90. Introduction: Neethikkathai

Born and raised in the settler-colonial U.S., I studied as my parents studied in Batticaloa, attempting to cultivate an eidetic memory by walking up and down a hallway with an open textbook, silently reading to myself, then closing my eyes, picturing the words, and reciting the passage out loud. The idea is that you can't appropriately engage with a text's meaning until you've absorbed it. Although my parents were brought up in the British education system established in colonial times, their studying process reflected ancient Tamil pedagogy, which relied on eidetic memory and encouraged lateral thinking. Given that instructional texts were composites of semi-fictive histories, poetic admonitions, existential musings, and parables, ancient Tamil students would memorize sacred poetry and kathai and then meditatively reflect on, analyze, and debate them, and through this process, develop moral principles, analogical reasoning, and critical and creative thinking.

Maybe it's because of this heritage that parables, proverbial expressions, and oral histories were woven into my parents' conversations as seamlessly as they integrated English words in Tamil speech and syntax.

Knowledge is essential for enlightenment regardless of how you study and attain it, so Tamil culture extols knowledge as its own reward, whether garnered recreationally or with a purpose. Ancient Sangam literature indicates high levels of literacy among men and women throughout Tamilakam, or the Tamil-speaking region in South Asia, including Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Tamil Eelam. When Western education arrived — with the missionary schools of the Portuguese and Dutch and the British schools designed to train an administrative workforce — they found widespread literacy, a cultural reverence for learning, and a system of education based on memorization, recitation, and writing on palm leaves. The ancient Tamil pedagogies that have persisted since antiquity include an exceptional emphasis on oral tradition and learning by ear, in addition to reading and understanding texts; questioning, to verify what students know and how they know it; and oral repetition and memorization (Subramanian, 2012, pp. 238-241).

Appa positioned himself at the intersection of Tamil and Socratic pedagogies. I memorized multiplication tables, pi and e to at least 14 places, the names of countries and capitals and their locations on a world map, the periodic table of elements by atomic number and recurring chemical properties, Tamil song lyrics, English vocabulary words, lines from plays, English poetry, Sanskrit verses in translation, neethikkathai — moral stories or parables told to me in Tamil and reproduced by me in English — and kathai about growing up in Batticaloa while ethnic tensions ran high.

Tamil culture possesses a rich oral tradition that legitimizes the epistemic value of lived experience and folklore alongside theoretical knowledge and scientific inquiry, so it's not surprising that kathai and neethikkathai shape my relationship with myself and my painervation, or that I adapt neethikkathai and their analogical reasoning to comprehend the past and anticipate future experience. All experiences are the potential basis of parables, and parables make meaning of past and future experience as argumentative, investigative tools, and they don't deny my cultural identity, as their prepackaged internal configurations rely on culturally validated or accepted experience.

Parables operate through analogy, where a concrete phenomenon gestures at a more abstract one; symbolism, where characters, events, and artifacts represent someone or something else; or case study, where a story is presented as an instance of something happening; or they combine all three approaches. Concepts that evade easy explanation are characterized rather than defined. Animals are anthropomorphized in culturally understood ways for moral instruction. Daily objects or encounters might be defamiliarized to encourage analogical reasoning and lateral thinking, prized forms of comprehension in my Tamil household. Parables advocate for learning through interpretation and reconciliation of meaning, not explicit theory and agonistic discourse, asking you to extract meaning from a story that may possess multiple interpretations. While a lesson is always embedded in them, inexplicitness is the point (Govier & Ayers, 2012, pp. 165-169).

None of this is unique to Tamil culture, but the speech style and physical mannerisms of a Tamil household color my ontological encounters with pain and external expressions of it.

A governing question in both neethikkathai and fibromyalgic Tamil personhood begins with this: If things in the story represent something else, what is that something else? Neither story nor body provide the allegorical code. By virtue of belonging to the culture (or flesh), your understanding is presumed (Govier & Ayers, 2012, pp. 164-165).

What happens when story/body/country are undecipherable to the cryptanalysts tasked with decoding?

