Meena Kandasamy’s documentary on Sri Lanka’s women Tamil warriors is now her latest book
With ‘The Orders Were To Rape You’, the writer takes the trauma of the participants towards posterity. LTTE women soldiers | Marietta Amarcord via Flickr / CC BY 2.0
Tamil nationalism grew stronger within the Tamil diaspora every day even as its flames died down with the end of the prolonged war in Sri Lanka in 2009. The end was not a quiet one, and it was not a war with a clear beginning or end, writes academician Sharika Thiranagama.
What happens when you grow up surrounded by conversations of this war in Tamil Nadu and your whole life becomes an act of documenting it, unravelling the entangled threads and ensuring that suppressed voices find a way to be seen and heard? This book, first intended as a documentary, emerges as a witness to the Sri Lankan conflict.
The
Dry
After the terrible
devastation caused by last year’s bushfires, which
prompted hundreds of Australians to shelter in the ocean to
escape incineration and destroyed uncountable amounts of
wildlife,
The Dry has been released during a totally
different kind of dry spell. The pandemic has provided an
instructive sense of scale, of how much we are going to have
to change patterns of consumption in order to overcome the
climate crisis. We stopped flying, gave up commuting, and
closed down many factories, all of which ended business as
usual pretty much across the entire planet, far more than we
The Dry, starring Eric Bana, matches wide open spaces with uncomfortably close drama. Photograph: Roadshow
Jane Harperâs best-selling novel The Dry is one of those books that feels written with a feature film adaptation in mind: a genre narrative (crime mystery-thriller) thatâs pacey, plot-driven and full of dialogue, with a central location ripe for cinematic imagery. Extensive use of flashbacks is built into its structure, and theyâre even presented in italics as if to say, âThis is where the cuts and scene changes goâ.
Director Robert Connollyâs adaptation is a very gripping and polished film, commandingly performed and directed, with an airtight sense of tonal cohesiveness â despite lots of, well, air in the frame, derived from countless mid- and long-shots capturing barren exterior locations in a fictitious Australian outback town. Written by Connolly and Harry Cripps, the script â lik