I need this spoon to mix the sugar in the tea. One needs money for sugar. When I displaced¹ I did not take any spoons with me, they asked us to leave in five minutes. When I came back from Puttalam to Jaffna, I brought pots and pans, other utensils with me. I have three spoons now. One for the rice, the second for serving curries and the third to mix sugar in the tea.

‘We walked through a covered strip about the length of, say, up to that tree from here… (about 200 metres); the planks on either side barely covered our bodies. We were stark naked. Nothing on our bodies. At the end of the walkway there was an army woman. Our clothes had come round to us from the other end. We put them on and moved on.’ One of the women we were talking to, who had ‘survived’ the last and heaviest onslaught of war, the concluding Eelam War IV, narrated this account of her passage to the government controlled area, in the thick of the war.²

The air was thick with the shelling and bombing, and two desperate sides in a merciless and murderous contest. The passage marks the moment from war to no war; shelling to no shelling; bombing to no bombing. A dangerous inbetweenness, a no man’s land, a forever, and an always already violent place. This narration, which was not entirely new to us, speaks volumes not about that moment with its immense uncertainties, but about the state of living in the Vanni today. ‘We had to forego our feelings of modesty and shame and walk.’

Even as we reflect on the violence of this moment and seek to understand it as the crippling vice-like grip of public gaze, epitomized in war and in the military, let us not forget that the ‘woman’ walked, forgetting her shame and recounted the experience to a group of her own people, other women she has been living with for years and to four stranger women, us researchers. We here pause to reflect on the epistemological premises of our endeavour of researching violence against women, sexual violence in a time of conflict. There was no sense of shame on her face when she told us this story as we recall it.³

This account of fleeing to safety was something that had been told again and again. But hearing it first hand, recounted by the speaker after several years (maybe told again and again), suggests something that we cannot quite grasp within the discursivity provided by the academic-activist rhetoric of violation, human rights, mass murder and sexual violence.

 

How does one listen to, hear, and speak of these momentous and yet literally fleeting events that are publicly shared by both the ‘perpetrator’ of the violence – the military, the woman soldier at the end of the line, or the male soldiers ‘who might have been watching’, who knows? – and the women who forgetting their shame walked their way toward, what for me/us would be the numbing experience of arriving at a place, the receiving Sri Lankan forces in territory held by the conquering army that does not necessarily promise relief, refuge and reconciliation. It is safety in enemy country even as one flees the clutches of another enemy.

What struck us most sharply was the fact that it is not the heavily personalized violence of a perpetrator of hideous violation that we have here; nor is it the totally mechanized, dehumanizing exercise of ‘x-raying’ human bodies as bearers of explosives, mutants passing through the highways of air traffic criss-crossing the United States. It is the intricate weaving of the public institution, the state, army, nation and family and a privatized gaze (and gazing back) of its agent/victim that we confront in our own accounting. In our account of women’s narratives of war and peace, they turn their gaze back which we lay claim to as our collective voice.

 

What is violence? And what is sexual violence? Where does one locate it?

Krishanthi⁴

As the birds sang

And the sun fell into the sea

Her death took place

At the open space of white sand

No one knew about it

When she was born a female child

She wouldn’t have thought of such an end

Her mother neither

First their look pierced her like a thorn

Then their terrible hands seized her arms

 

No sound arose

She fell in a faint

They raped her senseless body

It happened

In the open space of white sand.

She was buried

At the edge of the salty cremation ground

 

When she was born

Would she have thought of such an end?

 

The simple and straightforward object of our work is to inquire into sexual violence in a time of political conflict. Framed by the questions raised above we present a collaborative work that both looks at the historical trajectory of women’s participation within the rise of nationalism and associated violences, including that of state and non-state actors; and to capture the voices of the present moment as a reflection on how women can forge a collective consciousness that acts as a counter point to dominant narratives of state, nation and nationalisms.

