Survival Media

The Politics and Poetics of Mobility and the War in Sri Lanka

S. Perera

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137444639
• eBook ISBN: 9781137444646
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Through the narratives and movements of survivors of the war in Lanka these interconnected essays develop the concept of 'survival media' as embodied and expressive forms of mobility across borders.

1

Lines of Flight: Survival Media

Abstract: Chapter 1 develops the concept of survival media in the context of people on the move. Survival media encompass the embodied and expressive movements of survivors and refugees of the war and the practices and narratives, artefacts and apparatuses that constitute their flights, forced and free. Survival media include the spaces and geographies produced by refugee bodies moving over land and sea, the cultural forms they mobilise (testimonies, slogans and protests, media statements, hip-hop, poems, stories, and performances), as well as the affiliations and interconnections they engender and the new subjectivities and citizenships, social ecologies and transnational politics and poetics they bring into play.

Keywords: Jaya Lestari; poetics of survival; refugee poetics; Yaguine Koïta and Fodé Tounkara

Perera, Suvendrini. Survival Media: The Politics and Poetics of Mobility and the War in Sri Lanka. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137444646.0007.

On 9 April 2013, a boat carrying 67 asylum seekers from Lanka made its way undetected through several levels of security, to sail straight into the remote port of Geraldton, in Western Australia. It was lunch time, and diners at the local beachfront café could hardly believe their eyes: this overburdened and ramshackle craft was nothing like the agricultural and cargo ships that criss-cross this regional harbour. It would turn out that the boat had sailed all the way from the west coast of Lanka, across the Indian Ocean, to thread its way southwards through the Indonesian archipelago, undetected by elaborate surveillance and border security systems, into waters heavily patrolled by the Australian navy (Orr 2013). Customs officials and police were alerted to the presence of ‘unauthorised maritime arrivals’ off the beach, and lost little time cordoning off the scene and impounding the boat. But for a short while, the arrivals remained on board their incongruous craft and could be viewed and photographed for the local news.

Caught in the brilliant afternoon sunshine, silhouetted against a giant ‘Welcome to Geraldton’ sign, the castaway boat has an almost festive look. A jaunty blue trim offsets the cracks and rust stains on its hull. There is a stir and energy to the figures moving on deck. Curious children peer through the railings. A woman unfurls a thick plait of hair. You can just read the name on the prow, Bremen, and a corporate logo that identifies it as a gift of the tsunami aid effort, almost ten years ago. A makeshift banner atop the cabin declares the desired destination, New Zealand, and even bears a makeshift image of that country’s flag. The boat, it seems, was making for friendlier shores than Australia before engine trouble forced the passengers to try their luck here, after 44 days at sea. A breeze lifts the homemade flag. A statement of intent and a call-out to the future, it flutters, then flies, for now, in the uncertain shelter of this strange harbour.

In flight: a double-edged phrase, whose Janus-face looks back and forward, betokening both the fears it seeks to escape, the terrors of the past and present, and the dare of joys ahead. Within fraught refugee geographies of peril and possibility, a voyage across oceans in a small boat, flight signifies at once the covert or embattled movements that attempt escape from desperate situations and the soaring hopes and aspirations of those in flight. Embodied movements of flight and escape are animated by flights of imagination and desire; they are the expressive media of high-flying hopes and dreams. Flight and fancy: here they allude to a poetics of survival that attends movements of terrified escape and the large and small acts of imagining that enable and sustain them—messages set afloat in plastic bottles, or held up high across razor wire, the name of a destination blazoned on a ship’s mast, a letter stored on a washed up or frozen body—through the spaces of terror and blockage in which they are repeatedly ensnared. The sections of this chapter weave and veer across disjunctive, irreconcilable geographies of flight and fancy, the slices of time that entwine past and present, and the heterogeneous assemblages of human and non-human bodies, artefacts, elements, technologies and interrelations that encompass survival media for subjects in flight.