Like many incurable chronic illnesses, fibromyalgia inspires an attitude of this is incurable but must be cured. Neethikkathai inspire a disposition towards openness, patience, and decryption. For instance: Every day, I meet a woman with a beautiful yellow complexion and find in her a healer. The answer to this old Tamil riddle is manjal (turmeric): antimicrobial, antibacterial, and anti-inflammatory, the tridoshic golden goddess in Ayurveda. She, and a riddle like that, are as exotic as my counterstories in Western institutions that treat the most Othered or undesirable material conditions of my existence — disability, Tamilness — as objects of study suitable for non-Western literature or cultural rhetorics courses, if they are treated at all (Martinez, 2020).

According to Martinez (2020), counterstory "is methodology that functions through methods that empower the minoritized through the formation of stories that disrupt the erasures embedded in standardized majoritarian methodologies" (p. 3). It is committed to intersectionality and social, political, and legal reform, challenging the "natural" status of majoritarian stories that "privilege whites, men, the middle and/or upper class, heterosexuals, and the able-bodied by naming these social locations as natural or normative points of reference" (p. 23). As a method, counterstory offers researchers a creative, interdisciplinary lens to critically engage with how multiple forms of oppression (1) intersect in the daily lives of nonwhite folks too dark to claim white privilege, and (2) manifest in allegedly neutral systems, like the biomedical complex or the academy, exposing them as spaces that often exclude us and deny us palliation.

While counterstories can be told anywhere, when told in communities that presume those social locations as dominant and natural, they permit the counterstoryteller to reconfigure this master narrative and disrupt that false neutrality. Certainly I have used counterstorying to gain better access to the privileges and goods of that community. Like when the head nurse in the inpatient wing of NYU Langone's emergency department asks about my numerous tattoos and scarifications while entering codes in my medical record, and her tone and body language address me as deviant, I react with instinctive counterstorying: describing myself as a professor and each of my mods as teaching tools, particularly the panopticon tattooed at the nape of my neck, which lets me wax poetic about social control and state regulation of bodies, concepts nurses understand. This rendered my tattoos respectable and my claims of pain less suspect. And of course, my skin color legitimizes "primitive" traditions like body modification: pachai kuthu, the traditional stick-and-poke done by tribes in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, was thought to relieve persistent pain, much like other ancient non-Western tattooing practices, and to most white people, South Asian skin signifies a rich culture of temporary body art in the form of mehndi and turmeric.

Telling kathai is how we Eelam Tamils maintain and reproduce our cultural heritage, since the oral tradition of ancient Tamilakam, since the 1981 burning of the Jaffna library and the continued erasure of Tamil history and identity. As the oppressed minority in Sri Lanka, as minorities in new diasporic homes, we have always been telling counterstories. This is the genre of counterstory I tell most in academic writing, something recognizably narrative, kathai with a beginning, middle, and end, because it is most recognizable to audiences already skeptical of qualitative methods that employ storytelling. Academic genres leave little place for neethikkathai with Tamil perspectives, oblique references, unorthodox structures, implicit lessons. Because this is an academic project, I explain more than was explained to me as a child, more than I would explain in a creative piece. Because this is an academic project, it is possible to read linearly and never encounter these stories.

This chaotic bricolage of kathai and neethikkathai, disjointed infra-ordinary stories in search of a narrative, attests to my theoretical learning and attempts to generate meaning through the unexpected encounter. In reworking Tamil parables, presenting episodes of experience as parables in and of themselves, relying on indirection and inferred meaning created through white space and juxtapositions, or citing parables verbatim, I explain enough and leave enough unsaid to invite confrontation with a sense or relation that disturbs common sense and signals something imperceptible, just past the limits of recognition. If you're looking for a theoretical hinge, know that it's meant to illuminate an aspect of the Deleuzian "thought without image" that governs my inquiry in academic and clinical settings. In Deleuze's (1968/1994) words, "it is the fortuitousness or the contingency of the encounter which guarantees the necessity of that which it forces to be thought" (p. 145).