By Lynn Ockersz A new-born girl child, Left alone and found crying, In desolate provincial wilds, Seems yet another story, Of family planning gone awry, But this time around, There’s more to it than that, Because the lights are going out, One by one in the Isle’s hearths, As the economy grinds to a halt, […]
The 51 sessions of the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council is underway. Sri Lanka is again in the focus with Western powers and their lackeys targeting the war-winning Sri Lanka military. Successive Sri Lankan governments, including the incumbent administration, failed to address core issues. Their failure to counter accusations that over 40,000 Tamil civilians […]
Meena Kandasamy records the gruesome first-person experiences of two women of the Tamil Eelam struggle
The picture of a woman with cropped hair, attired in camouflage shirt and trousers, and wielding a gun, can symbolise the ultimate dream of empowerment. More so if the woman is part of an armed liberation struggle.
Often invoked in the depiction of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, the image of a Tamil militant woman challenged some prevalent social norms, but could it overturn the entrenched biases in society?
Meena Kandasamy’s
The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle, is in part an essay, with narratives of three Tamil women the wife of an LTTE fighter, a female combatant from the LTTE, and the author herself. Its second part is a collection of resistance poems by female guerrillas and militants.