Blood and Dust

Earth, in Mutinie [Blood and Dust: Part 3 of 3]

| Vajra Chandrasekera

Blood and Dust is a trio of essays about, among other things, Philip Pullman’s paired His Dark Materials/The Book of Dust trilogies and what it means to be, or ideally not be, a Sinhala Buddhist. This is the third and final essay in the set, all brought to you by my patrons, those paragons of virtue and taste. Part 2 was Ruinous; Battering. Fair warning, this one is probably the most depressing of the three.

Theſe Elements in Mutinie

වඳ-fear, the fear of extinction, is widespread, deep-set, and powerfully tied to the root and founding myth of Sinhala Buddhism, which moves simultaneously in both directions: Sri Lanka is a Sinhala Buddhist country because-therefore Sinhala Buddhism must have the foremost place in Sri Lanka. The possibility of losing that primacy, the threat of losing status and power for the race relative to other races, is what that dreaded extinction looks like in the present day: not losing life, but soul. The fear of extinction is not truly fear of the hard stop at the end, which is after all in the distant future even in the wildest nightmares of the Sinhala supremacist, but of the long decline on the way, which is where they believe we now are. The fear of the slippery slope, the ground already uncertain underfoot.

Of course, in Sri Lanka, race as such (especially in English) is often not how we talk about what are, nevertheless, clearly race-coded issues. We talk instead about ethnicity, culture, religion, majority/minority, north/south, specific historical actors and events. These do all have specific meanings: I don’t mean to suggest that they are always reducible to euphemisms for race. However, they are frequently used in a euphemistic way when what is actually being talked about is race/racism, with the result that many seemingly sober analyses begin by impatiently dismissing race/racism as either irrelevant or insignificant, the province of fringe extremists, and promptly rendering their analyses hollow, no matter how ascetic their sobriety. We are usually told that it’s all actually about something else—class, or the “economy” if you don’t want to say the c-word. Or to put it another way, that the problem is not about race but poverty and precarity.

It would indeed be a simplistic to suggest that all seven million people who voted for Gotabaya Rajapaksa in November 2019 are racists in the narrow sense of practioners of the local extreme of racist violence. Seven million people might not have seven million distinct reasons for that vote, but there will certainly be many reasons with permutations beyond easy counting. But all those individual reasons are founded upon shared fears, and while the justifiable fear of poverty and precarity is undoubtedly present, perhaps even primary among those fears, in this country all common fears for the self-identified Sinhala polity are framed, organized, and directed by that root වඳ-fear, the fear of slippery soullessness, the fear of a barren Sinhala no-future. It’s not poverty per se: it’s Sinhala poverty against the prosperity of others.

Precarity, economic disenchantment, youth disillusionment: all these things are real social problems, but as long as these anxieties are framed by race, the energies they generate are channelled and directed by racism. Not necessarily the firebombing kind of racism (that too); not even necessarily the kind that deplore-supports (supplores? deplorts?) the firebombing (that too); but rather the kind that sees Sinhala poverty as a problem distinct from වෙන අයගෙ poverty. It is impossible to bridge this fracture without first acknowledging how deep it goes. To even speak of bridging is wildly premature while the state of affairs is deep and ingrained denial.

Much commentary insists on that denial, framed as an optimism less of the will than of the gut. There is something digestive about this optimism, something masticatory. Hope is the fiber of psephology, the reduction of politics to electioneering and the elevation of electoral results to mythic resonance. In victory it manifests as the inability or unwillingness to see naked but tactically useful hypocrisies; in defeat it manifests as imitating the action of the (wounded) lion, stiffening up the sinews, summoning up the Sinha-le. I don’t want to make—and yet so often find myself making—an argument against hope, but the problem is that so much hope is dragged out like last year’s decorations and dumped in public in the very moment of defeat. The moment of defeat is too valuable to be so soiled. There is a clarity that comes from understanding the depth and extent and texture of defeat, its structures and histories. Without that clarity, hope is shallow.

By defeat I don’t here mean electoral defeats alone, or any particular election: I mean also this long defeat of progressive politics, perhaps what Stuart Hall called “the Great Moving Right Show” about the rise of the right in the late 70s—he’s mostly speaking about the UK, but the same is true across much of the world, and certainly here as much as anywhere. This was a rise that never stopped, and which some of us have lived in all our lives, and which continues without serious challenge to date. This is also why recurring post-election discourse in recent years about a newfangled “wave of strongmen” or a “rise in populism” is ridiculous: it’s not that this isn’t happening, it’s just that it’s been ongoing for decades. Gotabaya Rajapaksa is not our first strongman president. It would be more accurate to say we have never had a non-strongman (or strongwoman) president, any more than we have ever had a non-racist politics. As an occupied colony or dominion, as an independent republic, even as something that once bore a distorted resemblance to a democratic socialist welfare state, our politics has been defined by racecrafted Sinhala supremacism. That abyssal history is the truth of our defeat.

Perhaps we are also fooled into too-easy hope by stories: it is a popular narrative convention that protagonists must begin deep in defeat to end in triumph. But the sharpest part of that kind of story is not in the triumphant ending; it is more often to be found in the troubled beginning. Not the very beginning but a scene soon after, usually a moment of utter defeat, where the story shows you the depth of what is at stake.

