Disappearances, dissident memory and magic: Sandya Ekneligoda’s struggle for justice

Abstract

In January 2010, Prageeth Ekneligoda, a journalist based in Colombo, Sri Lanka was forcibly disappeared. Since then, his wife Sandya has been searching for truth and justice while organising periodic protests to keep his memory alive in the public sphere. In some of these protests, she invokes Kali, the Hindu mother goddess of death and destruction, beseeching her to punish the perpetrators. Foregrounding public cursing as a form of memory activism, with its own aesthetics, this article makes three interrelated arguments. First, I argue that protest performances that foreground impunity can be analysed as powerful enactments of ‘dissident memory’ that challenge ‘official political memory’ and its manifestations in the ‘memoryscape’ of a nation. Second, I locate Sandya’s protest performance within a broader local and global vein of gendered activism in contexts of mass disappearances that shifts the aesthetics and affective mood/register of the disappearance protest from grief and mourning to rage and vengeance, taps into memory differently, and intervenes in the postwar memoryscape from a different agentive location. Third, I argue that Sandya’s increasing reliance on cursing must be apprehended as a response to continued impunity, which decentres the victims and survivors in favour of insistently centring and remembering the perpetrators.