Remembering genocide in the diaspora: Place and materiality in the commemoration of atrocities in Rwanda and Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT

The pain of war and genocide is often very physical and place-based. At the same time, displacement compels many of those who lost their loved ones to remember them and their homeland’s violent past from afar. This article explores the territoriality and materiality of diaspora remembrance by looking at diaspora initiatives to remember victims of genocide and war in Rwanda and Sri Lanka. In Brussels, a memory conflict between supporters and critics of the Rwandan government is played out around a small monument. In rural United Kingdom, an envisioned memorial park to Tamils martyred in the struggle for independence illustrates how memorial spaces in the diaspora challenge official homeland state narratives of the past and carry meaning as a symbolic land for Tamils. Initiatives to plant trees, name streets and throw flowers on a river provide additional examples of how diaspora actors strive to anchor memory of atrocities physically and territorially. The article suggests that materiality and spatiality of memorialization takes on different meanings in a diasporic context, as initially ‘meaningless’ places are turned into self-referential sites for remembrance, and the establishment of more permanent memorial structures can form part of home-making processes in the country of settlement.

KEYWORDS:

• Memorialization
• diaspora
• memorial
• Rwanda
• Sri Lanka

Introduction

The pain of war and genocide is often very physical and place-based: the smell of dead bodies; the unbearable bodily grief of losing a child or a parent; the traces of blood that are still there, weeks after it happened; the bullet holes left in the wall for years to come; that familiar piece of clothing that helps someone identify a close family member in a recently opened mass grave. The experience of suffering is tied to matter and to place, both as tragedy unfolds and long after. Just as mass-atrocities are anchored in the physical, so is remembrance and mourning: the act of laying down flowers on a grave; the images of life in a concentration camp evoked at the Auschwitz barracks in Poland; the emotions stirred up by the human remains in the Murambi genocide memorial in Rwanda. The very materiality and design of memorials has the power to shape the ways people relate to a difficult past. Physical structures and artefacts are often given meaning as perceived repositories of memory, as storage systems which will enable future generations to learn from history, or as material invitations to reflection on and dialogue with the past (Forty 1999; Bonder 2009).

War and violence not only kills, it also displaces. Armed conflicts, grave human rights abuses and a long range of other triggers of migration have dispersed mourners across the globe. Those carrying the pain of loss are not necessarily close to the places of loss, but reside in other locations where they mourn not only their loved ones who fell victim to atrocities but often also their own loss of home, motherland and life as it used to be. The notion of ‘diaspora’ captures this sense of being displaced from one’s homeland and deemed to eternally long for and worry about it and its scattered people (see Safran 1991; Clifford 1994; Cohen 2008). Memory, being the ‘glue that holds the past and present together’ (Agnew 2005, 19), is absolutely central to diasporic existence. A diaspora, per definition, is made up of people who maintain their sense of belonging by remembering the past – across geographical space and generations. A violent and traumatic past can provide particularly strong memorial glue in the form of a ‘collective trauma’ around which a diasporic identity can be constructed and people mobilized (Volkan 1991).

That remembrance is often appropriated for political purposes has been widely recognized and discussed (e.g. Edkins 2003; Bell 2006; Jinks 2014; McDowell and Braniff 2014; Logan and Reeves 2009). The ways in which remembering and forgetting are closely intertwined has also been noted. An ‘inevitable feature of memorials’, Forty (1999, 9) contends, is that ‘they permit only certain things to be remembered, and by exclusion cause others to be forgotten’. The construction of monuments or establishment of spaces to mourn inevitably involves a struggle over narratives of the past, which has as much – or more – to do with present power dynamics as with history.

This article focuses attention on memorialization in the diaspora – more specifically in the diasporas from Rwanda and Sri Lanka – and explores the meanings that place and materiality take on in exile. Recent scholarship has emphasized the role of diasporas in transitional justice and commemoration (Haider 2014; Koinova and Karabegovic 2017; Orjuela 2018). However, the role that space, physical structures and artifacts play in diaspora memorialization have remained largely un-explored, despite their importance in linking past with present and here with there.

Materiality has received much attention in scholarship on genocide memorialization in Rwanda, where the preservation and display of dead bodies, skulls and bones has been framed both as physical evidence necessary to show future generations what happened and as government attempts to divert attention from present problems in Rwanda (Guyer 2009; Meierhenrich 2011). In Sri Lanka, the erasure of memorials to Tamil martyrs after the government 2009 victory over the separatist Tamil Tigers, and the setting up of new monuments honoring the government forces points to how continued conflict in the post-war era is played out around memorialization (Hyndman and Amarasingam 2014). In diasporic spaces – this article will show – place and matter take on different meanings in relation to remembrance; meanings that are shaped both by the distance between the mourners and the mourned and by altered relations of power outside the homeland.

