic significance of the color red is manifested in a variety of social and cultural arenas. For example, in Tamil ceremonies and celebrations of puberty and marriage in Sri Lanka, women are adorned in red fabrics. The status of marriage itself bestows auspiciousness upon men and women. The groom places kungkumum, a vermillion powder in the shape of a circle, at the penultimate moment of a Hindu marriage ceremony. As a signifier of their married status, Tamil women traditionally place kungkumum upon the center of the forehead as a daily ritual. The daily placing of kungkumum on the body is also a part of ritual worship for both men and women. In the practice of prayer and worship, the ritual offering of red flowers and the offering of fire along with the articulation of particular mantras are believed to invoke and materialize the presence of spiritual energies or deities.64 In the name of our young sister compose a thousand, thousand songs in exalted Tamil verse

A sense of home, a sense of place, and the desire for kinship and community were symbolically significant in the LTTE’s vision for their emergent state of Tamil Eelam. In this second phrase of the song’s refrain, Aungkaiatkanni is regarded as a sister, a sibling, and daughter belonging to all Tamil community members; transcending the boundaries of conventional kinship, space, and time. This is an important theme in the social and cultural ontologies of Tamil relationships that were reflected with the LTTE’s social network and sense of family. Within the social and cultural realm of community relations, it is customary for Tamil community members to invoke the relationship of sister and brother, uncle

158

Y. SANGARASIVAM

and auntie, mother and father in addressing one another; whether or not you are actually related by birth through these designations. As a linguistic sign of respect, those who are elder in relation to the speaker are addressed as Acc¯ a (older sister), Ann¯ a (older brother), Amm¯ a (mother), or Ayy¯ a (father or “sir”). Those younger are addressed by the diminutive forms of family relations—Thungkachi (younger sister) or Thumbi (younger brother) or Pillai (child). Within the movement, these linguistic markers were the obligatory form of address, which established the kinds of extended community and kinship relations that unified the LTTE. Elder or higher ranking members of the movement were addressed by the respected forms of Ann¯ a or Acc¯ a.65 Thus, when Aungkaiatkanni is referenced as Thungkai or younger sister, and Makhullae or daughter in poetic song, she is not only respected and recognized in the context of social and community relations vis-à-vis the LTTE; she is also claimed by means of community kinship as the affectionate younger sister and daughter of her parents, her immediate family, and by the greater Tamil community, which she represented as a member of the Tamil liberation movement. What is significant here is that while she was recognized and honored for her life’s sacrifice toward the liberation of her community and her nation, as a Black Tiger she was not considered an outsider or "Other" because of her choice to join the movement and, thereafter, to give up her life in a Black Tiger attack. In other words, she is not perceived as someone who committed suicide. She is perceived as a family member who sacrificed her life by deploying her body as a life-weapon. She is represented in this song as a distinguished daughter and adored younger sister. By identifying Aungkaiatkanni through this familial relationship, the song makes visible a concern for intimate family and community relations while simultaneously advocating for the sacrifice and destruction of life in service of freedom for the larger family and community of the Tamil nation. Aungkaiatkanni embodied both her own local community and that of the Tamil nation. The despair, dislocation, and dispossession felt by her parents and siblings upon her death is recast in terms of her sacrifice for the future safe-guarding and continuity of the very community and family she left to join the LTTE. The song implicitly holds the contradictions of dislocation and integrity, dispossession and solidarity that nationalism and patriotism demand. The dislocation and dispossession of: children displaced from their families by the violence of Sri Lankan soldiers; children recruited by the LTTE into armed resistance

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

159

and the work of war. The cultural integrity and social solidarity manifested in: Tamil language, arts, literature, history, heritage, kinship, and community. In all the directions, Tamils arise with dignity! Upon the waves she carries her song. She will live a thousand cycles in time. Inscribe in your life, this poem. She is the rising sun, appearing in time to make visible the dawn of our future...

Aungkaiatkanni is not regarded as merely a historical figure to memorialize and sentimentally recall. The song recognizes her as active and alive in the waters of the sea and in the daily struggles of her community. Again, from the perspective of an LTTE cadre as well as a fellow community member in Jaffna, Nundthini shared her interpretation of the song and how she relates to Aungkaiatkanni: She [Aungkaiatkanni] is one of many whose lives have been sacrificed in this conflict. Her life’s work, her sacrifice encourages our strength and fortifies our courage to move forward without wavering from our goal of national liberation. This poetic song calls for us to inscribe these words, these sentiments in our lives: so this will give you an indication of the strength and depth of determination that our movement and this struggle demands in each of us, not only as a member of the movement but as a member of the Tamil community—a determination that does not falter from the vision of a new nation dawning in time.

Puthuvai Ratnathurai’s song for Aungkaiatkanni describes with an intimacy of local knowledge and response to the extent of sacrifice required in a struggle for liberation, while giving access to the prevailing cultural sensibilities of Tamil nationalist thought and nationalist experiences. The politics of performativity allows for the subject positions of LTTE cadres to become visible in ways that community members can resonate and connect with. Aungkaiatkanni’s song gives access to an examination of what was the everyday felt experiences and sentiments of people within

160

Y. SANGARASIVAM

the Tamil community, in general, and within the Tamil nationalist movement, in particular. Through an analysis of songs like the one composed by Puthuvai Ratnathurai for Aungkaiatkanni, we can witness the politics of performativity: how cultural productions like songs, political posters, and the poetics of speculative ethnography make tangible and reveal a path toward an elusive understanding of the ontological demands of patriotism and national belonging—the dispossession and destruction of suicide and homicide as a practice of going to war with an enemy Other. ●

You are about to enter into that place called terrorism. Where you will encounter. Presidents and political leaders of the United States of America. Afghan family members. Drone warriors. LTTE cadres. We are in the method. Enter here.

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

I want to make sure people understand why my mother was actually, drones have not caused casualties did that look like a child to you? like for the most part for the most most part for the most they have been very precise precision my grandmother

●

161

targeted that day a huge number of civilian a little human person for part for the part strikes against

162

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Missile off the rail Missile off Missile off the rail Missile off Missile off Missile off the rail inscribe these words these sentiments in our lives inscribe these words what motherfucker’s gonna die today inscribe these words inscribe these words inscribe these words inscribe these words an exquisite weapon when you want to be both effective and moral what motherfucker’s gonna die today

●

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

163

Missile off Missile off Missile off the rail we affirm it again today we choose freedom and the dignity of every life when the drone fired the first time the whole ground shook and black smoke rose up the smoke clears and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater the air smelled poisonous it took him a long time to die we have shown freedom’s power we will see freedom’s victory inscribe these words inscribe these words inscribe these words inscribe these words I told her I killed someone everything will be ok I killed people and I don’t feel good good, that’s how it should feel I killed people and I don’t feel good you should never not feel that way

●

164

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Missile off Missile off Missile off the rail freedom’s price freedom’s power freedom’s victory inscribe these words inscribe these words inscribe these words inscribe these words she will live a thousand cycles in time she was the string that held our family together she is the rising sun raise a thousand, thousand sacred lamps of fire her sacrifice encourages our strength and fortifies our courage inscribe these words inscribe these words inscribe these words inscribe these words We affirm it again today the strength of will of these human beings of fire the depth of determination this struggle demands in each of us

●

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

165

Missile off Missile off Missile off the rail price freedom’s power freedom’s victory freedom’s price freedom’s power freedom’s victory the state of our union killed people don’t feel good killed someone has never been stronger we feel alone we feel lost you should never not feel inscribe these words inscribe these words inscribe these words inscribe these words we affirm it again today we feel alone we have shown freedom’s power we feel lost we will see freedom’s victory

●

166

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Missile I want I sure I make I people I understand Drones precise precision exquisite weapon effective and moral Missile off the rail for the most for the part Drones strikes against my mother my grandmother Missile affirm it again human beings of fire effective and moral Drones freedom’s price freedom’s power freedom’s victory motherfucker’s gonna die

●

4

M i s s i l e

o f f

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

M i s s i l e

o f f

t h e

167

r a i l

APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE APPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSEAPPLAUSE

●

168

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Notes 1. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 2. 2. Judith Butler, Frames of War, 1. 3. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 4. Judith Butler, Frames of War, 25. 5. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), 108. 6. Judith Butler, Frames of War, 26. 7. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession, 104–106. 8. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession, 106. 9. Ibid. 10. In Nasser Abufarha’s ethnographic study of political violence in Palestine and the tactic of suicide bombings employed by Palestinian resistance movements, there is a similar absence of the word suicide in describing a suicide bomber. Palestinians refer to a person deploying their body as a weapon in a suicide attack as “amaliyyat istishhadiyya” (operations of martyrdom): Nasser Abufarha, The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 11. I rely on Matthew Power’s reporting to tell this story of Brandon Bryant’s experiences of being a sensor operator of Predator drones in the United States Airforce (USAF): Matthew Power, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior,” GQ Magazine (October 23, 2013), https://www.gq. com/story/drone-uav-pilot-assassination. It is meaningful to note that the testimonies of soldiers like Brandon Bryant and the realities of drone warfare were made visible in a mass media context of a popular men’s fashion magazine like GQ (Gentlemen’s Quarterly). It speaks to the reality that a wide-reading public was and remains aware of drone warfare and has accepted it as a part of everyday life in a post 9/11 world where regular, targeted, extrajudicial executions take place as an aspect of upholding the cultural values of nationalism, patriotism, freedom, and democracy. 12. Hugh Gusterson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 30: In fact, this team is supported by a network of people across the globe that include maintenance crews to equip the drones, known as “unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)” or “unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs).” In his discussion of drone technology and the remix of post 9/11 warfare, Hugh Gusterson analyzes how the drone pilot “in the air conditioned trailer with a hand on the joystick is but one node, albeit a central node” of a network of people distributed across the globe. For example, “it takes 168 people to keep a Predator in the air.”.

4

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

169

13. Ian G.R. Shaw, “Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare,” Geopolitics, 18 (2013): 540. 14. Matthew Power, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior,” GQ Magazine (October 23, 2013), https://www.gq.com/story/drone-uav-pilot-assass ination. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Alyssa Brown and Frank Newport, “In U.S., 65% Support Drone Attacks on Terrorists Abroad,” March 25, 2013, https://news.gallup.com/poll/ 161474/support-drone-attacks-terrorists-abroad.aspx. 18. President Obama quoted in: Hugh Gusterson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 84–85. 19. Michael Hayden quoted in: Hugh Gusterson, “Drone Warfare in Waziristan and the New Military Humanism,” Current Anthropology 60, Supplement no. 19 (February 2019): S77. 20. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “America’s Security State Is Apparently Trying to Hassle Its Critics Into Silence,” New York Intelligencer, October 3, 2013, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/09/critics-of-us-securitystate-cant-get-visas.html. 21. Karen McVeigh, “Drone strikes: tears in Congress as Pakistani family tells of mother’s death,” The Guardian, October 29, 2013, https://www.the guardian.com/world/2013/oct/29/pakistan-family-drone-victim-testim ony-congress. 22. Pink Floyd, Goodbye Blue Sky. From The Wall. Columbia Music, 1979; “Goodbye Blue Sky,” Pink Floyd, published on January 12, 2016, YouTube video, 02:47, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn6YnU t4Vuk&list=OLAK5uy_nE3dmeYl_9Jgv2CT0aqufkDcyB6BBMcGM&ind ex=7. 23. Karen McVeigh, “Drone strikes: tears in Congress as Pakistani family tells of mother’s death,” The Guardian, October 29, 2013, https://www.the guardian.com/world/2013/oct/29/pakistan-family-drone-victim-testim ony-congress. 24. Washington Post, “Text of President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address,” January 29, 2002, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/ onpolitics/transcripts/sou012902.htm. 25. Matthew Power, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior,” GQ Magazine (October 23, 2013), https://www.gq.com/story/drone-uav-pilot-assass ination. 26. Ibid. 27. Jim Garamone, “DOD Releases Suicide Report,” Military Newspapers of Virginia, May1, 2014, https://www.militarynews.com/norfolk-navy-fla gship/news/quarterdeck/dod-releases-suicide-report/article_b3bc9457323d-5554-88d3-b75f573b5b13.html.

170

Y. SANGARASIVAM

28. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “Suicide Among Veterans and Other Americans: 2001–2014,” Office of Suicide Prevention, August 3, 2016 (Updated August 2017 by the Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention), https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/2016suicidedatarep ort.pdf. (Maaveerar Naal ) as “Day of Commem29. I have translated oration for the Bravest of the Brave” while others have translated this phrase as “Great Heroes (Maaveerar) Day (Naal )” in many discussions of the LTTE’s designation of November 27 of each year as a day of remembrance and commemoration. 30. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession, 98. 31. Thich Nhat Hanh, Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change (Berkley: Parallax Press, 1993). 32. Thich Nhat Hanh, Love in Action, 88. 33. Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 76–77. 34. “You are either with us or against us,” CNN, November 6, 2001, http:// edition.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/. 35. Ian G.R. Shaw, “Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare,” Geopolitics, 18 (2013), 536–537. 36. As I’ve discussed in the previous chapter, the implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act and the expanding powers of the National Security Agency (NSA) are examples of a people’s implicit agreement to equate freedom and democracy with the increasing powers of surveillance, extraordinary rendition, torture, indefinite detention without a charge or evidence of crimes committed, without due process. It is also an implicit agreement to equate liberty and justice with extrajudicial killings through drone strikes that have been normalized in the consciousness of people in the United States and in the international community of nation-states. 37. Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, [2013] 2015), 12, 86. 38. Washington Post, “Text: Bush: ‘I Don’t Have Anthrax,” October 23, 2001, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/att acked/transcripts/bush_text102301.html. 39. National Coalition for the Homeless, “Homeless Veterans,” last modified, February 21, 2012, http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/ veterans.html. 40. The United States Interagency on Homelessness, “Homelessness in America: Focus on Veterans,” (June 2018) 1. https://www.usich.gov/ resources/uploads/asset_library/Homelessness_in_America._Focus_on_ Veterans.pdf. 41. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession, 99. 42. Judith Butler, Frames of War, 1–32.

4

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

171

Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession, 97. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession, 99. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession, 101. The grand narrative of Sinhala nationalism references the Mahavamsa, a fifth-sixth century chronicle, which claims that the Buddha declared the island of Sri Lanka as a place divinely reserved for the Sinhala-speaking, Buddhist population alone. The authors of the chronicle constructed the Sinhalese people as a superior race. In contrast, the Tamil-speaking people of the island were constructed as not fully human, as “demons” to be feared; see, Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Alexandra Watkins, “Combatting Myths: Racial and Cultural Identity in Postcolonial Sri Lanka,” Cross/Cultures 180 (2015): 79–121. Sontag quoted in Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 96. Barthes quoted in Judith Butler, Frames of War, 97. Also see Rey Chow’s analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s theorizing of victimhood, “bare life,” and what she calls “the twin logics of sacrifice and mimesis.” In her discussion of the biopolitics of and relationship between colonizing violence, sovereign power, and memetic resistance, she raises this question: “what if sacrifice is part of an effort to (re)imagine and (re)narrativize an otherwise lost, because inaccessible, past—a collective, retrospective striving for coherence?”; Rey Chow, “Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood (A Speculative Essay),” in Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 2, ed. Henry Sussman (University of Michigan: Open Humanities Press, 2012), Chapter 6, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/10803281.0001.001. White House: President Barack Obama (Archives), “Remarks by the President at the United States Military Academy Commencement Ceremony,” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, May 28, 2014, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/05/28/rem arks-president-united-states-military-academy-commencement-ceremony. Judith Butler, Frames of War, 97, 98. I’m drawing on Rey Chow’s discussion of “the importance of deconstructing linguistic structures alongside a sexual politics” in the written work by Toril Moi and Julia Kristeva; “Reading [Moi’s] analyses, one has the impression that textual politics is the more radically political because that is where essentialism, including the essentialism of the term ‘woman,’ can be properly confronted and undone. In particular, Moi is taken with the manner in which Julia Kristeva brings attention to the materiality of textual production. From Kristeva, Moi tells us, we learn that the subject position (it is no longer radical enough to talk of the self or the individual)

172

53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

Y. SANGARASIVAM

is what indicates revolutionary potential”: Rey Chow, “When Whiteness Feminizes…: Some Consequences of a Supplementary Logic,” in The Rey Chow Reader, ed. Paul Bowman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 78. “A poet’s fearless death,” Tamil Guardian, May 21, 2016, https://www. tamilguardian.com/content/poets-fearless-death. “Angkaiyarkanniku Aayiram Aayiram,” Tamil Eelam Songs, Track 4, on Viduthalai Pulikal Kalai Panpattu Kalakam, Kadal Karumpulikal Part 01, Tamileela Kadalpulikal, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, 1994, https://tamileelamsongs.com/kadal-karum-pulikal-1/; note that my transliteration/spelling of the name Aungkaiatkanni differs from the transliteration/spelling presented in the title of the song in this citation. Though I don’t focus on an analysis of the role of women in the LTTE’s Tamil nationalist struggle in this book project, I have published this work previously: Yamuna Sangarasivam, “Militarizing the Feminine Body: Women’s Participation in the Tamil Nationalist Struggle,” in Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the State, ed. Arturo J. Aldama, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 59–76. To situate Puthuvai Ratnathurai’s commemorative song for Aungkaiatkanni in a broader Hindu context, see: Guy L. Beck, Sonic liturgy: Ritual and Music in Hindu Tradition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012). An understanding or conceptualization of the Tamil national community in Sri Lanka is fraught with histories of marginalization and violence exercised by privileged members in a community that is stratified by religious, caste, and class designations. For example, prior to 1990, when the LTTE expelled all people of Muslim heritage, the Jaffna peninsula alone was a place of diverse religious practices including those of Protestant and Catholic communities along with Muslim and Hindu communities. In 1990, the LTTE forcefully removed Muslim community members from Jaffna under their policy of expulsion. Consequently, Hindus and Christians have largely remained in Jaffna. The Muslim communities were displaced as refugees to the regions of Puttalam, Colombo, Batticaloa, and Trincomalee. The repatriation of Muslim community members began after a negotiated agreement and attempt at reconciliation initiated by the LTTE with Muslim community members and political representative in 2005. I have discussed the expulsion of Muslim community members elsewhere, see: Yamuna Sangarasivam, “Ecologizing ‘Terrorism’: Attending to Emergent Pathways of Ethnographic Fieldwork, Writing and Analysis,” in Critical Methods in Terrorrism Studies, eds. Priya Dixit and Jacob L. Stump (London: Routledge, 2016), 59–74. For further analyses on the LTTE’s policy of expulsion and the forced migration, marginalization, political challenges, and lived realities of Muslim community members,

4

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

GOODBYE BLUE SKY: THE ETHICAL DEMANDS …

173

see: Dennis B. McGilvray and Mirak Raheem, Muslim Perspectives on the Sri Lankan Conflict: Policy Studies 41 (Washington: East–West Center, 2007); Nimmi Gowrinathan and Zachariah Mampilly, “Resistance and Repression under the Rule of Rebels: Women, Clergy, and Civilian Agency in LTTE Goverened Sri Lanka,” Comparative Politics 52, no. 1 (October 2019): 1–20; Farzana Haniffa, “Three Attempts at Peace in Sri Lanka,” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 6, no. 1 (June 2011): 49–62. A. Parthasarathy, Symbolism of Hindu Gods & Rituals (Mumbai: Vedanta Life Institute, [1983] 2000). See also: Veena Das, “The Uses of Liminality: Society and Cosmos in Hinduism,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 10, no. 2 (July 1976): 245–263. For discussions and interpretive debates on the iconography of Shiva Nataraja, see: Padma Kaimal, “Shiva nataraja: Shifting Meanings of an Icon,” The Art Bulletin 81, no. 3 (September 1999): 390–419; Gomathi Narayanan, “Shiva Nataraja as a Symbol of Paradox,” Journal of South Asian Literature 21, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 1986): 208–216. For a broader, contextual discussion on Hindu ritual practices involving self-sacrifice, see, for example: Mary Storm, “Speculation on Hindu SelfSacrifice Imagery at Nalgonda,” Journal of Religion and Violence 6, no. 2 (2018): 225–244. Of significance in understanding the meaning-making processes of the song, note: all the directions—meaning, all the cardinal points of the compass—also bear symbolic and mystical significance within Hindu thought and ritual practice. The cardinal points are personified by the deity, Lord Brahm¯a and understood to be sacred; thus respected and recognized in daily ritual worship. Within a broader Hindu ritual practice and understanding, the four cardinal points manifest powers that are borne of the constant tensions of resistance and acquiescence to the contesting forces of gravity and mass. For a discussion on mystical ecologies and geographies in Hindu cosmology, see: Jai Pal Singh and Mumtaz Khan, “Saptadv¯ıp¯a Vasumat¯ı: The Mythical Geography of the Hindus,” GeoJournal 48, no. 4 (1999): 269–278. Though I don’t discuss and provide an analysis here, arguably, the willful act of going to war, willing to kill and be killed, can be situated within a discussion and analysis of the just war principles and arguments that are presented in the Bhagavad G¯ıt¯ a, Mahabhäratha, and Ramayana. For example, see: Matthew Robertson, “The Autophagous Absolute: Revelations of Cosmic and Sovereign Violence in the Bhagavad G¯ıt¯ a and the Taittir¯ıya Upanis.ad,” Journal of Religion and Violence 6, no. 1 (2018): 73–105; Michael Roberts, “Saivite Symbols, Sacrifice, and Tamil Tiger Rites,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 49, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 67–93; Rashmi Luthra, “Clearing

174

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Sacred Ground: Women-Centered Interpretations of the Indian Epics,” Feminist Formations 26, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 135–161. 63. It is also significant to remember that Hindu practice calls for the cremation or inflaming of the body at death. Arguably, the ontologies of Black Tigers are not completely disjointed or displaced from the social, cultural, and spiritual context from which their sacrifice emerged. In this context, for a meaningful analysis of individual desire and choice to renounce life in the act of sacrifice within a Hindu context, see: Veena Das, “Language of Sacrifice,” Man 18, no. 3 (September 1983): 445–462. 64. For a broader gendered analysis of Hindu worship, ritual, and meaningmaking processes within community spaces, see: Ann R. David, “Gendering the Divine: New Forms of Feminine Hindu Worship,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 13, no. 3 (December 2009): 337–355. 65. For example, Vellupillai Pirabaharan, the leader of the LTTE, was referred to as Annah (elder brother) as well as Thalaivar (leader), by all cadres, regardless of gender, caste, and class, with the exception of those within and outside the movement, who are considerably older than him, who referred to him as Thumbi (younger brother). This again invokes the signifier of family in reference to the relationship shared by Tamil community members within and outside the LTTE’s nationalist movement; one that transcends caste and class.

CHAPTER 5

Comfortably Numb: Abjection & Anarchy

War is transmedial. Its content of violence occurs in more than one medium. At once. Simultaneous. The medium of suicide and sacrifice emerge as heroic and enigmatic properties of nationalism and patriotism to be preserved through war—“that higher, indestructible sublime ideal, that something to die for.”1 The sacrifice of one’s life by enlisting to fight on behalf of one’s national community is understood, accepted, and honored as an enduring testimony of selfless service in protection and defense of nation and country. We can observe that even in the context of Gandhian nonviolent action for social and political change, the act of a hunger strike is also an articulation of nationalism and patriotism where the body is deployed as a weapon or an instrument to enact the sacrifice deemed essential to effect social-political change.2 The hunger strike is a call to witness a slow death through which the imminent potential of suicide is lauded as a heroic sacrifice. As a willful choice of resistance or as a consequence of going to war, suicide emerges as, what Daniel Tiffany describes, “the figure of a riddle.”3 In his analysis of the poetic and philosophical principle of

“Comfortably Numb,” Pink Floyd, The Wall, Columbia Music, 1979; “Comfortably Numb,” Pink Floyd, published on January 12, 2016, YouTube video, 06:22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-xTttimcNk. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. Sangarasivam, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82665-9_5

175

176

Y. SANGARASIVAM

the riddle, Tiffany goes on to make a connection with a similar “enigmatic quality” Adorno observed in Hermetic art works. Adorno argued that “the enigmatic quality renders the very notion of Verstehen [understanding] problematic [and consequently] aesthetics cannot hope to grasp works of art if it treats them as hermeneutical objects. What at present needs to be grasped is their unintelligibility.”4 Tiffany points out that Adorno shifts the focus away from solving the riddle. Instead, our attention is to be drawn to the ontological and epistemological reality of unintelligibility. Suicide is a riddle that cannot be solved. It draws our attention to affirm the incalculable potential of human will as a presence, a resistance, a state of being that “posits unintelligibility as expression, increasingly destroying the intelligible moment [of war, where], the traditional hierarchy of understanding is shattered.”5 The choice of suicide is conventionally regarded as a tragic, misguided, and horrific taking of human life: unintelligibility as expression. As a tactic of war, the choice of suicide shatters the traditional hierarchy of understanding the conventional tactics of warfare exemplified by white nation-states. In conventional warfare, a soldier confronts the enemy to kill or capture this enemy Other. In the case of suicide as a tactic of warfare, the enemy forecloses the chance for the soldier to enact that intelligible moment of kill or capture in the moment of confrontation. The enemy takes herself/himself out before the soldier can kill or capture. In other words, the traditional hierarchy of understanding kill and capture is foreclosed by suicide; thus, rendering it as the figure of a riddle. As a way of solving the riddle of this foreclosure, conventional analyses of suicide as a tactic of warfare is viewed as a contemptible and barbaric act of violence that marks the abject forms of extremist and fundamentalist politics, thereby reifying the dichotomy between the civilized warfare of so-called First World democracies and the remainder of the “developing” world.6 The previous chapter explored the ethical demands of suicide bombers by endeavoring to understand the precarity of their lives, which then imposes an ethical obligation to understand our relationship with them, with war, and with soldiers from our own families and communities. This chapter continues this endeavor by squarely focusing on the unintelligible experience of suicide: as an ontological and epistemological reality to be seen; made visible; and, as an enigmatic expression of willfulness that shatters the conventional perceptions and rhetoric through which the justifications of the US-sponsored global war on terror are sustained.7

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

177

Daniel Tiffany’s analysis of the enigmatic quality and poetics of the riddle emerging from the Greek rhapsodic tradition, inspires a meaningful approach to witnessing the material conditions of war, which invites the willful choice of suicide.8 Herein lies the riddle of suicide, silence, identity, and anarchy, which animate national belonging and patriotic pride. ●

Suicide Given the protracted commitment to the global war on terror, which the international community of nation-states continue to embrace, what can we learn by getting lost in the riddle presented by suicide as a tactic of war? While we hold on to our ideas about terrorists out there posing a threat to our security, how are we getting lost in the deadly melodies, the binding spells, and the siren calls of nationalism and patriotism: to kill and be killed in service of nation and nation-state? Suicide, as a form of self-sacrifice, throws the human will to war into a “riddle of Being” carrying within it an apocalyptic identity of abjection and anarchy.9 In other words, the self-sacrifice of a soldier or an insurgent takes the form of a riddle by the choice to take his or her own life in the act of suicide versus being killed in the theater of war. As such, the choice, the tactic, and the experience of suicide takes the form of a riddle, a “riddle of Being” in the topological spaces of war. To willfully step into this riddle is to invite ourselves into the possibilities of getting lost in a state of being, an ontological reality that is suicidal—one that simultaneously escapes into fantastic performances of national belonging and “the power of pride.”10 Arguably, to become a soldier or an insurgent fighter is to willfully step into this riddle of getting lost into a suicidal state of being: like a US marine, like a “drone warrior,” like an LTTE cadre pensively waiting to meet or keep death at bay. Like a patriot who is willfully stepping into a state of existence where the work of killing inexorably invites the likelihood of being killed. In the case of the LTTE cadre, this riddle of Being, this willful state of suicidal existence is articulated by accepting a vial of cyanide, which signifies their completion of military training and inculcation into the nationalist movement of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. As an LTTE cadre, the vial of cyanide became a signifying artifact that was incorporated into the uniform and

178

Y. SANGARASIVAM

code of honor, distinguishing this movement from other Tamil nationalist movements that emerged in the 1980s in Sri Lanka. This practice of wearing a cyanide capsule drew further attention to the LTTE and a reified construction of this movement as a uniquely fierce “cult of martyrdom” dedicated to “terrorist” tactics in its armed struggle against the Sri Lankan government.11 The choice to accept a vial of cyanide and wear it as a part of one’s uniform exemplifies the stepping into a willful state of suicidal existence; it is a riddle of Being that intersects with the ethical demands of nationalism and patriotism while simultaneously signifying the construction of identities by conditions of abjection and anarchy. Sara Ahmed deconstructs Rousseau’s idea of “general will” and makes the point that those who refuse to comply with the hegemonic authority of the general will (enforced by state regimes) are the willful parts who threaten the reproduction of the social contract and political order.12 The preparedness and choice for suicide, as a strategy and tactic of war, is a testimony of the refusal to comply with the hegemonic authority and social-political order of state regimes. Dangerously, this refusal reinforces the cultural value of white supremacy, which state regimes invoke to amplify the threat of terrorism and the need to maintain national security as justifications to wage war within and beyond national borders when faced with popular demands to address systemic inequalities, human rights violations, and political disenfranchisement by opposing social-political movements. Under these conditions, suicide becomes an act of willfulness that “involves persistence in the face of having been brought down, where simply to ‘keep going’ or to ‘keep coming up’ is to be stubborn and obstinate.”13 In an instance of unintelligibility as expression, suicide becomes a means of persevering and persisting in the face of hegemonic state authority and military power. As an act of willfulness, suicide can be seen as an ultimate act of disobedience—as an act of conscientious abjection: the acceptance of exclusion, defilement, and dislocation of self. What causes abjection, in Julia Kristeva’s analysis, is that which “disturbs identity, system, order.”14 In the context of war, suicide becomes a quintessential example of a willful choice to disturb the normative identity, system, and order of citizenship and national belonging. Constituting a kind of defilement of citizenship, the willful choice of suicide is that which must be jettisoned from the “symbolic order” of national belonging. Kristeva defines this as,

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

179

that social rationality, that logical order on which a social aggregate is based, which then becomes differentiated from a temporary agglomeration of individuals [i.e. an insurgency, a separatist movement, or a stateless population of refugees and migrants] and, in short constitutes a classification system or a structure.15

Though it is rejected by and intervenes to disturb the social identity and structure of citizenship and national belonging, suicide as an act of conscientious abjection invites us into the traumatic experience of being forced to face the abject self who appears in the form of a soldier or an insurgent. Kristeva illuminates that state of abjection: There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.16

Suicide is that elsewhere, that riddle of Being, as tempting as it is condemned. In her study of abjection, Kristeva creates a pathway of analysis that allows us to witness suicide; the riddle of Being reveals the inescapable boomerang of nationalism and patriotism, which generates a vortex of summons and repulsion, haunting soldiers, insurgents and civilians with the binding spells and rhapsodic measures of heroic service and sacrifice. Abjection may be a step toward witnessing unintelligibility as expression, the riddle of suicide in the context of war: the riddle of why a person becomes a suicide bomber, as well as the riddle of why soldiers come home to choose suicide after doing the work of killing on our behalf. Suicide looms, within abjection, as one of those violent, dark revolts of Being. Suicide is that impetus, that spasm, that leap that is directed against the threat of dispossession, alienation, the loss of integrity, and the loss of identity when confronting the threat of statelessness and rejection from national belonging.

180

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Suicide, this riddle of Being, seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside colonizing force of imperial invasions and state regimes. Alternatively or simultaneously, suicide seems to also emanate from inside as a fear of being assimilated into the other, of giving up, of losing oneself to a colonizing, terrorizing force: fear of capture, fear of defilement through rape and torture, fear of annihilation, fear of hauntings by memories of killing in service of nation and national belonging. Unintelligibility as expression, suicide lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated into the general will of national belonging and patriotic pride. This riddle of Being is ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable identity of citizenship, forced migration, statelessness, and the logic of national security. Kristeva writes that if the abject self (the soldierand suicide bomber) “simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject” (you and I, us and them) then “one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject.”17 Apprehensive, the desire for national belonging and patriotic pride turns aside; sickened, it rejects suicide. The abject self who shows up as a suicide bomber or as a soldier preparing for suicide upon returning home from the theaters of war, is riddled with post-traumatic stress disorders and brain injuries and soul injuries and life injuries that are collected as unwanted or wanted souvenirs of going to war. ● The poet and soldier, Brian Turner embodies the figure of a twentyfirst century rhapsode, an itinerant soldier-singer of the epic verses of war. He gave seven years of his life to service in the US-sponsored global war on terror. He was deployed to Iraq and fought in the war between 2003 and 2010. He served as an infantry team leader for a year with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division of the US Army.18 His hauntings remain insistent. Let’s not pretend that our patriotism and our feeling of national belonging can protect our soldiers from the unbeautiful, disgraceful reality of what it means to come home from the work of killing. On our behalf. In wars. Let’s listen. In the silence. With him. With them.

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

181

Body Bags19 A murder of crows looks on in silence from the eucalyptus trees above as we stand over the bodies— who look as if they might roll over, wake from a dream and question us about the blood drying on their scalps, the bullets lodged in the back of their skulls, to ask where their wives and children are this morning, and why this hovering of flies, the taste of flatbread and chai gone from their mouths as they stretch and rise, wondering who these strangers are who would kick their hard feet, saying Last Call, Motherfucker. Last Call.

What does it mean to kill? And then to look at the bodies that you just killed from the detachment of a crow? Will we look on in silent detachment as they kick the dead bodies of men who still hold the taste of flatbread and chai in memories of murderous strangers. One thing is certain: we are murderous strangers cloaked by the monopoly on legitimate violence of this global war on terror to uphold and protect our freedom and our democracy. Our certainty of citizenship and belonging may give us the illusion of protecting a colonial-imperial desire from the shameful work of killing. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm of nationalism and patriotism, that leaps to kill and be killed is drawn toward an elsewhere, an apocalyptic space of memory and hauntings as tempting as it is condemned. Suicide, the abjection of self, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself, herself, yourself, ourselves. Herein lies unintelligibility as expression—that riddle of Being, of getting lost in the abjection of suicide. Are we willing. To stand witness. To the work of killing. Experienced at the peak of its strength, nationalism and patriotism enacts an inaugural loss of self in the form of a soulless detachment from the horrors of killing. When our desire. For citizenship and national belonging. Weary of fruitless attempts to identify. With the sacrifice of our soldiers. On the outside. Thank you for your service. With the sacrifice of our liberation fighters. On the outside. Raise a thousand, thousand sacred lamps of fire. Find the impossible within. When patriotic

182

Y. SANGARASIVAM

pride finds that the impossible constitutes its very Being. It is none other than abject. That sublime ideal, that something to die for. Looming within abjection, suicide lies there, quite close, as a violent revolt of being, but it cannot be assimilated into citizenship and national belonging. Suicides of soldiers and insurgents demand that we come face to face with the traumatic realization that going to war in defense of national security, national belonging, and citizenship inexorably leads to getting lost in the loss of self and the loss of loved ones. Ejected beyond the space of freedom and democracy. To that place called terrorism. Where, as Kristeva writes, the “abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being.”20 War teaches us the inaugural loss of national belonging and patriotic pride that laid the foundations of suicide as that riddle of Being. War teaches us to get lost in this riddle of Being we call suicide. A willfulness. A willingness. To accept a vial of cyanide. To take a bullet for nation and country. Last call, motherfucker. Last call.21 Let’s not pretend that our patriotism and our feeling of national belonging can protect our soldiers from the un-beautiful, disgraceful reality of what it means to come home from the work of taking a bullet for nation and country. On our behalf. In wars. Let’s listen. In the silence. With him. With them. ● Here, Bullet22 If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh. Here is the clavicle-snapped with, the aorta’s opened valves, the leap thought makes at the synaptic gap. Here is the adrenaline rush you crave, that inexorable flight, that insane puncture into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet, here is where I complete the word you bring hissing through the air, here is where I moan the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

183

inside of me, each twist of the round spun deeper, because here, Bullet, here is where the world ends, every time.

