Chapter 2

POSTCOLONIAL SRI LANKA AND “BLACK STRUGGLES FOR SOCIALISM”

Socialist Ethics in Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies

These others, Hardy and Foster and them, he reflected, familiarized us with their cities and villages and the people in them through their tales, but the tales themselves had nothing to say to us. And when they wrote about our countries and our people, though the tales were familiar, the characters were strangers…. We had no history, or we had several, mostly not of our doing, or we had forgotten that part of it which was, or it was a part too late to remember: it could only unmake the present.

—Ambalavaner Sivanandan, When Memory Dies

It is significant that the idealization of the peasant, in the modern English middle-class tradition, was not extended, when it might have mattered, to the peasants, the plantation workers, the coolies of these occupied societies.

—Raymond Williams, The Country and the City

Above all, communalism, like ethnicity, is a pluralist word in a class world. They both describe, but do not tell—are historicist rather than historical.

—Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Communities of Resistance

The opposition between the history of labor immigration to the Euro-US metropolitan “centers” of the world and the history of the working class in the manufacturing sector of the postcolonial “Third World” forms the impasse that generally delineates the boundaries of the separate fields of immigration studies and postcolonial studies. However, this provisional distinction (produced in the context of framing institutional objects of investigation) risks reifying an instrumental, structural difference into an absolute, ontological one—forever dwelling upon economisms of comparative advantage and competition, rather than beginning to consider, however shakily, the possibility of a transnational “socialist ethics” in the shadow of trade unionist socialism.

Such an ethics is envisioned as an alternative to deadlocked dualisms of thinking that juxtapose the rational economic self-interest of the national worker against that of the foreign worker. The adjective added category of the immigrant worker supplants the naming of the worker—now more so than ever, in the era of remittance economies and outsourcing. Thinking of these (admittedly opposed) categories together is looked upon as ideologically suspect by extremes of left and right alike.¹ But these lines cross, or are forced together, in historical situations, in creative labor organizing, and within the narrative predicaments of working-class literature. For Ambalavaner Sivanandan, where “black is a political color,” working in the interest of underclass migrants and (black) working-classes in Britain requires simultaneously addressing stateless immigrant and national—the categories themselves are certainly politically charged—workers in postcolonial Sri Lanka. In When Memory Dies, as we will see, the lines of the subject and antisubject of the fabula are made to cross in the narrator’s self-annihilating wish for reparative justice.

Sivanandan’s concept of “black socialism”—forged, on the one hand, in opposition to Eurocentric Marxism, and on the other, against the divisive culturalism of a certain type of (essentialist, narrowly identitarian) ethnic studies—opens up a different set of possibilities for knowledge politics. Toward elaborating the terms of these possibilities, in this chapter I focus on the doubling of the postcolonial/ immigrant subject represented in the literary texts and political essays of Sri Lankan Tamil/black activist-writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan (b. 1923). While Sivanandan’s own journey is from newly independent “Ceylon” to the imperial metropole of Britain—not North America—nevertheless, the subject position that he theorizes has relevance for U.S. Marxist cultural studies. This is not only because the genealogy that Sivanandan plots for black socialism derives from the political arsenal of U.S., Caribbean, and African pan-Africanist internationalists like W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Amilcar Cabral; it is also because Sivanandan’s writings open us up to new ways of apprehending what has become an unthinkable abstraction in the era of economic globalization: the changing terms of the new international division of labor—in Sivanandan’s lexicon, the dialectic of “race and class.”

Following up on questions raised in the previous chapter, here my objectives are twofold. There I called attention to how the anticolonial proletarian novel is overlooked within working-class literary historiography. The first part of this chapter describes how Sivanandan’s work illuminates the place of this ideological blind spot in Western Marxism. However, moving beyond a consideration of this omission, in this chapter I also focus on the means by which Sivanandan moves away from the language and dicta of trade unionist socialism and left-party politics toward a more abstract and expansive philosophy of socialist ethics. The turn toward socialist ethics marks a break with conventional Eurocentric, masculinist analytics of class as well as with nationalist counternarratives. It opens up ways of articulating class and other collectivities—of asking “How many are we?”—in ways that anticipate contemporary working-class women writers’ and feminist thinkers’ attempts to conceptualize class as an anti-essentialist category. (Chapter 3 of this book provides a sustained examination of such working-class women’s and Marxist feminist critiques, focusing on writers and texts from either side of the international division of labor.)

The strategy behind this sort of organization of class—not framed by the particular historical example of the Industrial Revolution in England but based rather on the idea that the concept of class cannot be understood by generalizing from a particular historical moment—once again relies on a careful reading of some of Marx’s later writings. But if the idea of class should not be tied to a particular historical moment, only to be retroactively enshrined as the defining moment of social revolution, the questions persist: “What makes a class?” What constitutes socialist ethics? In Sivanandan’s case, the content of socialist ethics derives from the idea of literature and a concept of “the literary.” His move from left journalism to socialist ethics also coincides with his turn to literature and the decision to write historical fiction. For Sivanandan (who is best-known, perhaps, for his political essays and analyses), the publication of When Memory Dies opens up a different avenue for theorizing class struggle and a philosophy of history. The second objective of this chapter is to try to understand this turn to literature: What ideological—or, possibly, ethical—work does it accomplish?

I read Sivanandan’s literary texts and political analysis as supplementing each other in ways that many critics have neglected to examine. There seems to be a clear, categorical divide separating different schools of readership when it comes to Sivanandan. On the one hand, postcolonial scholars focus only on When Memory Dies, reading the novel as an epic narrative of class struggles leading up to the Sri Lankan civil war. On the other hand, scholars of black British cultural studies focus exclusively on Sivanandan’s critiques of the British government—his analyses of institutionalized racism, labor management, and immigration policy in contemporary Britain. Sivanandan, however, does not subscribe to this cauterized, compartmentalized vision of history. In his fiction as in his political analyses, we notice a doubling of subjects and historical scenes. What do we make of this narrative move? In his novel about the war in Sri Lanka, the life stories of disenfranchised immigrant workers constantly intrude to interrupt and sideline the primary narrative of interethnic violence. In his book Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism Sri Lankan history is included as a “case study.”² This back-and-forth movement between Sri Lanka and black socialism also becomes, for Sivanandan, a back-and-forth movement between history and literature. Ultimately, as we will see, this alternating movement itself becomes allegorized as a figure for reading.

