Coconuts have been in the news lately, what with US Vice President Kamala Harris’s viral invocation of her mother asking her, “You think you fell out of a coconut tree?” But Lars Waldorf and Nilanjana Premaratna look at a very different kind of coconut in “‘This coconut was the one that finally worked’: cursing for peace and justice in Sri Lanka,” an article newly published in Peacebuilding.
The authors were interested in “how Sandya Ekneligoda repurposes cultural and religious cursing rituals to challenge disappearances, impunity, and illiberal peacebuilding in post-war Sri Lanka. Drawing on several cosmologies (principally Buddhist and Hindu), she invokes archetypal female deities/demons for healing and revenge.”
The authors open by introducing us to Sandya Ekneligoda, a human rights activist who, in 2022, “publicly performed a cursing ritual against Sri Lanka’s ruling Rajapaksa clan,” appealing to female deities for vengeance in the case of her disappeared husband — and against illiberal peacebuilding. When, six months later, a popular uprising drove the Rajapaksas from power, some credited Sandya Ekneligoda’s curse.
The article then turned to the role of healing and curse rituals in transitional justice. “Unlike healing rituals, ritual cursing can be viewed as the dark side of hybrid (liberal-local) peacebuilding and transitional justice. It can be seen as an illiberal or non-liberal challenge to liberal peacebuilding’s secular, rationalistic, and legalistic rationality,” they explain. But, in fact, women activists turn to them in moments of disempowerment and in struggles for justice.
“Long History of Impunity”
The authors then looked at cursing in the history of Sri Lanka, which has a “long history of impunity for disappearances” — and a land of cursing as a form of justice seeking.
Consideration is then given to how the strongest women’s movement transformed cursing from private ritual to public protest. They pay particular attention to the Southern Mother’s Front in the early 1990s, which used cursing to address the disappearances of their husbands, brothers, and sons.
Finally, they analyzed Sandya Ekneligoda’s ritual cursing for peace and justice. It is not that she only cursed for her husband: on the contrary, she “has relentlessly pursued justice through domestic courts despite military obstructionism, judicial delays, and personal threats…” But she combines a legal approach with a cultural one. “She uses performative rituals and cosmological power to keep Prageeth’s disappearance in the public eye and critique the justice system,” the authors write. She “smashes coconuts” to invoke the curse of Goddess Kali against those responsible for her pain — and to drum up public attention in the process.
The authors conclude by stressing the importance of another part of Harris’s coconut speech: the context. In the context of Sri Lanka, Sandya Ekneligoda was appealing to the liberal and the local, the legal and the cultural, and both pushing back against illiberalism and advocating resistance.