101. The GoSL Engages Appendicitis

On July 11, 1983, less than two weeks before the Black July pogroms began, Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayawardene says in an interview with London's Daily Telegraph: "I am not worried about the opinion of the Jaffna people now . . . Now we can't think of them. Not about their lives, or their opinion about us. Nothing will happen in our favour until the terrorists are wiped out. Just that. You can't cure an appendicitis patient until you remove the appendix [emphasis mine]."

When this is proclaimed and published, I am in the womb, and Black July is oceans away, making tides in the amniotic surf that nurtures me for another trimester, drafting my own appendicitis into my Eelam Tamil thalaiyeluththu. To the body of the Sri Lankan State, I am the organ that needs to be removed.

Is this why mine so stalwartly resists? I am told after the appendectomy that there are two reasons I survived: one being that the organ swelled and descended to an area regularly flushed by lymph nodes and white blood cells; the other, that it repeatedly walled itself off in a months-long attempt to prove that removal isn't cure. Dr. Jiang, the only doctor who believed something was wrong and sent me to the ER, later tells me that sometimes the body can so effectively barricade a perforated appendix that it can obviate surgery. The omentum, a highly vascularized, sheet of fatty tissue draped around the intestines, can wrap itself around the appendix and the purulent material seeping from it, creating ever-larger containers in the abdomen. As though expecting to be under siege, my lymphocytes swarmed, but could not prevent peritonitis or adhesion.

Hedva (2016) outlines

Sick Woman Theory [as] an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. . . . [It] maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression — particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick. (§ 5)

The thought periodically occurs to me that the infrastructures of the world have come to be concentrated in my gut. The war in Sri Lanka plays out in my intestine while I apathetically wander the aisles in a Walgreens on Lexington Avenue in 2014, on the phone with Amma, asking her to tell me where I am.

My appendix could be Jaffna, the Vanni, Ampara, islands in Batticaloa's lagoons. In Jayawardene's framing, it's LTTE, terrorist, Eelam Tamil, me. It/me balloons with resentment and non-belonging. Through adhesion, our borders grow. We resist removal. We fight, with intermittent rebellions that likely go as far back as 2008 and 2009, for our right to survive. State oppression makes the appendix uninhabitable, and eventually we can't coexist. The laparoscope and LigaSure are inserted like instruments of evolution. Either it must fall, or Empire.

Jayawardene's reductive take overlooks that, after excision, new diasporic colonies form with the promise of hypertrophy in the borderlands and interstices. Survival is understanding the significance of the analogy.