“When was the post-colonial?” asks Stuart Hall. “What should be included and excluded from its frame?”³ (242). Sivanandan, one of Hall’s contemporaries and a “co-worker in the kingdom of culture,” embeds the story of postcolonial Sri Lanka in the context of “black struggles for socialism,” displacing the (commonly agreed-upon) order of the frame and what lies outside. Sivanandan, prior to Robert Young and his influential theoretical study, conceptualizes postcolonial historical difference in the context of a broader history of internationalism.⁴ If Dipesh Chakrabarty’s exhortation to the reader is to “provincialize Europe,” Sivanandan suggests we go further.⁵ We must also provincialize Sri Lanka.

PROVINCIALIZING SRI LANKA

“Was it a smooth transition, your development from teacher in the plantation areas of Sri Lanka to left-wing thinker here in Britain?” This question is posed to Ambalavaner Sivanandan during a 1990s interview (Communities, 8). The interviewer is a sympathetic colleague, but it seems significant that the phrasing of the question precludes any discussion of leftist political culture in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). It also presumes a continental divide between the practice of teaching working-class students in Sri Lanka and the practice of theorizing within Marxist circles in Britain. Moreover, the interviewer comprehends the postcolonial socialist’s journey as an evolutionary progress.

Sivanandan, however, recounts his arrival not as an introduction to left political culture but rather as a “double baptism of fire.” In the aftermath of the passage of the racist “Sinhala Only” language act of 1956 and the 1958 riots, he left Sri Lanka and entered upon the scene of race war in Britain. In his own words: “That was, I suppose, a double baptism of fire—Sinhalese-Tamil riots there, white-black riots here” (9). This is a much-quoted rendition of events. This synopsis of the author’s passage to England is in fact reprinted in the prefatory pages of When Memory Dies. While the language and rhetorical strategy of the brief biographical sketch are a necessary corrective to a neo-Orientalist optics that (still entrenched in its civilizing mission) only sees Third World violence, Sivanandan’s easy parallelism of separate historical events does not do justice to the breadth and depth of his own later work, which grapples with the complexity of differing ideologies of class, race, and “ethnicity” in the metropolitan center versus the postcolonial, anticolonial periphery.

In early pieces of prose writing and left journalism, Sivanandan emphasizes a cause-and-effect, structural connection between the exploited working class “here” (in Britain) and the one “there” (in Sri Lanka). As he puts it, writing under the heading “Casualties of Imperialism”:

The economic depredations of multinational capital, the political repression of the regimes that host it … all combine to effect the brutal dislocation and displacement of people all over the Third World and force them to flee their countries. Whether as economic refugees or as political asylum-seekers is no matter—for, however their arrival at the center may be categorized, their ejection from their countries is, as I have shown, both economic and political at once. To distinguish between them is not just willfully to misunderstand the machinations of imperialism today, but to pretend that the struggle against imperialism is not also here, at the center, or has nothing to do with workers’ struggles here.

(Communities, 189)

Beyond linear, causal narratives, When Memory Dies, however, might be read as mapping the political différance between ideas of race, class, and Marxism “here” and “there.” Specifically, it is a reworking of anecdotal, historical, and sociological evidence into political fiction—into literature’s provenance, the so-called ethical universal. The writing of When Memory Dies marks the political journalist’s turn to a medium other than realist reportage. Beyond personal history and the fact that—as it reads on the title page of his novel—“Sivanandan came to Britain from Ceylon in the wake of the riots of 1958 and walked into the riots of Notting Hill,” how can these different, multiple instances of racialization be understood as representative of a collective experience? What is at stake in this movement from the particular to the general (from metropolitan history to Third World political fiction—to Marxism and literature) signifies nothing less than a reorienting of the critical terrains of Marxist historiography and theory, starting from the grounds of an ethics of class struggles in the periphery.

In the concluding chapters of The Country and the City, Raymond Williams begins to touch upon the need to examine the politics of modernism in light of the racialization of the international division of labor, but ultimately stops short of closely examining the racism that is a structural, not aberrational, part of the left, liberal paradigm. Centering the example of postcolonial Sri Lanka, the export-oriented tea plantation industry, and other legacies of the colonial division of labor, Sivanandan ultimately engages the provenance not only of bourgeois (Sinhala) nationalist historiography, but also of “left-wing thinking” or “left cultural imperialism,” as he formulates it.

WRITING RACE, CLASS, AND (LITERATURE)⁶

One year after the anti-Tamil pogroms of July 1983 in the city of Colombo, Sivanandan first published the essay “Sri Lanka: A Case Study” in the London-based journal that he had founded, Race and Class. In 1990 he republished the article as the final chapter in Communities of Resistance, an anthology of heterogeneous political writings—reviews, transcripts of interviews, pieces of left journalism, and historical studies. Here we find—strangely, perhaps—that the particular historical case study of postcolonial Sri Lanka constitutes the last word in “black struggles for socialism.” In 1997 Sivanandan revisited the text of this monograph once again, this time transforming its phrasing into bits and pieces of dialogue and plotline for an epic novel/part fictionalized memoir set against the backdrop of the ongoing Sri Lankan interethnic war, When Memory Dies.

What enables the politics of that reframing? What limits it? What is gained (or lost) for Marxist historiography in this move from the radical particularity of the case study to the supposedly universal properties of “Marxism and Literature”? “Sri Lanka: A Case Study” is an angry piece of writing. It concludes like a manifesto with a call to arms; the final paragraph reads:

Against that mounting dictatorship stands only the armed resistance of the Tamil freedom-fighter—and whatever the goal in view, their immediate and inevitable task is to continue their unrelenting war against the fascist state…. There is no socialism after liberation; socialism is the process through which liberation is won.

(Communities, 248)

Sivanandan’s novel When Memory Dies, however, is written in a different register—not in the tone of a manifesto, but in one of elegiac protest.⁷ Counter to the staging of history in the case study, in the closing scene of book 3 the hero is gunned down by an LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) “freedom fighter.” And Sivanandan rewrites the “no socialism, after liberation” speech, reshuffling the terms as part of an unresolved debate between an LTTE operative and a grassroots activist (the novel’s protagonist) struggling to find common ground in socialism—but failing (405–406). The final speech in the book, not incidentally, will be given over to Meena, the girl-child/organic intellectual from the tea estate regions of Sri Lanka.

