History Bearing, History Suffering and History Creating — Putting

Wijenaike vividly captures the plight of Sri Lankans after the tortured memory of the civil war in Sri Lanka during 1980-2009. An Enemy Within (1998) resembles a gory catalogue of the harrowing experiences of some of the victims of the Central Bank bomb blast of January 1996 that extensively damaged the city and its environment which constitute the heart of the commercial centre of the nation's capital, Colombo. The author tells us that the experiences recorded are factual, though she has taken the liberty in rendering them in fictional terms. The paper, in particular, seeks to explore three main stages involved during the traumatic situation i.e., 1) Pre-war, 2) War and 3) Post-war. Raghavendra Rao succinctly sums up the lengthy thought as, “history bearing, history suffering and history creating” (159). Nietzsche's “On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life” creates a typology of three modes of historical consciousness of the country in particular, which fits Wijenaike's portrayal of disassociation and transmutation as well.