In his translation of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi glosses the term ‘lines of flight’ as ‘not only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance (the vanishing point in a painting)’—though he specifies, ‘It has no relation to flying’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, xvi). My usage here encompasses the contingent and ephemeral trajectories of subjects on the run, the acts of disappearing, and the violent dispersals that attend them, as it also references the transformative and creative promise, at least, of Deleuzian lines of flight. In this chapter, and those that follow, survival media signify the embodied and expressive movements of survivors and refugees of the war, and the practices and narratives, artefacts and apparatuses that constitute their flights, forced and free. Survival media include the spaces and geographies produced by refugee bodies moving over land and sea, the cultural forms they mobilise (testimonies, slogans and protests, media statements, hip-hop, poems, stories, performances), as well as the affiliations and interconnections they engender, and the new subjectivities and citizenships, the social ecologies and transnational politics and poetics they bring into play.

Of flight—and fancy

The possibility and peril with which flight is fraught are perhaps most clearly embodied in the story of two 14-year-old boys from Guinea who stowed themselves away in the wheel-bay of a plane bound for Belgium. Found on their frozen bodies on landing was a letter, with the simple instruction, ‘In case we die, deliver to Messrs. the members and officials of Europe’ (Sullivan and Casert 2000). It was signed with their full names, Yaguine Koïta and Fodé Tounkara. In what they intended as their last testament, the boys assume the authority to speak, not only for themselves, but also for the youth of their entire continent:

We have the honor and pleasure and great confidence in you to write this letter to talk to you of the objective of our journey and the suffering of us, the children and young people of Africa. . . . But first of all, we present to you our sweetest, most adoring and respectful salutations . . . You are for us, in Africa, the ones whom we must ask for help. We appeal to you, for the love of your continent, for the feelings you have toward your people and above all for the affinity and love you have for your children . . . Moreover, for the love and meekness of our creator, almighty God, who has given you all the good experience, wealth and power to build and organize well your continent to become the most beautiful and admirable of all. (ibid.)

The boys’ language may be fanciful in more ways than one, yet it could not offer a more acute analysis of the forces that impel them into flight. Speaking as ambassadors for the children of Africa, they show a clear-eyed understanding of Europe’s place as the continent that has built and organised itself so as to become the beneficiary of all ‘good experience, wealth and power’. Of necessity, Europe becomes the prime source of support and aid, the power from whom, above all, the citizens of lesser continents must ask for help—even at the cost of their lives. A visa application from the grave, the letter articulates the compelling historical and geopolitical logic that set Yaguine and Fodé in motion, mobilising their bodies into flight from their small village in Guinea into the freezing metallic cavities of a plane bound for the Europe they will never reach.

Like countless others in flight by air, land and water, Yaguine Koïta and Fodé Tounkara represent the surplus of a geopolitical and economic order in which both their lives and deaths are rendered expendable, disposable, and finally, invisible. In Jenna Brager’s acute analysis in the wake of the drowning of thousands of African migrants in the Mediterranean, this is an order that operates through a ‘necropolitical creation of disposable classes that are prone to vanishing’ (2015).This vanishing, however,’ is not episodic or mysterious,’ but ‘traceable’, linked in a ‘genealogy of violence’ to those disappeared by contemporary political terror elsewhere in Europe’s former colonies as to the sedimented histories of those lost at sea in the ‘Middle Passage, as global capitalism’s constitutive act’ (ibid.). In a line powerfully reminiscent of Derek Walcott’s famous poem, ‘The Sea is History’, Brager insists, ‘The water is full of evidence, and that which is dumped as trash reemerges to haunt us, demanding justice’ (ibid.).

Even as the bodies of Yaguine Koïta and Fodé Tounkara vanished among the legions of the lost and disappeared, their voices returned to circulate, through their carefully preserved letter, the traces of a call for justice. A deliberate and closely crafted document, the letter survives as a type of insurance for members of those classes that Brager terms ‘prone to vanishing’. Preparing for the likely eventuality of their death and rapid disposal, the boys are determined not to die nameless or in silence. At once apologia and manifesto, their lucid articulation of the violent neocolonial and postcolonial geographies that entrap them, and of the aspirations of others like themselves to which they sought to draw attention, boldly claims the space to make its case, to articulate the call for justice in the face of a necropolitical order that seeks their disappearance.