I resist the contention that the turn to literature signifies a capitulation, an abandoning of an earlier radical—even violent—stance in favor of an uncritical liberal humanism. Rather, the turn to literature enables a different elaboration of radical politics and ethics. In Sivanandan’s case, this different elaboration is motivated by a dispute with the idea of “history as fait accompli” that sociological explanations must rely on to ground their truth claims—that is, by a critique of historicism.⁸ Elsewhere, in a rousing prose passage on the poverty of the historicist imagination, Sivanandan has noted that “above all, communalism, like ethnicity, is a pluralist word in a class world. They both describe, but do not tell—are historicist rather than historical” (Communities, 235). And yet this literary rewriting cannot be understood to be simply equivalent to an exercise in revisionist history.

As mentioned, “Sri Lanka: A Case Study” is an angry piece of writing. In the novel, however, the writer restages the final drama differently. Sivanandan rewords the terms of his manifesto, this time simultaneously knocking the gun out of the LTTE adherent’s hands. By the end of the book, we find that Vijayan, the final protagonist of the novel, although he does not live to realize his goal, has foresworn allegiance to militant nationalism and revolutionary violence, dedicating himself instead to teach in a rural school district. Inspired by reading Amilcar Cabral, he resignifies the slogan “Return to the Source,” to serve the cultural politics of the struggle at hand. Undoubtedly there are other, more programmatic ways of understanding this ideological shift in the text, especially in the wake of philosophical and tactical changes in organizations like the LTTE (and indeed the Sinhala chauvinist JVP) from socialism to nationalism to violence.⁹ But it’s also worthwhile to consider Sivanandan’s general statements touching upon Marxism and the philosophy of literature.

In Sivanandan’s case, the turn to literature, simultaneous with the movement away from the language of manifestos, is a move toward an understanding of the dialectic as quotidian—to be apprehended not in the context of revolutionary moments, but in the struggles of the everyday. As the writer explains it, “that tool of analysis that Marxism gave me in dialectical materialism was ‘the moment of a miracle’ which in Dylan Thomas’s phrase is ‘unending lightning’ and I was later, much later, to discover with the poets and novelists that the dialectic was not just a tool of analysis but a felt sensibility” (Communities, 5). Not incidentally, lines from Dylan Thomas’s “Forgotten Mornings” compose the epigraph to book 1 of When Memory Dies; the idea resurfaces in a short story by Sivanandan titled “The Man Who Loved the Dialectic.”¹⁰ Literary rewriting, then, is not simply equivalent to an exercise in revisionist history, but is an exercise in dialectical thought.¹¹ The turn to literature also must be seen as Sivanandan’s effort to grapple with a Marxist philosophy—from class politics to socialist ethics. But finally and most importantly, the literary turn enables a deterritorializing double focus—a principled, intentional blurring of the lines not permitted in the tenets of history writing, reportage, or, indeed, revolutionary propaganda.

Literature preserves the shifting relationality, the différance of race and class that Sivanandan attempts to illuminate when he writes elsewhere of the ever-changing terms of the international division of labor. Describing his own position, as the organic intellectual of the anticolonial struggle, he writes, negating the concepts of “exile”—and of “domicile”:

For me to feel truly “an exile” would to be exiled from the struggles of the black and Third World peoples I know so well and from whom I come. And the struggle is where I am, the struggle is here and now. But of course, I carry a double consciousness with me: that of my place in this society, my place in the struggle of black, working-class people here and now, and that of my place in the struggles of Third World Peoples in Third World countries both here and there. And I am not exiled from that…. And therefore I do not understand the question of exile. I do not understand the question of domicile.

(Communities, 16)¹²

For Sivanandan, ultimately it is a philosophy of literature and the provenance of the literary that enables the ethical double movement—a worldview that not only “provincializes Europe” (to refer to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s intervention) but also, just as importantly, provincializes Sri Lanka—frames the nation in the context of a larger history of socialist internationalism, class politics, and comparative ethnic struggles, worldwide.

TELLING HISTORY

Some might argue that the turn to literature (that I am identifying in Sivanandan) is synonymous with what Marxist critics of poststructuralist theory have decried as the “linguistic turn.” According to certain orthodoxies of Marxist literary criticism, formal experimentation (outside realism) would constitute at best a form of sleight of hand and at worst a type of ideological betrayal. Critics like John Berger, for example, seem adamantly against poststructuralist readings of When Memory Dies. In his back-cover blurb—admittedly an overdetermined genre of critical appraisal—he writes, “There are no flip evasions, or post-modern copouts. Here [in When Memory Dies] you are in life, just as one says ‘in love.’” By contrast, Timothy Brennan finds the course of the novel “unsatisfactorily” dictated by the saga form. He would excuse the novel’s limitations by redirecting the focus to Sivanandan’s writings in other genres. Yet conventional theories of literary historiography (more often than not, merely conveniences of periodization) do not help us to account for the particular ways in which Sivanandan breaks with chronology to establish a relationship between narrative form and the conceptual and ideological content of historical discourse. Rather than a chronicler’s saga, When Memory Dies might be read as charting the zigzagging prospects and unverifiable outcomes of actively marginalized stories with working-class history and formal labor organizing.

Given its intergenerational scope and richness of historical detail, When Memory Dies resists summary. The sheer expanse of time covered presents us with a difficult, if not impossible, task. We are forewarned by the narrator at the outset to expect “no one story, with a beginning and an end, no story that picks up from where the past left off—only bits and shards of stories” (5). And yet, interfering with this qualification, the imperative of the book is to recover what we have now passively forgotten or actively repressed—moments of solidarity, compromise, and forgiveness, remembrances of life and work before the creeping ethnicization of politics and the systematic militarization of daily life in post-Independence Sri Lanka. The novel is at war with itself in terms of its ideological and taxonomic legacy. Some parts read like an archetypal social realist working-class novel; others, however, dream after another way of “telling history.” For Sivanandan, literary rewriting—the expansion and annotation of the polemical essay and historical case study—despite certain critics misgivings, permits the exercise of dialectical revisionism (as opposed to relativist second-guessing) of certain entrenched Marxist orthodoxies.

“Historicist histories … describe but do not tell.” To tell, then (“to make a narrative of,” might we say?), is to do more than to describe, tally facts, or keep faithful score according to the time line of significant events in nationalist history. In When Memory Dies, the historical backdrop changes from early anticolonial labor struggles to the rise (and decline) of the trade union movement, to the compromises of post-Independence left-party politics, to “IMF Capitalism,” to the institutionalization of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, to LTTE violence. The basic plot (rearranged for chronology’s sake) traces the biography of a three-part collective subject—father (Sahadevan), son (Rajan), and the son’s adopted son (Vijaya/Vijayan)—over a period extending from the 1920s to the contemporary moment in Sri Lanka. Following upon the murder of his wife and his subsequent breakdown, Rajan, the narrator-protagonist, all but drops out of the story with the end of book 2. Vijayan, the hero-protagonist, is depicted as haunted by memories of his murdered mother—more of a presence in his life than his absent father.

