Sri Lanka: Tamil Tiger Women- Through

Selected Writings by Them:

By Prof. Charles Sarvan:-Dated 23-July- 2015

The web-site tamiltigerwomen.com contains material, both poems and
prose-sketches, selected and translated from the original Tamil into English
by Dr N. Malathy: my thanks to her for sending me a copy.
The documents are rare in that they are the writings of women (many were
teenagers or in their early 20s) who were Tiger combatants. Presumably
most, if not all, are now dead, killed in action. I may be mistaken but think
their names as given are nom du guerre. Much of the material they left
behind was destroyed by the government. Dr. Malathy is owed a debt of
gratitude for collecting, translating and making available for posterity these
intensely personal perspectives. It is, one hopes, an on-going project to
which others will contribute. Eventually, a data or document bank can be
established from which those interested can draw.
Our memory and recall are not to be trusted. Memory adjusts and alters the
past, and creates something different, that is, something that did not
happen quite the way we remember and believe. But many of the works
selected here are not the product of distant recollection but were written as
it were in medias res, and so are all the more valuable. I admit: immediacy
does not eliminate subjectivity. Reading the fictionalised contributions, one
recalls the words of Nadine Gordimer, Nobel-Prize winner for Literature:
Nothing factual that I write is as true as my fiction. If there is death and
awful injury; great grief and unutterable pain; mutilation, hardship,
exhaustion, shortage of food and medicine, theres also warm camaraderie;
brief and in-between moments of teasing, tomfoolery and laughter. Love
finds brief expression in Fire within by Ampuli. Neela belongs to a carrierteam tasked with bearing away the dead and the injured, bringing forward
food and ammunition. Suddenly, in the midst of the fire of battle, she
catches sight of Hari, her love. She had believed he was in another theatre
of the war, and the fearful thought wells up: will she also carry his dead

body?
Even after death, the Tamil Tigers continue to excite sharply contrasting
reactions, and those who attempt a balanced approach risk the ire, if not
abuse, from both extremes. Some see them as heroes who, inspired by a
precious dream, fought for about three decades even though they were
internationally isolated (a poem composed by Barathi accuses the United
Nations of protecting not the vulnerable but the vultures); were massively
out-numbered, and didnt have a single jet-fighter or helicopter: see,
Sarvan, A great military victory? in the Sunday Leader of 25 October 2009.
They fought with courage, often displaying chutzpah as in, for example,
their attack on Colombo airport, 24 July 2001.
Others see the Tigers as cruel and foolish: most of us are not immune to the
infection of partisanship, though we may not be conscious of carrying the
bacillus. The way in which the war ended brings honour neither to the
government nor to the Tigers. The latter are accused of using thousands of
Tamils, including children, women and the aged as human-shields the
very people to whom they had sought to bring freedom. In
Shakespeares Macbeth (Act 1, Scene 4), it is commented of a character
facing execution: Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it. The
same is not said of the Tiger leadership. There are several examples from
history of courage to the very end, such as the Battle of Thermopylae, 480
BCE, where Spartan King Leonidas with 7,000 men faced a Persian army
thought to number about 150, 000. On realizing that he had been betrayed
and was trapped, Leonidas released the bulk of his army and remained with
a few to fight to the end. "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that
here, obedient to their laws, we lie."
The Tigers were a complex phenomenon: in other words, there were
contradictory elements which went to form their make-up. As I have written
elsewhere, if there was cruelty in them, there was also discipline and
courage; if there was strategic error, there was also tactical brilliance; if
there was foolishness, there was also exceptional intelligence; if there was
fatal stubbornness, there was also ingenious improvisation; if there was
ruthless ambition, there was also pure idealism and the total self-denial and
self-sacrifice such idealism can create. (For the last, see my review of the
documentary, My Daughter, the Terrorist
in: www.sangam.org/2008/08/Film_Review.php?print=true)

As far as I know, there are no reports of the Tigers (unlike Sri Lankan
government soldiers) indulging in rape, be it of civilians, alleged
sympathizers or captured combatants. Again, unlike with government
security personnel, there is no record of the Tigers stripping naked, publicly
taunting and humiliating Sinhalese, were they soldiers or civilians. (Gangrape and rape continue with complete impunity in Tamil areas occupied by
the army: see the Human Rights publication of 2013 titled We Will Teach You
a Lesson. I have drawn attention to this book in Paper No. 5904, South Asia
Analysis Group, 2 April 2015, and in Colombo Telegraph, 3 April 2015.)
In the present blog, Dr Ms Malathy does not concern herself with politics,
with right and wrong, but with the experience of female Tamil Tigers as
expressed in their own writing. War is presented in its detail - and in its
terrible waste and tragedy. These poems and prose sketches reveal the
individual, sentient, human being behind stereotype labels such as
terrorist. The contrast between the beauty of nature and the cruelty of
human beings has long struck and saddened humanity.
In the words of Bishop Reginald Hebert: where every prospect pleases,
and man alone is vile. If Sri Lanka is a Paradise Isle, as touted in tourist
literature, it is so in terms of its natural beauty and not on political,
economic, social or ethical grounds. These last are gifted neither by the
gods nor by nature but are the creation of wise and caring, sustained and
patient, human endeavour. In Rise up for the new dawn, also by Barathy,
bird songs welcome a beautiful new dawn and trees shake off their dew. But
then the blood of the female comrade next to her paints new pictures on
the soil; the trees are crushed and birds rendered wingless.
Under the Tamil Tigers, women enjoyed a rare degree of emancipation.
They carried out the same duties, did the same work, suffered and died as
their male comrades. They saw it as a challenge to prove they were as
good, if not better, than the men and so deserved their new status as
equals. In Malaimahals Puthiya Kathaikal (New Stories), the Indian army
for the very first time in its history battles an all-women unit. (Female Tiger
units are known to have routed all-male government forces.) It is indeed a
new story because it is about a new breed of women freed from the notions
and constrains of conservative society. Words from the poem Easter, 1916
by Yeats come to mind: All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is
born. (The Easter uprising was an attempt by the Irish to free themselves
from British imperial rule but it couldnt prevail against superior numbers

