Reply to comment

The War in Sri Lanka and the Left

Noaman Ali and Fathima Cader

This is quite a good article on the issues of Sri Lanka that you can read in full on the Socialist Project web site.  Within the article, they have criticized my writing here.  With the exception of their critique about me using "Tamil Community" to refer to the people who occupied the Gardiner Expressway, which I agree was an sloppy formulation (a problem with blogs) that I later corrected, I think they have a fundamentally different approach to solidarity.  I will leave it up to you to read the two points of view and comment.  Below is their critique.

"Parallel to Miller's homogenization, though coming from the opposite direction, veteran dissident leftist Judy Rebick notes on her blog that, “in a brilliant action, the Tamil community [...] climbed the on ramp on to the Gardiner Expressway [...] and sat down blockading traffic for several hours.” While the action, as an object lesson in activist tactics, was brilliant, one can say with certainty that “the Tamil community” neither climbed onto nor sat down on the Gardiner. Rather, a more correct terminology would be what Rebick subsequently calls “a group of Tamil activists.” The tenor of her blog post, however, confirms that she views the Tamil community in homogenous terms. She goes so far as to end her post with the note that “we are all Tamils,” a statement that is problematic on two grounds. First, working in solidarity with others requires acknowledging the lived differences that separate us so that we might use those differences for the purposes of justice, rather than discounting them out of an unhelpfully over-forced empathy. Second, that kind of statement presupposes that there is only one kind of Tamil identity, which everyone else can access. Yet if Tamilness is an identity constructed solely on the basis of one’s presence at or support for the protests, not even all Tamils can be called such.

"If Toronto's Tamil population is being flattened into one homogenized entity by politicians and many leftist activists, that process is certainly not being opposed by some sections of Toronto’s Tamil community. The Canadian Tamil Congress (CTC), one of Toronto’s more prominent Tamil political groups, notes that it is “the unified voice of Canada’s 300,000 Tamils.” Its FAQ page shows that it ascribes to all Sri Lankan Tamils the desire for a separate homeland (Tamil Eelam). The history and current reality of a diversity of non-communal and Tamil organizations and individuals within and without Sri Lanka, with varying goals and political objectives – and varying definitions of self-determination for Tamil people – is elided by this construction of Tamil identity. It is impossible for the CTC to be the unified voice of Tamils when Tamils don't have a unified voice. In other words, to return to Rebick’s rallying cry, we are not all Tamil, if only because there is no one Tamil identity we can be."