Eva Ranaweera who edited Voice of Women from its inception for the feminist NGO Kantha Handa, died suddenly when she was preparing the April issue. For this issue she had selected the theme ‘The Displaced’.
“It is not only about women displaced by the war. I am thinking of women who have been displaced through tradition and convention,” she told me. This was typical of this many faceted woman, journalist, bi-lingual writer, poet, feminist and activist. In every theme she chose for her journal she would always go to the heart of things, dig deep the unconventional, the little known. Often she would think about her current theme to the exclusion of everything else, even her meals. Often she confessed that she even dreamt of the magazine she produced single handedly, planning it months ahead.
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Producing the journal she wrote many of its contents herself. At times she identified men and women relevant to her theme who felt strongly about it, whether it was the environment, sexual abuse, children, women and violence, health, education - an endless list of topics she treated with dedication and commitment. “Voice of Women’ was never advertised. It was sold by her colleague Mala to visitors to the office or at women’s workshops. Not many people, therefore, knew about it. In her usual casual style Eva always said that the people who matter read it!
With her death, however, those who had looked forward to Voice of Women felt an emptiness that, however small, however little known the journal, they missed Eva’s dynamic hand, her feminist viewpoints and her unconventional treatment of her themes.Fortunately through the efforts of her sister and her niece, Kantha Handa has brought out this year’s journal as a tribute to Eva. It features another theme Eva was contemplating on the environment, ‘Protecting Mother Nature for the Future’.
Women and their plight meant the world to Eva. She planned workshops, training programmes and art classes on feminist themes. Her office was adorned with feminist paintings by men and women who were trained there. With these drawings annually she produced a calendar which was a mosaic of these drawings. On her errands to create awareness of women’s rights and gender, she travelled widely within the country, to distant rural villages amid much discomfort, often at her own expense.
“I want them to move away from their kitchens to the wider world, “she said. There was much criticism, and many critics. But she forged ahead, undaunted.As in her journal, in her other writings too she always picked on the unusual, the unconventional and lived according to those ideas, despite public opinion.
Her social consciousness is clear in her work as a writer and poet which she extended to her writings at Kantha Handa. She picked on issues critical to women with unerring accuracy – AIDs, displacement, domestic violence, feminist writings. She had her own vision of the world and its happenings. Her sincerity and firm convictions of her beliefs overrode the many slings and arrows that fortune dealt her throughout her life.
The current issue of Voice of Women is a tribute to her, an intimate expression of the person she was, a woman for all seasons.
Jean Arasanayagam, in her “Requiem to Eva” writes,
‘I want a poem from you for Voice of Women,’
‘Deadlines?’ I asked
‘As early as you can,’ her voice smiled back to me.
Now as I recall there was no deadline
for the completion of your life, but thoughts
remain in my mind and imagination
where you will always live… |
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