The Lure Of The Tigress

• Fact or Fiction?

By Raisa Wickrematunge

The picture that appears when you go to www.niromidesoyza.com is very evocative. It shows a young child in the foreground, with the muzzle of a gun pointed straight at the camera.
There are other armed children in the background. This picture is also the cover of Niromi de Soyza’s latest book “The Tamil Tigress.” The book details Soyza’s decade-long stint in the LTTE, as one of the first female cadres, she says.
The website is empty other than for this picture. Clicking on it redirects the user to the book’s official Facebook page. The first post is a picture of the “Tamil Tigress” in a school library.
Following the July release, the ‘Tamil Tigress’ was well received in Australia, where de Soyza now lives. As the Facebook page notes, the book was named one of the ‘50 books you can’t put down’ in the Australian Government’s “Get Reading!” 2011 campaign. Scrolling down the page, it becomes apparent that de Soyza is active in the literary events circuit. Her more recent activities include speaking at the Australian Council and even a radio interview on Australia’s ABC Classic FM; she has also attended (and spoken at) several literary festivals.
However, despite the acclaim she has received from overseas, there are an increasing number of dissenting voices – people who claim she is a fake. What is more, there are claims that her charitable efforts are not above suspicion. Principal researcher and founder of the Point Pedro Institute of Development, Muttukrishna Sarvananthan attended a literary festival in Eltham where de Soyza was speaking. At one point, she said that the proceeds of the ‘Tamil Tigress’ would be going towards her ‘alma mater’, and provided an email address with the username sjc87. A simple Google search and the website www.sjc87scholarship.org pops up.
This website depicts a young girl bent over a book, looking at the camera. The SJC87 initiative aims to assist war affected children in the North and East, by helping provide them with a decent education at selected schools. Children are selected by a sponsor, who can choose based on school, gender or age. Apart from scholarships, there are English and IT programmes, even programmes to encourage those with an aptitude for theatre. It seems a legitimate call for humanitarian aid – except for the minor fact that SJC stands for St. John’s College, a boy’s school in Jaffna. As Sarvananthan observed, it is curious that de Soyza appeared to claim that she attended this school.
The ‘Tamil Tigress’ Facebook page notes that 15% of the money from book sales would be going to the SJC87 initiative, though there was no mention of de Soyza attending the school. In fact, de Soyza does not appear to be mentioned anywhere in the SJC87 initiative website—which is curious considering her charitable donations.
In order to get some answers to the questions raised, The Sunday Leader attempted to contact de Soyza through her publisher, Allen and Unwin. Several emails were sent to the publicity department, as directed, with no response.
De Soyza has conducted many interviews with Australians, but is more reticent with Sri Lankans. In fact, she had postponed meeting Sarvananthan for two months.
The questions posed in the email were as follows:
Why does de Soyza continue to use a nom de guerre, when the war has been over for two years? Is she under threat in Sydney, where she reportedly lives with her husband and two children?
What is her response to the allegations that her book was not in fact a true story? Several points did not ring true, such as her use of the term ‘boyfriend’, a term not commonly used in Jaffna at the time and her claim in the opening chapter of smelling ripening palmyrah fruit, which ripen in June or July, not December. More serious, however, is the fact that she portrayed the LTTE as battling government forces in December, when in fact they were fighting the Indian Peacekeeping Force; it was Groundviews reporter Michael Roberts who pointed out this error. Were these minor mistakes? Or deliberate rearrangements of the truth? Questions were also raised as to de Soyza’s fundraising activities for her supposed alma mater.
Although it was stressed that de Soyza had an opportunity to respond to her detractors, she or her publishing company chose to ignore the emails.
One thing is for certain- the book is captivating, told from the point of view of a female child soldier. The opening scene, which has de Soyza crouching in the shadow of a water tank in the midst of a desperate mission, is just as evocative as the book cover. Whether it is fact or fiction, though, is something only de Soyza can answer.