The Slow, Imperceptible Violence of Sri Lankan Trauma in People and Places

Seek the Singing Fish by Roma Wells

Roma Wells writes with gritty little words that culminate in an uncomfortable novel about the sanctity of the ecological world amongst the trauma of human experience. By focusing on the animals around her in Sri Lanka and England, Mila not only finds comfort but decentralises the human from the narrative.

Throughout the novel she addresses the reader as “Shi, breath of life” (p.1) from the first language of civilisation. This concept permeates many cultures, some call it Gaia or Sila (Inuit) or Simongi (Dayak). This all-encompassing life breath that fills every individual, human or non-human, as explained by Inuk author Rachel Qitsualik is “a force seemingly no different from wind and being drawn from the air itself, appeared to be the animating principle of life. They [Inuit] logically concluded that life itself was in fact the breath, the Sila, and that when the Sila was drawn into a body, it was alive and animate.”[1] Shi is a life force that breathes forth this novel and seems to imbue the reader with a sense of responsibility for the narrative. Shi is not neutral, it is everything. Therefore, the reader is thickly within everything Mila encounters including the people and animals.

Shi could also be linked to climate as it acts similarly to wind, to the air all around us. This interesting comparison comes into play when a huge weather event rolls into Mila’s life in the form of a tsunami. The tsunami is anthropomorphised with “its jaws closed around us, drenching and lashing, chewing and pulling, soaking and battering” (p.87). This water is literally a force of nature as it destroys her world. Tsunamis are capable of completely altering landscapes so the sodden land in Sri Lanka is unrecognisable to Mila. The question arises, however, about whether this tsunami is inadvertently human caused. The difficulty of tracking this is owed to the human need to see a chronologically sequential cause and affect. In other words, if the climate catastrophe is not visible as immediately causing a tsunami, then it becomes difficult to blame this. However, rising sea levels, extreme rain causing landslides, changes in air pressure and iceberg calving, are all causes that can be linked back to human activity and the affect they are having on the world. A small action like chopping down a rainforest tree can climax in the entire devastation of huge portions of the rainforest. This leads to changes in the climate and ultimately all these aforementioned triggers of a tsunami. This anthropocentric issue has been decentralised in the novel by Wells but in its place are her prose of simmering oral feasts and unique perspectives on the animal world.

Eric Santner proposes the idea of the creaturely, which politicises the bodies that have been affected by the world to the point that they cannot be separated from the animal world. After losing her family, her friends and her beloved homeland to civil war and natural disasters, Mila begins inhabiting a more creaturely approach to life like the animals she admires rather than the humans she fears. After being forced to immigrate to England, she slowly begins to build her trust back up and compares potential allies in the human world to her beloved creatures. By looking at the creaturely, the lack of separation between nature and politics is revealed. The novel depicts the people that reside in Batticaloa who are uncared for and forced to survive on their own. Their enmeshment in complex world issues as well as the world of the ecological surrounding them is important when considering a long history of state negligence to people that are subject to its dominion. Instead of care, they receive an abuse of power and control – much like humans can subject animals to.

There is a TRIGGER WARNING for this next paragraph as it contains descriptions of rape.

The soldiers, enact this power on Mila’s Amma, her mother, as she listens from her hiding place. “No matter how hard I focused on the darkness of my inner eyelids those sequins still came glinting and those droplets still came pooling… I could feel it. Feel their filthy hot thumbs on her neck, grabbing at her breasts, pinning down her pelvis as she struggled. I felt their breath and sweat on her skin, their weight on her ribs, their grime squelching and spreading inside her” (p.119). This image of the sequins continues to haunt Mila as memories of the past constantly collide with the present as she is enveloped by these traumatic flashbacks. Her traumatic journey is intertwined with the devastation of the landscape by the tsunami, with her people by the soldiers (and Tamil Tigers). However, quiet moments of hope arise as she journeys to England and finally back to Sri Lanka. The comfort she finds in the non-human world amongst the fear is inspiring and heart shattering. Whilst she is homeless and living in a park in England, she discovers the reprising designs in amongst the chaos, like divine symmetry. “I started to notice the same repeating patterns all over the park, on the spirals of pinecones, the veins of leaves and seedlings; each organism a canvas of smaller and smaller copies of itself. I like uncovering the subtle symmetry, grounding myself in the enduring order nestled in disorder” (p.181). Usually, spirals are associated with a downwards trajectory but these joyful acts of resistance appear to represent an upwards spiral as if symbolising a move towards happiness. The flower petals bloom as she laments of how her father will view her, no longer a precious flower. However, this flower survived the winter and those are the best flowers, the unexpectedly resilient.

Spiralling can also represent fate as past, present and future run simultaneously alongside each other. Mila does not privilege the present but instead understands the importance of the interaction of it with the past which teaches and influences and the future that affects. Actions have transtemporal effects and this story does not stand alone as it happened to many other people and across (a colonial) history. Wells successfully conveys the reality of these traumatic stories and their embeddedness in the world around us. Mila struggles with belonging as the novel maps out these seemingly disparate moments into a spiralling map of what it means to feel like a stranger far away from home only to return with the years folded into your body to something disrupted.

[1] Todd, Zoe ‘Indigenizing the Anthropocene’, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), p.5.