Jaffna Public Library was one of the largest libraries in South Asia, and one of the most significant archives of Eelam Tamil culture and history, until its state-sponsored destruction in 1981. Inaugurated in the 1930s, it housed over 95,000 books, irreplaceable ancient ola (palm leaf) manuscripts and parchment scrolls, original copies of regional historic documents, and politically significant Tamil newspapers. On June 1, 1981, Sri Lankan military, paramilitaries, and organized Sinhalese mobs torched the library, along with other sites of Tamil history and material culture — like the office and presses of the Tamil newspaper Eelanadu and Poobalasingam Book depot — Jaffna central market, and Tamil-owned homes, businesses, and property. The fires rage unchecked for two nights. It's overkill. Flame is a peerless speed. Within hours, our ancient stories and material culture were reduced to ash. A state of emergency wasn't declared until June 2, at which time the government also imposed a curfew and censored news emanating from the region ("'Jaffna burns again,'" 2022).
Despite local Tamil demands to memorialize the arson attack by constructing a new library adjacent to the burnt wreckage of the old one, the government of Sri Lanka fully restored the original building, eradicating any traces of violent anti-Tamil oppression. It's rarely in the interests of power to preserve evidence of its own crimes, except perhaps as a warning (Varatharajah, 2017; "History in flames," 2021).
My archival construction is influenced by forms of memorializing that subtly do justice to the violent cultural erasure of a biblioclasm by recovering and re-presenting Tamil material culture in its diverse, scattered forms. Narratives of violent curative logics and intergenerational trauma converge in and around these evocative objects, rhetorically reconstructing Eelam Tamil diasporic chronic pain and challenging reductionist portrayals of victimhood or inspiration porn.
This archive is influenced by the kinds of multimodal archives I turn to in order to augment my study of my personal and familial archives, including but not limited to: Jeyavishni Francis Jeyaratnam and Simon-Pierre Coftier's National Museum of Eelam (2021), Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan's The Incomplete Thombu (2011) and Cabinet of Resistance (2017), The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience's The Herstories Archive (2013), Alice Wong's Disability Visibility Project (2016), and Laura Mauldin's Disability at Home (2022).
This digital multimodal archive, Pain and Relief Come of Themselves (2024), assembles commercially worthless but culturally and/or medically resonant objects that might be exotic in America but are infraordinary in my Eelam Tamil household — Georges Perec's (2008) term for things that aren't just unsensational but minute, habitual, belonging to a wavelength of existence so mundane it escapes notice. The title is taken from The Purananuru (No. 192), written by Sangam poet Kaniyan Poongundranar and translated by A. K. Ramanujan, and quoted by G. G. Ponnambalam in his 1966 address to the U. N. General Assembly. In 2000, his son was shot dead, an assassination widely believed to have been ordered by the president. In 2004, I visited Batticaloa for the second time, and a split in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) led to renewed violence: a politician gunned down by the LTTE, close by; another (rumor has it) murdered in the hospital in broad daylight after he survived the first attempt. In 2002, when I visited for the first time, I caught a bad case of the December flu, which left me delirious, feverish, vomiting, too weak to move and in severe pain. We never thought to test for tropical disease.
கதை கதையாம் காரணமாம் (kathai kathaiyam karanamam): stories, stories, and the reasons for them, or because the story is the story.
Rooted in the specifics of the personal (familial memories, personal experiences) while gesturing at the universal (medically and culturally specific pain and trauma), Pain and Relief Come of Themselves evokes the torturous thrill of chasing slippery, shapeshifting truths through archives of familial lore, personal medical records, and mass violence.
Each object in this digital, multimodal, fictocritical archive hums with Eelam Tamil cultural resonance, diasporic (hi)stories, and medical experiences. Each is accompanied by a brief narrative that correlates chronic pain and resilience, using the feminist writing strategy of literary fictocritism: a practice that "juxtaposes creative and academic writing environments, and breaks down their separation and autonomy [...] Such texts can take many different forms, but may often be experimental and discontinuous: for example, fictional or poetic sections are juxtaposed with theoretical interjections so that they reverberate with each other. Or, fictocritical critics may attempt to disrupt the formality of the academic essay with strategies such as crossing of genres, collage, non-linearity, wordplay, anecdote, or use of the first person" (Smith, 2009, pp. 1001-2).
Combining the seemingly incompatible genre conventions of fictocritical and academic writing and museum and tabletop photography — a layout reminiscent of a gallery wall whose objects are informally, haphazardly photographed — these images interrogate the rhetorical embodiment and circulation of ideas, pain, truth-quality, and hope in the quotidian and institutional.