The article continues from here with a note on methods and data, before it presents three sections which offer empirical examples of how place and objects matter for memorialization in the diaspora. The first section talks about a diaspora ‘memory conflict’ (Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013, 692) centered on a monument in Brussels put up to commemorate the Rwandan genocide. The second discusses a memorial park honoring Tamils lost in the war in Sri Lanka, envisioned in the United Kingdom. The third section brings up additional examples of diaspora attempts or aspirations to anchor memorialization physically, before a concluding section discusses how place and materiality is imbued with meaning in diaspora memorialization in ways that strive to compensate for not being there and make use of new spaces for alternative narratives of the past. It also argues that attempts at establishing memorials and sites to remember in the diaspora can be understood as collective home-making practices which position the diaspora not only in relation to a distant homeland but also within its country of residence.

The study

This article has emerged from a research project that studied the involvement of diaspora actors in transitional justice (TJ) after mass-atrocities in Rwanda and Sri Lanka. I had selected Rwanda and Sri Lanka for the study as both had a legacy of mass-violence as well as influential diasporas which have contributed to a globalization of the efforts to come to terms with the countries’ painful pasts. A main difference between the two contexts is, however, that while the Rwandan government has been a strong driver of memorialization and justice after the 1994 genocide, the government of Sri Lanka has largely avoided transitional justice and severely restricted memorialization of victims of the 1983–2009 civil war. People from the two countries living in the diaspora have taken on different roles – as a vehicle for the hegemonic memory project of the state (in the case of Rwanda) and as constructors of alternative spaces for memorialization (in both cases) (see Orjuela 2018).

My data consists of 56 in-depth interviews with persons involved in diaspora efforts to address the violent pasts of Rwanda and Sri Lanka, as well as observations of and participation in numerous memorialization events. The research was multi-sited, focusing on key events and actors. Interviews and observations were carried out in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States 2015–2018. Among the interviewees were leading figures in diaspora organizations and opposition parties, ambassadors or embassy staff, organizers of commemorations and persons involved in advocacy, documentation of atrocities or legal actions against perpetrators.¹ The selection of interviewees mirrors the composition of the diasporas; interviewees from Rwanda had varied ethnic and political background, whereas interviewees in the Sri Lankan case were predominantly Tamil (a minority in Sri Lanka, but dominant in the diaspora).

Early in the research project, it became clear that the memorial sites discussed in this article were important places of meaning-making and contestation. Some interviewees were directly involved in memorialization projects there, while others knew and had opinions about the sites. To study them closer I made several visits and participated in events organized there. Looking at the two sites – and the two diasporas – together gives a broader picture of diaspora memorialization than a single case study offers (cf. Jinks 2014). The first site – in Brussels – provides an example of how a monument is rendered meaningful for two contrasting versions of how the past is to be remembered, while the second – the park in the UK – illustrates how alternative spaces for remembrance and belonging can be established in the diaspora. Materiality and territoriality play somewhat different roles in these different endeavors.

The monument

In a small roundabout in an affluent area in Brussels, a monument was erected in 2004 to mark the tenth anniversary of the genocide that killed around one million people – mainly Tutsi, but also Hutu and Twa – in Rwanda. Commissioned by the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the artist, Tom Frantzen, describes it like this:

The pillar of life, a huge, immemorial blue stone wounded by thousands of machete strokes, remains standing, unwavering, despite everything. On its top, it carries the world in its most fragile form: an egg, the polished bronze shell of which opens up to every possibility, and to the future in which we place all our hopes. The birds, symbolizing renewal, are taking away with them this trust in the future, and they are taking it to our brother continent, Africa, with which we have shared so much, and had a relationship marked with friendship, treason, love and envy.²

Apart from memorializing the victims of genocide in Rwanda, the monument thus invites a recollection of the historical bond between Belgium and Rwanda, highlighting brotherhood and renewal, while avoiding a direct reference to a past of colonialism and Belgium’s pivotal role in the identity politics which eventually led to genocide (see Mamdani 2001). Being one among hundreds of memorials in Brussels,³ and placed in a residential area out of sight for most inhabitants and visitors, the monument does not attract much attention. But it has become significant to the Rwandan community in Belgium, a community which itself is a product of the historical intertwining of the two countries. After Rwanda’s independence in 1962, Belgium emerged as a center for Rwandan diaspora activism. The Rwandan community is diverse, encompassing people of different ethnic backgrounds and generations of migration. There are those who survived genocide, those who were outside Rwanda at the time, those who belong to the perpetrator group and those who lost their loved ones in the genocide or in other massacres and political killings. There is a significant cleavage between supporters of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) government and its critics, for whom the exile offers a somewhat less circumscribed space for dissent.⁴

