Complexities in the Re-Fashioning of a State through the Lens of Romesh Gunesekera's Noontide Toll

After the outbreak of Elam War in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009, it takes only few years for the Sri Lankan forces to defeat the Tamil separatist guerrilla or LTTE. After that war the country seems to be standing at the cross-roads bewildered as to the direction it should take regarding the post war peace building and attempts to sort out the ethnic cohesion and inclusive developments. The end of a civil war does not necessarily mean the end of ethno political cohesion rather it redefines the war in the condition of no war. Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll (2014) revisits that scars of war and problematic of reconstruction in the context of civil war, and highlights the gaps and conflicts in the process of nation building. It incorporates death, memory, trauma as a tool to project that conflict and interrogates the past, present and future of a nation. A psychological approach to the text will examine the disruptive experiences that impact the individual’s emotional faculty and their perception to the external world. In the background of official history, the private history which remains always hidden comes out in the spotlight with Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll. State takes up the strategy of total amnesia and oblivion to refashion itself which is in contrast with the post war traumatic disorder that the people face after the war in the process of rehabilitation. This paper intends to highlight the complexities in re-fashioning the state in an aftermath situation through the lens of Noontide Toll (2014).

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