The Fall of the House of Maggona

Kudawa
We arrived late Sunday night to the Maggonna house. I was excited upon arrival, even though the jet lag was tugging at me. From the entry to this part of the village, it's like entering another world. The entrance is a small opening to a lane behind Monis bakery. The bakery is on the main Galle road that runs down the coast from Colombo to Matara and Galle. It's packed with little shops up and down it. After weaving through the first row of businesses and homes, the little lane opens way to a row of housing.

Debris from the Tsunami lines the sides of the dirt road. The hardest hit areas of the island are in the far south, east, and northeast of the country. This area was damaged and in some places badly. People died and were displaced, but it was not on the scale of the villages immediately south of here. Still, as we drove a few yards in the night, we saw open sea from the road where the poor people had lived, and on the right, just before the Magonna house, was a small encampment: UNCHD read the tent tops.

This part of Maggona village, Kudawa, or little rock, sits on its own small peninsula. It is formed by two beaches that come together to form a small triangle extending out of the coastline. The beaches jut together against a series of rock formations to make two small bays at the tip. One of the bookending beaches leads to the town of Beruwela to the south and the other stretches long towards Colombo.

Each of the middle bays can't be longer than 300 yards each. The second one is my favorite. The rocks that guard it are covered with palms and other trees that ascend up 100 feet, just enough for a good children's climb. My mother and her siblings swam in this bay in the shallow water near the rocks. There's a fresh water well just off the beach where they could bathe without having to walk the 100 meters to have to do it at home. My grandfather caught lobsters off the rocks for fun and food, while his in-laws carried on their generational work of netting the fish in the bay for their livelihood.

My great grandfather's family built a house that directly overlooked the bay. I'm not sure for how many generations before that they lived there. My mother said she was always scared to go there because the pigs would gather to feed off of food and excrement. The noisy pigs would wait around the outhouse for food to drop from humans. It would scare her to death, and now I really understand the Muslim perspective on eating pigs.

The Catholics on the Plantation
My family is Catholic, and we eat that which eats our shit(pigs!!). The Portuguese transplanted Catholicism here early in their colonial period, circa the 1500's. According to my uncle Dennis, our family's original family name is 'Ponninbaduge' which he believes is a Malayali word for 'from St. Thomas.' Malayali is the language spoken in Goa, the Christian section of the south Indian state of Kerala. Dennis picked up this piece of historical deduction from a National Geographic special, and it is he who provided much of the background for this account. He speculates on our roots between the Goans and the Portuguese and the people who inhabited the island previously. We definitely got Perera from the Portuguese, but whether that was through intermarriage or forced name swapping is unclear.

My great grandfather grew up on that hill behind Kaduwa bay. He became an English teacher in a Catholic elementary school. It was at the same that the British wrested control of the entire island from the Dutch on the coast and the defeated the Kandyan kings who had resisted the Europeans bitterly for 400 years in the central hill country.

The British began immediately transforming a colony used primarily as a mercantile and trading outpost to a plantation state. They turned the hill country, home of the Kandyan kingdoms into a vast network of tea plantations. To make it possible, they needed a few good natives that could speak English and be their eyes and ears. They needed men who did not have loyalty to the militant upcountry folk whose land and social networks were being appropriated. They recruited my great grandfather, a Catholic from the low country, to help the Whites manage the plantation and its labor.

Following his new profession, my great grandfather went to Kandy. He met a woman there with whom he had children but never married. It was a scandalous thing, especially in those days, but that was her lot. She was the illegitimate daughter of Thomas Cameron, a British planter. He had his will with a local Sinhalese girl to produce her, my great grandmother. The circumstances of her conception were never spoken about, “out of respect,” my uncle Dennis tells me. But it was anything but respectful that the little girl lived with the mark of her masters with no claim to them. This is the story of every plantation across the world.

Before leaving back to Europe, the planter tried to make up for his ill-doing by leaving the mother with a track of paddy lands. In her death and in her wisdom, my great great grandma left the land to her daughter instead of any male child. The daughter, however, completed the circle by falling in love with a Sinhalese plantation employee, my great grandfather, whose sons would become the first natives in charge of running the plantation. My great grandfather never married her.

