Fidel Castro and the tragedy of revolution

Last week, for the first time, my column attracted censure. Someone identifying himself under a pseudonym took me to task over two points: my indifference towards the American Election and what was unfortunately perceived as my championing of Fidel Castro. I answered him twice but could not, for some unfathomable reason, get him to see my perspective. This person was adamant that I was refusing to see Donald Trump’s demagoguery, his blatant racism, and his stance on immigration even as I clearly noted that a United States under Hillary Clinton would be no better, at least in terms of that great country’s foreign policy.

As for Castro, I hold no candles for him. The Cuba he governed languished without democracy for almost half a century. Dissent was out of the question, criticism not at all tolerated. Even the slightest hint of sarcasm, wit, and unconventionality was met with imprisonment: sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, more often than not for decades. It is indeed unfortunate that those who worship the likes of Castro, Che Guevara, and the Sandinistas are entranced by their garb and their supposedly ascetic existence. Fact is, there was nothing ascetic about these people when it came to governing their citizens.

The Miami Herald is published and read in Florida, which is 90 miles from Cuba. It is mainly catered to the same community that celebrated the death of Castro: naturally, what gets published in it is quite critical of him. In an op-ed (titled “Red ink: The high human cost of the Cuban revolution”) published therein, Glenn Garvin goes through some compelling statistics, all of which centre on the human cost of Castro’s regime.

Garvin essentially infers that, given the obscurity which shrouds much of that regime even today, it is difficult to get at a proper number for those who were killed, imprisoned, or made to disappear. Castro’s cronies probably took a leaf out of Nazi Germany’s book here, after all the Nuremberg Trials were made possible because of one mistake: the Nazis archived each and every atrocity they committed, a virtual treasure trove for those who wanted to prosecute the likes of Goering and Eichmann after the War.

There are two main sources that enumerate the murdered in Cuba. R. J. Rummel, the late historian from the University of Hawaii, estimated the death toll at anywhere between 35,000 and 141,000, with a median of 73,000. However, the Cuba Archive, a project which documents human rights abuses in that country, placed the toll at somewhere around 7,200, a much lower figure. This is not conclusive, though: Castro is reported to have killed as many as 5,000 immediately after the 1959 Revolution that brought him to power. Clearly, it would be a bit remiss to assume that from 1959 to the 2000s only 2,000 more people were killed.

Statistics can get controversial. In the mid-nineties a collage (drawn up by Cuban Americans) bearing the names of 10,000 countrymen killed by Castro’s regime was challenged when many of those 10,000 proved to be alive or to have died of natural causes. Cuba’s interventions in other countries – most notably in Africa – which helped push to power (at least temporarily) Marxist governments are officially said to have caused 4,000 deaths. But a Cuban Air Force General who defected put the number of those killed in one country alone (Angola) at 10,000. Meanwhile, there still is debate over the death toll of those who tried to escape the regime: the Harvard-trained economist Armando Lago put it (until 2003) at 77,000, but this was soon questioned as a shaky figure. Clearly, there is no consensus here, though not for a lack of trying.

I am wary of dogmatists from both sides of a debate and I am wary of those who pretend to sleep when carefully documented statistics tell a different story. The truth is that Castro, and his (intellectual) forefathers before him, provided an absolution for much of the garb that adorns revolutionaries. There is nothing romantic about dictatorships, nothing idealistic about turncoats. What happened in 1959 in Havana, to put it simply, should not have turned into a bloodbath that survived on propaganda, state terror, and cosmetic nationalism. However, this does not and will not belittle the propaganda of those ideologically opposed to such bloodbaths for less than innocent reasons.

I never get tired of reading Granta, the quarterly literary magazine published in the United Kingdom. Last year I was gifted with two whole boxes of these priceless gems, by a writer I am yet to meet. Just the other day I was reading an issue which centred on Russia, that is, the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Bloc. There were some rather interesting pieces on what revolutions to do the truth and how the truth gets contorted by those who wish to attack revolutions.

One of them caught my attention at once. Orlando Figes, in a feature story titled “Burying the Bones”, encounters members of the clergy and ordinary citizens on the day they buried the remains of Nicholas II (the last Tsar of Russia) in 1998. By that time, soon to close in on a century and a millennium, Boris Yeltsin’s regime was facing acute food shortages, rising poverty and crime, political turbulence, and of course widening economic inequalities. That, however, didn’t ruffle the people of St Petersburg, as they watched the funeral of the man who ruled Russia with an iron fist, who sanctioned anti-Jewish pogroms and authored mass executions of peasants who protested against his regime, with an almost mystical sense of awe.

In his article, Figes talks with those who idolise Nicholas and his family, including a priest from the Orthodox Church that would beatify the Tsar as a saint. When asked about the atrocities perpetrated by the man, the good Father replies that the demonstrations, uprisings, and protests over inequalities were not peaceful and more startlingly, were in fact sinful (try telling that to those starving on the streets today). When asked about the anti-Jewish pogroms authored by him (which continued even after the Revolution), well, the good Father has only one excuse to trot out: that the Tsar did not directly sanction it.

