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.