In the 2019 TV adaptation of His Dark Materials, they made two changes to that scene as it is in the book. First, they replaced Tony Makarios with Billy Costa, which makes sense. It’s one fewer Tony to keep track of, and presumably one fewer child actor to wrangle, not to mention making the scene that much more painful because we see and relate to the Costas more in the show, which is of course the whole point. But the second change is trickier. They took the dried fish away from Billy.

Taking the fish away is the heart of the scene in the first place. In the book, the boy—who has been severed from his daemon by the villains, having had his soul cut away—is near death, and is pathetically clinging to a dried fish in its place when Lyra finds him. When she and her allies are attempting to make him comfortable, some adult thoughtlessly takes the fish away from him because he doesn’t understand its symbolic value to the boy, or to this scene. When Lyra asks where the fish is, people respond with nervous laughter, and Lyra responds:

“Don’t you dare laugh! I’ll tear your lungs out if you laugh at him! That’s all he had to cling onto, just an old dried fish, that’s all he had for a dæmon to love and be kind to! Who’s took it from him? Where’s it gone?”

Lyra Belacqua, in His Dark Materials

This is one of the ways in which we know that Lyra understands instantly the true horror of the intercision of souls, well before any of the adults have processed it. It is important because it shows what happens when you lose your soul, which is that you cling to whatever you might find at hand that at least looks like a soul, something that approximates a lost soul’s shape and size and the memory of life, even if it is long dead and dessicated.

It’s important to the story that we see Lyra understand the cost of the dried fish: that it is beyond price. It is even important that someone should take it away from the boy, because that is how the story is able to demonstrate that the appropriate response to that loss is rage. The story, at least in that first book, understands the value of exploring defeat.

On the other hand, when the show removes the fish from the narrative entirely, when there is no fish, only a boy—when the text itself is playing the part of the random man who does not understand the value of a symbol—it is left to the watcher (or perhaps more accurately, the reader) to play Lyra’s part and ask, who took it from him? And of course, it does make sense that a TV adaptation in 2019 would do this. The Great Moving Right Show has done a lot of moving this quarter-century: perhaps a scriptwriter found it too obvious, too belaboured, too sentimental. Of course this is about defeat and loss, they might say, but what is even defeat and loss except the whole world as we know it? There has never been an alternative, so why dwell on a fish?

(I feel like I am arguing for the space between samudaya and nirodha here. Between cause and cure there are many questions to which the answers are beyond price: is this proximate cause or ultimate cause? Is this cause or correlation? Are there biases in the questions? Are there buried assumptions in the questions that are still there in the answers? Is the apparatus faulty? Who paid for this? This is why this essay will break with genre tradition and not end on a note of hope and exhortation. This essay is only meant to trouble.)

We—and here I mean Buddhists, including unbuddhists like myself—don’t have souls. This is not exactly what anatta means, but also, it sort of is. We are not, or at least were not supposed to be, a tripartite array of discrete components. Except we are that, now, like everybody else. For us, the horror is not intercision of souls but the grand intercession that ensouled us in the first place: the invention, between the late 19th and the mid 20th centuries, partly imperial and partly postcolonial, of the Christianized, modern, political Buddhism, which today is the standard establishment Theravada of Sinhala Buddhism, and more importantly, the selfhood that it makes out of us. The soul grafted on to us, dead on arrival: we have an old dried fish in our hands and are beating ourselves to death with it.

The ſtedfaſt Earth

In the long run, you can think of the Sinhala fear of extinction as a straightforwardly true prophecy, in one (or both) of two ways; it’s just that neither of those ways are the one that the fear itself is concerned with.

The first is the way of hope. This is the idea that the painful fiction of “race” can become extinct through people collectively, gradually learning how to disengage from it, to harmlessly discharge the energy, the mythic resonance, and the emotion that it has been imbued with for several generations. Nothing becomes extinct here except an idea that was never even ours, and which has caused only horror. The optimism of the spleen, if you will. It’s a lovely idea. I wish I believed it was possible.

The second way, which has the unfortunate quality of being real and underway, is the way of despair. It is that the greater crisis will overtake this fear of extinction and annihilate it along with much of the contested sacred land. This is the pessimism of the gallbladder. It is full of bile, you see.

These are Sri Lanka’s final decades as we know it. How do we know this? We are neck-deep in true prophecies.

The pessimism of the gallbladder teaches us that grandiose climate agreements will not be enforced or followed. Meanwhile, we are deep into the business-as-usual scenario already. Many writings on the subject still persist in the unearned optimism of the spleen and waffle about 1.5 degrees when we are already looking at much worse than that, and that is only going to accelerate. Weather, like racism, can no longer be defined as the local extreme of itself, because extreme weather is already becoming, simply, weather.

Our low-lying coasts will go under: the island whose territory was mythically sanctified by Buddha’s three-point landing, that sacred, prophesied island whose perfect unity vs. unitarity has been fought over for so long, will be unceremoniously redelimited by the sea. Almost all of us will live in moderate to severe climate hotspots in just three decades—there will probably still be Rakapaksas in politics at that time. Between the sea, the storms, the floods, the landslides, the bad air, the heat, the food shortages, and the indifference of our elites who will simply decamp when it gets messy, many Sri Lankans will become climate refugees.