●

Silence Brian Turner’s award-winning poetry documenting the brutality of the US war in Iraq is internationally recognized; yet, he is haunted not only by the memories of the war’s insistent images, sounds, smells, and voices but also by the insistent silence at home in a country that has been waging multiple wars for more than two decades. In an interview with Sara Crown of The Guardian, Turner pointed out that “America has several wars going on right now, but I found back home that you wouldn’t know it. It’s like an obscenity. I realized I had to find images that created doorways between the two realities. … it seems there’s a kind of psychic disconnect that needs to be attended to.”23 This obscenity impresses upon him, upon us, like a riddle. Here, Bullet penetrates through this disconnect between the two realities of multiple wars going on right now and the silence about them back home in America. Like the riddle of the Sphinx in Greek antiquity that Daniel Tiffany writes about, this obscenity of the disconnect between silence and war “is not merely apotropaic in its terrifying effects, but apocalyptic, as it combines the promise of revelation and the threat of annihilation. In this respect, the operation of the riddle of the Sphinx captures a moment of public discourse when a certain kind of terror must be counted among the effects of poetry.”24 In other words, the obscenity of silence captures a moment of public discourse when the terror of suicide, that riddle of Being, is trapped in our refusal to know about the realities of the multiple wars being waged on our behalf by the soldiers who are defending our country and projecting our freedom and democracy through the work of killing and being killed. Soldiers coming home to suicide. Insurgents going to war with a vial of cyanide. The terror of taking a bullet for nation and country must be counted among the effects of their poetry. Listen. They are speaking through our silence. Creating doorways to that place called terrorism. Telling us the price of our patriotic pride. If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

184

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Silence and the refusal to know is another kind of willfulness, one that is caught in the captivating spell and the binding power of a need for national belonging. Turner’s poetry accounts for the effects of this terror that is trapped in the silence of national (in)security, disconnect, and a state of willful not-knowing about the realities of war. The obscenity of silence can be understood as both apotropaic and apocalyptic; it promises to both reveal this trap of nationalism and patriotism, and endow it with a mystical power to avert the evil forces of a terrorist enemy Other. It also simultaneously signals the threat of annihilation—an inaugural loss of identity where the self disconnects with the realities that soldiers bear: the realities of war; the realities of occupying foreign lands; the realities of killing and being killed by foreign peoples only to be brought face to face with the unconscious privilege of patriotic pride back home. “Thank you for your service.” Can you hear the disconnect? While some soldiers prepare. For suicide upon returning. To their families and communities back home. Suicide becomes a way of returning. Suicide becomes home. Let’s not pretend, when we presume to thank them, that our patriotic pride and our performance of national belonging can protect our soldiers from the un-beautiful, disgraceful obscenity of our silence, our willful disconnect to know what it means to come home from killing and come home to suicide. ● The Hurt Locker25 Nothing but hurt left here. Nothing but bullets and pain and the bled-out slumping and all the fucks and goddamns and Jesus Christs of the wounded. Nothing left here but the hurt. Believe it when you see it. Believe it when a twelve-year-old rolls a grenade into the room. Or when a sniper punches a hole deep into someone’s skull. Believe it when four men step from a taxicab in Mosul

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

185

to shower the street in brass and fire. Open the hurt locker and see what there is of knives and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn how rough men come hunting for souls.

●

Identity Poets such as Layli Long Soldier and Brian Turner ask us to walk through doorways, bend time, and journey with people to connect our histories of brutality and our realities of war that we are taught to forget in order to uphold our nationalism and patriotism. Long Soldier invites us to witness the mendacity of distorted historical accounts and the violence of broken treaties and broken presidential apologies that reinforces white supremacy and undermines the sovereignty of tribal nations.26 Turner invites us to meditate on the terror trapped in the silence that our patriotic pride demands. Both ask us to heal the silence and the disconnect between soldiers and civilians, between histories of colonial violence then and now, between all victims of nationalism and patriotism, between them and us. Can we walk through this doorway to also discover and heal the disconnect between our soldiers and their insurgents, between our families and their families we are at war with, between our need for national belonging and patriotic pride and theirs? What will we hear through the deafening silence of our disconnect to understand that after all the pomp and circumstance through which we celebrate our heroes whom we idealize for their courage to fight, to kill, and be killed on our behalf? Will we hear. That there is. Nothing left here but the hurt. Cyanide became a well-recognized symbol within the Tamil nationalist movement that idealized the courage and willful sacrifice an LTTE cadre was willing to make on behalf of the struggle for independence and national liberation. Media reports sensationalized the use of cyanide by LTTE cadres throughout the representation of the war in Sri Lanka.27 The presence of cyanide was also a means of identifying the remains of an LTTE cadre after an attack against the Sri Lankan government and its military, political, and economic institutions. Among the most prominent examples are: the reports on the Central Bank bombing (1996); the

186

Y. SANGARASIVAM

assassination of Lalith Athulathmudali, the United National Party opposition leader and Sri Lankan Minister of National Security and Deputy Minister of Defense (1993); and the assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa (1993). The Tamil Times reported: The day after Athulathmudali was shot, around noon, the body of a man alleged by the police to be the assailant was found lying on the nearby Mugalan Road.... A post-mortem examination carried out later by the Judicial Medical Officer revealed that the man... had died of cyanide poisoning giving credibility to the police allegation that Athulathmudali’s killing was carried out by the LTTE.... Shortly after Premadasa’s killing, the Sri Lankan police formally accused the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) with responsibility for the assassination.... In an obvious attempt at giving credence to his claim [Director of the Colombo Crime Detection Bureau, Lionel Gunatilleke] added that the assassin’s mutilated body had the broken part of the cyanide capsule embedded in the flesh of its neck. It is a well-known fact that LTTE cadres wear a cyanide capsule around their necks ready to be consumed to prevent being captured alive.28

Though the LTTE did not claim responsibility for either of these assassinations, the presence of cyanide on the body confirmed these attacks as the work of LTTE cadres. The LTTE began the practice of wearing cyanide on the body in the 1970s. Ponnuthurai Sivakumaran was a student activist and member of the Tamil Student Federation. The LTTE lauded Sivakumaran as an “outstanding freedom fighter” who was the first to consume cyanide when he was captured by the Sri Lankan police in 1974 following a failed attempt to assassinate the Superintendent of Police in Jaffna.29 At the time of and prior to Sivakumaran’s death, the presence of cyanide in the form of a vial to be worn on the body as a part of one’s uniform had not been established as a standard practice by the LTTE. A central part of my ethnographic fieldwork in 1994–1995 involved extensive weekly discussions with Nundthini, a cadre from the LTTE’s political wing.30 She recounted the episode of Sivakumaran’s death and shared her analysis and justification for the use of cyanide in the LTTE’s liberation struggle: Our leader, [Velupillai Prabhakaran] was not the one to introduce the cyanide capsule to the movement. It was Sivakumaran who first decided to wear the cyanide capsule and it was he who first died as a result of

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

187

consuming the cyanide. He joined the movement in the early 1970s as a member of the students’ movement for national liberation. Had he lived to this day, he would have been an important leader in the LTTE. He was recognized as a person of great courage and he set a great example of Tamil nationalism and patriotism. He’s remembered as a brave liberation fighter. He took cyanide and died when he realized that he was certainly going to be captured by the [Sri Lankan] police for the movement’s attempted attack on a militarized convoy of police vehicles that carried a prominent police inspector at that time. At that time the police were also on alert as a result of a series of bank robberies that the movement took part in during the mid 1970s.31 The reason why he, himself, made such a resolution was because, upon capture and arrest by the police, he knew that he would definitely be tortured to the point that he would be in danger of revealing many crucial details about the movement. Under the unbearable strain of severe beatings and various other methods of torture, he feared that he would come to tell that this guy is in the movement, that guy is in the movement, this other guy is in the movement and so on. In this way our movement would be destroyed. In this manner [by being an unwilling informant], our movement, our initiative [for national liberation] will in itself be destroyed and shattered. To prevent such a situation, if I died in this manner [with the use of cyanide]? With me alone, my secrets will also be gone. Others will not come to have access to the knowledge that I carry within me. This is the kind of resolution that he [Sivakumaran] is taking at the time of his capture. So he is the very first one to take cyanide and die. It is precisely this kind of justification that our leader [Prabhakaran] is taking up and introducing to our movement. Why? Because, in the process of a nation’s liberation struggle, one person, that is, I must not be the cause of the death of ten other people. Because of me, the life of ten other people must not be sacrificed and destroyed. Because of me, our national liberation struggle must not be shattered. Definitely upon capture, the enemy is going to ask us to name the people that are in the movement, who all are in the LTTE, for example, and we’ll inevitably give up the names of a few people. By that, I don’t mean that we simply give up such information willingly, but under the stress of beatings and torture, we’ll inevitably give up some kind of information that will be harmful to others. So then what happens, when we give up such information, that whole lot of people and then some, will be arrested. For example, if I’m captured and I give up ten names of people in the movement, they’ll capture and torture those ten to get a hundred

188

Y. SANGARASIVAM

names, and after capturing a hundred people they can capture a thousand people and so on. In this way, a movement can be destroyed. So if you ask me why I should give up my own life [with the taking of cyanide]? At the time when we are captured alive by the enemy, when I die, as a single individual who gives up her life, I have the capacity to protect not only the lives of several other people but I am also able to protect the movement and the liberation struggle as a whole. We must maintain our resolution that we must never be caught by the enemy. So for this reason, we carry the cyanide capsule with us. You must have seen the large memorial at Urumpirai Junction that has been built [by the LTTE] for Sivakumaran. The original statue was destroyed by the IPKF [Indian Peace Keeping Force] and the EPRLF [Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front]. That broken memorial was not erased but has been preserved.32 That original statue is left just as it is, in the state of destruction and right next to it a new memorial for Sivakumaran has been built. Why? Because, let all the people who come here be a witness to what has happened here in this country. Today, as a matter of fact, the movement has rebuilt many of the structures that the Indian Army destroyed. After all, we must keep rebuilding in order to survive and forward our struggle. But certain acts of destruction must be preserved so that the people will not forget where our struggle came from, what the history of our nation’s struggle has been, what kind of violence we have endured as a community. We need to remember this past. You won’t believe the number of tourists and reporters that have come to this site and taken pictures of Sivakumaran’s broken statue as evidence of the history of violence in this country.

● Yearly commemorations honoring Ponnuthurai Sivakumaran continue in his hometown of Urumpirai to memorialize and make visible the selfsacrifice he made as the first LTTE cadre to commit suicide in the struggle for national liberation.33 Community members gather to light sacred lamps of fire and place garlands of flowers on the statue of Sivakumaran in ritual ceremonies of remembrance. In addition to the large statue at Urumpirai Junction, political posters of Ponnuthurai Sivakumaran memorialize his sacrifice and are incorporated into yearly commemoration events organized by Tamil diasporic communities to remember and mark the “The Tamil National Student Uprising Day” on or around the 5th of June.34 On this day in 1974, Sivakumaran consumed cyanide in the face of being captured and tortured by the Sri Lankan police, thereby

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

189

inaugurating the practice of “sacrificing one’s life by consuming cyanide” and by establishing this practice as one of the “basic attributes” of the LTTE’s armed struggle for national liberation.35 As a part of an effort to educate Tamil community members and to remember the history of Tamil student political activism in Sri Lanka, this day of “uprising” was organized by Tamil youth organizations that emerged in the Tamil diasporic communities in Europe and North America. For example, on June 9, 2012, the Tamil Youth Organization of Canada (TYO-Canada) hosted the “Tamil Students’ Uprising Day Conference” in memory of Pon. Sivakumaran. TYO-Canada organized this conference, in Toronto, in a collaborative endeavor with the York University Tamil Students Association and the University of Toronto—Scarborough Campus Tamil Students Association. “The conference aimed to educate the attendees of the selfless sacrifice of the first student martyr in the struggle to liberate Tamil Eelam.”36 These yearly commemoration ceremonies serve to celebrate the history and heritage of Tamil diasporic community members, many of whom arrived as refugees and immigrants escaping the human rights violations and the violence of Sri Lanka’s civil war. These commemorations also serve to educate Tamil youth who are born and raised with hybrid national identities, such as “Tamil-Canadian” and “Tamil-Norwegian,” about the political struggle for national independence that brought their families as refugees and immigrants into diasporic life and the consequent shaping of diasporic identities. Addressing the audience at the 2012 youth conference, Neethan Shan, then president of the Ontario New Democratic Party, reminded fellow community members that “Tamil youth have always been at the forefront in the struggle for peace and justice in our homeland. As Tamil youth we should continue to engage and educate our fellow youth about the righteous cause of our struggle.”37 Echoing Shan’s message of educating Tamil youth, Naaventhan Thamiyrajh, a member of the Canadian Tamil Youth Organization, made explicit the connection between the commemoration of Sivakumaran and the shaping of diasporic Tamil identities. Thamiyrajh said, “Pon. Sivakumaran Anna will always be an inspiration to Tamil youth. His courage and determination will never be forgotten. As youth it is our duty to follow his footsteps and never stray away from our identity.”38 Tamil youth organizations in North America, the U.K., and Europe support generations of Tamil youth to learn about their heritage and history; and by doing so they are able to connect with Sivakumaran’s

190

Y. SANGARASIVAM

participation as a student activist. Sivakumaran was an active participant in the 1974 International Tamil Conference that was held in Jaffna. He witnessed the police attacks and killings of civilians at this conference. His experience of witnessing the violence of the Sri Lankan military police became a significant part of the cultural practice of educating and understanding why he developed a commitment to sacrifice his life by joining an armed struggle for national liberation. He is especially remembered for his ardent stand against the Policy of Standardization imposed by the Sri Lankan state in 1971.39 This policy discriminated against Tamil students by requiring higher scores on university entrance exams and by enforcing a quota system that curtailed the number of Tamil students seeking higher education. Encouraged by the example set by Sivakumaran, the freedom to pursue higher education became a powerful motivating force for generations of Tamil youth to join an armed struggle for national liberation. By consuming cyanide when captured by the Sri Lankan military police, Sivakumaran demonstrated that he was able to maintain both the integrity of his body and the integrity of the movement. The consumption of cyanide denies the possibility of torture and mutilation of the captured body. As such, the sacrifice of a willful death maintains a respect for the body and physical integrity of the self. After Sivakumaran’s death, the LTTE employed his example of resistance as standard movement practice.40 With this choice, the practice of consuming cyanide at the moment of capture became an incalculable practice of resistance that embodied unintelligibility as expression. “It is better to die fighting than wait in the village to be picked up and tortured to death,” acknowledged Varadan, an LTTE cadre, in a 1991 interview with Time magazine.41 Unintelligible is the willful choice to consume cyanide as an expression of fighting. In other words, the willful choice of suicide transforms the human body (ooyiraayutham), “life-weapon,” when confronted into an with capture. As in the experience of the Black Tiger, the expression of integrity is complicated by the contradiction of sacrifice, which calls for the destruction of the self in order to maintain the integrity of the nation. As I have discussed earlier, it is a contradiction that appears in the violence of non-violence that is satyagraha. In the context of anti-colonial struggles, Gandhi’s sacrifice of his body through the act of satyagraha was lauded as a symbol of resistance and integrity for the Indian national liberation struggle against British colonial rule. In the contexts of asymmetric warfare, the consumption of cyanide

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

191

can be viewed on a continuum of the violence of nonviolent resistance along with the practice of satyagraha’s fasting to death.42 The power of satyagraha lies, partly, in its capacity to demonstrate the threat or potential of violence—a willful, slow death by fasting. In other words, the act of satyagraha finds its power to call for resistance and demand for action by constantly presenting the threat of violence that is done on to the self by a willful death. The presence of cyanide on the body is similarly a call for resistance and demand for action by a sustained recognition and orientation toward the potential for violence to be done on to the self— a preparedness for suicide. At the moment of capture, suicide embodies that riddle of Being; it leaves the capturing forces empty handed and thus foreclosing any possibility of victory in any form. In fact, victory itself is foreclosed. Suicide embodying unintelligibility as expression reveals that ultimately there are no winners in war. In that moment of capture, the insurgent embodies resistance by sacrificing his/her life in a willful death by consuming cyanide. The soldier, who is intent on capture, is left with the haunting of witnessing suicide. Our identities are shaped by their suicides and their hauntings of the general will that celebrates triumphant wars. What will we encounter when we open the hurt locker of patriotic pride? Are we willing to stand in solidarity with soldiers and insurgents to learn how our patriotism and desire for national belonging transforms us all into rough men who come hunting for souls ? The LTTE employed both the practice of satyagraha and the consumption of cyanide in resistance to Sri Lankan and Indian military forces. The practice of satyagraha and the practice of cyanide consumption both claim the body as the principal site of resistance to the oppression of colonial rule. Both forms of resistance are enacted in front of a witness. Unlike the act of suicide bombing, these practices culminate in the death of the self without the destruction of others. The consumption of cyanide contrasts with the practice of satyagraha in obvious ways. First, the former practice engages death with relative immediacy whereas satyagraha draws out the eventuality of death to a space of several weeks. Second, the expression of liberation and struggle in consuming cyanide differs from satyagraha in that the consumption of cyanide is marked by the experience of absolute alienation and abjection from the conventional spaces of resistance and dialogue through violence in the context of war. As an act of resistance that is shared by the participation of community members who are present as sources of support, sympathy, and witness to

192

Y. SANGARASIVAM

the compelling and willful sacrifice of one’s life, satyagraha allows for the opening of spaces for negotiation and mediation that hold the possibility of arresting a hunger strike and moving toward a resolution of conflict. In the case of failed efforts at negotiation and mediation, satyagraha articulates the shared experience of exceptional camaraderie and solidarity by all who are gathered to stand witness to the ritual of self-sacrifice; this is the experience of communitas that Victor Turner identified and is akin to a sense of national belonging.43 In contrast, the consumption of cyanide takes dialogue to a level of greater abstraction by redefining the space of interaction and communication between combatants in a struggle for the creation of a separate state. The body as a site of resistance responds to the closing spaces of dialogue in the face of hegemonic state regimes. Bypassing the space of arrest, capture, and torture that has been defined by state regimes, the consumption of cyanide redefines this space of confrontation in combat. The reality of capture is radically transformed into a potential for ultimate liberation; it is the liberation from capture and the inevitable dehumanization of torture. As such, the preparedness to consume cyanide was viewed as not only signifying ultimate liberation from capture but also, as Nundthini stated, a way of realizing one’s responsibility and obligation to “protect the lives of several other people…to protect the movement, the liberation struggle as a whole.” Adele Ann Balasingham documented the use of cyanide as a means of protection and resistance by women cadres who were confronted by IPKF troops in Mullaitivu. She is an Australian-born British national who became a leader of women cadres after joining the LTTE’s national liberation struggle with her husband, Anton Balasingham in the early 1980s. In her memoir documenting her observations and analysis of her participation in the LTTE’s nationalist movement, Adele Balasingham describes the choice for suicide: The women fighters were determined to resist to the very end rather than surrender to the army.... Four fighters swallowed cyanide rather than allowing the enemy to take them alive and subject them to torture.44

In her explanation of the pragmatic choice to carry the cyanide capsule, Nundthini, also analyzed the symbolic significance of a preparedness for suicide in the context of war:

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

193

As member of the movement we can’t afford to be afraid of dying in such a terrifying way [through torture] but we maintain the principle of integrity in being a liberation fighter. If we give up critical information about the movement under the torture of the enemy, there is little integrity there. So let’s say that I’m captured by the enemy and I’m undergoing the usual beatings and torture and I give all kinds of information like this is where [LTTE] camps are, these are the military strategies that the movement employs, these are the people in the movement, then there’s been no point in being a liberation fighter for all these years and furthermore, I am not worthy of being a liberation fighter. Why? Because I, myself, came forward to sacrifice my life for my country. For fear of being beaten and tortured, how could I betray my own people, my own country? Is that not so? But in saying this, I’m aware of our foibles as human beings. Under the extraordinary stress of torture, we cannot help but release some bits of information. Even if we are resolved to not give up any information, those guys [the Sri Lankan and Indian army] will not allow for this. They will escalate the torture until some kind of information is received. Again, for this reason, we need to protect our own lives from torture and the thereby protect our country.

In his analysis of Algeria’s liberation struggle, Frantz Fanon recognized that “violence represents the absolute line of action.”45 Fanon described the closing spaces of dialogue that requires a similar process of bypassing or transcending through the act of violence by the “native” Algerian in the face of the French colonizer: The native’s back is to the wall, the knife at his throat (or, more precisely, the electrode at his genitals): he will have no more call for his fancies. After centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish phantoms, at long last the native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only forces which contend for his life—the forces of colonialism.46

For the LTTE cadre, the face to face confrontation with the colonizing forces of the Sri Lankan and Indian military was ultimately that moment when one’s back was pressed to the wall. When faced with capture and torture in the hands of the enemy, the gun held a lesser potential for liberation and freedom in comparison to the vial of cyanide. Freedom was articulated through the violence done on to the self by denying the opportunity of capture and torture by soldiers of the Sri Lankan and Indian military forces. The consumption of cyanide was a final act of resistance

194

Y. SANGARASIVAM

that demanded a recognition of a willfulness to disobey the command of capitulation and capture. It was also an act of willful acceptance of that incalculable trajectory which an armed struggle portends—a stepping into the time–space reality of anarchy that grabs hold and shapes one’s destiny and identity. ●

Anarchy The presence of cyanide on the body of LTTE cadres symbolized the extent of sacrifice, determination, and integrity that was understood as the foundations of the Tamil nationalist struggle. The willingness to die for nation was symbolized by the preparedness for suicide. Because the vial of cyanide was accepted upon completion of training and worn continuously thereafter, it became symbolic of an LTTE cadre’s anarchic commitment to reject the authority of the Sri Lankan government. It was also an anarchic choice to reject the conventions of preparing soldiers for war. These are the conventions which elide the fundamental reality that all forms of military training for combat in service to the nation-state is a preparation for death and thus essentially a preparation for suicide. Whether you come out of military combat dead or alive is the persistent fear that feeds the insecurity, which in turn gives form and content to make the notions of sacrifice and patriotic pride real. By making an anarchic choice to attach a vial of cyanide to their bodies as a part of their uniform for combat, the LTTE rejected this general will of eliding the fundamental reality that to become a combat soldier is a preparation for death/suicide. In an interview with the Indian newspaper, The Hindu, the LTTE leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran discussed the significance of cyanide as a form of resistance: We have adopted this measure from the start. As a consequence, many comrades have sacrificed themselves. You won’t find people from our movement in jail, at least, not many more than you can count on your fingers, perhaps two or three persons, and even those are people not involved in the inner circle of activity. Our fighters, through laying down their lives, protect our sympathizers and contacts, the people who give us support and assistance. Otherwise, the great mass of people who support us, and their families, would be herded into jail. But that is not the only reason for this practice. It is this cyanide that has helped us develop our movement very rapidly. Carrying cyanide on our person is a symbolic

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

195

expression of our determination, our commitment, our courage. It gives our fighters an extra measure of belief in our cause, a special edge; the cyanide has instilled in us determination to sacrifice our lives and our everything for our cause.47

Prabhakaran identified sacrifice, determination, commitment, and courage as the sublime ideals of nationalism and patriotism that sustained the Tamil nationalist movement. On October 2, 1987 the Sri Lankan Navy apprehended seventeen LTTE cadres, two of whom, Kumarappa and Pulenthiran, were area commanders of the eastern province townships of Batticaloa and Trincomalee, respectively. The cadres were traveling by speed-boats from Jaffna to the east coast crossing the Kankesanthurai seaboard where they were captured and consequently held in custody at the Sri Lankan air base in Palali. Under the orders of the Sri Lankan army Brigadier, Jayantha Jayaratne, the cyanide capsules were removed from the LTTE cadres. The IPKF commander, General Rodriguez, said that these seventeen cadres should have been released with amnesty in compliance with the Indo-Lanka Accord. The Sri Lankan Minister of National Security and Deputy Defense Minister, Lalith Athulathmudali, blatantly violated the Indo-Lanka agreement of amnesty and demanded the seventeen LTTE cadres be flown to Colombo for further interrogation. The LTTE, in turn, pressured the IPKF to allow for visitation rights to the seventeen cadres, which was eventually granted. During one of these visits, cyanide capsules were secretly passed to the cadres. Consequently, the seventeen LTTE cadres threatened to take the newly received cyanide capsules if they were denied their release under the amnesty agreement. Nonetheless, Brigadier Jayaratne, following Athulathmudali’s orders, signaled the seventeen cadres to be boarded on a Sri Lankan air force plane to be taken to Colombo. Sugeeswara Senadhira, a Sri Lankan journalist writing for the Colombo Sunday Times described the events that followed: [Brigadier] Jayaratne selected 34 of his strongmen and told them to rush into the hanger when they received his signal and prevent the Tigers from taking cyanide. He kept the doctors, ambulances and stomach pumps ready. Then he walked into the hanger with his soldiers. But they could not stop the Tigers from biting into the capsules. Pulendran, Kumarappa and seven others died immediately, four died in the hospital and four were saved.48

196

Y. SANGARASIVAM

This incident brought Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi directly into talks with then Sri Lankan president, J.R. Jayewardene. Following the consumption of cyanide by the LTTE cadres, the role of the IPKF (Indian Peacekeeping Forces) in Sri Lanka was fundamentally changed. The result was India’s full participation in the Sri Lankan war with Operation Pawan, which began on October 10, 1987. The IPKF’s military occupation of northern and eastern Sri Lankan continued until they were ousted by the LTTE in 1990.49 With the deaths of Kumarappa, Pulenthiran, and other LTTE cadres, Indian troops became aware of the practice of cyanide consumption and at times tried to resuscitate LTTE cadres who had taken cyanide. Peter Schalk observed that, The taking of cyanide is not always successful. The enemy can apply stomach pumping and save a life for torture to extract information. This happened in the case of the LTTE cadre Rancit who at the age of 19 was saved by Indian soldiers from dying through cyanide but was then, after questioning, beaten to death.50

Symbolically, the act of resuscitation can be observed as an attempt to assert control and authority in a situation of anarchic resistance to the order of conventional warfare. Resuscitation signified an attempt at the recovery of power and control by the Indian and Sri Lankan military forces in the situation of capture. The LTTE cadres’ consumption of cyanide undermined the authority of state regimes, whose power is articulated by the violence of its soldiers in the theaters of war. The act of suicide—at the moment when capture was imminent—embodied the chaos, disorder, and confusion when those intelligible moments of power and authority were snatched away by an anarchic choice of consuming cyanide. ●

Suicide-Silence-Identity-Anarchy In her account of the aftermath of communal riots in north India, Veena Das discusses the “narratability of death” in her analysis of the ordinary language of women mourners.51 In the case of an LTTE cadre’s consumption of cyanide, death narrates the intersectionalities of suicide-silence-identity-anarchy that coalesce to articulate resistance and

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

197

liberation. Within the worldview of the LTTE, the choice to consume cyanide was a choice that transformed death into an expression of resistance against the colonizing forces of state regimes and an expression of the liberation of self and nation. Death by cyanide was regarded as a “good” death, signifying the integrity of self, sacrifice, determination, and courage. This contrasts with the “bad” death commonly associated with suicide. Das argues that “when death has occurred in violation of all cultural ideas about a good death,” then it is dismissed as an act of fanaticism and irrational violence.52 Yet, suicide through the consumption of cyanide was not considered by the LTTE to be either irrational or “bad.” Peter Schalk observed that cyanide deaths were listed by the LTTE as combat casualties, not as a separate category of “suicide.”53 This is because the LTTE did not view the use of cyanide as a distinct practice but rather as a normative aspect of preparation for combat.54 LTTE cadres did share an understanding with soldiers recruited to represent state regimes: death in combat is symbolic of self-sacrifice.55 For the soldier, it is a lauded form of self-sacrifice to kill and be killed in service to the nation-state. For the LTTE cadre, it was a lauded form of self-sacrifice to prepare for the anarchic choice of suicide in service to the nation and a struggle for national liberation, regardless of how that death occurred: by the consumption of cyanide; by an enemy bullet; by the (Black practice of satyagraha; or by the tactical bombing of a (ooyiraayutham), a Tiger) who deployed her or his life as “life-weapon.” The narratability of suicide was also transformative in that it was an expression of reclaiming the integrity of the self—and by extension, the integrity of the nation—at the moment of capture. Arguably, a suicidal death also narrated a kind of political agency whereby integrity is laced with an anarchic dissolution of our attachment to national belonging that gets lost in patriotic wars. Here, in this space of getting lost, suicide and silence signify the condition of abjection that Rey Chow theorizes as “identificatory anarchy.”56 She breaks down this concept through her analysis of a short story titled “Lian” (“Attachment”) written by Lao She, “an eminent writer who, in the summer of 1966, was hounded into suicide during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”57 Through her analysis of Lao She’s short story, Rey Chow recognizes that “in retrospect, the narrative of ‘Attachment’ seems to stand as an uncanny kind of foreboding” that functions very much like a photograph or a commemorative

198

Y. SANGARASIVAM

poster (as discussed in Chapter 4), which carries an anterior future where Lao She’s choice for suicide is certain. Lao She’s short story juxtaposes an attachment to a collection of objects and an attachment to a patriotic community in the face of Japanese colonial occupation. In this short story about “Attachment,” Rey Chow identifies the underlying ideological efficacy that gives patriotism its momentum and endows it with cultural capital and social power: This ideological mechanism works by polarizing external reality into an antagonism between “us” and “them,” offering those who subscribe to patriotism an unambiguous purpose in which to anchor themselves. As Slavoj Žižek suggests, the reason ideology works is never simply because it tells lies … but rather because it serves a protective function: the polarities, the antagonisms on which ideology depends for its persuasion in fact help to shield us from the terror of a free field of significatory possibilities and thus from complete identificatory chaos. Adhering to the ideology of patriotism during war, for instance, would allow one the security of an epistemic closure (we are good, the enemy evil), which in turn would make it possible to act without self-restraint or compunction.58

Similarly, the ideological efficacy of nationalism works because it serves a protective function of anchoring our desire for an ever-elusive sense of national security that is predicated on our attachment to a need for national belonging. Chow also reveals how the obsessions and entanglements that emerge in the midst of colonial domination resonate “against a background of competing forces of commodity fetishism, patriotism, and nihilism.”59 Lao She’s story about “Attachment” centers on the character of Zhuang Yiya, a collector of minor works of art—paintings and calligraphy, for example—and who is of that category of middle-class professionals and educated collectors who value art and artifacts as the aesthetic pleasures of culture, which they believe is tied to a history that is revered. Unlike the class of collectors who are mercenary in their relationship with their collections that they view as a source of profit and who have no regard for history, Zhuang regards his collections as a way “to make something of his life.”60 He is able to do so by coming into possession of a painting by the renowned master, Shi Qui. The story is set in 1937 at the time of the Japanese invasion of China. Zhuang is faced with the ultimatum of either serving as the head of the education bureau, a position appointed to him by the command of the occupying Japanese forces or losing his life and his precious collection of art and artifacts. Zhuang is devastated at

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

199

the thought of losing his art collection, his hard-earned social status, and the sense of purpose that emerged from the years of striving to arrive at this place in his identity. He is especially distraught because his collection, particularly the highly valued acquisition of the Shi Qi painting, served the purpose of confirming his elevated social status in his community and allowed him to finally make something of his life. Zhuang is caught in a predicament where the forfeiture of cultural identity that one is attached to is demanded in either scenario; faced with the choice of loyalty to country or loyalty to artifacts, he chose his loyalty to his art collection and became a civil servant of the Japanese. Rey Chow analyzes the consequences of Zhuang’s choice: When Zhuang declines to act in accordance with patriotism, he is declining a socially endorsed ideological anchoring and moral protection it allows him. His declination brings to the fore the inarticulate fact that there is perhaps something else at stake, and that the closure and security offered by national chauvinism, with its polarization of us and the enemy, are not necessarily final. But it is lethal to dare forsake such closure and security. Hence, even though by his decision Zhuang gets to live, the concluding line suggests the opposite to be the case; his surrender to the Japanese is in effect a kind of suicide, the annihilation of an existence that has been socially and culturally derived.61

Lao She ends the story with this pronouncement: “To be attached to something is to die with it.”62 ● Enter here. We travel forward in time from 1937 to 1987 and find ourselves listening to yet another story of identificatory anarchy. In this story, Nundthini tells us about an attachment to betrayal and an attachment to self-sacrifice: In a small village near the town of Kilinochchi a memorable event took place during the time when the Indian army was here. A cadre, who had been in the movement for many years, had not been able to see his parents for a long time. After the IPKF came, it was not at all possible to visit his mother. At that time, the movement had sent him on a mission to his hometown to collect intelligence information on the IPKF. So after being away from his hometown for such a long time, he certainly would look forward to visiting his family, wouldn’t he? So he goes to his family home to see his father and mother.

200

Y. SANGARASIVAM

As he was making his way to his family home, another man of this same village spots him [the LTTE cadre] and betrays the community by reporting to the IPKF that this boy is an LTTE cadre. As the boy visits his family, the IPKF surrounds the house. When the IPKF [soldiers approach] the house, the boy holds on to his mother as she cries out, begging the Indian soldiers to spare her son. He bites into the vial of cyanide as he tightly hugs his mother. He dies in his mother’s arms. In fact, the movement has recreated this story in a video drama. It’s really unbelievable, you know, because, not a single cadre would ever imagine a situation where he or she would die in his or her mother’s arms and not only that, not a single mother could bear the fact that her own son would consume cyanide and die in her own arms. Which mother could bear this, can you tell me?

● Enter here. We travel forward in time to yet another story, this one told by poet Brian Turner, that happened on March 22, 2004: Eulogy 63 It happens on a Monday, at 11:20 A.M., as tower guards eat sandwiches and seagulls drift by on the Tigris River. Prisoners tilt their heads to the west though burlap sacks and duct tape blind them. The sound reverberates down concertina coils the way piano wire thrums when given slack. And it happens like this, on a blue day of sun, when Private Miller pulls the trigger to take brass and fire into his mouth: the sound lifts the birds up off the water, a mongoose pauses under the orange trees, and nothing can stop it now, no matter what blur of motion surrounds him, no matter what voices crackle over the radio in static confusion, because if only for this moment the earth is stilled, and Private Miller has found what low hush there is down in the eucalyptus shade, there by the river. PFC B. Miller (1980–March 22, 2004)

●

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

201

In preparing for combat, we are necessarily called to prepare for suicide, are we not? If combat requires a willfulness to kill and be killed, then it does indeed necessitate a willfulness of suicide, which in turn signifies a will to get lost in the hush of abjection. Amidst this condition of getting lost in that willful attachment to killing and being killed in service of patriotism and national belonging, self-sacrifice/suicide emerges as a riddle in the scrabbling for self-knowledge, that striving to make something of one’s life, that “indestructible sublime ideal, that something to die for.”64 When national belonging gets lost in the willful attachment to killing and being killed, does self-sacrifice—of service to nation and country— operate like an attachment to objects and collections of artifacts? Those experiences of self-sacrifice—are they akin to the objects that one might collect to make something of one’s own life? In her analysis of patriotic submission and resistive patriotism, Rey Chow raises questions about betrayal, about the value and possession of national identity, and about a refusal to fill an existential void with the promise of citizenship and national belonging: At the juncture between the love for the inanimate and the demands of group identity, what might the act of collecting signify? What might an intimacy with inanimate objects do to one’s sense of belonging, of being part of say, a national community?65

If we observe patriotism and nationalism as inanimate objects, we may witness what our intimacy with these objects might do to our need to belong, our need to be a part of a national community. Our intimacy with the inanimate objects of patriotism and nationalism pushes Private Miller to put a gun to his mouth and pull the trigger. Animating abjection in the intimacy of suicide. In a turn of identificatory chaos that is engendered by war, are we collecting the willful self-sacrifice/suicide of our soldiers, of our insurgents, as a possession of value? In this infinitely protracted global war on terror, have we become attached to collecting the willful selfsacrifice/suicide of our soldiers, our insurgents, instead of and beyond our attachment to nationalism and patriotism? In other words, is this attachment to collecting their self-sacrifice/suicide, in and of itself, our attachment to national belonging and patriotic pride?

