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| Sunday, 7 May 2006 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Opinion :
The Pregnant Bomber - A DIFFERENT PAIN
Anoja Kugenthirasah took this to its devastatingly logical culmination when she, actually pregnant, killed herself in an aborted effort to murder the Sri Lankan army chief. It is a chillingly grotesque example of life imitating art. In the film, Terrorist, the youthful female suicide bomber discovers she is pregnant a few days before she is due to attack. She is suddenly pulled in two directions. After Kugenthirasah, it may be possible to ask whether the film's exploration of the terrorist's psyche had stalled on the received ideas of motherhood. It needed a 21-year-old suicide bomber to put it in the terrorist's perspective. The youngster's pregnancy is unlikely to have been accidental. She belonged to the elite and secret Black Tigers, or Karumpuligal, unit of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a unit considered to be the most successful among suicide bombers in the world. One-third of the unit comprises women, and all members are given extensive training. The elitism and mystique of the suicide squad have been carefully nurtured. Unlike the fidayeen, there is no religious edge to the sacrifice, but only a notion of 'honour', symbolized by a 'last supper' with the leader, Mr V. Prabhakaran, before the mission. Black Tigers are revered and remembered by special cemeteries and ceremonies in this meticulously put together cult of death. The mission begins with a number of terrifying 'dry runs', and for Kugenthirasah, her pregnancy alone allowed her regular entry into the maternity clinic at the military hospital. She was either chosen because she was pregnant, or she became pregnant as part of the plan. What can motherhood mean to a young woman, barely out of her teens, trained to kill and die? Ideals of a glorious past, fed into young minds uprooted from an underprivileged milieu and dedicated to death in the service of another glorious future, manifest themselves in hideously distorted values. The vira tayar, brave mother, and the vira pen, brave woman, of Tamil tradition represent women who sacrifice their sons for war. Kugenthirasah exposed the dark core of the exploitative ideals men use to valorize aggression. By a single act, she has put into question the comfortable notion of a mother's sacred love for her child. Denying her agency in the act would be the easiest way out, and absurdly self-defeating. Instead of shrinking from reality, it is more important to ask what kind of social, economic and cultural emptiness allows hundreds of young women to be sucked into such a cult of tragic destruction. And to ask anew how motherhood is constructed. (Telegraph, Calcutta India) |
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Pretending to be pregnant is one thing, being pregnant is another. Women
have used the ruse of pregnancy for a variety of purposes, from smuggling
rice on the trains of Bengal to killing the enemy with explosives strapped
about their midriffs in Sri Lanka. 
