Figure of Speech (From Militarizing Sri Lanka, Sage 2007)

5

Figure of Speech:The Female Suicide

Bomber, Censorship andthe Literary-Cinematic Site

This chapter focuses on multiple sites of speech and their regulation underconditions of militarization in Sri Lanka. It does so by foregrounding, first,the domain of speech that governs the figure of the LTTE female suicidebomber, which points to a complex relationship between militarization andcensorship as one of its key technologies. It pays attention to how the rhetoricof ‘terrorism’ shapes the way we can talk about the female suicide bomberor not, and how the grammar of security deployed by both the LTTEand the Sri Lankan state expropriate her voice. She is not an autonomoussubject before power, but one constituted by and through it. In the com-plexity she inhabits, the female suicide bomber points to paradoxes inher-ent in censorship itself. It is a site of power that both represses and produces.The secrecy that surrounds the LTTE suicide bomber makes her subjec-tivity available to the public only at the precise moment in which she issilenced, and silences herself through her final act of violence. She isherself subjected to censorship, but also an author of it through her vio-lence. Her subjectivity unavailable to the public before her death, shebecomes the object of literary and visual portrayal, public speculation andfascination. Silenced, yet potent in her final utterance, the figure of thefemale suicide bomber presents a singular and remarkable instance in which

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militarization, censorship and gendered security regimes coalesce in par-ticular ways to construct an entirely new criminological category of women.

The chapter also foregrounds how selected cultural work within litera-ture and cinema is shaped and defined in relation to militarization andcensorship. Censorship, when imposed by an external authority, is at timesmet with resistance. Creative writers and filmmakers have not only at-tempted to ‘give’ the figure of the female suicide bomber a ‘prior’ voice,but also contour the war itself in alternative ways that go against the grainof official narratives. In doing so, they have become the targets of censurein a struggle over how the war should be represented. In turn they haveresisted censorship. But censorship is a complex category that wields itspower not only as an external force or from a centralized official authoritybuttressed by a legal order. It also does its work through distribution, dis-persal and displacement that effects a consensual self-censorship amongstmembers of the public (Burt 1998: 18). Thus, the relationship of artistto the state, civilian to the military, speech to silence is not self-evidentlyoppositional. There are many alliances and overlaps between and amongstthese categories which inhabit an amorphous terrain that is both producedby and thrives under the conditions of militarization. How these disparateyet complementary domains of speech coincide to cast the figure of thefemale suicide bomber in ways that sexualize her and how cultural works,despite their serious engagement with her complexity, can come to reso-nate with a moral public discourse about her is a focus of this chapter. Italso provides an account of how these multiple sites of speech about herand ‘enemy’ Tamil women in general participate, at times unwittingly, inthe establishment and circulation of a new gendered security regime thathas taken on new meaning in the global ‘war on terror’ being waged today.

The Rhetoric of Terrorism

The suicide bomber has been one of the most potent weapons of theLTTE in its protracted armed conflict with the Sri Lankan state. Since itsfirst suicide attack on 5 July 1987 when ‘Captain Miller’ drove a truckladen with explosives into a Sri Lanka army camp at Nelliady in Jaffna,blowing himself up (Narayan Swamy 2003: 241–42),1 suicide attacks havebeen regularly used by the LTTE. They have been an effective strategy in

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assassinating political and military targets, and successful in spreading fearand panic amongst the southern public because of their deployment incivilian spaces. They are an emphatic statement to the Sri Lankan govern-ment and the international community that the LTTE is a force to be reck-oned with.2 Statistics of the numbers of suicide attacks carried out vary.According to one security analyst, as of 1 August 2006, the total deaths ofmembers of the Black Tigers (the LTTE’s suicide wing), Black Sea Tigersand the intelligence wing of the Black Tigers in suicide attacks amountto 316. The LTTE’s own numbers stand at 273. Of these 196 are said to beby Black Sea Tigers, of which fifty-six are female. Of the balance seventy-seven carried out by the Black Tigers, eighteen are female. The LTTE doesnot acknowledge attacks by the Black Tiger intelligence wing. Accordingto independent figures, of the confirmed gender identities, seventy-five(23.73 per cent) of the suicide attacks have been carried out by women(Gunawardena 2006).

A significant tactical weapon in the arsenal of the LTTE, the presenceand actions of the LTTE female suicide bomber have raised several impor-tant, timely and difficult questions for feminist inquiry, providing a richanalytical site for an understanding of the overlay of militarism, patriarchy,gender and censorship. Feminist scholars have explored the issues of‘ambivalent empowerment’, cultural role models and the gendered natureof sacrifice/martyrdom in their analyses of the female suicide bomber(Coomaraswamy 1997; de Mel 2004: 203–32; Maunaguru 1995). At thesame time, a global, metropolitan, ‘security analyst’ language of terrorismhas accrued, making complex discussions of the suicide bomber a particu-larly fraught domain. This language plays on public safety issues, endorsescomprehensive surveillance and ‘inhabits a no-man’s land of absoluteevil. It refuses to acknowledge that an appalling act may have an intelligiblesocial and political rationale. It defines any attempt to find one as a gestureof support for the enemy and systematically conflates explanation withexcuse’ (Downey and Murdock 2003: 83). It polarizes the domain of speechthat governs the act of suicide bombing so that the debate today is largelycontoured on lines that affirm the bomber and the supreme sacrifice s/hemakes for the cause, or outright condemnation that casts the bomber as aruthless and fanatical killing machine devoid of humanity.

That suicide bombing is primarily discussed as a moral issue raises‘questions about the assumptions implicit in our categorization of violenceand about their significance in shaping our political and analytical judgment’


(Hage 2003: 67). That it is untested and outside conventional security frame-works is one reason why a predominantly moral discourse attends the sub-ject of suicide bombings. The ways we can talk about the suicide bomberor not points to how the work of militarization has normalized certain formsof violence and pathologized others. How has this happened? Suicide at-tacks have been common in war throughout history, and while not all ter-rorist groups have used suicide attacks as part of their arsenal, the commonexamples of groups that have are the Shiite Hashishiyyin or Assassins whowere active from AD 1090 to 1256, the Russian anarchists of the late nine-teenth century, the Japanese Kamikaze pilots who operated during 1944–45(most famously in the battle of Okinawa), and the Muslim tribes of the Suluarchipelago in the Philippines who fought against Spanish and Americanconquest and colonialism (Bloom 2005: 4–16; Pedahzur 2005: 9–10). Whatis modern about the attacks today is that weapons technology has made itpossible for a small amount of explosives to cause tremendous damage, forthose explosives to be packed into a car, truck, a suicide jacket or belt that isinconspicuous and detonated by a very small device that the bomber car-ries. Moreover, while harming civilians has always been a consequenceof war, with states as culpable as the so-called ‘terrorist’, driving a vehiclefull of explosives into a crowded area, walking into a bus stand, restaurantor temple, and using one’s body as a participatory, assertive tool of aggres-sion and weapon of war rather than a defence is new. It is termed a terroristattack because it is an act outside the mainstream ‘legitimate’ violence agreedupon and unleashed by a state military force.

Today, what constitutes legitimate conduct in warfare or not has beencodified for us not only through older moral commentaries such as SunTzu’s The Art of War, Homer’s Iliad and the Bhagavad Gita, but also a seriesof manuals, statutes and treaties incorporated into a corpus of internationalhumanitarian law that govern warfare. From the 1863 Lieber Code ofConduct for armies engaged in the American Civil War, which includedrules for treating prisoners of war, to the 1880 English Manual on the Laws ofWar on Land and the first Hague conference (1899–1907) that set out aConvention on Laws and Customs of War based on the manual, rules ofwarfare have been laid down in the West. An ethic of military accountabil-ity has a long history too. In 1439 Charles VII of Orleans held militaryofficers responsible for ‘the abuses, ills and offences’ committed by themen under their command. The technological innovations in weaponrythat made wars in the nineteenth century more forceful in their destructive


power necessitated further conventions such as the First Geneva Conven-tion of 1864, which sought to protect the wounded in battle; the 1874Brussels Protocol, which stipulated that war should not ‘inflict unneces-sary suffering’ on the enemy; and the 1906 Second Geneva Convention,which sought to enforce the protection of wounded combatants at sea andvictims of shipwreck. With World War I came another set of doctrines andprotocols that became part of international law governing warfare. Fore-most amongst them were the 1919 doctrine of criminal responsibility forwar crimes,3 the 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol that banned the use of poisongas and biological warfare, and the Third Geneva Convention (1929) thatlaid down rules to protect prisoners of war. Following World War II, the1948 United Nations Convention that adopted rules on the prevention ofgenocide and the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) that reinforced theelements of the first three Conventions and added rules to protect civiliansduring war came into being. In 1970 the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treatywas signed as a response to nuclear weapons build-up during the ColdWar, and in 2002 the International Criminal Court was inaugurated as apermanent court prosecuting war crimes. These conventions and proto-cols on warfare, albeit selected examples, point to a general internationalconsensus on the need to limit the violence on the battlefield and off it.But they treat war itself as inevitable and were often worked out in closecollaboration with military professionals (Kennedy 2004: 236). In effectthey legitimized an array of military tactics in the course and conduct of‘just’ wars, so that the violence of aerial bombing and missile attacks onmilitary targets or set battles at land and sea became accepted and natural-ized. Films and literature that glamourize these battles, as well as 24/7 newsthat relays graphic footage of bombings and missile attacks live to millionsof viewers over satellite TV play their part in legitimizing these forms ofviolence still further.

Suicide bombings, considered an extension of war ‘by other means’,(Bloom 2005: 126) remains so far outside this paradigm, and it is becausethe common professional vocabulary on military violence, its ‘legitimateobjectives and proportional means’ arrived at by military, political andhumanitarian leaders is framed and accepted as defining the very ‘bound-aries of civilization’ (Kennedy 2004: 269), that acts of suicide bombingattract a discourse of moral revulsion. But in contemporary wars in whichtechniques of destabilization aimed at sowing fear and hatred have targetedcivilians in the main, where there is little difference between zones of war


and peace, where war is ‘privatized’ through proxies such as warlords,paramilitary groups and criminal gangs working on behalf of both statesand militias (Kaldor 2001), and where the ‘technoscientific specialists’ (thatwould include bomb and suicide kit makers) no longer die in the fields andtrenches (Virilio 2002: 43) or at the checkpoints, suicide attacks are of apiece with the tactics of such wars. As of now, because suicide attacks arecarried out in the main by militant and/or ‘sub-national’ groups rather thanstates, because they are used as a ‘balance of terror’, or ‘martyrdom opera-tions’ in asymmetrical warfare in which the opposition has far greatermilitary capability (Bloom 2005: 3; Said 2006: 152), suicide bombingsremain outside what we consider legitimate warfare. Given their journeytowards becoming a regular, if not still spectacular, form of violence thatattracts immediate global media coverage, there is much at stake in con-trolling how the suicide bomber is represented and apprehended.

There are many messages and interpretive possibilities in the act of thesuicide bomber. There is a powerful paradox in self-annihilation that issimultaneously regarded as life-giving to a community. It is to die seekingdistinction and immortality as a hero-martyr, and so has an investment inthe ‘post-self ’ (Hassan 2005). The traditional understanding of suicide asan act of psychic distress and self-negation is inadequate here, for whatanimates suicide bombings is the personal status and self-esteem thataccompanies the act of self-destruction (Hage 2003: 77). This comes froma prestige assiduously constructed and reinforced by the militant group’sglorification of martyrdom.4 The suicide attack, particularly if used onlyby one side in a conflict, confers tactical advantage on the side that has it,for a sense of power is accrued by its spectrality, its ability, like King Hamlet’sghost, to see the target, but not the other way around, until it is too late. Itsshadowy, anticipated, yet unpredictable, appearance has enormous poten-tial to disrupt, destroy and create fear when it does arrive (Brown 2005:10). The symbolic violence of suicide attacks as a statement, as a refusal ofdefeat, inspires a combination of awe and revulsion.

Suicide has been a characteristic act of the LTTE combatant in general,and not only of its suicide bombers. When captured or cornered on the battle-field or during a mission, the LTTE combatant bites on a vial of cyanideattached to a chain worn around the neck. Such suicides are deemed neces-sary by the group to avoid custodial torture, rapes and interrogation. Thefirst instance of such a suicide was in 1974 by a 17-year-old male, PonnaduraiSivakumaran, when he was captured by the Sri Lanka police in Jaffna. Such


dedication has elicited various explanations: in ‘filial devotion’ within Tamilcultural traditions (Roberts 1996a: 245–72),5 the practice of bhakti withinHinduism (Roberts 2005) and push–pull factors that motivate Tamil youthto join the movement, in particular, the elite Black Tigers (Alison 2003;Narayan Swamy 2003: 235). In a conversation with an ex-LTTE male com-batant who told me that he had been a Black Tiger and while on a missionbeen captured, imprisoned for eighteen months and tortured by the Sri Lankamilitary (he said he was given the ‘helicopter’ treatment: tied and hung froma pulley), the motivation for joining was presented as revenge for the killingof his brother by the Sri Lanka army. I met him by chance while interview-ing war-affected women in the Trincomalee district, and although none ofthe women present discounted his story, corroboration of his narrative wasimpossible given the secrecy that surrounds the Black Tigers. However, myinformant’s version of the modalities of recruitment to the Black Tigerswas revealing for how, even in the folklore (and precisely so because it is asite from which symbolic value is conferred on the suicide squad), recruit-ment to the group is known to be fiercely competitive not unrelated to thestatus and honour accorded by the LTTE to the Black Tigers as the mostimportant warriors in the organization (Pedahzur 2005: 173). The man stated:‘You say you want to join the group. There is no special interview. No per-sonal details were asked, but a report is sent for the first round. As places inthe group are scarce and difficult to get into, sometimes there is a lottery.There were about thirty-five men in my group. Women were trained sepa-rately.’6 This statement can be heard in different ways, either pointing to thecomprehensive surveillance the LTTE has on its ‘subjects’, by its recruit-ment agents in the field so that personal interviews are redundant, or that,in fact, the LTTE is stuck for recruits and the lottery plays out like a roulette.Ghassan Hage (2003: 69) notes that in a study conducted of 1,000 youngPalestinians aged between 9 and 16 living in Gaza, over 70 per cent said theywanted to be martyrs, but that there is a difference between the socialdisposition towards self-sacrifice and the practice of it. However, whateverthe gap between intention and action, as a tactic, suicide attacks are viewedas cost-effective because with each operation and the sacrifice of one cadre,the movement recruits and inspires many more (Bloom 2005: 76).

