Speaking in Many Tongues
by Aparna Eswaran, Kerala Council for Historical Research, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, KCHR Working Paper Series, VOL – II, November 2021
KCHR Working Paper Series_Vol II_03 Nov 2021_Final
Abstract
The three decade long war in Sri Lanka fought over competing ethnic nationalisms was a period of grave human rights violations and of ‘unspeakable’ violence for Tamil women. While there were severe limitations in speaking out, women who lived through the violence, inflicted on their bodies and souls, spoke out in many tongues of pain and rage. Poetry was an important mode of witnessing in this period of surveillance and censorship where violence was in many occasions a State condoned act to enforce ethnic supremacy. In this paper, I trace the different articulations of violence found in the poetry of Tamil women, written during the period 1980-2009 and the tentative seeking of justice present in this act of poetic witnessing. Starting with the first collection of poetry written by women during the war, aptly titled ‘Sollatha Seithigal’ (Unspoken Messages), this paper bears witness to the nuanced explorations of surviving and resistance that these texts offer about being Tamil during the war. While the sexually violated Tamil woman was a trope used by the LTTE in its articulations of the formation of the female suicide bomber, the poetry bears a much broader understanding of the violence faced by women and their responses in confronting the experience. The paper will be looking at poetic texts that make visible the sexual violence inflicted by the Sri Lankan army as well as read poetry that puts forward an articulation of the insidious acts of daily violence found within homes, the difficulties inherent in navigating public spaces and checkpoints, the burden of expectations that the society had put on women to be bearers of Tamil cultural purity and the difficulties of holding in remembrance difficult deaths and disappearances.
Dr. Aparna Eswaran is currently the ICSSR Post Doctoral Fellow in Centre for Women’s Studies, JNU. She had combined her research interests in Literature, Gender and International Politics in her PhD thesis on “Women and Witnessing War: Poetry of Tamil Women in Sri Lanka.” She works on incorporating
gender as an analytical category in her research and writing within both academic and popular realms. She is also the recipient of the KCHR Revision of Thesis Fellowship (2019).