Figes ends his piece with a telling comment: “Most people know very little about Nicholas or any of the Tsars, since the subject was always poorly taught and grossly distorted in Soviet schools. There are just as many gaps in post-Tsarist, Soviet history. The result has been that myths and conspiracy theories are substituted for historical knowledge.”

The point I am trying to get at here is that no matter how repressive a dictatorship may be, that does not and will not absolve the excesses of a dictatorship which existed before it. Those who have an axe to grind with Castro, one can surmise, may be genuinely horrified at his malignant attitude towards dissidents, but I wonder: what of the many among them who belittle if not trivialise the excesses committed by Fulgencio Batista?

Do they not realise that inasmuch as both Batista and Castro were dictators, what divided the one from the other was this: under Castro, strides were made in healthcare, education, and poverty alleviation, strides which as one commentator pointed out to me the other day would take decades for the West to accomplish? What did Batista have to show during his regime? Only the Ugly American.

The mainstream media was always quick to ridicule Castro, sometimes for the gaudiest reasons. Once when Castro visited New York to attend a United Nations summit, an American news agency reported that after his entourage left the hotel they had stayed in, the management had to clean up the chicken bones the Cubans had left behind: a half-truth that certainly contributed to the image of the man as a devilish glutton. “Cuba is where Lucifer lives,” Michael Moore sarcastically says in his documentary on the US healthcare system, Sicko, just as he and a bunch of American patients arrive in Havana for a treatment denied to them in their own country.

In one sense, the attitude of the US government to Cuba, right until the Obama presidency, showed a lot of hypocrisy. Forget their involvement with the Batista regime. Just think of the doublespeak they were enforcing on the rest of the world when they dealt with Castro. "Mr Castro is a tyrant who uses brutal methods to enforce a bankrupt vision and I will use my veto powers to ensure that the four-decade old embargo on Cuba remains in place," George W. Bush once declared, even as his envoys in Sri Lanka were forcing our representatives to negotiate with the LTTE, who by no stretch of the imagination could be called freedom fighters.

The US government cut off international aid to Cuba in 1992, when the dubiously titled and drafted “Cuban Democracy Act” starved a country which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was without a proper international sponsor. The tragedy with today’s system of international sanctions, I have always felt, is its failure to distinguish a tyrant from his or her citizens, a tragedy that has cost the US and us (pun intended) a great many lives and a great many dollars. This came out most discernibly in much of the history of the relations between Washington and Havana.

The world had moved away from Communism when, in 2003, Castro declared that his country was transitioning to it. He said this as a response to the then newly established "Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba", co-chaired by Condoleeza Rice. The wording of that Commission itself was dubious: Bush would argue that his government was not waiting for the day of Cuban freedom (which would have come from within the country, organically), but rather the day of freedom in Cuba (which was doublespeak for intervention from outside).

Barack Obama, always the man of many words, opted for negotiation over conflict. Castro, by then an invalid who had retired as a would-be Elder Statesman, distrusted the Americans and openly criticised what could be considered as a U-turn by his government (led by his brother, Raul). That distrust has, one must admit, less to do with his affirmation of Communism than the history of US intervention in the region. With the election of Donald Trump, who is more Bush than Bush himself, one can’t tell where relations between Cuba and the US will go to. One can only conjecture.

And at the end of the day, conjecture does not help. I will therefore conclude.

People talk of Batista and Castro. The former died in 1973, having taken away more than 30 million dollars from his own country’s Treasury when his government was toppled in 1959. The latter died last week, having survived almost 640 assassination attempts. The former was the West’s playboy, the latter the playboy of those opposed to the West. In the much hyped debate between these two however, there is one name we forget: José Miró Cardona.

Who was José Miró Cardona? He was a member of the anti-Batista Unity Group that tried a peaceful negotiation with the man. In August 1958 he wrote a letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower protesting against American involvement in the Cuban civil war. He joined forces with Castro and was with him right until they seized power. He was Prime Minister for six weeks that year and was appointed as his country’s Ambassador to Spain in May the following year. In July however, he resigned his post and sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy. By 1961, he was in the United States. The Kennedy administration would soon hail him as a liberator.

Cardona was a moderate. Like all moderates, he was sidelined. Revolutions do not end with those who author them: they end only with the institutionalisation of the values those authors are supposed to stand for. Such values can only be enforced by reformists and moderates. Cardona did not live to see them inscribed in the land of his birth.

What else can we say? Fidel Castro (and we must be honest to acknowledge this) needed force. He monopolised it. Along the way, he alienated those who called for reforms. The rest is history. And history, as Regi Siriwardena once wrote, is open. So open that we are yet to determine whether those people on the streets of Havana mourning Castro were forced to lament the death of their former leader.