This iteration of Pain and Relief Come of Themselves is intentionally partial and incomplete, due to the constraints of this cluster conversation and the nonlinear, fragmented, incoherent, mythopoeic dimensions of chronic illness and trauma. The contents of this version include:
Only five of these images are accompanied by fictocritical narratives. As Jody Shipka (2016) suggests, acts of composing are material in product and process, and the incompleteness of this archive — when archival logic finds coherence in completion — points to the pained bodymind's difficulties in doing this work. This is a purposeful intervention, meant to materialize the fact that researching and writing about experiences of chronic pain and fatigue and intergenerational trauma — even fictocritically — is like gingerly probing a festering wound to see whether amrita (nectar of immortality) or halahala (poison) will emerge. The narratives featured here hold a cup to your lips without fully identifying the mixture it contains.
"An archive scripts modes of being and knowing, both materially and textually, that provide affordances and limitations to telling the past” (Hanson et al., 2018, p. 73). Every time I explore and re-present or -invent an archive, I'm imagining this biblioclasm, thinking of how I might disable the curatorial, classificatory, clinically observant gaze that many scholarly audiences have habituated. Any archive I enter or create contains at once the traces of destruction and the potential for resistance and re-inscription.
I may not have a personal link to Jaffna Public Library — my family is Batticaloa Tamil, I'm born two years after the library is burned, and I've never seen it except in two kinds of photographs: the charred remains of a building, absent its manuscripts; and the pristine reconstruction that hides this violent past — and at the same time, all Eelam Tamils do. Jaffna Public Library was a monument to learning and culture in Jaffna, an architectural manifestation of Eelam Tamil identity and values, an archive of the Eelam Tamil soul. Just bearing witness to the historical narrative and photographs feels like immolation.
That all archives are crypts, that hope guarantees nothing and must be continually reforged is something I knew from an early age.
The loss of an irreplaceable historical archive impedes our ability to fully know our past and understand, curate, and narrate our present, its absence a violent reminder of our illegitimacy as a people in the eyes of the Sri Lankan state. "As Eelam Tamil refugees we never fostered a culture of memorialization of our many displacements," Sinthujan Varatharajah (2016) muses, "Instead, we were fast to divorce experiences from our present and safely tuck them away until they were so far removed from our everyday that they no more appeared as ours" (para. 2). M. Neelika Jayawardane (2022) echoes this, saying, "A documentary photograph calls for accountability. Sri Lankans prefer to forget" (p. 58).
It's equally true that rememoration is a crucial part of diasporic existence, an openly performed and unremarked-on archival impulse. Driven by self-preservation and the need to assimilate into the host country (in our case, the U.S.), my family's practices of memorialization hinge on family photos, semantically loaded silences, intentional ambiguity — a Tamil communicative resource, wherein meanings are coded and lurk beneath the surface (Trawick, 1990) — and material conservation dictated by a sixth sense. Infraordinary objects become the locus for remembrance of the past, anchoring and encoding memories my parents are reluctant to speak about and creating opportunities for the stories to be extemporaneously, casually, and cryptically told.
Jacques Derrida (1995) writes that the archive isn't a closed, dead relic of the past but is always marked by its openness to the future (p. 79). The archive produces as much as it records, continually refocusing individual and group identity. For peoples whose libraries, book depots, and universities have been repeatedly razed, attacked, and occupied, it's impossible to trust in the permanence of archives, institutional or informal, centralized or decentralized. Maybe that's why so many of us make our own, and why I locate in this endeavor a rhetoric of Eelam Tamil diasporic-disabled resistance and resilience.
This is a selection of cultural objects and quotidian medical moments that some sixth sense led my family and I to conserve and document — potentially for how they similarly precipitate thought, feeling, and memory and provide opportunities for intentionally ambiguous oral transmission. A communicative mode that doesn't require commitment to or modification of an utterance is a survival tactic, a defense mechanism, unintentionally (epigenetically?) bequeathed to me (Jayawardane, 2022, p. 18).
When loss is so painful it can only be told through parable, objects become haunted by composite characters and narratives. Thus, the narratives attached to these objects are fictocritical, reflecting both Jayawardane'’'s (2022) question — "What good are documentary images, for an island like this? Whatever counts for truth may flit behind the shade of an interior, just as a doorway curtain shifts in the breeze. Something may come into focus, only to ghost itself out of the frame. Looking for truth here will be an exercise in circumambulation that will yield no tidy closure" (p. 58) — and Betsy Birmingham's (2008) "argument for the researcher's sixth sense [which] is not that it will enable us to recover and converse with the lost dead, to understand them in a way that is definitive and true, but that they will help us recover ourselves, help us discover that we did not know that we were the dead, inhabiting the crypt, repeating dead histories in dead languages" (p. 145).
Every act of selection and placement is also an act of exclusion and fixity. Every shared name suggests that the particular opens up to the universal.