Analysing the predilection of an individual who wants to be a suicidebomber or assessing the specific family background and socio-political andeconomic conditions that motivate him/her towards the Black Tigers is adifficult task. That definitions and explanations for suicide attacks globally


are still only partial but expanding, attest to the complexity and exceptionsin the field (Pedahzur 2005: 42). In the case of the Black Tigers utmostsecrecy surrounds the identities of enrolled cadre, so that even their fami-lies do not know before the ‘martyrdom’ that their children and siblingsbelong to the elite unit. Once selected for a mission, only Prabhakaran, thetrainers and members of the Black Tiger intelligence wing who also gatherinformation and arrange the logistics know the identities of the bombers(Narayan Swamy 2003: 235). No video testimony by the bomber is leftbehind other than the footage of some of the missions themselves. In theabsence of a significant number of publicly available interviews or personalaccounts by women Black Tigers, it is the representation of these women inliterature and film, in public discourse and in the praxis of national securitythat mediates our understanding of their personal lives and politics. This isnot to forward a notion of authenticity as available only in autobiography.The suicide bomber’s narrative of herself could be contiguous with that ofthe movement. But in silencing her, in circumscribing and surveying hermovements, both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state’s security apparatusexpropriate her voice, denying her the possibility of controlling her ownnarrative structure, appraising her own agentive moments, and negotiatingher own terms of agreement and/or dissent with the group she belongs to.In the act of her death she seems to leave behind a statement about thededication of LTTE women on the front line, but in the absence of publicinformation about the events that have shaped her, her personal life, spe-cific location of class and caste, educational background and political choices,the popular discourse on her feeds on speculation. An a priori subjectivity isthus conjecturally produced at the site of her death. In these speculations,motives of reclaiming lost honour and revenge for a sexual violation appearas a reiterated, circulating narrative.7 This is a discourse, markedly, that doesnot accrue around the male suicide bomber.

A controversy that played itself out on the theatre stage, at a securitycheckpoint in Colombo and in the Sri Lankan English print media in theyears 1999 and 2000 marked the domain of speech governing the femalesuicide bomber. It signalled a complex and contested terrain. It pointed tothe imaginative possibilities within literary culture to go against the grain ofofficial speech. It highlighted the congruence and purchase of the state, theLTTE and members of the public in a patriarchy that converged with secu-rity interests. It accounted for both the possibilities and limitations withinsociety for a feminist reconstituting of the female combatant on her own


political terms. In doing so, it forced an engagement with the knotty issuesof censorship and representation, of subaltern representation in particular,and whether the suicide bomber who also expropriates other peoples’ voicesby her violent action can be termed subaltern in the first place. It called foran attentiveness to the subaltern’s speech as not only contingent, but also insome ways resistant to the dominant recuperation of her voice. RosalindO’Hanlon noted:

In speaking of the presence of the subaltern, we are, of course, refer-ring primarily to a presence which in some sense is resistant: whicheludes and refuses assimilation into the hegemonic, and so providesour grounds for rejecting elite historiography’s insistence that thehegemonic itself is all that exists within the social order. Our ques-tion therefore must in part be what kind of presence, what kind ofpractice, we would be justified in calling a resistant one: what is thebest figure for us to cast it in, which will both reflect its fundamentalalienness, and yet present it in a form which shows some part of thatpresence at least to stand outside and momentarily to escape the con-structions of dominant discourse. (cited in Mohanty 2003: 219)

It is in recognition that the dominant narrative(s) on the female suicidebomber is not all that exists in the social order, that literature and literaryanalysis as cultural work steps in. Given the public silence that surroundsthe bomber in life, what constitutes her agency, autonomy, resistance andchoice can only be imaginatively constructed. What is at stake, then, is notan emphasis on an ‘authentic’ subjectivity that continues to elude us (not tobe conflated with her having nothing to say), or the plotting of agency thatmay or may not be part of her consciousness and politics, but on how sitesof power and speech produce her for the public (Abu-Lughod, cited inMahmood 2005: 8). The issues, therefore, of how her agency is framed,when is it foregrounded and retracted, and on what affective registers is itintroduced become important points of inquiry.

Domains of Speech

Literature can, and perhaps must, give the lie to official facts . . . . Lit-erature is not in the business of copyrighting certain themes for


certain groups. And as for the risk: the real risks of any artist are takenin the work, in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible,in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think.Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling overit—when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or hasnot, artistically dared. (Rushdie 1991: 14–15)

A strong investment in the potential of literary and visual culture to be arepository of ethical consciousness that interrogates oppressive sites of poweranimates many commentaries on its work. Derrida (1992: 38, 40) remarkedthat literature, in principle at least, has the possibility of ‘being able to sayeverything’. Although uncomfortable with fixing literature with a singlemission because the freedom to say everything is double-edged, for it couldlet itself be neutralized as a fiction, he nevertheless asserts that literaturedoes have the capacity to interrogate and shed light on institutionality.Rushdie, as illustrated in the quote, keeps greater faith in literature’s abilityto ‘give the lie to official facts’. In fact, he emphasizes the imperative thatit should extend the horizons of how we think and apprehend, which issimultaneously an act of artistic daring by which the work stands or falls.For Jean Paul Sartre, literature should act not as a sedative, but an irritant, ‘acatalyst provoking men to change the world in which they live and in sodoing change themselves’ (cited in Caute 1978: x). Alexandr Solzhenitsyn,who wrote under Soviet regimes of severe censorship, declared: ‘Thesimple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies . . . . But itis within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!For in the struggle with lies art has always triumphed and will alwaystriumph!’ (cited in Coetzee 1996: 133).

Solzhenitsyn’s faith in the triumph of art has to be tempered with theknowledge that art has also worked in the service of totalitarianism andviolence, and that all art, including ‘great’ art, occupies heterogeneousdiscursivities that include kernels of conservative politics that draw strengthfrom patriarchy, racism, class or casteism. In its variegations and contradic-tions, there is a plasticity that permits this art to be interpreted in variousways according to different historical moments and contingencies. Forwriters and filmmakers working within a militarized society who takeon the task of laying bare the ideology of militarism as an overt themeand aesthetic form, however, his/her work invariably becomes a site ofstruggle between artistic freedom and expression on the one hand, and


state regulation and censorship on the other. It is a struggle in which thepublic too take part, for what is at stake, for artist, society, militant groupsand the state is also a memory on war and loss. If ‘Identities and memoriesare not things we think about, but things we think with’ (Gillis, cited inJelin 2003: 14), they shape how we apprehend the war, its key features andoutcomes, including notions of public security and safety. As such, theybecome contentious sites of debate, struggle and control.

One such debate brought together Visakesa Chandrasekeram’s (2000)play Forbidden Area, a review of the play in the feminist column ‘Cat’s Eye’(2000)8 and a reader’s response to the review.9 It took place in the contextand aftermath of an incident that had occurred at an army checkpoint inColombo, where on 19 March 2000 a woman was stripped in public onsuspicion of being a suicide bomber. This incident marshalled a diverserange of views that included statements from the state and the generalpublic. In all of this the female suicide bomber was mediated primarilythrough her body and sexuality. Tiffany Atkinson (2005: 2) notes that‘contemporary culture loves body-gazing’, and that this fascination, ‘farfrom proving the essential naturalness of bodies, emphasizes how they areproduced and made meaningful only by the discursive frameworks whichposition them as objects of knowledge’. Foucault’s work on biopower andthe understanding he and critics like Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agambenhave given us, that ‘politics is always a matter of the body’ so that the bodyis a biopolitical one, is resonant here (Norris 2005: 15). It is a line of think-ing that Judith Butler (1993: 2) stressed when she wrote: ‘What constitutesthe fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material,but materiality. . . rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most produc-tive effect.’ Sexuality, the performativities of which are deeply etchedon the body, is a constitutive site of power: a public matter, somethingnot only judged but administered, regulated and, in eighteenth-centuryEurope, also policed (Foucault in Atkinson 2005: 45–46). The English lawson vagrancy, also enacted in the colonies, which policed the movementsof newly freed slaves, gypsies, the poor, the homeless and prostitutes pro-vide an example. The contemporary gaze on the body and sexuality of thefemale suicide bomber draws, therefore, from a long history of investmentin public morality that converges with colonial and national security.But elements of this praxis have also come together in particular and con-tingent ways today to produce not only a heightened vigilance of women,but also a new criminological category. The advent of the female suicide


bomber has effected such a moment, contributing to a surveillance andgaze on particular women sutured into the units of security, sexualityand censorship that criminalize her as a terrorist. In the circulation of thisdiscourse, how Chandrasekeram’s play, the ‘Cat’s Eye’ review, the responseto the review and the checkpoint incident became participatory sites, pro-viding language, governing statements and ways of representing knowl-edge on the bomber crucial to the founding of a discourse (Hall 1997: 185)is noteworthy.

Visakesa Chandrasekeram’s play Forbidden Area was first performed inSinhala as Thahanam Adaviya and later at the second round of the annualstate drama festival in July 1998. In 1999 it was a joint winner of the GratiaenPrize,10 demonstrating its success at crossing over from Sinhala to Englishand their divergent audiences. Its plot revolves around an LTTE femalesuicide bomber named Urmila just before her mission. The characteriza-tion of her in the play as well as the situation that frames her is portrayed bythe playwright in a complex and accomplished manner. But this portrayalreflects no more or no less the ‘true’ subjectivity of the female suicidebomber. When Derrida cautioned that the latitude literary portrayals haveto shed light on institutionality/power could be opportunely neutralized asa ‘fiction’, there was also an understanding that a gap exists between what isbeing represented and the representation itself, and that the two shouldnever be conflated. Where literary work can differ from the official narra-tives thereby interrogating them, is in the different emphases it provides inthe representation of a subject. In the portrayal of the LTTE female suicidebomber in Chadrasekeram’s play, these emphases lead to the staging ofdifferent ethical choices for the protagonist that are in variance with thecommandments of her group.

The LTTE representations of its female combatants depict them ashomogeneously and unwaveringly committed to the cause they struggleand sacrifice their lives for. Describing the female LTTE cadre known asthe Birds of Freedom, Adele Ann Balasingham (1993: ii) stated:

Women in combat belong to a totally new world, a world outside anormal woman’s life. And that is what makes these women fightersso interesting and admirable. They have taken up a life that bearslittle resemblance at all to the ordinary existence of women. Trainingand carrying weapons, confronting battle conditions, enduring theconstant emotional strain of losing close associates, facing death


almost every day, are situations that most women not only wish toavoid, but feel ill at ease with. But not the women fighters of theLTTE. They have literally flourished under such conditions andcreated for themselves, not only a new women’s military structure,but also a legend of fighting capability and bravery.11

For Balasingham, this is agency at work, and it is important to present thefemale cadre as having joined of their own free volition and elected to un-dergo military training, courageously face death, and leave their past livesbehind as a matter of autonomous choice. In doing so, the LTTE foreclosesthe argument that its female cadre act out of a false consciousness for aninsistence on their considered commitment to its military and political goals.Literary and cinematic treatments of the female suicide bomber on theother hand often depict her hesitancy, fatigue and anxiety at impendingannihilation.12 In Forbidden Area, as she waits with Raman who providesthe logistical support for the mission, Urmila’s constant refrain is, ‘Howmuch longer?’ This is a clue to her nervousness. Raman notes that she isunusually talkative (Chandrasekeram 2000: 12). Urmila responds withan aggressive insistence that she is undaunted in her mission, but there isa defensiveness in her response that underscores a poignant struggle withinher: between the discipline and single-mindedness required of her as aLTTE suicide bomber on a mission and an interiority marked by fear andanxiety at death.

Urmila’s struggle, as depicted in the play, marks a refusal by the play-wright to be co-opted into a dominant discourse that demonizes thesuicide bomber as cold-blooded and devoid of humanity. Mia Bloom (2005:89) states that this is a rhetoric foregrounded by militants themselves: that‘as part of the propaganda, suicide terrorists…portray themselves as fanati-cal, and irrational, because they want their potential victims to believe thatthere is nothing can [sic] be done against such an adversary’. Prabhakaran’s1993 Black Tiger Day speech, however, draws attention to the ambiguitieswhich underscore this rhetoric, and, importantly, that emphases differand are contingent. It may be strategically useful for the militant group toportray bombers as fanatical for the enemy, but for the cadre within,the commitment of the suicide bomber must necessarily be recognizedand represented as rational and cohesive; and that this rationality, more-over, is not gained at the expense of a sense of humanity. Prabhakaran’sspeech, emphasizing the concurrence of political resolve and goodness


in his cadre, was an implicit acknowledgement that the widely circulatingrhetoric of fanaticism has the capacity to hurt:

I have groomed my weak brethren into a strong weapon called BlackTigers. They possess an iron will, yet their hearts are so very soft. Theyhave deep human characteristics of perceiving the advancement of theinterest of the people through their own annihilation. . . . Death hassurrendered to them. They keep eagerly waiting for the day they woulddie. They just don’t bother about death. This is the era of the BlackTigers. No force on earth today can suppress the fierce uprising of theTamils who seek freedom. (quoted in Narayan Swamy 2003: 250)

While the leadership presents the suicide bomber’s political commit-ment and humanity as coeval (reiterated in Adele Balasingham’s [2001: 42]comment on Prabhakaran’s own disposition: ‘Despite the steely reputationthat preceded Mr Piribakaran, I discovered at our first meeting, a warmand concerned human being’), literary representations often make themcome into conflict particularly at heightened moments of crisis. They do thisprimarily by mapping a dichotomous individual versus collective rubric onto the categories of humanism/compassion (presented as the place of theindividual) and ‘steely’ political resolve (presented as the place of the col-lective). This agonism is also represented on another register, symbolizedby the suicide bomber’s former life that she sets aside on joining the move-ment and the residue of this past which tenaciously persists. This formerlife, in the best of these representations, is never bare but inscribed bysocial relations and regulatory categories of caste, class and gender.But its legacy, both painful and joyous, remains, and has the potentialto rupture the commitment and concentration needed for the difficultmission. In Charles Sarvan’s (1998: 357–61) short story ‘Appointment withRajiv Gandhi’ and Chandrasekeram’s Forbidden Area, both Dhanu andUrmila are suicide bombers who recollect their lives’ journeys from child-hood as they approach the end of their own lives.13 Where these memoriescannot be recounted in direct dialogue or soliloquy, they are conveyedthrough song and symbol, a literary convention that heightens the tone andmood of pathos and tragedy.14 Urmila sings of a dream in which she flies asa seagull, ‘Across the blue sky/When the silky clouds drift’. It is a flightduring which the breeze embraces her and she feels free (Chandrasekeram2000: 24). She notes that it is a long time since she sang a song other than


LTTE liberation songs. That she can still sing ‘freely’ comes as a surpriseto her (ibid.: 21). There is a subtle critique by the playwright of LTTEindoctrination here, even as there is an investment in the liberal notion of asovereign subject as autonomous and free. However brief, it is also amoment in which Urmila becomes conscious of her pre-combatant lifeas one qualitatively different from her present. Urmila’s song is heardagain when, just before her suicide, she sees a flock of seagulls (ibid.: 30).The birds are now a metaphor of death, which connotes freedom from thetravails she has recounted before: the oppression of the Sinhala state, thegendered violence of the IPKF, the casteism of Tamil society, the cycles ofpoverty her family has endured.