Written for: Ceylon Today, December 6 2016

Thank you, belatedly

How does one compose epitaphs for the dead? What is there in one obituary that is not there in another, particularly when it comes to those who won us while they were alive? Penning down words is easy, trying to attain some sense of meaning, order, and sincerity is not. So it is with those who gave something back to our so-called cultural industries, including the cinema. As always therefore, there are no tributes, only attempts at them. This is one such attempt.

The past two years swept upon us like a curse. One by one, almost all suddenly, some of our brightest and of course irreplaceable icons left us. Right down from Mercy Edirisinghe in 2014 to W. D. Amaradeva about three weeks back, we lost them all.

True, in this sansaric, interminable universe of ours not even icons are spared the indignity of death, but it is not those who fawn on them that I pity: rather, on those who belittle, ignore, or in other ways undervalue their work and their careers. There are children who have not heard of Amaradeva, for instance. These are not children sent to institutions teaching foreign curricula: these are children from local government schools. Speaks a lot about our education system.

Last week we lost Wimal Kumar da Costa. Did we, as a nation and a people who cherish the arts, know him? I am not so sure that is easy to answer. How can one answer such a bold, assertive question, after all? More to the point, what is there in the man that merits an affirmative reply to it? Let me say this, hence. I didn’t know Wimal personally and I am sure there are hundreds if not thousands who are yearning to write tributes to the man with their personal encounters. The man deserves as much, not because such encounters ought to be written on, but because in all of them (I am willing to bet) he comes across as a lovable, peaceable, yet self-indulgent man.

Wimal came to us through Dharmasena Pathiraja. He was featured in the latter’s first film, Sathuro, in 1969. He immediately joined the likes of Daya Tennakoon and Amarasiri Kalansuriya (both of whom are, thankfully, still with us) as part of Pathiraja’s repertoire of actors, and the films kept on coming: from Ahas Gawwa right down to cameo appearances in that remarkable masterpiece, Para Dige. In all these, Wimal came across as a talker who likes to indulge in rhetoric and is therefore flawed, but who like all such flawed individuals did not begrudge another’s friendship.

The exception to that, I think, was Pathiraja’s own Eya Dan Loku Lamayek, where as the hopelessly infatuated village boy he showed us that he’d go to any lengths to achieve what he wanted (even beating up the man with whom the girl of his dreams had fallen in love). That was, some would like to call it, an aberration in his career, one which saw role after role after role with him as the talkative sidekick. He was born for that role, and like Philinte from Moliere’s The Misanthrope his part was that of a consoler, a soother of sorrow, and a joker. No wonder he won us.

He could also be an idealist. In Bambaru Avith he showers his two friends (Kalansuriya and Vijaya Kumaratunga) with Marxist rhetoric and is continually the object of ridicule everywhere. He speaks of equality, the oppression of class hierarchies, despite the painfully obvious fact that no one is there to listen to him. No, not even when his predictions turn out to be correct, his friends’ interference in the fishing village in which the film is set invites chaos and anarchy, and, in probably the most iconic moment in the plot, he gets up by a bus stand and rants and raves on the virtues of pre-capitalist societies. As with all such ideologues, there is (again) no one to listen to him: as he looks down after he finishes his little speech, his audience is gone. What does one do in such a situation? I wouldn’t know, but Wimal did. He laughed.

But it wasn’t just Pathiraja who made use of him: in fact from the seventies I’d might as well say that his best performance came out in Vasantha Obeyesekere’s lovable (but atypical) Diyamanthi, where he is a pickpocket who befriends an unemployed Arts graduate (Vijaya) and a man just released from prison (Somasiri Dehipitiya) and goes on a rampage everywhere. That was a kinder, gentler world we lived in back then, and so, when we saw him frolic everywhere with the other two, when we saw the three of them stumble into a mystery that was resolved in a way which would have compelled a second glance from Hitchcock, we never forget his face: unkempt, rough, yet always smiling.

Yes, smiling. Peruse whatever photo you can of him (not from a film though), and you will see that his face was ever ready to break into a smile. That smile adorned wherever he was and made up the essence of his character: he didn’t meet a lot of people but he was not unapproachable, and he was (from what I have heard) almost self-demeaning when he did meet people. He was neither indifferent to nor enamouring of the public gaze, hardly a trait one comes across a man who took part in as many films as he did (more than a hundred, a respectable amount for someone who emerged from our cinema rather late in its history).

People talk. I’ve heard some of those who worked with him talk on him. “Wimal ta thibba gathiyak, e gathiya nisa mulu Lankawama eyata priya kara” was one such comment. “Eyata kochchara adareda kiwwoth kohe giyath minissu eyata adagahala sangraha karanawa” was another.

Yes, these are raw and unpeeled, hardly the sort that must get into a formal tribute. But then, should tributes be formal? Isn’t it precisely these comments, from those who knew the dead, which should describe the person being lamented? I believe so, and I believe that what I heard from Wimal’s closest confidantes can only lead to one conclusion: he was not popular in the cosmetic sense of that term, only in the sincerest, plebeian, and unrefined sense.

