Let us layout a large map made of concrete or granite somewhere in the country. It must be to scale with all its mountains and valleys, rivers and reservoirs, forests and cites. Let it be, say, 500 metres in length or more. Let us mark on this map the place of every violent event that took place within its shores from the April 5, 1971 to the May 19, 2009. It cannot be comprehensive of course, but it can be representative, no ‘sides,’ but in the sense of a random statistical sample. Identify survivors of these selected events. Record what they remember, not about politics, not about violence, nor about who did what to whom, but about their loved ones died in that place. That’s all, a narrative of their love and attachment, which will also be a narrative of loss, pain and grief. Let us take these recordings made in the language the survivor chooses, and translate them also in to the other two languages of our country.
The idea is to place these recordings on the map of our country so that any one, especially, our children can listen to them. This map then will be filled with markers, of stone also, simple and yet distinct from the terrain it represents of death.

Violent death
Let us walk on this map– it is a large map, remember, and we can walk on it; respectfully of course — as we walk our country, and we can visit and revisit, in some small way, at each place someone died.
As we walk this map, then, with simple portable playback device with pre-recorded disk, yes, like a iPod, and a pair of supplied head phones, which we obtain from the administrator of the site as one does in some museums now, we should be able to listen at each place that is marked, by selecting number, like k324 on the device to a narrative of a survivor that pertains to that place.
Listen, take it in, and perhaps move on to another spot. It will take hours, of course, perhaps days, to traverse this map.

I do not offer panaceas; nor can I foretell the future. But I do think this may be a better way for us Sri Lankans to reconcile ourselves to our violent past.

Take a good look at the man in the center and the man on the right. They are Kenneth Moreno (43) and Franklin Mata (29) two New York City Police Officers who raped an intoxicated woman in her home, after they were called by a taxi driver to ensure her safe arrival. On a night in December, 2008, Mata stood guard, while Moreno raped his victim. They were acquitted yesterday after trial by jury in a New York City courtroom. This is just another example of botched justice in a history of violent police abuses of the citizenry of this city.

According to CCTV recordings these enforcers of the law entered her home four different times in the same night. According to 911 tapes, they made false calls, impersonating a concerned stranger.
Moreno admits to serenading his victim with Bon Jovi, and “snuggling” with her on the bed.

They used their unchecked power as police officers to rape a woman in her home.

Unfortunately, “home,” or very near it, is where most women get raped. According to philosopher Jana Leo in her insightful and frightening book Rape New York:

The idea that rape is a rare event, occurring beyond familiar places, dissociated from the ordinariness of the everyday is an illusion. In reality rape is not associated with risk, adventure or the unknown. Ninety-four percent of rapes and sexual assaults occur within fifty miles of the victim’s home. It frequently occurs in the home, often committed by those with whom the victim feels comfortable. Police call such offenders ‘known doers.’ Men who live in the victim’s house, relatives, or men with whom the victim has social contact constitute seventy-five percent of rapists. One in four female rape victims are raped in or around their own residence.

These representatives of the law used their “long arms” to restrain and violate a woman who was, ironically, returning home from celebrating a promotion at work. The violence is now extended as these abusers are acquitted of charges of rape. While they are stripped of their authority as police officer for reasons of “misconduct,” one gets the clear message that the problem was not the rape itself, but the fact that they were stupid enough to get caught. After acquittal, Moreno called the woman “mistaken and confused,” saying: “I’m glad it’s over, it’s a lesson and a win.”

A lesson in what exactly? And a win for whom?

This is “NOW” (1965) a short film by Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez. The song in the film is called NOW, and is sung by civil rights activist, Lena Horne, (who also performs in the video clip below, with another civil rights activist, Kermit the Frog). A classic archive of the civil rights struggle in the cities of the United States of America.

What I find interesting about the film, is how it is composed almost entirely of still images, mostly photos that one might find in the newspapers of the period. Simple materials, but the rhythmic editing, matched to the intensity of the music, produces a remarkably moving effect. Alvarez was a master of using found materials. As he once said: “Give me two photographs, a moviola and some music and I’ll make you a film.”

Now, Now, Now, Now, Now, Now, NOW IS THE TIME. THE TIME IS…NOW!

Martin Luther King Day, New York City, 2010

A key character in dreams, or narratives of dreams, is the setting itself. In my dreams, interior and exteriors blend, neighborhoods in different cities open up to each other, like the impossible geographies of Kafka’s stories.

(film credit: “N.Y., N.Y.” Francis Thompson, dir. 1959)

Yesterday the New York Times published an Iraq war veteran’s dreams and reflections. Here are some important excerpts:

What if it’s not a dream at all? What if I really have the city of Mosul inside of me? Or at least that neighborhood on a sunny morning. Maybe when I go to sleep I’m actually entering a world in which Iraqi mothers search through the landscape of my memory in the vain hope of finding their dead sons. My body a sort of graveyard, a repository of the lost and the dead.

Where does the dream world end and the waking world begin? There are moments, in the dead of night or far from home, when I seem to float between the two.

For Brian Turner, the veteran-dreamer-poet quoted above, both the city of Mosul and the countryside of California’s San Joaquin valley, where he grew up, are somehow viscerally melded by the combined experiences of war, violence and dreaming.

It seems almost childishly simple when I try to reconstruct it. The mother’s dead child of war is my own innocence, perhaps, as its loss is being interrogated by the world, which needs the medicine of home to…? To what? Regain its form? For me to be given back my body? To be made whole again?

The thing is, if this is true, if home is the medicine my mind is telling me to search out, then why do I continually leave? Why do I travel to the far corners of the earth? If I were to stand among those eucalyptus trees back home, if I were to reach down and clear away the red bark covering everything, what would I find?

And finally a poem :

“Here, Bullet”

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
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
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

(From Here, Bullet. Copyright ©2005 by Brian Turner.)