Legacies of War in Current Diasporic Sri Lankan Women’s Writing

Abstract

Since the end of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, Sri Lankan writers have sought to come to terms with the long-running war and its violent conclusion. This essay considers three recent novels by Sri Lankan diasporic women: Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012), Chandani Lokugé’ s Softly, As I Leave You (2012) and Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014). Each of these novels focuses on the trauma of the war and the way that the war has affected and continues to affect those in the diaspora as well as in the homeland. Moreover, the novels provide a comparative view of the diaspora’s relation to the war, as Munaweera is resident in North America, Salgado in the United Kingdom, and Lokugé in Australia. In keeping with this issue’s theme – “from compressed worlds to open spaces†– my essay explores how South Asian women writers address the Sri Lankan war in the open spaces of the transnational Sri Lankan diaspora. As all three novels suggest, the end of the military conflict has not ended the need to understand the quarter-century of violence that preceded it. Diasporic women writers continue to intervene in a still fraught ethnopolitical situation, as all three novels deal with questions of loss, violence, trauma and the persistence of the conflict in the diaspora.