Abstract
Our essay is concerned with life and death, grief and mourning. Palestine is a reminder that we too live in a country of perpetual grief where death is denied and discounted, and mourning deferred; a painful reminder of our past, a past that is eternally present because, although we in Sri Lanka grieve, the State refuses to recognise our right to mourn.
After months of anger, outrage, and unspeakable sadness for the loss of lives in Palestine, many of us have been left feeling powerless in the face of profound indifference of world leaders who have authorised themselves as the arbiters of geopolitics and remain silent, and, therefore, complicit in the genocide that Israel is inflicting on Palestine. We in Sri Lanka know the terrible weariness that descends when months, years, then decades go by without justice and restitution for lives lost and still missing. Years of being exposed to the horrors of civil war, the violence of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s second insurrection and the State’s spectacular counter-terror, and, more recently, anti-Muslim violence, have not made us immune to loss but have left us in a limbo between the trauma of death and the pain of learning to live without the people we love—mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, wives and husbands, friends and neighbours—whose lives mattered.
After months of anger, outrage, and unspeakable sadness for the loss of lives in Palestine, many of us have been left feeling powerless in the face of profound indifference of world leaders who have authorised themselves as the arbiters of geopolitics and remain silent, and, therefore, complicit in the genocide that Israel is inflicting on Palestine. We in Sri Lanka know the terrible weariness that descends when months, years, then decades go by without justice and restitution for lives lost and still missing. Years of being exposed to the horrors of civil war, the violence of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s second insurrection and the State’s spectacular counter-terror, and, more recently, anti-Muslim violence, have not made us immune to loss but have left us in a limbo between the trauma of death and the pain of learning to live without the people we love—mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, wives and husbands, friends and neighbours—whose lives mattered.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Polity |
| Publication status | Published - 20 May 2024 |