The war lasted for about 30 years. The sheer magnitude of loss, continual enactments of displacement, small and large, the long years of a violent authoritarianism that has characterized the culture of governance and institutional frameworks compel us to look at justice in broad and collective terms. Justice is usually associated with the courts, but it is our contention that courts, court hearings, accountability and punishment cannot bring justice to more than a 30 year sense of injustice, given the undue faith placed in individual agency and culpability in the legal system.

Justice often is about rule of law and not about justice really. The understanding of justice as a closed singular act, predicated on individual culpability, where the victim and the victor, the accused and the accuser, the powerful and the dominant and the marginal and powerless neatly form two sides of a symmetry of justice/injustice is a restrictive and theoretically limiting conception. In the court of law, the victim and the perpetrator are held equal in the abstraction of law and justice, bracketing out the social, the social circumstance, in its full. Are there alternate ways of understanding justice? If one hopes to get at a sense of justice through tribunals, broad based mechanisms of justice, they have to be embodied, inhabited and indicated by the woman. It will be meaningful then.

 

The enactment of justice carries with it the task of transformation of the social and the material. In saying so, I am making a case for understanding justice as a necessary enactment of recognition and reclamation of people’s voices as socially mediated acts; and a repudiation of the socially underlined injustice of the last 30 years arising through that encounter, the recognition. While I am in no way arguing for doing away with the courts of law, trials, and the sharpening of laws on sexual violence, reforming and reframing access to the courts of law for marginalized women, in the final analysis, I see justice has to be a trans-formative act, materially and socially.

Apart from the fact that the courts of law have become complicit with the states of law in recent times, there is also the attendant fact that it has always been the case. Also, given the violence of the state and non-state institutions that embodies a history of violation not just of the individual body but of the collective as well, where the media is as complicit in these violences as other agents of the state apparatus, one is compelled to construct a narrative for justice that negotiates these dominances without falling prey to them and without becoming complicit in those very same structures. Can we move toward alternative ways of understanding justice?

 

In the court of law, the victim and the perpetrator are held equal in the abstraction of law and justice. It does not take the social into account. In Sri Lanka, we are faced with a problem with this form of justice. One, it places culpability on individuals, even where the state is concerned. So, even tribunals and courts of law cannot prosecute or even deliver justice to the women or the ‘victims’ since:

1. The social circumstance is not mediated and transformed.

2. Whatever changes that take place do so at the level of the individual and not through a transformative practice within society. It could very well be the case that armed men (and women?) would continue to rape or be dominant sexually, despite treaties; women would continue to be harassed within marriage or sexual relations, in labour, love or sex.

3. Justice is about truth telling; given the dominant nature of the state and the structures of community and nation, how much truth can you tell? What do you keep back and what do you tell? This is a very challenging process. If the ‘victim’ becomes an agent in the delivery of justice in the court, she (or he) manipulates the system in a particular way in order to have her voice heard. What does she tell? What is the truth and how is the truth framed? Relatedly, courts of law could make women feel more vulnerable too.

4. Are there alternate ways of telling the truth? What does one do with private, personal and/or group encounters which foreground other forms of truth telling? Do these complement or transform the court of law where the person (the woman in this case) becomes an agent, to whom that mode of truth telling is good, important, empowering and transforming? How is this related to the above?

 

One of the women we spoke to in our quest, queried from us, ‘Why does a woman, bruised and battered the previous night, pamper her man the next morning? She goes from house to house, to find something for him to eat. She begs from the neighbours the loan of an egg to make him breakfast in the morning, while the previous night he had brutally beaten her. Is it only the oppression that guides her? Is it only the abuse? Is it only society? She too wants to have her say here. Feminist thinking does not have an adequate understanding of this phenomenon.’

These are the words of a long time activist in the North who has faced violence of many kinds and has lost three sons and others to the war. Today, she has nobody but herself as family and the fraught memory of her own involvement in the LTTE. Thamil Arasi’s question does point to something that is both easy to understand and yet incomprehensible. Why would a woman stay inside a marriage that is full of violence; is it only social stricture and dependence? If it’s psychology, is it only negativity? There is nothing to be affirmed here. She wants her husband, she wants to bear children, these fulfil her needs. Feminists do not understand that.