The symbolism of the machete strokes (a reference to a common means of killing during genocide), the egg and the birds on Tom Frantzen’s sculpture seems to be of no particular interest to the Rwandans whose memory conflict is played out around the monument. It is the very existence of the humble memorial that matters. When I in 2016 visited the Rwandan embassy its representative drew my attention to what he described as the ‘problems with that place’. He described how ‘the people who don’t like the government of Rwanda’ had appropriated the memorial and driven the embassy and survivor organizations to hold their commemoration events elsewhere (interview, 2016). The government critics he referred to had organized yearly commemorations by the sculpture since 2005. Every 6 April, they gather and march towards the monument. That year, a group of forty or so held white roses in their hands. But they did not reach the monument: a police cordon stopped them a block from the roundabout. The day before, the Rwandan ambassador had made a press statement calling the event ‘criminal’, alleging that its main organizer was ‘a known genocide denier’ (Ambassade du Rwanda en Belgique 2016) and local authorities had mustered the police to prevent the perceived misuse of the memorial. Instead, the participants laid their flowers on the asphalt in front of the metal barrier and speeches were held there.

Twenty-five years after the genocide, remembering it is as important as ever – both in Rwanda and globally. Hundreds of memorials across Rwanda and the many commemorative events organized in April every year attest to this. For survivors, remembering collectively is important: ‘[w]ith so many dead and so few left to mourn them, private bereavement necessarily became a public matter’, Ibreck states (2010, 336). Honoring the dead and grieving them in dignity has been a priority for those who lost their loved ones. For the Rwandan government, on the other hand, remembrance has served its politics of patriotism and unity (Ibreck 2010). The government has strived – and largely succeeded – to frame genocide as a ‘cosmopolitan memory’; a memory which is part of a global ‘memoryscape’ and of relevance beyond the territory and people of Rwanda (Bell 2006; Levy and Sznaider 2002). Drawing parallels with the Holocaust, official discourse wishes to elevate Rwanda’s genocide to a ‘status as an unquestioned moral value on which all people can supposedly agree’ (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 88). In government-driven memorialization, place and materiality is put to work to keep the memory of genocide alive in what Meierhenrich 2011, 292) has called a ‘strategy of suffering’ pursued by the RPF towards the international community. For instance, the Kigali Genocide Memorial plays a pivotal role in Rwandan diplomatic relations as a site routinely visited by prominent internationals (Giblin 2017). Moreover, the display of human remains in several key memorials has been interpreted as a macabre way of remembering the past which ‘facilitates a forgetting of the present’ – a present of increased authoritarianism and RPF dominance (Meierhenrich 2011, 289). The focus on genocide commemoration and the government’s insistence that the genocide must always be referred to as ‘the genocide against Tutsi’ has brought the Tutsi victims to the center and muted the stories of Hutu and Twa victims as well as of other massacres and political killings.

The mourners with the white roses in Brussels challenged the official narrative of Rwanda’s past.⁵ Initiated by a human rights activist, and with participation from opposition parties, youth organizations and individuals who felt alienated at official mourning events, the initiative expanded the delineation of victims but also – importantly – of perpetrators, as it shed light on RPF complicity both in triggering the genocide and in massacres after its end.

‘The endorsement of a collective memory’, Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2013, 689) write, ‘regulates the relation between individuals and the group by delimiting the boundary between the “us” and the “them”. It distinguishes between those who can refer to this common past and those who cannot’. Although unity and the abolishing of ethnicity have been central to Rwanda’s post-genocide nation-building, the hegemonic memory project of the state has created new divisions and frustrations when only recognizing the suffering of some victims (see Kuradusenge-McLeod 2018). That the genocide against the Tutsi has become a ‘cosmopolitan memory’ is visible in the spaces where it is memorialized: at the UN headquarters in New York and the European Parliament in Brussels, for instance. Counter-narratives are told, however, in alternative memorialization events organized by diaspora groups in churches or assembly halls – and more publicly by the sculpture with the birds.

Björkdahl et al emphasize that in memorialization ‘place produces meaning’ (2017, 6). This is especially so in a diaspora setting. In Brussels (and elsewhere in the diaspora), members of the Rwandan community are far removed from the places where the terrible atrocities took place. Nora’s idea of lieux de mémoire comes to mind: when there is no ‘natural environment’ of memory and when the places where the past could be experienced no longer offer traces of that past, a need for self-referential sites of memory arises. These sites are material, symbolic and functional, and can be important to a group’s self-identification process (Nora 1989). A leader of a diaspora survivors’ organization pointed to this when saying: ‘In Rwanda it is easier. They are near the grave, they go and mourn. It is better there’ (interview, 2016). As Um remarks:

The evacuation from the original source denies refugees and diasporas of a milieu de mémoire, where memory can be enveloped and anchored. Instead, memories, like the refugee body that they inhabit, are fractured, dispersed, multiple and diverse, foregrounded and invisible (Um 2012, 835).

