Hernia in Hell
The handbasket’s full. Really. There’s no room at the inn, my friend. Thirty five thousand souls blown off the Gaza Strip since October, 1500 from Port Au Prince since January.…
Author: Indran Amirthanayagam
The Question Seller
Behind front doors of friends and compatriots in Port Au Prince, we listen to evening prayers and the silence of fear, and observe the strength of resistance against the bush’s rules,…
It’s A (Sur)real World
In North Gaza a food pallet is attached to a parachute that fails to open. Five people are crushed when it hurtles to earth. Besides burying the bodies, pallbearers open the…
Surviving In Wilderness
sprayed blood on flour sacks, on February 29. A Leap Day for a Leap Year, 2024. But 112 dead Palestinians are no longer leaping for flour. They are lying on the…
News Without Terror
The reporter gives us news and despite the agony in details: shrapnel killing kids, hospitals, schools and mosques bombed with two thousand pound projectiles, almost two million people displaced, hounded, on…
Elegy for the Extended Family
Mosab, reading your post today of the dead from an airstrike in Khan Younis, cousins, uncles, aunts, six members of your extended family, six degrees that separate us, I felt at…
Mourning Children, Tyrant
Nobody will mourn you, tyrant, when you’re gone, when the coffin lowers into the grave. Nobody will visit the memorial and there will need to be guards placed on each…
To Pledge Again
The math is simple. There are fifteen members of the UN Security Council. Five are permanent, the rest elected for two year terms. Together they represent the enforcement wing of the…
Nyet…Yahu
Do you think we can put this aside, forget, go to the reading with books and introductions, nothing nagging in gut and mind? No vision of a baby wrapped in…
Kill the Families
When I set off for Columbia University to become a foreign correspondent, to cover wars and peacemaking, famine, floods, murders, kidnappings, larceny on a global scale, I never imagined that…
Tamilian in Paris
Weekly The restaurant served idly and dosai around the corner from Notre Dame, before the fire, in a perfect union of India and Europe, while at my table a waitress asked…
Rebirth and Memory Black July, 40 Years Later
It is painful to read how Sri Lankan government ministers rallied their goondas to fan out in neighborhoods looking for Tamil homes marked on voter lists. It is painful to…
War Never Ends
This anniversary marks a stage, a pause in the fighting, does not a lasting peace reflect( especially when celebrated as if one party won). But dictates of reason, and…
Jaffna Today
How to select keys for the door when you know the gatekeeper all too well, when chance and destiny carry the same code words, when love no longer depends on…
Independence Song, 2023
Are we free in 2023? To declare love and friendship without fear, without visits from police or blackmail from nosy neighbors? Are we free in 2023? To deny low wages or flagrant…