Content note: graphic descriptions of violence
New publication alert! “Pain and Relief Come of Themselves” is now live in Peitho’s Cluster Conversation “(Re)Writing our Histories, (Re)Building Feminist Worlds: Working Toward Hope in the Archives.”
As with many of my publications, this open-access photo gallery and creative-critical essay was composed and designed as a prototype of a planned படலம் (padalam, or section) in ஐயோ/AIYO. I photographed objects from my childhood that I brought with me to New York, and Amma texted me photos she took of objects I’d left behind. After several false starts, I paired each photograph with a parable. The sum is a representation of a diasporic-disabled life, presented through diasporic-disabled composition.
I’ve since developed this prototype into நீதிக்கதை கண்டம் (Neethikkathai Kandam), a chapter in ஐயோ/AIYO.
I’m grateful to Ruth Osorio for giving me grace and inviting me to submit to the cluster conversation after the deadline had passed, and to all three editors—Ruth, Meg McIntyre, and Lamaya Williams—for permitting me to write on crip time, especially since the original deadline for this project was very close to my deadline for my 2024 Computers & Writing keynote. I recognize frequently that I would not be able to maintain my current research agenda if it weren’t for folks inviting me and accommodating me.
From the Artist Statement I included in the preface to my diasporic-disabled archive:
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.
Read “Pain and Relief Come of Themselves” on Github and check out the full Peitho 27.2 Cluster Conversation as well!
