Portrait

J. S. Tissainayagam was arrested on March 7, 2008 by the Terrorism Investigation Division (TID) of the Sri Lanka Police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. He has since been charged with attempting to cause the commission of acts of violence or racial or communal disharmony relating to articles he published in a North Eastern Monthly magazine in 2006 and 2007. He was also charged with collecting and obtaining information for the purpose of terrorism and for donating funds for the purpose of terrorism through the collection of funds for the magazine. The magazine has since been closed down.

During his trial, Tissanayagam claimed that he was harassed and threatened by the TID while under detention. He has also filed a Fundamental Rights Petition with the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka. The TID have produced a confession allegedly signed by Tissanayagam, although he claimed it was dictated to him, and he was pressured to write it in his own handwriting. He spent more than a year languishing in prison. He was a well-known journalist who frequently addressed displacement of civilians and other humanitarian issues stemming from Sri Lanka’s war in weekly columns for the Sunday Times, and was charged more than five months after he was detained.

He was convicted by Colombo High court and sentenced to 20 years Rigorous Imprisonment on August 31, 2009.

We have all shouted about media freedom and injustice. We have all said that there is a bigger war at hand, a less controllable one: the war against journalists and the right of free expression. But what now? All the protest and rallying in the world is rendered useless with one swiftly delivered verdict. One sentence, and a man is imprisoned for 20 long years. All the energy to fight has diminished.

Why couldn’t we save him from the cell? Will our children ask us this, 20 years from now? Why couldn’t we stop it, somehow? I will squirm with shame at the idea that we, with all our placards and megaphones, shouting for hours in the sun, marching coffins all the way to the Kanatta, and standing outside Courthouses, couldn’t stop it - for how can I explain, how will we ever explain to anyone about this time that we lived in, in which we couldn’t do a thing?

How will we ever make them understand that everything we did, anything we did - it didn’t matter? That whatever we did was useless, and that these things happened unaffected by criticism or fear of a tarnished reputation? That this wheel continued to turn, unafraid of how it looked to the world? That it placed itself above all else, high and mighty upon its self constructed throne of arrogance, intimidation and violence, holding its position of power through the spreading of fear and threat? How will we ever tell them that we were all powerless against this thing that didn’t care about seeming just or good - this thing that just didn’t care at all?

I’m afraid of what it makes me. Does it make me a part of a time that stood back and let these things happen - a part of the generation that didn’t have any power to stand up for what they thought was right? Will anyone believe us when we say that we didn’t really have a choice? That we were all helpless? I don’t know.

I have been angry and enraged and furious - but today all I feel is a deep, melancholy sadness. I am truly sad for Tissainayagam, and everyone else, who like him paid the price for being better than me - stronger than me, braver than me, actually saying the things I don’t have the guts to say. I am sad for us all, because one day we’ll all have to answer to the next generation when they ask us what we were doing when all this happened. We’ll all have to say, ‘We couldn’t help it’, and wait quietly while they judge us with their idealistic, young eyes, through which they see only the weak as they look at us.

I am sad for my country - a great, beautiful, abundant country, that has been forced to lose its way.

I have only one rule with art: it has to speak to me. Salvador Dali speaks to me, Andy Warhol just doesn’t. Akram Khan speaks to me, Matthew Bourne just doesn’t. Radiohead speaks to me, Coldplay just doesn’t. If it doesn’t speak to you, if it doesn’t move you, then I think you can safely say it’s not doing its job. But then the age-old question arises: do we believe in taste? Or do good and bad exist? As Kant says, it’s aestheticism vs. subjective taste. Do we believe in taste/opinion, or are there standards?

I honestly don’t know. I’m a snob, so to a large extent, I believe there are some standards. Good and bad is a delicate subject, one hard to grasp. If you are someone who does believe in good and bad, then the good is indeed very hard to achieve. Grappling with this distinction can be a wild goose chase. Instead - I was taught from a very young age - be truthful, and you will never fail.

Truthfulness - maybe that’s my other rule.

