Despite all its contradictions, controversies and corporate control, it was the American Liberal Arts College that first got me thinking. For the first time in my life I was taught to look beyond textbooks; for the first time in my life I didn’t hear the phrase, “don’t be too smart” when I challenged a teacher or questioned their authority over me, and for the first time in my life I was actively critiquing educational oppression that I had struggled against for years as a student in Sri Lanka. Once, during a class called the Intimacy of Terror, students were asked to recount experiences in which the pervasive nature of state control affected us on a personal level.
Instantly, I was reminded of myself as a thirteen year old, sitting in my English Language classroom in an international school in Colombo. We had been assigned an essay about “An Unforgettable Day.” I wrote about a Tamil family from Colombo who took a vacation to their ancient family burial ground in Jaffna. After a full day’s travel, the family reaches the graveyard to find that the bodies have all been dug up by Sinhala mobs. Corpses are everywhere. The family attempts to digest this kind of violence, the kind that is hell-bent on claiming ownership over the land, over the right to be there. One of the other girls in my class wrote about a date rape. Another friend of mine wrote her essay on an unforgettable day with a physically abusive father. The teacher failed us all on the assignment. She claimed we had not ‘followed instructions.’ “Unforgettable doesn’t mean these things,” she shouted, flourishing our essays in her fist. “Unforgettable means going to the park, or having a party.” We were forced to re-write our essays. This is not a particularly exceptional anecdote; rather, it represents the limits of what, in my opinion, is publicly, socially and politically sayable on a national level in Sri Lanka. The class carried on, other students chiming in with their own personal stories of state control. But the lesson lingered in my mind long after I’d left the lecture hall.
During moments of national crisis, certain groups bear the brunt of state repression. These groups are: the minorities (oppressed races, sexes or language groups); the labor unions (representing disenfranchised workers); the independent media (harbingers of truth) and the students (visionaries) It stands to reason, then, that these are also the groups that can be counted on to pull a nation out of crisis – by championing democracy, equality and change in the face of stagnant dictatorships. The faster a government clamps down on these groups’ freedom of speech and expression, the easier it becomes to ascertain the magnitude of their threat to the established regime.
