Richard de Zoysa's other Eden

The murder of Richard de Zoysa was a turning point in the gruesome story of how the Sri Lankan government handled nationwide civil disobedience which grew into dangerous armed rebellion in the 1980s and early 1990s. Marking a dark period in the history of the sunny island, the official figures of the dead and the disappeared from this era cross 75,000 while it’s widely speculated to cross well into six figures. In this terrifying picture, Richard is one of the most visible figures. 

Belonging to a family of influential artists, educated at one of the most prestigious private schools in Colombo and a gifted poet, playwright and journalist, Richard had all the right networks and access. Like most people from his background, Richard could have remained above and beyond the chaos that ravaged the lives of rural and lower middle class youth in the island. Like many with connections abroad, he could’ve left as soon as possible. But, he didn’t. Well aware of his privilege, Richard de Zoysa used his education, talent and connections to speak about the injustices that gripped the lives of young Sri Lankans, the ugliness of strategically propagated racial tensions and the growing anger towards oppressive governance. His poetry, plays and writing resonated the significant mind shifts of the time, questioning the machinery at work to maintain the class and race gaps. He did this in a way that broke linguistic and ethnic barriers to extents that even more directly political figures could not. Of course, this charismatic, creative, and eloquent man with leftist leanings meant danger to many powers. 

Richard’s body was found on a beach, not too far from where he went to school as a child. It was discovered by a fisherman who recognised the face of this well-known actor. The records mention that it was beaten, broken, mutilated and shot at point blank. His mother and other eyewitnesses identified the abductors as high ranking police officers reporting directly to the President, making it one of the most strongly evidenced and widely publicised cases of rumoured government death squads. But, all identified suspects were never sentenced; instead, the leads were ignored by the police and the two main officers identified by eyewitnesses were allowed to walk free while two only got interdicted as punishment after the trial. None were even imprisoned. The two high ranking officers involved in Richard’s murder ended up dying in a bomb attack, along with the President, in an incident that many deemed karmic. Sri Lanka’s current President Ranil Wickremasinghe was one of the youngest ministers of the government at the time of Richard de Zoysa’s murder, and is said to have brushed off the death as ‘suicide or something else.’ 

Not failing to leave a mark even in his death, Richard triggered many significant milestones in the common citizen’s fight against a corrupt regime. Local and international media flooded with tributes, excerpts of his work and most importantly, questions that demanded answers. Time magazine published a piece on his death—that particular issue is still banned in Sri Lanka. The BBC did a tribute play for him many years later. Richard’s incredibly courageous mother—Dr. Manorani Sarvanamuttu— started the Mothers Front amidst death threats. It remains an active voice for families of the forcibly disappeared in the North and the South.

Richard's work—articles, plays, acting and writing remain, changing minds and telling the story of how people get played by governments to stay divided and fighting, for the benefit of a few. His poetry is particularly powerful; some pierce, shake, mock, and prophesy powers and their players as much as the played; others give views into his loves, encounters and lend us glimpses into intricacies of being a queer human in a conservative society. 

This book is a small volume of poems by Richard de Zoysa. It’s a treasured part of our library, reminding how even the most difficult questions can be asked with beauty, grace and wit. It’s an essential collection that carries the very essence of Richard; his daring to ask the hard questions, the strength to remain someone that isn’t the expectation, and most importantly, the beauty of being a human who loves the world and embraces all its experiences—the terrible and the blessed. 

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Monthly Story, August 2022

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Image → Ron Lach

Archetype → Rebel

Rasa → Hāsyam (हास्यं): Laughter, mirth, comedy. Presiding deity: Shiva. Colour: white, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow

Archetype → Rebel

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Leela stopped to catch her breath before shouting again between the bars of the police cell.

“You!”, she shouted, pointing at the back of the police deputy walking away. His shoulders hung from the relief of having just locked in Leela—the loudest woman he had ever encountered—pricked up again at the sound of her voice.

“You’re a dog! A hired dog paid to bark at us people,” she shouted at his back, trying in vain to rattle the heavy bars. But, the bars stood resolute and responseless.

The policeman sat down at his desk and sighed as Leela turned around throwing her fists into the air. ‘Who’s power? People’s power! You can’t shut us down!’ she chanted.

