In Memoriam: A. J. Canagaratna A day in the intellectual life of Jaffna

By: Suresh Canagarajah

Source: Northeastern Monthly - November 2006

It was AJ who had first spotted this brief article titled ‘Life in the postmodern world’ in an old issue of the American journal Dialogue during one of his weekly visits to the university library. After reading it, he passed it on to me, and recommended it as an article that attempts to define the movement in relatively simple terms. He also requested that before we return the journal to the library we should get our stenographer to type out the article in full so that we can pass it around among our colleagues. (Typing was necessitated because we didn’t have xeroxing facilities – or even electricity – in Jaffna at that time.)
After explicating the connections between pre-modernism, modernism, and postmodernism, and illustrating the different manifestations of postmodernism in fields like philosophy, literature, architecture and the social sciences, the article concludes with an explanation on the popularity of this movement in the late capitalist period.
When I cycled the next evening after classes at the university to AJ’s house to return the journal and have one of our usual chats over tea (a popular form of relaxation in war-torn Jaffna), Sankar was already there. Sankar was a final year student in theater at the University of Jaffna, who read voraciously, keen about developments in a variety of other disciplines. Krishna, who worked as an assistant in the local public library, with whom AJ shared a house at that time, had already returned home. His wife Soma, a lecturer in history at UJ (University of Jaffna), walked in with mugs of tea for us. But she was too busy feeding her twin infants to join us in the conversation – although she was listening to what was going on and would interject at critical points.
Soon our talk turned to the article. Krishna had skimmed through this when AJ had brought it home. Sankar had become sufficiently interested in the article that he asked AJ to lend the journal to him that night. He began browsing through it as we talked. Each of us possessed different forms of background information, but none complete enough to come to terms with this new-fangled thinking. Krishna had seen modernist and postmodern art while living and working in France for a couple of years. I had read some theoretical writing on the movement while I was completing my doctorate in the US. But as the philosophical discourse had reached an advanced stage during my stay in the west, I hadn’t mastered it adequately to be able to explain things coherently to my colleagues (or to myself). Sankar had read some South Indian books in Tamil which offered their own jargon-ridden interpretations of the movement. AJ, though widely read in many intellectual movements, always bemoaned the lack of current publications in Jaffna to confidently interpret articles like this. Therefore, we had to pool together our resources and information to make sense of the article.
While AJ, Krishna, and I mentioned the different aspects of the article that had attracted our attention, Sankar read aloud some statements that he found puzzling. “In the postmodernist sensibility, the search for unity has apparently been abandoned altogether. Instead, we have textuality, a cultivation of surfaces endlessly referring to, ricocheting from, reverberating onto other surfaces.”
Krishna gave some interesting examples from his visits to museums in France, where collages made of jostling disparate images challenged the viewer into sense-making. Sankar went on: “The implied subject is fragmented, unstable, even decomposed; it is finally nothing more than a crosshatch of discourses. . . . Dance can be built on Beach Boys songs; circus can include cabaret jokes; avant-garde music can include radio gospel.” The ease with which the writer was referring to western popular culture irritated the others. I had to then explain the references to Beach Boys and the gospel music tradition from my limited acquaintance with them.
But AJ quickly steered the conversation to the feeling of entrapment of the western intelligentsia. Their failure to achieve social change, their own vested interests in the system, and the general apathy of the people had made them find radicalism and meaning in the textualized world of things. Sankar related at this point a Tamil article he had read, which described postmodernism as a cultural reflection of the social degeneration of the west. The failure of the workers’ ‘revolution,’ the bourgeoisification of the working class, and the welfare cushioning in capitalist states which muffled the disillusion of the exploited, were all blamed for the tendency to play with images/surfaces and enjoy the shreds of the post-capitalist social fabric. We thus constructed a different schema for the interpretation of the article – one that diverged from that of the writer.
At this point there was a noise of machine gun fire far away which made AJ sit up and ask us to stop talking. As the noise came closer, it was clear that it was one of those nightly helicopter patrols to enforce the government’s six o’clock curfew from the air. AJ rushed into the makeshift underground bunker outside the house and motioned everyone to follow. As we all went inside the bunker (including Soma and the four children) I was fascinated by the carving on the mud walls inside. There was a small niche where they had placed clay figurines of Hindu deities. Krishna pointed out that the bunker was a good place for meditation. While staying inside the bunker, his son had dug a small hole in the mud wall and used the clay to sculpt the figure of a God.
