38. Veedu and As-Needed Relief

All of the material manifestations and felt resonances of the aesthetic experience I describe boil down to a sense of veedu, literally house and home but also like the possessions, attributes, and relationships that make up the home-identity. The preservation and replication in me of the disposition that derives from the culture of Batticaloa and the Tamil diaspora and particularities among family in the veedu is significant because it, in part, dictates my aesthetic experience of and response to suffering and my adoption of the "sick role." However, modern biomedicine centers these interpretations almost exclusively on empirical biological principles and scientific inquiry. In my upbringing, all pain is chronic, always an unremarkable fact. Chronic pain as a biomedicalized disorder, like mental illness and queerness, are Western disorders we don't have in Sri Lanka, according to my relatives. Really, though, it's just a nameless and highly neglected problem, one that I struggle to name for biomedical and biocultural discourse. Academic production, with its rapid pace and focus on deadlines, is also chronic (Chen, 2014, p. 180; Dolphin-Krute, 2014). Because of its chronicity, fibromyalgia is too complex a phenomenon for one-track, conquest-focused approaches (Morris, 1991, p. 26).

All this is compounded by the Tamil genocide that began escalating as I was growing up and intensified in 2008, as my bodymind molted to reveal catastrophe. In Ganeshananthan's (2010) short story "Hippocrates," a Jaffna girl being treated for rape says, "I want to know what is happening and if the pain goes away then that might be worse." The doctor thinks, "She was right. Pain informs. Pain draws a map. Doctors resolve to relieve pain, but pain is information, and to lose it is to lose something valuable. Pain is useful, even as a distraction. If it hurts, it is there. And if your body hurts, then your mind is occupied and cannot think too deeply about what has happened to you" (paras. 53-54). It's not so neat a separation as this, and the Jaffna girl in the story, anyway, goes on to become an LTTE suicide bomber. Where Morris (1991) suggests that "pain on such an immeasurable order of magnitude will very likely defeat or cancel thought" (p. 51), survivors, refugees, and descendants of genocide know that forgetting is not an option.

Maybe this unwillingness to forget as part of the Eelam Tamil aesthetic experience is why my parents rarely, if ever, stocked analgesics. We took on an as-needed basis seriously, implicitly demarcating as needed as udambu nohuthu so bad you can no longer endure. In high school, when I popped my knee out, I wore a brace and gritted my teeth to put weight on it until I could walk again. Amma complained of vali all the time, yet endured. When I was in grade school, Appa disturbed a nest of yellowjackets and was stung repeatedly in the face and head, and took Tylenol for the swelling, as needed, never more than four a day. When he has knee surgery, he dutifully fills his prescription for Vicodin, to be taken on an as-needed basis, and takes it only when the pain exceeds the ability to vocalize it in words, mulangkaal nohuthu.

I'm told this is because pills are bad for you, but I wonder if the deeper, subconscious reason is our cultural sensibility, the pluralist health practices we carried out in an Eelam-Tamil-Hindu-American home. My parents grew up without relying on painkillers, so this tendency seems inherited. Amma recounts the bitter teas her mother made when she was feverish and achy, and she has knowledge of herbs for pain, like turmeric, fennel, and ginger, but she doesn't recall anyone in her family masking pain with paracetamol. Even her sister, whose menstrual cramps were so intense she could barely move, took nothing, just stayed home from school and cried. They grew up without a reliance on painkillers, so maybe this tendency was inherited. I learned to do the same. I didn't embrace post-anesthetic culture until I was in college, with the mobility and financial freedom to purchase Advil, Aleve, Motrin. And when I do, I have to rewire my perception of as needed for myself, believing — as my parents do — that if I resort to Advil, I must be experiencing pain ranked between 8 to 10 on the pain scale. When I am prescribed daily medication for fibromyalgia, my interpretation of painkilling necessarily changes to remain aligned with concepts of acceptance and coexistence: not masking pain, but managing it. Ether Day marks the end of pain as the ancients knew it in the West, but pain-relieving practices long preceded 1846, and killing pain isn't always desirable. Every drug I've gone on, I instinctively stop titrating at a dosage level high enough to cope and low enough to still feel. For vali that is empowering through shakti, or to simply enact acceptance-based strategies, pain is a sensory experience that cannot, should not, be killed.

Modern biomedicine doesn't emerge locally but is exported globally, as though preexisting traditions didn't exist. However, it rarely, if ever, overwrites those traditions. Sri Lanka's healthcare system is largely pluralist (Tribe, 2007), accounting for Western colonial influence on biomedicine and for Indigenous and traditional medical practices, and this filters into attitudes within Tamil families and homes. Accepting a state of being, like pain, means accepting its sensory experience even when it lacks a biological function. My family strongly wishes for me to be well, to be cured, but this desire coexists with "acceptance, as a state of having to come to terms with, as having absorbed and fully worked through, so as to eradicate, a loss. Being in a state of acceptance is one diametrically opposed to a state of mourning; in acceptance, everything has been resolved" (Dolphin-Krute, 2017, p. 67). ↩