Portrait

In the world, women have always been at the receiving end of a lot of shit. With the war, as with any war, women have been further victimised and marginalised.

20 years ago in Sri Lanka, when women got angry, they got really angry. 5000 mothers in Jaffna, whose sons had been mysetiously taken away: they got angry enough to storm a Government office and demand to know where their sons had been taken, they got angry enough to march down the streets of Jaffna making their voices heard, they got angry enough to protest with fearlessness. They were just housewives. That morning, they packed their lunches, and their bottles of water, and set out to get their sons back. These were just normal, rural women. These weren’t high powered activists. They were just mothers, who wanted to know what happened to their sons. Driven by desperation in a time when there was little else they could do, they were no longer kindly inquiring; no longer merely asking; they became powerful enough, in the thousands, in their anger, to demand. And get what they demanded. Not long after, many of their sons were returned to the village.

My mother always tells me this story when I ask whether ‘people’ can really change anything. Do we have the power? Yes, we do, she still believes. Or we should at any rate.

My mother and her feminist friends come from this generation of women. Women who did something with their anger. Women who weren’t afraid. They come from this generation of activists. They were the ones who demanded justice then, and they are the ones who will demand justice today. They will still take to the streets and get people to listen. They will still put their lives on the line to help their sisters. They will still voluntarily march on a hot day, to tell the world the story of a woman who was raped at a checkpoint, a woman whose was abducted in the night. These stories that no one else thinks are real.

I fear that our generation doesn’t care that much about anything. I look around at us, my generation that has been born into the war, into corruption, into injustice. For us sexual harrassment on the bus, in the workplace, at a checkpoint; they are all things we have learnt how to live with; we have learnt how to live side by side with these things. We tip toe around them, trying not to draw too much attention to ourselves, weary of how futile it would be to get angry. We do nothing with our anger; we hold it inside, maybe blog about it, tell our friends about it, and then we forget about it. Because my generation has seen that anger doesn’t get you anywhere these days.

What makes us so complacent? What makes us care so little about what’s going around us?

We don’t have the information. If an average Sri Lankan picks up the paper or hears the news, they wouldn’t know that there is a problem to begin with. Information about sexual violence within the conflict is highly sensitive: there are cases which are reported, and a million more that aren’t. Even with the reported cases, these reports cannot be published, because it would risk the lives of those it is about. Most often, the victims will not want them to published as they live in fear of being hunted down and killed. Those that wish to make these reports public cannot do so simply because they cannot offer the victims adequate protection and security. Most often, these women don’t even want to talk about it; there is such fear and social stigma surrounding sexual violence. They would rather ‘forget about it and move on’. So these things get swept under the rug, and the only people that know that a problem exists are the ones who have always known. No one new is educated.

We are not angry because mostly, we don’t know there is anything to be angry about.

We are fearful. We see what happens when you speak out. We have seen where it takes you. No one wants to risk their lives. No one wants to risk the lives of their loved ones.

We see no hope as far as change goes. We see that with this Government, implications of change are met with more resistance than ever before. 20 years ago, the Government Servent in Jaffna was overwhelmed by 5000 women who were distraught. He met their demands because he had to. Today, the Government is not accountable to anyone. It has placed itself above everything. Storming a Government Office today would be met with no response, if you’re lucky. If you aren’t, you’d probably be shot on the spot.

Due to a combination of a lack of unbiased information, fear and hopelessness, my generation has learnt to co exist with this terrible situation. We have learnt to turn a blind eye when necessary.

And yet, as I write this, I realise that it is my generation that is actually fighting this war. On both sides, they are men and women roughly my age. Maybe some are younger, maybe some are slightly older.

While some of us are fighting, some of us are not fighting at all. For anything.