All of this is in the next few decades; many of the people who will live it are already alive. By the next century, given the ongoing net global failure to act on climate change, Sri Lanka will be uninhabitable, along with much of the rest of South Asia. For this nation, there will be no twenty-second century.

For Sinhala climate refugees, the fear of racial extinction will lose some ground to true fears, but it will also become a rallying cry, a performance of the devoured past ever more frantic because of its attenuation. Sinhalaness will not, more’s the pity, simply go away by itself. This is the business-as-usual scenario of race and its story of blood: unlike climate, it doesn’t change. It is a fixed idea, still the hammer that made a nail of the world. It does not go away; it can only be relentlessly recognized and disavowed at every turn. How to do that, how to break it so it stays broken, is not an easy question. Any easy answer is a trap.

In this multiverse, there is no Dust to grace us, like Lyra, with the gift of understanding deep truths without effort; like the other readers of the alethiometer, we have before us only the possibility of doing the lifetime’s work to understand those truths on our own—and while we read and think and try to understand, to not allow ourselves to be co-opted by the grinding Magisteria of our worlds as most alethiometer-readers seem to.

“We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.”

John Parry, in The Amber Spyglass

When Parry, Will, and Lyra speak of the Republic of Heaven in The Amber Spyglass, they are contrasting it with the more traditional Kingdom of Heaven: the idea is, stripped to the bone, is simply that people must try and make life on Earth a heaven instead of waiting for bliss in a next life. This is a profound idea but also a greeting-card truism, or perhaps more charitably a well-worn slogan, that the point is not to interpret the world but to change it.

What becomes of this idea when we have already made of Earth a hell? Given its own premises—because for us there is still no elsewhere—it would seem at first that nothing changes and we must work toward a People’s Republic of Hell. But those premises are themselves shopworn. Heaven and Hell are not fungible: this is the error of shallow hope, the hope that does not reckon with the depth of defeat.

Like Parry’s rejection of the Kingdom of Heaven, Sinhala Buddhism’s political turn in the 1940s and 50s—during the slow process of independence from the British Empire—put away childish things such as questions of soul and spirit and salvation, nirvana banished not just to the next life but to a future life unimaginably distant from the concerns of the day, to instead build the infernal republic of their heaven where they were. In this they succeeded: the Citizenship Act, the Sinhala Only Act, the 1972 constitution with Buddhism’s primacy written down in black and white. “For us there is no elsewhere” is to this day their rallying cry: that they have only this one sanctified island.

But perhaps John Parry is not the right voice for us to hear about the Republic of Heaven. In his mouth it just turns to ashes. Let’s hear it from Lyra instead, so we can hear the better version, too.

“He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place […] we have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we’ll build …”

Lyra Silvertongue, in The Amber Spyglass

Ever since the rise of the right forty years ago—which is to say, ever since the neoliberal turn, the pilot episode of the Great Moving Right Show —the rulers of the world posited a new Kingdom of Heaven of their own: endless growth, endless prosperity, an end to troublesome history, capitalocene without end. And in that same forty years, at the very same time, those same rulers went to war with that same Kingdom of Heaven and overthrew it: plundered and exhausted its resources, burned through the world. A future conjured and destroyed at once, in the same movement. The price of this necromancy—in exchange for that beautiful moment of value for the shareholders—is the transition from capitalocene to chthulucene, or, more likely, the very cthulhucene that Haraway refuses, Black Tom’s revenge. This long moment of our lives when, it seems, the mask is always coming off.

Lyra’s tactical injunction to study, think, and work hard is straightforward regurgitation of Protestant work ethic; her definition of the republican affect is composed of childishly sensible commonplaces—kind, curious, patient—but cheerful is where the British child-hero’s sheer grating Britishness becomes disturbing, evoking that old chinuppery, a stiff-upper-lippery, a calm to keep in all this carrying on, the colonizer’s smug self-soothing. For everyone else, it is a reminder that overthrowing gods and heavens is far easier than overthrowing empire and its hellspawn, race and nation. As Lyra learns, overthrowing heaven is easier than overthrowing the church, too.

Sinhala culture will never overthrow its temples in the time it has left, of course, no matter how degraded its gods have already become: the pessimism of the gallbladder teaches us that. The temples will not be overthrown by too-few hands and too-weak wills, but they will fall to smog and sea and storm anyway. This is what it means to have one crisis overtaken by another. It’s been only a few decades since the Muhudu Viharaya was excavated and restored to the beach where it now stands—and where it has spent a lot of that time being a flashpoint for Sinhala anti-Muslim racism—and soon enough to be moot, when the sea takes back what it is owed.

I don’t argue against hope and cheer out of a love of misery; I argue against them because they manifest too soon in their shallowest form, as denial. Even this could seem harmless but for the things that are lost to drowning in those acidic shallows; grief, despair, and rage are a fragile mangrove biome, but somewhere in that swamp grows the ability to finally learn from plentiful defeat, to look for not only the roots of things but the underwater joins between those roots, the connections at once occulted and obvious, to find the everyday Sinhala/Buddhist daemon that’s been in our face the whole time, to understand how desperately we need intercision.

