Review: Island of Blood by Anita Pratap

On reading Island of Blood: Frontline Reports From Sri Lanka, Afghanistan And Other South Asian Flashpoints I was struck by the fact that one learns more about Pratap and her careerism than one learns about the conflict zones under scrutiny. Anita Pratap is an award-winning journalist who has worked for the Indian Express, Time Magazine, India Today and eventually CNN.
The book itself is essentially a biographical account of her experiences reporting from these various conflict zones. Biographical accounts written by journalists are common enough, but it is the peculiar narcissism that mars Pratap’s work that really strikes the reader. In these kinds of biographical accounts it is acceptable for the author to provide an account of their feelings and comportment towards the incidents under analysis, but when it obscures an understanding of the encounters there is a problem. And this is precisely what happens in Island of Blood.
Although Pratap discusses coverage and incidents in Afghanistan and India, I will focus on her discussion of Sri Lanka which substantially makes up her book anyway. This is partly because many of the flaws become most evident there.
First, let me say that there are some positive aspects to the book. Pratap recounts a number of interesting and enlightening encounters: running from the IPKF, covering the 1984 riots in Colombo, taking note of the 1989 JVP uprising, and smuggling a boy out Batticaloa (to name just a few). She also adequately recounts some of the historical and contextual connections that her encounters are grounded in (however, there are other books – like Swamy’s Tigers of Lanka that realize this goal more effectively). But in spite of these positive matters the book, I would say, is fatally flawed.
The initial problem is with her narcissistic and self-serving style of writing. The horrors that she witnesses are delivered almost exclusively through her own emotional reactions and this – as a consequence – results in the book being focused on her rather than the victims of the attacks. Her narcissism is painfully obvious in the following self-assessments: “Akbar had planted the seeds of my reputation as a daring, fearless journalist” (p.52), “But crisis always transforms me into Ms Professional.” (p.127), “I guess I’m tough.” (p.129), and so on. The worst case is the painful-to-read epilogue in which she says (amongst numerous other self applauding comments):

“All through, I maintained my calm, always the determined Ms Professional, journeying to in accessible areas, reporting, taking notes, dredging details and information that no one else could, faithfully telling the world what I’d seen and heard, competing to be the first to break the news…” and so on. Also, “While reporting these tragic events, there were times when I felt faint, felt ill. But succumbing would have meant missing the deadline.” (p.273)

The epilogue goes on like this at length and these seemingly endless comments are distracting for the reader. The reader does not want to hear an author pump up his or her ego. The merits or flaws of the author are for the reader to decide based upon the actions and successes of the writer. For Pratap to insist on her journalistic excellence is painful to read and insults the readers intelligence.
There is also the troubling matter of Pratap’s impartiality. Pratap explains that she is Prabharkaran’s preferred journalist – something Pratap takes some pride in explaining. To some degree this betrays her loyalties:

“I shared the Tigers’ vision of their destiny. I was sure Pirabhakaran’s uncompromising commitment to Eelam would ensure his trajectory as the most powerful leader of the Sri Lankan Tamils. So I ignored the other groups and concentrated on the activities of the LTTE. Needless to say, this endeared me to the Tigers. They felt that I was the only one who understood their spirit, their superiority, and their inevitable pre-eminent role in the Sri Lankan ethinic conflict.” (p.71)

What she means to say is that ‘needless to say, this endeared the Tigers to me.’ She gets it around the wrong way of course, but could this be a Freudian slip? Pratap is certainly enamoured by Prabharkaran, describing him at length as charismatic, muscular and decisive. Yet she omits any detailed examination of his brutal leadership and morally unscrupulous activities. At one point in the book she declares that she, “did not want to put him in the spotlight” and that she wanted to understand his “psychology.” Yet the book has a certain humanistic tone (she even admits to this in her epilogue) and she seems eager to let her audience know about the immoral activities that are executed in Sri Lanka. So why not ask Prabharkan uncomfortable questions? Is it because she wants to preserve her premier position as favoured journalist? There is no reason why she cannot have both (Robert Fisk achieves this with Usama bin Laden). Yet she has a double standard because she is happy to ask difficult questions of Sinhalese killers (and that, after all, is what these people are). For example she disapproves of Premadasa Udagampola for his brutal crackdown on JVP supporters. She describes him as having become:

“… a burly, brutal engine of revenge taking pleasure in exterminating his enemies. His campaign of terror was even more ruthless and effective that the JVP’s” (p.110)

While conducting an interview with him, he produces a gun and places it on the table in front of them in order to intimidate her. She replies:

“’That gun is not going to stop me from asking tough questions.’ A faint quiver of a smile flickered across Gill’s stern face, and eh answered my questions, staring at me intently while his fingers caressed the revolver.” (p.111)

Why is it acceptable to ask tough questions of Udagampola and not Prabharkaran? If she is engaging in some kind of moral awareness project, which cannot be denied, then she has a responsibility to be even in her interviews. And she does, after all, judge Udagampola to be morally unpraiseworthy. Consider the following extract:

“I caught a gleam in his eye. An indescribable gleam. Years later, when somebody asked me to picture evil, what came to my mind was that gleam.” (p.111) (Small point: First, she says the gleam is indescribable but then characterizes it as “evil”. This is inconsitent).

The book implies that she has been charmed by Prabharakan in some way and that she agrees with his politics (although she seems reticent on the matter of his brutality).
At one point, after an interview and having learnt that Prabharkaran likes Chinese takeaway, she quips: “Surely he is entitled to some good food.” (p.123). It seems self- evident that, no, he is not so entitled since he denies basic services (let alone luxuries) to his own people, the people he is precisely trying to protect. Instead, Pratap seems to regard his resourcefulness at being able to obtain Chinese takeout in spite of the embargos against him as praiseworthy. If she had have bothered to explicate that Prabharkaran is feasting on Chinese takeout (in fact, growing fat, as she points out) while his own Tamil people starve due to his intractability, there would be something morally useful at play. As it stands it only goes to show how uncompassionate Prabharkaran is for his own people and how gullible Pratap is.
Pratap describes at length how resourceful and talented Prabharkaran is and how well organized the LTTE are. This is fine (it may well be true), but is there any need to glorify them? On Prabharkaran:

“That’s the critical difference between Piribhakaran and most politicians (p.121)…He never boasted or threatened [to kill people]. He just did it…” (p. 122).

When one makes statements like this, one better quickly add that it is morally impermissible to assassinate people arbitrarily, hold extra-judicial killings, abduct children and force them to fight against their will. But Pratap does not do this. The above comment seems to be is praise of Prabharkaran’s ability to kill people. Better for Pratap just to report that Prabharkaran is good at killing people merely by explaining the facts. She endangers her own credibility by making these kinds of value judgements in such an arbitrary fashion.
On the whole, Prataps moral aptitude can be called into question in various ways. At the beginning of the book she explains that having had a privileged childhood, the 1984 riots helped her:

“…grow up, made me realize that another world of violence, horror, injustice and brutality exists. It prepared me for life, especially for the personal challenges that were soon to come hurtling my way” (p.52)

Fine. But surely any vaguely sensitive person is aware of these horrors already? If it requires one to actually witness such atrocities in order to be morally sensitive to them, then it says few positive things about the moral fortitude of such an individual. On the whole, Pratap comes across as hopelessly naïve in these passages.
If that were her intention, there are better ways to explain her journalistic development (i.e. as a story of her development from a simple reporter to a towering authority on south asia). I do not want to suggest that Pratap is morally autistic, but is rather confused in her moral convictions. This is somewhat evident by her inconsistencies and implausible explanations for moral failure. For example, she later says, having witnessed looters murdering and burning innocent Tamils on the streets of Colombo:

“Those were not men looting and burning and murdering on the streets of Colombo. They were demons escaped from some infernal region of hell. Most of them were drunk. It’s not possible for human beings in their senses to commit such ghoulish crimes.” (p.57)

But of course they do. Pratap’s pseudo-moralizing doesn’t help her case. She should either report the bare facts or engage in the business of moral debate maturely. This doesn’t involve her simply writing off morally impermissible acts as being perpetrated by the possessed. This is nonsense because it implies that the mass killings and violence that go on in Sri Lanka (or anywhere else for that matter) are not motivated by conscious, calculating minds, but instead are motivated by some other – possibly supernatural – action. The trouble is that many of these crimes are often committed by knowing and thinking participants. Prabharkaran, for example, purposefully murders civilians for the supposedly rational purpose of the founding of the state of Eelam. Only a particularly zealous theist would suggest he is possessed.
Her moral confusion is also evident when she later presses her driver to continue on in spite of the danger quite unaware – it would seem – that she has a responsibility to consider the welfare of her employee (p.107-109). Why, given the dangers, could she not hire a self-drive vehicle? From her own account, the driver was eager not to go on and – apparently – suffered a mental break-down on account of her insistence (“he was hunched forward in his seat, clutching the steering wheel tightly – out of fear or to stop his trembling…I felt sorry for him, I felt bad about bullying him, but I had a job to do (p.109)). The encounter is meant to illustrate how frightened the local people were and how brutal the police were at that time (all true), but it indirectly shows how career orientated Pratap is and how she (in this instance) disregarded the needs of those in her care.
Her pseudo-philosophizing extends in other directions. After witnessing a man (who was later murdered) voting in spite of the promise that there would be retribution, Pratap writes:

“Societies have survived only through the heroism of such ordinary men and women who live and die, faithfully living out their principles, undiscovered by the media. In many ways their actions, their beliefs, their very existence remains, like them, simple, ordinary, innocent, without being exaggerated and distorted, lionized or demonized, as inevitably happens when presented through the prism of the media.” (p.113).

This flowery monologue only illustrates how desperate Pratap is to say something profound. Various profound things could be said I suppose, but in her case they seem to result in tired clichés and poor prose. (Incidentally, she refers to the above man as “A god-fearing Buddhist…” (p.113), but Buddhists don’t believe in god so this is nonsense). Her melodramatic style of writing is especially evident in the following account:

“Sri Lanka, this enchanting tear-drop shaped island in the Indian ocean, began to resemble a drop of blood. Murder became the great leveler, sparing neither guerilla nor parliamentarian, rich nor poor, soldier nor farmer, priest nor president. It became an island where the blood of its ordinary and extraordinary inhabitants continuously spilled and seeped into its red earth. An island of blood, swirling with broken dreams and broken hearts.” (p.114)

I’m not sure this style is suitable for this kind of writing. In fact it is more like fiction prose (the quality of which is up to the reader as far as I am concerned – I don’t think much of it). Basically, it just doesn’t fit with the tone and nature of the writing which seeks to expose facts, not mysticize historical event. I cannot say much in favour of her writing style at all, which is amazing given that she is a print-journalist and has presumably written countless news reports.
I don’t mean to say that the violence that goes on in Sri Lanka is the explicit domain of Prabharkaran and the LTTE. The Sri Lankan government and other paramilitary factions have perpetrated their own brutal crimes. In fact, Pratap is quite adept at describing the crimes executed by these latter groups. But that is precisely the problem – she is inconsistent in her reporting. Why in heavens name did Pratap not interview and child soldiers or investigate their abductions? These are unique activities peculiar to the LTTE and Pratap was in a special position to engage in their investigation. Island of Blood is satisfactory as an account of the conflict in Sri Lanka, and, if one can get past the self-congratulatory prose, an enjoyable enough read. The problem is rather with the failure of the author to engage in a morally meaningful way with the material that she is confronted with. I think this is an important aspect of journalism that should not be overlooked or trivialized.