Krishna said that he had seen such carvings in other bunkers too – perhaps everyone found that doing such work kept them preoccupied and creative while nerve-wracking bombardment was going on outside. This led us to talk about the functional nature of art under these circumstances, which differed from the attitude towards art as an apathetic play of ‘surfaces’ or ironies. Although we didn’t refer to anything specific in the article, we were all aware of the implications of this discussion to its message. Perhaps Sankar was reading the statements around the end of the article in front of him at that very moment: “there is a deliberate self-consciousness, a skating on the edge, dividing irony from dismay or endorsement . . . the quality of deliberateness and the sense of exhaustion in the postmodern are what set it apart.”
As we emerged from the bunker, sensing that the strafing had ended, AJ half-ironically pondered what prospects there were for changes in the militarized nature of our social environment by the scholarly activity of deconstructing news reports and state proclamations. There was no consolation we could draw from the splintered reality and shredded social fabric as the post-modernists could do. They wouldn’t help us withstand brute force inflicted on us by a military regime.
Sankar was gradually coming to the end of the article, and read with some sarcasm: “post-modernism rejects historical continuity and takes up residence somewhere beyond it because history was ruptured: by the bomb fueled vision of a possible material end of history, by Vietnam, by drugs, by youth revolts, by women’s and gay rights movements.” We all realised at this time that it was getting dark and we should be getting home if we didn’t want another confrontation with the soon-to-return helicopter. People were already gathering outside their huts in the narrow alley to inquire about the casualties from the helicopter strafing and to seek the location of the attack.
For all of us this was just another ‘communal reading’ where the meaning of a text is negotiated collectively through talk. Such encounters are everyday social activities in Jaffna. What is interesting is the manner in which talk embeds, reconstructs, and resists the written word. The text gets situated in a clear social context, as we wrestle with linguistic signs and produce meanings that were perhaps unanticipated by the original writer. In this collective and collaborative reading we pool together our resources insightfully to interpret the text. Through personal experiences and stories we construct a suitable schema for our reading. The resulting interpretation has a clear local relevance and oppositional implication. This approach generates a more critical reading as it adopts a skeptical attitude towards the writer and the text. Though we start with the intention of arriving at a straightforward definition of postmodernism, we end up adopting a critical orientation that is loaded with value judgments. It is through such processes that we generate insights that are motivated by our social context even as we engage with books and thinking from the West.
As I cycled back home I thought to myself that I should note down the points we had discussed and write a paper on that subject, developing a third world view of post-modernism. But I gave up that thought when I realised the practical obstacles in getting the project accomplished in Jaffna. I realised, however, that what passed through my mind is the typical attitude of western scholars after an interaction of such a nature. They would have their eyes set on producing a paper out of an enlightening conversation. I had naturally been influenced by this attitude during my graduate studies in the west.
As for AJ and the other participants in the conversation, writing a paper was far from their minds. For them, it was a rich moment of discovering new things in interaction with others and in engagement with the text. The collective experience of passing the evening together in talk was what mattered. The talk did make each of us richer in thought and feeling. But that was it. We didn’t do anything with those insights to record them, pass them to others, spread these insights through publications, or gain credit for ourselves by claiming ownership over those ideas in the intellectual marketplace. Perhaps, if we chanced to have another encounter on such a topic in another gathering, we may share some of the insights we had produced earlier and build on it unconsciously. But such interactions were rare – we had many other topics to discuss in other gatherings, and we had many other insights to share in those conversation events. As I reached home, I bemoaned the waste of intellectual resources in this momentary, fluid, random sharing of ideas – even though it had something romantic, radical, and enriching about it.
What would the impact be if AJ and other local thinkers put their thoughts on paper, published them widely for others to read and received greater recognition in the world of ideas? But, perhaps, this attitude is again colored by my America-centred postgraduate educational experience that measures the worth of people and ideas by the books one has published rather than the collective sharing of opinions and the changes at the grassroots level. Though publications may emerge overwhelmingly from the West, and western scholars may take credit for every new thought or fashionable intellectual movement, critical thinking is alive and well in Jaffna – thanks to perceptive intellectuals like AJ!
(This is an adaptation from Geopolitics of Academic Writing, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2002. The identities of the characters, other than myself and AJ, are disguised.)