202

Y. SANGARASIVAM

In her analysis of China’s Cultural Revolution and the systematic destruction of any attachment to prior political ideologies, Rey Chow observes that, violence and the loyalty it demands are turned into properties or possessions exclusive to the political state, which can henceforth legitimize, indeed normalize, the ruthless stamping out of an equal contender for popular submission in the name of the collective good.66

As we will encounter in the next chapter, massacres and the loyalty it demands of its citizens and soldiers are turned into properties and possessions of state regimes, which legitimize and normalize the ruthless stamping out of contending nationalist movements and sovereign peoples for the good of the nation-state. The disconnect between the realities of war and the obscene silence that Brian Turner witnesses in the homeland, serves a protective function of maintaining the polarities and antagonisms of “over there” and “over here.” Of soldiers and civilians. Of insurgents and citizens. Of terrorists and patriots. Of suicide and sacrifice. These polarities and antagonisms emerge as an ideological mechanism that gives patriotism and nationalism its momentum to consolidate cultural capital and social power. The danger of getting lost in this momentum of fateful attachment to patriotism and national belonging is that of becoming attached to the willful self-sacrifice of preparing to kill and be killed; it is an attachment that plants the seed of identificatory anarchy. In that scramble, in that striving to make something of one’s life through a willful attachment to selfsacrifice, suicide may appear as a last call to recognize our own humanity and the humanity of our enemy in the face of unbearable violence. It is an anarchic choice that ultimately rejects all kinds of belonging, including that laudable and valiant sense of nationalism and patriotism, in favor of becoming comfortably numb to a self-sacrifice that distills that moment of identificatory anarchy—of belonging to no one and everyone. Here Bullet, here is where. The world ends. Every time. ●

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

203

Notes 1. Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 74. 2. Elsewhere, I have analyzed the LTTE’s practice of Gandhian nonviolent resistance in an analysis of political posters representing Thileepan’s hunger strike against India’s intervention and the occupation of the IPKF (Indian Peace Keeping Forces). Thileepan was a medical student who joined the LTTE and sacrificed his life through his choice to embark on a hunger strike to death. See: Yamuna Sangarasivam, “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Cultural Production of Nationalism and Violence: Representing the Integrity of Nation and the Choice for Armed Struggle” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2000), 160–210. For an analysis of the hegemonic narrative of nonviolent resistance as it intersects with the hegemonic narrative of neoliberalism in the contexts of Iran and Egypt, see: Sean Chabot and Majid Sharifi, “The Violence of Nonviolence: Problematizing Nonviolent Resistance in Iran and Egypt,” Societies Without Borders 8, no. 2 (2013): 205–232. 3. Daniel Tiffany, “Rhapsodic Measures,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. S2 (Winter 2008): S146. 4. Theodor W. Adorno quoted in Daniel Tiffany, “Rhapsodic Measures,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. S2 (Winter 2008): S147. 5. Adorno quoted in Daniel Tiffany, “Rhapsodic Measures,” S147. 6. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 7. While my analysis coincides with conventional representations and analyses of suicide bombers when nationalism is cited as a motivation for the choice to deploy the self as a weapon, my work departs from these conventional approaches to the study of suicide as a tactic of war and to the conventional approaches to the study of terrorism. Conventional studies of terrorism and suicide bombing, for the most part, begin from the standpoint of drawing a clear line dichotomizing us and an objectified them: we are normal people and they are terrorists; we are inherently nonviolent and they are committed to violence and irrational religious fanaticism; our nationalism is rational and is disconnected to their nationalism, which is irrational. In my studies of terrorism, I invoke the engaged Buddhist perspectives of Thich Nhat Hanh who teaches the concept of interbeing to understand war. An engaged Buddhist perspective begins with the premise that our patriotic motivations and desires for national belonging are intimately connected to those of soldiers, insurgents, and especially suicide bombers; because they do the work of killing and being killed in order to sustain and support our collective sense of nationalism and patriotic pride. For an explanation of the nature of interbeing

204

8. 9. 10.

11.

Y. SANGARASIVAM

and the shared responsibility of war that civilians hold with soldiers and insurgents, see: Thich Nhat Hanh, Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1993). For conventional perspectives on suicide bombers in the contexts of Palestine, Kurdistan, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka, for example, see: Christoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, trans. Helena RaggKirkby (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Gardner, “Is There Method To The Madness? Worldwide Press Coverage of Female Terrorists and Journalistic Attempts to Rationalize Their Involvement,” Journalism Studies 8, no. 6 (2007): 909–929; Martha Crenshaw, “The Causes of Terrorism,” in The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls, ed. Charles W. Kegley (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003), 92–105; Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” in The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls, ed. Charles W. Kegley (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003), 194–201; David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Rebel Terror and September 11,” in The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls, ed. Charles W. Kegley (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003), 36–52; Richard E. Rubenstein, “The Psycho-Political Sources of Terrorism,” in The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls, ed. Charles W. Kegley (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003), 139–150; Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Niccolo Caldararo, “Social Thought & Commentary: Suicide Bombers, Terror, History, and Religion,” Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 1 (2006): 123–131; Rosemarie Skaine, Female Suicide Bombers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006). Daniel Tiffany, “Rhapsodic Measures,” S146-S169. Tiffany, “Rhapsodic Measures,” S168. “The Power of Pride” is a slogan found on, for example, bumper stickers and spare tire covers of jeeps. For an example of the extent to which the slogan finds its way into capital campaigns and popular culture, see the Memorial Day celebrations featuring a “Power of Pride show car” in a “Power of Pride” motor race, and a “Power of Pride paint scheme” that was offered at by Lowe’s Home Improvement company as they collaborated with the United Service Organizations (USO) to support the “Power of Pride Program”: https://us.motorsport.com/nascar-cup/news/jimmiejohnson-teams-up-with-uso/1027574/; see also, https://usveteransma gazine.com/2019/05/lowes-partnerships-military-organizations/ Michael Roberts, “Filial Devotion in Tamil Culture and the Tiger Cult of Martyrdom,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 30, no. 2 (1996): 245– 272; Pamela Price, “Revolution and Rank in Tamil Nationalism,” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (May 1996): 359–383.

5

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

205

12. Refer to Chapter 2 above where I introduce Sara Ahmed’s analysis of Rousseau’s political theory of the general will. 13. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 2. 14. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 15. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 65. 16. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1. 17. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5. 18. Prior to his deployment to Iraq, Brian Turner was deployed in 1999–2000 to serve with the 10th Mountain Division of the US Army to fight in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 19. Brian Turner, “Body Bags,” in Here, Bullet (Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books, 2005), 14. 20. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5. 21. Brian Turner, “Body Bags,” in Here, Bullet, 14. 22. Brian Turner, Here, Bullet, 13. 23. Sarah Crown, “Brian Turner: Words of War,” The Guardian, October 27, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/oct/27/brianturner-soldier-poet 24. Tiffany, “Rhapsodic Measures,” S156. 25. Brian Turner, “The Hurt Locker,” in Here, Bullet, 11. 26. Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS: Poems (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017). 27. For examples of media reports on the LTTE’s use of cyanide, see: Richard M. Weintraub, “Tamils Kill Dozens in Revenge,” The Washington Post, October 7, 1987, A25; John F. Burns, “A Corner of Sri Lankan Tires of Living Under Siege,” The New York Times, October 16, 1994, 3; John Lancaster, “In Some Ways, Rebels Without a Cause: Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers Have Already Achieved De Facto Independence,” Washington Post, January 14, 2003, A.14; Mark Fineman, “Rebels’ Weapon: Cyanide with a cult of suicide, the Tamil Tigers rank among the world’s most dedicated guerrilla groups. Their liberation war in Sri Lanka has entered the realm of fanaticism,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1992, 1. 28. “The Assassinations,” Tamil Times 12, mo. 5(1993): 4–5; Kenneth J. Cooper, “Bomb Kills 60 in Sri Lanka’s Capital,” The Washington Post, February 1, 1996, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/ 1996/02/01/bomb-kills-60-in-sri-lankas-capital/2acad84c-59fe-462eb841-5996fd4977f4/. 29. Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Towards Liberation: Selected Political Documents of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. LTTE publication, 1984, 44; A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, S.J.V. Chelvanayakam and the Crisis of Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism (London: Hurst & Company, 1994), 127;

206

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Robert Paul Jordan, “Time of Testing for An Ancient Land: Sri Lanka,” National Geographic 155 no. 1 (1979): 122–150. The LTTE maintained several military and administrative wings or divisions in their movement, for example: a naval wing called Sea Tigers, a women’s wing, an intelligence wing, a sustainable development wing, and the Black Tigers wing of suicide bombers. During the 1970s the LTTE, as well as other Tamil nationalist organizations like the People’s Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE), engaged in a number of bank robberies throughout Jaffna to secure a financial base for their liberation struggle. The LTTE targeted Sri Lankan national banks and justified their appropriation of funds from these government institutions as an attack on the economic infrastructure of the Sri Lankan state. They made explicit this point of view through a variety of cultural productions including street theater, pamphlets, and political rallies. My grandparents had described one of these street theater performances that the LTTE had presented on a road, a few meters from our home in Jaffna. The original statue of Sivakumaran following its destruction by the Sri Lankan forces in August 1977 is featured in, Robert Paul Jordan, “Sri Lanka: Time of Testing for an Ancient Land,” National Geographic 115, no. 1 (January 1979): 123–150. See also, Priit J. Vesilind, “Sri Lanka: a Continuing Ethnic War Tarnishes the Pearl of the Indian Ocean,” National Geographic 191, no. 1 (1997): 110–133. For images of Ponnuthurai Sivakumaran’s statue and commemoration ceremonies, see: “Pon. Sivakumaran remembered in Jaffna,” Tamil Guardian, June, 5, 2017, https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/ pon-sivakumaran-remembered-jaffna. See image of a political poster commemorating Ponnuthurai Sivakumaran that is used in yearly events in Tamil diasporic communities: “Pon. Sivakumaran,” Eelam Images, accessed June 22, 2021, https://puliveeram. wordpress.com/2011/11/19/6288/pon-sivakumaran/; For images of a yearly commemoration of Sivakumaran organized by Tamil community members in Germany see: “Sivakumaran remembered in Germany,” Tamil Guardian, June 7, 2021, https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/siv akumaran-remembered-germany. Excerpts from a speech by K.P. Aravinthan, a contemporary and “a close associate” of Sivakumaran, in his address to Tamil community members at the 34th annual day of remembrance in 2008, in Rohr, Switzerland; similar commemorations are held in Canada, Norway, and the U.K.; reported in TamilNet, “Diaspora Students Mark Sivakumaran Day,” June 9, 2008, http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?artid=25949&catid=13. It is also meaningful to note that Ponnuthurai Sivakumaran is popularly and affectionately referred to as “Pon. Sivakumaran,” within the Sri Lankan

5

36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

207

Tamil community that supports the LTTE’s nationalist struggle. “Pon” (in the Tamil language translates as “gold”) is used affectionately in everyday speech to signify a relationship with one who is regarded as more precious than gold. “Canadian Tamil Youth Mark Students’ Uprising Day,” Tamil Guardian, June, 11, 2012, http://www.tamilguardian.com/article.asp?articleid= 5067. For another example of politically engaged practices of Tamil cultural education and cultural heritage that are organized by the Tamil Youth Organization in the U.K., see: “Why is the World Not Hearing Our Protest?” Tamil Youth Organization, UK, February 7, 2021. https://www.tyouk.org/why-is-the-world-not-hearing-our-protest/. See also, Tamil cultural and heritage program presented by the Tamil Youth Organization-Canada, in June 2011, commemorating the 37th anniversary of Sivakumaran’s death: “TYO-Canada Remembers Sivakumar,” Tamil Guardian, June 16, 2011, http://www.tamilguardian.com/article. asp?articleid=3244 Quote from Neethan Shan’s speech reported in “Canadian Tamil Youth Mark Students’ Uprising Day,” Tamil Guardian, June, 11, 2012, http:// www.tamilguardian.com/article.asp?articleid=5067. Quote from Naaventhan Thamiyrajh’s speech reported in “Canadian Tamil Youth Mark Students’ Uprising Day,” Tamil Guardian. For discussions and analyses of the discriminatory policy of Standardization in higher education see: S. Anuzsiya, “Standardization in the University Admissions and Ethnic Crisis in Sri Lanka,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 57, (1996):779–807; C. A. Perumal and R. Thandavan, “Ethnic Violence in Sri Lanka: Causes and Consequences,” The Indian Journal of Political Science 50, no. 1 (January-March 1989):1– 17. For an anthropological analysis of how Tamil community members were marginalized through the discriminatory policies that impacted Tamil access to citizenship and education, see Birgitte Refslund Sørensen, “The Politics of Citizenship and Difference in Sri Lankan School,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39, no. 4 (December 2008): 423–443. The consumption of cyanide appears in other liberation struggles. In her ethnography on Sikh nationalism, Cynthia Keppley Mahmood discusses the choice to consume cyanide by some Sikh militants at the moment of capture by the Indian police and military. It must be noted that although the reasoning behind the consumption of cyanide is similar to that of the LTTE, unlike the LTTE it was not a prescribed practice by all Sikh militants to wear and consume cyanide. For a further discussion of sacrifice and suicide, see Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

208

Y. SANGARASIVAM

41. Quoted in Sumantra Bose, States, Nations, Sovereignty: Sri Lanka, India, and the Tamil Eelam Movement (New Delhi: Sage, 1994), 99. 42. The practice of self-immolation as a form of protest against the US war in Vietnam by Vietnamese monastics in Vietnam and peace activists in the United States can also be placed on this continuum of the violence of nonviolent protest. For further discussion and analysis see: Sallie B. King, “They Who Burned Themselves for Peace: Quaker and Buddhist Self-Immolators during the Vietnam War,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000): 127–150; and Thich Nhat Hanh, Love In Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change, Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1993. 43. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1974). See also, Donald Weber, “From Limen to Border: A Meditation on the Legacy of Victor Turner for American Cultural Studies,” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (September 1995): 525–536. As in the examples of the renowned LTTE cadre, Thileepan, who conducted a fast to death in protest of the IPKF occupation and Annai Poopathi, an elderly woman, who conducted a fast to death in protest against the IPKF’s capture and killing of her children, satyagraha articulated an act of self-sacrifice that was shared with a sense of communitas and a sense of national belonging by all Tamil community members who stood in solidarity and who stood vigil with them until their death. 44. Adele Ann Balasingham, Women Fighters of Liberation Tigers (Jaffna: LTTE Publications, 1993), 38. For a discussion on the varying degrees of commitment and individual experiences of militarization, see: Nimmi Gowrinathan, “The committed female fighter: the political identities of Tamil women in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 19, no. 3 (2017): 327–241. 45. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 85. 46. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 58. 47. Quoted in Bose, States, Nations, Sovereignty, 117. 48. Sugeeswara Senadhira’s article, “The cyanide drama that brought ‘referee Rajiv’ into the ring,” originally published October 1, 1989, is reprinted as “Appendix II” in Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram, K. Sritharan, and Rajani Thiranagama, The Broken Palmyra: The Tamil Crisis in Sri Lanka, an Inside Account, Claremont: The Sri Lanka Studies Institute, 1988. See also: Sugeeswara Senadhira, “Cyanide Drama: Referee Rajiv Fought My Battle,” Ceylon Today, October 5, 2020, https://ceylontoday.lk/news/ cyanide-drama-referee-rajiv-fought-my-battle. 49. A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism: It’s Origins and Development in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Vancouver: UBC Press,

5

50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

COMFORTABLY NUMB: ABJECTION & ANARCHY

209

2000), 136–156. For further analyses of India’s intervention and participation in the Sri Lankan government’s war against the LTTE see also: M.R. Narayan Swamy, “Sri Lanka’s Arming of LTTE Against IPKF: Mystery of Kobbekaduwa’s Death,” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 40 (October 1998): 2577–2578; Sandra Destradi, “India and Sri Lanka’s Civil War: the Failure of Regional Conflict Management in South Asia,” Asian Survey 52, no. 3 (May/June 2012): 595–616; Paul Staniland, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Insurgent Fratricide, Ethnic Defection, and the Rise of Pro-State Paramilitaries,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, no. 1 (February 2012): 16–40. Peter Schalk, “‘Birds of Independence’: On the Participation of Tamil Women in Armed Struggle,” Lanka: Studies in Lankan Culture 7 (1992), 73. Veena Das, “Our Work to Cry: Your Work to Listen” in Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 345–399. Das, “Our Work to Cry: Your Work to Listen,” 346. Peter Schalk, “Resistance and Martyrdom in the Process of State Formation of Tamililam,” in Martyrdom and Political Resistance, ed. Joyce Pettigrew (Amsterdam: VU Press, 1997), 61– 84. In his study of the LTTE’s use of cyanide, Sumantra Bose estimated that 15% of all LTTE casualties (roughly 600 LTTE cadres in the early 1990s) were due to cyanide consumption: Bose, States, Nations, Sovereignty, 118. See Joseph Blake’s discussion of “altruistic suicide” in his study of US soldiers in Vietnam who received the Medal of Honor for “voluntarily using one’s body to shield other men from exploding devices”: Joseph A. Blake, “Death by Hand Grenade: Altruistic Suicide in Combat,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 8, no. 1 (Spring 1978), 47. Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture, 74. Rey Chow, Entanglements, 9. Ibid., 70. Rey Chow, Entanglements, 9. Ibid., 68. Rey Chow, Entanglements, 70–71. Ibid., 66. Brian Turner, “Eulogy,” in Here, Bullet, 20. Rey Chow, Entanglements, 74. Rey Chow, Entanglements, 59. Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture, 76.

CHAPTER 6

Run Like Hell: Mullivaikkal

Mullivaikkal What do we become. In the wake of massacre. Enter here. Into the wake. Into this place called terrorism. A place of holding. Holding enemy combatants. Theirs and ours. Soldiers and civilians. Theirs. Ours. Insurgents and extremists. Theirs. Ours. Excavate histories. Of the holding. What cultural value. Does this place, terrorism. Hold. Encounter. Speak with. Sit beside those. Who are killed. Accompany. Those who do the work. Of killing. Walk. With soldiers and insurgents. Kill and killed. Terrorizing violence. In service of your need. For national belonging. In service of your feeling. Of patriotic pride. Walk with them. A little further. Ask what persists. After the killing. Stay. With them. Longer. In the wake. This account of the massacre at Mullivaikkal. Will take form. Break form. One sentence. At a time.

“Run Like Hell,” Pink Floyd, The Wall, Columbia Music, 1979; “Run Like Hell,” Pink Floyd, published on January 12, 2016, YouTube video, 04:23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2s8yGMEbSs. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. Sangarasivam, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82665-9_6

211

212

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Sister Hak Kyung Cha, you give us permission. Sister Chin, you give us permission. Sister Long Soldier, you give us permission. To be. Conscious of our path. This telling. An inquiry into the workings of a massacre. The form. Disordered. In the wake of aerial bombardments. Disordered. In the wake of heavy weapons. Disordered. The content. Disordered. In the wake of rape. Disordered. In the wake of torture. Disordered. In the wake of executions, extrajudicial killings. Disordered. The spirits of many. Disorder us. Along the way.1 We might wonder. Why some massacres come forth. Into the foreground. Some others recede. Further back. Ground. Into shadows of histories we train. To forget. While some others yet. Exist beyond our conscious awareness. We might wander. Together. Through these grounds. In the fore and in the back and beyond. To see. As Sister Lorde said. See whose face it wears. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.2

The violence is too overwhelming to be contained. In the conventional structure. To deliver what they might desire. As the proper form. Of ethnographic knowledge. Captured from the words and experiences of our people. In service of their research. Objectivity. Only theirs. They search. Re-search. For natives. Informants contained. Documented. In the field. In the wake. The violence is overwhelming. A disobedient anthropologist. Will not keep her subjects still. She will not keep her subjects still. In time. In place. Insisting. Insistent. Incessant movement of subjects, objects of massacres and wars across time, through space, arriving and leaving simultaneously in multiple places, always refusing their ways of order, creating structures alien to conventions of colonizing, occupying our bodies, our voices, our stories, our loss, our life they collect as artifacts, this they claim to discover on the grounds of what only they can call knowledge, in the midst of war, your weapons deployed in their wars feeding our wars avenging the death of your families reckoning for killing our families time and again massacres cannot be still, she cannot, we cannot hold this massacre still in one place

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

213

in one time as it wills into existence time and again, resisting closure always on trial in the consciousness inside the memories of all who suffer in the wake of wars refusing to make common the sense of arriving at belonging to earth shakers raining fire and steel. I am. A disobedient. Anthropologist. To see. Whose face terror and loathing wears. I disobey. I disturb. I disorder. The way the stories are told. The way the accounts are made. Available to you, the way. They are accounted for. The way they account for you. The way they account you. ● What do we become. In the wake. Of massacre. In the wake. Of war. Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence; living the historically and geographically dis/continuous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality in, and on, our bodies while even as that terror is visited on our bodies the realities of that terror are erased.3

Living. In the wake. Means living the history and the present. Of terror. Of colonial invasion and occupation of indigenous lands. Of massacres. Of extraordinary rendition. Of indefinite torture and incarceration. Guantanamo Bay. CIA black sites. In the wake of freedom and democracy. In the wake of national security. In the wake of the global war on terror. Authored and authorized by the United States, the regimes of nationstates around the globe are emboldened. Taking up the call to eradicate terrorists and terrorism. Their claim to a monopoly on legitimate violence. And just war.4 Wakes are processes; through them we think about the dead and about our relations to them; they are rituals through which to enact grief and memory. Wakes allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the dead through ritual; they are the watching of relatives and friends beside the body of the deceased from death to burial…. But wakes are also ‘the track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water; the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow; in the line of sight of (an observed object); and (something) in the line of recoil of (a gun)’; finally, wake means being awake and also, consciousness.5

●

214

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Be/in the wake. Be awake. Be conscious. Be/in the wake. Make. Create ritual. Be/in the wake. Mourn the dead. Be/in the wake. Keep watch. With the dead. Be/in the wake. Be in the path of a ship. Be/in the wake. Be in the path. Of war. Be/in the wake. Be in the recoil. Of massacre. Be/in the wake. Be in the consequence. Of torture. Be/in the wake. Be in the sight. Of aerial bombardment. Be/in the wake. Be in the target. Of heavy weapons. Be/in the wake. Occupy those “time/space/place constructions.” Once ordered. Now disordered. In the wake. Of massacre and war.6 Be/in the wake. To awaken. To terror and loathing. Of any difference that lives. There. Within your consciousness. Beneath your conscience. ● Prepositions are secret doorways through which we find pathways altering time and space allowing you to follow me into this undisciplined practice of speculative ethnography where we will visit terrorism as a place of encounter with massacres that recede from memory or rise up in memorials or forgotten forcefully in the curriculum by the demands of national belonging.7 With, in, within, without, of, to, into, through, before, beneath, against, after, beyond, behind. Time-traveling prepositions. Making journey. One sentence at a time. We can be with multiple massacres in this moment where one massacre exists against the background of another and with another, through another before another after another beyond another behind another without another massacre how will we find one another through time and time again we find one another through another massacre. You are in the wake. Are you willing. To travel through time. Into the spaces of your fear and loathing. Beyond the place of your belonging. Whitestone, Wounded Knee, My Lai, Mullivaikkal, Tulsa, Nisour Square, Haditha, Aleppo, Charleston, Fergusson, Minneapolis, countless more, killings spilling, across time, beyond borders, some receding from, others surging forward into the curriculum, into memorial monuments, into international uprisings, into Black Lives Matter, into no justice, no peace. How many deaths does it take to be counted as a massacre?

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

215

George Floyd, Michael Brown, Shoba (Isaipriya), Tamir Rice, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Akal, Sandra Bland, Treyvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Miriam Carey, Glenda Moore, Jordan Dunn, Jonathan Holloway, Eric Garner, Jonathan Crawford, Rekia Boyd, Yvette Smith, Laquan McDonald, Emit Till, Tatanka Iyotake, Si Tanka, Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, Breonna Taylor and we keep counting black and brown people whose bodies pile up across time and space in a timeless loop of extrajudicial killings. An ongoing massacre. Reach into timeless loops. Into places of knowing. Not knowing. Their killings. Touch the terror and loathing of any difference. Between lives. Lost there. Between lives. Lost here. Whose face do you see. And which nation will you long to belong to. And who will you claim as yours. And who will you walk away from, as theirs. And who do you belong to, as ours. In the wake. Of massacre. Sister Christina Sharpe asks: How might we stay in the wake with and as those whom the state positions to die ungrievable deaths and live lives meant to be unlivable?8

● What do we become. In the wake. Of massacre. You may or may not have learned about the massacre at Mullivaikkal. On May 19, 2009, the Sri Lankan government announced the death of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and declared victory in their war with the Tamil nationalist movement. The British media outlet, The Guardian, reported: “The Sri Lankan government today formally declared an end to the 25-year civil war after the army took control of the entire island and killed the leader of the Tamil Tigers.”9 Why do they call it a civil war? Is there. Anything civil. About war. No longer. Civil. No longer. Contained. In this global exchange. In this global marketplace. Of weapons. Of making civil. Of making global. War. In his speech to the Parliament, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa said, “We have liberated the whole country from LTTE terrorism.”10

216

Y. SANGARASIVAM

“Our intention was to save the Tamil people from the cruel grip of the LTTE. We all must now live as equals in this free country,” he reassured.11 President Rajapaksa then declared. May 20, 2009 a national holiday. To celebrate the triumphant victory of the Sri Lankan military. Here is the curriculum. Nationalism’s victory. Demands a holiday. In the wake of war. In the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Report of The Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability In Sri Lanka, we learn that “the Government has consistently contended that it conducted a ‘humanitarian operation’ with ‘zero civilian casualties policy’.”12 Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, the 2011 Channel-4 British Television documentary, reveals a different reality. This video documentary chronicles the testimonies and experiences of United Nations (UN) aid workers and their last days inside the LTTE’s territory; testimonies of what they witnessed before they evacuated themselves from the bombardments by the Sri Lankan military against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the 330,000 civilians caught in the massacre of what they called the No Fire Zones leading to Mullivaikkal.13 The documentary reveals excerpts of trophy videos. Sri Lankan soldiers recording themselves as they raped and killed girls, women, men, naked bodies, hands tied behind their backs, kicked to the ground, kneeling, blind folded, extrajudicial killings recorded on their phones, their voices commenting on which of the women’s bodies they thought was best as they loaded the dead, bodies, limp, bloodied, lifeless, dragging feet first, heads dashing against the back of the truck, images that will haunt you into wondering and wondering how is it possible for one human being to indulge in this much violence. Trophy videos. Document. The triumph. Of raping. Of Killing. In the name of nationalism and patriotic pride. Sri Lanka’s government called it. A humanitarian operation. Soldiers attach to weapons. Their bodies attach. As weapons. Ripping into her flesh. Rabid eyes. Chilled with the rush. Of killing. Of cannibals. Ready for feasting. Rabid mouth. Eating death. Rabid hands. Rubbing with revelry. Rabid flesh ripping flesh. They recorded. Trophy videos recording what is more naked than flesh ripped to reveal sons made into soldiers made into cannibals who will haunt and be haunted by their triumph of the kill. They called it. Victory.

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

217

You are in the wake. Of the global war on terror. Of the global plantation. Of killing fields. Harvesting hauntings. In the wake of massacre. Just inside. Just around. Just behind. Just in front. Of the place you call home. ● The U.S. Army practiced the same tactic of rape, torture, and extrajudicial killings in the early morning hours of May 16, 1968. Aerial bombardments surrounding My Lai announced the arrival of soldiers in Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry regiment, 11th Brigade. More than 500 unarmed women, children, and men were killed. First Platoon leader, Lieutenant William Calley ordered his soldiers to shoot at point blank range. Some soldiers refused. “Calley set his rifle on automatic and executed many of the villagers himself.”14 Sgt. Ron Haeberle, a U.S. Army photographer and reporter, documented Charlie Company’s rape, torture, and killing of Vietnamese elders, women and girls, infants and children. He described one of the killings he witnessed as he kneeled down to document what he saw: There was a little boy walking toward us in a daze. He’d been shot in the arm and leg. He wasn’t crying or making any noise…GI fired three shots into the child…. The first shot knocked him back, the second shot lifted him into the air. The third shot put him down and the body fluids came out. The GI just simply got up and walked away.15

His photograph of a group of women and children after they were raped and seconds before they were killed, captured the attention of Americans. It was an enduring image among the many photographs of the massacre at My Lai that brought home the realities of the war in Vietnam; U.S. soldiers doing the work of killing, documented and published in the December 5, 1969 issue of Life magazine.16 None of the published photographs put American soldiers in the same frame with the villagers.17 When published, Haeberle’s photographs fueled anti war sentiments among some people and denial among others.18

218

Y. SANGARASIVAM

“You know our boys would never do anything like that,” said Representative L. Mendel Rivers.19

L. Mendel Rivers was a member of the Democratic Party and served as a Congressman representing South Carolina’s First Congressional District, which included the city of Charleston. In 1965, he was named the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He served in congress for thirty years until his death in 1970. He took pride in championing everyday servicemen in the military. He also took pride in defending racial segregation. He was “the only South Carolina congressman to declare himself a member of the White Citizens’ Council.”20 The White Citizens’ Council was one among a proliferation of white supremacist organizations that regarded themselves as “protective societies” in the wake of the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education. The federal government proceeded to institutionalize the process of desegregating schools, heralding the end of the era of apartheid, the era of racial segregation, in the United States. The Association of Citizens’ Councils of South Carolina served as the umbrella organization to coordinate the efforts of like-minded citizens’ councils in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to reject the Supreme Court decision and maintain racially segregated schools in order to uphold a white supremacist society.21 Reflecting the growing segregationist fervor of the white supremacist citizens’ councils, U.S. Senator Burnet Maybank declared on the Senate floor his response to the Brown decision in 1954: The Supreme Court decision shocked me. In my judgement it was a shameful political move, rather than a judicial decision.22

U.S. Representative L. Mendel Rivers shared Senator Maybank’s feeling of shock and shame and warned that the Brown decision would usher in “one of the gravest problems to confront the white people of the South since the days of reconstruction.”23 You are in the wake. Of the end of segregation in America. Of one of the gravest problems to confront white people. See whose face fear and loathing wears. Are you following this disruption. In the telling. In the accounting. Are you moving further away or are you coming closer as we wander through these stories of citizens and councils, of white supremacy,

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

219

and who are the real citizens in this story, who are you, who are you not. Who are capable of massacre. Who are not. In the 1980s, South Carolina’s Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) emerged from the proud heritage of the White Citizens’ Council that Representative L. Mendel Rivers belonged to. Drawing from the mailing list of the White Citizens Council, the CCC grew to become the largest white nationalist group in the United States in 2015. Leading up to the 2016 presidential election, the CCC made significant contributions to Republican presidential candidates and candidates running for federal and state offices. The Council of Conservative Citizens announced their Statement of Principles in the 2007 publication of the Citizens Informer: We believe the United States is a European country and that Americans are part of the European people. … We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority in our lifetime. We believe that illegal immigration must be stopped, if necessary by military force and placing troops on our national borders; that illegal aliens must be returned to their own countries; and that legal immigration must be severely restricted or halted through appropriate changes in our laws and policies. We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called ‘affirmative action’ and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.24

Twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof was “awakened” by George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin and proceeded to Google; to learn further about this self-appointed, white, neighborhood vigilante who shot and killed the unarmed black youth. In a 2,500-word manifesto that he published on his website, lastrhodesian.com, Dylann Roof wrote: The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens.... There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.25

220

Y. SANGARASIVAM

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof wrote the last entry in his manifesto at 4:44 pm and posted it to his website: “… at the time of writing I am in a great hurry.”26 Later that evening, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. After being invited to join a Bible study group, he sat down. To listen. And contemplate. And awaken. His choice to kill the African-American people gathered there to study and worship. After fifteen minutes he got up, pulled out his Glock 45. And fired 70 rounds into the people who welcomed him to join them in study and prayer.27 Dylann Roof killed nine people who gathered for Bible study and prayer. At the Mother Emanuel Church. There. That summer evening. Ethel Lee Lance, age 70. Clementa C. Pinckney, age 41. Cynthia Graham Hurd, age 54. Susie J. Jackson, age 87. Rev. DePayne Vontrease Middleton-Doctor, age 49. Tywanza Kibwe Diop Sanders, age 26. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr., age 74. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, age 45. Myra Singleton Quarles Thompson, age 59. In his manifesto, he walks his readers through his motivation and sense of urgency that he learned from his reading of white supremacist websites including the Council of Conservative Citizens. The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. I have no choice…. I am not in the position to alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.28

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

221

Along with his manifesto, Dylann Roof posted pictures of himself posing with the Confederate battle flag in one hand and a gun in another.29 On June 22, 2015, then governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley announced at a news conference that the Confederate battle flag would be removed from the front of the State House building. Today, we are here in a moment of unity in our state without ill will, to say it’s time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds. A hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, the time has come. There will be some in our state who see this as a sad moment. I respect that. But know this: For good and for bad, whether it is on the statehouse grounds or in a museum, the flag will always be a part of the soil of South Carolina.30

● You are in the wake. Of a time that has come. Of a massacre. Of a moment of unity. Without ill will. Whose massacre will be a part of your soil. Now. Whose soil do you belong to. Now. Charleston. My Lai. Mullivaikkal. Will you wander through. The soil of these disparate histories and are they still. Disparate. Can you see. The soil coming closer and closer. The soil of one massacre nourishing the soil of another massacre through time. Two years after the end of the war in Sri Lanka, the UN confirmed that “there is still no reliable figure for civilian deaths, but multiple sources of information indicate that a range of up to 40,000 civilian deaths cannot be ruled out….”31 The total number of Tamil civilians killed remains contested. According to a report in the Tamil Guardian, “Local census records indicate that at least 146, 679 people are unaccounted for and presumed to have been killed during the Sri Lankan military offensive.”32 President Rajapaksa denied that there were civilian deaths in the No Fire Zone. A policy of zero civilian casualties. He said. He could not recognize Tamil people. As civilians. Now targets in the sight of heavy weapons, in that zone of non-Being. No longer recognizable. As being. Human.33 We cannot know. The number of children and adults. Women and girls. Men and boys. Raped. Tortured. Executed in extrajudicial killings. In the No Fire Zones. And who will count and account for these lives. We can know. That Shoba was identified by her family. She was one of the young women. Captured, tortured, raped, and executed in the Sri Lankan soldiers’ trophy video.

