Rethinking resilience: Exploring decolonial possibilities of representing narratives of conflict-affected women in the North and East of Sri Lanka

This paper reflects on the interventions presented in my master’s thesis from 2020 which analyses representations of conflict affected women in the North and East of Sri Lanka in post conflict discourse through postcolonial and decolonial feminist lenses. A central source in the analysis is a documentary I produced in 2019 titled Women’s Plight: Dreams of a Better Life which presents five women’s narratives of their lives during and post- conflict. This work was produced as a submission to the ‘Tamils of Lanka: A Timeless Heritage’ exhibition which took place in 2019, marking 10 years to the end of the conflict and the atrocities committed by the state at Mullivaikal. The documentary aligned with the exhibition’s central theme of recognising the resilience of the community in the homeland and diaspora through the violence, marginalisation and its resulting impacts. I worked within a team of volunteers, who were part of the Tamil Information Centre in London, to organise the exhibition. The thesis unpacks the reductive ways conflict affected women are represented in the discourse and draws from Sangam literature and historical narratives of gendered spirituality and resistance to trace alternative epistemologies that could be applied to represent these women and their perspectives in more expansive ways. The paper includes reflections from engagement and presentation of these interventions in both academic and non-academic contexts.