7 - Militancy, Maternity and Masquerade in Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist

Summary

The Perplexities of the Female Suicide Bomber

In his discussion of suicide bombing, Talal Asad (2007) has argued that a suicide bomber's motives are always of primary interest but they can never really be known since he or she dies in the event. Discussions of suicide bombings therefore turn to the trials, confessions and testimonies of those who train for similar missions but do not complete them; they cobble together an explanation that is part fantasy, part history, part fiction and part ethnography. As such, Asad argues, ‘the social scientist, novelist, and filmmaker endow the dead terrorist with the motives of the living’ (2007, 45). It is in this sense that representations of ‘suicide attacks are therefore, above all, histories. In recounting plausible histories, they also employ fiction’ (41). While they might signal the occluded personal and collective histories of the terrorist, they are also driven by the dominant cultural values and tropes of the moment and place they represent. In doing so they convert the raw, partially understood continuum of violent acts and their consequences into socially meaningful, politically significant, morally compelling and, sometimes, aesthetically arresting narratives.

The narrative act of connecting events, causes and motives in a causal relationship has typically played a prominent role in rendering acts of violence meaningful in ways that direct us to moral condemnation, repugnance and retaliation. However, attention to the ways these narratives are plotted makes visible the evasions, dissimulation and occultation that are necessary and distinctive features of all ideological activity. We see a similar complex mix of source material and strategies in the plotting of Santosh Sivan's film The Terrorist (1998). As it depicts a young Sri Lankan woman preparing for a suicide bombing mission, the film enters a field of contradictory discourses that seek to explain terrorism in general or vindicate, in particular, the violent civil war waged by Tamil separatists between 1983 and 2009. While the film recognises the potential women's militancy holds for unsettling gender arrangements, it amplifies the anxiety provoked by the figure of the female suicide bomber by overlaying it with the possibility of motherhood. This anxiety finds a particular focus and expression in the protagonist's many acts of feminine masquerade whose implications the film simultaneously plays up and contains through its reliance on conventions of melodrama – especially in its moment of closure.