Nor did he bring her home to Maggona. He married another woman from the upcountry who he did bring to the little house overlooking the bay. But he also felt guilty after time, and so, after seven years, he brought the three eldest children of the illegitimate woman with illegitimate children to live in Maggona, to be raised as part of the family.

My grandfather, Peter, the eldest of those children, was raised in Maggona in Catholic schools. He was a rebel, fighting against all the tither and fro that was his history. He was mad about being removed from his mother when he was seven. He was mad again to have to leave Maggona and go back to the hill country. He wanted to be a lawyer, but his father was retiring from the plantation, and the Whites were tiring of directly ruling the natives.

National independence was coming, and they chose Peter to follow his father's lead. He refused, and ran away twice. They found him and made him into a gentleman. He got to the highest position a native could have in the plantation system, effectively running the place for the absentee owners. However, it was not until after independence that he became an official plantation superintendent. He became the first Sri Lankan to be a manager of a British plantation. This is one of those dubious 'firsts' that colonized people's achieve. To some it's a badge of honor and high achievement, and to others it represents a sign of capitulation to foreign powers. For my mother, sister, and brothers it is something they say unequivocally as a monumental achievement in the face of British discrimination.

My grandfather headed his family from the seat of the plantation. He put his children, my mother and her siblings, in Colombo Catholic boarding schools to be educated. The children returned home every few months in between school sessions, sometimes going to the plantation house in the hills and on other holidays returning to Maggona.

Peter groomed his boys to be plantation managers. Francis and Dennis obliged, sometimes going against their own kind constitutions. My grandfather had a reputation of being a clear boss and disciplinarian who ruled with a fair hand.--At least according to my family. When nationalization came to the plantations, Francis and Dennis left the country to join their sisters. All of Peter's children eventually left the country. My grandfather's gravestone has a quote from the Bible and a line from a 'Negro spiritual.' It was a Mahalia Jackson ballad that he heard on the hit parade, a popular radio program in the 1950's.

The Mahadel and Mudalali
All of the villagers on Kudawa peninsula come from fishing people's stock including my great grandfather. Even though he left the tradition in the late 1800's, his family continued in the life of the village. One of his daughter's, Katherine, wedded a prominent fishing family. The family spread from the house on the hill to others until the entire jetty was almost completely made up of relatives.

I have to clarify in calling them fishermen, however. The family insists that they are not fishermen. Fishermen are those that go out on boats, pull the line, catch the fish. Instead, my family are Mahadel, 'managers of the big net.' They oversee the operation of harvesting the big net that goes out immediately into the bay. They employee the men that pull the line. They own the nets, and they have status. They are village aristocracy. The fishermen, especially the Mahadel, are the second highest caste in the Sinhalese order. The fishing people and the farmers are the highest castes because they do the king's work: they produce. They provide the sustenance of rice and meat to the entire community.

Katherine, my grandfather's step sister, married, PattyApu, the eldest son of the fishing clan. She gave birth to Joseph, Nilan, Crescent, Iona, Annette, and Lalita. Everyone reports that PattyApu was a grand man. He was dark, with a large frame, big stomach, booming voice, and an engulfing presence. He was the mudalali(big man) of this area and staunchly conservative. He supported the UNP (United National Party) to his death, It is the party of the owning classes.

“When the Prime Minister would visit this district during election time, it was PattyApu that would host him,” says my Aunt Doreen.

He and his brothers were the Mahadel. They ran the place. He refused to wear Western dress. He always carried himself in a white sarong and white traditional Sri Lankan shirt. You could hear him bellowing from the bay, says my aunt, whenever a good catch came in. The big mudalali would jump and dance while holding his umbrella and throw fish to all the poor people that would assemble. The honor was handed down to the the three brothers, Joseph, Nilan, and Crescent. The family controlled the peninsula and they established hereditary rights to harvest the two little bays.


Magic on the Bay
This morning I was awoken at 6a.m. by a pair of dodo birds doing their chores, and the morning's call to the mosque. It reminded me of hearing the same call from the parking lot of the Workers Center as the mosque in Liberty City blares its speakers in the afternoon.

I wearied to the window and looked out on the trees, and the people already bustling and the children in white uniforms going to school. In the road in front of the house there is a statue of the Virgin Mary and further down another one of St. Thomas Aquinas. The island is eighty percent Buddhist, but this area of the coast is Catholic and Muslim. The two groups have cohabited, fished, and farmed this area for hundreds of years. The Muslims have fished in this place even longer than the Catholics. They've been here for a thousand years or more since the Arab traders made their rounds to this island.