Ruinous; Battering [Blood and Dust: Part 2 of 3]

| Vajra Chandrasekera

Blood and Dust is a trilogy of essays, or perhaps a unitary tripartite essay about, among other things, Philip Pullman’s paired His Dark Materials/The Book of Dust trilogies and Sri Lankan mythopolitics—it is brought to you by my patrons, who are the most brilliant and most beautiful. (This sort of elaborately ridiculous essayistic exercise is actually exactly what I had in mind when I set up a Patreon in the first place.) Part 1 was last year’s Abyss & Brink. This is Part 2. As is known, the middle part of a trilogy is always the best, or the worst.

Noiſes loud and ruinous

Fantastical worlds, like alternate universes and nation-states, are generally accompanied by what is (often tiresomely) called “worldbuilding”. This is the purpose of a root and founding myth, such as “Sri Lanka is a Sinhala Buddhist country”. Here founding is not a dating—in Sri Lanka, in any case, the myth dates only to the middle 19th century, not the twin 5th centuries AD and BC that the myth claims for itself—but a description. This is the work that a founding myth does: it founds, from Middle French fondre, to melt and pour into a cast. It shapes. It moulds. And so in this molten place we come to race/racism, and its dark prophecies of extinction, from the Great Replacement to the Rivers of Blood to the Rising Tide. Power is expressed as the fear of losing that power; there is no castration without penis, but also no penis without castration.

In Sri Lanka, too, we have the same fear-claim, except adapted from its white supremacist origins to serve postcolonial Sinhala supremacism, most usually expressed in this context in the form of anti-Muslim racism—as Gangodawila Soma claimed in the 90s and Udaya Gammanpila claimed last year, the prophecy of the Sinhala supremacist is that the Sinhala race is going extinct.

Where do these strange fears come from? How did that adaptation happen?

In the case of Sinhala Buddhism and its association with land, however, it was not God (or a god) who established the island for the Sinhala people in the beginning, but rather the Buddha […] according to the Mahavamsa and its story of the island’s primordial charter, in his three visits to the island, during which he cleared the land of inimical forces and meditated as he went along, the Buddha sanctified the island, one aspect of which was his proclaiming that its human inhabitants—commonly assumed by the Sinhala people to be the Sinhala people—would be responsible for its preservation.

Tessa Bartholomeusz, In Defense of Dharma: Just-War Ideology in Sri Lanka

The Mahavamsa is important to Sri Lanka’s root and founding myth, but not as a source. The Mahavamsa is itself produced as an object of racist thinking, being “discovered” and translated into English by the British during the occupation in the early 19th century, only after which it was first translated into Sinhala in the 1870s. The Mahavamsa becomes the Mahavamsa in the same span of time that it takes for the British imperial census-takers to invent and harden racial categories.

It seems that at least until 1824 Sinhalese and Tamils were perceived not as clear-cut ethnic groups, but first and foremost as members of a number of caste groups of various sizes […] In 1835 a detailed statement of the total population had been prepared from headmen returns and registers of births and deaths. The population was grouped under the following headings: whites (9,121), free blacks (1,194,482), slaves (27,397) and aliens and resident strangers (10,825). The categories were no longer castes, but they expressed more clearly the feeling of exclusion-inclusion that permeated colonial situations. The British were whites. The ‘others’ were their antithesis—blacks, an all-encompassing term. In the 1871 and 1881 censuses the term ‘race’ appeared for the first time along with the category of nationality. In 1871 there were seventy-eight nationalities and twenty-four races.

Nira Wickremasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age

By the 1880s and 1890s, this new-old Mahavamsa was being routinely cited in letters to a wave of new Buddhist periodicals, a confused (but not confusing) hotbed of nationalist, anticolonial, and racist sentiment. This type of rhetoric does not significantly evolve, any more than anything changed in the quarter-century between Gangodawila Soma and Udaya Gammanpila. What Dharmapala said a hundred years ago is what is said now. What we see in the 1890s is not even a simpler or more primitive version of the argument we see in the 1990s: it is identical.

For instance, the outspoken monk, Venerable Sobitha, reflecting a common reading of the Mahavamsa, has argued that “everyone [knows] that Sri Lanka was a Buddhist country and Buddhism has been the country’s religion for 2,500 years.” […] In his line of thinking, if devolution of powers were granted in the north—thereby legitimating the territory as non-Sinhala and non-Buddhist—the integrity of the Buddhist island would be undermined. This, for Venerable Sobitha, would be unthinkable: from his point of view, which is based on the Mahavamsa, the Buddha himself claimed the entire island, including the north, as the Buddhist promised land. The 1997 remark of the Venerable Sobitha had been foreshadowed for over at least one hundred years; a Buddhist layman, writing in 1893, referred to Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, as the “sacred Island” as he described the island as the “centre” for Theravadin Buddhists.

Tessa Bartholomeusz, In Defense of Dharma: Just-War Ideology in Sri Lanka

If you’re wondering, yes, that is the same Maduluwawe Sobitha from the battle for the Republic of Heaven in the previous instalment of this essay, the same man who now gets an annual memorial lecture. He has ascended into myth now, a lifetime of racist activism obscured so that he can reappear as a newborn elder of liberal democracy. Of course, this is political mythmaking: it is (presumably) understood by most (or at least some? I prefer to imagine manipulation rather than mere gullibility) that these are lies, but pragmatic lies, tactical obfuscations that serve a partisan and purportedly antifascist purpose. But at the same time, it is also the kind of myth that becomes hyperreal, becomes factish, becomes a source of distorted thinking.

