flamearrows
come on die young
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2004
- Messages
- 296
- Gender
- Male
- HSC
- 2005
"You've stolen my character!"
Imagine you are a central character in one of the prescribed texts. You resent the way your character has been manipulated by the composer. Write a reflection on how you think things could have unfolded. In your response, you should draw on your knowledge and understanding of the conventions of crime fiction.
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The fall was as violent as it was swift, the bucket of toddy falling down upon me in a final indignity, the warm stickiness drenching my body. I lay there, my leg bent at an unholy angle until someone was roused by my cries in the early morning sun, and they lifted me to bed and I drank away some of the pain. The next morning I lay there, sprawled across my makeshift bed, the dawn light prying my eyelids open. The earlier evening’s deliberations came to me, and I limped my way to the mine, crude crutches aching beneath armpits.
I was not down there for long – a week perhaps, maybe even shorter in the darkness. It distorted time somehow, a sameness that turned hours into minutes. When the billa came down the shaft, slit eyes agleam in the phosphor glow, I was not surprised. They took me far away; bound up in agony in the back of a rattling government truck, my broken leg deliberately twisted and each jar of the vehicle another spike of leaden pain. They tortured me then, and I wept, bleeding and broken, crimes tumbling out of my lips. The government official. The bombings, the hospital raids. The chart of my life was picked out by froth and bile and when I came at last to the renouncement of my ways, he leveled the gun at me. I raised my arms in front of my face, a final feeble gesture, and the bullet tore through my shoulder. The yammering of the thwarted soldiers ran coarse and bloody through my ears. Twisted on the earthen floor, the coup de grace was cheap and quick, my body was abandoned firstly to the flames, and then to dust.
I guess that when I was younger, I saw my life as taking on some sort of important role, becoming something more than I was. A Tamil in a Sinhalese city is destined to have dreams of grandeur. I excelled in school, dreamed of university, even though I knew I would ultimately take up my father’s position as a businessman, tapping and brewing toddy for sale. I believed that even in this capacity, I could make a difference – in retrospect, it was this thought more than any other which lead me to take up the mantle of the freedom fighter, shortly after the Government finally legislated its discrimination in blood. I fought, then I ran, then I died, a toddy tapper turned miner in a nowhere village.
But you are not to know such things. The knowledge itself seems to be dangerous, eluded to be almost pornographic in its detail. The crimes of Sri Lanka against itself in incestuous civil war are shaded in greys and khaki greens, the blood of the dying a broad stroke across the page, signifying nothing. I myself am little but a deus ex machina, a toy, and the final completion of a beautiful puzzle for white Anglo-Saxon consumption. What means my death, the final resting place of Ruwan Kumara? What have I lived for? What have I died for?
It’s a foolish vanity, but I can see my story being retold in a very different way. If Anil had been able to unearth more than my name, if my story was more than an endless string of false positives. The deliberately anticlimactic revelation of my identity leaches the wonder and the empathy out of my life, replacing it with the impression that a life of toddy was my only one. The sense of social justice intended would be heightened, allowing clearer focus on the principal point of the novel – the crimes against humanity, the one voice that should no longer speak for one alone. Without the revelation of the motivations behind the resistance, they too are reduced to another plot point, a force set in motion to fulfill the stated outcome. I make a case for the reduction of apathy, for the reinstitution of wonder, the insinuation of the why behind the enormous crime our nation has become.
Ask someone I knew. Ask the commoner, the peasant. Allow them to tell my story from their perspective, the terrorist who the village would not allow to stay. Let them speak of the brutality, the repression. Ask my mother of my motivations, the soul-destroying worry and guilt she felt as I packed my bags and donned khaki, a borrowed assault rifle over my shoulder. Visit my father’s grave and trace your fingers across his bitter epitaph, Dulce et Decorum Est, Pro Patria Mori. He knew. He, and all others wanted you to know how the people were affected, the tragedy that defied the meticulous leaving of clues. Let the crime be translated into something far grander, the solution of the human problem undercutting the aims of the archaeologist. The common people are almost absent in this story, in favour of high-flying doctors, Anglo-Saxon anthropologists, Sri Lankan archaeologists. Surely the focus of a story dealing with a civil war must reside with the people of the country, those most affected by the conflict. Additionally, this will allow greater reader empathy and engagement through the increased identification with the victims, hopefully allowing a greater impact of my story.