These are the very struggles implied by Adele Balasingham (2001: 76)when she stated:

The liberation struggle definitely involves a collectivity of people . . . anation of people for whose political freedom the struggle is con-ducted. . . . Then comes the individual level of participation . . . theindividual is compelled to wage his or her own struggle within thetotality of the struggle in general, within the context of a multitudeof contending situations, challenges, relationships . . . the individualstruggle [is] now parallel to the development and progress of thenational liberation movement.

Balasingham’s statement makes clear that the collective good and its socio-political goals provide the template within which the individual has tonegotiate her subjectivity and private struggles to arrive at a parallel point.In this she draws from traditional Marxist thought, on the notion of the‘disinterested revolutionary’ who, in Arendt’s (1970: 24 [2]) words, ‘hadfirst to espouse the nonspeculative, down-to-earth interests of the workingclass and to identify with it; this alone gave them a firm footing outsidesociety’. There is no individual versus collective dichotomy here: rather,the two move complementarily. The privileging in literary texts of theindividual, on the other hand, runs counter to this argument. It doesso by drawing on a literary heritage in which strong heroines have beendramatically pitted against sites of oppressive power, such as Antigoneagainst the state. It also draws inspiration from liberalism’s address of thesovereign individual subject, even if this emphasis relies on an abstractionthat permits the portrayal of the individual as autonomous and fully formed


before power, rather than constituted by and through it; already shaped bymeanings of community and culture (see Passavant 2000: 117–18).

In the portrayals of the female suicide bomber, particularly in dramaticand cinematic texts, her individuality is not only contoured onto her anx-ious interiority and her past, but also her sexuality. What is at stake here? Tobegin with, her sexual intimacies and desire appeal on an affective registerto the reader/viewer to convey the bomber’s emotional vulnerability andhumanity. Pathos can be elicited from such encounters because her deathspells the end of life within intimacy and companionship. Second, thismoment can be constructed as one of agentive choice and resistance. Inplays and films that depict the strict disciplinary codes of the LTTE thatdisavow sexual relationships amongst its cadre, the bomber who sleeps withher ‘controller’ is shown to have crossed the line by choice. In the moreself-reflexive of this work, a complicated notion of the autonomoussubject emerges here by bringing into play her body as a biopolitical one. Insuch a treatment her sexualities within patriarchy, history, the law, cultureand politics can be shown to operate in a manner that disavows a represen-tation of her as a fully self-governing being. Complex characterizationbecomes possible. Third, where the themes of biopolitics and individual-ism are embodied and made visible through the corporeality of a (usuallybeautiful and commodified) female actor, the materiality of her bodyprovides the grounds on which these themes and narrative forms coincide.Centering the female body on stage or cinematic frame is also a processof making it available for fantasy and/or violence in which sexuality playsa key role.

The sexualities in Forbidden Area are complex and take us through a rangeof desires that signal different frames of mind. The infatuation that charac-terizes Urmila’s behaviour towards the Supremo, as the group’s leader iscalled in the play, traces a false consciousness in which Urmila mimics a fanhero-worshipping a superstar. Her physical encounter with the Supremowavers on the brink of the erotic—but the moment is reconstituted by himinto a moment of bhakti in which he is the star/deity from whom the ador-ing Urmila seeks strength and guidance (Chandrasekeram 2000: 20). Theerotic, sensuous, sexual encounter of Raman and Urmila on the other handis portrayed as markedly different and constituted as autonomous choice.The consummation of this desire leaves Raman at a turning point in hislife. He cannot get away from the softness of this woman who presents aniron exterior. He is overcome by the fact that she is a virgin, and both


amazed and guilty at having ‘defiled’ her before marriage (ibid.: 28–29). Inturn, Urmila’s sexuality awakened after the night with Raman, she desiresmore, but cannot name it:

Urmila: Raman, you didn’t ask me for my final request.Raman: I never thought you had one.Urmila: My request.Raman: What is it?Urmila: I want . . .Raman: What?Urmila: That. Again that. (ibid.: 34)

That Urmila is without language here marks a censorship that is bothexternal and internal to her. Its internal work is as a site of power that hasproduced her gendered subjectivity deeply entrenched in traditional Tamilculture in which premarital sex is taboo. But if Urmila is produced bythese discursive foreclosures that makes the subject of sex itself taboo—animplicit censorship that constitutes a domain of power that works preciselythrough its illegibility and inaudibility (Butler 1998: 253)—its explicit formresides in the imposition of the LTTE’s codes of sexual conduct for itscadre. It is here that the daring, courage and defiance with which Urmilaand Raman consummate their sexual desire can be constructed as agentivebecause what circumscribes them is a context of violence that punishesthem precisely for having journeyed into this deeply ‘forbidden area’.

The fear of sexual intimacy is grounded in the strict disciplinariancodes decreed by Prabhakaran.15 Several events of draconian punishmentfor disobedience within the LTTE testify, however, to how at times thisideal has to be imposed with force rather than through persuasion and emu-lation. Urmila, the very name of Chandrasekeram’s female protagonist,evokes the story of a senior and early LTTE female cadre whose relation-ship with the LTTE leader’s close associate Uma Maheswaran was frownedupon. When marriage was suggested as a ‘regularizing’ mechanism thatthe couple refused, they were expelled from the group causing an earlyinstance of factionalism within the LTTE. Urmila later died of hepatitisin Vavuniya (Balasingham 2001: 51–52). Others who were found out ashaving illicit love affairs were executed on Prabhakaran’s orders. A couplewho were guards at Prabhakaran’s heavily fortified Base One Four Campin the Mullaitivu jungle were executed despite the woman’s pregnancy and


pleas for clemency (Narayan Swamy 2003: 204). In 2002 an LTTE femalecadre who became pregnant following a relationship with a male combat-ant at the Rupaskulam LTTE camp in the eastern Amparai district commit-ted suicide by biting on her cyanide capsule. Following this incident theLTTE transferred its female cadre out of this camp to Batticoloa.16 It is thisdisciplinary context as well as its encouragement of an a priori ‘virginal’subjectivity of the female combatant within popular discourse that led tothe frenzy of speculation that surrounded 32-year-old KanapathipillaiManjula Devi who, on 25 April 2006, targeted the Sri Lanka army com-mander and killed herself and twelve others. It was alleged in the pressthat she was five months pregnant. While no forensic evidence after herdeath proved her pregnancy, that she had visited the prenatal clinic withinthe army headquarters on the basis of pregnancy, fuelled speculation as toher prior sexual history, age of recruitment, possibility of having been achild soldier, the ruthlessness of the LTTE in using a pregnant woman assuicide bomber, and the instrumentality of the woman herself in gettingpregnant so as to infiltrate the army premises (see, for instance, Gunasekera2006). Here, the sanctity (and sentimentality) around motherhood and the(unborn) child also drew a statement from the Sri Lanka All Party women’sCongress about the LTTE’s use of women, ‘especially pregnant women.’17

In Chandrasekeram’s play it is not the ‘awakening’ of her sexualitythat makes Urmila flinch at her ultimate task. She begins to question hermission when she realizes that her target is not the president as she hadanticipated, but an elderly Tamil politician. For both Raman and Urmila,killing Chief Minister Doreiraja is senseless. Raman acknowledges him asthe man who first gave birth to the idea of a separate Tamil nation.18 ‘What-ever he has done, he has dedicated to the Tamils,’ is Raman’s tribute to him(Chandrasekeram 2000: 32). With the order to annihilate Doreiraja comesthe realization for both Urmila and Raman that they are to be sacrificialpawns in an internecine battle also about speech—in this case as to who getsto speak for the Tamil people and who does not. The suicide attack is to bea strategy in the continuing struggle towards the Supremo’s undisputed lead-ership. Urmila sees a valuable chance lost. Instead of making the biggestimpact by assassinating the president, she is now asked to sacrifice herself inorder to kill an old man (ibid.). This disappointment at what she perceivesas a misjudged and misplaced decision by the Supremo is what sparks offUrmila’s refusal to fulfil her mission. When the Supremo enters the stage/room for the second time, this time in disguise, she tells him that she wants


to live and get married (ibid.: 37). She is coerced by him into pursuing hermission through shaming and chastisement that relies on calling into ques-tion her commitment to the collective good (ibid.). As for Raman, whomthe Supremo accuses of planting ‘the poisonous seeds in her heart, as pureas jasmine’, of having raped the ‘heroic virgin’ (ibid.: 39), and whose originswere in another rival Tamil group to begin with (ibid.: 32), he has to beeliminated just as soon as Urmila annihilates herself. As the play presentsher, Urmila at the end, occupies neither a place of false consciousness norautonomous choice. She prefers to stay alive and stand apart from her group’sfactionalism, but cannot. The ‘celebration’ of her in the play is as someonewho has become fully aware of the fault lines in her act of violence, but istragically doomed to carry it out and in doing so pay a heavy price.

The Cat’s Eye review praised the play’s deft portrayal of the ideologicalgrip the LTTE has on its cadre like Urmila, mediated through and focusedon the charisma and bravery of the Supremo.19 The play was also valuedfor presenting the complex location, within this continuum, of femalecombatants inhabiting an ‘ambivalent empowerment’. The review tookissue, however, with the play’s depiction of Urmila’s sexuality. Reading theturning point of Urmila’s resolve as rooted in her sexual desire followingher intimacy with Raman, the review noted: ‘The fact that a night ofpassion with Raman is followed by her willingness to abandon the causeand her mission in favour of a life with Raman, is a point to ponder and itsimplications with regards to the play and its success’ (Cat’s Eye 2000a: 276).For the reviewer, the playwright had trivialized the female suicide bomber’spolitical convictions. She noted:

One may not claim to know the inner workings of the LTTE or thethinking behind their actions, but one must be reluctant to accept theexplanation that suicide bombers’ convictions are based on mere sexualfrustration. Due consideration needs to be paid to the convictionsthat drive its grass-roots members. The explanation given for Urmila’sconviction goes against the concepts of female agency. One may becompletely against the violent tactics of the LTTE but one has toshow some degree of respect towards the convictions of its mem-bers. (ibid.: 278)

Whether the sexual encounter between Urmila and Raman is the pivotalmoment in the play or not, it was Cat’s Eye’s statement that the suicide


bomber’s motives and resolve be acknowledged and respected, and itsinsistence that the female combatant’s complex subjectivity is irreducibleto a question of her sexuality that ensured controversy.

The Cat’s Eye review was sharply rebuked in a response published in aleading English language daily newspaper that brought into sharp relief thedomain of speech governing the representation of the suicide bomber.The rebuke (Swaris 2000) held that Cat’s Eye was defending the LTTE, itspolicies and practices by asking that recognition and respect be given tothe political convictions of its cadre. It noted that the LTTE is indefensibleand cannot be called a liberation movement when its methods are ‘flagrantviolations of the civilized norms that should govern the conduct of war-fare’. It chastised Cat’s Eye for drawing attention to the suicide bomber’spolitical convictions that drive her actions rather than her motives, andstated that the distinction between conviction and motive is importantbecause convictions denote a rationality the suicide bomber is incapable of.It noted that the Nazis and Pol Pot had their convictions too, but that theworld at large does not respect them. It criticized Cat’s Eye for insistingthat the agency of the female suicide bomber be taken into account; thatshe be not always represented as the victim of a false political conscious-ness; and for not displaying even ‘an iota of feeling for the victims of thesekillers and their loved ones’. That the Cat’s Eye review did make an em-phatic statement about the LTTE’s violent and totalitarian methods andpraised Chandrasekeram’s play for a skilful dramatization of these aspectsthat bind Urmila to the Supremo was ignored. That the review never oncereferred to the LTTE as a liberation movement but is read as if it did, pointsto how explanation is conflated with excuse. In its statement that there are‘civilized’/legitimate norms of warfare from which suicide bombing standsoutside, the response to Cat’s Eye was within a militarism that legitimizedcertain forms of violence and pathologized others. The feminist call thatthe female suicide bomber be warranted a deeper look, that there werefactors that led to her disaffection and lack of alternatives that drove herto a life—and death—within militancy was stifled. Instead, the critic heldthat the female suicide bomber was a pathological, schizoid being, thevictim of a false revolutionary consciousness. He stated:

The LTTE has succeeded in producing a personality type which couldwith justification be classified as schizoid. Suicide killers have beentrained to lead normal lives without drawing attention to themselves


while all the time living at the edge of death. Only a split personalitywould be capable of displaying normal behaviour until the very mo-ment he or she detonates him/herself. (ibid.)

Such statements govern the notion that every Tamil citizen is a possibleterrorist, an ‘enemy within’, leading a normal life around civilians of otherethnic backgrounds as she awaits her own violent death.20 The logic of thisargument illustrates Slavoj Zizek’s (2002: 110) observation that ‘“enemyrecognition” is always a performative procedure, which in contrast to decep-tive appearances brings to light/constructs the enemy’s “true face”.’ In thisconstruction ‘one has to “schematize” the logical figure of the Enemy, pro-viding it with concrete tangible features which make it an appropriate tar-get for hatred and struggle’. How the enemy is demonized and scrutinized,placed apart and ‘recognized’ through a performative rhetoric and practiceis signalled here. As Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993, 1994) work has shown,the body is central in the work of performativity—of the production ofnorms and subjectivity through reiteration and repetition, of sequencingand schematization, of how each citation not only lends itself to scrutinyand eventual mastery, but also of how each repetition enacts a difference ina manner that makes the structures of the norms themselves vulnerable.And it is precisely because the body is a site of both restraint and subver-sion that the impulse to performatively ‘recognize’ the ‘enemy’ throughthe materiality of his/her body leads to misrecognitions that are, nevertheless,fully legitimized by the national security apparatus and a public primed tobelieve that pre-recognition of the enemy is a key to its own security. Thishas its parallels, for instance, in how and why the prison industrial complexin the US has expanded, promoting ‘the popular ideological assumptionthat safety and security are a function of the imprisonment of vast numbersof people of color and criminalized undocumented immigrants’.21 ForAngela Davis (2002: 326) the growth of this complex spelt a ‘dangerousrehearsal’ for the post-9/11 security paradigm. Exactly how dangerous andinimical to women this new security regime has been was evident in whathappened at the checkpoint in Colombo.