I got up and with my uncle and brother walked to the bay.

I remember when I was here just a year ago with Marcia and my little son Nas who was just 1 ½ at the time. We stopped by the Maggona house because one of my mother's aunts had died; it was a by-chance visit to pay respect to our relatives. I had been here before, but always in passing to go further south. Our plan this time was to to go Hikaduwa where the resorts begin to check into a hotel, to relax, to vacation.

It was on the way here last time that my mother began telling us the history of my family on this peninsula- or at least it was the first time I really heard it. The stories from my childhood and my mental tree of relatives began coming together in that moment as we entered the little lane. When we came through the black gates of the Maggona house, I was struck by its beauty, simplicity, and grandeur. It has has a large well- kept yard with palms, bamboo, and a thousand plants kept in a line in front of the house. The sand in the driveway was swept in patterns, which turns out to be a daily early morning ritual.

The house itself was large, open, and immaculately kept inside and out. It was built by PattyApu, the Mahadel in the 1950's. From the outside it has an almost art deco look to it. There are two end rooms which are rounded with windows wrapping around them. The entrance way is squared with a row of windows that oval at the ends. It opens to a huge living room, sparsely furnished with red clay floors. The floors turn your feet into the color of the red clay, just as the beetle nut that the people chew turn their lips a brick crimson.

Before I could make it into the house with the baby, my mother, who had gone in first, came out quickly and said in Sinhala, “let's go, the nets are coming in, the nets are coming in.”

Incredulous to what she was talking about, I followed—if nothing else to let Nas get a little running room in this beautiful place. She took us down the little sandy path between houses and trees not more than 100meters. As we passed she hurriedly explained how in each house there had been someone related to us.

As she talked we scuttled upon the little bay which was busy with activity. There were some ten little boats upon the shore, nets, and a lot of men scurrying around in sarongs.

“Come, come,” said my mother.

She passed through the men as I followed behind a bit hesitantly. We were getting into their business, and it felt like an intimate secret. As the men began all looking at us, one of them came up and embraced my mother and began talking to her casually. It turned out to be Nilan, her cousin. After a few minutes Nilan excused himself, he was leading the operation.

On one end of the bay, men began pulling what appeared to be a rope, in from the water, but it was confusing to me. They kept pulling and pulling and pulling, and it wasn't clear what they were bringing in or how. I looked out to the water and out in the open sea. About 300 yards away I spied a boat. A single man was perched on it with hundreds of seagulls surrounding him. They were needling in and out of the water. Now, that looked like fishing to me, but this activity on the shore was unfamiliar.

The line of men kept tugging as they stepped in rhythm toward the center of the bay where we were sitting on a boat on the shore. As they approached we could hear a frantic calling from them. It seemed chaotic at first, but as I listened there was rhyme and rhythm to it. If I was a music scholar I could call it some type of official musicological term, but for now I'll just call it hypnotic. The men were chanting, some high, some low. It was not in harmony but in layers. Th timing was irregular, in staggered layers. All the layers of sound mesmerized me. I couldn't tell one voice from the other nor from whose mouth the sounds came. The cries bounced around the bay.

It felt like I was listening in stereo. I couldn't believe my ears. I looked to the right to see if i could see the echo and realized that there was another line of men in step and rhythm coming from that side too-- in stereo!!

The two lines of men were converging, and as they collapsed their cries intermingled and separated as if they were playing with each other. The closer they came to each other the louder and faster paced was the layered song. I asked my mother what they were singing and she hadn't a clue. It wasn't Sinhala.

I looked out, and the little boat in the sea had come closer now. It was actually the guard boat for the enormous net that these two columns of men were bringing in. The net had expansed the entire bay. As they brought it in, the site and sound was a carnival, a novella, a sea theater. The little boat and the columns of men were reigning in on the feast between them. They could feel it within their reach. But the birds were at it first, while the men had to work. Hundreds of seagulls were frantically stealing the harvest while the men watched and were predisposed to pulling while the birds stole one fish at at time in front of them. And the men, almost solely to deny the thieves, worked feverishly.

