When Art Mirrors Agony

Since time immemorial, a piece of art or literature has carried the power to unsettle the authorities, to shake the hierarchy, break the complacency of the world, and often bring peace in the most unexpected ways.

- ANUSREE PV

Be it Picasso's anti-war painting 'Guernica' or Ernest Hemingway's 'Farewell to Arms', they were reiterations of the devastation and futility of wars.

From the Russian Civil War, World Wars I and II, to the Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, or the Myanmar Civil War, the brunt of this barbaric power play has always been borne by the innocent ones. Though these atrocities make it to the newspapers' front page, to the TV news channels, to social media, with a flip, a scroll, we can evade this extremely triggering content. Is it because it is happening in someone else's backyard? Or is it because we are powerless?

It is unfathomable to bring even the slightest change in the situation. But art, a piece of literature, or a poem, a painting, or a photograph, holds enormous potential to disturb the status quo, the structure, the hierarchy, the government. Some are so powerful and explicit that they have been banned. Artists and writers talk about replicating the angst, grief, sheets through strokes and words from which fierce colours of emotions ooze out and amorphous sentiments take forms.

AS Vijitharan, a writer who was born in Sri Lanka and came to Tamil Nadu as a refugee, has been carrying the memories of the Civil War. Intuitively understanding the pain and grief of the victims of war, the minorities, and scarred by the wounds of war, of having to live a life of displacement, devoid of proper living conditions, the mere thought of war is beyond perturbing for Vijitharan. He says he has been following the Palestinians' issues for five years. "It's more like our story."

A friend's death by suicide at a refugee camp in Tamil Nadu was the point that made him think resolutely of articulating the heart-wrenching grief. Among his other poignant works, his recent book, 'Song of the Martyrs', a translated version of his Tamil work 'Marithor Paadalgal', he says, is a compilation of the last words of the people who have been killed in the war.