A woman dressed in a pink salwar kameez22 came to the notice of securitypersonnel as she dallied at a checkpoint near the approach to Temple Trees,the presidential residence at the time. The Section Command, under theSri Lanka Air Force, was alerted, and two of its personnel carried out aphysical search of the woman. The woman turned out to be of Sinhala


ethnicity and a sex worker who was waiting for a client. This is her story asreported in the Sunday Times of 26 March 2000:

Last Saturday I came to meet a client in Union Place but he did notarrive. I am not familiar with the area so I decided to walk alonghoping to find other prospective clients. . . . While I was walking alongI was stopped by two airmen on a motorbike and asked for my iden-tity card. . . . With guns pointed at me from a distance they orderedme to raise my kameez [blouse]. Then they asked me to take off myundergarments. They simply stared at me while I stood semi-nakedon the street. (p. 8)

The public stripping took place in front of about a hundred people. A by-stander, interviewed by the press, corroborated the woman’s story and stated:

It was around 10.45 A.M. when I suddenly spotted a woman standingon the center island of the road. She was dressed in a pink colourShalwar Kameez—a dress similar to those worn by suicide bombers.At least half an hour passed with authorities frantically trying to alerttheir officers using their communication equipment. She was thenasked to get to the other side of the road. She was then ordered toraise her hands. She refused to do so, making the onlookers moresuspicious. One of the officers pointed a gun at her threatening toshoot her. She started crying and shouted in Sinhalese ‘MataWedithiyanna epa. Mata lamayek innawa’ [Don’t shoot me. I have a child.]She was then ordered to raise the top part of her dress and also or-dered to raise the brassier. Thereafter she was told to take down thelower part of her garment including the knicker up to her knees. Shewas then asked to dress after which she was thoroughly checked.

This incident drew protests from Sri Lankan women’s groups andhuman rights activists, who blamed the security establishment for subject-ing the woman to public humiliation, demanded accountability, drew at-tention to a pattern of violence against women during the war, and insistedon guidelines and training of security personnel to ensure the dignity ofthose being searched. This response was premised on accepted codes ofconduct for policing in democratic societies. In a militarized security para-digm, however, the military-police-civilian spaces and the codes by which


the military itself should behave are suspended.23 What was at stake, apartfrom the compromised security of the victim herself, were notions offreedom of mobility and expression, the struggle over which was evidentin the subsequent reaction of both the state and the public to the check-point incident.

The director of information, also the Competent Authority for censor-ship of military news, charged that the Sunday Times in carrying the storyhad violated of Emergency Regulation No. 1 of 1998, which prohibitspublication of sensitive military information. The government was clearlyembarrassed by the incident and wished it erased from public record.Supporting this view, was a letter by a member of the public to the editor ofthe Island newspaper, chiding the media for irresponsible reporting anddemanding it take into account that ‘service personnel both men and womenhave paid with their lives, while examining suicide bombers’.24 A colum-nist for the same newspaper took the incident as his cue to titillate. ‘Thereevidently has been quite a hue and cry over the alleged stripping of a womanin a salwar kameez near a check point,’ he wrote, adding: ‘There are manypossibilities in such a situation. In the first instance a large percentage ofmales would have been furious at not been given the same opportunityas the men at the checkpoint had’ (Corea 2000). The very title of thissalacious piece—‘Not a Suicide Bomber but a Sex Worker’—suggested thatstripping the woman was permissible because, as a sex worker, that is whatshe did for a living anyway. These responses participated in a censorshipthat drew its authority from an imposed juridical order, but which workedthrough dispersal and distribution to produce a gendered consensuality.An alliance between state and sections of the public thus took place, whichwas also a coalition of national security interests and patriarchal publicmorality. The collaboration buttressed the criminalization of this woman,which hinged on her body and its mobility,25 and drew its legal authorityfrom vagrancy laws as much as from emergency regulations under condi-tions of militarization.26

The performativity of this coalition and security regime as a repeatingpractice was evident again in the arrest of a Tamil woman on 19 November2005, suspected of being an LTTE spy because she was found ‘loitering’near the Presidential Secretariat as the newly elected president of Sri Lankawas taking oaths of office (Palihawardana 2005). A hyper-vigilant securityframework that homogenizes criminality and collapses the differencesbetween the ‘terrorist’, the spy and the sex worker was signalled here. The


sex worker as spy is a conventional plot that has done its rounds duringmany wars, and circulates avidly through films and literature. What is novelabout the current security regime is the gaze on this female body as terror-ist weapon. This has enabled a new criminological category and discourseto emerge in which the materiality of the female body, its markers of class,age, dress, complexion, etc., become integral to the profiling and produc-tion of knowledge on ‘terrorists’. Women in Sri Lanka whose performativitiesof body, dress and behaviour converge with the ‘image’ of a female suicidebomber/terrorist/spy are ready pickings for security officials.27 Under sucha gaze Tamil women are particularly vulnerable and automatically treatedas guilty of terrorism if found in the metropolis with no permanent addressor with one in a Tamil neighbourhood. Class also comes into play for sus-picion accrues if she is found to have no reliable—that is, ‘respectable’—contacts in the city.28 Checkpoints, as sites of masculinized military power,are particularly dangerous. Even as the sex worker was stripped at one inColombo, the rape and murder in 1996 of Krishanthy Kumaraswamy werecommitted by Sri Lankan army soldiers stationed at the Chemmani check-point in Jaffna. But while both Tamil and Muslim women have been thevictims of a pattern of violence against women under militarization andwar, the criminalization of vagrancy in the Sri Lankan penal code and acirculating discourse on the female suicide bomber that demands absolutemoral condemnation of her, calls her schizoid and draws attention to herfalse normalcy in public, folds neatly into the agendas of the state and patri-archy in a manner that permits the surveillance of all Sri Lankan women.

The coalition of security and morality has, however, placed Tamil womenwho have crossed permitted sexual lines in double jeopardy, vulnerable tothe policing of both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state. In 1999 a 29-year-old Tamil woman from Batticoloa who had first married a Tamil and thena Sinhala soldier, and had left both husbands, was executed by the LTTEon suspicion of being a decoy for the Sri Lanka police.29 Whether a decoyor not, the woman’s refutation of the distinct ethnic boundaries as set downby the LTTE was played out on the site of her body. This theme and thereported executions by the LTTE of Tamil sex workers in Jaffna who hadclients from the Sri Lankan army form a significant episode in the playIn the Shadow of the Gun by Sumathy Sivamohan (Sumathy 2002: 18–20),which shared the Gratiaen Prize in 2002. The extra-judicial killings oftwo of the three young Tamil women who approached an internationalaid organization with stories of rape and subterfuge are other documented


cases. These women alleged that in 2002 they had been raped by men whospoke Sinhala, but were later discovered to be Tamil. Although the womendid not report the violations, they were visited by the LTTE three days laterand coerced into joining the movement to recover ‘the family honor ofhaving had sex with Sinhalese men’ (Bloom 2005: 164). Apart from theinstrumentality of the gendered violence in such recruitment practices, thattwo of the women were killed on their way for an interview with Mia Bloomin November 2002 and that the third had to flee for her life (ibid.: 236)points to how the licence to survey, control and summarily execute thesewomen was provided, yet again, by a discourse on security interests, honourand discipline. In each of these cases the bodies of these women becamesites of biopower: regulation and control on which ethnic purity had to beaffirmed and if/when transgressed, deemed fit to be cast out from the polisand onto the terrain of ‘bare life’.

Bare Life

This bare life as emblematic of modern life itself is at the centre of Agamben’sinfluential text Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). I turnto this text here not only because its analyses of biopower, the state ofexception, and relationship of law and life are pertinent to a discussion ofmilitarization buttressed by prolonged periods of emergency rule as is inplace in Sri Lanka, but also because the figure of the female suicide bomberboth supports and refutes Agamben’s arguments in significant ways.Unlike Foucault who sees biopower as a particularly modern form ofgovernmentality and politicization, Agamben traces its roots to classicalGreece and Aristotle’s distinction, in the first book of Politics, betweenpolitical life and the biological or bare life. For Aristotle, epitomizing barelife is ‘the man who is isolated—who is unable to share in the benefits ofpolitical association, or has no need because he is already self-sufficient’.He is, therefore, ‘no part of the polis, and must . . .be either a beast or a god’.To be truly human one must, therefore, be ‘a member of a polis, for it isonly as such that one can truly speak’ (Norris 2005: 3–4). It is only thepolitical that has language. Naming the political the ‘good life’, Aristotlesees the polis itself (community/city-state) as constituted and defined bythe opposition between ‘life (z" en) and good life (eu z" en)’. According toAgamben (1998: 7), this distinction between the good and bare life needs


to be interrogated not only for ‘the sense, the modes, and the possible articu-lations of the “good life” as the telos of the political’, but also for the veryterms on which western politics constitutes itself in relation to the bare life.

Agamben sees in the Roman figure of Homo sacer, a criminal who can bekilled without punishment, the man who has been cast out of the polis, whohas no language, on whom neither ‘divine nor human justice and neitherdivine nor human legal judgment falls’ (Kiesow 2005: 253), as one whoexists in a condition of bare, naked life. In this state anything can be done tohim. He can be killed without it being either a homicide or a sacrifice(Agamben 1998: 83). But who decides on the Homo sacer, on who is to becast out and who included in the polis and the community? And how is thisdone? Agamben turns here to Carl Schmitt’s analysis of sovereign power:of the sovereign who not only ‘decides on the exception’, but also inhabitsa paradox in doing so. Drawing on his legal power, the sovereign—or thestate—suspends and withdraws the law to declare a state of exception andemergency. But in doing so, he places himself in an inverse relation to thelaw, because by this very move he reinstates sovereign power in a mannerthat makes the law vulnerable, open to governmentality and the augmentedpower of the executive, which can establish its own juridical functionunder emergency (see Butler 2006: 60–63).30 Agamben (1998: 15) notedthat: ‘The topology implicit in the paradox is worth reflecting upon, sincethe degree to which sovereignty marks the limit (in the double sense of endand principle) of the juridical order will become clear only once the struc-ture of the paradox is grasped.’ Andrew Norris (2005: 5) notes thatAgamben’s understanding of sovereignty here encompasses not only kingor nation-state, but the ‘expression of the inner dynamics of the logicsof politics’ itself. And if the political must repeatedly ‘enact its internaldistinction from bare life’ (ibid.: 8), the degree of the limit between thegood and the bare life, where one begins and the other ends, become ofcentral importance. It signals the threshold between life and death, humanand inhuman, inside and outside that the sovereign must decide upon.This is a frontier that is unstable, ambiguous and contingent, and has to beconstantly adjudicated and maintained. Instituting a state of emergency isone modality in this process.

For Carl Schmitt (cited in Agamben 1998: 16) the state of exception thesovereign decides on is more interesting than the rule, for the ‘exceptiondoes not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives off the exceptionalone’. But whereas for Schmitt the state of exception is where normalcy


has been suspended, where martial law exists and so follows the collapse ofnormalcy, Agamben sees the modern political sphere as ruled by a norma-tive exceptionality. Where does bare life fit into this paradigm of the excep-tion as norm? The presence of the camp in our contemporaneity, whetherfor refugees, the purpose of genocide or (terrorist suspects) is metonymicfor Agamben, of the state of exception as norm, where ‘the state of excep-tion begins to become the rule’ (ibid.: 168–69). It is also the site of bare lifebecause in the camp ‘bare life becomes the direct concern of bio-sovereignpolitics’ (Kalyvas 2005: 109). Here, refugees are denied rights, experimentsin eugenics performed, forced pregnancy and sexual slavery take place,human beings are incarcerated in isolation or exterminated altogether. Here,bare life is lived in all its nakedness, stripped of all rights and compromisedof humanity. Following Primo Levi amongst others, Agamben foregroundsthe figure of ‘the Muselmann’,31 an Auschwitz term for the prisoner who hasbecome so abject that he is a walking dead, as the ‘most extreme figure ofthe camp inhabitant’. He is ‘a being from whom humiliation, horror, andfear [has] so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to makehim absolutely apathetic . . . mute and absolutely alone, he has passedinto another world without memory and without grief ’ (Agamben 1998:184–85). The presence of such a figure in addition to the camp itselfrefutes the Aristotelian distinction between the good and bare life for aninsistence that today these two poles are indistinguishable. The camp andits biopolitics is the site at/on which the classical binary between the politi-cal and biological life collapses (Kalyvas 2005: 109).

In the context of an internal armed conflict and multiple, competingsovereign spheres, the discursivities of the female suicide bomber both sup-port and refute Agamben’s arguments in Homo Sacer. If the good politicallife defines itself in relation to the bare, and the sovereign decides on thethreshold between good and bare in a repeating gesture, prolonged periodsof emergency, schematizing the ‘logical’ figure of the enemy, deemingher behaviour aberrant and schizoid are modalities in this process. Oncesurveyed and categorized in this way, the suicide bomber is deemed by thesovereign for the sake of the nation to have transgressed, outside of moral-ity and so fit to be outlawed. The normative state of exceptionality permitsthat anything can be done to her, from slander to killing, because in thissovereign sphere it is permitted to kill without committing homicide andwithout celebrating the death as a sacrifice (Agamben 1998: 83).32 In thisstate the body of the female suicide bomber becomes the site of bare life


itself, stripped of rights, constitutive of a compromised humanity. Asalready noted, the predominantly moral discourse (working on behalf ofthe political) around the suicide bomber that frames the public debate abouther delegitimizes her political goals and strips her bare of humanity itself. Itpermits a sexualized gaze on her body and excuses the public stripping of awoman at a checkpoint, in effect legitimizing the female body as a site ofbiopolitical regulation and control, fantasy and expulsion. That the body ofthe female suicide bomber is biopolitical is also marked in another sense—in the very harness of explosives she carries—so that her body is literally aweapon of death. In this way her corporeal frame becomes a site of conver-gence of the biopower of both sides: of the Sri Lankan state that surveys,photographs and publicizes her mutilated body and strips her down to barelife, and the LTTE that wires her up for death.

