The Unconventional book - Challenging the Blacklisting of Resistances

The unconventional book – Challenging the blacklisting of resistances

the orders were to rape you

The book arrives with the title without capitals - a cruel reminder of the Sinhala army’s trophy and trigger happy rapes of Tamil women, civilian and militant, after victory over a Tamil homeland liberation army and after its occupation. Even in written form it is unconventional; essay for most parts, recollections and face offs with former militants on the run and then the poetry. What took me through was my own thirst to read the original parts within and then the thoughts of a fellow Tamil on the Tamil freedom struggle. Her perspective as a consistent and knowing Tamil voice on the most influential and successful Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) struggle for freedom of Tamils from Sinhala speaking Sri Lanka presents an overall picture of the struggle, its influences and its spread. The book presented the thoughts of both the combatants of the freedom movement and the “trauma” of the author on what Tamil Nadu has seen and experienced as the most under-recognized freedom struggles of the world which involved Tamils.

This book comes at a time when the missing Tamil perspective and voice on Tamil affairs in the international arena has been a felt  absence in the coverage of not only the freedom struggle of Tamils but also of affairs in Tamil Nadu in proper perspective. Nevertheless, LTTE’s women or male combatants and civilians have indeed been writing throughout and post the 2009 end of war in Sri Lanka. Fictional, biographical and autobiographical accounts of LTTE women and male combatants do exist in Tamil. Before its defeat and decimation, LTTE itself had a robust Tamil media and record wing. This book however scores in being from South Asia and challenging notions that exist in English about resistances that are not white. It brings forth the poetry of combatants, also challenging the west’s racist dismissals of post-colonial freedom struggles and also challenging India’s casteist notion of resistances, including internal resistances.

The initial essay, essentially recollections, is a record of what has been felt in Tamil Nadu on the issue. The observations are telling on the scenario in Tamil Nadu while the latter part fills up on many unknown information like the experiences of the Tamil civilian and ex-militant refugees post war. For those in Tamil Nadu in the know about what happened in Sri Lanka, some information may pass on as not new but as a strongest record of Tamil voice on Eelam freedom struggle. However, where the book is poised to make the most impact for all is in presenting the poetry written by women who went to war as well as in presenting the Tamil liberation struggle in its proper perspective, factually and contextually. For, in the Indian context of caste, the context always gets dismissed as an inconvenient truth.

 The poetry in the book written by high ranking LTTE women military officials represent what happened during the war and during the negotiated peace times and become significant as written by combatants. The poems were in Tamil and are presented in translation by Meena. The poems and some of the information in the book have been painstakingly collected going through various sources and at times over personal risks and also slights.

How the women in military thought, what they felt, what they hoped for, what they dreamed as they took to writing amid combat duties even otherwise marks a departure from known poetry. Meena quoted not just combatant Tamil women’s poems but also linked those of a Nepali in a similar mission and to militant-poets from other parts of the globe caught in similar resistances and who wrote. Meena calls it an entry into a “rarefied realm” of an “activist / fighter as author.” It is a distinct perspective to be had. It opens a window to a world where more of their thoughts would exist. I wish Meena had included more of the poetry in the book.  

The thoughts of the women who fought a real war, who risked and overturned thoughts of frailty attached to women, who had come up with raised hopes for a different role for women in society which is in conflict with women in peace times elsewhere including in Tamil Nadu. This collection of poems is a rare read.

Recollections of what a battle gets to be when the war is for freedom from a neo-colonizer in a post colonial black-country or a third world country is a new ground, indeed an unexpressed ground which Meena has filled up.

The book challenges the notion that has taken hold in every imagination including that of the “Indian” imagination that war across the world ended with the two world wars which are labeled “just wars.”  The rest are labeled rebellions, militancy, skirmishes with the state apparatus, naxalism, separatism with a negative connotation, even war to establish democracy, but never war for freedom, and never a just war. The essay pokes holes in this laziness. The challenges of an Asian community or communities of developing nations seeking independence in a post-colonial era with terrible consequences for the suffering population in curtailing their overall progress including progress of women is brought to the fore. Each of the essays walks one through the Tamil Eelam freedom struggle, western engagement, India’s involvement as also captures the mood in Tamil Nadu throughout, and the post Tamil war disillusionment and distortions.

“As Tamils in India, we were furious and betrayed by how the Indian intervention had turned out. Our anger turned inwards; it brought us to the brutal realization that the Tamils were not only fighting the Sinhala state, but another enemy in disguise; India. Disillusionment with our own country made us realize that the Tamil people of Eelam could not rely on external powers to secure their liberation. We believed only the Tigers were capable of a successful struggle for self-determination,” Meena says pointing to Indian intervention 1987-1990.

