Then There Were No Witnesses

Translated from Tamil into English by Geetha Sukumaran./p>

In recent times, Tamil poetry from Sri Lanka has taken a new turn, serving as a countermemory–a witness to torture, loss, trauma, and exile. Ahilan gives us a unique voice and style, in which he expresses the trauma of the violence in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka with great nuance and subtlety. His background as art historian has allowed him to blend the 2,000-year-old Tamil cultural, literary, and philosophic tradition with visual, graphic imagery to create a rich and distinct body of poetry.