The interest diaspora groups take in the monument in the roundabout in Brussels can hence be seen as an attempt to establish a lieux de mémoire, a place where memories are evoked, also far away from the original places of pain. In this case, the location and materiality of the monument appears arbitrary. The artist’s careful design and choice of materials is not incorporated into the meaning-making of the rival diaspora groups. But the place is important nevertheless: ‘We need to commemorate’, the main organizer emphasized, ‘this point is like the pilgrimage to Mecca, the rallying point’ (interview, 2016).

In violence-affected areas, places where dreadful atrocities took place sometimes remain unmarked. They are ‘hidden in plain sight’ (cf. Tyner 2018), and often intensely meaningful to people. Perhaps we can talk about such places as ‘empty but meaningful’. In the diaspora, memorialization efforts have the potential to imbue meaning into otherwise ‘empty and meaningless places’, such as a roundabout in Brussels, thereby linking materiality and space to conflicts over what should be remembered and forgotten, and to contemporary struggles over power.

Moreover, the conflict about the monument sheds light on the role of memorialization in making territorial claims (Björkdahl et al. 2017, 6; McDowell and Braniff 2014) also in a diasporic context. That the police stopped the alternative commemoration illustrates both how eager the Rwandan government is to control the narrative of the past⁶ and its ability to make (temporary) territorial claims even outside of Rwanda.

‘In Rwanda there are about 400 memorials, none of which is used to commemorate Hutus. This is sad’, the organizer of the march to the monument continued. Establishing an alternative memorial in the diaspora is likely to be hard, though: ‘It is difficult to find a location. We can negotiate with this or that mayor, but the government in Kigali is putting pressure everywhere and anyone who would like to give us a memorial would be in difficulty’ (interview, 2016). Hence, the memory conflict continues to be played out by the sculpture in the roundabout. By 2017, the embassy and the main survivors’ organization, Ibuka-Belgique, had reclaimed the place for their commemorations. Key to this was the adding of a golden plaque, which named the genocide correctly according to Rwandan official discourse. The challenging groups have persisted in their yearly attempts to lay down flowers by the monument, and the police have again prevented them from doing so.

The memorial park

The land where the memorial park is to be constructed is lush and green, with an old farm house and a small stream traversed by an ancient stone bridge. So far, only three structures indicate that there are great plans for this place: a portal with the Tamil Eelam flag, a monument for the martyrs and a preliminary construction of a Hindu place of worship. The monument is made of wood which is painted grey to give a stone-like impression and features an image of a freedom fighter carrying a dead comrade. On my visit in 2016, it was ornamented with flowers and candles left from the park’s inauguration event a few days earlier. The aesthetics remind of the remembrance structures in the areas controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka before their defeat in 2009. This time, the setting is not the tropical, palm-dotted island, though, but the temperate climate of rural United Kingdom, a country which hosts a large and active Tamil diaspora.

As the Sri Lankan government gradually captured the LTTE’s territory in Sri Lanka, they destroyed their monuments: the many portraits of martyrs set up along the roads and – most importantly – the cemeteries where the fallen LTTE fighters were put to rest under neat rows of tombs (Hyndman and Amarasingam 2014; PEARL 2016). Migration from Sri Lanka has a long and diverse history. The diaspora that has formed and continues to engage with the homeland tends to identify as Tamil, rather than Sri Lankan, and was dispersed from the island mainly due to state repression and war. To buy this piece of land – slightly more than a hundred acres – the initiators had collected money from diaspora Tamils and complemented with a bank loan to reach the about 1.3 million pounds needed. Contributors had chipped in for the Tamil cause; a cause than had now shifted from an LTTE-led military struggle for independence in northeastern Sri Lanka to a non-violent strife for justice and self-determination with the diaspora in a leading role (see Amarasingham 2015; Vimalaraja and Cheran 2010). With severe restrictions on commemoration in post-war Sri Lanka, the victims of Sri Lankan government violence could be publicly remembered only outside the country. Every 27 November, LTTE martyrs are commemorated by tens of thousands of diaspora Tamils at Maaveerar Naal (Great Heroes’ Day) events around the world. The anniversary of the brutal end of the war, in May, has emerged as an additional crucial date for commemoration and protest.

During Maaveerar Naal, replicas of tombs play a central and symbolic role. A momentary cemetery is created – rows with dozens of graves in enormous halls in London and Toronto, or one or a few graves at the smaller events organized in universities with Tamil student associations or cities with a lower concentration of Tamils. Typically, participants walk up to the graves, which are often made of grey-painted wood or cement, and place flowers or light candles in respect for the martyrs. After the event, the tombs are tucked away and stored to next year.