And for that, I think we must be grateful, though not complacent. There may be children who never heard of the man, and that is tragic. Should we lament? Yes. Should we brood? No. It is the duty of those who are alive, to bring him back to life. It is the duty of the writer to aid that miracle.

Wimal Kumar da Costa died last week and I never met him when he was alive. I saw him, though, ever since I began seeing the movies. He made me smile. He made me laugh. He made me think. He will now be missed.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, November 30 2016

On myths, facts, and the blogosphere

I know a friend who despises opinion pieces. He is a cynic when it comes to commentaries and as such, measure commentators (political or otherwise) on the basis of their fidelity to facts. Now facts, as the saying goes, are sacred, and comment free, but for all he cares this friend tends to disparage certain writers based on their lack of regard for the truth: journalism, for him at least, must be stripped of frill. The truth and nothing but the truth is what he aspires for in whatever he reads (barring the occasional novel or comic book, of course). I can’t say I agree with him entirely, but I will say this: I am no fan of opinion columnists, and going by that logic, at least when it comes to such columns, I am no fan of writing them either.

At one level I suppose it has to do with the blogosphere. There are so many writers out there on the net that it’s difficult to set some sense of uniformity. It’s difficult to standardise, in other words. Those who rant and rave, for the lack of a better way of putting it, rant and rave to their hearts’ content, never mind whether or not the extrapolations and the analyses they make come close to the truth.

The best columnists, to my mind at least, don’t indulge in such rants: they are careful to support what they write with what they know. There’s a reason, after all, why Keats, despite his saturated paens and tributes to love, is definitely not the superior of the likes of Pushkin: the former was young, too young, to talk of what he talked about with any concreteness.

All this came to me during the days that followed the American Election. I observed in this column two weeks ago that we shouldn’t care about the results because whoever wins and whoever loses, it’s still the same show when it comes to US foreign policy. There the matter would have ended, if not for the almost ceaseless barrage of comments and opinion pieces that Sri Lankans kept on writing. It would be interesting, I hence thought, to delve into some of these comments and glean from them a sense of the political that their writers exhibit, and how, at the end of the day, they congeal to their awareness (or the lack thereof) of the political in their country.

First and foremost, as Nalaka Gunawardene pointed out in a column last week, Donald Trump is everything the alt-right (or alternative right) could have dreamt of: a global warming sceptic, a panderer to hardcore evangelists and fundamentalists (while being an atheist), and a pragmatist in the world of business. “We can only hope that Trump’s business pragmatism would prevail over climate action” is a parting shot Gunawardene takes at the American president. We agree. In yet another article written before this, he went on to argue that what we saw was a “largely fact-free election choosing a (mostly) fact-resistant winner.” What of that?

To the extent that Trump’s perception as a fact-resistant candidate is based on his crass handling and distortion of facts, I agree. Malinda Seneviratne, on the other hand, who is less prone to dichotomies that characterise the American political scene, argued that it cut both ways: Clinton’s bid for the presidency was defeated because of facts (her past record, her husband’s devious stances on foreign policy, and her economic views), while Trump worked on the fears of outside invasion which can, as I observed two weeks ago, congeal into a whole electorate unless they are addressed in time. The former was based on realities, the latter on myths.

Who won what? As Paul Krugman puts it, “Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than two million, and she would probably be president-elect if the director of the FBI hadn’t laid such a heavy thumb on the scales, just days before the election.” That heavy thumb, to put things in perspective, got a whole lot heavier when Trump supporters whipped up a campaign of irrational frenzy against her.

In a context where political preferences are framed by the obsessive need to pick a champion, how is it possible to (de)select candidates based on the (as important) need to choose the lesser of the two evils? It is here, I think, that most commentators are batting for a six and failing miserably, starting with one pertinent point: dichotomising candidates based on the perceived lesser evil tends to distort the truth.

That is why I can’t understand why writers (here and elsewhere) consider gender as the predominant factor in the election. I believe the tussle between Trump and Clinton was more dependent on perceptions: on who was standing for the Establishment and who was against it. Democrats who are whining about the winner losing at the Electoral College (for Trump is the fifth president to lose the popular vote) should consider the man they ignored. Gender figured in, yes, but if Democrats are so worried about gender, one can ask, why did they conveniently throw out Bernie Sanders (through the flaws of the system) who stood for gender equality in a less ambivalent way than Clinton?

That’s just one fact. Here’s another. Unlike in 2000, when Ralph Nader campaigned as an independent candidate and effectively “robbed” key votes which would have ensured victory for Al Gore, neither Jill Stein nor Gary Johnson (the man who did not know what Aleppo was) courted enough popularity for one to conclude that they did for Clinton what Nader did for Gore.

Fact is, not enough young people voted for Clinton: they were either fed up with the System (because of which Sanders was kicked out) or worried about electing a warmonger for a president (for Clinton, despite what her supporters can and will say, was the lady who jubilantly said, “We came, we saw, he died!” of Muammar Gaddafi). They couldn’t vote for Trump because he was far, far away from their ideals, and because of their idealism they decided to stay at home. How close was the fight, then? “If just one in 100 voters changed their votes to Clinton, the electoral college votes would have been 307 Clinton, 231 Trump. Not much of a landslide, really” was what a lecturer in Political Science in Texas observed. True.

