A Lazy Sunday in Abu Dhabi
June 4th 2023 was a largely unremarkable day. A lazy Sunday in balmy Abu Dhabi—where I unexpectedly find myself, having left Sri Lanka when I least expected to do so. But it was also a day for reflection, as most Sundays are because they offer a rare respite from the relentless movement of life.
June 4th of course has a symbolic political resonance and one that has increasingly become a spectral presence in Hong Kong where I spent nearly eight years of my life. Although I was keenly aware of June 4th while I was in Hong Kong and later as I observed the pro-democracy movement in the city from afar, I was never affectively part of it. But recent events in Sri Lanka and the people’s uprising of 2022 (called the aragalaya or “struggle” in the Sinhala language) have generated an uncanny sense of affinity.
I have never experienced a sense of displacement in my life before. While I have lived outside of Sri Lanka for prolonged periods of time, there was always the certainty of a location I could call home—a place that provided orientation and meaning. But with the events of 2022 and how their aftermath is rapidly reshaping Sri Lanka, I am no longer so certain. Perhaps some of these feelings are intensely personal, rather than political. My father passed away in 2021 and that too has created a void—something that provided meaning and orientation is gone. But perhaps the personal is also political. My father belonged to a generation that came of age when Sri Lanka gained independence. He believed, as did most of his generation, in the promise of postcolonial nationhood. But I belong to a generation that has seen this promise fail and the aragalaya marked an unprecedented crisis in the Sri Lankan nation state. The story through which the nation had made sense of itself for nearly seven decades no longer seemed to make sense. Maybe Sri Lanka would never be the same again.
I feel it is in the loss of this sense of orientation and the actual and figurative displacement it created, that I might share some affinity with my colleagues and friends from Hong Kong—particularly those who identify themselves as Hong Kongers. While their social history and Sri Lankan social history shares little in common, they too believed in a certain kind of vision for Hong Kong—but this vision now appears a distant reality—a spectre that haunts the imagination. I think many of them may feel a sense of displacement—and many of them, like me, have also left their home. What meaning will we make of this displacement? How will we “return”—both literally and metaphorically. We are of course not unique in this predicament. Many others have experienced, written, agonised and struggled over similar or far worse experiences of displacement throughout history. But those histories—which we have read, debated, studied and taught—now seem to have a meaning they did not possess earlier. When you become the subject of “history”, history begins to become “real”.
How to cite: Rambukwella, Harshana. “Just Another Day: Harshana Rambukwella.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/harshana-rambukwella.
Harshana Rambukwella is a comparative literature and cultural studies scholar with an interest in the intersections between literature, history, aesthetics, and nationalism in South Asia. He is also a sociolinguist with interest in critical sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Harshana is the author of the Politics and Poetics of Authenticity (UCL Press, 2018) and has published in journals such as boundary 2 and the Journal of Asian Studies and Interventions and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Harshana is currently working on a project on the “cultural life of democracy”, looking at democracy in “everyday life” as expressed in cultural and aesthetic artifacts. He is currently Visiting Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. [Harshana Rambukwella and chajournal.blog.]
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