I presented as part of a panel on rhetoric, harm, and healing at CCCC 2023. I’m grateful to my co-panelists for facilitating my access, but I also feel terribly resigned. As long as our professional organizations refuse to really work on constructing a viable model for hybrid participation, I’m (literally) virtually marginalized.

Anyway. Access copy of the talk below.

Ocularcentrism, Intergenerational Trauma, and the Euro-American Composition of Eelam Tamil Pain

Dr. Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University – Pleasantville
Conference on College Composition and Communication, Chicago, IL
February 18, 2023

Hello, I’m Vyshali, and I’m an Eelam Tamil American fibromyalgic woman. This talk references ableism, racism, and genocide, so please engage as you’re able.

I want to reflect on the intersection of fibromyalgia (or chronic pain and fatigue), Euro-American ocularcentrism, an ableist epistemological position that reifies vision, and intergenerational trauma. A few minutes isn’t enough to fully unpack these ideas, and I hesitate to, because American audiences are primed to hear psychosomatic in them. I suggest that somatization in ethnic communities with histories of collective violence is understood differently in those communities—as a term rooted in war and displacement, not synonymous with hysteria or fictionalization—and must be treated accordingly. But in the clinic and academy, I’m deracinated until my ethnic identity becomes disruptive. The emphasis presumptively falls on the American in Tamil American while the Eelam part is discarded, though pain is culturally informed and my fibromyalgia possesses an Eelam Tamil character.

Eelam is a Tamil name for Sri Lanka that came to refer to the Tamil homeland in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka. My parents are from Batticaloa, in the east. They immigrated to America willingly, but their move was meant to be temporary. Their return was prevented by Black July, an anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983, the year I was born in New York. This unexpected permanent resettlement stripped us of kin, Hindu temples, and local Eelam Tamil community, the cultural contexts that impart meaning to social activities and relations. Grønseth (2011) suggests that this fractured “Tamil wholeness,” combined with the receiving country’s insistence on erasure through assimilation, heavily impacts the Tamil self in its capacity of “being-in-the-world,” and that consequently, “Tamils embodied ongoing social processes by developing vague and lasting pain and fatigue” (p. 321). The Tamil refugees she interviewed withdrew from local Norwegian social arenas to Tamil social arenas, where cultural approaches to pain were respected and valued rather than minimized or stigmatized (p. 327). 

The only culturally sensible response to my parents, on the border between Eelam Tamil and American life-worlds, with no Eelam Tamil social arenas to withdraw to, was to accept and endure the acculturative stress and racial discrimination that manifested as a socially produced, somatized ache. Ghosh (2003) calls this result “a species of pain”: the jagged lines of flight of Eelam Tamil refugees, severed from traditional homeland, the conditions that rhetorically compose the fugitive bodies of diaspora. It’s an ontological dislocation that finds its twin in chronic pain.

Kleinman and Kleinman (1985) suggest there is a relationship between political and social stress and a somatic idiom for various threats to the integrity of the self, from violence and loss to communal non-belonging (p. 470). According to Affleck et al. (2021), Eelam Tamil refugees and families often use cultural idioms to describe their pain. Euro-American ocularcentrism is so preoccupied with finding a visible origin and enacting cure (in the clinic) or making pain and its expressions invisible in service of respectability politics (in the academy), that my merging of somatic and cultural idiom goes unseen, unheard, undiagnosed, unaccommodated. 

Many syndromes, and their treatments, are culture-bound and influenced by racial and intergenerational trauma. A higher incidence of chronic pain syndromes in nonwhite people has been connected to epigenetic mechanisms like racial discrimination, in addition to biological factors. Extending Aroke et al.’s (2019) epigenetics study, the prolonged state of fight-flight-freeze caused by racial trauma alters the body’s response to the ordinary functioning of daily life. In the U.S., darker skin is associated with increased stress, which catalyzes an overactivation of the autonomic, endocrine, and immune systems, in turn causing chronic maladaptive response in these systems (paras. 11-15). Collective trauma and racial trauma bestow an everydayness on Eelam Tamil pain, but the Western biomedical complex examines it through Western assumptions of personhood, memory, morality, temporality, and well-being. In Ayurvedic medicine, the mind is seated in the heart, and so the physical manifestations of psychological disorders aren’t construed as psychosomatic but somatopsychic, bodyminded (Affleck et al., 2021, pp. 10-11). 

In America, the clinic considers a biocultural approach non-empirical; the academy erases the body altogether in favor of the mind, and is averse to minds impacted by intergenerational trauma, as such impacts are forcible reminders of the racialized body. I fear I’m leaving myself vulnerable to the accusation that I made myself sick or it’s all in my head, when what I’m really asking for is rhetorical listening with regards to cultural idiom. Without it, I end up with medical notes saying I’m not in discomfort or distress, because I use unexpected language and metaphors and perform pain like I’m passing a checkpoint. I end up with a white man professor who accidentally called me “terrorist”—it’s a long story—and who apologized, but never understood how the word literally strikes me as an Eelam Tamil American, how one word instantaneously disarranged my fibromyalgic fascia. 

Of course, fibromyalgia is not solely an Eelam Tamil phenomenon, nor is it always linked to trauma, intergenerational or otherwise. Not everyone in the Tamil diaspora shares this diagnosis or its constellation of symptoms. Still, these geopolitically specific affective hauntings are significant.

I’ll stop there, but I’m happy to talk more about these connections during our discussion.

Works Cited

Affleck, W., Thamotharampillai, U., & Hinton, D. (2021). Walking Corpse Syndrome: A trauma-related idiom of distress amongst Sri Lankan Tamils. Transcultural Psychiatry, 0(0), 1-13.

Aroke, E., Joseph, P., Roy, A., Overstreet, D., Tollefsbol, T., Vance, D., & Goodin, B. (2019). Could epigenetics help explain racial disparities in chronic pain? Journal of Pain Research, 12, 701-710.

Ghosh, A. (2003). The greatest sorrow: Times of joy recalled in wretchedness. Kenyon Review.

Grønseth, A. (2011). Tamil refugees in pain: Challenging solidarity in the Norwegian welfare state. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(2), 315-332.

Kleinman, A., & Kleinman, J. (1985). Somatization: The interconnections in Chinese society among culture, depressive experiences, and the meanings of pain. In A. Kleinman & B. Good (Eds.), Culture and depression: Studies in the anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry of affect and disorder (pp. 429-490). University of California Press.