222

Y. SANGARASIVAM

She was known as Isaipriya. A twenty-seven-year-old journalist for the LTTE’s media outlet, Oliveechchu. Caught in the No Fire Zones at Mullivaikkal, Shoba’s (Isaipriya) sixmonth-old baby girl, Akal, was killed by the military bombardments of civilians targeted by the Sri Lankan government.34 The UN report states that on “20 January 2009, the Government unilaterally declared a No Fire Zone (NFZ); Commander for the Vanni [region/district], Major General Jayasuriya announced by notice that ‘the Army Headquarters has demarcated this safe zone, as the Security Forces are fully committed to provide maximum safety for civilians trapped or forcibly kept by the LTTE in the un-cleared areas of Mullaitivu.’”35 This would be the first of three No Fire Zones (NFZ) set up by the Sri Lankan government’s Army Headquarters. The UN report confirms that on “2 February 2009, the AGA [Additional Government Agent] based in the second NFZ sent a situation report to the Ministry of Public Administration and Home Affairs stating that there were about 81,000 families present in Mullaitivu District at the time, totaling some 330,000 persons.”36 Mullivaikkal is a place situated within the second and third No Fire Zones. Between May 13–18, 2009, a time described as the last days of the war, “the United Nations estimated that 100,000 civilians remained trapped within three square kilometers” of the second and third No Fire Zones while the Sri Lankan “Government continued to use heavy weapons such as MBRLs and aerial bombardment, although it said that it was conducting a ‘humanitarian rescue’ of the hostage civilian population….”37 It may be of interest. For you to know. MBRLs are multi-barrel rocket launchers. Described as an “unguided weapon, using as many as four dozen rockets in a single firing, the MBRL is indiscriminate, and is designed to wreak devastation over a wide area of land.”38 Listening in the presence of MBRLs, Gordon Weiss, Australian journalist and former UN official said that “they are usually mobile and mounted on the back of trucks or wagons, and emit an unmistakable piercing shriek.”39 A UN aid worker recounted his experience of the Sri Lankan military’s aerial bombardment in September of 2008, just before the siege of the No Fire Zones:

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

223

For me it was never the sound of the bomb—it was [the] sound of that engine. The plane swoops and goes into supersonic—it’s the roar of death.40

● You are in the wake. Of UN reports. Of multi-barrel rocket launchers. Of supersonic engines. Of trophy videos. Is this roar of death too distant, too strange, too familiar, too far gone, too much. Will you stay with her. In the wake will you stay. With them in the zone of non-Being. On September 16, 2008, the UN convoy of trucks and international aid workers left Kilinochchi, the de facto capital of the territories the LTTE once fought for as their homeland called Tamil Eelam. “I felt abandoned by the rest of the world,” said Uma. An English teacher. Caught in the No Fire Zone. “The UN was supposed to help people in need but they left us to the mercy of aggressors.”41

On January 16, 2009, the UN sent one of its last food convoys to provide for the thousands of Tamil people captured in the No Fire Zones. UN Trucks Delivered Dry Foods and Tents to People at Puthukkudiyiruppu. The UN convoy was trapped within the No Fire Zone for three days under the bombardment of heavy weapons deployed by the Sri Lankan Army. As the UN convoy prepared to leave the No Fire Zone after receiving clearance from the government, LTTE cadres stopped the trucks and “refused to let the 132 Tamil staff and their families through.”42 Reports from international and national aid workers confirm that LTTE cadres prevented civilians from leaving the No Fire Zones. The UN report states that “some LTTE cadre[s] would let fleeing civilians through, but others opened fire on them with AK47s, killing men, women and children, alike.”43 The UN report states that “the LTTE again stepped up its policy of forced recruitment, dragging away more and more youngsters, including the under-aged, to be used in the first lines of defense.”44 The report goes on to document that “on one occasion in mid-April, LTTE cadre[s], led by the former Trincomalee Political Wing leader

224

Y. SANGARASIVAM

known as Ezhilan, forcibly recruited hundreds of young people from Valayanmadam Church and put them on busses to Mullivaikkal.”45 ● You are in the wake. Back there. With the UN convoy. With Tamil staff and their families. In the church in Valayanmadam. You. Loaded on a bus. Destined for massacre. You. Gathering for prayer and study. Back there. In a church in Charleston. You. Gathering for the arrival of Charlie Company. Back there. In a field in My Lai. Observing the human rights violations and the killing of civilians caught in the government-declared No Fire Zones, Bernard Kouchner, one of the co-founders of the international non-governmental organization Médecins sans Frontières, acknowledged that “group massacres aren’t internal matters” to the government of Sri Lanka.46 Humanitarian aid workers with international non-governmental organizations, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Médecins sans Frontières, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), attempted to hold the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE accountable for maintaining the safety of civilians throughout the war. Dr. Kouchner arrived with medical humanitarian aid in Sri Lanka. During those last months of the war. Between January and May of 2009. President Rajapaksa reassured that the Sri Lankan military was “not using heavy weaponry.”47 You might wonder, as I did. What are heavy weapons? The United States National Guard promotes a career in heavy weapons. We are told that they are “EARTH SHAKERS AND AIR DEFENDERS.” Out of sight, but rarely out of range, Guard heavy weapon experts give ground forces the gift of superior firepower.48 Cannon and rocket crews stand ready to shoot, raining fire and steel on targets over 15 miles away.49

Human beings. Become targets. Of cannons and rockets. Crews ready. Shoot. Raining fire and steel. Heavy weapons. Superior firepower. They promise. They deliver. They gift. ●

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

225

Reporting for the South Asia Journal, Mahamtan Vijaykumar identifies more than 39 countries that gifted military aid in the form of heavy weapons, direct military intelligence, and training to help Sri Lanka defeat the LTTE and declare a triumphant victory.50 Gifts. Received. In the wake of asymmetric war: India provided loans, upwards of $100 million (US) to Sri Lanka and supplied its military with fighter jets, attack helicopters, and JY 11 3D radars, along with additional arms. India’s intelligence division, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) gave the Sri Lankan military “access to Indian satellites and drones to observe LTTE operations in the jungles while the Indian Air Force conducted routine airstrikes on Sea Tiger vessels and cargo-ships full of weapons while the Indian Navy created a blockade on the outskirts of the Indian Ocean to prevent the importation of LTTE ARMS and the escape of high-level LTTE commanders.”51 Pakistan supplied heavy weapons valued at approximately $150 million, which included Al-Khalid MBT Tanks and provided support in bilateral airstrikes against LTTE strongholds in the Vanni region where approximately 330,000 Tamil people became military targets.52 Israel donated Kfir jets with cluster bombs, Super Dvora MK II-class patrol boats, Dvora and Shaldag attack crafts, MIG-29 fighter jets, and Blue Horizon Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or drones to Sri Lanka.53 Iran offered low-interest loans to purchase drones and other military weapons.54 In addition to military training, Russia gifted weapons such as Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-27, Antonov An-32, Mil Mi-17 jets, T-54/55 battle tanks, and other weaponry worth $300 million to Sri Lanka between 2006 and 2009.55 Formerly known as the “U.S. Coast Guard Cutter USCGC Courageous,” the United States donated this naval ship with sea and ground surveillance capacities to Sri Lanka as part of the U.S. Excess Defense Articles (EDA) program in 2020. It then became known as the Sri Lankan Naval Ship, “SLNS Samudra.”56 The U.S. Department of State reported: “In Sri Lanka and across the Indo-Pacific region, smart investments in security cooperation like this [EDA program] make the United States the global security partner of choice and help our allies and partners contribute more effectively toward our shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific for all nations.”57 ●

226

Y. SANGARASIVAM

You are in the wake. Of global circuits. Of weapons bought and sold. Serving your wars. Serving our wars. Serving their wars. You are in the wake. This massacre is here. Getting closer. To your war. To your nation. The quality of your alienation. Through which you choose. To stay. Or walk away. From the unrelenting accounting. Of massacre. Holds a direct bearing upon. The way you enact your mourning. For the lives. Of your people. Massacring. Our people. Killing. Your people. Making room. For their people. To sustain. The wars we are forgetting now. UN representative, Gordon Weiss reported that in the aftermath of Israel’s attack on Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009, the Israeli government reported 295 civilian deaths; Hamas reported 926 civilian deaths. In Gaza, an invasion force consisting of 176,000 Israeli men and women with tanks, aircraft and gunboats faced a force of 20,000 Palestinian fighters seeded among a civilian population of one and a half million people. In the case of Sri Lanka during the first five months of 2009, roughly 160,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen faced off against a core force of perhaps 2,000 to 5,000 Tamil Tiger fighters, seeded amid a civilian population of some 330,000.58

We will never know. Exactly how many disappeared. In that sixteen-week siege at Mullivaikkal. We do know. At least 40,000 people died. The Sri Lankan government called it. Victory. To be in the wake is also to recognize the ways that we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to overwhelming force though not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force.59

You are in the wake. Will you recognize. That overwhelming force. Of their denial. You know our boys would never do anything like that. Not only known to me. Smart investments in security cooperation. To you. No civilian casualties policy. See what face denial wears. How does your body constitute the denial of their lives in the marketplace of weapons bought and sold and gifted by the global war on terror. This war is getting closer now.

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

227

In April 2007, following a diplomatic mission by President Rajapaksa to China, “a $37.6 million deal was signed for Chinese artillery guns, armored personnel carriers and light weapons, and there were additional agreements for special weapons to destroy deep concrete bunkers and airstrips and to counter ambushes. The Chinese also supplied the breadand-butter ordnance used on the front lines, such as the mortar shells that killed so many civilians.”60 In March 2012, The United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution supported by the United States calling for the government of Sri Lanka to investigate “the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in the final stages of the civil war with the Tamil Tigers.” Russia and China opposed the resolution.61 Gifts. Delivered. In the wake of debt. In the wake of repayment war demands: To China, the Port of Hambantota and 15,000 acres of land around it for 99 years.62 In 2017, the Sri Lankan government signed up for a $1.1 billion agreement with China for them to build a deep-sea port in Hambantota, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s hometown. “Struggling to pay its debt to Chinese firms, the nation of Sri Lanka formally handed over the strategic port of Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease [in December 2017], in a deal that government critics have said threatens the country’s sovereignty.”63 After liberating the country from the threat of terrorism and national security posed by the LTTE, the Sri Lankan government struggled to make payments on the debt to China. “Sri Lanka owes more than $8 billion to state-controlled Chinese firms.”64 You might be interested in knowing that, as of January 2021, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority owns and operates 15% and China owns and operates 85% of the Colombo International Container Terminal in Sri Lanka’s central port of entry. “Chinese submarines made unannounced visits to the Chinese-managed terminal in 2014. … India and the United states are concerned a Chinese foothold at Hambantota, 240 km (150 miles) south of Colombo, could give it a military naval advantage in the Indian Ocean.”65 Who will liberate Sri Lanka now? ●

228

Y. SANGARASIVAM

What do we become. In the wake. Of massacre. In the wake. Of war. In the wake. Of victory. Terrorism. That zone of non-Being. After liberation. After massacre. After they called it. Victory. See whose face. Fear and loathing. Wears. Across time. Massacres. Theirs. Yours. Ours. Embodying supremacy. Racial. National. Military. Economic. Geopolitical. Supremacy. In the wake. Of bread and butter ordnances bought. In the wake. Of sovereignty sold. In that zone. Of abject terror. Of sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, children, and grandchildren. In that moment. Of encounter. With soldiers. Getting ready to massacre. In the wake. Of essential workers. For essential wars. Soldiers and insurgents. Heavy weapons. Bought and sold. For essential massacre. Bought and sold. Land and sea. Bought and sold. They call it security cooperation. In the wake. Of tactical systems and strategic plans. In the wake. Of smart investments. In the wake. Of Excess. Defense. Articles. In the wake. Make the United States. In the wake. The global security partner. In the wake. Of choice. In the wake. Of our shared vision. In the wake. Of imperial white nation-states setting an example. In the wake. Of vying for global partners. In the wake. Of neoliberal economic order. In the wake. “Welcome to MAS Holdings.” In the wake. Of managing “a portfolio of business with a revenue of (USD) $2 billion.” In the wake. Of “the seamlessly integrated supply chain that is balanced to perfection.”66 In the wake. Of “MAS Intimates a preferred partner of global brands.” In the wake. Victoria’s Secret. In the wake. Calvin Klein. In the wake. Tommy Hilfiger. In the wake. Athleta. In the wake. Lululemon.67 In the wake. MAS Holdings, in 2012. Opened two factories in Puthukkudiyiruppu and another in Ariviyal Nagar just outside of Kilinochchi. In the wake. Towns and villages of the No Fire Zone. In the wake. Now the Free Trade Zone. In the wake. Surviving war. In the wake. Surviving massacre. In the wake. “Workers who feel ill are not allowed to leave the factories to see a doctor.” In the wake. After working for MAS for one year, a 22-year-old female worker said, “I’m working standing on one leg and operating a machine with the other leg. I suffer from heel swelling and chest and back pain, with most of my day spent in the factory. … Production from our factory is exported to America and Europe. If we

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

229

can’t meet the production targets we’re scolded with filthy words by the management. … There are only 16 workers in our section but we have to complete 1,500 to 1,800 items per day.” In the wake. Stitching garments for $75 a day. In the wake. Production for export. In the wake. To me and you in Europe and America.68 In the wake. “MAS is proud to hold a global reputation for an ethical and sustainable working environment. The tireless effort put towards women’s empowerment has put MAS on the map as a global standard to aspire to.”69 In the wake. How do we come clean. In the wake. Of our participation. In the wake. Of buying and selling. In the wake. Of the global economy. In the wake. Of bearing some part of this signature. In the wake. Of the Holdings. In the wake. Of garment factories holding workers. In the wake. Of the No Fire Zone. Stitching Lululemon. In the wake. Stitching Victoria’s Secret. In the wake. Of wandering souls. In the wake. See whose face. Massacre wears. ● You might remember. Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL). Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). Operation New Dawn (OND).70 You might remember. When President Bush announced, “Mission accomplished!”71 When they bombarded Baghdad. Fallujah. And you might remember. Saddam Hussain was hanged. In public. On December 30, 2006. “Just before dawn at an execution chamber in Baghdad during the morning call to prayer.”72 You are in the wake. The war is here. In the wake. Anyone can watch. In the wake. The execution. In the wake. The hanging. In the wake. Posted on YouTube.73 You would have thought. That this would have been the end. Of the global war on terror. To break that hold of fear and loathing that stabilized our patriotic pride. Identifying Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as regimes “arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction,” President George W. Bush forewarned that “states like these, and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”74 It turns out. There were no weapons of mass destruction. In Iraq. You are in the wake. The global war on terror continues. The war is here. Your sons and daughters. Your sisters and brothers. Your lovers and friends. Are boarding busses, boarding planes. To desert storms.

230

Y. SANGARASIVAM

No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the 2003 United States invasion. However, we know that over 182,000 civilians have died from direct war related violence caused by the US, its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through November 2018. The violent deaths of Iraqi civilians have occurred through aerial bombing, shelling, gunshots, suicide attacks, and fires started by bombing.75

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) confirms: Decades of conflict. And widespread violence. Have resulted. In more than. 3.3 million Iraqis displaced. Across the country. Since 2014. It is estimated that approximately 6.7 million—approximately 18 percent of the population—are currently in need. Of humanitarian assistance. Including 3 million children. There are also 300,00 refugees in Iraq. From neighboring countries. The vast majority escaping. Violence and persecution. In Syria.76 In July 2015, the UNHCR reported the total number of refugees from Syria. Just over 4,013,000 people. An additional 7.6 million people. Are displaced. Inside. Syria.77 On May 2, 2011, President Obama directed the drone strike that killed Osama bin Laden. President Obama recalled the unity. The sense of purpose. And perseverance that defines. A nation: The world is safer…. It is a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden. … Today we are reminded that as a nation there’s nothing we can’t do when we put our shoulders to the wheel, when we remember the sense of unity that defines us as Americans.78

You would have thought. That this would have been the end. Of the global war. On terror. The killing of Osama bin Laden. You would have thought. Would have avenged the 9/11 attacks. On the World Trade Centers. On the Pentagon. On America’s freedom. You are in the wake. Remember. The sense of unity. That defines us as Americans. ● Historians teach us. The “infamous Plains Wars of the second half of the nineteenth century culminated in the massacre at Wounded Knee” on December 29, 1890.79 Will we. Will our children. Their children. And

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

231

their children’s children. Teach themselves. About the infamous Global Wars on Terror. That culminates in the massacre of the future. We are making now. But when the Seventh Cavalry shot and killed over 150 women, children, and men and buried them in a mass grave in South Dakota, they put the final period on a policy established in the 1830s.80

White men representing their people in the U.S. Congress debated on, voted on, and ratified the policy of mass deportation, expulsion, and extermination of Lakota, Dakota, Seminole, Cherokee, Iroquois, Seneca, Odawa, Delaware, Shawnee, Wyandot, Miami, Potawatomi, Chippewa, Oneida, Navaho, Choctaw, Creek, Quapaw, Menominee, Anishinaabeg, Ho-Chuk, Chickasaw, and many more indigenous people from their homes and homelands.81 Refugees. IDPs. Internally. Displaced. People. In the wake. Of mass deportation. In the wake. Of expulsion. In the wake. Of extermination. In October 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau reported this statistic, “26.2%: The percentage of single-race American Indian and Alaska Native people who were in poverty in 2016, the highest rate of any race group.”82 “For the nation as a whole, the poverty rate was 14.0 percent.”83 What is the purpose. You may wonder. Of recounting. These facts and figures. It will become clear to you. In the wake. Together with Sam and Therlene. Sam Ybarra is the son of Therlene Ramos, of the Apache Nation. He would often seek refuge at his elderly mother’s trailer located in the San Carlos Indian Reservation. “It was one of the poorest and most desolate areas of southeastern Arizona, a no-man’s-land where generations of Native Americans survived on food stamps and other government handouts.”84 Sam’s father was from Mexico. He reportedly died in a barroom brawl. Sam was five years old at the time. After dropping out of high school and getting arrested several times for underage drinking, he joined the U.S. Army in 1966, at the age of twenty-one. He was dishonorably discharged from the Army in April of 1969. He returned to live in the San Carlos Reservation until his death in 1982.85 Sam was a renowned member of the Tiger Force, U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division, 327th Infantry, 1st Battalion; working in small teams,

232

Y. SANGARASIVAM

a reconnaissance platoon of forty-five men, volunteered and vetted for their combat experience and willingness to kill. They were known as an elite, special force unit of the Army. They wore tiger-stripe fatigues. They carried out “search-and-destroy missions.”86 Between May and November 1967, soldiers of the Tiger Force traveled across the Central Highlands of South Vietnam killing civilians in a series of massacres that are memorialized in rituals by survivors and their relatives in Vietnam today. The Army began an investigation in 1971 that proceeded for four and a half years only to be buried in the archives and hidden from the public until investigative journalists, Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss, for The Blade (a newspaper in Toledo, Ohio) broke the story.87 They published the story in Blade in a four-day series of articles between October 19–22, 2003. The latest United States invasion of Iraq was already in progress at the time. You are in the wake. Do you remember. What life was like then. For you and for them. In March 2003 when we invaded Iraq. Do you remember. Learning about the massacres of the Tiger Force then. I don’t remember. I didn’t. Remember. In what became one of the bloodiest periods of 1967, the Army launched a campaign on Sept. 11 known as Operation Wheeler. The battalion commander who would lead Tiger Force and three other units was Lt. Col. Gerald Morse, who had taken over the previous month. The 38-year-old officer was described as an aggressive, hands-on commander who rode in helicopters and kept in frequent radio contact with his units in the 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry. Within days of taking over, Colonel Morse changed the names of the battalion’s three companies — an action questioned by investigators years later. Instead of companies A, B, and C, they were now known as Assassins, Barbarians, and Cutthroats — with a sign hoisted over battalion headquarters bearing the new names.88

You are in the wake. Of another 9/11. Will you remember. September 11, 1967. Now. Will you stay. Will you walk with soldiers. Through multiple

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

233

wars as assassins. Through multiple histories as barbarians. Through multiple massacres as cutthroats. In Vietnam. In Afghanistan. In Iraq. In Sri Lanka. In the infamous Plains Wars of the United States. In a story in the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, Tiger Force’s Sam Ybarra was praised for the 1,000th kill of Operation Wheeler.89

Private Sam Ybarra had developed a fierce reputation within the Tiger Force for killing and mutilating Vietnamese people. In June, Pvt. Sam Ybarra slit the throat of a prisoner with a hunting knife before scalping him — placing the scalp on the end of a rifle, soldiers said in sworn statements. Ybarra refused to talk to Army investigators about the case.90 That same month, Ybarra shot and killed a 15-year-old boy near the village of Duc Pho, reports state. He later told soldiers he shot the youth because he wanted the teenager’s tennis shoes. The shoes didn’t fit, but Ybarra ended up carrying out what became a ritual among platoon members: He cut off the teenager’s ears and placed them in a ration bag, Specialist Carpenter told investigators. During the Army’s investigation of Tiger Force, 27 soldiers said the severing of ears from dead Vietnamese became an accepted practice. One reason: to scare the Vietnamese. Platoon members strung the ears on shoe laces to wear around their necks, reports state. Former platoon medic Larry Cottingham told investigators: ‘There was a period when just about everyone had a necklace of ears.’ Records show soldiers began another gruesome practice: Kicking out the teeth of dead civilians for their gold fillings.91 Two soldiers said he decapitated an infant to remove a necklace known as a ‘Buddha Band’ from the baby’s neck. Several soldiers said Ybarra later bragged about killing the baby.92 When investigators last tried to interview him in 1975, he was living in a trailer and suffering from diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver.93

234

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Sam Ybarra’s former wife lives in the wake of his death. She said. “Maybe he was afraid of the demons, the ghosts of the people he killed, the things he did. He probably died haunted by those ghosts.”94 Another haunting. Another massacre. You are in the wake. Of soldiers haunting. Of people they killed. In service of your patriotism. That overwhelming force. Getting too close to you now. Pulling your body further. Into another. Patriotic haunting. Back in time. ● In the spring of 1892, John W. Comfort, a career soldier in the U.S. Army, wrote a long and detailed letter to his brother, Chess (Winchester) documenting what he witnessed as a combatant. He called it the “Affair on Wounded Knee.” In 1861. At the age of seventeen. John Comfort joined the army. The Union forces. He fought in significant battles of the Civil War. The battle at Gettysburg. Among the most notable. He re-enlisted as a soldier to fight in, what they called, the “Indian wars of the 1870s.” He was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor. For he “single-handedly pursued and killed one of the leaders” of the Comanche and Kiowa nations. In the winter of 1890. He was dispatched to Wounded Knee with the First Artillery Division.95 According to John Comfort’s documentation, the Seventh Cavalry Division of the U.S. Army killed at least 243 Lakota women, children, and men. Earlier in the year, Lakota people gathered to dance with songs and chants delivered by the Great Spirit. They were bringing forth the spirits of their ancestors through rituals and ceremonies to find liberation. From the tyranny of white Europeans who governed by mendacity, theft, and occupation of Lakota homes, Lakota lands. Who governed by the systematic killing of Lakota people and other First Nations peoples. The Lakota adhered to their belief. In the power of their dance and song to invoke their reunification. With ancestors who would bring back the buffalo, reclaim their lands, and usher in a new world where the white man recedes and disappears back into the place from whence they came. They danced with a belief. In willful nonviolent resistance to colonial occupation.96 “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy,” warned Daniel Royer, in a frenzy. He was the newly appointed Indian agent who was

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

235

dispatched to manage the Lakota people at Pine Ridge Reservation that fateful year of 1890. “We need protection now.” He said.97

The killing began on December 15, 1890. A contingent of forty-three Indian police was deployed by James McLaughlin, the Indian agent at Standing Rock. The mission was to capture and assassinate Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull) at Standing Rock Reservation. Here, Tatanka Iyotake led the first of the Great Spirit dances that became widely known as the “Ghost Dance.” It was reported that “… two of the police shot Sitting Bull in the head and chest. Sitting Bull’s teenage son and six of his followers were also killed, along with six Indian police.”98

On December 28, 1890, army scouts of the Seventh Cavalry Division captured Lakota Chief Si Tanka (Big Foot) at Wounded Knee Creek on Pine Ridge Reservation. Led by Colonel James W. Forsyth, upwards of five thousand soldiers were deployed along with the Seventh Cavalry to arrest and exterminate Chief Si Tanka and a group of approximately three hundred and fifty Lakota men, women, and children gathered at Wounded Knee.99 Particularly devastating were the four Hotchkiss cannons. Few Lakota warriors had ever encountered this weapon, which could fire almost fifty rounds per minute. In less than an hour, Indian resistance to Forsyth’s troops collapsed.100

Among the Lakota survivors of the massacre was Black Elk. He described what he witnessed in the aftermath of the Seventh Cavalry Division’s assault: We followed down along the dry gulch, and what we saw was terrible. Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away. The soldiers had followed along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them in there. Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along. Sometimes bunches of them had been killed and torn to pieces where the wagon guns hit them. I saw a little baby trying to suck its mother, but she was bloody and dead.101

236

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Trying to justify the necessity for excessive force. The excessive use of the Hotchkiss cannons. Trying to justify the excessive disparity between. The 5,000 or more Union soldiers attacking 350 Lakota men, women, and children. John Comfort’s description of the Lakota warriors reveals. Not only the face of his own fear and loathing. But also, the face of his own desires and admiration for. A people he reviled as his enemy. In his letter to his brother he wrote: The 120 Warriors had no superior on the earth as fighting men, they were taught to be brave, to shoot well and to fight to the Death from infancy, the whole aim and training of an Indian, and his sole ambition is to become a Great Warrior. Physically they were the finest lot of Men I ever saw. Above the average height many of them over 6 feet, very powerfully built, some of them being Herculean in muscular development.102

In the aftermath of the massacre at Wounded Knee, many accounts remembered. The blizzard. The bitter cold. The heavy snowfall that arrived to blanket the dead. ● You are in the wake. Of another asymmetric war. Are you getting lost. In this disorder. Are you wondering about why we are wandering. Through disparate massacres. Displacing wars. Disjointing histories. Are you disturbed, displaced, desperate for order, for symmetry, for a joining. With linear time and telling. You are in the wake. The wars are getting closer. Writing of another time. Another place. Another atrocity. Sister Hak Kyung Cha describes another snowfall. It had been snowing. During the while. Interval. Recess. Pause It snowed. The name. The term. The noun. It had snowed. The verb. The predicate. The act of. Fell. Luminescent substance more so in black night. Inwardly luscent. More. So much so that its entry closes the eyes Interim. Briefly. In the enclosed darkness memory is fugitive.

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

237

Of white. Mist offers to snow self In the weightless slow all the time it takes long ages precedes time pronounces it alone on its own while. In the whiteness no distinction her body invariable no dissonance synonymous her body all the time de composes eclipses to be come yours103

● You are in the wake. Of another massacre. Redacted from the curriculum. We are tracing. Histories unfinished. Soldiers and mothers. Warriors and fathers. Infants suckling on the dead. Will you mourn the death of these children. Will we mourn the lives of their families and friends. Will you stand in solidarity with their descendants. Now. Fugitive memories. In the weightless slow. Time de composes wars. Closing in. One massacre de composing into another. Twenty-seven years before Wounded Knee another massacre took place. Hidden from the conventional curriculum of American history. Less known is the Whitestone or Inyan Ska massacre of September 3, 1863. Commanded by Brigadier General Alfred Sully, soldiers of the Union Army killed more than three hundred men, women, and children of the Dakota, Lakota, and Yanktonai nations within the Standing Rock Sioux confederacy who had gathered at a seasonal encampment to prepare for winter. General Sully returned the next day after the massacre. To survey the killing. And what was left on the land. He described the work of his Union soldiers as “a ‘melee,’ a ‘murderous slaughter,’ of a ‘promiscuous nature’… giving ‘one of the most severe punishments that the Indians have ever received.”104 But the slaughter wasn’t enough. He desired more. The triumphant victory of a colonial army demanded more. General Sully said: The deserted camp of the Indians, together with the country all around, was covered with their plunder…. I burned up over 400,000 to 500,000 pounds of dried buffalo meat as one item, besides 300 lodges, and a very large quantity of property of great value to the Indians.105

● In December of 2015, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published its plan.106 To authorize Energy Transfer Partners, a Texas-based company,

238

Y. SANGARASIVAM

to proceed with building a $3.8 billion pipeline cutting across the Missouri River. They called it the Dakota Access Pipeline.107 With the promise of delivering oil. To valuable consumer markets in the Gulf Coast, Midwest, and East Coast. The pipeline was designed to transport up to 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day. From North Dakota to Illinois.108 The pipeline would threaten the ecological integrity of the homelands belonging to the people of the Standing Rock Sioux nations. Poisoning their drinking water. Desecrating their sacred burial grounds. Denying their sovereignty.109 Lands. Waters. Sacred grounds. Sovereignty. All of great value. For the Standing Rock Sioux nations. They are the descendants of those who survived the Whitestone massacre. Ladonna Brave Bull Allard lives to tell the story of her great-greatgrandmother, Nape Hote Win (Mary Big Moccasin) who witnessed and survived the massacre at Whitestone Hill in North Dakota. They were among the people who were rounded up by Union soldiers. They were forced to march to the prisoner-of-war camps. They were released in 1870. Relocated and displaced. They rebuilt their lives. They created self-sufficient communities. They created self-sustaining economies with community gardens and agricultural practices in their sovereign territories.110 Ladonna Brave Bull Allard said: We must remember we are part of a larger story. We are still here. We are still fighting for our lives on our own land. As we struggle for our lives today against the Dakota Access pipeline, I remember her. We cannot forget our stories of survival.111

She lives to tell the story. Of her people. The descendants of the Whitestonemassacre who rebuilt their lives and thrived. Until and despite. The arrival of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in August of 1948. They began constructing the Oahe Dam. One of five dam projects administered by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation under the Pick-Sloan Plan to restructure the great Missouri River Basin.112 You may or may not know. The original intent of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. In restructuring. The great Missouri River Basin. In 1902. Their reclamation programs intended to consolidate economic power. By providing the storage and delivery of water for irrigated farming. As

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

239

an incentive to encourage white settlers to claim and make use of arid lands.113 The Oahe Dam project of 1948. Penetrated into the land and waters of the Missouri River. Its walls. 245-feet high. The largest earth dam in the world. Stretching 250 miles. Inundating 160,889 acres of sovereign lands belonging to the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux nations. More than 180 families were forced to leave their homes. More than a third of their people were forcibly removed from their homelands. Lands abundant with. Community gardens. Grazing cattle. Timber. Wild fruit. Wildlife. Clean drinking water.114 All of great value. Stolen. From the people of the Sioux nations. Stolen. From Ladonna Brave Bull Allard and her people. She lives to tell the story. And so, they came, and they moved our people out of their homes. They took our homes. … I lived here. I remember the trees and the forest. I remember coming down and collecting water to drink from this river. We would come down and haul water up to the house. We drank this water. We lived with this water. We had huge gardens here. This is me. This is not something long time ago. This is me who lived through this.115

In total. The Army Corps’ dam projects destroyed more than 550 square miles of tribal land in North and South Dakota. Dislocating. More than 900 families of the Sioux nations.116 All of great value. You are in the wake. Of massacres. Creating a wake. Of forced migration. Creating a wake. Of displacement. You are in the wake. Of war. They called it the Pick-Sloan Plan. Then. They call it the Dakota Access Pipeline. Now. In the summer of 2016, the U.S Army Corps of Engineers commenced with constructing the Dakota Access Pipeline approximately fifty miles east of the site. Of the Whitestone massacre. The original plans had the pipeline crossing the Missouri River at Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota. Concerns were raised about the safety of the water at the State’s capital and so the pipeline was rerouted to cross the river at Lake Oahe, half a mile from Standing Rock Tribal territories.117 In the “Environmental Assessment” report for the Dakota Access Pipeline, Colonel John W. Henderson of the Army Corps of Engineers concluded:

240

Y. SANGARASIVAM

I have evaluated the anticipated environmental, economic, cultural, and social effects, and any cumulative effects of the Proposed Action and determined that the Proposed Action is not injurious to the public interest and will not impair the usefulness of the federal projects. … As a result, I have determined that preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement is not required.118

The people of the Standing Rock Sioux nations stand in opposition to the environmental assessment of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A report of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) reveals. Another reality. There have been “more than 3,300 incidents of leaks and ruptures at oil and gas pipelines since 2010. And even the smallest spill could damage the tribe’s water supply.”119 On April 1, 2016, people of the Standing Rock Sioux communities began their encampment at the site where bulldozers were already poised to begin to dig into the earth to proceed with the pipeline project. Eight hundred people joining in solidarity from three hundred First Nations communities gathered. They call themselves. Water protectors. Serving at the frontlines. Of war. Between the armed, militarized forces of the federal government and Missouri River. Between the armed, militarized forces of the federal government and the people of the Standing Rock Sioux nations as well as all people who stood in solidarity with the Missouri River and the First Nations people gathered there. Water protectors stood in the path of the pipeline. Approximately 1.3 million people checked in with their support on Facebook and many traveled to Standing Rock in North Dakota to stand in solidarity with the water protectors.120 On January 24, 2017, President Donald Trump issued an executive memorandum to the U.S. Army to expedite the completion of the pipeline. A few months earlier, Forbes business journal reported that in 2015 President Trump owned between $500,000 and $1 million in stock investments in Energy Transfer Partners, the Texas-based development company that was awarded the contract to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. Mr. Trump also had additional financial interests in the pipeline. His federal disclosure forms filed in May 2016 reveal that he “holds between $100,000 and $250,000 in Phillips 66, which owns a 25% share of the Dakota Access Pipeline.”121 With the support of the Army Corps of Engineers, Energy Transfer Partners employed private security contractors who fired rubber bullets and who deployed armored tanks and dogs to attack. Men, women,

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

241

and children gathered. Standing in solidarity. Standing in protest against the violence and violation of. Their people. Their lands. Their sovereign responsibility to protect the waters of the Missouri River and the lands of Standing Rock Sioux nations.122 Do you still think. The Seventh Cavalry put the final period. To end the wars against indigenous people. To end the policy of expulsion and extermination. From their lands. You are in the wake. Of massacres. Traveling through the killing fields of patriotic wars. Across time. Through places and histories. With seemingly no connection. Will you still. Be at rest. Assured of no connection. With this disordered telling of massacres through time. Will you still sing. America’s other national anthem.123 Will you still find. Your national belonging. And patriotic pride. In singing the words. This land is your land this land is my land.124 From California to. The New York island. From the redwood forest. To the Gulf Stream waters. This land was made. In the wake. Of massacres. For you and me. ● What do we become. In the wake. We hear the call to action. Sister Christina Sharpe shows us. A way. … we join the wake with work in order that we might make the wake and wake work our analytic, we might continue to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives, to survive (and more) the afterlife of property. In short, I mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives. With that analytic we might imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery.125

This episteme of slavery. Then. And now. The plantation is everywhere. The globe becomes the plantation in their imperial wars. Where you will find. Neoliberal order. Delivering 570,000 barrels of crude oil. In the wake of their pipelines and dams. Disorder and displacement. Forced migration and massacres. In the wake of their search-and-destroy operations. Soldiers haunting. The killing fields. They carry home. Whitestone. Wounded Knee. South Vietnam. South Carolina. My Lai. Mullivaikkal. Iraq. In the wake of our national security. Under the cover of CIA black sites. Around our wars. Their wars. Linking back to our wars by proxy. Vying for global partners, military contractors, bounty hunters, overseers

242

Y. SANGARASIVAM

of choice. Mission accomplished. They said. As our soldiers come home to suicide. I am here. With you. Joining the wake. With work. Making wake work. What do we become. In the wake. To live. To survive. In the wake. Of nationalism’s massacre. In the wake. Of patriotism’s global war. In the wake. Of the afterlife of asymmetric victory. We are in the wake. In this episteme of asymmetric victory. In the wake of patriotic pride. In the wake of national belonging. In the wake of expulsion and extermination. In the wake of massacre and displacement. In the wake of police brutality. In the wake of white supremacy. In the wake you inhabit. In the wake you rupture. In the wake you encounter. In the wake you imagine otherwise from what you know of those who are killed and those who do the work of killing. ● What do we become. In the wake of massacre. In the wake of victory. In the wake of war. We are in the wake of his victory speech at the National Ranaviru Day (war heroes) commemorations on May 19, 2020. The president of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, referenced the massacre at Mullivaikkal. He said: The Prime Objective of the Humanitarian Mission Was to Bring Lasting Peace in the Country.126

We are in the wake of William Doyle losing count. At the age of seventy, he had lost count. He had killed so many Vietnamese people as a Tiger Force sergeant. He said: We were living day to day. We didn’t expect to live. Nobody out there with any brains expected to live…. So you did any goddamn thing you felt like doing — especially to stay alive. The way to live is to kill because you don’t have to worry about anybody who’s dead…. The only thing I regret is that I didn’t kill more. If I had known that it was going to end as quick as it did, the way it did, I would have killed a lot more.127

We are in the wake of Sam Ybarra dying. Slowly. Once praised. By his commanders in the Tiger Force for scoring kills. Then haunted. By what he had done. He would curl up on his mother’s couch. His hands shaking.

