Absent bodies and present memories: marking out the everyday and the future in Eastern Sri Lanka

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic work carried out between 2005 and 2007, this article considers the ways in which a women’s network has developed strategies to find meaning around the absences of loved ones, killed or ‘disappeared’ during the decades of conflict in Sri Lanka. For most of these women, the fate of their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers is not known and the lack of answers means that they are unable to fully grieve and find closure. In order to survive, they must find ways to deal with the absent bodies and present memories of those who may never be located and accounted for. These strategies include tree-planting ceremonies carried out as a way of not only remembering and mourning loved ones but also asking questions about how one makes sense of loss and what it means to carry the burden of unanswered absences through everyday life and into the future.

Keywords:

• Sri Lanka
• conflict
• women
• activism
• violence
• memory

Notes

1. Given the ongoing climate of fear and risk in eastern Sri Lanka, all names along with specific details about people and places have been changed.

2. Although my focus is on the women in the Valkai group, the role of the men is also important to recognise. As the group themselves pointed out, it is often the pain experienced by husbands, fathers, sons etc. during conflict that is viewed as secondary to the grief of mothers and wives.

3. Under international law, a state commits an enforced disappearance when it takes a person into custody and denies holding them or disclosing their whereabouts. ‘Disappeared’ persons hereafter referred to as disappeared are commonly subjected to torture or extrajudicial execution and cause family members continued suffering. An enforced disappearance is a continuing rights violation – it is ongoing until the fate or whereabouts of the person become known (HRW 2008, 4).

4. Rather than follow a specific standard Tamil transcription, I have relied upon common usage and forms reproduced in newspapers, reports and other fora. Where I quote from other literary sources, I use the specific Tamil transcription employed in the given text.

5. For an in-depth analysis of Sri Lanka’s political histories, see Hoole et al. (1988), Spencer (1990) and Hoole (2001).

6. Where and when funds were needed, small donations were given by personal contacts amongst the group and the facilities of local NGOS were used.

7. Many of the abductions were carried out by white vans – known to be linked to the government forces.

8. The notion of ‘dirty war’ is used to characterise conflicts in which non-combatant populations are targeted and forced into submission through the construction of a ‘culture of terror’ (Nordstrom 1992, 26).

9. Similarly, Lawrences’s (2000) study of Batticaloa’s Amman temples demonstrates how the temple became a safe space during the 1990s and one of the only public spaces where people could gather during one of the worst periods of conflict.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Walker

REBECCA WALKER is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the African Centre for Migration and Society at Witwatersrand University.