Worlds: War, Desire and Labour in Contemporary Tamil Women’s Writing Life
எழுத்தாளரும் பெண்ணியவாதியுமான வ.கீதா அவர்கள் ஆங்கிலத்தில் பத்திரிகை ஒன்றுக்கு எழுதிய பெண் எழுத்துக்கள் பற்றிய கட்டுரையில் ஊடறு பற்றி… (…V. Geetha…)
Sri Lankan Tamil feminists on the island and in the diaspora have also sought to connect with feminist writers from India –oodaru, Udaru, well-known feminist ezine regularly features, poems, essays, short stories and articles by Tamil feminists, including the poets I have discussed here, and these latter, as I have pointed out, have referred to, published and written about women writers from Sri Lanka.This essay is an attempt to understand and frame contemporary Tamil women’s writing, in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka and in the diaspora. I have chosen to do this through invoking a time-tested trope, the positing of meaning in and through an invocation of place. The poetry of place is ancient – and rests as much on geography as it does on culture, and demonstrates how the material world inhabits the world of words, even as the latter calls forth that world into existence. This sense of landscape, returned to the modern period through the conscious reconstruction of tradition in the early twentieth century, haunts us yet, even as those who speak the Tamil language live in far-flung lands and are fast turning into global migrants and citizens.