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

243

Repeating the question. Why? His mother. Therlene Ramos is an elder of the Apache nation. His mother. She listened. She remembered. Her son. Dying. Slowly. She said: I would ask him: What’s wrong? Why are you crying? recalled Therlene Ramos. He would say: It’s my life. What I did. What I did. I killed people, mama. I killed regular people. I shouldn’t have. My God, what did I do?128

We are in the wake of Specialist Varnado Simpson’s work. Of killing. Of mutilating. People in My Lai. He said: From shooting them to cutting their throats to scalping them to cutting off their hands and cutting out their tongue… I did that.129

We are in the wake of Specialist Varnado Simpson sitting with the photographs he collected. Keeping them in a scrapbook as a reminder. The photographs taken by Ron Haeberle published in Life magazine. The photographs of the massacre he took part in at My Lai. He said: This is my life, this is my past, this is my present, this is my future, and I keep it to remind me.130

We are in the wake of Specialist Varnado Simpson returning home. To Jackson, Mississippi. After serving in the war in Vietnam. After My Lai. After his fourth attempt. He died in 1997. Committing suicide.131 We are in the wake of a veteran soldier’s response to my question. Why. He had served. On behalf of us. Against them. In the first Gulf war. I asked him. Why. Why do soldiers take part in. The extreme, unimaginable, insane violence of raping, dismembering, and murdering defenseless people. I asked him. Why soldiers massacre. He said: It’s that final fuck you. Soldiers did what they did because it was their job. Even though the way they did it was wrong. They are broken. I feel bad that they felt that they had to do that, commit those atrocities but I’m angry that they did what they did. Someone that’s broken like that, there’s no fixing them…. Most wars start because history was forgotten, because the atrocities of war, once they’re buried, no one talks about them anymore. But they come back.132

244

Y. SANGARASIVAM

We are in the wake of a letter John Comfort writes, a year before his death. He was a soldier who operated the Hotchkiss cannons. The heavy weapons used by the U.S. Army in the massacre at Wounded Knee. He writes. To his brother. On the 5th of April, 1892. After the excitement of traveling across the Great Plains as a soldier in the U.S. Army to fight in what they called “America’s long Indian Wars.” After he returns to his life. As an ordinary soldier. He writes: A Soldiers life in garrison is a same-thing-over-again routine I detest it I like to be on the move Campaigning the more danger the better.133

We are in the wake of a letter Major John Vance Lauderdale writes. A contracted surgeon with the U.S. Army. He was deployed to Pine Ridge, South Dakota on the 29th of December, 1890. The day of the massacre at Wounded Knee. Prior to his arrival at Pine Ridge, Dr. Lauderdale served as acting assistant surgeon at Fort Bridger in the Utah Territory. There, he experienced his first contact with Native Americans. In a letter to “Frank,” his younger sister Frances Helen. He writes: If they won’t work like other people they had better be exterminated. They are nothing but a nuisance and an obstruction to civilization. … every redskin must be killed from off the face of the plains before we can be free from their molestations. They are of no earthly good and the sooner they are swept from the land the better for civilization.134

We are in the wake of the patriotic pride of a mother from Florida. As she writes a letter. Responding to Life magazine’s 1969 publication of Charlie Company’s massacre of Vietnamese men, women, and children in My Lai. She writes: My child…is much more precious to me (and should be to every fellow American) than the life of any enemy, no matter what their age or condition.135

We are in the wake of Dylann Roof writing in his jailhouse journal. After killing nine African-American community members at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, he documented his intentions and convictions. In the summer of 2015. He writes:

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

245

I would rather live imprisoned knowing I took action for my race than to live with the torture of sitting idle. It isn’t up to me anymore. I did what I could do, I’ve done all I can do. I did what I thought would make the biggest wave. And now the fate of our race sits in the hands of my brothers who continue to live freely. I would like to make it crystal clear. I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed. I do feel sorry for the innocent white children forced to live in this sick country, and I do feel sorry for the innocent white people that are killed daily at the hand of the lower races.136

We are in the wake of the bond hearing. On June 19, 2015. It is the first court appearance of Dylann Roof. After he murdered the nine people with whom he sat in prayer and study of the Bible. At the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. We are in the wake of Nadine Collier speaking. At the bond hearing. She spoke directly. To Dylann Roof who killed her mother Ethel Lee Lance, the 70-year-old elder, who had welcomed him to join their gathering for Bible study. She said: You took something very precious away from me… I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.137

We are in the wake of Bethane Middleton-Brown speaking. At the bond hearing. She spoke directly. To Dylann Roof who killed her sister Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor. She said: I acknowledge that I am very angry… she taught me that we are the family that love built. We have no room for hating.138

We are in the wake of the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charlestonon June 17, 2015. Pastor William H. Lamar IV gave his sermon at the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, DC on June 21, 2015. He said: Consider now with me the possibility that the uninterrupted assault on black humanity—from the moment of enslavement in this country to the heinous act of violence at Mother Emanuel this week—has everything to do with our unwillingness to unpack this conundrum, that faith and fear have always been inextricably intertwined in the Christian imaginary,

246

Y. SANGARASIVAM

nowhere more so than in this land we find ourselves in today. And our continued failure to reckon with it can only lead to continued violence. Let us go to the other side. The black body is the geography upon which the myth of white supremacy fought its primary battle and will fight its ultimate one. The letting of black blood funds the expiation of America’s sins. As difficult as it is to hear and as painful as it may be to believe, violence against black bodies is the essence of American history, prosperity and hegemonic control of land, and thus wealth. … The myth of redemptive violence is theologically grounded in a view of Christian atonement theory that posits that Jesus’ horrid torture, suffering and death are necessary for the forgiveness of sins. This Christian logic plays itself out daily as black bodies are made to suffer as a means of cleansing America from its original sins of colonial conquest of the natives’ land and enslavement of Africans to work it. But instead of redemption, violence against black people draws America more deeply into amnesia surrounding its past and denial of its present. It is an all-too-familiar story that cannot be resolved unless we are willing to go to the other side, and on that side we see an ugly truth.139

We are in the wake. Of an ugly truth. Of massacres. Whitestone. Wounded Knee. My Lai. Mullivaikkal. Charleston. Countless more. Killings. Sedimenting. Over time. Genocides. Isolated. Displaced. Disconnected. Redacted from the curriculum of patriotic pride. Revisionist histories in speeches to commemorate triumphant wars and heroic deeds. Of soldiers reckoning with the work of killing and coming home to suicide. We are in the wake. Of an ugly truth. What do we become. ●

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

247

Notes 1. My studies and practice of writing to develop a methodology of speculative ethnography are deeply informed by the writing and performance practices of: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Layli Long Soldier, “38,” in WHEREAS: Poems (Greywolf: Minneapolis, 2017); Elizabeth Chin, “Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology: Suits of Inquiry,” e-misférica 12, no. 1 and 2 (2015), Hemispheric Institute, Edited by Gina Athena Ulysse. https:// hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj/12-1dossier/e-121-dossier-chin-laboratory-of-speculative-ethnology.html. 2. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press), 113. 3. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 15. 4. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 77–128; Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 5th edition (New York: Basic Books, 2015 [1977]). 5. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake, 21. 6. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake, 16. 7. I am thankful to Kristin Prevallet who taught me the politics and power of grammar in her writing workshop on prepositions: Kristin Prevallet, “Prepositions: An Ecopoetics Exploration” (Virtual Workshop) Summer Writers’ Week, Manhattanville College, June 23, 2020. See also, Kristin Prevallet, “The Enclosure You Thought Protected You Is An Illusion: Prepositions, Freedom, and Getting Outside,” Currents: Journal of the Body-Mind Centering Association (Spring 2021): 53–59. 8. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake, 21–22. 9. The Guardian, “Sri Lanka Declares End to War with Tamil Tigers,” May 19, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/18/tamiltigers-killed-sri-lanka. 10. The Guardian, “Sri Lanka Declares End to War with Tamil Tigers,” May 19, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/18/tamiltigers-killed-sri-lanka. 11. The Guardian, “Sri Lanka Declares End to War with Tamil Tigers,” May 19, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/18/tamiltigers-killed-sri-lanka. 12. “Report of the Secretary’s General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability In Sri Lanka,” United Nations Security Council, March, 31 2011, 1. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/doc ument/poc-rep-on-account-in-sri-lanka.php

248

Y. SANGARASIVAM

13. To view the complete video documentary, see “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields,” Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2021, https://www. channel4.com/programmes/sri-lankas-killing-fields/on-demand/519 49-001; “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields (Documentary): Real Stories,” YouTube, September 19, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= r3yPzyM0KMU&bpctr=1586135921. 14. Claude Cookman, “An American Atrocity: The My Lai Massacre Concretized in a Victim’s Face,” Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (June, 2007): 156, 154–162. 15. Claude Cookman, “An American Atrocity,” 156. 16. Ben Cosgrove, “American Atrocity: Remembering My Lai,” Life, December 5, 1969, https://www.life.com/history/american-atrocityremembering-my-lai/. 17. Claude Cookman, “An American Atrocity,” 157; Ben Cosgrove, “American Atrocity: Remembering My Lai,” Life, December 5, 1969, https:// www.life.com/history/american-atrocity-remembering-my-lai/. 18. Claude Cookman, “An American Atrocity,” 159. 19. Claude Cookman, “An American Atrocity,” 160. 20. “Inventory of the L. Mendel Rivers Papers, 1940–1962,” The College of Charleston, Special Collections, accessed January 29, 2021, http://archives.library.cofc.edu/findingaids/mss0094.html. 21. William D. Smyth, “Segregation in Charleston in the 1950s: A Decade of Transition,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 92, no.2 (1991): 99–123; Rebecca Brückmann, “‘Work…Done Mostly by Men’: Cornelia Dabney Tucker and Female Grassroots Activism in Massive Resistance in South Carolina, 1950–1963,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 117, no. 2 (April 2016): 96–120; Neil R. McMillen, “White Citizens’ Council and Resistance to School Desegregation in Arkansas,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Summer 1971): 95–122. 22. Smyth, “Segregation in Charleston in the 1950s,” 108. 23. Ibid., 108. 24. “Council of Conservative Citizens,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed January 29, 2021, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/cou ncil-conservative-citizens 25. David A. Graham, “The White-Supremacist Group That Inspired a Racist Manifesto,” The Atlantic, June 22, 2015, https://www.theatl antic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/council-of-conservative-citizensdylann-roof/396467/; see also, Michael Wines and Lizette Alvarez, “Council of Conservative Citizens Promotes White Primacy, and G.O.P. Ties,” New York Times, June 22, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2015/06/23/us/politics/views-on-race-and-gop-ties-define-group-cou ncil-of-conservative-citizens.html?referringSource=articleShare.

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

249

26. Frances Robles, “Dylann Roof Photos and a Manifesto Are Posted on Website,” New York Times, June 20, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2015/06/21/us/dylann-storm-roof-photos-website-charleston-churchshooting.html?referringSource=articleShare. 27. Debbie Elliott, “5 Years After Charleston Church Massacre, What Have We Learned?” NPR National Public Radio, June, 17, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/06/17/878828088/5-yearsafter-charleston-church-massacre-what-have-we-learned 28. Frances Robles, “Dylann Roof Photos and a Manifesto,” https://www. nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/dylann-storm-roof-photos-website-cha rleston-church-shooting.html?referringSource=articleShare. 29. Frances Robles, “Dylann Roof Photos and a Manifesto Are Posted on Website,” New York Times, June 20, 2015,https://www.nytimes.com/ 2015/06/21/us/dylann-storm-roof-photos-website-charleston-churchshooting.html?referringSource=articleShare. 30. “Transcript: Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina on Removing the Confederate Flag,” New York Times, June 22, 2015, https://www.nyt imes.com/interactive/2015/06/22/us/Transcript-Gov-Nikki-R-Haleyof-South-Carolina-Addresses-Removing-the-Confederate-Battle-Flag. html. 31. “Report of the Secretary’s General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability In Sri Lanka,” United Nations Security Council, March, 31 2011, 41. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/document/ poc-rep-on-account-in-sri-lanka.php. 32. “9 Years Today—A Massacre in Mullivaikkal,” Tamil Guardian, May 17, 2018, https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/9-years-today-–massacre-mullivaikkal. 33. Lewis R. Gordon, “Writing Through the Zone of Nonbeing,” in What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 19–46. 34. “Woman Victim in Channel-4 Video Identified as Journalist Isaippiriyaa,” TamilNet, December 1, 2010, https://www.tamilnet.com/art. html?catid=13&artid=33147. 35. “Report of the Secretary’s General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability In Sri Lanka,” United Nations Security Council, March, 31 2011, 23. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/document/ poc-rep-on-account-in-sri-lanka.php. 36. “Report of the Secretary’s General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability In Sri Lanka,” United Nations Security Council, March, 31 2011, 37. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/document/ poc-rep-on-account-in-sri-lanka.php. 37. “Report of the Secretary’s General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability In Sri Lanka,” United Nations Security Council, March, 31 2011,

250

Y. SANGARASIVAM

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

33. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/document/ poc-rep-on-account-in-sri-lanka.php. Gordon Weiss, The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2012), 283. Gordon Weiss, The Cage, 283. Quoted in: Frances Harrison, Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War. (London: Portobello Books, 2012), 16. Quoted in: Frances Harrison, Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War. (London: Portobello Books, 2012), 18. Frances Harrison, Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War (London: Portobello Books, 2012), 22. “Report of the Secretary’s General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability In Sri Lanka,” United Nations Security Council, March, 31 2011, 34. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/document/ poc-rep-on-account-in-sri-lanka.php. “Report of the Secretary’s General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability In Sri Lanka,” United Nations Security Council, March, 31 2011, 34. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/document/ poc-rep-on-account-in-sri-lanka.php. Ibid., 34. Quoted in: Gordon Weiss, The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2012), 176. Gordon Weiss, The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2012), 176; See also: “Sri Lanka Halts Heavy-Weapon Attacks on Rebels,” New York Times, April 27, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/world/asia/28lanka.html? referringSource=articleShare. “EARTH SHAKERS AND AIR DEFENDERS,” Army National Guard, accessed January 30, 2021, https://www.nationalguard.com/careers/ heavy-weapons. Ibid. Mahamtan Vijaykumar, “Which Countries Helped the Sri Lankan Government in the Sri Lankan Civilian War 2009?” South Asia Journal (blog), January 23, 2020, http://southasiajournal.net/which-countrieshelped-the-sri-lankan-government-in-the-sri-lankan-civilian-war-2009/. Mahamtan Vijaykumar, “Which Countries Helped the Sri Lankan Government in the Sri Lankan Civilian War 2009?” South Asia Journal (blog), January 23, 2020, http://southasiajournal.net/which-countrieshelped-the-sri-lankan-government-in-the-sri-lankan-civilian-war-2009/.

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

251

52. Mahamtan Vijaykumar, “Which Countries Helped the Sri Lankan Government in the Sri Lankan Civilian War 2009?” http://southasiajou rnal.net/which-countries-helped-the-sri-lankan-government-in-the-srilankan-civilian-war-2009/. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Kurosh Ansari and Bryan Walsh, “New Missions and Stronger Partnerships: How U.S. Excess Defense Articles Help Promote a Free and Open Indo-Pacific Region,” U.S. Department of State (Bureau of Political-Military Affairs), May 8, 2020, https://2017-2021.state.gov/ new-missions-and-stronger-partnerships-how-u-s-excess-defense-articleshelp-promote-a-free-and-open-indo-pacific-region/index.html. 57. Kurosh Ansari and Bryan Walsh, “New Missions and Stronger Partnerships,” https://2017-2021.state.gov/new-missions-and-stronger-par tnerships-how-u-s-excess-defense-articles-help-promote-a-free-and-openindo-pacific-region/index.html. 58. Gordon Weiss, The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2012), 170. 59. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 16. 60. Gordon Weiss, The Cage, 178. 61. Nick Cumming-Bruce, “In Resolution, U.N. Council Presses Sri Lanka on Civilian Deaths,” New York Times, March 22, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/world/asia/rights-bodypasses-measure-on-sri-lanka.html?referringSource=articleShare. 62. Maria Abi-Habib, “How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port,” New York Times, June 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/ 25/world/asia/china-sri-lanka-port.html. 63. Kai Schultz, “Sri Lanka, Struggling With Debt, Hands a Major Port to China,” New York Times, December 12, 2017, https://www.nyt imes.com/2017/12/12/world/asia/sri-lanka-china-port.html?referr ingSource=articleShare; see also, Umesh Moramudali, “Is Sri Lanka Really a Victim of China’s ‘Debt Trap’? Sri Lanka’s Debt Crisis and Chinese Loans—Separating Myth from Reality,” The Diplomat, May 14, 2019, https://thediplomat.com/2019/05/is-sri-lanka-really-a-victimof-chinas-debt-trap/; “Similar to the Chinese port projects in Gwadar, Pakistan, the Hambantota scheme provides potential anchorage and port facilities for Chinese merchant ships, container vessels, oil and gas tankers, and military vessels including nuclear submarines operating in the Indian Ocean or transiting through the western approaches of the Straits of Malacca, one of the world’s principal maritime routes linking the major Asian economies.” Gordon Weiss, The Cage, 178.

252

Y. SANGARASIVAM

64. Kai Schultz, “Sri Lanka, Struggling With Debt, Hands a Major Port to China,” New York Times, December 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes. com/2017/12/12/world/asia/sri-lanka-china-port.html?referringSou rce=articleShare. 65. “Sri Lanka Revives Port Deal with India, Japan amid China Concerns: The Deep-Sea Jetty Is Located Next to the Colombo International Container Terminal, Which Is 85 Percent Owned by China,” Aljazeera, January 14, 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/14/srilanka-revives-port-deal-with-india-japan-amid-china-concerns. 66. “Welcome to MAS,” MAS: CHANGE IS COURAGE, accessed February 1, 2021, https://www.masholdings.com/overview.html#ove rview. 67. “MAS Intimates-Overview,” MAS: CHANGE IS COURAGE, accessed February 1, 2021, https://www.masholdings.com/intimates.html#int imates-overview; “MAS Active Wear-Overview,” https://www.mashol dings.com/active.html#apparel-active. 68. R. Sudarshan and Vimal Rasenthiran, “Sri Lanka: Kilinochchi Garment Workers Denounce Harsh Working Conditions,” World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), May 22, 2018, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/ 05/22/kili-m22.html. 69. “Welcome to MAS,” MAS: CHANGE IS COURAGE, accessed February 1, 2021, https://www.masholdings.com/overview.html#ove rview. 70. Though it is debated and questioned that the initial invasion of Iraq under the administration of President George W. Bush was named “Operation Iraqi Liberation” creating the acronym OIL, this name is confirmed by the March 24, 2003 press briefing by press secretary Ari Fleischer: “The President this morning has spoken with three foreign leaders. He began with Prime Minister Blair, where the two discussed the ongoing aspects of Operation Iraqi liberation.” See, “Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer,” The White House, Office of the press Secretary, March 24, 2003, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ news/releases/2003/03/20030324-4.html; See also, “Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn Fast Facts,” CNN, last modified March 6, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/ operation-iraqi-freedom-and-operation-new-dawn-fast-facts/index.html; See also, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Naval History and Heritage Command, last modified August 6, 2020, https://www.history.navy. mil/content/history/nhhc/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operat ions/middle-east/operation-iraqi-freedom.html; Kyle Crichton, Gina

6

71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

78.

79.

80. 81.

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

253

Lamb, and Rogene Fisher Jacquette, “Timeline of Major Events in the Iraq War,” New York Times, accessed February 1, 2021, https://arc hive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/31/world/ middleeast/20100831-Iraq-Timeline.html?src=tptw#/#time111_3262. President Bush quoted in, Kyle Crichton, Gina Lamb, and Rogene Fisher Jacquette, “Timeline of Major Events in the Iraq War,” New York Times, accessed February 1, 2021, https://archive.nytimes.com/www. nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/31/world/middleeast/20100831Iraq-Timeline.html?src=tptw#/#time111_3262. Kyle Crichton, Gina Lamb, and Rogene Fisher Jacquette, “Timeline of Major Events in the Iraq War,” New York Times, accessed February 1, 2021, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 2010/08/31/world/middleeast/20100831-Iraq-Timeline.html?src= tptw#/#time111_3262. This is one among several videos of the execution of Saddam Hussein, along with the commentary of the viewing audience, posted on YouTube: “DVS Saddam Video Raw,” AP Archive, published on July 31, 2015, YouTube video, 01:18, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= yNvMjADToFE. “President Delivers State of the Union Address,” The White House: President George W. Bush (Archives), January 29, 2002, https:// georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/200 20129-11.html. “Costs of War,” Watson Institute International & Public Affairs, Brown University, last modified November 2018, https://watson.brown.edu/ costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/iraqi. “About the Crisis in Iraq,” UNHCR The UN Refugee Agency, accessed February 8, 2021, https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/ iraq/. (Quotes are reconfigured into poetic form.). “Total number of Syrian Refugees Exceeds Four Million,” UNHCR The UN Refugee Agency, accessed February 8, 2021, https://www.unr efugees.org/news/total-number-of-syrian-refugees-exceeds-four-millionfor-first-time/. (Quotes are reconfigured into poetic form.). Steven Lee Myers and Elisabeth Bumiller, “Obama Calls World ‘Safer’ After Pakistan Raid,” New York Times, May 2, 2011, https://www.nyt imes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/osama-bin-laden-dead.html?referr ingSource=articleShare. Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020), XVII–XVIII. Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic, XVII–XVIII. See Claudio Saunt’s Unworthy Republic for a detailed representation and historical study of strategic planning, bureaucratic accounting, and

254

Y. SANGARASIVAM

82.

83. 84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

diligent implementation of the policies and procedures of expulsions, deportations, and exterminations of indigenous peoples throughout the North American territories that were occupied by European colonists. “American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month: November 2017,” United States Census Bureau, October 6, 2017, https://www.census. gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2017/aian-month.html. Ibid. Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands: Soldiers Executed Prisoners, Then Turned Weapons on Civilians,” in “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths,” The Blade: Toledo, Ohio, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, p. 9. http://bgsujournalism.com/pulitzer/jfoust/wordpress/wp-con tent/uploads/2016/01/Blade-pulitzer-entry-reduced.pdf. Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “7 Allegations Focused on GI from Arizona: ‘He Had No Mercy for Anyone,’ a Fellow Soldier Remembers,” in “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths,” The Blade: Toledo, OH, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, p. 9. For the comprehensive, detailed account of the soldiers and their experiences both during and after their deployment with the Tiger Force in Vietnam, see: Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss, Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006). Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths,” The Blade: Toledo, Ohio, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, p. 9. http://bgsujournalism.com/pulitzer/jfoust/wordpress/wp-con tent/uploads/2016/01/Blade-pulitzer-entry-reduced.pdf; For the full account of stories, testimonies, and suppression by the U.S. military of the Tiger Force war crimes in Vietnam see: Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss, Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War, (New York: Back Bay Books, Little, Brown & Company, 2006). Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands: Soldiers Executed Prisoners, Then Turned Weapons on Civilians,” in “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths,” The Blade: Toledo, OH, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, p. 9. http://bgsujournalism.com/pulitzer/jfoust/wordpress/wp-con tent/uploads/2016/01/Blade-pulitzer-entry-reduced.pdf. Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands: Soldiers Executed Prisoners, Then Turned Weapons on Civilians,” in “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths,” The Blade: Toledo, OH, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, p. 10.

6

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

255

90. Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands: Soldiers Executed Prisoners, Then Turned Weapons on Civilians,” in “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths,” The Blade: Toledo, Ohio, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, pp. 6–7. 91. Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands: Soldiers Executed Prisoners, Then Turned Weapons on Civilians,” in “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths,” The Blade: Toledo, OH, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, pp. 6–7. 92. Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands: Soldiers Executed Prisoners, Then Turned Weapons on Civilians,” in “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths,” The Blade: Toledo, OH, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, p. 9. 93. Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “7 Allegations Focused on GI from Arizona: ‘He Had No Mercy for Anyone,’ a Fellow Soldier Remembers,” in “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths,” The Blade: Toledo, OH, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, p. 9. 94. Ibid. 95. Karl Jacoby, “Of Memory and Massacre: A Soldier’s Firsthand Account of the ‘Affair on Wounded Knee’,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 64, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 341. 96. Jacoby, “Of Memory and Massacre,” 339; For further historical analysis see B.C. Mohrbacher, “The Whole World Is Coming: The 1890 Ghost Dance Movement as Utopia,” Utopian Studies, 7, no. 1 (1996): 75– 85; Rani-Henrik Andersson, The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008); Gregory E. Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 97. Jacoby, “Of Memory and Massacre,” 336. 98. Jacoby, “Of Memory and Massacre,” 337; For a detailed documentation and analysis of the murder of Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull) see, Jerome A. Greene, American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). 99. For detailed discussion of the escalation of military forces and the asymmetric realities of the U.S. Army’s assault on the Lakota people at Wounded Knee, see Jeffrey Ostler, “Conquest and the State: Why the United States Employed Massive Military Force to Suppress the Lakota Ghost Dance,” Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 2 (May 1996): 217–248; Jerome A. Greene, American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). 100. Jacoby, “Of Memory and Massacre,” 338.

256

Y. SANGARASIVAM

101. Black Elk quoted in: Jacoby, “Of Memory and Massacre,” 340. 102. John Comfort quoted in: Jacoby, “Of Memory and Massacre,” 353–354. 103. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 118. 104. Aaron L. Barth, “Imagining a Battlefield at a Civil War Mistake: The Public History of Whitestone Hill, 1863 to 2013,” The Public Historian 35, no. 3 (August 2013): 73. 105. Aaron L. Barth, “Imagining a Battlefield at a Civil War Mistake,” 77. 106. “Dakota Access Pipeline Environmental Assessment,” US Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District, accessed February 12, 2021, https://www. nwo.usace.army.mil/Missions/Civil-Works/Planning/Project-Reports/ Article/633496/dakota-access-pipeline-environmental-assessment/. 107. Sam T. Levin, “Standing Rock: Obama Suggests ‘Reroute’ of Dakota Pipeline Being Investigated,” The Guardian, November 2, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/02/dakotaaccess-obama-suggests-ways-to-reroute-pipeline-being-investigated. 108. Justin Worland, “What to Know About the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests,” Time, October 28, 2016, https://time.com/4548566/dak ota-access-pipeline-standing-rock-sioux/. 109. Sam T. Levin, “Standing Rock”; Justin Worland, “What to Know About the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests.” 110. LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, “Why the Founder of Standing Rock Sioux Camp Can’t Forget the Whitestone Massacre,” Yes! Magazine, September 3, 2016, https://www.yesmagazine.org/democracy/2016/ 09/03/why-the-founder-of-standing-rock-sioux-camp-cant-forget-thewhitestone-massacre/; also see transcript of the complete interview of LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Standing Rock Sioux tribal historian and investigative journalist, Amy Goodman at: “Standing Rock Sioux Historian: Dakota Access Co. Attack comes on Anniversary of Whitestone Massacre,” Democracy Now! September 8, 2016, https://www.democr acynow.org/2016/9/8/standing_rock_sioux_historian_dakota_access. 111. LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, “Why the Founder of Standing Rock Sioux Camp Can’t Forget the Whitestone Massacre.” 112. In the early 1900s, the Bureau of Reclamation was established as the federal government’s primary agency, as part of Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation program, for developing irrigation and flood control plans as well as hydroelectric power with its dam projects. Since 1824, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were responsible for regulating the navigation of the major rivers and harbors as well as flood control across the country. For a detailed analysis of the competition for economic and political power between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers led by Colonel Lewis A. Pick and the Bureau of Reclamation led by its assistant director, William Glenn Sloan, see Michael L. Lawson, Dammed Indians:

6

113.

114.

115.

116. 117.

118.

119.

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

257

The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944–1980 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982) and Campbell, David C. “The Pick-Sloan Program: A Case of Bureaucratic Economic Power.” Journal of Economic Issues 18, no. 2 (June 1984): 449–456. David C. Campbell, “The Pick-Sloan Program: A Case of Bureaucratic Economic Power,” Journal of Economic Issues 18, no. 2 (June 1984): 451. Michael L. Lawson, Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944–1980 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 50–51. Excerpt of interview of LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Standing Rock Sioux tribal historian, by investigative journalist Amy Goodman: “Standing Rock Sioux Historian: Dakota Access Co. Attack comes on Anniversary of Whitestone Massacre,” Democracy Now! September 8, 2016, https://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/8/standing_rock_s ioux_historian_dakota_access. Michael L. Lawson, Dammed Indians, 27. Bill McKibben, “A Pipeline Fight and America’s Dark Past,” The New Yorker, September 6, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/news/dailycomment/a-pipeline-fight-and-americas-dark-past; For a timeline of legal and policy decision leading to the construction of and consequent resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, see Rebecca Hersher, “Key Moments in The Dakota Access Pipeline Fight,” NPR (National Public Radio), February 22, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwoway/2017/02/22/514988040/key-moments-in-the-dakota-access-pip eline-fight; For President Joseph Biden’s decision regarding status of the Dakota Access Pipeline, see: Rachel Frazin and Rebecca Beitsch, “Biden gets more time to decide on Dakota Access Pipeline,” The Hill, February 9, 2021, https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/ 537969-biden-administration-asks-for-more-time-to-decide-whether-toshut?rl=1. John W. Henderson, “Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact: Environmental Assessment Dakota Access Pipeline Project Williams, Morton, and Emmons Counties, North Dakota,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-Omaha District, July, 25, 2016, accessed February 12, 2021, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3460832-DAPLEnviroAssessment-July252016.html Justin Worland, “What to Know About the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests,” Time, October 28, 2016, https://time.com/4548566/ dakota-access-pipeline-standing-rock-sioux/; For an analysis of the consequences of environmental injustice and its intersection with settler colonialism see: Kyle Whyte, “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice,” Environment & Society 9, no.1 (September 2018):

258

Y. SANGARASIVAM

120.

121.

122.

123.

124.

125–144. Also, for a further analysis of environmental injustice and settler colonialism as it connects to the Standing Rock Sioux nations’ resistance to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers building the Dakota Access Pipeline, see Kyle Whyte, “The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and U.S. Colonialism,” RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities, 19, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 154–169, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_ id=2925513; and https://kylewhyte.cal.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/ sites/12/2020/07/2020-Update-Dakota-Access-Pipeline-US-Coloni alism.pdf. Alene Tchekmedyian and Melissa Etehad, “2 Years of Opposition, 1,172 Miles of Pipe, 1.3 Million on Facebook Check-Ins. The Numbers to Know About the Standing Rock Protests,” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-standingrock-numbers-20161101-story.html. For the full text of former President Trump’s executive memorandum see: “Memorandum for the Secretary of the Army: Construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline,” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, January 24, 2017, https://legacy.npr.org/assets/news/ 2017/01/DakotaAccessConstruction.pdf; Tim Daiss, “Trump Owns Stake in Hotly Disputed $3.8 Billion Oil Pipeline, Conflict of Interest Looms,” Forbes, November 26, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ timdaiss/2016/11/26/trump-owns-stake-in-hotly-disputed-3-8-billionoil-pipeline-conflict-of-interest-looms/#570259d5d006. Bill McKibben, “A Pipeline Fight and America’s Dark Past,” The New Yorker, September 6, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/news/dailycomment/a-pipeline-fight-and-americas-dark-past; For video footage of military contractors using dogs to attack protestors, see Democracy Now! “Standing Rock Sioux Historian: Dakota Access Co. Attack comes on Anniversary of Whitestone Massacre,” September 8, 2016, https://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/8/standing_rock_s ioux_historian_dakota_access. Dorian Lynskey, “This Land Is Your Land: America’s Other National Anthem,” BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), September 29, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200929-this-land-isyour-land-americas-other-national-anthem; “Woody Guthrie-This Land is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie: Pastures of Plenty (1940–1947), Woody Guthrie, YouTube Video, 02:18, accessed February 13, 2021, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE. See the lyrics and listen to the Woody Guthrie’s rendition of the song: “This Land is Your Land: Words and Music by Woody Guthrie,” Woody Guthrie, accessed September 24, 2021, https://www.woodyg uthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.htm; “Woody Guthrie-This Land is Your

6

125. 126.

127.

128.

129.

130. 131. 132. 133.

134.

135. 136.

137.

RUN LIKE HELL: MULLIVAIKKAL

259

Land,” Woody Guthrie, published October 12, 2007, YouTube video, 02:18, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 18. “Full text of the speech made by His Excellency the President Gotabaya Rajapaksa at the National Ranaviru Day commemorations on May 19th 2020,” Permanent Mission of Sri Lanka to the United Nations, accessed June 12, 2021, https://www.un.int/srilanka/news/full-text-speechmade-his-excellency-president-gotabaya-rajapaksa-national-ranaviru-day. Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands: Soldiers Executed Prisoners, Then Turned Weapons on Civilians,” in “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths,” The Blade: Toledo, OH, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, pp. 6, 10, http://bgsujournalism.com/pulitzer/jfoust/wordpress/wp-con tent/uploads/2016/01/Blade-pulitzer-entry-reduced.pdf Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “7 Allegations Focused on GI from Arizona,” in “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths,” The Blade: Toledo, OH, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, p. 9, http://bgsujournalism.com/pulitzer/jfoust/wordpress/wp-con tent/uploads/2016/01/Blade-pulitzer-entry-reduced.pdf. Claude Cookman, “An American Atrocity: The My Lai Massacre Concretized in a Victim’s Face,” The Journal of American History 9, no. 1 (June, 2007): 156. Cookman, “An American Atrocity,” 159. Ibid. Gulf War veteran of the U.S. Army, in-person interview, June 27, 2020. Karl Jacoby, “Of Memory and Massacre: A Soldier’s Firsthand Account of the ‘Affair on Wounded Knee’,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 64, no. 2 (2003): 362. The quote presents the spelling and grammar found in the original document of John Comfort’s letter. Jerry Green, ed., After Wounded Knee: Correspondence of Major and Surgeon John Vance Lauderdale while Serving with the Army Occupying the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1890–1891 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996), 3–4. Cookman, “An American Atrocity,” 160. Quoted from the original text of Dylann Roof’s journal. For the full text of his jailhouse journal see Jennifer Berry Hawes, “Dylann Roof Jailhouse Journal,” The Post and Courier, January 6, 2017, https://www.postandcourier.com/dylann-roof-jailhouse-journal/ pdf_da3e19b8-d3b3-11e6-b040-03089263e67c.html Nikita Stewart and Richard Pérez-Peña, “In Charleston, Raw Emotion at Hearing for Suspect in Church Shooting,” New York Times, June

260

Y. SANGARASIVAM

19, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/20/us/charleston-sho oting-dylann-storm-roof.html?referringSource=articleShare. 138. Nikita Stewart and Richard Perez-Pena, “In Charleston, Raw Emotion at Hearing”. 139. Quoted from the full text of the sermon by Pastor William H. Lamar IV: “William H. Lamar IV: Let Us Go to the Other Side,” Faith & Leadership, Duke University, last modified June 30, 2015, https://fai thandleadership.com/william-h-lamar-iv-let-us-go-other-side.

CHAPTER 7

A Great Day for Freedom: Life Under Occupation

Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. —President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress and the Nation, September 20, 2001.1

I A Country Awakened to Danger ●

You may or may not know about the Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military prepared by the Department of Defense (DOD), the findings of which revealed that an estimated 20,500 active duty soldiers, of whom about 13,000 are women and 7,500 are men, experienced some kind of contact or penetrative sexual assault in 2018.2

“A Great Day for Freedom,” Pink Floyd, The Division Bell , EMI Records, 1994; “A Great Day for Freedom,” Pink Floyd, published on January 8, 2016, YouTube video, 04:17, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01F1leQgsEc. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. Sangarasivam, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82665-9_7

261

262

Y. SANGARASIVAM

We have come to know that a female soldier in combat zones is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than be killed by enemy fire; that 20% of female veterans have been sexually assaulted while serving in the military; that 25% of rape victims did not report it because the person they would have to report the rape to was the rapist and/or the commanding officer himself; that only 8% of military sexual assault cases are prosecuted; that a congressional hearing in 1991 revealed an estimated 200,000 women had been sexually assaulted within the military.3 We have come to know that according to a 2013 Pentagon report, 70 sexual assaults are likely to take place within the United States military every day. This study was published two days after Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Krusinski, the head of the Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, was arrested for sexual assault.4 We have come to know that soldiers who report incidents of rape and sexual assault are further sexually harassed, punished, disciplined, and involuntarily discharged with a declaration of “Personality Disorder,” which bears the consequences of denial of veterans benefits including healthcare, education, job placements, loans, and disability claims for support.5 ●

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

Question

How do we know terrorism is it in the wake of massacres we affirm again today what motherfucker’s gonna die today Hey you! out there in the cold raise a thousand thousand sacred lamps of fire sacrifice self suicide targeted exquisite weapon effective and moral nothing but hurt here freedom’s price freedom’s power freedom’s victory plastic bottles filled with piss we affirm again today Iraq for sale missile off the rail we were told our boys would never rape

263

264

Y. SANGARASIVAM

a country awakened to danger a country called to defend ugly truth bring justice to invisible wars?

● You may or may not know about the 2011 landmark case Cioca et al. vs. Rumsfeld et al. Kori Cioca, a United States Coast Guard soldier and twenty-seven soldiers from the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps sought to bring justice to bear upon former Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. The twenty-eight soldiers served their country by holding the former Secretaries of Defense accountable for their upholding of rape and sexual assault as an accepted occupational hazard in military service: like being shot by enemy fire; or losing a limb; or being killed by an improvised explosive device (IED).6 We now know that Judge Liam O’Grady presiding over the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted a motion to dismiss the case, which was filed by Department of Justice attorneys representing the Department of Defense. We now know that attorneys for the Department of Defense argued “that per a 1950 Supreme Court ruling, the military cannot be sued by current or former soldiers for injuries incurred in the armed forces, including sexual assaults” requiring an acceptance that “the alleged harms are incident to plaintiffs’ military service.”7 We now know that by ruling to dismiss the case, Judge O’Grady affirmed that rape and sexual assault are “incident to” a soldier’s military service. Consequently, we now know that by joining the United States armed forces, soldiers must forfeit their Fifth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection, their First Amendment rights to free speech, and their Seventh Amendment rights to trial by jury.

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

265

We now know that Judge G. Steven Agee of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed Judge O’Grady’s ruling to dismiss the case. Judge Agee in the Court’s published judicial opinion, wrote this as the Court’s conclusion: In the more than twenty-five years since the Supreme Court pronounced in Stanley that service members will not have an implied cause of action against the government for injuries arising out of or incident to their military service under Bivens, Congress has never created an express cause of action as a remedy for the type of claim that Plaintiffs allege here. And it is Congress, not the courts, that the Constitution has charged with that responsibility. In concluding that Plaintiffs lack a Bivens cause of action in this case, we do not downplay the severity of Plaintiffs’ allegations or otherwise imply that the conduct alleged in Plaintiffs’ Complaint is permissible or acceptable. Rather, our decision reflects the judicial deference to Congress and the Executive Branch in matters of military oversight required by the Constitution and our fidelity to the Supreme Court’s consistent refusal to create new implied causes of action in this context. Those principles, as clearly expressed in Chappell, Stanley, and Feres, counsel that judicial abstention is the proper course in this case. For all the foregoing reasons, the judgment of the district court is affirmed. AFFIRMED8

●

266

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Affirmed: We are a country awakened to danger. In the wake. Of an ugly truth. What do we become. We are listening. In a state of emergency. They are calling upon us. To willfully accompany. To willingly stand in solidarity. With them. Enter here. Into this place called terrorism.

● Affirmed: rape and sexual assault must be accepted as expected injuries out of or incident to military service. Affirmed: “The Pentagon puts the percentage of women raped in single digits, yet two Department of Veterans Affairs surveys in the past decade found 21 percent and 30 percent of women reported a rape or attempted rape.”9 Affirmed: “During congressional hearings in 1991, witnesses estimated that up to 200,000 women had been sexually assaulted by servicemen.”10 Affirmed: “According to the Department of Defense (DOD), 3,230 women and men reported assault in the last fiscal year, fiscal year 2009. But they also admit, DOD itself, that 80 percent of sexual assault survivors do not report. So if you do the math, 16,150 service members were assaulted.”11

● She would see the movies of the military and she just knew that was her. That was her. It was what she always wanted to do. Wanted to be. She would do boot camp over and over again, she said. “The discipline, the camaraderie, they taught you who I wanted to be—that’s what they taught you there,” she said.12

Affirmed: Kori Cioca was beaten and raped by her supervisor in the United States Coast Guard. Affirmed: After boot camp she was stationed in Saginaw River Coast Guard Station, Michigan. Affirmed: She was the only female in her section. Affirmed: Her supervisor would call her at three in the morning, drunk, demanding her to come pick him up from the bar. Affirmed: When she refused, he threatened her. Affirmed: She’d return from training and she would find him sleeping in her bed.