But is this bare, naked, even mutilated, body (post-detonation) entirelyshorn of language? The female Black Tiger may not be able to express herviews in public, but her body leaves behind several statements about herpolitical cause and the movement she belongs to. The manner in whichAgamben delineates bare life, however, contoured on the figure of ‘theMuselmann’, denies it any possibility of agency and is underpinned by ana-historicity that critics have drawn attention to. Agamben (1998: 187) stated,‘The “body” is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothingin it, or in the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid groundon which to oppose the demands of the sovereign power.’ In this AndreasKalyvas (2005: 113) sees a ‘rather alarming and fatalistic’ notion that thebiopolitical body can never be negated or transformed. That the LTTEfemale suicide bomber throws terror in her wake and makes a powerfulstatement of purpose to the Sri Lankan state is her resistance and challengeto state biopower. At the same time, that her suicide is the culmination ofher hitherto silenced life within the LTTE, that at times her expendabilityderives from patriarchal notions of lost honour so that she is indeed barelife, but that in her final act her body is also the vehicle of redemptivetransformation for her, and that as a martyrdom her death is celebrated inthe sovereign sphere of the LTTE, makes the sign of bare life itself morecomplex, contingent and within history than Agamben’s delineation of itin Homo Sacer.

If cultural work and feminist analysis are amongst the interventions thathold the capacity to depict the suicide bomber as a complex being, ques-tioning and engaged, this points, moreover, to how the sovereign sphere


itself is not watertight but contested. The threshold between good and barethus becomes a site of debate within the sovereign sphere itself. Agamben,however, provides no room for this. Lacking in his account is the appraisalof the forces, struggles, movements, strategies and actors involved in theunfolding of bio-sovereign politics (ibid.: 112). On the other hand, thatthere is very little room at present outside the creative medium and place ofprogressive politics to write and speak about the female suicide bomber ina complex way does indicate the constraints on this speech. In comment-ing on her politics feminist approaches audible in the Cat’s Eye review, forinstance, which speak at the interstices of what can be said about her or not,at the boundaries of overt and covert censorship, run the risk of a backlash.It is a backlash in which the boundaries that govern the speech about thesuicide bomber can be redrawn with even greater vigour to coincide withthe emphasis of the sovereign space on ‘which form of organization wouldbe best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life’(Agamben 1998: 122, my emphasis). A predominant focus on security andthe policing of her is thereby secured, which permits a disengagement withthe politics of the female suicide bomber. But if this security paradigmrequires a group of statements as a repeating and citational practice in orderto become a discourse on ‘enemy’ Tamil women, cultural work can alsoparticipate in its production in unwitting ways. An example from the inde-pendent Sinhala language cinema that encompasses a complex and disturb-ing portrayal of a Tamil woman as well as the continuous challenges facedby this cinema for its alternative portrayals of the war point to the fraughtsite of cultural work under conditions of militarization.

The Persistent Body

Third world cinema cannot establish itself in the tradition of mystifi-cation, but must be a cinema of demystification. (Gerima 1989: 76)

In 1986 the Edinburgh International Film Festival hosted a conferenceaddressing the idea of a Third Cinema that took its name from the 1969manifesto by filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (Zhang2002: 219). This cinema signed itself as one of decolonization and libera-tion distinguishable in its adoption of ‘new practices’ that were ‘no longer


captivated by the mirrors of dominance/independence or commerce/art,but grounded in an understanding of the dialectical relationship betweensocial existence and cultural practice’ (Willemen in Pines and Willemen1989: 2). Several definitions of Third Cinema animated the conference. Itwas a cinema that, as a critical and theoretical practice, was impatient withthe realism versus modernism or post-modernism debates; it favoured‘a historically analytic yet culturally specific mode of cinematic discourse’;it refused to create a simplistic binary between national and ‘Western’/imperial identity; it rejected the simple notion of cultural authenticity for acomplex representation of the multiple layers that form cultural andhistorical realities; it insisted on a politics of deconstruction which strives tosay something different; it adopted a chronotope anchored in ‘narrativeimages and rhythms’ that are non-European or -American; it was a revolu-tionary cinema (ibid.: 3–16).

The films of Sri Lankan film directors Asoka Handagama and PrasannaVithanage that portray the war and the impact of militarization on contem-porary Sri Lankan society share many of the goals of the Third Cinema.They form a ‘critical dialogue’ with the state and militarism, and explorethe multi-layered political, moral and sexual economies of the armed con-flict. Both filmmakers are deeply interested in contemporary Sri Lankanlife, although their depiction of it takes different aesthetic forms andrhythms. Their films can be viewed as guardians of ‘popular memory’, animportant function of the Third Cinema. It is a popular memory in whichthe past is considered as ‘a political issue [and] orders the past not only as areference point but also as a theme of struggle’(Gabriel 1989: 53–54). ForSri Lankans living through protracted war, the films of Vithanage andHandagama explore a popular memory that is not temporally vested in adifferent era, but has contemporary significance. In the context of conflictand violence, the management of memory, as we have seen in previouschapters of this book, is a site of struggle. Official memory, whether onthe part of the Sri Lankan state or the LTTE, preserves certain memoriesfor militaristic ends by erasing others. If, ‘In a broader sense, all policiesfor conservation and memory, by selecting which artifacts and traces topreserve, conserve, or commemorate, have an implicit will to forget’ (Jelin2003: 18), what is inconvenient for military goals is amongst the abandoned.

Sinhala cinema has played its part in supporting militarism. GaminiFonseka’s 1994 film Nomiyana Minissu (Immortal Men), which portrayedthe valour of the Sri Lankan army and its leadership, is one example. The


counter-memory to these narratives seeks to bring out stories of people ‘atthe edge, of those who were directly affected in their physical integrity bydeath, forced disappearance, torture, exile, and imprisonment’. For Jelin,this counter-memory has a double intent of representing the ‘true’ versionof history while demanding justice for what happened (ibid.: 29). Whilethe films of Handagama and Vithanage do not set themselves up as cin-ematic missions for retributive justice or ‘truth and reconciliation’, theydo encourage the viewer to learn from how militarization has shapedcontemporary Sri Lankan society. At the centre of their cinematic visionsare characters who live liminally, refuse to play the game, are namedenemies by some, but who nevertheless either doggedly pursue or inhabita moral and ethical stature that interrogates the official versions of the war.By doing so they demand a redirection of public consciousness.

If new cinematic forms are central to the Third Cinema as a function ofcritical spectatorship itself (Gabriel 1989: 60), Asoka Handagama’s cinematicstyle has been in keeping with this goal. His 2001 Sinhala language filmMe Magey Sanday (This is My Moon) has earned the accolade of being calledby Lester James Peiris, a renowned Sri Lankan filmmaker, ‘the third revo-lution in Sri Lankan cinema’ (cited in Crusz 2001: 25). In the way AsokaHandagama described many of his concerns and objectives in This is MyMoon, the goals of the Third Cinema emerge:

This is My Moon has no plot points, No suspense. Standing againstthe rules of Syd Field, the guru of scriptwriting, this anti-Hollywoodstyle film will I hope be powerful enough to keep the audiencetagged to the film right through out. No dissolves. No fade-ins. Nofade-outs. This film applies only the most primitive technique ofshot joining, the CUT. No panning. No zooming. No tracking.This film uses the most fundamental way of framing, the STATICframe. No magic. No effects. It employs the simplest of techniques,a rhythmic flow of static images to maintain the tempo. (Handagama,cited in ibid.)

Handagama deliberately sets himself apart from the style of classic realismto return to the very first cinematic techniques of the static frame. But indoing so, he was also tapping into an ancient indigenous art form and sokeeping faith with the Third Cinema’s goal of using narrative frames andimages that are indigenous. His technique in This is My Moon takes its cue


from ancient Buddhist temple paintings in Sri Lanka so that his style, asRobert Crusz (2001: 27) points out, is radical in the sense that the word‘radical’ derives from the Latin word ‘radix’, which means ‘roots’. Like thetemple paintings that use a stylized iconography of flat images, whetherfull frontal or in profile, Asoka Handagama frames his characters in This isMy Moon from head to toe without close-ups. They are mostly still withinthe frame and when there is movement they move in and out of the framein a straight line from left or right, or walk into, or away from, the camera.Crusz notes that the spectator is always aware of watching the film at a90° angle. There is no attempt at seducing the audience towards ‘realism’(ibid.: 27).

Handagama’s style was not without its critics. Thomas Sotinel (2003)noted that the ‘wrong way of the laws of the filed-reverse shot’ and tinycharacters within the framework (perhaps referring to the lack of close-ups) were used too systematically in the film. Another accused Handagamaof being too preoccupied with visual forms at the expense of thoughtfulcharacter and plot development (Wijesiriwardana 2002). Yet another at-tacked the film for a ‘host of gimmicks’ (Jayaratne 2001). But the film alsohad its fans. Finding new forms—or, as in This is My Moon reusing oldcinematic forms no longer in the cinematic mainstream—to make acomment on the Sri Lankan war that was markedly different and fresh,Handagama’s artistic daring extended the limits of our understanding ofhow the war could be represented in the visual text. The film was hailed fordisturbing ‘our assumptions about war, about love, about life’,33 for its ‘damn-ing comment on war’,34 and its ‘cool clinical objectivity laced however witha deep humanism’.35 Chandima Nissanka (2001) wrote that since ‘prevail-ing traditional forms and narratives are incapable of portraying [the] newsocial reality’, Handagama’s technique was apt, enabling him to ‘portraysocial reality successfully’. The exhibition of the film also kept to the alter-native ethos marked by the Third Cinema. Financial constraints forcedHandagama to produce only a single copy of the film for internal screeningin Sri Lanka (Wijesiriwardana 2002). It, therefore, did not have a widecommercial release, but was shown in one theatre at a time in selectedareas of the country, to small focus groups, with discussions following thescreening. This style of exhibition also coincided with the Third Cinema’sinsistence on control and autonomy over its own releases, means of pro-duction and screenings, as did Handagama’s (2001) pledge that he wouldnot alter his way of expression just to attract a larger crowd.


The film’s representation of the economies of war in a border village inthe north-central dry zone was stark and bleak. Handagama noted that hewas shocked at how the traditional relationship of villagers to their landhad changed during the two decades of war. Agriculture was already incrisis when the war began. The abandoned paddy fields, the lack of choicethat made young men join the military and young women seek work inthe garment factories were the ground realities that he portrayed. He said,‘The film is my response to this shocking change’ (2001). In presenting thevillage in this way, Handagama also challenged the romanticized, idyllicdepiction of rural Sri Lanka as a timeless tight nexus of agricultural andBuddhist community for an understanding that decades of militarizationand globalization had irrevocably transformed traditional patterns of life,alienated people from the land, and introduced new sexual, moral andpolitical economies.

These economies in the film revolve around the war although its‘action’ is off-screen. The military and what is stands for takes precedenceover all else in the village, and relationships form and re-form aroundeach person’s needs from the war. Samitha (Saumya Liyanage), the soldier-deserter is pressurized by his parents to return to the army so that his salarycan support the family again. His fiancé Sudinna (Anoma Janadari) dog-gedly sticks by him despite his liaison with a Tamil woman because he, hissalary and his family that she has come to know are also her means ofsurvival. Two village lads vie with each other to get into the army in orderto impress the girl they both admire. Handagama masterfully foregroundsthe relationship of militarism and male sexual prowess. That the ladwho does join the army gets the girl underscores the investment withinmilitarization of military vocations and masculinities as economicallyviable and virile. Amongst the vignettes in the film is the story of a youngwidow who dare not remarry for fear of losing her army widow’s pension.Army widowhood is her only means of livelihood.

The sexual economies of the village complement its economies ofbarter, gambling and compensation for the war-dead. While the film’sportrayal of these economies in a border village was daring and pro-vocative, to the extent that it was attacked for its obsession with sex(Ilayapparachchi, 2001), Handagama’s handling of the ‘enemy’ Tamil womanmade for a far more ambivalent address. At the centre of This is My Moonis a Tamil woman36 who, while escaping from Sri Lankan military fire,finds herself in a bunker that she thought was empty but is occupied by


the lone, armed, but cowardly Sinhala soldier Samitha who subsequentlydeserts the military. When the offer of her gold chain is not enough toprotect her from death, she raises her skirt, offering her body. The rapesaves her life and sets the tone of tragic and dark irony with which the filmexplores the conditions of life that circumscribe her, as one who has beendisplaced and lost everything but her body, reduced to biological/bare life.

This is My Moon does not flinch from showing sexual violence as aninstrument of war, a tool in the subjugation of enemy women. Yet, whilethe first scene of the film is a powerful enactment of gendered violence inwar, it is the Tamil woman’s subsequent insistence on following the soldierto his village and her behaviour there that is problematic as it is complex.She persistently uses her body in exchange for her life, for food, for accep-tance in the village. The men in the village—the soldier/deserter, his bookiebrother, as well as the Buddhist priest, take advantage of it. Sometimesshe is raped, sometimes she willingly submits to sex as with the deserter,although the thorns that wound her hand during this searing encountersuggest that her submission is fraught and painful. She refuses to be side-lined and conveniently forgotten by being sent off to a refugee camp assuggested first by the Buddhist priest and then the villagers. She forms afriendship with the soldier’s sister. She becomes pregnant with the soldier’schild, and gives birth to a daughter who steals her way into her father’sheart at the end of the film in a closure commented upon as collapsing intoa surprising conventionality for a film radical in its cinematic aesthetics(Crusz 2001: 31).

It is tempting to see this Tamil woman as a metaphor of the Tamil‘question’ that dogs the Sinhala consciousness. She refuses to go away. Shedeterminedly follows the Sinhala soldier and remains in the village. Thereis resistance in her refusal to be consigned to the refugee camp and status ofrefugee: a ‘limit-figure’ of humanity itself, moving in a ‘zone of indistinctionbetween outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit in which thevery concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer [make]any sense’ (Agamben 1998: 170). The village is both provoked by her andalso accommodates itself to her so that at the end she seems to have carvedout a niche for herself that also supports the reading of a sisterly solidarityamongst the women of the village (Abeysekera 2001: 11). In refusing toleave, she insists on remaining within the polis whatever the cost. In doingso she attests to the varying degrees of bare life within the sovereign, politi-cal sphere itself. Her presence in the village marks this in a literal, material


sense—and not only as a necessary concept within the political by which itdefines itself in relation to the bare. And in refusing the bare life thatfinds its apogee in the refugee camp, she seems to be in agreement withAgamben’s (1998: 171) controversial understanding that the camp is where‘its inhabitants [are] stripped of every political status and wholly reducedto bare life’ so that it becomes ‘the most absolute biopolitical space everto have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life,without any mediation’.

