The Orders Were to Rape You Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle

In 2009, the genocidal war of the Sri Lankan state against Tamils ends. In 2012, Meena Kandasamy, who grew up with poster-size pictures of Tamil Tigers and Tigresses, decides to make a documentary on the violence faced by the female fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the aftermath of the brutal war. She meets the women who had survived the Sri Lankan camps where the orders were to rape them—women who are now refugees in distant lands, pale shadows of their blazing selves. Her documentary never gets made. But Kandasamy exhumes old hard drives to piece together their shattered lives.

Kandasamy also translates and presents us the poetry of three Tamil women combatants—poetry as op-ed, poetry as resistance, poetry as a call to arms, poetry as a call to poetry.