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

267

Affirmed: When she went up through the chain of command to report these incidents of injury and assault, she encountered his drinking buddies. Affirmed: They told her, just because you didn’t like somebody they weren’t going to switch her away from this guy to another station. Affirmed: He unlocked the door to her room and tried to get her to touch his erection. Affirmed: She pushed back, with her right hand against his chest, yelling for someone to hear her. Affirmed: He hit her across the left side of her face. Affirmed: She remembered holding the closet, thinking, what just happened? Affirmed: When she and the Petty Officer who saw her face went to the Command about it, they let it wait because they didn’t want any problems. Affirmed: A few weeks later, she needed to get a key from him to complete her clean up duty. Affirmed: He demanded that she come into the room to get the key. Affirmed: He grabbed her arm and he raped her. Affirmed: The doctor’s looking at the x-rays of her jaw asked her if she had been in a car accident. Affirmed: When he hit her in her face, her jaw was dislocated and the discs in her face were displaced requiring a partial bone replacement. Affirmed: The military denied her request for medical attention and support. Affirmed: She was forced to maintain a soft diet of mashed food and Jell-O for more than five years.13

● “I come from a military family,” she said. “I was taught that it’s every citizen’s duty to join the military. If you can, you should.” She joined. She wanted to start a career in the United States Air Force. She received several awards in recognition of excellence in service.14

Affirmed: Jessica Hinves was raped by a fellow service member in the U.S. Air Force.

●

268

Y. SANGARASIVAM

She was seventeen years old when she joined the United States Air Force. Her boyfriend encouraged to sign-up. So that’s what she did, she said. Her mom signed the papers and gave her permission to go.

Affirmed: Robin Lynne Lafayette was raped by a medical officer in the United States Air Force when she went in to be treated for symptoms of pneumonia.15

● She was from a really small town. She wanted to go see the world. She had a college scholarship to go play basketball. But she, instead, opted to go into the military. That’s what she chose to do, she said.

Affirmed: Trina McDonald was repeatedly raped by fellow service members and security police within the United States Navy. Affirmed: After basic training she was posted in the Naval Security Group in Adak, Alaska. Affirmed: Within two months of her arrival she was drugged and raped. Affirmed: They made it clear that if she said anything, they were going to kill her. Affirmed: The people that raped her were the military police. There was no one to whom she could report the crime of rape. Affirmed: After graduating from high school, she wanted to see the world. Affirmed: She received the highest marks and recommendations, she was a great team leader, she was a 4 O Sailor.16

● She was impressed with the Marines she met in high school. A Lieutenant Colonel used to run laps around the track after soccer practice. He told her, “you’d be perfect for the Marine Corp because you’re really fit and smart and that’s what the Marine Corp needs.” “The professionalism, the camaraderie, everything about it inspired me,” she said.17

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

269

Affirmed: Lieutenant Ariana Klay was raped by a senior officer and his friend at the prestigious Marine Barracks Washington D.C. United States Marine Corp. Affirmed: He told her that if she told anybody that he would have is friend Marv from Indiana kill her and throw her body in a ditch because that’s how they took care of things in Indiana. Affirmed: Speaking to her for the first time, a senior officer in her command told her that “female marines here are nothing but objects for the marines to fuck.” Affirmed: The Naval Academy was challenging, the education was top notch, and in her senior year she was selected to be in one of the top leadership positions by company officers before she joined the Marine Corps.18

● She comes from a long line of military lineage, she said. Somebody from both sides of the family, all the way back to the revolutionary war, had served in the armed forces. “I chose the Marine Corp because no one had ever done it,” she said.19

Affirmed: Lieutenant Elle Helmer was raped by her company commander in the United States Marine Corps while stationed at the Marine Barracks Washington D.C. Affirmed: She was ordered to drink at the 10–12-hour drinking events, which routinely took place after the performance of the ceremonial drill at the evening parades that political officials, including the president of the United States, attend. Affirmed: The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) opened and closed an investigation within three days of the rape, with no action taken. Affirmed: The base commander told her that the investigation is closed for lack of evidence and that they were opening a new investigation against her for conduct unbecoming an officer and public intoxication.20

● “I love putting on a uniform every day, getting out there and giving it my all and it’s a very proud feeling,” she said.21

270

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Affirmed: Hannah Sewell was locked in a hotel room and raped by a fellow recruit in the United Stated Navy. Affirmed: Once he was done, he rubbed his hand all over her body and told her he owned all of this, she said. Affirmed: The Navy said they lost the rape kit, the nurse examiner’s report, and the pictures of the bruises on her arm she sustained during the rape. Affirmed: She launched her own investigation and called the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) headquarters in Washington D.C. and discovered that all the evidence was there. Affirmed: They said the case was closed. Affirmed: They said nothing could be done.22

● Affirmed: Tia Christopher was raped by fellow service members in the United States Navy. Affirmed: When she tried to report the rape to the Lieutenant Commander, he said, “Do you think this is funny? Is this all a joke to you?” She asked, “What do you mean?” He said, “You’re the third girl to report rape this week. Are you all in cahoots? Do you think this is a game?”23 Affirmed: After she reported the rape, “over the remaining six months of her career she was isolated, humiliated by her command (for example, a senior petty officer asked her to ‘lift up [her] shirt and show [her] big titties’), and ordered not to talk about the case. She described what happened after the assault as so much worse than the rape itself. That summer, Christopher attempted suicide and her command decided to process her out of service. … Although she had no history of mental health problems prior to service, Christopher received an honorable discharge with a narrative reason of personality disorder. Her command told her she was not a veteran and would not receive benefits.”24

● Affirmed: Rebecca Catagnus was raped by fellow service members in the United States Marine Corps. Affirmed: She was told that she could choose to report the rape but if they found that what she was saying was not truthful then she would be reduced in rank.25

●

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

271

Affirmed: Christina Jones was raped by fellow service members in the United States Army. Affirmed: Even with a rape kit and with the testimony of her friend catching him raping her, they said they still didn’t believe her.26

● Affirmed: Tandy Fink was raped by fellow service members in the United States Army. Affirmed: She reported it two different times to her squad leader and he told her there was nothing he could do about it because he didn’t have any proof of rape.27

● Affirmed: Andrea Werner was raped by fellow service members in the United States Army. Affirmed: They charge her with adultery after she was raped because he was married and she was not.28

● He joined the Air Force in 1972. He thought the military was a great way of life. He got to see the world, he got educated, he loved the military, he said.

Affirmed: Michael Matthews was raped by fellow service members in the United States Air Force. Affirmed: He was nineteen. Affirmed: He went to the chow hall. Affirmed: He was struck from behind, pushed to the ground by two guys, and they pulled his pants down and raped him. Affirmed: They told him to shut up or they’d kill him. Affirmed: It destroyed his life, he said.29

●

272

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Affirmed: Jeremiah Arbogast was raped by fellow service members in the United States Marine Corps. Affirmed: “You would get labeled as a buddy-fucker, so you don’t talk about being raped or bring it to anyone’s attention, you just keep it to yourself,” he said.30

● Affirmed: Amando Javier was raped by fellow service members in the United States Marine Corps. Affirmed: “It’s really, really, hard to forget,” he said. Affirmed: “They live in my head,” he said. Affirmed: “I can hear them laugh,” he said. Affirmed: “I can see their faces,” he said. Affirmed: “I can see what they’re doing to me,” he said.31

● Affirmed: Brian Lewis was raped by fellow service members in the United States Navy. Affirmed: “I felt scared,” he said. Affirmed: “And I was scared to tell my friends, the people that really knew me, the truth about what had happened,” he said.32

● Affirmed: On May 19, 2016 Human Rights Watch submitted a report on the “Lack of Recourse for Wrongfully Discharged US Military Rape Survivors” with recommendations for redress to the Secretary of Defense, United States Congress, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Based on research conducted between October 2013 and February 2016, the report compiled ethnographic data from written testimonies, interviews, public records, and supporting documents provided by sexual assault survivors from all branches of the United States Armed forces. Affirmed: Amy Quinn testified before the Judicial Proceedings Panel on Sexual Assault in the Military, May 19, 2015. She is one of over 270 service members whose testimonies are recorded in a Human Rights Watch report on “the impact of ‘bad discharges’ on military personnel who were separated from the military after reporting a sexual assault.”33

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

273

Affirmed: Amy Quinn’s experience of sexual assault was documented by Sara Darehshori in the May, 19, 2016 Human Rights Watch Report. She writes: Amy Quinn joined the Navy in 2002 when she was age 19 out of a sense of duty following the 9/11 attacks on the United States. She initially thrived, performing well and receiving awards. Her trouble started after she rejected the advances of her master chief. After that, others told her he was looking for her to make a mistake so he could kick her out of “his” Navy. When a Navy technician later raped her, she did not report for fear of what would happen since she was already labeled a troublemaker. Later, on deployment, when she fell asleep in a chair due to medications she was taking, her shipmates sprayed her body with aircraft cleaner and set her on fire with a lighter. Her fire-retardant clothing protected her from physical injury, but the perpetrators were only given an oral reprimand and, when she complained to a supervisor, she was told she was overreacting. After being transferred to a different unit, she was verbally harassed and her breast was groped by a first class petty officer. After her request for a transfer was refused, she was ordered to work the night shift with the same officer. When she refused, she was ordered by her superior to spend six to eight hours standing at attention each day. A few days later, she was discharged for having a “Personality Disorder,” the first she had heard of it. She was told this discharge was a favor, the only way to get what she wanted—to be away from the ship—and that it would not have any ramification. Later, potential employers rejected her for jobs in security and law enforcement because, even though her discharge was honorable, they could not hire someone whose papers said “Personality Disorder.” 34 Affirmed: Sara Darehshori further documents that: The US government has an obligation under international human rights law to protect the rights of sexual assault survivors in the military, including those who have been wrongfully discharged from the services. As a party to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the United States committed to ensure that those who report torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment “are protected against all ill-treatment or intimidation as a consequence of his complaint or any evidence given.

274

Y. SANGARASIVAM

In 2014, the United Nations Committee against Torture, the expert body charged with monitoring compliance with the convention, reminded the US government of its obligation to ensure those protections for complainants reporting military sexual assault .35

● Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done. —President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress and the Nation, September 20, 2001.36

II Justice Will Be Done ● You may or may not know about the Pentagon developing a strategy called the Human Terrain System (HTS). It is part of the Pentagon’s counterinsurgency strategy that dovetailed with the United States attempts at nation-building after the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.37 The Human Terrain System is a $600 million-dollar project that created an ethnographic database by a network of social scientists recruited and embedded within the United States Armed Forces. They were tasked with the work of gathering information about local Afghan and Iraqi tribal cultures, economic and political structures, and social vulnerabilities in order to wage a hearts and minds campaign as well as provide crucial information for commanders to decipher the realities on the ground.38 Researchers at Brown University’s Watson Institute started studying the role of cultural awareness in the military. Keith Brown, a professor of international studies at the Watson Institute, said they were “interested in how the military was thinking about culture and especially [how] they seem to be operationalizing culture.” Operationalize culture: Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic; watch this documentary film directed by researchers at the Watson Institute;

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

275

witness U.S. soldiers gathering Iraqi children and passing out soccer balls for them to play with; listen as a U.S. soldier tells Iraqi children, “Each one of these balls has a fallen soldier’s name on it, that has came to Iraq trying to help kids just like you.”39 Operationalize: “Culture was becoming the killer variable with a military that was being tasked to have war among the people,” said James Der Derian, a Professor of International Studies at the Watson Institute.40 ● Maiwand District, Afghanistan. On a clear day in the autumn of 2008, an anthropologist named Paula Loyd and two of her Human Terrain System teammates walked with a group of soldiers to a village just outside the U.S. military base. Karl, a 64-year-old psychologist and conflict resolution specialist from Texas, and “Banger,” a Human Terrain team member, met Paula and her teammates to discuss their mission for the day. They were to photograph and map the settlements in this district.41 Paula was a 36-year-old anthropologist from Texas. She is described as having a “winning personality and pedigreed education” that could have taken her on a safe path to success in numerous career choices.42 She earned her undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology from Wellesley and proceeded to earn a master’s degree in conflict resolution and diplomacy at Georgetown University. She had years of experience as a United Nations aid worker and a civil affairs team member for the United States Army. She chose to become a contracted researcher for the Pentagon and joined the Human Terrain System project to “help commanders understand the tribal forces they were trying to pacify.”43 In documenting the story of Paula Loyd, Vanessa Gezari describes the work of anthropologists and other social scientists recruited to the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Systems project. She writes, Cultural understanding was a tool that could be used for saving or for killing, like the knife that cuts one way in the hands of a surgeon and another in the grip of a murderer. … It was important for soldiers to understand Afghan culture so they wouldn’t needlessly offend people. But for a force with a mission to strengthen local government and kill and capture terrorists in a place with no working justice mechanisms, it was crucial, too, that Americans make informed decisions about who to protect, which lives to ruin, and which lives to take.44

276

Y. SANGARASIVAM

On November 4, 2008, Paula walked through the narrow lanes of the village of Chehel Gazi, talking with local people. It was a historic election day back home. President Barack Obama was elected as the first African-American man to lead the United States as the president and Commander-in-Chief of the country. In a campaign speech leading up to the election, Mr. Obama said, … as President, I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win. … We need a stronger and sustained partnership between Afghanistan, Pakistan and NATO to secure the border, to take out terrorist camps, and to crack down on cross-border insurgents . We need more troops, more helicopters, more satellites, more Predator drones in the Afghan border region.45

In October 2009, President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded President Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”46 On that historic election day, Paula walked with her fellow soldiers into a market bazaar to interview local villagers. She engaged in a conversation with a man about the price of the jug of gasoline he was holding. Within minutes of this conversation the man doused her with that jug of gasoline he was holding and set her on fire. Human Terrain teammates and soldiers rushed to put out the flames by placing her charred body in a nearby stream. One of Paula’s teammates and close friend, Don Ayala, a 46-year-old former Army Ranger, caught her attacker. When he learned that this man had set Paula on fire, Ayala told the Afghan translator to tell the man that he was “the fucking devil” and shot him in the head.47 Don Ayala was charged with murder. “Prosecutors said he acted as an executioner and deserved a lengthy prison term.” US District Senior Judge Claude Hilton decided probation was an appropriate ruling on the case. Ayala pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was “sentenced to five years of probation and a $12,500 fine.”48 Paula was flown to a hospital in her hometown of San Antonio, where she died in January 2009. She was the third Human Terrain social scientist killed in the field within eight months. ●

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

277

This is a war that we have to win. …. We need more troops, more helicopters, more satellites, more Predator drones in the Afghan border region. —President Barack Obama49

III This Is a War that We Have to Win ● We are in the wake. Of an ugly truth. What do we become. In the wake. Of patriotism’s soldiers sexually assaulting their own comrades. In the wake. Of a nation’s Personality Disorder. In the wake. Of the Human Terrain System. In the wake. Of human beings on fire. In the wake. Of life-weapons. In the wake. Of “all the fucks and goddamns and Jesus Christs of the wounded.”50 In the wake. Of nationalism’s suicide and sacrifice. In the wake. Of humanitarian missions of massacre. In the wake. Of national security’s global wars. In the wake. Of colonial occupation. In the wake. Of asymmetric victory. Enter here. Into this place. We call. Terrorism.

●

278

Y. SANGARASIVAM

WAR TO WIN

LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION UNDER LIFE OCCUPATION UNDER LIFE LIFE ●

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

279

Life under occupation is a condition of liberal democracies that continue to be defined by the legacies of white supremacy and colonial rule. She was eight years old at the time of the 1958 Revolution and the liberation of her country from British occupation. From 1917 to 1958, Iraq was seized by the power of white supremacy to invade and occupy the place she called home. Baghdad. Iraq.51 Life under forced migration and exile. Into the heart of colonial metropolis. London. From this place. She writes. Herstory. “The USUK catastrophic adventure has been shrouded by the old colonial phrase ‘liberators not conquerors,’ and by the new imperial lie of ‘establishing democracy.’”.52 Occupation, Haifa Zangana reminds us, calls us to recognize armed resistance as a right under international law. “It is a response to arbitrary break-ins, humiliating searches, arrests, detention, and torture.”53 She joined the Palestinian struggle in the wake of the 1967 War. Like many Iraqi men and women, she could not be a bystander to the injustice and violence of colonial invasion and occupation that destroyed Palestinian sovereignty, Palestinian families, and displaced them from their homes and ancestral lands. As a trained pharmacist she participated in the Palestinian Red Crescent to serve Palestinian families who were displaced from their homes and living in refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon. In solidarity with people across the world, she became an activist and writer. In the struggle for Arab unity, the liberation of Palestine, the end of foreign domination, and women’s liberation from the tyranny of patriarchal order, Haifa Zangana joined a lineage of Arab feminist writers, poets, scholars, doctors, and human rights lawyers, such as: Nawal El Saadawi (1931–2021); Nazik al-Mala’ika (1923–2007) and her mother Um Nizar (1908–1953); Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863–1936); Q¯asim Am¯ın, (1863–1908); Huda Sha’arawi (1879–1947).54 Under life occupation, Sister Zangana reminds us: they have no need for white feminists to educate or rescue them; they have no need for white liberal democracies to show them the way. During the Algerian Resistance, she joined thousands of women in protesting the incarceration of a fellow female comrade who had been detained and tortured by the French colonial regime. She joined fellow Iraqi women in their yearly celebrations of International Women’s Day on March 8th and International Workers’ Day on May 1. She joined the armed struggle against Saddam Hussein’s

280

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Ba’ath Regime. She was detained, imprisoned, and tortured. After her release from Abu Ghraib prison she left Iraq in 1974 to live in exile.55 Under life there is resistance. To colonial occupation. There are dreams. Of going back home. Returning from exile. Rebuilding a country from the chaos and destruction left in the wake of imperial wars. After the invasion of white nation-states. There is. Life. After redaction. There is. Willful resistance. Sister Zangana tells us: What the occupiers have failed to see is that Iraqis who have committed acts of resistance are not terrorists. We are a people willing to risk our lives defending our homes, families, ways of life, history, culture, identity, and resources. We do not hate Americans, though we do loathe their government’s greed and brutality, and are willing to defend ourselves against it. We simply believe that Iraq belongs to Iraqis.56

●

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

281

Life Under Occupation (an Erasure)57 They sent the most powerful army equipped soldiers kick in the doors and enter the house

with the latest high-tech weapons, and zip-tie the men of military age and shush the women

whether in the initial phase of “Shock and Awe” and the frightened little children and drink

or at later stages, using cluster bombs, phosphorus, the spooned sugar stirred into the hot chai and

a new generation of napalm called AK77, remove their stinking boots and

depleted uranium, and other unconventional weapons. take off their flak vests and

in Baghdad alone, stack their weapons and turn off their night-vision goggles and

there are an estimated eight hundred hazardous sites, say to the frightened little children, softly, with

the majority related to cluster bombs58 their palms held out in the most tender of gestures

thousands of mothers just like my mother continue to queue for weeks

282

Y. SANGARASIVAM

they can offer, their eyes as brown as the hills

on end at the gates of prisons, detention centers, and military camps that lead to the mountains, or as blue as the rivers

in “liberated Iraq,” that lead to the sea

waiting for any news about their loved ones59 “All is well, little ones, all is well.” 60

●

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

Life Under Life under occupation is bleak. we are shelled on close to a daily basis.

A dismantled state, a powerless government confined the enemy is bracketing our position

to the fortified Green Zone, corruption, the absence of law basically, an Iraqi mortar crew is day by day

and order—the resulting chaos makes and round by round, discovering the proper distance,

the notion of citizenship here impossible61 elevation, deflection and explosive charge necessary to

Remember, armed resistance against occupation is a right fire rounds directly into our camp

under international law62 if they adjust correctly, there’s a good chance

What happened in Haditha has been described as the Iraqi My Lai mortar rounds will explode inside the wire tomorrow

and the details of the slaying of civilians contradicted it’s a matter of ballistics,

those from the US military statement

283

284

Y. SANGARASIVAM

range, velocity and patience.

Eyewitnesses said they were forced into a wardrobe and shot. It’s a matter of great patience.63

Outside on the street, US troops are said to have the rounds land nearly simultaneously

gunned down four students with an overwhelming, godlike finality,

and a taxi driver they had stopped at the soft architecture of the brain registering

a roadblock set up each concussion as a type of conversation 64

after the bombing.65 ●

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

285

Occupation Affirmed: According to an Iraqi member of Parliament, there were 1,053 cases of documented rape cases by the occupying troops and Iraqi forces from 2003 until early 2007.66

● Under Life Occupation Affirmed: While the drivers used our vehicles to dominate the roadway, those of us standing in the rear hatches warned off civilians by other means. When a car began to approach us as if it meant to pass, I’d raise my M4 up in the air, the barrel toward Mars. If the car continued, I’d step up onto the troop seat below to make myself as visible as possible to the driver, before lowering the barrel of my weapon and training it on the car. We’d use multiple hand gestures to warn the driver to slow down. But if they kept coming, I’d fire. I’d lean into the weapon and fire two shots into the radiator. The car would then slow and pull over to the shoulder of the road, or decelerate rapidly, then disappear as we drove on. I stopped counting the cars we shot at each day. I got tired of counting.68

●

286

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Under Life In the fifth year of occupation, soldiers kick in the doors and enter the house the sectarian and ethnic divide and zip-tie the men of military age and shush the women

between politicians, parties, and their warring militias

and the frightened little children and drink

has become monstrous, turning on its creators

the spooned sugar stirred into the hot chai and in the Green Zone and beyond, remove their stinking boots and and not sparing civilians take off their flak vests and

black-cloaked women are seen queuing at prisons

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

stack their weapons and turn off their night-vision goggles

government office or morgues in search of

say to the frightened little children, softly, with disappeared or detained male relatives

All is well, little ones, all is well.

women who have come to bury the dead.

●

71

70

69

287

288

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Life

soldiers kick in the doors and enter the house the sectarian and ethnic divide and zip-tie the men of military age and shush the women

between politicians, parties, and their warring militias

and the frightened little children and drink

has become monstrous, turning on its creators

the spooned sugar stirred into the hot chai and

in the Green Zone and beyond,

remove their stinking boots and and not sparing civilians

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

289

take off their flak vests and

black-cloaked women are seen queuing at prisons stack their weapons and turn off their night-vision goggles

government office or morgues in search of say to the frightened little children, softly, with disappeared or detained male relatives All is well, little ones, all is well.i women who have come to

●

290

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Notes 1. Washington Post, “Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation,” September 20, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/att acked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html?noredirect=on. 2. Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, “Department of Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military Fiscal Year 2018,” April 9, 2019, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenth elper/800-dod-annual-report-on-sexual-as/d659d6d0126ad2b19c18/ optimized/full.pdf#page=1. 3. The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/; See also the three-part series on how the military handles sexual assault and domestic violence cases: Amy Herdy and Miles Moffeit, “Betrayal in the Ranks,” The Denver Post, November 16–18, 2003, http://extras.denverpost.com/justice/tdp_betrayal.pdf. 4. Democracy Now! “Pentagon Study Finds 26,000 Military Sexual Assaults Last Year, Over 70 Sex Crimes Per Day,” May 8, 2013, https://www. democracynow.org/2013/5/8/pentagon_study_finds_26_000_military. 5. For further details on military’s use of “Personality Disorders” to dismiss and obfuscate reports of rape and sexual assault, see: Human Rights Watch, “Booted: Lack of Recourse for Wrongfully Discharged Rape Survivors,” May 19, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/05/19/ booted/lack-recourse-wrongfully-discharged-us-military-rape-survivors# 8e1a53. 6. Hannah Brenner, Kathleen Darcy, and Sheryl Kubiak, “Sexual Violence as an Occupational Hazard and Condition of Confinement in the Closed Institutional Systems of the Military and Detention,” Pepperdine Law Review 44, no. 881 (2017): 882–956. Jesse Ellison, “Judge Dismisses ‘Epidemic’ of Rape in Military Culture,” The Daily Beast, December 13, 2011, https://www.thedailybeast.com/judge-dismisses-epidemic-of-rapein-military-case. 7. Jesse Ellison, “Judge Dismisses ‘Epidemic’ of Rape in Military Culture,” The Daily Beast. 8. Quoted from the published judicial opinion of Judge G. Steven Agee and joined by Judges Niemeyer and Thacker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit: Kori Cioca, et al. v Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, 720 F.3d 505 (4th Cir., 2013), http://www.ca4.uscourts. gov/Opinions/Published/121065.P.pdf. 9. Amy Herdy and Miles Moffeit, “Betrayal in the Ranks,” The Denver Post, November 16–18, 2003, http://extras.denverpost.com/justice/tdp_bet rayal.pdf. 10. Ibid.

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

291

11. Captain Anuradha Bhagwati (Ret.), Director, Service Women’s Action network, US Marine Corps stated this statistic in the documentary, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. 12. Kori Cioca quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. 13. Ibid. 14. Jessica Hinves quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. 15. Robin Lynne Lafayette quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/ films/invisible-war/. 16. Trina McDonald quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. 17. Lieutenant Ariana Klay quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/ films/invisible-war/. 18. Ibid. 19. Lieutenant Elle Helmer quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/ films/invisible-war/. 20. Ibid. 21. Hannah Sewell quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. 22. Ibid. 23. Tia Christopher quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. 24. Human Rights Watch interview with Tia Christopher, New York, February 21, 2014: Sara Darehshori, “Booted: Lack of Recourse for

292

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

Y. SANGARASIVAM

Wrongfully Discharged US Military Rape Survivors,” Human Rights Watch, May 19, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/05/19/boo ted/lack-recourse-wrongfully-discharged-us-military-rape-survivors#_ftn1. Rebecca Catagnus quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. Christina Jones quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. Tandy Fink quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. Andrea Werner quoted from her testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. Michael Matthews quoted from his testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. Jeremiah Arbogast quoted from his testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. Amando Javier quoted from his testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. Brian Lewis quoted from his testimony in the documentary film, The Invisible War, Documentary Film by Kirby Dick (May 13, 2013; PBS, Independent Lens), http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/ invisible-war/. Amy Quinn’s testimony documented in: Sara Darehshori, “Booted: Lack of Recourse for Wrongfully Discharged US Military Rape Survivors,” Human Rights Watch, May 19, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/report/ 2016/05/19/booted/lack-recourse-wrongfully-discharged-us-militaryrape-survivors#_ftn1. Ibid. Ibid.

7

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

293

36. Washington Post, “Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation,” September 20, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/att acked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html?noredirect=on. 37. James Dao, “To Reach Out, Befriend, and Kill When Necessary: An Ever Trickier Terrain,” New York Times, August 27, 2013, https://www.nyt imes.com/2013/08/28/books/the-tender-soldier-examines-the-us-cou nterinsurgency-strategy.html. 38. Ibid.; For further discussions and analyses on the role of social scientists in military intelligence gathering, and the role of anthropologists in particular, see: David Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); David Price, “Buying a Piece of Anthropology Part 1: Human Ecology and Unwitting Anthropological Research for the CIA,” Anthropology Today 23, no. 3 (June 2007): 8–13; David Price, “Interlopers and Invited Guests: On Anthropology’s Witting and Unwitting Links to Intelligence Agencies,” Anthropology Today 18, no. 6 (December 2002): 16–21; Brian Foster, “‘I Love Working for Uncle Sam, Lets Me Know Just Who I am’: Culture, the Human Terrain System, and the Inquiry of World War I,” Canadian Review of American Studies 44, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 345–364; Maximilian C. Forte, “The Human Terrain System and Anthropology: A Review of Ongoing Public Debates,” American Anthropologist 113, no. 1 (March 2011): 149–153. 39. Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic, directed by James Der Derian, Michael Udris, David Udris (2010; Reading, PA: Bullfrog Films), https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B079RLGC62/ref= msx_wn_pv?autoplay=1. 40. Ibid. 41. The story of Paula Loyd represented here is gathered from: Vanessa M. Gezari, A Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). 42. Pamela Constable, “A Terrain’s Tragic Shift,” Washington Post, February 18, 2009, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2009/02/17/AR2009021703382.html. 43. James Dao, “To Reach Out, Befriend and Kill When Necessary: An Ever Trickier Terrain,” New York Times, August 27, 2013, https://www.nyt imes.com/2013/08/28/books/the-tender-soldier-examines-the-us-cou nterinsurgency-strategy.html. 44. Vanessa M. Gezari, A Tender Soldier, 3. 45. “Text: Obama’s Remarks on Iraq and Afghanistan,” New York Times, July 15, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/us/politics/15textobama.html.

294

Y. SANGARASIVAM

46. “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009,” NobelPrize.org, last modified April 13, 2021, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2009/pressrelease/. 47. Vanessa M. Gezari, A Tender Soldier, 5–23. 48. Associated Press, “Former US contractor in Afghanistan Given Probation, Fine for Killing Prisoner,” Boston.com, last modified May 9, 2009, http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2009/05/09/ former_us_contractor_in_afghanistan_given_probation_fine_for_killing_p risoner/. 49. “Text: Obama’s Remarks on Iraq and Afghanistan,” New York Times, July 15, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/us/politics/15textobama.html. 50. Excerpt from: Brian Turner, “The Hurt Locker,” in Here, Bullet, 11. 51. Haifa Zangana, City of Widows, 14. 52. Ibid., 9. 53. Ibid., 20. 54. Nawal El Saadawi, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, trans. Marilyn Booth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Noga Efrati, “The ‘Effendiyya’: Where Have All the Women Gone?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 2 (May 2011): 375–377; Sadok Masliyah, “Zahawi: A Muslim Pioneer of Women’s Liberation,” Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 3 (July 1996): 161–171; Q¯asim Am¯ın, The Liberation of Women: And, the New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000); Mohja Kahf, “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 53–82. 55. Haifa Zangana, City of Widows, 14–16. 56. Ibid., 149. 57. In the following three erasure poems, the text in the left column are passages excerpted from: Haifa Zangana, City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007). The text in the right column are passages excerpted from: Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). I have imposed the redactions and erasures in structuring/creating these poems from their words. 58. Haifa Zangana, City of Widows, 20. 59. Ibid., 58. 60. Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country, 72–73. 61. Haifa Zangana, City of Widows, 107. 62. Ibid., 20. 63. Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country, 14. 64. Ibid., 15.

7

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM: LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

Haifa Zangana, City of Widows, 112. Ibid., 21. Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country, 131. Ibid., 72–73. Haifa Zangana, City of Widows, 19. Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country, 72–73. Haifa Zangana, City of Widows, 19.

295

Bibliography

Abi-Habib, Maria. “How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port.” New York Times, June 25, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/ world/asia/china-sri-lanka-port.html. Abufarha, Nasser. The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Acemoglu, Daron, James A. Robinson, and Rafael J. Santos. “The Monopoly of Violence: Evidence from Colombia.” Journal of the European Economic Association 11, no. S1 (January 2013): 5–44. Acharya, Amitav. Rethinking Power, Institutions and Ideas in World Politics: Whose IR? London: Routledge, 2014. Adams, Guy. “Troubling Questions That May Never Be Answered.” The Daily Mail, October 31, 2015. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article3296382/Last-British-prisoner-Guantanamo-Bay-Shaker-Aamer-released-13years.html. Ahmad, Eqbal. Terrorism: Theirs & Ours. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Alexander, M. Jacqui. “Groundings on Rasanblaj with M. Jacqui Alexander.” e-misférica 12, no. 1 and 2 (2015), Hemispheric Institute. Edited by Gina Athena Ulysse. Accessed September 12, 2020. https://hemisphericinstitute. org/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj.html. Allawi, Ali A. The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Alonso, Ana Maria. “The Politics of Space, Time and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism, and Ethnicity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 379– 405.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 Y. Sangarasivam, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82665-9

297

298

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aljazeera. “Sri Lanka Revives Port Deal with India, Japan Amid China Concerns: The Deep-Sea Jetty Is Located Next to the Colombo International Container Terminal, Which Is 85 Percent Owned by China.” January 14, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/14/sri-lanka-revives-portdeal-with-india-japan-amid-china-concerns. Alvarez, Lizette, and Cara Buckley. “Zimmerman Is Acquitted in Trayvon Martin Killing.” New York Times, July 13, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/ 07/14/us/george-zimmerman-verdict-trayvon-martin.html. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “Guantánamo by the Numbers.” Accessed January 21, 2021. https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/ detention/guantanamo-numbers. ———. “Slahi V. Obama—Habeas Challenge to Guantánamo Detention.” Accessed January 21, 2021. https://www.aclu.org/cases/slahi-v-obama-hab eas-challenge-guantanamo-detention. ———. “Targeted Killing.” Accessed October 2, 2020. https://www.aclu.org/ issues/national-security/targeted-killing. Am¯ın, Q¯asim. The Liberation of Women: And, the New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000. Amnesty International. “Edited version of the Sermon Given by the Reverend Lieutenant Colonel N J Mercer at the Amnesty International Service Held on Thursday 17 October 2013 at Salisbury Cathedral.” Accessed January 27, 2021. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/groups/salisbury/sermon-nicholasmercer. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, [1983] 1991. Andersson, Rani-Henrik. The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Ankel, Sophia. “Some Capitol Rioters Could Go Free to Stop Local Courthouses Being Swamped, Report Says.” Business Insider MSN News, January 24, 2021. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/some-capitol-rioterscould-go-free-to-stop-local-courthouses-being-swamped-report-says/ar-BB1 d3eyb. Ansari, Kurosh, and Bryan Walsh. “New Missions and Stronger Partnerships: How U.S. Excess Defense Articles Help Promote a Free and Open IndoPacific Region.” U.S. Department of State (Bureau of Political-Military Affairs), May 8, 2020. https://2017-2021.state.gov/new-missions-and-str onger-partnerships-how-u-s-excess-defense-articles-help-promote-a-free-andopen-indo-pacific-region/index.html. Anuzsiya, S. “Standardization in the University Admissions and Ethnic Crisis in Sri Lanka.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 57 (1996): 779–807.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

299

AP Archive. “DVS Saddam Video Raw.” Published on July 31, 2015. YouTube video, 01:18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNvMjADToFE. Army National Guard. “Earth Shakers and Air Defenders.” Accessed January 30, 2021. https://www.nationalguard.com/careers/heavy-weapons. Arya Neil, and Sheila Zurbrigg. “Impact of Sanction and Prospective War on the People of Iraq.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 94, no. 1 (January/February 2003): 9–12. Asad, Talal. Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press, 1973. Associated Press. “Former US contractor in Afghanistan Given Probation, Fine for Killing Prisoner.” Boston.com. Accessed May 9, 2009. http://archive. boston.com/news/nation/articles/2009/05/09/former_us_contractor_in_a fghanistan_given_probation_fine_for_killing_prisoner/. Baker, Yousef K. “Killing ‘Hajis’ in ‘Indian Country’: Neoliberal Crisis, the Iraq War and the Affective Wages of Anti-Muslim Racism.” Arab Studies Quarterly, 42, no. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2020): 46–65. Balakrishnan, Gopal, ed. Mapping the Nation. London: Verso, 1996. Balasingham, Adele. The Will to Freedom: An Inside View of Tamil Resistance. Mitcham: Fairmax Publishing, 2001. ———. Women Fighters of Liberation Tigers. Jaffna: LTTE Publications, 1993. Barry, Dan, Mike McIntire, and Matthew Rosenberg. “‘Our President Wants Us Here’: The Mob That Stormed the Capitol.” New York Times, January 9, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/capitol-rioters.html. Barth, Aaron L. “Imagining a Battlefield at a Civil War Mistake: The Public History of Whitestone Hill, 1863 to 2013.” The Public Historian 35, no. 3 (2013): 72–97. BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). “Paris Attacks: Holland Blames Islamic State for ‘Act of War’.” Accessed November 14, 2015. https://www.bbc. com/news/world-europe-34820016. ———. “Shaker Aamer: ‘No Plans to Sue’ over Guantanamo.” Accessed December 14, 2015. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35089908. Beck, Guy L. Sonic liturgy: Ritual and Music in Hindu Tradition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bennis, Phyllis. “‘And They Called It Peace”: US Policy on Iraq.” Middle East Report, no. 215 (Summer 2000): 4–7. Blake, Joseph A. “Death by Hand Grenade: Altruistic Suicide in Combat.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 8, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 46–59. Bloom, Mia. Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