Forget all that. I still don’t get this gender argument. Trump, so the conventional wisdom goes, courted the mythmakers, the worst elements of a society touted as the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave: homophobes, sexists, and racists. Should we be worried? Of course. But to argue that gender (or for that matter ethnicity) was all that figured in the election would be (and I say this at the cost of irking those arguing otherwise) as reductionist as saying that Trump was an anti-Establishment candidate (which is, by the way, the most common observation made by those vouching for the man, even here).

Yes, he made some unseemly comments about women that the mainstream media in the US made use of, only to irk those who supported him even more. But does this make the other candidate progressive? “Progressivism is a disease!” is what Glenn Beck loved to shout out. Now Glenn holds the Founding Fathers in esteem and criticises if not trashes the likes of Clinton, but reading his rants against liberal politicos, I questioned myself, “Who is progressive in this world? Obama? Clinton? Ralph Nader?”

Besides and more importantly, what is progressivism? Is it being soft on foreign policy, in which case no candidate can be singled out and commended? Or is it being soft on domestic policies, in which case one can cut (only) some slack for the Democrats? The truth, as anyone with any sense of history will tell you, is that the American electoral system cannot and will not promote the likes of Howard Dean or Bernie Sanders, by which I am not criticising it (after all there have been electoral systems which have taken in and crowned Hitler and Ferdinand Marcos) but only commenting. And yes, that was a comment for all those who think that the United States is capable of electing a Pierre Trudeau.

Just the other day I came across an article that claimed to explain why so many Sri Lankans (here and there) supported Trump. This article attempted a miracle: to jump from misogyny in the American system to misogyny in Sri Lanka’s education system to the politicisation of Buddhism to the chauvinism inculcated in mono-ethnic schools here! Some points were valid, others were not, but all in all I couldn’t help but think back on that friend I alluded to at the beginning of this piece, and what he had to tell me at one point: shouldn’t such extrapolations be made with a pinch of salt?

Nationalism, some say, is over. I wouldn’t agree. Nationalism is here to stay. Whether you are from the States or from Sri Lanka, if you are a presidential candidate you cannot, will not, and shall not win or clinch the presidency if you belittle the fears of the majority. Obama was no saint (who is?) but when it came to the final reckoning, his perceived saintliness ticked off the fundamentalists whose fears were not being addressed. Can one blame them? I for one cannot, even though there is much in them that I oppose and will continue to oppose.

Going by that, I can with all sincerity say that the most common misconception made by writers of such opinion pieces as that quoted above is this: in their bid to champion the lesser of the two evils, they forget the tendency of the System to twist and contort the most idealistic candidate.

As Padraig Colman pointed out in a series of perceptive articles on Trump and Clinton (published by "Ceylon Today"), neither candidate was perfect. Well, the truth is that no one is perfect, not you and not me, but in this rush to commend the less imperfect person we are entranced by personalities so much that we forget that the mere lack of any DISCERNIBLE flaws cannot and will not salvage a person from his or her corruption at the hands of the Establishment. That explains the many U-turns made by leaders both in America and in this country, U-turns that seem to get no press and which depress the idealist into thinking that there’s no hope left in a polity.

A prominent political commentator once told me, quite candidly, that there was nothing black about Obama, only the colour of his skin: a contention I subscribe to (with some reservation). What Obama did (and his legacy, whether one likes it or not, is not palatable to the idealist) was basically conceal the deficiencies of a system that couldn’t be bottled for long.

To add fuel to the proverbial fire, he was offering as his successor a person who represented everything the American Right wanted in a more aggressive candidate: pushing for interventionism, arguing for external interference, and championing unilateral action in a context where R2P (Responsibility to Protect) is being pointed out as a justifiable alternative to the sovereignty of a country. In this regard, is it a wonder that Trump won? Not really. Blue-eyed idealists, however, will have a hard time swallowing that.

Fidel Castro died last Saturday. He was 90. He spent the better part of his life combating the many myths that the West bred and perpetuated about him. I will not spend time on Castro (I leave that for next week’s column), but I will say this: for a man beset with so many falsities by the mainstream media, he triumphed and trumped. He never lost. Not once. Says a lot about perception and reality, when it comes to politics that is. Commentators who continue to lament the defeat of "idealistic" candidates, I believe therefore, should spend more time reading the many op-eds, essays, and articles written on him, mostly by those who see in him the devil he (almost) never was.

George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” He could have been writing of the voter: suckered into supporting a candidate who hides behind a veneer of sophistication and respectability, who upon victory embraces the same values that same voter opposed. In such a context, who should we blame? Naturally, ourselves.

