Dr Sumathy Sivamohan (University of Peradeniya) is an academic, filmmaker, poet, translator, actress and activist. Originally from Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka, she is now Professor of English at the University of Peradeniya.
SEMINAR TOPIC: Untelling the truth: troubled narratives of war in Sri Lanka
ABSTRACT: ‘We walked through a covered strip about the length of, say, up to that tree from here…. (about a 100 metres); the planks on either side barely covered our bodies. We were stark naked. Nothing on our bodies. At the end of the walk way there was an army woman. Our clothes had come round to us from the other end. We put them on and moved on.’ One of the women we were talking to, who had ‘survived’ the last and heaviest onslaught of war in Sri Lanka in March-May 2009, the concluding Eelam War IV, narrated this account of her passage to the government controlled war in the last days. The air was thick with the shelling and bombing; two desperate sides in a merciless and murderous contest. The passage marks the moment from war to no war; shelling to no shelling; bombing to no bombing. A dangerous inbetweenness, a no man’s land, a forever and an always already violent place. ‘We had to forego our feelings of modesty and shame and walk.’ Speech is an event and a story, both existing uneasily together in contestation, contesting the received wisdom one finds in the much talked about BBC documentaries on the war in Sri Lanka, Cyanide Killers, No Fire Zone, Killing Fields. Drawing upon the undecided manner of truth telling, I as researcher narrate my own stories of war, in my body, in theatre and in film, and in cross cutting narratives that question the decisiveness of power, authority and imperial trajectories.
Co-hosted with the Centre for South Asian Studies.