300

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bose, Sumantra. States, Nations, Sovereignty: Sri Lanka, India, and the Tamil Eelam Movement. New Delhi: Sage, 1994. Boxill, Bernard. “Kantian Racism and Kantian Teleology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, 44–53. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Brave Bull Allard, LaDonna. “Why the Founder of Standing Rock Sioux Camp Can’t Forget the Whitestone Massacre.” Yes! Magazine, September 3, 2016. https://www.yesmagazine.org/democracy/2016/09/03/why-the-fou nder-of-standing-rock-sioux-camp-cant-forget-the-whitestone-massacre/. Brecher, Bob, and Mark Devenney, eds. Discourses and Practices of Terrorism: Interrogating Terror. New York, Routledge, 2015. Brenner, Hannah, Kathleen Darcy, and Sheryl Kubiak. “Sexual Violence as an Occupational Hazard and Condition of Confinement in the Closed Institutional Systems of the Military and Detention.” Pepperdine Law Review 44, no. 881 (2017): 882–956. Brittain, Victoria. “Besieged in Britain.” Race & Class, 50, no. 3 (2008): 1–29. Brown, Alyssa, and Frank Newport. “In U.S., 65% Support Drone Attacks on Terrorists Abroad.” March 25, 2013. https://news.gallup.com/poll/161 474/support-drone-attacks-terrorists-abroad.aspx. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Brown University. “Costs of War.” Watson Institute International & Public Affairs. Accessed November 2018. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ costs/human/civilians/iraqi. Brückmann, Rebecca. “‘Work…Done Mostly by Men’: Cornelia Dabney Tucker and Female Grassroots Activism in Massive Resistance in South Carolina, 1950–1963.” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 117, no. 2 (April 2016): 96–120. Bruya, Brian. “Ethnocentrism and Multiculturalism in Contemporary Philosophy.” Philosophy East and West 67, no. 4 (October 2017): 991–1018. Brynen, Rex, and Paul Noble. “The Gulf Conflict and the Arab State System: A New Regional Order?” Arab Studies Quarterly 13, no. 1/2 (Winter/Spring 1991): 117–140. Burke, Jason. “St-Denis Female Suicide Bomber Is Not the First, and Will Not Be the Last.” The Guardian, November 18, 2015. http://www.theguardian. com/world/2015/nov/18/st-denis-female-suicide-bomber-is-not-the-firstand-will-not-be-the-last. Burns, John F. “A Corner of Sri Lankan Tires of Living Under Siege.” The New York Times, October 16, 1994. Bush, George W. “President Urges Readiness and Patience.” Office of the Press Secretary, September 15, 2001. Accessed February 18,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

301

2021. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/ 09/text/20010915-4.html. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013. Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Butler, Paul. Chokehold: Policing Black Men. New York: New Press, 2017. Caldararo, Niccolo. “Suicide Bombers, Terror, History, and Religion.” Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 1 (2006): 123–131. Callahan, Kathe, Melvin J. Dubnick, and Dorothy Olshfski, “Framing Our Understanding of the War on Terror,” Public Administration Review 66, no. 4 (July–August, 2006): 554–568. Calhoun, Craig. “Nationalism and Ethnicity.” Annual Review of Sociology 19 (1993): 211–239. Calvert, John. Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism. London: C. Hurst & Company, [2010] 2018. Campbell, David C. “The Pick-Sloan Program: A Case of Bureaucratic Economic Power.” Journal of Economic Issues 18, no. 2 (June 1984): 449-–456. Campbell, Duncan, and Richard Norton-Taylor. “US Accused of Holding Terror Suspects on Prison Ships.” The Guardian. June 1, 2008. https://www.thegua rdian.com/world/2008/jun/02/usa.humanrights. Caprioli Mary, and Peter F. Trumbore. “Rhetoric Versus Reality: Rogue States in Interstate Conflict.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 5 (October 2005): 770–791. Carrera, Sergio, Elspeth Guild, João Soares Da Silva, and Anja Wiesbrock. “The Results of Inquiries Into the CIA’s Programme of Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Prisons in European States in Light of the New Legal Framework Following the Lisbon Treaty.” Directorate General For Internal Policies, Policy Department C: Citizen’s Rights And Constitutional Affairs, Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, European Parliament, 2012. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/0e0 7596a-9e90-11e5-8781-01aa75ed71a1. Casey, Michael S. The History of Kuwait. London: Greenwood Press, 2007. Cassel, Elaine. The War on Civil Liberties: How Bush and Ashcroft Have Dismantled the Bill of Rights. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2004. Casteel, Joshua. Letters from Abu Ghraib. Edited by Joseph Clair and Kristi Casteel. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2017. Center for Constitutional Rights. “FAQs: What Is Habeas Corpus.” Accessed September 13, 2020. https://ccrjustice.org/home/get-involved/tools-resour ces/fact-sheets-and-faqs/faqs-what-habeas-corpus. Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

302

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chabot, Sean, and Majid Sharifi. “The Violence of Nonviolence: Problematizing Nonviolent Resistance in Iran and Egypt.” Societies Without Borders 8, no. 2 (2013): 205–232. Chakrabarti, Arindam, and Ralph Weber, eds. Comparative Philosophy without Borders. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Chamayou, Grégoire. A Theory of the Drone. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press, [2013] 2015. Chambliss, William J., Raymond Michalowski, and Ronald C. Kramer, eds. State Crime in the Global Age. Portland, Oregon: Willan Publishing, 2010. Chang, Nancy. Silencing Political Dissent. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002. Channel 4 Television Corporation. “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields.” 2021. https:// www.channel4.com/programmes/sri-lankas-killing-fields/on-demand/519 49-001. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed Books, 1986. ———. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. ———. “Whose Imagined Community?” In Mapping the Nation, edited by Gopal Balakrishnan, 214–225. London: Verso, 1996. Chin, Elizabeth. “Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology: Suits of Inquiry.” e-misférica 12, no. 1 and 2 (2015), Hemispheric Institute. Edited by Gina Athena Ulysse. https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-121-caribb ean-rasanblaj/12-1-dossier/e-121-dossier-chin-laboratory-of-speculative-eth nology.html. Chomsky, Noam. Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000. ———. “Wars of Terror.” New Political Science 25, no. 1 (2003): 113–127. Chow, Rey. “When Whiteness Feminizes…: Some Consequences of a Supplementary Logic.” In The Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bowman, 76–81. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. ———. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking About Capture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. ———. “Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood (A Speculative Essay).” In Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 2, edited by Henry Sussman, Chapter 6. University of Michigan: Open Humanities Press, 2012. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/10803281.000 1.001. Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 1–26. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. ________. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

303

CNN. “Gulf War Fast Facts.” Accessed July 29, 2020. http://www.cnn.com/ 2013/09/15/world/meast/gulf-war-fast-facts/. ———. “Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn Fast Facts.” Accessed March 6, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/ meast/operation-iraqi-freedom-and-operation-new-dawn-fast-facts/index. html. ———. “You Are Either with Us or Against Us.” Accessed November 6, 2001. http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/. College of Charleston, Special Collections. “Inventory of the L. Mendel Rivers Papers, 1940–1962.” Accessed January 29, 2021. http://archives.library.cofc. edu/findingaids/mss0094.html. Constable, Pamela. “A Terrain’s Tragic Shift.” Washington Post, February 18, 2009. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/ 02/17/AR2009021703382.html. Cook, Mercer. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Negro.” The Journal of Negro History 21, no. 3 (July 1936): 294–303. Cookman, Claude. “An American Atrocity: The My Lai Massacre Concretized in a Victim’s Face.” The Journal of American History 9, no. 1 (June 2007): 154–162. Corbyn, Jeremy, David Davis, Andrew Mitchell, and Andy Slaughter. “Obama’s Slap in Britain’s Face.” New York Times, June 7, 2015. https://www.nytimes. com/2015/06/08/opinion/obamas-slap-in-britains-face.html. Cosgrove, Ben. “American Atrocity: Remembering My Lai.” Life, December 5, 1969. https://www.life.com/history/american-atrocity-remembering-mylai/. Crain, Mary M. “The Social Construction of National Identity in Highland Ecuador.” Anthropological Quarterly 63, no. 1 (1990): 43–59. Crenshaw, Martha. Explaining Terrorism: Causes, Processes and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2011. ———. “The Causes of Terrorism.” In The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls, edited by Charles W. Kegley, 92–105. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003. Crichton, Kyle, Gina Lamb, and Rogene Fisher Jacquette. “Timeline of Major Events in the Iraq War.” New York Times. Accessed February 1, 2021. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/31/ world/middleeast/20100831-Iraq-Timeline.html?src=tptw#/#time111_ 3262. Cumming-Bruce, Nick. “In Resolution, U.N. Council Presses Sri Lanka on Civilian Deaths.” New York Times, March 22, 2012. https://www.nytimes. com/2012/03/23/world/asia/rights-body-passes-measure-on-sri-lanka. html?referringSource=articleShare.

304

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crown, Sarah “Brian Turner: Words of War.” The Guardian, October 27, 2010. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/oct/27/brian-turner-sol dier-poet. Daiss, Tim. “Trump Owns Stake in Hotly Disputed $3.8 Billion Oil Pipeline, Conflict of Interest Looms.” Forbes, November 26, 2016. https://www.for bes.com/sites/timdaiss/2016/11/26/trump-owns-stake-in-hotly-disputed3-8-billion-oil-pipeline-conflict-of-interest-looms/#570259d5d006. Daniels, E. Valentine. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Dao, James. “To Reach Out, Befriend, and Kill When Necessary: An Ever Trickier Terrain.” New York Times, August 27, 2013. https://www.nytimes. com/2013/08/28/books/the-tender-soldier-examines-the-us-counterinsur gency-strategy.html. Darehshori, Sara. “Booted: Lack of Recourse for Wrongfully Discharged US Military Rape Survivors.” Human Rights Watch, May 19, 2016. https:// www.hrw.org/report/2016/05/19/booted/lack-recourse-wrongfully-discha rged-us-military-rape-survivors#_ftn1. Das, Veena. “Language of Sacrifice.” Man 18, no. 3 (September 1983): 445– 462. ———. “Our Work to Cry: Your Work to Listen.” In Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, edited by Veena Das, 345–399. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. “The Uses of Liminality: Society and Cosmos in Hinduism.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 10, no. 2 (July 1976): 245–263. David, Ann R. “Gendering the Divine: New Forms of Feminine Hindu Worship.” International Journal of Hindu Studies 13, no. 3 (December 2009): 337– 355. de Mel, Neloufer. Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Armed Conflict. London: Sage Publications, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deliso, Christopher. Migration, Terrorism and the Future of a Divided Europe: A Continent Transformed. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2017. Democracy Now! “Democracy Now! Confronts Madeleine Albright on the Iraq Sanctions: Was It Worth the Price?” July 30, 2004. https://www.democracy now.org/2004/7/30/democracy_now_confronts_madeline_albright_on. ———. “Pentagon Study Finds 26,000 Military Sexual Assaults Last year, Over 70 Sex Crimes Per Day.” May 8, 2013. https://www.democracynow.org/ 2013/5/8/pentagon_study_finds_26_000_military.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

305

———. “Standing Rock Sioux Historian: Dakota Access Co. Attack comes on Anniversary of Whitestone Massacre.” September 8, 2016. https://www.dem ocracynow.org/2016/9/8/standing_rock_sioux_historian_dakota_access. Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response. “Department of Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military Fiscal Year 2018.” April 9, 2019. https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/800-dod-annualreport-on-sexual-as/d659d6d0126ad2b19c18/optimized/full.pdf#page=1. Derian, James Der, Michael Udris, and David Udris, directors. Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic. 2010; Reading, PA: Bullfrog Films. https://www. amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B079RLGC62/ref=msx_wn_pv?autoplay=1. Destradi, Sandra. “India and Sri Lanka’s Civil War: the Failure of Regional Conflict Management in South Asia.” Asian Survey 52, no. 3 (May/June 2012): 595–616. Dick, Kirby, dir. The Invisible War. 2013; PBS: Independent Lens. http://www. pbs.org/independentlens/films/invisible-war/. Dillinger, Johannes. “Tyrannicide from Ancient Greece and Rome to the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century.” In The Routledge History of Terrorism, edited by Randall D. Law, 15–27. London: Routledge, 2015. Dixit, J. N. Assignment Colombo. Delhi: Konark Publishers, 2002. Dixit, Priya, and Jacob L. Stump, eds. Critical Methods in Terrorism Studies. London: Routledge, 2016. Doty, Roxanne. Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation of North-South Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Dragon, Jean. “The Work of Alterity: Bataille and Lacan.” diacritics 26, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 31–48. Eelam Images. “Pon. Sivakumaran.” Accessed June 22, 2021. https://pulive eram.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/6288/pon-sivakumaran/. Efrati, Noga. “The ‘Effendiyya’: Where Have All the Women Gone?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 2 (May 2011): 375–377. Egan, Suzanne. Extraordinary Rendition and Human Rights: Examining State Accountability and Complicity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Elliott, Debbie. “5 Years After Charleston Church Massacre, What Have We Learned?” NPR (National Public Radio), June, 17, 2020. https://www.npr. org/2020/06/17/878828088/5-years-after-charleston-church-massacrewhat-have-we-learned. Ellison, Jesse. “Judge Dismisses ‘Epidemic’ of Rape in Military Culture.” The Daily Beast, December 13, 2011. https://www.thedailybeast.com/judge-dis misses-epidemic-of-rape-in-military-case. Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. “Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp: United States Detention Facility, Cuba.” Accessed December 27, 2020. https://www.britan nica.com/topic/Guantanamo-Bay-detention-camp.

306

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press, 1993. Esch, Joanne. “Legitimizing the ‘War on Terror’: Political Myth in Official-Level Rhetoric.” Political Psychology 31, no. 3 (June 2010): 357–391. Escobar, Arturo. “Anthropology and the Development Encounter: The Making and Marketing of Development Anthropology.” American Ethnologist 18, no. 4 (1991): 658–682. European Parliament. “The Results of Inquiries into the CIA’s Programme of Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Prisons in European States in Light of the New Legal Framework Following The Lisbon Treaty.” Accessed October 2, 2020. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/note/ join/2012/462456/IPOL-LIBE_NT%282012%29462456_EN.pdf. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ In Kant’s Anthropology.” In Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, edited by Katherine M. Faull, 200–241. London: Associated University Press, 1995. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Farley, Anthony Paul. “The Black Body as Fetish Object.” Oregon Law Review 76 (1997): 457–535. Fineman, Mark. “Rebels’ Weapon: Cyanide with a Cult of Suicide, the Tamil Tigers Rank Among the World’s Most Dedicated Guerrilla Groups. Their Liberation War in Sri Lanka Has Entered the Realm of Fanaticism.” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1992. Foerstel, Herbert N. The Patriot Act: A Documentary and Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008. Forte, Maximilian C. “The Human Terrain System and Anthropology: A Review of Ongoing Public Debates.” American Anthropologist 113, no. 1 (March 2011): 149–153. Foster, Brian. “‘I Love Working for Uncle Sam, Lets Me Know Just Who I am’: Culture, the Human Terrain System, and the Inquiry of World War I.” Canadian Review of American Studies 44, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 345–364. Frazin, Rachel, and Rebecca Beitsch. “Biden Gets More Time to Decide on Dakota Access Pipeline.” The Hill, February 9, 2021. https://thehill.com/ policy/energy-environment/537969-biden-administration-asks-for-moretime-to-decide-whether-to-shut?rl=1. Fusté, José I. “Containing Bordered ‘Others’ in La Frontera and Gaza: Comparative Lessons on Racializing Discourses and State Violence.” American Quarterly 62, no. 4 (December 2010): 811–819.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

307

Gamp, Joseph. “Journalist Beheaded: What Happened to James Foley?” The Sun. Accessed October 13, 2020. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12849629/ james-foley-isis-beheaded-journalist/. Garamone, Jim. “DOD Releases Suicide Report.” Military Newspapers of Virginia, May 1, 2014. https://www.militarynews.com/norfolk-navy-fla gship/news/quarterdeck/dod-releases-suicide-report/article_b3bc9457323d-5554-88d3-b75f573b5b13.ht. Gardner, Elizabeth. “Is There Method to the Madness? Worldwide Press Coverage of Female Terrorists and Journalistic Attempts to Rationalize Their Involvement.” Journalism Studies 8, no. 6 (2007): 909–929. Gates, Henry Louis. Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. New York: Penguin Press, 2019. Gezari, Vanessa M. A Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. George Washington University. “Campaign to Install Pro-Western Government in Iran.” US National Security Archives. Accessed February 17, 2021. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/docs/Doc%202% 20-%201954-00-00%20Summary%20of%20Wilber%20history.pdf. Ghosh, P.A. Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka and Role of Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF). New Deli: A.P. H. Publishing Corporation, 1999. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson, 1987. ———. “Race Ends Here.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 5 (September 1998): 838–847. Givens, Austen D., Nathan E. Busch, and Alan D. Bersin. “Going Global: The International Dimensions of U.S. Homeland Security Policy.” Journal of Strategic Security 11, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 1–34. Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, comte de. Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. Paris: Didot, 1853–1855. Golden, Tim. “The Battle for Guantánamo.” The New York Times Magazine, September 17, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/ 17guantanamo.html?_r=0. Gomez, Adam. “Deus Vult: John L. O’Sullivan, Manifest Destiny, and American Democratic Messianism.” American Political Thought 1, no. 2 (September 2012): 236–262. Gordon, Lewis R. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Goswami, Namita, “Thinking Problems.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2, Special Issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (2012): 189–199.

308

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gowrinathan, Nimmi. “The Committed Female Fighter: The Political Identities of Tamil Women in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 19, no. 3 (2017): 327–241. Gowrinathan, Nimmi, and Zachariah Mampilly. “Resistance and Repression under the Rule of Rebels: Women, Clergy, and Civilian Agency in LTTE Governed Sri Lanka.” Comparative Politics 52, no. 1 (October 2019): 1–20. Graham, David A. “The White-Supremacist Group That Inspired a Racist Manifesto.” The Atlantic, June 22, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2015/06/council-of-conservative-citizens-dylann-roof/396467/. ———. “What Is France Doing in Syria?” The Atlantic, November 15, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/11/francesyria-iraq-isis/416013/. Gray, Sally Hatch. “Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color.” The Eighteenth Century 53, no. 4 (December 2012): 393–412. Green, Jerry, ed. After Wounded Knee: Correspondence of Major and Surgeon John Vance Lauderdale While Serving with the Army Occupying the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1890–1891. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996. Greene, Jerome A. American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Greene-Sanders, Dominique T.N. “The Plausibility of a Slippery Slope: Guantanamo Bay as an Example of Direct/Indirect Participation in Torture and the Corruption of Societal Morality.” Master’s Thesis, University of North Florida, 2014. https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article= 1578&context=etd. Gregory, Derek. “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception.” Human Geography 88, no. 4 (2006): 405–427. ———. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Guardian. “Shaker Aamer: Timeline of Events Leading to Release from Guantánamo.” October 30, 2015. Accessed February 15, 2021. https://www.the guardian.com/world/2015/oct/30/shaker-aamer-timeline-of-events-releasefrom-guantanamo. ———. “Sri Lanka Declares End to War with Tamil Tigers.” May 19, 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/18/tamil-tigers-kil led-sri-lanka. Gunaratna, Rohan. Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka: The Role of India’s Intelligence Agencies. Colombo: South Asian Network on Conflict Research, 1993. Gunasingam, Murugar. Tamil Eelam Liberation Struggle: State Terrorism and Ethnic Cleansing 1948–2009. Sydney: MV Publications, 2012.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

309

Gusterson, Hugh. Drone: Remote Control Warfare. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. ________. “Drone Warfare in Waziristan and the New Military Humanism.” Current Anthropology 60, Supplement no. 19 (February 2019): S77–S86. Guthrie, Woody. “Woody Guthrie-This Land is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie: Pastures of Plenty (1940–1947). YouTube video, 02:18. Accessed February 13, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE. Hanh, Thich Nhat. Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1993. Haniffa, Farzana. “Three Attempts at Peace in Sri Lanka.” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 6, no. 1 (June 2011): 49–62. Harding, Sandra. “After Eurocentrism: Challenges for the Philosophy of Science,” Proceeding of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1992, Symposia and Invited Papers 2 (1992): 311–319. Harrison, Faye Venetia. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation. Arlington, VA: Association of Black Anthropologists, American Anthropological Association, 1997. Harrison, Frances. Still Counting The Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War. London: Portobello Books, 2012. Hawes, Jennifer Berry. “Dylann Roof Jailhouse Journal.” The Post and Courier, January 6, 2017. https://www.postandcourier.com/dylann-roof-jailhouse-jou rnal/pdf_da3e19b8-d3b3-11e6-b040-03089263e67c.html. Hayes, Thomas C. “Confrontation in the Gulf; the Oilfield Lying Below the Iraq-Kuwait Dispute.” New York Times, September 1990. https://www.nyt imes.com/1990/09/03/world/confrontation-in-the-gulf-the-oilfield-lyingbelow-the-iraq-kuwait-dispute.html. Henderson, John W. “Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact: Environmental Assessment Dakota Access Pipeline Project Williams, Morton, and Emmons Counties, North Dakota.” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-Omaha District, July, 25, 2016. Accessed February 12, 2021. https://www.docume ntcloud.org/documents/3460832-DAPL-EnviroAssessment-July252016. html. Herdy, Amy, and Miles Moffeit. “Betrayal in the Ranks.” The Denver Post, November 16–18, 2003. http://extras.denverpost.com/justice/tdp_betrayal. pdf. Hersh, Seymour M. “U.S. Secretly Gave Aid to Iraq Early in Its War Against Iran.” New York Times, January 6, 1992. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/ 01/26/world/us-secretly-gave-aid-to-iraq-early-in-its-war-against-iran.html? pagewanted=all. Hersher, Rebecca. “Key Moments in the Dakota Access Pipeline Fight.” NPR (National Public Radio), February 22, 2017. https://www.npr.org/sections/ thetwo-way/2017/02/22/514988040/key-moments-in-the-dakota-accesspipeline-fight.

310

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Hoffman, Bruce. Inside Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Hoole, Rajan, Daya Somasundaram, K. Sritharan, and Rajani Thiranagama. The Broken Palmyra: The Tamil Crisis in Sri Lanka, an Inside Account. Claremont: The Sri Lanka Studies Institute, 1988. hooks, bell. Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Horgan, John. The Psychology of Terrorism. London: Routledge, 2005. Human Rights Watch. “Booted: Lack of Recourse for Wrongfully Discharged Rape Survivors.” May 19, 2016. https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/05/ 19/booted/lack-recourse-wrongfully-discharged-us-military-rape-survivors# 8e1a53. Hurston, Zora Neale. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”. New York: Amistad/HarperCollins, 2018. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Amistad/HarperCollins, [1937] 2006. Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz. Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008. Isakhan, Benjamin, ed. The Legacy of Iraq: From the 2003 War to the ‘Islamic State’. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Ismael, Shereen T. “The Cost of War: The Children of Iraq.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 38, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 337–357. Ivie, Robert L. “Savagery in Democracy’s Empire.” Third World Quarterly 26, no.1 (2005): 55–65. Jackson, Richard, Marie Breen Smyth, and Jeroen Gunning, eds. Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda. New York: Routledge, 2009. Jacoby, Karl. “Of Memory and Massacre: A Soldier’s Firsthand Account of the ‘Affair on Wounded Knee’.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 64, no. 2 (2003): 333–362. Jeffrey, Alex. “The Politics of ‘Democratization’: Lessons from Bosnia and Iraq.” Review of International Political Economy 14, no. 3 (August 2007): 444–466. Job Monkey: The Coolest Jobs on Earth. “Unique Job Section: Security Contractor Jobs.” Accessed December 26, 2020. https://www.jobmonkey. com/uniquejobs/security-mercenary/. Jordan, Robert Paul. “Time of Testing for An Ancient Land: Sri Lanka.” National Geographic 155, no. 1 (1979): 122–150. Kahf, Mohja. “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity.” Arab Studies Quarterly 20, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 53–82. Kaimal, Padma. “Shiva Nataraja: Shifting Meanings of an Icon.” The Art Bulletin 81, no. 3 (September 1999): 390–419.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

311

Kapferer, Bruce. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. New York: Berghahn Books, [1988] 2012. Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in American. New York: Bold type Books, 2017. Kenyon Review. “The Weight of What’s Left [Out]: Six Contemporary Erasurists on Their Craft.” Accessed September 7, 2020. https://kenyonreview.org/ 2012/11/erasure-collaborative-interview/. Kime, Patricia. “New Law Would Require Pentagon to Identify All Burn Pit Locations.” Military Times, December 12, 2019. https://www.militarytimes. com/news/your-military/2019/12/12/new-law-would-require-pentagonto-identify-all-burn-pit-locations/. King, John. “Bush: Join ‘Coalition of Willing’.” CNN , November 20, 2002. https://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/11/20/prague.bush. nato/. King, Sallie B. “They Who Burned Themselves for Peace: Quaker and Buddhist Self-Immolators During the Vietnam War.” Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000): 127–150. Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. New York: Times Books, Henry Holt & Company, 2006. Koch, Bettina. “U.S.-Drones Strikes: Acts of Terror, Violence, or Coercion?” In State Terror, State Violence: Global Perspectives, edited by Bettina Koch, 151–170. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Springer VS, 2016. Kori Cioca, et al. v Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, 720 F.3d 505 (4th Cir., 2013). http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/Published/121065.P.pdf. Kramer, Ronald C., and Raymond J. Michalowski. “War, Aggression and State Crime: A Criminological Analysis of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq.” British Journal of Criminology 45, no. 4 (July 2005): 446–469. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translation by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lalmalani, Sapna G. “Extraordinary Rendition Meets the U.S. Citizen: United States’ Responsibility Under the Fourth Amendment.” Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal 5, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 1–29. Lamar IV, William H. “William H. Lamar IV: Let Us Go to the Other Side.” Faith & Leadership, Duke University. Accessed June 30, 2015. https://faitha ndleadership.com/william-h-lamar-iv-let-us-go-other-side. Lancaster, John. “In Some Ways, Rebels Without a Cause; Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers Have Already Achieved De Facto Independence.” Washington Post, January 14, 2003. Langley, Erin E. “The Loss of American Values in the Case of Erroneous Irregular Rendition.” Georgetown Law Journal 98, no. 5 (2010): 1441–1479. Laqueur, Walter. The New Terrorism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

312

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lawson, Michael L. Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944–1980. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Leopold, Jason, and Ben Bryant. “Shaker Aamer, the Last Remaining UK Guantanamo Detainee, Has Been Released.” Vise News, October 30, 2015. https://news.vice.com/article/shaker-aamer-the-last-remaining-bri tish-guantanamo-detainee-has-been-released. Levin, Sam T. “Standing Rock: Obama Suggests ‘Reroute’ of Dakota Pipeline Being Investigated.” The Guardian, November 2, 2016. https://www.the guardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/02/dakota-access-obama-suggests-waysto-reroute-pipeline-being-investigated. Lewis, Bernard. “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” In The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls, edited by Charles W. Kegley, 194–201. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003. Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. “Angkaiyarkanniku Aayiram Aayiram.” Tamil Eelam Songs. Track 4, on Viduthalai Pulikal Kalai Panpattu Kalakam, Kadal Karumpulikal Part 01. 1994. Tamileela Kadalpulikal. https://tamileelamso ngs.com/kadal-karum-pulikal-1/. ———. Towards Liberation: Selected Political Documents of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Jaffna, Sri Lanka: LTTE Publication, 1984. Lipset, Seymour Martin. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Lock-Pullan, Richard. US Intervention Policy and Army Innovation: From Vietnam to Iraq. London: Routledge, 2006. Long, David E. The Anatomy of Terrorism. New York: Free Press, 1990. Long Soldier, Layli. WHEREAS: Poems. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 1998. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Lowery, Wesley. “They Can’t Kill Us All.” New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2016. Lubbock, John [Lord Avebury]. Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages. London: Williams and Norgate, 1865. Luthra, Rashmi. “Clearing Sacred Ground: Women-Centered Interpretations of the Indian Epics.” Feminist Formations 26, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 135–161. Lynskey, Dorian. “This Land Is Your Land: America’s Other National Anthem.” BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), September 29, 2020. https://www. bbc.com/culture/article/20200929-this-land-is-your-land-americas-other-nat ional-anthem.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

313

MacAskill, Ewen, and Julian Borger. “Iraq War Illegal and Breached UN Charter, Says Annan.” The Guardian. Accessed October 2, 2020. https://www.thegua rdian.com/world/2004/sep/16/iraq.iraq. Macdonald, Kevin, dir. The Mauritanian. 2021; United States: Topic Studios and STX Films. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761112/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt. Mahmood, Cynthia Keppley. Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Managhan, Tina. Unknowing the ‘War on Terror’: The Pleasures of Risk. New York: Routledge, 2020. Margulies, Joseph. Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. MAS: Change Is Courage. “Welcome to MAS.” Accessed February 1, 2021, https://www.masholdings.com/overview.html#overview; “MAS Intimates-Overview.” https://www.masholdings.com/intimates.html#intima tes-overview; “MAS Active Wear-Overview.” https://www.masholdings.com/ active.html#apparel-active. Masliyah, Sadok. “Zahawi: A Muslim Pioneer of Women’s Liberation.” Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 3 (July 1996): 161–171. Mason, Wyatt. “The Boundless Artistry of Steve McQueen.” New York Times Style Magazine, October 12, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/ t-magazine/steve-mcqueen-artist-director-interview.html?_r=0. Mayer, Jane. The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. New York: Anchor Books/Random House, 2009. ———. “Outsourcing Torture: The Secret History of America’s ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ Program.” The New Yorker, February 7, 2005. https://www.new yorker.com/magazine/2005/02/14/outsourcing-torture. McClaurin, Irma. Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001 McFate, Sean. Mercenaries and War: Understanding Private Armies Today. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2019. McGilvray, Dennis B., and Mirak Raheem. Muslim Perspectives on the Sri Lankan Conflict: Policy Studies 41. Washington: East-West Center, 2007. McKibben, Bill. “A Pipeline Fight and America’s Dark Past.” The New Yorker, September 6, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/apipeline-fight-and-americas-dark-past. McLean, Stewart. Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017. McMillen, Neil R. “White Citizens’ Council and Resistance to School Desegregation in Arkansas.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Summer 1971): 95–122.

314

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McVeigh, Karen. “Drone Strikes: Tears in Congress as Pakistani Family Tells of Mother’s Death.” The Guardian, October 29, 2013. https://www.thegua rdian.com/world/2013/oct/29/pakistan-family-drone-victim-testimony-con gress. Meeropol, Rachel, ed. America’s Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees and the ‘War on Terror’. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer And The Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. Merriam-Webster. “Definition of Habeas Corpus.” Accessed January 22, 2021. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/habeas%20corpus. Michaels, C. William. No Greater Threat: America After September 11 and the Rise of a National Security State. New York: Algora Publishing, 2005. Mitropolitski, Simeon. “Weber’s Definition of the State as an Ethnographic Tool for Understanding the Contemporary Political Science State of the Discipline.” Paper Presented at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association, Wilfrid Laurier University, May 16, 2011. https://papers. ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1823401. Moath Hamza Ahmed Al-Alwi v. Donald J. Trump, et al., Civil Action No. 18–740, Case No. 17–5067. United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, 2018. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18740/74187/20181205150643166_2018-12-05%20Petition%20for%20Writ% 20of%20Certiorari.pdf. Mohamedou Ould Slahi v. Barack H. Obama, et al. Civil Action No. 05-CV0569 (United States District Court for the District of Columbia. 2010). https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/2010-4-9-Slahi-Order.pdf. Mohrbacher, B.C. “The Whole World Is Coming: The 1890 Ghost Dance Movement as Utopia.” Utopian Studies, 7, no. 1 (1996): 75–85. Moramudali, Umesh. “Is Sri Lanka Really a Victim of China’s ‘Debt Trap’? Sri Lanka’s Debt Crisis and Chinese Loans—Separating Myth from Reality.” The Diplomat, May 14, 2019. https://thediplomat.com/2019/05/is-sri-lankareally-a-victim-of-chinas-debt-trap/. Morton, Samuel G. Crania Americana. Philadelphia: Dobson, 1839. Musharraf, Pervez. In the Line of Fire: A Memoir. New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2006. Myerhoff, Barbara. Number Our Days. New York: Touchstone Book/Simon & Schuster, 1978. Myers, Steven Lee, and Elisabeth Bumiller. “Obama Calls World ‘Safer’ After Pakistan Raid.” New York Times, May 2, 2011. https://www.nytimes.com/ 2011/05/03/world/asia/osama-bin-laden-dead.html?referringSource=articl eShare Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

315

Narayanan, Gomathi. “Shiva Nataraja as a Symbol of Paradox.” Journal of South Asian Literature 21, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 1986): 208–216. National Coalition for the Homeless. “Homeless Veterans.” Accessed February 21, 2012. http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/veterans.html. Naval History and Heritage Command. “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Accessed August 6, 2020. https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/bro wse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/middle-east/operation-iraqi-fre edom.html. Nayar, Jayan. “Some Thoughts on the ‘(Extra)Ordinary.’” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 42, no. 1 (February 2017): 3–25. NBC News. “James Wright Foley, Kidnapped Journalist, Apparently Executed by ISIS.” August 19, 2014. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/james-foley/ james-wright-foley-kidnapped-journalist-apparently-executed-isis-n184376. Neugebauer, Christian M. “The Racism of Hegel and Kant.” In Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy, edited by H. Odera Oruka, 259–272. Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1990. New York Times. “Sri Lanka Halts Heavy-Weapon Attacks on Rebels.” April 27, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/world/asia/28l anka.html?referringSource=articleShare. ———. “Text: Obama’s Remarks on Iraq and Afghanistan” July 15, 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/us/politics/15text-obama.html. ———. “The Guantánamo Docket.” Accessed January 21, 2021. https://www. nytimes.com/interactive/projects/guantanamo/detainees/current. ———. “Transcript: Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina on Removing the Confederate Flag.” June 22, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 2015/06/22/us/Transcript-Gov-Nikki-R-Haley-of-South-Carolina-Addres ses-Removing-the-Confederate-Battle-Flag.html. Nolen, Jeannette L. Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. “Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp: United States Detention Facility, Cuba.” Accessed December 27, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Guantanamo-Bay-detention-camp. NobelPrize.org. “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.” Accessed April 13, 2021. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2009/press-release/. Noone, John B. Jr. Rousseau’s Social Contract: A Conceptual Analysis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Norton-Taylor, Richard, Ed Pilkington, Caroline Davies, and Ian Cobain. “Shaker Aamer Released from Guantánamo Bay After 14-Year Detention.” The Guardian. October 30, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2015/oct/30/shaker-aamer-released-from-guantanamo-bay. Nossiter, Adam, Aurelien Breeden, and Katrin Bennhold. “Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS.” New York Times, November 14, 2015. https://www.nytimes. com/2015/11/15/world/europe/paris-terrorist-attacks.html?referringSou rce=articleShare.

316

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O’Leary, Cecilia Elizabeth. To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Ostler, Jeffrey. “Conquest and the State: Why the United States Employed Massive Military Force to Suppress the Lakota Ghost Dance.” Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 2 (May 1996): 217–248. Otterman, Sharon. “Iraq: The U.N. Role.” Council on Foreign Relations. Accessed October 2, 2020. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/iraq-un-role. Owens, Patricia. “Distinctions, Distinctions: ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Force?” International Affairs 84, no. 5 (2008): 977–990. Packard, Jerrold M. American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Parker, Christopher, and Pete W. Moore. “The War Economy of Iraq.” Middle East Report no. 243 (Summer 2007): 6–15. Parthasarathy, A. Symbolism of Hindu Gods & Rituals. Mumbai: Vedanta Life Institute, [1983] 2000. PBS NewsHour. “‘We’re at War.’” Accessed September 14, 2001, https://www. pbs.org/newshour/world/terrorism-july-dec01-bush_comments_9-15. Percy, Jennifer. “The Priest of Abu Ghraib: Inside Iraq’s Most Notorious Prison. An Army Interrogator Came Face to Face With a Shocking Truth About the War—And Himself.” Smithsonian, January/February, 2019. ———. “The Things They Burned.” The New Republic, November 22, 2016. Accessed January 21, 2021. https://newrepublic.com/article/138058/thi ngs-burned. Permanent Mission of Sri Lanka to the United Nations. “Full Text of the Speech made by His Excellency the President Gotabaya Rajapaksa at the National Ranaviru Day commemorations on May 19th 2020.” Accessed June 12, 2021. https://www.un.int/srilanka/news/full-text-speech-made-his-exc ellency-president-gotabaya-rajapaksa-national-ranaviru-day. Perumal, C.A., and R. Thandavan. “Ethnic Violence in Sri Lanka: Causes and Consequences.” The Indian Journal of Political Science 50, no. 1 (January– March 1989): 1–17. Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Pink Floyd. “Hey You,” The Wall. YouTube video, 04:40. Published on January 12, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soL8JK6kALc. ———. “Goodbye Blue Sky.” YouTube video, 02:47. Published on January 12, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn6YnUt4Vuk&list=OLAK5uy_n E3dmeYl_9Jgv2CT0aqufkDcyB6BBMcGM&index=7. ———. The Wall. Columbia, 1979. ———. The Wall. YouTube video. Published on October 26, 2020. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=DieSDwfuGAQ&list=RDDieSDwfuGAQ&start_ radio=1&t=226.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

317

Poets.Org. “Erasure: Glossary of Poetic Terms.” Accessed September 7, 2020. https://poets.org/text/erasure-poetic-form. Power, Matthew. “Confessions of a Drone Warrior.” GQ Magazine, October 23, 2013. https://www.gq.com/story/drone-uav-pilot-assassination. Poynting, Scott, and David Whyte, eds. Counter-Terrorism and State Political Violence: The ‘War on Terror’ as Terror. New York: Routledge, 2013. Prevallet, Kristin. “The Enclosure You Thought Protected You Is an Illusion: Prepositions, Freedom, and Getting Outside.” Currents: Journal of the BodyMind Centering Association (Spring 2021): 53–59. ———. “Prepositions: An Ecopoetics Exploration.” Virtual Workshop Presented at the Summer Writers’ Week, Manhattanville College, June 23, 2020. Price, David. “Buying a Piece of Anthropology Part 1: Human Ecology and Unwitting Anthropological Research for the CIA.” Anthropology Today 23, no. 3 (June 2007): 8–13. ———. Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. ———. “Interlopers and Invited Guests: On Anthropology’s Witting and Unwitting Links to Intelligence Agencies.” Anthropology Today 18, no. 6 (December 2002): 16–21. Price, Pamela. “Revolution and Rank in Tamil Nationalism.” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (May 1996): 359–383. Rahman, Khalid. “Contemporary Middle East Global Politics and Regional Issues.” Policy Perspectives 7, no. 1 (January-June 2010): 1–3. Rainer, Yvonne. Work 1961–1973. Halifax and New York: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University Press, 1974. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. Rapoport, David C. “The Four Waves of Rebel Terror and September 11.” In The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls, edited by Charles W. Kegley, 36–52. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003. Rapport, Mike. “The French Revolution and Early European Revolutionary Terrorism.” In The Routledge History of Terrorism, edited Randall D. Law, 63–76. London: Routledge, 2015. Razack, Sherene. “From the ‘Clean Snows of Petawawa’: The Violence of Canadian Peacekeepers in Somalia.” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 1 (February 2000): 127–163. Reimann, Nicholas. “DOJ Reportedly Considers Not Charging All Capitol Rioters, Sparking Outrage.” Forbes, January 23, 2021. https://www.forbes. com/sites/nicholasreimann/2021/01/23/doj-reportedly-considers-not-cha rging-all-capitol-rioters-sparking-outrage/?sh=4486985027b9.

