Mother as Witness: Poetry by Tamil Women in Sri Lanka

Abstract

In the three decade long civil war between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government terrible atrocities were committed on the minority Tamil community by both the parties involved. This period of Tamil nationalism saw constructions of Tamil nation which were grounded on the construction of an ideal “Tamil Woman.” The period also witnessed a variety of cultural responses, including those by women poets. This paper broadly tries to elucidate how poetry was used to act as a witness to the experiences of the Tamil women during the Sri Lankan Civil War and how they responded to the Tamil nation making process. This paper will argue that the witnessing of war is “gendered” as can be evidenced in the critical reading of poetry written by Tamil women in Sri Lanka. Specifically the paper will look at how the figure of the mother has been used in this gendered witnessing. Different kinds of motherhoods were mobilized in Sri Lanka through the course of the war, namely the valiant mother who encourages her children to die for the country, the suffering mother and the mother who resists power for the sake of her children. One of the key constructs of women in Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka was of the figure of the “Veerathayar” – the brave mother, who is the reproducer of the nation. In the context of a war fought over competing nationalisms, the figure of Veerathayar was constructed through reimaginations of the mythic characters from the old legends and classics. A much more radical positioning of the mother figure was seen in the 1980s with the construct of “social motherhood.” Even though social motherhood appealed to the naturalized and essentialized construction of women as mothers, it also revealed the transgressions of the Sri Lankan State and the LTTE which otherwise valorized the nurturance role of mothers. Set against this context, the paper will examine how the figure of the “mother” has been used by Tamil women in their poetry to write their experience of the conflict. This is done through a critical reading of their poetry by giving attention to the ways through which they have used the construct of mother to subvert the dominant notions of being an ideal “Tamil Woman” as perpetuated by Tamil nationalism.