Annotating, and at moments disrupting, the primary story line of male bonding/unbonding, however, is a different, dispersed, dislocated kinship narrative of father, sister, and daughter (Sanji, Selamma, and Meena) who are stateless plantation workers facing the threat of “repatriation” to India. Here, within the situation of indentured labor, we see that the Oedipal/familial bond has been broken and reconstituted at the outset. In a novel without a center, the exorbitant vignette of (the child) Sanji’s expulsion from school serves as recursive, provisional focal point for the narrator. The character development of Meena, Sanji’s daughter (and Vijayan’s lover) reads as a counterpoint to this abortive narrative trajectory. The author represents her as an autodidact and organic intellectual of the working class. She gets to pronounce the final word on ethnic fratricide—simultaneously a verdict on nationalism and a eulogy for socialism: “You have killed the only decent thing left in this land…. We’ll never be whole again” (410).

Reordered through the lens of Sivanandan’s fiction, the exorbitation of the organic intellectual of the stateless plantation working class is made central to the telling of Sri Lankan history.¹³ The author contrives a connection between the main actors of the nationalist contest and these others, deemed peripheral to all action. In assessing how and where he breaks with chronology to establish a relationship between form and ideology, we cannot overlook the meaning of the novel’s labored and unwieldy beginning and interrupted ending. The story opens with a philosophical meditation on a sense of self located in the acknowledgment of a disenfranchised other. Linearity and the “saga form” are in fact dispensed with at the very outset of the novel. In practices of reading as in movements of migration, which do we privilege, origins or destinations? Sivanandan’s narrator-protagonist, Rajan, cannot answer this question for himself in any positivistic sense. He starts us off from a muddled place where lines of territorial claims and losses, those dividing victims and conquerors, and even self and other, are more ethically compromised than the accommodations of slogan-shouting peace builders and war mongers alike.

READING INTERNATIONALISM: THE DIALECTIC OF RACE AND CLASS

Sivanandan’s cross-generational epic, most often construed as a novel focusing on the Sri Lankan civil war, opens with this unwieldy moment of the narrator-protagonist attempting to articulate an archive of working-class history across dispersed locations—the immigrant writer (in England) and the immigrant worker (in Ceylon). The moment is framed by the author’s own history; Rajan, like the author, leaves Ceylon in the wake of anti-Tamil violence of 1958. At the very outset of the novel, we are confronted with a deliberate provocation: Is it possible to read internationalism as transference, and transference as ethical—as the displaced affective basis for the activist intellectual’s politics?

The problem of describing internationalism as a “structure of feeling”—in Sivanandan’s own words, “the dialectic as a felt sensibility”—becomes the narrative burden of When Memory Dies. In context, the story of an estate worker’s son who is expelled from the English-medium school is forthcoming in book 2 (following the birth of the narrator). In a book that is primarily ordered into three sequential parts, the marked achrony of the first few pages reveals something about the past and memory before it gets separated out from the narrating self as something objectified, nameable, and discrete—the social. The novel opens out of sequence with an out-of-sync narrator contemplating a strange death wish:

My memory begins, as always, with the rain—crouched as a small boy against the great wall of the old colonial building that once housed the post office. It frightened me, the great monsoon downpour, and saddened me too, threw me back on my little boy self and its lonelinesses, the growing things in myself I could not tell others about, the first feel of the sadness of a world that kept Sanji from school because he had no shoes. And I welcomed the lightning then, not frightened any more, for it would strike me dead and Sanji would have my shoes, and I would be sad no more … in that moment that had gone and come again, it was awe and grief and wonderment crowding in on each other mixed up with Sanji’s shoes.

Rajan, the narrator of this passage, is speaking out of turn. According to the book’s narrative chronology, his birth has not occurred. Yet this strange (and estranged) figure is also very familiar and proximate in relationship to Sivanandan, the author. Furthermore, the author constructs Rajan as an unreliable narrator (traumatized after losing his wife to a murderous Sinhala mob) who begins telling the story from outside the frame, from a place removed from Sri Lanka—distant England. But conceptually and logically prior to (any) protagonist’s story is the space displaced for the cosmopolitan, colonial intellectual: The nonsubject, Sanji, whose absent presence haunts the story from the very outset, happens to be the child of one of the “stateless million,” Indian-origin Tamil laborers, originally recruited by the British in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth to work on colonial tea plantations. He belongs to a subaltern class that remains disenfranchised in the aftermath of national independence. The narrator recalls the day his childhood friend was sent home from school. Sanji is denied access to education in an era of free education for all (in postcolonial Sri Lanka) because his parents can’t afford to supply him with shoes to go along with the required pristine uniform.

The doubling of the subject and antisubject (of the political and economic migrant) is predicated on a self-reflexive/deauthorizing movement. These two figures converge/disband as a dialectical image. Across time, distance, and class difference, the mise en scène is a moment of fraught overidentification—but one which emblematizes an acknowledgment of the autocritical privilege of narration: wishing someone else into his shoes. The “dialectic as felt sensibility” in the opening iterative movement is a complex recasting of the desire and interests of “double consciousness.” The class divisions between the speaking subject (the postcolonial Tamil diasporic intellectual) and the subaltern antisubject (stateless economic migrant) cannot be magically undone by slogans and manifestos: “I don’t believe in exile. I don’t believe in domicile” resonates differently for the stateless immigrant (in Ceylon). Sivanandan’s narrator and alter ego risks communicating what Sivanandan, theorist of black British cultural studies cannot—that internationalism is a feeling of connection based on disconnection.

The narrator goes on to observe, “Other seasons I would come to know—spring and autumn and winter—and other countries where shoes abounded. But the things that crowded in on me that day in the rain, and in many rains after, and made me an exile for the better part of my life, were also the things that connected me to my country and made me want to tell its story” (1). The troping of history writing as survivor’s guilt is a strange way of representing the ethical stance of the engaged historian, to be sure. Furthermore, here the speaking subject’s own access to collectivity in “other countries” is predicated upon the recognition of the denial of access to the subaltern other in Sri Lanka—glaringly faulty logic, certainly. Sivanandan’s critique of historicism proceeds by way of an imagined substitution and an active displacement—an exchange of places between “here” and “there,” between colonial subject and organic intellectual, between diaspora and nation. Is this rhetorical maneuver simply to be understood as Sivanandan instrumentalizing the history of up-country Tamils in Sri Lanka?