318

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Reuter, Christoph. My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing. Translated by Helena Ragg-Kirkby. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Riley, Patrick. Will and Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in Hobbes, Locke Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Roberts, Michael. “Filial Devotion in Tamil Culture and the Tiger Cult of Martyrdom.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 30, no. 2 (1996): 245–272. ———. “Saivite Symbols, Sacrifice, and Tamil Tiger Rites.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 49, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 67–93. Roberts, Rodney C. “The American Value of Fear and the Indefinite Detention of Terrorists Suspects.” Public Affairs Quarterly 21, no. 4 (October 2007): 405–419. Robertson, Matthew. “The Autophagous Absolute: Revelations of Cosmic and Sovereign Violence in the Bhagavad G¯ıt¯ a and the Taittir¯ıya Upanis.ad.” Journal of Religion and Violence 6, no. 1 (2018): 73–105. Robles, Frances. “Dylann Roof Photos and a Manifesto Are Posted on Website.” New York Times, June 20, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/ us/dylann-storm-roof-photos-website-charleston-church-shooting.html?referr ingSource=articleShare. Rose, David Guantánamo: America’s War on Human Rights. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. Rosenberg, Carol, Charlie Savage, and Rachel Shorey. “The Guantánamo Docket.” The New York Times. Accessed January 21, 2021. https://www. nytimes.com/interactive/projects/guantanamo/detainees/current. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right. Translated by. H.J. Tozer. London: Wordsworth Classics (1762) 1988. Rubenberg, Cheryl A. “US Policy Toward Nicaragua and Iran and the IranContra Affair: Reflections on the Continuity of American Foreign Policy.” Third World Quarter 10, no. 4 (October 1988): 1467–1504. Rubenstein, Richard E. “The Psycho-Political Sources of Terrorism.” In The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls, edited by Charles W. Kegley, 139–150. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003. Saadawi, Nawal El. Memoirs from the Women’s Prison. Translated by Marilyn Booth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. ———. “Irangate: A Many-Sided Crisis.” Journal of Palestine Studies 16, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 27–49. Sallah, Michael, and Mitch Weiss. Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War. New York: Back Bay Books, Little, Brown & Company, 2006.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

319

Sallah, Michael D., and Mitch Weiss. “Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands: Soldiers Executed Prisoners, Then Turned Weapons on Civilians.” In “The Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets Brutal Truths.” The Blade: Toledo, Ohio, Sunday, October 19, 2003. Section A, p. 9. http://bgsujournalism.com/pulitzer/jfoust/wordpress/wp-content/ uploads/2016/01/Blade-pulitzer-entry-reduced.pdf. Samari, Mona. “Bounties Paid for Terror Suspects.” Amnesty International. (Australia: January16, 2007). Accessed May 18, 2018. http://www.amnesty. org.au/hrs/comments/bounties_paid_for_terror_suspects/. Sangarasivam, Yamuna. “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Cultural Production of Nationalism and Violence: Representing the Integrity of Nation and the Choice for Armed Struggle.” PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2000. ———. “Researcher, Informant, ‘Assassin,’ Me.” Geographical Review 91, no. 1–2 (January–April 2001): 95–104. ———. “Militarizing the Feminine Body: Women’s Participation in the Tamil Nationalist Struggle.” In Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the State, edited by Arturo J. Aldama, 59–76. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. ———. “Ecologizing ‘Terrorism’: Attending to Emergent Pathways of Ethnographic Fieldwork, Writing and Analysis.” In Critical Methods in Terrorism Studies, edited by Priya Dixit and Jacob L. Stump, 59–74. London: Routledge, 2016. Saunt, Claudio. Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020. Scahill, Jeremy. Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. New York: Nation Books, 2007. ———. Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. New York: Nation Books, 2013. Schalk, Peter. “‘Birds of Independence’: On the Participation of Tamil Women in Armed Struggle.” Lanka: Studies in Lankan Culture 7 (1992): 44–142. ———. “Ilavar and Lankans, Emerging Identities in a Fragmented Island.” Asian Ethnicity 3, no. 1 (2002): 47–62. ———. “Resistance and Martyrdom in the Process of State Formation of Tamililam.” In Martyrdom and Political Resistance, edited by Joyce Pettigrew, 61–84. Amsterdam: VU Press, 1997. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36, no. 3 (June 1995): 409–440. Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Schultz, Kai. “Sri Lanka, Struggling With Debt, Hands a Major Port to China.” New York Times, December 12, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/ 12/world/asia/sri-lanka-china-port.html?referringSource=articleShare.

320

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schwartz, Walter. The Tamils of Sri Lanka. London: Minority Rights Group, 1998. Scott, Catherine V. “Bound for Glory: The Hostage Crisis as Captivity Narrative in Iran.” International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March 2000): 177–188. Senadhira, Sugeeswara. “Cyanide Drama: Referee Rajiv Fought My Battle” Ceylon Today, October 5, 2020. https://ceylontoday.lk/news/cyanidedrama-referee-rajiv-fought-my-battle. Serle, Jack. “At Least 80 Airstrikes Hit Afghanistan in October: The White House’s Covert Drone and Air War—Monthly Update.” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, November 2, 2015. https://www.thebureauinvest igates.com/2015/11/02/at-least-80-us-airstrikes-hit-afghanistan-in-octoberthe-white-houses-covert-drone-and-air-war-monthly-update/. Shamsi, Hina. “Finally Free: ‘Guantánamo Diary’ Author Released After 14 Years Without Charge,” ACLU National Security Project (blog), October 17, 2016. https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/detention/finallyfree-guantanamo-diary-author-released-after-14-years. Shanmugaratnam, N. “Seven Days in Jaffna: Life Under Indian Occupation.” Race and Class 31, no. 2 (1989): 1–15. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Shaw, Ian G.R. “Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare.” Geopolitics, 18 (2013): 536–559. Singh, Harkirat. Intervention in Sri Lanka: The I.P.K.F. Experience Retold. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2007. Singh, Jai Pal, and Mumtaz Khan. “Saptadv¯ıp¯a Vasumat¯ı: The Mythical Geography of the Hindus.” GeoJournal 48, no. 4 (1999): 269–278. Skaine, Rosemarie. Female Suicide Bombers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006. Slahi, Mohamedou Ould. Guantanamo Diary. Edited by Larry Siems. New York: Back Bay Books, 2015. Smith, Anthony D. Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Smith, Steven. “Policy Preferences and Bureaucratic Position: The Case of the American Hostage Rescue Mission.” Royal Institute of International Affairs 61, no. 1 (Winter 1984–1985): 9–25. Smoak, Gregory E. Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Smyth, William D. “Segregation in Charleston in the 1950s: A Decade of Transition.” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 92, no. 2 (1991): 99–123.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

321

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. Southern Poverty Law Center. “Council of Conservative Citizens.” Accessed January 29, 2021. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ group/council-conservative-citizens. Sørensen, Birgitte Refslund. “The Politics of Citizenship and Difference in Sri Lankan School.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39, no. 4 (December 2008): 423–443. Spencer, Jonathan, ed. Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict. London: Routledge, 1990. Spillers, Hortense J. “Writing and States of Emergency.” In The Power of Writing: Dartmouth ’66 in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Christiane Donahue and Kelly Blewett, 57–73. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015. “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields (Documentary): Real Stories.” YouTube. September 19, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3yPzyM0KMU&bpctr=158 6135921. Staniland, Paul. “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Insurgent Fratricide, Ethnic Defection, and the Rise of Pro-State Paramilitaries.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, no. 1 (February 2012): 16–40. Steafel, Eleanor, Rory Mulholland, Rozina Sabur, Edward Malnick, Andrew Trotman, and Nicola Harley. “Paris Terror Attack: Everything We Know on Wednesday Afternoon.” The Telegraph, November 18, 2015. http://www.tel egraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11995246/Paris-shootingWhat-we-know-so-far-on-Wednesday-afternoon.html. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Stokes, Doug. “The War Gamble: Understanding US Interests in Iraq.” Globalization 6, no. 1 (March 2009): 107–112. Storm, Mary “Speculation on Hindu Self-Sacrifice Imagery at Nalgonda.” Journal of Religion and Violence 6, no. 2 (2018): 225–244. Stump, Jacob L., and Priya Dixit, eds. Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods. New York: Routledge, 2013. Sudarshan, R., and Vimal Rasenthiran. “Sri Lanka: Kilinochchi Garment Workers Denounce Harsh Working Conditions.” World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), May 22, 2018. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/22/kili-m22. html. Swamy, M.R. Narayan. “Sri Lanka’s Arming of LTTE Against IPKF: Mystery of Kobbekaduwa’s Death.” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 40 (October 1998): 2577–2578. Sydney Morning Herald. “Bremer Gets Ready to Open Iraq for Business.” Accessed May 28, 2003. https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/bre mer-gets-ready-to-open-iraq-for-business-20030528-gdgu3g.html.

322

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Taibbi, Matt. I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2017. Tambiah, Stanley. Buddhism Betrayed: Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. TamilNet. “Diaspora Students Mark Sivakumaran Day.” June 9, 2008. http:// www.tamilnet.com/art.html?artid=25949&catid=13. ———. “Woman Victim in Channel-4 Video Identified as Journalist Isaippiriyaa.” December 1, 2010. https://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13& artid=33147. Tamil Guardian. “A Poet’s Fearless Death.” May 21, 2016. https://www.tam ilguardian.com/content/poets-fearless-death. ———. “Canadian Tamil Youth Mark Students’ Uprising Day.” June, 11, 2012. http://www.tamilguardian.com/article.asp?articleid=5067. ———. “Pon. Sivakumaran Remembered in Jaffna.” June, 5, 2017. https:// www.tamilguardian.com/content/pon-sivakumaran-remembered-jaffna. ———. “Sivakumaran remembered in Germany.” June 7, 2021. https://www. tamilguardian.com/content/sivakumaran-remembered-germany. ———. “TYO-Canada Remembers Sivakumar.” June 16, 2011. http://www. tamilguardian.com/article.asp?articleid=3244 ———. “9 Years Today—A Massacre in Mullivaikkal.” May 17, 2018. https:// www.tamilguardian.com/content/9-years-today-–-massacre-mullivaikkal. Tamil Youth Organization, UK. “Why Is the World Not Hearing Our Protest?” February 7, 2021. https://www.tyouk.org/why-is-the-world-nothearing-our-protest/. Tchekmedyian, Alene, and Melissa Etehad. “2 Years of Opposition, 1,172 Miles of Pipe, 1.3 Million on Facebook check-ins. The Numbers to Know About the Standing Rock Protests.” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2016. https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-standing-rock-numbers-201 61101-story.html. Tiffany, Daniel. “Rhapsodic Measures.” Critical Inquiry 34, no. S2 (Winter 2008): S146–S169. Trigger, Bruce. A History of Archaeological Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Turner, Brian. “Body Bags.” In Here, Bullet. Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books, 2005. ———. My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1974.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

323

United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner. “About the Crisis in Iraq.” UN Refugee Agency. Accessed February 8, 2021. https:// www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/iraq/. United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner. “Total Number of Syrian Refugees Exceeds Four Million.” The UN Refugee Agency. Accessed February 8, 2021. https://www.unrefugees.org/news/total-num ber-of-syrian-refugees-exceeds-four-million-for-first-time/. United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner. “Submission to the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms While Countering Terrorism for the thematic Report on the Interface Between Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law in the Context of Counter-Terrorism.” Reprieve-GA75CT. (https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Terrorism/ SR/GA75/Reprieve-GA75CT.docx) https://search.ohchr.org/results.aspx? k=Reprieve. United Nations Security Council. “Report of the Secretary’s General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability In Sri Lanka.” March, 31 2011. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/document/ poc-rep-on-account-in-sri-lanka.php. University of California-Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas. “Guantanamo’s Children: The Wikileaked Testimonies.” Accessed December 26, 2020. http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/reports/guantanamoschildren-the-wikileaked-testimonies/guantanamos-children-the-wikileaked-tes timonies. United States Census Bureau. “American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month: November 2017.” October 6, 2017. https://www.census.gov/new sroom/facts-for-features/2017/aian-month.html. United States Interagency on Homelessness. “Homelessness in America: Focus on Veterans.” June 2018. https://www.usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_ library/Homelessness_in_America._Focus_on_Veterans.pdf. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District. “Dakota Access Pipeline Environmental Assessment.” Accessed February 12, 2021. https://www. nwo.usace.army.mil/Missions/Civil-Works/Planning/Project-Reports/Art icle/633496/dakota-access-pipeline-environmental-assessment/. U.S. Department of Defense. “Department of Defense Open Burn Pit Report to Congress.” April 2019. https://www.acq.osd.mil/eie/Downloads/Con gress/Open%20Burn%20Pit%20Report-2019.pdf. U.S. Department of Defense Memorandum of the Joint Task Force in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control for Guantanamo Detainee, ISN US9SA-000239DP.” The New York Times report, “The Guantánamo Docket.” http://projects.nytimes.com/gua ntanamo/detainees/239-shaker-aamer/documents/11.

324

BIBLIOGRAPHY

U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Terrorism 2002– 2005.” Accessed January 25, 2021. https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/pub lications/terrorism-2002-2005. U.S. Department of State. “Rewards for Justice.” Accessed January 25, 2021. https://www.state.gov/rewards-for-justice/. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “Suicide Among Veterans and Other Americans: 2001–2014.” Office of Suicide Prevention, August 3, 2016 (Updated August 2017 by the Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention). https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/2016suicidedatareport.pdf. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “Airborne Hazards and Open Burn Pit Registry.” Last updated August 24, 2020. https://veteran.mobilehealth.va. gov/AHBurnPitRegistry/index.html#page/home. Vesilind, Priit J. “Sri Lanka: A Continuing Ethnic War Tarnishes the Pearl of the Indian Ocean.” National Geographic 191, no. 1 (1997): 110–133. Vijaykumar, Mahamtan. “Which Countries Helped the Sri Lankan Government in the Sri Lankan Civilian War 2009?” South Asia Journal, January 23, 2020. http://southasiajournal.net/which-countries-helped-the-sri-lankan-gov ernment-in-the-sri-lankan-civilian-war-2009/. Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. “America’s Security State Is Apparently Trying to Hassle Its Critics Into Silence.” New York Intelligencer, October 3, 2013. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/09/critics-of-us-securitystate-cant-get-visas.html. Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. 5th edition. New York: Basic Books, 2015 [1977]. Washington Post. “Text: Bush: ‘I Don’t Have Anthrax.” October 23, 2001. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/ transcripts/bush_text102301.html. ———. “Text of President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address.” January 29, 2002. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/ sou012902.htm. ———. “Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation.” September 20, 2001. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/ transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html?noredirect=on. Waters, Roger. “My Pink Floyd Hit and This Tragedy.” The Daily Mail, December 22, 2014. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2884488/ My-Pink-Floyd-hit-tragedy-ROGER-WATERS.html. ———. “Shaker Aamer.” Vimeo. Accessed January 25, 2021. https://vimeo. com/104042185. Watkins, Alexandra. “Combatting Myths: Racial and Cultural Identity in Postcolonial Sri Lanka.” Cross/Cultures 180 (2015): 79–121. Watt, Nicholas. “Barack Obama to ‘Prioritise’ Case of Guantánamo Detainee Shaker Aamer: David Cameron Discusses Case of the Last Briton Held

BIBLIOGRAPHY

325

at Guantánamo Bay, Amid Fears He Could Be Sent to Saudi Arabia.” The Guardian, January 16, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ 2015/jan/16/shaker-aamer-guantanamo-bay-prioritise-obama-case. Weber, Donald. “From Limen to Border: A Meditation on the Legacy of Victor Turner for American Cultural Studies.” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (September 1995): 525–536. Weber, Max. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. New York: Routledge, 2009. Weintraub, Richard M. “Tamils Kill Dozens in Revenge.” The Washington Post, October 7, 1987. Weiss, Gordon. The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and The Last Days of the Tamil Tigers. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2012. Weissbrodt, David, and Amy Bergquist. “Extraordinary Rendition: A Human Rights Analysis.” Harvard Human Rights Journal 19 (2006): 123–160. White House: President Barack Obama (Archives). “Remarks by the President at the United States Military Academy Commencement Ceremony.” Office of the Press Secretary. May 28, 2014. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/2014/05/28/remarks-president-united-states-military-academy-com mencement-ceremony. White House. “Memorandum for the Secretary of the Army: Construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.” Office of the Press Secretary. January 24, 2017. https://legacy.npr.org/assets/news/2017/01/DakotaAccessCon struction.pdf. White House: President Bill Clinton (Archives). Containing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. December 19, 1998. https://clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov/WH/ EOP/NSC/html/nsc-11.html. White House: President George W. Bush (Archives). “President Delivers State of the Union Address.” January 29, 2002. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.arc hives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html. White House: President George W. Bush (Archives). The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Washington, DC, September 17, 2002. https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/63562.pdf. White House, Office of the press Secretary. “Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer.” March 24, 2003. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/rel eases/2003/03/20030324-4.html. Whitlock, Craig. “Bounties a Bust in Hunt for Al-Qaeda.” The Washington Post, May 17, 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2008/05/16/AR2008051603921.html. Whittaker, David. Terrorists and Terrorism in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge, 2004.

326

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. Terrorism: Understanding the Global Threat. London: Pearson Education, 2007. Whyte, Kyle. “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice.” Environment & Society 9, no.1 (September 2018): 125–144. ———. “The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and U.S. Colonialism.” RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities 19, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 154–169. https://papers.ssrn. com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2925513; and https://kylewhyte.cal.msu. edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2020/07/2020-Update-Dakota-AccessPipeline-US-Colonialism.pdf. Wilkinson, Paul. Terrorism versus Democracy: The Liberal State Response. London: Routledge, 2006. Williams, Brackette F. “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 401–444. Wilson, A. Jeyaratnam. The Break-Up of Sri Lanka: The Sinhalese-Tamil Conflict. London: Hurst & Company, 1988. _______. Chelvanayakam and the Crisis of Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism, 1947– 1977: A Political Biography. London: Hurst & Company, 1994. _______. Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism: It’s Origins and Development in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000. Wines, Michael, and Lizette Alvarez. “Council of Conservative Citizens Promotes White Primacy, and G.O.P. Ties.” New York Times, June 22, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/us/politics/views-on-race-andgop-ties-define-group-council-of-conservative-citizens.html?referringSource= articleShare. Worland, Justin. “What to Know About the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests.” Time, October 28, 2016. https://time.com/4548566/dakota-access-pip eline-standing-rock-sioux/. Zack, Naomi, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Zamudio, María Ines. “Deported U.S. Veterans Feel Abandoned by the Country They Defended.” NPR (National Public Radio), June 21, 2019. https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/06/21/733371297/dep orted-u-s-veterans-feel-abandoned-by-the-country-they-defended. Zangana, Haifa. City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.

Index

A Aamer, Shaker, 69–74, 76, 77, 101, 105, 106, 128 abjection, 140, 141, 177–179, 181, 182, 191, 197, 201 Abu Ghraib, 34, 47, 280 Acharya, Amitav, 26, 63 Afghanistan, 27, 38, 48, 49, 51, 70, 71, 73, 76, 79, 80, 85–87, 94, 96, 101, 112, 117, 119, 125–128, 130, 131, 137, 148, 233, 274, 275 agency, 16, 70, 72, 90, 91, 93, 95, 103, 127, 197, 256 Ahmed, Sara, 21, 22, 28, 29, 58, 61, 63, 66, 178, 205 willful method, 15, 16, 29, 44, 45, 100 al-Qaeda, 34, 49 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 50, 63, 67, 68 anarchy, 177, 178, 194, 196, 197, 199, 202 asymmetric warfare/asymmetrical warfare, 87, 90, 116, 119, 190

attachment, 16, 32, 39, 98, 102, 145, 197–199, 201, 202 Aungkaiatkanni, 147, 149, 150, 152–160, 172

B Bennett, Jane, 64, 89, 90, 93, 95, 111–113 Black Tigers, 122, 124, 125, 132, 133, 136, 141, 143–145, 152, 174, 206 life-weapon, 124, 143, 144, 155, 156, 158, 190, 197, 277 Blackwater, 36, 49 bounty bounty hunters, 72, 241 Brown, Wendy, 84, 89, 93, 109, 111 burn pits, 48, 67 Bush, George W., 30, 34, 62, 72, 82, 83, 86, 87, 93, 108, 129, 138, 140, 229, 252, 253 Bush Doctrine, 26, 27 Butler, Judith, 117, 120, 121, 132, 142, 148, 149, 168, 170, 171

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 Y. Sangarasivam, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82665-9

327

328

INDEX

C Casteel, Joshua, 47, 48, 68 Cha, Hak Kyung, 212, 236, 247, 256 Charleston, 101, 214, 218, 220, 221, 224, 244–246 Chin, Elizabeth, 212, 247 Chow, Rey, 138, 139, 143, 170–172, 197–199, 201–203, 209 CIA black sites, 22, 23, 34, 70, 241 citizenship, 15, 16, 35, 40, 44, 45, 49, 58, 76, 78, 85, 97, 119, 121, 142–144, 178–182, 201, 207, 283 Clinton, Bill, 23, 87, 88, 110 Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), 83 colonized, 43, 98 colonizer, 17, 35, 43, 97, 98, 193 Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), 219, 220, 248 counterterrorism, 22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 39, 70, 81, 83, 87, 89, 96–98, 112 cultural value of democracy, 17, 18, 23, 24, 79, 83, 85, 92, 93, 102, 121, 127 of freedom, 17, 18, 23, 24, 79, 84, 85, 93, 94, 102, 121, 127, 168 of nationalism, 24, 29, 34, 72, 80, 92, 93, 95, 98–100, 102, 118, 121, 139, 168, 178 of neoliberalism, 84, 90, 92, 93, 95, 98–100, 102 of patriotism, 23, 29, 72, 92, 93, 95, 99, 100, 118, 121, 138, 139, 168 of sacrifice, 148 of terrorism, 17, 24, 25, 29, 34, 72, 79, 80, 92, 93, 96, 98–102, 121, 211 cyanide, 41, 177, 178, 182, 183, 185–197, 200, 205, 207, 209

D Dakota Access Pipeline, 238–240, 256–258 Das, Veena, 173, 174, 196, 197, 209 democracy, 21, 22, 24, 26, 32, 71, 81, 84, 87, 93, 102, 103, 116, 170, 181–183, 213, 279 cultural value of, 17, 18, 23, 24, 79, 85, 92, 93, 101, 102, 121, 127, 168 drones pilots, 29, 119, 121, 122, 126, 168 terrorist attack disruption strikes (TADS), 30 warfare, 125, 127, 139, 168 warriors, 122, 125, 160, 177 E ecological, 22, 32, 43, 63, 78, 90, 93, 98, 102, 238 ecology of war, 72, 92, 95 enemy, 31, 34, 38, 44, 71, 87, 96, 102, 116, 120, 121, 132, 137–141, 144, 155, 157, 160, 176, 184, 187, 188, 192, 193, 196–199, 202, 211, 236, 244, 262, 264 racialized enemy Other, 98 enlightenment, 18–20, 32, 35, 99 constructions of race, 18, 20, 29 constructions of racist ideologies, 20, 60 extrajudicial killings, 30, 32, 212, 215–217, 221 extraordinary rendition, 22, 23, 30, 36, 49, 61, 70, 72, 74, 102, 104, 121, 170, 213 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, 19, 59 F Fanon, Franz, 43, 58, 66, 193, 208

INDEX

Farley, Anthony Paul, 97, 98, 112, 113 freedom cultural value of, 17, 18, 23, 24, 79, 81, 84, 85, 93, 94, 102, 121, 127, 168, 170 free market, 83, 84, 88, 93

G general will, 21–24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 44, 45, 178, 180, 191, 194, 205 globalization, 17, 27, 81, 94, 116 global war on terror, 22, 26–29, 31, 32, 34, 38, 44, 72, 74, 76, 78, 79, 82–90, 94, 97, 99, 102, 110, 116–119, 121, 138, 140, 144, 176, 177, 180, 181, 201, 213, 217, 226, 229 Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, 17, 22, 34, 48, 50, 70–74, 76, 102, 105, 106, 139

H Habeas corpus, 33, 50 Human Terrain System (HTS), 274, 275, 277, 293 Hussein, Saddam, 70, 78, 88, 106, 253, 279

I identity, 21, 25, 35, 39, 44, 58, 76, 97, 101, 116, 125, 139, 140, 143, 149, 154, 177–180, 184, 185, 189, 194, 196, 199, 201, 280 Indian Peacekeeping Forces (IPKF), 40, 188, 192, 195, 196, 199, 200, 203, 208, 209 insurgents, 15–17, 23, 24, 29, 34, 38–40, 45, 59, 91, 99, 101–103,

329

119, 137, 139, 141–143, 149, 177, 179, 182, 183, 185, 191, 201–204, 211, 228, 276 international community, 22, 25, 26, 28, 136, 138, 170, 177 international order of nation-states, 22, 24–26, 28, 29, 101 of races, 22 interrogations, 23, 47, 49, 50, 70, 195 Iran, 78–80, 107, 138, 203, 225, 229 Iraq, 38, 47, 48, 51, 62, 78–80, 83– 88, 91, 94, 96, 101, 106, 107, 109–112, 117, 119, 136–138, 148, 180, 183, 205, 229, 230, 232, 233, 241, 252, 274, 275, 279, 280 Islamic State, 86, 87, 110 attack in Paris, 86 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 86, 87, 95, 111

J Jihadists, 39, 72, 73, 77, 86, 90, 91, 95

K Kant, Immanuel, 18–21, 59 kill list, 30, 32, 126 Kristeva, Julia, 171, 178–180, 182, 205 Kumarappa, 195, 196

L Lao She, 197–199 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), 25, 28, 31, 39, 40, 61, 62, 66, 100, 101, 121, 122, 124, 132, 133, 136, 137, 141–145,

330

INDEX

147, 148, 150, 152–155, 157– 160, 170, 172–174, 177, 178, 185–197, 200, 203, 205–209, 215, 216, 222–225, 227 life-weapon, 124, 143, 144, 155, 156, 158, 190, 197, 277 Long Soldier, Layli, 68, 185, 205, 212, 247 Lorde, Audre, 212, 247 Loyd, Paula, 275, 293 LTTE. See Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) M Marine Corps, United States, 84, 124, 264, 268, 269, 291 Martin, Trayvon, 66, 215, 219, 220 massacre Charleston, 101, 214, 218, 220, 221, 224, 244–246 Mullivaikkal, 150, 211, 214–216, 221, 222, 224, 226, 241, 242, 246 My Lai, 214, 217, 221, 224, 241, 243, 244, 246, 283 Whitestone, 214, 237–239, 241, 246 Wounded Knee, 214, 230, 234–237, 241, 244, 246, 255 Mujahideen, 49 Mullivaikkal. See massacre My Lai, 214, 217, 221, 224, 241, 243, 244, 246, 283 mythology of white nation-states, 17, 18, 87 N nationalism cultural value of, 23, 24, 29, 34, 72, 80, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100, 118, 121, 139, 168, 178

national belonging, 15, 16, 31, 35, 36, 40, 43–45, 58, 78, 92, 95, 98, 103, 116, 117, 122, 127, 133, 137, 138, 140, 141, 153–156, 160, 177–182, 184, 185, 191, 192, 197, 198, 201–203, 208, 211, 214, 241, 242 white nationalism, 34, 96 national security, 22–24, 26, 27, 31, 38, 44, 50, 72, 79, 82, 83, 88–90, 94, 102, 117, 119, 120, 127, 138, 139, 178, 180, 182, 198, 213, 227, 241, 277 nations, 17, 22, 24, 26, 62, 63, 87, 95, 99, 117, 185, 225, 234, 237–241, 258 nation-states, 17, 18, 21–30, 32, 35, 58, 63, 77, 80, 88, 93–97, 99, 101, 116, 119, 122, 132, 136–138, 142, 144, 147, 154, 156, 170, 176, 177, 194, 197, 202, 213, 228, 280 neoliberal curriculum, 79, 83–85, 88–90, 92–94, 98 rationality, 83–85, 88, 89, 93, 94, 98, 99 reason, 84, 88, 89, 94 neoliberalism, 71, 81, 84, 85, 89, 91, 93–95, 99, 101, 103, 203 cultural value of, 84, 90, 92, 93, 95, 98–100, 102 No Fire Zone (NFZ), 216, 221–224, 228, 229 O Obama, Barack, 30, 50, 72, 111, 127, 138, 148, 149, 169, 230, 276 occupation, 29, 32, 48, 49, 78, 83, 84, 88, 90, 92, 97, 99, 120, 133, 137, 152, 153, 155, 156, 196,

INDEX

198, 213, 234, 274, 277, 279, 280, 283, 285 Operation Desert Fox, 88 Operation Desert Shield, 78 Operation Desert Storm, 78 Operation Desert Strike, 88 P patriotism, 15, 16, 34, 36, 38, 40, 44, 58, 63, 69, 71, 78, 81, 84, 89, 103, 116, 117, 132, 137–139, 141, 158, 160, 175, 177–182, 185, 191, 195, 198, 201, 202, 234, 242, 277 cultural value of, 23, 24, 29, 72, 92–95, 99–101, 118, 121, 138, 139, 168 patriotic pride, 16, 24, 29, 31, 36, 38, 43, 59, 76, 77, 79, 80, 92, 95, 97, 98, 102, 103, 116, 122, 127, 133, 138, 140, 177, 180, 182–185, 191, 194, 201, 203, 211, 216, 229, 241, 242, 244, 246 Pink Floyd The Division Bell , 261 The Wall , 69, 71, 76, 77, 98, 99, 101, 108 Prabhakaran, Velupillai, 186, 187, 194, 195, 215 Pulenthiran, 195, 196 R race, 18–21, 24, 26, 29, 39, 95, 97, 219, 231 race pleasure, 97, 98 racism, 19, 20, 44, 45 racist slurs, 96, 102 racist terms, 96, 112 Rainer, Yvonne, 59 Rajapaksa, Gotabaya, 242, 259

331

Rajapaksa, Mahinda, 215, 216, 221, 224, 227 Ratnathurai, Puthuvai, 150, 154, 159, 160, 172 Razack, Sherene, 17, 59, 87, 110, 111 resistance, 25, 29, 36, 39, 41, 71, 76, 80, 89, 92, 116, 119, 142, 149, 153, 158, 168, 171, 173, 175, 176, 190–194, 196, 203, 234, 235, 257, 258, 279, 280, 283 Rivers, L. Mendel, 218, 219, 248 Roof, Dylann, 219–221, 244, 245, 259 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18–22, 59, 61, 205 general will, 21, 22, 29, 31, 44, 45, 178, 180 social contract, 29, 31 S sacrifice, 15, 38–41, 116, 132, 139, 141, 143, 144, 147–150, 152– 154, 158, 159, 171, 173–175, 177, 179, 181, 185, 188–190, 192–195, 197, 199, 201–203, 207, 208, 277 satyagraha, 190–192, 197, 208 violence of non-violence, 190 Scahill, Jeremy, 30, 63, 108, 111 September 11, 38, 78–80, 129, 232 9/11, 27, 38, 48, 71, 81, 82, 93, 119, 138, 168, 230, 232, 273 sexual assault, 50, 261, 262, 264, 266, 272–274, 290 Sharpe, Christina, 215, 241, 247, 251, 259 silence, 177, 180, 182–185, 196, 197, 202 Sivakumaran, Ponnuthurai, 186–190, 206, 207 Slahi, Mohamedou Ould, 48–50, 67, 68

332

INDEX

soldiers, 15–17, 23, 24, 29, 34, 36, 38–40, 44, 45, 47–49, 70, 76, 80, 81, 84, 86, 90–92, 94–99, 101–103, 117–119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 131, 132, 136–142, 148, 149, 158, 168, 176, 177, 179–185, 191, 193–197, 200– 203, 209, 211, 216, 217, 221, 226, 228, 232–238, 241–244, 246, 254, 255, 259, 261, 262, 264, 275–277 sovereignty, 25–27, 29, 45, 85, 94, 99, 116, 118, 185, 227, 228, 238, 279 speculative ethnography, 15, 16, 25, 32, 36, 45, 64, 69, 99–102, 160, 214, 247 Spillers, Hortense, 63 Sri Lanka, 25, 28, 30, 39, 66, 100, 101, 133, 134, 141, 142, 144, 147, 149, 150, 154, 157, 171, 172, 178, 185, 189–191, 193–196, 204, 205, 215, 216, 221–227, 233, 242, 259 state-sponsored violence, 25, 31, 39, 61, 73, 98, 142, 145 Standing Rock, 235, 237–241, 256–258 Stewart, Kathleen, 16, 58 suicide as satyagraha nonviolent resistance and protest, 190–192, 197 narratability of, 197 of soldiers, 29, 34, 39, 81, 90, 95, 117, 118, 121, 122, 125, 131, 132, 139–141, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182–184, 191, 194, 196, 201, 202, 242, 246 unintelligibility as expression, 176, 178–181, 190, 191

suicide bombing, 101, 115–120, 124, 139, 143, 144, 147, 168, 191, 203 suicide bombers, 29, 34, 39, 86, 90, 95, 115–119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 132, 139, 141, 142, 154, 176, 203, 204, 206

T Tamil Eelam, 25, 28, 31, 44, 61, 101, 144, 150, 152, 154, 156, 189, 223 terrorism as a place of encounter, 214 cultural value of, 17, 24, 25, 29, 34, 72, 79, 80, 92, 93, 96, 98–102, 121, 211 vibrant materiality of, 89, 90 terrorist, 16, 22–25, 27–31, 34, 38, 39, 44, 65, 69–77, 86, 87, 90, 93–99, 101–103, 108, 116–118, 120, 127, 132, 141, 142, 144, 149, 177, 178, 184, 202, 203, 213, 229, 275, 276, 280 cultural and political constructs of, 93 Tiger Force, 231–233, 242, 254 Trigger, Bruce, 59, 60 Turner, Brian, 91, 111, 180, 183–185, 200, 202, 205, 209, 294, 295

U USA PATRIOT Act, 97, 98, 112, 170

V veteran(s), 48, 67, 91, 131, 136, 140, 148, 243, 262, 270, 272 vital materiality, 89, 91, 93, 95 vibrant matter, 64, 89, 95 vital materialism, 95

INDEX

W war, 15–17, 22–24, 32, 33, 36, 38–40, 43–45, 47–49, 69–72, 78, 79, 81–83, 86, 87, 89–103, 108, 110, 115–118, 120–122, 125, 132, 133, 136–142, 147, 152, 156, 159, 160, 173, 175–180, 182–185, 189, 191, 192, 194, 196, 198, 201–205, 208, 209, 212, 213, 215–217, 221, 222, 224–230, 236, 239, 240, 242, 243, 269, 275–277, 279 as ecological, 43, 72, 92, 95, 98 Waters, Roger, 74, 77, 99, 105, 106 weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 88, 229 White Citizens’ Council, 218, 219 Whitestone, 214, 237–239, 241, 246 white supremacy, 16–22, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 44, 84, 93, 94,

333

96–99, 101–103, 138, 178, 185, 218, 242, 246, 279 cultural value of, 17, 18, 24, 29, 34, 84, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 138, 178 willful willful methodology, 15, 16, 25, 29, 45 willfulness, 22, 35, 176, 178, 182, 184, 194, 201 willful subjects, 15, 24, 29, 44 Wounded Knee, 214, 230, 234–237, 241, 244, 246, 255

Y Ybarra, Sam, 231, 233, 234, 242

Z Zangana, Haifa, 279, 280, 294, 295