Her dogged pursuit of the people who both abuse and protect her drawsattention to her complex subjectivity, simultaneously agentive, unpredict-able, absent. It provokes an understanding of agency not as a self-evident orteleological site of resistance, or an inherent will to freedom, but a contin-gent category, one that cannot be fully determined in advance (Butler 1998:256; Mahmood 2005: 9). Her footsteps reflect her abject condition evenas she struggles to inhabit the cusp of the threshold between the goodand bare life. The absence of anger marks the extent of her dehumaniza-tion for, as Hannah Arendt (1970: 63), noted of those stripped to bare lifein concentration camps, undergoing torture or hunger in famine, ‘Onlywhere there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and arenot does rage arise.’ The Tamil woman in This is My Moon is not (yet) insuch a camp and psychic state, but in her passive and fatalistic moments, inher acceptance of her subjugation, is the very elaboration of the violenceshe is subjected to within the polis itself.

In figurative representations, the destination of the cinematic or literaryaddress is the viewer/reader, and it is not necessarily the case that we iden-tify totally with the characters on screen, stage and page. But their condi-tions of existence and what they stand for are important in sheddinglight on the structures of power that organize society. Arendt (ibid.) stated:‘Only when our sense of justice is offended do we react with rage, and thisreaction by no means necessarily reflects personal injury.’ Alluding to ‘thehistory of revolution’, she provides the example of the middle-class elitewho supported revolutionary movements despite not being the personaltarget of class and labour oppression themselves. In This is My Moon,Handagama’s goal was to realign public consciousness on the war throughthe fate of the Tamil woman, and the sexual and moral economies of thevillage as a whole. However, that the entire burden of the Tamil woman’snarrative and action is projected on to and carried by her body leaves adisturbing trace. This is a consequence of producing her as an allegory—


an interpretive position supported by Handagama’s (2001) claim thatthe incidents in the film ‘do not bear any real, rational sense’ and that hisinterest was in working out a human relationship between the two pro-tagonists. Given his cinematic style, signalled here is the filmmaker’s inter-est in abstraction, and it is in keeping with this move that the woman remainsunnamed, her body figuratively approximated to bare life, in the serviceof the good in a manner that keeps close to an Agambenian a-historicity.We are told nothing of her background, her family life, the conditions un-der which she lived, or her politics. What this encourages and enables is afocus on her body as the sole locus and materiality of her identity. It is abody that is not totally empty and bare, for to ‘visualize a body is to plungeimmediately into the particulars of gender, race, age, posture and so forth’(Atkinson 2005: 3). The body of this woman in This is My Moon is notwithout an ethnicity. It is a Tamil body, which is why, at times, she getsraped when, in the film, all the other sexual relations by Sinhala peoplein the village are consensual. It is also inscribed by markers of beautyand youthfulness that within the cinematic frame makes it available for aneroticized, voyeuristic gaze.

In essentializing and paring down his female protagonist to her body, indenying her a political history and an imaginative politics of a future,Handagama deprives his heroine of speech: reminiscent of Agamben’snotion that ‘Bare life is mute, undifferentiated, and stripped of both thegenerality and the specificity that language makes possible’ (Norris 2005:4). In a film sparse in dialogue, the Tamil woman’s voice is suppressedstill further. This resonates with a gendered censorship embedded in domi-nant discourse that silences women’s voices, denies the validity of theirexperiences, and excludes them from the political discourse (Tax et al. 1995:20–21). The woman’s prolonged passivity in the film is all the more re-markable for being in counterpoint to acts of Tamil ethno-nationalism thatcall for the constitution of a separate and different polis from the Sinhalaone. Her acquiescence also counteracts the struggles of Tamils andMuslims (the latter unmarked in the film), who tenaciously cling on totheir humanity in the context of war, who do not give up, act and re-act.But in This is My Moon, except for her attempt at bartering her life for hergold chain and the offer of her body as a strategic move in the first scene ofthe film, the Tamil woman is not shown to find another means of escapeor self-protection within the community except through her body andservices of sex. Her compliance also marks her acceptance of male sexual


violence against women as normative. There is no moral condemnation ofher because her deeds are part of the sexual economies of the village as awhole. The condemnation, rather, is on the war that has transformed rurallife in this way and made of this woman such an abject figure. That thewar per se is shown to shape sexual encounters into particularly violentepisodes was less than convincing to some viewers (Seneviratne 2001). Note-worthy, however, was the filmmaker’s thematic and strategic refusal to con-demn the ‘enemy’ woman for a critical scrutiny of the structures ofmilitarization instead.

Unfortunately this was a manoeuvre that collapsed on itself because inthe manner in which Handagama brought the Tamil woman’s body intovisibility, he also invited an objectification of her.37 This points to an impor-tant principle in the gendering of security. If ‘a certain logic of genderedmeanings and images helps organize the way people interpret events andcircumstances’ that incorporates security responses and a rationale forthem (Young 2003: 2), the repeating trope of the sexualized Tamil womanbecomes institutionalized through the figurative site as much as throughsecurity praxis and censorship. That disquiet over the representation of theTamil woman remained largely silenced for the public outcry againstHandagama for bringing Buddhism and the Sinhala village into disrepute,38

and that his film faced covert censorship because of its treatment of thesecultural icons, proved how naturalized surveillance and objectification ofthe ‘enemy’ Tamil woman had become within dominant discourse.

Censorship and the Public Good

The backlash against This is My Moon for its dark portrayal of the Sinhalavillage and its sexual economies that ensnare everyone, including theBuddhist priest, took an insidious, covert route. Handagama had sought afinancial loan from the Peoples’ Bank to make the film. Following proce-dure, the bank released part of the loan based on the approval of the filmscript by the National Film Corporation (NFC). At the final edit stage thebank authorities sought to preview the film. This was accepted practice.On seeing it the officials found the film unacceptable. Particularly disturbedby the depiction of the Buddhist priest, the film was deemed provocative,and possibly too risky for the bank to support. The remainder of the loanwas refused.


The work of censorship was at hand here, but by a different route. JackMapanje, the Malawian poet whose work, together with that of his univer-sity colleagues, was heavily censored by the Hastings Banda regime, stated:

Perhaps the most outrageous legacy of censorship that our dictatorand his sycophants invented for us is one where they censored with-out actually censoring; where they banned without invoking the ban-ning order; where they effectively let you ban yourself. Self-censorshipis not an adequate concept to describe this kind of censure which wastoo subtle and too brutal for description. (1997: 73)

Mapanje points here to an important modality in how censorship works:privatized, distributed, extra-legal. Other than the juridical order that isdirectly invoked to ban the work of an artist, which often runs the risk ofbeing unpopular, a host of indirect threats, harassments and alternativemethods of censorship are put into play that are as effective in controllingcultural work. They induce pre-emptive self-censorship which Mapanjecharacterizes as too subtle and brutal for description, for, in the context ofmilitarization, if the public consciousness is the destination of militarism’sinterpellations, self-censorship is the index of how successful this ideologi-cal address has been. The technologies of extra-judicial censorship are alsopowerful because they inhabit a grey and fluid terrain that does not proceedaccording to the ‘rule of law’. The withdrawal of financial support by thePeoples’ Bank for Handagama’s film is a case in point. The film was notpublicly banned or even denounced in a widespread fashion. Rather, it wasundermined in a way that delayed its completion, harassed the filmmaker,and sent out a signal to other artists that they should think twice beforeemulating Handagama or mocking the Sinhala Buddhist nation. Fortunatelyfor Handagama, in this instance, the chairman of the NFC as well as a groupof artists, public intellectuals and renowned personalities provided solidar-ity, arranged for a special screening of the film to canvas support for it, andexerted pressure on the bank to release the funds following which the filmwas completed. In this amorphous terrain of censorship, peer pressure couldbe applied for redress, albeit reliant on a network the filmmaker could sum-mon because of his artistic reputation and the willingness of a small butsocially powerful group of people to make a stand against censorship.

The resistance Prasanna Vithanage had to mount over the overt censor-ship of his 1998 film Purahanda Kaluwara (Death on a Full Moon Day) was


of a different nature. Unlike Handagama’s This is My Moon, Vithanage adoptsa classic realist narrative mode, but keeps to the tenets of the Third Cinemaas a guardian of popular memory that ‘foregrounds the struggle betweengood and evil which has a unique symbolic significance in popular memory’(Gabriel 1989: 54). The story is set in a Sinhala village from which theyoung Bandara (whom we never see in the film) has joined the army. Hisaged father Vannihami, a farmer, is blind. His younger sister awaits mar-riage. They are dependent on Bandara’s army salary. Fairly early into thefilm the news of Bandara’s death in combat in the north of the countryreaches his family. Army personnel bring to his home a sealed coffin drapedin the Sri Lankan flag and donate money collected by the corps towardsthe funeral expenses. The funeral takes place and the coffin is lowered tothe ground. Thereafter, the compensation paid by the government to thefamily of soldiers killed in combat becomes the pivot around which theplot of the film revolves. The money is needed for several urgent reasons:to repair the leaking roof, to finance the three months’ alms-giving, to payfor the wedding expenses of the younger sister. The village administrativeofficial in the film also eyes the compensation as his only chance of recov-ering a loan he once lent Vannihami. The father, however, refuses to signthe necessary papers. He asks, ‘Did any of you see the body? How do youknow Bandara is dead?’ His uncertainty is reinforced when a letter writtenby Bandara promising to come home on leave reaches the family soon afterthe funeral. Vannihami is the parent and village elder (in line with a figura-tive tradition of blind seers) who affirms an older ethical stance in his stead-fast avowal of the irreducibility of life to a monetary unit.

As much as this film, like This is My Moon, depicted the political econo-mies of the war and the transformations they have effected in the lives,relationships and values of the Sinhala village, Vannihami’s dilemma, hisinability to be sure whether his son is dead or alive in the absence of a bodyto decisively prove death, not only resonated with the experience of parentswhose children are currently missing in action in the war,39 but also a publicmemory not confined to the war alone. The 1987–89 JVP–UNP ‘reign ofterror’ in the south of the country resulted in an alleged 40,000 people forc-ibly ‘disappearing’ (Gunaratne 2001: 269) while routine security sweepsaimed at capturing militant Tamil youth in the north-east from the late 1970smade the absent bodies of loved ones a reality for Tamils long beforethe official start of the war. In Vithanage’s film, Vannihami is the fatherwho complements the figures of the mothers who organized collectively


to file cases of habeas corpus and demand the release of their sons. TheJaffna Mothers’ Front was formed in response to the north-east disappear-ances in 1984, just as the southern Mothers’ Front was organized later, in1991, to protest and lobby the government for the release of detained south-ern youth. Vithanage’s film does not make an overt statement about theabsent body as a common site of Sinhala and Tamil suffering. Nor does itovertly acknowledge the refusal of monetary compensation for the dead asa stand taken by some parents whose children were forcibly ‘disappeared’.40

But his cinematic address, primarily to a Sinhala audience, resonated withthe conditions of political violence, untimely death, trauma and loss thecountry had suffered for over three decades since the 1971 JVP insurrec-tion. This marks a period in which parents, family and friends of the ‘disap-peared’ have inhabited a painful liminality. Reluctant to offer alms on behalfof the dead for fear of tempting fate and retreating from hope that the lovedone is still alive, they are also unable to perform last rites, hold alms-givingsand memorials as ceremonies of closure. The result is a debilitating psychicloss (Perera 1997: 5–14). 41

In Death on a Full Moon Day the imperative to ‘see’ the body of his sonimpels Vannihami to exhume the coffin. Intending to clear up his uncer-tainty once and for all, Vannihami’s intended son-in-law prises it open.Vithanage manipulates cinematic suspense masterfully in this scene. As thecamera tilts towards the coffin, we and the characters in the film, see thatthe coffin does not carry Bandara’s body but pieces of wood and stones. Asa reviewer of the film noted:

Vannihami’s refusal to accept that it was his son in the coffin is vindi-cated. The rest of the village is left behind in shock, coping withthe fact that most bodies of soldiers killed in battle are never in factreturned to their families, and that all the funeral rites and obsequiesare performed for blocks of wood. Injunctions from army superiorsthat the coffin’s seal should not be broken take on a new meaning.(Abeysekera 2001: 9)

It is this twist in the tale that brought Vithanage’s film into open con-frontation with the state in a struggle about the management of publicmemory and knowledge on the war. The public release of the filmwas ‘deferred’. Its censorship took place, however, in a militarized contextin which numerous regulations under prolonged emergencyrule continue to curtail the media’s reporting of the war (Gunasekera 1999:


204–09). These regulations range from direct censorship of military news tocontroversial defamation clauses that protect the president’s handling of thewar as overall commander of the security forces.42 Amongst them is thePrevention of Terrorism Act (1979, Part V), which prevents the printing,publishing and distribution of certain publications without the writtenapproval of the Competent Authority. During 1999–2000, at the height ofthe war that led to the debacle for the Sri Lankan military at ElephantPass, it was common to see newspaper reports and features on the warwith many blank spaces and the lone word ‘Censored’ printed across. TheOfficial Secrets Act that restricts access to certain official documents, theNewspaper Ordinance that regulates the printing of newspapers, the SLBCAct that gives the minister of information and broadcasting discretionarypowers to issue radio licences, and the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Act that givessimilar powers to the minister in controlling TV stations are other statutesin force. This body of regulation has the media at the mercy of the military-political apparatus of the state.

State censorship in Sri Lanka has not been without its critics. The Presi-dential Committee appointed in 1996 to advise on media law reformationstated that: ‘Past and present practices with regard to the application of cen-sorship has often been arbitrary and erratic, and in violation of internationalstandards of freedom and expression.’ It expressed unease at thefact that censorship was imposed by emergency measures without publicannouncement or explanation, and urged the government to table thesemeasures in Parliament and publish them in the Sinhala, Tamil and Englishlanguage press. It also recommended that the law and practice relating tocensorship be kept strictly within the framework permitted by internationalnorms, notably the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights towhich Sri Lanka is a party.43 The crackdown of the media also led to thebirth of the Free Media Movement and several challenges in the SupremeCourt. (In April 1997 the Supreme Court reviewed fifteen petitions againsta Bill to establish a Broadcasting Authority with overarching powers of cen-sorship. The Bill was subsequently quashed as unconstitutional.)44 But whathappened on a day-to-day basis in this climate of both arbitrary and ‘rule oflaw’ repression was self-censorship exercised by media personnel themselves.The obstacles placed in the path of Vithanage, who, like Handagama, soughtto present an affective history of the war that went against the official lineproved only too well that under conditions of militarization, military pro-fessionals and defence bureaucrats take precedence over cultural agents.


