Salt, sand and water: movement and citizenship in the narratives of displaced women

Abstract

‘Salt, Sand and Water’ is the outcome of a writing project that evolved out of a series of workshops in theatre and writing carried out in Sri Lanka over a period of three weeks in 2004. The workshops brought together 14 Muslim and Tamil women into a dialogue about the condition of displacement that has become an integral part of the decades-long ethnic conflict and ensuing civil war in Sri Lanka. Having lived as neighbours, these women were thrown headlong into an inter and intra-ethnic conflict as a result of which they continue to live as neighbours but now as strangers in their displaced state. The coming together of these women is an exercise in forming a political consciousness of ethnic and gender marginality and displacement. This becoming collective consciousness celebrates heterogeneity, not for its own sake, but for the query it brings into understandings of the state, power, authority, privilege and territory. As a political and theoretical intervention of the formation of the state, this collaborative essay dislocates the notion of place as fixed by recovering its mobility in the midst of the political, cultural and economic realms. Similarly, the emerging consciousness of the displaced class undermines traditional notions of ethnicity as homogenous and of the state as bounded.

Keywords:

• refugees
• displaced women
• Sri Lanka
• Jaffna

Acknowledgements

Unless otherwise stated, all images and artwork were produced by the authors.

Notes

1. In 2004 Sumathy was awarded a research fellowship from the South Asia Program of Social Science Research Council in New York with funds provided by the Ford Foundation. This article is a product of that award.

2. ‘Eelam’ is the name of the longed-for separate state. But originally it meant the whole of Sri Lanka and is still used in many contexts particularly in cultural and literary contexts to refer to Sri Lanka as a whole.

3. Periyamadu is the name of the place; the speaker lays claim to it by calling it ‘our Periyamadu’.

4. Tamil militant movement, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fighting for a separate state in the north and east of the country.

5. Thileeban is an LTTE martyr who fasted to death in 1987 at the outbreak of war between the Indian peacekeeping forces and the LTTE.

6. The ‘boys’ in this instance is a reference to the cadres of armed militants, who were once fondly or indifferently addressed as boys by the Jaffna people.

7. ‘Coolie’ is a Tamil word that is used both in the sense of labour and wage; the speaker uses this term in its double-edged sense here.

8. ‘Kallathoni’ literally means stolen boat and is a derogatory term used to refer to Tamil and Tamil speaking – as is in this instance, Muslim – immigrants from India.

9. Temples of Hindu deities: Pillaiyar is Lord Ganesha. Mariyamman is the temple of the mother goddess.

10. A minority Tamil community tied to the plantation economy in the hill country, distinct from the north eastern Tamils and Muslims. Brought over as indentured labour from India by the colonial government, they have fought for and won many rights, but continue to live in marginalisation.