The women she spoke to lived as refugees in Southeast Asian countries where the threat of war still lurked in their everyday lives.
The Orders Were to Rape You also documents Kandasamy’s experience, as an adult, meeting women fighters from the Liberation Tigers in the aftermath of the brutal war. Inspired by these women, Kandasamy participated in demonstrations to support the movement for Tamil Eelam, and started translating news reports and articles to give their struggle a wider readership. It was during this time that she saw women from Tamil Eelam fighting back, “donning combat gear and taking up AK-47s” as part of the guerrilla independence movement known as the Liberation Tigers. More specifically, Kandasamy remembers life in Tamil Nadu when the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) was still occupying Tamil Eelam, a proposed independent state for Tamils in Sri Lanka. In her latest book-length essay, The Orders Were to Rape You, she writes about growing up during the Sri Lankan Civil War, which lasted from 1983 to 2009 and involved the violent persecution of Sri Lankan Tamils, including many state-supported anti-Tamil pogroms, the designation of Sinhala as the sole official language of the state, and the unreported rape, torture, and disappearance of Tamils. Her work as an activist has made her no stranger to trolls and threats. Her work is an active resistance against gender- and caste-based violence, and she describes her writing process as taking things that "rattle her" and "smuggling them into English." Much of her recent focus has been on dismantling Hindutva, the hard-line right-wing rule of the Bharatiya Janta Party in India. Thirumavalavan, writer Salma, Tamil Eelam poets, and many more. She started translating at the age of eighteen and has worked on speeches and writings by activist and politician Thol. Meena Kandasamy, photo courtesy of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW, Berlin)Ĭhennai-born Meena Kandasamy is an award-winning novelist and poet, best known for her book When I Hit You.
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