Written for: Ceylon Today, November 29 2016

Rehan Mudannayake reaches out

Filmmakers are a peculiar lot. The best of them privilege nothing and the lesser among them get entranced by the cosmetics that are, I suppose, part and parcel of an essentially commercial industry. That explains, to a considerable extent at least, how the good and the great are surpassed by the bad and the mediocre, and how the most unyielding artiste had to compromise, no matter how marginal that act of compromise may have been, to yield to the pressures of commercialisation. Only a select few, who thanks to social background or personal preference, strayed out of that accursed reality called “expedience” and showed us their conception of art with no frills.

I first met Rehan Mudannayake in 2014. I didn’t know who he was apart from the fact that he was an up-and-coming director who “deserved” a biographical sketch. Given that I was rather immature and naive in my understanding of how artistes work, I was (and I say this quite honestly) quite bewildered: how would I ever take to him the way I had with others like him?

There were two points against him, for me at least: one, he was a relative newcomer; and two, his film (which was supposed to absorb the bulk of the article) had delved into the (double) lives of the Colombo bourgeoisie. I am no Marxist, but I was quite young back then (which amounts to the same thing, really), so I was a little sceptic: how could the elite of Cinnamon Gardens figure in ANY serious flick?

Two years later that flick, Elephant, was selected for the International Film Competition Festival in Jakarta, Indonesia, where it managed to win a Silver Prize. I am no Marxist yet, and I have since grown older. My tastes, let it suffice for now, have changed.

Directors are neither demagogues nor ivory towers. The worst of them tend to take to the commercial sector, but that does not and will not absolve the few who take the deterioration that results from this as a license to shut themselves up in academia and throw out arty flicks that, while critically well received, alienate their audience. I am no fan of those who intellectualise the cinema. Rehan Mudannayake, fortunately for me, is no fan of them either. This is his story.

He was educated at Elizabeth Moir in Colombo and later at Worth Abbey School in England. In both schools, he had derived a love for art that would stay. Predictably, it stayed with him even when he entered the University of Kent, to study film for three years, and the University of Amsterdam, to study not just film but also literature, drama, and musicology. Apparently jazz was one of the subjects he had to study in the latter stream, which he remembers with some justifiable fondness.

I remember talking with Sanchitha Wickremesooriya not long ago, and I remember him telling me that despite an atmosphere that was more amenable to the arts, he was not enamoured of the West to the extent of living the rest of his life there. So he returned to the land of his birth. Rehan, I suspect, is not too far behind Sanchitha on this count, when in 2012 he left Europe and came back to Sri Lanka. When asked as to why he did so, he replies, "Purely and simply, the desire to make movies in my own country." He qualifies this: "Besides, I grew up on a diet of films here. So this is where I really began my career.”

I put to him that despite the cold, less than emotional attitude to life privileged by the British, they have inculcated a cinema that could reckon with the best in the world. He agrees, with a caveat: "England doesn't have a vibrant film culture anymore. There's hardly any continuity in the industry there, quite opposite to what's happening across the Atlantic."

What's missing, he explains, is state support. "I remember David Cameron once publicly stating that all directors in the UK must strive to make more films like Harry Potter. He was probably offering justification for his government's decision to abolish the UK Film Council. That's absurd though, quite harrowingly. Forget the fact that not everyone can make or afford to make a Harry Potter. Where's the youth going to be in the British film industry? I think not addressing this question, especially in the long term, will do more damage than anyone can imagine."

For his part, Rehan has stuck to principle. He is also eclectic. That is how he can talk about his fascination with Eisenstein and the Russians, Godard and the French, and Spielberg and the Americans with equal vigour and fascination. "Point is, we can't really inflate ourselves and think that what we love as film-styles are the best. We need to learn as many of them as we can," he says, "Which brings me to my second point: if cinema is NOT to remain as a minority art, we need to go beyond a crowd mentality."

I suspect he would bring up Wes Anderson, and he did. Anderson (who gave us The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014 and a torrent of other, as quirky features before) remains the unconventional parvenu he always was, more so than even the Coen Brothers. "I believe he has conformed the least among American directors today. You can't really talk about the American cinema without factoring in its studio system. Anderson has kept away from all that. That is why, when you see films like Moonrise Kingdom, you tend to think, 'Ah, this must have been done by some recluse!' In a way, that's true, because the man has really become an outsider to his country's studio-oriented movie culture. He is to be applauded for this, no doubt."

This however does not mean Rehan appreciates the less appreciated only. For him, the cinema can only attain perfection if it nurtures both the outsider and the mass producer, a point he drives home succinctly when he argues, “The cinema is never static. It's always trying to question and liberate itself. It's always on the go. To a large extent, this has to do with the fact that it's the youngest of the arts. So I guess it's natural that we haven't really unearthed half the potential that films are capable of reaching.” As a summing up, he lays out one point: "The world needs its Andersons. But without the Spielbergs and Lucases, it would be quite dull."

What of his work? One of his first attempts was a short called Insecxtual, made about three years back and nominated for the top prize at the Mosaic Film Festival in Toronto. Elephant (an adaptation of an Ashok Ferrey short story), was not really a follow-up in that it explored new themes, best left to be discerned by the filmgoer and not revealed by the critic.

