இரத்தம்
Iraththam (blood)
Content note: dilettantism, performative activism
A man had a good milk cow who, every day, gave eight gallons of milk in the morning and another eight in the evening. This man was astonished by this tremendous yield and noticed that all this milk came from the same udder. He foolishly thought this udder held much more milk than this, and that the cow was refusing to yield more than eight gallons at a time. He wanted all the milk at once, thinking to sell what he could not consume and make his fortunes. One day, hoping to drain the entire milk supply, he took a razor and slit the cow's udder. But instead of yielding even a drop of milk, the udder bled profusely, and the cow tragically died.
Like this, there are those who want to extract the highest use-value from a person in a day. Nothing less will satisfy them. When an Eelam Tamil American fibromyalgic woman is not bound by print-based Eurocentric composition, she might compose prolifically and innovatively. But this productivity occurs in bursts, pain permitting, so her progress is always gradual. And when she observes her physician's counsel and takes what is prescribed, she might improve her symptoms. But as she cannot be cured, her progress is an interminable plateau. Like the man who cut the cow, academic culture takes the sharp razor of overwork to her heart, seeking an ever-higher volume of normative writing; Western biomedicine wields the scalpel of curative violence, seeking to erase her problematized anomalies for the putative greater good (Kim, 2016). And what do exploitation and enforced normalcy earn them? Her downfall and death.