This Divided Island review by Samanth Subramanian – Sri Lanka’s tragedy

An account of the civil war in Sri Lanka and its aftermath is all the more devastating for withholding judgment

 A Sri Lankan soldier walks among debris as the war with the Tamil Tigers came to a close. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Amit Chaudhuri-Wednesday 13 May 2015

“It is equal to living in a tragic land/ To live in a tragic time,” said Wallace Stevens in the poem “Dry Loaf”. It is about an attempt to portray a bucolic scene – “That was what I painted behind the loaf,/ The rocks not even touched by the snow” – while the exercise is transformed at every moment by the incursion of history: “It was the soldiers went marching over the rocks/ And still the birds came, came in watery flocks,/ Because it was spring and the birds had to come.” In Samanth Subramanian’s excellent account of the civil war and its aftermath in Sri Lanka, history encompasses the people who lived through that “tragic time”, and the land’s sole function is to serve as that history’s paradigm. There’s no getting away, whether you find yourself in Canada or in a time of peace.

This Divided Island Review by Samanth Subramanian – Sri Lanka’s Tragedy by Thavam Ratna