At a dance student at the age of 6 1/2, I only saw passion around me. I saw those who were wholeheartedly committed to what they were doing. They truly believed it, believed in it, and therefore, they made you believe it too. They loved it, they embraced it, they treated the dance with such care and tenderness, with such love and dedication, with such respect and reverence. And they taught me to love it. They taught me, along with posture and precision and discipline, to love it and embody it. To bow down to it, to become it. To conquer it, but also to let it conquer you. To this day, onstage and off, this is what shines through all else when you see these people; the love for what they are doing. The simple, pure, wholesome love. And even if they make mistakes, or the lighting is wrong, or the costumes are not just so (and they always are, anyway) you don’t see anything but this complete and total absorption in what they are doing. This is truthfulness. And this is what draws me to them, time after time.

Once older, I met Tracy. She’s taught me a lot of things; all of them important. But the most important lesson I learned from her is to tell the truth. She taught me that to ‘act’ is not to become a character, but to find that part of you that is that character. It’s about searching within yourself to reveal all the parts of you that are good, evil, pathetic, strong, ugly, beautiful. It’s about discovering that you have the capacity to be anyone. You are that person, somewhere, in some small corner of your being, you are. Let it out. This is easy theoretically, but difficult to achieve. And this what we’re always trying to do: to reveal those lesser explored parts of ourselves. To achieve authenticity, emotional truth - she calls it. To not ‘act’, but be. And this is truthfulness.

So I don’t know if there is good and bad in art. But I do know that if you are truthful, then it will naturally do its job in speaking to its audience. If you are honest, it will draw them in. If you tell the truth, then they will relate to it. Because those truths are universal. And in the end, that’s what art is for: to tell stories that are universal, that cross boundaries of time, gender, race, ethnicity, even reality. If you mean it, really, really mean it: then your audience will get it, they will feel it. Dali meant it, Akram Kham means it every time, Radiohead meant every word, every chord. If your intention is honest, then your message will be clear.

Sometimes, there are certain ideas which seem almost too predictable, too much of a stereotype, to be real. Pro-life ideas, for example: I have never really thought that there are people in this day and age who actually think that abortion is a sin and those who undergo abortions are heartless murderers. But there are. I have never really thought, for example, that there are people who actually thinks homosexuals are perverts. But there are. You never really think that there are still men that want to tell their wives what to wear; but there are! Some things never cease to surprise. Human beings can be stupid like that.

I found this on a status update on the Facebook profile of someone I know: “Let the walls inside the abortion clinics be filled with forgiveness, let the cries of innocent LIFE be heard, Let redemption and vindication take place through LOVE LOVE LOVE. That the God indwelt spirit of motherhood would arise in the women that go through those doors so that they would turn around and would walk out because of a convicted heart that would be REVEALED to them…Forgive..Forgive…Forgive.” Leaving aside the more than slightly hysterical obsession with God, what makes me shudder is the not one, but three ‘forgive’s at the end of it. So women who undergo abortion, sinful heathens that they are, need three times the forgiveness.

What always irritates me is that pro-life types seem to get more than the basics wrong. They always think it’s an argument about whether abortion is good or bad, about its moral, or rather immoral, status. They think they need to convince us that abortion is bad. Er, I think any fool can understand why it is bad. Abortion is a sad, terrible thing that should always be absolute the last resort: and I don’t think anyone knows that as much as the women who have had undergone it. The argument of the pro-legalisation section of society is never that it is good. The argument is that it is necessary to give women the choice.

I can be naive and say ‘oh the poor unborn’. But what about the already living? What about the life of the woman, for whom life is about to be eternally changed drastically? Would you rather a baby was born to she who does not want it? Or cannot afford it? Would you rather it was strangled at birth and dumped in a toilet? Would you rather it was brought up by a mother that couldn’t bear to feed it because it was the child of her own grandfather?

So I’m sorry - I’ve seen teenage mothers, victims of rape, mostly of incest, who cannot even go near their children. Both mother and child spend the rest of their lives in trauma. I’ve seen families who have one too many children and can’t afford to look after either one. I’ve seen families who just aren’t ready for a child: which, I assure you, is much much worse for the child than being aborted at a stage where it is a barely formed group of cells.

So I’m sorry - No, I don’t believe that life begins at conception; who does, really? How can it? Life begins when a child is born, when it breathes its first breath and cries its first cry. Until then, I think it’s fair to take the mother’s rights into account before those of a barely formed group of cells.

