The Copper Tumbler and Donkeys in Mannar: A Work of Mourning – IV
‘it is not narrative that we should abandon but chronology’’
Kumar Shahani
By Laleen Jayamanne
Mourning the Dead: Phaneroscopy
“There is a reality which we each create in our own minds.”
(C.S. Peirce)
The American logician and semiotician C.S. Peirce using the Greek word phaneron, meaning ‘that which appears,’ and adding the suffix skopein, (the Greek word to see, as in Bioscope!), coined the term phaneroscopy. He wanted thereby to capture something common to how we all perceive. He didn’t want to call this subjective mode of seeing an ‘illusion’ or ‘fantasy’ posited against ‘reality’. He elaborated his idea of ‘phaneroscopy’ by saying it is a way of seeing which is not cognitive (being prior to it), a pre-logical, direct awareness, without ego. I think this is much like the way a child, presumably, sees the world before it’s captured in language. Sumathy gives Lalitha phanero-scopic powers. So, as she slowly begins to remember her own childhood in that house, absorbed in the photographs of Jude and of herself as a girl, becoming reflective, but also prodding her siblings insensitively about what actually happened during the war to both the Muslims and to Jude, she begins to perceive visually, what she hears. She herself appears within each of the following events, from which she was in fact absent, away in Canada.
Most of the framed photographs we see in the house are from Sumathy’s own childhood home in Jaffna which she shared with her parents, three sisters and also her two nieces. Even before I learnt this detail, I felt that this home had a shadow cast on it by Sumathy’s own family history which is now public. So, it is the most personal of her films, but she uses her autobiography to testify to those innumerable nameless Muslim folk, too.
The house has shadows, ‘ghosts’ who come in and out. The brother who disappeared, Jude, comes in and out of the film, just as Fatima Teacher does, both as a young woman carrying her precious possessions and then as an old woman. Intriguingly, Sumathy only credits one actor, Asiya Umma, as both the young and the old Fatima Teacher, when realistically one would expect two actors to be named. In the course of the monologue, when her mother tells Lalitha that Fatima Teacher stood right where she now stands, the latter appears. As her head is partly covered by her sari, it is unclear if Fatima Teacher is in fact played by Lalitha, who has inserted herself into that story as she hears it narrated by her crazed mother. But the credits resolve it. However, this sense of uncertainty is important because (disturbed by her mother’s accusatory account of Fatima Teacher), Lalitha creates a film-within- the-film, placing herself in the position of the victim. In appearing at that moment as Fatima Teacher, addressing her friend Daisy Teacher, Lalitha performs an act of mourning.
It’s the musical composition of sequences, with intervals, repetitions and disjunctions between them, which allows Sumathy to abandon chronological progression (without using the usual tired devices like flash-backs as memory images), to play with time in this way.
Three different accounts of Jude’s disappearance are given, two shown. There is that dreaded knock on the heavy wooden door late at night, with two men on a motorbike and car, the boys as they are called, to take Jude away. Lalitha in bed with her cell phone hears the knock and goes to the door in her nighty wrapped in a sheet, asking him to not open the door and watches him being taken away by ‘the boys.’ Earlier there is a snatch of conversation that the story is that the army took Jude away. We see him walking to the church to meet two young Catholic priests, to ask them to intercede with the LTTE, on behalf of the Muslims. Within this sequence we are taken into a large Italianate, grand Catholic church with polished pews and woodwork. But we also see Jude walking into the sea, watched by Lalitha, in the film within the film she creates with herself as a presence.
In this strange retelling, Sumathy is able to make the dead Jude testify to the stories of the many disappeared, without ceasing to be that irreplaceable son of Daisy Teacher. That quiet act of Jude’s suicide, witnessed by Lalitha, standing amongst the braying, foraging donkeys, is a ritual of burial and mourning, an epic cosmos-centric event. The old Fatima Teacher also walks through the mangrove, and earlier through the debris of bomb blasted houses (without their solid timber doors and windows), that might well have been her own dense urban neighbourhood.
In this strange elegiac scene by the sea at night, with the wind and sound of waves lapping the shore, Jude slips off his sarong and simply walks into the ocean slowly. The entire qualitative, tonal, atmospheric mood of the scene amidst nature with Fatima Teacher and Jude and the donkeys as they appear to Lalitha, has a ritualistic, musical quality with its varied rhythms. One exiting life and the other returning from the dead, unreconciled, one might say, amidst the sound of waves. After this long sequence, the film cuts to Jude’s naked corpse washed up on the beach at dawn, spotted by two fishermen who look closely and abandon it.