We have no explicit textual evidence to suggest that the character, Rajan, is identical to Sivanandan. We don’t know that he goes on to become politically active in working-class struggles in these “other countries.” He fades out of the narrative at the end of book 2, “resurfacing” only for the opening meditation at the beginning of the novel. In Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man suggests, however, that “political and autobiographical texts have in common that they share a referential reading-moment explicitly built in within the spectrum of their significations” (278). In a text that is as political as it is autobiographical—part fictionalized history, part political memoir—this is one such referential reading-moment captured in confessional mode. The colonial intellectual hearkens back to an earlier moment of originary dispersal, forcing a connection between “diasporas old and new.”¹⁴

Rajan’s remorseful commentary as it occurs in the novel, then, is very different from the strident postcolonial immigrant credo, demanding legitimation and visibility in the imperial metropolis. It is voiced in a different register than the familiar line “we are here because you were there,” or, as Sivanandan maintains in his political essays: “I do not understand the question of exile. I do not understand the question of domicile” (Communities, 16). Rather, it is modified—completely reformulated in the service of the subaltern other: “I am here, because he is not” seems to be the formulation of the colonial intellectual in a strange sleight of hand involving cause and (a)ffect. Problematically perhaps, the concept of the literary in terms of Sivanandan’s definition (as the graph of différance) can also make visible the difficult fact that representation for one constituency is predicated upon the effacement of another. But knowing this, how do you proceed? Historicist histories dictated by pregiven sociological categories such as race and ethnicity (“pluralist words in a class world”) “describe but do not tell.” Again, to “tell” then (to make a narrative of) is to do more than to describe or merely tally facts. Thus counter to dominant narratives of Sri Lankan nationalist history, When Memory Dies begins by recalling the displaced origins of labor history—not those of archaeological settlement history or those of separatist nationalism.

In a novel that has no center—we are forewarned to expect “no one story, with a beginning and an end, no story that picks up from where the past left off—only bits and shards of stories”—the foreclosed narrative trajectory of the organic intellectual, like the memory of shoes that never were, calls attention to itself through absence. Beyond merely gestural politics or claims of solidarity from a distance, Sivanandan’s explicit decision to prioritize stories of estate workers resonates with the efforts of labor historians who would frame Sri Lanka in the context of histories of labor internationalism and the politics of migration. Displacing competing nationalist claims to national territory, When Memory Dies recalls us to the fact that Sri Lanka must be understood to be the beneficiary of Indian immigrant labor. Sithaperam Nadesan makes the case explicit, reminding us that “millions of Indians were compelled to migrate to the various colonies of the British Empire. And today we find peoples of Indian origin constituting a considerable part of the populations of many countries, such as Sri Lanka, British Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Mauritius, Malaysia, and Fiji.”¹⁵ At the beginning of the novel, questions of nation and diaspora are presented as all tangled up with the narrating subject’s own feelings of displacement and cathexis. “And therefore I do not understand the question of exile. I do not understand the question of domicile.” Again, undoubtedly, the phrase indexes a different reality for the internationalist as opposed to the stateless million plantation workers, and yet while for Giorgio Agamben the refugee marks the paradigmatic figure of the age who brings to crisis the fiction of the sovereignty of the nation-state, Sivanandan would seem to want to underscore that it is the figure of the stateless refugee worker who does so.¹⁶

“DEHISTORICIZING HISTORY”: LABOR HISTORY AS SUPPLEMENT¹⁷

“And even what little is left of them you want to send back to India. They never knew India. They were born here. Even the British let us die here and be buried among the tea-bushes for manure, but your people …”

—When Memory Dies

 

The alternating rhythm between prospective and retrospective (new objects and old) is not framed in terms of different spaces (diaspora and mainland/England and Sri Lanka) throughout the novel as it is in the opening scene. (The opening frame narrative is the only segment—descriptions of locale withheld—that is set in England.) And yet, the back-and-forth movement, which is also the motion of reading, propels the critical ethical agency of this book. Elsewhere in the novel, the concept of the dialectic as felt sensibility is illuminated against and through dialectical revisionism as the activity of reading and rereading. (I return to this point at length in the final section). The narrator as “reader” (in the robust sense of the word) is a leitmotif of the novel. Both as trope and plot point, questions of what reading is, who reads, who fails to, who is rendered illegible, and who is rendered illiterate become freighted with meaning. Meena, Sanji’s daughter, an autodidact and proletarian philosopher in her own right, struggles to acquire the educational opportunities denied to her father. As we see, Sivanandan’s own allegory of reading strains, however imperfectly, toward a performative poetic justice for the stateless refugee workers of Sri Lanka’s plantation economy.

The year that Ceylon received national independence from Britain, 1948, saw over a million tea plantation workers rendered “stateless” by fiat of the new “post-Independence” state. The catachrestically named Ceylon Citizenship Act (No. 18) disenfranchised an entire social formation of working-class Sri Lankans, officially designated as “recent Indian-origin Tamils,” based on where they were born. (The appellation “recent” is itself a misnomer, given that many of those disenfranchised were the descendents of South Indian workers who had been arriving in waves since as early as the 1820s, summoned, cajoled, and in other instances coerced by labor recruiters working in the pay of British tea planters.) The sequence of events unfolded as follows: the famine in Madras (one in a series of agrarian crises in India under British rule) lead to the proletarianization of rural labor and subsequent forced migrations to Ceylon. Endless cycles of debt, hunger, and coercion (or compromise) then compelled the journey along Mannar and the North road to the dismal line rooms of the tea estates.

Among historians of the plantation economy in Sri Lanka, former trade unionist and labor activist Nadesan presents the case most emphatically for understanding Sri Lanka in diasporic relation to India. Not surprisingly, such a perspective is actively marginalized in Sinhala and Tamil nationalist historiographies.¹⁸ Nadesan’s account of the history of “Up-country Tamils,” however, begins by invoking changing cartographies of labor, and piecing together unforeseen or ignored linkages also with systems of slavery and forced labor.¹⁹

In 1964 the Sirima-Shastri Pact established elaborate terms for “repatriation” and devised a mathematical formula for apportioning citizenship between donor and recipient states. According to the terms of the agreement, of an estimated 975,000 stateless people, 525,000 (“with their natural increase”) were to be “repatriated” to India over a period of several years. Ceylon agreed to grant citizenship to a mere 300,000, along with “their natural increase.” The fate of the remaining 150,000-plus was slated to be determined later. While the Indian government balked at the prospect of an influx of repatriates, the Ceylonese government congratulated itself on solving the crisis to the nationalists’ satisfaction—for the time being at least. The projected time line for the satisfactory balancing of the equation was set for fifteen years, but the stateless question remains unresolved. Registration and repatriation, both voluntary and coerced, continue in post-Independence Sri Lanka, past sundry election year maneuverings. As of 2003 the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) was continuing its programs of registration and repatriation for Sri Lankans unable to hold property in their own name—noncitizens who have lived their entire lives without a passport, identity card, birth certificate, or bank account. The wording of the 1961 convention, under whose auspices such work is carried out, captures the futility of the endeavor: its mandate is for “the reduction of statelessness.”