Of course contraception is the first choice. We know. I doubt any woman ever goes in for an abortion without it being the only choice she has; I doubt any woman likes abortion, or thinks it’s good, or does it lightly, or for fun. Women who undergo abortions do so for the lack of choice, not because they like the idea of terminating their pregnancy. Not because they are irresponsible, immoral, bloodthirsty fiends. But because they simply do not want a child at that moment in their lives, for whatever reason it may be. States who legalise it do it so that women can have safe and hygienic abortions performed. Not because it is an evil state.

Anyway, there is no place in state law for morality. That’s what religious institutions are there for. By all means, they should go ahead and educate the congregation on the horrors of abortion and teach them about ways not to get pregnant if you don’t want to. BUT NO, of course they wouldn’t do this either. Some religious institutions are even against contraception.

And so they give you this spiel about the ‘blessing of motherhood’ - it’s a blessing for those who want it. It’s a choice.

Maybe if all these people shouting about the sin of abortion spent that much time and effort talking about contraception to their friends and children, there wouldn’t be so much abortion. Maybe if we spent time and and money educating our societies about birth control, there wouldn’t be so much abortion. These pro-life types would be far more useful, and effective no doubt, if they focused their energies on being pro-contraception types.

If you’re genuinely concerned about the rising rates of abortion, start a campaign to educate on safe sex. Don’t go around passing moral judgment on those who have had abortions. Don’t go around thinking you’re better than someone else.

Suddenly you’re in a new place, with no identity, where no one really cares who you are or what you think. And all those special things about you, your talents, your ways, your character, cease to exist: because of course, if no one knows, leave alone loves or appreciates those very things about you, then how much do they matter? Or how little?

Suddenly you’re not special, you’re nothing much, really. You can be anybody, but you can also be nobody. And this is the best and worst thing about being away. Just like the best and worst thing about being home, especially when home is Sri Lanka, is that your business is everyone’s business and everyone wants to know where you’ve been and who you’ve been with. We are all suffocated by this sense of community, family, networks: but it’s also what assures you, time after time, that you will never, ever be out on the street starving. Someone will care enough. Out there, in the big bad city, you’re anonymous. And it’s this anonymity that is liberating to me; this sense that no one cares what you’re wearing or what you’re doing, or how ‘different’ you are. Nothing is ‘different’. Certainly, nothing is worth staring at. But with the anonymity, comes the isolation. It’s no one’s business to help you.

The trip to London was a revelation to how much I’m anchored by context, how much I depend on those who love me, how much they create part of who I am by simply appreciating me. It was also a good, swift kick to that part of my ego which has told me ‘You’re so special and interesting and no matter where you go, everyone will love you’.

It was also a revelation to find that nothing is necessarily better there, only maybe easier. The buses are late, the streets are dirty, people litter. Most people are emotionally distant and isolated from each other, and exist in this cocoon of never risking getting too close. It’s a country of over-analysis and labels, where everything is a mental illness with a name, and the system has a way to solve any problem, telling you that they are there you help you, while actually what they are telling you is that you have a ‘problem’ which is ‘abnormal’: but of course the government is there to help you, you need the government. They make a big deal about everything, creating a society which doesn’t function without queues or carefully built systems, a society in which things like drugs are much of a taboo than here. There is CCTV everywhere, apparently they are watching out ‘for’ you, and they tell you things like ‘We’re here to give you emotional support if you’ve drunk too much or taken drugs’ and (on the bus) ‘Relax and breathe normally. If you feel sick or stiff, immediately tell our staff. Exercise your upper body and do relaxation exercises. Carry water with you at all times’. I just wanted to shake them sometimes.

The great thing about London is that you never feel like you’re in a white country. But drive 40 minutes out of London, and it’s almost as if they’re forcing the stereotype down your throat. White families with farms and thatched roofed houses, with sheep and cows dotting the meadows and the green pastures.

My week at the Laban Centre, on the other hand, made me not only optimistic about the UK and the West, but about life and the human race in general; that’s how amazing it was. It was exactly what I’ve been searching for and thinking about for a long time, and what I always felt we sorely lacked, doing Dance and Dance Theatre in Sri Lanka. It taught me the ‘how’ and most importantly, the ‘why’, which has changed the way I see movement forever. Laban’s work is so interesting and radical, and it fills a lot of gaps that have arisen in my mind over the years. The perfect balance between the spiritual and the scientific is exactly what I think anyone needs to achieve to be a truly good artist.

So I’m back. In my comfort zone, in my country. Far from the madding crowd.