Their chants had now become the pace of a pant. The two columns collapsed into one with men rotating from back to front. Looking and listening at the line as a whole, it was an organic machine, now in its best form. In trying to discern voices to the sounds I looked closer and noticed that there were old men and young. . And while I couldn't tell the difference in voices, there were clearly some that were pulling more than others. Some of the older men barely could get a hand on the rope, others even older, were pulling in the sea whole. Three of the young men darted in the shallow water to guide the catch home in the final push to shore. Their calls brought the net upon sand in a final flurry of calls.

The furious activity settled quiclky. Then, the quiet exhaustion gave way to obvious excitement at the anticipation of opening the net. Men, children, and the neighborhood dogs had come to see. My mother pulled us into the middle of the horde. As Nilan and another man gave the order to open the net, a final burst came from the men, the final note, and the net was opened.

Inside were thousands of fish and shrimp, and a sea snake that slivered to the top and escaped. They began picking out the fish and separating them. I was surprised not to see many bigger fish in the multitude. All of the men took their pick, which for many of them was their sustenance, the rest of the fish would go to market.

To think that I was connected to all of this somehow, was magical. As the men continued their work we went back to the house, but not before Nas jumped and swam in the water. He splashed around naked. He looked like he could be left here and be just as happy, his little bottom blackened in the sun. It made me wonder of what would have become of me had I not got taken across the planet. We fought Nas to return to the house where some of the men were washing down their catch to take home.

Death of the Mahadel
I learned yesterday that this one of the last times that Nilan and his brother, Crescent, had commanded that show. They've now left the fishing business and the centuries old tradition that was their culture and their honor. The end came quickly even though it had been rapidly deteriorating over the last 15 or so years.

It completely unraveled when Joseph, the eldest brother died. In addition to the Mahadel, the family operated a small furniture store on the main road and a toddy tapping operation that supplied sweet fresh coconut tree sap for distilling into Arrack. Joseph managed all the business and managed the money for all the houses and families. When he died, there was nothing but family cohesion to rule the the next steps. But that cohesion did not hold back dissension.

A scampering for resources ensued and those that got a hold of a lawyer first grabbed the wealth. So it happened. The law was used to break family and tradition. From the height of family's grandeur, Nilan, Crescent, Iona, and Lalita were left nothing The only thing they held was the deed to PattyApu's house, and the pride of keeping a good appearance. Even the nets were finally taken and sold to an outside operation that now manages the big net on Kaduwa bay.

It breaks everyone's heart. The loss is on a thousand levels.

Nilan and Crescent decided that all they could do was sell the house. They wanted to use the capital to start another business, perhaps selling used vans in the upcountry.

We asked, if we helped them to get nets, whether they would be willing to go back to the bay and pull in the big net.

They say that it no longer pays. A centuries long family tradition ended within a year.

“The costs are going up and the fish are going down,” Nilan says.

It is customary that the Mahadel pays everyone that puts a hand on the net and pay them equally. All the men are allowed to take home a part of the catch, no matter how much fish is caught. It is part of the honor and responsibility of being Mahadel. Sometimes fifty men show up, sometimes a hundred. Many old men come and many young. They all have to be paid.

Meanwhile the catch has continued to decline. After thousands of years of fishing, Nilan said the decline has been over the last 15 years. Everyone remembers when the catches were so bountiful. All of it was sold locally, and it made for a handsome life. In the last two decades, the lifestyle and economy that was the lifeblood of generations and the practice which sustained an entire culture and community has reversed.

Nilan says that the world temperature and ocean itself is changing. He's seen it transform, literally in front of his eyes. He claims that all the seasons have changed from the rains to the tides to the temperature. For generations they could predict year to year and season to season which fish they would catch, when, and how much. It was automatic, and they planned on it-always respecting the changes and the balance of the ocean. They were managing for themselves and future generations.

He says the fish came to the bay to feed upon the moss and the clams which made a city for themselves upon the rock shores.

“Go look,” he says to my uncle Dennis, “they're not there anymore. The fish have nothing to eat. The ocean is completely polluted The bay is now packed with boats that have outboard motors, for the fishermen who go out to the deep sea. It's too much traffic now,” Nilan suggests.

