Dinithi Samarawickrama
My Mother's Rice
'This division of labour has sanitised rice farming from its original being. It has created, as Marx would put it, a division between the manual forces of labour and the spiritual forces of labour. This means that my people, and many other peoples whose lives were so deeply woven with the cycles of this little grain; are no longer "in direct contact with the conditions of their own existence" (Weil)...Life is no longer – "I am fed and I grow and in turn I feed the land" but instead a struggle for infinite growth; the incessant pestilence of profit.'