By Fareez Farook –

“I live in days that have no meaning.”

Some sentences acquire a different meaning after their author is gone. These words belonged to Thiagarajah Selvanithy, Selvi, a poet, dramatist and women’s-rights activist studying Theatre and Dramatic Arts at the University of Jaffna. She was not a soldier or a politician. She was a young woman who wrote, acted and questioned. On 30 August 1991, members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) abducted her from her home in Jaffna.

The following day, she was due to appear in a university play about the role of women in the Palestinian intifada.

She never made it to the stage.

Selvi disappeared into LTTE custody.

She would never return.

In 1992, while she was imprisoned, PEN honoured her with the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, recognizing writers persecuted for their words. In 1993, the LTTE acknowledged that she was in its custody. Four years later, in 1997, an LTTE spokesman acknowledged that she had been executed.

Six years had passed since she was taken.

For much of that time, the organization holding her knew where she was. Her family did not.

Before she became a prisoner

Selvi’s life before her disappearance was defined not by violence but by her engagement with women, theatre and literature.

She was associated with Poorani Illam, a women’s centre in Jaffna that supported women affected by bombing, bereavement and war. She was involved with the university’s women’s organization and founded the feminist journal Tholi. Her plays addressed subjects such as dowry and rape, while her poetry examined women’s lives amid war, repression and social constraint.

Sivamohan Sumathy, who knew Selvi personally, remembered her as a young woman with a questioning mind and a deep commitment to theatre. Selvi acted in Sumathy’s play “Aduppadi Arattai” in 1989 and was closely involved in the work of Poorani.

She was, in other words, part of a generation trying to imagine a different future while war was closing in around them.

The play that went on without her

The circumstances of her abduction remain particularly haunting because of what was supposed to happen the next day.

Human Rights Watch recorded that the university production dealt with a Palestinian prisoner who had been tortured and resisted his captors. Selvi was due to appear in it.

Instead, on the eve of the performance, she was taken away.

The irony was stark: a play about imprisonment and resistance was preparing to open while one of its performers had herself been imprisoned.

The stage was ready.

Selvi was not.

When liberation became intolerance

The LTTE presented itself as a movement fighting for the liberation of the Tamil people. Yet the organization’s record also reveals the darker reality of life under its authority.

Human Rights Watch documented arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, extrajudicial killings and the suppression of political opponents and critics. It also reported severe restrictions on freedom of expression and cultural life in areas under LTTE control.

Amnesty International documented prisoners of conscience held by the organisation and restrictions on access to detainees. It also reported torture by the LTTE, while noting the difficulty of obtaining independent first-hand information because of the secrecy surrounding its detention system.

This was the political environment into which Selvi disappeared.

There was no transparent public charge against her, no independent court to examine her case and no meaningful judicial process through which she could challenge her detention.

An armed movement that claimed to be fighting for freedom had placed a young poet beyond the protection of any independent law.

The poet’s weapon

Selvi’s poetry did not need political slogans to challenge power. Its questions were more unsettling.

In “Within Me,” she portrays a world in which political absurdity has invaded everyday life and truth itself has become difficult to recognize.

In “Raman, Like Ravanan,” she unsettles the familiar moral divisions of the Ramayana, questioning the certainty with which people divide the world into heroes and villains. The poem asks what happens when those who claim righteousness begin to resemble the oppressor they condemn.

And in “Summertime,” translated by Shash Trevett, the beauty of Sri Lanka’s landscape exists alongside the memory of violence. The poem closes with the words:

“presses mutely on the mind.”

Read today, the line carries an added poignancy, not because Selvi predicted her own fate, but because her poetry understood how violence can remain long after the immediate moment has passed.

Her work has since travelled beyond Sri Lanka, including through Out of Sri Lanka, an anthology of poetry from Sri Lanka and its diasporas.

Six years in captivity

The outside world did not stop asking what had happened to her.

Amnesty International followed her case. In November 1993, LTTE spokesman Anton Balasingham reportedly told Counterpoint magazine that Selvi was still alive and in LTTE custody, as far as he knew. Yet her whereabouts remained undisclosed, and her relatives were not permitted to visit her.

The significance of that statement is difficult to escape.

She was not merely missing.

She was being held.

By then, the international literary community had already taken notice. PEN’s 1992 award had brought her case to the attention of writers and human-rights advocates around the world.

But international recognition could not release her.

The killing

In 1997, the LTTE acknowledged that Selvi had been executed.

Beyond that, the historical record becomes less certain. Later accounts have alleged that she was tortured, while contemporary human-rights reporting establishes that torture was used by the LTTE against detainees. But the available reliable evidence does not establish precisely what was done to Selvi herself or allow the final circumstances of her death to be reconstructed with confidence.

That distinction is important.

Her story requires no embellishment.
She was abducted from her home. She was held for years without a transparent judicial process. Her family was denied meaningful access to her. And the organisation that held her eventually acknowledged that it had executed her.

Those facts speak for themselves.

The tragedy of Selvi’s life lies not only in how it ended, but in the contradiction surrounding it.

The LTTE claimed to be fighting for the freedom of a people. Yet it could not tolerate the freedom of an individual to question, dissent and think independently.

That contradiction is central to Selvi’s story.

She wrote about women caught between war and social control. She questioned conventional ideas of power and righteousness. She remained involved in women’s work at a time when independent voices were increasingly dangerous.

Then she was taken.

Her captors could control her movements and eventually her life. They could not determine what would happen to her words afterward.

Her poems survived. They were translated and published. New readers encountered a woman they could never meet but whose questions remained alive on the page.

Perhaps that is the most fitting memorial to Selvi, not simply that she was killed, but that the attempt to erase her voice failed.

She disappeared in 1991. Her poetry did not.

Decades later, readers still encounter the question Selvi placed before her generation:

What becomes of a liberation movement when it begins to fear the freedom of those it claims to liberate?

Selvi never lived to hear the answer.

Her poetry did.