Prinita Thevarajah and Tong Wu
The art activist project, Kathai consists of several online interventions that draw awareness and contribute to the mobilization of diasporic Thamil communities around the many injustices of the Sri Lankan government. The project began as an online space to share and discuss Thamil women’s intergenerational sexual trauma that exists within the diaspora and for those still living in Sri Lanka as a direct result of the genocidal tactics used by the majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist Sri Lankan government during the civil war from 1958 to 2009. The living archive allowed women to share their stories anonymously and was clearly a needed platform given the number of stories and exchanges that took place. Many women indicated that it was the first time they were sharing their stories of trauma.
Since 1958, the Thamil community in Sri Lanka has been the target of discriminatory policies and ethnic cleansing that officially ended in 2009 with the death of over 100,000 Thamil civilians. The government of Sri Lanka still refuses accountability despite evidence of war crimes and pressure from the international community. As a result, the Thamil community in both the diaspora and Sri Lanka remains trapped by the trauma of witnessing killings and sexual violence against women that have not been processed and so remains subconscious and passed on from one generation to another. The objective of the project Kathai is to create awareness within the wider Thamil diaspora about the violence in Sri Lanka, while fostering a space for reflection about their own experiences of the war and also affirming individual experience within the collective struggle.
The bombings of churches and hotels on Easter Sunday May 2, 2019 led to the death of 250 people shifted the focus of Kathai to educate people regarding the human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government. The existence of trauma within the diaspora is an effect of the Sri Lankan government continuing to intentionally target minority Thamil communities within Sri Lanka. Although, there exists a rhetoric that Sri Lanka is now a ‘peaceful’ and ‘unified’ island that has been struck with terror due to the bombings, our intention was to inform the audience that violence is common and not unusual in Sri Lanka. Through two coordinated Instagram disruptions on May 2nd and May 9th, working alongside PEARL Action (People for Equality and Relief in Lanka) and various other activists internationally, Kathai was able to engage175 people. Some people were previously unaware of the genocidal history of Sri Lanka and wanted to learn more about it.
On May 2nd (10th anniversary of the bombing of the Mulivaikkal hospital in the no fire zone where 64 people were killed and 87 injured) Kathai disrupted Instagram and Facebook with an image of the word Sri Lanka made up of statistical data detailing the injustices of the Sri Lankan government. Describing Sri Lanka as ‘the peril of South Asia’ was a play on the historical labeling of the island as a ‘pearl’. The post received 100 shares globally and again several people wanted to learn more about the history of Sri Lanka. These posts were shared over 75 times on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
The second intervention was a video compilation that highlighted how many tourist destinations in Sri Lanka were in fact sights of conflict, related to human rights violations by the government. This video was a parody of the recent viral video by Lonely Planet, naming Sri Lanka ‘top country to visit in 2019’. This video was posted on May 9th, shared 75 times and also a few viewers of the video created their own posters creating the domino effect of activism.
For more information visit our website: https://www.kathai.space/
Stills from the parody video based on the Lonely Planet Video on Sri Lanka as the top tourist destination for 2019:
