Confronting the Complexity of Loss

Part 2: Narratives of Loss
1. Home and Belonging
The information in this section is based entirely on the recollections, observations and
opinions of those who participated in interviews and focus group discussions. The
participants come from diverse backgrounds; geographically, they represent the Southern,
Central, Western, Eastern, North-Central and Northern Provinces.
The initial focus of the interviews was on the participants’ conceptions of ‘home’ and
‘belonging’. The aim of this segment was to gather perspectives on context and identity
and gauge how they affected the manner in which participants interpreted their
experiences of violence and loss.
Most participants associated their current place of domicile with their sense of belonging.
Many of them had lived in the place they considered ‘home’ for several decades, and had
developed deep attachments to these places. While the research sample is too small to
discover any strong correlations between geographical location and opinion, it is
interesting to note that most participants maintained a sense of belonging with respect to
their ‘homes’ despite any association with certain traumatic events.
The reasons for such deep attachments often varied. Some participants stated that their
land was bought with ‘hard-earned money’ and that they wished to remain in or return to
their land for this reason. Some valued the ‘familiarity’ of their surroundings, which they
considered important to a shared sense of security. One participant from Ambalangoda
mentioned that the people of the area respected her and treated her family well, and that
she had no intention to move away despite the trauma she suffered there. Another
participant from Kilinochchi speculated that she would earn a higher income if she went
abroad, but preferred to remain in her ‘own country’. Participants generally maintained
that they preferred to remain in their current locations for the remainder of their lives, or
in the case of the displaced, to return to their places of origin.
Tamil participants who fled Colombo after the July 1983 pogrom and Muslim
participants who were expelled from the North presented a more complex appreciation of
belonging. They observed that they were either fundamentally deprived of a sense of
belonging, as in the case of some Muslim IDPs in Puttalam, or were forced to evolve
multiple accounts of belonging, as in the case of those affected by the July 1983 pogrom.
A participant—whose family moved from Bandarawela to Haputale in July 1983, then to
Matale a year later, to Kotahena soon after, and eventually to Wellawatte—claimed his
sense of belonging is severely obscured. Similarly, younger participants who lived in the
North and East during the war described their sense of belonging as fluid and transient,
given the fact that they constantly moved to avoid violence. One participant recalled the
tragedy of moving to Mulankavil in June 1999 due to shelling in her village, only to lose
her father and sister during the final stages of the war. Another female participant based
in Kilinochchi recalled her family’s constant movement due to violence. She said her
family moved from Ramanathapuram to Mathalan during the final stages of the war and
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