Racecraft—a deeply useful word I keep borrowing from Karen and Barbara Fields—is that which creates race as a credible reality in social consciousness. The only purpose of race as a category is racism: to discriminate based on ancestry, to create double standards. In what is generally referred to as British divide-and-rule policy in occupied Ceylon, race was the fundamental unit of politics. This is why the history of the censuses matter. Independence didn’t change this: race determined representation in the Legislative Councils then as much as it determines party politics and electoral blocs today.

More importantly, independence didn’t change the colonial relation that racial hierarchy had imposed. The imperial project to redefine the entire world on racial lines largely succeeded—the whites, the free blacks, the slaves, and the aliens, in the typology of the 1830s, a basic relational structure that has remained intact through all the fine-tuning and euphemistic renaming it has undergone since—and the formal end of empire did not undo it. Rather, what independence and the 20th century accomplished was that the Sinhalese self-determined themselves as the inheritors of the role of whiteness: a movement commonplace across the Commonwealth. Sinhalaness, defined into being by racecraft census as the demographic “majority” in the context of a generations-old politics of representation-by-race, could then be weaponized by the universal franchise in 1931 and strengthened by the Ceylon Citizenship Act in 1948 to divide and disenfranchise the largest “minority”. The Mahavamsa ideology of the island as a sacred Sinhala Buddhist country smoothly becomes the ideology of tactical electioneering (as witnessed most recently in November 2019). Sinhalaness claimed that white space, becoming the new unmarked default, the inheritor-owners, and therefore by definition being set against the still-marked exceptions. The relation of marked to unmarked, of owner to interloper, has no mode other than domination.

This racial relation, which could not be any older than itself, was nevertheless (and still is) projected backwards in time as the filter through which to understand all Sri Lankan history, including the precolonial, the ancient, and the mythic. The racial framing posits ancient, destined, and enduring divides that stretch into deep time, obscuring the much simpler truth that the divisions are the largely arbitrary product of racist colonial policy in the lifetimes of our great-grandmothers. Race is a predatory framing: it eats the past, including the past that predates it.

Some clarifying distinctions are probably called for. Race is not language-speakers or culture-practitioners, which are things that anybody could learn or forget. Rather, race is the framing itself: the assortment of humanity into hierarchical subgroups based on ancestry to justify the violence of present and historical domination. Race is power’s claim of inevitability. It is power’s assertion that injustice is natural and necessary.

Racism, similarly, is often (re)defined in casual usage as a subset of itself, referring exclusively to the local extreme of racist violence. So, for example, in contemporary Sri Lanka that would be assaulting minorities, firebombing mosques and churches, setting people’s houses on fire. But most racism is neither notably “extremist” nor physically violent. Racism is a much larger structure than only its local extreme, its sharp end: by the time a situation arrives at racist violence, it has already been racist for a long, long time. Even the 1915 anti-Muslim pogrom was predated by decades of Mahavamsic belligerence.

Racism at its broadest is an insistence: to always see the world through race. To be unable to see it otherwise. To constantly speak race into being, because it is a necromancy that cannot sustain itself without endless blood sacrifice. To speak “the Sinhala race” into being is to simultaneously bemoan its impending extinction, a demise possible because race is something in the blood—an ancestral biological essence of Sinhalaness, something that can be diluted or made extinct by preventing the Sinhalese from breeding. Or to return to Udaya Gammanpila’s claim, by the Sinhalese being outbred. This last link is a “fact check” contradicting Gammanpila, one of several that I’ve seen in recent weeks, that refutes his claim in exactly the wrong way. That wrongness is important, however, to the understanding of Sinhala racial thinking common to all wings of the southern polity.

The idea underlying Gammanpila’s claim, that the Sinhalese even exist as a distinct breeding population that can go up or down, is absurd and racist. But the liberal argument against it, as represented above by the fact-checking website but mirrored in all the other responses I’ve seen so far, is merely to contest the arithmetic of the race between races. Censuses and rates and ratios are cited to postpone the demographic extinction for a future so distant that it is of no concern, and to argue for the relief of continued demographic supremacy in the long present. This is not a counterargument but a confirmation, which is why this entire genre of response has never had the slightest effect on the racist claim in all these decades.

By reinforcing the idea of races as biological realities, as distinctive breeding populations competing for demographic and therefore electoral supremacy, this genre of refutation merely echoes the racist position that there is in fact potentially something to fear. If it is the arithmetic that is wrong, that leaves open the possibility that future events will change that arithmetic, and agrees that if the arithmetic some day happened to confirm the claim, that Gammanpila would then be correct, instead of being merely racist either way.