The history of Up-country Tamils thus testifies to the fact that the inauguration of the “subject of freedom” or of postcolonial “independence” coincides with that of a subject of bonded labor and statelessness. This cruel fact of postcolonial Sri Lankan history is more than the background or setting of Sivanandan’s novel; it constitutes the différance at the origin of independence.

Ultimately Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies must also be read as contributing to the ongoing projects of critiquing historicism and “dehistoricizing history” in Sri Lanka. In the context of recent Sri Lankanist postcolonial theory, “the critique of historicism”—or the critique of the idea that (past) history absolutely determines and dictates present history’s political and ethical options for organization and collectivity—is identified almost automatically with David Scott’s Refashioning Futures. In postcolonial literary studies, it is by now a meaningless piety to point to the fact—although it is still routinely done in the context of revisionist projects—that there are gaps and omissions in the available postcolonial record. Postcolonial fiction is thus marshaled via a poststructuralist reading practice to show how we produce history’s concept in the aftermath of colonialism—after epistemic violence.

It must be conceded that, on the one hand, When Memory Dies dramatizes a version of this useful but by now familiar political strategy. Book 3 finds the protagonist, Vijay/Vijayan, discovering the economic and philosophical lacunae of the canon and liberal humanism. As he sifts through the books that his father (now a political exile in England) sends him, he meditates on the ideological blind spots: “These others, Hardy and Foster and them, he reflect[s], familiarized us with their cities and villages and the people in them through their tales, but the tales themselves had nothing to say to us. And when they wrote about our countries and our people, though the tales were familiar, the characters were strangers…. We had no history, or we had several, mostly not of our doing, or we had forgotten that part of it which was, or it was a part too late to remember: it could only unmake the present” (289). On the other hand, however, beyond this moment in the book, the rhetorical protocols of When Memory Dies illuminate a more counterintuitive critique of historicism that also contributes to a specific school of thought within Sri Lankan Marxism.

Less well known than Dipesh Chakrabarty’s intervention into “provincializing Europe,” perhaps, are the projects of critiquing historicism and “dehistoricizing” history within Sri Lanka. In 1979, with a series of conferences, the Colombo-based Social Scientists Association opened up a general debate into how historians produce history’s concept. Papers from this gathering were later collected and published under the title Ethnicity and Social Change. This publication then led to the production of other collections, such as Facets of Ethnicity—critically important works of activist scholarship combining a wide range of different interdisciplinary theoretical interventions. How do we begin to write a “history of the present” without becoming caught up in the claims and counterclaims that structure the base terms of the nationalist contest? Radhika Coomaraswamy takes on this question in an early piece, titled “Myths Without Conscience: Tamil and Sinhalese Nationalist Writings of the 1980s,” in which she observes that too often “issues of justice and oppression get lost in a discourse of fact and counter-fact, [and] ironically, in this struggle for the ‘correct’ interpretation other more social values are forgotten” (54). Kumari Jayawardena writes about the rise and fall of the labor movement in Sri Lanka, excavating the brief history of an undivided Tamil-Sinhala left and working-class politics in the anticolonial 1920s—which undoubtedly serves as the background setting for much of the first segment of Sivanandan’s 1997 novel. Newton Gunasinghe, on the other hand, analyzing the political economy of the ethnic conflict, theorized that in Sinhala and Tamil ethnic formations “class contradictions” are overdetermined, in the Althusserian sense, by ethnic conflict. David Scott’s “Dehistoricizing History” invokes this collective project, even as he intervenes to show how some of its best-intentioned practitioners mistook its conditions and constraints.

Sivanandan’s book not only builds upon this scholarship but also extends its reach. If Ethnicity and Social Change assessed the banal templates for mapping Sri Lankan historiography in terms of mytho-historical chronicles and archaeological settlement history—rescued and resuscitated to validate current territorial claims—When Memory Dies dramatizes the irrelevance of origins fetishism altogether, placing as the supplement to the origin (of the book) working-class history and cartographies of labor. It is not incidental, I would argue, that the story begins with a subaltern figure, exorbitant to nationalist histories. That is, the recollection of Sanji, without shoes, barred from attending estate schools—child of one of the “stateless million” tea plantation workers originally recruited by the British—must go “before the beginning” of the story proper. (Historicist) history is irrelevant—especially competing versions of national history, either Tamil or Sinhala—in the context of such a narrative sequencing.

Ultimately Sivanandan’s novel needs to be read along with Nadesan’s historiography, which connects the history of the Up-country Tamils with the global history of indentured labor and forced migrations. Nadesan’s account of the estate workers’ struggles is a beautifully heretical statement that is mindful of the lost parts in the telling of the story, especially in a Sri Lanka riven by an interethnic war, where working-class history is daily being erased and reconstructed by political institutions such as the Sinhala Commission. We see how in 2001, for example, this militant nationalist organization issued a curious statement recommending to the government that as a means of righting British colonial wrongs it take measures to retroactively deny citizenship to the descendents of Indian-origin Tamils. A truly ironic use of the epistemology of postcolonialism—here in the service of Sinhala nationalism.

The discontinuous piece of the story that serves as a supplement to the origin has to be understood also in the context of the novel considered as literary rewriting of the earlier case study. Critics like Qadri Ismail, for example, have proposed that Sivanandan’s novel is “not historical, but historicist.”²⁰ But then again, most critics (Ismail included) focus on the beginning of the book (chronologically its end), commenting on the pessimism of its outcome. By this point, the protagonist is dead. The death of socialism has been pronounced. But to focus on beginnings—or properly speaking, beginnings as ends—I would argue, is to ignore the text’s own rhetorical and political protocols, given that the entire book is about the undecidablity of origins in one sense or another. Origins are in question, for example, if we consider the character-logic of the martyr-hero Vijay/Vijayan: Is he Sinhala or Tamil? By birth, or by socialization? The doubling of his name itself is an undoing of nationalist origin myths, as we know.²¹ Or, if we consider narratology itself, the undecidability is aptly emblematized in the signal phrase “socialism is the path to liberation, not just its end” (406). Thus to privilege beginnings, or indeed beginnings as ends, is to resolutely ignore the crucial, urgent motif of “undecidablity” of origins dramatized in the text.