Her shouting echoed around the cell and fell dead. From the adjoining cell, two women sitting on the floor watched her. One woman chewed betel, wore a chītta wrap and a stained T-shirt. The other wore smudged makeup, a long skirt, and a red satin blouse that took on a ghostly glow under the fluorescent light. Watching Leela, both wore expressions of half-hearted contempt. Leela recognised this contempt so well. From her university days—spent mostly in student protests—Leela had seen how, for most people, it was easier to respond to rebellion with a sudden disdain for lawlessness than to join its exhausting current towards upheaval.

Leela considered the two smoldering faces for a second; “You know why governments always make fools out of people? Because people act like goats who only know how to get herded; you sit here chewing away till the jackals come...,”

“Goats?”, snarled the woman chewing betel; the word ‘goat’ seemed to have struck her somewhere particularly sore. An escaped smile twitched Leela’s mouth; she knew that poking where it hurts was the fastest way to get people up and angry.

“Why does ‘Madam’ here get her own cell? Some big insurgency fellow?” the woman in the red blouse asked the policeman, cocking her head at Leela.

“Please be quiet, I’m trying to record this arrest,” said the policeman, his voice strained between concentration, exhaustion, and annoyance.

Leela felt her mouth open automatically in reaction, despite her best efforts to savor the secret pride of being speculated a ‘big insurgency fellow’. “Trying to send me to the Counter Subversive Unit? Dog!” she screamed at the policeman. But he scribbled away, determinedly ignoring the three women.

“Counter Subversive Unit? Damn good!” the betel woman’s voice cut through. “You insurgency-types belong there”.

“I heard there’s a torture chamber in some coconut plantation where you people are being taken to…”, the red-bloused woman said, unable to hide the glee on her face.

Leela seethed at them; “Yes! Goats like you’d rather see me dead than put effort into rising from your slavery. But, you know what? You’ll never see our revolution dead! Victory to people’s liberation!” she shouted, throwing a fist into the air. But, somewhere at the back of Leela’s mind, her husband’s voice echoed; ‘But, do the people you’re trying to liberate really want to be liberated?’

“To hell with your revolution. We have enough problems as it is,” said the red-bloused woman. “Since you got here and started shouting, they’ve even forgotten our dinner. You insurgency people never make it easy for the rest of us you know,” she said.

The policeman picked up the telephone and reminded someone about dinner.

“You don’t see the enemy do you? You don’t see how they make it about your people vs. my people, and keep us at each other's throats while they empty the bank…?” Leela shouted.

A man in khaki shorts walked in whistling; He held a tray of wrapped food and a glass of water in one hand and three carelessly stacked metal plates in the other. The man smilingly placed the tray on the policeman’s desk; He slid the metal plates under the bars without looking at the women and strolled back out, whistling.

“Wonder what’s in the special meal for Sir...” the betel woman remarked pointedly, picking up a plate.

“Not goat feed for sure...” said Leela, wiping food from the bottom of her plate.

The betel woman’s angry retort was cut off the next second when, suddenly, the electricity blacked out. Everything paralyzed into a soundless night.

“Police station being attacked? They cut the power? Apooo! The insurgency people are coming to kill us!” The red-bloused woman started wailing. “Let the thirty-three thousand gods see this! Oh gods I haven’t sinned that much...”

“Quiet! No one is coming to kill us!” the policeman’s voice snapped.

Without the ceiling fan and fluorescent lights driving them away, mosquitoes took over like a hungry choir. Leela heard their humming circling her. Their stings punctured her skin; She swatted one and got food on her forehead. To her side, a curse erupted in the betel woman’s voice with the sound of a metal plate being dropped loudly onto the floor. The startled policeman—who sounded as if he had just knocked over the glass of water—clicked his tongue in annoyance.

“What the hell is this power cut?” asked the betel woman.

No one responded. Even Leela had nothing left to say.

Only a quiet idea floating in the dark seemed to present an answer too uncomfortable to swallow. It settled down amidst them, growing painfully apparent against the dark.

Read the previous story

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The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Reading List, July 2022

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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

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Rasa → Kāruṇyam (कारुण्यं): Compassion, mercy. Presiding deity: Yama. Colour: grey, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow

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Archetype → Magicien

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“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” said Maya Angelou. Emotions are the first language. They are our most natural bridge to connect with another. Our understanding of other people is very much connected to our ability to observe, analyze and mirror others’ emotions—a very natural process for us humans who are inherently social creatures. Reaching consensus, communicating needs and sharing ideas, and experiences through empathy is our natural habitat.