Almost every page contains the unstated things in English, in the Indian mainstream, by a felt Tamil voice.

“…in the new lexicon of the neoliberal world order, they (Sri Lanka) were fighting against terrorists. A liberation struggle was now a security problem. Any interference was seen as aiding the so-called terrorists; this allowed the state’s human rights abuses to continue unchecked. At the same time, literally every imperialist power – America, Russia, China, Britain, Israel, to name only a few – was recruited to fight against the Tigers. In this battle of Us versus Them, we all walked (or cheered those walking) blindfolded towards certain defeat. “

For those who would say that caste has nothing to do with the war in Sri Lanka, read what Meena recalls about a “Tamil Brahmin politician, rabble rouser and routine Tiger baiter,” Subramanian Swamy,  demanding arrest of her mother, a mathematics professor at IIT, Madras, under the National Security Act linking her to the liberation movement in Eelam and his disparaging views of the struggle – a struggle that is not the brahmin’s. “My mother cannot point out Jaffna on a map, her knowledge of the Tamil struggle is sketchy, but she was singled out…I was still in the last years of school when this happened, and I realized that it did not matter what you were doing…but one day, your identity would be sufficient to put you back in your place. That my mother was a Tamil women scientist, outspoken against Brahmin elitism in educational institutions, was enough for Swamy to paint her as a Tiger collaborator and to demand her incarceration…”

The quoting of Swamy is not about an individual entity. As a brahmin he is representative of the views of the larger voice of brahmins in Tamil Nadu and their view about the liberation struggle and Tamils of Tamil Nadu. The incident is also cited as Meena’s reason for subsequent move to anti-caste platforms and exploring her Tamil identity from it.

In many a personal note, the author recalls the effect that the women of LTTE at war (a third of LTTE combatants were women) had on her while also shaking the conventions in Eelam society.

More often, the poems presented also unfold the dreams of the writers for something more than just acquiring a nation. The thoughts expressed in the poetry that Captain Vaanathi who died in battle in 1991 goes thus:

“You sob in the kitchen / as you are being rapped. / Get ready, and come away. / Let us create a new era, / in the shadow of the guns / we now carry.

When we get national freedom / that we desire so deeply, / we will build the tomb / for women’s exploitation. / We will dig the graves / for society’s backward ideas./ “

Or about chasing expression in poetry in The Unwritten Poem

“I am unable to write / the many, many thoughts that come…. / My gun is standing at the border / I am unable to come away / so, write, / write my unwritten poem./”

In the poem Superpowers by Captain Kasturi who died in battle in 1991:

“For you to create a history on the moon / you strip and pillage and shame lands./” about the politics of self-interest of developed nations.

In one poem by Aatilatchumi, a recipient of the de facto Tamil nation’s top literary awards while under LTTE administration, there emerges an abandoned school, a standing testimony to the loss and desecration done by a foreign (Indian) army. The Indian army intervention which began in 1987 in the name of securing rights of Tamils turned into an occupying army in Eelam until its defeat by LTTE and the army retreat from Sri Lanka in 1990. The same poem says recalling the memory of the school:

“Everything is now a dream. Many of my friends / are now on the battleground. / A few of them, in graveyards/ Me pen in hand, a poet./”  - in Memories Spreading Out In The Shade.

As Meena Kandasamy herself observes, “It is a shameful disservice to their liberation struggles if we reduce, restrict and flatten their discourse to a purely local context, to a question of language and territory. The freedom they envisioned is not limited to a particular place, or withheld by only one enemy… To read these poets is to reclaim their rightful historical space. To read them together is to embark on a resistance project, an attempt to undo imperialism’s blacklisting of all guerrilla movements under the punishing, isolating banner of terrorism.”

The chilling details recalled by the author who met women combatants and civilians on the run post war and as refugees, battling return of the old social norms for women in their homeland and of those enduring and surviving rape by the army men they once trained to battle, the shock of their unfinished mission, is in sharp contrast to the hopes and expressions given by poet-combatants and appears as the central point to this writing project.

Meena is original in challenging an existing narrative of misrepresentation and reductionism of struggles. The book is a record for seeking a re-look into what constitutes established nations outlook on separatism and definition of terrorism and what human rights are.

About the author

Meena Kandasamy is a well known Poet, an acclaimed author of three novels. She is a feminist, human rights activist and an outspoken supporter for independence for Tamil Eelam, once a de facto Tamil nation in the island of Sri Lanka. She is also a translator and has published two collections of Poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010). She published three novels, The Gypsy Godess (2014) When I hit you (2017) and Exquisite Cadavars (2019). The Orders Were To Rape You is her latest book released in the first quarter of 2021.