'Traitor'

by Shobasakthi, translated by Anushiya Ramaswamy, Viking Penguin India, 2010

(October 16, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) A stark rhetoric of torture, pain and black humour, Traitor, through its pathologically damaged protagonist, gives voice to the testimonies of millions of refugees of a war-ravaged land.

Summary

‘As I live my days locked up in a wretched prison in this frozen country, I start to write the story of my beloved child, Nirami. The story begins with the birth of God.’

Nirami, Nesakumaran’s fourteen-year-old daughter, is awaiting her abortion in the hospital room of an unnamed European city; she refuses to name her rapist.

Nesakumaran’s narrative begins in 1980s Sri Lanka when, radicalized by the dream of Tamil Eelam, he abandons his seminary studies. A bungling terrorist, botching up one task after another, Nesakumaran is in no way a genuine threat. But once he has entered the system as a suspect he can never find a way out of the maze of interrogation chambers, army camps and regional prisons. What follows is a surreal account of torture, which culminates in the extremely brutal massacre of Tamil prisoners by the Sinhalese inmates in the Welikade prison in 1983, and also, the revelation of Nirami’s rapist.

A stark rhetoric of torture, pain and black humour, Traitor, through its pathologically damaged protagonist, gives voice to the testimonies of millions of refugees of a war-ravaged land.

Book review by Urooj Zia, Himal, August 2010

Shobasakthi, a former LTTE child soldier, gives a stark account of some of the most bloodcurdling moments in the history of what his protagonist, Nesakumaran, refers to throughout as ‘the Movement’. The story begins with Nesakumaran in exile in the US, but quickly we go back to his years in the ‘Movement’. Throughout the narrative, Nesakumaran is neither ‘heroic’ nor superhuman – he gives in to tears and pleads with his Sinhalese tormentors when threatened with sexual humiliation. But he also survives, and in order to do so, the preyed-upon often becomes party to the predation. Every school of thought within ‘the Movement’ is examined – from the raw anger of ‘goons’ to the non-violence of the benign, intellectually inclined Pakkiri, who ‘gently pushes the gun barrel away from his face’ just before his Tamil tormentors ‘tear open his mouth and beat him to death with their bare hands’. Yet his characters are neither saints nor demons – the war is never depicted as one between good and evil. (Urooj Zia)