The film was, if my memory is correct, screened twice here last year. I missed watching it on both occasions, the first owing to an unfortunate illness and the second owing to another unfortunate illness. From what I have heard, however, I can say this much: Rehan has tried to probe into the fears, anxieties, and aspirations of the Colombo bourgeoisie. I fear I don’t have enough authority to comment any further, so I will desist and turn instead to his latest endeavour, Ladies Night.

Ladies Night is relatively short. I believe the plot tells it all: “A regular Wednesday night out in Colombo amongst three friends – Fiona, Rajinda, and Sulaiman – takes a twisted turn when they are paid a visit by an unsavoury visitor. A dark, fast-paced short film, Ladies Night is the story of a disturbed man who obsessively stalks and harasses his ex-girlfriend.” I asked Rehan to elaborate on this without revealing spoilers, and in one go (well, almost) he summed it all up: “We live in a society that shuts out the most basic flaws that beset us.”

I sense that the same themes embedded in his previous work comes out here as well, and I am not wrong: in particular, our inability to recognise social ills when they confront us, and how, despite the contextualised plot of the film (as I mentioned, it delves into the lives of the Colombo elite), this trait of ours is relevant to the rest of our small country. I put this to Rehan, who agrees almost at once: “Yes, it’s rooted in a particular milieu. But then that doesn’t belittle its relevance to the many other individuals and communities resident elsewhere.”

Ladies Night will, he tells me, be screened at the Lionel Wendt Arts Centre on Thursday, December 8, starting at 6.30 pm. It has a veritable cast, all of whom are young: Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke, Kinita Shenoy, Lasantha David, Sakshin Haran, Savera Weerasinghe, Vindhya Fernando, and Savithri Rodrigo. Rehan has not only directed but also written it. “Will it deliver?” is a question on everyone’s mind. “How can we tell?” is my rejoinder. We can only watch, comment, and wait. Until then, we can only guess.

I suppose the subject of any article deserves the last word. Here’s what Rehan has to say, hence: “We need to stop the cinema from being institutionalised. For this, we must seek cooperation from critics who know what they're writing about and audiences who appreciate films for what they are. We need truly independent directors. But will we ever get them? That is my question for you."

“Will we ever?” one can ask. “Let us see!” I will retort. Rehan has answered half that question, for us. We only have to answer the other half.

Written for: The Island YOUth, November 27 2016

Richard de Zoysa: The other side of paradise

The first thing that struck you about him was his voice. Polished, elegant, and not a little jarring, it helped explain his figure, which was at once filled with resolve and fear. It was these two qualities, perhaps, that explained how self-contradictory the man was: a scion of the elite, yet fighting against the same values that same elite fought so hard to solidify against everyone else. He paid a price for this act of rebellion and that price was his life, but upon his death he sealed his name for posterity. Life’s like that, I suppose: you remember the dead and you never forget the murdered.

Had he lived, Richard de Zoysa would have been 58. He was little more than 32 when he was killed, and brutally so, away from the solitude of his house and family. This is not a politically coloured tribute to the man, but a take on the fields of activity he took to: the theatre, the cinema, and literature.

I am no thespian and I suppose not being one makes it difficult for me to comment on the theatre. I was born long after Richard passed away and hence, it will take nothing short of a miracle for me to assess his worth as a playwright and actor (onstage, that is). His credits in the theatre were many and while not all of them could be regarded as monumental (they have long since been forgotten), it is certainly true that even with the lesser among them he came out remarkably as an actor. The only play which featured him, that I have read with any sort of interest, was Regi Siriwardena’s take on the Soviet dissident Nikolai Bukharin, The Long Day’s Task, in which Richard was not only the courageous dissident destined for the guillotine, but also a key shaper in the tone, the nuances, and the general direction of the plot.

Being a film buff, I was always more entranced by his credits in our cinema. Richard de Zoysa was there in two masterpieces that won praise in (almost) every quarter, Tissa Abeysekara’s Viragaya and Lester James Peries’ Yuganthaya. In the former, he is an idealist, a character who was not featured in Martin Wickramasinghe’s novel but who was scripted in to its adaptation by the director to provide a point of reference for the largely socialist tilt it manifested towards the end. In the latter, arguably the pinnacle of his career, he is the fervent revolutionary, the prodigal son of the merciless capitalist, who turns against his own family in his quest for social justice. His performance as Malin in that film, for obvious reasons, deserves scrutiny, but only after a brief perusal of his life.

Richard Manik de Zoysa was born in Colombo on March 18, 1958. He was the product of a mixed marriage: his father was Sinhalese and his mother, who later became a key voice for bereaved mothers, wives, and daughters, was Tamil. Young Richard was sent to S. Thomas’ College in Mount Lavinia, which had an active theatre culture and where, under the patronage of the then Head Master and Sinhala teacher D. S. Jayasekera, his penchant for the subject was encouraged. He was also a debater, while he won the Best Actor award at the Shakespeare Drama Competition in 1972.

