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| Sunday, 25 January 2004 |
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The scent of cyanide A young expatriate artist recounts some of her experiences while travelling alone in Tiger terrain by Jayanthi Liyanage A Sita is always tested by fire, specially on Asian territory.
These are the thoughts of a young Sinhalese woman in her mid-twenties raised in the West, who has stayed in the country for a while and who wishes to express her feelings on the hazards experienced by an independent young married woman travelling on her own. "Ganna", as she prefers to call herself, has travelled to the Vanni on several occasions on her own and says she has experienced encouraging as well as bizarre moments, when people failed to understand the logic behind her habit of self-dependent travelling. The self-directed and independent young woman, though relating to her local roots, has found certain local attitudes to women, encountered on her travels within the country and up North, dampening. For her, occasional artwork and poetry has given a medium of articulating vividly and dramatically her responses to the experiences she has gathered on such travel. The intensity of that interaction with Sri Lankan society and environment is revealed in her creative output, and it does not come across as a superficial response.
The depth of that response is perhaps also born out in the way she has lost her heart to a three-and-half-year-old baby living in a church orphanage in the Vanni. Ganna and has been yearning to take her back home with the intention of providing her with a loving home and education. Since the baby is related to her husband, Ganna hopes she will not encounter any barriers in the baby's passage to her country of residence. One of her most unnerving experiences was during her travelling in connection with the baby. She mentions the incident as the first and only one of this nature she has experienced in her travels up North. "The last time I went to the Vanni, I had with me a letter addressed to the LTTE Political Wing in Killinochchi, given to me by a person in Vavuniya," says Ganna. "I hired a three-wheeler to travel from Vavuniya to Killinochchi. Personnel at the Killinochchi check point told me that the letter was not sufficient and that I would have to bring along the person who wrote it as well. I went back to Vavuniya and got another letter from him, this time, addressed to the Killinochchi check point personnel. With this, the check point personnel allowed me to go through and asked a person there to go with me to the Political Wing.
While returning to Vavuniya after that meeting, this person tried to touch me when we were just outside the Killinochchi town. I shouted at him not to and pushed him off the three-wheeler. I asked the driver to return me to the Wing, but he was scared and we had an argument in which I tore in two, Rs. 4,000, the fare owing to him." I still have the torn halves of those notes" "He took me to a lodge and from there, I called the LTTE Media spokesman Daya Master but the call was disconnected. Someone from Sri Lanka Red Cross was passing through and he called the International Red Cross (ICRC) unit at Vavuniya and told me that ICRC would come to get me. Expecting that, I stayed two days at the lodge. During that period, two men came from the Vavuniya check point to see me and told me that ICRC could not be given a pass to come but that I would have to go with them. Thinking of my experience earlier, I did not agree. Later I managed to make a phone call to Daya Master and found a three-wheeler to go back to the Killinochchi Political Wing. When I told them of the incident, they told me that the person who tried to touch me did not work for the LTTE. Daya Master found me accommodation and I stayed there for two days until they provided me transport to the Killinochchi check point, and from there, I was able to find a van going to Vavuniya and came to Colombo by train." Ganna says that Daya Master acted as a translator of Tamil into English. "Because I knew that the LTTE pride themselves on having good discipline, I trusted that they would take my complaint seriously. I hope this incident would not hurt my chances of taking the baby back with me." Why should not a woman, whether foreign or local, travel on her own in any part of the country, without being sexually or otherwise harassed, or being made to feel degraded purely on the basis that she is travelling on her own? That is her question. A peaceful resolution, based on understanding from both sides, with the resulting change of attitude which could accommodate different facets of a woman's independence, could positively benefit all concerned. Ganna says she is currently involved in exploring the peace process in Sri Lanka because it relates to her own personal family. She has attended meetings with local women, grassroots, community elders, religious leaders and combatants to create coalitions for peace and discuss conflict issues. Having married a Tamil and learning more about Tamil culture she added an extra 'n' to her name Gana, giving her name a Jaffna Tamil accent she can never pronounce but will always respect. She believes that peace is not possible if you cannot get involved enough with the other side to understand their situation and that healing comes from understanding. Some of the artwork she showed us reflected her response to her experiences in the Vanni. "Peace smells good, try a "free sample" is an art work she has created using the images of the Tamil freedom fighter women in preparation for war, mixed with text of peaceful communication. "The message is that peace smells good. Life smells better so don't just try a free sample. Pay for peace by saving your life," remarks Ganna, adding that the picture shows a free sample of perfume inside the flask which otherwise carries cyanide which the freedom fighters wear around their necks. In another artwork, called "This is not my husband's blood! It's mine!", she uses a poem written by a freedom fighter woman expressing her desire to fight for liberation. "On the top of the picture is their leader (Prabakaran) garlanding/worshipping the women cadre who died in the struggle for their movement," explained Ganna. "I portray him as paying his respect to the image of a crying woman's pottu. The tears of this woman explode into the island of Sri Lanka. Behind the poem, you see a woman putting on her own pottu and this woman gives herself respect without a man behind her." One can perhaps, liken the spirit exuding from the two artworks to the strongly independent outlook of Ganna herself who says she is not a racist but combines a bit of the western, the eastern, the liberated and the motherly - each a different hue of universal femininity. Ganna, who lived in the orphanage, situated in a remote jungle, for nearly three months with the baby she loves and calls her Amma, has fed her pittu, played with her and lulled her to sleep with the Sinhalese lullaby, "Doy Doy Doy Doyya Baba," heard for the first time by the children there. "Last Christmas, I hired a van and a freezer and took them 75 cups of ice cream. They had very little electricity, no fridge and had no access at all to ice cream," explains Ganna. From her observations, she has noticed that the women freedom fighter cadres do not wear the pottu, the symbol of being married, as part of their uniform. "In Jaffna, I was told that historically the husband cuts himself to shed blood in order to place a red dot on his wife's forehead as a sign of ownership. Currently, women are more independent and put on their own pottu." |
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