Memorialize the Impacts of War: A Documentation of Oral Stories of Sri Lankan Tamils

Abstract

Oral history is a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events. Thus, it has become an awareness campaign and education in an alternative path for those who would search for truths throughout history. Further, the oral history puts forward the life, beliefs, objectives, thoughts, traditions and even the politics and emotions of the people belonging to the land in their voices; the oral history should not be sidelined when considering the number of vibrations. In Sri Lanka, the long-standing war affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of people from the Tamil community. Thousands of them were killed and forcefully disappeared; many of them were chased away from their habitats; they became internally displaced; a considerable number of them still live in refugee camps and houses of relatives and friends. The recorded stories of their plights do not reveal the facts. Instead, their stories are often or always falsely recorded, interpreted and distorted as a struggle of terrorism and violence in government documents and used to coerce the world to erase the memory of the suffering, asserting and maintaining its narrative of victory. The Sri Lankan government perceives the memories of the Tamils as a sign of possible revival or regrouping of terrorism. In this context, the study revealed the importance and the efficiency of the transmission of oral narratives in the present scenario in Sri Lanka by observing the two notable efforts made by an organization named ‘Noolaham’, a virtual library and Mr. T. Jeyaraj, well-known as Jera, a freelance journalist and social activist from the North of Sri Lanka in their efforts on the register the oral stories of the common people with different dimensions as case studies in order to inquire the memorialize the impacts of war through the documenting oral narratives.