“If you were a fish would you come into the middle of a traffic heap?“

The small fishermen with outboard motors also are also discouraged. Most come from the same traditional background. They are Nilan's neighbors. Talking to them on the shore reveals a tortured recognition. They say that as more people need work, more are coming to fish. The shore is now lined with at least 40 boats. They are put into increased competition. On this bay, they all share cooperatively the catch of all the boats, even though the returns are getting smaller and smaller for each.

Aquinas is the name of the man that counts the fish. His brother later distributes the shares from market to all the fishermen. They are now forced to catch Monk fish which live in rocks. The catch is sold exclusively for export, and sells in the U.S for a ton of money. The fish they traditionally catch are small in number these days because large industrial trawlers rake the open sea. Many of the trawlers are big boats from Japan that operate just outside of the international marker. These fishermen can't operate out there for fear of confiscation of their boat and equipment by the coast guard. Japan is a major donor to the Sri Lankan government.

Aquinas tells us that monk fish is something that they traditionally should not catch. They are crucial to the entire ecosystem because they regurgitate food from the rocks which is what all the smaller fish eat. Those smaller fish are why the traditional catch survive. They are the reason for the continuance of the cycle. Aquinas looks straight into us in stating that they have no choice but to catch the Monk fish. He says that they have refused to do many of the other harmful tactics that some fishermen have taken up to increase their yield, like dynamite and light fishing which completely kill everything in their surrounding. However, they have to survive.

Ironically for the local mudalalis and sadly for the local fishermen, the government's support of neo-liberal, free trade policies since 1977 has done them both in. The basis of the policies is economic growth at all costs, unbridled competition for labor, and deregulation. The basic pursuit is to become internationally competitive by attracting international capital to invest and use the resources of the country, raw materials, natural exploits, and labor to produce for export. On a global scale this set of policies has led to the acceleration of global environmental destruction in supporting non-sustainable industrial fishing and by gutting environmental standards throughout the world.

Locally, this is am open door to exploitation. The economic philosophy cuts asunder the basis for the local economy. The mahadel are forced to cut their costs of operation(pay to the people), the sea fishermen are searching for export fish, and they all are suffering from the impact of industrial fishing on their ecosystem.

The only survivors are those that transition to the mulitnational corporate game. Local mudalali's are pressured to give up on their local businesses and become agents for international capital, and the local fisherman are pushed increasingly out of operation, destined to be workers for the industrial fishing industry. All of this will only further unravel all of the economic and social relations which this peninsula has been built on.


The New House of Maggona
Nilan wanted to sell the house and get in to a profitable business. Perhaps he would take the money and buy used vans and sell them. Crescent is unemployed.

Meanwhile, Europeans have been buying property here in Sri Lanka like crazy. A German man purchased the house next to PattyApu's. It was built by one of his brothers. They also bought the rock hill that guards the bay.

It was with unanimous conviction then, that my mother and her sisters decided to buy PattyApu's house, the Maggona house from Nilan. The sisters plan to come back here together to retire. In the meantime, Iona, Nilan's sister will be able to continue to stay here. The house now will stay in the family and at least keep us linked to this history.
I can not think of a better place to come back to.

The purchase is bittersweet for me however. We all love this place. I, in my new discovery of it and its history, probably more than anyone. It really is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. I think constantly about bringing Nas back here. I think of the next generations that will still have a place of reference and place to come to be in touch with their history. Iona still lives here, and Nilan and Crescent come here everyday.

But our victory is in the context of so much more that is lost. Our need to intervene is because of the collapse of local fishing and economy, and our ability to intervene is because we are from the United States-what a cruel irony. And more than anything, we must recognize that buying this place will not reverse the geo- political and environmental ravages that are upon us and the fishermen. Those forces are transforming the entire village and the entire country. Our buying the house doesn't resolve that, it just gives us a special stitch in time.

Only effective, sustained organizing can give us the hope to do more than that.

Tomorrow, a representative of the Kalutara Fisheries Solidarity Organization, part of NAFSO, will be coming to meet us here at the house. We've arranged a meeting with Aquinas and the fisherman down at the bay. It is they, those who have no choice but to fish, that must be the center of the effort to fight for a sustainable way forward based on the needs and realities of local economies, cultures, and communities.

Nilan and Crescent will also be coming back to the house to talk with the organizers. Hopefully, the conversation starts a dialogue towards some concrete plans. We hope it is not too late.