Unlike the boys’ fragile, contraband bodies, all too apt to disappear, the eloquent witness of their letter succeeded, fleetingly, in breaking through the silence and separation of the border. It drew global, if short-lived, attention to their dreams of flight. Reminiscent of a message in a bottle, the boys’ letter is an attempt to communicate across a vast divide and against the odds: survival media.

Recalling the title of a hit track by the hip-hop artist M.I.A., I read Yaguine and Fodé’s letter to the masters of Europe also as a kind of paper plane, an improvised and fugitive craft of dreams. In ‘Paper Planes’, as elsewhere in her work, M.I.A. draws on her own history as a child refugee from Lanka. Her provocative lyrics allude to the complex geographies of mobility, transgression and blockage within which refugee and migrant bodies must operate, and the subterranean and illegalised flights of creativity and mobility they engender. In the circuitous cartographies they inscribe over land and sea, the new itineraries they map in the air, illegalised and migrant subjects draw upon and adapt a panoply of media, among them their own bodies, as they cast themselves out from the known into new lives and spaces. Medium and message, mediating and mediated, these expressive and embodied lines of flight in turn invest the scenes and elements through which they move with new meanings and ontologies; they set in play new geographies, poetics and politics, new vectors of movement. These precarious transmutations and forced improvisations are the survival media of illegalised refugees and migrants. Survival media include forms of cultural politics, corporeal poetics and their material effects. Through their embodied and expressive movements, refugee and migrant bodies inscribe lines of flight that glide and float, coast and soar, even as they are ensnared in the lethal operations and entrapping force of the borders they seek to navigate.

Joseph Pugliese has discussed how state agencies deploy an array of everyday technologies and civic spaces as means of covert imprisonment and punishment for illegalised migrants, and transmute ‘seemingly neutral and benign civil technologies’ into ‘modes of refugee trauma and death’. The targets of such practices at the same time redeploy ‘these same civil technologies and objects (a shipping container for example)’, a leaky wooden boat, a metal cavity as modes of escape and survival (2011, 143). Their passages and blockages, makeshift way stations and covert meeting points, map improbable itineraries, eke spaces for movement out of rock and razor wire. Following from Arjun Appadurai’s theorisation of the imagination as an ‘organized field of social practices . . . [that] is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order’ (2003, 30), refugees and illegalised migrants are understood as ‘imagineers’ of multiple forms and modalities of flight and fancy that are at once forms of agency and ‘social fact’. As imagineers, fugitive and illegalised migrants re-engineer and recast the material objects, spaces, cultural ecologies and ‘social facts’ through which they move.

Flying like paper

Along with the letter written by Yaguine Koïta and Fodé Tounkara, Belgian officials found several other pieces of paper alongside their bodies—birth certificates, school reports, family photographs—all assembled carefully in plastic bags. These, too, are potent media that protect, credential and authorise the refugee: paper planes that have the power to transport them to new lives. ‘Where aspiration, even survival, is closely tied to the capacity to migrate,’ Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff observe, papers ‘take on a magic of their own’. At sites where ‘human identities congeal along borders in paper and plastic’, passports, visas, marriage and death certificates, degrees, security clearances, family trees and birth lines carry talismanic properties, spelling out the lines that demarcate freedom and imprisonment, life and death. In these places, papers, actual and symbolic, forged and authentic, are literally survival media. The techniques and manufacture of these vital counterfeits thus ‘command a compelling power and fascination, rendering forgery a form of creativity that transcends easy definitions of legality’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, 12).