and fire-power.) A mother is shocked that her daughter who as a child was
even afraid to go out in the dark (presumably to the toilet) is now a Sea
Tiger, wearing shorts and diving deep into the dark depths of the ocean.
Another woman comments that the sea, outraged at this unbecoming
behaviour by a woman, will surely storm and rage.
In Pillais perceptive and tragic Malayalam novel of the 1950s, Chemmeen,
the belief is recounted that the life of a fisherman far out at sea is in the
hands of his wife ashore. Should she behave
improperly, Kadalamma (literally, sea-mother, meaning the goddess of the
sea) would visit vengeance on her husband. Such pseudo-religious beliefs
were (are?) used by older folk to control the younger, particularly women.
Patriarchy, supported by complicit, conservative and collaborative women,
often disguises its drive to domination as religious piety and social
propriety. As Louis Althusser showed, state and society maintain
themselves through Ideology which includes religious belief. The exploited
in this case, females - are persuaded to believe in and support their own
exploitation and subordination.
In What price? by Malaimahal, a group of female Tigers is surprised to
come across an old man crying on the edge of the frontline. He explains
that the land on which they stand was his, intended to meet the dowry
required to settle his daughter. Now the land is gone; with it the dowry and
his daughters future. What is the point in my living when I cannot do
anything for my child? It is dishonourable for a man to demand a dowry,
and an insult to the woman to have one paid, and the pernicious dowry
system was rejected by the Tigers. In this sketch, a female Tiger decides to
write to her brothers urging that, when they marry, they should not accept
a dowry.
Under a Carthaginian peace, the situation of Tamil women in the occupied
areas, now far worse than before the war began, is pitiful. It is not only
harassment and humiliation at the hands of soldiers but conservative Tamil
society has reasserted itself, and women who were free and enjoyed as
much scope as men are now consigned to playing traditional roles. A former
fighter cannot even climb onto a low wall to pluck a ripe fruit because that
would be un-ladylike: Haunted by her Yesterdays
at http://www.youtube.com/watch?
feature=player_embedded&v=nSSv9Kk3tkI

Object 1

Eluthaatha Kavithai (Unwritten poem) was composed by one Vaanathi

shortly before she was killed in action. Its refrain begs, Write my unwritten
poem / This is my plea to you. But while others may die with or even for
you, each must die her or his own death. So too only Vaanathi can write
Vaanathis poems, and she is no more. They emerged from her unique
inner-being. (Every human being, terrorist or freedom-fighter; however
lowly and obscure, is unique.) Dr Malathy has done whats possible by
rescuing these works and making them available to a wider readership. It is
for readers to access this site and form their own opinion: mine is merely
an attempt to draw attention to it.
Finally, there is the aspect of translation. In Shakespeares comedy, A
Midsummer Nights Dream (Act 3, Scene 1), when a character is temporarily
transformed into an animal, his friends exclaim: You have been translated!
A translation is a new avatar in a completely different form. Those who
dont know the original language can form impressions, make judgements,
only on the basis of the translation before them: translators bear a grave
responsibility. Secondly, to translate, say, from Italian to French is easier
than translating not only from a different language but also from a very
different culture: as is the case here. Thirdly, while translation assumes
near native-speaker competence in the target language, to work
on literary texts calls, in addition, for heightened sensitivity to language
and its nuances. So it is that the same text has been translated into the
same language by different individuals, each not quite satisfied with the
effort of her or his predecessor. For example, Homers Odyssey has been
translated into English over the centuries, each version more or less

different. Variety of interpretation is enriching and to be welcomed.

The present translation may leave much to be desired but it must be
commended for what it does: preserve and disseminate. No doubt, there
will be different translations, other versions, of this and other Tamil-Tiger
literature.
We want minds to strip away falsity; to nurture empathy and to
bury difference.
(Adapted from We want beautiful minds by Ampuli, included in
Tamil Tiger Women: Through Selected Writings by Them)
- See more at:
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/node/1821#sthash.oCVaPfDl.dpuf
Posted by Thavam