The claim cannot be refuted from within the racial framing, because the racial framing exists in order to make this claim. It is the entire purpose and definition of being Sinhala that one should fear Sinhala extinction: this fear of extinction, this වඳ-බය, is the core of the identity. A more reasonable counterargument would be to point out that there is no such thing as Sinhala people; therefore the Sinhala people cannot go extinct. The “Sinhala race” is a relation, not a population: it exists only as privilege and domination. This is what it means to be a race, as invented by British racecraft, as distinct from the myriad older ideas of allegiance and fealty that might have once defined what it meant to be a Sinhala, Chola, Kaurava, Pandava, Stark or Lannister. The explicitly racist Sinha Le/Blood of the Lion movement, for example, isn’t only trying to invoke bloodshed with that image, as that article surmises: it is also invoking this mythic ancestry, the legendary descent from the lion, to evoke this core fear of extinction.

Since the fear of Sinhala extinction cannot be argued away without arguing away the category of Sinhala itself, in a way, the fear of extinction can only be ended through a kind of extinction, the undefinition of a category, the ending of an insistent way of seeing the world. So you could call it a true prophecy, one that fears fruition.

With all her battering Engines

A perfect prophecy encapsulates the (original, inner, interrupting, idyllic) Dust trilogy. By “perfect” I mean that it is not only a true prophecy, but that it is the kind of prophecy that isn’t and couldn’t be subverted. Destiny is fixed, from the perspective of Dust, which is greater than time. Dust participates directly in that fixation within time and plot. It answers questions. It directs characters. It gives gifts: Lyra is able to read an alethiometer without training and without reference books, an impossible thing except by grace.

An alethiometer—a device that when questioned by an adept answers any question truthfully—would seem to confound the very nature of plot. How is possible to have drama if the protagonist has access to perfectly accurate and reliable information at all times? So this ability is constrained in various ways. Sometimes Lyra simply does not know the right question to ask, or fails to ask a question at the right time, or actively avoids knowing the future out of exhaustion or despair. Sometimes Lyra subordinates her will to someone else—she does this with Will for a while, allowing him to decide whether to use the alethiometer or what to ask it.

The alethiometer itself is not, despite its coldly scientific name and its apparently impersonal mechanism, a neutral source of answers: it is Dust that speaks through it, as it does through other such interfaces, and Dust has an agenda. The war against God is part of that agenda, but so is the preservation of the social status quo. Dust is all about things staying as they are fixed: heterosexual, paired off by destiny, socially stratified, godless but priest-heavy. Dust is quite literally attracted to sexually adult humans, presumably because in this multiverse, bodily sexuality represents the pinnacle of all being, a state envied even by angels. It is eros, not agape, that is a cosmic force. Two teenagers make out after (accidentally) killing God and this is enough to reverse the flow of Dust across worlds. Of course, drama requires the frustration of eros, too: at the end of the interrupting trilogy, Will and Lyra must separate into their respective universes for ridiculously contrived plot reasons.

But the outer, encapsulating second trilogy has already prepared a backup romance for Lyra: Malcolm, who as a young boy saves a baby Lyra from various threats in La Belle Sauvage and then reappears as an older man in The Secret Commonwealth when she’s a young woman—after the interruption of the entire original trilogy and all its contents, including Will and the war against heaven—as a spook, a secret guardian, and perversely, one of her teachers at university and eventually, it seems, her love interest. At least, this seems to be where it is going, though one hopes the as yet unpublished third book will go somewhere less creepy with it.

(God forbid that Lyra go unattached to some kind of male guardian figure/romantic interest for any length of time in these books—well, yes, God would have forbidden it if he were not already dead, and in fact did try at one point, sorry to Father Gomez. Lyra’s longest stretch of independence from such a thing, I believe, was in her mother’s custody in The Amber Spyglass, during which Lyra was kept unconscious.)

This possible-romance is not the most encouraging development, plotwise: it is still less discouraging than the other main plot of the second trilogy, which is that Lyra is reading some popular books that insist that daemons aren’t real and Pan is mad at her because he finds this insulting.

The Secret Commonwealth is largely Lyra’s journey in (re)discovering that magic is real, the same magic that she was so familiar with as a child, after a young adulthood tainted by trashy postmodern novels that have taught her to be sceptical of magic: a journey that seems rather unnecessary, and perhaps would have been persuasive material for a book that was about somebody else altogether rather than Lyra Silvertongue, who was named by a bear, became an honorary witch, talked to ghosts, visited the land of the dead, fought harpies, and personally fulfilled a prophecy that involved the death of God, all before puberty.

Or perhaps it would have been more persuasive even if it was just set in a universe where magic was not the most everyday and commonplace reality. Daemons change shape without conserving mass and speak human languages in bodies that don’t have a human vocal apparatus: every day in every human life in this universe is filled with violations of physics and biology. Is it possible for anybody in this universe to even develop a concept of science or scepticism, never mind whatever strawman Pullman is attempting to beat here? It is a magic universe made for faith. Its philosophies and cultural controversies should not so tiresomely resemble ours. I dread that the next book will elaborate Lyra’s battle against political correctness.

The Secret Commonwealth is, therefore, about Lyra absurdly losing touch with the root and founding myth of the Dust universe, which in a magical universe is also its truth: that humans have daemons. Unsurprisingly, she finds out that the clever authors she idolizes are hypocrites and liars, and of course their scepticism is a false god. Unlike the inconsequentially grand stakes of the original trilogy, we are two-thirds of the way through the second and so far it’s an extended spat between Lyra and Pan, and some creepy hovering/grooming from Malcolm. But perhaps this also makes sense, if you think of encapsulating narratives as smug realpolitik and interrupting ones as the hypocrisy of false idealism. Or perhaps the Dust trilogies are simply cursed to have weak middle episodes.

