Content note: intergenerational trauma, loss, myth, Sri Lanka
New publication dropped!
“Numerology” was excised from a creative nonfiction/memoir WIP titled BLACK TIGER WHITE VAN, a transgenre memoir about living in the shadow of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict. It’s a microcosm of the primary threads in the MS: coming to terms with physical and spiritual pain, with queer sexuality, with diaspora politics and assimilation; attempting to reconcile incompatible disciplines and ways of thinking, being, and knowing; relentlessly unearthing patterns, numbers, eternal returns, to make sense of war, trauma, and multiple kinds of loss.
I’m always looking for patterns, and it’s hard not to feel like it means something that my fascination with numerology parallels the superstitions held by LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa. That my numbers and star systems attempt to map the invisible arc of history, rising through the ages (Alan Moore, From Hell).
That by sheer chance I wasn’t there for the war, I heard everything and survived nothing, and I never died, and all I have to deny this trauma is mathematical objectivity, while this arc, implacable, continues to rise.