Scientists now know that this capacity for empathy requires an exquisite interplay of neural networks enabling us to perceive the emotions of others, resonate with them emotionally and cognitively, to take in their perspectives, and to distinguish it with our own. In the eastern artistic theory of Rasa, compassion (karunā rasa) is an emotional state that often leads to creating empathy. Wrongs that right injustice, worldly sorrows weighing down a young person, longing for life’s dreams are compassion evoking themes that we used in this monthly story to induce empathy towards a morally compromising act. The main character of this story, Kusum, was built using the shadow side of the character archetype magician—the manipulator.

In this reading list, you’ll find stories, books, films, and research that connects to compassion, finding emotional empathy in moments that conflict with the cognitive and the magician archetype from Jungian psychology.

• 1994, I.A. Richards and Indian Theory of Rasa, Gupteshwar Prasad. Sarup & Sons, New Delhi, India. Page 24: This book details the rasa theory with parallels to other theories connecting to the arts and their enjoyment. Gupteshwar notes how being affected by others’ emotions is the primary condition of aesthetic enjoyment. He points to this impersonal identification of emotions as an extension of the ‘karuna rasa’, which is called ‘samvēdhana’ in the original rasa theory, and says it’s the same as what’s knowns as ‘empathy’ in English and ‘einfuhlung’ in German.

• 2016, Mind and creativity: Insights from rasa theory with special focus on sahrdaya (the appreciative critic). Louise Sundararajan, Maharaj K. Raina. The Sage Pub: Rasa theory suggests that there are three aspects or stages to art: the first is the creative process of the artist; the second is the artwork; and the third is the viewer’s response—when the artist’s experience is recreated through empathy. It further details Tādātmya—a state of the reader or spectator who loses for a while his or her personal self-consciousness and identifies him or herself with some character in the story or scene.

• Saradiel is a man who lived in Mawanella, Sri Lanka in the 19th century and was executed for theft and murder. Saradiel’s image is conflicting. Bandit, vigilante, people’s champion, lawbreaker, murderer, hero of the poor….it’s not easy to fit him into one box. Saradiel’s targets were mostly the rich aristocracy and colonial officials; he robbed, killed, and intimidated many. At the same time, he selflessly shared his loot with the poor and fought against injustices that they suffered at the hands of the rich and the powerful. He is sometimes listed among national heroes. But, he is also marked as a dangerous criminal. Despite the sticky image, people still visit his last jail cell, and his tales have been made into many books, films and tele dramas. Saradiel certainly occupies that difficult space between hero and outlaw. In Saradiel’s stories, we see how a criminal by law is capable of evoking empathy even in usually law-abiding people.

• When Carl Jung first identified the ‘Magician’ archetype, he called it the Philemon. In his Liber Secundus we are introduced to Philemon, the ‘magician’. On the nature of magic Jung derived from Philemon he has written, “there is nothing to understand…Magic happens to be everything that eludes comprehension.” The difficulty with magic is precisely the difficulty of existing without reason. The foundation responsible for bringing Carl Jung’s works to the world is called the Philemon Foundation after this archetype that deeply influenced Jung.

• The antihero is a character type that blurs the line between good and evil, and achieves a justified cause in their own way, often questioning morality. They are morally ambiguous and lack conventional heroic attributes. Unlike the ‘hero’—who is an idealized, flawless personality—the ‘anti-hero’ is more human and relatable to the average person, evoking their compassion and empathy.

The antihero

The Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil

Patrick Bateman

The Narrator (Fight Club)

Lestat de Lioncourt (The Vampire Chronicles)

Man with no name (The Dollars trilogy)

Nancy Botwin (Weeds)

• 2009, Royal, Warrior, Magician, Lover—Archetypal reflectivity and the construction of professional knowledge. Darrell Dobson, Teacher Education Quarterly (Pages 154-157): Dobson identifies the magician archetype as one that actively seeks to put that content and methodological knowledge in service to the fullest possible individual and social development every day, and recognizes that such a practice derives from and will provide encounters with the numinous, whether in mathematics, science or art. He identifies the active shadow magician is the manipulator—who has either not mastered his technologies or himself, or both.

• 2012, “Rasa Yatra” — Using film to teach cross-cultural empathy, Martin Haigh, Planet, 26:1, 51-58: Empathy is a key skill for intercultural understanding. This paper evaluates the results of a pilot study for an exercise designed to introduce undergraduate geographers to the problems of interpreting emotional messages from an unfamiliar culture and worldview. Learners are set the task of interpreting the emotional content of this film and of trying to share the feelings of another.

>> Read the previous reading list