ABSTRACT
This chapter uses Primo Levi’s conception of the “grey zone” as a point of departure to draw on unlikely friendships and solidarities in camps of political incarceration. The study explores the role such relationships play in inspiring hope and confidence in prisoners who face long and seemingly interminable detention and are also subject, on a daily basis, to an uncompromising environment of hostility. The study is anchored to, and draws from, memoir and autobiographical fiction emerging from three camps of political incarceration in modern Sri Lanka: the detention centers of the April 1971 insurgency, the incarceration camps used by the state militaries during the 1987–1990 political emergency, and the prison camps of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during the country’s long Civil War. The discussion sets chosen texts in conversation with one another to tease out the significances and roles of these incongruous relationships, which surpass the oppression of the camps to complicate our readings of human emotions, power dynamics, and the interactions at play in negotiating with bare life.