Many who attend Maaveerar Naal have themselves lost their loved ones. LTTE’s insistence that every household give a son or daughter to the struggle has meant that many families in the diaspora are maaveerar families. Among the participants are also former LTTE cadres, politicians, representatives of diaspora organizations, as well as youth and children who have lived their whole life outside the Tamil homeland. The narrative of these events highlights the self-less sacrifice of the martyrs and brave struggle of the Tamils, while assigning blame to the Sri Lankan state perpetrating the killings and the international community which failed – and continues to fail – the Tamil people. There is, not unexpectedly, a complete silence about the numerous victims – many of them Tamil – of LTTE violence.

With large-scale commemorations and demonstrations in capital cities around the world, the diaspora has inscribed its presence in the countries where they now live. But this tends to be a temporary presence. The memorial park, on the contrary, would be something more permanent. A key person behind the initiative enthusiastically tells me about the plans. There will be a museum of Tamil history; a library which can be used by students and researchers; a Hindu temple; a church and a sports ground, perhaps also a guesthouse. But maybe most importantly, there would be a reproduction of the LTTE burial grounds demolished in Sri Lanka. My interlocutor imagines up to 40,000 tombstones in the park – one for each martyred LTTE cadre. Diaspora Tamils would pay for a tombstone for their particular maaveerar and come to remember them individually on special days (like their birthdays), and collectively on Great Heroes’ Day.

Again, we can think of Nora’s lieux de mémoire, and how it materially, symbolically and functionally provides space for remembering. The lieux de mémoire necessitates, Nora stresses, a will to remember; a sense that ‘without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them [the traces of memories] away’ (Nora 1989, 12). The diaspora Tamils’ urge to remember is materialized in the plans for the park. While originally being only a piece of land, far away from the Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka, it was quickly imbued with meaning. The land itself, and the beauty of the landscape, took on special significance for many Tamils visiting the place. ‘Everyone was impressed when they came here for the first time’, the initiator told, underlining that the place had an emotional effect on people. ‘They felt it was a good place’, that it was ‘like a holy thing’ or ‘the place we dreamt about’ (interview, 2016).

‘The Tamils don’t have a land in Sri Lanka. We are still like refugees’, a businessman who had contributed a substantial sum of money towards purchasing the land said when I visited again in 2018. He went on to talk about how Tamils have been, and continue to be, treated as second-class citizens in Sri Lanka. ‘At least here we can have a land’, he continued (personal conversation, 2018). The memorial park hence could be seen as an (imagined and partial) answer to the desperation of a people that had lost their struggle for a separate state, been dispersed across the globe and lacked access to a grave to mourn their loved ones. Bruland (2015, 93–94) maintains that when used in diaspora Maaveerar Naal events, the rituals and national symbols developed by the LTTE produce experiences which enable people to ‘overcome the distance between the new and old homeland’ and to heal ‘the sores of their unfulfilled longings’; through practices and aesthetics, participants sense that they belong to the Tamil nation. This connection between past and present, here and there, was visible also during the Maaveerar Naal event held in the UK memorial park in November 2018. The place itself was in this case significant. ‘I feel like coming home! This is our Jaffna’, the businessman exclaimed, referring to what is widely seen as the capital of the Tamil homeland in northern Sri Lanka. A woman who had regularly attended commemorations at the land shared this sense of coming home: ‘This is our own place’, she told (personal conversations, 2018). Apart from providing a link to the homeland, the memorial park thus also had a role to play in the process of collective home-making in the diaspora.

The maaveerar was given a special significance in the liberation struggle as an individual who had voluntarily abandoned life (by taking life) for the greater cause of freedom for the Tamil people. By being buried (rather than cremated), the ‘Maaveerar symbolically fuses sacrifice to the soil, a somatic metonym for an independent, territorial integral Tamil Eelam’ (O’Neill 2015, 135). The body of each martyr would, it was believed, fertilize the soil so that even stronger resistance would grow: ‘A LTTE martyr never dies. His body is planted as seed to be reborn’ (Schalk 1997, 153). Commemorating the martyrs was thus not only about respecting them and their family members, but intimately linked to Tamil resistance.