THE TURN TO LITERATURE

He reached out for his notebook to put his thoughts down; he kept one now, as his mother had; it helped him to talk to himself, to all those other selves of his. “He who sees himself in others and others in himself is no longer alone.” Was that the Gita or the Upanishads? He prided himself on his reading. Perhaps he should be a writer…. But for whom would he write? He did not want to write for intellectuals, they made playthings of knowledge. For ordinary people? … He understood contradiction out there in society, but he did not grasp it in himself, in people. He had not till now seen conflict as necessary to one’s personal growth, as an essential part of life, its motor, as natural as breathing. He had not seen that the dialectic was also a felt sensibility and, unless he grasped that, he would not be able to change anything.

(291; emphasis mine)

In one of the culminating episodes leading up to the tragic “ending” of When Memory Dies, the following conversation takes place between a separatist militant, fighting for a separate state, and Vijayan, a teacher, working-class activist, and, as seen here, believer in socialism. As many with other instances in the novel, it registers as pointedly didactic intrusion—made more interesting if we consider that it is the revision of Sivanandan’s earlier essay, “Sri Lanka: A Case Study”:

“What are you fighting for? Yes, yes, for Eelam, I know. But what sort of Eelam?”

“A socialist Eelam, of course.”

“But where’s the socialism now? … It never happens like that, you know, Yogi …”

“But then we’ll never take power” …

“There’s that chance, of course, but this way you are bound to end up replacing one tyranny with another. Where’s your socialism then? … Socialism is the path to liberation, not just its end.”

In the final, though not conclusive scene, of the novel, Vijayan is shot down as he attempts to rescue a mistakenly identified “informant” from the fate of a signature LTTE lamppost killing. But in the dialogue above, as elsewhere throughout the novel, we notice a deliberate turning away from revolutionary injunctions toward other meanings and moorings for socialist transformation. The autodidact’s discovery of literature—or to put it more precisely, his discovery of a mode of reading—is what leads him to question prescriptive dogmas. In When Memory Dies, as we see, what is lost and mourned is not sovereignty or territory as much as it is a shared way of life built on the value of learning as well as a mode of questioning motivated by habits of “reading” in the robust sense of the word.²²

The turn to reading and specifically the turn to literature becomes the defining trope of the book. Scenes of reading recur throughout. And at the heart of the novel, we are made privy to the precise moment where, eschewing revolutionary violence, Vijayan discovers (as Sivanandan does) the Marxism of literature. In terms of plot, this turn occurs when Vijayan finally and firmly abjures the propagandist revolutionary rhetoric of the Marxist university student groups to instead derive a politics from reading Marx, Cabral, and Avayyar. A nonhierarchized, expansive notion of literature which ultimately accommodates a “noncanonical reading of the canon” becomes the provenance of the working-class intellectual’s library:

He understood contradiction out there in society, but he did not grasp it in himself, in people. He had not till now seen conflict as necessary to one’s personal growth, as an essential part of life, its motor, as natural as breathing. He had not seen that the dialectic was also a felt sensibility and, unless he grasped that, he would not be able to change anything.

(291)

In other instances as well the work of reading signifies an active mode of engaging the world—a politics of interpretation. The opening scene of book 3 finds Vijayan poring over books and letters sent from England. He puzzles over double meanings and rhetorical figures in Marx:

Engrossed in the thoughts provoked by his repeated reading of the Communist Manifesto, he stared blankly at the parched land that stretched before his eyes…. “A spectre was haunting Europe.” “Why a ‘spectre,’” he thought inconsequentially. Was he clear about the meaning? Perhaps his English was not as good as he thought. He had looked up the word in the Concise English Dictionary that his father sent him from England: “spirit,” it meant, “ghost.”

(237)

Reading, misreading, even actively mistranslating the book extends meaning making beyond the covers into reading the world as the protagonist attempts to distinguish between two different senses of haunting. The living “memory” of his dead mother, not the “spectre” of his absent, yet living, father moves him to action and reflection: “her memory, not her spectre, haunted him now, like an experience whose meaning he had to find, not later but now.” Spectres of Marx. Shades of Derrida. Reading, in this sense, signifies a willful, disobedient, transgressive semiosis. “In the same way, the beginner who has learned a new language always retranslates it into his mother tongue: he can only be said to have appropriated the spirit of the new language and to be able to express himself in it freely when he can manipulate it without reference to the old, and when he forgets his original language while using the new one”²³ Later on, Vijayan learns to read Amilcar Cabral in the same way—making the “content transcend the phrase.” Cabral’s admonition, “Return to the Source,” is actively decontextualized and recontextualized to serve the purposes of a more immediate struggle.

The motif of reading-as-translation is ultimately emblematized in a pivotal metacommentary moment where, cutting across Tamil-Sinhala ethnic and linguistic divisions, literary reading figures the concept of internationalism. Even as the pogroms of Black July (July 1983) break out elsewhere in Colombo, Vijayan turns to “reading” Tamil poetry from memory:

Karrendha iddathelai naduthey karrom—the lines of a Tamil verse came to him … “the hand dwells where it suckles …” but why the hand and not the mouth? Was Avvayar deriding men as lustful creatures … and was she concealing it in a play on words because she was poet to the king’s court … ? How did the couplet go?

 

Pirandha iddathelai naduthey pay-the mannom

Karrendha iddathelai naduthey karrom.

 

… naduthey … “dwells on” … “reaches out” … the mind reaches out to the place where it came from … did she mean that was all that men thought about or was she speaking of the exile to which she’d been condemned … One word with so many meanings, what a beautiful language Tamil was … Sinhala too, Sinhala too, the same voluptuousness … hopeless to try to understand it in translation.

(383)²⁴

Distances between national identities and ethnicities are crossed and inhabited in the epistemology of comparative literary reading. In the activity of reading—moving back and forth between the stated meaning and its possible other—Vijayan arrives at an ethical blurring of the lines. It is a curious, though not completely isolated, moment in the text, where language acts, overwriting the language acts of the state.²⁵ Literary language defamiliarizes and deforms, illuminating uncanny affinities. It permits proximity where distance is contrived. In this miraculous moment of synesthesia where “the mind reaches out” and “the hand suckles,” in the paradigmatic doubleness of meaning and authorized confusion of literature, the protagonist sees/reads Sinhala and Tamil together—despite the state-imposed boundaries that deny the parity of status of languages.