Further, let there be a solution! The reader should be able to achieve some form of closure, some sense of satisfaction. If Anil was exposed to the true world of Sri Lanka, then she would have heeded Sarath’s acknowledgement of the futility of her mission. The humanitarian focus could be expanded to an international level, with the true perpetrator and victim of the crime, the country itself, put on trial. This would allow the reader to achieve the self-perpetuating justice that is at the heart of all crime novels, rather than be directed to a cheap, spiritual trick in order to achieve some closure. The assassination of the President spells the point of no return for the novel, the moment of complete despair for my country and the people within it. I make a campaign for reality, the empathy that can only be achieved through real events, the empathy that might allow people to change. My story might provide a model whereby people really might be able to hold Sri Lanka to account. I hope to inspire others about the futility of the war, while showing them that things that are buried are not necessarily gone, and the solution of the crime can mean more than a night’s worth of intellectual stimulation for the reader. Thus the genre of crime fiction might be subverted away from the simply cerebral, and into the more contemporary exposure of the psychological motivations of the criminal and the victim.
Allied with this, I would like to see a deeper integration of the motivations of war, and the motivations of violence. While senseless, the slaughter was not unmotivated. By failing to discuss the reasons behind my murder, and the eruption of civil war, the sense of reality is oncemore leached out of my story, replaced with inhuman brutality. Though I hated and fought the government, not even they were unmotivated in their response to the uprising. Stripped of reasoning, their actions form a caricature of evil, a plot device rather than the machinations of a very real force. The insight into the rebel’s moments of humanity was touching, but not revealing, their nature faded to grey by the intentional contradiction of contrasting flashbacks. The destruction of the concept of good versus evil is welcome, but not taken far enough. The notion of structured authority continues to hover in the background, a reasonless concept distracting from the humanitarian focus. Were the reality integrated, not only would the empathy and motivation for social change increase, but the fear and chaos of living in a country torn by civil war be more accurately conveyed. Thus, I believe my story could be written better without many of the fictional touches the composer has found necessary, the reality horrible and moving enough to speak for itself.
I would like peace, the fulfillment of knowing that my life has been of some use. I should have been the trigger for action, not a figure to be paraded before those who do not care about my existence. Closure and justice for the reader must also result from the closure for the victim, for without me, what crime has there been committed? There must a real measure of optimism in the story, above spiritual concerns. For Anil to escape with me is not enough, the hope in that future too uncertain and intangible. The satisfaction of having made a difference escapes me, as it surely must escape the reader. Thus, my victory might be a catalyst for other victories, a call to arms for the readers. I might not have died in vain, and the ghost that follows my country and those who live within it could be banished, the cleansing of the world and the restitution of what is right. For that is what I resent, the fact that I have not been able to make a difference, a change for the better accompanied by a sense of justice that should be at the heart of all fiction.
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Please be as harsh as you feel necessary, I am no stranger to criticism (provided it is constructive). Edited in the latest changes
Imagine you are a central character in one of the prescribed texts. You resent the way your character has been manipulated by the composer. Write a reflection on how you think things could have unfolded. In your response, you should draw on your knowledge and understanding of the conventions of crime fiction.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The fall was as violent as it was swift, the bucket of toddy falling down upon me in a final indignity, the warm stickiness drenching my body. I lay there, my leg bent at an unholy angle until someone was roused by my cries in the early morning sun, and they lifted me to bed and I drank away some of the pain. The next morning I lay there, sprawled across my makeshift bed, the dawn light prying my eyelids open. The earlier evening’s deliberations came to me, and I limped my way to the mine, crude crutches aching beneath armpits.
I was not down there for long – a week perhaps, maybe even shorter in the darkness. It distorted time somehow, a sameness that turned hours into minutes. When the billa came down the shaft, slit eyes agleam in the phosphor glow, I was not surprised. They took me far away; bound up in agony in the back of a rattling government truck, my broken leg deliberately twisted and each jar of the vehicle another spike of leaden pain. They tortured me then, and I wept, bleeding and broken, crimes tumbling out of my lips. The government official. The bombings, the hospital raids. The chart of my life was picked out by froth and bile and when I came at last to the renouncement of my ways, he leveled the gun at me. I raised my arms in front of my face, a final feeble gesture, and the bullet tore through my shoulder. The yammering of the thwarted soldiers ran coarse and bloody through my ears. Twisted on the earthen floor, the coup de grace was cheap and quick, my body was abandoned firstly to the flames, and then to dust.
I guess that when I was younger, I saw my life as taking on some sort of important role, becoming something more than I was. A Tamil in a Sinhalese city is destined to have dreams of grandeur. I excelled in school, dreamed of university, even though I knew I would ultimately take up my father’s position as a businessman, tapping and brewing toddy for sale. I believed that even in this capacity, I could make a difference – in retrospect, it was this thought more than any other which lead me to take up the mantle of the freedom fighter, shortly after the Government finally legislated its discrimination in blood. I fought, then I ran, then I died, a toddy tapper turned miner in a nowhere village.
But you are not to know such things. The knowledge itself seems to be dangerous, eluded to be almost pornographic in its detail. The crimes of Sri Lanka against itself in incestuous civil war are shaded in greys and khaki greens, the blood of the dying a broad stroke across the page, signifying nothing. I myself am little but a deus ex machina, a toy, and the final completion of a beautiful puzzle for white Anglo-Saxon consumption. What means my death, the final resting place of Ruwan Kumara? What have I lived for? What have I died for?