Some of those involved in conceptualizing the memorial park held a hope that they would be able to transfer – little by little – remains from the demolished cemeteries in the homeland to the UK. Placing these remains in the park could be seen as a symbolic transfer of the freedom struggle to the diaspora, and a physical linking between the occupied homeland and the new home. Those who spoke about this were aware that it was unlikely to be achievable. During the massive Maaveerar Naal event organized outside Toronto in November 2018, however, the organizers managed to establish a similar material connection. The hall displayed replica of gravestones and arches from every LTTE cemetery, and soil from each cemetery had been brought from Sri Lanka to be exhibited at the event (Tamil Guardian 2018). In a similar manner, Tamil activists had brought sand from the beach where the last battle was fought in 2009 to a genocide remembrance event in London in May 2014 (interview, 2016). Attempts to materially connect homeland and new country through memorialization can be seen in other cases too. For instance, the Cambodian American Heritage and Killing Fields Memorial Museum in Chicago hosts sacred water transported there from Cambodia (Um 2012, 835) and the Irish Hunger Monument in New York uses limestone from Ireland to recreate an Irish landscape, planted with native Irish flora and displaying a stone from each of Ireland’s counties (Battery Park city Authority 2008).

Just like commemorations in Rwanda strive to establish the genocide against Tutsi as a cosmopolitan memory, Tamils aspires to gain recognition for the atrocities in Sri Lanka as a genocide against Tamils and a global – rather than only Tamil – concern. In this case, however, few in the international community are convinced that the killings fit the definition of genocide (cf. Walton 2015). The narrative of the past brought out in the commemoration events thus provides a counter-narrative not only to the official Sri Lankan story of the war as a victory over terrorism, but also against the ignorance of the wider world. The demolishing of resting places for the maaveerar in northeastern Sri Lanka is perceived by many Tamils as part of the Sri Lankan government’s genocidal strategy. Reenacting the cemeteries in diasporic spaces can thus be seen as resistance against a still ongoing genocide.

For Maaveerar Naal in November 2018, more than a thousand people gathered at the land of the imaginary memorial park. The small monument with the freedom fighter had been stored away to give room for a tall structure where maaveerar parents were invited to light the flame of sacrifice. Hundreds of tombstones, each with a garlanded picture of a martyr, were placed around it. Tamils who had travelled from London and elsewhere in the UK did not let rain and wind distract them from the magnitude of the event. Due to difficulties of acquiring permissions, not much had moved forward with the memorial park. The tombs were put up only for the event, as were the large marquee tents in which further maaveerar portraits were displayed, speeches and music performed, and food, Tamil Eelam publications, calendars and sweaters sold. The idea of a Tamil land in the UK was indeed important to many participants. For other diaspora Tamils, though, the fact that this Maaveerar Naal event competed with the one held in London was a cause of aggravation. The lieux de mémoire under construction thus had ambivalent meanings. On the one hand, the envisioned park functioned as a small piece of homeland established in the country of exile, symbolically transferring the struggle for remembrance, justice and liberation from there to here. On the other, it symbolized competition and lack of unity in the Tamil diaspora.

The trees, the street, the river

This third section of the article highlights additional examples of how diaspora commemoration is anchored in the material and territorial (or aspires to be so) and incorporated into natural or urban landscapes.

In September 2015, the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam, one of the diaspora organizations aspiring to take the lead in the continued Tamil struggle, launched a ‘Trees for Justice’ campaign. The idea was to plant trees for all Tamil lives lost in what the organization called the genocide against Tamils in Sri Lanka. The trees would be planted in many different countries where Tamils lived, reminding of the lives lost, and – maybe more importantly – forming part of a campaign for justice and accountability.⁷ ‘I am the one who brought the tree from New Jersey to New York’, a Tamil activist told me. He went on to recount how key diaspora leaders had planted this particular tree in front of a school, as well as trees in other states in the US. For Maaveerar Naal, a group of Tamils had gathered in front of the tree to light candles (interview, 2016).

The ‘Trees for Justice’ campaign and other tree planting initiatives by Tamil diaspora actors, illustrate how the aesthetics and materiality of memorials can relate closely to nature (cf. Svendsen and Campbell 2010). The symbolism of the trees taking root in the countries where Tamil migrants have settled, while commemorating lives lost in the homeland, remind of the ideas behind the memorial park. However, rather than being restricted to one physical space, the placing of trees in a myriad of different public places around the world would reflect the global presence of the Tamil people and their establishment in their new countries of residence.

This too is a memorial project which is more of an aspiration than an implemented reality, though. Gaining permission to plant a tree in a park or other public place, activists had learnt, often required tedious efforts, and some of the trees planted hence remained without plaques that recognize the victims they honor. ‘In the future’, one interviewee said, ‘our goal is to put the name on each tree. [The trees] represent their lives, their lost loved ones. The trees will give oxygen [just like the] people who died gave oxygen to the freedom struggle’ (interview, 2016).

A similar physical linking of place of residence and homeland through memorialization appears in Ramírez and Serpente’s depiction of a tree-planting ceremony carried out in the UK by members of the Chilean diaspora in memory of those killed and disappeared during Pinochet’s dictatorship. With the planting of trees, the authors argue, ‘the disappeared are offered a hospitable space in a new landscape’, while the ceremony itself offered ‘a diasporic place of connection’ that was ‘able to blur and transcend the distinction between here and there’ (Ramírez and Serpente 2012, 194).