Thus in When Memory Dies “the turn to literature” is overdetermined in complicated ways. It is part motif, part epistemological shift, part ethical leverage, and part transference—if we consider that here, too, the novel contains recycled, modified content from previous political essays and interviews. And at the center of the novel is the above-mentioned passage where the hero-protagonist forswears the romance of revolutions for the task-oriented, unglamorous, always-incomplete work of the everyday—teaching and organizing. And yet the novel’s turn away from revolutionary violence is a risky choice in light of the author’s readership. Critics remain divided about the political meaning and utility of this revisionist impulse.

At first glance, some find this activist journalist’s attempt at fiction writing altogether unpersuasive: “Every single political event of any significance of twentieth-century Sri Lanka seems to get a mention in these pages,” comments Qadri Ismail. “There are other—metonymic, allegorical—condensed ways that the novel has adopted of depicting history. But this text can’t take that route. It must write narrative history in fictional guise.”²⁶ Ismail’s quick study dismisses the meaning of achrony, iteratism, and the myriad other infidelities and planned inaccuracies of the novel. Other, mostly sympathetic, critics explain the perceived ideological shift in terms of impediments of literary form.²⁷ Still other critics comment on the “strained pacifism” of the final scene. And yet I would argue that the novel’s uncompleted closing scene stages the dialectic as “un-ending lightning.” The story breaks off on, however tenuous, the slim grounds of hope, as the gun is knocked out of the commando’s hand and the thinking dissident stands poised to take over.

Panning out beyond the focus on reviews and commentary on Sivanandan, the epistemological shift toward literature and “the literary” (away from revolution) also resonates uneasily with broader debates in Marxist historiography. Theorists of Western Marxism have hypothesized that theoretization of Marxism and the turn to epistemological questions have risen in tandem with the decline of Marxist scholarship theorizing revolutionary social movements. The question might even be raised as to whether the epistemological and literary turn in currents of Marxism is analogous with the “embourgeoisement” that others (Aijaz Ahmad, for example) have identified as the neutralizing impulse of postcolonial studies.

Indeed, the semantics of reading and the concept of literature, as well as the desire for literature, accomplish a lot of ideological work for the writer. However, to dismiss this literary turn as a species of crisis management or retrospective “strained pacifism,” or even as either an aesthetic or a political failure, would be to overlook the imaginative ways in which this turn is elaborated. In terms of the formal composition of When Memory Dies, the arrangement of epigraphs signals a decided shift: the final segment marks a break in the sequencing and selection of canonical literature for epigraph text. While words from Dylan Thomas precede book 1 and authorize the narrative to follow, and a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins heads off book 2, book 3 invokes itself—a dialogic exchange between Uncle Para and Vijay—in a performative moment of self-constitution as literature.

In terms of political semiosis, the turn to literature is juxtaposed with stories of working-class intellectuals and proletarian philosophers who are denied access to education. As we see, who reads and whose writing is received as literary are questions that pertain not only to the subject’s story, but also to that of the repressed subaltern subject of When Memory Dies. The narratological meaning of reading, then, hinges just as much upon those works of working-class literature that will not be written. It relates just as much to codings of dyslexia. Counter to the authorized reading list selected for the education and cultivation of the postcolonial subject—“Hardy and Foster and them”—there are other anonymous texts that capture the meaning of the country and the city in critically intimate ways but will not find their way to readers’ bookshelves. “The third-world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce,” Jameson argues. But Vijay is moved by an immigrant plantation worker’s poetry:

One of them was a poet, you know…. I met him once, and recently a mutual friend sent me a poem of his, I have forgotten his name…. He gave me eyes to see my country with, his country, he was born here, but by government definition he was not a citizen, just a number in the agreed quota of “coolie Tamils” that India would take back.

(255)

CODA: HISTORY AND ALLEGORIES OF READING

We keep returning to this point. Book 3 of When Memory Dies is marked by the turn to literature and scenes of reading. In the first scene we encounter the protagonist Vijayan poring over books and letters sent home by his father. It is difficult to speak of allegories of reading, however, without first acknowledging that any scene of reading is overdetermined historically, politically, and ethically when we recall a seminal event in the history of postcolonial Sri Lanka: the state-supervised burning of the Jaffna public library. Writing insightfully about the event in the context of canons of Tamil cultural nationalism, Vasuki Nesiah calls attention to the fact that it was perceived not only as

a material attack on the building, the books, and the manuscripts stored in it [but] even more significantly, a symbolic attack against the value the Tamil community placed on learning. In this narrative [she argues] the core of “loss” experienced by Jaffna was that this was an attack against a culture of intellectual striving and a long tradition of academic achievement.²⁸

Questioning cultural nationalism as an end in itself, she underscores the point that “the symbolism at stake in the burning of the public library may not have been the ruin of a mythologized ancient culture of learning, but the ruin of a public space for a culture of questioning and resistance. Libraries are here markers not of academic heroism, but a space for ideas and questions, of public debates and contested histories” (2; emphasis mine).

When Memory Dies indexes the historic burning of the Jaffna public library as a moment where the thread of history becomes dechronologized. But that is only one end of the story. The other is imparted to us by Stuart Hall in his preface to A Different Hunger, Sivanandan’s collection of writings on black resistance (gathered under that haunting title phrase) wherein he recounts the seminal role of the IRR (Institute of Race Relations) librarian Sivanandan during the growing compartmentalization of black struggles in 1960s Britain. He explains that

behind these essays [in A Different Hunger] lies the history of the [IRR] Institute itself: the focal point for “race relations” research in the early days; then like CARD (the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination), polarized and fractured by the growing politicization of black struggles in the 1960s; the critical moment when the “race relations industry” was first identified, and its project analyzed—these are crucial moments, at each of which Sivanandan played a critical role. Few know the story of how he simply hijacked the Institute from under their very noses; took the material resources (books, journals, pamphlets, filing cards and connections) which he has helped, painfully, to accumulate, packed them up, and walked out with them, as it were, under his arm; transferring them to a less salubrious and less respectable part of town, bearing the official title (to the establishment’s intense annoyance) with him…. Few librarians have achieved so striking—and brazen—an appropriation/expropriation of the tools and materials of their trade.

(xi)

It is between these two moments, different but asymmetrically related—one archive lost, another rescued—that the terrains of socialist ethics versus race and class politics are mapped out in the middle ground of literature and in practices of reading in the robust sense.