A War of Words

I’ve spent a lot of my adult life analyzing the words we use to describe each other — from the propaganda of governments, to community-building narratives, the persuasiveness of advertising copy, and the ways we communicate our pain, our struggle, and our joy. This work comes from a very personal place. As the child of Sri Lankan Tamils who left Sri Lanka due to the 1983 pogroms, I am acutely aware of what it means to be a person, a community, in the crosshairs of an ethno-nationalist government’s propaganda. How the government’s stories about us, their descriptors of us, were the ones the international community used. That we were terrorists and violent and brutal and savages. That we were not interested in peace. All the while the government targeted Tamil schools and hospitals, leveling neighborhoods and towns. Creating refugees that western countries then built anti-refugee narratives around, continuing the propaganda of refugees as vermin, as drains on a nation, as the bringers of violence. Government supporters, both in Sri Lanka and abroad, held the same line — they had nothing against Tamil people, civilians, innocents. It was the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam) who were the problem. They were the terrorists, the savages, the animals. But any time the LTTE retaliated against government oppression, it was civilians who were targeted. It was hospitals in Tamil areas that were bombed, it was Tamil children who were beaten by their peers. It was the Tamil diaspora abroad who were surveilled. Until the war ended in 2009, whenever I told people I was a Sri Lankan Tamil, their only point of reference was that we were terrorists.

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