In July 2018, Vanni Avenue was inaugurated in Markham, Greater Toronto Area. That the street was named after a region in northern Sri Lanka was thanks to consistent work of a Tamil city councilor. He explained:

When you say Vanni it is not just the name. The next generation of Tamils and Canadians are going to think “What is Vanni?” They will learn the history, about the massacres […] When the next generation wants to do their master’s theses, PhD theses, these things … it will make them think (interview, 2016).

The will to remember hence makes also the signs indicating street names into enduring memorial objects where diaspora groups can inscribe their presence in their country of settlement and forge a symbolic link to the homeland.

Examples of the will to remember by imbuing artefacts with meaning were found also in the aspirations of Rwandans in the diaspora: ‘One thing we talk about is to have a museum’, one survivor of genocide said. ‘Like the way they [the Jews] have museums. Not as many, not only in America, [but] at least have museums of […] if you have like some small materials of … what we kept from genocide’. This interviewee goes on to mention objects which have gained special meaning as they are among the very few things preserved from the time – for instance her mother’s shoes from the family’s struggle to escape the killers:

She had shoes on through the entire hiding. They were white, but now they are brown. They never got torn. She was able to wear those shoes through the entire time, in muddy places. I told her: “Those shoes, makes sure they are kept, to remind [of that struggle]”. […]We don’t have many things. I asked a few survivors, one in New York City, he has his dad’s jacket, I don’t know how he found it, and another few things (interview, 2016).

The tree planting, the street name and the envisioned museum are all examples of attempts to physically anchor memory in diasporic spaces. A last instance of diaspora memorialization relates to something material, yet fluid – a river. A member of a survivors’ organization in Montreal described one of the rituals at the yearly commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda:

We go in a silent march […] to Fleuve Saint Laurent. Every person takes one flower and throws it on the river. Our loved ones, we never got a chance to bury them. Most were killed and thrown in the river. So it is our way to put flowers on the cemeteries of our loved. It is the idea also … that all water comes together at a certain point. We hope that those flowers put on Fleuve Saint Laurent will reach them [our loved ones] where they are (interview, 2016).

The river is thus, for the mourners, a memorial which is not fixed in space. Just like the idea of being a diaspora relates to movement and interconnectedness between home and host country, water moves and connects the two. While all memorials are continuously subject to reinterpretation and therefore fluid in their function and meaning, those constructed of objects from nature, such as trees and rivers, are even more obviously unfinished, as they live, grow and move (cf. Svendsen and Campbell 2010; Ramírez and Serpente 2012).

The fluidity at play in attempts at anchoring memory in physical objects and places gains a further dimension through virtual representation. The flowers on Saint Lawrence River also appeared on social media, as did the Vanni Street sign and the tree planting ceremonies, making the acts of commemoration available to a broader audience. Attempts at fixing memory of a violent past in matter and place thus have significance beyond their materiality, as representations of how remembrance takes physical form.

Conclusions

‘It is commonly assumed that memory, community and geographical proximity belong together’, Levy and Sznaider note (2002, 88). As is apparent from the commemorative efforts discussed above, this is far from true. This article has drawn attention to the diaspora as a space for memorialization and showed how place and materiality take on special meanings in exile. Some of these meanings are directly related to the geographical distance between people in the diaspora and the locations where atrocities occurred and loved ones are buried or went missing. A sense of separation from places of pain, graves and the homeland informs the ways in which memorialization is materialized; memorial sites, physical markers and monuments can produce experiences of connection and of ‘being there’ or be ascribed the task of (partially) substituting for the diaspora’s inability to be present.

Moreover, when the narratives of past atrocities are contested and freedoms restricted in the homeland, the countries of exile offer space to engage in memorialization and voice alternative stories that are unthinkable ‘back home’. In the Sri Lankan case, collective memorialization of Tamil victims has been severely restricted since the war ended. Even though a change of government in 2015 enabled some more space, Tamils have continued to be harassed by security forces when attempting to honor their dead (PEARL 2016, 4). The Tamil diaspora, however, is sizable and well-organized, and has been able to memorialize collectively and on a large-scale, without effectual interference by the Sri Lankan state. The Rwandan state is more efficiently governing and mobilizing its diaspora (see Turner 2013), but also in this case, exile opens up opportunities for alternative commemorative practices and stories. Earlier research had already noted that mobilization around commemoration is different within the country and in the diaspora. For example, the genocide in Srebrenica, Karabegovic (2014) argues, is memorialized in a less divisive way in the diaspora, while according to Schlund-Vials (2012) genocide memorialization by Cambodians in the United States needs to resist the amnesia of both the homeland state and the host state. This article adds a spatial and material dimension to the understanding of diaspora memorialization by pointing to the opportunities – and limitations – for diaspora groups to appropriate space and establish memorials in the countries they live in.

The examples discussed in this article also suggest that memorialization – and its anchoring in space and materiality – forms part of a home-making process and positions the diaspora in the society where they reside. When it comes to the Bosnian diaspora, Halilovich (2015) contends that ‘by sharing their stories of suffering and survival with the host communities and societies they settled in’, the diaspora inscribes ‘their own memories in the new socio-cultural and political landscape’. This process of inscribing diaspora memories in a new landscape can be very physical. Peach and Gale (2003) studied the relationship between minority faith groups and British urban planning. They showed how as newcomers, minority groups used residential houses as places of worship. After a time, they adapted existing building to their needs. As they became more established, the groups went on to build their own premises, initially with discrete design and later with traditional architectural features fully displayed. For diasporas originating in countries affected by massive collective traumas like war and genocide, the establishment of memorial places and structures may follow a similar trajectory. The many monuments in North America and Europe commemorating the historical tragedies of the Jews, Irish, Ukrainians and Armenians, can be seen as the result of successful processes towards giving their memories a more permanent and visible presence in the countries they inhabit, while also framing them as cosmopolitan memory. So far, the material marks that diaspora groups from Rwanda and Sri Lanka have been able to make are rather marginal. But as the groups become more established, they may continue to inscribe their stories in their new societies in more enduring and noticeable ways.

We should not, however, as Young (2008, 363) warns, ‘mistake material presence and weight for immutable permanence’. As also Edkins (2003, 134) discusses, monuments and memorial spaces do not need to – and cannot – be permanent. This is well illustrated in the Sri Lankan Tamil case, where temporary tombs are put up for commemoration events and then stored away. For the Tamil diaspora, memorialization – and the urge to remember – is largely driven by a sense of loss, absence and desire; the subjugated liberation struggle, the demolished cemeteries and memorials in the homeland, the geographical separation of people in the diaspora from their land and loved ones, and the dream of an independent Tamil state.

In the endeavor to create a memorial park to Tamil martyrs, the conflicting narratives of the past pursued by the Tamil diaspora and the Sri Lankan government do not confront directly. Rather, the land in rural UK is a safe zone – ‘a hospitable space in a new landscape’ (Ramírez and Serpente 2012, 194) – from which a shared memory and identity can be nurtured and the amnesia of the world resisted. In the case of the monument in Brussels, on the other hand, the memory conflict is played out at the very site, between diaspora groups with competing understandings of the past. In a very direct and territorial way, this conflict illustrates how it is often the very contestation over the past that keeps memory alive and makes memorialization urgent (cf. Eltringham and Maclean 2014, 2). Through contestation, and through the space opened up away (or partly away) from the control by the homeland state, places which carry no ‘natural’ connection to the diaspora’s homeland and past are imbued with meaning. Land, sculptures, trees or rivers – in all their fluidity – come to serve as glue (cf. Agnew 2005, 19) that holds together the past and the present, the here and the there.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank all those who generously shared their knowledge and provided practical help during the research. Many thanks also to the Heritage Research Group at the School of Global Studies, participants at the biannual Peace Research Conference in Sweden and the two anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and valuable input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Notes on contributors

Camilla Orjuela

Camilla Orjuela is Professor of Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research has focused on diaspora mobilization, peace activism, identity politics, corruption in post-war societies, memory conflicts and transitional justice. Her research experience in Sri Lanka goes back to the 1990s, while more recently she has also done work on Rwanda and Myanmar. Currently, she studies memorialization and justice after famines.

Notes

1. The study thus captures the practices, views and meaning-making of those who actively pursue memorialization, and leaves out the many descendants from Rwanda and Sri Lanka who do not take an interest in such activities.

2. http://www.tomfrantzen.be/en/arta.htm (accessed 24 November 2017).

3. Brussels Remembers lists some 600, http://www.brusselsremembers.com/(accessed 19 September 2018).

4. In this article, I refer to the whole Rwandan community outside Rwanda as the Rwandan diaspora, while being aware that among diaspora representatives there is a tendency to only label those who support the RPF government as ‘Rwandan diaspora’.

5. Also the date – 6 April, rather than the official 7 April – is a provocation and points to a disagreement about when the genocide started.

6. This eagerness is not only about the Rwandan government’s wish to use the genocide to retain legitimacy and power, but also reflects its concern with the continued spread of genocide ideology.

7. http://www.tgte-homeland.org/trees-for-justice-campaign-launched-by-tgte-to-demand-justice-for-tamils-killed-in-sri-lanka/(accessed 25 September 2018).