To rethink and turn this over, one may need to reconceptualize violence, survival, and justice. These three identifications, nouns that impact on us, and on the women we ‘study’ as the predicate, have to be rethought as the embodied bearers of an experience of the collective: the collective of women, Tamil women, of the nation. If we are to understand women as beings marked by gender and gender only, how is one to understand where they are situated and where they situate themselves within the collectivity of experience where close to 40,000 or even more died in the space of six months, women, men and children.⁵ How is death by shelling, death by conscription by the LTTE, death by the shattering of the limbs apart by gunfire, death at sea on the way to safety in a sinking boat to be understood but as violence against communities and against women? These are complexities that will unravel up to a point in our narrative.

 

On 19 May 2009, Sri Lankan news channels broadcast coverage of the end of the 25-30 year war with news of the capture and death of Prabhakaran, the Tiger supremo. The then President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was abroad returned to the country just as the news hit the broadcast channels and made his now (in)famous pose of kissing the ground as he stepped out of the airplane. Mother, earth and country have a currency that serve to advance your career or hurt you in your innermost being. This is a war which at its most basic has been about land. Crowds in southern Sri Lanka went jubilant in the streets of the cities and towns, while many others were engulfed in grief, doubt and questions about the future. In his address to the ‘nation’, the president blared into the microphone: ‘There are no ethnicities, no Tamil, Muslim or Sinhala. There are only two kinds of people. Either you are with us or against us.’ Ironically, being Tamil and Muslim would gather renewed importance in the years after.

This essay concerns itself largely with the last phase of the war, commonly called Eelam War IV, whose scale of violence is described here.⁶ Eelam War IV, an intense battle between the Sri Lankan forces followed by a rapidly retreating LTTE, took place in the latter months of 2008. It began in proper in late 2006, less than a year into Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidency. In 2008, the ceasefire agreement of 2002 was abrogated, though it had ceased to be in effect, to all intents and purposes, long before that. There had been conflict and friction throughout the four to five years of the ceasefire, with infractions of the agreement committed by both sides, most blatantly by the LTTE, which continued to target Muslims, the Sri Lankan forces and Tamil dissidents. […]

 

Locating violence within a collective experience is to reframe questions of agency commonly understood as that residing in the individual. Or, one may legitimately ask whether talk of agency is meaningless and that it is only a matter of academic import in a situation where an entire collectivity loses its sense of agency and self, its sense of individuality in the objectification of loss, death and violence; such as the 325,000 dragooned into ‘a mere 3.5 sq km of land’, the LTTE⁷ on one side and encircled by the military on the other side, with the sea providing an escape route and also a boundary, a border, barring one’s way into other territories. The 300,000 odd persons trapped inside the no fire zone, an area which the state forces fired upon, an area which the University Teachers for Human Rights-J (UTHR-J ) claimed was fired upon by the LTTE itself, were cannon fodder.

This scenario outlined above frames our search for justice. We reconceptualize justice as a process and that process as being linked to survival. Survival here is weighed down by the sheer scale of destruction of people, self and agency. To survive, to live, even in death, as a prod for memory, is a form of truth telling that we uphold as the only means through which we can chart a route for women’s narratives in the face of the total incomprehension of what had happened and what was happening in the North at this time.

 

This is one of the pivotal questions driving our inquiry and our work on violence, emphasized as sexual violence. In our actual work and collaboration with women in the North and in recovering a history of women’s voices as they pertain to their bodies and associated violences, we bring in other questions that bear upon our modes of inquiry and critical tradition: questions about violence in general and questions about violence as they relate to the state and the nation. Our inquiry into this is necessarily burdened with the double bind of the search for justice for all victimized and marginalized people, women and men, transgender beings, sex workers, other workers, children, street people etc, predicated on the existence of just such collectivities whose victimization one seeks to uncover and defeat.

