No Man’s Land: Refugees, IDPs and Asylum Seekers in a short story from Sri Lanka

Abstract

Set In the midst of the civil war in Sri Lanka, Neil Fernandopulle short story “Dear Vichy”
enables us to examine terms such as “Refugee”, “Asylum seekers” and/or “Internally displaced
persons” apart from their otherwise clichéd and repetitive geo-political usage. it enables us to
see the brutality with which sections of humanity labeled thus are designated to a political
state best understood as that of non-citizens and henceforth valued more as statistical data
intended for bureaucratic functioning and policy-making which ostensibly is deemed to be in
the interests of the nation-state and its citizens. So stigmatized are these labels that the
presence of refugees in our societies goes practically unacknowledged, unless they re being
subjected to acts of racial profiling - actions that in themselves imply a complete absence of
the very qualities that define our humanity - hospitality, warmth and compassion and which
those displaced and dispossessed thus, need most. What gets equally erased is cognisance of
the fact that the economic, social and emotional disempowerment wrought by displacement
accrues on account of political and man-made crisis and not individual actions and choices.
This narrative, the winner of the Gratiaen Award, leads us to question the very idea of
citizenship with reference to the violence on which it is founded and the random belief that
peace can be achieved through the deployment of violence. Fernandopulle’s text demonstrates
this by showing what societies militarized thus, leave in their wake. While located in Sri Lanka
“Dear vichy” resonates with the temper of our times and speaks to each one of us regardless of
our differences of nationality, ethnicity and/or race.