What does it mean to deny the fundamental structures of your world so thoroughly that you question the reality of the everyday daemon in front of your face? This is what Lyra is doing in The Secret Commonwealth, and it is what we must learn to do every day in the regular, exposed Commonwealth, the gentrified husk of the former Empire. In a magical universe built on faith, Lyra is wrong to question her daemon; in an all-too-unmagical world built on violence and racecraft, we must question our demons if we are to ever be free of them. Otherwise, the racecraft that organizes our politics and analyses alike, that reinscribes and reinforces itself every day, will never stop trying to cut—with its unsubtle knives, always further up and further in—through the veil of intervening human bodies into some perfected raceworld, some sacred island where that old necromancy is real at last.

Thanks again to my patrons, who did nothing to deserve this. Part 3 is Earth, in Mutinie.

Abyss & Brink [Blood and Dust: Part 1 of 3]

| Vajra Chandrasekera

Blood and Dust is a trilogy of essays, each one a house divided against itself. It is brought to you by my discerning and excellent patrons, by the apocalyptic gurning of the history we are cursed to squat in, and by the letter B: for bitter, baleful, and bileful.

Into this wilde Abyſs

In the weeks before 2019’s much-dreaded Sri Lankan presidential election, I read and (re)read Philip Pullman’s paired His Dark Materials/The Book of Dust trilogies (of course, spoilers abound in this essay for all of the above, including the election) partly for light relief from the apocalyptic mood and partly to remind myself of the story before watching the new TV adaptation. The first is the original trilogy from the 90s: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. The second is the still-incomplete ongoing trilogy: La Belle Sauvage, this year’s The Secret Commonwealth, and the as-yet untitled, unannounced finale. Instead of being entirely either a prequel or a sequel series, the second trilogy encapsulates the first: La Belle Sauvage is set about a decade before the original trilogy and The Secret Commonwealth about a decade after it. Or to put it another way, the first trilogy interrupts the second.

And of course, this made me think about, as everything does right now, the very election I was attempting to distract myself from, because Sri Lankan political history of this decade is also framed this way: a narrative of encapsulation, the interruption of one history by another. There was fascism, interrupted by an idyll of liberal democracy, and now, again, there is fascism; this is the story. The Sirisena-Wickremasinghe UNP administration of 2015-2019 as an interruption between the prequel and sequel fascisms of the Rajapaksa brothers. This interruption, this idyll, is temporary by design and destiny, a storm’s eye surrounded on all sides, a definitionally brief respite.

This framing is at best only partly true; what truth it can bear is based on the visible reduction in both harm and fear during the idyll, relative to the preceding decade. But this framing is also absurdly pollyannaish, not only because that idyllic administration protected its predecessor from prosecution but because various forms and degrees of harm continued to be perpetrated throughout this ඊනියා idyll. Was the violence really more constrained than before or only better targeted? Instead of attacking journalists in both north and south, the focus shifted to harassment of northern journalists alone. Did the idyllic administration not provide uninterrupted state sanction for Sinhala-Buddhist violence and harassment of minorities and dissenters? From the idyll’s failure to prevent, counteract, or successfully prosecute the perpetrators of the Digana anti-Muslim pogrom to the absurd imprisonment of the writer Shakthika Sathkumara for having the temerity to mildly critique Buddhist hypocrisies in a social media post, we see the continuous sharpening and strengthening of the tools, policies, and strategies of a Sinhala Buddhist fascist state exactly like the one it purportedly interrupted. From the ongoing military occupation of the north to the niqab/burqa ban and totalitarian surveillance fetishism after the Easter bombings, we see continuities, not interruption. To the extent that there was in fact a change, that much-celebrated, much-cited visible change we began this paragraph with, that idyll also visibly understood itself as an interruption. When the time came, it put itself away as a childish thing, undoing itself.

Any assessment that plants itself firmly on the ground of principle must acknowledge that the Sirisena-Wickremasinghe administration was not an idealistic effort that ended in dismal failure, but a grand and shameless hypocrisy in the first instance, and a tremendously successful one. There is no better demonstration of that hypocrisy than the campaign’s original whitewashing of Maithripala Sirisena—a man who until that point was best known as a proudly self-proclaimed war criminal in his own right and a vocal defender of the execrable 18th Amendment—as a humble soft-spoken saintly rescuer of democracy against autocracy, a characterization that only held very briefly, but long enough.

But why even bring this up now? Isn’t it all long since moot? The interruption, whether it was an interruption or not, is over; is it not petty to argue about whether it was actually an idyll or not? No, because without plucking out these deep-set hypocrisies, clarity of thought is impossible. This peculiar framing of 2015 continues to distort thinking in the present day. Propaganda repeated often enough acquires a factish sheen. Now we routinely see commentary citing it seriously as fact, despite all evidence to the contrary. It is long past time for southern commentators to acknowledge that the yahapalana campaign and its associated “movements” were a cynical, self-serving, partisan myth constructed as part of an electoral strategy. And more importantly, that this myth is not dead but still alive, serving to obscure the unbroken fascistic continuities, the long collusion of our purportedly divided ruling class, and the depth to which Sinhala Buddhist supremacism is not a fringe ideology but the core of all southern politics.

