Gastro-testimonials in Handmade: Narrating the War Experiences of Sri Lankan Tamil Women through Food

Abstract

This essay examines the silent traumas, gendered violence, and unacknowledged resilience embedded in women's war stories from Sri Lanka's civil war (1983–2009) in the cookbook Handmade. Handmade is not a conventional cookbook. It is a collection of culinary life narratives that emerge from the depths of war to provide insider perspectives on the impact of war on the lives of women. I discuss the trajectory of the civil war and its postwar phases through the gastro-testimonials of Sri Lanka's Tamil women in the war-devastated regions of the Jaffna peninsula and the Vanni. The majority of the women featured in the cookbook are war widows. These women become the authors of their own life narratives when they use culinary ingenuity as the language of self-expression to tell their stories of suffering and survival. I demonstrate how the women's stories uncover important life narratives through a culinary mapping of war as a feminist act to argue that the cookbook is not a cultural artifact or a compendium of recipes. It is a testimonial narrative that uncovers the fractured lives that reside within and behind each recipe. The language of food formalizes the survival narratives of resilient Tamil women as they transition from invisibility to public disclosure through their cooking "against war."