Vithanage had obtained the necessary clearance for the release of hisfilm by the Public Performances Board on 1 March 2000 after a delay ofthree years in the notorious NFC queue system, and the film was sched-uled for screening on 21 August 2000. In May–June 2000 Elephant Passwas under siege by the LTTE and the Sri Lanka military lost land access tothe Jaffna peninsula. The Peoples’ Alliance cabinet decided to place thecountry on a war footing on 3 May 2000, and emergency regulations wereimmediately promulgated. When Vithanage wrote on 22 May 2000 to theCompetent Authority at the Government Information Department whooversaw the media under emergency law seeking approval for the releaseof his film, the latter replied that ‘the theme as well as several scenes couldnot be approved under [Emergency] Regulations’ (quoted in the SupremeCourt Judgement, Case No. 516/2000, p. 4). The NFC had the sole rightsto release and distribute Death on a Full Moon Day in Sri Lanka. Respondingto an enquiry addressed to him by the chairman of the NFC, the Compe-tent Authority reiterated in a letter dated 17 July 2000 that the chairmancould decide on what course of action to take regarding the distribution ofthe film, but added: ‘However, I wish to point out that in my opinion cer-tain sections of this film, which describe the conduct of the soldiers [are]likely to affect the morale of the security forces [especially the exhumationof the coffin and its follow-up scenes]’ (ibid.: 2). On 21 July 2000 theminister of rehabilitation, reconstruction and development of the northernregion, to whom the subject and functions of the NFC were assigned, wroteto its chairman stating:

‘In terms of the powers vested in me under section 6 of the NFC Act,I hereby direct the National Film Corporation to defer the exhibitionof the film ‘Pura Sanda Kaluwara’.

I am sending this directive in view of the fact that the country isnow on a war footing. The producer may be informed that this filmwill be exhibited, as soon as the security situation improves’ (ibid.: 3).

The chairman of the NFC acted on the minister’s letter, sending a letterto Vithanage on the same day stating that the release of the film scheduledfor 21 August 2000 had been suspended until a fresh directive from theministry was received, dependent on the security situation.

Vithanage filed a fundamental rights appeal in the Supreme Court ofSri Lanka against the minister, the NFC, its chairman and officials in chargeof the subject, the Competent Authority, the chairman of the Public


Performances Board and the Attorney General. At the trial the president’scounsel (PC) who appeared on behalf of the respondents stated in awritten submission:

The film which portrays the absurdity of a war-time society whichaccepts that young men should risk and lose their lives in order toearn a living and contains a scene where a banana trunk is substitutedfor a dead soldier in a coffin sent by the army to his parents wouldhave not only an adverse effect on the recruitment drive, but also onthe morale of the armed forces and the kith and kin of a large numberof soldiers who were either deceased or engaged in the ongoing civilwar. . . . [T]his completely false depiction of the stark reality of deathand waste of life as presented in the film…without any disclaimerthat it does not refer to any persons living or dead and is entirelyfictitious would have had an adverse impact on the audience. . . . [T]hemotion picture is able to stir up emotions more deeply than any otherform of art and its impact on a nation that has experienced and isstill experiencing a war situation of this dimension which is presentlyraging could be counter-productive to the efforts of the Government.(ibid.: 8)

This submission is noteworthy for several reasons. The disparagingdismissal of economic factors in military recruitment is within a nationalistrhetoric that prefers a narrative of enlistment because of patriotic andmartial duty. The ‘empty’ coffin is viewed as deception, not a reality of war,nor a possible humane effort on the part of the military to bring closure tofamilies where the bodies of their loved ones are missing and/or mutilatedbeyond recognition on the battlefield. The power of the classic realist filmto be viewed as verisimilitude is seen as threatening and the filmmakerblamed for not classifying his work a fiction. (This also points to the crucialrole of narrative form in whether a figurative work lends itself to beingneutralized as a fiction or not.) The gist of the PC’s argument rested on aninsistence that the film would affect military morale, and hinder militaryrecruitment and the war effort.

In a random sampling conducted for this study from October 2001 toFebruary 2002, fifty people who viewed Death on a Full Moon Day wereinterviewed in Colombo and its suburbs of Nugegoda, Maharagama,Dehiwela and Ratmalana, and the provincial centres of Kalutara and Matara


as they came out of the theatre having watched the film. Of this fifty, fortyquestionnaires (twenty each in Sinhala and English) were distributedamongst the age group of 40 to 55 years, of whom twenty-three or 57.5per cent respondents were women. Ten questionnaires were distributedamongst the age group of approximately 70 years. The results are presentedin Table 5.1.

The responses are revealing. Despite an understanding that the film wascritical of the war, and despite acknowledgement by 64 per cent of thesample that the film had the ability to change people’s attitudes to it (whichis what the state feared), none of them supported its censorship, and themajority stated it would have no impact on military recruitment. This wasa verdict at variance with the official judgement.

The state counsel’s claim that the story depicted in the film was entirelyfalse was disputed by Vithanage at the trial. Although the film’s narrativedid not specifically allude to it, Vithanage’s counter-affidavit to the courtheld that a similar story had already been published. Entitled ‘A Soldier’sVersion’ by a major general (who the minister had cited earlier as support-ing the suspension of Vithanage’s film), this story had given details of asealed coffin and a subsequent funeral for ‘Lt S.C.’, a volunteer artilleryofficer who was captured by the LTTE on 13 October 1986, but reportedkilled in action. The major general wrote in the article that two days laterhe had visited the officer’s house: ‘The coffin was sealed. Family memberswere screaming at us requesting permission to open the sealed coffin toget a last glimpse of their loved one. [The] following day, the sealedcoffin was buried.’ What actually transpired, according to him, was that‘Lt S.C.’ was captured by the LTTE and released following talks betweenthe LTTE and Sinhala politician Vijaya Kumaratunge when the lattervisited Jaffna.45 Vithanage used the publication of this story to argue thatwhile his film was not based on a ‘true story’ as such, there was one event atleast that paralleled his story-line that had, importantly, gone uncensoredand been published.

The arguments of the case were taken up at the Supreme Court on5 February 2001 and on 2 August 2001. The judges ruled in favour ofVithanage, stating that the minister exceeded his powers in suspending thefilm without due notice or hearing, and that the NFC chairman had noauthority to suspend the release of the film under the NFC Act. Vithanagewas awarded Rs 550,000 as compensation. The minister was ordered to paya personal fine to the filmmaker of Rs 50,000 and the NFC Rs 500,000. The

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court also ordered the release of the film before September 2001, and in theevent of a delay in release, a further Rs 100,000 was to be paid to Vithanagefor each month of non-screening. The Supreme Court further held thatif by 15 November 2001 the film was not publicly released, Vithanage hadthe right to make a further application to the Court. On 12 October 2001the film opened in thirteen cinema theatres around the country and brokerecords at the box office within the first two months of screening.46

At stake in the Supreme Court judgement was an interpretive struggleover what constituted national security and the public good in a context ofmilitarization. Its judgement held that the film’s portrayal of the conductof the security forces did not necessarily prejudice national security andthat ‘disclosure and exposure may be the most effective and expeditiousmeans of remedying a situation enormously prejudicial to national secu-rity’ (Supreme Court Judgement, Case No. 516/2000, p. 11). This not onlyimplied that the war itself was the major cause of public insecurity, but alsothat national security is not the special interests of the military-political elite,but the public as a whole, which needs to be secured, moreover, throughinformation and debate. In his book on censorship entitled Giving Offense,J.M. Coetzee (1996: 9) states: ‘The censor acts, or believes he acts, in theinterests of the community. In practice he often acts out the outrage of thecommunity, or imagines its outrage and acts it out; sometimes he imaginesboth the community and its outrage’ (emphasis added). In the censorshipof both Vithanage and Handagama, the pre-emptive acts of the censorsimagined a moral outrage on the part of a cohesive Sinhala community onthe one hand, and a loss to the military on the other. As the reviews of bothfilms and the respondents to our questionnaire indicate, there was dividedopinion, a plurality of views, on the themes and outcomes of the films.Vithanage’s film in particular was received as depicting ‘deep truths’ aboutthe war that were within popular memory and knowledge on the armedconflict. Its themes were taken by the viewers, therefore, in their stride.The official censor on the other hand, as Coetzee pointed out, can act outof paranoia, and in the name of public/national security, deploy a body oflegislation at his disposal, indirect threats and harassment to ‘protect’ thosewhose voices resonate with his own dis-ease. At times he himself acts underpressure from authorities above.

In as much as speech and silence are constant sites of regulation, nego-tiation, acquiescence and resistance under conditions of militarization, thereare also contingent events that come together in unpredictable ways to


heighten official insecurity in a manner particularly detrimental to workswithin popular visual culture such as films. Just as the military defeat atElephant Pass and placement of the country on a war footing was the unan-ticipated context in which the struggle over the release of Death on a FullMoon Day took place, the vituperative attacks on Vimukthi Jayasundera, ayoung Sinhala language filmmaker whose film Sulanga Ena Pinisu (TheForsaken Land) co-won a Camera d’or Prize at Cannes in 2005, occurred ina politically charged atmosphere. The film portrayed a ‘suspended state ofbeing simultaneously without war and without peace—in between the two’.47

It offered a stark and hostile landscape in which its few characters—a homeguard, his wife and sister, an old man and a little girl named Batti live unde-fined and unspecified lives, trapped in suspense, ennui and frustration, withonly momentary glimpses of a vision for an alternative future. A radio thehome guard’s wife turns to, the job applications the sister wishes to fill, andBatti’s declaration at the end that she wants to go to school are some of thefleeting references in the film to a future and the outside that are in contrastto the hostile landscape and the stagnant temporality of the present theyinhabit. In depicting the forsaken land itself as a central feature, barren andsparse, dangerous with landmines and thorny vines, Jayasundera gives us acinematographically powerful film that privileges metaphor over narrative.The inevitable consequence of this move is an abstraction of place, peopleand the war itself. In refusing a classic realist narrative, the topography andsparse details of the characters are in synchrony with the theme of indeter-minacy that is the main figurative trope of the film. But this is a minimaliststyle that is vulnerable to a reinscription by viewers who wish to co-opt itinto classic realism. Many of the commentaries that followed the screeningof the film in September 2005 in Colombo drew for such reinscriptions ona Sinhala nationalist discourse. An opinion piece on the film stated that farfrom being the site of moral depravity and barren desert, the landscape ofthe film is purana: ‘traditional lands that quiet cultured people inhabit . . . thecradle of our civilization… [and the] settlements by ancestors who broughtBuddhist civilization to [the] land’ (Atugoda 2005).

It was Jayasundera’s depiction, however, of the Sri Lanka military andthe performativities of masculinity within militarization that courted con-troversy. Bored with the ceasefire, the militarymen in the film engage inacts of perverse ragging, sexual adventure and the ordering of summaryexecutions. Not surprisingly, the reaction of the Sri Lankan military itself tothe film, albeit not homogeneous, was hostile.48 Several factors coincided


towards a climate that could not comfortably accommodate Jayasundera’svision. The LTTE had assassinated Sri Lanka’s foreign minister, LakshmanKadirgamar, in August 2005, a month before the release of the film. Sinhalanationalist sentiment was in the air with the impending presidential elec-tion of November 2005. There was opposition to the Post Tsunami Opera-tion Management Structure (PTOMS) on the basis that it accorded theLTTE too much power. This opposition, lead by the JVP and the JathikaHela Urumaya, comprising largely of young Buddhist monks, took theform of demonstrations on the streets and petitions to court. In the run-upto the presidential elections, the JVP also provoked the patience of themilitary. JVP leader Somawansa Amerasinghe controversially called for thearmy’s disbandment if it could not defend Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity.Under fire, the army hit back. Retired army chiefs held a press conferenceto ask for an apology and even the arrest, under emergency regulations, ofthe JVP leader for his statements.49 More insidious, because both overt andcovert, was the backlash on Jayasundera and filmmakers like PrasannaVithanage, Asoka Handagama and Sudath Mahaadivulwewa, whosecinematic narratives refuse a glorification of the military. It was reportedthat a military delegation sought a meeting with the NFC to express itsobjections to how a series of Sinhala films had portrayed the army in amanner tantamount to ‘a new terrorism’ that would delight the LTTE.50

A newspaper column under the headline ‘Stop Ridiculing our ArmedForces’ (Godage 2005) published simultaneously in two English languagedailies (itself proof of the media’s pro-military line) demanded of film-makers and free media activists (whom the columnist characterized asvultures) that they stand up for the army as an obligation to ‘the dead andthe living’. Significantly, the columnist stated, ‘Let us take a lesson fromthe manner in which the LTTE respects their fighting cadres and theirdead: their Heroes.’

That several of these criticisms invoked the LTTE as bearing the stan-dard on patriotism and upheld its methods of censorship in the demand forcorporal punishment,51 demonstrated the work of militarization in the south.If ‘the production of security involves not merely relations of force andsurveillance, but also meanings and identities’ (Hutchful and Bathily1998: 13), these responses indicated that the ideological work of militarismhas been productive in norming militancy as exemplary and applicable insolving civilian and political issues. Despite statements of protest againstthe attacks on Jayasundera’s film and support for the free media,52 despite


the army’s own admission that the military is ‘in crisis’ (or perhaps becauseof it),53 militarism’s stakeholders went on the offensive in the context andaftermath of the screening of The Forsaken Land. Repeated accusations oftreachery published in the media, including the Internet, and death threatsallegedly forced Jayasundera to hurriedly leave the country in the lastweek of September 2005. The unit of value in this episode was firmly onmilitary culture, and members of civil society as much as the military roseto its defence.

These examples provide an indication of the extent to which militariza-tion has shaped the domains of speech that govern how the war, its econo-mies and modalities that include suicide bombings can be spoken aboutor not. The figure of the female suicide bomber points to the close allianceof militarization and censorship. She invokes a figure of speech because,silenced in a manner that makes her subjectivity elusive, she is yet thesymbol of a powerful statement by the LTTE about its political and mili-tary goals. She points, therefore, to a significant paradox within censorshipitself as a site of power that is both repressive and productive. This censor-ship operates from multiple sites. Its work takes place not only from acentralized state or military/militant authority to overtly silence critics, butalso covertly in a manner that is privatized, distributed and dispersed totacitly encourage self-censorship that avoids conflict with militarization’sgoals. Together, and working in a continuum, both overt and covertcensorship effect a rhetoric of terrorism that disavows complex discussionsof the female suicide bomber’s politics for an emphasis on pathologies andmoralities as it distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms ofviolence in war. On this ground a new criminological category that hasformed in the context of the ‘war on terror’ thrives, which puts womenwho fit a certain stereotype, including sex workers, in jeopardy.