Combining authentic images and objects with creative-critical composite characters and parables is one (relatively safe) way for me to reflect on remembrance, forgetting, and my species of pain as an Eelam Tamil diasporic-disabled composer who is often multiply delegitimized, often forgotten myself. I use a multimodal digital archive for this content in lieu of how online platforms have become home to Eelam Tamil and disabled testimonies, counterstories, and alternative discourse, challenging the hegemonic positions frequently taken up by governmental and medical institutions.
These objects come from my parents' home, my home, and my file of medical photographs, preserved for their cultural, sentimental, and/or informational value. Even though I couldn't say much about where the project would take me ("I won’t know until I'm working on it"), Amma took many of these photographs by general request ("Hey, can you take pics of stuff you might associate with when we were kids and/or with Sri Lanka?") followed by more specific prompts ("Do you remember that wall tapestry?"). Other objects, like decor in my apartment or my body, I photographed myself. I didn't direct Amma in how to stage or photograph the objects. On her own, she positioned them on cleared surfaces and used her cellphone camera, without special lighting. She texted the images to me with their names, descriptions, uses, and histories.
I also used my cellphone, maybe intuitively: after all, cellphone footage by Tamil civilians recording their last moments and Sinhalese soldiers saving war trophies have provided some of the only visual evidence of the end of the Tamil genocide, which transpired in a state-sponsored media black hole.
Alexandra Hidalgo (2016) observes: "If we are going to write passionate, electrifying scholarship — and I believe those are characteristics we need to value in our research — we are likely to find much of it inside closets and under beds." Much of this consists of subjective, incomplete living memories, when archival logic locates coherence in objectivity and completeness. As constituents of a narrative about pain, resistance, and resilience, the objects in this archive are initially inscrutable — especially to those unwilling to step out of Eurocentric ways of seeing and knowing — but chart my thoughts, feelings, and associations about chronic pain and cultural identity and the affective and technological dimensions of my composition process. The archive imposes a taxonomic order onto its contents that establishes semantic relationships based on adjacency and other alternating levels of organization, such as production, acquisition, medium, genre, technique, subject matter, and so on (Sekula, 2002). Meaning is directed through the space and mode of presentation (digital media), layout (color palette, sequential appearance), image descriptions, and fictocritical narratives.
As a cross between parable, rumor, and memory — and perhaps a comment on the unreliability of memory in witnesses and chronically pained patients alike — the attendant fictocritical narratives intentionally refuse to straightforwardly demystify these inclusions and juxtapositions. Jody Shipka (2016) advocates for nontraditional archives and values the persistence of mystery in them, a quality akin to Tamil literacy practices and the contingencies of chronic pain.
The resulting whole composition aims to challenge our established webs of signification and deconstruct binaries between transparency and opacity, noise and silence, presence and absence, assimilation and purity, and truth and mystery: "Indeed, you can question these partial glimpses all you like, but they seldom talk back" (Shipka, 2016, para. 2). And yet, an animating force lurks in the interstices of the gallery wall and in each image/text pairing, waiting to be felt. Photography may permit the photographed subjects — even when they're objects, I think — to talk back, through what Tina Campt (2017) calls the "felt sound" of their quietude: an affective, historical, vibrational and embodied resonance (p. 7). That is, if you can feel the images and stories, you can hear them.
Archival research — especially for multiply-marginalized BIPOC — is haunted by the question: "Who is inventing me, for what purpose, with what intentions?" (Miranda, 2013, p. 14). In inventing an archive that records remembrance, resistance, resilience, and adaptability from the ephemera of Eelam Tamil diasporic life and being-disabled in the U.S., I resist (in some small way) the violent erasure and rewriting of Eelam Tamil history and culture and of my disabled self-knowledge and oracular instinct; I help myself reconcile my experiences of chronic pain and intergenerational trauma. In creating and reinscribing archives of the painfully specific and universal lies hope.
Instead of masquerading as a transparent means to a comprehensive knowledge of Eelam Tamil diasporic-disabled pain, this archive is designed from below, to be read, heard, felt, and deciphered from below, in solidarity with the familial archivists, oral historians, chronically ill patients who must extensively self-document, and other culture workers for whom archiving is an expression of resistance and resilience.
Vyshali Manivannan (she/her) is a creative-critical scholar, living and working in what is currently called New York. She brought something out of darkness with her when she was born. She will never be able to prove if severe fever in Batticaloa or sharing birthdays and milestones with massacres are etiological factors in her chronic pain and fatigue. Here, you might glimpse her, her family, and members of her diasporic and disabled communities, tracing overlapping and diverging lines of flight through fluid personas with interchanging nom de guerres. A biography is meant to be factual data about a life. Even here, you are denied satiation.
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Jaffna burns again" - Snippets from the burning of Jaffna Library (2022, May 31). Tamil Guardian.
Poongunranar, K. (6 BCE). 192. "Every town our hometown, every man a kinsman." The Purananuru, 192. (A. K. Ramanujan, Trans.)
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