“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” — Plato
Even as the most of the country has been under a lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, it wasn’t very long ago that the now eerily silent streets were ground zero for anti-government protests. Since the government announced the Citizenship Amendment Act, the National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register, a series of arbitrary, discriminatory laws and mechanisms that question the very diversity that makes India unique, news of widespread violence, attacks against protestors and students, and the forceful displacement of minorities has become commonplace. At the time, it wasn’t unreal to question whether the nation was heading towards civil war.
Not too far away, the horrors of civil war in Sri Lanka has been recently documented with deep sensitivity in the graphic novel
Set in the northeast district of Vanni, Sri Lanka, the book reveals the plight of the Tamil families faced with civil war after being displaced by the 2004 tsunami, where 3,00,000 Sri Lankans lost their homes and loved ones to the sea. Vanni was where the repercussions of the 2009 civil war were felt the hardest, where tens of thousands of Tamil civilians lost their lives. What really stands out is the book’s authenticity, given that Dix based it on first-hand interviews with Tamil refugees and survivors, references from official reports and documents, that were then cross-referenced with findings from field reports. He fictionalises the fate of one family’s search for asylum to tell the story of other displaced families.
The idea arose while Dix was working for the United Nations as a communications manager in northern Sri Lanka during the civil war. Haunted by what he witnessed, Dix decided to tell the stories of the survivors as a way to highlight the human rights violations in an accessible, comic-strip format. He was introduced to Pollock, who had previously worked on A Perilous Journey , based on testimonies taken from Syrian refugees seeking asylum; and Migrants on the Margins , based on the everyday life of those living on the margins in four cities — Harare, Hargeisa, Colombo and Dhaka.
The collaboration resulted in an immersive book, where the reader becomes one with the Ramachandran family, quietly surviving the war. You empathise with each family member as they flee from their idyllic simple home to refugee camps, losing friends and family members along the way. There is a false sense of hope as you flip the pages, glimpse the war crimes and the inhumane living conditions in the camps, understanding the politics at play within the LTTE army.
While Dix tells the story through the lens of experience and truth, Pollock’s sharp pencil lines and watercolour strokes bring the characters to life, exhausted but walking with their lives on their shoulder from one camp to another holding onto a sliver of hope. Interestingly, the characterisation and picturisation of the people and place seem like the entire novel is set in India, making it even more hard-hitting and closer to home.
Graphic novels, especially political ones, have the power to devastate. While governments across the world are busy trying to gag their people, and project a different ground reality to further their own political motives, the medium of graphic novels allows the storyteller to paint a truthful picture of what happened. Some fantastic examples of this are Joe Sacco’s Palestine , Art Spegielman’s Maus , and more recently, Eoin Colfer’s Illegal . Vanni, too, carries the legacy forward, employing the monochromatic style to bring out the brutality and fragility of human nature.
In this era of modern warfare and fascist governments that we live in, where the concept of ‘home’ itself being taken away from people and forced migration is being normalised by governments, Vanni makes for essential reading for anyone interested in the human struggle. It is a story of belonging and identity, of survival and hope. It not only tells the story of Sri Lanka’s unimaginable past, but of a possible future that isn’t far away.
In January, Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse finally admitted that 20,000 “missing” Tamils were murdered during the bloody civil war. Death certificates have been issued, war crimes tribunal set up to investigate human rights abuses. But as Bertrand Russell says, “War does not determine who is right — only who is left.” Let this book serve as a memorial to the ones who never made it to the other side, as a reminder to the living to hold on for dear life and fight the good fight.
Rohini Kejriwal is a Bengaluru-based freelance writer, curator and photographer