Fugitive Sites: Tamil Memorialization in Post-War Sri Lanka

This paper examines performance as a fugitive site of memorialization in post-war Sri Lanka, focusing on the discussions that followed Strangers in the Night, a devised trilingual performance staged in Tamil-majority regions. Set against the backdrop of Maaveerar Naal (Great Heroes' Day), the performances generated politically charged audience discussions, emerging as dialogic spaces of remembrance and resistance in a context where Tamil mourning is heavily policed. Engaging Diana Taylor’s work on the archive and the repertoire and disappearances, the article shows how testimonies, gestures, and interruptions function as “vital acts of transfer” through which memory persists without stabilization (Taylor, 2003). These exchanges operate as repertoire: ephemeral and embodied. José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “ephemera as evidence” further illuminates how affective traces, silences, tears, faltering speech, constitute forms of political testimony that resist dominant regimes of visibility and documentation (Muñoz, 1996). The article also attends to the gendered nature of post-war trauma, foregrounding how women often assume the role of custodians of memory under conditions that seek to silence their grief. Situating Strangers in the Night within a broader lineage of Sri Lankan theatre, the article demonstrates how performance operates as a fugitive practice: temporary, covert and produced under conditions of surveillance and risk.