On Sunday night (March 16) Ruki Fernando and Fr Praveen, prominent Sri Lankan human rights defenders, were taken into detention in Kilinochchi under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. This followed the arrest of Jeyakumari Balendran and her young daughter on March 14; Balendran, the mother of a disappeared former LTTE cadre, has been outspoken about political disappearances in Sri Lanka, ...
Originally published here. ———————————————————————————————– The Namal Rajapaksa Twitter fiasco: Sri Lanka, sexism & political correctness Subha Wijesiriwardena is a Sri Lankan blogger and theatre practitioner currently living in Bangalore, India. The Namal Rajapaksa Twitter fiasco of March 4th revealed to us a grea
In the TED talk by Chimamanda Adichie, now widely famous because excerpts of it have been featured in a song off the all-new Beyoncé album (titled BEYONCÉ), she says the best feminist she knows is her brother, who is, she assures you, very masculine. Adichie is very much a spokesperson for the young, articulate, optimistic post-feminist world she inhabits: the ...
The Indian Supreme Court’s ruling today which once again criminalizes gay-sex, and thereby in principle homosexuality, has sparked angry protests and evoked much disappointment across the nation and in the region beyond. In 2009, in a landmark moment in Indian and South Asian history, the Delhi High Court ruled that the section of the Indian Penal Code which criminalized ...
It’s been three months today since my mother died. Her death has been everything like her life: big, tremendously powerful, changing everything, moving everyone within its reach to powerful and exciting revelations about their own lives, their own existences, their own choices. This was her; allowing choices to define who we are, allowing these definitions to shape what we want, ...
Tarun Tejpal, the iconic founder and Editor in Chief of Tehelka, India’s award-winning magazine for political reportage, has stepped down following accusations of sexual assault from a journalist who works for the magazine. For those of us who admire and follow brave independent journalism in the region, Tehelka, and Tejpal himself, were symbols of hope; of people standing by and ...
I’d forgotten that most people don’t know as much about Sri Lanka as one always expects, in India People raise their eyebrows, intrigued, suspicious; ‘Why do you know so much about India? Indian politics?’ They don’t know the first thing about Sri Lanka ‘There was a war? Really?’ ‘Do you have your own language? Does it have a script?’ Lost ...
What happened in 1983, I wasn’t there to see it – but of course, I, like many others of my generation who came after, are privy to a collective memory, an experience felt by association, by default; the muscle memory of our parents, relatives, their friends and their relatives, passed on through stories, recollections, little photographic bits, fragments. In every ...
Image description: Illustration of body and various objects. Artist: Umaimah Damakka From GenderIT.org (Excerpt) Earlier this year, the telecommunications minister of Bangladesh declared a ‘war on pornography’, blocking access to around 20,000 websites and banning TikTok, the Chinese-owned video production and sharing app. The move came after a petition citing ‘obscenity’ was filed by a civil society organization with ...
(Excerpt) Preface In October 2017, I said ‘#MeToo.’ I did it on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These were my words: ‘Me too. As a child. As an adult. By men I know and men I don’t know. More than once. More than twice.’ This piece is not about the everyday sexual harassment we face; not about every time a ...
Life moves very quickly here the days happen faster than I had imagined they would I’m already in a new home – a new bed with an internet connection, at that I watched The Dark Knight Rises on the very night of its International Premier And finally felt like I now live in a big, big city – a real ...
You know you should start worrying when ‘free speech advocates’ look like this. We have been hearing a lot about ‘free speech’ recently – and not in the way that we in Sri Lanka are typically used to; not as a call to defend journalists and activists against persecution. For example: the highly divisive Milo Yiannopoulos’ speaking appointment at the ...
Ada Lovelace (1815 — 1852), image courtesy of women.com: English mathematician and writer; known for her work on the Analytical Engine; first to recognise the machine’s potential beyond pure calculation and created the first algorithm to be carried out by the machine; now considered the first ‘computer programmer’ (Wikipedia) This was a short presentation I delivered (with a few ...
Courtesy of the Sunday Leader: ‘Don’t make Sri Lankan women slaves!’ For awhile now, I’ve been thinking about intersectionality and what it would mean for feminists and other activists in a Sri Lankan context at this moment. For young women activists and queer-rights activists in Sri Lanka, like myself, the temptation is strong to follow young, American liberational discourses. on social ...
(Written originally for and published in ShishtaLanka – DecentLanka – February 2017, in translation in Sinhala) What is the role, and what is the status, of women in Sri Lanka today? Where do we stand? These are the primary questions I asked of myself when I began writing this essay. It seemed a good moment, at the beginning of ...
“Sri Lankan mothers from the “Dead and Missing Person’s Parents” organisation hold photographs as they takes part in a protest in Jaffna, some 400 kilometres (250 miles) north of Colombo. Photo: AFP” (International Commission on Missing Persons) Note: This piece was commissioned for and originally published in Options Magazine, 51 edition, in Sri Lanka, in 2016. The full magazine ...
Note: In this piece, when I refer to ‘rape’, I refer more or less exclusively to heterosexual rape, as committed against women, by men. The omission of the discussion of other versions of sexual violence and rape is not exclusionary in intent, but because the piece attempts to discuss ‘rape’ as presented in the film ‘Silence in the Courts’, which ...
Lahore feminists (1983) protest the Islamisization of Zia government. Feminism is the only real way to challenge sexism; when we reject feminism, we play right into its hands. You would be surprised at the amount of messages I get from women (writing to say they so agree with something I have written) which begin with ‘I am not a feminist, ...
Diverse people gathered to celebrate differences and demand equality (from the official DifferentYetEqual FB page) The following statement can be found in all three languages on the Different Yet Equal Facebook group page. DifferentYetEqual: A campaign for equality and democracy Press Statement: 16 August 2016 On the evening of 15 August 2016, we, a group of citizens from diverse backgrounds, ...
Below are some notes and observations about how, why and when we choose to speak and what we choose to say on social media – but also in general. This is about how we respond to injustice, and how we respond to those who respond to injustice – and while specifically about recent events, can also broadly be applied ...
