Enemy Lines

Enemy Lines captures the extraordinary story of boys and girls coming of age during a civil war. Margaret Trawick lived and worked in Batticaloa in Eastern Sri Lanka, where thousands of youth have been recruited into the Sri Lankan armed resistance movement known as the Tamil Tigers (LTTE). This compelling account of her experiences is a powerful exploration of how children respond to the presence of war in their world and of how adults have responded to the presence of children in this conflict. What emerges from her beautifully written narrative, which includes many voices of the children and young adults who have joined the LTTE, is a picture of a region that has been profoundly affected by the horrors of war, but where war is not the only thread in the fabric of people's lives--these Sri Lankans fight and prepare for combat, but they also play, love, celebrate, and dream. Enemy Lines, the most extensive ethnographic account of the Tamil Tigers available, advances a striking argument about the nature of war itself as it brings alive a region where childhood, warfare, and play have become commingled in a world of continual uncertainty.