Justice is our object, which we see in the marginalized ‘face’ of the woman who is defeated by or who survives war, alone. We combine this quest of/for justice for ‘all’ within the messy walk toward freedom and safety, where the gaze of the perpetrator and the speech of the ‘victim’ are held together within the cusp of a violent struggle of the Hegelian dialectic of the master and slave. The master here is violently yoked to the slave, the victim, and cannot ever become independent, even within the state or in the spirit with one crucial difference. The victim is triumphant. Her voice that never quite occupies the position of self emerges as justice, but not as masterful. In this dialectic, it is our object to see whether she as voice provides a site of resistance to the state and its violences.

For the people themselves, the war had been a query about their very ontological status, their connection to their homes and land, their land, Tamil land and Tamil Eelam. The double-edged walk toward freedom (and internment) for women is a story that has to be recounted as a relation, a relation between what the everyday and the political of subjecthood means.

We close with a story of an encounter set in the present in order to develop an approach and a querying motif toward what our quest might be in this paper.A young woman roughly of the age of 20 is seated among many others, older. She had been silent throughout our meeting, but toward the end, suddenly and silently started crying. Her story is about a triangular relationship of a curious kind. She was friends with two other women. At the height of the war, in fear of being recruited by the LTTE, she was ‘forced’ into marriage. Her other friend was recruited and died in the war. The third friend seems to have escaped recruitment and/or death. She had obtained admission to the university after getting the necessary marks in the grueling advanced level examination.

When we asked her, about whether she’d like to continue with her studies, we were told by others in attendance that she had a small child now, and she’d not be able to. The silence of this young woman, finding little space within the political conscious and unconscious of the nation, state, marriage, family, school and education, resounds with the silences surrounding sexual violence. Can one understand all of the violences we are talking about today as emanating from this sexualized and classed narrative of the nation?

Footnotes:

1. The term ‘displaced’ is used as a transitive verb in the paper and is done so with the recognition of the active and agentful nature of the act.

2. Appendix 1 contains a very brief time line of the conflict and the war. Please note that the list is not comprehensive and has been created purely for the purpose of illuminating certain happenings referred to in this paper. Eelam is the name of the separate state fought for by the separatist Tamil organization, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the different phases of the war range from Eelam War I to Eelam War IV, concluding in May 2009.

3. A spoonful of sugar is a collective undertaking in which various research voices and other participants – women in the Vanni, Jaffna Muslims and others – came together in an investigative mode. For the research, apart from textual study, we spoke with roughly 70-odd women in the Vanni and Jaffna in workshops and focus group discussions and with another roughly 10 persons individually. I greatly value their willing participation, their trust in us and their faith in engaging in dialogue despite the seeming hopelessness of the situation. They are collaborators in this venture. In the paper I adopt a strategy of presentation that merges the voices of the many women, including ours, the researchers’ into a narrative and authorial voice, consciously aiming at a collapsing of the binary between researcher and the researched and more importantly, at making research objectives, outcomes, truth telling and the search for survival, collective, contingent and multi-tongued. All names of participants from the Vanni have been changed, even in instances where the participant has assumed a public face and even in instances where the participant did not seek anonymity.

A special note of thanks and acknowledgement is due to Ahalya Francisglaim, who was not just a research assistant, but was co-thinker and collaborator in this project.

4. Krishanthi Kumarasamy, 18, was waylaid at a checkpoint, raped and murdered in 1998 in Kaithady. For more on this case read the interview with Prashanthi Mahindaratne, state counsel in the case, pages 27-30 of this issue.

5. International Crisis Group cites Gordon Weiss who had estimated a death toll between 30,000-40,000, while Hoole places it at a higher figure of 97, 000.

6. Eelam or Tamil Eelam is the name of the separate state fought for by the militants. Eelam can also mean the whole of Sri Lanka in Tamil in some contexts.

7. Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are also commonly referred to as Tigers.