Lalitha asks her mother to sign over the family home to her. The younger brother asks Lalitha to send the monthly payment for their mother’s expenses directly into his bank account. Neither request is granted. The sister who actually takes care of the mother makes no demands of her more affluent sister but complains about the tedium of her life of chores. But the family gather together with affection as well as acrimony and learn of their trauma and the family history. And the terror of the war years is expressed through a truism of that era by Jesse, who has no time or inclination to linger in the past. She quotes a folk saying of the war years when Lalitha bugs her as to why she didn’t call her or write to her: “People here say those were times when one opened one’s mouth only to drink tea”. A biting sentence condenses the lack of food with terror.
Pedagogy of Film Programming: Suggestions
If a mini retrospective of Sumathy’s body of work is organised, then pairing The Single Tumbler with Ponmani (1976), by Dharmasena Pathiraja, could generate a few more ideas about how to creatively engage with linguistically and culturally diverse communities and cultures, without orientalising Northern landscapes and most especially the ‘Tamil Woman.’ Without a public release in the South and an indifferent short run in Jaffna, now Ponmani has the aura of a classic, one of a kind without a progeny.
This is not quite the case. The way the traditional Hindu Vellala home and its veranda is filmed in Ponmani, finds a different articulation in the way the Christian family inhabits the space of the open house, in the fluid spatial configurations of The Single Tumbler. In both films, changing or frozen family relationships are mapped out spatially through evocative gestures, postures and movements. The traditional Hindu home is marked by silences, while the bilingual Christian home with its different culture is voluble, rather urbane. Sumathy has clearly benefited from Pathi’s work in Jaffna though she is no clone.
It is essential not to forget that this singular film Ponmani was made possible by a visionary tri-lingual higher educational policy formulated by Tamil scholars at the Jaffna University. Pathi and several lecturers were sent to Jaffna University to teach there in the Sinhala medium. During this time, his friendship with Tamil intellectuals and artists resulted in the collaborative film, Ponmani. Until about this time Tamil students from Jaffna were able to study at the National Art School in Colombo along with Sinhala students and there were student exchanges of performances with Jaffna. That was of course possible because lectures were delivered in both English and Sinhala, but with the ‘Sinhala Only’ nationalism hegemonic, English was abandoned.
Sumathy’s documentary Amidst the Villus; Pallaikuli (2021), on the effort of the expelled Muslim populations to return to their homelands would also be important as a companion film to The Single Tumbler.
Ashfaque Mohamed’s debut film Face Cover (2022), with its fine spatial sensitivity and sense of tact, might also be screened together with these two films, to create a generative public context and discourse for these films from different generations and by directors from different ethnicities and set in different regions. He was the assistant director on The Single Tumbler. Sumathy has been a mentor to him and also played the Muslim mother in Face Cover.
Also, perhaps a few of Rukmani Devi’s and Mohideen Baig’s films might be part of it, and Sarungale by Sunil Ariyaratne, where Gamini Fonseka plays the role of a Tamil clerk, might also work well in such a non-linear, thematic mix. Sumathy’s Sons and Fathers about the multi-ethnic composition of the Lankan film industry during July ’83, would create a new political perspective on these films. Ingirunthu remembers the disenfranchisement of the tea estate workers at independence and also the deportation of a large number to India in 1964, despite having lived and worked in Ceylon for generations.
Expulsion of the Muslims
The Expulsion of the Muslims (estimated at 75,000), from the Northern Province by the LTTE is an event of epic magnitude in Lankan history. Refusing to forget the event and its aftermath, The Single Tumbler was made in collaboration with a dedicated ensemble cast and crew (with Sunil Perera’s cinematography, Elmo Halliday on editing and sound design, music direction by Kausikan Rajeshkumar), with a modest budget, but with a sophisticated understanding of ‘film as a form that thinks.’
That dented and burned single copper tumbler on fire is hard to forget, just like Sumathy’s other such images powered by fire. The fiery copper tumbler brings to mind two sentences by the French philosopher Deleuze, in a short piece written just before he committed suicide, being terminally ill. The brusque note, written in haste, is called ‘The Actual and the Virtual’.
He says: ‘Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images.’ This idea of ‘virtual images’ Deleuze owes to Henri Bergson who wrote a book titled Matter and Memory in 1895, the year the very first films were projected in Paris. And for Bergson, the concept of the ‘virtual’ is opposed to time as chronology, time as the simple linear succession of past, present and future. He says, speaking more like a poet, that the ‘virtual’, or duration, appears to us in its fullness when we are drunk with wine or dream, or in love, when all that has happened coexists in an intense, expansive present, open to a potentialized future. Film is surely the gift that plunges us into this cloud of virtuality – sometimes; as with The Single Tumbler. (Concluded)