The election is not the subject of these essay, of course. This is a book review only. But if you like, the reading of events is also a history that interrupts—and does not interrupt—the reading of books. This is about rhetoric. This is about myth, and lies.

The distorting myth of idyll, of interruption, leads the unwary reader to be more and more susceptible to a world of lies about where we are and how we got here. Some of these lies are told to us. Some of these lies we tell ourselves. Sri Lanka is a mangrove swamp of such myth, of course, but if you follow the roots until they come together, what seems at first like a forest comes together into a single organism with many manifestations, a particular dark fantasy told and retold every day since our great-grandparents were young. This is the root and founding myth that goes largely unchallenged in the south, that encapsulates everything from Mahavamsa to Dharmapala to Sinhala Only to the war—how it began, how it ended—and to the recent election of Gotabaya Rajapaksa: that Sri Lanka is a Sinhala Buddhist country.

The warie fiend stood on the brink of Hell

The most memorable thing about Pullman’s Dust universe—pretty much the only thing I still remembered about the original series after twenty-odd years, before rereading it recently in preparation for the TV adapatation—is that it is part of a multiverse where sentient life is tripartite in the Christian theological sense: there is body, spirit, and soul.

This multiverse includes our own universe, where spirit and soul are both tucked away within the body, and the Dust universe where most of the story takes place, where spirit is similarly obscured by body but soul exists outside the body, in the shape of a magical talking animal called a daemon. The animal is always symbolic in some way, and its form is fluid until the body’s puberty, when original sin—which here is the self-knowledge of sexuality—fixes the shape of your animal daemon into the form it will always occupy in your adulthood.

That fixed shape in turn is a visible marker of character, which the books fully identify with social class. Working-class humans have dog daemons because dogs are seen as naturally subservient; antihero aristocrats have unique exotic animals to symbolize their nobility and specialness; more openly contemptible villains have “bad” animals like snakes and hyenas and insects and suchlike; cute children have cute furry animals.

This is of course at the level of craft a convenient and frequently lazy device of characterization, among other things, but at the same time in the world of the story it is also deeply essentialist and casteist—adults not only have souls which are fixed and unchangeable and representative of fixed moral character, but also of fixed social role in societies that are deeply hierarchical caste systems. Destiny is fixed, if not at birth, then at puberty. This is, if you like, the root and founding myth of the Dust universe.

And of course, in the fantastical Dust universe, destiny is in fact truly fixed, because this entire cosmos is predestined and perfectly, fully known, not by God (who does, fantastically, exist) so much as by an immanent cosmic Spirit greater than mere gods, which is itself sentient and omniscient. That Spirit is variously known in different universes as Dust, as Shadows, as Dark Matter. Mortals can imperfectly access this knowledge of destiny through a variety of methods: prophecy, for example, or by directly interrogating this cosmic spirit using techniques such as the I Ching or technology such as the titular golden compass, a truth-telling device of mysterious origin called an alethiometer.

The golden compass is one of three transcendental objects that the books of the original trilogy are named for: the golden compass, the subtle knife, and the amber spyglass. The first is, as just noted, for accessing omniscient knowledge of destiny. The third object, the amber spyglass, makes it possible to see otherwise invisible movements of spirit in the mundane world—this ability to see the unseen spirit appears to be one of the big ideas of the second trilogy as well, perhaps because it is a relatively minor part of the original books.

The second object, though, is set in opposition to the others. The subtle knife allows its destined bearer to cut anything—body, soul, spirit, the veil between universes, God himself. It seemed inevitable that I should read it as representing Science, from the Latin scindere, meaning to cut. It is immensely powerful and ultimately dangerous: it must eventually be broken and its works undone. Or more broadly, it could stand for Reason, rationality, logic. This is a plot that operates on faith and grace. It acknowledges the subtlety and power of the laukika, especially in the hands of the master technocrats of Cittàgazze, but remains firmly occidented toward the lokottara. Cittàgazze is, after all, long dead of its own hubris.

As all this suggests, the books are thoroughly Christian, in the anti-establishment form of a renewed Gnostic heresy. God exists, but is not the true creator but rather a powerful, villainous demiurge; the Church, as the depoped Magisterium, is a similarly oppressive ruling body. The original trilogy is a rebellion against God, in the most literal form imaginable, via the gathering of an army of allied powers—humans, bears, witches, rebel angels, Gallivespians, Maithripala Sirisena, Ranil and the UNP, Chandrika, the National Movement for a Just Society, the Purawesi Balaya, Maduluwawe Sobitha—to overthrow God through force of arms and establish good governance, a yahapalana Republic of Heaven.

This great revolution is ultimately successful, but it does not appear to have had any effect in the mundane world. By the time of The Secret Commonwealth, the Church is still the same violent, repressive force it was in the (interrupting) original trilogy. The cruel powers of the world do not appear to have noticed the death of their God.

Thanks again to my patrons, to whom no blame attaches; meanwhile, I shall nurse this migraine as if it were a black dog, and cultivate my despair and unreason.

Part 2 of this series is Ruinous; Battering.