Once a woman is criminalized under such security regimes, she is con-signed to a state of bare life. But if, as Agamben argued, the good/politicaland bare life are indistinguishable in our modernity; the figure of thefemale suicide bomber and figurative portrayals of her both support andrefute his delineation of bare life and its procedures. Cultural work, whichimaginatively constructs the subjectivity of the ‘enemy’ woman in a man-ner that sheds light on institutionality, may, however, by objectifying her,also unwittingly participate in the repeating, circulating and regulating state-ments about ‘enemy’ women that produce a rationale for a gendered sur-veillance on them. The gaze on women’s bodies in the history of visibility


itself has been additive rather than transformative (Phelan 1993: 11). Therecan be a struggle on the part of the artist to make real the historical imagi-nary by substituting a woman’s body in pain. But the deployment ofviolent and sexual aesthetics ‘to illustrate the “truth” [about her] gets over-taken by the desire to “look”’ (Oster 2003: 96).

Cultural work, however, whether theatre, film or critical analyses thatattempt to provide alternative narratives of the war, speak at the intersticesof the discourses on it and at the boundaries of both overt and covert cen-sorship. They take the risk, therefore, of having these lines being redrawnwith even greater vigour. In charting how a feminist approach to analysingthe female suicide bomber was rebuked, how films that sought to be guard-ians of a popular memory on the war and that refused a glorification ofmilitarism were undermined financially, suspended from being screenedand denounced in the press, this chapter foregrounded the process andarguments by which these boundaries become reinforced. Yet, that at thesepoints of crisis there was a struggle over this record, not always in a self-evidently oppositional way, but in a contingent relationship of artist to state,civilian to military, and silence to speech, meant there was also the potentialto be at odds with militarization as a regulating discourse (Brown 1998:316; Post 1998: 4).

Notes

01. In the gun battle that followed the explosion, eighteen Sri Lankan army soldiers andtwo LTTE cadre were also killed.

02. Captain Miller’s suicide attack took place as the LTTE was retreating to an advancingSri Lankan army, and although the arrival of the Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF)in Jaffna provided the LTTE a reprieve (Manikkalingam 1995: 15, 18), it was unhappyat the Indo-Lanka Accord that the IPKF was in place to monitor. The positive responseof the war weary people of Jaffna to India’s intervention also brought pressure on theLTTE (Narayan Swamy 2003: 241–42). Its response was the dramatic suicide attack: anemphatic statement to both Sri Lankan and Indian governments that it is yet a force tobe reckoned with.

03. This was drafted by the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the Waron the Enforcement of Penalties.

04. Since 5 July 1991, the day of Captain Miller’s attack is commemorated as Black TigerDay, with speeches from the leadership praising the Black Tiger cadre and honouringtheir families. This has become an important event in the Sri Lankan political calendar,watched avidly for the policy messages the LTTE leadership send out on that day.


05. Roberts (1996a: 259, 261) argues that a solely ‘utilitarian’ explanation for LTTEsuicides is inadequate and later asserts that such an approach should complement‘subjectivist interpretations’.

06. Personal interview, Trincomalee district, 5 February 2004.07. For instance, it was rumoured soon after the assassination of Indian Prime Minister

Rajiv Gandhi that Dhanu, the LTTE suicide bomber, assassinated him to avenge herrape at the hands of IPKF forces, although other narratives (Bloom 2005: 160) claimthat it was her mother who was raped and that Gandhi’s assassination was a daughter’srevenge. Similarly, explanations of the motives of Palestinian female suicide bombersgiven by the community are predominantly on the sites of marriage, body, reproduc-tion and sexuality (Pedahzur 2005: 138–42). These causalities within failed marriage,divorce, disability or extramarital pregnancy point in effect to the moralistic condem-nation of these conditions by society.

08. The review of the play was first published in the Island of 31 May 2000.09. Island, 21 June 2000, p. 15.10. The Gratiaen Prize is awarded each year for the best creative writing in English by

a Sri Lankan writer resident in the country. The prize was donated by Michael Ondaatjefollowing his Booker Prize award for The English Patient in 1992.

11. Adele Ann Balasingham is the Australian-born wife of Anton Balasingham who was aninfluential theoretician within the LTTE for a long time.

12. Examples of this are to be found in the representation of the LTTE female combatantand suicide bomber in Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist (1999), Mani Ratnam’s KannathilMutthamittal (Peck on the Cheek, 2002) and Mohad Niyaz’s Kalu Sudu Mal (ColourlessFlowers, 2002); and Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005), which portray two Pales-tinian suicide bombers.

13. Although not named in the story, Sarvan’s protagonist is Dhanu on her final nightbefore she assassinates Rajiv Gandhi, and in doing so kills herself and many others.The assassination took place on 21 May 1991 at Sriperumbudur stadium, Chennai.

14. Desdemona’s willow song, which captures her foreboding and darkens the mood ofthe play before her murder at the hands of Othello, provides an example.

15. Traditions of warrior asceticism may resonate here.16. Island, Colombo, 5 November 2002, p. 3.17. A spokeswoman for the SLAPWC stated: ‘It is pathetic that the LTTE has been using

women as suicide bombers and they are now using pregnant women as suicide bomb-ers. We don’t want anybody to be killed . . . whether they are Sinhalese, Tamils or Mus-lims’ (Associated Press, 21 May 2005).

18. This is a veiled reference to Appapillai Amirthalingam, leader of the Tamil UnitedLiberation Front (TULF), who was killed by the LTTE on 13 July 1989.

19. The personality cult of Prabhakaran has been a hallmark of the LTTE. He is valourizedin LTTE freedom songs and accorded divine iconography. The January–February 2000issue of Liberation Tigers, the LTTE magazine published from the Vanni, is a case inpoint. It published a picture of Prabhakaran pointing to Jaffna on the map of TamilEelam with the following caption: ‘Where Sooriya Thevan [the sun god] points withhis finger/Thither the sun’s rays will hasten/To enfold Thamil Eelam in the brightnessof his glory’ (UTHR 2000).


20. That a substantial proportion of Tamils who reside in the greater metropolitan areaof Colombo provide a ‘fifth column’ within which LTTE assassins and commandoteams hide before they strike is a commonly held view in the south. While it is thecase that suicide attackers and assassins have been provided safe houses and logisti-cal support for their operations in Colombo by Tamils in the city, it is also importantto keep in mind the exceptions, the most notable of which is the assassination ofPresident Ranasinghe Premadasa by an LTTE suicide cadre who had infiltrated thepresident’s largely Sinhala household itself. These exceptions are important to holdon to for not only providing a strategic understanding of the diverse tactics of theLTTE, but also for a scrupulous refusal to fold into a dominant narrative in the souththat all Tamils are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, particularly in a situationwhere all Tamils in Sri Lanka are under suspicion simply because they are Tamil.

21. This is an expansion in which women of colour and immigrants of colour have beenadversely affected. An Amnesty International report estimated that the majority of theover 140,000 women in the American prison system are African-American, Latinoand poor women, incarcerated largely for petty crimes. The women and immigrantstogether form the fastest growing prison population in the US today. While womenof colour were affected by laws imposing mandatory minimum sentences for all drugoffences since the early 1970s, federal laws like the IIRAIRA, the 1996 Anti-Terrorismand Effective Death Penalty Act, have been responsible for the increase in immigrantincarcerations (Bhattacharjee, 2002: 7; Silliman 2002: xv).

22. A dress with loose drapery able to conceal an explosives jacket.23. The spokesperson at the police headquarters noted that although no guidelines were

in place on how to search female suspects, ‘common sense’ must be used, womenofficers present to frisk women suspects, and portable screens placed at police postsbehind which women can be searched. While this response indicates a sensitivity togender concerns, it also implies divisions between the police and military securitythat can be useful in avoiding accountability (‘Revealing Tale’, in Sunday Times, 26March 2000).

24. Milroy Peries in Island, 30 March 2000.25. The woman was remanded and allegedly assaulted in custody (‘Revealing Tale’, in

Sunday Times, 26 March 2000).26. The woman was charged with not being able to identify herself adequately. She did

not possess a national identity card and had earlier stated that she was unable toapply for one because she did not have a permanent address. The vagrancy lawswere not used in this case, but the moral tone of the public responses to the incidentdrew from its discursive assumptions.

27. Paul Amar (2003) notes how a similar ‘new criminological category of security threatin the context of an anti-terrorist campaign’ worked against gay men in Cairo.

28. This may shift in time to put women who work in middle-class, professional SinhalaColombo households also at risk. Their presence in these households—such as thefemale suicide bomber who attempted to assassinate EPDP leader Douglas Devanandaon 7 July 2004 and allegedly stayed before the attack in a Sinhala household inNawala—is proving that class and ethnic privilege may no longer safeguard thesehouseholds from surveillance.

29. Island, Colombo, 26 February 1999.


30. Butler (2006b: 52, 60) notes that the Foucauldian use of the term governmentalityrefers to ‘an extra-legal field of policy and management of population and goods thatmay use the law as a tactic’ and that sovereignty ‘which traditionally, provides legitimacyfor the rule of power and guarantees the representational claims of the state, acts, underemergency, as an extra-legal authority which may enforce a law of its own making.’

31. Agamben (2005: 45) notes that while several explanations have been given for theorigin of the term, the most likely one is ‘in the literal meaning of the Arabic wordmuslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God’.

32. Paul Hegarty (2005: 234) notes that Agamben’s emphasis on the sacred/sacrifice aswithin the juridico-political realm leads him to emphasize its existence only as a capac-ity to be killed. Thus, the sacred is about power, not the divine. Hagerty remarks thatAgamben’s redefinition of the sacred in terms of political power is useful and timely,but draws attention to how he dismisses ‘every other version of something like thesacred’ and is silent on the ‘history of thinking what is called the sacred’.

33. Radhika Coomaraswamy in Asoka Handagama’s webpage, http://www.geocities.com/thisismy moon.

34. Sunila Abeysekera in Asoka Handagama’s webpage, http://www.geocities.com/thisismymoon.

35. Tissa Abeysekera, Asoka Handagama’s webpage, http://www.geocities.com/thisismymoon.

36. Played by Sinhala actress Dilhani Ekanayake.37. The effect of this was evident in a reviewer’s comment that, ‘There are numerous

sexual liaisons but none of these illuminate the inner lives of those involved. Countlessissues are raised but not explored. Take, for example, the Tamil girl’s behaviour in frontof her adversaries. Why does she raise her skirt? Does she want to show her nakedfigure and survive through the violation of her sexual feelings? Does she hide her faceout of fear? No real answers are provided.’ The point here is that in the predominantfocus on the Tamil woman’s body, Handagama’s comment on the gendered violence inwar was likely to be missed, as it was by this reviewer (Wijesiriwardana 2002).

38. See Wijesiriwardana (2002) for views on Handagama’s representation of the village.39. Some of these parents have organized as Association of War Affected Women and Par-

ents of Servicemen Missing in Action to seek information on their missing children,provide funerals if they are found dead, or obtain their release if in LTTE captivity.

40. Many parents who, appearing before the Presidential Commission on InvoluntaryRemoval in the south of the country for the period 1987–89, wanted acknowledgementand due justice for the loss of their loved ones, refused the monetary compensationoffered by the state (personal communication, Manouri Muttettuwegama, chairper-son, Presidential Commission).

41. It was in this regard that Manorani de Zoysa, mother of journalist and actor Richard deZoysa, who was killed on 18 February 1990 by the police for alleged involvement withthe JVP, told me that she was one of the lucky ones to have actually seen the dead bodyof her only child. A medical doctor by profession, she identified her son’s bloated bodyafter it washed onto the beach at Ratmalana after being dumped at sea by securityforces. She went on to be a founder member of the Mothers’ Front and Family Reha-bilitation Centre, a NGO that began work with southern women whose sons and


husbands had disappeared or were killed during 1987–89. Manorani de Zoysa diedon 12 February 2001. At the time of her death her son’s murderers had not yet beenbrought to justice.

42. Section 118 of the Penal Code makes bringing the president into ‘contempt’ anoffence with a very broad definition of ‘sedition’, while the criminal defamationclause (Section 479 of the Penal Code) makes ‘unfair character assassination’ of thepresident or a public figure an offence. The latter regulation has since been repealed,but what the laws did was muzzle the press and curb criticism of the president’shandling of the war and the security forces. The Public Security Ordinance contin-ues to give the president almost unlimited powers to regulate any activity in theinterests of public security. This can mean stringent censorship as well as the seizureof assets of media establishments.

43. Summary of conclusion and recommendations of the committee to advise on thereforms of laws effecting media freedom, Pravada, 4(10, 11), 1997, Colombo. SocialScientists’ Association, p. 12.

44. For excerpts of the Supreme Court judgement, see Pravada, 5(2), 1997, Colombo.Social Scientists’ Association, pp. 27–30.

45. Vijaya Kumaratunga, leader of the Sri Lanka Mahajana Pakshaya (SLMP), was laterkilled by the JVP on 16 February 1988.

46. Sunday Times (TV Times), Colombo, 16 December 2001, pp. 8–9.47. Quoted in Island, Colombo, 26 September 2005, p. 7.48. It was reported that there was division within the military itself on how the issue should

be handled. Some felt the negative publicity stoked by army officers who attacked thefilm would be counter productive to the military itself (Island, 14 September 2005,p. 5). This proved correct. In the heat of the debate, the army attracted its own share ofcriticism. An article entitled ‘Apologizing to the Armed Forces’ by Lalin Fernando, aformer officer of the Gemunu Watch, accused the military of betrayal, under its owncodes, by pandering to politicians who interfered with military strategy and for aban-doning defence lines during key battles (Island, 7 October 2005, p. 13). Another letterto the editor entitled ‘Politics of war and double-talk’ by retired Major General GratiaenSilva accused senior military officials of failing to adequately train a successful fightingforce (Island, 3 October 2005, p. 9).

49. Daily Mirror, Colombo, 27 September 2005, p. 1. Simultaneously reported in the Island.50. Island, Colombo, 14 September 2005, p. 5.51. A rear admiral demanded that Jayasundera and Sannasgala, the film’s producer, be

arrested and tried for treason, the punishment for which is the death sentence (Divayina,25 September 2005, p. 23).

52. A statement by the Free Media Movement was published in the Daily Mirror, Colombo,23 September 2005, p. 3.

53. Island, Colombo, 14 September 2005, p. 5.

Figure of Speech (From Militarizing Sri Lanka, Sage 2007)

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