Politics of identity

The recent controversy surrounding Canadian Tamil actress Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and the way she chooses to describe her identity offers Sri Lanka an opportunity to have a conversation that is far more important than the actress herself. Ramakrishnan has made clear that she does not identify as Sri Lankan, while describing herself as Tamil Canadian and emphasising her family’s Sri Lankan-Tamil origins. This is not an entirely new position for her and she has expressed similar sentiments for years.

Identity is deeply personal. It is shaped by family, geography, language, culture, history, memory and, sometimes, trauma. In Sri Lanka, many of us define ourselves through race, ethnicity, religion or birthplace. Some carry their school identity with them decades after leaving the school gates. We identify ourselves by our villages, universities, professions, political affiliations and even by caste. These identities may appear trivial to an outsider, but they are meaningful because they form part of an individual’s personal journey.

Of course, identities can also be painful. A label that gives one person pride can evoke exclusion or discrimination in another. “Sinhala Buddhist”, for example, may represent heritage, belonging and pride for one person, while for another it may recall experiences of discrimination or alienation. The answer cannot be to declare one person’s identity legitimate and another’s illegitimate.

What is required instead is a degree of empathy, the willingness to recognise that another person’s experience may be fundamentally different from our own. We do not have to agree with every interpretation of history or identity to acknowledge someone’s right to describe their own life.

This becomes particularly important when we confront Sri Lanka’s unresolved memories of the war. In recent days, some people in Jaffna commemorated Rasaiah Parthipan, better known as Lt. Col. Thileepan, who died in 1987 after a hunger strike while serving as a political leader of the LTTE. Many gathered in Nallur for the 39th anniversary of his death.

For many Tamils, Thileepan is remembered as a symbol of sacrifice and Tamil political aspirations. For many others in Sri Lanka, however, his association with the LTTE inevitably evokes a violent organisation responsible for immense suffering. Both realities form part of the country’s history. A mature society must be capable of acknowledging why one person can be remembered as a freedom fighter by some and regarded as a terrorist by others, without pretending that these perspectives carry identical meanings or consequences.

It would also be reasonable to expect those commemorating Thileepan to recognise the profound pain caused to the rest of the country by the LTTE and its leadership. Remembering one’s own suffering should not require forgetting another person’s suffering.

This is ultimately what the debate over Maitreyi Ramakrishnan should teach us. We need not embrace every identity that someone claims, nor every historical interpretation that accompanies it. But we should be secure enough in our own identities not to feel threatened by another person’s choice.

A stronger Sri Lanka will not be built by insisting that everyone remember the past in exactly the same way or identify themselves according to labels prescribed by others. It will be built by developing the confidence to accommodate differences, the humility to listen to experiences unlike our own, and the maturity to understand that another person’s identity does not diminish our own.