‘I fly like paper, get high like planes/If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name’, the Tamil hip-hop artist M.I.A. (‘Missing in Action’) sings in ‘Paper Planes’. The track, featured in the hit film Slumdog Millionaire (2007), brought a whole new audience to the music of M.I.A., the persona adopted by Maya Mathangi Arulpragasam, who had come to England with her mother as a child refugee from Lanka (see Chapter 2). If Danny Boyle’s film provides an accomplished and ultimately reassuring fable of success for the homeless and impoverished third world child, a success story that M.I.A.’s own real-life story parallels, the lyrics of ‘Paper Planes’ follow the trajectory of the illegalised migrant as irredeemably suspect—criminal, forger, people smuggler, suspected murderer and possible terrorist. The music video for the track begins with shots of low-flying aircraft, a bold allusion to the 9/11 terror attacks. It is accompanied by a sound track of cash registers and gunshots, the shrieking of fax machines and cell phones, referencing the techno-hustles and backroom industries by which counterfeit visas are produced for unknown purposes. Like the ‘inspired captains of fakery’ described by Comaroff and Comaroff (2006, 12), the migrant as trickster, fraudster and forger of paper planes is the figure of a global folk outlaw, operating in the techno-underground and the cracks of the cyber economy to enable new mobilities across constrictive geographies and barred national borders.

Hand in hand with the deserving migrant and good refugee, the gangster, the criminal and the terrorist shadow the borders of the global north, troubling its claims to secure and sovereign nationhood. The dynamics of threat and fear they embody were strikingly exemplified in the narrative of a second boat carrying asylum seekers from Lanka to Australia, the KM Jeya Lestari 5, one of a scattered flotilla that put out to sea after the end of the war. Crammed on board were 254 people, some of whom had been waiting for asylum in detention camps in Indonesia or Malaysia for several years. One hundred and nine of them were already UNHCR certified refugees. They included a number of families, many with young children. When the boat was intercepted at Australia’s request off the Indonesian port of Merak, a long and arduous stand-off ensued. The Jeya Lestari, which had represented a passage to freedom, now turned into a makeshift detention camp. As the passengers collectively refused to disembark, under siege from both Indonesian and Australian governments, their health and morale visibly deteriorated in the intolerable conditions. The Lankan government, too, sought to intervene, attacking the credibility of those on board, casting them as fraudsters, criminals and terrorists. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), the body responsible for overseeing welfare and assistance to asylum seekers, withdrew after initially providing food and medicine. Aboard the floating prison boat, exhaustion and illness began to take their toll. There were hunger strikes and threats of self-harm, coupled with mounting signs of tension between different groups on board, while some quietly jumped ship to return to Indonesia, hoping to set sail again another day.

During this period, a nine-year-old girl, Brindha, together with a man in his 20s, ‘Alex’, acted as the main spokespeople for those on board. Brindha captured the headlines when she made a direct appeal on-camera to the Australian public: ‘Please help us and save our lives. We are your children. Please think of us, please, please’ (Grattan and Allard 2009). The striking and charismatic ‘Alex’, whose real name was later revealed to be Sanjeev Kuhendrarajah, was a far more complex figure. It gradually emerged that Sanjeev was the son of Tamil diasporic parents who were citizens of Canada. Deemed an unfit non-citizen in Canada after a stint in prison for being a member of the Toronto Tamil street gang, Alex was deported to Lanka, and made his way to India before he, yet again, sought asylum by boarding the Jeya Lestari (Fitzpatrick 2009). In a series of performance-lectures on ‘Alex’ the Tamil-Australian artist, Sumugan Sivanesan, reflects, in the context of the commonalities they share as young diaspora Tamil men, on the identities and narratives demanded of the refugee, setting out to explore whether ‘a flawed and . . . somewhat undesirable non-citizen, might yet determine a politics of mobility that has implications beyond his own self-interest’ (2013, 132).

In Alex’s tortuous movements—his to-ing and fro-ing and doublings back across Lanka, Canada, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand—and his multiple assumed and real identities—gang member, Indian call centre worker, member of the LTTE’s Toronto wing, and most recently, Christian convert in the Thai jail where he is incarcerated, despite being a UN-recognised refugee—are the traces of an exuberant and improvisatory embodied repertoire. Coupled with the fla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• IntroductionLethal Imaginaries of Nationalism: A Brief History in Checkpoints
• 1  Lines of Flight: Survival Media
• 2  Missing in Action: By All Media Necessary
• 3  White Shores of Longing: Castaway Stories and Nation Dramas
• 4  Accounting for Disposable Lives: Visibility, Atrocity and International Justice
• 5  Territory of Ashes: A Disjointed Unfolding
• ConclusionFrom What Has Happened to What Will Come
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index