It’s a foolish vanity, but I can see my story being retold in a very different way. If Anil had been able to unearth more than my name, if my story was more than an endless string of false positives. The deliberately anticlimactic revelation of my identity leaches the wonder and the empathy out of my life, replacing it with the impression that a life of toddy was my only one. The sense of social justice intended would be heightened, allowing clearer focus on the principal point of the novel – the crimes against humanity, the one voice that should no longer speak for one alone. Without the revelation of the motivations behind the resistance, they too are reduced to another plot point, a force set in motion to fulfill the stated outcome. I make a case for the reduction of apathy, for the reinstitution of wonder, the insinuation of the why behind the enormous crime our nation has become.
Ask someone I knew. Ask the commoner, the peasant. Allow them to tell my story from their perspective, the terrorist who the village would not allow to stay. Let them speak of the brutality, the repression. Ask my mother of my motivations, the soul-destroying worry and guilt she felt as I packed my bags and donned khaki, a borrowed assault rifle over my shoulder. Visit my father’s grave and trace your fingers across his bitter epitaph, Dulce et Decorum Est, Pro Patria Mori. He knew. He, and all others wanted you to know how the people were affected, the tragedy that defied the meticulous leaving of clues. Let the crime be translated into something far grander, the solution of the human problem undercutting the aims of the archaeologist. The common people are almost absent in this story, in favour of high-flying doctors, Anglo-Saxon anthropologists, Sri Lankan archaeologists. Surely the focus of a story dealing with a civil war must reside with the people of the country, those most affected by the conflict. Additionally, this will allow greater reader empathy and engagement through the increased identification with the victims, hopefully allowing a greater impact of my story.
Further, let there be a solution! The reader should be able to achieve some form of closure, some sense of satisfaction. If Anil was exposed to the true world of Sri Lanka, then she would have heeded Sarath’s acknowledgement of the futility of her mission. The humanitarian focus could be expanded to an international level, with the true perpetrator and victim of the crime, the country itself, put on trial. This would allow the reader to achieve the self-perpetuating justice that is at the heart of all crime novels, rather than be directed to a cheap, spiritual trick in order to achieve some closure. The assassination of the President spells the point of no return for the novel, the moment of complete despair for my country and the people within it. I make a campaign for reality, the empathy that can only be achieved through real events, the empathy that might allow people to change. My story might provide a model whereby people really might be able to hold Sri Lanka to account. I hope to inspire others about the futility of the war, while showing them that things that are buried are not necessarily gone, and the solution of the crime can mean more than a night’s worth of intellectual stimulation for the reader. Thus the genre of crime fiction might be subverted away from the simply cerebral, and into the more contemporary exposure of the psychological motivations of the criminal and the victim.
Allied with this, I would like to see a deeper integration of the motivations of war, and the motivations of violence. While senseless, the slaughter was not unmotivated. By failing to discuss the reasons behind my murder, and the eruption of civil war, the sense of reality is oncemore leached out of my story, replaced with inhuman brutality. Though I hated and fought the government, not even they were unmotivated in their response to the uprising. Stripped of reasoning, their actions form a caricature of evil, a plot device rather than the machinations of a very real force. The insight into the rebel’s moments of humanity was touching, but not revealing, their nature faded to grey by the intentional contradiction of contrasting flashbacks. The destruction of the concept of good versus evil is welcome, but not taken far enough. The notion of structured authority continues to hover in the background, a reasonless concept distracting from the humanitarian focus. Were the reality integrated, not only would the empathy and motivation for social change increase, but the fear and chaos of living in a country torn by civil war be more accurately conveyed. Thus, I believe my story could be written better without many of the fictional touches the composer has found necessary, the reality horrible and moving enough to speak for itself.
I would like peace, the fulfillment of knowing that my life has been of some use. I should have been the trigger for action, not a figure to be paraded before those who do not care about my existence. Closure and justice for the reader must also result from the closure for the victim, for without me, what crime has there been committed? There must a real measure of optimism in the story, above spiritual concerns. For Anil to escape with me is not enough, the hope in that future too uncertain and intangible. The satisfaction of having made a difference escapes me, as it surely must escape the reader. Thus, my victory might be a catalyst for other victories, a call to arms for the readers. I might not have died in vain, and the ghost that follows my country and those who live within it could be banished, the cleansing of the world and the restitution of what is right. For that is what I resent, the fact that I have not been able to make a difference, a change for the better accompanied by a sense of justice that should be at the heart of all fiction.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please be as harsh as you feel necessary, I am no stranger to criticism (provided it is constructive). Edited in the latest changes
Last edited:
