Wartime sexual violence and remembering resistance in Meena Kandasamy’s “The Orders Were to Rape You”

Abstract

Memory conditions human behaviour and is phenomenal to both individual and collective identity. It shapes the socio-political contours of racial/communal/diasporic and linguistic minority groups engaging them in constant cultural praxis. There have been prolific writings portraying wartime sexual violence and The Orders were to Rape You by radical feminist writer Meena Kandasamy is unique in its therapeutic endeavour which breathes the lives and struggles of the Women Guerilla warriors of the Tamil Eelam who were brutally and sexually tortured during the Tamil Eelam war into narratives. It is a grim and brutal tale of thousands and thousands of Tamil Eelam women warriors subjected to enforced impregnation. This research paper examines some of the contemporary issues through the intersection between memory, violence and politics. This paper also examines the labyrinths of chauvinistic military war atrocities that target women with abject brutality and perversion. Kandasamy brings to the women’s changing relationship with protest, power and place. The very act of remembering is resistance to these women guerilla warriors who manipulate space and place to engage with the dynamics of protest.