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How Does Our Media Cover Tragedy? An Open Letter to Sri Lankan Media Establishments
Published on Groundviews. On April 2016, two 19 year-old women were fatally hit by a train while attempting to cross a railway track in Dehiwala. The tragic incident quickly attracted the attention of the media, and journalists from every major domestic media outlet reported the incident, bringing to the nation and the world images and…
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Ethical Divides: ‘This Divided Island’ and ‘The Seasons of Trouble’
This post has been a long time coming. It has taken many shapes and been many versions of itself. Now I am back home in Sri Lanka, where all the nuances of our lives in this place and belonging to this place somehow pull and tug simultaneously, I think it’s time to say it…
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Leaving / Arriving
Today, on the day I leave India, I thought it would be nice to share this picture, which was shared via my mother’s friends on Facebook a few days ago. This is the great South Asian feminist sisterhood, as we know it, circa 1986. My amazing mother Sunila Abeysekera, wears possibly biggest smile in the…
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A Jungle Healing
(A Jungle Healing was originally written for and published in the UK magazine So It Goes, in April 2015. It was a collaboration with Cassie Machado, a British-Sri Lankan artist, whose images the original article was printed with, when they appeared in the magazine. The title, A Jungle Healing, was taken from R Cheran’s poem,…
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In My Mother’s Skin (A Personal History)
Invoking I’ve found it’s easiest to invoke my mother’s spirit when my heart is breaking. I am young. I am in love; heartbreak is common. I follow some simple steps: I turn off all the lights except the one in the bathroom. I take a long, hot shower; hot, hot, where the heat sears…
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BDS — an ethical agenda?
I posted this essay from Al-Jazeera English to my Facebook profile today. I understand what it’s like to belong to a nation at the receiving end of boycotts and I know I felt very frustrated and angry about it — to feel that to boycott was to reduce an entire nation of people in a…
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Sometimes, a girl has to buy herself flowers
Sometimes, a girl has to buy herself flowers, the smell of them will fill the house, she will like looking at them, she will take pride in arranging them, she will like how they light up the lonely kitchen, how the morning sun falls on each mysterious petal, And while, like her mother before her,…
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It’s Personal; It Should Be To Us All
Originally published on Groundviews on January 12th, 2015. So you see, democracy is not just a system, a structure; it is also a feeling. It is a feeling within each one of us; a desire to be led, a desire to be led by the things we believe in and the people we see those…
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Subha M Wijesiriwardena 