The Poetry of Female Fighters
Tamil Tiger parade in in Killinochchi, 2002. Wikimedia commons Seven years ago, on a chilly fall weekend in London, I wandered into an Oxfam second-hand bookshop in Walthamstow along with a man I was beginning to know, beginning to fall in love with. In the poetry section’s top-right corner, I pulled out a copy of Lovers and Comrades. I showed it to him (lover, comrade) and we exchanged a knowing smile. What’s that about? he asked. I read aloud the subtitle: Women’s resistance poetry from Central America. That looks interesting, he said. It was published by The Women’s Press. On its front page was the simple inscription, to my lover and comrade, June ‘97. The book, edited by Amanda Hopkinson, had itself been published in 1989.
I was five years old at that time and the Indian Peace Keeping Force was still occupying Tamil Eelam. I was too young to understand what was meant by the word “rape,” but old enough to understand that the Indian Army was doing bad things to Tamil women and children. That was also the time when Eelam Tamil women started joining the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in droves–so whenever we heard a story of
