Abstract:
Writing about a nation emerging from three decades of violent conflict requires one to rethink
identities irrevocably altered by the dehumanizing effects of war. Since the conclusion of the
armed conflict in May 2009, there has been much talk of reconciliation but more often than
not, the debate has been framed by the discourse of terrorism, on the one hand, and human
rights or war crimes discourse on the other. This paper attempts to circumvent such
regressive approaches to reconciliation by focusing on the politics of friendship by examining
Somaratne Dissanayake‘s first feature film Saroja (1999), which focuses on the subversive
friendship between a Sinhala schoolteacher and a Tamil Tiger.
In Chapter 8 of Nicomechean Ethics, Aristotle argues that friendship is the very foundation of
a unified nation. ―Friendship seems too to hold states together, and lawgivers to care more for
it than for justice; for unanimity seems to be something like friendship.‖ Not only is
friendship the glue that holds communities together but friendship also supersedes the law,
because Aristotle views friendship as the cornerstone of unity. He goes so far as to say that
where friendship exists, there is no need for justice; however its converse, justice without
friendship, is futile. Indeed as a nation emerging from a protracted civil war, contemporary
Sri Lanka is a space where minority communities demand that state-sanctioned injustices be
redressed, but if justice without friendship is counter-intuitive, it is imperative to forge new
partnerships between these two communities through a redefinition of Sinhala-Tamil
relations.
Further reinforcing this link between friendship and justice, Jacques Derrida remarks,
―friendship plays an organizing role in the definition of justice, of democracy even.‖
Derrida‘s reiteration that ―fraternity‖ is located between equality and liberty and is the
foundation of the French Republic has particular resonance to postwar Sri Lanka. If Tamil
militancy in Sri Lanka was launched on the demand for equality (and liberty) for Tamils, to
invoke the concept of fraternity or friendship is to highlight that reconciliation cannot occur
in a cultural vacuum.
