Acts of Resistance: Blood-soaked pads
Would ads for pads, tampons and menstrual cups be wheat-pasted to walls the same way?
August 2010 [a year and something after the genocide is declared ‘over’]: I spend my entire stay in Yaalpanam unable to shake off the rage –I have to get a fucking permission slip to return to my ancestral land. Meaning I have to do a walk of shame through the Department of Defense as the army men strip me with their eyes and dangle the permission slip in front of me like bait to keep my mouth shut. It did not help that I start bleeding heavily as my trek back home begins in the one available night bus, AC LUXURY BUS: COLOMBO to JAFFNA.
We reach the northern border at around 3 a.m. and are stopped at a check point. As a Tamil womxn with a Canadian passport, I am warned that the army would not be easy on me; they're still pissed about the Gardiner shutdown.
Army men bark at us to disembark and line up- bags and all-men on the left, women on the right. In the middle of no where, they set up two wooden tables with cold yellow light hanging over us. I put my bag, permission slip and wretched navy blue passport in front of the womxn officer and she looks at me with all the loathing she could muster. She holds my gaze and rips my bag open, pulling everything out haphazardly like she was gutting me. My undergarments, my little gifts and trinkets of love I’ve carried two oceans over for family I have never met and my diary are left hanging over the sides. She shoves my papers at me and growls, NEXT. I scramble to shove everything back in and run to my seat, heart pounding in my ears. In that moment I felt my spirit join my ancestors to look at my body from a birds’ eye view – a 19-year-old Tamilachi from Canada travelling alone. And she is bleeding.
“In that moment I felt my spirit join my ancestors to look at my body from birds’ eye view – a 19-year-old Tamilachi from Canada travelling alone. And she is bleeding.”
All the blood I have remaining in Eelam now dwindle down to 4 people in Mullai – my maami and her three boys. My tour of their house begins at the outhouse and my heart sinks as I realize that there is no trash can for me to dispose my blood-soaked pads. My maami has hit menopause and my three cousins have likely never considered the concept of menstruation beyond the samatheeya veedus they were forced to attend over the years. I heard in passing from co-workers in Colombo that there was a practice of burying pads near the outhouses- I let the idea go as quickly as it came-it didn’t sit well with me to add all that bleach and rayon to my homeland like that. I could do the walk of shame over to the kitchen and chuck the pads there – ah fuck but wait, then I’d effectively out myself to the pussy police and have all the kovils cut out of my Eelam tour. I resolve to just collect the blood-soaked pads in my travel bag.
With my ancestors’ blessings and hovering cousins, I safely board back on the bus at the end of the week to journey through blood-stained roads back to colonizer-land, AC LUXURY NIGHT BUS: JAFFNA to COLOMBO.
Army men once again point us into gendered lines at the checkpoint with their phallic guns and teeming insecurity. I hand over my papers and without pause the army womxn goes elbow-deep into my bag. I hold my breath, raging at the misogyny, raging at the tyranny, raging at the colonization. Sweat drips down my forehead and settles on my brows. Deep breath Luxe, I tell myself. Deep breath.
I made sure to change my last pad right before I got on the bus and left it sitting right in the heart of my travel bag. Deep in the middle where she would reach to try and break my spirit.
She’s ripped out most of my belongings and goes back in for the final kill.
Her eyes freeze. I can see the veins in her forearms pop as she squeezes - like a person in a horror movie who turns the doorknob to open the door while you scream at the telly to tell them to turn around and run. Except I don’t tell her to stop.
I picture the week’s worth of blood-soaked pads I let collect and urge her with my eyes, go on, squeeze a little harder and she does. She shudders as the perfume of my Tamil pussy blood wafts up to her nose. Her eyes scream in disgust as she pulls out, hands covered in caking drips and drabs of my blood and my ancestors cheer.
With one swift shove, I push everything back into my bag and I thank her in her blood - bohoma istuti nangi-and hightail it back to the bus, Entrance to Jaffna special permission slip searing hot in my hands, my life force searing hot in hers.
