Twelve Cries from Home speaks out against Sri Lanka’s official silencing of war crimes, reclaiming the stories of survivors who insist on being heard.
Since August 2020, the intimidation of witnesses and journalists has surged in Sri Lanka.Twelve Cries from Homenavigates the memories and stories of twelve war survivors, mostly women and relatives of the disappeared, who wished to have their stories retold so that a permanent record might be made, and so that those outside the country might understand their experiences.
The outcome of a journey across the island in late 2018 by writer and Professor of Literature Minoli Salgado, who was revisiting her ancestral home, Twelve Cries from Home is deeply-layered and localised work of travelling witness. It returns to the concept of home as a place of belonging and security, which is a lost ideal for most, and uses a Sri Lankan measure of distance – the c