He came from a particular social background and this, it must be admitted, explains the many contradictions his later career as an activist bred. As I pointed out, he was part of the elite, but being part of the elite he naturally saw the many ills and tumours which were being bred and perpetuated by them. He rebelled, naturally, and to this end sought refuge in progressive social movements. To date, he remains the only serious spokesperson for the New Left who emerged from the English-speaking intelligentsia, a feat no other person achieved. As a journalist too, he shone: during his last few years he was the head of the Colombo office of the prestigious Inter Press Service.

And in a large sense, those two film roles solidified the image of him as someone who detested compromise, who had a vision for the world and the society he was part of, and who wasn’t beset by the many fault-lines that encountered him as he set about reforming his community. In Yuganthaya, as the son of the ruthless Simon Kabilana, Malin (Richard) gave the impression of being a crusader at odds with his physique. At the beginning of that remarkable but overlooked film, we get it that he and his friend Aravinda (Douglas Ranasinghe) dabbled in Marxism in London, but we also get it that while Aravinda has shrugged off all that in his quest to rise socially, Malin hasn’t exactly let go of that (even as his own family jokes about it and as we are deceived into thinking that he will become as indifferent as every other child of the colonial bourgeoisie sent abroad to study).

Yuganthaya is considered by a great many critics as the weakest in Martin Wickramasinghe’s Koggala trilogy (it was written after Gamperaliya but before Kaliyugaya, even though the events in it take place after the latter), and it was left to Lester James Peries to salvage it from the political to bring it to realm of the personal. He did this by focusing the energy and the tension of the plot on the relationship between Simon and Malin. To this end, he went (whether unwittingly or not, we never can tell) for two actors who, by coincidence, represented the exact same political sympathies they exhibited in the film: Gamini Fonseka as Simon, and Richard as Malin.

Gamini was by then a recluse, a virtual loner who had bucks to spend and who had become to our cinema what the likes of Bogart, Wayne, and Burt Lancaster had been to Hollywood. Richard, on the other hand, was more fragile, sensitive, and refined. Gamini’s depiction of Simon was wholly aligned with the image of his character as a coarse, rough, by-his-own-bootstraps businessman, while the image of his son as a more detached, less vulgar gentleman added to the film’s inner turmoil, as he turned to the burgeoning trade union movement against his own family. This came out even in how these two spoke: Simon was the gruffer of the two, Malin the more soft-spoken.

Actors are by default flamboyant and the more flamboyant among them create an image which outlasts their life. So it was with Chaplin, so it was with some of our own actors and thespians. More often than not, this image subsisted on a dichotomy. In the case of Chaplin, that was a dichotomy between good and evil, with the latter represented as an externalised force which the man’s characters combated.

With Richard too, such a dichotomy existed, even in those few roles he played in the cinema: even as Malin, you never forgot that, try as he might, he was always bonded to a class background that was incongruent with his beliefs, so much so that this conflict could only be resolved if that background was externalised. He could do this in only one way: by openly spurning his father. And so, in that celebrated finale, Richard is carried away triumphantly by his cohorts in the Trade Union, while a despondent Simon looks on, with a close-up to his face which Sarath Amunugama would, in a speech delivered at the second Lester James Peries and Sumitra Peries Oration held four years ago, succinctly compare to the cold, harrowing, and tragic faces in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

It jarred, not surprisingly, when he was cast as the wayward son in Parakrama Niriella’s Yashorawaya. No one can seriously contend that he was miscast in that series, but the point is that because we had got used to a set image of the man as a blue-eyed, yet flawed, idealist, it was not easy to get used to him as a prodigal outsider. Small wonder.

In Yashorawaya there is, barring the elder son (played to perfection by Lucky Dias), no perfect person: even the father (G. W. Surendra) is a pretender, and the other son (Gamini Hettiarachchi) is a drunken slob, but with Richard’s character you came across a closeted, not so open, but as indulgent a child, so closeted that upon his exit from the plot you neither knew nor cared about what happened to him.

He could have graced our cinema more. Could have, but could not. Like the Lepidoptera of the poem (of the same name) that he wrote, his broken wings and his crippled mind, which left us on February 19, 1990, could not be restored. In that poem he wrote of the ants of time, which carry away fragile specimens of humanity to be cast aside, forgotten, and belittled. Such a fate, however, was not to meet Richard: as I pointed out, his death only empowered his legacy, and his legacy, which extends not just to the monolingual elite of Cinnamon Gardens (who, for reasons still unfathomable to me, have appropriated him as a symbol of lost causes relevant to their milieu when he was not) but to the rest of this country as well.

Richard de Zoysa, actor, thespian, writer, and journalist continues to be appropriated and continues to be celebrated. Should we celebrate or should we not? Is there reason for lament or is there not? These are, arguably, trivial questions. More important than any of these is this: has he been forgotten? The simple answer, no.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, November 23 2016